GSD News Archive: October 2007
The Far Side of Green Ecology.Design.Synergy Exhibition Proposes a Novel Approach to Sustainable Design by John Gendall Even with a torrent of public interest and press coverage, sustainable architecture, especially as it is understood in the United States, remains limited by its own narrow self-definition. When approached as a quantitative endeavor, checklists of green features threaten to become surrogates for real design. [The Architect's Newspaper, October 31, 2007] Related: |
How the Prado’s prayer was answered The extension of Madrid’s great museum, century cloister, which opens today, involved rebuilding a 16th-century cloister, reports Ellis Woodman [Competition won by “the grand old man of Spanish Architecture, 70–year-old Rafael Moneo,” GSD Josef Lluis Sert Professor in Architecture.]
Over the past 30 years, almost every one of the world’s foremost metropolitan art galleries has been extended to create extra exhibition space while providing the art-going public with all the education rooms, restaurants and retail opportunities that it increasingly expects. Inspired: The room of Muses in Rafael Moneo’s extension One notable latecomer to this party has been the gallery that many consider to be the greatest of them all, Madrid’s Prado. It has not been for want of trying. [Telegraph (U.K.), October 30, 2007; image: Inspired: The room of Muses in Rafael Moneo's extension] |
Building stories: GSD helps some come trueProgram offers students a chance to engage in design projects
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| In conversation with GSD lecturer, designer Erwan Bouroullec
CAMBRIDGE – It’s chilly, foggy, and the sky appears ready to spit drizzle, but Erwan Bouroullec has requested outside seating. “Do you mind?" he asks, already headed for the door. “So I can smoke. I'm French. I need to maintain the stereotype.” |
Toshiko Mori served on panel in “Women in Modernism — Making Places in Architecture”
By Eva Hagberg
Read full article... |
GSD faculty and alumni participated in “Public Space LA!” symposium George Hargreaves, Peter Luis Hornbeck Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture, recently served as a panelist at a day-long conference that focused on raising awareness and creating new solutions to address Los Angeles’ public space issues. Alumni who participated in the event included Bill Fain, Jr., FAIA, partner in Johnson Fain, (MAUD 1975); Thom Mayne, FAIA, principal of Morphosis, (MArch 1978); Richard Weinstein, vice chair of architecture and urban design at UCLA, (DES 1959); and Martha Welborne, FAIA, managing director of the Grand Avenue Committee and Vice President-elect of AIA/LA, (LF 1995). The symposium was held on October 26 in Los Angeles. |
Dutch lead Olympic legacy shortlist
[Building Design, October 19, 2007] |
| Architecture of Parking lauds Rem Koolhaas’ Working Babel parking structure
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GSD alumnus Thom Mayne receives Maybeck Award for lifetime achievement in architectural design
Harvard GSD alumnus Thom Mayne, FAIA, (MArch 1978), founder of the Santa Monica-based firm mOrphosis, recently received the 2007 Maybeck Award from the American Institute of Architects, California Council. Recipients of the Maybeck Award are selected once a year for their lifetime achievements in architecture. Mayne has been recognized because he has “consistently sought new and different solutions to design problems while resisting specialization in any one particular building type.” Some of Mayne’s recent projects include the Wayne Lyman Courthouse in Eugene, Oregon and the San Francisco Federal Building, both of which recently received Design Awards from the American Institute of Architects, California Council. On October 5, Thom Mayne participated in a Harvard Design Magazine symposium by giving a lecture and tour of his new San Francisco Federal Building to GSD alumni and area professionals. To view Mayne’s designs, visit the mOrphosis website. |
Thom Mayne (MArch ’78) hailed for San Francisco’s new Federal Building’s sustainable design; presents tour during GSD alumni gathering hosted by Harvard Design Magazine “When buildings are really working, you’re changing how people see and use the world around them,” Mayne said. “If you aren't changing behavior, you're cake decorating.”
Sustainability and aesthetics in one building? By John King Thom Mayne finds it strange enough that he—a left-leaning architectural iconoclast—is designing federal buildings. Now there's another twist: he's being hailed as a symbol of the green building movement. “It’s completely hysterical that I and my firm would be representing this topic,” Mayne said during a recent visit to San Francisco. “The green guys, their moralism and do-gooderness—phew. Horrible. There has to be joy in architecture.” Mayne was in town from Santa Monica, giving a tour of his San Francisco Federal Building, a structure that has attracted worldwide attention. One reason is a bravado that's rare on an American skyline, such as the slashed cloak of perforated steel that runs up one side and over the top of the thin 18-story slab at Seventh and Mission streets. But the real novelty is the emphasis on using design to cut down on energy use—that thin slab, for example, allows for operable windows and flow-through ventilation. [San Francisco Chronicle, October 16, 2007] |
Arts Journal and ArchNewsNow feature articles from current Harvard Design Magazine Innovate or Perish New Technologies and Architecture's Future by David Celento "Architects’ refusal to embrace technological innovations invites their extinction. Less hidebound professions are ruthlessly shoving their way onto the turf once the sole domain of architects. The capabilities now provided by furniture system designers, sustainability consultants, construction managers, and engineers of all stripes have become so advanced that Martin Simpson of Arup Associates suggests that architects may eventually become unnecessary—except, perhaps, as exterior stylists." [Arts Journal: The Daily Digest of Arts, Culture & Ideas, October 12, 2007]
Condo Cool Starchitect Branding and the Cost of "Effortless Living" by Sondra Fein A recent issue of W magazine features Zaha Hadid’s latest handbag design for Louis Vuitton. The architect, one-upping the fashion world, has transformed to three dimensions the famous Vuitton trademark monogram, extruding the monogram from the bag’s surface in a characteristically fluid gesture that announces to the fashion world—and those who covet the objects and imagery that constitute its products—that architecture is the hippest and smartest form of fashion, its products the ultimate status symbols. [ArchNewsNow, October 15, 2007]
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Boston Globe Lauds Adjunct Professor of Architecture Andrea Leers’ firm and new project
Unafraid to be unglamorous A design firm run by women turns unsexy projects into award-winning architecture By Linda Matchan, Globe Staff
image: Paul Warchol
It’s hard to imagine a duller commission for an architect than the renovation of the Tobin Bridge Administration Building. Perched in the framing of the bridge that spans Charlestown and Chelsea and suspended 120 feet above the ground, the structure has such a low profile it can barely be seen. "We're a box stuck up under the lower half of the bridge, nine stories off the ground," said former Tobin Bridge director Mary Jane O'Meara, now interim head of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority. "We are the trolls of Boston." But back in 1983 when this rusting corrugated steel box needed an overhaul, Boston architects Andrea Leers and Jane Weinzapfel had just started their own firm and were in no position to be picky. When the project came their way they made the most of it, designing an elegant, modern facility to house the mundane administration of toll collection that remains "a little gem hanging under the bridge," says Cambridge architect Charles Redmon, a principal of Cambridge Seven Associates. With its airy, light-filled offices, vaulted ceiling, curved hallways, and glass block partitions, this little gem - along with other unsexy infrastructure projects, community buildings, campus buildings, and courthouses - earned Leers Weinzapfel Associates one of the country's top architectural prizes. The 2007 AIA Architecture Firm Award is the highest honor bestowed by the American Institute of Architects upon an architectural firm, awarded to only one US firm each year; Leers Weinzapfel Associates is the first firm owned by women to receive it. [Boston Sunday Globe, October 14, 2007]
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A standing ovation for a Harvard stage Modernist designers honor tradition at New College Theatre
image: Alan Karchmer/Esto
By Robert Campbell, Globe Correspondent
Who would have thought Harvard would pick architects Leers Weinzapfel to create a modern undergraduate theater out of the old Hasty Pudding Club building in Harvard Square? The problem was to figure out a way to tuck a state-of-the-art undergraduate theater, to be known as the New College Theatre, into the back end of a dignified Victorian clubhouse. The original building, used mostly for parties and the Hasty Pudding theatricals, was designed in 1887 by noted architects Peabody & Stearns, who did many Back Bay houses as well as the Custom House Tower. As far from Victorian as you can easily get, Andrea Leers and Jane Weinzapfel are fiercely dedicated modernists who normally design in crisp, contemporary materials like glass and steel. But if the choice of architects was a gamble, Harvard wins this one in spades.
[Boston Sunday Globe, October 14, 2007]
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GSD Dean Altshuler Announces New Financial Aid Program for International Masters Students Harvard University Graduate School of Design Dean Alan Altshuler has announced an important new development in GSD policy with respect to financial aid. “For as long as anyone can remember, GSD grant assistance for study in the School’s master’s degree programs has been available only to U.S. citizens and permanent residents,” said Dean Altshuler. “(International doctoral students have, on the other hand, been eligible for assistance equally with American students). In concert with the University, we were able to make far more generous loan assistance available to international masters students several years ago, and just last year the School significantly augmented a GSD-financed work-study fund for international students as well. Meanwhile, the GSD has managed to increase spending for grant assistance to American masters students by 44% over the past two years, while strengthening the School’s finances in preparation for the new policy.” Beginning fall 2008, entering international master’s students will be eligible for grant assistance in similar fashion to American students. This aid will be drawn from a new fund within GSD, to be launched by the School using internal resources, which will hopefully be augmented over time with external gifts and grants as well. As in the case of American masters students, international student aid grants will be need-based. “We have also established, effective immediately, a fund to provide modest grant assistance for continuing international masters students who encounter unexpected emergencies during the course of their studies,” continued Dean Altshuler. “This is not, I should emphasize, a fund large enough to provide grants based on financial need alone. It is, rather, intended to deal with cases of particularly acute need triggered by unexpected events. Our director of financial assistance, Keith Gnoza, will shortly distribute a notice to all international master’s students providing further information on how to apply for such grants and the criteria by which applications will be evaluated. “I have, let me note, adopted this new policy with the enthusiastic concurrence of dean-designate Mohsen Mostafavi, who joins me in the hope that it will be possible during the years ahead to continue the recent trajectory of rapid growth in financial aid spending for all of our students, domestic as well as international.”
Related articles: Harvard Gazette, October 11, 2007 The Harvard Crimson, October 11, 2007 |
Community Center designed by Assistant Professor of Architecture Lluis Ortega featured in exhibition entitled "Patent Construction: New Architecture in Catalonia" at the Museum of Architecture, Frankfurt.
The recently completed Community Center for the Elderly in Barcelona, designed by f451arquitectura, the firm of Assistant Professor of Architecture Lluis Ortega, is on exhibit at the Museum of Architecture of Frankfurt. The exhibition, entitled “Patent Construction: New Architecture in Catalonia,” showcases innovative, detailed solutions and complex buildings in the specific settings for which they were developed and planned. They are attempts to do justice at the design stage to new construction tasks that arise from changed social standards, eco-requirements, and increasing budget constraints. The exhibition explores the range of experimentation for innovation – an undertaking that always contains the risk of the unknown and the unexpected. In a society that has traditionally been open to formal experiment, the combination of visionary architecture, craftsmanship, and industrial manufacturing skills enables the creative transformation of the environment. Here, architecture sees itself no longer just as the work of an individual, but as the joint achievements of a network of all the groups involved in the construction process. The exhibition is laid out as a tour through innovative construction agendas, spatial configurations and technologies in Catalan architecture of the last five years. It traces the relationships and paths that link the architects’ computer or model workshop to the emergence of built and inhabited space. Exemplary architectural details and structures dissolve the traditional boundary lines between landscape, urban planning, architecture, and interior design and allow us to experience a diversity of new forms of spatial experience. The products and insights developed and produced for a specific context offer new construction solutions that focus less on individual buildings and more on elements, prototypes, and patents. (Text excerpted from the Museum of Architecture, Frankfurt website.) |
Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design Rem Koolhaas among select architects reinventing cities of Republic of Kazakhstan
New Kids on the Bloc By Alec Appelbaum
“The Kazakh cities Almaty and Astana don’t have much in the way of an architectural pedigree, but a handful of firms—many from New York—are in the process of creating one. . . . . . And elsewhere in Almaty, the government has invested in expanding education to promote both the energy industries and the national standard of living. Rem Koolhaas’ Office of Metropolitan Architecture designed a masterplan for the Almaty Science Campus. Koolhaas has said that the project will include a neighborhood of homes and a ‘public zone’ with retail and entertainment. Its white cladding and varying shapes suggest an instant urban complexity.”
[The Architect’s Newspaper, October 3, 2007]
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