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Joe MacDonald
Associate Professor Department of Architecture |
Profile
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Joe MacDonald is Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and has been teaching at all levels of the Core Studio sequence since Fall, 2000. He also teaches seminars, lectures, and advanced fabrication workshops related to infrastructure and landscape data management, non-recursive digital patterns, and parametric modeling. His seminars explore naturally occurring organizational systems and their influence on built ecologies, new materials, and construction assembly innovations. MacDonald’s sponsored research on social patterns and urban density include speculative mapping projects for Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo thematically categorized as soft cartographic practices and informed urban terrains. Most recently, he has been awarded funding for his design research on Minimal Surfaces: Implicit Trigonometric Surface Patterns: Prototyping for Practical Applications in Designed Environments, 2004-2005, and On Pattern: its permutational, performative potential in the parametric formation of architecture, 2003-2004. Recent core studios include Introduction to Design and Visual Studies in Architecture, GSD 1102, Spring 2006, 2004, 2002, 2001; Tectonics and Urbanism: An Institutional Identity in Allston, GSD 1201, Fall 2005, 2004; Courthouse: Tectonics and Urbanism, GSD 1201, Fall 2003, 2002; Urban Conglomerate: A Recreation Facility, GSD 1201, Fall 2001, 2000; Housing Patterns, GSD 1202, Spring 2005, and Housing Architecture, GSD 1202, Spring 2003.
MacDonald has also taught the professional practice seminar Entrepreneurship, GSD 7404, Fall 2005, an Advanced Workshop titled The Harvard Project on the Work of Shigeru Ban, GSD 9206, Spring, 2003, and seminar offering Tadashi Kawamata: The Boston Project, Plan in Progress, GSD 3400-07, Spring 2001. Joe MacDonald is a founding principal of Urban A&O, www.urbanao.com, a design firm based in New York City, specializing in parametric modeling and research. He regularly incorporates his academic research into practice at the scales of building, exhibitions, and product design. Four operating principles describe the philosophy of the firm’s work: material exploration; the use of emerging technologies to design and fabricate form; multi-disciplinary collaboration; and the cultivation of social interaction and education through design within the public realm. The theme of architecture as an opportunistic interface for technology and space--simultaneously physical and social--is central to their investigations into future building materials and construction methods.
Recent work includes the Johnson & Johnson Olympic Games Pavilion in Beijing (2008), the Water Planet at the California Academy of Science’s Steinhart Aquarium, San Francisco, CA (2006-2008), an exhibition titled The Bone Wall at Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, NY (2006), an installation for VW/Audi Design Center, Santa Monica, CA (2005), the Roxbury Media Arts Gallery, Roxbury, MA (2005), and in 2006 Urban A&O was awarded US Patents for the Wave Workstation and Mercurial Surfacing in product design.
MacDonald’s work has been exhibited widely including most recently in association with the award of “highest honors” recipient of the 2008 New Practices New York from the New York Chapter of the AIA, and at the TED (Technology Entertainment Design) Conference, Monterey, CA (2006) in addition to being published regularly in the popular press: Metropolis Magazine, Interior Design Magazine Market Tabloid Best in Show, The Architect’s Newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, Time Out New York, The New York Times, Domus, Harvard Magazine, and Vanity Fair.
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