On Monday, August 24, the Harvard Graduate School of Design opened its main Fall 2015 exhibition Living Anatomy: An Exhibition About Housing. Focusing on the past 50 years, the mixed-media exhibition features both built and academic work and showcases innovative approaches and solutions to housing in contexts around the world.
Presenting material both historical and contemporary, the exhibition seeks to answer fundamental questions about how housing affects quality of life and the health of individuals and communities. It examines housing not only for its design elements as physical shelter, but also for its social and political implications, and the interplay among those forces.
Living Anatomy was initiated by Dean and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design Mohsen Mostafavi and produced by a curatorial research team of GSD faculty, staff, and students, including the GSD’s director of exhibitions Dan Borelli (MDes ’12) and the exhibition’s lead designer Megan Panzano (MArch ’10). It will occupy the lobby and first-floor corridors of the GSD’s Gund Hall throughout the Fall 2015 term.
BostInno visited the exhibition as it was going up and offers a preview of what visitors might expect. The Harvard Gazette and ArchDaily also took a look inside.
The topic of housing will be engaged through other events and exhibitions at the GSD this fall. The school will host a panel discussion titled “Housing—What’s Next?” on Thursday, September 10, hooked to Living Anatomy. On Monday, August 31, the exhibition Bang Bang Bang: Housing Policy and the Geography of Fatal Police Encounters will open on the GSD’s Experiments Wall, offering a critical examination of how the evolution of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and subsequent housing policies have adversely impacted disadvantaged populations. Meanwhile, in the GSD’s newly renovated Loeb Library, the exhibition Life in Alison and Peter Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens will also open on August 31. It explores archival material from the Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens estate, a late-1960s experiment in social housing in the United Kingdom.
To learn more about exhibitions at the GSD, visit our video Vital Discourse: Exhibitions at the GSD.