The Harvard Graduate School of Design announces a trio of faculty appointments, adding two professors to the Department of Urban Planning and Design (UPD) and one to the Department of Architecture.
In UPD, the GSD welcomes Toni L. Griffin (LF ’98) as professor in practice of urban planning, effective this month. During the spring 2016 academic term, she will teach a course titled Design for the Just City. She will also lead a GSD Design Lab.
Griffin most recently served as a professor at the City College of New York’s Spitzer School of Architecture and founding director of the Spitzer School’s J. Max Bond Center on Design for the Just City. From 2006 to 2011, she served as design critic, then adjunct associate professor, in urban design and planning at the GSD. She returned to the GSD last October as a panelist and participant in the GSD’s first-ever Black in Design conference.
Griffin also maintains an active private practice, Urban Planning and Design for the American City, which she founded in 2009. The firm recently completed the award-winning Detroit Future City Strategic Framework Plan.
The UPD department also announces the appointment of Daniel D’Oca (MUP ‘02) as associate professor in practice of urban planning, effective July 2016. D’Oca currently serves as design critic in the department.
At the GSD, D’Oca’s teaching has included studios and courses in urban planning focusing on aging, suburbanization, and segregation. His most recent studio invited students to consider the complex legacy of streets named after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and to imagine how these streets could be re-envisioned to better reflect the values of the great civil rights leader.
Prior to teaching at the GSD, D’Oca served as an assistant professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he taught seminars about American urbanization and produced an award-winning public exhibition about racial segregation in Baltimore.
In the GSD’s Department of Architecture, Jeannette Kuo (MArch ‘04) joins as assistant professor in practice of architecture, effective this month.
Kuo has served as a teaching assistant and design critic for core studios in the GSD’s Department of Architecture in the past. She was the 2006 recipient of the competitive Maybeck Teaching Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley.
Since then, Kuo has also taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where she has held a visiting professorship since 2011. In addition, she has been a guest critic at institutions including ETH Zurich, Columbia University, Rhode Island School of Design, Accademia di Architettura Mendrisio, Pratt Institute, Hong Kong University, and the University of Toronto.
In addition to her teachiong, Kuo is a founding partner of Karamuk * Kuo Architects based in Zurich. Established in 2010, the work of Karamuk * Kuo focuses on the intersection of spatial concepts with constructive technologies to approach architecture from its most fundamental sources.
Visit their individual faculty webpages to learn more about D’Oca, Griffin, and Kuo.