In 1965, as students protested the escalating war in Vietnam, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, and the federal government sought to revive faltering cities through urban renewal programs, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design launched a groundbreaking initiative: the Laboratory for Computer Graphics. Over the next quarter century, this multidisciplinary research group developed programs for automated mapping and spatial analysis that changed the ways we understand and create the world around us, from forecasting the weather to designing buildings. The lab served as an incubator for computer-based technologies that pervade all aspects of contemporary life—including the ability to avoid traffic back-ups, courtesy of the now-standard mapping software in today’s vehicles.
Origins: Howard Fisher and SYMAP
Howard T. Fisher was no stranger to Harvard. He had earned his undergraduate degree there in the mid-1920s and then studied architecture at the school, prior to the advent of the Graduate School of Design (GSD). Fisher, who for a time specialized in prefabricated housing and commercial architecture, was a versatile designer; a colleague would later describe him as “a complete architect, planner, master builder, inventor, environmental scientist, teacher, and scholar . . . truly a Renaissance man of the 20th century.” [1] Yet, those who knew Fisher best characterized him, above all, as a problem solver—a trait that prompted his return to Harvard in 1965.
In the decade following World War II, the flipside of American prosperity was urban turmoil. People with means abandoned the city, opting instead for suburban life. Businesses soon followed, leaving in their wake empty downtown commercial districts, deteriorating neighborhoods, and substandard living conditions. Cities were in crisis, and the search was on for potential solutions, many of which drew on the era’s developing technologies—including the computer. It was in this cultural milieu that Fisher, practicing and teaching in Chicago in the early 1960s, devised a software program to create legible maps from complex data.
Fisher’s creation, named SYMAP (short for Synagraphic Mapping System), was conceived as “a new way of seeing things together as a whole.”[2] In other words, SYMAP could analyze information from many sources and present it so that relationships were readily visible to planners, designers, or anyone. Furthermore, while earlier software programs required users to physically assemble the layers of a thematic map (essentially a map that tells a story about a place), SYMAP used a computer to create an entire thematic map, representing data by using contour lines, shading, patterns, and eventually color. To create such a map, the programmer manually keypunched data on cards, brought them to a computing center for processing, and returned for the printout hours or days later.[3] In the mid-1960s, Harvard had a single computer for such purposes; registered users were permitted one visit per day, and due to processing time, it could take up to a month to produce a single map.[4] Nevertheless, SYMAP’s ability to synthesize material and generate information-laden maps was an improvement, both in the sophistication of analysis and the time required to create such maps sans computer.
Given the precarious state of American cities at the time, SYMAP’s potential applications in the realm of planning and design offered great promise.[5] This appealed to the philanthropic Ford Foundation, which sought to further the public welfare by “identify[ing] and contribut[ing] to the solution of problems of national and international importance.”[6] Foundation officials signaled that they would be open to funding Fisher’s continued research, however he first needed a university to house this research. Fisher thus turned to his alma mater, where he found a champion in Harvard GSD dean Josep Lluís Sert.
Fisher and SYMAP relocated to Harvard in February 1965 where, within the GSD, he established the Laboratory for Computer Graphics (LCG).[7] That fall, through the GSD’s Department of City and Regional Planning, he submitted a proposal to the Ford Foundation, which promised $294,000 (equivalent to nearly $3 million today) “for research and training in the use of computers to make maps of social and economic features of cities.” This grant to the GSD, to run through 1969, formed part of a larger effort to address the ongoing crisis in American cities by, as the foundation characterized it, “harness[ing] computer-based analysis to the study of urban problems.”[8] Subsequent funding for the LCG would come from a variety of sources, including the sale of proprietary software; correspondence courses, professional development seminars, and conferences; local and federal government contracts; and grants from institutions such as the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation.
Early Years
Major funding in hand, Fisher wasted little time in attracting attention—and talented researchers—to the LCG, launching an ambitious lecture series in April 1966. Held weekly throughout the spring and fall semesters that year, these meetings attracted participants from throughout Harvard and beyond. Regular attendees, dubbed “Computer Graphics Aficionados,” engaged with distinguished speakers from many disciplines, including geography, cartography, engineering, economics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, classics, transportation and city planning, urban design, and landscape architecture.[9]
Mathematical geographer William Warntz, known for population analyses of social and economic patterns, spoke at an Aficionados session on the topic of statistical surfaces. Warntz soon became a key figure in the LCG, leaving his position with the American Geographical Society to join the GSD in 1966 as professor of theoretical geography and regional planning, and the LCG’s associate director. When Fisher retired two years later, Warntz moved into the role of director and added “Spatial Analysis” to the group’s name, signaling the lab’s expanding focus. Thus, from 1968 on, the organization was officially known as the Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis.
In fall 1966, geographer and urban planner Allan Schmidt was featured at an Aficionados meeting, where he discussed the role of computer mapping in the planning process. Shortly thereafter Fisher persuaded Schmidt to leave his position at Michigan State University and assume a new post at the LCG, starting in spring 1967. For the next 15 years, Schmidt remained at the lab in various capacities, including director (1971–1975) and executive director (1975–1982).
Another key figure who took part in the LCG’s formative years is Carl Steinitz, now Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning Emeritus at the GSD. Steinitz traced his involvement to a fortuitous 1965 encounter with Fisher, where Steinitz—then a graduate student in city and regional planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—learned of SYMAP. With Fisher’s tutelage, Steinitz used SYMAP to analyze and map data for his doctoral thesis, which explored Central Boston’s urban features in relation to his advisor Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960).[10] In 1966, Steinitz accepted a joint post at the GSD: assistant professor in the Departments of Landscape Architecture and City and Regional Planning, and research associate at the LCG.[11] He would stay with the lab through 1972.
By the end of the 1966–67 academic year, the lab employed 29 people, including GSD graduate students, Harvard undergrads, and experts from many fields. Staff numbers would fluctuate in the coming years, depending on specific research projects and funding. Despite being an organization within the GSD, the LCG was housed for its first seven years not in Robinson or Hunt Halls, but in the basement of adjacent Memorial Hall. In 1972, the lab joined the rest of the GSD across the street in the newly completed Gund Hall, occupying space on the 5th floor.
Research and Outreach
Fifty years after its founding, Steinitz described the LCG’s early research as falling into two basic categories. The first stemmed from SYMAP, involving “investigations into computer graphic representation of spatially and temporally distributed data.”[12] This research included time-series maps of a storm’s progression, three-dimensional data displays, and maps that conveyed large data sets, such as early census maps for New Haven, Connecticut.
The lab’s second area of inquiry, according to Steinitz, “related to city and regional planning, landscape architecture and architecture, focused on the role of computers in programming, design, evaluation and simulation.”[13] These efforts included research that drew on SYMAP and other programs to analyze data—such as a region’s possible uses, resources, and vulnerabilities—and generate models to assess future land-use impacts, which could in turn guide design and development decisions. This methodology, envisioned by Steinitz in 1967 to apply computer analysis and mapping to environmental planning, is today widely known as geodesign.
In tandem with its research and development activities, the LCG circulated its work through a variety of means. The lab sold SYMAP and later programs commercially, with nearly 1000 practitioners throughout the world participating in the lab’s correspondence training course, initiated in 1966. Beginning the following year, the LCG staged conferences, some for researchers and others for a broad audience that encompassed corporate and government employees—including from General Motors, Bell Laboratories, Anaheim Police Department, and the US House of Representatives. Branded as Harvard Computer Graphics Week, this renowned five-day conference occurred annually between 1978 and 1983, drawing up to 500 participants its final year.[14]
Highlighting Harvard Computer Graphics Week’s disciplinary breadth, a program for the 1981 session noted that participants would learn “how computer graphics is being used to solve problems in corporate planning and management, marketing, energy exploration and distribution, physical design, natural resource management, city and regional planning, education, research, financial management, and many other areas.”[15] And for those unable to attend this or other meetings, the LCG issued and sold the conference papers for all six years in the 19-volume publication Harvard Library of Computer Graphics.
Legacy
The LCG continued operation throughout the 1980s, albeit at a greatly reduced capacity due to shifting priorities and changes in GSD
leadership. The lab ultimately disbanded in 1991, leaving an impact that well exceeds its relatively brief existence.[16] Through the development of cutting-edge software packages and a robust outreach program, the LCG introduced computer graphics and spatial analysis to a host of disciplines—including architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. In addition, the lab acted as an incubator for innovation, providing “many of today’s essential ideas and early versions of tools now embedded in GIS [geographic information systems], remote sensing, geospatial science, geodesign, and online culture.”[17]Finally, the LCG served as a training ground for researchers who, following their time at the lab, went on to develop life-altering computer-based technologies. For example, the architectural software used throughout design professions today is grounded in the LCG’s work, as are four-dimensional holograms and digital mapping.
Among the LCG’s renowned former members are Jack and Laura Dangermond, then a GSD landscape architecture student and a social scientist, respectively. The Dangermonds spent a year in the late 1960s working in the LCG, which Jack recently described as “a place that shaped the rest of my life.”[18] After Jack’s graduation from the GSD (MLA ’69), the Dangermonds returned to his hometown of Redlands, California, and cofounded the Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri), building on their experience at the LCG. Today Esri is a global leader in GIS software, location intelligence, and digital mapping.
In 2015, Dangermond and other participants from the LCG’s heyday joined with contemporary researchers for a two-day conference entitled The Lab for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis and Its Legacy, organized to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the LCG’s founding.[19] Mohsen Mostafavi, then GSD dean and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design, offered introductory remarks that situated the lab and its contributions as “part and parcel of our history.”[20] This holds true not only for the GSD, where spatial mapping software is the cornerstone of many research studios, but for daily life in general. As we navigate city streets with the digital maps on our phones or learn about election results in precinct-by-precinct detail, we rely on LCG-derived technologies. As Mostafavi suggested, far from a bygone entity, the LCG endures as “a vision for the future.”[21]
*Unless otherwise noted, all images are courtesy of the Special Collections, Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Notes
[1] Leonard J. Currie, “Digest of the Career and Achievements of Howard T. Fisher,” sponsorship letter for Fisher AIA Fellowship application, c. 1974, https://web.archive.org/web/20150105113516/http://public.aia.org/sites/hdoaa/wiki/AIA%20scans/F-H/Fisher_Howard.pdf.
[2] Nick Chrisman, Charting the Unknown: How Computer Mapping at Harvard Became GIS (Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2006), 20. For a detailed discussion of SYMAP, see chapter 2.
[3] Evangelos Kotsioris, “The Computer Misfits: The Rise and Fall of the Pioneering Laboratory for Computer Graphics,” in Radical Pedagogies, eds. Beatriz Colomina et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022). An excerpt of this article appears in The MIT Press Reader, https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-computer-misfits-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-pioneering-laboratory-for-computer-graphics/.
[4] Carl Steinitz, “The Beginnings of Geographical Information Systems: A Personal Historical Perspective,” Planning Perspectives 29, no. 2 (2014): 239–254, doi:10.1080/02665433.2013.860762.
[5] A recent MoMA show, Emerging Ecologies, included a four-dimensional model derived from SYMAP’s output as an example of a pioneering approach to visualizing complex data about the environment. See Carson Chan and Matthew Wagstaffe, Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism (New York: MoMA, 2023), 70–71.
[6] Ford Foundation, The Ford Foundation Annual Report 1966 (New York, NY: Ford Foundation, 1966), mission statement, https://www.fordfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/1966-annual-report.pdf.
[7] Matthew W. Wilson, “Celebrating the Advent of Digital Mapping,” ArcNews, Esri, Winter 2015, https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/arcnews/celebrating-the-advent-of-digital-mapping/. Chrisman’s summarization of the LCG’s founding provides a slightly different ordering of events. See Chrisman, Charting the Unknown, 3.
[8] Ford Foundation, Annual Report 1966, 7.
[9] Chrisman, Charting the Unknown, 10–11.
[10] Carl Steinitz, “Meaning and the Congruence of Urban Form and Activity,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 34, no. 4 (July 1968): 223–247.
[11] Steinitz, “Beginnings of Geographical Information Systems.”
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Chrisman, Charting the Unknown, 158.
[15] Harvard GSD Lab for Computer Graphics, brochure for Harvard Computer Graphics Week ’81, July 26-31, 1981, https://www.vasulka.org/archive/ExhTWO/Harvard/general.pdf .
[16] The author thanks Martin Bechthold, Bruce Boucek, Stephen Erwin, Carl Steinitz, and Charles Waldheim for their willingness to be interviewed about the lab and its legacy. For more on the lab’s last decade and dissolution, see Chrisman, Charting the Unknown, chapter 11.
[17] Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis, The Lab for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis and its Legacy, conference program, April 30 through May 1, 2015, https://cga-download.hmdc.harvard.edu/publish_web/CGA_Conferences/2015_Lab_Legacy/2015_CGA_Conference_Program.pdf.
[18] In a recent article, Jack Dangermond wrote about his formative time in the lab. See Jack Dangermond, “How the Geographic Information System May Help Make the World Better,” Forbes, Oct. 8, 2024, https://www.forbes.com/sites/esri/2024/10/08/how-the-geographic-information-system-may-help-make-the-world-better/.
[19] The conference was hosted by the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA), established in 2006 to support the use of GIS in research and teaching across the university. As such, the CGA acts as a successor of sorts to the LCG.
[20] Mohsen Mostafavi, “Welcome & Introduction,” talk at The Lab for Computer Graphic and Spatial Analysis and Its Legacy, April 30, 2015, https://vimeo.com/128158780?autoplay=1&muted=1&stream_id=Y2xpcHN8MTMxODA5NTR8aWQ6ZGVzY3xbXQ%3D%3D .
[21] Ibid.