Berlin’s vast 19th-century sewage farms—once engineered to process the city’s waste across thousands of acres of agricultural land—remain one of the largest experiments in urban circularity ever constructed.

This spring, the Harvard Graduate School of Design studio “post FLUSH: Water, Waste and Intimacy in Berlin’s Civic Realm,” taught by Chris Reed and Laila Seewang, invited students to reconsider these overlooked landscapes not as obsolete infrastructure, but as ecological, social, and civic assets for the future.

Moving between Berlin’s expansive sewage fields and the everyday spaces where water and waste are managed—public toilets, baths, transit hubs, and housing—the studio explored how infrastructure quietly shapes urban life. Students proposed new futures for these landscapes, imagining cleaner water systems, renewable energy networks, public gathering spaces, and healthier urban environments. Ultimately, the work asks: What might cities become if the systems that sustain them were designed not to disappear from view, but to more openly support collective and ecological life?

This research was made possible by the Koji Yanai Innovative Infrastructure Initiative Fund.

How do you design for a city whose future is increasingly shaped by water?

In Miami, sea level rise, flooding, and storm surge are already reshaping everyday life. Yet construction continues, raising urgent questions about how architecture and urbanism can respond to a wetter reality.

In a Harvard GSD studio led by Nader Tehrani in spring 2026, students designed an architecture school and housing on a downtown site defined by the Miami River, the Metro Rail, and a shopping center—three infrastructures set at different above-ground elevations. Rather than treating infrastructure only as an engineering challenge, the studio explored how it might become an architectural framework for public space.

After traveling to Miami and learning from local experts, students are imagining new ways of living, building, and connecting in a city already confronting the future.

This research was made possible by the Koji Yanai Innovative Infrastructure Initiative Fund.

When architect Chatpong Chuenrudeemol spoke at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in spring 2026, he detailed his longstanding fascination with “Bangkok Bastards.” These improvised architectural forms, including improvised canal crossings made of long-tail boats to ad hoc structures of corrugated metal, define his home city’s urban landscape. Such “homegrown concoctions, created by everyday people to solve everyday problems in everyday life,” also inspire Chuenrudeemol’s practice.

Chuenrudeemol discussed projects by his firm Chat Architects in Thailand including Angsila Oyster Pavilion, Na-Eh Bamboo Market for the Indigenous Karen Pwo Community, Indigo Loom House, and Samsen STREET Hotel.

Chuenrudeemol taught a spring 2026 option studio at the GSD, “Shophouse Metropolis,” focused on re-imagining one of the most ubiquitous building types in Bangkok. Introducing Chat’s lecture, Department of Architecture Chair Grace La noted his “ingenuity in creating a living tradition of bottom-up architecture, shaped by necessity and culture.” These overlooked conditions reveal an alternative architectural intelligence rooted in necessity and adaptation. What might it mean to see these informal practices as central to how cities are made? For Chuenrudeemol, “this beautiful underbelly of Bangkok and Thailand” offers a new way to think about—and design—our physical environment.

Designing for Glacial Flour

In Greenland, climate change isn’t a headline—it’s visible, in real time.

As ice recedes, meltwater carries a fine, mineral-rich sediment known as glacial flour, a powder formed over millennia as glaciers grind bedrock, that collects along the shoreline.

Long dismissed as mere debris, this “magic mud” is now gaining attention for what it could make possible: boosting crop yields as a natural fertilizer, serving as an alternative building material, and even helping remove carbon from the atmosphere.

This spring at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), glacial flour beame a prompt for the semester-long studio “Arctic Futures: Designing Circular Systems,” led by Dan Stubbergaard, professor in practice of urban design.

Students look to Nuuk—where much of Greenland’s population and economic activity are concentrated—and ask: how might the city harness an emerging glacial flour industry to build a more resilient future?

Teaching Assistant: Kaitlin Tse (MArch I ’26)
Students: Isabel Adler (MUP ’26), Lucas Holter (MUP ’26), Luna Kim (MAUD ’26), Angel Li (MLA I AP ’26), Chutong Liu (MLA I AP, ’26), Lawrence Liu (MLA I AP ’26), Erin Park (MAUD ’26), Gwanghyeon Park (MAUD ’27), Jeewoo Park (MArch II AP ’27), Sylvia Shi (MLA II ’26), Joe Tu (MAUD ’26), Eric Wang (MArch I ’27), Jinghan Wu (MLA II ’26), Kongxi Zhu (MLA II ’26)
Photos: Lucas Holter, Luna Kim, and Chutong Liu

This research was made possible by the Koji Yanai Innovative Infrastructure Initiative Fund.

In the recent public program titled “Permanence and Transformation,” Fabrizio Barozzi and Alberto Veiga, founders of Barcelona-based practice Barozzi Veiga, presented their recent work and discussed how contemporary architecture can “grow from what already exists.”

Grace La, professor and chair of the Department of Architecture, introduced Barozzi and Veiga, who are both currently teaching at the GSD as John C. Portman Design Critics in Architecture. “In projects across Europe and beyond, their buildings respond precisely to specific places while retaining a robust and coherent sense of formal autonomy and identity,” said La.

Barozzi spoke from the podium about projects including Abby Kortrijk in Belgium and Villa AG in Dubai, before joining Veiga and La for a discussion. This video recap highlights Barozzi Veiga’s design for Oolite Arts in Miami, a project that aims to cultivate a community of artists.