For the excellence of her work with students and her strong commitment to teaching during the fall 2013 term, Ashley Mendelsohn (MDesS ’14) has been awarded a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching by the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning in cooperation with the dean of undergraduate education. Mendelsohn is 2 for 2: she won the award for the spring 2013 semester as well.
Two GSD student teams recently won first-place awards in the 2013-14 NESEA (Northeast Sustainable Energy Association) Net-Zero Energy Design Competition. The competition called for low-energy, high aesthetic architectural designs supported by energy simulation analysis for a variety of building types in Holyoke, Mass.
Floating overhead like a giant pair of wings at the 2014 Cevisama exhibition is a ceramic structure created by the GSD Design Robotics Group. It’s a mock-up of a structural ceramic and concrete shell system being developed in collaboration with the Institute for Structural Design at TU Graz, Austria.
Daniel Ibañez (MDesS ’12, DDes candidate) and Tomas Folch (MLA I ’12), in association with Rodrigo Rubio (Margen-Lab) and Sofia Armanet, have recently received second prize in the international competition to build a telecommunication tower in Santiago de Chile.
Section Cut, a new website of resources for design students, emerging practitioners and design educators, recently launched its new “Giants!” series with a profile of Rahul Mehrotra (chair and professor of urban planning and design).
Over two dozen students crammed into the newly opened photo studio in the basement of Gund Hall on Wednesday for a hands-on workshop with one of the world’s premier architectural photographers, Iwan Baan.
A team from Harvard that includes 3 GSD students has advanced to the regional finals of the 4th Annual Hult Prize. Venkata Krishna Kumar Matturi, Conor OShea and Ghazal Jafari (MDesS candidates) working with Varun Bhandari (MPA, HKS) and Yogeeta Manglani (MSc, HSPH) will compete for$1 million to launch a sustainable social venture that promotes global food security.
Lizzie MacWillie (MDesS ADPD/MAUD '14) and Nicolas Rivard (MAUD '13, 2013 Global Health Corps Fellow with MASS Design) have published a paper entitled "Beyond Participation: Community Storytelling for Self-Organization".
A GSD urban planning team’s hopeful vision of a sustainable and resilient future for the Tohoku region of Japan - devastated by earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in 2011 - has earned first prize in Toyo University’s Tohoku Recovery invitational academic competition. Maria Ignacia Arrasate (MDes), Elise Baudon (MUP), Natalia Gaerlan (MUP), Karina Gilbert (MAUD) and Trevor Johnson (MUP) collaborated on a team led by Kristen Hunter (DDes) and advised by Jerold Kayden (professor of urban planning and design). They will be traveling to Japan in February to receive the $10,000 award for their project “Here Today, Here Tomorrow.”
When humanitarian relief organizations substitute for civic structures in states weakened by crisis and conflict, a new type of urbanism prevails, contends Marianne Potvin (MDesS ‘13 and PhD). Too often the resulting agendas ignore or sacrifice the needs of the devastated populations they purport to serve. Potvin examines this phenomenon through the lens of “humanitarian urbanism” in an article for Open Democracy entitled "Kabul: the humanitarian city."