Comeback 2024: A Weekend of Ideas and connections

Hundreds of alumni and friends streamed back to Gund Hall last September for the GSD’s second Comeback—two days that fused studio thinking, professional insight, and the energy of Beer ’N Dogs in Gund Garden. For those who were there (and those who are wondering what they missed), the weekend demonstrated the power of a connected design community—and a glimpse of why the Comeback belongs on your calendar in 2026!

GSD Comeback 2024

Friday: A Brutalist Welcome Saturday: Mini Courses, Maximum Ideas Alumni Leadership in Focus

The weekend opened with a deep dive into Towards a New Brutalism, an exhibition curated by Design Critic Emmett Zeifman that reframed the postwar ethos for today’s material scarcity and social need. As dusk fell, students, faculty, and alumni gathered in Gund Garden for Beer ’N Dogs, where Dean Sarah M. Whiting and Harvard Provost John F. Manning set the tone: design as a civic engine.

Panel of four speakers on stage with image of Gund Hall windows in background

With coffee in hand, alumni moved through a day of panels, conversations, and talks reflecting the research and discovery animating the GSD today. Mini courses ranged widely:

● Reglazing Gund Hall—the innovative design behind Gund Hall’s high-performance future

● Beyond the Stacks—inclusive knowledge creation with GIS and collaborative engagement with archives

● Early Design Education—translating design thinking for non-designers through shared “boundary objects”

● Bangkok Porous City 2.0—reflections on the spring 2024 Landscape Architecture Option Studio

● Exhibition Talk: “Architecture as an Instruction-Based Art”

● Parisian Knees—exploration of the fall 2023 Architecture Option Studio

A panel on stage with 5 alumni speakers and a moderator — GSD Alumni Award winners were honored at the GSD Comeback on September 21, 2024.

Saturday evening’s Alumni Council Award Ceremony honored graduates whose careers demonstrate design’s broad reach. Their work—spanning public service, equitable housing, adaptive reuse, education, and community activism—underscored a collective message: GSD alumni are shaping global change through design practice.

2024 Recipients: C. Ronald Ostberg (MArch ’68); Gretchen Schneider Rabinkin (MArch ’97); Harry G. Robinson III (MCPUD ’73); Calvin Tsao (MArch ’79).

2023 Recipients: Edwin “Teddy” Cruz (MDes ’97); Shaun Donovan (AB ’87, MPA ’95, MArch ’95); William “Bill” Johnson (MLA ’57) (in memoriam); Frank Christopher Lee (MAUD ’79); Cathy Simon (MArch ’69).

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