Julia Thayne on the Challenges of Urban Sustainability

Julia Thayne , Loeb Fellow 2026 and Founding Partner of Twoº & Rising , recently delivered the keynote lecture at the Harvard Business School’s Climate Symposium , where she spoke about cities as catalysts for climate action. Her previous work at climate NGO Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office, and global company Siemens focused on how first-of-a-kind sustainable projects create tipping points for change at scale. Now, as a Loeb Fellow at the Graduate School of Design (GSD), she is applying that experience to research how cities meet their sustainability targets, while adapting to climate change. We met in Gund Hall to talk about her keynote and the work she’s undertaking at the GSD this year, including a new research project on the environmental and social impacts of hyperscale data centers in the U.S.

What is your research here at Harvard, as a Loeb Fellow, focused on?

In general, I’m looking at how cities are meeting their sustainability targets, or not, what that teaches us about where we need to focus moving forward, and how they’re also starting to incorporate more action around adaptation and resilience. 

Like many others in climate, though, I’m also taking on a new research project on data centers in the U.S. They already consume a large amount of energy, and are projected to consume even more (in some states as much as 39 percent of total power). They’re polarizing in terms of their impacts. The research I’ve seen so far at Harvard has primarily been about data centers’ power consumption: how do you reduce it, what impacts does it have on investments in the grid, and will the public have to bear the costs of these upgrades. There are some excellent papers out on these topics by experts at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Harvard Law School, for example.

Along with Robert G. Stone Professor of Sociology Jason Beckfield, and Harvard College undergraduates Brady McNamara, Hailey Akey, and Julie Lopez, and with the support of a Salata Institute Seed Grant , I’ve taken on a research project from a slightly different angle: how do you optimize the environmental and social impacts of future hyperscale data centers in the U.S. that are being built near communities. Our goal is educate people about the impacts, give policy makers and communities ways to shape them, and ultimately affect how these data centers roll out so that they do have benefits.

Fortunately, as I’ve started on this research, I’ve also found the incredible GSD faculty and alumni who’ve been working on this topic for years, like Marina Otero and Tom Oslund. Already, we’ve been discussing how their landscape and architecture designs and practice are shaping what’s being built inside and outside the U.S.

Many of these centers are being constructed right now. How will you intervene in that system?

Remarkably, there are five companies who are primarily responsible for somewhere around one third of new large-scale data center construction. Five. If you can affect the way they think about data center siting, design, community engagements, and impacts, you can affect one third of what’s being built, which translates to hundreds of billions of dollars of investment. That’s pretty wild. 

While the deliverables for our research grant are to create primers for key stakeholders, like developers, community groups, and policymakers, to inform actions that could optimize data center development, our ambition is to collaborate with the many others—at Harvard and beyond—who are trying to make sure that the best decisions possible are made around how data centers get built in our country. The development process is remarkably similar company-to-company. A real estate site selection team chooses sites based on power availability and land prices. The engineers help dictate the data center building design based on server needs, power, cooling, and time to construction. Then a team of architects, landscape architects, and engineers collaborate to optimize the design before—or sometimes as—construction is happening. 

This is where my experiences in local government, huge tech companies, and research non-profits are coming in handy. I’ve written local policy that helps shape where things get built. I’ve managed tech projects and worked alongside engineers and technologists (usually as the only economist and urban designer in the room). My job at RMI was to think about where the intervention points were for changing systems. For example, how do you pinpoint the change that needs to happen that’ll affect not just one development, but many? So, in a strange way I’ve been preparing for this moment for my whole career, even though I didn’t know it would come.

In some ways, it’s a deeply personal ambition. My family lives in a small city that’s currently grappling with how data center development might affect their local economy and quality of life. In fact, my mom has been a very valuable primary source of information around data center development, sending me local news articles that are guiding some of the ways we’re doing our research! And my niece and nephew, ages 7 and 1, are who I do the work for, always.    

Your keynote for the Harvard Business School’s Climate Symposium focused on the work you’ve done across your career on cities? 

Exactly. The Harvard Business School (HBS) student groups organizing this year’s Climate Symposium wanted a nontraditional keynote to kick-off the event—somebody with a different perspective than the one they’re normally taught or exposed to at HBS. They gave me a broad topic: “Cities as Catalysts to Climate Action.” I used it as an opportunity to look at why cities are so important to climate action, what they’re doing, and how that has played out (well and poorly) in my own experiences in LA. 

Cities are essential to climate action, because they’re the problem—and also hold the keys to the solution. Cities are responsible for roughly 70 percent of the world’s CO2 and methane emissions. They are where people live, work, and spend money. They also bear the brunt of climate change. So, in many ways, cities are both forced and choose to act on mitigation (how you reduce the impacts of human life on climate change) and on adaptation (how you adapt to the ways our climate is changing). 

You see that everywhere, from Mexico City, where they’ve greatly expanded their bike and bus rapid transit networks to enhance road safety and give people affordable mobility, to Jakarta, where 40 percent of the city is below sea level and 33 million people are figuring out ways to continue living in the region.  

You also see it in LA, where I’ve been living and working for the past 10 years. 

What’s happening in LA that makes it different from other cities?

LA was part of the first wave of cities setting ambitious targets around carbon reduction: 50 percent emissions reduction by 2025, zero carbon by 2050. It’s hard to underscore enough that when those targets were set, we had no idea if we could achieve them! I mean, we had plans and models showing how we might achieve them, but as anyone who’s worked in local government knows, plans are very different than reality.

What’s noteworthy is that by 2022, LA had reduced emissions by 20 to 30 percent off the 2025 target, yes, but still—when you think about how hard we make sustainability sound (and how hard it is in practice), it’s pretty impressive. What’s even more impressive is that LA was only 1 percent off the target they set for their own municipal operations. That means what the local government could directly control, they were able to measure and manage. And what’s most impressive is that LA’s economy grew over that time. So, economic growth and environmental harm were essentially de-coupled.  

Where was LA not able to meet its targets, and how does that reflect what other cities have done? 

Cities generally do five things on climate action. They change where their electricity comes from by incorporating more renewable sources of energy. They reduce the amount of energy they consume, especially in buildings. They shift people and things to more sustainable modes of transportation, like public transit or zero-emissions trucks. They try to reduce waste by not creating it in the first place or re-using it. And, increasingly, they’re adapting to life with different weather conditions. 

LA did really well on increasing the amount of renewables in their electricity mix, mainly by investing in big renewable infrastructure projects in and out of the state and changing up how people can buy renewable energy. LA also benefits from (right now) a mild climate where energy efficiency in buildings is easier. The city owns its own port and airports, too, so it was able to control more effectively emissions and pollution from those sources (though they’re definitely still not zero). 

They did not do well on people’s mobility, though, or on waste. Some people might chalk that up to bad policy and politics or to something abstract, like “the difficulty of behavioral change,” but I think you have to look deeper. Historical decisions on land use, the lack of readily available and attractive mobility options, inadequate systems and information and accountability about waste, and LA’s importance as both industrial and urban centers – these are critical aspects of LA’s climate story, and they have to be considered when you’re thinking about how to take action on a topic as interdisciplinary and interconnected as climate.

What is your firm, Twoº & Rising, doing to help LA and other cities course correct on climate action? 

My business partner and I started Twoº & Rising almost two years ago. We wanted to work with governments, companies, start-ups, investors, and organizations to accelerate the deployment of cleantech solutions in the U.S. “Twoº” is a reference to the Paris Agreement and the goal to keep global warming to 2 degrees by 2030. 

Our work in LA specifically has been a lot about mobility, and this idea of giving people mobility options so that they don’t have to rely on cars—and also about adaptation and resilience, a huge and growing topic in the region. 

LA is trying to use a series of upcoming global sporting events, like the 2028 Olympic & Paralympic Games, as tipping points for Angelenos to experience getting around the region without their own cars. We’re trying to capitalize on that moment by teaming up with local transportation agencies, as well as foreign start-ups and companies, who can offer high-quality, more affordable, safer ways to experience the city without its legendary traffic. 

Similarly, my business partner and I both were temporarily by the LA wildfires in January (him by Eaton, me by Palisades), and are passionate about helping to find solutions to prevent them and to be resilient if and when they do happen. We worked on a project around providing grid resilience during public safety power shut-offs. 

What do you hope students here at the GSD would think about in terms of sustainability?

I’ve explicitly devoted my career to climate. At the beginning, I don’t know that’s what I was doing, but now when I sit back, I realize it’s my calling. For some of you, that’ll also be your calling; for others, it’ll be something else. But whether you’re a “housing” person or a “public health” person or a “women’s rights” person or an “economic development” person, I hope you know that you also are, or can also be, a “climate” person. What you’re doing is inextricably linked to the climate and context it’s in, just as what I’m doing on climate is also inextricably linked to housing, public health, social justice, and economic growth or decline. If we can be mindful and intentional about that, we can stop considering these topics as trade-offs and start realizing just how supportive they are of each other. 

Student Journals Recount the GSD’s Intellectual History

When Cam My Nguyen, a first-year architecture student, was applying to the Graduate School of Design (GSD), she learned about one of the School’s student journals, Open Letters , which invites students, staff, and faculty to engage in public discourse about design in the epistolary form. This fall, Nguyen helped organize an exhibition of archival issues of Open Letters in the student-run Quotes Gallery . The history of the publication was also the subject of a separate event in the Frances Loeb Library Special Collections that celebrated the long history of student journals at the GSD.  

Nguyen’s interest in the journal rose out of her passion for the letter as a narrative device. She grew up reading Edgar Allen Poe’s collected letters, Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and was part of the last class of students at her elementary school who were taught to write cursive; she’s always hand-written letters to friends. So, in her first year at the GSD this fall, she immediately sought out Open Letters, joining its staff and working with two other students, Simona Evtimova (MArch ’29) and Hazel Flaherty (MArch ’29), to design the exhibition. The show included copies of all 100 issues the journal has published since its founding in 2013. Issues were hung side by side in the Quotes Gallery so that visitors could peruse and read each letter, flipping up the pages one by one.    

Since its inception, the topics in the journal’s letters have range d from “love letters, anonymous letters, curriculum proposal letters, letters of admiration and letters of discontent,” writes special collections curator Inés Zalduendo in the Special Collections’ guide to their collection of student journals. Open Letters’ founder, Chelsea Spencer, was inspired to launch the journal after reading a letter from Mack Scogin, Kajima Professor in Practice of Architecture, Emeritus, to architect Benedetta Tagliabue, about her Barcelona home, in Harvard Design Magazine No. 35. In the inaugural Open Letters, Spencer wrote to Mack Scogin , explaining the premise for the journal and speaking to her history with him and his partner and wife, Merrill Elam.  

“I’d tell you,” writes Spencer, “we wanted to pry open the gap between the stilted obfuscation of Academic English and the sloppy narcissism of Internetspeak, with the ambition of creating a space for slow, sincere correspondence.” She  adds at the end, “P.S. I’m blaming you if this whole thing turns out to be a waste of paper.” In fact, it would go on to be the School’s longest-running student journal.  

Over the years, the journal’s letter writers have grappled with many topics, “from the history of architecture,” noted Nguyen, “to a secret admirer writing to a crush.” Some are more experimental than others, she said. One person wrote to their unborn son, another to beds. One of her favorites is an exchange between Cameron Wu and Milos Mladenovic in 2017 and 2018. Mladenovic (MArch ’20) first wrote to Wu in 2017, when Wu served as assistant professor of architecture at the GSD. Mladenovic was grappling with his sources of inspiration and commitment to his projects as a student, and his reliance on “the essential dialectics of architecture” that Wu had taught in that semester’s studio course. Wu responded when Mladenovic was wrapping up his last semester at the School, offering advice to his student about his projects.

“What I found productive,” Nguyen noted, “is the very critical (almost combative) position that the letter format allows one to take. I’m advocating for generative conversations, especially in the face of opposing ideologies.”   

Nguyen explained that, when she was an undergraduate at Princeton, Wu was her mentor. While she’d known how influential Wu was in the core studios at the GSD, as a new student at the School reading Open Letters, she found it “really exciting to see a thread through the very different pedagogies of Princeton and Harvard.”

This year, the biweekly Open Letters will include a letter from Mae Dessauvage (MArch ’21), a trans woman addressing her pre-transition self, “M,” when she was a student at the GSD.  

The journal was also recognized as an important part of the history of student publications at the GSD. This fall, during an “archives party ,” an event during which attendees examined various archival documents and publications in the Special Collections Reading Room at the GSD’s Frances Loeb Library, special collections curator Inés Zalduendo and archival collections website editor Ashleigh Brady (MArch ’26) featured the wide range of student publications that are part of the GSD’s history, starting with TASK: A Magazine for the Younger Generation in Architecture , first published in 1941. In addition, Loeb Fellow Andy Summers delivered a presentation on his work to document student journals in Scotland. In partnership with Priscilla Mariani, access services specialist, Zalduendo and Brady have made the GSD student publications available to read online , with the guide written by Zalduendo.  

“Since its founding in 1936,” writes Zalduendo, “students at the GSD have produced at least 17 different student publications.”  

The journals mark not only the School’s culture and students’ “landscape of inquiry,” Zalduendo writes, but also offer a window into our national and global history. For example, TASK includes writing by Dean Joseph Hudnut and professor Walter Gropius; Synthesis (1957–1958) reflects Dean Josep Lluís Sert’s years and Jacqueline Tyrwhitt’s work to found a program in urban design at the GSD; Connection (1963–1969) documents visual arts at the GSD and other Harvard schools, and includes a photographic series of the 1969 beating of Harvard students by local police during a Vietnam War protest; and, the first issue of APPENDX: Culture/Theory/Praxis , published in 1993, includes an argument by editors Darrell Fields, then a Harvard PhD student (he’d go on to earn his MArch at the GSD), and Kevin L. Fuller (MArch ’92) calling attention to the dearth of diverse representation in the field.

“We, the editors, are not shouting to be included in the academy—indeed, we are already here,” they write. “We are more interested in conveying, from our various positions, our insights and experiences from within the discipline in order that these essential positions not continue to be overlooked….” The journal was intended to include space for their voices and others in the field who were overlooked or unheard.  

Zalduendo’s summaries of the School’s student journals highlight almost a century of thinkers and designers at the GSD who helped advance public discourse around design, consider the School’s pedagogy and curricula, expose systemic gaps and inequities, and highlight the ideas and works swirling through the trays each semester. 

The history of student journals has also been documented in the School’s publication, Platform, which “represents a year in the life of the GSD.” Issue 12, “How About Now?” covers 2018–2019, and includes a curated overview of several student journals, including Open Letters. Editors Carrie Bly (MDes ’19), Isabella Caterina Frontado (MLA, MDes ’20), and Natasha Hicks (MUP, MDes ’19) write that “GSD students have consistently sought to process their intellectual inheritance in order to evaluate their position as designers within and beyond the School.”  

GSD Students Curate Archives on Black Designers and Landscapes

This summer, Graduate School of Design (GSD) students Michael Anthony Bryan II (MLA ’26) and Tyler White (MDes, MUP ’26) traveled a humid path through rural Virginia and Texas to document Black landscapes, delving into historic records, oral histories, and the built environment for clues to the past. They were among the GSD students whose research was supported by the Penny White Project Fund.  

The funding allowed White and Bryan to join a three-day trip organized by Rutgers’ Black Ecologies Lab  in Richmond and Tappahonnack, Virginia, to study, as the Lab explains, “Indigenous (Rappahannock) and Afro-Virginian practices of place, land, and water stewardship…,” and then, employing similar research methods, they traveled through Texas on their own. They chronicled their journey with audio recordings and photography, creating an archive of images and maps to document sites where Black people designed and built landscapes. 

Their work is now on display at the GSD in the student-run Quotes Gallery , alongside documentation of other student projects supported by the Penny White Project Fund. 
 
In Virginia, the group observed Indigenous canoe-making and visited the place where the Lumpkin Slave Jail once stood. A highway overpass runs above a few fallen cement blocks on the grassy soil, a small sign marking the spot that’s now part of the Richmond Slave Trail. Nearby, over the remainder of the site, a perfectly manicured grassy field stretches vacant and quiet. In the 19th century, enslaved people were imprisoned at the jail before their sale.       

“I was left with this profound feeling,” said Bryan, “of the fact that there are all these spaces where our ancestors lived, and their lives have been glossed over. The only evidence of their existence is one or two stones on the site, or a marker that acknowledges that people have died here. There are so many stories there that will never be uncovered, never be told.” 

Bryan and White encountered more traces of such stories when they continued their journey in Texas, a state they chose for its relatively well-preserved freedmen’s towns, settlements established in the 19th century by formerly enslaved people. They note that they witnessed “a staircase to nothing in Houston’s Freedmen’s Town ,” as well as “mounds poking up out of the earth in a cemetery behind a Best Inn in Galveston, and blocked access all along the rockiest most industrial parts of the Rappahannock River…” 

The GSD’s History of Teaching Equitable Development in Allston

Harvard is not only an urban campus, but it is a campus in a congested city . . . . The acquisition of new land implies a careful study, not only of prices, taxation, and location of parcels, but also of size and shape of those parcels in terms of their future use. The programming and needs of new buildings and a rough calculation of the size and type can be of great help in an intelligent policy for Harvard’s future purchases.

—Jose Lluís Sert, 1957, as quoted in “Campus Harvard + Allston,” by Richard Marshall and Linda Haar

Faculty and students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) have studied the prospect of developing a campus in Allston since the 1990s, after it was revealed that Harvard had been buying land in the neighborhood. But even before that, GSD studios such as “The Beacon Yards, New Urban Structure,” taught in 1987 by Associate Professor Jonathan S. Lane, considered the neighborhood as a site with rich potential for future equitable development that benefits the Allston community.

At the initiation of a developer who approached the GSD and sponsored the studio, Lane looked at 200 acres in Allston, “including the Allston Landing truck depot, a section of the Mass. Turnpike and its Toll Plaza, as well as considerable frontage on the Charles River.” The studio aimed to create connections between the site and the Charles River, allowing access to green space for residents and Boston University students, who were hemmed in by the transportation depots.  

In considering how the site might be developed, the studio studied comparable examples of projects that transformed transportation depots into livable neighborhoods, including Philadelphia’s Penn Center and 30th Street Station, Boston’s Prudential Center over the old Boston and Albany Yards, and Pittsburgh’s “Golden Triangle.” Lane notes that some examples are more successful than others. For example, he cautions that the “inhumane” scale of the Prudential Center in Boston should be avoided.

On the heels of the news about Harvard’s purchase of Allston lands, in 1999, GSD instructors Richard Marshall and Linda Haar co-taught “Campus Harvard + Allston,” which recounted the history of development in Allston and offered a range of proposals for the campus. They note that as early as 1925, Harvard founded its campus in Allston, when Henry Lee Higginson proposed to President Eliot “developing the ‘unsavory stretch of brackish mud flats and marsh.’” A competition was held in 1924 to select the architect for the new Graduate School of Business Administration. McKim, Mead, and White—one of the nation’s leading architectural firms at the time—was selected, and Frederick Law Olmsted’s firm designed the landscape. 

The 1999 studio asked students to consider three concerns in Allston: “Housing, the redevelopment of Western Avenue, and the expansion of the Campus.” As students looked at each aspect of development, they would need to consider how Harvard would interact with its neighbors, for example, in ensuring sufficient housing for residents. Today, housing remains a pressing issue, and a housing complex is a significant portion of the Enterprise Research Campus that has recently opened in the neighborhood. 

In 2002, Alex Krieger, Professor in Practice of Urban Design, Emeritus, taught a course  on the development of Allston’s campus, in which one of the students proposed a “science hub” for the neighborhood. The group spent the semester grappling with concerns around how the university would interface with the community.  Several years later, in 2008, GSD students gathered in another Allston studio, this one led by instructor Jonathan Levi , to focus on student and community housing in the neighborhood. Looking back to Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell, who changed Harvard’s conception of student housing in the early 20th century, Levi noted that the “attempt was to democratize the benefits of living on campus.” After consulting with Allston residents and community members, students in the studio designed housing for Harvard students in Allston. 

The subject arose again in 2018, when Shaun Donovan and David Gamble co-taught “A Campus in a City—A City in a Campus: Harvard and Allston,” an urban planning and design studio that interwove “architecture, urban design, planning and landscape architecture to transform and grow a new neighborhood in Allston at the intersection of campus and city.” Exploring what Harvard’s “100 acres will become,” the studio emphasized the importance of equitable access to the neighborhood’s “innovation economy.” 

GSD students were also part of the conversation around Allston’s development in the 2017 competition  for an art installation at The Grove, and in a series of public events such as a 2020 conversation between Marika E. Reuling and Thomas Glynn, moderated by Stephen Gray, with Martin Zogran, Courtney Sharpe, and Rustom Cowasjee. Reuling is the Harvard’s Managing Director for Allston Initiatives, Glynn is the Chief Executive Officer of the Harvard Allston Land Company, and Rustom Cowasjee (MAUD ’82), is a part of Tishman Speyer, the developer for the Enterprise Research Campus. Most recently, in 2025, Martin Bucksbaum Professor in Practice of Urban Planning and Design Joan Busquets taught “Harvard Campus and the Changing Nature of the University,” focusing on both Cambridge and Allston. As construction progresses in Allston today on the ERC campus, GSD students will continue to help innovate and design in partnership with Allston residents. 

Alex Krieger on the History of Harvard’s Allston Enterprise Research Campus

For nearly 50 years, Alex Krieger, professor in practice of urban design, emeritus, taught at the Graduate School of Design (GSD). For about half of those years, he was committed to helping Harvard in the development of the Allston campus , serving on work groups, task forces, and design review committees focused on the project. First working with Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers and his administration in the early 2000s, Krieger helped to initiate a master planning process that, through various iterations over the years, ushered in the Allston campus. The first phase of the Enterprise Research Campus is now nearing completion. 

In addition to his scholarship, he’s well-known for his “iconic tour” of Boston that focuses on how the city, which was originally settled on an island, created land to accommodate its growth. He dedicated his career to the study of urbanism, with books including City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present (2019), Urban Design (with William Saunders, 2009), and Mapping Boston (with David Cobb and Amy Turner, 1999).

Here, he recounts the history of the Allston campus and how he’s witnessed—and helped shape—its evolution into the landscape we see today, with the opening of the David Rubenstein Treehouse conference center , the “front door to the Enterprise Research Campus.”

How did the idea for a campus expansion originate?
 
Upon assuming the presidency, and with the then-recent public acknowledgment by the university that it had been acquiring land in Allston, Larry Summers announced the need for an ambitious master plan to prepare Harvard for its next decades of growth. He would reveal his own ambition that Allston would enable Harvard to establish “the Silicon Valley of the East,” given the university’s leadership in the sciences, and its researchers’ role in the mapping of the human genome that had just been completed by the International Human Genome Project. At the president’s direction, an international search for architects and planners ensued. 
 
My first significant role was advising on the start of the overall planning process and becoming a member of the architect/planner selection committee for the master plan. I worked with Harvard Vice President for Administration Sally Zeckhauser, who directed the search process. We visited firms around the world, and in 2005, selected Cooper Robertson, Frank Gehry, and the Olin Partnership. At Sally Zeckhauser’s request, I began to serve on the design advisory committee as the master plan commenced and proceeded. 
 
Concurrently, I was asked to develop initial programming guidelines for the future campus, which, late in 2005 was released as Programming for the Public Realm of the Harvard Allston Campus. The Cooper Robertson plan was made public in 2007. It gained much attention and publicity, even as we all knew that it would evolve significantly over the years. Several subsequent planning efforts with other planners followed.

 
When did construction in Allston begin?

The next significant event, in my memory, was the commissioning of the firm Behnisch Architeken, from Germany, to design what, in nine long years, would become the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. However, it was initially planned to be a research and teaching facility for continuing stem cell, genome and life/health sciences innovation. Again, I served on the architect selection committee and on the design review committee that followed. 
 
The “Great Recession” of 2008-10 led to a substantial decline in Harvard’s endowment, and construction had slowed during 2009 and halted in 2010. Three underground levels had been built, intended for a large garage and a district energy facility. The District Energy Facility (DEF), was later built separately, designed by Andrea Leers of Leers Weinzapfel Associates, a frequent visiting faculty at the GSD. For much of the next five years, only the roof of those underground levels was visible, with four humongous construction cranes left idle and visible from afar. This was great fodder for The Boston Globe.
 

I remember; it was infamous. How long did it take for construction to get back on track?

 Drew Galpin Faust became Harvard’s President in 2007. Because of the national economic downturn, she became less concerned with expanding Harvard and focused on projects such as the adaptation of Holyoke Center to a student union. In Allston, President Faust focused on the reuse of some of the properties left vacant by Harvard’s earlier acquisitions, helping to attract new tenants to provide neighborhood services and amenities. 
 
Katie Lapp who became the Executive Vice President for Administration shortly following Zekhouser’s retirement in 2009, began to encourage President Faust to restart planning for Allston. I was part of various informal conversations about what to do with the unfinished project. A science facility had in the interim been built in Cambridge and so different uses needed to be identified before construction could resume. 
 
There were various ideas. One thought was that one of the Longwood Medical Area (LMA) hospitals, or the School of Public Health might relocate to sit on top of the “shortest building,” since there was little space for additional growth at the LMA. Some might find that idea unlikely, but, at the time Chan Krieger & Associates was planning in the LMA, and I heard such conversations there, not just in Cambridge. Ultimately, of course, the Science and Engineering Complex (SEC) , home of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), was the result.
 
There was also some discussion about a long-term future for Harvard’s acquisition of the Beacon Rail Yards and adjacent land under the Mass Pike, slated for eventual reconstruction. President Faust and Harvard leadership were becoming aware of just how much land was under Harvard’s control and cognizant that not all of it would be needed for Harvard’s academics.

How did the university decide they’d manage that land, and shift towards a new vision for the ERC?
 
 These informal conversations and brainstorming sessions culminated in the formation of a new Allston planning committee, the Allston Work Team in 2010. I became one of the three co-chairs of that committee, along with Bill Purcell, former Mayor of Nashville, then at the Kennedy School, and Harvard Business School Professor Peter Tufano. The Work Team included the participation of most of Harvard’s Deans, Drew Faust herself, invited urban development experts, and of course, Katie Lapp. 
 
Notions about a new kind of research campus, perhaps to compete with booming Kendall Square (which was beginning to be referred to as “the smartest square mile on the planet”) were already in the air. In Boston, Mayor Menino began to develop the concept of the Seaport Innovation Center. Underway were early phases of what, a decade later, would become the Cambridge Crossing innovation district, under the leadership of former Harvard planner Mark Johnson (MLAUD ’82). Harvard realized they’d better get into this game. 

How did they balance community and university needs in the final design?
 
The Allston Work Team commenced serious discussion about what an Enterprise Research Campus (ERC) might become; supported the resumption of construction for what would become the Engineering School; initiated plans for graduate student and faculty housing, which led in 2015 to the Continuum Residences in Barry’s Corner, with Trader Joe’s at the base; explored how a needed hotel and conference center might become part of early phases; and continued exploring how to revive retail and community facilities around Barry’s Corner and along Western Avenue. 
 
What can you tell us about the selection of Tishman Speyer  as the developer, and Jeanne Gang as the architect of the David Rubenstein Treehouse conference center ?
 
In 2018, Tom Glynn became the founding CEO of the Harvard Alston Land Company, and I helped Tom get up to speed on prior Allston planning efforts. We knew each other, as Chan Krieger had served Massport and earlier Partners Healthcare, both institutions he had led. We also had informal conversations about the Boston area development community, as, under his leadership, Harvard was getting closer and closer to proceeding with the selection of a development team for the ERC. I was not involved in that selection process but was quite pleased when Tishman Speyer announced that Jeanne Gang would play a major design role, including, of course, in the design of the Treehouse conference facility. 
 
So, the Allston Work Team helped shape today’s Allston campus, with the November 2025 opening of the David Rubenstein Treehouse conference center, and the ERC now well underway ?
 
Yes, right now, Phase One is nearing completion, which encompasses nine acres. This first mixed-use cluster includes space for research, housing, a hotel, and the conference center. It will form “the prow” or “beacon” for future phases of the ERC, as the economy allows.
 
In 2010, the ERC  was just emerging as an idea, and seemed like a way to complement the future Science and Engineering Complex (SEC) , once construction resumed. Behnisch Architekten , the architect for the initial construction, had made the brilliant decision to maintain construction liability during those years. Without a building mass on top there was the possibility that those three unfinished levels would begin rising out of the ground due to groundwater hydrostatic pressure. So, it made sense to bring Behnisch Architekten back, though some at Harvard felt that the design was too modern and unlike Harvard. The building has acquired iconic status, and as Stefan Behnisch promised, is one of the world’s most energy efficient science facilities.
 
I remained on the design review committee for the project, alongside former GSD Dean Mohsen Mostavi, and later Jeanne Gang, as well. 
 
How would you characterize Harvard’s relationship with the Allston community?
  
The relationship  has improved over time, beginning rather badlywhen it was first revealed that Harvard had secretly bought 52.6 acres of Allston land in the late 1980s and 1990s . Harvard has since substantially invested in Allston especially along the Western Avenue corridor. As I mentioned, President Faust and Katie Lapp began to focus more attention on neighborhood concerns and needs, and this has continued under Presidents Bacow and Garber. 
 
Of course, expressions of impatience on the part of the Allston community remain, citizens always asking Harvard to reveal any additional plans, plus deliver on some now-old promises. For example, mention the Greenway, and residents will say, ‘Those Harvard people, they promised that to us two decades ago.’ Indeed, a greenway was identified in the initial Cooper Robertson master plan, a continuous pedestrian park-like corridor from the Allston Public Library to the Charles River. Parts of it have been realized, but one long segment remains missing.  
 
The ERC is adding a segment at its center; it is beautifully designed. The trouble is, this segment is separated from the portions of the Greenway that exist, by those not yet built.  As the ERC fills with users and tenants, it may make this space seem like it’s proprietary to the ERC. Allston folks may not understand that it’s part of the long-promised Greenway, until Harvard builds the rest of it. I’ve been very vocal about this issue, to the point where everyone was sick of hearing it. Harvard will soon, I hope, complete the missing segments and it will all turn out okay.
 
Harvard deserves more credit than it sometimes gets from Allston neighbors. As far as I know, Harvard has committed something like $50 million at least three times—once for the Beacon Yards transit station . The current ten-year Allston plan promises an additional $53 million in community benefits. Another large sum is slated towards the reconstruction of the Turnpike. Finally, less publicly so far, another $50 million-or-so has been quietly promised for the eventual realignment of a portion of Storrow Drive to enable the widening of the Esplanade along the Charles River. 

How do you feel about handing off the Allston project, now that you’ve stepped back from the planning process?
 
Well, I still get to offer opinions, such as pressing the Business School to do something with its huge parking lot right across the street from the ERC, and cajoling Harvard to complete the Greenway. My last role was to serve on the design review committee for the A.R.T. project. This will be a truly wonderful addition to North Harvard Street and Barry’s Corner. The Allston Campus and the revitalization of the Allston neighborhood are progressing well.
 

 

Jeanne Gang on the David Rubenstein Treehouse and the Future of Sustainable Design

As a child, architect Jeanne Gang built treehouses in the woods of her hometown— Belvidere, Illinois—so it was, perhaps, inevitable that she would one day design a building inspired by a place where she once felt so free. 

“Growing up, I loved building treehouses,” Gang said. “There were several trees I’d climb to hang out in—and then,” she laughed, “I’d jump down when I was farther up than I’d realized. I love trees and feel there’s a deep connection between trees and humans.” 

That sense of wonder and freedom became central to her design of the David Rubenstein Treehouse conference center for Harvard’s Enterprise Research Campus (ERC) in Allston. It is the university’s first project employing mass timber, an engineered wood product used in the structures of large-scale buildings. Walk into the ground floor, and you will find an open central atrium, with wooden columns that rise and seem to branch out to the ceiling, operating as structural supports—but with the lightness of tree branches, notes Gang (MArch ’93), Kajima Professor in Practice of Architecture at the Graduate School of Design (GSD). 

“Mass timber not only allowed us to make the building visually lighter, but also reduce its mass,” she explained. “As we explored the idea of using mass timber, it made sense to let our design be informed by trees. The structure has a logical yet dynamic quality to it that creates this feeling of being in a forest while you’re inside,” she said.

Gang has always been inspired by relationships found in the natural world. Her recent book, The Art of Architectural Grafting, explores how the horticultural practice of grafting can be used as a metaphor for adapting existing buildings into architecture with increased longevity. Her recent studios at the GSD have focused on the cultural and environmental aspects of buildings’ reuse. This past spring, she taught “Grafting the Aquarium,” prompting students to create an “expanded, flourishing, and distinctive work of architecture” using her concept of architectural grafting. In 2020, she taught “Béton Brut and Beyond,” a studio that focused on extending the life and capacity of an existing Brutalist mixed-use social housing complex in Paris’s La Défense neighborhood, and in 2018, she taught “After the Storm: Restoring an Island Ecosystem” in St. Thomas, following Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017. This fall, with historian Lizabeth Cohen, she guest edited issue 53 of Harvard Design Magazine , on “Reuse and Repair.

Recent projects completed by her firm, Studio Gang , based in Chicago with offices in New York, San Francisco, and Paris, include the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The building’s central atrium, whose design is informed by geological formations shaped by wind and water, draws visitors in, encouraging them to explore and learn. The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts , with a design that recalls a very different form found within nature, was “conceived of as a stem that blossoms to the north and south.” Both projects are an example of her grafting technique, which expands the capacity of existing structures with new and strategic additions. And, the design for Populus , a hotel in Denver, draws from the characteristic patterns found on the region’s Aspen trees to create a distinctive façade. Her iconic Aqua Tower,  in Chicago, offers opportunities for connection to the city and neighbors along its exterior balconies.

Gang is not only inspired by nature but also has a keen interest in “how the things we do as architects can either support or harm the living beings around us.” She is an avid hiker who loves bird nests for their “beauty, humility, and efficiency” as structures, and advocates for biodiversity and protection of creatures with whom we share the natural and urban environments. For instance, architectural elements such as fritted glass can be deployed to protect migratory birds from collisions with windows that are often fatal—especially as they navigate through cities on waterways like Boston and Chicago. 

“I’m interested,” said Gang, “in the feeling of being up in the canopy. Within the crown of a tree, you get both a vista to beyond and a sense of protection at the same time.”

The building is intended to serve as the welcoming point of the ERC, a decades-long project. Once the first phase of the campus is completed, it will also include a hotel, residences, and commercial lab space (including one designed by Gang), all intended to be connected by Allston’s Greenway, which will extend from the west, through the ERC, and onto the Charles River. At the Rubenstein Treehouse, Gang and her team wanted to leave room for human-scaled spaces between the building and the neighborhood around it. These include the Laneway, a pedestrian corridor between the Rubenstein Treehouse and the hotel. She emphasized the importance of fostering a sense of community in the neighborhood and creating opportunities for the public to take advantage of the conference center and ERC more broadly. 

The Rubenstein Treehouse marks Harvard’s first mass timber building and Gang’s most ambitious use of the material. For over two decades, she has used mass timber, most recently in projects such as the expanded campus of the California College of the Arts as well as academic and residential buildings at Kresge College at UC Santa Cruz. When she began designing the Rubenstein Treehouse, the “idea of creating social spaces around the vertical circulation, came first,” said Gang, “and very soon thereafter, we considered using mass timber.” 

In addition to the aesthetic potential of mass timber, of course, it gives Harvard the opportunity to meet its high environmental standards. The wood structure helps to reduce the building’s embodied carbon by 55 percent compared to a similar building. Using the material for a large conference center has its challenges. “The hardest thing about using mass timber,” Gang said, “is that you want to expose it,” which requires a great deal of organization of the various building systems that would otherwise be hidden behind closed ceilings. The team had to balance the airy aesthetic of the mass timber design along with the complex mechanical systems required to support the building with the most sustainable means. 

The Rubenstein Treehouse is also one of the first buildings in Massachusetts to use concrete made with ground glass pozzolan, another element that helps reduce the building’s embodied carbon. Modern pozzolan is a glass aggregate that reacts with water, not unlike the volcanic pozzolan that ancient Romans added to concrete, Gang explained. The pozzolan employed in the Rubenstein Treehouse is derived from post-consumer glass containers, making the material cleaner than fly ash, a byproduct of coal combustion often used in concrete. 

The conference center’s design minimized basement space in order to use less concrete, and, to reduce energy, also makes use of solar panels, natural daylighting and self-shading, and a connection to Allston’s District Energy Facility. 

“It was really exciting,” said Gang, “to work on something that offers a peek into the future of what sustainable buildings can achieve.”

“Bright Harvest” Documents Efforts to Harvest Solar Power From Space

Isaac Asimov’s 1941 short story “Reason” imagines the possibility of powering earth from a solar station in outer space. “Our beams feed these worlds energy,” a human explains to a robot, “drawn from one of those huge incandescent globes that happens to be near us. We call that globe the Sun…”

More than 80 years later, Asimov’s vision is edging closer to reality, as the short film “Bright Harvest: Powering Earth from Space ” explains. The film was screened at the Graduate School of Design (GSD), with the support of the Master in Real Estate (MRE) program, after which Jerold Kayden, MRE founding director and Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design, led a discussion with the film’s producer, Brigitte Bren and producer, director, and writer Steven Reich . 

The film’s narrative begins over a decade ago, when three California Institute of Technology scientists  came together to talk about the possibility of powering earth continuously with solar energy from outer space. Harry Atwater, Caltech Otis Booth Leadership Chair in the division of Engineering and Applied Science, says in the film, “I thought it was a crazy idea to begin with.” Still, citing a commitment to projects with the potential to help the world as an established researcher, he began collaborating with Ali Hajimiri, Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering, and Sergio Pellegrino, Joyce and Kent Kresa Professor of Aerospace and Civil Engineering. Hajimiri and Pellegrino now co-direct the space-based solar power project at Caltech. 

While governments and large-scale corporations typically control energy collection and dispersal, explains Hajimiri, this project could give access to energy to anyone, with the capability to distribute it to various sites around the world depending on where the needs lie.  “It has the potential to democratize access to energy,” says Hajimiri “the same way that wireless access democratized information.” 

The trio explains that the system is “green” and the closest we can get to clean energy, as it’s gathered from the sun. They note that their design differs from others under production, as it beams energy in a non-ionizing way, which is how microwaves and radio waves distribute energy, and therefore poses low risk to humans. Additionally, it is set up in geospace, further out than near-earth orbit, which is heavily trafficked by existing satellites.

One of the greatest challenges the team faced in designing the solar panels was weight: the panels had to be light enough to pack and launch easily, and then expand once in space. “The system we envisaged,” says Pellegrino, “is a system of extreme lightness.” 

In addition, since the panels would be exposed to the elements in space, they had to be weather-resistant and durable. They designed a panel made of a series of microchips that could be curled and bent. Once the team had refined a paper-thin panel, they turned to the ancient Japanese practice of origami to fold it into a small cylinder. 

On January 23, 2023, using one of SpaceX’s rockets, they launched a prototype into space, and on March 3, successfully transferred energy . The film’s tension rises as we watch the team set up, in May, on the roof of the Gordon and Betty Moore Laboratory of Engineering at Caltech, to see if they would be able to receive power from the device as it passes overhead. One of the undergraduate students, Raha Riazati, professes her doubts as they watched the clock tick with no sign from above. Then, thirty seconds later, they see the signals come through: it worked. Graduate student Ailec Wu, the programmer, explained that he had forgotten to delete a bug that caused a delay. The audience laughed in appreciation of the very human moment in an almost surreal demonstration of how photovoltaic energy can be transmitted from space. 

During the discussion after the screening, producer Brigitte Bren noted that 18 people—including the foundational trio—have been working on the project for the last decade; several PhD students have graduated and moved on, with new students coming on board. The project was funded by her husband, philanthropist Donald Bren, chairman of The Irvine Company. 

Every year for the last decade, Brigitte and filmmaker Steven Reich visited the lab to gather information and document the team’s progress. On one such visit, she recounted, she arrived to find paper origami pieces taped up all over the walls, as a student had been researching how best to fold the panels. Grace La, professor of architecture and chair of the architecture department at the GSD, noted that origami was a source of interest for  students, including some who were experts in the practice and who could be excellent cross-disciplinary collaborators.

Kayden sees the drive for interdisciplinary work among MRE students as well. “All students and practitioners of real estate understand that success depends on insights and contributions drawn collaboratively from multiple fields and disciplines such as design, finance, law, planning, management, and public policy, among others,” he noted. “From its inception several years ago, the curriculum and pedagogy of the GSD’s MRE program have imparted the value of collaborative multidisciplinary efforts.”

Sarah Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture, emphasized the importance of recognizing the research that happens only at universities, and how discoveries made by academics and scientists contribute to humanity. One of the purposes of this film, noted Reich, in addition to advocating for space solar energy and highlighting the work happening at academic institutions, is to inspire more students to go into science research; this is why they made sure to feature an undergraduate.

Looking ahead to the project’s next steps, Bren and Reich explained that, in the service of providing “energy to anyone” with solar power from space, the team estimates that it would cost 10 cents per kilowatt hour. They are also considering questions such as how the system will be disposed of once it has run its course. Bren and Reich hope to persuade the US government to invest in the program. Other countries are also working towards harnessing outer space solar power, she says, but the Caltech team believes they still have an edge. Soon, perhaps, we’ll be living the reality of which Asimov dreamed.

A New Life Offered

In 1970, Peter Smithson made the lofty promise that, at Robin Hood Gardens , the social housing complex he and his wife, Alison, designed, “you’ll be able to smell, feel, and experience the new life that’s being offered .” Two years later, the complex was complete, spanning two city blocks, with so-called “streets in the sky” that gave residents access to community, expansive views, and sunlit apartments—at least, that was the hope. 

The detailed documentation the pair made of the site, with early sketches and photographs, as well as drawings and plans made throughout the design and construction process, can be viewed in the Frances Loeb Library’s Smithson Collection , the only publicly-accessible repository of the couples’ life work. Selections from the collection have been utilized for a wide range of scholarship activities, from books to exhibitions, including, last fall at the GSD, “Towards a Newer Brutalism: Solar Pavilions, Appliance Houses, and Other Topologies of Contemporary Life,” curated by Emmett Zeifman, a former GSD faculty member. Zeifman writes that the Smithsons understood new brutalism as “an ethic, not a style,” and hoped to “meet the changing needs and desires of postwar society through an architecture that directly expressed the material conditions of its time.”  

In addition to offering a historical framework for understanding architecture today, the Smithson collection holds never-before-published drawings, photographs, sketches, and ephemera that bear testimony to more than fifty years of their vocation, including their philosophy of seamlessly integrating family life with work. There’s a landscape design by their twelve year old daughter, Soltana, for example, and childrens’ book manuscripts the couple co-wrote, along with pedagogical materials about the historical significance of Christmas imagery. “Innocent imagination, children’s books, and the responsibility of the architect,” writes M. Christine Boyer in Not Quite Architecture: Writing Around Alison and Peter Smithson , which draws from the library’s collection, “are continuously intermeshed in the Smithson’s writings…” 

The Smithsons’ utopian design of Robin Hood Gardens, with its central hill created for children’s play, protected by a building made to support families in community, ended in controversy. While some residents advocated for the rich sense of connection facilitated by the “streets in the sky,” others argued that they became ideal tucked-away passages for crime. After decades of neglect, the dilapidated building was demolished starting in 2017, with the final portion completed in March of this year, though the V&A Museum preserved a small portion  for its collection.

The Smithsons’ legacy, however, and their dreams of the benefits of social housing, helped propel forward the conversation around how to best ensure safe, affordable housing for all. The GSD, in partnership with the Joint Center for Housing Studies , has long addressed issues around social housing, expanding affordable housing access in the face of the climate crisis, and centering care in housing—some of the same threads of thought that led the Smithsons to build the iconic, if ultimately flawed, Robin Hood Gardens.  

How GSD Students Design For Wildfire Prevention

Five months after California wildfires killed 29 people and devastated neighborhoods in Los Angeles and surrounding areas, three Graduate School of Design students interned at the Southern California offices of landscape architecture and urban design firm SWA , to learn how to leverage design for fire prevention and remediation. Facundo Soraire (MUP ’26), Enrique Lozano (MAUD ’26), and Eleanor Davol (MLA ’27) spent six weeks learning about complex issues around fire risk, prevention, and remediation, and generated proposals for parcels that sit at the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) , where human communities meet undeveloped land and fire risks run high. This was the most recent of many collaborations between the firm and members of the GSD.

This summer’s program built on research undertaken by Jonah Susskind  (MLA ’17), SWA director of climate and sustainability. Over the last decade, he’s conducted extensive research and taught a series of summer programs at SWA on the connections between climate change and fire risk, and how people and communities can best prepare, resulting in his book, Playbook for the Pyrocene , winner of a 2025 American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) merit award  in communications. Susskind writes that large segments of the population are moving to city outskirts. While residents once appreciated the suburbs for their access to nature and recreation, now, what draws them is the more affordable housing available further from the city due to “NIMBYism and local zoning restrictions.” 

Thus, more and more people are seeking out homes in the WUI, which, because of the dire need for affordable housing, is growing by about 2 million acres per year . Almost 100 million people in the US, Susskind notes, live in the WUI. This zone is especially vulnerable to wildfires as it’s often populated by “woodpiles, propane tanks, trees and shrubs, roof and gutter and deck debris,”^[i]  as well as housing materials that may be especially vulnerable to fire. Susskind writes that, “[d]uring the past three decades, more than 80% of California’s fire-related structure loss has occurred in these high-risk zones.” Millions of people are likely experience the losses inflicted by ever more powerful wildfires. 

Planners must “balance affordable housing with environmental conservation,” explains Susskind, especially because “the minute you get into the WUI, you also come up against entrenched histories of environmental conservation.” Susskind argues that suburban land use planning hasn’t changed much since the 1930s, and we need a new “suburban design ethos” that would allow for those communities to be “better resourced” in the face of fire risks and other climate change impacts.      

“This is a design and planning challenge as much as it is a policy and economic challenge as much as it is a social and equity challenge,” he noted.  

Each of the students in this summer’s cohort focused on a different aspect of wildfire prevention and remediation. Soraire, for example, envisioned a Community Land Trust (CLT) that would be led by the Santa Ynez Chumash tribe NGO, the local Indigenous nation, in support of co-governance and land stewardship that centers on the nation’s ancestral knowledge, including fire management techniques. The project includes affordable housing for the community. 

Soraire took inspiration from his home province in Argentina, Jujuy, which borders Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina, and is known as the “lithium triangle,” a mining territory. He investigated questions around land use, extraction, and the role of Indigenous voices in shaping land use. He started by mapping pre-colonial histories around Santa Barbara. Because several communities live in the region, “governance fragmentation and jurisdictional boundaries exacerbate fire risk.” His proposal, therefore, creates a central infrastructure for the many agencies already working in partnership with the Chumash, to share ideas and resources and center the nation’s presence and leadership on the land. 

Davol took a different approach, studying soil composition to think about post-fire resiliency for humans and non-humans. In a mega-fire, she explained, the soil’s composition changes, often leaving it impermeable to rainfall. Later, instead of sinking into the soil, rain slides over the slick surface and causes floods and mudslides, further threatening the ecosystem and people’s homes and communities. 

“The health of the earth and soil, and its ability to recharge and become permeable again,” she explained, “is really important for the long-term success of these landscapes.”   

Davol mapped the soil and created corridors both to prevent fire and rehabilitate the earth, for example, with chapparal plantings. The corridors also give species in the region, such as the mountain lion, safe access across human infrastructure in the WUI. “I thought about this region as a “patchwork of green spaces that could be connected for people and wildlife.” As we “expand into the wildlands, we’re often bisecting and covering up and burying natural systems like rivers.” Her project addresses biodiversity loss and interactions between humans and nonhumans. 

Finally, Enrique Lozano framed the WUI “not as a liability, but as a multiplier—a design tool that catalyzes infill development while preserving critical open space.” Instead of looking at the WUI as a “zone of vulnerability,” he saw it as an opportunity, using Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) from a nearby golf course to a 327 acre plot called Giorgi Farm. In the process, his proposal would increase affordable housing and restore resident access to Ygnacia Creek while also “enhancing biodiversity, using landscape as a fire buffer, promoting the wildfire corridor, and minimizing greenfield development.” 

He started by mapping the residents who are most vulnerable to fire risk, and found that it’s the people “pushed out of the urban core, to the peripheries.” In addition, he found that many of the Housing Element updates in the city, which mark new housing units, fell within the WUI. Applying lessons he learned in the MAUD program and a recent Architecture and Real Estate course collaborative, he looked at the site from different scales, studying the territory at large, and using TDR’s to build affordable housing within the city while also increasing biodiversity and usable green spaces. 

The complexity of wildfire prevention and remediation that Soraire, Davol, and Lozano address in their projects is why Susskind believes it’s so critical to establish bridges between firms like SWA and academic programs like the GSD. SWA has a long legacy of GSD collaborations, beginning with its founding in the 1950s by GSD professor Hideo Sasaki  and his student, Pete Walker  (MLA ’57), both of whom went on to prodigious careers. Today, Susskind regularly guest lectures at the GSD in the “Climate by Design” course, and the SWA summer cohorts often include GSD students. For example, in 2022, Slide Kelly (MLA & MDes ’24) worked on fire remediation with Susskind at SWA, and now serves as a design critic in landscape architecture at the GSD.

The GSD has long served as a site of experimentation where designers can explore issues around wildfire management and remediation, with increasing attention in recent years as climate change causes more frequent megafires. In recent years, three professors at the GSD taught classes on wildfires, and this fall, two option studios focus on fires: a new iteration of Silvia Benedito’s option studio, “Canary in the Mine,” co-taught with Kelly, takes students to the Jack Dangermond Nature Preserve in Santa Barbara County as part of their study of the aftermath of the January Los Angeles wildfires. James Lord and Roderick Wylie’s studio “Fireworks,” focuses on the Napa Valley in California, using the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art to inspire thinking around how art and landscape might, together, create a “speculative vision for the future hand in hand with design.”

These courses, along with the work that GSD students undertook in partnership with SWA this summer, mark significant opportunities for designers to intervene in the climate crisis, alleviating its impacts for humans and nonhumans alike. SWA encouraged students in the summer program to first consider “ecological systems before development,” explained Lozano. He thought first about restorative landscapes and fire buffers, and how to maximize affordable housing and resident mobility and open space, in two sites across the city.

“I wanted to show that, even though the urban core is very dense and active, and then, moving outward, there’s suburbia and then the woodlands—all of these seemingly disparate things are interdependent.” Fire mitigation requires looking at the city and suburbs as a unified system. 

^[i]  Katherine M. Wilkin, David Benterou, Amanda M. Stasiewicz, “High fire hazard Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) residences in California lack voluntary and mandated wildfire risk mitigation compliance in Home Ignition Zones,” International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, Volume 124, 2025, 105435, ISSN 2212-4209, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2025.105435 .

The Art in Architecture

Spanning the length of Gund Hall’s sunny back patio stands a life-size black-and-white drawing of a stone wall, a cluster of students and critics squinting to assess its merits. This is the final review for Ewa Harabasz’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) course “Drawing for Designers 2, Human Presence: Appearance in Natural and Built Environments.” Students spent the semester observing closely and developing drawing techniques, capping off their work with the final collaborative stone wall project. Each student created a single frame 1:1 scale drawing on large sheets intended for watercolor—bumpy and uneven, creating more texture—which were then pieced together to create a continuous wall.

The range in styles that students developed this semester is evident in the shifting image of the whole from section to section. Tosin Oshinowo , a practicing architect and 2024–2025 Loeb Fellow at the GSD  who was enrolled in the class, aimed to capture the “materiality of the stone,” she said, “without copying its patterns of darkness and lightness.” Junye Zhong (MLA ’25) relied on the texture of the paper and the bumpy tack board on top of which it was created to layer texture and strong contrasts, emphasizing the cuts in the stone. One student captured in meticulous detail the ivy at the top of the wall; another portrayed the patches of sunlight on the stones, encouraging the eye to move across the drawing.

The project is the culmination of what Harabasz defined as a semester-long focus on “an expressive and playful supplement to computer-based labor.” Because architecture and design students inevitably spend hours working with various software systems that help them realize their designs, meticulously mapping out structures and landscapes on computer screens, said Harabasz, it’s equally as important that they develop their creativity and drawing skills.

“I want students to gain sensitivity and imagination,” she added, “and to strengthen their perception of the human body and architectural space and design.” She noted that the skills they develop by observing closely and learning to draw will enrich their work across the span of their careers.

Harabasz  is a working artist who hails from Poland. Her drawings, paintings, and mixed-media projects are part of the permanent collection of the National Museum in Poznań, Poland, and have been exhibited in museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in Vaasa, Finland and the Kulturzentrum bei der Minoriten in Graz, Austria. Much of her work is created in large-scale formats, and deals with the violence of war and domestic abuse. Her recent series, “Icons,” for example, features stark photographs of people in the midst of conflict and grief, set on top of gold-leaf backgrounds. The images are reminiscent of medieval portraits of saints, the Madonna, and other religious figures, perhaps inspired in part by her work, earlier in her career, restoring paintings and frescoes in Poland and Italy.

This semester’s work in “Drawing for Designers 2” began with charcoal drawings. Harabasz asked students to home in on an emotional experience, gathering photographs to prompt memories, and to use charcoal in an “additive/subtractive process”—layering it onto the page as a gray base, and then erasing it to create highlights. The subject matter students chose to focus on ranged widely. Oshinowo explained that she had used charcoal in the past, “but never for abstraction.” In composing an image of a braid, she appreciated the challenge to approach the project with a different aesthetic in mind. Sabrina Madera (MArch I ’25) used the assignment to reveal to the group a recent surgery. “I felt I had to show the drawing publicly,” Madera explained. “Drawing the self-portrait forced me to have it out there.”

To offer more insight into the artistic process, Harabasz invited Polish abstractionist Urszula Śliz , PhD, to speak with the class from Poland, via Zoom. Śliz’s work, in mediums from drawing and painting to sculpture and collage, has been exhibited in museums around the world, including the Pavilion of the Four Domes Wroclaw Poland, the Nowich Museum UK, and many other cultural institutions in Europe.

For the last ten years, she’s been working on “Transposition,” a series of collages made from her own photographs of everyday materials, such as construction tape. In one collage, the tape, with red, pink, and white stripes, is criss-crossed over flowers fallen on the ground. Viewers might make their own associations—for Śliz, the red and white make her think of her Polish roots—but, she says, the tape creates its own random shapes and forms, and the photograph serves to re-process the large-scale collage. Part of her inspiration, she explained, was the first known photograph, View from the Window at Le Gras (1826 or 1827) by Nicéphore Niépce, which, she says, transforms the black-and-white rooftops and buildings into abstract forms, estranging the houses from reality—abstract art. Śliz walked students through her process so that they could think about their own place in the art world, sources of inspiration, and how their own work might evolve across mediums.

As Harabasz instructs students on how to quickly and accurately reveal what they see, she also encourages them think about perspective and form in public contexts. Each semester, she and her class install collaborative, mind-bending spatial experiences on the fifth floor of Gund Hall. This winter, their black-and-white optical illusions were made by painting stripes and laying down tape to change the perceived shape of the walls and floors: Here, a new door appears. There, a bulge pushes out. A blue cat perches at the top of wall, playing with a spool of strings. Step to the left or right, and it splits apart on a corner. The installation invites a sense of play, and engagement with other students, faculty, and staff in the space.

For the stone wall critique, several former students of Harabasz’s returned to share their insights. Paul Mok  (MArch I ’18) a New York–based architect and artist who was named 2024-2025 GSD Alumni Mentor of the Year , showed the class an in-process drawing that he created using a technique he developed back in 2017, during an independent study with Harabasz (one of four courses he took with her). He’s completed two other highly detailed pen and ink drawings  with the same methods, starting with marking the page with unplanned strokes, and then slowly filling to make the image.

“We always ask design students what their concepts are,” he explained, “and critique whether their designs are justified by their rationales. But what about intuition? I started this process of putting random strokes on paper without any preconceived ideas.”

For Mok, drawing is about “letting the mind wander,” an internal counterpoint to his work as an architect creating well-planned structures for others to inhabit. Similarly, two of Harabasz’s former students, Yuetong Li (MDes ’25) and Eva Cao (MDes ’25), spoke to the importance of the drawing classes they took at the GSD in developing their ability to “look not just at one part of an image,” said Li, “but to see the picture as a whole.” Cao appreciated the sense of narrative she developed in the course, combining image and text. They both found that drawing by hand is a useful tool, in addition to digital drawing.

Harabasz argued that developing their hand drawing skills grants designers the power to more clearly share their vision with others, and, perhaps even more importantly, to express who they are and what they value: “How do you view the world? What’s important? What do you see first, and second? How do we push the viewer to read the image as we want them to? This is what I teach.”