First Comprehensive Assessment of HouseZero Demonstrates High Energy Efficiency
Newly published research in the peer-reviewed journal Energy and Buildings shows that the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities’ HouseZero achieves a high level of energy efficiency with a combination of natural ventilation and a thermally active building system (TABS). With TABS, water flowing through pipes embedded in reinforced concrete is used to heat or cool a building, minimizing temperature fluctuations. A year-long assessment of the building’s ventilation and TABS presents the first comprehensive look at HouseZero’s energy efficiency.
“The research supports the effectiveness and success of [HouseZero’s] integrated system configurations and control strategies,” writes the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities in a press release . “Specifically, the data demonstrates that the natural ventilation and TABS integration can effectively control the indoor thermal environment while achieving high energy efficiency. This is also reflected by the low annual energy consumption for heating and cooling described in the paper.”
HouseZero—which functions both as the headquarters for the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities and as an experimental laboratory—was unoccupied during the first year of data collection due to the pandemic. But the research contains valuable information about the building’s performance and will help to inform strategies to minimize gaps between design intents and building operation. It also includes a set of takeaways that can be applied to retrofitting and operating similar structures.
“Comprehensive Assessment of Operational Performance of Coupled Natural Ventilation and Thermally Active Building System via an Extensive Sensor Network” is co-authored by Bin Yan, Xu Han, Ali Malkawi, Tor Helge Dokka, Pete Howard, Jacob Knowles, Tine Hegli, and Kristian Edwards and appears in Volume 260 of Energy and Buildings (1 April 2022).
Toni L. Griffin Honored with Edmund N. Bacon Urban Design Award from Center for Architecture and Design
Toni L. Griffin, professor in practice of Urban Planning and Publics Domain head, is the 2022 recipient of the Edmund N. Bacon Urban Design Award . Given by Philadelphia’s Center for Architecture and Design , the award recognizes professionals who have made significant contributions to the field of urban planning through expert articulation of vision, communication, and improvement in their communities. Griffin joins an impressive legacy of Edmund N. Bacon Urban Design Award recipients, including Theaster Gates (LF ‘11), Denise Scott Brown, and Paul Goldberger.
Griffin was selected as this year’s recipient for her focus on design justice in the built environment. A central question in her work asks, “Would we design better places if we put the values of equality, inclusion, or equity first?” A press release from the Center also acknowledged Griffin’s alignment with “conversations the Center is having about the future of our student design competition and how we can use it to help students become better designers with an ubiquitous lens of equity, inclusion and justice in their approach to urban design, planning and architecture.”
Griffin’s firm, New York-based urbanAC , consults on planning and design revitalization projects with a focus on “historical and current disparities involving race, class, and generation.” Cities Griffin and urbanAC have had their hand in include Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Memphis, and Detroit.
A graduate of the Loeb Fellowship Class of 1998, Griffin’s work to address, define, and stimulate the just city carry over to her engagements at the GSD. This semester, you can find her teaching “The Gentrification Debates: Perceptions and Realities of Neighborhood Change,” a seminar exploring the causes and effects of gentrification on national and city-specific scales. She is also the founder and director of the Just City Lab , a Harvard-based research center investigating the ways design can have a positive impact on addressing the conditions of injustice in cities.
Griffin will be honored in person and online and will give a talk at the Edmund N. Bacon Urban Design Award ceremony on March 24, 2022, in Philadelphia. Registration for the Zoom and in-person ceremony is required.
Stoss Landscape Urbanism Receives AIA Regional & Urban Design Award for Suffolk Downs Master Plan
Stoss Landscape Urbanism , the design studio founded by Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture Chris Reed, has received a 2022 AIA Award for Regional & Urban Design for the Suffolk Downs Master Plan. The annual AIA honors recognize “the best buildings and spaces—and the people behind them.”
Stoss received the award in partnership with Boston architecture firm CBT . The plan for the former horse racing facility in East Boston would create a highly resilient, mixed-use neighborhood oriented around transit. Studio director in the Boston office of Stoss and Design Critic in Landscape Architecture Amy Whitesides (MLA ’12) served as the director-in-charge for the project, with Reed acting as design director.
In addition to earning the AIA award, work by Stoss is featured as the cover story in the February 2022 publication of Landscape Architecture Magazine . The article reports on the design of a new central quad at the University of Michigan’s North Campus.
Reed also recently participated in an interview with the Canadian magazine Landscapes | Paysages , speaking with Snøhetta’s Michelle Delk and Dialog’s Doug Carlye about the future of landscape architecture. Asked to give advice for the new era, Reed says: “Embrace the challenges. Embrace the complexity. Don’t put it aside. And then find your own obsession, your own parallel obsession, and keep at that, too. Find your creative medium.”
Grace La and James Dallman Appointed First GSD Graduate Commons Program Faculty Directors
Grace La, professor of architecture and chair of the Practice Platform, and her husband, James Dallman (MArch ’92), have been appointed the newest faculty directors as part of Harvard’s Graduate Commons Program (GCP) . They are the first couple from the GSD to serve in the role, in which they will direct interdisciplinary, university-wide programs, serving as the intellectual leaders of the graduate residential communities of the GSD, HBS, FAS, and SEAS.
“We are thrilled to have our first GSD faculty directors joining us next year,” says GCP Director Lisa Valela . “In conversations with former HUH residents and interns, we learned that Grace and James share a commitment to mentoring and supporting graduate students.”
The couple will become the leaders of 10 Akron Street beginning in the fall of 2022. “James and I are delighted to join the distinctive GCP program, which enables us to contribute to the intellectual life at Harvard in new and expansive ways,” says La . “We look forward to collaboration across the university.” They will be joined by their two sons.
La and Dallman both hold degrees from the GSD. La graduated from Harvard College in 1992 and received her MArch from the GSD in 1995, and Dallman graduated with an MArch from the GSD in 1992. The pair are also principals and cofounders of the architecture practice LA DALLMAN .
This spring, La is leading the design research studio “Eco Folly” alongside Erika Naginski, Robert P. Hubbard Professor of Architectural History. The studio and corresponding seminar uses the folly opportunistically to create “a space of design experimentation in which participants will explore the behavior of materials, understand the life-cycle of buildings, and evaluate sustainable consequences.” The design work will be exhibited at the GSD’s House Zero this coming fall, and is generously funded by the Center for Green Buildings and Cities and the Department of Architecture.
Learn more about La and Dallman’s new leadership role in the Harvard Gazette .
New Book by Andrew Witt Examines the Visual Intersections of Architecture, Mathematics, and Culture
A new book by Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture Andrew Witt examines more than 150 years of seeing, drawing, and modeling architecture mathematically. It presents a rich tour of the drawing machines, geometric patterns, crystal structures, and stereoscopic images that connected modern architecture to modern science and expanded spatial imagination. The book’s research builds on the GSD seminar “Narratives of Design Science” led by Witt in past years.
Released in January 2022 by the MIT Press, Formulations: Architecture, Mathematics, Culture bridges the art of science and design. The book studies architecture’s encounter with mathematical calculation systems that were ingeniously retooled by architects for design. To illustrate initial exchanges between design and science, Witt provides a catalog of pre-digitization drawings and calculations from mid-twentieth-century mathematical practices in design. Formulations also takes up the “formal compendia that became a cultural currency shared between modern mathematicians and modern architects.”
As a way of illustrating the many ways mathematics penetrated design thinking as we know it today, Formulations examines a variety of innovations, including early drawing machines that mechanized curvature, the virtualization of buildings and landscapes through surveyed triangulation and photogrammetry, and stereoscopic drawing.
Antoine Picon, director of doctoral programs and G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology at the GSD, describes the book as a “brilliant and thought-provoking navigation through complex mathematical notions, models and machines, spatial patterns, and construction techniques. A must-read for anyone interested in the relationships between architecture, mathematics, and digital techniques.”
Formulations is part of the Writing Architecture series, edited by Cynthia Davidson, which includes previous contributions from Harvard faculty members including Giuliana Bruno, Edward Eigen, and K. Michael Hays. It is the first book in a complete graphic redesign of the series, by graphic designer Ben Fehrman-Lee .
Trained as both an architect and a mathematician, and a graduate of the GSD’s MArch and MDes programs, Witt’s research explores the relationship between architecture, science, and visual techniques through the lens of mathematics. He is also editor of the trilogy “Studies in the Design Laboratory ,” jointly published by the GSD and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. The final installment of the series, Tange Lab: The Quantified Economy and Urban Futurism, will be available online soon.
Learn more about Witt’s Formulations from the MIT Press .
Announcing the 2022 MICD Just City Mayoral Fellowship
The Just City Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD) are pleased to announce the launch of the 2022 MICD Just City Mayoral Fellowship, taking place in Spring 2022.
The 2022 MICD Just City Mayoral Fellowship will help mayors navigate a just and equitable recovery from the pandemic, providing actionable ideas for city leaders rising to meet this moment of change. Building on the inaugural 2020 Fellowship , this program will explore ways to create lasting, transformational impacts from new federal funding streams such as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the American Rescue Plan Act. The Lab’s Just City Index will frame dynamic presentations and dialogues with experts in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, art activism, housing, and public policy. Over the semester-long program, mayors will identify how racial injustices manifest in the social, economic, and physical infrastructures of their cities and develop manifestos of action for their communities.
The 2022 MICD Just City Mayoral Fellows include Charleston, SC Mayor John J. Tecklenburg ; College Park, MD Mayor Patrick L. Wojahn ; Duluth, MN Mayor Emily Larson ; Madison, WI Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway ; Providence, RI Mayor Jorge O. Elorza; Richmond, VA Mayor Levar M. Stoney; Salisbury, MD Mayor Jacob R. Day ; and Youngstown, OH Mayor Jamael Tito Brown .
The Just City Lab is a design lab located within the GSD and led by architect and urban planner Toni L. Griffin. The Lab has developed nearly 10 years of publications, case studies, convening tools and exhibitions that examine how design and planning can have a positive impact of addressing the long-standing conditions of social and spatial injustice in cities. The Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD), the nation’s preeminent forum for mayors to address city design and development issues, is a leadership initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the United States Conference of Mayors . Since 1986, MICD has helped transform communities through design by preparing mayors to be the chief urban designers of their cities.
“I’m delighted to see this powerful collaboration between the Just City Lab and the Mayors’ Institute on City Design continue,” says Sarah Whiting, dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture. “This year’s cohort of mayors come from many cities that are particularly interesting to our students as they consider their future plans. These are mostly middle-sized cities that are transforming quickly as a response to the skyrocketing costs of our nation’s largest urban centers. The Mayoral Fellowship is well-timed to help these eight mayors lead in terms of equity and opportunity. Our aspiration is that ‘just cities’ will become the standard for what we expect in this country, not the exception to what so many experience today.”
“Mayors have led our communities through a series of unrelenting challenges over the past two years. With new federal funding streams, we have a unique opportunity for once-in-a-generation change,” said Tom Cochran , CEO and executive director of the United States Conference of Mayors. “Mayors are now tasked with uniting their communities around real solutions and making transformational investments. The traditional MICD experience, with its candid, small-group format and access to national design experts, is so often transformative for mayors. There is no better model for empowering mayors to find solutions in our nation’s cities, and the United States Conference of Mayors is proud to partner with the Just City Lab to help guide mayors through this important chapter of American history.”
“Building on the National Endowment for the Arts’ vision to heal, unite, and lift up communities with compassion and creativity, we are proud and humbled to continue this important collaboration between MICD and the Just City Lab,” said Jennifer Hughes, NEA director of design and creative placemaking. “This program will take the transformative power of MICD, which illuminates the power of design to tackle complex problems, and apply it to the defining challenge of our time: ensuring equity and justice for everyone.”
On April 22, the 2022 Fellows will come together to discuss strategies for using planning and design interventions to address racial injustice in each of their cities at a GSD event hosted by Griffin. The program will be free and open to the public.
The Just City Lab and MICD are thrilled to continue this fellowship to help mayors shape more just cities. Learn more about the host organizations at www.micd.org and www.designforthejustcity.org .
Parts of this press release also appeared on the MICD website .
Jordan Weber, Germane Barnes, Design Earth Named 2022 United States Artists Fellows
Fellows and graduates of the Harvard Graduate School of Design are among the 63 recipients of 2022 USA Fellowships from national arts funding organization United States Artists (USA). Now in its 17th year, USA Fellowships provide recipients with an unrestricted $50,000 award to support their creative and professional development.
According to the United States Artists’ announcement , “The 2022 USA Fellows were selected for their remarkable artistic vision and their commitment to community—both within their specific regions and discipline at large.” They represent 23 states and Puerto Rico and span 10 artistic disciplines, including Architecture & Design.
Regenerative land sculptor and environmental activist Jordan Weber was honored with a fellowship in the Visual Arts category. He is the inaugural joint Loeb/ArtLab artist in residence , a collaborative program intended to enrich the Loeb Fellowship experience with studio space in the ArtLab and access to resources from the ArtLab community. This fall, “Perennial Philosophies ,” a public artwork by Weber commissioned by the Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA), was unveiled on the grounds of the ArtLab. The sculpture responds to the dual pandemics of 2020—COVID-19 and racial injustice—and features an excerpt from “The Hill We Climb,” the poem written by Harvard graduate Amanda Gorman for President Biden’s inauguration.
Architecture & Design fellowship winner Germane Barnes leads Miami-based research and design practice Studio Barnes . His 2021 Wheelwright Prize–winning project, Anatomical Transformations in Classical Architecture, examines Roman and Italian architecture through the lens of non-white constructors. Barnes is also the recipient of a 2021-2022 Rome Prize in Architecture and a 2021 Architectural League Prize.
Cambridge-based research practice Design Earth was founded in 2010 by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy (both DDes ’10) and honored with a USA Fellowship in the Architecture & Design category. The pair are founding editors of the GSD journal New Geographies and edited the “Landscapes of Energy” and “Scales of the Earth” issues. Ghosn and Jazairy are also associate professors of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan respectively.
The practice of 2020 Design Critic in Architecture Jennifer Newsom, Dream The Combine, which Newsom founded with Tom Carruthers, was also recognized with a USA Fellowship in the Architecture & Design category. Newsom led the fall 2020 option studio “Movements” at the GSD. Read an interview with Newsom on foregrounding the kinetic body in architectural representation.
In 2021, GSD professor Jennifer Bonner (MArch ’09) and Spring 2021 Senior Loeb Scholar Walter Hood received USA Fellowships. Other past recipients include 2019 GSD Class Day speaker Teju Cole (2015) and Johnston Marklee, the practice of GSD professors Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee (2016).
Farshid Moussavi Unveils Design of Ismaili Center in Houston
Professor in Practice of Architecture Farshid Moussavi recently unveiled the design for the first Ismaili Cultural Center in the United States, which will be built along Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park. Moussavi was selected by His Highness the Aga Kahn following an international competition in 2019. The design team for the Ismaili Center Houston also includes Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, DLR Group, and engineering firm AKT II—co-founded by Professor in Practice of Architectural Technology Hanif Kara. The center in Houston joins its counterparts established in London, Lisbon, Dubai, Dushanbe, Vancouver, and Toronto. As ambassadorial buildings, these centers are dedicated to advancing pluralism, public understanding, and civic outreach.
In a press release put out by His Highness the Aga Khan, the Ismaili Center Houston is described as “a venue for educational, cultural, and social events, to encourage understanding and facilitate the sharing of perspectives across peoples of diverse backgrounds, faiths and traditions. It will aim to build bridges through intellectual exchange by hosting concerts, recitals, plays, performances, exhibitions, conferences, seminars, conversations, book launched and community gatherings. The building will also provide space for quiet contemplation and prayer, as well as serve as the administrative headquarters of the Ismaili community in the USA.”
It also states that the center’s contemporary design is “reflective of a historically rooted, rich architectural heritage. It combines contemporary architectural technology—its light steel structure—with traditional Persian forms and ornament.” The central atrium, for example, features a stepped structure that “celebrates the heritage of the cupola dating back to 3000 BCE dominant in both the architecture of the Sasanian period in Persia and the Christian buildings of the Byzantine empire.”
In presenting the design, Moussavi says: “What made this project especially rewarding was the close alignment between the aspirations of the client and architect. What made it especially challenging was my awareness of the rigorous standards that His Highness the Aga Khan has established for architecture. We have tried to work with Islamic design philosophy, and celebrate its singularity and unique qualities as well as the features it has in common with Western design, so that the building, both through its fabric and through the way it is used, would act as a symbol of dialogue.”
The Ismaili Center Houston is scheduled to be completed in three years, expanding the city’s cultural realm and providing a place of gathering for the Ismaili community.
Announcing the Harvard GSD Spring 2022 Public Program
The Harvard GSD presents its series of public programs for the Spring 2022 semester. The program features designers, artists, theorists, policy makers, and others from across the design disciplines. Highlights include a visit by this year’s Senior Loeb Scholar and founder and director of the African Futures Institute, Lesley Lokko (March 1), as well as Marcia Fudge, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, who will deliver this year’s John T. Dunlop Lecture (February 8). The Spring 2022 public program also introduces Harvard Design Magazine #50: “Today’s Global” (April 19) as well as the inaugural Jacqueline Tyrwhitt Urban Design Lecture, featuring architect and Pritzker Prize winner Anne Lacaton (March 28).
All are invited to participate online in this semester’s series of programs. Harvard ID holders are welcome to attend programs in person, except where an event is listed as *Virtual. All times are listed in United States Eastern Time (ET). Please visit Harvard GSD’s events calendar for current information.
Live captioning will be provided for all programs. To request other accessibility accommodations, please contact the Public Programs Office.
Spring 2022 Public Program
John T. Dunlop Lecture: The Honorable Marcia L. Fudge
Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
February 8, 6:30pm
John Hejduk Soundings Lecture: Anthony Titus, “Rupture and Reconciliations”
February 17, 6:30pm
Small Infrastructures
Symposium with UC Berkeley Architecture
February 23, 9:00pm
*Virtual
Senior Loeb Scholar Lecture: Lesley Lokko
March 1, 6:30pm
Aga Khan Program Lecture: Mariam Kamara
March 7, 12:30pm
*Virtual
International Womxn’s Week Keynote Address
March 8, 6:30pm
Rouse Visiting Artist Conversation: Archive Matrix Assembly: Nana Last and Thomas Struth
March 21, 6:30pm
Bringing Digitalization Home
Symposium
March 24–26
Jacqueline Tyrwhitt Urban Design Lecture: Anne Lacaton
March 28, 12:30pm
*Virtual
Rachel Dorothy Tanur Memorial Lecture: Sam Olbekson, “Culture, Community, and Environmental Justice in Contemporary Indigenous Design”
March 30, 6:30pm
*The date of this event had previously been earlier in the calendar, but was changed to March 30.
Iñaki Echeverria, “Parque Ecológico Lago de Texcoco, an Ongoing Ecological Recovery in the Mexico City Valley”
March 31, 6:30pm
Sandra Barclay & Jean Pierre Crousse, “Transversal Grounds”
April 1, 12:30pm
TERREMOTO // David Godshall and Jenny Jones
April 5, 6:30pm
Interrogative Design: Selected Works of Krzysztof Wodiczko
Closing Reception
April 8, 4:30pm
Sylvester Baxter Lecture: Joan Nogué, “A Journey through Landscape: From Theory to Practice”
April 11, 12:30pm
*Virtual
Introducing Harvard Design Magazine #50: “Today’s Global” with editorial director Julie Cirelli and guest co-editors Rahul Mehrotra and Sarah Whiting, and featuring contributors from the issue
April 19, 12:30pm
John Portman Lecture: Bruther (Stéphanie Bru et Alexandre Thériot)
April 21, 6:30pm
Mayors Imagining the Just City
Symposium
April 22, 1:00pm
Lesley Lokko Appointed Spring 2022 Senior Loeb Scholar
Lesley Lokko has been appointed the Harvard GSD Loeb Fellowship ’s Spring 2022 Senior Loeb Scholar, a cherished and dynamic role within the GSD community. Each year, the Senior Loeb Scholar spends time on campus at the GSD, during which time they present a public lecture and engage directly with GSD students, faculty, staff, researchers, Loeb Fellows, and others. Since its inception, the program has offered the GSD community opportunities to learn from and be in discourse with visionary designers, scholars, and thought leaders in a uniquely focused context.
Lokko will be in residence at the GSD on Monday, February 28 and Tuesday, March 1, 2022. She will deliver the annual Senior Loeb Scholar public lecture on Tuesday, March 1 at 6:30 pm ET. Details on Lokko’s other engagements will be shared in the coming weeks. These will include connecting with Black in Design student organizers, who had initially invited her to the School last fall for the fourth biannual conference, Black Matter .
Lokko is a Ghanaian-Scottish architectural academic, educator and best-selling novelist. She is the founder and director of the African Futures Institute, established in Accra, Ghana, in 2020 as a postgraduate school of architecture and public events platform.
In 2015 she founded the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg. She has taught in the UK, in the US, Europe, Australia and Africa (the Bartlett School of Architecture; Kingston University and London Metropolitan University in London; Iowa State University and University of Illinois at Chicago in the USA; University of Johannesburg and University of Cape Town in South Africa and UTS in Sydney, Australia.) In 2019, she took up an appointment as Dean of Architecture at The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, CCNY, from which she subsequently resigned in 2020 to start the African Futures Institute in her home country, Accra, Ghana.
For the past thirty years, her work in both architecture and literature has looked at the relationship between ‘race,’ culture, and space. She is the recipient of a number of awards for contributions to architectural education, among them: the RIBA Annie Spink Award for Excellence in Education 2020; the AR Ada Louise Huxtable Prize for Contributions to Architecture 2021.
In 2004, she made the transition from architecture to fiction with the publication of her first novel, Sundowners (Orion), following up with further novels. Her thirteenth novel, The Lonely Hour is forthcoming in 2023 from Pan Macmillan. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of FOLIO: Journal of Contemporary African Architecture, and a UCL Press Series Guest Editor. She is the author of White Papers, Black Marks: Race, Space and Architecture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2000). She holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of London and a BSc (Arch) and MArch from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.
She is currently a founding member of the Council on Urban Initiatives, co-founded by LSE Cities, UN Habitat and UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose; and a Visiting Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.
Lokko was a member of the International Jury of the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2021. In December 2021, she was appointed Curator of Biennale Architettura 2023 of La Biennale di Venezia.
Lokko joins a cohort of previous Senior Loeb Scholars who include Walter Hood (2021); Bruno Latour (2018-2019); Kenneth Frampton and Silvia Kolbowski (2017-2018); Richard and Ruth Rogers (2016-2017); and David Harvey (2015-2016).
Learn more about the Loeb Fellowship on the Loeb Fellowship website .