Rahul Mehrotra appointed Chair of Department of Urban Planning and Design and John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization

Harvard Graduate School of Design announces the appointment of Rahul Mehrotra (MAUD ’87) as the Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design and the John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization, effective July 1, 2020. Mehrotra joined Harvard GSD’s faculty in 2010, serving as Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design from 2010 until 2015. He most recently served as the Director of the Master of Architecture in Urban Design Degree Program and Co-Director of the Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design Degree Program. He has also been a Professor of Urban Design and Planning at the School. “While our world continues to urbanize, while questions of housing intensify in their urgency and complexity, and as India’s population and role on the world stage both increase dramatically, the GSD’s ability to address these interconnected issues so successfully has been due to Rahul’s unique perspective, as well as his engagements on the ground,” says Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture. “As we look toward our collective ‘near future,’ Rahul brings an unmatched depth of insight to this contemporary moment. His extraordinary synthesis of pedagogy, practice, and a generous ethos will continue to guide us into challenging but essential debates and discoveries.” As Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design, Mehrotra will set the vision and agenda for Harvard GSD’s renowned urban planning and design programs, advancing the department’s ability to take on urgent, global questions and projects. It was at Harvard that the first North American programs in city planning (1923) and urban design (1960) were formally established; since then, the Department of Urban Planning and Design has graduated some of the world’s preeminent urban designers, policy-makers, and leaders. Its biannual Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design is considered the foremost award recognizing achievement in the field. In this role, Mehrotra succeeds Diane E. Davis, who led the department since 2015. “The pace and nature of urbanization are challenging how we define and teach planning and design,” Mehrotra says. “Today, the world is in a period of extreme transitions, triggered in large part by the inequities caused by globalization as well as climate change and its mark on people’s daily lives. This state of flux is obvious in the changing rhythms of nature and its impact on human settlements. Design and planning have crucial roles to play in using this condition of flux to create solutions to endemic inequalities, from conceiving innovative housing solutions to imagining entirely new urban formations.” As the John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization, Mehrotra will lead Harvard GSD’s efforts to study and advance discourse on housing, especially as pressures of widespread housing shortages and unaffordability continue to mount. In this role, Mehrotra succeeds Professor Emeritus Gerald McCue, who has held that title since 1996. “During his time as Dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and as U.S. Labor Secretary, John Dunlop trained and inspired generations of students to tackle complex questions of housing and urbanization,” says Chris Herbert, Managing Director of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, the research center that led the campaign to establish the Dunlop professorship. “With this appointment, Rahul will carry on John’s legacy and continue to elevate the importance of housing in the national conversation.” With a distinguished career as a practitioner and as an academic, Mehrotra’s practice, teaching, and prodigious writing focus primarily on housing and urbanization, particularly in Mumbai and India. Mehrotra taught at the University of Michigan from 2002 to 2006, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2006 until joining Harvard GSD in 2010. He founded his Mumbai- and Boston-based firm, RMA Architects, in 1990. RMA Architects has designed and executed projects around the world, including government and private institutions, corporate workplaces, private homes, and other projects, among them a Library for the School of Architecture at CEPT in Ahmedabad, a software campus for Hewlett Packard in Bengaluru, and a conservation master plan for the Taj Mahal with the Taj Mahal Conservation Collaborative. Mehrotra has also collaborated with NGOs to improve conditions for people living in informal settlements in Mumbai. Among other recent achievements, in 2015 RMA Architects completed the “Lab of the Future” on the Novartis Campus in Basel, Switzerland, and were finalists in an international design competition for the Museum of Modern Art in Sydney. In 2018, RMA Architects was awarded the Venice Architecture Biennale Jury’s Special Mention for “three projects that address issues of intimacy and empathy, gently diffusing social boundaries and hierarchies.” Mehrotra’s research on urbanism is focused on evolving a theoretical framework for designing in conditions of informal growth—what he refers to as the “Kinetic City.” From 2012 to 2015, Mehrotra led a Harvard University-wide research project with Professor Diana Eck called The Kumbh Mela: Mapping the Ephemeral Mega City. This work was published as a book in 2014, was extended in 2017 in the form of a book titled Does Permanence Matter?, and led to an invited exhibition at the 2016 Venice Architectural Biennale. His latest co-authored book is titled Taj Mahal: Multiple Narratives (December 2017). Mehrotra studied at the School of Architecture at CEPT in Ahmedabad, where he received the gold medal for his undergraduate thesis, and graduated with a master’s degree, with distinction, in urban design from Harvard GSD.

Harvard GSD announces Spring 2020 public program

Harvard GSD opens its spring 2020 public program on February 4, with an inside look at Harvard University’s footprint in neighboring Allston—the site of Harvard’s future research and innovation campus. Questions about urbanization in the United States are woven throughout the spring program, with a February 27 conversation among historian Lizabeth Cohen, former United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan, and Harvard GSD dean Sarah Whiting on “Saving America’s Cities.” Cohen and Whiting join Alex Krieger, Thomas J. Campanella, Paul Goldberger, and Alissa Quart on April 14 to discuss writing on and about cities, while on April 17, Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies presents “In Pursuit of Equitable Development: Lessons from Washington, Detroit, and Boston.” This spring also marks the 50th anniversary of Harvard GSD’s noted urban design program, celebrated on March 12 with a lecture by former Washington, D.C. mayor Anthony A. Williams. Other events explore developing interests that extend beyond cities. On April 10, designer Jennifer Bonner and structural engineer Hanif Kara moderate the conference “Mass Timber: Beyond Instrumentality and Technology,” dove-tailing with a concurrent studio that the professors are leading at Harvard GSD. Architect and urbanist Rem Koolhaas returns on April 23 to join Dean Whiting and curator Troy Conrad Therrien for a discussion tied to Koolhaas’s much-anticipated Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum exhibition Countryside, The Future (opening February 20); Koolhaas and Whiting visit the Guggenheim the following day for a related evening event. On February 6, landscape architect Günther Vogt gives a lecture in connection with his Harvard GSD exhibition First the Forests, reinviting designers to foreground forestry and plant life in their work—a conversation to be continued on February 25, when Ron Henderson, Julian Raxworthy, and Douglas Reed join Harvard GSD’s Danielle Choi to talk “Plants in the Design Imagination.” And on March 30, curator Stefanie Hessler and artist Armin Linke will discuss their ongoing research into the intermingled social forces at play in the excavation of the world’s oceans. The full public program appears below and can be viewed on Harvard GSD’s events calendar. Please visit Harvard GSD’s home page to sign up to receive periodic emails about the School’s public programs, exhibitions, and other news. Harvard GSD spring 2020 public program “Harvard in Allston: Perspective and Next Steps”: Marika E. Reuling and Thomas Glynn February 4 C. David Tseng February 5 Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture: Günther Vogt                February 6 “Plants in the Design Imagination”: Ron Henderson, Julian Raxworthy, and Douglas Reed with Danielle Choi February 25 “Saving America’s Cities: The Past, Present, and Future of Urban Revitalization” A conversation with Lizabeth Cohen, Shaun Donovan, and Sarah Whiting February 27 Elizabeth Hoover     March 2 International Womxn’s Day Lecture: Dr. Vandana Shiva     March 3 “Words Build Worlds”: Nicolai Ouroussoff, Florencia Rodriguez, and Tom Weaver March 10 50th Anniversary of Urban Design Lecture: Former Mayor Anthony A. Williams March 12 Conference: “On the Cene: New Approaches to Building the American Museum of Natural History” with a keynote lecture by Jeanne Gang, Gary Hilderbrand, and Douglas Reed March 13 “An Anatomy of Influence,” Thomas Daniell   March 23 John T. Dunlop Lecture: “Addressing Homelessness: What Can (and Can’t) Architecture Do?” with Michael Maltzan March 24 Conference: “Thresholds: Design and Science” March 27 Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture: “Prospecting Ocean: Artistic Research in the Oceanic Anthropocene”: Stefanie Hessler and Armin Linke        March 30 Open House Lecture: Amanda Williams April 2 Kenzo Tange Lecture: OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen April 7 Sol Camacho/RADDAR      April 9 Conference: “Mass Timber: Beyond Instrumentality and Technology,” moderated by Jennifer Bonner and Hanif Kara April 10 Aga Khan Program Lecture: “Tankers, Tycoons, and the Making of Modern Regimes of Law, Labour, and Finance,” Laleh Khalili April 13 “Writing Our Cities”: Alex Krieger with Thomas J. Campanella, Lizabeth Cohen, Paul Goldberger, Alissa Quart, and Sarah Whiting            April 14 Jan De Vylder April 16 Conference: “In Pursuit of Equitable Development: Lessons from Washington, Detroit, and Boston” April 17 Hashim Sarkis        April 21 “Project for a New Decade: From City to Countryside”: Samir Bental, Rem Koolhaas, Troy Conrad Therrien, and Sarah Whiting Co-organized with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum April 23 “Project for a New Decade: From City to Countryside”: a panel discussion at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum ​Co-organized with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum April 24

Announcing winners of 2020 Richard Rogers Fellowship, the Wimbledon House’s residency program for architectural and urban research

Harvard Graduate School of Design is pleased to announce the six winners of the 2020 Richard Rogers Fellowship, a residency program at the Wimbledon House in London, the landmarked residence designed by Lord Richard Rogers for his parents in the late 1960s. Now entering its fourth cycle, the Fellowship is inspired by Lord Rogers’s commitment to cross-disciplinary investigation and engagement, evident across his prolific output as an architect, urbanist, author, and activist.

The six fellows named for the 2020 cycle were chosen from more than 150 applicants from around the world. In addition to a three-and-a-half-month residency, each fellow receives travel expenses to London and a $10,000 cash purse. They will pursue research on a variety of issues, including allocation of parking around new buildings in London, the formal consequences of building booms on the city’s urban fabric, and the civic imaginaries that may be gleaned from building code.

The GSD introduced the Richard Rogers Fellowship in October 2016, and named its inaugural class of fellows in February 2017. Since its inception, the Richard Rogers Fellowship has drawn scholars from a range of fields and backgrounds to London, where they have engaged with that city’s great research and design institutions.

2020 RICHARD ROGERS FELLOWS (biographies and abbreviated project proposals appear below):

Spring 2020
Timothy Ivison (Los Angeles, CA)
Emma Letizia Jones (Zurich, Switzerland)

Summer 2020
Sean Canty (Cambridge, MA)
Michelle Chang (Cambridge, MA)

Fall 2020
Thomas Shay Hill (Somerville, MA)
Henry Grabar (Chicago, IL)

The 2021 Richard Rogers Fellowship cycle will begin accepting applications in October 2020.

The 2020 Richard Rogers Fellowship Selection Committee was co-chaired by Mohsen Mostafavi and Sarah Whiting, and included Eve Blau, Ricky Burdett, Hanif Kara, Niall Kirkwood, Farshid Moussavi, Irénée Scalbert, and Simon Smithson.

About the 2020 Richard Rogers Fellowship Winners and Proposals

Spring 2020 Fellows:

Timothy Ivison (Los Angeles, CA): Counter Constructs
Timothy Ivison is a writer and researcher living in Los Angeles. His work is concerned with the history and political ecology of cities, with a recent focus on post-war redevelopment in London and Los Angeles. He has taught a number of interdisciplinary seminars on biopolitics, crowd theory, and urban history, most recently at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and Art Center College of Design. His urban research is also informed by a sustained engagement with contemporary art, artist-run spaces, and self-organized institutional practices. Recent collaborations with the artist Julia Tcharfas include the exhibition 710 at Before Present, Los Angeles; The Tick Memorial Library at Magic Hour, Twentynine Palms; and Science of Rehearsal at the Swiss Institute, New York.

Ivison received a BA in Visual and Critical Studies and a BFA in studio practice from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and completed his PhD at the London Consortium, Birkbeck College, University of London in 2017. From 2014 to 2016, he was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Researcher at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

Ivison’s proposal Counter Constructs investigates the material history of a series of planning conflicts that took place within London in the late 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on the transition from post-war reconstruction to speculative redevelopment, the project points to a remarkable pattern in which communities worked with architecture students, legal advisors, ex-planners, and advocacy groups to create alternative visions of the city. Emphasizing the visual artefacts of these struggles, the project documents the production and counter-production of plans, models, and exhibitions by community groups using the visual tools of planning and architecture to challenge the redevelopment agenda and the terms of participation.

Emma Letizia Jones (Zurich, Switzerland): Built by the Book

Emma Letizia Jones is an Australian-born architectural historian and writer. She was educated at the University of Sydney and the Architectural Association, London, and obtained her PhD in 2016 from the University of Zurich with the thesis Schinkel in Perspective, a new account of the drawing practice of the Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. She has also been a design studio director at the EPF Lausanne. Alongside developing her PhD thesis for publication, Jones teaches the history and theory of architecture (1450-1850) at the GTA Institute, ETH Zurich, in the Chair of Prof. Maarten Delbeke, and is a founding member of TEN, winners of the Swiss Art Awards for architecture in 2018. Her current research is focused on the translations occurring between architecture and its drawn and printed representations with a focus on early-19th-century Britain and Germany; and the relationship between books and buildings in architectural culture. Jones’s writing has appeared in AA Files, San Rocco, Architectural Histories, and Architectural Review, among other publications, and she has organized exhibitions and teaching workshops in Switzerland, Italy, the UK, and Australia.

Jones’s proposal Built by the Book: The Global Impact of the Building Manual and Trade Catalogue in Nineteenth Century London is a study of the global dissemination of the English “building manual” and the “trade catalogue”: new types of architectural books which emerged in mid-nineteenth-century London as both a response to, and driver of, the rapid speculative development of the city’s housing stock. The research conducted while staying at the Wimbledon House will look critically at a selection of these commercial publications currently held at the Victoria and Albert Museum National Art Library and a group of other London-based archives, to understand how they emerged from a long line of books about building and ornamentation stretching back to at least the 16th century, while also investigating how they continue to inform the development of housing policy and the standardization of housing, both new and old, across London. This study is part of a wider research project supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the University of Technology Sydney.

Summer 2020 Fellows:

Sean Canty (Cambridge, MA): Before Images, After Pictures, and Somewhere In-between

Sean Canty is a designer and Assistant Professor of Architecture at the GSD, where he teaches architectural design in the school’s core design studios. Canty’s teaching, research, and practice explore unexpected forms of visuality, motivated by architectural type and geometry. Exploring the interrelationships between interior, envelope, and building, Canty explores montage as a spatial practice.

Canty is also one of the founding principals of Office III (OIII), an experimental architectural collective based in New York, San Francisco, and Cambridge. Office III was selected in November 2016 as a finalist for the Young Architects Program at MoMA PS1. They have also recently completed the Governors Island Welcome Centre for The Friends of Governors Island and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Cooper Union, and the A+D Museum in Los Angeles. Before establishing these two respective practices, Canty was a Project Designer at IwamotoScott Architecture in San Francisco, during which he led projects including the Pinterest headquarters, Bloomberg TechHub, the Goto House, Noe Valley House, and HeavyBit Industries. He received an MArch from the GSD and a BArch from California College of the Arts.

Canty’s proposal, Before Images, After Pictures, and Somewhere In-between, is a speculative exploration in revisiting the 18th-century English Picturesque tradition. In revisiting this aesthetic discourse, the research aims to tease out the spatial, perceptual, and representational techniques for application in contemporary practice. The development of the research will happen through the construction of a visual catalog of picturesque strategies developed through written, visual, and formal analysis by surveying critical picturesque landscapes through the lens of three themes: the fragment, view constructions, and filtered forms.

Michelle Chang (Cambridge, MA): Reframing Urban Imaginaries

Michelle Chang directs JaJa Co and teaches architectural design at the GSD. She founded her independent practice in 2014 after working in offices in New York, Boston, and San Francisco. Her design work experiments with the overlaps between and among film, installation, music, and building.

Chang holds an MArch from the GSD and a BA in international relations from Johns Hopkins University. She is a former MacDowell Colony Fellow, Wortham Fellow, and a recipient of the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers. In her research, Chang studies how optics, digital media, and modes of cultural production influence translations between design and building. Before teaching at Harvard GSD, she taught at Rice University, the University of California Berkeley, California College of the Arts, and Northeastern University.

In her Richard Rogers Fellowship proposal, Chang posits that, already embedded within building codes is a civic imaginary. Professional guidelines established by governments and non-profit associations project conceptual and material potentials for the environment. She speculates that architects can more creatively engage these imagined futures by translating legal descriptions to semantic images.

Fall 2020 Fellows:

Thomas Shay Hill (Somerville, MA): Cycles of Urban Form

Thomas Shay Hill is an urban historian and PhD candidate at the GSD. Hill’s research focuses on the boom-bust cycle of urban development: a process that is at once recurrent and unpredictable. Hill is interested in the role of this process in shaping and reshaping the urban environment. He focuses in particular on the relationship between building booms and the formation of new construction techniques, architectural styles, building types, and centers of activity on the urban fabric. Hill focuses as well on the destructive implications of the construction cycle: in accelerating the obsolescence of existing buildings, typologies, and places, and in giving way to “busts” that entail vacancy, devaluation, and bankruptcy. Hill is primarily interested in the formal and spatial implications of this irregular historical process.

Hill’s professional background is in planning, design, and construction in New York City. His writing has been published in the Journal of Urban History, Environmental Research Letters, the Urban History Association’s blog Metropole, and the Routledge anthology Architecture and the Smart City. His research has received generous support from the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Harvard Graduate Society, and the GSD. Before coming to Harvard, Hill completed a BA in Urban Studies from Columbia University.

During his residency, Hill will advance his dissertation research by studying the formal consequences of building booms on the urban fabric of London. A major focus of Hill’s research is the 1980s office development boom, a global phenomenon that witnessed the birth of Canary Wharf as an alternative commercial district to the City of London. Hill plans to access historical records on London’s urban fabric—including maps, plans, construction documents, and property records—from the London Metropolitan Archives and the National Archives at Kew.

Henry Grabar (Chicago, IL): Paved Paradise

Henry Grabar is a staff writer at Slate who writes about cities. His work has also appeared in the Atlantic, Architectural Record, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications, and his research on the urban landscape of Algiers after 1962 was published in the journal Cultural Geographies. In 2018, his story on immigrants in in the meatpacking town of Fremont, Nebraska was a finalist for the Livingston Award for National Reporting by a journalist under 35. He was the editor of the Future of Transportation anthology (Metropolis Books, 2019) and is writing a book about parking for Penguin Press. He has a BA from Yale in French and American Studies, and he lives in Chicago.

As Grabar observes: In the early 2000s, London stopped requiring new buildings to include parking spots. Between 2004 and 2011, the city constructed 144,000 fewer spaces than it would have under the old laws—in square footage, the equivalent of foregoing 20 Empire State Buildings worth of parking spots, not including the years since 2011. With his proposal Paved Paradise, Grabar will explore how this decision has changed the capital’s architecture, neighborhood character, housing costs, and commuting patterns, and will draw on London’s experience to project what might be in store for the dozens of cities now following in its footsteps.

November 2019 News Roundup

Anita Nai Tzu Cheng (MLA I AP ’19) and Payao Shih (MArch II ’19) curated the first Harvard Taiwan Arts Festival in Boston . Titled “Reveal,” it provided a platform for artwork inspired by Taiwan. The works on display sought to uncover similarities and differences between cultural influences and creative expression through painting, photography, music, architecture, and archaeology. “Through this exhibition, we hope to bring viewers from all backgrounds to experience the diversity and complexity of Taiwanese culture,” explained the curators. “Reveal” was exhibited at Smith Campus Center from November 13 to November 22 .

Toni Griffin was invited to write an article for the Guggenheim, “The Guggenheim as Third Space: Accessing Community and Contemplation in a Place of Privilege.” The article posed the question of whether “a privately owned space [can] be a place for building community, especially when it can cost $25 to enter.” Griffin wrote about the “third space” in relation to her research at Just City Lab , observing Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda museum and the notion of the third space on the Guggenheim’s ramp.

Safeer Shersad (MUP ’20) is the first recipient of Nippon Paint’s Gennosuke Obata Fellowship Fund. Sherad aspires to make a difference through human-centered design, pursuing the goals of providing inclusive urban design solutions to solve global challenges at the local level.

Grace La moderated an event “Drawing Attention: Unplugged with CJ Lim and Helen Thomas” at the Roca London Gallery on November 7. The event explored new directions, experiments and meanings of contemporary architectural drawings, in conjunction with the exhibition “Drawing Attention: The Digital Culture of Contemporary Architecture Drawings” that La co-curated. The exhibition is recently reviewed by RIBA and is listed as top five things to do in November by London’s Evening Standard.

Baku – Oil and Urbanism by Eve Blau and Ivan Rupnik received the 2019 DAM Architectural Book Award by the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in collaboration with the Frankfurt Book Fair.

“Ting,” an app that detects stress levels and offers mediation, won iF Design Talent Award 2019. “Ting”was developed by Togo Kida and Berlynn Bai (MDE ’20), and Lou Zhang at George Washington University. The app combines a stress level detector that draws data from mobile keyboard input with integrated design interventions through 30-second micro-meditations.

GSD Green Team is celebrating 10 years dedicated to sustainability and environmental justice. Founded in 2009, the team is comprised of members of the GSD Community who are dedicated to finding innovative solutions, challenging norms, and encouraging behavior change. The GSD Green Team is open to all members of the GSD community. Through ongoing collaboration between student, staff, and faculty-driven green teams, the Harvard Graduate School of Design is working to create a sustainable campus for the future.

@humansofgsd is a new Instagram page featuring members of GSD Building Services talking about their favorite spots in Gund Hall, favorite salad dressing–and most importantly, what students, faculty and staff at the GSD can do to make their jobs easier and the environment at the GSD a better place for everyone.

Entrepreneurs @GSD had a kick-off meeting on November 6, featuring guest speaker, GSD pioneer entrepreneur Teran Evans.

Diastika Lokesworo (MArch II ’20) & Womxn in Design hosted a live acoustic jazz performance from Lokesworo’s newest single and an installation on November 8 at GSD Kirkland Gallery . 

 

Harvard GSD Fall 2019 Option Studios

Please click the studio title for full descriptions of each studio.

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE

POST-SHAKER – Preston Scott Cohen

The studio’s hypothesis is that the Mount Lebanon Shaker Village in New York is to be converted into an art colony that reawakens the historic site as a living tradition in the present but one that extends and transforms many of the cultural and artistic practices of the Shakers.

HABITAT KASHGAR – Zhang Ke

Students in this studio undertake the challenge of designing a series of projects related to the subject of habitat, either as a single-family house, multifamily housing, or as community service programs (a school, a library, or an art center) in Kashgar, the ancient oasis city situated in between the great desert of Taklimakan and snow mountains of the Pamirs.

TYPE VS. DIFFERENCE: THE FUNCTION OF A 21^st CENTURY RESIDENTIAL BLOCK – Farshid Moussavi

Exploring the rooted politics of architecture and its agency in everyday life students in this studio address the subject of housing in relation to the individualized society of the 21st century. The project site is located in a dense historic area of Paris and each student will be asked to design a large-scale housing project that responds to the needs of our individualized and ever-changing society.

ADAPTING MIAMI – HOUSING ON THE TRANSECT – Eric Howeler, Corey Zehngebot

In this studio, students will explore housing types along an urban transect, cutting from the high-density coastline and following the primary commercial corridor of Calle Ocho (Eight Street) through Little Havana and out to the Florida everglades.

AN AMERICAN SECTION – Kersten Geers, David Van Severen

This is the second studio of American Architecture. In parallel to our previous endeavors, students will work on the university campus. The course will investigate the idea of American corporate education, perhaps best embodied in the image of the Mies van der Rohe’s Armour Institute. Students will look into Mittel Amerika, the Midwest, and the Great Lakes megalopolis, where the sheer economic expansion most apparently instigated this ambiguity between the idea and its mass production.

LABORATORY SCHOOL, STACKING, PRAGMATISM – Hilary Sample

On rethinking the scope and scale of the specific educational program, the laboratory school, students will reimagine a new type of primary public school for Columbia University’s Manhattanville campus, while drawing on historic precedents including pragmatist John and Alice Chipman Dewey’s Laboratory School (1896–1903) at the University of Chicago.

GROUNDLESS – Andrew Zago

The studio project is the new International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina. The museum has three physical components: the ground, which acts as a memorial garden; the interior exhibition; and the architecture.

CROSS RHYTHM (NEW HOUSE IN NEW ORLEANS) – Go Hasegawa

“Cross rhythm” is a term used to describe a composition made of different rhythms. This studio tries to deal with the building typology in positive way. How can we design a new house in New Orleans as a building of cross rhythm?

REFLECTIVE NOSTALGIA: ALTERNATIVE FUTURES FOR SHANGHAI’S SHIKUMEN HERITAGE – Lyndon Neri, Rossana Hu

This studio will explore how reflective nostalgia may offer a new model for adaptive reuse in the context of China, where the erosion of cultural identity and local heritage have come as a consequence of rapid urbanization.

A TYPOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGES – Eric Lapierre

Reconsidering the types and spaces of institutions that are dedicated to the classification and transmission of knowledge—schools of architecture, libraries, and museums—student will imagine how they can improve not only the society at large, but also their neighborhoods, at different scales and in different ways.

DOMESTIC ORBITS – Frida Escobedo, Xavier Nueno

How can architectural interventions help recognize, reduce, and redistribute the problems faced by domestic workers? This studio proposes to visualize and understand how space is articulated according to specific gendered, classist, and racist configurations of the social. The aim is to provide narratives of Mexico City that foreground the conflicts faced by the workforce onto which domestic labor is unloaded.

 

DEPARTMENT OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

ADRIFT AND INDETERMINATE: DESIGNING FOR PERPETUAL MIGRATION ON VIRGINIA’S EASTERN SHORE – Gary R. Hilderbrand

Virginia’s Eastern Shore is confronting sea level rise at a rate 40 percent faster than the global average. What can design offer in the face of this calamity? Students will examine a migratory phenomenon rooted in perpetual adaptation, one that has been in motion for far longer than the recent arc of concern for climate instability. The studio will pursue adaptive processes, land use strategies, and the design of landscapes and structures that extend the life of a challenged community.

GEOGRAPHIC REENCHANTMENT: SWISS LANDSCAPE INTERVENTIONS BETWEEN ATMOSPHERE, FUNCTION + EXPERIENCE – Robin Winogrond

In tiny Switzerland, landscape is regarded as a resource that serves lobbies from agriculture and speculation, to infrastructure, ecology, tourism, and recreation, each with a voice of its own except one–the landscape itself. This studio explores the potential of these spaces to develop a strong landscape voice and experience of their own, to imbue them with what Alistair Bonnet refers to as “geographical reenchantment”.

MANIFESTOS FOR BUILDING THE UTOPIA – Loreta Castro, Gabriela Carrillo

The continuous ground movements that happen in Mexico City, specifically those that have occurred during the last 40 years, demonstrate the territory’s frailty due to its radical landscape transformation. The focus will be ground-cracks, products of excessive water extraction, ground subsidence, and earthquakes. We are interested in their effects on the landscape and the urban fabric, and the possibilities they enable when considered as intrinsic elements that will shape the contemporary Mexico City. Participants will express their positions toward these extreme conditions through a space manifesto.

SOCIAL OPERATIVE INFRASTRUCTURE: SUSTAINABLE WATER MODELS IN CHILE – Eugenio Simonetti, Tomas Folch

As a way to start a discussion about networks beyond monofunctional operation, with the goal of bringing social, environmental, and functional upgrades to the city, students will explore the operative water infrastructure in Chile.

THE IMMEASURABLE ENCLOSURE – Segio Lopez-Pineiro

Single-space environments—outdoors, indoors, or in-between—are defined by enclosing and containing only a small part of the world. Precisely because of this condition, they have traditionally been perceived as the means for designing coherent singular identities. This studio aims to reframe the discrete space as the mechanism for containing and expressing the world. Through the design of a single-space environment, this studio proposes reframing the design technique of the enclosure and infusing landscape and architecture’s primordial roots with the ambition of holding the immeasurable.

FALLOWSCAPES, TERRITORIAL RECONFIGURATION STRATEGIES FOR ARLES, FRANCE – Anita Berrizbeitia, Marc Armengaud, Matthais Armengaud

On a promontory on the left bank of the lower Rhone River, the city of Arles presides over vast plains that, until fairly recently, were characterized as wastelands destined to remain permanently uncultivated. This studio will reconsider the interactions between systems and landscapes according to different scales, limits, time, and material, advocating for territorial reconfiguration strategies that investigate the existing and the potential, in order to face dramatic ecological threats and an enduring social crisis.

 

DEPARTMENT OF URBAN PLANNING AND DESIGN 

HOUSING & INFRASTRUCTURE IN YUCATAN: BEYOND THE MAYAN TRAIN – Jose Castillo

The Yucatán Peninsula in southeastern Mexico is a place where urbanization and environmental preservation have always been in delicate balance due to its particular geological conditions: a medium to low tropical rainforest on water-soluble limestone. This studio looks at the region in its historical and contemporary shifts and develop more productive, sustainable, and inclusive models for territorial transformation.

AFFORDABILITY NOW! – Dan D’Oca

The United States is in the midst of an affordable housing crisis. This interdisciplinary studio, offered in conjunction with Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, invites students from all departments to examine bold new affordable housing initiatives. The site is the Los Angeles region, where the affordability crisis is particularly dire. Students will work with tenants, community-based organizations, and city officials to imagine how we might creatively deploy cooperative developments, community land trusts, low-cost housing prototypes, and other weapons to help build a more equitable region.

NEWNESS AND SYNCHRONICITY: VISIONS FOR NOVI SAD 2050 – Alex Wall

The main objective in this studio is to critically explore Novi Sad, Serbia, the European Capital of Culture 2021. In this studio, students have researched future spatial scenarios for upgrading a series of defunct factory complexes into “civic social districts”. The challenge is to explore future civic design for these complexes via visionary urbanism, art, and design culture; finding a balance between government ownership and that of the private or informal sectors.

FEEDING BOSTON – Eulàlia Gómez Escoda

The development of postindustrial food supply systems parallels the explosion of the modern city. This studio deals with an ordinary matter whose future impacts every one of the world’s citizens. Focusing on Greater Boston, the studio will analyze temporal, spatial, and relational patterns of food production, transportation, storage, and sale.

 

October 2019 News Roundup

Sai Balakrishnan’s new book Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations Along Urban Corridors in India  from the University of Pennsylvania Press will be released on November 1st.  A related panel discussion moderated by Rahul Mehrotra will take place on November 5th at the Harvard South Asia Institute.

Diane Davis was a guest speaker on the topic of resilience at the 2019 Conscious Cities Festival at the Pratt Institute in New York, hosted by The Centre for Conscious Design. Davis, along with Maria Atuesta (Ph.D. candidate), recently published a research paper supported by the Joint Center for Housing Studies titled “Progressive Politics and Inclusive Social Housing: Enablers and Barriers to Transformative Change in Bogota.”

Daniel D’Oca and his firm, Interboro Partners, designed a seventeen-acre natural playscape for the City of St. Louis’ Forest Park . The city just broke ground on the playscape and it is planned to open next summer.

Christopher Herbert will be giving the opening remarks at an upcoming event, “Housing and Innovation: Lessons from the Ivory Prize,” hosted by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies on November 15th. Innovative strategies on how to overcome challenges of affordable housing will be discussed.

Bing Wang has been appointed as Advisor of Master Planning by the Royal Commission of Al Ula in Saudi Arabia . Also, Wang, along with former MDes student Van-Tuong Nguyen, gave a talk titled “Co-Living in the Sharing Economy,” which was sponsored by the Joint Center for Housing Studies.

The Harvard Gazette’s interview with Tom Hollister and Katie Lapp  explored Harvard’s positive annual financial report and touted the success and promise of Executive Education across the University. While growth of Executive Education university-wide is at 12%, the GSD’s Executive Education grew at more than double that rate last year, at 27%.

Jorge Silvetti and Rodolfo Machado are awarded the 2019 Druker Award & Lecture . Silvetti and Machado will be receiving and giving respectively, at the Boston Public Library on Saturday November 9, 2019. The Griffin Award is presented annually to a speaker or speakers who has or have made outstanding and important contributions to the world of urban art and architecture. This award is a reproduction of the historic copper griffins gracing the roofline of the Boston Public Library’s iconic McKim Building (1895), designed by acclaimed architect Charles Follen McKim.

Toni Griffin is awarded Social Justice Design Award by the Institute for Public Architecture . IPA uses design to challenge social and physical inequities in the city and believes in a future in which design is used as tool for facilitating social justice and the public has a voice in all decisions that shape our built environment. Griffin will join two other honorees, Deputy Mayor Vicki Been and artist Mary Miss at the IPA’s 7th Fall Fete on November 13 at JACK Studios.

Jesse Keenan leads and serves as Editor of the publication Community Development Innovation Review, “Strategies to Address Climate Change Risk in Low- and Moderate-income Communities”  published by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. It was discussed as part of a larger conversation on the New York Times regarding how climate change causes financial risks and their ramifications. The conversation continues on a Bloomberg article , with alarming statistics. In other research, Keenan’s study of the U.S cities identifies Duluth, Minnesota as a well-situated climate sanctuary, which was further discussed on Reuters and Inverse . In a Washington Post article , Keenan made a comment about the threat of water rising to stadiums along the coast and their supporting transportation and infrastructure.

Student groups are active at the GSD. A new student group: Asian Pacific Islander American (APIA) , recently forms for the community. Harvard Graduate Students Union-UAW , a larger Harvard University-wide published a zine “What Will It Take?” on Strike Authorization Vote.

The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) announced their 2019 student awards . Six awards went to GSD students in all categories. The Student Awards will be presented at the 2019 ASLA Conference on Landscape Architecture in San Diego, November 15-18.

Panharith Ean (MArch I ’20) was selected as one of the top five finalists in the Samsung Mobile Design Competition , a global context calls for the next paradigm of mobile wallpaper, incorporating interactivity and contextual awareness. Ean recently presented his design in London before a jury panel.

“Style Worry or #FOMO” curated by Max Kuo is exhibited on the Experiments Wall, displaying works produced for a seminar under the same name. The exhibition makes explicit the wide formal variety of architectural work that is not only coursing through GSD but also a widespread condition of our contemporary moment. This exhibition also underscores disciplinary concerns of architecture where research and scrutiny of how to make form is of primary concern.

“Landscape: A Human Centered Notion of Existence” by Shikun Zhu (MDes ’20) is exhibited on the Student Forum Exhibition Wall, the second floor of Gund Hall. It exhibits a series for photography records a range of landscape as well as existence, from our artificial objects in nature to our presence in nature and urban environment.  

 

Climate change, transportation, urbanism: 2019 ASLA Student Award winners tackle pressing landscape issues

The American Society of Landscape Architects has honored six projects by nine Harvard University Graduate School of Design students with 2019 ASLA Student Awards . Selected from 368 submissions, this year’s GSD winners tackle a range of topics, including climate change, transportation, urbanism, public space, and participatory design. Each project offers its own bold vision for the future of landscape.

Winner of an Honor Award in the General Design Category, “Engaging Hallowed Ground: Re-envisioning the Arrival Ground of Arlington National Cemetery ” by Amanda Ton (MLA ’19) uses elevation changes to create unique spatial experiences for tourists, mourners, and other guests visiting the sacred site each year. “This proposal both refines and redefines the currently fragmented and uninspiring arrival experience at Arlington National Cemetery, one of the most sensitive landscapes in the country, and is an example of the power of visual storytelling through landscape architecture,” writes the 2019 Awards Jury. Faculty Advisor: Martin Poirier.

Completed for the Spring 2019 core studio Landscape Architecture IV: The Near-Future City, “Retreat Yourself: Moving Ground, Preserving Place ” by Andy Lee (MUP ’19, MLA ’20), Chelsea Kilburn (MLA ’20), and Kari Roynesdal (MLA ’20) received an Honor Award in the Residential Design Category. Using the Boston suburb of Quincy, MA, as its case study, the project offers an alternative to our understanding of existing property rights in the face of coastal retreat precipitated by climate change. “We advocate for a near future city in which homeowners have the right to leave and the right to stay in place,” states the project narrative. Faculty Advisor: Danielle Choi.

Recipient of the Award Of Excellence in the Analysis and Planning Category, “Mobility As Equality: Building Towards the Olympic/ Post-Olympic LA Transit ” by Amanda Ton (MLA ’19), WeiHsiang Chao (MAUD ’20), and Xin Qian (MAUD ’19) uses the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics as an opportunity to launch a new-generation bus system built to service much needed public housing in the Olympic vicinity and neighboring communities. “This thoughtful, layered, and strategically developed plan is made stronger by its sophisticated understanding of the nature of decision-making in the complex political and social environments of Los Angeles,” writes the 2019 Awards Jury. Faculty Advisor: Andres Sevtsuk.

“Stone Wall Trees 2040: A Critical Discussion of their Alternative Futures ” by Anson Ting Fung Wong (MLA ’19) is a call to action around the future of Hong Kong’s iconic Stone Wall Trees. Winner of an Honor Award in the Communications Category, the project’s public campaign includes an information packet (print and digital), a documentary film, an exhibition (debuted at the GSD in spring 2019), and a website . Wong’s project was the recipient of a Penny White Project Fund grant in 2018. Faculty Advisors: Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich, Paul Yuen King Chan, and Alistair McIntosh.

Also receiving an Honor Award in the Communications Category, “Landscape Games: Tools for Collaboratively Shaping Our Environment ” by Christin Hu (MLA ’19) seeks to explain landscape design processes to the public through the language of an open-source game. “The adaptable game concept that takes players through phases of thinking about the environmental, social, and material aspects of both imaginary and real landscapes is an effective tool for stakeholder interaction but also serves as a hands-on lesson in interpersonal communication, collaboration, and participation, all critical components of the landscape architecture process,” writes the 2019 Awards Jury. Faculty Advisor: Craig Douglas.

A joint project by the GSD’s Matthew Macchietto (MLA ’19) and Zhicheng Xu, Alan Sage, and Shiqi Peng of MIT, “The CincyStitch ” won an Honor Award in the Student Collaboration Category. It takes a multidisciplinary approach to developing an area of Cincinnati, strategically situating a stretch of its waterfront at the city’s center, rather than on its edge. “Through four threads—Culture and History, Public Realm, Transportation/Infrastructure, and New Economies, the proposal strategically links and develops a formally vacant downtown site to create connections and break down barriers across geography, time, demographics, and perception,” states the project narrative. Project Credits: Josh Brooks and Eran Ben-Joseph. Faculty Advisor: Dennis Pieprz.

The Student Awards will be presented at the 2019 ASLA Conference on Landscape Architecture in San Diego, November 15-18. Additionally, a number of GSD faculty and alumni will be honored with ASLA Professional Awards .

The 2019 Conference will also recognize this year’s ASLA Medal winners. Among those honored are Doug Reed (MLA ’81), who will receive the 2019 ASLA Design Medal, and the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF), led by Chief Executive Officer Barbara Deutsch (LF ’06), recipient of the 2019 Medal of Excellence. This is the third year in a row that a GSD alumnus/a has received the ASLA Design Medal, meant to “recognize an individual landscape architect who has produced a body of exceptional design work at a sustained level for a period of at least ten years.” Mikyoung Kim (MLA ’92) was the 2018 winner and Gary Hilderbrand (MLA ’85), Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture, received the 2017 Medal.

Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee profiled in the Los Angeles Times: “Buildings that make you say, ‘Huh?,’ then ‘Wow!'”

Harvard Graduate School of Design professors (and alumni) Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, and their Los Angeles-based practice Johnston Marklee, have been profiled by the Los Angeles Times in a feature entitled “The L.A. architects who design buildings that make you say, ‘Huh?,’ then ‘Wow!'” In surveying a range of Johnston and Lee’s projects–including the recently opened Menil Drawing Institute in Houston and UCLA’s Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios in Culver City–the Los Angeles Times notes the “grace” of the duo’s work, as well as the inability to assign Johnston and Lee to one, single category of architect.

“Previous generations had a signature style, and it’s easier to label,” Lee observes in the feature. “Our generation wants to escape that.”

Johnston and Lee joined the GSD faculty in 2018 as Professors in Practice of Architecture. Additionally, Lee was named Chair of the GSD’s Department of Architecture that same year. Johnston and Lee’s Los Angeles Times profile offers a look, visually and conceptually, at a series of their firm’s works, presenting thoughts and reflections from various clients for whom the duo have designed.

“The path of their career is that they have the capacity to do different kinds of projects, but with the certainty that you will get Johnston Marklee quality,” says Brett Steele, dean of UCLA’s School of the Arts and Architecture. “It’s a tricky thing for architects. It takes a degree of confidence.”

“All of this is the work of an architectural studio that is less preoccupied with planting Instagrammable icons than in creating structures,” writes the profile’s author Carolina Miranda, “that react to local context in deliberate ways.”

“Our generation, globally, a little older or younger, we are more interested in the fabric of cities,” Johnston tells Miranda. “Not just the monuments and icons. It’s about understanding how we relate to the things around us. Not just ourselves.”

“A good building is like a good friend,” adds Lee. “If you want to be left alone, they will leave you alone. They will let you be quiet. But if you engage, they can tell you a lot.”

Johnston Marklee has been recognized nationally and internationally with over 30 major awards. A book on the work of the firm, entitled HOUSE IS A HOUSE IS A HOUSE IS A HOUSE IS A HOUSE, was published by Birkhauser in 2016. This followed a monograph on the firm’s work, published in 2014 by 2G.

Projects undertaken by Johnston Marklee are diverse in scale and type, spanning seven countries throughout North and South America, Europe, and Asia. The firm’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Menil Collection, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Architecture Museum of TU Munich. Johnston and Lee were also the Artistic Directors for the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial.

 

International landscape architecture prize named for Cornelia Hahn Oberlander

A new international landscape architecture prize has been named for Harvard University Graduate School of Design alum Cornelia Hahn Oberlander (BLA ’47). Established by the Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), the $100,000 “Oberlander Prize” will be awarded every other year beginning in 2021—the year Oberlander will turn 100 years old.

“It was the consensus of the Prize Advisory Committee, which helped shaped the Prize, and TCLF’s Board of Directors, that Cornelia Oberlander’s inspiring and trailblazing career in the field of landscape architecture exemplifies the critical values and ideals of the Prize, and that she is someone who embodies the Prize criteria of creativity, courage, and vision,” said Charles A. Birnbaum (LF ’98), President & CEO of TCLF.

A member of the class of 1947, Oberlander was one of the first women admitted to the GSD. She described herself as “elated” upon receiving her acceptance letter from Dean Joseph Hudnut and recalls sharing desk space with Lawrence Halprin (BLA ’44), who became a good friend.

Before moving to Vancouver with her late husband H. Peter Oberlander (MCP ’47, PhD ’57), whom she met on a GSD picnic, Oberlander worked with Louis Kahn in Pennsylvania and Dan Kiley in Vermont. She founded her own landscape architecture firm in 1953 and became known for her environmentally conscious and collaborative work. Among her many honors, Oberlander is a member of the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects’ College of Fellows (1981) and the American Society of Landscape Architects’ Council of Fellows (1992).

A leader in her field for over 60 years, Oberlander still finds time to give back. “It is important at this point in my career to mentor the younger generation,” Oberlander told Harvard Alumni in a 2014 profile. “It gives me satisfaction to pass along my knowledge of the field of landscape architecture and my philosophy of five p’s—patience, persistence, politeness, professionalism, and passion.”

Architecture program takes top national ranking, Dean Whiting named most admired architecture educator

Harvard University Graduate School of Design’s Department of Architecture has been ranked the #1 most admired graduate architecture program for the seventh year in a row by DesignIntelligence . The 2020 rankings are the result of an annual survey that asks academics, students, and industry professionals for their perspectives on design programs across the nation.

In addition, Dean Sarah M. Whiting topped the list of most admired architecture educators this year. Honorees also include alumni Evan Douglis (MArch ’90), dean of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute School of Architecture, and Amale Andraos (MArch ’99), dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

The 2020 survey is the first time DesignIntelligence has used the phrasing “most admired” to describe programs. The results previously ranked schools under the term “best.”

Select 2020 survey results, key findings, and methodology were published by Architectural Record  on Tuesday, October 1, 2019.