GSD launches the African American Design Nexus

The Harvard University Graduate School of Design is proud to launch the African American Design Nexus (AADN), a virtual collection that illuminates African American architects and designers from various generations, practices, and backgrounds. AADN employs a variety of interactive media to chronicle the history and ongoing promise of African American design practice across three categories—people, projects, and places—and to reveal previously undiscovered or under-acknowledged practitioners, theorists, and spaces.

AADN aims to not only introduce and highlight these various designers and contributions, but tell the stories behind each. In foregrounding these narratives, AADN seeks to attract and inspire the next generation of underrepresented designers, while exemplifying a value at the heart of Harvard GSD’s pedagogy: Designing the built environment must call upon insights and voices that represent a diversity of backgrounds and experiences.

AADN content includes video interviews, visual portfolios, and engaging written biographies and narratives, all curated by a team of Harvard GSD researchers. AADN launched last Friday with an initial collection that includes designers Alison Grace Williams, Mabel O. Wilson, and Walter Hood, and projects including the National Museum of African American History and the August Wilson Center.

AADN’s debut represents four years of research and development, a collaboration among Harvard GSD’s African American Student Union (AASU), Harvard GSD dean Mohsen Mostafavi, architect Phil Freelon (Loeb Fellow ’90), and Harvard GSD’s Frances Loeb Library, where AADN is housed. As such, the AADN both represents and advances Frances Loeb Library’s ambition of innovative information access and knowledge creation.

“By establishing a virtual collection for African American design resources, Harvard GSD’s Frances Loeb Library will ensure the legacy of African American architects by collecting, cataloguing, and sharing their work and stories,” says Ann Whiteside, Librarian and Assistant Dean for Information Services, Frances Loeb Library. “As a place of knowledge, the library’s role is to ensure the collection and dissemination of knowledge that promotes our goals for diversity and inclusion for Harvard GSD, and for the design fields. Creating an online platform for this allows us to share this information broadly.”

Following its launch, AADN will be expanded and maintained by a research team, charged with identifying people and institutions of interest, assessing gaps in knowledge, and advancing collaborative relationships. This research team includes Whiteside as well as Alix Reiskind, Research and Teaching Team Librarian and Team Lead, Frances Loeb Library; Gabriel Ramos (MUP ’19); and other Harvard GSD students and Frances Loeb Library researchers.

AADN took root following Harvard GSD’s inaugural Black in Design Conference in October 2015, as student organizers and AASU members considered how to proceed with building coalitions of African American designers and enhancing their visibility. Freelon and Mostafavi were engaged in parallel conversations; in dialogue with then-AASU president Dana McKinney (MArch/MUP ’17), Mostafavi envisioned an authoritative compendium of individuals and institutions that pursue a pattern-break in design education and practice.

“The African American Design Nexus is a powerful platform for disseminating knowledge about the remarkable achievements of a diverse group of designers, as well as projects,” Mostafavi says. “It also illustrates, more broadly, the legacy and power of the canon they have generated. I am incredibly proud of and grateful for the work that has been done to bring this incredible collaboration to fruition, and hope that it continues to evolve and provide inspiration for future generations.”

AADN represents the most recent and most public undertaking of the Dean’s Diversity Initiative (DDI), a portfolio of projects aimed at inspiring students from critically underrepresented populations to pursue design, and maintaining an inclusive environment that promotes an active and effective exchange of ideas. Establishing DDI was one of Mostafavi’s first actions as dean of Harvard GSD.

Visionary philanthropy has the power to preserve this important narrative and inspire future generations. A gift to the GSD in support of the African American Design Nexus will provide seed funding to begin this important work over the next two years. Please contact us at [email protected] to discuss how you can contribute to this project.

Is there an architect, designer, or theorist whom you believe should be included in this collection? Please let us know what you would like to see featured on the African American Design Nexus website. Send your ideas and suggestions to [email protected].

 

GSD honorees among 2019 Boston Society of Landscape Architects award recipients

The Boston Society of Landscape Architects (BSLA) honored 26 projects this year with its annual Design Awards , including a range of Harvard University Graduate School of Design students, faculty, and alumni. The program recognizes outstanding landscape architects, students, and projects based in Massachusetts or Maine.

“From a restored wetland in a residential yard to managed retreat of a seaside town; to rethinking neighborhood playgrounds, urban streets, or a war-torn city, the jury recognized projects that expanded the definition of design excellence,” noted Ricardo Austrich, BSLA President and member of the 2019 Design Awards jury. “Landscape architecture is one means to address the complex issues of our time, and create beautiful environments in the process.”

All six of the Merit Awards in the Student Work category were given to GSD projects. They include:

• Qiaoqi Dai (MLA ’19) and Chengzhang Zhang (MLA ’19) for “Across Racial and Infrastructural Boundaries”
• Jonathan Kuhr (MLA ’20), Koby Moreno (MArch/MLA ’20), Haoyu Zhao (MLA ’20), and Sijia Zhong (MLA ’20) for “Airport Archipelago”
• Alexandra DiStefano (MLA ’20), Sophie Elias (MLA ’20), and Jonathon Koewler (MLA ’20) for “Aggregated Inundation”
• Xiwei Shen (MLA ’19), Jiawen Chen (MLA ’18), and Chengzhe Zhang (MLA ’19) for “Bloom! A Dynamic Landscape Biological System”
• Chengzhe Zhang (MLA ’19) for “Oasis + Productive Settlement”
• Xiwei Shen (MLA ’19) for “The Forehead of Arlington National Cemetery”

GSD faculty and alumni were well represented in the professional categories. Among the GSD affiliated winners were Sasaki Associates , led by James N. Miner (MUP ’01) and other GSD affiliates, which received five awards; Stoss Landscape Urbanism , the firm of Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture Chris Reed (AB ’91); and Ground, Inc. , the firm founded and led by Shauna Gillies Smith (MAUD ’95).

Browse the full list of 2019 BSLA Award recipients .

Catherine Mosbach awarded medal by France’s National Order of the Legion of Honor

Landscape architect Catherine Mosbach has been awarded a medal by France’s National Order of the Legion of Honor, or Légion d’honneur, the highest French order of merit for civic and military accomplishment. Mosbach was formally honored by French Minister of Culture Franck Riester at a ceremony on April 23 at the Palais-Royal in Paris.

At the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Mosbach is the Aga Khan Design Critic in Landscape Architecture. She has led a variety of option studios at the GSD, most recently the Spring 2019 studio “Build with Life: Transformation + Formation: Landscape and Islamic Culture,” sited in Tunisia.

The French Legion of Honor awards recognize outstanding careers or service to the country of France. Honorees include entrepreneurs, high-level civil servants, champion athletes, artists, and business executives. Mosbach was awarded the Legion of Honor’s distinction of Chevalier, or Knight, from among the order’s five degrees of increasing distinction. To be considered for the Chevalier honor, a candidate must present a minimum of 20 years of public service or 25 years of professional activity with “eminent merits.”

Following eight years of service as a Chevalier, an honoree may then be promoted to Officier, or Officer. Subsequent honors include the Commandeur (Commander), Grand Officier (Grand Officer), and Grand Croix (Grand Cross) titles. The Order of the Legion has a maximum quota of 75 Grand Cross officers, 250 Grand Officers, 1,250 Commanders, 10,000 Officers, and 113,425 Knights. (As of 2010, the official memberships totaled 67 Grand Cross officers, 314 Grand Officers, 3,009 Commanders, 17,032 Officers, and 74,384 Knights.)

Prior to receiving the Chevalier medal, Mosbach was originally named to the Legion of Honor in July 2016 by France’s president Francois Hollande.

A world-renowned landscape architect, Mosbach is the founder of Paris-based design firm mosbach paysagiste, which she established in 1987, as well as the magazine Pages Paysages, which she co-founded with Marc Claramunt, Pascale Jacotot, and Vincent Tricaud. Among her many projects include the Solutre archaeological park in Saone-et-Loire, the “Walk Sluice” of Saint-Denis, the Botanical Garden of Bordeaux, “The Other Side” in Quebec City, “Shan Shui” at the International Horticultural Exposition in Xian, the “Place de la Republic” in Paris, and “Walking Mediterranean Fort Saint Jean” in Marseille. She received the Equerre D’Argent Award alongside Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa for the Louvre Lens Museum Park in 2013, while her “Phase Shift Park” (Gateway Park) in Taichung was honored in 2014 by with an Iconic Concept Award by the German Design Council.

Polish architect Aleksandra Jaeschke wins 2019 Wheelwright Prize

Harvard University Graduate School of Design is pleased to name Polish-born and U.S.-based architect Aleksandra Jaeschke the winner of the 2019 Wheelwright Prize , a $100,000 grant to support investigative approaches to contemporary architecture, with an emphasis on travel-based research. Jaeschke’s winning proposal, UNDER WRAPS: Architecture and Culture of Greenhouses, aims to explore the culture and architecture of greenhouses around the world, focusing on the spatiality of horticultural operations, as well as the interactions between plants and humans across a spectrum of contexts and cultures.

Jaeschke was among three remarkable finalists selected from more than 145 applicants, hailing from 46 countries. The 2019 Wheelwright Prize jury commends finalists Maria Shéhérazade Giudici and Garrett Ricciardi for their promising research proposals and presentations.

“With her pioneering work on greenhouses, Aleksandra Jaeschke reasserts that the field of architecture can and should continue to engage deeply with nature, with horticulture, and with ruralism and the countryside,” says Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean and Alexander and Wiley Professor of Design, Harvard GSD. “As we applaud Aleksandra and look forward to her project, I also want to take this opportunity to congratulate the other two finalists, Maria Shéhérazade Giudici and Garrett Ricciardi, for their outstanding proposals, which made the decision about this year’s award exceedingly challenging for the jury.”

A graduate of Harvard GSD (Doctor of Design, 2018) and the Architectural Association in London (AA Diploma, 2005), Jaeschke is an architect licensed in Italy and an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Sustainable Design at the University of Texas at Austin. She was one of the 2014 Kosciuszko Foundation Fellows and will be the Meadows Foundation Centennial Fellow, at the Center for American Architecture and Design at the University of Texas at Austin, from September 2019 to August 2021. She previously taught at the Woodbury School of Architecture in Los Angeles.

Jaeschke’s interests range from mainstream discourses on sustainability and broader notions of ecology to cross-scalar integrative design strategies and the role of architects in transdisciplinary projects. Her Harvard GSD doctoral dissertation, Green Apparatus: Ecology of the American House According to Building Codes, investigated how building regulations coupled with green building technologies and incentives shape environmentally-driven design and environmental awareness. While at Harvard GSD, she coordinated the project “Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians Housing Research and Prototype Design,” exploring sustainability as a building-scale issue, and one of embodied energy, transportation, and sourcing of materials. She co-organized the 2016 Doctor of Design Conference “#decoding,” which investigated the impact of codes in mapping of environments, demarcation of legal territories, and operational protocols of logistics and control of the built environment, highlighting the interconnections between design techniques, economic processes, and regulatory mechanisms.

Jaeschke’s Wheelwright proposal, UNDER WRAPS, stems from her fascination with the multifaceted nature of greenhouses and the very act of sharing a roof with plant life. Her goal is to investigate the impact of spatial arrangements and speculate about strategies for a more equitable “greenhouse ruralism” and an engaged “urban (horti)culture”—the former to empower farmers, and the latter to engage urban dwellers in the act of caring for plants, which she calls “our living substrate and the ultimate Other.”

Jaeschke’s intention is to spend extended periods of time in a number of regions with a high concentration of greenhouse agriculture and visit remarkable urban and rural greenhouses that are unique for their singular architecture, adaptive approach to technology, or extraordinary function. She will travel to the Netherlands, Spain, Israel, Morocco, Mexico, and South Korea, and will also visit significant sites in Canada, Singapore, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Poland. Her goal is to catalog and compare various greenhouse types, from farm-hoop houses to botanical conservatories; operations, from farming to hospitality; and locations, along a rural-urban transect. Jaeschke also hopes to use her travels to launch collaborative projects.

As with past Wheelwright winners, the $100,000 prize is intended to fund two years of Jaeschke’s research travel.

Jaeschke previously practiced at AION, an architectural firm she co-founded and co-directed with Andrea Di Stefano. As part of AION, she managed numerous design workshops and contributed to various publications. She participated in the 27/37 Exhibition of Young Italian Architecture at the Italian Pavilion, Shanghai Expo 2010, and was part of the ARCHITEKTUR! conference series held at the MAXXI Museum in Rome in 2012. In 2013, AION held a solo exhibition, Eco-Machines, in the Wroclaw Museum of Architecture in Poland. In 2011, Jaeschke received the Europe 40 Under 40 Award conferred by the European Centre for Architecture, Art, Design & Urban Studies and Chicago Athenaeum.

Jaeschke follows 2018 Wheelwright Prize winner Aude-Line Dulière, whose Wheelwright project Crafted Images: Material Flows, Techniques, and Uses in Set Design Construction is in its travel-research phase.

Now in its seventh year as an open international competition, the Wheelwright Prize supports travel-based research initiatives proposed by extraordinary early-career architects. Previous winners have circled the globe, pursuing inquiries into a broad range of social, cultural, environmental, and technological issues. The Wheelwright Prize originated at Harvard GSD in 1935 as the Arthur C. Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship, which was established to provide a Grand Tour experience to exceptional Harvard GSD graduates at a time when international travel was rare. In 2013 Harvard GSD opened the prize to early-career architects worldwide as a competition, with the goal of encouraging new forms of prolonged, hands-on research and cross-cultural engagement. The sole eligibility requirement is that applicants must have received a degree from a professionally accredited architecture program in the previous 15 years.

The 2019 Wheelwright Prize jury consisted of Tatiana Bilbao, Loreta Castro Reguera, K. Michael Hays, Eric Höweler, Erik L’Heureux (2015 Wheelwright Prize winner), Mohsen Mostafavi, and Megan Panzano. For extended juror biographies, visit wheelwrightprize.org.

2019 Wheelwright Prize Finalists

The Wheelwright Prize jury commends the 2019 finalists for their outstanding applications:

Maria Shéhérazade Giudici

Wheelwright proposal: The Spring of our Discontent: Urban Space and Conflict in the Mediterranean City

Giudici is the editor of AA Files and founder of Black Square, a collective engaged in research-by-design since 2014. Black Square makes projects, installations, and books, and serves as an educational platform with a yearly summer workshop. Giudici is the coordinator of the History and Theory course at the School of Architecture of the Royal College of Art and a Diploma Unit Master at the Architectural Association, both in London. She earned her PhD from Delft University in 2014; her theoretical research focuses on the construction of modern subjectivity, a topic she has explored in her writings and editorial projects—most recently, by co-editing with Pier Vittorio Aureli Rituals and Walls: The Architecture of Sacred Space (2016). With Black Square, Giudici pursues questions about the link between form, image, and use. The first installment of this research, Black Blocs (2017), was commissioned by the FRAC Centre-Orléans, and will be followed this year by How to Live in a Jungle, an experiment on the park as civic space exhibited at the Versailles Landscape Biennial.

In her Wheelwright proposal, Giudici writes: The contemporary city is often considered as a low-intensity landscape shaped by speculation; however, in the last decade this context has become again the scene of conflict, and nowhere more so than in those Mediterranean countries where a legacy of colonialism has come to its endgame in recent demonstrations. Tahrir, Place des Martyrs, and Gezi Park are not only controversial symbols of social discontent but also places where the limits of modern city-making—formless, generic, scaleless—are revealed. The research will find new forms of design agency by rereading these radical moments of political debate and their effect on urban space.

Garrett Ricciardi

Wheelwright proposal: Ground Tour: Material Commons and Architecture as a Limited Natural Resource

Ricciardi co-founded Formlessfinder in 2011 as an interdisciplinary practice combining research, writing, and design. Drawing from the disciplines of architecture, art, and engineering, the practice is focused on how the built environment can rethink its relationship to raw materials and natural resources. Ricciardi has been recognized internationally and received numerous design awards, including the AIA-NY New Practices award and a National Endowment for the Arts project grant, and he has been a finalist for the MOMA/PS1 Young Architects Program. Ranging from residential and commercial projects to public pavilions and installations, Formlessfinder’s work has been exhibited at institutions including the MAXXI in Rome, the Art Institute of Chicago, Design Miami, the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and has published the book Formless Manifesto with Lars Muller and Storefront for Art and Architecture. Currently, Ricciardi is a Lecturer at UCLA UAD Ideas, and has taught numerous studios at Columbia University GSAPP (focused on the National Park System, land art, land use, remote architecture, infrastructure, and the American southwest) and at Parsons School for the Constructed Environment. He holds a Master of Architecture from the Princeton University School of Architecture, where he was awarded the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Prize for Design, and is a graduate of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (BFA) and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. Previously he has worked for the offices of Steven Holl Architects and has collaborated with James Carpenter Design Associates on many large-scale projects, including the recently completed St. Louis Arch Museum of Westward Expansion for the Gateway Arch National Park.

In his Wheelwright proposal, Ricciardi writes: Our MATERIAL COMMONS are in crisis. By traveling to their remote reserves, this proposal seeks to unpack the aggregation of economies, politics, spaces, and forms embedded in the relationship between architecture and natural resources. This re-envisioned grand tour begins from the ground downward by visiting the resource deposits themselves—lithium in Chile, sand in Malaysia, bauxite in Australia—and studying the embedded, often fragile, native geographies to understand the complex relationship between each, as well as three distinctly different architectural outputs: the architecture designed FOR extraction, the architecture made OF extraction, and the architecture enabled BY extraction.

The full winner’s brochure, which includes jury comments and the winner’s portfolio, will soon be available at wheelwrightprize.org. Applications for the 2020 Wheelwright Prize will be accepted in Fall 2019.

Announcing establishment of the GSD’s Plimpton Professorship of Planning and Urban Economics

The Harvard Graduate School of Design is pleased to announce the establishment of the Plimpton Professorship of Planning and Urban Economics, made possible by a gift from Samuel Plimpton (MBA ’77, MArch ’80) and his wife, Wendy Shattuck. The position will be able to explore a wide range of urban issues and data, including: development, evolving land use patterns and property values, affordability, market and regulatory interactions, open space, consumer behaviors and outcomes, and climate change, and will help inform the decisions of future architects and planners. The position will reside within the GSD’s Department of Urban Planning and Design.

“Investments in cities and the built environment drive growth in local, regional, national, and global economies. Our students are committed to using design to create opportunities in these urban environments,” said Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design. “With this new faculty expertise and support, the GSD presents an ideal environment for planners and designers of the future to investigate best practices in new urban development, overcoming the hurdles that come with building in cities. The GSD is grateful to Sam and Wendy, two of the school’s most loyal advocates and generous donors, for their gift to create this position and keep the school on the leading edge of design education.”

“Using the tools of urban economics research to evaluate and measure the societal impacts of development should inform design and planning decisions,” said Plimpton. “As the world’s top design school, Harvard and the GSD are the best places for exploring these issues and advancing both urban economics and excellence in design. I appreciate all the work that Dean Mostafavi and Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design, Diane Davis, have done to set the foundation for this professorship, and I look forward to seeing what scholars in this position will achieve at Harvard.”

For Plimpton, Partner Emeritus and Senior Advisor at the Baupost Group, L.L.C, this gift is the latest chapter in a long partnership with the GSD. In December 2015, Plimpton and Professor William Poorvu MBA’58 established the Plimpton-Poorvu Design Prize, which honors and recognizes students whose work produced at the GSD exemplifies both feasibility and excellence in design. Plimpton received his bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and worked as an independent advisor, developer, and investor in real estate ventures. He held a research appointment in real estate at Harvard Business School from 1978 to 1980, and was an early supporter and a founding member of the Harvard Real Estate Academic Initiative, a cross-faculty initiative, from 2002 to 2015.

“Sam Plimpton is a visionary leader helping make the study of urban economics central to contemporary urbanism, and vice versa. We are thrilled that he has shared his aspirations in this regard with GSD,” said Diane E. Davis, Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design. “With a dynamic real estate program already embedded in the school, and with its strong links to urban planning and design, the GSD will be able to move this vision forward in the years to come. I have great expectations about the exciting new research directions and practical applications that we will see as a result of this new faculty position.”

Matthew Macchietto and MIT collaborators win 2019 Urban Land Institute Student Competition

Harvard Graduate School of Design degree candidate Matthew Macchietto (MLA ’19) and a team of collaborators from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have been named winners of the 2019 Urban Land Institute (ULI) Student Competition, an ideas competition that provides graduate students the opportunity to devise a comprehensive design and development scheme for a large-scale site in an urban area.

The selection was announced on April 4 in Cincinnati, where the competition’s four finalist teams presented to the competition jury. The winning team is awarded a prize of $50,000, while each finalist team receives $10,000. The four finalist teams were chosen from 90 teams representing more than 40 universities in the United States and Canada.

This year’s competition involved the redevelopment of a site in Cincinnati comprising portions of a highway, the central business district, and the downtown riverfront along the Ohio River, as the ULI notes on the competition website. Teams were asked to evaluate the potential to deck the highway and combine it with adjacent parcels, with the goal being to connect the parcels and create a vibrant, pedestrian-oriented, sustainable, mixed-use neighborhood.

The winning scheme from the MIT-Harvard team, “The Cincy.Stitch ,” repositions a pivotal stretch of waterfront not as the city’s edge, but as the center of a connected region. Through four threads—culture and history, public realm, transportation, and new economies—the proposal strategically expands the site and creates connections to break down barriers across geography and time. Together, these four threads weave an urban tapestry rich in history but geared to the future, creating a 24-hour neighborhood bustling with city dwellers and a center for new commerce that connects citizens across the region socially and physically.

Macchietto joined four students from MIT to form the winning team: Joshua Brooks, Shiqi Peng, Alan Sage, and Zhicheng Xu. Dennis Pieprz, design critic in urban planning and design, served as an academic adviser along with MIT’s Eran Ben-Joseph.

“The MIT-Harvard team stood out because it demonstrated the greatest cohesiveness by an interdisciplinary team to solve an urban challenge requiring multiple disciplines,” said Alex J. Rose, ULI Hines Student Competition jury chairman and longtime ULI Foundation governor. senior vice president of Continental Development Corporation in El Segundo, California. “The team had a very clear strategy, an achievable plan, a clear and creative financial model, and a presentation that strongly supported and illustrated their plan.”

Read more about Macchietto and his collaborators’ winning project via the ULI competition announcement .

Sarah Whiting named next dean of Harvard Graduate School of Design

Sarah Whiting, dean of architecture at Rice University, will return to Harvard, where she taught early in her career, as the next dean of the Graduate School of Design.

Sarah Whiting, a leading scholar, educator, and architect widely respected for her commitment to integrating design theory and practice, has been named dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), University President Larry Bacow announced today.

A Harvard GSD faculty member early in her career, Whiting has served since 2010 as dean of the Rice University School of Architecture, where she is the William Ward Watkin Professor of Architecture. She is also co-founder and partner of WW Architecture, a firm she launched with her partner, Ron Witte, in 1999.

Whiting will assume the GSD deanship on July 1, succeeding Mohsen Mostafavi, who is stepping down after more than 11 years of distinguished service.

“Sarah Whiting is an outstanding leader with broad interests that range across the design disciplines and beyond,” said Bacow in announcing the appointment. “She has a keen understanding of the intellectual dimensions of design and its distinctive power to shape the world of ideas. And she has an equally keen understanding of design as a force for shaping the communities we inhabit and for engaging with some of contemporary society’s hardest challenges. I have been deeply impressed by her during the course of the search, and I greatly look forward to welcoming her back to Harvard.”

“The GSD has long been a center of gravity for my thinking and actions, and I’m thrilled to be returning,” Whiting said. “It is altogether tantalizing to look across the School’s three departments, with their individual and collective capacities to shape new horizons within Gund Hall. And it’s even more enticing to envision working with the GSD’s remarkable faculty, students, staff, and alumni to help imagine and create new futures for the world, not just at Harvard but beyond.”

As dean at Rice, Whiting said she has been guided by an overarching commitment to “dissolving the divide between architecture as an intellectual endeavor and architecture as a form of engaged practice.” She has led efforts to reform the curriculum, introduce innovative studio options, recruit faculty, boost funding for research and course development, enhance facilities, and raise new resources.

Her interests are broadly interdisciplinary, with the built environment at their core. An expert in architectural theory and urbanism, she has particular interest in architecture’s relationship with politics, economics, and society and how the built environment shapes the nature of public life. Her work has been published in leading journals and collections, and she is the founding editor of Point, a book series aimed at shaping contemporary discussions in architecture and urbanism.

In recent years, Whiting has been recognized as an educator of the year by the publication DesignIntelligence (2014, 2018), by Architectural Record magazine’s Women in Architecture program (2017), and by the Houston chapter of the American Institute of Architects (2016).

“Sarah Whiting has earned an extraordinary reputation as dean of the School of Architecture at Rice, where she has pursued educational innovations while building connections across the university,” said Harvard Provost Alan Garber. “She is similarly committed to strengthening connections across the departments of the GSD and between the GSD and the rest of Harvard. At a time when the role of design is increasingly important, and when design education and practice face an array of challenges, her creativity, wisdom, and leadership experience will help the GSD navigate the changing demands of the design professions and the evolving interests of our faculty and students. She is the right person to lead the School forward.”

Whiting has held many other leadership roles at Rice, chairing search committees for the dean of graduate studies, the dean of humanities, and the director of Rice’s Moody Center for the Arts. She sits on the Rice board of trustees’ buildings and grounds design subcommittee and has been active in the university’s efforts to engage with its home city of Houston.

Before becoming dean at Rice, Whiting served on the Princeton architecture faculty as assistant professor from 2005 to 2009. From 1999 to 2005, she was a design critic, assistant professor, and associate professor in the Harvard GSD’s Department of Architecture. She also has taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Florida.

A graduate of Yale College, Whiting earned her MArch degree from Princeton and her PhD in architectural history, theory, and criticism from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Early in her career, she practiced with the architects Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, and Michael Graves.

In announcing her appointment, Bacow expressed thanks to the “many members of the GSD community — faculty, students, staff, alumni — who offered thoughtful advice during the search. Provost Alan Garber and I are grateful to all of you — and especially to our faculty advisory committee, whose members provided valuable counsel throughout. Special thanks go again to Mohsen Mostafavi, whose devoted service as dean these past 11-plus years has guided the GSD’s continuing leadership and progress.”

“Sarah Whiting is an exemplary academic leader and colleague. Her intellectual commitment to design education has enhanced the future of practice,” Mostafavi said of his successor. “I am delighted that she will be returning to the GSD to help shape the next phase of this incredible School’s journey.”

Grace La co-chairs annual Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture conference

This March, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Grace La co-chaired the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s (ACSA) 107th annual conference, leading the three-day symposium at Carnegie Mellon University and a culminating exhibition, installed at the Carnegie Museum of Art. La was joined by co-chairs Jeremy Ficca, Associate Professor of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University and director of its Design Fabrication Laboratory, and Amy Kulper, Associate Professor of Architecture and Department Head at the Rhode Island School of Design. At the GSD, La is Professor of Architecture and chair of the GSD’s Practice Platform. She also hosts the GSD podcast “Talking Practice.”

Titled “Black Box: Articulating Architecture’s Core in the Post-Digital Era,” the 2019 ACSA conference took its inspiration from architectural critic Reyner Banham’s final essay, in which he described the discipline as a black box, a device known only through its inputs and outputs, but never through its content. In the nearly 30 years since that essay’s publication, the ACSA’s 2019 conference theme responds to field’s current post-digital moment, La observes, in which design has continued to broaden its arsenal of techniques and operate across an increasingly expanded field. Amid such expansion and diversification, the conference aimed to ask what constitutes the central tasks of an architect today, and sought paper and exhibition proposals around architecture’s core assertions, approaches, and techniques.

The response to this call generated 454 paper submissions and 226 drawing submissions, totaling nearly 700 entries—the ACSA’s highest response rate in the last decade.

The conference’s subsequent exhibition, “Drawing for the Design Imaginary,” was on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art for the week following the conference. Presenting works collected from around the world, the exhibition inquired upon the role of drawing for the design imaginary, and how such drawings might scaffold contemporary design thinking and pedagogy amid ongoing advancement in technology, simulation, and modeling.

Alongside La, the conference also featured GSD faculty Antoine Picon and Toshiko Mori, honored as Plenary Keynote and Topaz Medallion awardees respectively, as well as Michelle Chang, Iman Fayyad, Andrew Holder, Max Kuo, Megan Panzano, Tom De Paor, and Sergio Lopez Pineiro. Over 30 additional GSD alums and affiliates from all degree programs participated via delivery of papers, exhibition of projects, and moderation of sessions.

In addition to her GSD work, La is founding principal of LA DALLMAN Architects, internationally recognized for the integration of architecture, engineering, and landscape. Co-founded with James Dallman, LA DALLMAN is engaged in catalytic projects of diverse scale and type. Noted for works that expand the architect’s agency in the civic recalibration of infrastructure, public space and challenging sites, LA DALLMAN was named as an Emerging Voice by the Architectural League of New York in 2010 and received the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence Silver Medal in 2007. In 2011, LA DALLMAN was the first practice in the United States to receive the Rice Design Alliance Prize, an international award recognizing exceptionally gifted architects in the early phase of their career. LA DALLMAN has also been awarded numerous professional honors, including architecture and engineering awards, as well as prizes in international design competitions.

Climate change, “climigration,” and the Rust Belt: The New York Times joins Jesse Keenan for a look at the future of Duluth

Faced with a rapidly changing climate, where might millions of Americans relocate to escape newly inhospitable environments? Already, rising seas in New Jersey and wildfires in California are forcing locals to rethink whether to rebuild or move elsewhere. “We are already seeing northern range migration of flora and fauna in the Northern Hemisphere,” says Jesse M. Keenan, lecturer in architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. “What is to say that we humans won’t be next to move?”

Last September, The Guardian tapped Keenan for a series of reportage about so-called “climate migrants,” or people forced to relocate due to the effects of climate change, including rising seas and persistent wildfires. As a concept, climate migration (or “climigration,” a term coined by the attorney and advocate Robin Bronen) hits at an intersection of Keenan’s wide-ranging work on climate adaptation, urban development, and public policy—but it may soon be less of a concept and more of a reality for many Americans.

“The climigration discourse is often framed around forced displacement, but there is another category of elective mobility that is critically important to understanding future climate scenarios,” Keenan says. “This broader range of migration considerations could have a significant influence on the future of American cities, particularly in the rust belt, which is proximate to the fresh water resources of the Great lakes.”

“Come to Duluth, the Air-Conditioned City,” heralds a vintage postcard that Keenan keeps in his Harvard office. It’s one of the many Duluth-flavored artifacts he has gathered over the past few months, as he and a team of GSD students have researched the city’s cultural and physical infrastructure with an eye for understanding the Duluth’s capacity to adapt to future climigrants.

Keenan says Duluth might set a valuable example for sustainable urbanization by advancing climate mitigation and adaptation policies, and by branding itself as a climate reprieve. Its cooler climate and fresh-water access are draws, certainly, but the region also boasts reliable sources of energy production and access to high quality healthcare and education. Duluth also has an infrastructural capacity that would allow the city and its region to diversify economically in the future. Land prices and the cost of living are cheap—for now—and the region boasts a well-educated and skilled labor force. Beyond affordability and accessibility, Keenan argues, Duluth is home to a diverse and vibrant range of cultures that speak to a certain authenticity of place that is compelling to populations on the move.

Climigration involves broad, overlapping sets of considerations. Current discourse tends to focus on forced displacement from specific events, but Keenan and his colleagues are also considering changing consumer preferences and economic mobility—in other words, if people are forced to move, what options are within their preferences and financial reach? And how can a city like Duluth prepare itself for such a shift while maintaining community-driven values?

The New York Times followed Keenan and his team around Duluth during a portion of their research. Their “Duluth Climigration” project engages climate adaptation planning, demography, market analysis, design research, and infrastructure analysis to explore a range of scenarios for the physical adaptation of Duluth. Thereafter, climate imaginaries and physical planning are synthesized, and then complemented by a marketing effort that could target mobility market segments—across the income spectrum—with the intent of projecting Duluth as a “climigrant friendly city.”

New York Times reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis observes the key assets that Keenan and other researchers have identified in Duluth, as well as other climigrant-appropriate cities like Buffalo: relatively cool temperatures year-round, lower wildfire risk than the West or the Southeast, inland location (as in, isolated from rising seas), and ample fresh water, via the Great Lakes.

Keenan’s concern is that inflows of climigrants may undermine affordability and further challenge existing income inequality in the Rust Belt. To this end, his team strives to “[u]nderstand not just how one markets to economically-mobile populations, but how we accommodate existing marginalized and aging communities in the advancement of affordable housing, as well as access to transportation, healthcare and other services and amenities.”

As principal investigator for “Duluth Climigration,” Keenan convened and collaborated with a team of GSD students to execute research and develop an economic development and marketing framework for the City of Duluth. Keenan and the team presented this work at a March conference focused on Duluth and the future of climate change. Their next phase of study will begin to address not just the receiving zones for climigrants, but also the high-risk geographies where people may be otherwise trapped.

“This idea that we have this national researcher who has identified Duluth as a place that has kind of a secret sauce when it comes to being a place for refuge and sustainability and resiliency, that is something you want to be a part of,” said Duluth’s mayor, Emily Larson.

“Because climate migration transcends disciplinary boundaries, the role of the designer becomes the facilitator of interdisciplinary collaboration,” observed project manager Alexandra DiStefano (MLA ’20). “This project has motivated me to further cultivate this role within academic research and professional practice.”

The full “Duluth Climigration” project team is: Jesse M. Keenan, Principal Investigator; Alexandra DiStefano, Project Manager; Don O’Keefe, Andreea Vasile Hoxha, Sam Adkisson, Jennifer Kaplan, Maura Barry-Garland, Sydney Pedigo and Runjia Tian

Read more about Jesse Keenan’s climigration research via The New York Times,  or view his March conference presentation via the University of Minnesota . 

Photography by Tim Gruber for The New York Times.

 

Harvard GSD Spring 2019 Option Studios

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

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE

AMERICAN GOTHIC, MONUMENTS FOR SMALL-TOWN LIFE
Pier Paolo Tamburelli
At a time when recent political developments have brought attention to the small towns of the American Midwest, the studio proposes to design a public building in provincial Ohio, trying to imagine how public space and collective buildings could contribute to shaping the future of a community, and so contribute to overcoming its current fragility.

A NOVEL MUSEUM
Johannes Kuehn, Wilfried Kuehn, Simona Malvezzi
The objective of this studio is to advance design proposals for the museum of the 21st century. Acknowledging the important shifts taking place in the realm of collecting and exhibiting with the advent of time-based and performative art, the student’s task is to rethink the structure of the contemporary museum. Studio trip to Berlin, Germany.

HOW TO LIVE TOGETHER?
Iñaki Abalos
The studio aims to construct a new ecology of humans and non-humans, a modality of a New Palace centered around one of the deepest paradoxes of our time… How can we live together? Studio trip to San Francisco.

MODEL AS BUILDING – BUILDING AS MODEL 2
George L. Legendre
This is the second -and final- installment of a critical exploration of the phenomenon known as ‘model as building—building as model,’ whereby buildings of any size or purpose are designed and built anywhere -except on site—using the latest materials, information technology, fundraising models, and cultural trending. Studio trip to Scotland.

RECASTING THE OUTCASTS
Jeanne Gang, Claire Cahan
One group of architectural outcasts that are particularly vulnerable to being erased and replaced are the Brutalist structures of the 1960s and ’70s. In this studio, we will explore how these buildings might convert their specific “waste-time” into a benefit.

SETOUCHI (SETO INLAND SEA) STUDIO
Toshiko Mori
The Seto Inland Sea in western Japan has historically been an active location for trade, marine activities, fishing industries, and tourism. The government commissioned Tange to design a Gymnasium here in 1964. In this studio, we will imagine a new program for the gymnasium re-aligning it within the region’s society into the future.

THE ANAMORPHIC DOUBLE: A BRIDGE FOR DC
Grace La, James Dallman
Students in this studio will explore the creative tension and formal possibilities inherent in the resolution of the physics and aesthetics of the bridge typology, while confronting the monumental scale of the nation’s capital within the context of the nation’s most iconic civic realm, the Mall in Washington DC.

THE NEW GENERIC
Sharon Johnston
This studio will investigate new forms of ephemerality and adaptability in spaces for living and working through the design of a tall building in Miami, Florida. The studio will merge the typologies of the deep plan office building and the parking structure with scenarios of diverse working and living programs.

ZERO ENERGY RESIDENTIAL HIGH-RISE
Ali Malkawi, Gordon Gill
The studio will investigate developing a zero energy residential high-rise building design. To better understand the influence of site and environmental conditions, the focus will be on two climate conditions typical of China and the Mideast, and two separate sites, Shenzhen and Dubai.

DEPARTMENT OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

SUPERBLOOM: SHELTER, DROUGHT, AND SCULPTURE IN THE CALIFORNIA DESERT
James Lord, Roderick Wyllie
This studio will focus on the Yucca Valley, CA, and its adjacent desert settlements. Students will consider the desert as a physical and metaphysical void, exploring opportunities to amplify experiences of both sublimity and reflection within the void.

FIELD WORK: BREXIT, BORDERS, AND IMAGINING A NEW CITY-REGION FOR THE IRISH NORTHWEST
Niall Kirkwood, Gareth Doherty
Focused on a cross-border area between Ireland and Northern Ireland, the studio will give form to a region (the Northwest City Region) which is arguably already in existence culturally and institutionally, but not well articulated formally through mappings and visual and spatial boundaries.

THE MONOCHROME NO-IMAGE
Rosetta S. Elkin
A 10,000-year-old barrier island formation named Captiva, Florida will be the focus of our studio research, helping to bring together otherwise disparate phenomena that settle upon it but have thus far been considered independent: the reprise of hurricanes, the mobility of sand, the impressions of concrete foundations and the salty, algal permanence of seawater.

LANDSCAPE OF TRANS-NATIONALITY: TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY (TSR) AND ALTERNATIVE NATURE
Jungyoon Kim, Yoon-Jin Park
The studio aims to propose the landscape frameworks for new, imagined stations along the existing railways between Seoul to London, and more specifically along the course of the Trans-Siberian Railway.

BUILD WITH LIFE: TRANSFORMATION + FORMATION: LANDSCAPE AND ISLAMIC CULTURE
Catherine Mosbach
The uprisings of the North African Arab Spring exposed the fragility of countries whose citizens were eager to revisit and adapt their identities in the face of a changing world. The focus of the studio is Tunisia, the country in which the uprisings first began. The purpose of the studio will be to reimagine the penitentiary infrastructure as a place of learning that promotes humanitarian behavior.

DEPARTMENT OF URBAN PLANNING AND DESIGN

DESIGNING ATMOSPHERES AND TECHNOLOGIES FOR SOCIAL INTERACTION
Jose Luis Vallejo
With the arrival of the digital era, new kinds of communities have appeared. The studio will look at new opportunities in the Greater Boston area for the creation of hybrid physical-digital urban atmospheres that can enhance social interaction.

EXTREME URBANISM 6: DESIGNING SANITATION INFRASTRUCTURE
Rahul Mehrotra
This studio examines the issue of sanitation infrastructure in Mumbai, with a special focus on community toilets in the city’s informal settlements. The site is an informal settlement with an organized community group that will serve as the constituency or client group for the studio.

FUTURE OF STREETS IN LOS ANGELES
Andres Sevtsuk
This studio will investigate the impact of new mobility technologies on the built environment of LA, seeking solutions that maximize multi-modal, socially inclusive, and environmentally sustainable outcomes for the city.

LARGE SCALE PROJECTS TO CREATE NEW CENTRALITIES IN SHANGHAI. POTENTIALS FOR THE REGULAR CITY
Joan Busquets, Dingliang Yang
The studio focuses on a study of capacity of big urbanistic projects to direct the growth and transformation of large metropolises. It takes the example of Shanghai and its Expo 2010 to investigate their potential for creating one or several centralities in this diverse, dynamic city.

PATTERNED JUSTICE: DESIGN LANGUAGES FOR A JUST PITTSBURGH
Toni L. Griffin
This option studio will interrogate and advance socio-spatial justice through design and planning “pattern-making” in Pittsburgh, PA.

RE-THINKING A HUMANIST SKYSCRAPER CITY
Moshe Safdie, Jaron Lubin
As a whole, we architects have advanced the tall tower typology very little in the past century, beyond our ability to grow it taller and more environmentally efficient. This studio will research visions of the past, develop master plans for an active development site in Chicago, and develop a building proposal on a parcel within the larger master plan.