An Update on Supporting Our International Students and Scholars from Dean Sarah Whiting
Dear GSD Alumni & Friends,
Most of you are aware that on Wednesday night, June 4, the administration announced a proclamation suspending entry to the United States for international students studying here at Harvard. I encourage you to read President Garber’s statement about the proclamation, in which he details how we, as a university, will continue to assert our constitutional rights.
As of Thursday, the court halted enforcement of the administration’s proclamation while our case proceeds. The court also extended its previous order, stopping the federal government from revoking Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification. A hearing has been scheduled for June 16. Yesterday morning, President Garber sent the university community a follow-up email with these updates.
At the GSD, we are actively planning for a range of scenarios this fall, all the while acknowledging that the conditions we face are fluctuating almost daily. Nevertheless, we are preparing to take what measures we can to ensure that our international students have a viable way to continue their studies.
These continued illegal actions threaten the very fabric of our especially international community here at the GSD. Futures are being thrown into uncertainty. In the days and weeks ahead, if you know a returning or incoming international student who is affected by the administration’s actions, consider checking in with them.
Our alumni community is spread globally but remains close and supportive, and that closeness matters most in times like this one. While the university defends our community in court, let’s not forget the simple human power of asking how someone else is doing.
Thank you for your continued support of the GSD and our international community.
Yours sincerely,
Sarah
Sarah M. Whiting
Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Supporting the GSD’s Internationality from Dean Sarah Whiting
Dear GSD Alumni & Friends,
Most of you will have seen the headlines that last Thursday afternoon, May 22, the federal government revoked Harvard’s ability to enroll international students, one of a series of government actions in retaliation for the University’s refusal to submit to the federal government’s illegal assertion of control over our curriculum, our faculty, and our student body. In response, the University is suing the government and was granted a temporary restraining order to block this suspension. On Friday, May 23, President Garber sent an email to the University community and all alumni about this situation, followed by this update about the status of the temporary restraining order.
I join President Garber in condemning the government’s illegal action against our school, and in affirming the immense value our international students bring to the GSD community. The GSD is one of Harvard’s most international schools. Our international makeup goes back to the founding of the GSD. It is part of our DNA—our student body, our faculty, our staff, and the discipline and practice of design all thrive on this internationalism. The extraordinary breadth of experience and perspectives that the international members of our community provide is essential to who we are.
While the situation is evolving, we remain committed to supporting every member of our community. The Harvard International Office is working diligently to provide guidance and up-to-date information to our international students directly and through its website . Commencement 2025 will proceed as planned, with Class Day on Wednesday, May 28, and Commencement Ceremonies on Thursday, May 29. We look forward to celebrating our graduates and welcoming them as our newest members of the alumni community.
Thank you for your continued support of the GSD and our international community.
Yours sincerely,
Sarah
Sarah M. Whiting
Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Welcome to Fall 2023 from Dean Sarah Whiting
Dear GSD community,
It was wonderful to see so many of you last Thursday afternoon for our all-school event to start the semester, and a big thanks again to faculty members Danielle Choi, Toni Griffin, Eric Höweler, Dana McKinney White, and Andrew Witt for their incredibly thought-provoking presentations, and to Student Forum president Cory Page for doing such a fantastic job as program emcee.
The fall semester is now in full swing, and as we become more deeply absorbed in our coursework, research, student organizations, and everything else that fills our semesters, I want to take this opportunity to emphasize a point I made in my remarks about the importance of conversation.
With any project—and by “project,” I mean a proposal, an argument, a discipline, a practice, a design, a text…—there is only so far you can advance on your own. Working in isolation, or only with people with whom you are in complete agreement, is admittedly a very comfortable place to settle. Being in total agreement with oneself and those around you makes for an easy and happy existence, and yet doing so essentially seals you off in uncritical affirmation of your own ideas. Without critical dialogue, without conversation, you will eventually bump up against the limits of your own experience and perspective. You will, in short, ensure your own irrelevance.
It is difficult to overstate how crucial conversation is to the success of our work, but what really qualifies as a constructive conversation? Conversation at the GSD isn’t always verbal. Design traffics in the verbal, the visual, and the textual, in speculative realities and realities of speculation. But the best conversations—those that help ground our work in relevance—are centered around making an impact, strive to connect to the issues of the day, or, better yet, help define the critical issues of tomorrow.
Constructive conversation also means opening oneself up to productive disagreement. Hearing disagreement can be difficult, and focusing on and finding the value in it takes some practice. But in being challenged by disagreement, we’re able to refine, edit, hone, rework, and reformat our ideas to fix a point of weakness or fill a blind spot, all toward making them stronger—more relevant—as a result.
And it’s equally important to pay forward the benefits of such constructive feedback by letting your curiosity take you in directions that you might not predict, paying close attention and offering your own constructive criticism to the work and words of others around you, and by striking up conversation with people you may not agree with but whose judgment you respect. For everyone to benefit from and be supported by constructive criticism requires a shared commitment to intellectual generosity, respect, and trust that our feedback is always in the service of advancing each other’s work. Graduate school is quite unique as a place where we have the opportunity to build for ourselves an intellectual community of friends, colleagues, and faculty whom we can count on to share genuine, honest criticism, and disagreement. The GSD is a place where, as I mentioned on Thursday (referencing an upcoming article by Diane Davis to be published in this book ) you can make room for constructive conflict. The design of rooms, we all know, requires specificity—materials, dimensions, details—so I encourage you to make the “rooms” of your time here at once specific and open. It’s a process of making that will carry you throughout your time at the GSD and in all the years beyond.
With that, I look forward to all that’s coming up over the next few months and can’t wait to find myself in conversation with all of you.
Kind regards,
Sarah
Sarah M. Whiting
Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Toward a New GSD
A Fall 2022 Message from Dean Sarah M. Whiting
Dear GSD Alumni and Friends:
First and foremost, I welcome students, faculty, staff, and soon alumni and friends, back to the GSD. It’s hard to believe it, but this is the first semester that we are starting fully in person since spring of 2020! Not only are we back in person, but we are also back collectively and in numbers. With 280 new students joining us and 87 students returning from leaves of absence, we are clocking in this fall at 963 students, and it gives me great pleasure to announce that as of this fall, all studios once again will be located in the Trays of Gund Hall.
As many of you know, Gund Hall turns 50 years old this year, and with the Trays once again filling up with students and studios and energy, I’ve been reflecting on the importance of the Trays to Gund Hall and the pedagogy of the School. They came to mind recently as I was reading an article by our own Danielle Choi MLA ’08, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture. Entitled “Risk and Fun” (published in Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes) her text analyzes the interior landscape design of the Ford Foundation atrium in Manhattan, which opened in 1967. Danielle writes:
The newness of this fully air-conditioned environment was met by a spirit of experimentation by the Office of Dan Kiley, who synthesized different and sometimes competing frameworks of knowledge—botanical and horticultural, scientific and technical, personal and professional—through the research, design, and execution of this project, and subsequent interior landscapes.
I read this description and immediately thought of the GSD. Aside from the fact that Dan Kiley studied landscape architecture here at Harvard, an obvious comparison that came to mind is between the Ford Foundation atrium and our Trays. John Andrews—who graduated from the GSD with a Masters in Architecture in 1958—designed Gund exactly 50 years ago as a space that encourages collaboration and dialogue within and across studios, programs, students, and faculty.
The Trays were Andrews’ invention—they weren’t in the brief he had been given—and in that single design move, he defined the GSD as a school of encounters and exchanges or, to return to Danielle’s phrasing, a school that synthesizes different and sometimes competing frameworks of knowledge—knowledge arising from student and faculty design, writing, fabrication, and research.
And there is a lot of knowledge being produced here. The school has 7 different programs offering 15 different degrees, and we’re in the process of adding a new degree, the Master of Real Estate, with applications coming in this fall. Added to all of these degree programs are the Loeb Fellowship, Executive Education, the Undergraduate Architecture Studies concentration, and other Early Design Education programs. That adds up to a lot of potential synthesizing. And that is where our work lies.
To foster the most productive synthesizing, I want to take this opportunity at the start of the fall semester to lay out three priorities for the school that I hope will carry us forward in the years ahead, as the disruption of the pandemic finally begins to recede into the background. We are all doing very different work—not only across departments and programs, but even within a single program or a single class—but these three priorities bind us all together, and I hope they will help move us forward as a whole, as one School:
- First, is building on the promise of the core.
- Second, is ensuring our relevance.
- Third, is expanding our reach.
Each of our degree programs has either a core or a pro-seminar or a required sequence of courses that lays out some fundamental skills, methods, and bodies of knowledge that drive the disciplines forward. And each of those core bodies of knowledge is akin to a living organism—they are constantly evolving. This evolution has been especially important over the past few years as the urgency of addressing issues of inequity, racism, and other biases and complicities in our disciplines and professions has been laid bare. In reckoning with the cores of our disciplines, and in laboring to command their fundamentals—as students, teachers, and practitioners—we all learn to sharpen our vision, deepen our empathy, and commit to an idea, an argument, a design, and its consequences.
The cores of our various disciplines also galvanize the dialogue that drives necessary change across the School and across the world to meet the demands of the 21st century—the dialogue between each of us as individuals and the fields we comprise; and also the dialogue between innovative ideas emerging on the periphery, and the established ways of thinking that underpin the disciplines as we know them today. Through the core, we better ourselves as practitioners striving to bring resilience, justice, and beauty into the world, and we embrace the responsibility for our fields to do the same.
So, priority one: the core is not an obligation to be crossed off en route to more advanced work—it is the basis of all advanced work. It is the expertise that underlies all productive collaborations. The core of each of our programs is not static; it is constantly evolving, and one of my priorities as dean is to ensure that we turn our attention to the core, writ broadly, so that we can direct that critical, urgent, and timely evolution together.
Priority two: ensuring our relevance.
We need to hone our core expertise in order to ensure our relevance. There are too many challenges in today’s world for us to sit on the sidelines. The mounting challenges of the 21st century—from the climate crisis to spiking social inequality and the global erosion of democratic institutions—constantly require us to pursue relevance. The design and planning fields are unique in their combination of such radical interdisciplinarity with the specificity and precision of our core expertise. We synthesize expertise from across the academy and the public and private sectors to uncover possibility in convergence and to distill genuinely new ideas—a resolved design, an effective public policy, a generative history—in response to the complex circumstances of a place, its community, and its future.
It follows that design and planning have immense potential—indeed, immense responsibility—to engage what are not just urgent challenges of today, but some of the most complicated and intractable issues of our time. We construct the world around us—that’s a hefty charge, but also an extraordinarily exciting and important one. We translate into policy, program, space, and form different ways of living together that can mitigate our climate catastrophe, can suture broken communities, and can offer new ways of living and working in our contemporary world.
And finally, priority three: expanding our reach.
Our work will never have traction—it will never lead to new possibilities, it will never synthesize, it will never gain relevance—if it can’t be understood by others. Design operates in an expanded field, which means that we are constantly moving within, among, and across different crowds—what the scholar-activist Edward Said once referred to as “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community” (published in Critical Inquiry). Said lamented the overspecialization of literary critics, because he felt that they wrote only for other literary critics, whereas politicians and journalists communicated to the entire world. Our different fields here at the GSD are always already imbricated in the world. Because of that, we need to pay attention to the crowds we surf among, so that we can best situate our work among constituencies, communities, stakeholders, audiences, and even, to use Said’s term, opponents.
For in addition to designing the world around us, we’re also constructing the terms that explain that world to those who have to construct it with us—technically, structurally, socially, economically, and politically. If we can’t translate our ideas across all of these registers, we won’t be able to get anything done. Design is the most public of the arts—we need to be comfortable operating in that public realm if we want to be effective scholar-activists.
Design, planning, policy, and history can’t be done alone, and none of our work can be done quickly: gaining the expertise of the core, ensuring our relevance, and expanding our audience all takes time and patience. Time is admittedly a weird concept in the best of times, but in these past 2.5 years it’s been downright wacky. We all complain that we don’t have control over time —and we often let that complaint become reality by not taking the time to think through what needs to be done when and how, which puts us in the position of rushing willy-nilly to the drumbeat of deadlines.
If Covid slowed the world down, and if racist murders, Supreme Court decisions, and global disasters have recently simply stopped the world in its tracks, one can say that these past years have given us cause for reflection. Patience is the attitude that makes it possible for us to comprehend, learn from, navigate, and build on the experience of these past 2.5 years. Patience is also the quality that enables us to gain our expertise, question its foundations, determine our relevance, and engage our audiences. Finally, patience is simply another way of saying take care—take the time to take care of yourselves, and take care of those around you.
These three priorities—building on the promise of the core, ensuring our relevance, and expanding our reach—can maybe best be understood as common sense, especially for a community of 963 students, 182 faculty, and 170 staff, who live and work together daily at the GSD. Ours is a big and extraordinary community, but its size is also why I ask that we all take care to care for one another. To thrive here, we must cultivate an ethics—a common sense, and a sense of our commons—in what we do as individuals and as a school to push our fields toward ethical forms of practice. As designers, planners, historians, critics, and educators, we strive to shepherd the world toward a future that we envision for a better tomorrow. To succeed, we must cultivate a keen sense of ethical judgment, an expansive sense of empathy, and a vigilant sense of our shared social contract as global citizens—our contract with one another here at the GSD, and across this fragile planet that we all inhabit.
I’ll close by sharing that I’m honored to be part of the community that is the GSD. I look forward to connecting with many of you at the GSD Comeback: Alumni & Friends Celebration, which will take place on our campus on Sept. 16 and 17. I look forward to talking more with you about how we can collectively make progress on these three priorities, and about other ways that we can move our school and our fields forward.
In community,
Sarah M. Whiting
Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Concluding 2021–2022
Dear Alumni and Friends,
With the end of commencement ceremonies and celebrations held over the past several days, the school year officially has come to a close. Congratulations again to the class of 2022, as well as the graduates from 2020 and 2021, for whom we were, at long last and not a minute too soon, able to celebrate in person. It was overwhelming and rewarding to see so many graduates, alumni, and their families gather in person on campus, and it all made for a fitting end to such an extraordinary year.
This year, the world’s focus gradually began turning toward living with COVID-19, and so in some ways the year marked the end of the pandemic’s grip on the school and our collective community. As Danielle Allen put it during her Class Day address last Wednesday, the class of 2022—and I would add to that the graduates from 2020 and 2021, as well as future graduates—are the classes of resilience. Indeed they are. I have been endlessly amazed by our students’ imaginative capacity for adaptation, reinvention, and perseverance amid the deep disruption that has defined the past two years. And as unspeakable tragedies continue to mount and leave little reason for hope—most recently the shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas—I find optimism for our future in our students’ seemingly irrepressible determination and ideas to make our world a better place.
We all need that optimism and the sense of possibility it evokes. It is foundational to the design and planning disciplines—the notion that there must be a new and better way—and our fields are capable of delivering on it. Our contemporary world is facing many challenges—from climate change and housing crises to deeply rooted social inequities—and now is the time when all of us need to not only demonstrate our expertise, knowledge, and ambitions, but also our ethics and values as an indispensable part of our work as designers, planners, historians, policy-makers, theorists, and educators.
I wish you all a peaceful summer, and please do take the time to rest and take care of yourselves. I already can’t wait to see what inspiring work the fall will bring. To recent graduates and all alumni, I look forward to crossing paths at future alumni events and to reading about your future adventures. Good luck to all!
Kind regards,
Sarah
Sarah M. Whiting
Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
A letter from Sarah M. Whiting on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery
Dear GSD community,
I write to encourage you to pause and take in this morning’s email from President Bacow sharing the Report and Recommendations of the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery. The report opens with the simple, direct claim that “Harvard’s motto, Veritas, inscribed on gates, doorways, and sculptures all over campus, demands of us truth.” The painful truths revealed in this carefully documented report betray the ethics represented by the word Veritas. The committee’s recommendations offer up just the beginning of a way forward for Harvard and for all of us. I am deeply grateful to the members of the Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery—appointed by President Bacow in 2019 and chaired by Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study—for undertaking this monumentally difficult task, in particular the contributions of the GSD’s own Stephen Gray, Associate Professor of Urban Design. I urge you all to read the report in its entirety. As designers, planners, historians, theorists, teachers, and citizens, it is critically important to learn about and know this part of our university’s history. The legacy of slavery at the university we call home is difficult to read, but also powerful in how it exemplifies how the ravages of slavery—while legally abolished in Massachusetts in 1783 and across the United States in 1865—were and continue to be inextricable from flows of global capital, the formations of modern cities as we know them today, and the repressive violence underlying them. The design and planning disciplines share culpability in this history—in their makeup as professionalized groups of experts and practitioners, and in the direct roles they play in planning for and designing the environments we inhabit. But as the committee’s recommendations make clear, the design and planning disciplines also have an important role to play in our reckoning with that history. There is an enormous amount of work to be done at Harvard, the GSD, and in our fields, and the committee’s recommendations and the university’s significant and sustained commitment of resources mark a valuable step forward toward progress. In the weeks and months ahead, we will consider and discuss with members of our GSD and Harvard communities the significance of the committee’s findings so as to begin to determine how best we might support the recommendations contained in the report, and where we might go from here. This work, which will be collective, will take many forms, and will be long ongoing. I encourage everyone to participate in a few related gatherings already planned for the coming weeks. This Friday, April 29, the Radcliffe Institute will be hosting a day-long symposium in connection with the report’s release titled Telling the Truth about All This: Reckoning with Slavery and Its Legacies at Harvard and Beyond. Two screenings and discussions of a video that the Radcliffe Institute has produced as an introduction to the committee’s report also have been scheduled during the next few weeks, and I hope those of you on campus on Monday, May 16, will attend the screening scheduled to happen at Gund Hall. Details about these three events are below. Thursday, April 28 12:00pm – 1:00pm Virtual screening and discussion Community & Affinity Spaces, an initiative of the Harvard Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging Register here Friday, April 29 9:15am – 6:00pm Telling the Truth About all This Radcliffe Institute Register here Monday, May 16 4:00pm – 5:00pm In-person screening and discussion Gund Hall 111 No registration necessary At the GSD, we all necessarily traffic in optimism—we aim at a better world—even if reading this history of Harvard can make it almost impossible to maintain any degree of optimism. And it is vital that we know its truth, as uncomfortable and painful as it may be, and keep that truth squarely in view as we gather our collective will toward repairing the devastations of the past and present, and strive for that better world for our families and loved ones, colleagues, and ourselves In community, SarahHonoring the Legacy of Urban Design Pioneer Jaqueline Tyrwhitt
The GSD renamed the 50th Anniversary of Urban Design Program Lecture for Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, a GSD associate professor who worked to establish and fortify the urban design program during its founding years. The Jaqueline Tyrwhitt Urban Design Lecture will be delivered each year by a visionary urban planner, designer, scholar, or leader who has opened novel directions in urban-design thinking and traced new intersections between urban design and other disciplines. Moshe Safdie, Lee Cott (MAUD ’70), and Jay Chatterjee (MAUD ’65) played a key role in establishing the original lecture in 2010 and fortifying its energy since.
About Professor Jaqueline Tyrwhitt
Written by Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture
Professor Tyrwhitt (1905–1983) served as an Associate Professor at the GSD between 1955 and 1969, and worked to establish and fortify the urban design program during its founding years. Professor Tyrwhitt—or Jacky, as she preferred to be called by friends—spent her early years in London and the English countryside. While taking a course at the Architectural Association, she found inspiration in the work of Patrick Geddes and his view of urban planning as organic rather than predetermined; her study and illumination of Geddes’s ideas would later prove seminal. After World War II, Tyrwhitt would stake out a transformative role in shaping the post-war Modern Movement toward decentralized urban, community, and residential design. She left England for Canada in 1951, working to establish a graduate program in city and regional planning at the University of Toronto. She arrived at the GSD in 1955, teaching here until her retirement in 1969.
Central forces throughout Professor Tyrwhitt’s pedagogy include her humanistic approach to urban planning and design, and her commitment to communicating and sharing design discourse. She translated and edited all major works by Swiss art historian Sigfried Giedion, and in 1955 launched a journal titled Ekistics to activate the influence of Greek architect and planner Constantinos Doxiadis. She moved to Greece after her GSD retirement, settling on an Attic hillside near the village of Peania; she passed away there in 1983, working on her final book. Our Frances Loeb Library offers a number of Professor Tyrwhitt’s publications; additionally, she was a focus of the library’s 2018 exhibition “Feminine Power and the Making of Modern Architectural History.”
Opening of the 2021-2022 Academic Year
Dear Alumni and Friends,
With the GSD community together on campus again, we return to a world that needs thoughtful, caring designers more than ever. I recently listened to an interview with George Saunders, one of my favorite writers, and a phrase he said truly resonated with me: “Kindness is the only non-delusional response to the human condition.” This short sentence captures a great mindset for all of us as the GSD community.
We have many ways of responding directly to what is going on in the world through what we do at the GSD. We have an impressive range of courses this fall, many of which take on the question of where design intersects with critical contemporary issues of equity, health, climate, infrastructure, re-use, and migration. We also have courses that look at a whole host of other topics, ranging from Michelangelo to insects, social infrastructure, and finance. We will have our hands and heads full this semester. As we dive into this remarkable range of intelligence and knowledge, we’ll be doing it together again.
Our students, faculty, and staff will once again learn and work alongside one another under the same roof (and I’ll note that over the summer, we replaced all 120 of Gund Hall’s roofs!). We’ve also expanded outward, with tents, tables, chairs, and portable digital screens on Gund’s “front porch” as well as in the “backyard”—spaces that we can now use for teaching as well as for eating or napping. Taking forth some positives from our experience online, we will continue to make extensive use of digital technologies to produce and share ideas, collaborate, and communicate with each other. The guiding priority for us remains as it has been throughout the pandemic: the health and safety of each member of our community. Community-wide vaccination, weekly testing, and indoor masking have enabled us to return to campus and I am grateful to everyone for their cooperation.
I want to highlight our new class—the students who will eventually join your esteemed ranks as GSD graduates. Our incoming class hails from 34 different countries; more than half of the class population is international. There are 1,073 students total at the GSD and 23 programs of study, thanks in part to the overlap this year of the former MDes “tracks” and the inauguration of the new MDes “domains.” Things I love the most about the GSD include the spontaneous and informal intersections of these many different areas of expertise that happen when students from various programs take courses together or sit near one another in the Trays, and when faculty from different departments discover productive overlaps in their work.
We are also pleased to welcome back the Loeb Fellowship this year, with ten Fellows coming to us with backgrounds in activism, urbanism, public art, film and media, technology, and real estate development. This year’s cohort marks the 51st class of Fellows and inaugurates collaboration between the Loeb Fellowship and the ArtLab at Harvard University . Also, this year, alongside the customary cohort of Irving Innovation Fellows, we have a group of Irving Instructional Technology Fellows, likewise made possible by the John E. Irving Dean’s Innovation Fund. All of the Irving Fellows, who are recent graduates of the school, are furthering their individual postgraduate research while also helping academic departments and programs navigate and incorporate new pedagogical approaches.
This semester, our campus buildings are open only to Harvard University ID holders, so while we will have to wait a little longer to welcome you, our alumni, to events with us in person, we look forward to offering many ways to connect virtually. Starting today, September 23, you can join the two-day global virtual summit “Design Impact – Following the Sun: Design Futures at the Intersection of Health, Equity, and Climate Change,” an initiative of the Alumni Council. This fall, the GSD’s robust Fall 2021 public program will be live-streamed. I hope you can join us for the Loeb Lecture “Felon: A play; A discourse” featuring Reginald Dwayne Betts; the “Black in Design: Black Matter” conference with keynote addresses by Lesley Lokko and Mpho Matsipa; the issue launch and conversation for Harvard Design Magazine #49: “Publics,” edited by Anita Berrizbeitia MLA ’87 and Diane Davis; and many more events. In the new year, we will hold the annual GSD Town Hall, which is an opportunity for us to connect and discuss my priorities for the school.
I’m looking forward to the return of exhibitions inside Gund Hall in the Druker Design Gallery, with content being available to you on our website. The first exhibition of the fall semester, “GSD: A–Z 2020 & 2021,” is a compendium of work from the last two graduating classes and coincides with a new A–Z yearbook for each graduating class. Opening in October is “Interrogative Design: Selected Works of Krzysztof Wodiczko,” GSD Professor in Residence of Art, Design, and the Public Domain, which will introduce, or reintroduce, you to the diverse and wide-ranging aspects of one of the most vital artistic practices of the 21st century. The exhibition will reemphasize Wodiczko’s practice as one bridging art with design, weaving social engagement with innovative technologies, mapping marginalized identities onto architecture, and reinscribing new memories onto existing monuments.
Also on the faculty side, I am thrilled to announce that Rachel Meltzer was appointed the inaugural Plimpton Associate Professor of Planning and Urban Economics, effective July 1. This role was established in 2019 and made possible by a generous gift from Samuel Plimpton MBA ’77, MArch ’80, and his wife, Wendy Shattuck. Also as of July 1, Antoine Picon assumed the role of Director of the Doctor of Philosophy program, which Erika Naginski has tirelessly overseen for the past seven years. Our PhD students have done extremely well in obtaining terrific positions after graduating, and I know that Erika’s organization and mentoring were instrumental in helping them succeed.
I’m thankful for our thoughtful and creative students, who are at the forefront of that crucial work. I encourage all of you to tune into the African American Design Nexus’ podcast , The Nexus, which explores the intersection of design, identity, and practice through conversations with Black designers, writers, and educators. The African American Design Nexus was developed by the Frances Loeb Library in collaboration with the GSD’s African American Student Union. In the latest episode of the podcast, Dmitri Julius connects the dots between terrestrial, sustainable building practices and new technologies being developed for human habitation in outer space through a conversation with two student hosts, Tara Oluwafemi and Darien Carr, who pepper Julius with thoughtful and provocative questions.
Finally, our beloved Gund Hall received some upgrades before it celebrates its 50th birthday in 2022. Improvements focused on safety, sustainability, and modernization, including a rewired fire alarm system and gleaming polished concrete floors in the Trays. The lounges now have cork floors, the entrances to Gund have 10-foot doors, and I already mentioned the 120 roofs. Refurbished bathrooms include an accessible non-gender bathroom on the first floor. And, given the emphasis on outdoor activities during the pandemic, we’re especially happy with the plein-air experience that our new outdoor furniture provides.
I am very much excited by our return to campus, and I thank you for all that you have done over the last year to keep the GSD, our faculty, and our students safe, supported, and engaged. I look forward to when we can greet each other in person soon.
Yours optimistically,
Sarah
Sarah M. Whiting
Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Fall 2021 Welcome Address from Dean Sarah M. Whiting
Hello and welcome to the GSD, Fall 2021! I’m Sarah Whiting, your dean, and I’m so excited to be back in my office. I very much look forward to seeing you all. This welcome back address was in the back of my mind the other morning when I was out for a walk, listening to a podcast—The Ezra Klein Show—he’s a very sharp journalist and political analyst and, it turns out, a great podcast interviewer. This particular episode happened to be a rerun, featuring one of my favorite writers, George Saunders, who’s a master of the short story genre, a terrific essayist, and who received the Man Booker Prize in 2017 for his haunting novel Lincoln in the Bardo. So here I am, walking while listening to two smart people, and very quickly I was struck by resonances between their conversation and the school. That happens to all of us, I suspect: when you’re in the middle of something, everything around you seems to come into relevance, sometimes quite directly and sometimes in a roundabout manner. For me, that’s one of the real luxuries of this school: Because so much (arguably everything) intersects and overlaps with what we do here, it’s very easy to find such parallels. The first resonance was a quote from George Saunders that “kindness is the only non-delusional response to the human condition.” He’s written more extensively about kindness elsewhere, but this short sentence captures a great mindset for all of us, as we return to being in person together in a world that is still beset by anxiety regarding the pandemic and endlessly troubling news regarding the environment, the economy, the hard work we all face in ending systemic racism here and abroad, and additional challenges that riddle our newsfeeds. There is a lot going on in the world out there. We have many ways of responding directly to all that is going on through what we do in here, in the school, as you can see from the huge range of courses that we have this term, many of which take on issues of equity, health, climate, infrastructure, re-use, and migration. Our courses focus on the specificity of where design intersects these issues. For example: the specificity of, how housing design impacts our individual health and our collective equity—the forms and spaces of each apartment, as well as the shared spaces for getting to apartments, and also housing’s outdoor spaces. We also have many courses that look at a whole host of other topics, ranging from Michelangelo to insects to social infrastructure to finance. We will, in short, have our hands and heads full this semester as we dive into a remarkable range of intelligence and knowledge, and we’ll be doing it together again in Gund, 485 Broadway, the Kirkland and Sumner “houses,” our backyard, and our other GSD campus spaces. After a year and a half of having our computer monitors mediate our encounters, we’re going to have to get used to being together again—we can’t hit mute so easily anymore! Can’t cook a boeuf bourguignon or bake a sourdough loaf while still attending (or teaching) class anymore! Can’t sit barefoot anymore or Zoom from a Peloton anymore! My advice? Keep George Saunders’ quote front and center: kindness is the only non-delusional response to the human condition. It’s a fantastic default both for engaging one another and for responding to the world at large, which is more than a little tough these days. The second resonance I took from that episode of The Ezra Klein Show was Saunders’ description of how he revises his work. He describes the process as training your intuitions so as to improve your ability to make your own choices—for him, choices of word or phrase; for us, choices of design and research. As Saunders explains, “part of the trajectory of becoming a better writer is just to start listening to those little opinions you have in your head, believing in their existence, getting better at discerning them, and then getting better at instantaneously acting on them.” He continues: “So the kind of amazing truth, in my experience, is that that’s the whole game for a writer: you have a lot of opinions that most of the time you override or miss. Can you slow down a bit in your revision process and find out what those are and then radically honor them? That’s what makes a writer distinctive, I would say. So there’s not much to that really, except cultivating that state of mind.” Cultivating that state of mind—hand it to George Saunders for finding such a great phrase for describing what an education really is. It’s hard work to shepherd all those opinions in your head so that you can build in yourselves the confidence to determine which opinion, which choice, will take your work forward. I encourage all of you to cultivate a state of mind to enable you to be open to what you’re being exposed to here in your courses, and in the opinions and contributions of others, and to hone your own opinions so that you can constantly revise and improve your lines, whether drawn or written. That cultivation happens here, and it will continue throughout your lives. I don’t want to imply that that cultivation is simple; and yet, it’s something that every one of us can and should do. Let me turn to another of my favorite writers, Hannah Arendt, to find some tips for paving the way. I use that expression “pave the way” deliberately, because Arendt, who was a political philosopher who wrote perhaps most famously about totalitarianism and humanity, also wrote about thinking and did so often by relying upon built analogies: like “hitting a brick wall,” or “the path paved by thinking,” and one that really struck me: “thinking without a bannister”—her expression for how one can forge thought after the horrors of World War II, the horrors that removed the shared bannisters of reason that one thought one could always count on in the world. After the war, in other words, it was as if everyone found themselves having to climb up and down rickety stairs without the safety of a shared sense of reason because with the war, reason had disappeared from the world. That’s not dissimilar to how we find ourselves today in a world where reason and certainty seem gone—we have to tread carefully up and down stairs without bannisters. Arendt condemns thoughtlessness. As she puts it, thoughtlessness is different from stupidity, for, as she says, “it can be found in highly intelligent people. And it is nothing rare (she continues) but quite ordinary, especially in our everyday life, where we hardly have the time, let alone the inclination to stop and think.” Arendt wrote this almost fifty years ago, in her final and unfinished book, Life of the Mind, but it sounds like she’s describing our own world. Finally, and importantly, Arendt notes that thoughtlessness can lead to the same horrifying results as evil motives might: in short, thoughtlessness isn’t just a benign selfish removal from the world; it can be dangerous. So how do we avoid thoughtlessness? How do we cultivate our state of mind? Arendt explains that thinking should not be understood as a withdrawal from the world; instead, she says, thinking requires us to enlist the past and the future, to engage with them and against each other, and to try to make sense of them. In sum, Arendt provides a valuable lesson in her writing about thinking: while you’re here at the GSD, you should all follow her advice: take time to stop and think. Make sure that you contextualize what you are thinking by looking to the past—history—while also positing the future. Make sure that you engage others: Test out your opinions by talking with your peers in and outside of your classes. Take full advantage of the informal conversations that being together again allows us all to have. And try to design your own bannisters. We have unique reasons to be optimistic as we contemplate the beginning of this new school year, not least of which are the impressively high vaccination rate at Harvard and the GSD, as well as the steady, reassuring guidance from Harvard University Health Services director Dr. Giang Nguyen, and others informing our return here at Harvard. But we also have reasons to remain guarded. Needless to say, the rise of Covid’s Delta variant this summer has reminded us that, even as we do everything we can to mitigate risk, this pandemic carries with it a great deal of inherent uncertainty—and, as we have seen, it is an ongoing challenge in which individual decisions and collective responsibility are intertwined. As we reconvene, regather, and reassemble, I am confident that we will ably balance these seemingly conflicting impulses. Simply entering Gund Hall or walking across Harvard Yard—daily routines that once were unremarkable—now feel utterly transformational. Now is an exciting moment, for certain, but it’s also certainly one that is complex. So, while the start of the academic year bursts and flourishes with adrenaline and color, I want to encourage an expansive, George Saunders-ian kindness, and also patience. We will need to be patient with each other as we continue gauging Covid’s evolving impact on our daily lives and near future. We also need to be patient with ourselves. Self-care may be a well-worn cliché at this point, but I mean it when I say it: give yourself the individual time, freedom, and mental space to do what you need to do in order to situate yourself comfortably and confidently for this semester and this year. Add time and space around even the most rudimentary moments of reconnection—like literally reconnecting your technology, a task that may take more time and patience than in semesters past. Patience will also beget patience with ourselves. I share with you each the eagerness to get “back to normal,” but I also feel wonder, and yes, some anxiety, around how this is all going to play out. I commit to taking this day by day, reaction by reaction, and I hope we each allow ourselves the elasticity, and the patience, to navigate this term and this year with the awareness that it is a shared moment, a shared experience, and a set of shared reactions. One thing that allows me some more of that all-important mental space is knowing how tirelessly so many of our staff and faculty have been working over the past several months in preparation. We have organized our efforts in order to have the best of all worlds: collaborating in person again, but doing it safely enough to ensure that we can continue doing so. I again encourage you to take some extra time now to process all the information you’re getting, and to acclimate to some of the new ways in which we access our campus and work together. Let me take a moment now to remind us of some key points. Our campus buildings will be accessible only to Harvard ID holders, and we are closing Gund Hall and our other GSD campus buildings for a few hours each night—between 2:00 and 5:00 am. This nightly closure will, in part, enable building cleaning, but will also, I hope, help put some brakes on the unproductive culture of “24/7” work, an impulse that is so endemic to the design fields and so counter to intelligent outcomes. Note I’m not saying that you should only leave the building for three hours, but I’m hoping that this schedule can accommodate both our night owls and our early birds. I also want to remind us all of the obligation to wear face masks while indoors (except when you’re alone in your office, like I am now), and to refrain from eating in shared spaces (go outdoors to eat, please). There is plenty of other information available on the “Reopening” menu on our homepage. Please review this information frequently, and ask questions if you have them. We will all need to remain flexible around shifting policies. I want to extend a huge thanks to all of the staff and faculty who have worked hard over the summer to ensure our smooth return to campus, and an equally huge thanks to the students, staff, and faculty who’ve been so patient and flexible throughout this ongoing process. An added thanks to our Building Re-Entry Committee, made up of faculty and staff: their work and insight has shaped and informed almost everything we are doing this term. I am also so thrilled about some of the physical improvements that have been made to Gund Hall: we rewired and updated the fire alarm system, pulled up the worn vinyl tiles in the Trays, which now have gleaming polished concrete floors; the lounges now have cork floors. The entrances to Gund now have new 10-foot doors and improved card swipes; the studio roofs (all 120 of them) are new; you’ll also see new paint; and refurbished restrooms (though please note that the first floor restrooms, which include a new, accessible non-gender restroom, will not be complete until next week). We have three new tents (two at Gund and one at the Kirkland houses) and additional outdoor furniture to enable outdoor (maskless) teaching. You can schedule these spaces through SERT. Outdoor video screens are coming soon—they are on backorder. And last but not least, the new basketball hoop will be installed mid-September—you’ll be able to sign out a basketball from the Donut. Many of you don’t know how changed these spaces are; you may not even know what the Donut is. We have two classes worth of students who haven’t studied in our buildings and even some faculty who haven’t yet been here, despite having started teaching already last year. Those of you who are old hands here at the GSD, please share your insider intel; those of you who are new, don’t hesitate to ask questions and develop your own new traditions. While our return to in-person collaboration is thrilling and long awaited, some of the digital pathways we carved over the past year and a half have been impressively constructive. We should continue not just making use of them, but building from them. As an example, I encourage you, especially our faculty, to use our internal website GSD Now’s “Trays”, either as a space for collaboration within courses or for sharing conversations and projects with the rest of the school. And students, especially student groups, will find GSD Now a simple and effective way to promote student events, or to curate Trays on topical projects, group discussions, or ongoing research. Likewise, the virtual setting of our public programming last year proved valuable in its reach as well as the depth of discourse it enabled. While virtual lectures, conferences, and exhibitions are fundamentally different from their analog cousins, the upside is seeing how many people from around the world can join us at each event this fall. This semester, we can watch these events together even if our speakers cannot come here to give these events in person. We will be holding several spaces—Piper Auditorium, Gund 111 (aka “The War Room”), and two seminar rooms on the 5th floor—for watch parties for this semester’s online public events. I look forward to seeing how these watch parties fuel some exciting and profound internal conversations. One of the things I love most about the GSD is the variety of perspectives we have: just consider the number of our academic programs—we’re clocking in at 23 this year, thanks in part to our overlap of the previous MDes tracks and the inauguration of the new MDes domains. These aren’t 23 individual camps of people who only talk among themselves—instead, it’s over a thousand students who bring very different perspectives and areas of expertise to one another. You all bring to the school some extraordinary opinions, some amazing thoughtfulness. If you need any confirmation of that, just tune in to The Nexus Podcast, a collaboration between the GSD’s African American Student Union and the Frances Loeb Library. Yesterday’s episode is a riveting conversation between MArch students Tara Oluwafemi and Darien Carr with Dmitri Julius, CPO of ICON. Tara and Darien’s probing questions guide a conversation that moves from 3d printed housing, to Afro-futurism and Sun Ra, to collaborations with NASA and what constitutes context when designing on the moon, among many other topics. I encourage you all to jumpstart your own conversations by checking out the current exhibition A to Z in the Druker Design Gallery (the lobby of Gund Hall for those of you who are new). Showcasing student work, A to Z offers an evocative way to return and reconnect with our school and each other. There are a LOT of students here this year—every desk in Gund and 485 Broadway will be occupied. On the student front, I want to applaud the entire incoming Student Forum—and wish Student Forum president Stephanie Lloyd a very happy birthday! Student Forum organized last week’s fantastic (and fantastically named) “Offline” events, which introduced and reintroduced the GSD to the student community. And speaking of reintroductions, let me say that I really wanted this address to kick off a joyous and delectable in-person celebration for us all—a backyard bash behind Gund. As you can tell, we concluded that now is not the right time for that, but I commit to holding that party, in person, at a point in the near future. We all deserve it. For now, our optimism for a continual return to campus and all that the on-campus experience can entail depends on our shared, collective care and our consideration for one another. Please don’t be stupid or thoughtless: please follow the testing regimens with care, please wear masks inside, and please take care outside. In closing, let me reiterate the four key points from George Saunders and Hannah Arendt:- kindness is the only non-delusional response to the human condition.
- cultivate your state of mind
- stop and think
- and enlist the past and the future, engage with them and against each other, and to try to make sense of them.