Dean Whiting’s Greeting for the Lunar New Year

Wishing the GSD’s Alumni & Friends prosperity, happiness, and good health.

After such an unfathomable year, I am glad to be welcoming a new year, one that I hope will offer renewal and connect us with the loved ones, communities, and ideas that nourish us.

One of the more uplifting moments that came from this past year was sharing our virtual programming with you and our alumni worldwide in a new way. I was heartened to see so many familiar names and faces in the Zoom rooms. I look forward to the day when we will be together again.

With kind regards,

Sarah M. Whiting
Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture
Harvard Graduate School of Design

Spring 2021 All-School Welcome from Dean Sarah M. Whiting

On Tuesday, January 19, 2021 Dean Sarah M. Whiting joined the GSD community on Zoom to deliver a virtual welcome to start the spring term. A transcript of the Dean’s remarks is below. Good morning, afternoon, and evening everyone, and happy new year. I hope you all tried to have a restful holiday break. I just have to say, it’s so heartening to welcome everyone back to school for the spring semester. Many of us had been looking forward to the new year—I know I was—and I could not wait to put 2020 behind me. Twenty-twenty, though, is clearly not going away so easily. Today is January 19th, almost two weeks after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. I’m still reeling from that day and I’m sure many of you are, too. By nature, I’m an optimistic person, but I admit I’m finding it very hard to find any silver linings right now. Yes, we have tomorrow’s inauguration to look forward to and yes, the vaccines are promising. (Speaking at a virtual conference of arts professionals over the weekend—and even dressing the part by wearing a black turtleneck—Dr. Anthony Fauci suggested that we might reach herd immunity this fall.) And yes, my surgery over break was successful, so I’m entering the new year in good health. All of these are positive, very positive, starts to the new year. But I can’t get the images of the rioters who broke into the Capitol out of my head. The vision of the confederate flag being carried within that space is particularly seared in my memory, confirming the work that this country has to do in reckoning with its structural racism, past and present. The U.S. Capitol, was designed by a succession of architects—the original competition, held in 1792, was won by Dr. William Thornton, who, according to the history on the Capitol’s website, was a “gifted amateur architect who had studied medicine but rarely practiced as a doctor.” Thornton’s original design was modified by Benjamin Henry Latrobe and Charles Bullfinch, among many others over time. Having partially burned in the war of 1812, it was rebuilt by European laborers working with American slaves. In short, this building embodies our country’s history as well as architectural history. In 1850, the building was expanded to create the House and Senate chambers—the two wings that swarmed with rioters early this month. Barton Gellman, one of my favorite columnists, described in The Atlantic what happened on January 6th as attempted “democracide.” Gellman concluded that “The republic survived a sustained attempt on its life because judges and civil servants and just enough politicians did what they had to do.” In other words, our system of checks and balances worked…just barely. Just barely because we discovered that facts, evidence, and history can be hijacked more quickly and more thoroughly than anyone could have ever imagined. We all need to be vigilant to prevent that kind of hijacking. It’s so important, so urgent, for us to pay close attention to what is happening politically, socially, economically, here in the U.S. and around the world, because yes, it does affect us. It is equally crucial for each one of us to be sure to base our research, our work, and our opinions on facts and on history that are backed up by evidence. I point you again to our event last September with Danielle Allen and Michael Murphy discussing “Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century,” the report issued by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that Allen co-authored. It’s available on the American Academy website. The report issues 31 recommendations, ranging from ranked voting to independent citizen-led redistricting in all 50 states, to subsidizing projects to reinvent the public functions that social media have displaced. While I would argue that every recommendation speaks to each of us as individuals, some, like redistricting and the ones challenging the space that social media has consumed, also speak to us as designers, planners, historians, and theorists. Susan Glasser, the New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, recently recounted that in her first job out of college working on Capitol Hill as a reporter for Roll Call Newspaper, every time she walked into the Capitol building it had awed her. The building’s solidity and its spaces inspired, utterly resonating with its civic mission. How often does someone refer to buildings that way today? Successful design (architecture, landscape, urban design, information design, product design) resonates. That doesn’t mean that it has to look like the U.S. Capitol—our world is a whole lot different from what it was in 1792. But it does mean that we have to consider the effects of what we do, and how we shape the world. Even if right now I’m challenged to find much to be optimistic about, I am unswerving in my conviction about our role. Toward that end, we have an extraordinary array of classes this semester intended to engage us in this work: courses looking at how housing has been affected by changed notions of family, changed practices of the workplace, and changed expectations about climate impact. We have courses laying the grounds for design justice. We have courses positing the impacts of neoliberalism, of material extraction, and of symbols, ranging from confederate monuments to the national park service’s monuments. We have courses covering a dizzying range of techniques, ranging from gaming technology to optical strategies to acoustic ones. We’re looking at materials: their lifespans from extraction to building units; their agency; their heterogeneities; their burning; and their symbolisms. We’re looking at Tar Creek, Oklahoma; Sao Paolo, Brazil; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Tokyo, Japan; Harvard Square, and Nantucket Island. Despite having fewer students this semester, we have as many if not more courses than we’ve ever had. In response to feedback from students and the Innovation Task Force, we have committed this semester to capping studios to 10 people and capping seminars and limited enrollment workshops at 12 to ensure a better “Zoom world” for everyone. We have also reworked the class schedule—the Academic Affairs staff, working with the faculty, deserve a lot of thanks for this huge effort—to ensure that classes better accommodate the 14 different time zones we find ourselves teaching to. Smaller classes ensure stronger conversations—we even have a seminar devoted to that topic, “Talking Architecture,” focused on the art of the interview. Having witnessed the utter collapse of conversation and communication at the hand of those who believe that simply repeating falsehoods with greater volume or greater social media spread will somehow make them true, nothing could be more urgent right now than real conversation. I’ll be continuing my weekly office hours this semester, and I look forward to those conversations as well. To facilitate even more conversation within the school, we’ll be launching a new, internal website in the coming weeks. Called GSD NOW, this website can be understood as a digital Gund Hall, and will give everyone a direct window onto so much of the activity happening across the school at any given time. It will also include virtual “trays” that encourage formal and informal collaboration. Stay tuned for more details, but for now I can say that I’m super excited by it. GSD NOW will stay with us well past the pandemic as a source for information and collaboration within the school. And speaking of collaboration and conversation, if you weren’t tuned into the launch of Prada’s Fall Winter 2021 Menswear collection on Sunday morning, I encourage you all to go to the website. The runway show was followed by an intimate online conversation between a selection of students across the world with co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons. It was a remarkable acknowledgement of the value of all students, the up and coming creative generation. The GSD was represented by Celeste Martore, Ian Erikson, and Isabel Strauss. Many thanks to Assistant Professor Sean Canty for making that happen on very short notice. And as always, we have an incredible roster of lectures, conferences, and conversations in our public events calendar this term. See what happened? Just talking about what’s going on this semester has brought my optimism back. Indeed, while we have some seemingly insurmountable challenges right now, I’m really excited by what’s going on this spring—it’s all giving 2021 a good horizon. I want to end on a very personal note, though not related to me. Determined not to let 2020 go down in history as the worst year ever, Assistant Professor Jacob Reidel and his partner Laura took it upon themselves to end 2020 on a positive note. Characteristic of his talents as a writer, Jacob tells the story perfectly—you should hear it from him directly, but I’ll just share a couple lines: “Thanks to New York City’s ‘project cupid’ it became possible to meet with a clerk over Zoom. I’ll admit that jumping into a Zoom with the City Clerk on a random workday sandwiched between our own back-to-back work Zoom meetings was a whole new level of dissonance for us, but certainly special and memorable in its own way. Once we had that precious PDF license in hand, we only had until December 22 to complete the marriage with an officiant before it expired. We snuck an officiant, a laptop, and Laura’s parents into the old unused Williamsburgh Savings Bank Hall downstairs from our apartment, loaded up Zoom, exchanged rings, said our vows, smashed a glass, and got married!” I suppose that I should note here that I don’t condone breaking into spaces, but the story does continue (again, quoting Jacob): “and yes, at one point a doorman caught us using the space, but when I explained to him what we were up to, he immediately melted and said ‘let me get the lights on for you!'” A picture, a space, and a happy couple says a thousand words. Congratulations to Jacob and Laura and cheers to everyone for a light-footed and dance-filled 2021!

Reaffirming Our Commitments: A letter from Sarah M. Whiting and the leaders of Harvard University

To the Harvard University Community,

In the United States and around the world, this year has brought immense challenges and heartache—with a pandemic causing disruption and deaths; horrifying examples of deeply rooted racism; violent conflicts between and within nations; threats to freedom; inequalities of economic opportunity and outcomes; alarming signs of climate change; growing worries about the health of democracies in the face of heightened political polarization; and more. For many people, the U.S. election has brought the trials and tragedies of this year into even sharper focus. All of us who have an opportunity to vote in a well-functioning democracy can use that opportunity to help address the problems we see in the world. As this U.S. election period draws toward its close, we write to restate our encouragement to all eligible members of the Harvard community—regardless of political affiliation or ideology—to vote next week. We write, too, to reaffirm the values that bind us together as a community. We are committed to a just Harvard and a just world where all people’s rights and dignity are respected and honored. No one should be harmed or denied an equal opportunity to thrive because of their race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or religion. Our commitment reflects the moral responsibility that everyone owes to one another and recognizes that true excellence and human flourishing are possible only by fully including people of all backgrounds and lived experiences. We are committed to free and honest inquiry in the unfettered pursuit of truth. Such inquiry, which is the fundamental basis for learning and action at Harvard and in the broader society, requires reasoned dialogue and a respect for knowledge, evidence, and expertise. We encourage everyone to develop their views with care and humility and to listen generously to those with different perspectives, so that ideas can be tested and differences can be a source of progress. We are committed to practices and institutions that enhance the common good by enabling people to act effectively together and leaders to hear and respond to public needs. The success of democracy in the United States depends on the right to vote, a free and independent press, checks and balances, the peaceful transfer of power, and the rule of law with equal justice for all. We think it vital to support and adhere scrupulously to those norms, especially in times of division and stress. The teaching, research, and outreach of Harvard—and other universities—serve the societies we belong to. We are grateful to be part of the Harvard community and to be able to work together with all of you to advance these crucial commitments. Sincerely, Lawrence S. Bacow President, Harvard University Tomiko Brown-Nagin Dean, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study George Q. Daley Dean, Harvard Medical School Emma Dench Dean, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Francis J. Doyle III Dean, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Douglas Elmendorf Dean, Harvard Kennedy School of Government Alan M. Garber Provost, Harvard University Claudine Gay Dean, Faculty of Arts and Sciences William V. Giannobile Dean, Harvard School of Dental Medicine David N. Hempton Dean, Harvard Divinity School Rakesh Khurana Dean, Harvard College Bridget Terry Long Dean, Harvard Graduate School of Education John F. Manning Dean, Harvard Law School Nitin Nohria Dean, Harvard Business School Sarah M. Whiting Dean, Graduate School of Design Michelle A. Williams Dean, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Master in Design Studies (MDes) at the GSD

Dear GSD community, I write to share with you some exciting updates to our Master in Design Studies program, a realm of the GSD that incubates some of our most innovative interdisciplinary design work. This program refresh further deepens the MDes program’s historic commitment to a pedagogy of nimble and independent design research, while also multiplying productive overlaps between the program and the school’s departments. These changes emerge from an ongoing internal review, which includes conversations with students, faculty, alumni, and design professionals, and discussions with program director K. Michael Hays, as well as Jorge Silvetti, who was among the MDes program’s originators, and John May, who directed the program prior to Hays. I’ll begin with the mechanics: The MDes program will drop its eight formal concentration areas and instead take up four flexible “Domains” of inquiry: Ecologies, Mediums, Narratives, and Publics. Across a four-semester curriculum, MDes students in each of these four Domains of study will pursue a set of shared courses, including research methods and related topical courses, before each defining an individualized “Trajectory,” or curricular path. Anticipated “Trajectories” may include, for example, the design analyses, impacts, and possibilities of topics like resilience and climate change; housing densities; responsive environments and technologies; participatory historical chronicles; and risk, recovery, and preemptive practice. In their final semester, students will combine their independent expertise in directed, collaborative and applied capstone projects. An important note to those students currently enrolled in the MDes program: nothing will change in terms of your degree requirements or expectations. More broadly, the MDes program will continue investigating the underlying processes shaping contemporary life, while encouraging a more elastic, intellectually generous, and embracing approach to design questions and investigations. In a sense, we hope with this reorientation to implicitly question the over-standardization of knowledge and method, and offer a mobile, dynamic course of study that can cut among and through different topic areas. MDes is understood as an opportunity to study design to become not just a stronger designer, but also a stronger thinker. I am excited to announce that the following faculty have been appointed to head the program’s four Domains: Toni L. Griffin will lead the Publics Domain, which will consider what constitutes the global public realm, focusing on how design facilitates urban justice, on where policy and publics intersect, and on what defines resilient communities, cities, and regions; Erika Naginski will oversee the Narratives Domain, which will offer students the opportunity to advance a broad array of visual and verbal discursive genres, furthering historical and theoretical investigations into the social, cultural, technical, and political contexts of design; Chris Reed will lead the Ecologies Domain, which will pursue advanced studies in topics related to climate resiliency, obsolete industries, territorial infrastructures, migration, and other critical issues within the broader contexts of our global social and natural environment; and Allen Sayegh will direct the Mediums Domain, which will develop and deploy computational and analogue tools and technologies across fields of interactive design, human interfaces, and artistic and responsive environments; In part, the success of the MDes program has stemmed from its currency; this exciting update expands that rich topicality, amplifying focus on topics like social equity, climate, and housing. Finally, the Real Estate and Built Environment track of the MDes program will be given a new home in the Department of Urban Planning and Design. Application to the Real Estate track is suspended for a year while we finalize that transformation. Students currently enrolled in MDes REBE will finish their degree following the current structure of the program. In sum, all of the moves described above are evolving, and many of you will have questions. I encourage you to visit the MDes program website to review frequent developments and to reach out to the four Domain Heads—Chris Reed, Allen Sayegh, Erika Naginski, and Toni L. Griffin—as well as to the MDes Program Director, K. Michael Hays, Program Administrator, Margaret Moore de Chicojay, and Program Coordinator, Liz Thorstenson. All my best, Sarah M. Whiting

Spring 2021 at the GSD

Dear GSD community,

After exhaustive scenario planning, I write to you today to share the decision that the GSD will continue with remote teaching, following the existing academic calendar, with no building access through the spring 2021 semester. GSD Staff who are able to work from home should plan to continue to do so.

We very much appreciate the students who took part in the survey that Student Forum sent out last week. The results of that survey as well as mid-semester evaluations, and the teaching task force survey all provided valuable information for informing our planning for the spring. While this is not the choice I had hoped to be sharing with you, it stems from a number of factors: the rising infection rate in Cambridge, Somerville, and the rest of the Boston area; the challenge of making the single space of the trays truly safe; and the continued closure of U.S. embassies and consulates worldwide, making it impossible for many of our international students to obtain visas.

This is disappointing news, but we are not unprepared. We have doubled-down on investing in efforts to support how we teach, learn, and organize ourselves and exist as a community online, and over the coming months we will be rolling out additional initiatives aimed at moving the school further in that direction.

More details are forthcoming, but a few to mention include efforts by the Loeb Library to expand digitization of its holdings for needs beyond the immediate needs of courses, as well as the library’s plans to initiate a book-mailing program for materials that cannot be accessed in any other way. This semester, we are also piloting a project on virtual site visits through Urban Design’s core studio and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes and Rahul Mehrotra’s current studio on Ishkashim, Afghanistan. We hope to expand on this work and make virtual site visits more widely available by the spring. We are also working with alumni to schedule socially distanced small gatherings of our students and alumni across the globe.

The school is also aiming to release two significant web projects in the coming months that will expand the ways in which faculty and students can share work and engage each other online. One is a project provisionally titled “GSD Now,” which will provide a real-time and comprehensive view on all activities happening across the school at any given time, and provide a means for students (and courses) to share work more broadly and publicly across the school’s community. The second is a new website-building toolkit for faculty and student groups that will enable rapid creation of customized websites and will accommodate a wide range of purposes, web development skills, and available budgets. Lastly, the work of the Innovation Task Force has been enormously influential on all of the projects described above, and they will continue to serve as the school’s in-house think tank, helping to guide our immersion online in ways that are smart and effective.

As we did in preparation for the fall term, we are setting a Leave of Absence (LoA) deadline of noon on November 2, to enable us to finalize our course offerings for the spring. As we noted with this fall’s LoA deadline, if the number of students going on a LoA exceeds the spots we’ll have next year when new students enter into our programs, we will have to revert to a lottery system in order to spread returns across two years. We will be calculating the numbers and will let you all know as soon as possible when we have. In the meantime, please go to this resource page on the GSD’s website for further information about LoAs. Each program will be holding a town hall conversation with their students prior to this deadline.

Students with visa questions should contact the Harvard International Office , or visit their newly updated FAQ section , which provides answers to many questions about visas, COVID-19, and online learning for international students. Harvard’s COVID-19 information page is available and regularly updated, and the GSD’s COVID-19 resource page is also regularly updated.

In closing, I want to thank our faculty, staff, and students who have worked hard to make this semester special and who are committed to making the spring a success as well.

All my best,

Sarah M. Whiting

Our Democracy in Action

“Election Day lands on Tuesday, November 3 this year. Once again, Gund Hall will serve as a polling location; we will not hold reviews or exams that day to enable students to vote and work for polling stations across the country. I encourage each member of our community who is eligible to vote in United States elections to register (if you have not already) and to encourage your peers to do the same. Visit Vote.org to verify state-by-state voter registration deadlines, request mail-in ballots, and learn about early voting options.

Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics has organized the Harvard Votes Challenge , a student-initiated, university-wide challenge to all 12 Harvard schools to increase voter registration and participation among eligible students.

This afternoon, we host Harvard University Professor Danielle Allen and MASS Design Group’s Founding Principal Michael Murphy in a conversation about the design of voting. Allen co-authored the American Academy of Arts and Science’s report , Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century.

Regardless of your political views, I urge you all to take this opportunity to begin or deepen your engagement in this election year’s conversations and process. As always, we have work to do.”

Toward a New GSD

Dear GSD community,

Four days ago, I received an ardent and thoughtful message from the GSD’s African American Student Union (AASU) and AfricaGSD, laying out 13 directions for change in response to the structural racism that has directly impacted this country’s Black population. This message coincided with communications across the faculty, also asking ourselves how we might change. I am writing you today with the beginning of a response, a response that we must all usher forward in unison. GSD students, faculty, staff, and alumni share one humanity, and the only human response to this moment is to recognize that changes need to be enacted that are real and targeted. Black Lives Matter at the GSD, and I am committed to taking the steps necessary to make sure that this becomes a lived reality for everyone at our school.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” James Baldwin wrote in 1962. This was his powerful conclusion to a call for the writers of his generation to “remake America into what we say we want it to be.”

Today, almost sixty years later, Baldwin’s call to action is ever more urgent. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many other Black Americans, have led to a powerful wave of protests and a shared call to overturn injustices that ripple through every facet of our country and that have been borne disproportionately by the African American community.

In that same piece, Baldwin writes that “…we will never remake those cities…we will never establish human communities – until we stare our ghastly failure in the face.” We as designers, architects, urban planners and designers, and landscape architects, have contributed to that ghastly failure. We have failed by contributing to policies and designs that have concretized structural racism in our cities; compromised definitions of “public” in our public spaces, places, and buildings; and technologies that have increased, even inadvertently, environmental and economic inequities across the globe. As a school, we have also failed to meaningfully increase our numbers of Black students, faculty, and staff.

On behalf of the GSD community, I apologize that we have not served our Black community members better, historically and at present. I resolve that the school will make progress, not just with words, but with actions. I propose that we work together as a community, including our faculty, students, staff, and alumni, to enact real change, beginning with the following six measures:

• Establish for all departments and programs across the school a shared agenda, to be reviewed annually, for instilling anti-racist practices in their hiring, their visitors, their communication, and their curricula, and create a permanent page on the school’s website that includes our shared values as well as resources that advocate for racial understanding.
• Create specific programming for new student orientation and training for new faculty and staff to educate all members of our community on the specific racial context of the United States, as well as of the immediate Boston area, and how to better engage in race-related discussions and actions inside and outside the classroom. These topics will also be included within the introductory core curriculum of every program.
• Establish a GSD Gift Fund in support of anti-racism. This fund, already in the process of being created, addresses a number of demands shared in the statement from the African American Student Union (AASU) and AfricaGSD to the GSD’s administration. The school is committed to supporting initiatives aimed at combating racism, and plans to initiate this fund immediately, as a part of many actions that we will take to acknowledge that design pedagogy has a cultural obligation to address injustice and discrimination. It is our hope to engage our alumni and friends with a strong call to action that addresses the immediate needs of the GSD’s Black community, and leverages this moment in time to create systemic change.
• Identify and commit to new ways of recruiting and retaining students of color writ large, with specific efforts to recruit and retain Black students, faculty, and staff, including but not limited to expanding our numbers of Black speakers and visitors to our classes; establishing close relationships to the HBCUs; strengthening our outreach to Black communities in the Boston area; expanding Design Discovery and Design Discovery Young Adult; expanding our Community Service Fellowships; and proactively cultivating a strong network of Black professionals, alumni, and students.
• Expand faculty bias training beyond search committees to include bias issues related to grading and awards. We will also introduce a graduation prize for a student who has engaged with issues of equity in a sustained way throughout their years at the GSD, and an annual prize for a faculty member who has engaged in such issues and through their work have made a demonstrable impact.
• Review these measures annually to ensure that we are indeed remaking the school into what we want it to be.

For the GSD to stop “staring our ghastly failures in the face,” we must lead by example. We must lead by design. We must lead by conscience.

Yours kindly,
Sarah

“Minneapolis Affects Us All”

Congratulations to all, especially our Class of 2020, for finishing out the academic year with the flourish of a truly memorable Commencement yesterday. While this week has been filled with mirth for so many, it has been marred by violence and injustice for others across our country, pain of various forms that directly and indirectly affects countless among us. As we celebrate our GSD community, it is equally imperative that we pause to acknowledge the events of racial violence and degradation that were permitted to take place in this week.

The death of a black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis has resurfaced a national conversation about race in America. His murder, coupled with other racially charged occurrences this week, has reminded us that race textures the American experience. As a community of shared values, the GSD strives to recognize diverse perspectives and experiences, and to create spaces for them and their stories; this is an integral part of our mission as a design school. I asked our graduates yesterday to go out and lead the conversations that unite us as global citizens. This conversation happening right now across the country is one that needs all of our voices, and needs it now.

The GSD teaches students how to shape our world, engaging not only buildings, technologies, infrastructures, landscapes, and spaces, but also what it means for us to live together in the world. The death of Mr. Floyd and the events of this week have been tragic, with implications for every corner of our community and for each of our disciplines. It is important that while we have been forced to reframe what community looks like spatially in the face of COVID-19, we never lose sight of what community should feel like. No element or facet of your design work is too small or too isolated to impact our broader world.

As designers and as citizens of the world, I urge you to recognize and acknowledge the injustices that remain so persistent and so ingrained across our globe, and I ask you always to take the time to consider how the work we do as designers impacts how we live together.

In this moment, and as we move forward, I ask that you recognize and talk with one another about the different experiences, the different forms of pain and of understanding, that people may feel given what we’re seeing in the news and on social media. I recognize that the recent events may cause additional emotional distress and anxiety, and I urge you to be in touch with either Harvard Counseling and Mental Health Services or the Harvard Employee Assistance Program if you need assistance.

I so look forward to us all uniting again and continuing our work: educating and inspiring leaders who will create a more resilient, more beautiful, and more just world.

With respect and reflection,
Sarah

 

*This posting has been modified slightly from the original in response to criticism from a student who questioned the lack of reference to Mr. Floyd as black or as African American. I appreciate and acknowledge that criticism.

Remembering Henry N. Cobb (1926–2020): A Letter from Dean Sarah M. Whiting

Dear GSD community: I write to share the sad news that we have lost Harry Cobb (Henry N. Cobb), who passed away Monday, just a month shy of his 94th birthday. Harry’s long relation to the GSD extends back to 1947, when he began his MArch studies here. His greatest impact on the school was undoubtedly his tenure as chair of the Department of Architecture from 1980 to 1985. In his inaugural lecture as chair, he noted that he brought “to the school a mind burdened with a few biases and a great many questions, but no preconceived answers.” That quote captures him perfectly: actively engaged until his last days, Harry always had opinions, but his insatiable curiosity about architecture, pedagogy, the city, and design more broadly, was never curtailed by preconceptions. A great tribute to Harry would be for all of us to carry this attitude forward. The last surviving namesake partner at Pei, Cobb, Freed & Partners, Harry’s designs were sharp, his output was towering—quite literally—and, above all, his soul was generous. His buildings punctuate cityscapes and our shared canon alike, offering us the enduring legacies of Montreal’s Place Ville Marie (1962), Portland’s Museum of Art (1983), and of course the John Hancock Tower (1971) here in his birthplace of Boston. Harry would go on to contribute other remarkable projects to his hometown, among them the John Joseph Moakley Courthouse & Harborpark (1998) and Harvard’s own Center for Government and International Studies (2005), which many of you can likely see by looking out from the trays. As steadfast as ever, Harry remained active to the end, with recent works like Boston’s commanding One Dalton (2019) and 30 Dalton (2016), New York’s 7 Bryant Park (2019), and Charleston’s International African American Museum (in progress). In 2017, he received the Harvard Medal, the highest honor presented to a member of the Harvard Community and recognition of Harry’s commitment to the university–as an alumnus, teacher, administrator, and architect–over five decades. As the Architect’s Newspaper put it, Harry “seemed to have never considered retirement as an option.” Among other characteristics, what sets Harry apart from other legends of architecture is his commitment to the discipline as a holistic art. In 2018, Harry joined Peter Eisenman and Rafael Moneo in Piper for an event entitled “How Will Architecture be Conceived?” In his remarks, Harry delicately unpacked each word of that proposition—does “architecture” mean discipline? practice? built form? Does “conceived” imply imagined? or directed? or brought into being? As Harry thoroughly dissected the question, he demonstrated his belief that, in his words, “the discipline and practice of architecture are inseparably comingled.” His dedication to a synthesis of pedagogy and practice was at the heart of his GSD teaching and leadership. We are all so very lucky that only a couple of years ago, at the age of 91, Harry published Henry N. Cobb: Words & Works 1948-2018, a 548-page tour de force capturing the multifarious manifestations of his extraordinary career—architectural, pedagogical, critical, and otherwise. This thick but small tome has been at the top of my list of recommendations since it first came out. Every GSD student should read it. It captures his talent, his intelligence, and his curiosity, but above all, it gives some suggestion of the deep and generous humanity that so marked Harry Cobb. Many of the tributes that have poured in over the past day have noted Harry’s dedication to teaching, to supporting a new generation of designers. Those of us who had the luck to know him over these many years he had with the GSD can hear the methodical but precise way that he articulated his always relevant observations, occasionally punctuating them with a little chuckle, revealing his delight at talking about architecture, at learning from all of us, particularly the students. As a community, the GSD stands in admiration of and gratitude for Harry’s manifold contributions and inspirations, and for his thoughtful, generous humanity. He is greatly missed. Sadly, Sarah

A Welcome From Dean Sarah M. Whiting

 

Dear Alumni of the GSD,

When I began my position as dean of the GSD this July, I shared with you how thrilled I was to be joining the School in this role. That sense of adventure, coupled with responsibility, has only grown with time. Thank you for your support and engagement in my first months in this role.

When I met with students at the start of the academic year, I told them that one of the qualities that distinguishes the GSD is our remarkable density of heterogeneity. The many differences among us are one of our greatest assets, as we can learn so much from one another, but it is also important to remember that we are all so very different. As I am sure you have learned through your own varied experiences, it is crucial to take time to ask questions and listen to the views of friends, classmates, and colleagues.

I count you, our alumni, as an important piece of our collegial community. No matter your field or your GSD experience, you provide a valuable perspective into our School’s past and future. You have the unique opportunity—as someone who walked the same path as our students—to contribute to our collective conversation. We welcome your thoughts and presence here on campus and at our community events. The impact you can have on our students—whether it is a friendly networking conversation, attendance at a GSD event, or studio review—is enormous. I appreciate you devoting your time, energy, and resources to helping our designers of the future as they navigate their studies and careers.

Pursuing a graduate degree in the design disciplines can sometimes be a challenging endeavor. To empower students to thrive and contribute to the future of our disciplines, I believe in fostering an environment of empathy, respect, humor, and constructive criticism.

This last point—constructive criticism—is particularly important to me: it is so extraordinary that we enable design students to join experts like yourselves in a conversation about design. It is our obligation to teach students how to join this conversation confidently and productively. We learn as much from each other as we do from the work we produce, especially when we engage in a dialogue that puts connection and trust at the forefront. All of us are responsible for cultivating such a culture of empathy.

What I have learned in my first weeks and months as dean is that this position involves a good deal of active listening and learning; please know that I am here to listen to you. I look forward to building relationships and connecting with you in the years to come.

Over the coming year, I will be traveling to New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Houston, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, and I hope to meet and hear from alumni in the course of my travels.

Kind Regards,

Sarah M. Whiting

Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture

Harvard University Graduate School of Design