Black in Design 2023 Creates a “Home Away From Home” at the GSD

Where is home for you? It’s an ice-breaker question we all get asked at some point, especially at the start of a new academic year. For many it’s a city, a street, a building, or a community. For attendees at this year’s Black in Design conference (BiD), held at the Graduate School of Design from September 22nd through the 24th, answers ranged from Chicago to Nigeria. But home could also be much closer and subtler; for many attendees, home could be evoked by the familiar bottles of Nivea shea lotion the conference organizers added to the GSD’s main floor restrooms.

The African diaspora remains critically underrepresented in traditional design fields such as architecture, landscape design, and urban planning. Since its inaugural session in 2015, the Black in Design conference has worked to create a space where Black designers from all fields, beyond credentialed architects—from visual artists to DJs to family archivists—feel welcome and celebrated.

“I think we all came into the planning process knowing that it was important to reflect on the precedents that we use in our work, and a lot of that was not design-based,” said Kai Walcott (MLA I ’24), one of the conference co-chairs. She noted that despite having professional training in design, a lot of what she draws on to inform her own work and thesis research comes from Black visual and performing arts from outside the academy. Those disciplines, Walcott said, “reflected more of the ideas that I want to… grapple with to understand how Black people use space and make space.” These sources and ways of creating and preserving knowledge are often missing from traditional design curricula, the conference organizers noted, and they sought to develop conference themes that would make practitioners from a wide range of formal and informal disciplines feel comfortable alongside each other.

This year’s theme, the Black Home, came out of listening sessions held between the organizing committee members (current GSD students Dora Mugerwa [MLA I ’24]; and Walcott; and recent alumni Tobi Fagbule [MDes ’23] and Michael Johnson, [MUP ’23]); representatives of Africa GSD; the GSD African American Student Union; and Black GSD students generally, who were asked what topics they wanted to see represented. These sessions revealed a number of themes that ultimately coalesced around the idea of home not just as a building to be designed, but as a synthesis of objects, scents, colors, or feelings. Taken together, these are elements that can make an experience of home simultaneously unique and a source of commonality across a diaspora.

When it came time to choose keynote and panel speakers, Mugerwa said it was important that there was a mix of invitees from both inside and outside the boundaries of what is traditionally considered “design” in the professional field. “We wanted to focus on folks whose work was new to us,” she said, “and show how artists and designers can take inspiration from people outside of the discipline. But we tried to have a balance of design practitioners and non-practitioners as well that could have cross-disciplinary conversations.”

In addition to coming from diverse professional and curatorial backgrounds, the conference organizers invited speakers who also had different visions of what home meant to them. In the keynote panel, “Legacy: Defining the Black Home (Past, Present, Future),” the first question asked by moderator Toni L. Griffin, a Professor in Practice at the GSD and Founder of urbanAC, was: Can home be designed? Panelist Bryan Mason, Co-Founder and Creative Director of AphroChic , responded that like everything in our daily lives, a home and the objects within it can be designed, and that Black people have been doing so for centuries. In contrast, panelist Germain Barnes (the Principal of Studio Barnes , and Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Architecture Graduate Program at the University of Miami School of Architecture) was more skeptical, noting that designers could facilitate other people’s ability to create home, but that for him home ultimately came down to people, feelings, and sensory experiences that cannot be explicitly designed. Renata Cherlise, Founder of the Black Archives multimedia platform and author of Black Archives: A Photographic Celebration of Black Life (2023), drew from memories and how they imbue art, objects, and spaces. “I know Great Grandma’s house is not there but I still go back in my dreams,” she said, noting that her recent book celebrates memories and sensory experiences of place through photographs in Black family archives.

In addition to panels, Black in Design conferences feature  hands-on workshops hosted throughout the weekend. This year’s workshops included “Black Feminist Imagination and the Black Home,” led by BlackSpace Urbanist Collective , and “Archiving the Black Home,” led by Wayside studio Founder, public artist, and educator Curry J. Hackett. The sessions gave conference participants a way to not only form cross-disciplinary connections with each other, but to approach their own design practice through potentially new methods such as incorporating artificial intelligence or curating multimedia archival exhibitions.

In searching for workshop leaders, Walcott said, “We wanted people who were doing this work but may not (yet) have the platform of Harvard, to try and connect them,” with the GSD community and a broader design audience.

Between workshops, panels, and food catered by the local restaurant Jamaica Mi Hungry , the conference organizers wanted to ensure the GSD felt like home as well, hence the bottles of lotion in the bathrooms—an immediate hit with attendees. Nina Cooke John, a keynote panelist and Founding Principal of Studio Cooke John Architecture and Design , noted that while she has created architectures of home, recently through Obsidian House , home is also found in gestures of care just like that.

While BiD is a temporary experience, one piece of it remains in Gund Hall in the form of an exhibition called Stories That Take Me Home, on view until October 18th. Curated by the conference co-chairs and designed by Àrà Lab, a project of Fagbule and Sumayyah Súnmàdé Raji (MArch ’23), the exhibition seeks to reclaim images and theorizations of the Black Home in Africa from negative associations with conflict or destitution, or “as mere artifacts, objects for study, or curiosities to be sampled,” according to the curators’ statement. Instead, the exhibit demonstrates “their profound multidimensionality… (reflecting) culture, identity, and traditions and generate(s) spaces of the home that transcend the physical realm.”

Visually, the exhibition is anchored by an outline drawing of a home with an arch and porch yard. “That was something that was very close to our hearts,” Fagbule said. She grew up in Nigeria and said her context for home is always changing, but that there are elements of home that start to appear in different ways throughout her daily life wherever she happens to be living. She wanted viewers to share in that and recall their own stories of home, or treasured objects, over time.

One of the things that made Black in Design successful, Mugerwa added, is the feeling of commonality it fostered. While people may think their home or neighborhood is unique, they could come to this exhibition, and the various conference events, and recognize a sofa, a cabinet in the front room that they were never allowed to touch as a child, a glass figurine, a familiar brand of lotion, and so on. “So we wanted to reinforce that multiplicity, that we are not a monolith,” she said, “but it was nice to see those moments where there was overlap, where we could all identify with something similar.”

The Forest for the Trees (and the Birds, and the People, and the Planet)

As we continue to face the twin crises of rapidly accelerating climate change and biodiversity loss, city leaders and city residents are especially feeling the heat. The increasingly desperate need to radically cool cities is becoming widespread news , and the appointment of chief heat officers in cities as widespread as Athens , Miami, and Freeport, Sierra Leone , is a testament to the urgency of the issue. Many factors contribute to both the climatic challenges and the loss of biodiversity in cities (including, simply, the construction of buildings and streets), but one solution stands out: trees.

Trees are known for their inherent ability to provide shade, and therefore to cool the environment. In many cities generally, and especially in urban neighborhoods with predominantly Black, Brown, multi-ethnic, and socially vulnerable communities, the pervasive lack of a healthy tree canopy contributes to soaring temperatures and negative public health outcomes. This is just another way in which lower income, racially and ethnically diverse communities (often referred to as “environmental justice communities”) are impacted more significantly by the multiple effects of climate change.

The absence of trees also contributes to an increasing loss of ecosystem biodiversity and wildlife habitat, which in turn has detrimental effects on the environment as a whole (both in cities and beyond). And, with few or no trees in urban spaces, we reduce the opportunity to sequester carbon, to clean the air and the soil, to mitigate stormwater flooding, and to sustain healthy habitats for birds and other creatures–all critical functions of trees in healthy ecosystems–thereby exacerbating both the effects of climate change and the impacts of social and racial inequities.

Boston and Cambridge, along with many cities around the world, have recently developed their own urban forestry master plans to reverse these negative effects. They are creating new urban forestry divisions and leadership that will oversee implementation–including both care of existing trees and cultivation of an expanded tree canopy specifically adapted to tough urban environments. In many other places, like Los Angeles, city governments are partnering with educational institutions, non-profit organizations, and professionals to develop metrics-based, neighborhood-specific plans for the most impacted communities, from both environmental and social standpoints. In Dallas–Fort Worth, the non-profit group Texas Tree Foundation has been raising philanthropic dollars to fund and oversee the installation of tree plantings, advise on urban forestry plans in various cities in the region, and set up new training opportunities in the green labor force for those coming out of prison and looking to gain new skills and move on with their lives. Additionally, new “microforestry” efforts (also known as Miyawaki Forests) that dramatically increase species biodiversity in very small urban footprints are finally making their way from around the world into American cities and even into news coverage by the New York Times .

Most recently, as of the last week in September, Cambridge has its first urban forestry demonstration project at Triangle Park, in the Kendall Square neighborhood. The project is one of three small urban parks–two on “leftover” or underutilized parcels of land–that is meant to dramatically increase the amount and type of open space available to residents and workers in this part of the City. (My firm, Stoss Landscape Urbanism, was commissioned in 2016 to design both Triangle Park and the nearby Binney Street Park, which will open in 2024 as a park for dogs and people, while another Cambridge firm, MVVA, was commissioned to design the third park, Toomey Park, as a community gathering space and play area). Triangle Park in particular, was designated to embody the principles of the City’s urban forestry plan–in part as a test, in part as a demonstration–of this new commitment to trees, biodiversity, and innovative maintenance techniques tailored to this new mission.

“The design of this project was guided by the City’s Urban Forest Master Plan and includes significant tree plantings and canopy growth in the Kendall Square area,” said Public Works Commissioner Kathy Watkins. “It also allowed us to try some new approaches for how we think about open spaces and planting trees in the City. As the trees and plantings grow in over time, this unique park will provide an incredible shaded space in the heart of Kendall Square for residents and visitors to enjoy.”

The site itself is small (three-quarters of an acre) but complex. At various times in his history, it was a tidal mud flat at the mouth of the Charles River, a fueling station, a parking lot for trucks, a dumping ground for urban debris, and an empty traffic island. It continues to be surrounded on all three sides by vehicular traffic–to the east and north by busy and noisy four-lane arterials, and to the west by a smaller connector street with an active retail/restaurant frontage. All this presented a series of challenges for transforming a compacted site with urban fill and contaminated waste to a healthy and thriving ecosystem that could support the growth of trees, shrubs, and groundcovers, and become the new center of the nearby community. These are challenges that were ultimately overcome by an extensive and collaborative team comprised of landscape architects, ecologists, arborists, maintenance specialists, environmental engineers, and others that are a combination of both city staff and hired consultants.

The design responds to these conditions and seeks to create a new space for trees and people to intermingle in a dense urban neighborhood. A berm along the eastern edge of the park marks the eastern edge of the site and screens the traffic and noise from Edwin Land Boulevard, allowing for elevational differences that enhance both social and environmental opportunities. On the back and top, it is planted with a variety of native upland trees and plant species (shagbark hickory, black oak, hackberry) in dense thickets that are designed to grow rapidly and to allow for natural competition and succession–an innovation in urban parks like this, one that requires an intense level of ongoing care and maintenance for which the City has committed resources and expertise. The inner side of the berm is inscribed with terraced lawns and linear seating walls, creating a welcoming and active social edge at the heart of the space–perfect for socializing, sunning, or reading. On the north, a lawn slope and stage are backed by woodland varieties and border forest floor (including American hornbeam, American smoketree, arborvitae, Eastern hayscented fern); these, too, screen out some of the noise and visuals of the nearby traffic but also create distance from the street to allow for more casual sunning, play, and performance activities. The very south end of the site–where the triangle comes to a very sharp and dramatic point, the earth is excavated to collect the site’s stormwater (a kind of green infrastructure stormwater “sponge”) and is overplanted as a lowland forest of Dawn Redwoods and a variety of birch species with an understory of ferns and witch-hazel. This feature even twenty years ago would have been non-existent, as conventional engineering techniques would have relied on pipes and infrastructure to flush the water away; here, instead, we deliberately retain the water on site into order to create ecological diversity and an environmentally healthy space. Finally, the central plaza–designed with a dramatic but abstracted parquet floor motif and rendered in white and black gravel–is populated with a combination of multi-stem River Birch and Kentucky Coffeetrees, which will provide a unique and richly shaded and flexible setting for people on scattered cafe table and chairs.

In all, the park includes almost 400 new tree plantings and introduces 15 new tree species to the collection of eight trees and four species already on site. This is quite remarkable on a site that measures just over three-quarters of an acre with a variety of spaces reserved for people and activities!

In a burgeoning neighborhood with very low levels of open space and urban canopy, this small city forest is impactful–and the social and environmental benefits will continue to grow and intensify over time, just as the trees themselves grow and take on wonderful shapes and characters. Equally important as these direct effects, the project is intended to serve as a test case and model for how the City of Cambridge implements its Urban Forestry Plan –and how cities across the country and around the world can benefit from what we learn moving forward. More tests and demonstrations like this are needed–so that we can collectively see how these projects mitigate and reverse the effects of climate change and biodiversity loss we are seeing now–and how cities can re-tool their own staffs and maintenance practices in order to better cultivate and care for these leading-edge, research-in-practice projects.

Remembering Claude Cormier (1960–2023)

I first met Claude Cormier (MDes ’94) when he approached me about being a teaching assistant position in my core studio course, in 1993. What impressed me most in our first meeting: his excitable voice, with an upward-sounding pitch, along with his genial and upbeat manner, which made me feel like I already knew this man. A quick wit, a quizzical intensity. I liked this about him. This was the convivial and always curious guy with whom I enjoyed a warm friendship over the past 30 years.

Claude passed away on September 15 this year, at age 63, after a four-year fight with a rare and uncurable form of cancer. His was a life too short, though it was filled with great drive and remarkable success. Claude was a rare landscape architect whose take on common design problems was nothing if not uncommon.

I will admit that fun has perhaps only rarely been a design motivation for me, but it was almost always this way for Claude. Once he established his firm in Montreal, he immediately made his mark with projects that came to him in the form of the typical kinds of urban problems we face everywhere—but his design solutions always defied expectations, and he was persuasive with concepts that were at times far-reaching though always precise in execution. Painted or wrapped trees, blue sticks, balls and cones, pink lights, umbrellas, fake stones—often ordinary things made dramatically unordinary. His admiration for and friendship with Martha Schwartz surely influenced this way of working, but Claude made it his own. He rather famously used to say he imagined himself as the love child of Martha Schwartz and Frederick Law Olmsted—another of his great influences, and a very different one at that.

Because of the sustained popular appeal of Claude’s work, he accumulated attention, enthusiasm, and recognition from far beyond the design community—including being appointed a knight of the Ordre National du Québec. But while he enjoyed peer recognition much like the rest of us, these things had little effect on Claude’s persona or his ego. What animated him the most was talking about the work, along with the jubilant embrace of his work by those who use the public realm spaces he and his partners and staff designed. Those of us who knew him will remember his love of fashion and design, his uncanny passion for art—high, low, fake, or real—and his unbending joyfulness in life. Amen. Yet his far larger legacy will remain those life experiences by the citizens who inhabit his comic, playful, and highly intelligent parks and squares every day.

A comprehensive account of Cormier’s life and career was written by Beth Kapusta and can be found at The Cultural Landscape Foundation’s website .

The Design Thinking Behind the GSD’s New Identity

A Language and a Tool

A visual identity is both a language and a tool. The Harvard Graduate School of Design needed an updated language of forms to communicate the School’s mission and values, as well as a tool to facilitate its pedagogical activities and day-to-day operations with a common set of visual standards.

Dean Sarah M. Whiting, in welcoming the GSD community back last year as Covid-19 pandemic restrictions eased, described the School as a place that synthesizes different and sometimes competing frameworks of knowledge. She challenged GSD students, faculty, staff, and affiliates to drive a public dialogue, bringing the knowledge produced at the School to the world.

Conceived this way, the GSD is a dynamic center for learning and discourse. An identity that can help galvanize the breadth of the GSD community and convey the diversity of its ideas must be both adaptable and resilient. It needs to be functional, able to work with everything from large-scale physical signage to social media posts. In every context, the identity has to embody the critical design thinking at the heart of the School.

The University

The GSD is rooted in the broader Harvard University community. Early versions of the School’s identity took the Harvard shield as a point of departure. Right at the turn of the 21st century, the GSD departed from this tradition—and set itself apart from other Harvard schools—by adopting the “Flying H”, designed by Nigel Smith.

The abstracted Harvard “H” projects the dynamic outlook of an educational institution devoted to fostering leaders in design, research, and scholarship.

The School

The heart of the GSD is our main building, Gund Hall. This is where the energy associated with learning, teaching, and study is most palpable. In turn, the Trays are at the heart of Gund. This iconic space facilitates the work that happens here.

John Andrews, the architect of Gund Hall, affirmed this importance through his design—the Trays were not part of his brief for the building’s design and are solely his invention. The Trays serve as the backbone of the building. They also define its distinctive form. The physical structure of the building is also the symbolic foundation of the School. In a sense, Gund Hall is a language and a tool: a visual identity expressed in the built environment.

The Structural H

We took inspiration from Gund to develop the new GSD logo. The letter “H” immediately connects the GSD with Harvard. If we strip away the surface of the glyph, we reveal the underlying structure of the letter’s form and composition: its architecture. The letterform foregrounds the features of its own design and construction, just as Gund Hall does. The visual form, derived from self-reflexive inquiry, both embodies and represents the GSD’s pedagogical mission.

A Multiplicity of H’s

An institutional identity grows and changes over time. The GSD encompasses the multifaceted work that happens at Gund Hall. But the institution is bigger than a building. It is the network of people who put in the work—organizing, teaching, studying, building, communicating, and ultimately fashioning the School in their own unique ways. To be true to the GSD, the structure of the logo needs to accommodate a myriad of creative perspectives. A template of the “H” structure is available to students, faculty, and staff who are empowered to create their own versions of the wordmark.

 

Typeface

GSD Gothic is both an aesthetic companion to our new logo and a unique means of addressing a wide audience. It needs to be legible in different environments, from signage that feels at home in Gund Hall to dense documents circulating in print or online. It is the workhorse of the identity.

Variable Font for the Digital World

The typeface will exist in two different formats. A traditional format has different weights and styles—that is, regular, italic, bold. GSD Gothic will also exist in a variable format, an approach to typography suited to the digital world.

A variable format does not have discrete styles; it can exist in any variable between a set of parameters. This version of the typeface is delivered not in files but in code. It can live on our website and within other digital assets, and it can be programmed to react to dynamic conditions of display.

A System

The logo and wordmark function as separate elements, each addressing different needs.

But sometimes they come together. The different elements of this system will be displayed throughout the GSD, online, and in the documents that GSD community members use to correspond with the world.

The Harvard Graduate School of Design embarked on its new visual identity in 2022. It was officially adopted in fall of 2022, and since then has been implemented in phases. The GSD’s art director, Chad Kloepfer, designed the new identity.

Beyond Zoning: A New Approach for Today’s Cities

The early 20th-century zoning paradigm has outlasted its usefulness for 21st-century cities. Harvard GSD’s Matthew Kiefer argues for a more flexible—and democratic—approach to urban development.

Zoning arose more than a century ago after decades of urban expansion. Zoning rules governed land use—separating heavy industry from housing—and subjected buildings to uniform dimensional standards to help balance competing urban needs. Today, cities in general, and Boston in particular, are very different places: hubs for knowledge and culture instead of manufacturing. Zoning laws once meant to ensure orderly growth for industry while encouraging homeownership are coming into conflict with the need for housing, green development, and other urban imperatives.

Matthew Kiefer, a Lecturer in Real Estate at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), says that Boston is well-positioned to pioneer a more dynamic approach to regulating growth, replacing fixed zoning rules with nuanced development impact review for apartment buildings, labs, hotels, and hospitals. The impact review process, he argues, makes large developments subject to rigorous public oversight rather than the whims of nearby property owners. Kiefer lays out his argument in a chapter of the new book Idea City: How to Make Boston More Equitable, Livable, and Resilient (2023), edited by David Gamble. Kiefer spoke with the GSD about Boston’s urban aspirations, the history of zoning, and the future of socially engaged real estate development.

GSD: Why is reform to the zoning paradigm necessary now?

Matthew Kiefer: After a long late-20th-century decline, cities are reinventing themselves for very different purposes—knowledge, innovation, culture, and entertainment. People expect very different things from cities today. Some, like Boston, are lucky to be growing. But archaic zoning rules impede that growth and prevent its benefits from being shared more broadly.

How would you characterize Boston’s current approach to zoning, and why do you think it’s an obstacle to building an equitable city?

Virtually every US city has comprehensive zoning, with Houston as the famous exception. Boston has been a zoning innovator, but Boston’s innovations have merely adjusted the 100-year-old zoning framework. They’re patches on an overall system that no longer fulfills its intended purposes, if it ever did. Boston has not been able to overcome zoning’s fundamental flaws: inflexible rules that impede urban adaptation and empower self-interested abutters in a way that’s anti-democratic.

Why do you think the basic zoning paradigm doesn’t accomplish its intended purposes?

The basic idea of zoning comes from an effort at the US Commerce Department, just after World War I, to try to harmonize housing—and especially homeownership—with industry. Starting really after the Civil War, cities began exploding as places of manufacturing, abetted by railroads, port facilities, and mechanization. Before the automobile, workers lived near where they worked, which created tremendous land use friction. It’s not good to live next to a slaughterhouse or a foundry.

Those conflicts led the US government to propose what we now call comprehensive zoning. They published a standard state zoning enabling act that many states followed. The zoning paradigm had two components. First: let’s carve a city up into use districts to make sure industrial enterprises don’t get mixed together with single-family houses, and establish uniform dimensional requirements for buildings that serve those uses—height, amount of floor area, setbacks, etc. Second, let’s require any landowner who wants to do something that doesn’t conform to those rules to convince a citizen body, called a board of appeals, to grant a waiver based on proving that the property in question is uniquely disadvantaged by the rules.

That was the basic zoning structure that originated in the 1920s: uniform rules by district and a very high bar to justify any departures. We now have plenty of experience showing that that paradigm does not work in re-urbanizing cities like Boston that grew up before zoning. Zoning has often been used as an instrument of exclusion—a way to restrict newcomers, especially if they’re not like you. Besides that, it’s impossible to devise an after-the-fact set of rules that works in cities that have already been settled for centuries. You might be able to make rules that stick for a new suburb in a corn field, but how do you do that in a quirky, textured city like Boston? Add to that the city needs to adapt—to become more livable, equitable, and resilient. So there’s just no workable set of rules to govern how things get built that doesn’t require many exceptions from those rules.

Why can’t zoning boards simply issue the needed exceptions?

In zoning-speak, they’re called variances. The problem is that, even if you can convince the Board of Appeal to grant the ones you need, any nearby property owner who disagrees with the decision of the board can challenge it in court, and likely win. I argue that the process is anti-democratic. Any significant project in Boston goes through a very public process of vetting its potential impacts on its neighbors. You change your project design in response to what you heard, adopt mitigation measures to lessen impacts, and agree to provide public benefits for the impacts you can’t eliminate before you ask for your variances. By that point, the public has spoken in a very democratic way.

It only takes one abutter, who may be totally self-interested—you’re going to block her view, you’re going to create more traffic on his street—to challenge that public body’s grant of zoning waivers. So, in effect, one self-interested voice cancels the result of a democratic process.

Are there particular types of projects that run up against zoning challenges?

All privately built projects are subject to zoning. Most large projects in Boston need zoning variances. The projects most likely to attract challenges are those that are different in character or larger in scale than what’s around them—especially if surrounding uses are residences.

But not always. In my book chapter, I give an example of a non-profit developer proposing supportive housing for people experiencing chronic homelessness. The developer went through a lengthy process to receive a variance, and a landowner whose property across the street was used as a microbrewery sued to challenge it. He didn’t think the project—designed to serve a population with negligible rates of car ownership—had enough parking. That’s how the current zoning paradigm works: a single business owner could challenge this exemplary project because he thought it would take away street parking from brewery customers.

What are the consequences of these legal challenges for developers working on a project?

A legal challenge to zoning relief can take years to resolve. And often the project sponsor can’t beat the challenge. In order to win, the sponsor has to show unique characteristics of the property that result in the zoning rules not working. That’s hard to do in most cases—the zoning rules don’t work because they just don’t work, not because the property is different.

What’s the alternative? How can you create a more livable city while also addressing the real concerns of neighbors?

Development impact review can take the place of zoning relief. Impact review didn’t exist in 1920, when the current zoning paradigm was framed. It started at the federal level with the National Environmental Policy Act, in 1969. That law was translated into state-level environmental review laws, and then many cities like Boston developed their own impact review ordinances. They’re all based on the same concept: before a public body takes action on a project—grants approval or funding—the project sponsor has to study its potential impacts in a public forum following an iterative process.

The sponsor submits a series of increasingly detailed project reports. At each stage, public agencies, advocacy groups or any member of the public can comment. With help from specialized consultants in different subject areas, the sponsor publishes detailed studies in response to those comments. The studies sometimes demonstrate that the suggested impacts won’t occur, or if they are likely to occur, the studies quantify them and the sponsor proposes measures to mitigate them. Some impacts are unavoidable; 500 housing units next to a transit station will increase demand for transit, and may create shadows on a nearby park at some times of day. So the sponsor proposes public benefits to compensate for the burdens that can’t be eliminated. And eventually you approach consensus that your project merits approval.

As a sponsor, once you get to the end of that process, you’ve put your project out there in public forums. You’ve responded to the concerns you’ve heard in those forums with technical studies and project changes. You’ve entered into a set of binding agreements on mitigation measures and public benefits. The process isn’t perfect—not everyone gets what they want– but it’s very rigorous. It often takes, literally, years. Once you’ve completed it, there’s no reason you should need zoning waivers.  If you’ve accounted for your project’s impacts in a very nuanced, project-specific way, what purpose does it serve to judge your project against uniform zoning rules designed to avoid impacts?

So that’s my solution in a nutshell: projects that go through impact review should be deemed to comply with zoning, regardless of whether they conform to the rules. The uniform zoning rules would still apply to homeowners, small business, people doing small, simple things that don’t warrant impact review, but even they could opt in. And, by the way, the rules should be more permissive, especially of multi-family housing, given Boston’s housing shortage.

What changes would need to happen and at what level to implement this kind of reform?

Boston’s zoning enabling statute gives it latitude to do this without going back to the legislature. Development impact review already exists in the Boston zoning code. If the Boston Planning and Development Agency and Zoning Commission were convinced this was a good idea, they could adopt a zoning amendment to put it in place.

What role will urban planners and real estate professionals play in the future growth of cities?

Cities are evolving more rapidly all the time in response to technological advances, social change, environmental imperatives and, lately, a pandemic. So it’s much more important for urban environments to be designed thoughtfully, and for land use to be regulated nimbly. Cities need to accommodate more versatility and adaptability—even some improvisation. The zoning paradigm of having a uniform set of rules that are hard to change and difficult to get relief from is increasingly obsolete given the way cities work today.

In this dynamic environment, real estate development is increasingly recognized as a social endeavor. Most of what gets built in cities is built by private actors—for profit and non-profit developers, hospitals, and universities like Harvard. The things they build affect many people and will hopefully be versatile enough to last a long time. They need to both meet the needs of their sponsors and account for their impacts on others. Development impact review is a key tool for achieving that. So to be successful, real estate professionals have to be social entrepreneurs; that’s why social impact is embedded in the GSD’s new Master in Real Estate Program. Professionals have to understand how to create places that accommodate changing aspirations for how people want to live and work—to be responsive and responsible city-makers.

 

 

 

Jingru (Cyan) Cheng Wins Harvard GSD’s 2023 Wheelwright Prize

Fellowship to support Cheng’s research proposal, an examination of the critical role of sand in human communities and the built environment.

Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) is pleased to name Jingru (Cyan) Cheng the winner of the 2023 Wheelwright Prize , a $100,000 grant to support investigative approaches to contemporary architecture, with an emphasis on globally minded research. Her project, Tracing Sand: Phantom Territories, Bodies Adrift, focuses on the economic, cultural, and ecological impacts of sand mining and land reclamation. From airports to beaches and river basins to hydroelectric dams, sand is a humble material that has a fundamental role in the built environment and human communities. Supporting modern cities and modern life, sand is a key component of concrete, glass, asphalt roads, and artificial land. However, by dredging underwater systems and channels, sand mining erodes riverbanks and disrupts ecosystems. Colossal amounts of sand are mined and moved to shape one habitat while destroying another.

The Wheelwright Prize will fund two years of Cheng’s research and travel, including visits to airports in Singapore, beaches in Florida, rivers in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, and rural immigrant communities in China. Investigating how sand is mined and used in these diverse sites, Cheng will conduct interviews with key stakeholders and research design decisions, procurement routes, contractual relations, financing, regulations, and policies. She also plans to develop educational and public programs, and a multi-media archive that will be open access and made available for the affected communities, activist groups, and associated researchers.

“The proposal of Tracing Sand is the convergence of my different lines of work so far, the teachings that made me an architect, and the life experiences that made me. I see architectural materiality as an active, tangible force driving and shaping long chains of consequences and dependencies. It draws surprising connections between sites, communities, and ecologies. Winning the Wheelwright Prize affirms that the questions I’m after are part of the larger quest of architecture today, at a time of intensified social injustice and ecological crisis,” Cheng says. “As a travel-based design research award, the Wheelwright cannot be more fitting for this rather audacious proposition: to follow sand is to trace architectural materiality through supply chains and ecosystems. It is to learn through embodied experiences the entangled flows of people, life forms, matter, and the built environment across scales. Understanding how interconnected and interdependent we all are is fundamental today. I believe architecture provides a material wayfinding through this almost incomprehensible entanglement—and offers possibilities to transform it.”

 “In his book The World in a Grain (2018), American-Canadian journalist Vince Beiser underscores why sand affects each and every one of us: ‘It is to cities what flour is to bread, what cells are to our bodies: the invisible but fundamental ingredient that makes up the bulk of the built environment in which most of us live.’ Cyan Cheng’s Wheelwright proposal takes Beiser’s claim one step further: sand underpins our built environment, but also our global economy,” says Sarah M. Whiting, Harvard GSD’s Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture. “Tracing together material evidence, technological expertise, labor practices, and corporate reach, Cheng’s study has breadth that makes it relevant to every community across the globe, and specificity that promises to reveal hitherto unknown repercussions of this fragile resource.”

Jurors for the 2023 prize include: Noura Al Sayeh, Head of Architectural Affairs for the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities; Mira Henry, design faculty at Southern California Institute for Architecture; Mark Lee, Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard GSD; Jacob Reidel, Assistant Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard GSD; Enrique Walker, Design Critic in Architecture at Harvard GSD; and Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at Harvard GSD.

“Tracing Sand examines an increasingly ubiquitous material that is at the base of the production of land and architecture by following its sourcing and consumption, unveiling the increasing entanglement of matter and site, as well as the livelihoods affected by its extraction,” observes Noura Al Sayeh, Head of Architectural Affairs for the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities. “By dissecting the complexity of material supply chains and the complicity of architecture in the destruction of natural environments, Cyan’s research bridges opposing sites and actors, from extraction to consumption, local communities to stakeholders. Through a multi-media approach and an in-depth analysis of the guts of hypermodernity, the proposal aims towards a comprehensive shift in the value system of architecture.”

The Wheelwright Prize supports innovative design research, crossing both cultural and architectural boundaries. Winning research proposal topics in recent years have included the potential of seaweed, shellfish, and the intertidal zone to advance architectural knowledge and material futures; how spaces have been transformed through the material contributions of the African Diaspora; and new architecture paradigms for storing data that can reimagine digital infrastructure.

Cheng was among four distinguished finalists selected from a highly competitive and international pool of applicants. The 2023 Wheelwright Prize jury commends finalists Isabel Abascal, Maya Bird-Murphy, and DK Osseo-Asare for their promising research proposals and presentations. Jingru (Cyan) Cheng follows 2022 Wheelwright Prize winner Marina Otero, whose Wheelwright project, Future Storage: Architectures to Host the Metaverse, is currently in its travel-research phase.

About Jingru (Cyan) Cheng:

Jingru (Cyan) Cheng works across architecture, anthropology, and filmmaking. Her practice follows drifting bodies—from rural migrant workers to forms of water—to draw out latent relations across scales, confronting intensified social injustice and ecological crisis. Cheng received commendations from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) President’s Awards for Research in 2018 and 2020. She is also a 2022 Graham Foundation Grantee. Her work has been exhibited internationally as part of Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany (2020–2022), the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2019), the Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), among others, and is included in the Architectural Association’s permanent collection. Cheng holds a PhD by Design and MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design (Projective Cities) from the Architectural Association (AA), and was the co-director of AA Wuhan Visiting School (2015–2017). She co-led the MA architectural design studio Politics of the Atmosphere (2019–2022) and currently teaches an interdisciplinary module across all schools at the Royal College of Art in London.

About the 2023 Wheelwright Prize Finalists:

Isabel Abascal: Mother Architecture: Shaping Birth

Isabel Abascal is a Mexico City–based architect and writer. In 2015, she founded the architecture studio LANZA Atelier, along with Alessandro Arienzo. From 2015 to 2017, Abascal was the Executive Director of LIGA, Espacio para Arquitectura, a platform dedicated to the dissemination and discussion of Latin American architecture. There, she curated myriad exhibitions, and co-edited the book Exposed Architecture, published by Park Books. She has also contributed to publications such as DOMUS, Avery Review, Arquine, Wallpaper*, and the UNAM Journal, among others. Abascal studied architecture at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, the Technische Universität in Berlin, and at the Vastu Shilpa Foundation in Ahmedabad, under Balkrishna Doshi.

Maya Bird-Murphy: Examining Architectural Practice Through Alternative Methodology and Pedagogy

Maya Bird-Murphy is a designer, educator, and the founder of Mobile Makers, an award-winning non-profit organization bringing design and skill-building workshops to underrepresented communities. She was selected by Theaster Gates and the Prada Group as an Experimental Design Lab awardee, featured as one of 50 people who shape Chicago in Newcity Magazine, and received the 2022 Pierre Keller Prize at the Hublot Design Prize ceremony in London. In 2018, she was named as an AIGA Design + Diversity Conference National Fellow. The same year, she was featured in The American Institute of Architects’ (AIA) Emerging Professionals Exhibition 2018 for Mobile Makers. Bird-Murphy attended Ball State University and received an MArch from Boston Architectural College.

DK Osseo-Asare: Bucky in Africa: Remembering the Chemistry of Architecture

DK Osseo-Asare is a Ghanaian American designer who makes buildings, landscapes, communities, objects, and digital tools. He is a co-founding principal of the transatlantic architecture and integrated design studio Low Design Office (LowDo), based in Austin, United States, and Tema, Ghana. He holds an appointment in Humanitarian Materials at the Pennsylvania State University, where he directs the Humanitarian Materials Lab, a transdisciplinary research lab architecting materials for human welfare. He is a TED Global Fellow; member, Ghana Institution of Engineering (GhIE); and received AB in Engineering Design and MArch degrees from Harvard University, with a focus on kinetic architecture and network power.

Data, Digital Media, and a Different Design Office

In the summer of 2022, the nonprofit artificial intelligence group OpenAI introduced DALL-E, a groundbreaking text-to-image artificial intelligence software engine. With a prompt of a few simple words, this engine could produce dozens of photorealistic images that depicted the prompt. The popular press marveled at the striking new technology and a flood of AI-generated images, created as easily as one might make an errant comment, left some critics to ponder the future of the creative process. Architects were quick to seize on the complexities and contradictions of DALL-E with a surge of freshly generated and startlingly compelling architectural images on the one hand, and a moral panic around the implications of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence on the other. By autumn, it was clear that this technology, developed for purposes totally unrelated to architecture, was confronting architects with profound new questions around the future of design.

The advent of new generative AI methods seemed to resurface latent sympathies and hostilities about the role of technology, software, media, and data in architectural practice. Arguments about authorship and agency that emerged with the first application of computers to design around 50 years ago—and that seem to recur with each technological cycle—were exhumed for another ritual airing. Tacit questions about the hierarchy of design practice, such as who truly holds creative power, hovered at the margins as well. Design technology is often reflexively associated with the tooling of production labor, a means to control the execution or documentation of ideas rather than a locus of creation itself. Yet new AI systems erase the distinction between production and creation with a technology that accelerates both, a medium through which to imagine novel design ideas rather than merely a utilitarian tool to more efficiently produce drawings, images, or models. By destabilizing the typical media of representation and upending the hierarchy of creative labor, are these new technologies inimical to the foundational conventions of architectural practice?

Perhaps architectural practice needs some creative destruction. Young architecture offices have always faced challenges, from finding clients willing to trust large capital investments to untested designers with scant built work, to the risky up-front investment by architects themselves to keep a practice going until viable commissions can support the office as a business. Yet today, the classical model of a small design practice nurtured by will, pluck, and ineffable creative fervor is more precarious than ever. If the number of successful young firms is a barometer of how welcoming an industry is to innovation and generational opportunity, the architectural scene is a dismal picture. Rankings of the most financially successful architecture firms are dominated by offices with roots that date back decades. Even modest mid-sized firms—say, those with revenue in the $25–$50 million range—were founded more than 45 years ago on average, with some being twice as old.

Young designers have to think in terms of decades or generations to establish their practices, while venture-backed start-ups, in contrast, think of growing to the same scale in terms of months. And while the survival rate of firms varies widely by industry, a recent estimate from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that firms in the construction space—which architecture is ultimately a part of—have among the lowest 10-year survival rates, roughly half that of health-care businesses. Moreover, within architecture, engineering, and construction, a decade of mergers and acquisitions has created a much more hegemonic and consolidated business landscape. By 2018, about half of 2008’s largest architecture, engineering, and construction firms had consolidated with others. Starting any small business has also gotten more daunting. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of new jobs created by small businesses (defined as companies of fewer than 250 employees) of any type in the United States plummeted by nearly half. Ironically, by this measure, many of the largest architecture offices in the US are still small businesses. Regardless of talent and determination, the fortunes of small design offices are dominated by macroeconomic factors and by their ability to compete in a differentiated way, and by these metrics, competition is tough indeed.

The march of digital automation is likely to cloud the picture for new practices further. The striking products of AI are only one example of how technology may restructure, democratize, and upend architectural practice and labor. Beyond manual jobs most susceptible to automation, scholars have warned that the so-called knowledge professions, including architecture, must adapt or reinvent themselves. While the most dire disruptions hinted at by newer AI technologies—massive workforce redundancy or the wholesale replacement of architects by automated tools—will likely be avoided, architects must confront these developments free of any sentimental or antiquated image of what their discipline should be.

The future health of the discipline demands deeper experimentation with alternative models of practice that embrace the opportunities of a changing cultural, technological, and economic landscape without nostalgia. To pioneer new work, young offices must be more resourceful about developing transdisciplinary approaches grounded in architecture but claiming a broader design mandate. An integrated practice that fuses design, data, and technology more holistically is not only better aligned with seismic technological and economic shifts than classical models of practice, but it is also, arguably, better placed in the contemporary cultural conversation.

 

Data has become a common lingua franca among disparate disciplines and industries, and as such constitutes an indispensable mode of analysis, insight, and action around complex multidimensional problems. As vexing ecological, social, and economic issues call for systemic transformation, data can provide a common framework for understanding and action. Architects intuitively feel the need to respond to these challenges today, yet rudimentary data literacy—including topics like data sourcing, acquisition, and cleaning; data visualization; and elementary statistics—is virtually absent from architectural practice and training. If architects want to expand their impact in tackling systemic challenges and win allies as informed system designers, leveraging data is an essential tool.

Data is essential not only to inform how we deal with urgent societal and planetary challenges as a discipline, but today it is also fundamental to contemporary cultural life. In fact, by some measures, data has long surpassed architecture as a subject of popular fascination. Consider, for instance, how frequently “architecture” or “data” are mentioned in the popular press and published conversation. In the 19th century, during the initial professionalization of architecture, “architecture” and “data” appear with comparable frequency in published sources. Of course, data in the 19th century was not the electronically manipulable computational quanta we now know. When that usage became current in the 1940s, references exploded, so that by the mid-1980s, data was mentioned in published sources a staggering 60 times more frequently than architecture. Moreover, today data drives and shapes every digitally mediated interaction and is embedded in how we access and experience much of our world. There can be little doubt that data has captured the cultural imagination of the 21st century.

We hardly need statistics to corroborate the ubiquity of data and digital media in popular culture. Yet digital media is transforming the more elite spheres just as profoundly. One index of the burgeoning cultural influence of technology is the swelling number of institutions devoted to the intersection of design, art, and technology. Lisbon’s Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Basel’s HeK (Haus der Elektronischen Künste), Shanghai’s Aiiiii Art Center, Berlin’s Futurium, Dubai’s Museum of the Future, and Tokyo’s teamLab exhibition space, as well as older institutions including Karlsruhe’s ZKM and Tokyo’s InterCommunication Center and Miraikan, have all been founded in the last 20 years or so to champion the possibilities of integration of art, design, and technology. When compared to the number of new institutions devoted specifically to architecture founded in the same period, one might plausibly argue that data and digital media are more relevant as a cultural force than architecture itself.

Beyond its popular and social relevance, interweaving data more deeply with design practice offers creative possibilities to address the ever expanding visual data that is an essential product of our collective society. Try as we may, human eyes and brains are finite. If one scrolled through Google Images endlessly—16 hours a day, for 80 years—one would have seen about 25 billion images, a miniscule proportion of the estimated 750 billion images on the internet, or the 1.72 trillion photographs taken every year. In training as an architect, one could not hope to see more than a few tens of thousands at an absolute limit. Data science techniques open the possibility of comparative analysis for vastly larger sets of visual data, effectively augmenting the intuition and capacity of an architect. In recent years, new tactics of data sensemaking such as machine learning and neural computation have opened up the possibility to address qualitative dimensions of visual data that were once thought to be beyond the purview of calculation—dimensions like textual descriptions or comparisons that had been the exclusive domain of architectural critics. This blurs the boundaries between the humanistic and computational techniques of analysis and criticism, and further calls into question the sacrosanct distinction between design and technique.

What, then, would a data- and media-fluent design practice that could respond to these evolutions look like? First, it would be multidisciplinary to its core, drawing people with versatile design, technical, and humanistic backgrounds capable of negotiating our world’s multidimensional design problems. Thanks to this broad disciplinary background, it could omnivorously imagine projects across scales and industries, engaging the relevant issues at a deeply strategic level. Second, it could imagine innovations in spatial design beyond the typical typologies by intersecting physical space with data-enabled ways of perceiving and understanding it. Third, it would be an office very much about making the future in tangible, physical, spatial detail, not merely visualizing possibilities digitally. It would understand the continuum between physical and digital experience as more fluid today than ever before, and that fluidity is a uniquely contemporary design opportunity. Fourth, it would embrace collaborations in many forms, engaging corporate, institutional, governmental, and cultural clients with equal relevance because it could speak the common data language of systemic challenges.

 

Some might protest that architecture is a generalist discipline, and that an expertise developed in media or data smacks of specialization. Yet ironically, one could argue that data science is the generalist discipline of our time, in demand and applicable in virtually every field and a veritable necessity to understand the complexities of contemporary life. By connecting spatial imagination, creative drive, and a technically synthetic approach, a young office could prototype a new kind of creative generalist.

The survival of any fledgling design venture depends on its ability to create a differentiated, valuable, and defensible expertise. While architectural methodologies and business models for young offices have remained complacently stagnant for decades, the context in which they operate has dramatically transformed. Beyond macroeconomic and technological changes, over the last 20 years, the very definition of design itself has mutated around architecture, with the advent of user-centered design, design for manufacturing, strategic design, and design futures, to name only a few. Yet architecture has remained largely oblivious to these developments, content to conform to outdated models of practice until the bitter end. To create a future for design, we must look to the challenges and opportunities of today. The data-enabled design office is no universal panacea for the ills afflicting architectural practice. Yet it might be a conduit for a richer and more vital way of practicing design—one attuned to our age and embracing the opportunities ahead.

How Designers Can Help Keep Our Air Breathable

Smoke from wildfires raging in Canada blanketed the Northeastern United States this month, turning the skies an eerie orange. Responding to record-setting levels of pollution, officials around the region declared health emergencies. Advice to close windows and run air filters helped mitigate the acute effects of the short-term crisis, but the event also drew attention to how climate change is intensifying chronic air pollution around the world.

Ensuring the safety and quality of air is now an urgent issue for designers. Holly Samuelson, Associate Professor in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), is changing how the design fields think about the complexities of air quality. Protecting inhabitants from outside pollutants is only one part of the challenge. Buildings also need to have proper ventilation and provide efficient heating and cooling systems that could lower the emissions driving climate change in the first place. Samuelson shared her insights with William Smith, editorial director at the GSD.

William Smith: With this wildfire smoke offering a possible glimpse into a future of more frequent disasters stemming from climate change, what are some possible solutions the design fields could offer?

Holly Samuelson: With good design, buildings can be more airtight when desired to keep out smoke and other pollutants. As a bonus, reducing unwanted air leakage also increases thermal comfort during the winter and tends to be one of the most effective energy-saving measures in buildings. Improved airtightness requires good window selection and architectural detailing, especially at corners and joints between materials. There’s room for advancement here. It also requires a well-constructed building, so architects often specify air leakage limitations to be verified with on-site testing.

Of course, a more airtight building then requires better protection against indoor sources of pollution (If you give a mouse a cookie . . .) So, during periods of acceptable outdoor air quality, which is most of the time in many places, this means bringing in outdoor air to flush indoor pollutants, carbon dioxide, and airborne pathogens, a topic that needs little introduction since the onset of COVID. Design solutions are definitely needed here. How can we achieve the health benefits of more fresh air without all the carbon penalties of heating, cooling, and dehumidifying this air, moving it around, and constructing these systems in the first place? Cue the genius designers!

So what strategies have been used in buildings?

In Harvard’s Center for Green Building and City’s HouseZero , a naturally ventilated lab building, windows open automatically in response to measured air quality conditions. In buildings like the Chesapeake Bay Foundation Philip Merrill Environmental Center or the Artist for Humanity Epicenter, simple lights alert occupants when it’s a good time to open windows. Architects then design for good buoyancy or cross ventilation when they want to move abundant fresh air naturally.

Design teams also use energy recovery ventilation to allow heat and humidity exchange between incoming and outgoing air and to promote ventilation at times when window opening may be unpopular, like in winter. This energy recovery can be via heat exchangers, enthalpy wheels, or with small, ductless, through-the-wall units. Some design researchers are also working on passive versions of these systems, and others are advancing ultra-efficient radiant systems that focus on heating or cooling people rather than air in the first place.

Filtration is also an important topic that gains increased attention during wildfires. For buildings without mechanical ventilation, occupants can use standalone air filtration. Since pressure moves air through filters, and the higher the filtration efficiency, like MERV (minimum efficiency reporting value) 13 or HEPA (high efficiency particulate air) filters, the more air pressure that’s needed, and that takes fan power. Therefore, in mechanically ventilated buildings, designers can choose efficient equipment and remove other pressure losses in the system to avoid adding even more fan loads, for example by allowing for straight air paths with minimal surface area for friction. (Think boba tea straw, rather than curly straw for a thick milkshake.) This strategy takes space planning early in the design.

What other considerations should architects account for when creating efficient, ventilated buildings that also protect against pollution?

If we expect building occupants to close windows in unhealthy outdoor air conditions and to open windows in unhealthy indoor air conditions (a frequent problem in unventilated buildings), then issues of thermal comfort and safety matter, especially in residential buildings. This is especially important for occupants who are physiologically more sensitive to indoor overheating and poor air quality, such as young children and older adults. Architectural strategies like good sun shading, including trees, envelope insulation, and thermal storage, can reduce energy use while significantly extending the length of time that a building can remain comfortable in extreme weather conditions and power outages, an increasing concern with climate change.

 

Interview with Toni Griffin: A Spotlight on the MDes Degree Publics Domain

How is a public constituted, both spatially and socially? How does the public become legible and desirable? For whom does it exist? These are some of the questions that animate Toni Griffin’s proseminar “Of the Public. In the Public. By the Public” at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). Toni Griffin, Professor in Practice of Urban Planning at Harvard GSD, specializes in leading complex, transdisciplinary planning, and urban design projects for multi-sector clients in cities with long histories of spatial and social injustice. The proseminar course draws from scholars, practitioners, and urban planners to build foundational intelligence and provocative interpretations of the plural meanings of public.

Griffin is Domain Head for Publics, one of four concentrations in the Master in Design Studies (MDes) at GSD. The program challenges conventional ways of learning and prepares students to understand how design shapes and influences the underlying processes of contemporary life. The program is uniquely situated at the GSD to draw on insights from a multitude of fields and expertise to break down the silos between disciplines and develop a holistic understanding of complex issues. Through fieldwork, fabrication, collaboration, and dissemination, the program is aimed at those who want to develop expertise in design practice while gaining tools to enable a wide range of career paths. Students select one of four domains of study—Ecologies, Narratives, Publics, and Mediums—and undertake a core set of courses, including labs, seminars, workshops, initiatives, publications, and ongoing projects that connect advanced research methods and related topical courses. Uniquely, trajectories within each domain allow students to construct their own interdisciplinary tracks and take part in course offerings across the GSD, as well as other schools and departments at Harvard.

Many of these core concepts resonate with Grffin’s practice. She is founder of urbanAC , based in New York, and leads the Just City Lab , a research platform for developing values-based planning methodologies and tools, including the Just City Index and a framework of indicators and metrics for evaluating public life and urban justice in public plazas.

Harvard GSD’s Joshua Machat spoke with Toni Griffin about the MDes program, open projects, and how the Publics domain set out to explore the socio-spatial design, planning, implementation, and advocacy.

Joshua Machat: Why do you think the Publics domain is of interest to architects who are still in the early parts of their professional careers?

Toni Griffin: They appear to be architects who are no longer satisfied with traditional modes of architecture, which tend to focus on the building and the outcome. They’re more interested in the forces that shape architecture and the built environment. And they’re interested in the impact of that architecture on society, people, and place. Architecture, particularly in its pedagogy in undergraduate and graduate programs—and sometimes even in practice—doesn’t address those issues sufficiently. I’m finding that applicants are looking to round out their understanding of how the built world is produced through architecture and/or other disciplines. Who is involved in that work, who’s impacted in that work, who does that work benefit, and who gets to decide, are all part of their curiosities.

Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary thinking is a critical part of contemporary problem-solving in design. Can you explain how this approach is integrated into the Publics domain?

I do it perhaps in a couple of ways in the proseminar, which is divided into six modules. “To be Public”, which is about how we bring our individual identities, cultures, and backgrounds into the public realm. “Of the Public”, which is about the data, knowledge, memories, that we place into the public realm. “By the Public”, which is about public governance. “For the Public”, which is about the things that the public sector provides for society, cities, and neighborhoods. “With the Public” is about engagement, participation, and power. “In the Public” is about how creatives and designers place things in the public realm.

We have two guest speakers who come and speak on each of those modules. They tend to come from two disciplinary perspectives: two different disciplines are in dialogue about a particular topic every other week. Secondly, the students are put into teams, and they have to co-facilitate a class where they lead the discussion, not me. This requires them to work together. Because the students come from different backgrounds and experiences—whether different genders, ethnicities, nationalities, or disciplines—they often forge a cross-identity and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

The advance of the just city is at the core of your Publics proseminar. The Mayors Imagining the Just City Symposium was held in April and MICD Fellows discussed strategies for using planning and design interventions to address racial injustice in each of their respective cities. How did this conversation support the Publics proseminar learning objectives?   

The Mayors Imagining the Just City public event is a part of the Mayor’s Institute on City Design (MICD) Just City Mayoral Fellowship program, which I lead through the Just City Lab. This is the third year of the fellowship in which eight mayors participate in an eleven-week online curriculum centered on best practices and examples of how urban planning, design, and development—the work that mayors lead—can achieve greater social and spatial justice.

During the closing session, when the mayors come back to Cambridge to present their projects and get feedback from eight resource experts, we end the program with a public program and presentation to give the GSD community exposure and access to city leaders and the roles that they play in building cities in collaboration with practitioners of the disciplines we offer at the GSD.

The learning objective is to create greater understanding around how public government, and specifically mayors, lead and shape this type of work. The event exposes students and the rest of the GSD community to the complexity of decision making around resources, choices, policies, and priorities that are helping to address issues in chronically disinvested neighborhoods and/or populations that have historically been marginalized through racially exclusionary and discriminatory practices.

It’s always my interest to expose students to other modes of practice, like the public sector, and the ways in which architects, landscape architects, and urban planners might find themselves situated in a public sector role—even running for mayor—and the ways in which their expertise can be useful within government, and not always as a consultant to government.

What do you think are the most distinguishing qualities of the MDes degree program at the GSD?

What makes the MDes program so attractive to students, and to me, is that it’s the most entrepreneurial design degree that we offer. Being a part of the program requires students to be comfortable with self-directing their journey through the four semesters. Students’ ability to choose a substantial number of your courses, across the departments at the GSD, across Harvard, and even some at MIT, is just amazing. It parallels how you might do a doctorate. It’s very self-directed. The beauty is in all the choices you get to make to inform your own intellectual curiosity. The challenge of that is all the courses on offer that you just won’t have time to do. It’s an embarrassment of riches and an extraordinary luxury students have that sometimes causes them a little bit of angst. But ultimately, they end up quite satisfied with the volume of choices.

I also like that the program includes students who have been out in the world working for some time alongside some students who are just coming out of their undergrad. I think that world experience, whether it’s two years or fourteen years, adds a lot to the depth of conversation. Students don’t realize that we as teachers are just as engaged in what they bring to the discussion as we give to them; in fact, it is a reciprocal relationship that makes for the best classroom environment.

The GSD is one of the most student-engaged design programs that I’ve ever been a part of. Students are very proactive through clubs, volunteer efforts, the production of their own events, and discussion groups. That brings a unique energy to the school and can drive change within the school. Students have a level of agency that allows them to feel very connected to each other and the GSD community, both during their time in the program and even after as alumni.

Ryan Gerald Nelson on Designing Iconic Typographic Moments

Within the work of graphic designer Ryan Gerald Nelson there is a persistent thread of experimentation. He experiments with images, typography, materials, and printing techniques, often manipulating all these elements at once. The compelling results range from the elegant and spare exhibition catalogue for Merce Cunningham CO:MM:ON TI:ME to the aggressive, overloaded posters he created for the Walker Art Center and Yale University. The attention to both big ideas and small details made his Studio Xee a perfect fit for designing the posters and related materials for the Fall 2022–Spring 2023 public programs at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). As we look back on the academic year, Chad Kloepfer, art director of the GSD, caught up with Ryan. The two met years ago when Ryan was a design fellow at the Walker.

Chad Kloepfer: We began discussing the past year’s public programs identity on a conceptual level, looking at how the project’s intellectual foundations could inform the design. Paige Johnston, associate director of public programs at the GSD, brought up The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013), a collection of essays by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney that draw on a radical Black intellectual tradition to critique academia. Moten and Harney write about ways to create the worlds you want to inhabit, outside of or adjacent to the existing world and its systems of knowledge. These are not easy concepts to formalize into a poster, but I wonder how, or if, Moten and Harney’s text ultimately fed into the final design?

Ryan Gerald Nelson: I did have some early moments of feeling a bit lost in all the potential ways and paths of interpreting The Undercommons and trying to land on certain ideas that I felt could propel my design decisions within the poster.

But as I dove deeper into the text I couldn’t help but notice the extent to which Moten and Harney’s observations and discourse feel so relevant to so many different spaces and aspects of society. A public programs and lecture series at a major university certainly felt to me like one of those spaces.

Ultimately, I felt like there was so much to glean from The Undercommons, and certain ideas from the book led me down a path that I wouldn’t have otherwise taken. As a graphic designer, that is something I always hope for in a project—some combination of collaborators, content, and reference material that expands my ways of thinking and making.

But to give some detail of how The Undercommons influenced certain design decisions of mine, we can look at how the authors define the idea of study. As Jack Halberstram observes in his introduction, Moten and Harney suggest that study is “a mode of thinking with others separate from the thinking that the institution requires of you.” Moten goes on to say that “It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice.”

I love this definition, and it’s clear to see how study is pervasive and already happening, and that we’re building a world through the acts of sharing space and ideas with one another (which is certainly something that the public programs and lectures at Harvard GSD become vectors for). So there’s an energy and potential in these notions that I attempted to capture within the poster through a sort of graphic/typographic density, overlap, and cross-pollination. The idea of study can be broad, but it prompted me to think about how I could use the design to reflect a sense of movement, momentum, a gathering of a chorus, a decentering, a deconstruction.

Something that attracted me to your work is that you are not exclusively a graphic designer. You also have a visual arts practice that runs parallel to your design practice. From the outside I can make formal connections between the two but I’m curious what the relationship of these worlds is for you?

These days the relationship is more separate than it has been in the past. Or at least in my conscious mind I’m always “switching” between the two: graphic designer mind and artist mind. Maybe that’s because these two worlds still, to this day, seem like oil and water.

But if I start to examine things more closely, I can see a relationship between certain approaches or aesthetic sensibilities that I have in both my art practice and my graphic design practice. Like gravitating toward a certain formal starkness or austerity, or a level of high contrast (tonally, typographically, relationally between forms and elements), or even just a very granular level of detail.

The use of images is crucial to your work—both as a designer and visual artist—and you have specific ways that you use and manipulate them. We don’t have artworks or photographs in our poster, but you have almost treated “GSD” as an image and manipulated its presence in multiple cases. Can you talk about using images beyond their representational value?

I definitely seek out more formal and aesthetic ways to use images, or as elements that feel or act as texture or tone. Or maybe it’s just a desire to use them less conservatively. Having worked mostly in and around the world of contemporary art I’ve often bumped up against the preciousness or strictness that surrounds images. Rules like: no cropping, no altering, no going across a gutter, etc. I understand it of course, but it does make me want to rebel against those rules when the opportunity arises.

I’m also a big proponent of using type as image or type as texture. There’s a very type-centric or type-first mentality that’s pretty firmly embedded in the way I approach design, which definitely pushes me to be more inventive with type and to find certain type moves that can do some of the heavy lifting in terms of conveying ideas and content. That said, I’m often aiming to create typographic moments that feel very integrated (i.e., not just floating or slapped on top), and weighty, and iconic.

Repetition plays a large role in the posters, emails, and related materials for this year’s public programs. How did this come about as a visual device?

I started using repetition throughout the visual identity as a simple strategy to reference space, scale, and expansion, which of course felt very appropriate for a graduate school revolving around architecture and urban planning.

Repetition as a visual device most noticeably plays out within the poster where there are three relatively prominent “GSD” graphics that are descending in scale from top to bottom. I repeated the GSD “tag” not only to establish these different spaces or levels, but also to represent two ideas at the same time: the idea of ascension representing expansion or growth on the one hand, versus the idea of descension representing a zooming or zeroing in on the other.

The vertically stacked grid spaces on the poster also nest with or mirror this structure. Whereas the three “GSD” graphics are descending in scale from top to bottom, the vertically stacked grid spaces are ascending in their column structure from top to bottom starting with the one big “block” column on top, then the two “block” zones in the middle creating two columns, and finally the three columns of listings on the bottom of the poster.

The day numbers from the calendar are also repeated and overprinted on the top half of the poster. The core parts of the poster were already locked in this nesting, symbiotic structure, so I wanted to bring in a similar, connective gesture to reinforce the repetition. In this instance I felt that the overprinting red day numbers become more of a representation of time as a space, presence, or structure.

You have a wonderful sense for type and typeface choices. Even the simplest typeface, in the right hands, can be used to great effect. How do you go about choosing a typeface (our poster is set in Helvetica Neue) and then using it?

I love a simple typeface! To me there are some absolute classics that I would probably be happy to use forever. I feel fortunate that when I was first being introduced to typography that my instructors were showing me the work of a lot of amazing Dutch graphic designers. That had a major influence on me, and I definitely noticed the typefaces they used, the sort of calculated unfussy-ness of their approach to type, and even their loyalty to using just a handful of typefaces for all their projects, or even a single typeface.

Just some of the typefaces I’m thinking of are: Gothic LT 13, Grotesque MT, Univers LT, Akzidenz Grotesk, condensed cuts of Franklin Gothic, more obscure cuts of Times New Roman like MT or Eighteen, Gothic 720 BT, Pica 10 Pitch, Prestige Elite, AG Schoolbook, and of course Helvetica Neue, among many others.

As far as choosing a typeface goes, I like to keep that process simple as well. I think the width of the strokes are a major factor. Sometimes I’m trying to find stroke widths that feel in harmony with other elements like images, content, format, the proportions of the format, etc. But in other instances, it makes more sense for the stroke widths to have a lot of contrast or weight difference in comparison to the other elements. Lastly, I think the letters used in the main title of the design project play a big role in how I make my typeface selections.

With the uppercase letters in “HARVARD GSD”, I’m primarily looking at the “R” and the “G”: both great letterforms that I happen to find pretty irresistible when they’re typeset in Helvetica Neue. With a Helvetica Neue “R”, it’s the curve of the leg. It’s a super elegant curve with a slight outward taper down on the baseline that I think sets Helvetica Neue apart. With the Helvetica Neue “G”, it’s almost all about that downward spur in the bottom-right of the letterform that’s perfectly balanced and gives the “G” such an iconic stance.

Had the main title of this project not included an “R” and a “G”, I’m sure I would’ve chosen a different typeface. It all comes back to content and what you’re working with—even down to the letters being used.

I don’t imagine you have a traditional studio structure as a designer, but the desk-job portion of running a studio is not something they teach in school. Is there any kind of learning curve when it comes to practicing design for clients and what it takes to “manage” a studio?

I think there can be a fairly steep learning curve considering that being an independent or small studio graphic designer can often require you to possess so many graphic design adjacent skills. You might only be working on actual graphic design for 20 percent of the time during a project, while the other 80% of the time is dedicated to aspects like pre-production, editing content, communicating with collaborators and vendors, ensuring quality final production, etc. Like you mention, design schools barely and sometimes never teach these aspects of graphic design to students, but they’re obviously important.

These types of skills tend to live in the background which is probably why they go untaught in design schools and, frankly, are not even spoken about very often. But I wouldn’t trade them for anything simply because skills like these give me the confidence to handle just about any project thrown at me and allow me to focus more on the actual graphic design.