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.

Why the Digital World Needs Sustainable Architecture: An Interview with Marina Otero

Data centers located around the globe function 24 hours a day to support digital networks. These facilities consume vast energy resources, occupy fragile ecosystems, and emit prodigious amounts of CO2. Marina Otero, winner of the 2022 Wheelwright Prize , is researching new architectural methods and systems for storing data, and reimagining how digital infrastructure could meet the unprecedented demands facing the world today. Through field research, data collection, and prototype development, Otero aims to publish the first open-source manual for global data center architecture design, featuring examples of ecological, sustainable, and egalitarian data storage models. By looking at cases in Australia, Chile, China, Iceland, Netherlands, Nigeria, Singapore, Sweden, and the United States, she investigates spatial and material innovations. This work is especially urgent at a time when digital-data production is outpacing the scalability of today’s storage solutions, and AI usage is on the rise. We caught up with Otero to discuss the progress of her globe-spanning research project, Future Storage: Architectures to Host the Metaverse.

Sweden is an international leader in renewable energy with the digital infrastructure sector making up a large percentage of the economy. In the past year, you have toured several data centers in the country. What did you discover?

Yes, in December 2022 I visited several data centers in the North of the country. One of them is the Infrastructure and Cloud research & test Environment (ICE) Data Center in Luleå. ICE is one of the main data center research institutions in Europe and a testbed focusing on digitalization and information technology infrastructure. During my visit, I learned of several prototypes being tested at ICE to recover data center heat in subarctic climates. One of them involves growing mealworms in a heat box, whose heat comes from the server cooling system. In the long run, these mealworms ultimately become chicken feed. They can replace the soy concentrate that has been until now used to feed chickens in the region, and which is largely produced in the Amazon. According to ICE, this can become an economical and environmentally friendly solution. And, apparently, the chickens are quite happy. ICE also repurposes heat from data centers to dry firewood and heat water for their own office consumption and for local fish farms. Together with the company Containing Greens, ICE has designed a facility that uses excess heat inside vertical hydroponic systems, harvesting produce that is delivered to local restaurants. Our emails can feed chickens and grow lettuce!

How are data centers in Sweden using solar, wind, and hydro power?

Data center providers are attracted to the possibility of using renewable energy for their functioning, which grants them green labels. I visited Ecodatacenter Piteå , powered by hydropower, and Ecodatacenter Falun , a facility that is powered entirely by wind and hydropower and built in wood with the frame, interior walls, and ceiling in cross-laminated timber and glulam. The data center uses a heat recovery system that pumps surplus energy into a district heating system for the municipality of Falun, as well into a wood pellets factory.

In the country’s capital I visited Stockholm Data Parks in Kista. This is a joint initiative by the City of Stockholm, district heating and cooling provider Stockholm Exergi, power grid operator Ellevio, and fiber network provider Stokab. The operation contributes to the City of Stockholm’s objective to be entirely fossil fuel free by 2040. This public-private partnership model that involves energy loops between data centers and the urban energy grid is becoming a reference for cities around the world.

However, the Swedish data center “boom” has also sparked national protest. During my visit I participated in debates on how the development of this digital infrastructure in the Nordic countries is occurring at the expense of indigenous peoples. The expansion of wind farms to provide renewable energy for industries such as data centers is having an adverse impact on the Sami people’s culture and environment, raising concerns of “green colonialism.”

Iceland is one of the only place in the world where a data center can operate with 100% sustainable green power. You visited the Verne Global campus, which relies on local geothermal and hydroelectric sources. What did you learn about the use of geothermal energy during the site visit?

I was interested in experiencing first-hand how geothermal energy is used in the country, and how it powers data centers. I travelled to one of the largest single-site geothermal power plants on the planet, Hellisheiði power plant . The area also includes carbon capture infrastructure. I then followed the power lines that cross and power the country. The journey took me to the Verne Global campus, which relies on local geothermal and hydroelectric sources. With Halldór Eiríksson, a partner at T.ark Architects, the architects responsible for the Verne Global data center design, I learned about the interconnections between geothermal energy sites and data centers. Eiríksson is also the designer of the Sky Lagoon, a human-made geothermal bath complex in Kópavogur.

I also met with Marcos Zotes, partner at Basalt Architects, who are responsible for the design of the Blue Lagoon . The lagoon is located in a lava field near Grindavík and is supplied by water used in the nearby Svartsengi geothermal power station. In fact, the Blue Lagoon was formed from water spilling from the geothermal power plant.

In these architectures where people undress and bath together in the hot waters coming from the entrails of the earth, one could comprehend how our bodies connect to others and to the planet. These embodied experiences help us question the intricate energy processes that keep bodies and data centers up and running.

The Humboldt Cable in Chile will be the first submarine cable linking Latin America and Oceania. The project will make the country a preferred data center location in the Southern Hemisphere. When you return to Chile, what do you intend to research?

I was invited by the Chilean Senate to participate in Congreso Futuro , the main scientific-humanist dissemination event in Latin America and the Southern Hemisphere. I had the opportunity to present the research and meet representatives from the government, universities, companies, and other Chilean institutions. Together with members of the government, I travelled to Chilean Antarctica. I will be back in Chile in May and June to visit data centers and related infrastructures in a field trip and program jointly organized with the Master of Architecture at the Universidad Católica de Chile. I will visit the site selected for the construction of the Humboldt Cable. I will also meet with members of a network of academics and activists who oppose data colonialism, and work closely with communities protesting data centers around the world.

For example, I will meet with representatives from the Cerrillos community, who opposed a Google data center megaproject due to the project’s shortcomings in its environmental processing. The community successfully demonstrated that the project contributed to the overexploitation of the Santiago Central aquifer in a context of drought. I will also meet with representatives from ALMA observatory, a state-of-the-art telescope that studies light from some of the coldest objects in the Universe. ALMA comprises 66 high-precision antennas, spread over distances of up to 16 kilometers. I am interested in learning about data processing and data storage connected to their activities.

What other site visits are planned for 2023?

This August I travel to Australia. My aim is to meet Stewart Stacey, managing director of Binary Security, who developed the world’s first Indigenous-operated data center at Charles Darwin University in Darwin. I am also planning to meet with representatives of Kalinda IT, an indigenously owned Australian IT services business formed in 2018, which recently partnered with TRIFALGA DC to develop a network of hyperscale and edge data centers across Australia, of which Toowoomba, Queensland-based Pulse Data Centre, is their first location. I am also interested in the work of the Maiam nayri Wingara Indigenous Data Sovereignty Collective, which advocates for Indigenous data sovereignty.

In October I travel to California to meet experts working on DNA data storage (Illumina, Microsoft, Twist), hologram data storage (Microsoft), and floating data centers (Nautilus). On my return, I will be in Cambridge and hope to meet with George Church, who leads Synthetic Biology at Harvard’s Wyss Institute . I am looking forward to learning more about their DNA data storage experiments and about the Whitesides Research Group’s research on fluorescent dye storage. Later in the year I travel to Singapore, China, and Nigeria.

Has the Wheelwright Prize grant generated other research opportunities or collaborations?

Absolutely! I am conducting research on the future of data centers alongside NASA Senior Research Scientist Eduardo Bendek. I will study the possibilities and implications of building data center in orbit around the Earth. We will look into how these facilities could harness energy through solar panels, and benefit from the lack of gravity and absence of air to avoid cooling problems and reduce the impact on energy consumption. We will also explore the ecological implications and possible geopolitical and urban transformations that such infrastructures could unleash. There is a trend of locating data centers in increasingly remote and extreme locations, such as underwater or in space, and it is important to inspect its repercussions.

With the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC), in the context of an invitation by Tabakalera, Spain, an international center for contemporary culture located in Donostia / San Sebastián, I will look at how quantum computing will transform the design of data centers. The Center has received European investment for the study of superconductors (essential in quantum computing) and will soon celebrate the opening of the IBM quantum computing center that will host one of the most advanced quantum computers in the world. I am interested in study two main aspects. On the one hand, data centers can take advantage of the power of quantum computing to accelerate and improve their operations and optimize resource allocation and the simulation of complex systems. On the other hand, quantum computing requires new hardware and software solutions and a highly controlled and isolated environment from the outside world to reduce interference and errors. Cooling and energy management are also important in this context, as qubits, the building blocks of quantum computing, require extremely low temperatures to function properly. This is way beyond my area of expertise but that’s precisely why I am so eager to learn about it.

In Fall 2023, I will lead a clinic at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, focusing on the case of Tuvalu. The island nation has an interest in creating a digital twin to preserve its heritage in the face of rising sea levels. The team will comprise a group of students from architecture, theory, historic preservation, urbanism, as well as leading experts from the fields of data storage, archiving, and computing. We will consider how to approach the storage of different types of data, their access, ownership and governance, their ecological cycles, as well as processes of preservation, celebration, decay, and mourning.

Meet Caroline Dignes

Caroline Dignes (MDE ’23)’s path to the GSD included the theatre, circus arts, and rock climbing – all of which, she says, have some surprising things in common with the GSD and with the Master in Design Engineering, a two-year collaborative degree program between the GSD and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences that combines aspects of both design and engineering.

Meet Junainah Ahmed

Junainah Ahmed (MArch I ’23) talks about the GSD classes that had a lasting impact on her thinking, including Core II with Michelle Chang and “Reflective Nostalgia: Alternative Futures for Shanghai’s Shikumen Heritage,” an option studio taught by Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu. The MArch I program leads to an accredited professional degree intended for individuals who have completed a bachelor’s degree with a major other than one of the design professions or with a pre-professional undergraduate major in one of the design professions.

Designing Food Security in Rural Mississippi

For nearly a decade, Mississippi has ranked as America’s hungriest state. Nearly 19 percent of its citizens—about 600,000 people—face food insecurity, including one in four children. This catastrophe is not the fault of geography. Agriculture serves as the state’s main industry, with about 34,700 farms operating across 10.4 million acres of fertile soil. The fault principally lies in a long history of exploitation, from the arrival of settler colonialists who identified its promise and built some of the South’s largest plantations to the continued privileging of crops grown for profit, like soy and hay, which perpetuates the legacy of slavery.

In his fall 2022 studio, “The Paradox of Hunger—Rural Mississippi,” Design Critic in Architecture Cory Henry asked students to examine this crisis and investigate what mitigating role architecture and design could play. “In Mississippi, you have some of the most arable land in the country,” says Henry. “Over 30 percent of the state is farmland—a percentage which is growing—but the state consistently ranks as one of the most food insecure in the country.”

In Mississippi, you have some of the most arable land in the country,” says Henry. “Over 30 percent of the state is farmland—a percentage which is growing—but the state consistently ranks as one of the most food insecure in the country.

Cory Henry

That land has attracted numerous out-of-state investment funds as well as wealthy Americans. It was only for sale, however, after being stolen from Black and Indigenous people, sometimes with the help of abusive policies. In these instances, profit motivates more than feeding local people: only 45,000 of those 10.4 million acres are devoted to fruits and vegetables. “A farmer told me that Mississippi farms value the green dollar more than the green for sustenance,” says Henry. As a result, the state imports most of its produce, which in turn is difficult for many to access due to a dearth of grocery stores. Dollar Generals, which do not sell fresh produce, are often the nearest source of food, particularly in rural areas.

This condition contradicts the dream Laurence C. Jones had in 1909 when he founded the Piney Woods School, the nation’s second oldest continuously operating Black boarding school, located about 21 miles southeast of Jackson. Jones’s mission was to teach formerly enslaved people not just how to read but also about food sovereignty. “We educate for the head, the heart, and the hands” remains a foundational motto. Occupying approximately 2,000 acres, about 10 percent of which is farmland, the school became an ideal case study for Henry’s students to translate their research on the multipronged roots of food insecurity into a concrete intervention at a specific site.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed many of the country’s structural inequalities that already existed. These include how Black, non-Hispanic households are twice as likely to be food insecure,” says Henry. “I wanted students to understand the agency of our design disciplines—that we must understand the socioeconomic conditions of a place in order to have meaningful change—and to explore ways in which design thinking can create opportunities for food sovereignty.

Younger Americans do not gravitate toward farming careers. According to the 2017 census, the average age of a Mississippi farmer is 60. At Piney Woods specifically, the farm today carries punitive associations, with students sent there as a form of discipline. Altering these impressions requires creating a new relationship between the youth and the natural environment—one that emphasizes joy and excitement rather than obligation.

Avi Robinson (MArch ’23) and Supriya Ambwani (MLA ’23) understood that inculcating a positive connection to farming will not arise from harsh prescriptions, particularly for high schoolers and especially those in communities with an acute awareness of the history of slavery. Freedom—of choice, movement, and program—resonates throughout their design. “Spaces often tell you what you can or cannot do,” says Robinson. “The more nondescript spaces are, the more flexibility you have.”

Utilizing inexpensive materials such as plywood and employing ancient techniques like rammed earth, the pair emphasized minimalist simplicity. At the site of the existing barn, for instance, they retained the original structure but added a variation of terraced farming inspired by farms in South Africa, with plots arrayed throughout a series of long, arched passages that are enclosed in chain-link fences. This expansion created room for a kitchen, where food from the farm can be taken directly and either stored or served, making an alternative to the cafeteria. Guided by the impulse not to demarcate aspects of the plan as being strictly focused on sustainability, waste, design, or any other narrow concept, the complex becomes multiuse in a way that makes the food cycle more legible.

Hybridity is emphasized further in the new makerspace, which includes a woodshop, classroom, computer lab, library, and drawing studio. It acts as a center for hands-on learning, such as the construction of goat sheds which house the herd that provides fertilizer. The frame of the makerspace partially echoes the sloping arches of the new barn complex. And as with the chain-link roofs in the barn, the porousness of the building’s multistory, floor-to-ceiling windows establish an attachment to the land, even for those uninterested in this work.

But the flexibility of Robinson and Ambwani’s design encourages students to use these spaces in ways both related and unrelated to farming—whether doing homework or just hanging out. It also positions Piney Woods as a site of inspiration for schools and institutions in Mississippi and beyond, with plans that are more widely adaptable than rigidly defined spaces. “I wanted to find ingredients that people could use,” explains Robinson. “What you see are the current needs of Piney Woods. But this is an entry point, a recipe book, about how to mix things together to address, in any specific situation, both food and education.”

Christian Behling (MArch II ’24) and Gabriel Schmid (MArch II ’24) saw the campus as bifurcated, with the “hands,” represented by the farm, lacking both a material and positive emotional connection to the “head,” represented by the academic buildings. In order to join the two, they designed a boardwalk that functions as a kind of spine across campus. Made of light-frame pine to respect the school’s history of building with on-site materials, it begins at the original schoolhouse and the grave of Laurence Jones, passes by Jones’s house, and then integrates with the farmland and historic barn. “We want this to be a physical path, a formal procession,” says Behling, who is sensitive to the importance of not imposing an entirely new history on the site but rather being in dialogue with its celebrated past.

Consideration for the past also concerns cross-generational respect. Behling and Schmid’s plan facilitates formal and informal mentorships between farmers and students to support new generations of farmers. Programmatically, this takes the form of a farmer living on campus in the newly designed dormitories. Accessed from the boardwalk, these buildings utilize Southern vernacular forms, such as the shotgun house and the wraparound porch. “There’s an important lack of social and spatial hierarchy between the different spaces in the dormitories, with private bedrooms and shared spaces all connected through a procession of doors. There are no hallways,” explains Behling.

Near the dormitories, each student is provided a small plot to manage. Behling and Schmid believe these should be given without assignments or expectations. “We had an idealistic idea that if each student has a little piece of the school of which they are in charge, it will make them more invested in the mission that the school is trying to promote,” says Behling. Whether they grow food, put in a trampoline, or let it grow wild, the plot remains their own. “It fully embraces the entrepreneurial aspirations the school already promotes.”

These plots are not the only means by which students can learn about a circular system of resources, in contrast to the current model in Mississippi in which crops like soy are largely exported for processing. The new woodshop and makerspace will educate them about the process of growing wood, milling, and making furniture or other resources. The same is true for a new test and production kitchen, where students can learn about culinary practices and make food products, like preserves, that can be supplied to the surrounding community. In the short term, Behling and Schmid believe this exchange could take place at Piney Woods farm stands constructed in the parking lots of the closest Dollar General stores, with similar architecture to that found on campus so as to pull the campus beyond its property.

Mariama Kah (MArch II ’24) and Shant Charoian (MArch II ’23) also saw the agricultural sciences as being disconnected from the rest of the school, with physical relics dotting the campus serving as a reminder of its original ethos. They were reluctant to make any changes to the site, however small. As a result, their respect for the past became a focus on repair. “We were very cognizant that this is a historic campus which is very proud of its history,” says Kah. “We wanted to touch the ground very lightly, so we decided to take an adaptive reuse stance rather than do anything invasive which takes over the campus.”

In an effort to subvert the notion of agriculture as an extractive force, Kah and Charoian looked at a speciality crop that leaves a small footprint and requires minimal space and labor: mushrooms. The opportunity for financial returns from mushroom farming is high, with a projected annual revenue of $62,000 per year for the school. Evoking another of the school’s mottos—“Land as laboratory”—this initiative could then be used to make Piney Woods a magnet for agricultural research and study. “It would become an opportunity for fellowships and engagement with local farmers and universities. It would give it power through economics as well as education,” says Kah.

To further this goal, and in keeping with their anti-interventionist philosophy, Kah and Charoian propose to turn the back end of Iowa Hall, a building that had fallen into disuse but which is slated to become a chemistry lab, into an agronomy studies and mushroom laboratory. Like their peers, they understood the importance of multiuse spaces, especially for a centrally located space like this. Surrounding the laboratory are revived basketball courts, porches and other extensions overlooking the campus, a sunken student plaza, and additional spaces that create moments for gathering.

We did not want to be an imposition on the legacies that exist but rather create space and ground them, to allow them to continue into the future.

Mariama Kah

These sites address the students’ desire to have more time to enjoy nature, which Kah and Charoian learned through a game in which the teens were asked how they connected with the green spaces in their lives. The pair responded to these concerns elsewhere, too. At the barn, they followed the gables of the original roof to create shading moments as well as classrooms, established two laboratories for animal research, and introduced spots for levity and community at the top of the silos, with panoramic views of the farm. The community garden was commandeered to include a food-nutrition lab and student kitchen, while a cabin near the water, a favorite leisure space for students, also features a water- and soil-testing lab. What was once forgotten or given less attention now has a new sense of prominence.

“The intention of the project is for Piney Woods to become the center for agricultural research and ecological study in Mississippi. The space would be used for research through fellowships and partnership, as well as for the teaching of students, who could then see themselves doing agricultural work in the future,” says Kah. But, for her, that must not come at the expense of the architecture already present: just as crops have multigenerational lives and their successful harvesting requires the passing down of knowledge, design at this site cannot ignore the past in an effort to change the future. We did not want to be an imposition on the legacies that exist but rather create space and ground them, to allow them to continue into the future,” Kah continues. “We thought of our additions of these agricultural laboratories as another link in the chain of the school’s history rather than a top-down approach of saying how things should be.

After the Turkey-Syria Earthquakes, Rethinking Design on Shaky Ground

While the recovery is still unfolding and the damage is tallied, all signs suggest that the recent earthquakes in Turkey and Syria will go down as one of the most severe natural disasters in the early 21st century. Turkey’s death toll has already passed 50,000—rare for a country that is a member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), especially since its seismic risk was well known beforehand. In addition to technical and regulatory failures in the building industry that the earthquakes have made viscerally evident, a broad range of political and business practices are implicated. As an architect and scholar whose work focuses on earthquakes and the broader design problem of risk, resilience, and reconstruction, I can attest that amid such mass tragedies, it is difficult but essential to find a balance between the overwhelming empathy that the individual circumstances of each disaster evoke and a rational outlook on the broader cadence and patterns of crisis and rebuilding. Borrowing a Tolstoyan sentiment, earthquakes are much the same everywhere, but each disaster is tragic in its own way.

Writing from my office in Cambridge, Massachusetts—a famously non-seismic context where the age-old building practice of putting a brick on top of another brick has worked without issue for almost 400 years—I am well aware of the cultural difference and geographic distance, and that water afar quenches no fire. Nevertheless, I offer a few thoughts for those like me, who are distant but concerned, to contemplate and perhaps draw lessons from. Some will be directly related to earthquakes and the reconstruction that follows, while others might be relevant to adjacent fields and the broader question of how to think and build on shaky ground.

An often cited aphorism about earthquakes is that people are not injured by the ground shaking, but by buildings collapsing. This straightforward observation is a stronger indictment than it may initially seem, once one understands that the technical problem of building in earthquake regions is relatively well resolved in the contemporary world, akin to polio or famine. Today, with advice from a typical engineer and working well within the technical capacity of most construction teams, it is possible to build directly on top of a fault line and be relatively confident that the inhabitants would survive an earthquake, even if the building itself sustains some damage.

It is misguided, therefore, to think about earthquakes as a purely technical problem. A survey of building cultures across seismic regions reveals that architects and designers have come up with different design options and strategies at various scales of environmental design—from furniture to buildings and urban plans—that combine technical and structural know-how with several kinds of social and cultural understandings. Just as societies once viewed earthquakes as supernatural phenomena requiring divine intervention, and then as natural phenomena requiring scientific study and adaptation, today we understand that the disasters caused by earthquakes are in part, if not primarily, social disasters requiring design solutions. An earthquake simply reveals latent vulnerabilities that are exacerbated by the geological phenomenon.

In Turkey and Syria as elsewhere, the poor and vulnerable are subject to an outsize share of suffering because they were allocated, implicitly or explicitly, a larger share of the risk of disaster. We see similar dynamics play out in more familiar locales in the United States, with the correlation between housing prices and seismic risk in California’s Bay Area determining to a great extent the outcome of the next big earthquake, whenever it may strike. The social nature of earthquake disasters, however, also means they are a catalyst for change. In many building cultures, earthquakes and natural disasters are seen as a test of a government’s effectiveness and mandate. The first emperor of China, Yu, was seated in 2070 BCE as a result of his effectiveness in curbing disastrous flooding, while the European Age of Enlightenment was in part sparked by the Catholic Church’s inability to explain the large toll among pious congregations when the Lisbon Earthquake struck during mass on the morning of All Saints’ Day in 1755. Earthquakes are a reality test, revealing previously invisible fault lines in the ground and in society, and therefore are a potential agent for change.

A curious but immensely generative aspect of my work with earthquake architecture is that there are distinct and diverse—even opposing—approaches to the persistent problem of building in seismic regions, many of which may be useful in similar situations. Timber experts point out the unique advantages of its flexibility, while concrete specialists advocate for its irreplaceable solidity. Urbanists foreground the need to pool and manage risk efficiently, while disurbanists stoically adhere to the foolproof approach of dispersing risk by spreading it out. These different approaches prove to be effective in their own context, even if they appear contradictory.

In earthquake architecture and reconstruction, breakthroughs in the last decade have been driven by what until recently has been this under-recognized diversity of approaches and its inclusion in design education and practice. For example, earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand in the last two decades have resulted in a degree of devastation that contrasts with the relative progress that Indonesia and western China have made in terms of earthquake preparedness, challenging assumptions about how technical expertise flows from “advanced” to “developing” regions. Emerging now is a broadened understanding of strategies for dealing with risk and building resilience, which frequently results in retroactive validation of vernacular approaches, and a recognition of the value of having a wide repertoire of technical solutions and diverse ways of thinking about the problem.

As our understanding of seismic architecture expands beyond any imperative for a single correct approach, a more useful way to think about the diversity of options and strategies for seismic architecture is to conceive of them in terms of design schemas, or frameworks, through which a designer approaches a particular issue or question. What should be shared among designers working in response to earthquakes and natural disasters is not the same technical solution, to be applied uniformly across different regions of the world. Instead, what should be communicated is a sense of the design schema. Indeed, the ability to see and understand the utility of different kinds of design innovation will be key to navigating new scales of risk and uncertainty associated with climate change and the Anthropocene era, and especially future disasters that will strike as a consequence. Instead of focusing on design thinking as a single innovative way of thinking, the examination of building in seismic regions demonstrates how different design schemas can coexist and be complementary, together offering a meta-diversity of approaches consisting of not only different solutions, but also different ways of thinking about the problem.

“Seeing Ukraine, Then and Now,” by Jerold S. Kayden

At the time of this writing, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is front and center in the news. The mounting numbers of dead and wounded stun the imagination. The creation of millions of refugees crossing into Poland and other Eastern European countries testifies to the indiscriminate brutality of war. Those of us in the professions of planning and designing cities cannot fathom the immense physical devastation being visited upon them. Homes, civic structures, and physical infrastructure have been wantonly destroyed. Billions of dollars will be needed to rebuild. Now is decidedly not the moment to ponder how to rebuild, but there will be a time, hopefully in a not too distant future, when Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian planners, designers, and other professionals will be pressed into action. As I watch the unfolding horror, I can’t help but be reminded of an earlier period in my life.

On January 1, 1995, I flew from Kyiv to Boston to start my new position as an associate professor of urban planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. For more than two years, I had been shuttling between Boston and Ukraine as a United States Agency for International Development–funded advisor to Ukraine’s new government on issues of land reform. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine sought to introduce private market reforms to its state-controlled economy. Land and housing, among other state-owned assets, were on Ukraine’s privatization agenda. How much land should be privatized and how it should be accomplished were two of many questions confronting the government.

It cannot be emphasized enough that no one—Ukrainian or non-Ukrainian—had experience with mass-scale privatization. The former Soviet states and republics, along with former Eastern bloc countries, were suddenly flooded with foreign consultants, funded by various multilateral and bilateral donor organizations (USAID, World Bank, International Finance Corporation, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, among others), many claiming to have the secret sauce that would ignite mixed market economies. When it came to laws that could enable such transformations, the proposals too often involved cut-and-paste jobs on laws from the consultant’s home country. I remember seeing verbatim excerpts from Connecticut’s housing condominium law being circulated for adoption in an Eastern European country as it worked to privatize hundreds of thousands of housing units in multifamily buildings. That type of copying of laws and policies from an entirely different context constitutes the worst kind of technical assistance delivered by international consultants.

My early visits to Ukraine involved a deep dive into existing laws, institutions, and on-the-ground practices, accompanied by the forging of trust relationships with key government counterparts who could enable or scuttle any changes. I remember well many meetings with Volodymyr Gusakov, first deputy minister of the Ministry of Construction and Architecture; Boris Chepkov, chairman of the State Committee on Land Resources; and Anatoly Dron, chairman of the State Committee on Housing and Communal Services. Volodymyr Nudelman, one of Ukraine’s leading planning experts, joined many of the meetings. Between disquisitions drawn from his encyclopedic knowledge of Ukrainian planning policies, he would plaintively ask, “Would it be all right if I told a joke?” His repertoire of Slavic humor, deeply ironic, equaled his planning knowledge and created a relaxed atmosphere that enhanced our collective work.

Our approach was expressly collaborative: my counterparts were the experts on state ownership of urban land while I was invited to consult about private land markets. None of us were expert in how to transition from one to the other. Consequently, we needed to pool our respective knowledge banks and imagine the path forward together.

One of my first steps was to convene a conference in Kyiv about land policies worldwide. Hundreds of Ukrainian government officials, professionals, and academics joined speakers from the United States and elsewhere to hear about everyone’s real estate systems. Speakers were exhorted not to advocate but to describe and, yes, to offer judgments of strengths and weaknesses. Grasping how a fully state-owned and state-administered land system worked seemed as alien to the private market country representatives as did private ownership to the Ukrainians. Boris Chepkov kept asking me how much land was privately owned in the United States. I was initially evasive, fearing that the ratio might become a Ukrainian goal. Of course, I ultimately told him (it is roughly 60 percent); thankfully it did not become official policy.

An early step desired by the Ukrainians involved changes to their laws to authorize private ownership of urban land. As an initial foray, Ukrainian counterparts and I prepared a ministerial decree enabling that type of ownership in advance of the broader legal changes that would have to navigate a much more difficult path through the Ukrainian parliament. Prime Minister Leonid Kuchma signed and issued the decree; it was a victory of sorts, but one that would hardly guarantee action on the ground.

To that end, with a primary team composed of a private Ukrainian lawyer (Volodymyr Nosik), an MIT student (Alex Gamota), a USAID official (Amy Osborne), the consulting firm PADCO, and my simultaneous translator (Valeriy Ponomerov, who was as close to a right arm as my actual right arm), along with Kharkiv mayor Yevhen Kushnaryov and land manager Lubov Pogulayeva, we designed one of the first-ever open competitive land auctions in the former Soviet Union. Our idea was to create a demonstration project that would be widely publicized, demonstrably successful, and ultimately replicable throughout the country.

Auctions could be a particularly effective way to accomplish privatization. They were relatively transparent, governed only by the highest responsible bid, and speedy. The Kharkiv auction preparation took roughly six months. We readied the legal and institutional framework to sell ownership and lease interests in a number of land parcels in downtown Kharkiv. [1]

The lead television station in Moscow, Ostankino, promised to broadcast the event. USAID officials from Kyiv and Washington were scheduled to attend. Two weeks before the auction, not one bidder had registered. I remember sitting in Ms. Pogulayeva’s office, distressed, saying how this would be an embarrassing disaster if the auction failed. She looked at me and said, in Russian, “Jerold, don’t worry. There will be bidders.” And there were. The auction went off without a hitch, with actual competitive bidding and long-term land leases sold. I never asked what happened in the two weeks to produce bidders. I didn’t really want to know.

My work took me to many Ukrainian cities. We rolled out the auction model to Lviv, Odessa, and Chernihiv. Chernihiv also served as the site for a demonstration project on zoning. I talked about housing condominium laws in Zaporizhzhia before hundreds of state-owned housing managers. The country seemed on the move, albeit slowly. Understanding the mechanisms of change, however, was not the same as effecting change. None of the essential infrastructure of land markets was present. There were no private real estate brokers, appraisers, lenders, developers, and other actors crucial for functioning land markets. There was no system for registering private titles to land. The judicial system was not geared to resolution of private conflicts. There was no history or culture of market-determined competition, without which all the legal and institutional changes would be that much harder to implement.

One of the most interesting collaborations involved a week-long tour of American real estate markets from Boston to Washington, DC, by roughly five percent of the Ukrainian parliament. I served as tour guide. Seeing is believing, but we didn’t sugarcoat the experience. As much as our visitors were impressed by the variety and quality of housing types, we showed them places where, as economists would say, market failures and inequitable outcomes proliferated. How could it be, in one of the richest countries in the world, that far too many families lacked adequate housing and other services? At least in Ukraine, the state provided housing for all. That reality could temper even the most ardent advocates of private ownership.

Looking back this many years later, our efforts at technical assistance seem idealistic and naive. We didn’t accomplish anything near what I had initially hoped. Demonstration projects did not scale out as planned. Adoption of laws did not mean implementation on the ground. The infrastructure needed to create functioning real estate markets remained incomplete. Generations of experience with state ownership would take generations to unlearn, even for those deeply motivated to move in that direction. The very idea that systems working in one country could be readily transferred to another would be challenged. Globalization in many respects has its limits. Seeing buildings in which I worked damaged or destroyed by Russian bombs shakes me to the core. I don’t see silver linings in the rampant destruction, but the idealistic and naive part of me also hopes that, if and when the horror ends, there will be opportunity for renewal which, if done well, can create a better future for Ukrainians.

[1] For those interested in learning more about the legal and institutional framework of land auctions in Ukraine, see Jerold Kayden, Volodymyr Nosik, and Alex Gamota, A Guide to Land Auctions in Ukraine (1995).

This piece was originally written for and printed in Harvard Design Magazine #50: “Today’s Global ,” in spring 2022

Jerold S. Kayden is the Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Founding Director of the Master in Real Estate Program, which will welcome its inaugural cohort of students in fall 2023. He previously served as co-chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design and director of the Urban Planning Program. His teaching and scholarship address issues of land use and environmental law, public and private development in cities, public space, urban disasters and climate change, and design competitions. His books include Privately Owned Public Space:The New York City Experience; Urban Disaster Resilience:New Dimensions from International Practice in the Built Environment; Landmark Justice:The Influence of William J. Brennan on America’s Communities; and Zoning and the American Dream:Promises Still To Keep.

Christina E. Crawford is assistant professor of architectural history at Emory University. Her research focuses on the transnational exchange of ideas about housing and urban form in the 20th century. She is the author of Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union (2022) and co-editor of Detroit-Moscow-Detroit: An Architecture for Industrialization, 1917-1945 (2023). Crawford holds a PhD and MArch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and was a Fulbright student in Ukraine in 2001-2002.

A Moratorium on New Construction?

“Yet what we need is a voluntary cessation, a conscious and fully consensual interruption. Without which there will be no tomorrow.”¹

The concept of sustainable construction does not hold meaning any longer. Real sustainability is an impossible endeavor and a delusion in the present modus operandi of global construction. From land consumption to material use, building is a destructive process: urbanization devours hectares of unbuilt land every year, and the construction industry relies intensively on resource extraction.²  Through mining, manufacturing, and building, the energy used in construction impacts the planet at a tectonic scale. Water bodies, ecosystems, topography, geology, climate, food systems, labor conditions, humans, and nonhumans everywhere are destroyed or damaged to propel voracious global supply chains.

The end of the world has been ongoing for many. From the tons of toxic bauxite residue stored in unstable pools in Hungary to the devastated social landscapes surrounding the coltan mines of Chile, this damage is a prerequisite of designed spaces, affecting all non-constructed surfaces—from forest to farmland.³ Despite loud calls to reexamine our faulty growth model, the expansionist global enterprise of land and resource exhaustion fueled by both construction and real estate development goes on relentlessly.⁴

Stop Building? 

The call for a moratorium on new construction emerges from these global urgencies and from the palpable lack of action on the side of the building industry and planning disciplines beyond flaccid corporate strategies (green labeling, carbon compensation, material reinvention, and LEED, for example). Devised to cover up ongoing devastation, construction’s greenwashing of its toll on the environment is deployed in full force. Little is done to curb the damage done through commodified and speculative real estate development and construction schemes. Moreover, global material use is expected to rebound with post-pandemic economic policies and to double by 2060; a third of this rise is attributable to construction materials.

And this is but a fraction of what ultimately makes up the built environment. The transformation of raw resources into exploitable architectural elements (aggregates to concrete; sand and silica to glass; petroleum to insulation foam) not only necessitates the combustion of fossil fuel at every turn, but also relies on a host of facilitating technologies. Automated mining systems and computer-aided drawing software, for example, steer an increase in the extraction of critical minerals including aluminum, cobalt, copper, graphite, lithium, manganese, nickel, platinum, tin, titanium, tungsten, and zinc, among others.

The front lines of extraction are moving in all directions, and rapid devastation is ongoing. Paradoxically described as unavoidably necessary in order to transition to less carbon-intensive lifestyles in selected parts of the planet, this commodity shift toward rare materials suggests that sustainable oil rigs and e-Caterpillars will be undertaking the greener enterprise of destruction we design.

Against the propagandizing of ecological concerns both for eco-fascist agendas and as a business driver of technofixes, a moratorium on new construction calls for a drastic change to building protocols while seeking to articulate a radical thinking framework to work out alternatives.

House Everyone 

Because housing is a human right and the mandate of the design disciplines, our fields stand at the difficult threshold between housing provision and devastation: How does one navigate the need for housing as well as the destructive practice of its construction? According to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) census of 2021, the median size of new single-family homes was 2,273 square feet, compared to 1,500 square feet in the 1960s, despite the shrinking of the median household size, down from 3.29 in the 1960s to 2.52 persons today.⁵ This trend sees more land, more materials, more appliances, and more infrastructures directed toward larger homes built to host fewer people, with debt at the core of its financing. In a talk at the GSD in February 2022, HUD secretary Marcia L. Fudge said that the days when one can have a plot to build a house were numbered—despite her lecture being titled “Building the World We Want to See.”⁶

If we jettison the maxim that the solution to the housing crisis is to build, myriad other possibilities come into view: decent minimum living wages, just protocols to housing access, rent control, zoning reforms, purchase of private property to provide public housing, fostering of collective ownership and forms of cohabitation, and alternative value generation schemes. These solutions allow us to move beyond the struggles and dichotomies that plague the debate: renting vs. ownership, YIMBYs vs. NIMBYs, nature vs. humans, and housing crisis mitigation vs. zero net emission, among others.

If new construction were to stop completely, even for a short while, the current built stock—buildings, infrastructure, materials—would have to be reassessed, and the productive and reproductive labor that goes into it necessarily would be revalued. Varying widely from well-paid skilled workers to exploited manual laborers, the labor force involved in construction remains mainly unautomated—and overlooked. We could anticipate the emergence of new societal and ecological values and a reevaluation of the labor involved in caring for buildings, from surveying the existing stock to engaging in reparative works to acts of daily upkeep.⁷

The effort ahead is immense; a different way of designing the world emerges, one that demands a careful assessment of present and vacant inventory, strong policies on occupancy and against demolition, anti-vacancy measures, densification plans, maintenance protocols, end-of-life etiquette for materials, and overall upgrading tactics. These will all need to be imagined, formulated, planned, and implemented—according to the needs of the context.

Who Is to Say Build or not Build? 

At the same time, a moratorium’s global validity must be interrogated. The geography of harmful extraction and the political economy of construction are mirrored in today’s neocolonial modes of extraction capitalism, with gendered and racialized populations most affected. Assuming that the bauxite extracted in Guinea ends up on the facades of pencil towers in New York, shouldn’t a moratorium be limited to new construction where a consolidated stock already exists? Indeed, the integrity of the sustainability narrative is belied by the extent to which environmental laws have been successfully weaponized and how unpersuasive frugality arguments continue to be.

As Peter Marcuse argues, “the promotion of ‘sustainability’ may simply encourage the sustaining of the unjust status quo and how the attempt to suggest that everyone has common interests in ‘sustainable urban development’ masks very real conflicts of interest.”⁸ Achille Mbembe spells it out: “In Africa especially, but in many places in the Global South, energy-intensive extraction, agricultural expansion, predatory sales of land, and destruction of forests will continue unabated.”⁹ Thus, with overbuilding and resource consumption on one side and lack of housing and material extraction on the other, a new construction moratorium could be restricted to extractive built nations and adopted by countries incrementally along GDP lines.

Upon closer inspection, the need for nuance emerges. In Cairo, there are 12 million vacant units, high vacancy rates grounded in locally specific conditions such as questionable rent control laws, proactive suburban development state programs, and a lack of trust in banking institutions.¹⁰ In Costa Rica, the bulk of new construction consists of coastal residential units aimed at tourists or expatriates, fueling socio-environmental issues of displacement and degradation.¹¹ In South Africa, the demolition of scarce public housing to make way for market-rate units shows the limitation of the construction-as-solution storyline.¹²

Nevertheless, building more is heralded everywhere as the sole answer, a debatable leitmotif served up from the Bay Area to Mumbai that conceals the reality of the commodification of housing fueled by debt financing. Housing needs are not the question when home insecurity is such an acute problem for many, and when it is true that crucial infrastructures are lacking in some regions.¹³ Thus, construction is not to be condemned outright when there are such vast disparities in what different countries can provide. But while contextual complexities require a deeper investigation into where and what is constructed and what should not be built, a moratorium on new construction challenges the incapacity of the sector to envision alternative large-scale housing provision schemes beyond building new.

Beyond GDPs and other faulty measurements, beyond moral confines and neo-Malthusian indictments, how are we to grapple with sustainability as a contested concept, legacies of degrowth theory, green capitalism, and problematic CO₂ reduction policies becoming the stuff of riots?¹⁴ How many of the thousands of new housing units built every year everywhere are accessible to those who need them most? How can we optimize and maximize our existing stock before extracting new materials? How do the design disciplines face their complicit role in environmental degradation, social injustice, and climate crisis, and challenge the current system of global construction?

Imagining Possibilities 

The following vignettes play out in various locations to answer some of these interrogations. Drawing from A Moratorium on New Construction, an option studio that took place at the GSD in spring 2022, these ideas point to what must stop and what needs to change, from India to the United States. In contemplating redistributive modes of ownership and communing and  questioning the standard claim of building right, predatory real estate practices, high-tech-heavy solutions, and the assumption that architects must build anew rather than practice methods of repair and prolonging, a vision for a material future relying on our current built stock emerges.

In Mumbai, a city where affordable housing is in high demand, the ongoing demise of chawls—collective units built in the 1930s for mill workers, and now home to active but modest communities—epitomizes the rapid destruction of affordable housing at the hands of the state and the private sector. High-rises for wealthier owners replace the chawls, and the tenants are displaced. Devashree Shah (MArch ’22) argues for a moratorium on the demolition of chawls and all subsequent new construction. But because aging chawls’ structures require upkeep, Shah proposes a post-moratorium design strategy that envisions physical and social repair as a unified design task.

From maintenance protocols (cleaning, clearing trash, painting, and re-plastering), to reparative works (replacing broken shingles, sistering, straightening structures), to strategic interventions (co-living arrangements, shared amenities), to additions aimed at increasing social capital (community kitchens, daycare centers), to strengthening neighborhood networks (pooling capital, sharing facilities), the design of an entire repair strategy at every scale advocates for a value shift, one that privileges care labor above newness. Primarily undertaken by gendered and ostracized populations, upkeep work is considered belittling to many. Shah’s project challenges this perception through a socio-spatial tandem design by illuminating the crucial relevance of repair work both for buildings and communities—in a context where new construction is halted.

On the shores of the Yucatán Peninsula, Tulum is the latest Instagrammable ecotourism destination, with its pristine beaches overlooking the Caribbean Sea, which already is dotted with so-called eco-resorts and sustainable Airbnbs. Tourism growth is highly contested by local communities who oppose the construction of a high-speed Mayan Train aimed at ushering in more visitors. Indigenous voices have pointed to the harm caused to the area’s fragile ecosystem by constant growth within their economies. Turning these calls into a radical design brief, Gerardo Corona Guerrero (MAUD ’23) designs the gradual recess of tourism activity in Tulum.

The project disputes the success story of ecotourism and imposes as a first step a moratorium on tourism-oriented infrastructure. Considering that the “reconstruction of nature” is an equivocal concept bordering on eco-fascism, the project embarks instead on an incremental approach, phasing measures across a time span of 70 years, from reparative ecologies to deconstruction and material reuse. It articulates a decolonial understanding of degrowth toward a negotiated human stewardship of the land.

Going against the grain, Aziz Alshayeb (MAUD ’23) proposes a critique of the current trend of demolishing highways. He exposes a national agenda of hardcore gentrification and CO2-heavy development operating under the auspices of post-oil mobility and community betterment. In this context, the project proposes a moratorium on the demolition of Highway I-45 in Houston and puts forward a counternarrative to highway demolition that is based on Sara Ahmed’s concept of “complaint as resistance.”¹⁵

Taking community grievance as mandate, the project seeks to listen to all—from anyone who has registered a complaint, and from children to bees—to articulate an alternative program to the kind of solutionism that currently plagues design. With tools including legal frameworks and ecological measures, the project pushes against the evils of urbanization, including environmental degradation and gentrification and their manifold consequences. What emerges is a future of peaceful cohabitation between nonhumans, humans, and our obsolete infrastructures.

Starting from the perspective that the single-family home is an unsustainable, energy-intensive housing type that is itself fundamentally grounded in colonization, Bailey Morgan Brown (MArch ’22, MDes ’22), a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, proposes a moratorium on suburban sprawl for Edmond, Oklahoma, a site she describes as being paradigmatic of settler-colonialism. She argues that the single-family house exemplifies the combined burden of legal, economic, environmental, social, and environmental pressures, in the form of mortgage financing, lawn care, air conditioning, car infrastructure, normativity, materialism, and low occupancy rates, among others.

Going further, Brown develops a protocol for establishing a sovereign suburban space, articulating a plan for how “land back” would actually play out. Her plan unfolds into a multilayered strategy that includes a land transfer of “unassigned lands” to a Tribal Cooperative Council; a mandate against the displacement of existing residents; the termination of property lines and of zoning and the creation of new land use definitions; and the development of ambiguous, contested, fluid, and temporal spaces for energy production, medicinal vegetation, nonhumans, crop production, and new models for taxation.

These few examples speak of the incredible potential of what design can do if new construction is not an option—the potential to confront the built environment’s past, present, and future and to engage with existing building stock to question the current economic model of development and to move forward toward a better industry. Pausing construction problematizes the narrative of progress and techno-positivism that propel capitalist societies as well as the mandates for their design. Buttressed by an imperative for boundless economic growth proffered by postcolonial powers, those mandates sell “a better life for all humanity—a mentality that continues to structure global asymmetries,” as articulated by Anna Tsing.¹⁶ 

Nubian architect and decolonial scholar Menna Agha frames the call to “stop building to start constructing” as a prerequisite to setting off the reconstruction and rehabilitation of the built environments of the racialized, gendered populations bearing the brunt of ecological and social devastation.¹⁷ A pause would also allow the design professions to pivot toward resource stewardship, to remodel what we do and deploy design’s organizational capacity to (begin to) think about new forms of emancipated practice, to engage in remedial work, and to establish the care of the living as our sole priority.¹⁸ Somewhere between a thought-experiment and a call for action, a moratorium on new construction is a leap of faith to envision a less extractive future, made of what we have. It’s about building less, building with what exists, and caring for it.

 

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is an architect, urban designer, and Assistant Professor of Architectural and Urban Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Most recently, she was Assistant Professor of Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she taught studios and seminars and, in 2021, launched the initiative A Global Moratorium on New Construction, which interrogates current protocols of development and urges deep reform of the planning disciplines to address earth’s climate and social emergencies.

 

¹ Achille Mbembe and Carolyn Shread, “The Universal Right to Breathe,” Critical Inquiry 47, no. S2 (Winter 2021): S58-S62, https://doi.org/10.1086/711437.

² See David Harvey, Explanation in Geography (Jaipur, India: Rawat Publications, 2015).

³ See Martin Arboleda, Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2020).

⁴ “A Global Moratorium on New Construction” was an initiative started in April 2021 and undertaken with B+, in the form of four roundtables that generated a wealth of ideas instrumental to articulate this work. I would like to thank for their generous inputs: Cynthia Deng & Elif Erez, Noboru Kawagishi, Omar Nagati & Beth Stryker, Sarah Nichols, and Ilze Wolff (1st roundtable, April 2021); Menna Agha, Sarah Barth, Leon Beck, Silvia Gioberti, and Kerstin Müller (2nd roundtable, June 2021); Connor Cook, Rhiarna Dhaliwal, Elisa Giuliano, Luke Jones, Artem Nikitin, Davide Tagliabue, and Sofia Pia Belenky, (Residents of V—A—C Zattere with Space Caviar (3rd roundtable, July 2021); Manuel Ehlers, Saskia Hebert, Tobias Hönig & Andrijana Ivanda, Sabine Oberhuber, Deane Simpson, and Ramona Pop (4th roundtable, August 2021); as well as Arno Brandlhuber, Olaf Grawert, Angelika Hinterbrandner, Roberta Jurčić, Gregor Zorzi, and Rahul Mehrotra for supporting this experiment.

⁵ Unites States Census Bureau, “Highlights of Annual 2020 Characteristics of New Housing,” Census.org (2020), https://www.census.gov/construction/chars/highlights.html .

⁶ Marcia L. Fudge, “Building the World We Want to See: What Do We Want Our Legacy to Be?,” in John T. Dunlop Lecture (Harvard University Graduate School of Design: 2022).

⁷ Thanks to Sarah Nichols for articulating this idea in the frame of the first roundtable, “Stop Building?” in April 2021 at the Harvard GSD.

⁸ Peter Marcuse, “Sustainability Is Not Enough,” Environment and Urbanization 10, no. 2 (October 1998).

⁹ Mbembe and Shread, “The Universal Right to Breathe.”

¹⁰ Yahia Shawkat and Mennatullah Hendawy, “Myths and Facts of Urban Planning in Egypt,” The Built Environment Observatory (2016). Omar Nagati and Beth Stryker in Stop Building? A Global Moratorium on New Construction, eds. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes and B+ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2021).

¹¹ See Andreas Neef, Tourism, Land Grabs and Displacement: The Darker Side of the Feel-Good Industry (London: Routledge, 2021).

¹² Ilze Wolff in Stop Building? A Global Moratorium on New Construction, eds. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes and B+ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2021).

¹³ See Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (New York: Crown/Archetype, 2016).

¹⁴ Marcuse, “Sustainability Is Not Enough.”

¹⁵ See Sara Ahmed, Complaint! (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).

¹⁶ Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 23.

¹⁷ Menna Agha in Pivoting Practices. A Global Moratorium on New Construction, eds. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes and Roberta Jurčić (Zurich: Swiss Institute of Technology, 2021).

¹⁸ Elif Erez and Cynthia Deng, “Care Agency: A 10-Year Choreography of Architectural Repair” (Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2021).