“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).

2022 Holiday Book Round-up: Recent Publications by GSD Faculty and Alumni

Looking for a design-related book this holiday season? Look no further than this list of recent and upcoming publications by Harvard Graduate School of Design faculty and alumni. From artificial intelligence and postwar Japanese architecture to real estate development and the architecture of UN peacekeeping missions, this roundup showcases the wide range of books published by members of the GSD community.

Through the triple lens of history, application, and theory, Artificial Intelligence and Architecture: From Research to Practice   (Birkhäuser, 2022) by Stanislas Chaillou (MArch ’19) provides a survey of artificial intelligence’s encounter with architecture and unveils the promise and challenges AI holds within the field and beyond.

BLUE: The Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions (Actar, 2023) is part of the ongoing activism, research, design, and advocacy work of Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (FAST). Author Malkit Shoshan, design critic in urban planning and design, explores the UN peacekeeping mission as an urban phenomenon and shows how designs rooted in local cultures and empowerment can address a history of violence. The book builds on earlier presentations, including the exhibition BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions for the Dutch Pavilion at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale.

In his new book, Constructing Latin America: Architecture, Politics, and Race at the Museum of Modern Art (Yale University Press, 2022), Patricio del Real  (MArch ’92) examines multiple architecture exhibitions and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) as a cultural weapon. The book looks at MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design as it navigated the thorny politics of Pan-Americanism and the cultural conflicts of the second postwar era.

In Cyberfeminism Index , hackers, scholars, artists, and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology. Edited by Mindy Seu (MDes ’19), the book celebrates the multiplicity of practices that fall under this imperfect categorization and makes visible cyberfeminism’s long-ignored origins and its expansive legacy. “This book served as my doorway to cyberfeminism and I now see what an energetic continent awaits me. Anywhere I stepped it burned my hair off, it’s that brilliantly intense,” writes Kevin Kelly, founding editor Wired magazine.

In Designing Landscape Architectural Education: Studio Ecologies for Unpredictable Futures (Routledge, 2022), Rosalea Monacella, design critic in landscape architecture, asks designers and academic practitioners to describe their own work through an ecological lens, and then to articulate design approaches for developing new practices in landscape architecture teaching. The book draws on the manifold issues of the climate crisis as a set of drivers to examine a range of innovative design approaches to address the current and future priorities of the discipline.

Birkhäuser Press has released an expanded second edition of Drawn to Design: Analyzing Architecture through Freehand Drawing by Eric Jenkins (MDes ’99). The book examines research in fields outside of architecture, such as the cognitive sciences and physiology, to further understand how sketching fosters design thinking.

Formulations: Architecture, Mathematics, Culture (MIT Press, 2022) is an investigation of mathematics as it was drawn, encoded, imagined, and interpreted by architects on the eve of digitization in the mid-20th century. Author Andrew Witt, associate professor in practice of architecture, draws from the seminar “Narratives of Design Science” and examines the visual, methodological, and cultural intersections between architecture and mathematics. Through an intercultural exchange with other disciplines, he argues, architecture adapted not only the shapes and surfaces of mathematics but also its values and epistemic ideals.

Inscriptions: Architecture Before Speech (Harvard Design Press, 2022) presents a theory of contemporary architecture that spans the work of 112 practices in 750 images. Against the popular characterization of contemporary architecture as a centerless field where anything goes and everything is possible, K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory and director of the Master in Design Studies Program, and Andrew Holder, associate professor of architecture and director of the Master in Architecture I Program, argue that much recent work belongs to a collective undertaking. The ensuing work is nothing less than democratically optimistic in its wide appeal and challenging in its cuts against convention.

ORO Editions published Live Learn Eat: Architecture (2022) by Anthony Poon (MArch ’92). Architectural Digest contributor Michael Webb writes, “Anthony Poon’s passion for music inspires a vibrant architecture that engages its users and the environment. This monograph explores three fields in which Poon Design has excelled: housing, schools, and restaurants. It explains how they enrich the experience of living, learning, and eating, and promote social interaction. Affordability and sustainability are hallmarks of Poon’s designs, which fuse quality and innovation.”

Originally published in Italian in 1964, Manfredo Tafuri’s book L’Architettura Moderna in Giappone explored Japan’s postwar architecture, including its metabolist movement. Tafuri, who had never visited Japan before writing the book, used photographs, articles, and texts to explore the country’s modern architecture. Edited and introduced by Mohsen Mostafavi, Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, Modern Architecture in Japan: Manfredo Tafuri (MACK, 2022) introduces English speakers to the influential book for the first time.

Featuring historical and contemporary images of architecture at the threshold between water and land, Occupation: Boundary: Art, Architecture, and Culture at the Water (ORO Editions, 2022) by Cathy Simon (MArch ’69) examines the social, political, and cultural factors that influence the evolution of the urban waterfront as seen through production created from art and design practices. Together, the instincts, reflections, and architectural production collected here evidence the role of art and design in the creation of an equitable and inviting public realm.

Now in its fourth edition, Professional Real Estate Development: the ULI Guide to the Business (The Urban Land Institute, 2023), co-authored by Richard Peiser, Michael D. Spear Professor of Real Estate Development, covers the nuts and bolts of developing all types of real estate, including multifamily, office, retail, and industrial projects. Thoroughly updated, this new edition includes numerous case studies of actual projects as well as small-scale examples that are ideal for anyone new to real estate development.

John Ronan (MArch ’91) has written Out of the Ordinary (Actar Publishers, 2022). This publication on the work of John Ronan Architects explores the firm’s spatial-material approach to architecture and the underlying themes of its typologically diverse output. Out of the Ordinary proposes an architecture of innovation rising from ordinary concerns about relationships, not form.

John Gendall (MDes ’06) released Rocky Mountain Modern: Contemporary Alpine Homes . Published with Monacelli Press (2022), this book presents 18 new and recent houses built in the Rocky Mountain region, from Canada to New Mexico, examining the relationship between aesthetics and the functional demands of what can be an extreme environmental context. It situates these projects in a broader historical arc by presenting a brief history of architectural modernism in the region, including designs from Mies van der Rohe, Breuer, and Neutra.

Verify in Field: Projects and Conservations with Höweler + Yoon (Park Books, 2022), Höweler + Yoon Architecture’s second book, highlights verification as an integral part of the design process and demonstrates it as a productive tool to test ideas and act on the world. The book examines the discipline’s pressing questions, as they relate to verification, uncertainty, and design agency.  Essays by Eric Höweler, associate professor of architecture and architecture thesis coordinator, and J. Meejin Yoon cover topics including means and methods, the public realm, energy and environments, the construction detail, and social media.

OFFICE on the United States flag and American Architecture (Model)

As midterm elections approach in November across the United States and citizens exercise the right to vote, OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen offer the following statement on the image of the flag that is included in American Architecture (Model), on view on the front patio of Gund Hall until April 2023.

Atop the pavilion stand three objects: a model of a technical box, a model of a solar panel, and a model of a flag. Together they stand as symbols of architecture. The simple structure of the pavilion foregrounds these technological and emblematic features as pure signifiers, emphasizing architecture’s representational dimension. But whereas the solar panel is a literal symbol of the urgent necessity to address climate change, the image of the United States flag provokes diverse interpretations and demands explanation.

The flag is a poignant symbol saturated with manifold meanings, any one of which may be true for those encountering it—not only within the United States, but also around the world, where nearly anyone who is confronted by the flag has been affected by some form of American hegemony. The flag epitomizes a fundamental contradiction central to the United States’ origin story—the way in which democratic values are and have been simultaneously extended and ruthlessly denied. Over the course of its political history, the flag has been claimed by both the right and left. It has stood as a symbol of liberation and colonization, war making and peace keeping. It has been taken up by abolitionist and pro-slavery causes, and has been championed by immigrants and nativists alike. Most recently, the flag has been embraced by demagogic populist and white nationalist movements, prompting liberals and progressives to distance themselves from it. Overall, it is important to acknowledge that through time the flag has served as the ultimate symbol of shifting, if not conflicting national values.

In the United States, the national flag is given a prominence rarely seen in other countries. It adorns government buildings and single-family homes. It hangs in airports and schools, and above the statue of John Harvard in Harvard Yard. As a commonplace object, it has been appropriated by consumerist culture and transformed into a pop symbol. It has also served as a means of exposing longstanding histories of violence, racism, and sexism, in works ranging anywhere from The Simpsons to works by visual artists including Jasper Johns, Cady Noland, Tseng Kwong Chi, David Hammons, Barbara Kruger, Gordon Parks, and Ed Ruscha.

The flag atop the pavilion is not intended as a real flag. It is an image of a flag printed on vinyl, as a billboard. Detached from its political context and aestheticized as an artwork or architectural ornament, we hope it sustains reinterpretation as a readymade, one that recalls the flag while creating critical distance and space for discussion and reflection in its abstraction. The pavilion was envisaged as a public space available for everyone’s use, as a place for debate and encounter, politics and culture, education and humanism, and most importantly one of embrace of the diversity of the Harvard community. We should not be naïve, however, and ignore the multitude of visceral and critical responses the image of the flag provokes. On the contrary, we hope to acknowledge and provide an opening for scrutiny of the flag’s symbolism, grounded in the perspectives and experiences of those who encounter it.

 

How an urban design studio is proposing a more equitable approach to Boston’s building boom

Over the past decade, the Boston/Cambridge area has attracted tremendous attention and investment as a global center for technology innovation. Major hospitals and research institutions (so-called “meds and eds”) have been the driving forces behind innovation and enterprise districts arising across the city, including Kendall Square, the Seaport, and the planned Harvard Allston Enterprise Research campus. Across the United States and globally, these districts represent a relatively recent product of the market, an urban typology that’s not yet well established. To Andrea Leers, design critic in the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Urban Planning and Design department, this kind of development is a double-edged sword. She explains, “It’s powerful, and it’s bringing jobs and economic benefit of all kinds, but it is also a kind of community killer because it’s frequently a mono-use and fairly exclusive development type.”

This spring, Leers’s Urban Design studio, “Leveraging Boston’s Building Boom to Advance Equity” (taught with Associate Instructor Anthony Averbeck), took on a real site as a case study in proposing a more vibrant, inclusive, and welcoming type of innovation district in Boston. “The task that we set for ourselves was how to build on the energy and initiative of this burst of economic investment to build more than a cluster of lab buildings and associated facilities, but something that could really benefit and connect with the adjacent neighborhoods to bring a sense of equity—not an island of privilege—to this site,” she says.

Harvard has an obligation to lend its creativity and research to making its home city as wonderful as it can be, to take part in its community, and to contribute,” Leers points out. “I think that there was real value in having a serious look at Boston itself.

Andrea Leers

With its proximity to Moakley Park and Carson Beach to the north, Dorchester Bay to the east, a housing development and the institutional campuses of UMass Boston and the JFK Library to the south, and the diverse neighborhood of Dorchester to the west, the site is ideally located, but plagued by accessibility challenges. “The site is well served by transit and by car, but made an island effectively by the elevated highways, train lines, and massive traffic circles,” Leers says. “It’s a great site that’s impossible to get to.”

This underdeveloped land, currently a 1,300-space parking lot for UMass students that was formerly a convention center and shopping mall, is a blank slate for a porous new district that can leverage public transit to link nearby communities with economic opportunity through jobs, services, stores, the waterfront, and the city beyond. “[The students] really enjoyed tackling a real site that they could go to visit,” Leers says. “They could walk through the adjacent neighborhoods and get a feel for the place, and then begin to imagine things on it.”

Students undertook an initial hands-on research and analysis phase before diving into the development of their studio projects. Physical engagement with the site, research, and guest lectures from the Dorchester community, UMass leadership, and GSD faculty enriched the students’ understanding of the area’s topography, history, and demography, and helped them identify the unique possibilities and challenges that informed their design strategy. Students also looked at global approaches to innovation districts and other waterfront development precedents to analyze programmatic needs and opportunities specific to the Dorchester site.

Building upon this shared research and analysis, students split into teams to develop and test their design concepts. Through drawings, physical models, and building studies, the students engaged issues of urban form, circulation, and open space, exploring the specific qualities that make a place vibrant but also useful and inclusive to a diverse range of constituents.

Dorchester Innovation Commons,” designed by Pinyang Chen (MAUD ’22) and Zhuoer Mu (MAUD ’22), features a chevron-shaped development, with a network of streets and buildings widening to either side of a central green. The intent was to draw people from the transit hub down through the district to the waterfront park, via this porous central promenade.

In “Pathways to Prosperity,” a model designed by Danny Kolosta (MUP ’22) and Adriana Lasso-Harrier (MUP ’22), research and interviews with Boston educational and vocational experts inspired the inclusion of three on-site spaces—the Nonprofit Exchange, the Adult Success Navigator, and the Youth Excelerator—that create job training and educational opportunities to help residents gain access to the innovation economy.

“Greenway to the Bay: A Stroll Through the Neighborhood,” a model developed by Dianne Lê (MLA ’22 and Danny Kolosta (MUP ’22), organizes the site through the landscape, anchored by a new diagonal greenway that connects the site and adjacent neighborhoods to the harbor.

The “Well-Tempered Grid” by Saad Boujane (MAUD ’23) and Naksha Satish (MAUD ’22) proposes an urban fabric that reconciles the different street networks and land uses surrounding the site. Disrupting the new grid are strategically placed and distinct blocks of buildings that respond to the adjacent conditions: a gateway node housing biotech and pharmaceutical labs, a learning commons interfacing with the residential neighborhood, and an eco-innovation hub on the waterfront.

The students’ concepts for the Dorchester Bay site present varied approaches to density, building scale, programming, and urban frameworks; but the exercise yielded critical learnings that were shared across the board. Innovation districts are a recent phenomenon, and a typology that’s not yet well defined—there’s no standard that can serve all sites. They discovered that a coherent blend of street networks, open spaces, access to the water, and inviting places to go matter more than the density and composition of buildings.

“Going in, we were really concerned with what was it going to be like to have so much building in this place where there wasn’t any and nothing like it nearby,” recalls Leers. “And in fact, that turned out not to be the key question. It was really interesting to learn the importance of just making it a normal piece of city.” Critically, integration of programmatic anchors that engage the community—whether training or education facilities, spaces for family recreation, childcare centers, and neighborhood retail—are crucial to making innovation districts more inclusive to and integrated with their neighbors.

“Plains and Pampa: Decolonizing ‘America,’” by Ana María León Crespo—Excerpt from Harvard Design Magazine

It is a common trope for scholars from South America, Central America, and the Caribbean to argue that America is the continent, and not the country. It is less common to consider what the idea of America as a territorial unit might imply. Thinking about the region as a whole prompts us to notice similar processes and shared politics, particularly in reference to decolonization and decolonial discourses.[1]

Indigenous scholars in settler colonial countries such as Australia, Canada, and the United States have advanced theories of decolonization as the rematriation of Indigenous land and life. [2] In contrast, Latin American decolonial theorists—known as the Modernity/Coloniality group—have focused their critique on the role of colonialism in the construction of modernity.[3] Both terms stem from the discourse on resistance and struggle by Martinique intellectuals Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, whose argument cuts across these groups and highlights the role of Black studies within both—a complicated intersection that I’m unable to address in this piece. [4]

Given the increased use of these terms, it is important to understand the slippage between decolonization and decoloniality, which have in many cases been conflated. More urgently, both concepts have often been reduced to apolitical notions of increased geographical coverage, eloquently summarized by Anni Ankitha Pullagura as the notion of “making empire more inclusive.”[5] Rather than cede ground to this depoliticized inclusion, the challenge in thinking through the idea of decolonizing “America”—or any territory for that matter—is that of centering the voices excluded by empire. Land and its inhabitation, occupation, or possession plays a key role in this conversation. The way we situate ourselves within it has the potential to redefine the history of architecture as well as architecture itself.

Decolonization points to the impact of settler colonialism—a type of colonialism in which the Indigenous population is replaced by an invasive settler society. Meanwhile, decoloniality is less geographically determined, and seeks to critique colonialism as an epistemic framework whose violence is present in all locations, even in colonizer regions. In doing so, decolonial theory can sometimes place too much emphasis on Eurocentrism, eliding the internal conflicts highlighted by what decolonization theory describes as the “entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave.” [6]

Thinking through this structure, decolonization points to the multiple ways in which the development of settler colonialism—in countries such as the United States but also, I argue, Argentina—is enmeshed in processes of capital extraction that have racialized populations and depleted the land. Complementing this discourse, decoloniality reveals the ways in which these processes are constitutive of modernity itself, understanding the European arrival to America as a component of the acceleration of global commerce that links modernization, capitalism, and empire.

A brief example highlights how comparing these different histories through these combined theoretical frameworks can reveal some blind spots. The independence movements in both the US and Argentina were led by European descendants eager for political independence from Europe and more economic power. While in other countries Indigeneity was strategically appropriated in the formation of national identity (particularly in countries with monumental Indigenous architecture, such as Mexico and Peru), in settler colonial societies Indigenous peoples were seen as a threat to the construction of the nation.[7] Thus upon gaining independence, both the US and Argentina targeted the Indigenous populations that inhabited what they conceived as their land, resulting in a series of extermination campaigns with the specific objective of appropriating Indigenous territory.

Human and non-human agents have inhabited the continent for millennia, benefitting from mutually sustaining relationships. The aggressive hunting of the bison in the US, and the introduction of non-Indigenous species such as cattle and swine in both countries, radically transformed this landscape.[8] The replacement of local staples with more profitable, non-Indigenous crops echoes the aggressive replacement of Indigenous people including Anishinaabe groups in the north and Mapuche, Aymara, and other groups in the south. Taken together, these are the processes of settler capitalism, the primary goal of which is the transformation of land into a site of extraction. The role of the US Plains and the Argentinian pampas in the construction of these countries’ national identities highlights how the mythification of the land is a component of its commodification. These and subsequent histories of land dispossession, occupation, extraction, and capital constitute our American modernity.

Decolonization points to the status of America as occupied land, and decoloniality reveals the role of this occupation in the production of modernity. Understanding the intersection between the two allows us to turn toward new relationships with the land—relationships that might dismantle settler frameworks and center previously silenced voices. While decolonization and decoloniality have different, overlapping definitions, it is their shared politics that suggest a different approach to land and its history. Nick Estes, historian and citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, titled his groundbreaking book on Indigenous resistance with the beautiful words Our History Is the Future. [9] Indeed, the histories we learn, research, and teach open up other futures. By studying the environments that peel away settler narratives of buildings and landscapes, we can open the way toward decolonized and decolonial futures.

Ana María León Crespo is an architect and a historian of objects, buildings, and landscapes. Her work traces how spatial politics shape the modernity and coloniality of the Americas. León teaches at the Harvard GSD and is cofounder of several collaborations laboring to broaden the reach of architectural history.

[1] The Decolonizing Pedagogies Workshop (2018—) and the Settler Colonial City Project (2019—), both co-founded with Andrew Herscher, have been key in understanding these topics. The students of “Histories of Architecture Against” (Fall 2019) at the University of Michigan helped me think through these categories. A longer, earlier version of this text was originally presented in Mexico City at the CIHU congress in Fernando Luiz Lara and Reina Loredo’s panel “Rompiendo Fronteras Coloniales.” I am thankful to their call to think about these histories.

[2] See Eve Tuck (Aleut) and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1:1 (2012): 3.

[3] The Modernity/Coloniality group includes the work of Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Ramón Grosfoguel, Arturo Escobar, Fernando Coronil, Javier Sanjinés, Enrique Dussel, and others. The project starts roughly in 1998 and includes both collective and individual books.

[4] Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Éditions Reclame, 1950) and Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (France: Éditions Maspero, 1961). For more on the intersection between Black and Native studies see Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

[5] Anni Ankitha Pullagura in the introduction of her recent CAA panel with Anuradha Vikram, “A Third Museum is Possible: Towards a Decolonial Curatorial Practice.” Collegiate Art Association Annual Conference, 14 February 2020, Chicago, IL. In working through these ideas I’m also indebted to Ananda Cohen-Aponte’s beautiful response to “Working with Decolonial Theory in the Early Modern Period,” CAA 13 February 2020, Chicago IL.

[6] Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” 1. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui has made an eloquent critique of the Modernity/Coloniality group from an Indigenous perspective. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization,” South Atlantic Quarterly (2011), 111(1): 95-109. For a conversation across these differences, see “Thinking and Engaging with the Decolonial: A Conversation Between Walter D. Mignolo and Wanda Nanibush,” in Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 45 (Spring/Summer 2018): 24-29.

[7] This is not to say that Indigenous peoples have not been under attack in societies that do not strictly fit settler colonial frameworks.

[8] For an environmental history after settler occupation in New England, see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).

[9] Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (London: Verso, 2019).

This piece was originally written for, and printed in, Harvard Design Magazine #48: “America ,” 2021

Excerpt from Harvard Design Magazine: “The Perpetual Stranger” by Elijah Anderson

What is driving the surge of incidents in which white people have called the police to report Black people who are simply going about their business—hanging out at Starbucks, birding in Central Park, or as was the case recently for a small group of middle-class Black women, talking too loudly on a train in California wine country.

Part of the answer has to do with the ubiquity of cell phones, which facilitate rapid reporting of racial incidents to police and the news media, along with social media, which bring news of the same incidents to the public with nearly equal speed. Yet there is also a sociological explanation.

White people typically avoid the Black space, but Black people are required to navigate the white space as a condition of their existence.

And many white people have not adjusted to the idea that Black people now appear more often in “white spaces”—especially in places of privilege, power, and prestige—or just in places where they were historically unwelcome. When Black people do appear in such places, and do not show what may be regarded as “proper” deference, some white people want them out. Subconsciously or explicitly, they want to assign or banish them to a place I have called the “iconic ghetto”—to the stereotypical space in which they think all Black people belong, a segregated space for second-class citizens.

A lag between the rapidity of Black progress and white acceptance of that progress is responsible for this impulse. It was exacerbated by the previous presidential administration, which emboldened white racists with its racially charged rhetoric and exclusionist immigration policies.

Over the past half-century, the United States has undergone a profound racial incorporation process that has resulted in the largest Black middle class in history—a population that no longer feels obligated to stay in historically “Black” spaces, or to defer to white people. When members of this Black middle class (and other darker-skinned Americans, too) appear in civil society today, and especially in “white” spaces, they often demand a regard that accords with their rights, obligations, and duties as full citizens of the United States of America.

Yet many white people fundamentally reject that Black people are owed such regard, and indeed often feel that their own rights and social statuses have somehow been abrogated by contemporary racial inclusion. They seek to push back on the recent progress in race relations, and may demand deference on the basis of white skin privilege.

As these whites observe Black people navigating the “white,” privileged spaces of our society, they experience a sense of loss or a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. They may feel an acute need to “correct” what is before their eyes, to square things, or to set the “erroneous” picture right—to reestablish cognitive consonance. White people need to put the Black interlopers in their place, literally and figuratively. Black people must have their behavior corrected, and they must be directed back to “their” neighborhoods and designated social spaces.

Not bold enough to try to accomplish this feat alone, many of these self-appointed color-line monitors seek help from wherever they can find it—from the police, for instance. The “interlopers” may simply want to visit their condo’s swimming pool, or to sit in Starbucks or meet friends there before ordering drinks, something white people typically do without a second thought, or take a nap in a student dorm common room, make a purchase in an upscale store, or jog through a “white” neighborhood.

For the offense of straying—for engaging in ordinary behavior in public and being Black at the same time—they incur the “white gaze” along with a call to the police. And we all know what can happen then. When the police have killed Black people—which seems epidemic—they have almost never been held accountable. The George Floyd case was an exception.

In times past, before the civil rights revolution, the color line was more clearly marked. Both white and Black people knew their “place,” and for the most part, observed it. When people crossed that line—Black people, anyway—they faced legal penalties or extrajudicial violence. In those times, to live while Black was to be American and nominally free but to reside firmly within a virtual color caste—essentially, to live behind the veil, as W.E.B. Du Bois put it in The Souls of Black Folk.

Continue reading on the Harvard Design Magazine website…

“The Perpetual Stranger” by Elijah Anderson is excerpted from Issue No. 49 of Harvard Design Magazine: Publics. It has been adapted by the author from his new book, Black in White Space: The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

Summer Reading 2022

Looking for something design-related to read this August? In this list of recent publications by GSD faculty, alumni, and students, you can find everything from a deep dive into cross-laminated timber to a murder mystery set during a design competition.

John Ronan (MArch ’91) recently published Out of the Ordinary  (Actar Publishers, 2022), showcasing the firm of John Ronan Architects and its spatial-material approach to architecture.

Stanislas Chaillou (MArch ’19)’s Artificial Intelligence and Architecture: From Research to Practice  (Birkhäuser, 2022) explores the history, application, and theory of AI’s relationship to architecture.

Bert De Jonghe (MDes ’21, DDes ’24) examines the intense transformation of Greenland through the lens of urbanization in Inventing Greenland: Designing an Arctic Nation  (Actar, 2022). The book is based on De Jonghe’s MDes thesis, which was advised by Professor of Landscape Architecture Charles Waldheim.

Verify in Field (University of Chicago Press, 2022) is the second book from the firm Höweler + Yoon, founded by Eric Höweler (associate professor in architecture) and J. Meejin Yoon. It features recent designs by Höweler + Yoon, including the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia; a floating outdoor classroom in Philadelphia; the MIT Museum; and a pedestrian bridge in Shanghai’s Expo Park.

Blank: Speculations on CLT (Applied Research + Design Publishing, 2021), by faculty members Hanif Kara and Jennifer Bonner, explores the history and future of cross-laminated timber as a building material.

The Kinetic City & Other Essays (ArchiTangle, 2021) presents selected writings from Rahul Mehrotra, chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design and John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization. Mehrotra writes about the concept of the “Kinetic City” (as opposed to the “Static City” conceptualized on many city maps) and argues that the city should be seen as “patterns of occupation and associative values attributed to space.”

Looking for fiction? Check out Death by Design at Alcatraz (Goff Books, 2022) by Anthony Poon (MArch ’92). Described by LA Weekly as “The Fountainhead meets Squid Game,” it’s a mystery about architects being murdered during a competition to design a new museum at Alcatraz.

Photographer Mike Belleme and landscape-urbanist Chris Reed, professor in practice of landscape architecture at the GSD, collaborated on Mise-en-Scène: The Lives & Afterlives of Urban Landscapes (ORO Editions, 2021). It includes case studies of seven cities: Los Angeles, Galveston, St. Louis, Green Bay, Ann Arbor, Detroit, and Boston. Reed describes Mise-en-Scène as “a collection of artifacts and documents that are not necessarily intended to create logical narratives, more intended as a curated collection of stuff that might reverberate . . . to offer multiple readings, multiple musings, multiple futures on city-life.”

What makes an environment “responsive”? Responsive Environments: An Interdisciplinary Manifesto on Design, Technology and the Human Experience (Actar, 2021), from the GSD’s Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab  (REAL) and co-authored by Associate Professor in Practice of Architectural Technology Allen Sayegh, Stefano Andreani (MDes ’13), and Matteo Kalchschmidt, uses case studies to examine our “technologically-mediated relationship with space.”

Formulations: Architecture, Mathematics, Culture (MIT Press, 2022) by Andrew Witt, associate professor in practice, draws from Witt’s GSD seminar “Narratives of Design Science” and examines the relationship between mathematical calculation systems and architecture in the mid-20th century.

Environmental Justice, Energy Infrastructure, Migration and War: What Role Does Design Play in Mitigating a Crisis?

At their speculative edge, the design professions flourish in envisioning future scenarios, and we usually imagine these to be positive additions to a well-ordered world. A true crisis throws fundamental assumptions into disarray, requiring designers to rethink the way they operate as the ground shifts beneath their feet. The old rules of geopolitics suddenly don’t lead the imagination anywhere predictable. What’s left is a feeling that the game itself is being reinvented.

In the past two years, the theme of crisis has been studied across the GSD at the annual Practice Plenary, and lessons learned by investigating responses to pandemics and hurricanes can help us look at responses to crises happening now across the globe. I spoke with three professors teaching practice courses and plotting new modes of practice in architecture and urban planning. All three encouraged humility, and they spoke of the central place for self-reflection in designing a profession better able to address injustices and inequalities. Asked about the ongoing war in Ukraine, Elizabeth Christoforetti, a founding principal at Supernormal and an assistant professor in practice of architecture, urged caution: “It’s a response time question. We’re just not built to respond quickly as a profession. It can feel frustrating, not being able to confront the crisis, but our impact happens in different ways.” Jacob Reidel, also an assistant professor in practice of architecture and a senior director at Saltmine, a technology startup, suggested that designers “focus on what our responsibility is as engaged citizens,” noting that “there’s a tendency to try to make everything a design problem—but there are other ways one can and should be active in the world.”  Matthijs Bouw, founder of One Architecture and Urbanism, saw a parallel between his work on climate adaptation and the exodus from Ukraine (there are more than 5 million refugees so far): “One of the things I worry about is how our cultural fabric will be able to cope with the climate crisis and the associated migration. It’s going to change our cities in drastic ways.” The war also exposes problems with the global energy infrastructure: “We should have been investing much more in renewables and decentralized systems,” Bouw says. “This is an issue of environmental justice. Who gets to own the energy infrastructure? Many communities have really suffered in the past from energy infrastructures.”

Bouw’s work and teaching at the GSD has placed designers at the edge of several unfolding crises. Among his best-known projects at One Architecture and Urbanism is the Big U—a proposal for a protective system that encircles Manhattan to mitigate the effects of rising sea level—which was originally developed with a multidisciplinary team including BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group). The associated research and design continues in ONE’s work on the Financial District and Seaport Climate Resilience Master Plan, among other projects. This semester at the GSD, Bouw is teaching “Houston: Extreme Weather, Environmental Justice, and the Energy Transition.” The course begins with the premise that crises have a tendency to build on one another. Bouw says it’s important to distinguish between two types of crisis: “There are slow-running crises that are eating away at people’s health and livelihoods, or coastal areas, or ecosystems, and then there are catastrophic crises that are—in the language of resilience—low probability and high impact.”

As Bouw explains, “During COVID, we have seen how public health is related more than ever to issues of structural racism, to our fossil fuel economy (because of pollution and respiratory issues), and so on.” This logic applies to other crises as well: “The climate crisis is intimately connected to the biodiversity crisis.” The complexity inherent to interrelated systems is the first problem found in crisis situations, he says. “There is a lot that we don’t know about these relationships, but we do know that many of these relationships play out on a systemic scale and bring with them a high level of uncertainty.”

Bouw advises that we should approach crisis through careful research and as part of a team. “Projects you do as a practitioner cannot stand on their own,” he says. “Any project is part of something much bigger.” This can be an uncomfortable situation for designers: “I was trained as a designer to stand in front of an audience and say, ‘This is the big idea,’ and then try to sell the idea,” Bouw says. “That’s an ethic of the past. You need to start thinking about yourself more as a participant in a much more complex process.” Design in face of crisis requires “the right mix of willfulness and humility.”

This doesn’t mean abandoning the tried-and-true techniques of design. Bouw emphasizes the importance of “tools for communication—creating the material to make conversations easier—and the tools of research through design exploration.” He says that design professionals play an important role as mediators: “Balancing the systemic dimension with the hyperlocal or the hyperprecise is what we do.” This is particularly important in large-scale crises, which are also largely invisible. Take the climate crisis, for example. “Given the magnitude of changes that we need to make in our Earth system,” Bouw says, “we need to develop quick ways of learning and protocols that can be scaled and replicated, and which don’t get in the way of the nuance that’s needed in some situations.” He cautions that there is no single framework for understanding something so complex. “The Earth system as a whole cannot be captured in an algorithm,” he observes. “You need to understand the limits of the algorithms you develop because otherwise you start to reduce reality to the algorithms.”

Asked about specific participatory design practices, Bouw notes that they vary around the world: “In planning in the Netherlands, we are employing design in a more integrated way to engage complex processes. Planning in the United States is relatively disassociated from design—the tools of planning are predominately things like texts and spreadsheets and PowerPoints. It doesn’t tend to test things and try to see how things come together on the ground.” For Bouw, this tendency avoids the crucial questions of practical engagement: “What would it take to implement this? Where could it get funding from? How do we engage the powers that be in the set processes of delivering projects?” Without practical, on-the-ground participation, Bouw says, “the end is often either paralysis or business as usual, and we can’t do either.”

Crisis frequently spurs invention. In her class this semester, Elizabeth Christoforetti focuses a historical lens on a range of design practices to ask when and why they were first formulated. “Products of Practice” begins by showing students that “the profession of architecture is actually relatively new,” she says. “It came out of a number of radical social and economic changes—the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, for instance.” The course builds on Christoforetti’s class last semester, “Elements of the Urban Stack,” which delaminated the built environment from its most expansive social fabric to its smallest detail. Across both classes, Christoforetti asks students to “look back at historical hinge points to see, for instance, how architectural specifications changed over time and how those changes impact the architect’s agency or relationship with society.”

This approach gives students a perspective on the possibilities of design practice. “The best thing we can do is to understand the limits of the structural framework of practice now,” Christoforetti says, “and where we can or must push boundaries if we want to change things.” Critical reflection plays an important role in formulating new directions. “We can identify what the value systems out there are—in the discipline, in practice, and in society at large,” she says. “Then if architects want to impact the future of housing, for example, maybe the thing to do isn’t to design a single-family home. Maybe it would be better to go work for Fannie Mae and design mortgages, because they shape housing at scale. Or maybe it’s okay to just design a really remarkable single-family home. But it’s a choice about impact and agency.”

This wider view of practice suggests an expanded notion of professional ethics. Christoforetti asks, “Do we need a redefinition of design in an era when we are accountable to the major crises of the moment, whether it’s climate change, war, systemic racism, or computer surveillance? Is form enough?” This can appear sometimes as a drastic decision to be made—a fork in the road. “Maybe we’re thinking about how to fundamentally redefine our practice, and maybe the profession as we know it dies as a result,” Christoforetti speculates. This sort of wholesale redefinition has happened before, and like previous hinge points, she says, “We live today in an unprecedented moment for the role and agency of the designer.”

When it comes to dealing with the compounding crises of the contemporary world, Christoforetti is particularly interested in the problems and potentials of computation. She cites Architectural Intelligence by Molly Wright Steenson which mentions that, in the world of technology, the verb “to architect” refers to the design of information systems. “The people she writes about are not thinking about buildings per se,” Christoforetti says, “they’re thinking about something much bigger. They’re thinking about an operative process for creation.” She pinpoints the central conundrum of contemporary professional practice in a way that parallels Bouw’s observations: “The crisis that we look at in “Products of Practice” is one of scalable systems and late capitalism.”

 The professional practice course taught by Jacob Reidel last semester also took a historical perspective. He notes that “the profession of architecture as we currently understand it is not nearly as old or straightforward as is often assumed.” On this basis of historical contingency, “Frameworks of Practice” is designed to get students “to look critically at what they’ve been told it means to be an architect, and to see both the profession and their own careers as designed things,” Reidel says. Opportunities provided by unexpected circumstances offer a good starting point for this investigation. “Crises, even if only temporarily, tend to throw the old way of doing things out the window,” says Reidel, and he has numerous examples.

“One of the few built responses to the crisis of COVID,” he points out, was the “thousands of structures built in the street, practically overnight, in one of the most heavily regulated built environments in the world, New York City. All the rules had to be rewritten, and myriad public and private entities had to come together to figure out how to make it possible for the restaurant industry to continue operating. Suddenly the Department of Transportation was regulating building because the shacks were in the street.” The result was the Open Restaurants and Open Streets programs, the latter of which set itself the task of “transforming streets into public space open to all,” according to their website. This made for an apt case study in the relationship between crisis and design—and it became the subject of the second Practice Plenary.

Reidel brings the questions raised by Open Restaurants and Open Streets to bear on a wider investigation of design. “What did it reveal about how the design professions can and cannot effectively engage in moments of crisis?” he asks. One lesson involves seizing opportunity. Reidel tells the story of the creation of the re-ply program: “During the first COVID summer of 2020, many businesses in New York City temporarily covered their storefronts in plywood. Seeing that a ton of valuable plywood was headed to the dump, members of the small New York studio of the international Australian practice BVN began collecting plywood from businesses and landlords, some as big as Rockefeller Center’s Tishman Speyer, and started a pro bono effort to repurpose it into affordable outdoor seating for local restaurants that couldn’t serve food indoors because of COVID. What started as plywood furniture eventually became a kit-of-parts streetery building system named re-ply that’s now operating almost like a small independent product business within the larger BVN design practice.” It’s an example, Reidel says, of how a crisis can spur “new approaches to operating as an architect.” The example suggests the importance not only of having a good eye for opportunity, but also of being prepared. This is the practical, on-the-ground knowledge that Bouw also emphasized.

Although the place of design may be far from the battlefield, it can help to think about crisis situations in terms of wartime mobilization. “What we are trying to do as a practice is to have the boots on the ground and to change the practices of implementation,” Bouw says. “It is difficult to build coastal adaptation projects or integrated stormwater projects that also improve the urban environment as a whole and deal with other systemic issues. We have to create the conditions necessary to capitalize on those opportunities.” A lot of the work involved in addressing crises comes beforehand, in the form of research and planning—and this requires being out there, on the ground, embedded in the complex systems in which we may have to intervene. So whether it’s destabilized ecosystems, new technologies, or something else driving change, Bouw’s advice applies: “A shock is also often an opportunity, but we need to have equitable plans ready before the event occurs.”

Designing Sustainable Solutions for a Better Built Environment: A Meeting of Ideas at Harvard’s Center for Green Buildings and Cities

Commemorating Earth Day, the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities (CGBC) hosted its first in-person event since the beginning of the pandemic, featuring six short presentations by GSD faculty whose research relates to designing sustainable solutions for a better built environment. The topics of the presentations ranged from algae-based biomaterials to urban infrastructure, and were followed by five-minute Q&A sessions. All work was supported by CGBC faculty grant awards.

The timeliness of addressing these environmental challenges was highlighted by James Stock , Harvard’s new vice-provost for climate and sustainability, who stressed the importance of interdisciplinary communication in his keynote address, pointing out the scale of the problem in monetary terms: “Our energy system, from what we are doing, is imposing $600 billion in damages, every year, on future generations.” He also warned of the dangers of merely “spending money to feel good without actually solving the problem.”

The six speakers all presented their research aimed at improving the built environment with one clear vision in mind: “to transform the building industry by developing new processes, systems, and products that lead to more sustainable and high-performance buildings and cities,” according to the opening address from Ali Malkawi, founding director of CGBC , director of the Doctor of Design Studies Program, and professor of architectural technology.

Algae-Based Biomaterials for the Built Environment

Martin Bechthold, Kumagai Professor of Architectural Technology, presented a unique solution to the challenge of reducing the embodied carbon footprint of the construction industry. By developing new algae-based materials that absorb CO₂ during photosynthesis, Bechthold proposes that the built environment could be transformed into a carbon storage device on a large scale, sequestering carbon in the material itself and holding it for the lifetime of the building.

Working in collaboration with a team of material scientists at Caltech led by Professor Chiara Daraio , the GSD’s researchers have been focused on the practical challenges and implications of the algae-based material being developed at Caltech: How can we fabricate functional building components from it, while navigating its active properties? What opportunities and efficiencies might it offer us? Bechthold noted that a growing network of colleagues and partners has been fundamental to their research, thanks to the CGBC.

Reshaping Urban Environments through Infrastructure Design Protocols (Phase I + II)

Rosalea Monacella, design critic in landscape architecture, offered timely insight into the increasing demands faced by the electrical power grid—and how design can provide solutions while simultaneously addressing the global implications of climate change. As urban communities grow and put pressure on existing infrastructures, a radical reevaluation is required in order to develop adaptable, modulating structures for the future. This means understanding and anticipating not only environmental concerns but also the technological, economic, logistic, and social challenges for the cities of tomorrow.

Tellingly, she noted how sorely out of date America’s national grid infrastructure is: “The majority of the transition and distribution lines were constructed in the 1950s and ’60s, with a life expectancy of 50 years.”

The team’s design research was intended to develop deployable prototypes that work on a regional scale, giving individual cities control, responsibility, and accountability for their own power and water consumption, drawing resources from their local environs.

Energies of the Night: Nocturnal Public Space and Energy Policy in the Arabian Peninsula

Considering the geo-social implications of design in the Arabian Peninsula, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Gareth Doherty gave a presentation centered around the use of public spaces after-hours. Given that communities in this region tend to socialize when darkness falls and the temperature drops, there is a need to come up with less light-polluting solutions.

Drawing on field research conducted through his “Design Anthropology” seminar, Doherty explored the possibilities of more efficient design for darkness, plus strategies to make better use of cooler temperatures and remediating lighting needs. “Navigating the dark spaces of the night calls for the activation of our senses, beyond the primacy of the visual,” he says.

Benefits of Building-Level Heat Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies

It is a self-perpetuating problem that the issue of urban heat is exacerbated by building design. Consequently, as Associate Professor of Architecture Holly Samuelson explained, the onus is on architects, urban planners, and designers to come up with strategies for heat mitigation—noting that, “In 50 years, there could be billions of people that are susceptible to temperatures and climates that are outside of the conditions that have served humanity well for the past 6,000 years.”

As Samuelson pointed out, this can also have implications for the health of the urban community thanks to factors such as heat exposure and greenhouse gas emissions. In addressing such a multifaceted problem, a joined-up approach is required—one that considers the impact of building design strategies at different scales, while demonstrating a reproducible and scalable framework that can inform future work. 

Evaluating Location-Based Sustainability at the Site Level

Carole Turley Voulgaris, assistant professor of urban planning, highlighted the need for greater consistency in the methodology for measuring vehicle miles traveled (VMT) at site level for existing and proposed developments. She explained that it’s “one way to measure the sustainability of a particular location.” Research was undertaken into existing office sites in both the San Francisco Bay Area and the Wasatch Front Region of Utah.

With VMT estimations varying considerably, it was noted that discrepancies are often magnified as the figure is multiplied to cover wider areas. The team suggested that further research is required to prioritize the “four Cs”: consistency, cost-effectiveness, closeness, and conservatism.

The Oasis Effect: Agricultural Practices in Arid Environments

With a backdrop of climate change and aggravated environmental degradation, the challenges of agricultural practices in extreme arid environments are only going to become more severe. With this in mind, Pablo Pérez-Ramos, assistant professor of landscape architecture, explained how his team’s research had produced a typological matrix of oases, allowing for a methodological and comparative study of them. It’s a resource that will become increasingly relevant as the effects of global warming and the resultant shifts in landscapes intensifies.

Pérez-Ramos announced that his team will soon be able to conduct field research that includes the use of drone technology to measure the thermal shock induced by the presence of vegetation and water.

Ali Malkawi concluded the meeting by saying, “It’s been wonderful to see this impactful research grow as a result of the CGBC seed funding—and continue to gain traction.” He also announced the issuing of at least five new awards for the coming year.