What if Washington DC were granted statehood? Preston Scott Cohen on designing a new American city-state

“Architecture for Statehood,” Preston Scott Cohen’s recent studio, tackles the timely question of what statehood would mean for Washington, DC, one of the most elegantly designed cities in the United States. Conceived in 1791 by Pierre Charles L’Enfant, a French-American military engineer, the urban plan for what was to be the new federal city positions the symbolic buildings of national power—including the White House and Capitol building—within a central core, with boulevards radiating out diagonally toward the fringes.

But while Washington is the seat of the country’s government—and a symbol of democracy throughout the world—its own people are denied one of their most basic democratic rights. The Constitution of the United States grants that each state has voting representation in both houses of Congress. But as the District of Columbia is not a state, there is no representation in Congress for its more than 700,000 citizens.

It’s a matter of justice. Washington must become a state. The slogan on DC’s license plate is indisputably accurate: ‘Taxation without Representation.’ It’s unconstitutional. It’s authoritarian. It’s undemocratic. This kind of design query and investigation is absolutely necessary.

The implications of this are substantial. And it begs some fundamental questions—sociopolitical, geographical, and architectural. “It raises so many consequential questions. This is my favorite studio hypothesis, ever. This is because of the way it intersects the urban, the architectural and the symbolic questions,” says Cohen. “The significance and importance of having it become a state is so palpable, so necessary. It’s a matter of justice. Washington must become a state. The slogan on DC’s license plate is indisputably accurate: ‘Taxation without Representation.’ It’s unconstitutional. It’s authoritarian. It’s undemocratic. This kind of design query and investigation is absolutely necessary. And the students are responding to it in very different ways.”

If Washington were to become a state, the introduction of new governing institutions and agencies that states require would bring about potentially dramatic changes to the city and the federal district, both spatially and symbolically. As a city-state, the renamed Washington, Douglass Commonwealth (in honor of Frederick Douglass) would be the seat of three systems of governance: city, state, and federal—which would, in turn, be multiplied threefold across the three branches: executive, legislative, and judicial.

The question that Cohen poses is how could this be articulated, architecturally. Currently, the L’Enfant plan places an overwhelming emphasis on the symbols of federal power. “What’s different about Washington is that it does not have a state government,” Cohen explains. “State governments have numerous institutions: departmental administrative buildings, archives, departments that deal with taxation, childcare, the elderly, and of course, the main governing bodies—the state courts, the capitol, and the executive branch and residence.’

But in Washington DC, the federal buildings, naturally, dominate. “This would have to be contested if the district were to gain statehood. For a start, there would need to be a basic re-weighting and reemphasis of official buildings—and the cityscape itself to some degree—in order to address this imbalance,” explains Cohen. “We envision these ideas because we’re interested in the implications as architects.” One potential solution is to imagine the new city-state as a cluster of mini cities—divided either by the four existing quadrants or by wards, reflecting how schools are governed locally. These, in turn, would each have their own, more robust, local governments, similar to those of the various counties or cities in the other states.

But this doesn’t solve the glaring architectural issue here: the fact that the city’s geographic center is also its symbolic center—and it is filled with federal buildings. “The new state will be a doughnut. The constitution for the new state (that has been voted on but not, of course, officially instituted) calls for carving out the iconic center of Washington as a strictly federal district inclusive only of the Mall and the main buildings of the federal government. Some of the federal government buildings will not be in this area, of course, ” Cohen says. “So this new state will have numerous federal buildings in it, but on state land. They will be leased by the state and taxed by the state, etc. So the overlay of state and federal will be very much like it is in other states where federal buildings populate states. Though we will still have a purely federal district, no one will hold residency there.”

How can Washington evolve into a place of its own, with its own state identity—one that isn’t subordinate to its beautifully designed federal core? The students are weighing several options, using specially created 3D digital modeling of the city that allows them to envisage overlays and interventions on the existing infrastructure. “You can quite literally undo the L’Enfant plan, subvert the hierarchies, you can interrupt L’Enfant’s diagonals—and some people are looking into that. If you want to break those diagonals, you’d have to tunnel or divert circulation—and that’s an interesting problem,” says Cohen.

“One idea is to adopt the ring of historic forts that sit on the periphery of the city—built to defend the Union during the Civil War—as symbols of state autonomy. We looked very intensely at many parts of the city. We’ve analyzed and interpreted its architecture extensively. I wanted to adopt the language of the urban fabric as a source for building new state institutional buildings. Not to always adopt strategies that are monumental, but rather to deploy anti-monumental strategies.”

Cohen emphasizes how important questions of social justice are for his students, and how statehood is fundamental to this. “The making of the state is to change DC, to have it not merely be what it is today—a city completely determined and governed by the federal government, without democratic representation. It’s really exciting to be dealing with a matter of social justice that’s so indisputably significant.”

Excerpt from The Kinetic City & Other Essays: The Permanent and Ephemeral, by Rahul Mehrotra

The Kinetic City & Other Essays  is the latest book from Rahul Mehrotra, Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design and John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Published by ArchiTangle, the book presents a selection of Mehrotra’s writings from the last three decades and illustrates his long-term engagement with urbanism in India. Through the essays, Mehrotra describes how the emerging urban condition in India represents the “Kinetic City”—opposing the “Static City” of conventional city maps—by being “perceived, read, and mapped in terms of patterns of occupation and associative values attributed to space.” 

On November 29, 2021 at 12:30pm ET, join Mehrotra on Zoom for a discussion of The Kinetic City & Other Essays as part of the Frances Loeb Library’s faculty colloquium series. Dean Sarah M. Whiting will moderate the event.

The Permanent and Ephemeral:
What Does This Mean for Urbanism?

by Rahul Mehrotra, originally published in The Kinetic City & Other Essays

Cities have largely been imagined by architects and planners as permanent entities – artefacts where architecture and planning are the central instruments for their manifestation. Today, this basic assumption stands challenged on three counts. Firstly, because of the massive scale of the “informalization” of cities where urban space is constructed and configured outside the formal purview of the State – a phenomenon that has engulfed the globe in the last four decades. Secondly, on account of the massive shifts in demography occurring around the world. The phenomenon of the movement of large groups of people across national boundaries as a result of political instability will only be accelerated by climate change, the depletixon and imbalance of natural resources or the rise of natural disasters. Lastly, the assumption that permanence is a default condition or the single instrument to imagine our cities is further complicated, albeit in positive ways, by the fact that in recent years, there has been an extraordinary intensification of pilgrimage practices as well as celebration and political congregations of all kinds globally, which have consequently translated into the need for larger and more frequently constructed temporal structures and settlements for hosting massive gatherings.

The combination of these factors should prompt us to rethink the assumption or notion of permanence in our response to the ever-shifting conditions of urbanism around the world. Like the “informalization” of the city, which results in temporary auto-constructed environments, natural disasters and changes in climatic conditions are also turning temporary shelters, extended with increasing frequency into camps or settlements, into holding strategies or short-term solutions.

There are numerous examples of such temporary occupation in response to natural catastrophes and environmental threats, such as those recently seen in the Philippines, Haiti and Chile, along with several other cases of temporary cities built in the context of disaster. Furthermore, political tensions in many places around the globe contribute to the displacement of people from their places of origin and fuel tremendous ecologies of refugee camps. The flux will continue to accelerate given the general inequity and imbalance of resources that have disrupted and brutally dislocated communities and nations across the globe. Extreme examples of humanitarian spaces hosting stateless persons and asylum seekers are the refugee camps located in Ivory Coast, which accommodate more than nine hundred thousand refugees, mostly from Liberia but also from other adjacent locations. However, the most striking cases are those of Dabaad in north-eastern Kenya, which accommodates almost five hundred thousand people, the Breidjing camps in Chad, home to two hundred thousand people, and several camps in Sri Lanka holding three hundred thousand people displaced during the decade-long civil war.

Startlingly, these camps only hold a small fraction of the forty-five million people who, according to the United Nations Commissioner for Refugees, are currently displaced around the world and living in temporary structures. At the other end of the spectrum, cultural and religious celebrations are also on the rise. Increasing in scale as well as frequency, they too lead to the erection of temporary structures within and outside urban areas.

Extreme examples of temporary religious cities are the ephemeral constructions set up for the Hajj, as well as a series of temporary cities constructed in India to host celebrations like the Durga Puja, Ganesh Chaturthi or Kumbh Mela – a religious pilgrimage, which according to official figures, draws congregations of over one hundred million people.

Extensive music festivals like Exit in Serbia, Coachella in California or Sziget in Budapest also lead to the construction of extended ephemeral settlements to house large groups of people together for short periods. Festivals range from relatively small gatherings, like the Burning Man in Nevada or Fuji Rock in Japan, where around forty thousand people gather to enjoy music and celebratory events, to three hundred fifty thousand people flocking to musical events like Glastonbury in England, Roskilde Festival in Denmark, and Werchter in Belgium.

These examples could be expanded to include many others, such as the temporary cities built on mining, oil drilling or forestry sites where natural resources are exploited. The Yanacocha mine in Peru, for example, employs over ten thousand people who live in temporary housing. Other mining communities like the Maritsa Iztok mines in Bulgaria, the Motru Coal mine in Romania, or the Chuquicamata, Salvador and Pelambres sites in the north of Chile generate completely different sorts of temporary settlements on account of the different time spans involved, adding a further degree of complexity. Here, large-scale operations have modified the topography of a landscape, albeit temporarily, on a territorial scale with the attendant environmental consequences.

The lifecycle of these temporary cities lasts as long as the resources being mined, and so have a known or predictable date of expiry. The operative question is thus: Can temporary landscapes play a critical “transitionary” role in this process of flux that the planet will experience evermore frequently? This contemporary condition, coupled with the rampant expansion of the influence of global capital and the colonization of land on the peripheries of cities, is locking the globe into unsustainable forms of urbanism, where fossil fuel dependence in combination with isolationist trends of gated communities for the rich are creating a polarity that will become harder to reverse.

So, while cities grow in the formal imagination of governments and patrons, the proliferation of the informal city is amplified in magnitude as never before! Is there a role for urban design in addressing these questions? Can we as architects and planners challenge the assumption that Permanence matters?

The city in flux is a global phenomenon. In several cities around the world, the postindustrial scenario has given rise to a new system where living and working have become extremely fragmented. The locations of jobs and places of living are no longer interrelated in the predictable fashion when job locations were centralized. In today’s networked economies, these patterns are not only fragmented but in flux and constantly reconfiguring.

This results in the fragmentation of the structure of the city itself and its form, where the notion of clear zoning or predictable and implementable land-use all break down into a much more multifaceted imagination of how the city is used and operates. It is an urbanism created by those outside the élite domains of the formal modernity of the State. It is what the Indian scholar Ravi Sundaram refers to as a “pirate” modernity that slips under the laws of the city to simply survive, without any conscious attempt at constructing a counter-culture.

Yet, this phenomenon of flux is critical to cities and nations connected to the global economy; however, the spaces thus created have been largely excluded from the cultural discourse on globalization, which focuses on élite domains of production in the city. They are spaces that have been below the radar of most architects and planners, who focus on the traditionally defined public realm. Yet within these confines, the very meaning of space is in flux and ever changing. It cannot only be defined as the city of the poor, nor can it be contained within the regular models of the formal and informal, and other such binaries. Rather it is a kinetic space where these models collapse into singular entities and where meanings are ever shifting and blurred.

The questions this raises are as follows: Can we design for this space as urban designers and planners? Can we design with a divided mind? Can other forms of organizations be embedded in our concept of the city and, if so, how do we recognize and embed these in the formal discourse on urban design? This is not an argument for making our cities temporary but rather one of recognizing the temporary as an integral part of the city and seeing whether it can be encompassed within urban design – in terms of urban form, public spaces, and governance structures.

Framing this phenomenon of flux under the rubric of “ephemeral urbanism” is perhaps to create a more inspirational category than the binary of the formal and informal city, for it implies the transitional rather than the transformative or the absolute. Furthermore, as designers we tend to observe and organize the world around us in binaries such as the rich and poor, the state and private enterprise, or the formal and informal city.

While these are productive as categories to describe the world, they do not seem to serve design operations productively because they force urban designers to occupy and advocate one or the other world articulated in the binary. Urban design, on the other hand, is about design synthesis and dissolving and resolving contestations through spatial arrangements.

So, what then is the role of urban design in this condition? Most certainly, this flux is the new normal. In addition, the spurts of growth and flux triggered by natural and political uncertainty are going to challenge our reading of the urban condition and the role of urban design. J. B. Jackson in his book Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (1984) and writing about North America highlighted the importance of what he called the third landscape – the landscape of cyclic events. He stressed that the first landscape was one of mobility: of the early colonial vernacular cultures, which preferred mobility, adaptability, and transitory qualities; of the short-lived tents and log cabins – a landscape that characterized North America before Jefferson’s classical farm villages appeared, he added.

These settlements of the decomposable (equivalents of which exist in every culture) are what Jackson brought to our attention. This mobile ephemeral landscape was replaced by another landscape, which “impressed upon us the notion that there can only be […] a landscape identified with a very static, very conservative social order” found in most of contemporary North American and European – and now perhaps Chinese – cityscapes. The people in this landscape, he argued, feel isolated from one another even though they work and live closely together. Thus, he implicitly argued for the “third” landscape where the ephemeral and the temporary can be instilled in the landscape of static objects to create richer social interaction. It is a landscape in flux and temporary, serving specific needs on a sometimes predictable timescale. The circus, the farmers’ market, and the festival, for example, are suddenly moments where different parts of society are made aware of their own existence within the urban system.

The ephemeral obviously has much to teach us about planning and design. In fact, the ephemeral city represents an entire surrogate urban ecology that grows and disappears on an often extremely tight, temporal scale. In short, this notion of the ephemeral as a productive category within the larger discourse on urbanism deserves serious consideration. For in reality, when cities are analyzed over large temporal spans, ephemerality emerges as an important condition in the life cycle of every built environment.

Peter Bishop and Lesley Williams recently asked: Given overwhelming evidence that cities are a complex overlay of buildings and activities that are, in one way or another, temporary, why have urbanists been so focused on permanence? The aim of broadening the rubric is a way of starting to assemble evidence that could give us some material to move toward a more open urbanism – open in the way Richard Sennett describes it, which in a city means being incomplete, errant, antagonistic, and non-linear.

The issues that could be negotiated in this form of urban practice are therefore as diverse as memory, geography, infrastructure, sanitation, public health governance, ecology, and urban form, albeit in some measure temporary. These parameters could unfold their projective potential, offering alternatives of how to embed softer but perhaps more robust systems in more permanent cities.

Andrea Branzi advises us on how to think of cities of the future. He suggests that we need to learn to implement reversibility, avoiding rigid solutions and definitive decisions. He also suggests approaches that allow space to be adjusted and reprogrammed with new activities not foreseen and not necessary planned.

Thus, architecture and urban design as a practice must acknowledge the need for re-examining permanent solutions as the only mode for the formulation of urban imaginaries, and instead imagine new protocols that are constantly reformulated, readapted, and re-projected in an iterative search for a temporary equilibrium that reacts to a permanent state of crises.

Furthermore, the growing attention that environmental and ecological issues have garnered in urban discourses, articulated through the anxiety surrounding the recent emergence of landscape as a model for urbanism, has evidenced that we need to evolve more nuanced discussions for the city and its urban form in the broadest sense. The physical structure of cities around the globe is evolving, morphing, mutating, and becoming more malleable, more fluid, and more open to change than the technology and social institutions that generated them.

Today, urban environments face ever-increasing flows of human movement, accelerating the frequency of natural disasters and iterative economic crises, which in the process modify streams of capital and their allocation as physical components of cities. As a consequence, urban settings are required to be more flexible in order to be better able to respond to, organize, and resist external and internal pressures. At a time in which change and the unexpected are omnipresent, urban attributes like reversibility and openness seem critical elements for thinking about the articulation of a more sustainable form of urban development.

Therefore, in contemporary urbanism around the world, it is becoming clearer that for cities to be sustainable, as both Saskia Sassen and Richard Sennett have pointed out, they also need to resemble and facilitate active fluxes in motion rather than be limited by static material configurations.

This expanded version of the practice of urbanism that embraces rubrics such as the “ephemeral” presents a compelling vision that enables us to better understand the blurred lines of contemporary urbanism – both spatial and temporary – and the agency of people in shaping spaces in urban society. Thus, to engage in this discussion, the exploration of temporary landscapes opens up a potent avenue for questioning permanence as a univocal solution for the urban conditions.

One could instead argue that the future of cities depends less (or completely, as in the case of the city beautiful movement) on the rearrangement of buildings and infrastructure and more on the ability of architects and urban designers to openly imagine more malleable, technological, material, social, and economic landscapes.

That is, to imagine a city form that recognizes and better handles the temporary and elastic nature of the contemporary and emergent built environment with more effective strategies for managing change as an essential element for the construction of the urban environment.

The challenge is then learning from these extreme conditions how to manage and negotiate different layers of the urban while accommodating emergent needs and the often largely neglected parts of urban society. The aspiration would then be to imagine a more flexible practice of architecture and planning more aligned with emergent realities that would enable us to deal with more complex scenarios than those of static, or stable environments constructed to create an illusion of permanence.

I would like to thank Felipe Vera and acknowledge the many essays we have written together on the subject of Ephemeral Urbanism. Naturally those have influenced this essay. And to Ricky Burdett for the development of some of these ideas.

Anne Anlin Cheng on Discussing Beauty and Aesthetics to Dismantle Systems of Oppression

In her latest book, Ornamentalism, multidisciplinary scholar and Princeton professor Anne Anlin Cheng focuses on the urgent, albeit often overlooked subject of Asiatic feminism. Intending to fill a conceptual void, Cheng addresses the centuries-old Western tradition of equating Asiatic femininity and excessive ornamentality. “Ornamentalism, for me, is not just about having a person made into a thing, which is oftentimes something that we think of around the history of race. But it is also about the condition of life and possible intimacy within objectness. It is about how personhood might be indebted to objects,” she said during her recent lecture at the GSD: “Monsters, Cyborgs, and Vases: Apparitions of the Yellow Woman.”

Cheng describes ornamentalism as a “theory of being.” It focuses on the means by which the personhood of the “Yellow Woman” is construed through the artificial and the ornamental. “These processes happen more often and more visibly than we think,” she explained in the lecture, “through the minute, the sartorial, the decorative, the prosthetic, and design.” In a recent conversation over Zoom, she reflected further on ornamentalism, the importance of finding an unorthodox vocabulary to examine racialized gender oppression—especially in the case of the Yellow Woman—and why we must radically reconsider what is beauty and what is human in a broken world.

What inspired you to begin writing about the Yellow Woman?

The issue has been at the back of my mind for a very long time. But the need to write a book and do the work came after I saw an exhibit at the Met in 2017—China: Through the Looking Glass. I was stunned by its unabashed Orientalism. At the same time, I also found this show mesmerizing. Not only because it was so sensorially rich, but also because of the intense objectification and the insistence of Asiatic femininity as an idea and presence in the show.

I read all of these articles about it (there were a lot of protests). And the thing that struck me was that we’re looking at this expansive history of the representation of Asiatic femininity, but the way we have to talk about it is incredibly limited. I mean, critiques of commodification, objectification, or fetishization are all accurate critiques. But we have been saying the same thing for decades and we should have a much richer vocabulary to think about these issues. This phenomenon is what got me started on this project. And once I delved into it, it became very clear to me that the association between Asiatic femininity and ornamentality is philosophically, artistically, and representationally, deep and expansive.

How do you define the Yellow Woman?

I find the term very painful. I’m using it deliberately because I wanted to denote the racialization of Asiatic women, one that is quite obvious and yet very underdiscussed. I’m also talking about a history of representation that is completely indifferent to what “Asian” or “Asian American” really means. What I’m talking about is an American view of Asiatic femininity.

You’ve spoken about invisibility as a form of oppression. What does that look like in practice?

I think Asian Americans and Asians in America suffer from an ambivalence problem. They are invisible since they rarely fall into the racial calculus unless a crisis happens (like a virus). They are often seen as invisible through discourses such as the model minority discourse, where people say, “They’re all doctors and lawyers anyway, so what do we care?” And at the same time, they’re hypervisible as subjects of difference. They look racially different. And this is part of the reason why there’s been such a spike in anti-Asian violence across the country. At the same time, Asian American women are super visible because of what is considered an aesthetic privilege, while they’re also being evacuated under this language. We think of oppression as something embodied—as it can often be— but it is also about erasure, a kind of violence that’s harder to talk about because it’s not as visible.

You’ve said that you view ornamentalism as a form of survival; can you expand on that?

I think part of the problem with naming something as a stereotype is that in naming it, oftentimes there’s a kind of assumption that we know it only too well: “This thing again. Terrible. We know it. Let’s turn away from it.” And I think when we do that, we fail to see all kinds of alternative possibilities for agency and what other kinds of survival might be at stake. And so my approach is I don’t want to simply decry objectification. I want to first acknowledge it. I want to acknowledge its profound philosophic and historic material history and imaginative history. But then I want to go on to ask what happens to the person that is actually still living as a person underneath that objectification. So I think what we need is something in between—a much more nuanced and expansive look at what constitutes surviving. If the Asiatic woman has lived for thousands of years under the terms of this objectification, how do we think about her as actually continuing to have a certain form of ontology?

During your lecture, you said, “We must radically reconsider what is beauty in a broken world, as well as what is human.” Why do you think discussions about aesthetics and beauty are essential to subvert systems of oppression?

They don’t usually go together, right? Aesthetics and politics. But the aesthetic often expresses the political, and it can be a place to undo the political in certain ways. For instance, there are areas in which beauty remains uncontested. That is to say, I can talk about the beauty of a flower, a painting, or a small child, without too many people getting upset. They might not agree, but no one is going to come and yell at me about it. Yet, when it comes to a racialized person, and particularly women, beauty is really fraught. It is something they’re historically excluded from. And our instinct is to correct it by offering a positive stereotype (e.g., “Black is beautiful”), but that doesn’t challenge the fundamental logic. I’m not interested in judging who is or isn’t beautiful. I’m interested in how beauty is a site of value and affirmation and how that gets inflicted differently when it comes to race and gender.

I also think aesthetics—particularly art and literature—have a way of articulating certain things left out in legal or sociological discourses about race. Aesthetics is a language about the ineffable and the contradictory. It makes room for the historical, the imaginative, and the phantasmagoric. What people don’t realize is that race and gender are such complicated phenomenons that straddle the material and immaterial, that we desperately need the realm of art and literature to help with a vocabulary.

*This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

In Inaugural Cycle, REA Fund Supports Diverse Projects United by Pursuit of Equity and Anti-Racism

In spring 2021, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging introduced the Racial Equity and Anti-Racism Fund (REA Fund), an initiative aimed at raising awareness of how race, racism, and racial injustice affect society—especially by and through design professions—and to promote a culture of anti-racism at the GSD. The inaugural REA Fund projects, ranging from the individual to the institutional, have come to fruition in recent months, illustrating the diversity and depth of inquiry the fund has supported. “The REA Fund has been a vehicle to bring the GSD together,” says Naisha Bradley, Chief Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Officer at the GSD. “Over this first year we’ve had strong community input and were able to support initiatives from multiple constituencies at the school. Whether it was through one-time initiatives, community-wide programming, or semester-long classes, the REA Fund has created an innovative pathway for us to incorporate anti-racism into our community fabric and help create a GSD where many voices can be heard and all people can thrive.” The fund has sought stakeholders from around the GSD to consider the sorts of programming and dialogue that has been missing, and to suggest solutions. It has also prioritized the need for immediate or accelerated change alongside longer term, ongoing work connecting design and anti-racist practice. “The REA Fund serves as one action of a holistic approach to institutional transformation,” explains Esther Weathers, Associate Director of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging. “It requires the GSD community to pause and take stock of where we are now and imagine what could be possible. By distributing resources to faculty, researchers, staff, and students alike, we lower barriers and empower everyone to be a leader in cultivating a GSD for all.”

Technology as Racial Justice

“Access to technology, like the internet and the devices through which we interact with it, are susceptible to the racial disparities that affect our physical environments and social structures,” says Omotara Oluwafemi (MArch ’22). “In creating digital spaces, we have to begin to reinterpret accessibility and equity as terms that also apply to the virtual realm.” Oluwafemi collaborated with Idael Cárdenas (MArch ’22) to plan the February 22 panel discussion “The Use of Technology in Design as an Avenue Towards Racial Justice,” focusing on digitally driven design narratives, technology, and mechanisms and how these dynamics intersect with questions and matters of race in design. With REA Fund support, organizers convened Michelle Chang and Marisa Parham, as well as two moderators, for conversations around how to ground considerations of equity and community empowerment amid ongoing digital innovation and growth. “This past year has been especially challenging for BIPOC designers, as a resurgence of white supremacy and police violence negatively affected our most vulnerable communities,” says Cárdenas. “In this heightened atmosphere, Tara and I felt that it was critical to provide a platform where diverse voices can discuss these issues in parallel with how it affects the built environment.” Through the panel, Chang and Parham observed how the digital universe can be a liberating space, but also one whose effects can vary widely based on each user’s identity. The context of the pandemic and virtual pedagogy threaded the conversation: panelists took up the intersections between technology and narrative, and how means and formats of communication and idea-sharing can shape methods of teaching and designing. Parham has long positioned technology and digital media as fundamental to the creation of narrative and dialogue. During the panel, she shared her multimedia project “.break .dance”—a “time-based web experience,” she explained—that gathers various stories and voices, presenting them via an unfolding user-interface. Like other projects and phenomena discussed during the panel, “.break. dance.” demonstrates how BIPOC voices and experiences, so often minimized or overlooked, can find particular resonance in the digital world. “Through technology and digital media, we are able to connect with communities across the globe to empower our local and domestic efforts for equity,” Oluwafemi says. “Digital media has given us access to histories and stories that we are not taught in school. We are able to fill in the gaps in our institutional knowledge, as seen through efforts like [anti-racist design school] Dark Matter University.”

A Moratorium on New Construction to Disrupt the Design Paradigm

Assistant Professor of Urban Design Charlotte Malterre-Barthes has shaped pedagogy and research around urgent aspects of global urbanization, addressing questions of how disadvantaged communities can gain access to political and economic resources as well as to ecological and social justice. Last spring, Malterre-Barthes engaged the REA Fund to organize the April 23 panel discussion “Stop Construction? A Global Moratorium on New Construction” with panelists Arno Brandlhuber, Cynthia Deng, Elif Erez, Noboru Kawagishi, Omar Nagati, Sarah Nichols, Beth Stryker, and Ilze Wolff. Malterre-Barthes moderated a conversation in which designers questioned the role of construction in generating and perpetuating social and ecological injustice, as well as alternative growth models and approaches that eschew construction as a primary force. She notes that suggesting the possibility of a moratorium on new construction was bound to stir debate, especially given that designing and creating new spaces are foundational to the design fields. Panelists questioned common definitions of architecture and design, as well as assumed models for growth and development. Deng and Erez, for example,  expanded the definition of “architect” beyond the creator of a building to include maintenance and repair—a role of continual caretaking rather than a momentary or ephemeral act. Evoking his ongoing doctoral research on urban development in Tokyo, Kawagishi positioned a construction moratorium as an opportunity to consider alternative real estate models—ones that look beyond office and commercial space—as economic motors for a city or region. Malterre-Barthes sought also to question which nations and people hold the power to direct other nations on how or what to build—or not build—given inequalities in housing, infrastructure, and other resources. A moratorium could, for instance, inhibit disadvantaged nations from achieving growth and harden socioeconomic divisions along GDP lines. Nagati and Styker challenged this idea, however, drawing from research on Cairo: there, high vacancy rates are fueled in large part by locally specific conditions that beget a need for nuance beyond GDP and economics. Wolff echoed the call for a deeper look into contextual, local complexities, pointing to ongoing debates in Cape Town over social housing. And Brandlhuber pushed for the need to reconsider ownership structures on existing buildings, to take into account the costs of embodied carbon energy, and to foster or inspire different economic systems through a moratorium. “Controversy is inherent to the debate [over new construction], just like with growth in general—namely, how can nations with a consolidated building stock tell others they should not build further?” Malterre-Barthes says. “We also need to avoid falling into ‘academic extraction’ ourselves as we take on these debates. This means the conversation needs to be absolutely plural, something the REA Fund helped us achieve.” “Stop Construction?” was the first in a series of roundtable discussions at the heart of the broader “A Global Moratorium on New Construction” research initiative, which Malterre-Barthes co-organized with Berlin-based architectural practice B+.

Elevating Design’s “Hidden Figures,” and Finding New Ways of Creating and Sharing Knowledge

As an architect, urbanist, and activist, Hansy Better Barraza has studied the complexities of how identity and design intersect. Following years of research, as well as the cultural tumult that marked 2020, Better Barraza conceptualized the Spring 2021 Harvard GSD seminar “Hidden Figures: The City, Architecture and the Construction of Race and Gender” as a dual opportunity: an effort to reveal designers and communities who have been historically diminished or overlooked, as well as a disruptive moment in which to question how design knowledge and pedagogy—their production and dissemination—may be complicit in such inequities. Better Barraza placed co-creation at the heart of the course’s mission—a value and an act that is fundamental to her ongoing design practice and research. She saw co-creation as an opportunity to challenge the traditional model of professor-to-student knowledge distribution, seeking instead to generate knowledge holistically. Throughout the seminar, Better Barraza encouraged students to engage their own ethnic and geographical identities as touchstones, and to seek connections between the “Hidden Figures” seminar and their concurrent studio work. Collaborative pedagogy, Better Barraza believes, can lead to a fairer and more complete understanding of design’s history. The seminar synthesized their research into a series of public-facing resources. Student-led “Transforming the Timeline: Reclaiming Women’s Authorship in the Built Environment” celebrates a diverse set of women who offered significant but underacknowledged contributions to design and the built environment. With REA Fund support, students also produced an Instagram account and end-of-semester panel discussion that both share and deepen the seminar’s knowledge production. “A research paper is only read by the student and their instructor and is then stacked in a folder,” Better Barraza says. “I thought instead, Let’s post our panel discussion online, let’s do a website, let’s make an Instagram page, let this knowledge be free and dispersed. It’s just so much more powerful when made public.” One goal behind “Transforming the Timeline” is to provide an ongoing resource linked with various affinity groups at Harvard GSD that acts as a natural, co-creative element. Such a database encourages communal dialogue rather than concentrating ownership to one editor or curator—similar to the seminar’s disruption of professor as knowledge creator and student as merely a recipient. As a title, “Transforming the Timeline” suggests not only reassessing the predominant historical narratives of design but also eschewing the concept of a timeline at all. Students rethought the linear, hierarchical dynamic of design production—exemplified by hypothetical questions such as “Who invented this building type?” or “Who did this first?”—in order to look more democratically into design history. Linear, flat narratives of design history thus open up to fresh intersections and new areas of inquiry. Students emerged with, in many cases, fundamental shifts in how they view not only design but many other forces and powers that shape society and the built environment. “Having an architecture background, I’ve been taught the tools and skills throughout my education to perceive design and form in a seemingly ‘objective’ matter, now understood to be through a wildly subjective and western lens comprised of Eurocentric canon and framed by white-dominated architectural and academic references and ideas of beauty,” observes Robert Nilsen (MDes ’23). “Although empathy to the users and context of our orchestrations and buildings are stressed as a component of the design process, what has been widely overlooked is how far this context extends. The seminar and the dialogue between Hansy, my colleagues, and myself acknowledged design as a node within a context of a larger societal landscape, a web intermediating between our physical environment, its influences, and the implications for its future.” Anna Carlsson, who is cross-enrolled from Harvard Law School, credits the seminar with encouraging a reassessment of how the law functions. “In doctrinal law classes, almost everything we read is judge-written case law. That’s a very particular perspective given who’s had the opportunity to become a judge in this country,” Carlsson says. “And in the typical law classroom environment, your ability to find the right and wrong answers are based on how well you’ve managed the language of those judges. With the Hidden Figures course, we had the opportunity to sit with ideas, process them together, and apply insights to our own experiences.”

¡…. A La Calle!

Latin GSD’s spring symposium, ¡…a la calle! Art, Design, and Discourse in times of turmoil in Latin(x) America, invited artists, designers, and scholars to present and speculate about the current and future state of Latinx creative practices. Participants discussed critical practices and action models via social agency, art, and design. “The current socio-political instability in Latin American regions and the criminalization of Latinx communities in the US invites us all to find physical and virtual spaces for reflection, action, and solidarity through the lens of art, architecture, and design,” writes Latin GSD. With REA Fund support, Latin GSD invited Latinx leaders in the design fields and other designers to join this event. Speakers included Regina José Galindo, Noemí Segarra Ramírez, Ronald Rael, and Delight Lab.

Shifting Power in the Black Belt

While a lecturer in urban planning and design, Lily Song helped organize CoDesign, an effort to strengthen links between teaching, research, practice, and activism and to foster applied projects within the GSD and collaborative opportunities beyond. The project intrigued 2016 Loeb Fellow Euneika Rogers-Sipp, an artist, activist, and CEO and founder of Atlanta’s Destination Design School of Agricultural Estates (DDSAE). Noting a mutual commitment to promoting anti-racist practice and epistemology throughout design, Rogers-Sipp invited Song to collaborate on a research seminar focused on the so-called Black Belt region—a band of the American South stretching from Virginia to Texas in which plantations and slavery were endemic. A full-service art and community-design school that takes the Black Belt region of Georgia as its campus and canvas, DDSAE has 10 partner-site locations. The school aims to “celebrate and reimagine the profound culture and history of food, farming and hospitality through the creation of a Black Belt Reparations Design Residency and education center that can serve as a replicable model with a national ripple effect.” Song says, “Having studied with Black radical thinkers and activists like Robert Allen and Phil Thompson, who look to the Black Belt as the cradle of American freedom movements and cultural traditions, I received this as a real honor.” Song and Rogers-Sipp’s Spring 2021 field lab arose amid ongoing dialogue over the proposed Green New Deal, a congressional resolution to combat climate change and generate jobs in clean-energy industries. The CoDesign Field Lab research seminar worked to gather, analyze, and illustrate data in order to make a case for the Black Belt region as prime siting for Green New Deal initiatives. Organized into five teams, GSD students mapped out opportunities and assets in the Black Belt region, especially as related to production of food and fiber, energy and waste systems, climate resilience, mobility, and access to other resources. The teams also examined regional stakeholders, decision makers, and resource holders in order to gauge the power dynamics at stake in planning out a Green New Deal. With a focus on reparative planning and design, the goal of the seminar was to seek to compensate for and heal past injustices while establishing fair, constructive approaches for forward progress. The seminar concluded with “Black Belt future histories,” in which each of the five teams collaborated with DDSAE students and community leaders to create multimedia narratives that imagine and, in some cases, propose design solutions for the Black Belt. Cynthia Deng (MArch/MUP ’21) designed a website gathering these narratives, including storymaps and other analysis, as well as information about the various GSD and DDSAE participants. The REA Fund enabled the field lab to collaborate with mentors and DDSAE partners, and enriched the lab with support from teaching associates. Reflecting on the power of connecting GSD designers with DDSAE’s students, Song says, “This was, of course, owing to the DDSAE’s ongoing youth and intergenerational leadership efforts, along with the lead the DDSAE partners took in prompting mutual guidelines for cross-nourishing and engagement, which were critical infrastructures for the ensuing co-design.”   (1, 2) Work by CoDesign Field Lab and Destination Design School of Agricultural Estates is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at https://codesignfieldlab.cargo.site/

Zero-Waste Architecture for Climate Resilience: Iman S. Fayyad’s CloudHouse Shade Pavilion

In the months that Iman S. Fayyad, lecturer in architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, spent refining the design and construction of the CloudHouse Shade Pavilion, she met many residents and user groups near the proposed site. Greene-Rose Heritage Park, located in one of the most diverse areas of Cambridge, had very little shade before the pavilion was built. Now, Fayyad says, “People have started to feel that they can spend more time there when it’s hot or raining. . . [it’s] a place of refuge.” The pavilion, developed with the City of Cambridge’s Public Space Lab, was designed by Fayyad (MArch ’16) and built with four student researchers: Rayshad Dorsey, Pietro Mendonça, Jack Raymond, and Audrey Watkins (all MArch ’23). It responds to the Resilient Cambridge Plan by providing temporary respite from the heat and rain, and complements longer-term plans for improving tree canopy coverage across the city. Children at the nearby elementary school, who came to see the pavilion’s construction during recess, have returned over the summer with their parents. Teachers and children, emerging from nearby daycares, use the benches for reading sessions. College students playing volleyball take rest breaks underneath the pavilion. A woman who walks her dog by the park told Fayyad about a sudden rain that led nearby residents to shelter under the pavilion and get to know each other. These stories reflect the pavilion’s intention to celebrate existing usage of the park. From the street, CloudHouse frames the park, and is oriented to receive direct daylight in the early morning and evening. During the day, the interior is fully shaded.   CloudHouse’s design was informed by one central constraint: avoiding material waste. The pavilion is built with standard four-by-eight-foot sheets of high-density polyethylene (HDPE), an inexpensive, recyclable plastic. Through a geometric technique called curved-crease folding, Fayyad was able to “create curvilinear surfaces that seem complex but are actually very easy to make.” It also made the pavilion easy to fabricate, transport, and assemble on site. Bending the sheets produced the undulating sides of the pavilion, the benches, and a gable roof inspired by the Cambridge vernacular.     Because of the uniform sheet size, “everything became parametrically related,” says Fayyad, “which is extremely interesting and enriching to the design process.” Together, material and technique produced an economical modularity and varied facade, which includes oculi folding out from the roof. “I wouldn’t have discovered this composition if I hadn’t placed the constraint [of no waste] at the forefront of my design strategy. For me, constraint serves as a catalyst for innovation.” As the sun shifts, the oculi produce elegant, curved shadows on the inside of the pavilion.   In an article for Log 51 (Winter/Spring 2021), Fayyad observes, “We want curved exuberance but it has to be cheap. These desires are difficult to reconcile.” CloudHouse Shade Pavilion, in its sensitivity to material efficiency as well as to aesthetic experience, does both, and provides necessary refuge in a neighborhood park.

Practice in a Time of Economic Uncertainty: Advice for Emerging Architects

For many architects—particularly those at the start of their careers—the current moment feels fraught with uncertainty. How will design engage the climate crisis and calls for a more equitable and inclusive society? What is the future for collective practice and for firms based on more traditional models? Will the skills architects have relied on in the past equip them to meet future demands? In a series of interviews with architects from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design—James Cheng (MArch ’77), Elyse Agnello (MArch ’14), Alex Shelly (MArch ’13), and faculty members Emanuel Admassu (Design Critic 2020) and Jennifer Bonner (MArch ’09)—a consensus seems to emerge that, while we may not be in the throes of an economic crisis like the devastating recession of 2008, this could very well be the proverbial “calm before the storm.” They offer insight for newly-minted architects who harbor doubts about the typical ways in which architecture is practiced or uncertainty about how things might change.

James Cheng (James K.M. Cheng Architects)

You started your firm in Vancouver in 1978, and since then you have weathered more than one recession—and in fact your firm has done quite well. What advice would you give to architects at the beginning of their career in the current mood of economic uncertainty?

How you weather these things depends on the stage of the career you’re at. If you’re mid-career and working for a firm, the firm can support you, and if you set out on your own after that you’ll have some real experience with built projects to convince potential clients. For a recent graduate it’s more difficult. My first piece of advice to young people starting out is to be tenacious. You have to believe in yourself and your portfolio, because as an architect, that’s the most important thing that we have to represent us. It was a horrible economic climate when I graduated from the University of Washington with an undergraduate degree in architecture. Architects were not getting jobs or even interviews. I was lucky to have part-time work from when I was a student, and I had already won national awards for my design. I stayed with the firm for a while—and they offered to pay for my graduate education—but I eventually decided that Seattle didn’t have anything more to offer me. At that point I moved to San Francisco, which was the biggest city on the West Coast for architecture. I was a nobody. I had no connections. I tried to show firms my portfolio but they said they were not hiring—I couldn’t even get in the door. It was very tough—I was sleeping in my car because I couldn’t afford rent in San Francisco. As luck would have it, I had learned architectural photography as a student. I was good at it, and a couple of my photographs were published in Architectural Record. A senior editor, Elizabeth Thompson, had her office in San Francisco, and she was very kind to me—she wrote to me about how I could improve my photographs. When I got to the city, I took a chance and called her up to say I was looking for a job and that I was getting nowhere. She said she’d take a look at my portfolio. She thought it was great—good enough to get me a job. Then she picked up her phone and called the top architects in the city to say, “You’ve got to see this guy.” So I got an interview with a renowned architect in the city; we talked for an hour, and he said, “Well, I’d love to offer you a job, but we just don’t have any work. But I have friends and you should go see them.” One of these said, “We have no work, but if we find something we’ll contact you.” A month later I got a letter from them saying they had three months’ worth of work, and was I interested? I said Sure! That month turned into three years, and I’ve worked my way up since then. The second piece of advice is to pick the best firm to work for. Now that I have my own company, the first thing I look at is: where did you go school? The second thing is: what firms have you worked for? If you’ve gone to a great school and worked at one of the top firms in the world, then automatically you’re at the top of the pile. The third thing that’s very important in today’s world is your skill set. A lot of us think we’ll be great designers right out of school, but that’s not true. There’s a lot to learn that is not academic: knowing how to put together a building, manage a project, and so on. No firm is going to give a young graduate a major project to do. But this is the computer generation, and most graduates today are good at four or five different programs, and they’re very savvy with social media. Most firms need this because nowadays communication and presentation is almost everything. Our clients are conditioned by the internet to expect an instant response. Unique expertise is always beneficial, especially if it has to do with presentation—editing, writing, graphics, photography. Recently I’ve been invited to participate in the RFQ [request for qualifications] for a major federal project—a $500–$700 million job. To even submit our qualifications, we have a team of more than 20 people, including lots of very talented writers, photographers, designers, and people who know the system and how to score. Clients are sophisticated. They know about branding. They know how an architect can help their object by creating a certain image. A subtext to all this is connection. I’m surprised by how many staff we hire through reference from people who work here. They like the firm, they tell their friends, and pretty soon their friends are in here for an interview. That’s very important: maintain connections with your classmates and colleagues, because that’s how you get a job. The first thing for young people is to round out their education. After I graduated from Harvard and moved back to Vancouver, I called up Elizabeth Thompson again, and asked her, “Who are the good architects in Canada?” She said to go see Arthur Erickson. She wrote me a letter to go to see Arthur, but initially I didn’t really want to work for him because I was worried that I’d be too overwhelmed and that I’d be too influenced by him. But I wanted to at least meet the guy. When I did, he liked my portfolio and we talked for over an hour about architecture. And he offered me a job. I didn’t take it because I was worried. I had read the history: he had been offered a job working for Frank Lloyd Wright, and he decided not to take it for exactly the same reason—because he didn’t want to turn into a mini-Wright. But I realized after talking to other top firms in Vancouver that his firm was unique. He had just gotten a big job, and he had people from all over the world working in the studio. So I decided to take the job. It changed my life because I was exposed to international practice. On big urban projects I got to meet with experts from San Francisco and New York—to sit together and draw with them. Another thing I would suggest is to win as many awards as possible and get published. Joining and winning competitions is one way. While working for Arthur Erickson I also did a competition for the Chinese Cultural Center in Vancouver. Since winning that competition and getting a house I built published, I’ve never had to go looking for a job. People start to hear about you and the jobs come your way. Just being an architect is not good enough nowadays. A lot of smart young architects collaborate and share studio space. Some might specialize in graphic design others will be industrial designers, some focus on research, and so on. And then they go for jobs together. These people know their own strengths, and they also know they need other people with different strengths. Somebody might want to focus on affordable housing, or to do nonprofit work. You can do environmental research or be an activist. Ask yourself, “What do I want to do as an architect?”  Then prepare yourself for that role—it could be anything, the opportunities are huge.

Emanuel Admassu (AD-WO)

As the co-founder of a new firm (with Jen Wood) that works in the worlds of both art and architecture, have you found the current economic situation difficult? Have you had to adjust the way you practice due to the pandemic?

There was no work in 2008, after I graduated as an undergrad. Now a lot of practices are actually pretty busy. Our firm is relatively small, and we’ve been working on a big exhibition for the Museum of Modern Art, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, as well as a couple other projects, so it’s been an incredibly productive time. The real challenge has been figuring out how to work from home. The lockdown happened a month after we had our son, so managing new parenthood alongside the practice was a challenge. But maybe it’s better not to think in strictly economic terms. A driving force for us has been thinking about the role of architecture in producing certain forms of inequity. This has led us to question the ethical implications of the discipline of architecture and how we’re contributing to systems that have always been incredibly problematic. That fits the second half of our practice, which has less to do with architecture and more to do with research and art production. When we receive an invitation from a client or an institution, it always comes with a set of constraints and requires us to position ourselves in relation to those constraints. In contrast, the art side of things has been fairly imaginative, and it has allowed us to be a lot more radical with ideas.

Is there more of an appetite now for your radical ideas, compared to 2008? Would you have been able to do your artistic practice back then? I’m thinking of your role on the board of the Black Reconstruction Collective and the MoMA exhibition.

The Black Reconstruction Collective was produced out of a certain frustration with institutions. A particular institution invited 10 Black architects to do an exhibition, but it became clear very early on that they weren’t ready to really understand the implications of that exhibition. This is unique to architecture and design, because the other departments at that museum have already engaged with these issues more directly and have done a kind of institutional critique. Even before the pandemic, forming a collective gave us leverage to go back and forth with the institution and ask for certain things. When you’re operating as a set of individuals, you are a lot more vulnerable, especially to these structural problems. My personal understanding of this recent history is that the 2008 recession really helped us understand how much of a luxury sport architecture is. A lot of us had to recalibrate and ask, “What is the role of architecture in this particular moment, when a lot of the harm that we’re seeing is caused through the speculation of occupation?” I think that was a moment for us to move away from the self-righteousness that was always embedded in architectural discourse and ask, “What are we doing and how are we implicated?” By the time I went to grad school around 2011, the shift was already happening, and it was mostly driven by the incredible injection of capital into the realm of art. A lot of my colleagues became curators. The curator-architect type came out of the post–Great Recession era, and it started an engagement with critical theory and other ideas that architects had typically shied away from. Now we’re at a moment in which even the figure of the curator is no longer new, and more architects are leaning into art practice. For instance, Amanda Williams and Lek Jeyifous, two out of the 10 founding board members of the BRC, left architecture a while ago and became artists. The rest of us are catching up and thinking that a lot of the ideas that we’re interested in could be explored much more directly and with a greater level of precision within the realm of art. Architecture is still not really providing space for that conversation, especially when it comes to anything related to race, gender, or class. I think the shift is happening now with architects who are producing artworks. To do a genealogy, I would say that after the Great Recession there were the austerity architects trying to do cheap buildings. Then came the figure of the architect-curator. And I think now we’re really starting to see the figure of the architect as an artist. That might be too reductive because all of these figures have existed for a while, but it’s intensifying due to recent shifts in culture, politics, and economy. It’s also driven by the people on the ground—activists who are demanding a better world. Institutions are still not fully meeting the moment.

Do you have advice for someone who might want to start a collective or collaborative practice?

For me, it’s very simple. When you’re operating within an academic institution, a cultural institution, or even practicing within a firm, you begin to hit a wall when the work you’re producing starts to feel soulless—it feels as if you’re contributing to a world that you’ve always been against. The first step is to identify a set of people that you want to be in extended conversations with and who will continue to challenge you. Build a community that has embedded within it certain contradictions and disagreements, but also fundamentally some sort of mutual respect and willingness to challenge one another. That way you can be sure to grow as an artist or as a designer. Being part of BRC means being part of a group where the people don’t always agree with each other’s methods, but we have a common goal and there are certain fundamental things that we’re not willing to compromise.

Is there a set of skills necessary for collective practice?

Absolutely. In our practice we have a certain commitment to drawing, and we put a lot of energy into producing drawings that we believe in. We are interested in beauty, for sure. But beyond that, there are certain faculties like critical thinking and even just being able to genuinely listen to people. These aren’t taught in school. I think a lot of the conversations about decolonizing pedagogy and decolonizing the canon are really about listening: can we actually listen to other people who are from non-dominant cultural backgrounds or who come from environments that are “marginalized”? I’m in favor of designers and artists learning how to listen, but also learning how to accept critique. We have to embed these in the pedagogy and make sure that we practice them on a daily basis. It’s something that you can always get better at. When it comes to forming collectives with a group of people that might not have the same aesthetic sensibilities or political sensibilities, you need to find ways to negotiate and listen to the people you don’t agree with. I hope that architects will stop trying to be tastemakers and instead try to understand how our ideas of beauty have been constructed, how they might be in conflict with someone else’s ideas of beauty, and how negotiation produces something fresh.

In this hypercapitalist world, we’re taught to be individual free agents selling ourselves, so even just sitting down and agreeing to work with somebody can be a leap.

Everything is being further fragmented, individuals are turning into brands, and everything is really tied to a certain underlying value system—some voice saying, “Get that money.” And that’s at the cost of everything else. That’s at the cost of the planet. That’s at the cost of relationships. I hope we can really begin to think about those fundamentals and the things that we value in our everyday lives.

Has the pandemic helped put things in perspective?

No matter what, twice a day we have had to go for a walk, to get out of the house—and that compresses the workday. I think it’s been great because it forces us to edit out all of the things that we typically say yes to, and to really focus on the things we value.

Jennifer Bonner (MALL)

How does the job situation look for architects right now, from your perspective of running a boutique practice? How tough is it?

I think graduates are getting jobs right now. When I finished grad school, it was in the middle of the Great Recession. People were leaving architecture before they even started because they were frustrated at having worked so hard and then not being able to do the kind of work they wanted to do. I have friends who ended up in film, and others working as consultants at think tanks. Now it’s different—we’re not in a recession like that. As for getting projects to work on, it seems like there are a lot of developers who are still pursuing large-scale building projects. In most cities nobody is going to build an office building for a few years, so office projects are out. But those developers are switching to housing—affordable housing or the missing middle. I’m working on a project designing the cladding and aperture system for a modular housing project in the Pacific Northwest. It’s fun because it’s not the entire project, but a very particular scope of work that overlaps with my spring 2021 core housing studio, “Matchy Match,” which was all about the role of materials, contemporary culture, and the city.

How do you choose between focusing on one particular approach to architecture and being more of a generalist?

My critique of American practices is that they get locked into a single building type and method pretty quickly, and they end up churning out the same formal project. In contrast, I’m interested in designing a small number of buildings that are each very different. Each project attempts to have a different form, a different program, and a different idea. The aim is to jump from working with CLT [cross-laminated timber] on Haus Gables—a single-family residence in Atlanta—to working with wood frame construction on Lean-to ADU, an accessory dwelling unit in Los Angeles. And then to dive into a mid-rise tower. This strategy is linked to a way of seeing architecture as an intellectual pursuit. Some people see my work and think I’m all over the place, but I’d politely counter by saying it’s an optimistic way to build a boutique practice: being able to reinvent yourself with each project is liberating. The generation of architects before me named their housing projects in numerical series—houses one through 10—and some of my contemporaries have continued in this tradition. Pushing back on this approach to architecture and thinking about how to transition from Haus Gables, I was interested in moving beyond the diagram of the roof plan. The next house will have a flat, commercial roof, and it takes a deeper dive into a material argument. This has certainly been a process of discovery that I would connect back to my time at Foster and Partners, where I was exposed to the workings of a big office. I initially had ambitions to run a  larger office—like Jeanne Gang or Farshid Moussavi. It was jarring to begin a practice during the recession. Slowly my career has evolved into what it is today, with one foot in academia and one foot in practice.

Running a solo practice, how have you kept momentum in this last year when most of us have felt pretty isolated?

The cross-conversation between colleagues and friends about architecture is not happening right now on design crits. I’m missing those run-ins, but I’m really enjoying putting my head down into making new work—specifically, leaning in on creativity. For example, Hanif Kara and I put together a book called Blank: Speculations on CLT. Hanif calls it our “lockdown project.” We conceived of and completed the book virtually from our respective cities of Portland and London, and throughout the process we conducted dozens of conversations with all the contributors on Zoom. So my advice is to focus on your work—no matter what the noise is around you, no matter what’s on trend. That’s the strategy I took during the last recession, too. Even though there was no work—except for the odd gallery installation —I filled out one hundred RFQs for public art callings with my partner at the time, Christian Stayner, under the label Bonner+Stayner, posing as public artists. We didn’t necessarily plan on working in the realm of public art, but rather seized an opportunity and made sure the projects had architectural ideas embedded within them. Out of one hundred applications, we landed our very first commission in Miami. That’s been my secret strategy: work your way out of it.

Elyse Agnello and Alex Shelly (DAAM)

How has the pandemic changed architectural practice in Chicago, and at your firm?

EA: The biggest change was that we decided to go remote. We also downsized a little bit early in 2020, but then residential work really started to take up for us as people were spending more time in their spaces and figuring out the additions and renovations they needed. Then early in 2021 there was more commercial work as people were getting vaccinated, but the construction industry has its own challenges, so it has been slow to start those projects. We’ve been trying to stay lean—to take on the new work, but to move through it methodically. We haven’t staffed up yet, although we’re now thinking about it and deciding whether to run a remote studio or to return to a physical space for our office. AS: It seems that there’s a strong interest out there in getting back to working together because architecture is such a highly collaborative industry. Also, it’s good to have a kind of third space to work intimately with other people—with some aspects of work and some aspects of a more personal space. But we’re a bit cautious at the moment. And to echo Elyse, the other biggest challenge has to do with the ever-changing dynamics of the construction industry—supply chains, material costs, and so on. Wood prices and delivery times have shot up, for example. The last 12 months have been a lesson in adaptability and flexibility—just trying to keep the ship moving forward, but understanding that the wind and the waves are moving in all sorts of directions.

Are clients more forgiving of disruptions that are beyond anyone’s control?

EA: We have had the good fortune of working with some great clients that have come to us through referrals, but they are not as experienced as institutions and larger companies are, so it has been important to be transparent about issues that are beyond our control. If we send a millwork package to five different local fabricators and everyone says that they can’t take it on until November, that’s tough news for a client to hear. We’ve always been willing to take on projects that have challenges—whether they have to do with existing conditions or budget—and that means that we’re always rolling up our sleeves and having to work harder and smarter. That ethos has made relations with clients smoother in the current situation. I’d imagine that working with larger institutions would be tough right now. They might not hesitate to put a project on hold if the numbers come in too high. It’s hard to know how everyone is reacting, which is its own challenge. AS: At least everybody’s in the same boat and relatively aware of what the entire world is going through. There’s a general sense of wanting to make the best of a bad situation.

Do you see changes in what clients are asking for as a result of the pandemic? Is the focus of architecture itself shifting?

EA: I think that there’s an awesome opportunity right now to rethink so many things. For instance, we’re working with a local design company on their new office space—we’re working with 12 designers as clients, so it’s an intense situation to say the least. We’re inventing a new process for how to engage them. A few years ago there was an easy answer: it’s a creative office, so you’re going to have an open studio space, breakout rooms, and so on. The pandemic has allowed us to inspect it all differently. How do we work? How’s it been to work from home? What did you find that absolutely hasn’t worked? The slower pace of work in the pandemic has given people an opportunity to reflect on what’s important. Maybe we’re entering a period in which people value quality over quantity. Minimal aesthetic interventions, less ostentatious, but higher quality building systems, for example. Prioritizing physical comfort might be a real turn for architecture.

How do you strike a balance between specialization and broadness at your firm?

EA: I think our projects to date have followed our interests. But when you’re known for certain things, it can become difficult to get different kinds of work. Even getting a foot in the door can be really challenging. My thinking on this is that you should enjoy the projects that you do get, and you will continue to amass projects. We’ve found that doing an excellent job on any project, no matter the scale, no matter the type, can give us leverage to break into other areas. For example, we were able to convince a developer in Green Bay to hire us to do a 60,000-square-foot condo project—at least the first couple of phases before it went on hold. And we didn’t have that type of experience actually. AS: I would agree that once you have a project type, it’s easier to continue to get similar projects, but if you want to diversify or expand—whether that’s in scale or typology—that’s a bigger challenge. So we’re always strategizing around that.

How do you make work you’ve done at other firms legible to clients? If you’ve worked as a project architect at a big firm, how do you convey that?

AS: We do leverage our past experience at other firms, for sure, because our first wave of projects are really only being completed now. We always get permission to show work done at other firms in our promotional materials. Generally speaking, previous employers empathize—they’ve been there, right? EA: No one teaches you in school that if you want to be an architect, you also need to be a salesperson. Otherwise there really is no firm. That means that you need to frame and reframe, and pitch and repitch. It’s a very complicated business. There’s a reason that the Genslers of the world have business development departments. So give yourself all the props that you can in presentations, on your website, and so on. AS: Narrative is really important. You need to be cognizant of your client’s goals and interests and understand how your skill set meshes with them. In the sales conversation or on an RFQ or RFP, you have to craft a project narrative that incorporates your strengths as well your understanding of what their needs and desires are. Architecture, particularly in Chicago, is dominated by older, more established firms. When you’re dealing with millions of dollars of somebody or some institution’s money, they want to be sure they can trust you. So we try to build that trust by overdelivering on promises—even if we’re making a big promise.

What skills are most important right now?

EA: You really need to be a self-starter, but beyond that it depends on what you want to do. If you’re working at a firm, you should be educating yourself on the process of making and how a project gets delivered. It’s obviously different at every firm, but having more than an academic understanding is important. AS: You’ll stand out above the rest if you do one thing really well, whether it’s assembling models, creating renderings, or even just design. EA: There’s a certain way that we talk about architecture when we’re in school that doesn’t translate to the professional world. I’m talking about the words you use and the personality you’re putting behind those words. There has to be a cognitive shift between communication within academia and within the firm, versus more externally focused communication. The sooner young architects learn that, the more powerful they’ll be. Contractors, clients, consultants aren’t necessarily in our internal club, and we need to know how to talk to people not in the club. AS: Know your audience. Who’s in the room with you? What’s their level of experience with architecture? We may have conversations in our office that are similar to what you’d experience in academia, but then with the client, word selection may be changed or topics are slightly adjusted to get the point across.

An Island in Flux: Envisioning a more resilient Nantucket

Nantucket offers a vivid illustration of the principle of flux, the idea that everything is in a constant state of becoming. There is a powerfully optimistic sense to this ancient Greek concept: on one hand, steady change begets stability—think of a river or an organism, which is never quite the same from one moment to the next, yet it resolutely maintains its identity—and on the other, “becoming” suggests possibility, improvement, and innovation. Lately, we have become accustomed to viewing change with trepidation: climate change, especially, offers fearsome potential for catastrophe. Warmer temperatures and rising oceans will alter Nantucket, possibly inundating its beaches, its historic town center, and other low-lying areas across the island.

A recent survey of Nantucketers revealed that over 70 percent are “very worried” about climate change. However, the Envision Resilience Nantucket Challenge organized by ReMain Nantucket calls for a sense of confidence in the face of change. It “seeks to inspire the community to imagine a future that is adaptive in the face of sea level rise.” Over the last year, ReMain Nantucket has brought together island residents, scientists, business leaders, artists, and preservationists to advise graduate students and faculty from five different US design programs, including a group from the Harvard GSD led by Professor Chris Reed, as they considered the possibilities for long-term change on Nantucket.

Nantucket took shape through the unhurried dynamism of earth’s geological transformations. Twenty-five thousand years ago, the slowly advancing Laurentide ice sheet pushed huge piles of soil and gravel southward, forming irregular glacial moraines south of Cape Cod. The ice retreated, sea levels rose, and erosion beat down the low hills to form Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and the Elizabeth Islands. The earliest settlers on Nantucket walked there from the mainland before the Atlantic gradually surged up around it. Some 10,000 years before Greek philosopher Heracleitus first wrote about the concept of flux, the Wampanoag people benefited from change on the island, taking advantage of its seasonal abundance of food. They fished on the windswept shore during the summer and retreated to more protected inland areas to hunt and harvest cranberries in the winter.

European settlers on Nantucket from the 1640s on carried with them a very different understanding of change and land tenure, fixing property boundaries and building more permanent settlements. Although their fortified harbors, sturdy wooden buildings, and well-established infrastructure offered a degree of stability over the last four centuries, natural flows of water, wind, and time have continually enforced the inevitability of change. The island’s first harbor silted up in the late 18th century, requiring the main town to move two miles to a new harbor. A hundred years of whaling enriched the island, but a devastating whale oil fire, another silted harbor, and the distant civil war sent Nantucket into decline. The whalers and other settlers drifted away, although a diminishing fishing industry persisted. Beginning in the 1950s, tourism shifted the island’s economy again, bringing wealthy property owners and visitors and as well as a diverse population of seasonal and full-time service workers.

Global climate change will affect this current version of Nantucket, but the crucial question is whether sea level rise, altered ocean currents, and unfamiliar weather patterns will bring catastrophe or a new becoming for the island. Reed’s spring semester Landscape Architecture studio, “Away. . . Offshore. . . Adrift. . . Shifting Landscapes, Unstable Futures,” delved deeply into this question. Although it carefully addressed the Envision Resilience Nantucket Challenge, the studio considered the consequences and possibilities of change even more broadly, both in the context of the island, and with a view toward other maritime localities that must also respond to climate change. Reed and his 10 students examined the natural and human drivers of change, in order to understand their entanglements and their mutually reinforcing influences on the island.

In the initial research portion of the studio, “Migrations,” Reed proposed that “climate change and human practices are already having significant impacts on the island, eroding bluffs and collapsing houses, flooding critical infrastructures and streets around downtown and the port, impacting the quality of the natural environment and its ability to sustain habitat and ecological life.” To understand these circumstances more fully, students undertook research in five different areas—earth, water flows, ecologies, people, and land tenure—“within a broader frame of glacial, hydrologic, ecological, and social change over longer periods of time.”

Part of the goal of this first phase, Reed explains, was to avoid merely responding to the crisis at hand—to “the set of now conditions”—so they could account for “the bigger forces that are in play.” Using software to model the flows of water, for example, the students were able to understand present-day mechanisms of erosion and sedimentation within the much longer processes of constant change that have shaped the island from the beginning. They could then speculate on how these flows might continue to alter Nantucket’s shorelines. In particular, Reed points out, students could envision how human efforts, such as the creation of groins, jetties, and artificial islands, or the dredging of harbors, have contributed to natural geological alterations of the island. Modeling provided crucial insights into the problems these devices have caused, but also showed how they might be used creatively to help mitigate or even capitalize on long-term effects of climate change.

Research into social changes on the island yielded other insights, recalling, for example, the “light touch” of Indigenous modes of seasonal land use, in contrast to European settlers’ more fixed approaches to settlement on the island. The students investigating people and land tenure on Nantucket also uncovered the diverse stories of an island disconnected in crucial ways from mainland culture—of the Wampanoag settlers—“People of the First Light,” of enslaved people who had escaped their oppressors and found refuge on the island, of generations of prominent Black landowners and whalers who prospered there, and more recently of a large number of people from all over the world who provide seasonal labor.

In phase two of the studio, “Shifting Grounds,” students continued their research with what Reed calls “performative speculations.” These exercises “introduce a physical design component,” Reed explains, and get the students “to deal with materials, physical things and physical forms within a constantly changing and dynamic environment.” Digital simulations in this phase of the studio helped students look at “the physical and the temporal, and the mutual effects between them, so that they are designing with these forces in mind.” They investigated ways, for example, that installation of fences or piles on a vulnerable shoreline might help control beach erosion and encourage dune deposition, or how chains, nets, and other small structures anchored in shallow tidal areas would channel flows of water and sediment to make shore areas more productive for sea life, or how houses might be anchored against the attrition of coastal bluffs.

During the final phase of the studio, “Provisional (Re-)occupations,” the students carried this research into designs for specific sites on the island. In focusing on the vulnerable areas identified by Envision Nantucket—Brant Point, downtown, and Washington street—students developed extensive long-term proposals that could take advantage of sea level rise and shifts in tidal currents to improve habitats and accommodate evolving public interests. But Reed explains that he wanted these proposals “to go beyond the brief that Envision had given us, which was very much focused on the inner harbor and the downtown,” in order to address more comprehensive climatic and social issues that affect the whole island. So students also proposed long-term protections for and reconfiguration of other important places on the island—the collapsing bluffs on the North Shore and the barrier beach of Coatue peninsula.

The benefit of going beyond the brief in their proposals, Reed argues, was that “because we stepped so far back to look at some of the formational processes in a bigger geography [the students] were able to say ‘we can actually address a whole bunch of potentially bigger problems by acting out here, than by acting locally.’” The resulting designs proposed sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic adjustments to the island’s shorelines that would allow Nantucket to evolve productively while sustaining the fundamental identities of the island and its communities.

Although climate change is a developing crisis—a widespread disaster of our own making—this studio extended from a sense of optimism about change. From the outset, “Away. . . Offshore. . . Adrift. . . Shifting Landscapes, Unstable Futures” accepted that Nantucket is in flux—as it always has been. Climate change became the inspiration for long-term designs to build more plentiful habitats and fisheries, more protective shorelines, and more resilient and flexible communities. In the face of malevolent change, of potential catastrophe, the studio instead envisioned powerful new ways of becoming for Nantucket.

Using Math to Reduce COVID-19 Transmission in Informal Settlements

With the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, “social distancing” became a household term. While governments urged us to stay six feet apart, many of the over 1 billion people living in informal settlements, with narrow streets and poor ventilation, found this impossible. An article in the journal Buildings and Cities authored by Juan Fernández González (MArch I ’25) and Ankit Gongal, who earned a B.Sc. Architecture from McGill University with Fernández González, looks to math for a solution. “Unidirectional Pedestrian Circulation: Physical Distancing in Informal Settlements” posits that a flexible mathematical method could slow down COVID-19 transmissions in the narrow public circulation spaces of informal settlements. The cost-efficient, low-tech solution is “proposed for turning a planar circulation network of any size or complexity into a network of unidirectional lanes,” write Fernández González and Gongal. The novel Cluster Lane Method “makes physical distancing possible in narrow circulation spaces by limiting face-to-face interactions.” New notions and theorems are introduced for oriented graphs in graph theory. The process, which involves the inhabitants of informal settlements, works by subdividing large clusters of dwellings into smaller clusters with each circulation lane around the dwellings assigned an orientation. People within a certain cluster can move within that cluster and those who have to cross clusters can go around the dwellings without entering them. “This limits unnecessary traffic within clusters of dwellings [and] could reduce the chances of COVID-19 spreading between clusters of dwellings, slowing contagion within an informal settlement,” write Fernández González and Gongal. While altering informal settlements presents challenges, which are discussed in the paper, Fernández González and Gongal argue that unidirectional circulation, taken together with tools such as masking and vaccination, has real potential to slow COVID-19 transmission in dense areas and save lives. The full article appeared in the journal’s special collection Urban Systems for Sustainability and Health.

Fall 2021 Welcome Address from Dean Sarah M. Whiting

Hello and welcome to the GSD, Fall 2021! I’m Sarah Whiting, your dean, and I’m so excited to be back in my office. I very much look forward to seeing you all. This welcome back address was in the back of my mind the other morning when I was out for a walk, listening to a podcast—The Ezra Klein Show—he’s a very sharp journalist and political analyst and, it turns out, a great podcast interviewer. This particular episode happened to be a rerun, featuring one of my favorite writers, George Saunders, who’s a master of the short story genre, a terrific essayist, and who received the Man Booker Prize in 2017 for his haunting novel Lincoln in the Bardo. So here I am, walking while listening to two smart people, and very quickly I was struck by resonances between their conversation and the school. That happens to all of us, I suspect: when you’re in the middle of something, everything around you seems to come into relevance, sometimes quite directly and sometimes in a roundabout manner. For me, that’s one of the real luxuries of this school: Because so much (arguably everything) intersects and overlaps with what we do here, it’s very easy to find such parallels. The first resonance was a quote from George Saunders that “kindness is the only non-delusional response to the human condition.” He’s written more extensively about kindness elsewhere, but this short sentence captures a great mindset for all of us, as we return to being in person together in a world that is still beset by anxiety regarding the pandemic and endlessly troubling news regarding the environment, the economy, the hard work we all face in ending systemic racism here and abroad, and additional challenges that riddle our newsfeeds. There is a lot going on in the world out there. We have many ways of responding directly to all that is going on through what we do in here, in the school, as you can see from the huge range of courses that we have this term, many of which take on issues of equity, health, climate, infrastructure, re-use, and migration. Our courses focus on the specificity of where design intersects these issues. For example: the specificity of, how housing design impacts our individual health and our collective equity—the forms and spaces of each apartment, as well as the shared spaces for getting to apartments, and also housing’s outdoor spaces. We also have many courses that look at a whole host of other topics, ranging from Michelangelo to insects to social infrastructure to finance. We will, in short, have our hands and heads full this semester as we dive into a remarkable range of intelligence and knowledge, and we’ll be doing it together again in Gund, 485 Broadway, the Kirkland and Sumner “houses,” our backyard, and our other GSD campus spaces. After a year and a half of having our computer monitors mediate our encounters, we’re going to have to get used to being together again—we can’t hit mute so easily anymore! Can’t cook a boeuf bourguignon or bake a sourdough loaf while still attending (or teaching) class anymore! Can’t sit barefoot anymore or Zoom from a Peloton anymore! My advice? Keep George Saunders’ quote front and center: kindness is the only non-delusional response to the human condition. It’s a fantastic default both for engaging one another and for responding to the world at large, which is more than a little tough these days. The second resonance I took from that episode of The Ezra Klein Show was Saunders’ description of how he revises his work. He describes the process as training your intuitions so as to improve your ability to make your own choices—for him, choices of word or phrase; for us, choices of design and research. As Saunders explains, “part of the trajectory of becoming a better writer is just to start listening to those little opinions you have in your head, believing in their existence, getting better at discerning them, and then getting better at instantaneously acting on them.” He continues: “So the kind of amazing truth, in my experience, is that that’s the whole game for a writer: you have a lot of opinions that most of the time you override or miss. Can you slow down a bit in your revision process and find out what those are and then radically honor them? That’s what makes a writer distinctive, I would say. So there’s not much to that really, except cultivating that state of mind.” Cultivating that state of mind—hand it to George Saunders for finding such a great phrase for describing what an education really is. It’s hard work to shepherd all those opinions in your head so that you can build in yourselves the confidence to determine which opinion, which choice, will take your work forward. I encourage all of you to cultivate a state of mind to enable you to be open to what you’re being exposed to here in your courses, and in the opinions and contributions of others, and to hone your own opinions so that you can constantly revise and improve your lines, whether drawn or written. That cultivation happens here, and it will continue throughout your lives. I don’t want to imply that that cultivation is simple; and yet, it’s something that every one of us can and should do. Let me turn to another of my favorite writers, Hannah Arendt, to find some tips for paving the way. I use that expression “pave the way” deliberately, because Arendt, who was a political philosopher who wrote perhaps most famously about totalitarianism and humanity, also wrote about thinking and did so often by relying upon built analogies: like “hitting a brick wall,” or “the path paved by thinking,” and one that really struck me: “thinking without a bannister”—her expression for how one can forge thought after the horrors of World War II, the horrors that removed the shared bannisters of reason that one thought one could always count on in the world. After the war, in other words, it was as if everyone found themselves having to climb up and down rickety stairs without the safety of a shared sense of reason because with the war, reason had disappeared from the world. That’s not dissimilar to how we find ourselves today in a world where reason and certainty seem gone—we have to tread carefully up and down stairs without bannisters. Arendt condemns thoughtlessness. As she puts it, thoughtlessness is different from stupidity, for, as she says, “it can be found in highly intelligent people. And it is nothing rare (she continues) but quite ordinary, especially in our everyday life, where we hardly have the time, let alone the inclination to stop and think.” Arendt wrote this almost fifty years ago, in her final and unfinished book, Life of the Mind, but it sounds like she’s describing our own world. Finally, and importantly, Arendt notes that thoughtlessness can lead to the same horrifying results as evil motives might: in short, thoughtlessness isn’t just a benign selfish removal from the world; it can be dangerous. So how do we avoid thoughtlessness? How do we cultivate our state of mind? Arendt explains that thinking should not be understood as a withdrawal from the world; instead, she says, thinking requires us to enlist the past and the future, to engage with them and against each other, and to try to make sense of them. In sum, Arendt provides a valuable lesson in her writing about thinking: while you’re here at the GSD, you should all follow her advice: take time to stop and think. Make sure that you contextualize what you are thinking by looking to the past—history—while also positing the future. Make sure that you engage others: Test out your opinions by talking with your peers in and outside of your classes. Take full advantage of the informal conversations that being together again allows us all to have. And try to design your own bannisters. We have unique reasons to be optimistic as we contemplate the beginning of this new school year, not least of which are the impressively high vaccination rate at Harvard and the GSD, as well as the steady, reassuring guidance from Harvard University Health Services director Dr. Giang Nguyen, and others informing our return here at Harvard. But we also have reasons to remain guarded. Needless to say, the rise of Covid’s Delta variant this summer has reminded us that, even as we do everything we can to mitigate risk, this pandemic carries with it a great deal of inherent uncertainty—and, as we have seen, it is an ongoing challenge in which individual decisions and collective responsibility are intertwined. As we reconvene, regather, and reassemble, I am confident that we will ably balance these seemingly conflicting impulses. Simply entering Gund Hall or walking across Harvard Yard—daily routines that once were unremarkable—now feel utterly transformational. Now is an exciting moment, for certain, but it’s also certainly one that is complex. So, while the start of the academic year bursts and flourishes with adrenaline and color, I want to encourage an expansive, George Saunders-ian kindness, and also patience. We will need to be patient with each other as we continue gauging Covid’s evolving impact on our daily lives and near future. We also need to be patient with ourselves. Self-care may be a well-worn cliché at this point, but I mean it when I say it: give yourself the individual time, freedom, and mental space to do what you need to do in order to situate yourself comfortably and confidently for this semester and this year. Add time and space around even the most rudimentary moments of reconnection—like literally reconnecting your technology, a task that may take more time and patience than in semesters past. Patience will also beget patience with ourselves. I share with you each the eagerness to get “back to normal,” but I also feel wonder, and yes, some anxiety, around how this is all going to play out. I commit to taking this day by day, reaction by reaction, and I hope we each allow ourselves the elasticity, and the patience, to navigate this term and this year with the awareness that it is a shared moment, a shared experience, and a set of shared reactions. One thing that allows me some more of that all-important mental space is knowing how tirelessly so many of our staff and faculty have been working over the past several months in preparation. We have organized our efforts in order to have the best of all worlds: collaborating in person again, but doing it safely enough to ensure that we can continue doing so. I again encourage you to take some extra time now to process all the information you’re getting, and to acclimate to some of the new ways in which we access our campus and work together. Let me take a moment now to remind us of some key points. Our campus buildings will be accessible only to Harvard ID holders, and we are closing Gund Hall and our other GSD campus buildings for a few hours each night—between 2:00 and 5:00 am. This nightly closure will, in part, enable building cleaning, but will also, I hope, help put some brakes on the unproductive culture of “24/7” work, an impulse that is so endemic to the design fields and so counter to intelligent outcomes. Note I’m not saying that you should only leave the building for three hours, but I’m hoping that this schedule can accommodate both our night owls and our early birds. I also want to remind us all of the obligation to wear face masks while indoors (except when you’re alone in your office, like I am now), and to refrain from eating in shared spaces (go outdoors to eat, please). There is plenty of other information available on the “Reopening” menu on our homepage. Please review this information frequently, and ask questions if you have them. We will all need to remain flexible around shifting policies. I want to extend a huge thanks to all of the staff and faculty who have worked hard over the summer to ensure our smooth return to campus, and an equally huge thanks to the students, staff, and faculty who’ve been so patient and flexible throughout this ongoing process. An added thanks to our Building Re-Entry Committee, made up of faculty and staff: their work and insight has shaped and informed almost everything we are doing this term. I am also so thrilled about some of the physical improvements that have been made to Gund Hall: we rewired and updated the fire alarm system, pulled up the worn vinyl tiles in the Trays, which now have gleaming polished concrete floors; the lounges now have cork floors. The entrances to Gund now have new 10-foot doors and improved card swipes; the studio roofs (all 120 of them) are new; you’ll also see new paint; and refurbished restrooms (though please note that the first floor restrooms, which include a new, accessible non-gender restroom, will not be complete until next week). We have three new tents (two at Gund and one at the Kirkland houses) and additional outdoor furniture to enable outdoor (maskless) teaching. You can schedule these spaces through SERT. Outdoor video screens are coming soon—they are on backorder. And last but not least, the new basketball hoop will be installed mid-September—you’ll be able to sign out a basketball from the Donut. Many of you don’t know how changed these spaces are; you may not even know what the Donut is. We have two classes worth of students who haven’t studied in our buildings and even some faculty who haven’t yet been here, despite having started teaching already last year. Those of you who are old hands here at the GSD, please share your insider intel; those of you who are new, don’t hesitate to ask questions and develop your own new traditions. While our return to in-person collaboration is thrilling and long awaited, some of the digital pathways we carved over the past year and a half have been impressively constructive. We should continue not just making use of them, but building from them. As an example, I encourage you, especially our faculty, to use our internal website GSD Now’s “Trays”, either as a space for collaboration within courses or for sharing conversations and projects with the rest of the school. And students, especially student groups, will find GSD Now a simple and effective way to promote student events, or to curate Trays on topical projects, group discussions, or ongoing research. Likewise, the virtual setting of our public programming last year proved valuable in its reach as well as the depth of discourse it enabled. While virtual lectures, conferences, and exhibitions are fundamentally different from their analog cousins, the upside is seeing how many people from around the world can join us at each event this fall. This semester, we can watch these events together even if our speakers cannot come here to give these events in person. We will be holding several spaces—Piper Auditorium, Gund 111 (aka “The War Room”), and two seminar rooms on the 5^th floor—for watch parties for this semester’s online public events. I look forward to seeing how these watch parties fuel some exciting and profound internal conversations. One of the things I love most about the GSD is the variety of perspectives we have: just consider the number of our academic programs—we’re clocking in at 23 this year, thanks in part to our overlap of the previous MDes tracks and the inauguration of the new MDes domains. These aren’t 23 individual camps of people who only talk among themselves—instead, it’s over a thousand students who bring very different perspectives and areas of expertise to one another. You all bring to the school some extraordinary opinions, some amazing thoughtfulness. If you need any confirmation of that, just tune in to The Nexus Podcast, a collaboration between the GSD’s African American Student Union and the Frances Loeb Library. Yesterday’s episode is a riveting conversation between MArch students Tara Oluwafemi and Darien Carr with Dmitri Julius, CPO of ICON. Tara and Darien’s probing questions guide a conversation that moves from 3d printed housing, to Afro-futurism and Sun Ra, to collaborations with NASA and what constitutes context when designing on the moon, among many other topics. I encourage you all to jumpstart your own conversations by checking out the current exhibition A to Z in the Druker Design Gallery (the lobby of Gund Hall for those of you who are new). Showcasing student work, A to Z offers an evocative way to return and reconnect with our school and each other. There are a LOT of students here this year—every desk in Gund and 485 Broadway will be occupied. On the student front, I want to applaud the entire incoming Student Forum—and wish Student Forum president Stephanie Lloyd a very happy birthday! Student Forum organized last week’s fantastic (and fantastically named) “Offline” events, which introduced and reintroduced the GSD to the student community. And speaking of reintroductions, let me say that I really wanted this address to kick off a joyous and delectable in-person celebration for us all—a backyard bash behind Gund. As you can tell, we concluded that now is not the right time for that, but I commit to holding that party, in person, at a point in the near future. We all deserve it. For now, our optimism for a continual return to campus and all that the on-campus experience can entail depends on our shared, collective care and our consideration for one another. Please don’t be stupid or thoughtless: please follow the testing regimens with care, please wear masks inside, and please take care outside. In closing, let me reiterate the four key points from George Saunders and Hannah Arendt:

• kindness is the only non-delusional response to the human condition.
• cultivate your state of mind
• stop and think
• and enlist the past and the future, engage with them and against each other, and to try to make sense of them.

And, finally, do remember to pause to take the time to enjoy being here: while this talk may have been a little long, time generally goes by fast at the GSD. I’m so very excited by this return and look forward to seeing you all: Welcome home!

Excerpt from Harvard Real Estate Review: “Transitioning Cross-laminated Timber to an American Context” by Ian Grohsgal

The Harvard Real Estate Review is a student-run publication that investigates the intersection between real estate, technology, and design. It operates between multiple disciplines to imagine a future for our homes and cities by developing creative solutions for the problems of the built environment. “Disruption and Resilience,” the ninth and latest issue of the Harvard Real Estate Review, explores humanity’s ability to adapt through various themes such as climate change policy, housing affordability access, and innovative building materials, thus demonstrating the “strength and value” of adaptability “and its impact on our built environment.” The following excerpt was selected from an essay contributed by Ian Grohsgal (MArch ’21), whose interests transverse sustainable design, affordability, real estate development, and technology.

Excerpt from Harvard Real Estate Review:“Transitioning Cross-laminated Timber to an American Context”

by Ian Grohsgal (MArch ’21)

The U.S. construction industry is at a crossroads. Facing shortages of traditional structural materials and a growing imperative to adopt more sustainable practices, builders must adapt. Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) has the potential to accelerate the sustainability of the built environment, but without a broader awareness of its cost saving potential, it remains an underutilized material in U.S. development projects. CLT is a subset of the mass timber product category, which includes large, laminated solid wood panels, nail-laminated timber (NLT), and glued-laminated timber (glulam). At its essence, CLT is an engineered wood system constructed from several layers of lumber board, which are stacked crosswise and glued together in an offsite factory. The material is unique in that it leverages the lightweight structure of wood while its crosswise stacking gives it the rigidity and strength of heavier materials. The effect is that CLT has a strength-to-weight ratio that rivals concrete and is quickly deployable in bidirectional spans. CLT is also a highly efficient building material to withstand earthquakes often without the use of more expensive seismic engineering techniques. As a relatively new entrant into the construction industry, CLT is structurally competitive in larger, regularly shaped buildings where the material’s mass production techniques are most advantageous. Currently, the material is used most effectively in the construction of mid-rise residential and commercial structures as well as low-rise educational, retail, and industrial buildings. CLT is increasingly being deployed in larger and taller buildings, illustrating its potential to challenge the paradigms of the construction industry. The use of CLT dates to the 1990s where it was engineered and incorporated into construction in Germany and Austria. Leveraging access to plentiful timber and a tradition of timber innovation, the region is home to some of CLT’s largest producers, including Stora Enso and Mayr-Melnhof Holz Holding AG. As green building techniques rose to prominence in the early 2000’s, use of CLT skyrocketed in Europe. With firmly established production, marketing, and distribution capacities, Europe leads the world in CLT adoption. (1) The global CLT market is small when compared to that of steel or reinforced concrete. In 2016, CLT production totaled $670.2 million USD with expected CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 15.1% through 2025. In comparison, the steel and concrete markets are respectively fifty and four-hundred times larger. European developers account for 50% of CLT consumed and have consistently proven the disruptive potential of the material. The question thus arises, why has CLT not taken off in the United States? While researching the regulations and economics constraining CLT, it becomes clear that CLT in U.S. construction is inhibited by a slow adoption rate of new policies, a lack of awareness of how cost and time savings are achieved, and a less developed network of manufacturing facilities in the supply chain. Read the full essay in the latest issue of the Harvard Real Estate Review. (1) Karacabeyli, E. CLT Handbook: Cross-Laminated Timber. Pointe-Claire, Canada: FP Innovations, 2013.