Mohsen Mostafavi Remembers Richard Rogers (1933-2021)

Richard Rogers was one of the few remaining major figures in architecture whose career and education had a direct link with the ideological project of the modern movement and its call for social change. Richard loved bright colors, in architecture and in clothing, and believed in the contribution of cities toward a better quality of life. More specifically, he championed urban regeneration on brownfield or disused sites with an emphasis on compactness and density.

Born in Italy and raised in the UK, his ideas and works were shaped by his European heritage. He was related to the celebrated Italian architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers, editor of Casabella magazine and a founding member of BBPR, the practice responsible for the iconic Torre Velasca in Milan.

Despite having dyslexia, Richard completed his diploma at the Architectural Association in London, where he worked with Peter Smithson, among others. He then continued his education at Yale under Paul Rudolph. His time at Yale coincided with that of another British architect, Norman Foster.

Richard will probably be best remembered for two of his practice’s most iconic buildings, the Pompidou Center in Paris (1977) and Lloyd’s in London (1986). The former was designed in collaboration with Renzo Piano; Peter Rice was the engineer on both.

However, it is two relatively small houses that helped define his characteristic approach toward architecture. The first of these, Creek Vean, was designed within the context of a collaborative practice, Team 4, made up of Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, and their then partners, Su Rogers and Wendy Ann Foster. Anthony Hunt was the engineer for the project, which was completed in 1966.

Looking at the house today, one wouldn’t associate it with the later work of either Richard Rogers or Norman Foster—apart, perhaps, from the open-plan interiors with their beautiful views of the landscape captured through the plate glass windows. Still, the house is important for Richard’s subsequent and lifelong commitment to teamwork and the idea of collaborative practice.

While Creek Vean was designed for Su’s parents, Richard soon had the opportunity to design a house in the London suburb of Wimbledon for his own parents, a doctor and a ceramicist. Based on an unrealized project, the Zip-Up house, it required the use of factory-made insulation panels that could be easily assembled on site. Ironically, given this dream of industrial production, the result was, to a large extent, a bespoke and handcrafted artifact. But the innovative and experimental house not only captures the DNA of Richard’s later work, it also exemplifies the sense of lightness, joy, and color that defines the best characteristics of his architecture.

On a personal note, I was fortunate to have Su Rogers amongst a group of teachers when I first started my architectural education. Later, during my tenure as the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Richard and his second wife, Ruthie, generously gifted the Wimbledon house to the GSD. The house was meticulously restored by Gumuchdjian Architects. Philip Gumuchdjian had been a former student and had also worked with Richard for a long time before setting up his own practice. The landscape architect for the restoration of the garden was a GSD graduate, Todd Longstaffe-Gowan.

When the house was first built it had a carport, which was subsequently turned into a separate smaller house, creating an intimate courtyard with the main house. The two buildings, with the help of a generous donor, provided the basis for a GSD/Richard Rogers residential fellowship program. The aim of the Richard Rogers Fellowship was to enable designers and scholars from around the world to spend up to three months in London and to engage in the study of the built environment. Richard’s own interests in architecture, culture, technology, the arts, and the city provided the framework for the broader scope of the fellowship.

In addition, a series of events on the city, and London more specifically, brought a diverse range of speakers and experts together. Organized as a “salon,” these small gatherings of around 50 people in the main living room of the house created great opportunities for debate, on such topics as engineering and housing. It was inspiring to have Richard participate in these events and to meet and mentor the fellows. He also enjoyed the experience very much.

Richard and Ruthie spent about a week at the GSD a few years ago when we invited them to be the Senior Loeb Fellows. Ruthie, a celebrated chef, gave a wonderful talk about how they managed and organized the produce and the menu at her restaurant, the River Café. Richard met with students and talked about architecture and, as you might expect, about what it could do for society.

Probably more than any other architect of the recent past, Richard was committed to architecture and technology’s social and political impact. It can be argued that his practice’s work, especially the exclusive residential projects, didn’t always align with his intellectual and political beliefs. But during certain moments, the practice’s outcome genuinely challenged the relationship between architecture, technology, and the conditions of production. He also managed to be hugely influential for a period of time with Britain’s then ruling Labour Party by making architecture and the built environment topics of political significance that affect people’s quality of life, and indispensable cornerstones of democracy.

I will miss Richard’s friendship, warmth, and generosity. And of course, his flair for colors.

Strictly Typographic: Behind this year’s public programs posters by Harsh Patel

The Harvard Graduate School of Design’s art director Chad Kloepfer first came across designer Harsh Patel ’s work in two books: Of Walking in Ice by Werner Herzog and Roman Letters by Evan Calder Williams (co-designed with Mark Owens). “They both felt as if they had landed in the here and now from a different era,” says Kloepfer. “It was hard to pin down a reference point and I was immediately charmed by the mystery and mood of it all.” It was in part due to these two exquisite objects that Patel was invited to design this year’s public programs posters, the second iteration of which will be unveiled today with the announcement of the spring semester’s public programs. Kloepfer and Patel sat down to discuss design practice and thinking in a world that’s pushed ever further into the digital sphere.

Chad Kloepfer: Coming into this season’s public programs posters, we were interested in pushing this project somewhere new, graphically. Can you talk about your entry into the process and the creation of this poster? 
Harsh Patel: In our initial discussions, I suggested that the seemingly straightforward task of presenting this information could simultaneously express two different feelings about the second year of this pandemic. The first approach—reflecting how introspective everything sort of got, assuming you stayed inside—was to be pared down typography, in a kind of first-person singular voice. It would be laid out in dense, intricate grids with pragmatic but idiosyncratic typefaces like the original Futura. The second approach resonated more with me on a personal level, although it made for a far less practical working methodology. It’s a visual summary of the anxious barrage that we stepped into when we went outside. The public programs poster and all of the individual event posters are pastiches of these ideas.

I want to backtrack for a moment and ask: when you get a commission like this one—where there is not a lot of specificity to the brief—how do you begin to generate an idea or concept? Do you have a methodology that applies to a broad range of work, or is it a different working model, specific to every project?
Employing a set methodology could make things easier on myself, financially. Designers in the cultural sector with one of those in place really do manage assembly-line operations, especially in cities like New York. But, no: the problem-solution model isn’t something I believe in. There’s sometimes a financial incentive to commit immediately to a project like this and think backwards from a timeline or budget, but nowadays it’s more important to find a meaningful intersection, and to know when to say no.

Something I’ve always appreciated about your work is how it defies an easy definition. Almost every component of the work appears, to me, to be “found” for lack of a better word—which I mean as a compliment—and this poster is no exception. How did you arrive at the mixture of different typefaces used on the poster and how do you see that relating to the form of the lecture poster?
The typography is a capsule of street level commercial design—mostly the more vernacular kind that preceded today’s digital hypermarket. It’s the lettering on a paper cigarette package, or the logo on the underside of a plastic toy, or the made-to-order lightbox signage of a fried chicken shop. The only purely institutional component was the base typeface, Margaret Calvert’s New Rail.

Is there a strategy to the typeface(s) chosen for each lecture, or is it something you come at from a more instinctual place?
There’s no set strategy, other than going for lesser-known types.

The posters for the GSD are strictly typographic, but I’ve always been curious about your use of imagery; it’s quite specific. How do graphics and imagery find a place in your work?
In our profession, we typically receive photographic content pre-determined to fit within the image-and-copy relationship that defines most advertising design. We are usually granted some license to manipulate these images and attempt to subvert their meaning, as long as we remain within the bounds of the brief. This framework just isn’t that interesting to me. Graphic design shouldn’t willingly constrict its expressive possibility to that kind of messaging.

We also have more access to images and to the means of comparatively simple image making than ever before. In my intro courses, a ground concept is that we can articulate our aesthetic subconscious into visual form. It takes confidence and honesty to mine those depths and hone meaning into an individuated language or style. Making images is only meaningful or fulfilling if I feel that the translation from thought to expression is clear and concise, that the process is economically sensible in terms of time and resources, and that there’s ideological consistency in the bird’s-eye view.

We spoke briefly over Zoom about the relationship, or influence, of European design on US design. You were born in Nairobi and you currently work from both Los Angeles and New York City: how does both a sense of place and design’s many histories enter your work?
My upbringing in India and Kenya gave me a set of cultural experiences that shaped how I see myself amongst the world, generally. The American cities I’ve lived in as an adult have shaped my critical outlook and working methodology. Certainly my perception is that our daily practice hasn’t fully realized the value of biographical self-examination. It usually draws a freehand line to mid-20th-century European techniques that were engineered for workhorse production and systemic portability. As an immigrant and as someone who is interested in more intimate, or sensitive, ways of creating and appreciating, I protest this reality more than I accept it.

I find this approach very beautiful and refreshing—and it brings to mind the influence and power of “local” design histories. I feel like there is still so much to learn from both individual and local practices.
Yeah, there is. I’ve taught and talked about the history of graphic design for 10 years now. A public archive of that class material is slowly building up here . Every example there asks questions about how and why things are categorized.

You work as both a traditional designer (taking commissions) and with self-generated content. How does either side of that coin inform the other, if at all?
Assuming I say yes to the right projects, then there shouldn’t be a marked difference. By sharing my editorial skills with my collaborators, and helping them identify some of their own visual amalgam, we usually find an authentic communication strategy.

I find being a graphic designer is to exist very much in a gray zone, which brings to mind the question of designer as editor, designer as artist. How do you see your role within the work or a given project?
The initial discussions—where you exchange values and decide what’s interesting, sustainable, and efficient—should take considerable time. Traditional studio structures operating on bureaucratic calendars can’t manage this as easily as someone with a completely solo operation like mine. My role is at first articulative, and then about devising expressive strategies.

Thank you, Harsh! We look forward to unveiling this spring’s public programs posters. 

Does Originality Still Exist? On Pushing the Boundaries of Architecture Representation

Architecture students arrive at the task of representation with a mounting sense of urgency. There is a lot to learn, and quickly. Plans, it turns out, are not merely arrangements of rooms and hallways on a page, but a particular way of conceiving buildings. Perspectives prove to be trickier to master but are less esoteric, maybe. Then there is a multitude of instruments, drawing media, modeling materials, software, and digitally mediated apparatuses to grasp. Even the basics of architectural representation reveal that there is more than skill involved in mastering its tools and techniques.

From the first it becomes clear that in representation the hand and mind interact in complex ways. Architects think, create, and communicate through representation, but the conventional techniques insert their own agendas. They carry traditions, place demands, shift motives, shape communication. Unsurprisingly, architects challenge and circumvent these techniques, even as they exploit them. So learning about representation does not entail merely gathering a set of handy skills for studio, it is the dawning realization that representation is the central task of architecture and one of its most daunting challenges—which takes more than a few weeks to figure out.

Even the term “representation” becomes uncertain. At first, re-presentation seems conceptually transparent: it obviously involves presenting something—again. But what gets presented, to whom, and why more than once?

Fundamentally, the process of representation in architecture starts with ideas and moves toward substance—from construal to construction, as architectural theorist Marco Frascari expressed it. Typically, it originates with the designer and ends with the builder. The first mark of drawing or the earliest glue joint in a model begins to give form to a thought, putting it before the designer for consideration, testing, and reconfiguration. The design takes shape in its various representations. It grows through new versions of drawings and models. These eventually mediate conversations between designer and critic or client, which lead to alterations and alternatives. At some point, usually after protracted exchanges with colleagues, contractors, and consultants, a designer must offer a provisionally complete set of representations for municipal approval. Finally, a more developed version serves as exhaustive, contractual instructions to builders. There is a many-linked chain between initial construal and final construction, and almost nothing an architect does happens independently of representation.

Deeply embedded biases lurk in this process, however. Representation is not transparent. In the flow of design, drawing and modeling techniques fortify and contaminate the work. Architectural historians Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier explain that, unavoidably, “value-laden tools of representation underlie the conception and realization of architecture.” Design necessarily moves through established methods of drawing and modeling, but every technique carries a historical legacy and an already-formed intellectual orientation. Representation in design thereby constitutes what anthropologist Edward Robbins refers to as a “cultural practice” that binds architects to a set of historical ideas and habits. It also serves, he explains, as “an instrument of social production” that mediates virtually all communication in architecture. To expedite the flow of information and avoid confusion, architecture relies on conventional techniques of representation, which are crucial but limiting. They facilitate design but also constrain it.

The most basic and ubiquitous architectural drawing convention that students must learn is orthographic projection, which carries historical vestiges of an old branch of advanced mathematics. Along with elevations and sections, modern plans arose from descriptive geometry, which involves the casting of parallel vectors from imagined objects to imagined planes in imagined space. Orthography lives in an abstract Cartesian expanse, best viewed these days in the pixel arrays of digital modeling viewports. It implies omniscience, infinity, homogeneity, and mastery over space and form.

Perspective, by contrast, emanates from the eye. Its Renaissance origins in painting point to its fundamentally humanist orientation, and terms used to set up a perspective drawing—ground line, horizon, station point—hint at an earthbound conception of space and the objects in it. Complicating this, the standard interfaces of Rhinoceros and other digital modeling tools blandly combine these conventions, presenting orthographic and perspectival views simultaneously. They imply control over both realms, while also staking a claim on the practice of modeling. Modeling, however, has its own conventions, which computer programs can’t quite replicate. These reside in the contraction of scale to accommodate the hand and the substitution of paper, cardboard, and wood as surrogates for construction materials. For architects, all of these tools can be relevant and useful.

However, one challenge with learning these conventions, valuable and fascinating as they are, is understanding where to find the intellectual space for creativity around them. Two Harvard GSD courses offered last semester—Elle Gerdeman’s short module, “Representation 1: Origins, Originality,” and Jennifer Bonner’s more advanced course, “Representation First (!!!) Then Architecture”—frame an attitude toward conventions of representation that helps students open their design process, shift entrenched biases, and build their creativity. The courses push students to question traditional techniques, import representational strategies from other disciplines, and undertake their own experiments.

“Representation 1: Origins, Originality,” a six-week introduction to architectural representation, starts, Gerdeman explains, “by investigating the origins of conventional representational techniques.” But it quickly expands beyond these techniques. Each lecture topic pursues “a tie between historical background and contemporary interpretation and pressures.” Her approach to this, for beginning students, is both instrumental and intellectual. She repeatedly brings together two basic questions about representation technique: “How do you do it, and what makes it theoretical or conceptual?”

In the first lecture on orthographic projection, for example, students learn the systems of projection and cutting that are essential to creating plans and sections but also learn that there can be “misreading and slippage” within these conventions. This opens an opportunity to challenge them. So an associated exercise responds to the presumed need for “a multiplicity of views to describe a single object” by shifting the requirement. Instead, students stitch together two projections in a single image. This exercise demonstrates how “thoughtful mis-use” of conventions might open space for new ways of thinking about design. Another lecture, “Temporality, Scale Figures, and Stuff,” essentially bypasses conventions by focusing on those aspects of architecture that standard representations often don’t depict—occupation, furniture, weathering, impermanence, maintenance. Through these examples, Gerdeman encourages students to imagine “buildings as environments, as places of performance, of ritual, of behavior” and to envision new ways of developing and depicting these aspects of architecture.

In “Representation First (!!!) Then Architecture,” Bonner extends this kind of thinking by stepping almost entirely out of the conventions of architectural representation. During the first course meeting, she offers the students a standard list of final review requirements—plans, sections, elevation oblique, axonometrics, wall sections, models, diagrams, and so on. This is something they are used to seeing, “But,” she argues, “that’s not the way we should be thinking about representations—like dressing up your building in the last weeks of the semester.” The primary goal of her course is to move way beyond this list, and to realize it is a tiny subset of possible representation techniques. She wants to expand architectural creativity through “novel representational techniques,” and to “push architecture in a new direction.”

In the first weeks of the semester, Bonner delivers a series of precisely formatted lectures “with the majority of sources located in art practice and popular culture.” These might include cake decorating, text redaction, 80s bubble lettering, main stream music videos; the range of possibilities is endless. Sometimes these images might develop unexpected associations that “leak into architecture,” she says; other times, they may be more practicable. For example, in Bonner’s own practice, Mall , she considered sandwich design when looking to change the typology of a midrise tower. The firm’s “Best Sandwiches ” research project yielded Office Stack , a bold new office building for Huntsville, Alabama.

During the last weeks of Bonner’s class, the students take over. Employing the same prescribed lecture format Bonner uses, they each explore six themes, often seemingly unrelated, and the class becomes “like an open source for visual imagery . . . it’s like a conceptual ideas generator.” Bonner admits that it’s a bit humbling. “What happens,” she says, “is that the students find more interesting things than you. . . .” But that is precisely the point: representation becomes wide-open, intellectually expansive exploration, out of which entirely new architectural ideas might (or might not) emerge.

Video: Make a Collection of Scale Figures for “Representation First (!!!)” by Sam Sheffer (MArch I ’22)

“Representation 1” is manifestly for students at the beginning of their educations in architecture, whereas “Representation First (!!!)” is most useful for students thinking about their thesis work, or who might be envisioning academic careers for themselves. In both courses, though, an urgent sense of discovery seems remarkably consistent. An initial effort to acquire the skills for creative work in architecture brings a realization that conventional techniques might not be adequate to the task. Searching around—and past—these methods reveal new sources of creativity. Beyond architecture, the alternative representation strategies that art, music, and popular culture have to offer are abundant, varied, mind-expanding. Three exclamation points say it well: there is a lot to learn, and quickly!!!

Meet the Loeb Fellowship Class of 2022

Last fall, the Harvard Graduate School of Design welcomed the Loeb Fellowship Class of 2022, marking the program’s 51st year. The 2022 cohort of fellows includes ten exceptional mid-career practitioners and innovators who work across activism, urbanism, public art, film and media, technology, real estate development, and other fields that engage the built environment and social outcomes. This year, the ten Loeb Fellows were selected from among 134 candidates through a highly competitive and global application process.

Loeb Fellowship Curator John Peterson observes that “the Class of 2022 exemplifies our commitment to some of the most urgent social issues of both the current moment and our collective history, among them racial justice, environmental and spatial equity, the societal impacts of technology, inclusive cultural preservation, and activism.”

Learn more about the 2022 Loeb Fellows in the videos below:

Veyom Bahl, New York, NY; Managing Director, Robin Hood Foundation

Karen Blondel, New York, NY; Founder, Public Housing Civic Association

Andy Bolnick, Cape Town, South Africa; Managing Director, Ikhayalami

Stephanie Hankey, Berlin, Germany; Executive Director, Tactical Tech

Will Hunter, London, United Kingdom; Founder, The London School of Architecture

Mpho Matsipa, Johannesburg, South Africa; Founder and Chief Curator, African Mobilities and Chancellor’s Fellow (FALF), University of the Witwatersrand

Monica Rhodes, Baltimore, MD; Director of Resource Management, National Park Foundation and Director of Partnerships, Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania

Moddie Turay, Detroit, MI; Founder and CEO, City Growth Partners

Michael Uwemedimo, Port Harcourt, Nigeria; Co-founder and Director, Collaborative Media Advocacy Platform and Senior Visiting Research Fellow, King’s College London

Jordan Weber, Des Moines, IA; regenerative land sculptor and environmental activist; Artist-in-Residence, Walker Art Center and Pulitzer Arts Foundation

Best of 2021: The GSD’s most popular stories, podcasts, photos, and public programs this year

As 2021 comes to a close, take a look back at the top stories, podcasts, photos, and public programs from the Harvard Graduate School of Design over the past year.

Most Read Stories

In Cotton Kingdom, Now, Sara Zewde retraces Frederick Law Olmsted’s route through the Southern states

For the course “Cotton Kingdom, Now,” Assistant Professor Sara Zewde presented a cross-temporal pedagogical approach derived from her own experience of retracing Olmsted’s route through the Southern states in 2019. Twenty students embarked on this experimental seminar, which drew upon Olmsted’s original text and other primary historical documents from Black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northup alongside a range of contemporary authors including historians, journalists, and social psychiatrists, from Toni Morrison to Alexander Manevitz and Mindy Thompson Fullilove. Read more about the course and Zewde’s research.

Designing for Disability Justice: On the need to take a variety of human bodies into account

Disability ought to be an exciting subject for architects: it’s about lived experience, problem solving, and designing a better built environment. While the topic engages with critical theory and aspirations for collective life, it’s often seen as a field that requires checking boxes and fulfilling requirements, or worse, a touchy subject strewn with outdated terms and outmoded habits of thought. The typical routines of design don’t always take the variety of human bodies into account. Read how four practitioners are changing minds and moving the field forward.

Loeb Fellowship Announces Incoming Class of 2022

In June, the GSD’s Loeb Fellowship announced its Class of 2022, a cohort of ten innovators who work across activism, urbanism, public art, film and media, technology, real estate development, and other fields that engage with the built environment and social outcomes. In addition to marking the program’s 51st class of Fellows, the Loeb Fellowship’s 2021-2022 cycle inaugurated a collaborative fellowship between the Loeb Fellowship and the ArtLab at Harvard University. Read more about this year’s Loeb Fellows.

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. Warmer temperatures and rising oceans will alter the island, possibly inundating its beaches, its historic town center, and other low-lying areas across the island. Browse a photo essay capturing the site of the Landscape Architecture option studio “Away…Offshore…Adrift… Shifting Landscapes, Unstable Futures” led by Professor in Practice Chris Reed.

Groundscrapers: Exploring the logic behind long, low buildings

In “Specific Ambiguity: Groundscrapers,” a studio taught by Design Critic Camilo Restrepo Ochoa, 12 students explored the possibilities of large, low buildings whose scale and complex programs necessitate deep thinking about how architecture can “operate as a mediator between social and environmental conditions.” Unlike a tall building, which seeks a relationship with an ineffable abstraction—the sky—a long, low building challenges designers “to redefine our relation to the ground,” the field of public and ecological relationships. Read more about the course and Camilo’s research.

Most Downloaded Podcast Episodes

Design Now Podcast: The Climate Crisis

In the inaugural episode of this Harvard GSD podcast we hear from people working in and around the school about the existential threat posed by climate change. Featuring: Seth Denizen, Martha Schwartz, Adriana David, David Moreno Mateos, Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich Listen on our website.

Nexus Podcast: Dmitri Julius

Julius connects the dots between terrestrial, sustainable building practices and new technologies being developed for human habitation in outer space. Listen on the African American Design Nexus website.

‎Future of the American City: Maurice Cox

Commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development Maurice Cox joins Charles Waldheim to discuss his career in public service and recent work in Chicago. Listen on the Future of the American City website.

Talking Practice: Practice in an Uncertain World

Listen in on an informal event recorded over Zoom in May 2020, after the GSD evacuated its campus due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The occasion gathered thirteen prominent architectural practitioners who assembled on an early Saturday morning to share candid thoughts on the complexities of practice at this unprecedented moment. Listen on our website.

 

Most Liked @HarvardGSD Instagram Photos

Most Watched Public Programs

H ARQUITECTES, “Where the Invisible Becomes Visible”

H ARQUITECTES is an architecture studio founded in 2000 by David Lorente, Josep Ricart, Xavier Ros and Roger Tudó. They combine their professional activity teaching in the ETSAV-UPC, ETSAB-UPC and Harvard GSD.

Kenzo Tange Lecture: Christ & Gantenbein and OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, interviewed by Jeannette Kuo

Swiss architects Emanuel Christ and Christoph Gantenbein founded their firm Christ & Gantenbein in 1998. The office’s activity extends to a broad spectrum of projects—private and public commissions, ranging from small transformations, to housing, office buildings, bridges, and urban master plans. OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen was founded in 2002. It is renowned for its idiosyncratic architecture, in which realisations and theoretical projects stand side by side. Jeannette Kuo is Assistant Professor in Practice at Harvard GSD and founding partner of KARAMUK KUO.

Robin Winogrond, “In Search of Geographical Re-enchantment”

Robin Winogrond, landscape architect and urban designer, is co-founder of Studio Vulkan Landscape Architecture, in Zurich, Switzerland. She was partner from 2014-2020, a period in which numerous international competitions and prizes were won, most notably the recently completed Zurich Airport Park.

Senior Loeb Scholar Lecture: Walter Hood, “When Memory Is Not Enough”

Walter Hood was the the Spring 2021 Senior Loeb Scholar at the GSD. He is Creative Director and Founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California, a cultural practice working across art, fabrication, design, landscape, research and urbanism. Hood also serves as the David K. Woo Chair and the Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley.

Kate Thomas, “Lesbian Arcadia: Desire and Design in the Fin-de-Siècle Garden”

Kate Thomas is the K. Laurence Stapleton Professor of Literatures in English at Bryn Mawr College. She publishes and teaches on Victorian literature and material culture, gender and sexuality studies, and food studies.

The Future of Tourism: Can the pandemic change how we visit popular sites, for the better? 

Many of us have spent the past months yearning to travel, but we’ve also had time to reflect on our collective travel habits. Businesses won’t be eager to resume flying after successfully shifting meetings online, and that will be a good thing when it comes to carbon emissions. As for leisure travel, increased engagement with our local environs will probably have led many of us to question what tourism is for. If the global tourist economy is going to ratchet back into high gear, how can it be done more sustainably, with greater understanding of cultural diversity, and with fewer negative impacts on sought-after sites? This semester at the Harvard GSD, studios in architecture and urban planning led by Toshiko Mori, Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu, and Daniel D’Oca explored these questions both directly and indirectly. All four professors are wary of tourism even as they acknowledge its seemingly inextricable role in so many aspects of our lives.

I caught up with Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu via videoconference in Shanghai, where they’ve been for most of the pandemic. Neri and Hu are the John C. Portman Design Critics in Architecture and co-founders of Shanghai-based Neri&Hu . Like most of us, their travel has been significantly curtailed these past months, and what tourism they’ve engaged in has been mainly within China. Hu observes that, with few options for traveling abroad, “People are just restless, so they’ve started traveling inland to visit cultural landmarks. I feel like everyone I know in Shanghai has gone this past year to Jingdezhen, the ceramics town.” Neri also notes “a conscious effort to travel within China and understand all the great places in this country.”

Tourism within China has been facilitated by a boom in infrastructure development, much of it built as part of the so-called Belt and Road Initiative that began in 2013. (The “belt” refers to the Silk Road Economic Belt and “road” to the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road—these are the land-based and sea-based parts of the initiative.) Transportation infrastructure of all types has been rapidly modernized. “The extension of major roadways has meant that places that would have taken you days to get there now take hours,” Neri says. “Before the train that takes 40 minutes from Shanghai to Hangzhou, it used to take three-and-a-half hours by car.” This increase in speed has “definitely increased tourism to places that would not have been easily accessible.”

How do you bring about an authentic connection to culture? How do you bring people together rather than isolating everyone? How do you prevent experience from being entirely commercialized?

A particular type of cultural tourism in China has grown dramatically as a result of this intensification of speed and accessibility. Imagine staged scenes of farmers leading cattle across picturesque bridges—with rows of tourists lined up in the right spot to catch the perfect photo. Neri describes how “developers have picked up on the idea that if you add culture to a common itinerary for tourists, it adds value.” This cold economic logic raises questions: “How do you bring about an authentic connection to culture?” Hu asks. “How do you bring people together rather than isolating everyone? How do you prevent experience from being entirely commercialized?”

Neri and Hu’s studio, “De/constructing Cultural Tourism,” looks at these questions as the impetus to exploring ways of creating more meaningful engagement with tourist sites. The problem they pose begins with John Ruskin, the 19th-century architecture theorist and philosopher of travel. Neri recites a famous Ruskin quote, which acts as a riddle: “I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love nature, than teach the looking at nature that they may learn to draw.” Neri explains that, “For Ruskin, drawing is the catalyst to seeing and understanding the things around us. In Ruskin’s argument, when we see something beautiful, our natural tendency is to want to possess it. But if we don’t understand it, the possession is meaningless.” Generating such understanding is difficult, Hu says: “The state of our contemporary reality involves taking out your iPhone to photograph something rather than sitting there and spending the time to sketch out a building. Nobody really writes in journals anymore. They just take films of themselves that go into the cloud, and they never have time to look at them again.”

The studio’s two locations are UNESCO-listed heritage sites, Ping Yao and the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang. The latter is a Buddhist sanctuary first constructed in 366 AD and located at a strategic point along the Silk Road, and the former is an “exceptionally well-preserved example of a traditional Han Chinese city, founded in the 14th century.” [1] These are among the most visited tourist sites in China, and thus are more likely to become checkboxes on itineraries than places for thoughtful engagement.

The studio focuses on a particular building type, the kezhan, or travelers’ rest stop. Neri describes one elaborate architectural form that serves as a precedent: “The typology of the caravanserai from the Middle East actually came to China along the Silk Road and became a different form,” he says. “It’s a city in itself. It’s usually round, very much like the famous Tulou in Fujian province, except much bigger. There are buildings inside—it’s a bazaar—and there’s always a hotel component. It’s a place where people come in and not only are they resting, but they’re also trading. It’s also a place of business, a safe environment.” Taking time is a key aspect of the architecture. “The longer you’re there, the more you come to know the inner circle of who’s actually in charge of the place,” Neri says. “It’s not just about fast transactions. It’s about layering. It’s also about hierarchy and vertical relationships. People sleep above and do their commercial activities on the ground floor.” The external orientation is equally nuanced. “Ultimately, our goal is for you to understand all the things around it,” Hu says. “There’s a lot of architectural strategy that students can use: framing views, staging interactions, opening up the layers of culture.”

Neri and Hu’s studio may ultimately provoke more questions than it answers. “The best part of the studio is that no one is traveling, so everyone is itchy to embark on that first trip after things open up,” Hu says. “The studio is like a rest stop for the students as well.”

Daniel D’Oca’s studio, “Highways Revisited,” focuses on a slice of American urban history that at first glance has little to do with tourism. D’Oca is an associate professor in practice of urban planning and co-founder of the New York–based firm Interboro Partners , and I talked to him while he was on the road. His studio zeroes in on the local impacts of America’s interstate highway system, which was expanded dramatically beginning with the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. The changes brought about by the act were enormous, including an explosion of suburban growth, the emptying of downtowns, and the solidification of automobile culture in the American psyche. Many freeways were routed through low-income minority neighborhoods, changing them profoundly, usually in negative ways. Examples are scattered across the country. D’Oca lists a couple his studio has investigated: “In Detroit, a highway was routed through Black Bottom, a Black neighborhood, more or less destroying it,” he says. “We’re also looking at a situation in El Paso where the fight is not whether to remove a highway, but whether or not to expand it beyond its current sixteen lanes.”

Tourism is not the most pressing issue in these neighborhoods, but it is an inextricable component of the urban dynamics the studio is considering. “The communities we’re working on care primarily about housing, stability, and quality of life issues,” D’Oca says, “but I suspect that tourism would be a desirable feature of a lot of these plans, as long as it turns out equitably.” One way tourism might help is by providing a boost to local economies. Take the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa. “This was a thriving Black neighborhood—it was called Black Wall Street—and it was the site of a massacre in the 1920s, an unspeakable tragedy. The second tragedy was the highway, which went right through the neighborhood when it was rebuilding itself,” D’Oca says. “You have a lot of efforts now to remember the past as part of revitalizing this community and others like it—both past tragedies and the history of when it was thriving. I suspect they want tourists, and tourists might want to see the history of Black Wall Street.”

There is a serious conflict between what the community needs and the effects of tourism.

Although tourism can bring a welcome influx of people, it has the potential to overwhelm. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in New Orleans, where the Claiborne Expressway runs through the Tremé neighborhood. “You can imagine that if the freeway comes down, the neighborhood will be more desirable, and there will be a feeding frenzy with speculators buying up shopfront houses and turning them into Airbnb rentals,” D’Oca says. “Nobody in the community wants that. There is a serious conflict between what the community needs and the effects of tourism.” D’Oca advises that planners should take care when unleashing the force of tourism. “New Orleans is a cautionary tale,” he says. “The city has been eaten alive by Airbnb speculation. Entire neighborhoods have been bought up by speculators who turn houses into short term rentals. In the Tremé, it is the freeway that is keeping property values low. Fighting for the freeway to come down is only half the battle. The real battle is to make sure there’s an equitable plan for when it does come down.”

Another tricky question: What happens when tourists stay? D’Oca has noticed that “something interesting has happened in the pandemic” in the small town in upstate New York where he lives. “Some people have moved here as remote work has become more plausible, and a lot of people are buying up second homes to get out of the city. I guess it’s a form of tourism—these are people who aren’t moving here but all of a sudden have houses here.” This has created cultural conflict. D’Oca continues: “It becomes a different vision of what the place should be, and sometimes it’s a zero-sum game. For example, if this is your second home, you don’t want to see growth; you want it to remain a 19th-century pre-industrial hamlet. But a lot of other people don’t have the luxury for their hometown to be that. They need jobs, they need housing.”

D’Oca describes a scene that has played out in similar small towns across America: “In a neighboring town there was a huge fight over a dollar store,” he says. “It was basically local people against weekenders. Some people thought it was the apocalypse—a dollar store coming to town. People like us need to check our class privilege. It’s about the image of the place: whether it will remain an agrarian landscape with hardly any houses in it, or somewhere more livable for working-class people.”

Among the lessons of D’Oca’s studio is how tourism can shade into gentrification. “The connection to tourism that’s really important is that this is a region with a declining population that is desperate for economic development,” D’Oca says. “And the tourist economy is thriving. The town is twice as busy on the weekends now, and increasingly amenities are geared to tourists—business that are only open Thursday to Sunday, selling $15 deli sandwiches. It comes at the expense of people who don’t see this as a boutique town but just as a regular place.”

The studio project of Toshiko Mori is set in Maine, so it is inevitable that tourism factors in. Mori is the Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture at the GSD and principal of Toshiko Mori Architect , and I reached her at her office in New York. Tourism has long been a major part of Maine’s economy, and it was hit hard by pandemic travel restrictions: the number of visitors and total tourist revenue each fell by about one-quarter last year. Mori’s studio, “Between Wilderness and Civilization,” is set in the small town of Monson, near the Hundred-Mile Wilderness, which is considered to be the wildest section of the Appalachian Trail and is thus a major hiking destination. But the studio is not about tourism. The brief asks students to “balance progress with respect for its ecology” on an abandoned 72 acres of farmland near town, and Mori is interested in other, deeper ways of thinking about the relationship between a place, local people, and visitors.

The studio brief begins with story: “Over one hundred and fifty years ago, Henry David Thoreau was introduced to this forest by a Penobscot guide and chronicled his journey in his collection of essays The Maine Woods. At the end of his journey when he asked his guide if he was glad to have returned home, the guide replied, ‘It makes no difference where I am.’ To him, he belonged to the land, and the land did not belong to anyone—a fundamental mindset for living in balance with nature.”

Playing out the architectural implications of this mindset is a central goal of the studio. There don’t appear to be easy solutions. Monson has suffered job losses as local industries have shifted in recent decades, and it is not clear that plugging into Maine’s flow of tourists would revitalize the town. Hikers equip elsewhere, and the area is packed with picturesque locales. With support from the Libra Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Portland, Mori has instead set up an experiment in symbiosis with Monson Arts , an artists’ and writers’ residency program. “The foundation bought up housing stock that was in decline, renovated them, and started an artists’ and writers’ residency program—bringing in a total of 90 people in the last couple of years,” Mori says. “They have a restaurant and a general store. The foundation previously bought a building in New Gloucester, Maine, which used to be a horrible institution—they called it an institution for the mentally feeble—that really just placed marginalized people in terrible living conditions. The organization renovated the building and converted its program to an agricultural facility.” The question of the studio: How can one intervene in one of the poorest places in New England to attract young people and propose a new and viable economic base?

Tourism is consumption-based—humans going somewhere to take and take and take. We don’t give back and we don’t even think of the symbiosis that’s necessary to sustain human life in the forest.

Toshiko Mori

Monson Arts does draw tourists of a sort, although they are different from those who come to hike. Instead, Monson is being recognized as “a good laboratory for solving the major problem of how to deal with poverty in rural areas in the United States, and how to save towns from obsolescence,” Mori says. “It’s a kick-starter kind of a program. Because of the artists’ residency, people like museum curators and cultural commissioners have been drawn to see what is going on in Monson. Even in the short time we were involved with Monson, we heard of many different organizations coming to see it as an example, perhaps to consider investing.” For Mori, one idea is to “create a new resource for these visitors.” She notes that “the artists themselves are interested in certain types of tourism. They may want to visit the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture or the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association , the oldest and largest organic farming organization in the country.”

This circulation of people and ideas will hopefully serve the larger goal of connecting people with the Indigenous way of existing on the land. Monson is situated among the lakes and forests alongside the Piscataquis River, which flows into the Penobscot River, along which the present-day Penobscot Nation is located. Before European settlers, the tribe called the vast watershed of the Penobscot River home. “[The Penobscot] have a very different ethos and understanding of engagement with the place where they live,” Mori notes. “Tourism is consumption-based—humans going somewhere to take and take and take. We don’t give back and we don’t even think of the symbiosis that’s necessary to sustain human life in the forest.”

 

For the studio, Mori invited an ambassador from the Penobscot Nation to speak to the students about their life. “They travel by canoes on the Penobscot River; it’s a survival technique,” she says. “Which season to go to the coast or the river to fish, and when to forage in the forest. In the past they suffered a great deal because they were forbidden to forage in the forest, they were given ration foods, and their lifestyle was completely changed, leading ultimately to a public health crisis.” Fortunately, “They’re slowly gaining back their way of life,” Mori continues. “It depends on respecting land, not exploiting it. They think of the forest and human society in terms of equal coexistence.” This mindset manifests in all sorts of ways, large and small. Some examples came through in a visit to the exhibit of Penobscot birchbark canoes in Harvard’s Peabody Museum around the corner from the GSD. “For the birchbark canoes, there are ways to peel the bark without damaging the trees,” Mori says. “Another idea is that, when harvesting bark, it is better not to harvest from the best trees, but rather from the second best. That way the best trees can continue to sustain younger trees and protect other species. This is a very important piece of Indigenous wisdom.”

When emphasizing the sense of connection with nature, Mori is quick to point out that we should not be misled by simple distinctions between city and wilderness. “I live in New York, and this is our nature,” Mori emphasizes. “This is the place we live. We have to work with an ecosystem of this particular density, with the lives of people collapsed together in this way.” Mori is ultimately pessimistic about the capacity of tourism to allow connections to such wisdom. “In a real analysis, you would see that tourism is a colonial activity,” she says. “We really have to think twice about it. I think climate change is helping people to see this. The pandemic has helped us realize how high the energy consumption of travel is, and how unnecessary it is. Tourism in a city is similar to tourism in nature: people just skim the surface of glamour of a place like New York. But the people who lived through the pandemic in a city really got to understand its true nature and what makes it work. That’s similar in some ways to how Indigenous people live: living with the land, in good times and bad, then not just leaving because it’s not a fun time. Going through different seasons and difficult predicaments and embracing all the circumstances of a place and people—that is very different from the voyeuristic mentality of tourism.”

So, can the mentality of tourism shift? Mori’s conclusion also summarizes the sentiments of her colleagues D’Oca, Neri, and Hu: “Going forward from the pandemic, we have to be very wise and conscientious tourists. To get away from tourism as consumption, we have to be open-minded to learn from other people and their environments.”

[1] “Mogao Caves,” UNESCO [https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/440]. “Ancient City of Ping Yao,” UNESCO [https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/812].

Report on Manufactured Housing and Latinx Homeownership Finds Significant Challenges and Offers Strategies for Improvement

With approximately 20 million Americans living in manufactured homes , it’s vital to examine the difference in financing between site-built and manufactured homes. Much of it boils down to the fact that a manufactured home is considered “personal” property instead of “real” property, since the homeowner typically owns the house, not the land it sits on. Prosperity Now —a nonprofit working to transform the economy into one that works for all people—recently published “Manufactured Homes: A Key Element in Growing Latinx Homeownership.”

In the report, authors Chadwick Reed (MUP ’22) and Doug Ryan examine the implications of this financial distinction—particularly its effects on communities of color.

For Reed, interest in manufactured homes was catalyzed in college, after he began working for a small nonprofit involved with residents of manufactured home parks. Through the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Community Service Fellowship Program , which supports GSD students to work over the summer with organizations that serve public needs, Reed was connected with Prosperity Now. He explains, “[Manufactured housing] is a fascinating and largely misunderstood sector of affordable housing. It has been the subject of a disproportionately small volume of scholarly inquiry as compared to conventional housing, which is at least partially to blame for some of the dysfunction in the space today.”

Reed and Ryan begin their report by acknowledging that, in the United States, homeownership is a primary means of wealth-building. They explain that while manufactured homes represent 5.4 percent of US homeownership, the housing type makes up approximately 10 percent of Latinx homeownership. “While the decoupling of the home from the underlying land is undeniably valuable in the extent to which it mitigates the initial expense of homeownership, it also represents two major weaknesses for residents,” the report continues. “First, without ownership of the land that their homes occupy, tenant-owners are materially subject to the decisions and actions of an actor whose interests may not align with their own. Second, because mortgages must be secured by land, financing options for land-leasing manufactured home owners are limited to personal property or chattel loans.”

Given the separation of the manufactured home from the land it sits on, the physical assembly of the housing type tends to significantly depreciate in value over time. Unlike with a mortgage, this results in the diminished security of a chattel loan. The truncation of chattel loan terms and the reciprocal increase of interest rates, in a relatively uncompetitive market, follow. Reed and Ryan elaborate, “In 2014, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reported that ‘interest rates on chattel loans may be between 50 and 500 basis points more expensive than real property loans.’ To put this figure in context, in 2012, roughly 94% of all manufactured home chattel loans—as compared to just three percent of loans for site-built homes—were categorized as ‘higher-priced mortgage loans’ under criteria set forth by the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act.”

Chattel loans are also regulated differently than mortgages, with considerably less government involvement in the marketplace. Chattel borrowers are ineligible for the foreclosure proceedings that precede repossession for homes purchased with mortgages, which can place them in precarious situations where homes financed with chattel loans can be immediately repossessed should their borrowers enter default.

Relatively speaking, manufactured homes constitute a small proportion of U.S. housing, but that proportion represents nearly 20 million people. If well regulated, manufactured housing could be a boon to U.S. affordable housing.

By examining financing practices that are successors of restrictive covenants and federal redlining, Reed and Ryan mine how these disparate challenges are exacerbated on the basis of color and how they knot into the convoluted American history of race and property. For Latinx communities in particular, diminished access to credit has served as a deterrent to chattel-financing. The report cites, “With a national median of 668, U.S. Latinxs’ credit scores are significantly lower than those of the general population, for which the median score is 706, according to the 2020 National Association of Latinx Real Estate Professionals.” Referencing journalism about discrimination against Latinx people in the mortgage-lending market as well as recent mortgage studies on interest rate disparities between white borrowers and those of color, the report suggests that similar conditions for lending discrimination exist in the chattel market, too.

For Latinx people that do own manufactured homes, it is not uncommon for their parks to be materially worse—in terms of infrastructure and amenities—than parks of comparable lot-rent inhabited by mostly white communities. It is also not uncommon for Latinx communities to be subjected to predatory management practices, akin to those in contract sales, that target non–native English speakers and undocumented homebuyers to exploit potential illiteracy.

In their report, Reed and Ryan offer ways to address the challenges and inequities associated with manufactured housing. “More data collection and research gives way to better regulation, which is critical for the housing type,” Reed reflected in an interview. “Relatively speaking, manufactured homes constitute a small proportion of U.S. housing, but that proportion represents nearly 20 million people. If well regulated, manufactured housing could be a boon to U.S. affordable housing. If poorly regulated, it remains a space where predatory lenders and other bad actors can continue taking advantage of it.”

“A crash course in loving”: Oana Stănescu remembers Virgil Abloh

“I have been refusing to put words down, afraid they might make real something none of us is anywhere close to accepting: Virgil Abloh, the architect, fashion designer, possible prophet, exquisite DJ, eternal collaborator, and brilliant friend, husband, father, and son, has died after privately battling a rare, aggressive form of cancer for over two years.

We had known each other for years, and worked together on too many projects to count when I invited him in 2017 to give a talk to our small student cohort of the Core 3 design studio at the GSD. Before we knew it, we got calls from the administration, asking: “Is Virgil Abloh giving a lecture? High school students have been calling to ask if they can attend.” Well, they didn’t just attend, they showed up, hours early, lining the walls of the GSD for what was, for many, their first lecture. And with that, all sorts of people whose lives would otherwise unlikely intersect, filled the lecture hall to the brim. No other single voice was able to connect with youth in the past troublesome decade the way Virgil did, and he did so naturally, because he was youth incarnate. The rest is living history. The talk became the GSD’s most watched lecture, followed by Incidents, the instantly sold-out transcript of the lecture, which was ultimately translated into Japanese.

Last summer—that 2020 summer—he wanted to see what we could do to bring architecture schools closer to the streets. We had been trying for years, in various ways, to cross what felt like a disconnect between the profession and education, between skill and purpose. Within two months, we created a seminar at the GSD in collaboration with the Stanford Legal Design Lab, where law and architecture students were working together, addressing the real-time changes the justice system was undergoing due to the pandemic. Virgil noted, “That invisible hand of design is why this course exists, because it’s often easy to say, ‘Hey, that’s not our responsibility,’ but ultimately, our human responsibility is to make it so that everyone can understand the basic premise of design, which is the basic premise of helping people.” It takes an incredible amount of work and luck for all the stars needed for this project to align, but Virgil liked aiming for the stars. And time and time again, he was able to reach for new heights, with his vision, his humbleness, and a generosity of resources.

The first grieving email I received last Sunday was from a former student: “I can’t explain how powerful it was to witness a Black designer speak so directly to us young people.” Virgil meant so many things to so many people: I keep thinking of him as a glue that held people together, the conduit to so many great leaps, the spark to so much trouble. If you drew a map of his reach, it would cover the world. This pertains to fashion, to music, to design, to philanthropy, but really, it’s about a spirit that transcended any definition. That was the very point.

Few people achieve in a lifetime what Virgil Abloh did in too short of a time: he broke the odds, not just once, for fun, but as a rule. It’s not that he didn’t face obstacles. On the contrary, he chose to ignore them as such, use them as a springboard, revealing their hypocrisy and limitations, carving a path not just for himself, but for generations to come. It’s hard not to smile between the tears, because he always shared his lust for life freely and his infectious, raspy laughter.

It was also 2017 when I told him about my own cancer diagnosis and he texted back in a heartbeat “Love you, cancer can’t stop us.” We didn’t know the cards we were dealt. A couple of weeks ago, as we were talking through the impossible challenge of such an illness, he said something very powerful: “What a crash course in loving this task deals us.” It struck me how universal, how true, how well it encapsulates life at its hardest. And this is the task we have been dealt now, too, a crash course in loving.

In doing so we will continue to live in a world shaped by him and while the world is certainly lesser without Virgil, we were lucky to have had him in the first place.”

Fostering Relationships Between Insects and Humans Through Design

Insects are indispensable creatures: vital pollinators, crucial recyclers of waste, the foundation for food webs around the globe, and a unique resource for medicinal purposes. As bioindicators, they are harbingers of ecosystem change. Yet they are often considered threats, plagues, or merely irrelevant, making them some of the most misunderstood animals on Earth.

Gena Wirth, design principal at SCAPE studio and visiting professor at the GSD’s Department of Landscape Architecture, is leading a studio that asks students to take a much closer look at these valuable species. Starting from the premise that “the health of insect populations is directly tied to the health of our landscapes,” “ENTO: Fostering Insect/Human Relationships through Design” prompts students to investigate human/insect dynamics and design for insects using a multidisciplinary and research-driven lens, and engaging with experts of ecology, entomology, horticulture, and landscape architecture.

We need to slow down a little bit and look more closely at what insects are telling us, at what their presence is telling us, at what their chemical composition is telling us. And, really view them as valuable cohabitants of the world that we live in, not as pests to smash or things to spray.

Estimates suggest that there are about 10 quintillion live insects on Earth, which is the equivalent of around 1.4 billion for every human. Of this staggering number, scientists have identified an estimated 5.5 million varieties, meaning insects represent close to 80 percent of the world’s living species. But research indicates their numbers are rapidly decreasing. “I think there’s a general consensus in the entomology community that we have a large-scale problem with insect decline,” Wirth says. In 1987, E.O. Wilson, also known as the father of ecology, gave an address at the National Zoological Park in Washington, DC, referring to invertebrates, and especially to insects, as “the little things that run the world.” Back then, Wilson also famously said: “If invertebrates were to disappear, I doubt that the human species could last more than a few months.”

“Urban environments and the way that we develop and build life on land is not necessarily helping or accelerating most insect life,” Wirth explains. Intensive farming, broadcast pesticide applications on crops, and climate change are altering populations. And many insects are susceptible to global warming: “They are very temperature-sensitive, and even the smallest changes can trigger large movements of species, the seeking out of new habitat types, and the adaptation to new environments,” Wirth says. Even seemingly innocuous human activity can affect insect development. Wirth uses the example of fireflies, which have evolved to lay their eggs on leaf litter. Something as common as a raked grass landscape means they can no longer reproduce or survive.

There is a lot about insects that is yet to be understood—including the exact size of their populations. And since many have not yet been discovered, it’s difficult to grasp the extent of their decline. “It’s almost like, we think there is a big problem, but we don’t know how big or what exactly is happening,” Wirth explains. “That’s the kind of space that design can operate well within. We’re a field that needs to propose action, adaptation, and change. We have to work in this environment of uncertainty, test new ideas, and put thoughts forward. So that’s really the aim of the studio: to test and foster new insect/human relationships using our design language and tools.”

As Wirth points out, there are many inspirational thinkers in the overlapping fields of insect conservation, gardening, and horticulture. “I would say that there is a trend towards ecological gardening, or a kind of backyard scale habitat improvement, which I think is having some momentum in the greater public discourse,” she says.

At the beginning of the semester, students traced relationships between certain insect taxa in rural, suburban, and urban sites of eastern Massachusetts. Field trips allowed them to take a closer look at insects and the impact many of these species could have on a single habitat. In one outing, the group participated in a guided tour with Harvard Forest’s Greta VanScoy, education coordinator & field technician, and David Orwig, senior ecologist and forest ecologist. They are researching the hemlock woolly adelgid, an invasive insect, native to Japan, that targets hemlock trees in North America and has killed millions of them in the eastern US. “We got to see first-person, from their perspective, the impact of one single species on an entire forest type that covers and blankets New England,” Wirth explains.

In the studio, students are conducting projects focused on particular species—investigating habitat requirements and needs during all the phases of the life cycle, as well as any changes that have been occurring. This advanced research is expected to develop into site-based design proposals. Although Wirth believes all insects should be preserved, she is careful not to impose such an opinion on her students. “Ultimately, the goal of the studio is to have [them] reflect on what is the existing [human] relationship with the species they chose, which might be one of admiration, or in the case of fireflies, for example, nostalgia but also neglect. Ignorance is also a relationship we have with many species that we don’t even know exist or know anything about.”

Students are not only defining the relationships that currently exist between insects and humans, but also determining the sorts of relationships they want to foster with their design process. Wirth notes, “Some of those are about expanding and supporting habitat needs or living in a more mutualistic or beneficial way with insects. And some are about being defensive with them. But that is all completely up to students and is very species- and project-specific.”

Sijia Zhong (MLA I AP ’22) is focusing on the emerald ash borer, a non-native wood-boring beetle that has been deemed one of the most significant threats to North American forests. As Zhong explains, the beetle—which is indigenous to northeastern Asia and was first identified in Michigan in 2002—was probably brought to the West through the global trade of wood products or packing materials. This invasive borer has already killed millions of trees and is a continuing threat to native ash trees.

One part of Zhong’s project is aimed at the economic impact this species poses to communities who find themselves having to remove dead ash trees by the thousands. Her design will address this issue by proposing “an on-site alternative to dispose and reuse the deadwood left by the emerald ash borer, and developing an urban deadwood habitat system to utilize the aftermath of infestation for nitrogen-fixing and local biodiversity restoration.”

Liwei Shen (MLA I ’22) and Hyemin Gu (MLA I AP ’22) are researching the impact human activity has on monarch and cabbage white butterflies close to the I-91 highway, specifically due to the accumulation of chemicals such as zinc (emitted by cars) and neonicotinoids (heavily used in agriculture). Monarchs are vulnerable since they feed off milkweed, which grows on roadsides absorbing pollution, while the cabbage whites—an invasive species hailing from Europe—are much more resilient to harsh conditions. The duo is developing an “environmental justice” solution by designing butterfly corridors with vegetation species that can absorb pollutants and create balanced habitats.

Since Shen and Gu are looking at the highway, the roadside, and agricultural sites alongside the roadside, they are also interested in the way human needs, particularly local farmers’ needs, can intersect with those of the butterflies they’re studying. “We’re working with butterflies at the edges of farmlands, [so] we are also thinking about creating healthy environments for both human and non-human species,” they explain.

“No inch of the world is untouched by human impact,” Wirth says. Even landscapes that don’t appear to be affected by humans are reshaped by the innumerable human activities that accelerate climate change. “We are impacting these places. We are a part of these ecosystems. And we have to figure out how to be a better, more compatible part. I think that involves bringing in the greater suite of design tools. We need to slow down a little bit and look more closely at what insects are telling us, at what their presence is telling us, at what their chemical composition is telling us. And, really view them as valuable cohabitants of the world that we live in, not as pests to smash or things to spray.”

Climate Change, Water Rights, and the Future of the Mexican Altiplano: An interview with Lorena Bello

The recent United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow offered fresh evidence of the unbridled global climate crisis, and reminded us that while humanity faces unprecedented threats, some communities are bearing an undue portion of the burden. GSD Design Critic Lorena Bello Gómez’s research combines landscape, architecture, and urbanism to mitigate that burden for environmentally vulnerable communities. As an urbanist, she is interested in how design at the territorial scale can address flawed policies and infrastructures to reduce injustice.

This semester, Bello is teaching “Aqua Incognita: Deciphering Liquid Territories in the Mexican Altiplano.” Using a water-scarce region in the hinterland of Mexico City as a case study, studio participants are designing sustainable and scalable pilot projects to help this farming region confront the fallout from unsustainable industrialization and the active threats to local livelihoods posed by climate change.

How has your practice informed the Aqua Incognita studio?

For five years, I have been looking at territories beyond cities that are engulfed in climatic risks. I typically work with local foundations in collaboration with interdisciplinary teams, raising support through international grants. My current project looks at the Apan Plains, an area 80 kilometers from Mexico City. The city and the plains form a single region climatically, in terms of water resources, fluxes, and metabolism. But they don’t have any other connection, which creates tensions. There’s a political divide because these plains belong to another state, Hidalgo, with different policies, governor, and political agendas. And while Mexico City is always in the spotlight of climate crises; the Apan Plains don’t get into the news. This absence of visibility makes them vulnerable to climate change and to other environmental injustices.

The studio is positioned to respond through design to the cultural, political, biophysical, and socioeconomic structural issues that are placing pressure on this liquid territory. We are supported by a UKPACT international grant to build capacity for implementation and to establish trust with local stakeholders.

As climate crises increase, the new regimes of too much or too little water that don’t allow you to farm are also increasing. This requires a more equitable access, provision, treatment and reuse of water resources. Designers can provide scenarios showing the gains of such redistribution.

What can you tell us about these pressures?

In the 1920s, after an agrarian revolution, lakes were drained and land was given back to farmers as commons or ejidos. Mexican land is communally owned and individually farmed, a trend diminishing over time as the nation entered a neoliberal era. After NAFTA, in 1992, land could be privatized and transferred from common land to dominio pleno, or private land. Mexico is still urbanizing peri-urban areas in the outskirts of cities, transforming ejido land to urban land.

In Apan, land has been abandoned or overexploited through industrialization. Adding to farmer’s challenges, in 1954, the national government determined that the Apan Plains’ aquifer, linked hydrologically to Mexico City’s, could not be used by local farmers. Instead, the national government has granted aquifer access to many industrialists. There are now global beer and paper industries, metal companies, and solar farms in the valley, all using aquifer water needed by communities.

So, the crux of the issue is access to—and control over—water resources?

Yes. On the one hand, you have a population who depends on their land yet only have access to rainwater. Then you have the urban areas of the valley together with these industrialists, that have access and are depleting the aquifer—as nobody measures consumption.

This, along with the privatization of land, is causing water-intensive processes and erosion, since Apan Plains’ municipalities lack urban plans to protect critical environmental zones and resources.

Does the course look at a particular kind of solution?

The studio is testing hypotheses through design, working closely with Mexican and global experts in law, urban sociology, ecology, agronomy and environmental sustainability. This interdisciplinary team provides students a holistic view of the intertwined structural challenges that these communities are facing.

At selected settlements of ~2,000 people, students are designing aquacultural projects that improve the hydrological region in a bottom-up fashion. They are integrating formerly siloed areas of scientific knowledge to build spatial connections, creating processes that enhance positive feedback loops and decrease waste. They are designing systems, not objects.

Can you give me examples of potential solutions to any of the problems that you’ve mentioned?

Farmers can be helped to reforest and transition from barley monoculture into more sustainable and profitable agriculture. This will in turn diminish the amount of pesticides and agrochemicals that go into the aquifer and water bodies, and improve the quality of soil—which is arid—in order to amplify wetness.

As climate crises increase, the new regimes of too much or too little water that don’t allow you to farm are also increasing. This requires a more equitable access, provision, treatment, and reuse of water resources. Designers can provide scenarios showing the gains of such redistribution.

What kind of experience have you created for your students?

The Apan Plains make visible and tactile the challenges that vulnerable human/non-human communities are facing. Students heard this in first person from different stakeholders and they had the opportunity to get a lot of feedback. In this sense, Aqua Incognita gives them an active voice in reducing such vulnerabilities with projects that must anticipate: resistance among actors, low budgets, low management and maintenance—not dissimilar from greening plans in Europe or the US.

When I think about landscape architecture, I imagine gardens. What does landscape architecture mean in the context of this work?

Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted was one of the first designers to think systemically about the metabolism of cities, with large visionary projects that move beyond gardens and become a kind of regional design. To me, it is an excellent way to think about sustainable regions today: How do you enhance the metabolic cycle of resources? How do you start closing cycles instead of linear structures that leave things open? So, part of the approach of the studio is to think about water circularly, moving from a myopic understanding of solutions to a holistic understanding of problems.

UKPACT project collaborators include Antonio Azuela, Charlotte Chambard, Diane E. Davis, Gabriela Degetau, Gustavo Madrid, Raúl Mejía, Samuel Tabory, Monica Tapia, and Luis Zambrano. Student researchers include Ying Dong, Lauren Duda, Angel Escobar-Rodas, Barbara Graeff, Xingyue Huang, Jingyun Li, Hala Nasr, Sophie Mattinson, Alison Maurer, Morgan Vogt, and Maria Vollas.