Tar Creek Remade: Taking on 120 years of environmental injustice at an Oklahoma Superfund site

Envision a broad expanse of barren gray mounds riven with erosion channels. Pools of viridian, ochre, and bright russet water fill low areas between the piles. Some of these drain into a meandering multicolored creek that makes its way through rank grass and shrubs. A hot breeze lifts gritty dust from the mounds and swirls it across empty roadways. Its dull dry odor mixes with the sharp acidic tang of the creek. A trickle of water and the whisper of rushing air fill the quiet. Residential streets among the huge piles slowly narrow under encroaching weeds, and cracked concrete slabs hold back overgrown lawns. Only memories of the houses remain along 5th, 6th, and 7th, along Cherokee, Oneida, and Ottawa, and along Treece, Picher, and Main Streets. At Memorial Park a black gorilla on a red pedestal announces a 1984 football victory—Oklahoma division 1A. A block away, rising higher than the gray gravel piles called “chat,” a water tower announces: “PICHER Gorillas since 1918.” From an airplane or satellite, Picher, Oklahoma, appears as an anomaly in the endless green grid of agricultural land at the center of the United States. Huge irregular gray blots and dark pools interrupt the geometric precision of roads, and the colorful smear of Tar Creek runs diagonally through the town. Abandoned a decade ago—like its neighbors Cardin and Douthat, Oklahoma, and Treece, Kansas—Picher reveals a legacy of environmental indifference and staggering injustice. For just over 70 years, the town served an immense lead and zinc mining complex. Its corporations enjoyed virtually unregulated access to billions of dollars’ worth of buried minerals, which it extracted aggressively until profits declined in the early 1970s. Members of the Quapaw Nation, who owned parts of the land, derived little benefit, because they had been forced by the federal government to sign unfavorable leases during the mid 1890s under the pretext that they were “incompetent,” incapable of using their own land profitably. Consequently, the Quapaw tribal members received none of the mining profits but were left with the toxic and hazardous waste when the mines closed. Dust from the chat piles contain high concentrations of lead, zinc and cadmium; ground water is intensely acidic; and underground excavations give way unexpectedly under lawns, houses, streets, and the once-proud home of the Picher Gorillas. The Environmental Protection Agency designated the area as the “Tar Creek Superfund Site” in 1983 and eventually bought out the residents of Picher, Cardin, Douthat, and Treece. Disincorporated and abandoned by 2010, vestiges of the towns remain among the toxic piles and sinkholes. Cleanup has been exceedingly slow, and until recently, the Quapaw tribal members were excluded from the remediation effort. GSD professor Niall Kirkwood describes this passionately as “a horrific story. . . 120 years of environmental injustice.” By design, the brutal legacy of the mines haunted his spring 2021 landscape architecture studio, “Tar Creek Remade: Environmental Legacy, Toxic Terrain and Re-Imagining the Future in the Tri-State Mining Area, Ottawa County, Oklahoma, USA.” From the beginning, Kirkwood challenged his 10 students to take on this immense problem of Tar Creek—a project “so utterly terrifying and so utterly complex that any sense of a resolution within a 15-week period is almost impossible”—with energy and creativity, but also realistically, anticipating small steps and a long time frame. It is crucial, he warned, to anticipate that progress will occur only “little by little” over centuries. Accordingly, their task was to “to go down to the micro-scale on the site. . .” and to propose “test experiments. . . they could scale up over the site—a hundred times, a thousand times, ten thousand times.” In addition to many technical experts, Kirkwood invited two long-time participants in the Tar Creek evolution to advise the class. Rebecca Jim and Earl Hatley, Quapaw tribal advisors and co-founders of Local Environmental Action Demanded (LEAD), based in Miami, OK, are deeply familiar with the frustratingly slow progress and long time frame at Tar Creek. Since 1997, their non-profit organization has advocated for all the tribal and non-tribal communities in the area, pointing out that “the EPA and State of Oklahoma have spent more than $300 million at Tar Creek—yet the creek still flows orange, tailings piles still loom on the horizon and children are still poisoned by lead.” In addition, environmental scientist Dr Kurt Frantzen, an expert in large scale environmental damage and superfund sites advised the class on issues of pollutants, site remediation and risk. Through more than a hundred hours of class time the three advisors helped guide the students through some of the otherworldly complexities that are so central to their everyday lives. The studio unfolded in four stages: “Legacies,” “Voices,” “Wisdom,” and “Futures.” During the first weeks of the semester, Kirkwood explains, “We start the course with a land acknowledgment. . . we get the students thinking about the idea that sites are not just given to you; this one has a very deep history that is tied to the Indigenous people.” Reinforcing the understanding that all sites have legacies, the students produced two acknowledgments—one for Tar Creek and another for where they were living during the semester (since the class met remotely). Subsequently, the students read texts, watched videos, gathered images, and listened to the voices of Tar Creek area residents so that they could begin to formulate initial “hypotheses”—first proposals of what they might test at the site. Over the course of several weeks, they interrogated and adjusted their hypotheses. During this third phase, which brought them to the midterm, they began to consider how their proposals might work for environmental remediation on small test plots, but they also sought to “infuse that within a cultural structure,” by adding programs that would accommodate people’s needs—for trails, agriculture, hunting, food security. During the final stage of the studio, the students more fully envisioned how the experiments might develop over the long term to address the question “what’s the future of this place?” This entailed not just an understanding of the sometimes agonizingly slow pace of remediation and cultural change, but also the inevitable interactions of these experiments with changes in larger global forces—shifting populations, rising temperatures, more violent storms, and new technological developments in remediation and clean-up. By the end of the semester, the students produced a wide range of proposals for the blighted site—addressing the contaminated water, the toxic chat piles, and the perilous sinkholes while also considering the residents of the area and their livelihoods. In one project, microorganisms would invisibly decontaminate the water and soil on many small sites where people could come together on the cleansed ground to play, learn, and enjoy each other’s company. Another project looked back at the legacy of the Quapaw Nation, understanding the community as mound builders who could reclaim their ancient expertise and reshape the chat piles to redirect hazardous airflows and accommodate beneficial plant life. One student took on “something no one has even considered,” Kirkwood says, choosing “to remediate groundwater contamination in the numerous sinkholes.” Surprising for its boldness, the project proposed using the collapsed ground as remediation ponds—monitored over the long term through robotics—so that, eventually, “the landscape could be loved.” Other students developed sophisticated plans for the slow reclamation of the land and water: regenerating the native prairie, rerouting Tar Creek around the toxic site, and highlighting the slow transformation of colors in a healing landscape. A day after the final review, Rebecca Jim sat down to recall the students’ efforts and generosity, writing: “I have long thought this place will only find the solutions and the reclamation deserved by establishing relationships with people with vision, skills and training, and ultimately the power who will see this place but also see and experience us, each of us they encounter as people who matter, who have lives that matter and desires to live in places students like these can imagine. . . . These students took on Tar Creek and with their projects ‘Remade’ it all and gave hope where there has been none.” Rebecca Jim zeroes in on the essence of good design: It can and must contend with the physical substance and challenges of a place, but design is, most importantly, about people, about justice, about care. The daunting story of Tar Creek—“so utterly terrifying and so utterly complex”—calls out for this kind of care. But Kirkwood points out that every country has Tar Creeks, places where global forces fall heavily and unjustly on the land and the people who live there. These are difficult but appropriate subjects of study for designers, he says, even in short-term academic studios where resolutions may be unattainable. The goal is to cultivate expertise and creativity, as well as humility and generosity. At the outset of “Tar Creek Remade,” Kirkwood cautioned the students to consider that in their designs, what matters is not “the ‘stamp’ or ‘signature’ of the author” but “ethical and cultural attitudes to land, landscape and the natural world” and a genuine concern for the people who work to repair the land and who live on that land.

Concluding an Unforgettable Year: A Message from Dean Whiting

Dear GSD Community, As we gathered virtually to watch the Class of 2021 receive their graduation honors, I was overwhelmed with admiration for what you each, and we collectively, managed to accomplish this year. While now is a moment for celebration, it is also a time to reflect, given the impact the past fifteen months and more have had on all of our lives. We all know—we all have lived through—how difficult that time has been. To celebrate and honor you each is also to remind ourselves what work and values we must continue to carry forward. I am always struck by the sheer talent and passion that thrives within our community. One aspect of this year I will never forget is how our students and faculty spoke out, compellingly and evocatively, about the challenges and legacies of racism in our world and in the design fields. I am beyond grateful for our faculty and students who have made race and equity not afterthoughts but core values. We must maintain that ethos. Some important projects on race, equity, and design emerged over the past year at the GSD, illustrating design’s agency to affect these big, structural questions. I want to highlight our African American Design Nexus (AADN) and the podcast it launched this year, “The Nexus,” as well as a specific project that emerged from it: the Harlem StoryMap, created by Thandi Nyambose (MUP ’21). Thandi’s engaging reveal of the designers and stories that shaped Harlem exemplifies both the self-scrutiny and reassessment we must undertake as designers, as well as the overdue honor we owe to those designers whose contributions have long been overlooked. I also want to applaud Toni L. Griffin for launching the inaugural Mayors’ Institute on City Design Just City Mayoral Fellowship, which convened seven Black mayors from around the United States to directly tackle racial injustices in each of their cities through planning and design interventions. These are exactly the sorts of projects that remind us all how much work we have to do, but also how dialogue and action can shift when design intervenes. The pandemic presented us with other challenges, both immediate and ongoing. We needed to create a virtual pedagogy that would be potent and inspiring, and our Innovation Task Force, and really our entire community, worked to develop the finest virtual education possible. I applaud the ITF for their insights, which directly shaped our academic year and will inform and elevate our pedagogy well beyond the pandemic. Introducing “GSD Now” to the community was a real thrill; to be able to gather, if virtually, in shared “Trays” and to immerse ourselves in the daily pulse of activity made our spring semester just a bit more normal. Our Fabrication Lab raised the bar, too, with their Virtual Gund. Our faculty and students deserve a hearty round of applause for pivoting so quickly and effectively and for producing such remarkable work despite great challenge. But we also face broader questions of how people will design and create space in a world where space and coexistence can be feared as dangers. Among those who have begun exploring that bigger question is Farshid Moussavi, who led a fascinating studio last fall on rethinking residential architecture in light of the pandemic and its erosion of the live-work dichotomy. Farshid is among the GSD faculty who are working, as we speak, on studying our own Gund Hall and preparing it to accommodate our return this fall. Despite the headwinds we faced, the GSD expanded and elevated its public programming and engagement. Our events and exhibitions remained top-notch, and it was especially powerful to see our exhibitions turn “Inside Out,” starting with last November’s Election Day message. Harvard Design Magazine returned with a stunning redesign and a roster of brilliant and dedicated contributors and guest editors, scrutinizing the idea of “America” from diverse angles. And in launching Harvard Design Press and the student journal Pairs, we have ensured that written word and expanded, immersive conversation will remain cornerstones of design dialogue at the GSD and beyond. With all that there is to celebrate in the moment, it feels almost hasty to look ahead to our return to Cambridge and to campus this fall. But that is where we currently stand: an inflection point between immense hardship and eager optimism. I encourage you each to take good care of yourselves, and to follow university guidance and public health recommendations as we embark upon our summers and start planning our return to campus. With optimism and with the wish that you all have a peaceful and promising summer, Sarah

2021 Class Day Speaker Jia Tolentino: An Interview

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of the bestselling essay collection Trick Mirror, which has been translated into eleven languages. She was the recipient of a Whiting Award, a MacDowell Fellowship, and the 2020 Jeannette Haien Ballard Writer’s Prize. She graduated from the University of Virginia, received her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan, and lives in New York. Tolentino will present Harvard GSD’s annual Class Day Address during the School’s 2021 Commencement Exercises. Ahead of her address, Tolentino spoke with Harvard GSD’s Travis Dagenais about her writing, her pandemic experiences, and a cherished piece of personal art.

Let’s start with something I think a lot of people will want to learn more about: is that an original Ecce Homo in the backdrop of your headshot?

It absolutely is—thank you so much for noticing. I painted it several years ago while consuming three glasses of merlot on “free paint night” at a place in my neighborhood in Brooklyn called Wine and Design, which really sadly was a casualty of the pandemic. I’m not joking at all when I say that Ecce Homo speaks to me on a profound spiritual level—it is a reminder of the absurdity and transience of all human effort—and it was the ideal choice of subject for free paint night, because if I messed it up I would only honor its powerful energy even more.

Trick Mirror, like much of your writing, suggests clarity and conclusion amid chaos and conflict, though you write in the introduction that you are not always the “calm person who shows up on paper.” For you, what goes on in the space/s between thinking and writing?

For me, there is almost no space between thinking and writing, because I essentially can’t engage with my own thoughts outside a written form. My head is either empty or full of opaque gaseous substances. I can hardly even perceive properly without writing; I keep a notebook that’s mostly about the sky and the trees and the weather, because this is the best way to get myself to actually see the natural world. Outside writing, I have instincts, I feel conflict and trouble and dread and gravitation, but otherwise I have absolutely nothing—the only sense-making I am capable of always occurs in words.

You’ve observed that the pandemic has, among other things, altered your sense of the “possible rate of change.” That’s impressive, because I can barely remember what day it is. What sorts of events or phenomena have you seen accelerate, and what has slowed down?

In March of 2020, we shifted overnight to a way of life we’d thought of as unthinkable a week prior, and remained in that way of life for more than a year. Abolition and Universal Basic Income entered the Overton window, as did a near-unanimous acknowledgment that at least one specific form of healthcare, in COVID treatment, should be public and free. We stopped traveling, stopped using carbon in ways that many of us had thought of as completely essential. Not that I ever want to spend another year in one chair staring at my computer, but I have been galvanized by the reminder that we are capable of so much more than is typically expected of us, and that we are capable of reconstructing the way we live on other terms.

In an article in Elle—back in 2019—you were described as “extremely online.” How far did “extremely” expand last year?

It actually contracted—even as, like most everyone, I spent much more time looking at screens than I would have liked. I had been limiting my time on social media to 45 minutes a day for a while before the pandemic, but I had continued to excuse my participation in the world of memes and Twitter discourse with the fact that real life and real people were self-evidently and considerably more vivid and interesting to me, and the fact that I wrote about the internet for work. But in the pandemic, there was no real life to outweigh the internet; it was just the internet, and I was also shifting toward other kinds of work, like screenwriting. I eventually got off Twitter in summer 2020, shortly before having a baby, because I didn’t want to be up all night with her doing the numbing pleasureless scroll.

You’re intellectually omnivorous, and it’s enviable. The rest of us could probably use a revamp of our media hygiene, or some media hygiene to start with. What might you place in a starter pack for someone who wants to begin, or end, their day with a useful and enlightening periscope on social and cultural news of the day/moment?

I think that I’m probably underinformed right now, because I haven’t really looked for a workable substitute for Twitter in terms of finding and bookmarking new things to read; but reading books in the morning and evening has always been my main tactic for attentional hygiene. The most interesting way to think about the present almost never comes from the present, right? I try to indulge my passing curiosities, and read books about feudalism and cloud formation, and trust that nothing you go out of your way to learn is a waste.

You’ve been credited with revitalizing the essay over the last decade, and your writing is a pleasure, a master class, a therapy session, and a stand-up routine all in one. You’ve also deftly maneuvered what, in the early 2010s, felt like bit of a wall: the print-digital divide. You’ve taken on long-form writing and published a book, while also going viral somewhat regularly. What is it about the essay and long-form that suits your intellectual contours and desires? And what future do you see, or imagine, for long-form as our slightly bruised modern society continues tiptoeing through the 2020s?

You are very generous, and I can’t believe I wrote so much throughout the last decade. But I liked every kind of writing, from silly short blog posts to way-too-long essays in my book. It was a gift to be working at a time just before algorithmic flattening had completely taken over the internet, a time in which there was enough variety and flexibility in the media ecosystem to shift between flippancy and formality and giddiness and solemnity. I like writing long, because I like the depth and the challenge, and I think that readers, myself included, remain very eager for a winding, absorbing, consuming journey. But all types of worthwhile writing are disappearing right now because of the economics of publishing. Social media companies have made it impossible for publications to support themselves on advertising, venture capital is stomping local newspapers into the ground, and there are very few alternative or truly independent outlets for young writers to play around and develop a voice.

Your boyfriend Andrew Daley is an architect. You must, therefore, have some advice for our graduates. And maybe it’s advice on living with an architect, not being one.

My boyfriend and I historically do not speak about work with each other—he doesn’t read books and I don’t know what cement is. But there was one night that he brought home a 70-page drawing set and when I asked him to explain “what it was” I felt like I was a monkey being given a tour of a space station. I think (and hope, for the purposes of Class Day 2021) that there are parallels between writing and design in terms of mapping structure and identifying possibility and envisioning what does not exist yet, but I’ve always been kind of amazed at the way design work lives in the realm of the actual, when my work is just a sort of trick of direction in the mind.

Excerpt from Kazuo Shinohara: Traversing the House and the City by Seng Kuan

by Seng Kuan (ed.)

Shinohara Kazuo created a series of sublimely beautiful, purist houses that have reconfigured and enriched our understanding of domesticity, tradition, structure, scale, nature, and the city— the dwelling redefined as a space where meaning can be generated, based on a raw, private relationship between the inhabitant and the surrounding environment. Interest in Shinohara’s work has been in steady ascendance in recent years, especially since his death in 2006 and the posthumous awarding of a Golden Lion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, which took him from being a cult figure for initiated connoisseurs to an architect who is now widely taught in schools around the world. As one surveys the state of architecture today, the aesthetic values he espoused and promoted with singular conviction appear more insightful and germane than ever. Younger generations of Japanese architects, especially those who came of age after the collapse in 1991 of the so-called economic bubble, are indebted to Shinohara for new paths he forged and traversed in approaching the problems of form and context. In a similar manner, the appeal of Shinohara’s architecture to young architects abroad lies in its potential for renewed faith in modernism after fatigue and disillusionment from the formal exuberances and moral relativism of recent decades. Shinohara belonged to the remarkable generation of Japanese architects to come of age as Japan emerged from the trauma of war and began its course toward economic prosperity. Born in 1925, Shinohara began studying architecture at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) in 1950, stayed on to join its architecture faculty, and remained until retirement from teaching in 1986. Having studied mathematics before turning to architecture and therefore being slightly older in age than Kikutake Kiyonori, Maki Fumihiko, Isozaki Arata, and Hara Hiroshi, Shinohara was nonetheless part of that cohort of Japanese architects and engaged in the same intense discursive confrontations with modernity and tradition and between the house and the city, helping to establish Japan as one of the foremost centers of international modernism of the last half century. Shinohara’s many aphoristic pronouncements, such as “A house is a work of art” and “Inscribe eternity in space,” represented a distinct vertex in the topography of modern Japanese architectural thought. Shinohara’s key tenets, especially those from his early career, were often critiques of Japan’s prevailing architectural practices and ideology, especially the strain of techno-rationalism centered at the University of Tokyo with Metabolism as its most emblematic offshoot. Throughout the 1960s he sharpened his polemical stance with concepts like house as art, eternity in space, autonomy of the architect, superfluous space, and symbolic space. While these ideas may appear contretemps to the ethos of postwar Japan’s developmentalist economy and the bureaucratic state, the validity of Shinohara’s architecture came into focus as the logic of growth and top-down organization, encapsulated in the architectural excesses of the 1980s, came to its sudden and disastrous close. Most secondary literature on Shinohara has until now focused on a handful of the most iconic houses, especially House in White (1966), Tanikawa House (1974), and House in Uehara (1976), often presenting them as distinct, one-off phenomena by an elusive and mercurial architect. While Shinohara’s writings are widely understood to be an integral part of his creative strategy—as Okuyama Shin-ichi’s chapter in this volume addresses—even in their Japanese originals the vocabulary and language, always employed with precision and placed in a structured framework, are often deemed abstruse and inaccessible. Translating these terms faithfully and accurately indeed has been one of the major challenges of this project. Building on a series of archival exhibitions and symposia, the collection of new scholarly essays and translations of Shinohara’s key texts included in this book reframes Shinohara’s architectural achievements in terms of his oeuvre as a whole and situates them in the broader cultural and social contexts in Japan and globally. The inclusion of institutional-scale projects of the Fourth Style, which have been largely overlooked until now, is crucial to establishing Shinohara’s insistence on the equivalation between the house and the city. More pointedly, the three key historiographical themes this volume attempts to address are (1) continuity and change through Shinohara’s four successive styles; (2) a mathematical framework in his spatial imagination; and (3) his engagement with artists as clients and collaborators.

CONTINUITY AND CHANGE

A major historiographical contention in studying Shinohara concerns the significance of the four successive styles, whether shifts between the ordinal numbers represented more disruption or more coherence. As Shinohara pursued distinct formal, technological, and even ideological strategies in each of the four styles, the individual styles invariably attract their own constituencies and followers. Those interested in a more overt dialogue with Japanese tradition, executed with great finesse and elegance, are naturally drawn to the First Style, whereas others seeking forceful structural expressions tend to focus on the Third. Each of the styles also encompasses a significant span of time—a decade or more with the exception of the Second—and bears the imprint of the broader context of its era. Several essays in this volume, especially those by Tsukamoto Yoshiharu and Shiozaki Taishin, underscore the coherence in Shinohara’s creative process, which specifically allows for different formal or even conceptual approaches. Tsukamoto describes a series of matrices, inherent in Shinohara’s method, as ontological spaces where specific design solutions can occur. Shiozaki’s chapter examines the dialogue between the earthen slope in two of Shinohara’s works, the famous Tanikawa House and the unrealized design of a mountain cabin for his own family, which are separated by almost thirty years. While Shinohara addressed the issue of style, or yōshiki in Japanese in his earliest writings, this nomenclature came with the Third Style, which emerged in the mid-1970s. He claims to have been inspired by Pablo Picasso’s periodization, the blue and the rose, and so on. For Shinohara the significance of style is rooted in the potential of a clear, rigorous framework of operation: “The creation of any style will axiomatically encompass any force that is opposed to it and [the result] is the consequence of the struggle to resolve that opposition.”¹ It is part of an ongoing process, an act that provides fresh nourishment to past achievements and affords the possibility of claiming as one’s own some uncharted territory of the future. Interspersed throughout this volume are image folios of Shinohara’s works. These drawings, sketches, and photographs are organized essentially chronologically, according to progression of the styles. Before delving into the thematic issues, it may be useful to introduce the key characteristics of the four styles here. “I would like for the houses I make to stand on this earth forever.” –“A Theory of Residential Architecture,” 1967²

THE FIRST STYLE

Shinohara’s First Style is an exercise in conversing with Japan’s architectural tradition, distilling compositional concepts such as frontality and division from his studies of prehistoric pit dwellings, minka commoner houses, and pedigreed shoin-style buildings like Katsura Villa and Jikō-in. Spanning one and a half decades, the First Style was the longest of the four phases. The first house in this series, House in Kugayama (1954), reveals a rudimentary interest in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and response to prevailing attitudes toward tradition as shown in contemporary works of Tange Kenzō and Shinohara’s teacher Seike Kiyoshi. Later works such as House in White and Suzushō House (1968) are far more abstract, as Shinohara turned to more symbolic aspects of space-making. The period also coincided with the peak of Metabolism’s popularity as he countered with a rhetoric of permanence, expansiveness, irrationality, and the emotive desires for dwelling. “I believe the world flows ceaselessly through the small spaces of the house.” –“Beyond Symbol Spaces,” 1971³

THE SECOND STYLE

For a brief few years between The Uncompleted House (1970) and Prism House (1974), Shinohara explored a series of formal and semantic themes, turning his focus to a new reductive, formalist approach and appearing to favor a system based on a series of abstract operative terms. The rigorous geometry of Shinohara’s Second Style emerged out of House of White’s cubic volume, and the idea of fissure can be found in the interstitial space between North and South Houses in Hanayama (1965, 1968). The tension between expansiveness and divisions that defined the First Style gave way to sequences of movement and volumes that are choreographed with an almost baroque theatricality. Narrow double-height crevices lead into light-filled courtyards shimmering in bronze-colored walls. These changes also call for different representational tools, notably emphasis on axonometric drawings and new photographic techniques. The Second Style was the briefest of the four styles, but the works from this period gave Shinohara his first major professional recognition and established his appeal to a rising generation of architects. In 1972, the annual prize from the Architectural Institute of Japan (AIJ), regarded as the most prestigious in Japan, was awarded to “the series of houses from The Uncompleted House onward.” Prior to Shinohara, the only other occasion on which the AIJ awarded its top prize to private residences occurred seventeen years before, to the works of his teacher Seike Kiyoshi. The timing of this public recognition of Shinohara’s architecture, following Osaka Expo ’70 and the student protests of 1968–69, also signaled a profound shift in the discursive context of Japan’s aesthetic culture. “In the city, the act of traversing has literal basic functions. I use traversing as a method of thinking simultaneously of the city and its antipode, the house.” –“When Naked Space Is Traversed,” 1976⁴

THE THIRD STYLE

In his design brief for a country house, written in verse, client Tanikawa Shuntarō described a summer room as “church for a pantheist.” Architecture is reduced to its most basic terms, like a geometric tent that drapes over a sloping landscape and raw earth. The 45-degree pitch in the roof and column struts clash with the gentler incline of the ground plane, resulting in a deeply unsettling space inside. In the Third Style, Shinohara pushed the dialogue between the inhabitant and the spatial environment to new levels of intensity, as a series of bare, brute confrontations. During this period Shinohara made extended journeys abroad. Traveling through these foreign lands, he was drawn to the rigors of the urban environment—the bodies and movement of people as formal elements that constitute, in their aggregate, space itself. Nakedness is to dispense with everything that obfuscates and confounds the basic ideas and shapes underneath. “The greatest probability for anarchy to produce vitality and liveliness occurs when buildings designed and produced on the basis of the most advanced technology of the age and replete with totally decorous beauty submerged in the planlessness of street.” –“Towards Architecture,” 1981⁵

THE FOURTH STYLE AND MODERN NEXT

Beginning in the 1980s Shinohara took on a series of larger-scale, institutional commissions. At the same time he came to embrace more overtly the generative potential of urban chaos, which he first commented on in the 1960s during his First Style. The pairing of Centennial Hall at Tokyo Tech and his own house in Yokohama collectively manifest his idea of the “space machine,” unmediated in its power and logic as a fighter jet. Shinohara’s rising notoriety abroad, with solo exhibitions traveling through Europe and North America beginning in 1979 and teaching appointments at Yale University and the Technical University of Vienna, led him to a series of international design competitions. These often more expansive site conditions yielded designs that play with basic geometric forms, in contrast with the complex programs within. This belated opportunity to intervene on an urban scale allowed Shinohara to realize fully his nuanced attitude toward the city. While this position was partly informed by his travels abroad, to Africa, the Americas, and Europe, it was also rooted in his earliest memories of suburban life in Tokyo, with his childhood home located in the environs of Shibuya Station. In an essay published in the journal Kenchiku bunka in 1988, Shinohara further introduced the term “ModernNext.” As a counterpoint to postmodernism, ModernNext is a commentary on the “contemporary enormous village” that Tokyo had ballooned into, as the scale and intensity of urban activity reached unprecedented heights. ModernNext is a decisively forward-looking attitude. In the same way tradition formed the basis of innovation for the First Style, chaos and randomness are to instigate a new vitality for architecture and the city. The essay is translated into English in its entirety for this volume.

SHINOHARA AS MATHEMATICIAN

Shinohara Kazuo was first trained in mathematics at Tokyo College of Physics.⁶ He turned to architecture in the immediate postwar years after a poignant moment of encounter with Tōshōdai-ji, one of the great ancient temples of Nara. Shinohara indeed looked back to mathematics for much of the architectural vocabulary he developed over time: division, transversality, discreteness, set theory, and chaos are the most salient appropriations. It is tempting for those in the Anglo-American world, where the writings of Rudolf Wittkower and Colin Rowe are widely taught, to draw parallels with the work of Andrea Palladio. This hypothesis becomes even more compelling as we consider Shinohara’s houses from the Second Style, abstract spaces such as The Uncompleted House and Shino House (1970), which give a hint of sympathy with the Renaissance master. In another fragment of this superficial affinity, the Institute for Architectural and Urban Studies (IAUS) in New York hosted Shinohara’s first solo exhibition in the United States in 1981. The title of Shinohara’s 1964 essay, “The autonomy of house design,”⁷ would have appealed to IAUS’s leadership. Still, Shinohara was not overtly driven by Kantian aesthetics, rather he was speaking entirely within the context of Japan’s postwar construction industry. Using the term shutaisei⁸ to stand for autonomy, Shinohara referred to such precepts as freedom from urban master plans, avoidance of too much attention to site context, expansiveness, and independence from the client. More provocatively, the essay also suggests that the realities of everyday life render detailed spatial planning of domestic interiors pointless; the architect’s strategy should be to elevate design to abstraction and pursue beauty in the realm of fictive spaces, citing Mies’s Farnsworth House as an example. There is no record of Shinohara referring to the work of Palladio, nor that of Wittkower or Rowe. In the late 1950s, as Shinohara was developing his theory of Japanese residential tradition as based on principles of division and frontality, he looked to the Western tradition for comparison and contrast.⁹ As he was mainly interested in defining certain cultural and formal archetypes, such as pit dwellings and elevated granaries, as the origins of the Japanese tradition, he referred to Tragic Poet’s House and House of Pansa in Pompeii and even older houses of Priene and Olynthus. The archetypical Western example from the early modern period Shinohara cites is Montacute House, one of the so-called prodigy houses from Elizabethan England. Shinohara makes no pronounced effort toward an absolute, “fictive” idea of natural order and mathematical beauty. His very first published writing was titled “A critique of the Modulor,” stating that the modern age of atomic energy operates on abstract mathematics, whereas ratio-based theories based on natural observations like the golden ratio or Fibonacci sequence have little to contribute.¹⁰ In his final book of architectural theory, Toward a super big-numbers set city (2001), Shinohara obliquely addressed the issue of architectural harmony in the musical sense—the topic of Wittkower’s famous chapter in Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism that situated Palladio’s proportions in sixteenth-century musical theory.¹¹ In praising twentieth-century advances in atonal music, Shinohara saw the same beauty in contemporary Tokyo, as the cacophonous, atonal manifestation of its underlying confusion and turbulences.¹² As a mathematician, Shinohara embraced the irrationality (higōriteki) of things around him as a necessary condition, but also employed mathematical tools to come to terms with these realities. Transversality (ōdansei) is the most powerful of these tools. It is the cutting across of different lines, spaces, and ordering systems, producing fragments and sections, but transversals also describe moments of intersection. In House under High-Voltage Lines (1981) we see this transversal vividly captured in the two swooping curves in the sky.

ARCHITECTURE AND ART

When Shinohara made the pronouncement in 1962 that “A house is a work of art,” it would have been immediately apparent to Japan’s architectural community that the antagonist was the techno-rationalism of the mainstream construction industry. In the postwar period Shinohara was hardly alone in recognizing the importance of working with allied disciplines in the fine arts—painting, sculpture, poetry, drama, film, and so forth.¹³ In 1949 the Shinseisaku Art Society expanded its membership to welcome architects, including Taniguchi Yoshirō, who was the éminence grise of Tokyo Tech; Tange Kenzō; and even Ikebe Kiyoshi, renowned for minimum dwelling prototypes for industrialized mass production. Throughout the 1950s, both Tange and Shinohara’s teacher Seike Kiyoshi were also highly active in exhibition designs, working alongside other avant-garde practitioners in the arts. Shinohara was more successful than his predecessors and peers in cultivating his artistic collaborators as patrons. This publication features interviews with some of the most loyal among Shinohara’s remarkable coterie of clients: poet Tanikawa Shuntarō (Tanikawa Houses of 1958 and 1974), painter Nomiyama Gyōji (Sea Stairway, House in Itoshima), and the widow and son of photographer Ōtsuji Kiyoshi (House with an Earthen Floor, House in Uehara). As Christian Kerez’s conversation with Tanikawa Shuntarō records, Tanikawa’s father had originally suggested the eminent Taniguchi for his son’s house, but was in turn referred to the slightly younger Seike, and the younger still Shinohara. Tanikawa, Ōtsuji, and Nomiyama all commissioned Shinohara with both a house in the city and one in the country. Shinohara’s clients indulged him with extraordinary liberties in reinventing domestic arrangements. Many of them are considered bunkajin, or people of culture, referring to a broad spectrum of well-educated individuals engaged in the arts, writing, or education. Shinohara also maintained a long friendship with painter and stage set designer Asakura Setsu. Their collaborations, beyond the house Shinohara designed for her in 1964, also included mingei-inspired designs on the shōji screens in Umbrella House (1961) and a two-person exhibition held in 1964 on their individual works. The identities of these clients are sometimes imprinted onto Shinohara’s designs in subtle ways, as in the shimmering bronze-color wallpaper in Shino House. Its owner was a publisher of encyclopedias. One of the hallmarks of Japan’s success in sustaining consistently high-quality architecture is the robustness of the infrastructure of architectural production and discourse—an extraordinary plethora of magazines, schools, design competitions, and professional organizations that defined and reinforced a strong community. Despite Shinohara’s reputation as a severe personality, he actively participated in these professional activities, not only through writings and publication of his personal work, but also by joining and hosting roundtables and other forums of discussion. This generous exception to his otherwise introvert demeanor was especially evident even in his later, post–Tokyo Tech years in bringing together younger generations. As the interviews make clear, the relationship between the architect and clients was not one of conventional patronage, as we understand of princely commissions of the Renaissance or those from bourgeois industrialists in the nascent days of modernism. Despite the paucity of specific design briefs, there was no lack of communication from these clients in conveying their beliefs and aspirations. The roundtable discussion translated for this volume documents a forum moderated by Shinohara. The clients were his peers and partners, and these houses were modestly scaled, typically located in new emerging suburbs in Tokyo’s periphery. What emerges from placing each of these houses in the context of its owners’ lives is a remarkable view into not only this bunkajin community as it evolved in postwar Japan but also Tokyo’s very urbanism. With few exceptions, the images of Shinohara’s houses presented in this volume are period photographs, meticulously staged with few visible traces of domestic life. Shinohara characterized architectural photographs as false images¹⁴ of spaces, but he noted that once we are accustomed to their conventions, “we are able to comprehend the true architectural spaces behind the false images.” Shinohara saw this true architectural space as a fictive space that becomes the new level of reality. Nomiyama Gyōji echoed this sentiment in the interview featured in this book: before he moved to France in 1952 he thought it was “a land that is not where humans lived,” but existed only as the place of paintings by Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse. Shinohara’s clients were his collaborators in this act of fiction writing.

LEGACY

In 1979 the idea of a “Shinohara School” was first floated in the monographic issue of SD devoted to Shinohara’s houses. The column “Notes on architecture in Japan” refers to Sakamoto Kazunari, Hasegawa Itsuko, and Itō Toyoo as representing a new generation in the propagation of Shinohara’s architecture. All three were in their thirties at the time and had received much critical attention for their recent works.¹⁵ Under the collective pen name Gruppo Specchio, the column was written by a handful of graduate students from the University of Tokyo, most notably Takeyama Kiyoshi Sey and Kuma Kengo. They were known for sharp, witty, and occasionally scathing commentaries, and one cannot help but suspect that the label “Shinohara School” was proposed with a little tongue-in-cheek, as its authors anxiously contemplated their own professional futures.¹⁶ Four decades after Gruppo Specchio’s initial conjecture, we may ask: What would a Shinohara School look like today? Certainly Sakamoto, Hasegawa, and Itō, as well as other protégés of Shinohara, have cultivated their own followers, and different generations of architects, from different countries, have found lessons from Shinohara’s work. Many Japanese architects now attribute the ideas of architects as auteurs and houses as art as principles that were created almost single-handedly by Shinohara. Such adulation is perhaps overly enthusiastic, but there is no doubt that Shinohara was one of the true masters of the past half century, standing as a beacon of a particular conviction in space-making that remains relevant today. As Shibuya undergoes another round of transformation, there is no better time to revisit Shinohara and take a closer look.  

1. Shinohara Kazuo, “Daisan no yōshiki,” Shinkenchiku, vol. 52, no. 1 (January 1977): 221–25. Translation used here from English version, “The Third Style, 1977,” in Kazuo Shionhara: Houses, ed. David B. Stewart, Okuyama Shin-ichi, and Shiozaki Taishin, 2G, no. 58/59 (2011): 268.
2. Shinohara Kazuo, “A Theory of Residential Architecture,” The Japan Architect (October 1967): 39–45.
3. Shinohara Kazuo, “Beyond Symbol Spaces: An Introduction to Primary Spaces as Functional Spaces,” The Japan Architect (April 1971): 81–88.
4. Shinohara Kazuo, “When Naked Space Is Traversed,” The Japan Architect (February 1976): 64–72.
5. Shinohara Kazuo, “Towards Architecture,” The Japan Architect (September 1981): 30–35.
6. The same school, now known as Tokyo University of Science, established its own architecture program in 1962.
7. Shinohara Kazuo, “Jūtaku sekkei no shutaise,” Kenchiku, no. 44 (April 1964): 52–55.
8. Typically the term “jiritsusei” is used to stand for autonomy in the Kantian sense.
9. These studies were presented at successive meetings of the Architectural Institute of Japan and subsequently published in its bulletins: “Kūkan no bunkatsu to renketsu: Nihon kenchiku hōhō (7),” (June 1960); “Kūkan bunkatsu kara mita heimen kōsei: Nihon kenchiku hōhō (8),” (October 1960); “Seiō no heimen kōsei tono taihi” (October 1961).
10. Shinohara Kazuo, “Mojyurōru hihan,” Nihon kenchiku gakkai Kantō shibu dai 17 kai kenkyū happyokai (February 1955): 19–22.
11. Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949; repr., New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), 132–42.
12. Shinohara Kazuo, Chō taisū shūgo toshi he (Tokyo: Kajima shuppankai, 2001), 127.
13. Seng Kuan, “Unity of the Arts at Sōgetsu Kaikan,” in Tange Kenzō: Architecture for the World, ed. Seng Kuan and Yukio Lippit (Zürich: Lars Müller Publisher, 2012), 127–41.
14. Shinohara Kazuo, “The Mechanism of Fiction Never Stops Functioning, Exchange of Letters with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron,” trans. Watanabe Hiroshi, SD, no. 401 (February 1998): 115. (Shinohara’s italics).
15. Guruppo supekkio, “Shinohara sukūru no kenchiku,” SD, no. 172 (January 1979): 223¬–28. The works cited in the column include Sakamoto’s Machiya in Daita and House in Kumano-Nagareyama, Hasegawa’s House in Kakio and Stationary Shop in Yaizu, and Itō’s PMT Building and Hotel D. Of the trio, Sakamoto was the only one formally educated at Tokyo Tech. Hasegawa joined Shinohara’s lab as a research student after working for Kikutake Kiyonori, whereas Itō lacked any formal affiliation with Tokyo Tech.
16. Takeyama Kiyoshi, “Kenchiku sekkei jimusho to iu ‘ba’ wo tsukuru,” traverse shinkenchiku-gaku kenkyū, no. 14 (October 2013): 72–79.

Excerpt from Very Vary Veri: “Crowded” by Oana Stănescu

Very Vary Veri is a journal about the built environment and how it is produced. Created by students and alumni from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the annual publication provides an alternative platform for students and professionals to share diverse perspectives on architecture and design concepts more broadly. “Crowds,” the fourth and latest issue of Very Vary Veri, aims to shed light on the various, and often contradictory, interpretations of the word. The following edited excerpt is taken from an essay contributed by Oana Stănescu, design critic in architecture.

Excerpt from Very Vary Veri: “Crowded”

By Oana Stănescu

The first crowds I consciously remember are the big orchestrated ones. I had to wear a uniform and stand for hours in a specific spot in the central square of Reșița, Romania, a tiny piece in a giant puzzle with timing and movement choreographed to perfection, dancing and waving at the helicopter that was said to “have Ceaușescu, waving back.” In spite of the huge numbers of people, the whole affair felt rather unconvincing—even at a young age I couldn’t help but be skeptical about this choreography of affection toward a mechanical bird. I was about six, though, when I discovered the depth of voluntary collective experience. On a sunny December day a group of about 15 people were walking energetically on the main street, yelling things I couldn’t quite understand, holding signs I couldn’t yet grasp. This was a welcome distraction on a slow afternoon, but my grandmother told me to go inside and mind my own business. On the next night a much larger crowd had gathered in the city square, this time louder and with an energy I hadn’t witnessed before. The air was filled with voices screaming “Down with Ceaușescu.” I asked my mom what it meant and she explained that if Ceaușescu wasn’t president anymore, I could buy as much chocolate as I wanted. Considering that these were times when you had to wait in line for hours for bread, milk, and maybe meat on weekends, that sounded perfectly reasonable. Like dictators before and after him, the man in power made a desperate attempt to instill fear and distrust, but there were no individuals left to buy into it; there was only the crowd which had its truth. The once all-powerful president had been reduced to a tiny, helpless being—like a lifeless doll on the oversized balcony—facing a hungry animal that even the monumental plaza couldn’t contain. You can watch it online, that instant, barely a minute into his speech, when the crowd turned from an obedient, numb creature into a force that was stronger than the fragile abstract entities it was facing. Not the army, not the presidency, not even Christmas could keep individuals from putting themselves in harm’s way. Because when they’re with their crowd, people are willing to die so that the animal can live. Crowds are mesmerizing and, in an unsettling way, hard to resist. Your voice becomes amplified in the anonymity, as if the air were flammable. Once ignited, it leaves you wondering if it was really your voice shouting at all. When I was growing up, my mother had a crocheted German saying on the kitchen wall: “Shared pain is half the pain and shared joy is double the joy.” It is worth remembering that the verb “to share” is defined as “to split, or divide, to give a portion of” or “to use, possess or enjoy something jointly with another.” Today we seem to have taken the generosity out of sharing, reducing it to the act of pos(t)ing. One doesn’t need to use a real name, to show one’s face, or even to get out of bed to “share” things: it has turned from an intimate, intentional act to something anonymous and oftentimes accidental. Yet despite the noncommittal nature of these new forms of sharing, when you do it you likely have the attention of a crowd. And you are certainly part of many more virtual crowds yourself—a couple of hundred on average each day, whether you know it or not, some real, many fake (an average of 15 percent of Twitter accounts are estimated to be bots). Read the full essay in the latest issue of Very Vary Veri, available for purchase at veryvaryveri.info.

Landscapes of the Void: Speculative design for tunnels, mines, cemeteries and other underground spaces

At once welcoming and foreboding, the underground realm has long captured our attention. When considered metaphorically and literally, it is simultaneously womb and tomb—infinitely expansive and claustrophobia-inducing. A well-organized infrastructure that challenges rationality by seeming outside time and space, it is also a storage space for human waste, computers, and even, in the Arctic, a plant-seed bank created in case of an apocalyptic event. In recent years, architects and designers have increased their focus on what lies beneath us. Necessity, in part, has driven attention downward: It is estimated that by 2050, about two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities, where space above ground is finite. Solving the needs of these future megalopolises by continuing to build into the sky is inadequate and dangerous. Not only does the fetish for ever-taller buildings privilege visuality and surfaces, it supports an ideology that ignores earthly and human-scale problems, such as climate change and inclusive community-building. The logical conclusion of this hubristic, isolationist, and individualistic predilection—leaving Earth itself—is no longer cast as a total fantasy either. Underground spaces need not always be built anew. Many already exist but have been abandoned or entirely forgotten—even steps away from the GSD. As a child, Jungyoon Kim walked to kindergarten across Harvard Square, where she passed a nondescript grate each day. Decades later, she learned that this portal leads to the Brattle Tunnel, a decommissioned section of America’s oldest subway system. Opened in 1897 and completed in 1912, the Cambridge section of the subway was in part built underground as a means to preserve the landscape of the area’s historic buildings. Since it was closed in 1981, the Brattle Tunnel portion of Harvard Square Station—a 450-foot-long, 45-foot-wide, and 18-foot-high space just two feet below ground—has remained an empty and, to most, hidden chamber. In her studio “Below and Beyond: Imagining the Future of Underground Infrastructure at Harvard Square,” Kim asks her students to imagine the site as a public space whose design is sensitive to the urban fabric at ground level as well as to the Charles River and its surrounding landscapes. “The main topic we’re dealing with is where you should open up the tunnel so that people can have access to it,” she says. “We are also reconceiving the infrastructure which was once monofunctional and illegible into something multifunctional and legible, for the pleasure of the public.” Any speculative redesigns for this enclosed, cavernous space require attention to the location of the bedrock, the soil type, and other structural and natural concerns around the site. But these elements should not be viewed as limitations. Edda Steingrimsdottir (MArch ’22), for example, considers the area’s geothermal-rich soil as an impetus for turning the site into a heated swimming pool—a destination rather than an incidental or, as is the case for many underground sites, a transitory space. Annie Hayner (MLA ’21), looks at using the tunnel as a water passage, whether for emergency use (like Tokyo’s flood-defense systems) or as a detention area to slow down run-off caused by increases in torrential rain. This water can then be used to recharge the soil and keep it moist. The run-off could also become an aesthetic feature, echoing the Hakka Indenture Museum in Lishui, China, where an irrigation channel on the site’s roof creates a water curtain in the interior. These structural concerns demand that an ecological framework be introduced to conversations regarding urban growth. The students’ interventions will make legible the existence of the tunnel to those moving across Harvard Square, establishing novel relationships between them and the spaces below their feet. The same legibility issues are not present with all underground spaces, however. The vast mining pits that surround Santiago, Chile, for example, are etched into the urban fabric and in many instances draw its boundaries. “Santiago is defined by its topography,” says Danilo Martic. “The city is flat, but we’re surrounded by mountains. There are also a number of hills which have been a part of life here for hundreds of years. The Native peoples used to dwell in them. These mining holes are a nice counterpoint, making the cross-section of the valley not just a flat line with hills.” The mountains and hills are not the only inverted relationship in the city that involves these gargantuan holes, which can be carved roughly 60 meters deep and hundreds of meters wide. The gravel, sand, and stones extracted from these sites become construction material for buildings, turning the subterranean spaces into visible marks in the earth that are materially linked to the built environment. Martic emphasizes this relationship in his studio “Landscapes of the Void: Urban Projects on Residual Topographies” with a quote by photographer Edward Burtynsky: “I remember looking at buildings made of stone, and thinking, there has to be an interesting landscape somewhere out there because these stones had to have been taken out of the quarry one block at a time.” Rather than acknowledge these ecological scars as scars, current laws dictate that the holes be refilled whenever mining activity ceases, typically after a few decades. This erasure creates another type of void, because after the filling process—which can also take decades—no new buildings can be constructed on these sites. The policy compounds what was initially a brutal act against the natural environment by foreclosing many future possibilities for these spaces. Martic asks his students to consider how these pits might be transformed and utilized in terms of their landscapes, which introduces questions of topography, planting, and programming. For many of the city’s inhabitants, the holes are embedded in their collective memory, and the sites evoke a sense of mystery. “These places are fenced off, but you can smell them, hear the machinery and the explosions, and see the dust flying and the trucks carrying sand and gravel. But you don’t see what is done there. Young people try to find out, by trespassing,” Martic says. “These sites can be just 10 meters away from your house. It’s only fair not to erase that aspect of people’s reality.” The disappearance of collective memory also concerns Mohsen Mostafavi’s studio “Fudo/Umwelt: Devising Transformative Environments in Japan,” in the context of the underground realm’s associations with darkness, the illicit, the disruptive, and play. The project’s site and focus is the location of the now-demolished Tsukiji Fish Market. Opened in 1935, it was the world’s largest fish and seafood market and a major tourist destination in a densely packed area of shops, stalls, and restaurants. The tuna auctions and other activities of the inner market, a site of commerce and spectacle, took place at night, beginning at 3:00 a.m. and finishing by 9:00 a.m. Now, in an effort by Japan to compete as a corporate business hub against other Asian cities in particular, the 23-hectare site will become a sterile convention center, with the fish market moving to nearby Toyosu. “This nocturnal affair happened out of view from the vast majority of people. Its operations were a little extraterritorial as well—not seen, in the dark,” explains Mostafavi. “The experience of the city was different there. The marketplace is a circumstance with its own theater and is against normative rules and regulations. With its disappearance, the citizens of Japan and tourists face certain forms of erasure because new markets, whether in Paris or Tokyo, are farther away, much bigger, and more and more hygienic, which includes not letting people inside them.” Hygiene has been a focus of urban design and planning since the 18th century. The relationship between the Enlightenment’s obsession with cleanliness and the city began with the purgation of cemeteries from urban centers and continued, for example, with pushing prostitution and drug selling to urban peripheries. “The fish market is still a component of that argument,” says Mostafavi. “Part of its removal is the idea of not being able to bear witness to it, and part of it is also not enabling citizens to participate in situations and scenes that are thought to be not clean. It is a denial of participation in those operations of the city which make it vibrant and dynamic. When you turn the market into a convention center, you deny the theater, joy, and excitement that it offered and replace it with something that’s hermetically sealed, interior, often without windows, and where events don’t take place every day.” In contrast to the proposed convention center, students are developing projects with a range of programs, compositions, and densities. The work draws on a multiyear research project at the GSD supported by Takenaka, a major Japanese design and construction firm. In the studio, the Tsukiji site serves as a means to examine the sectional city, which Mostafavi describes as similar to “the architectural section in that it doesn’t have to do with the facade or appearance but that which is drawn but not made visible.” This concept has particular resonance in a Japanese context, where developers have long looked to the underground as a space for retail, restaurants, and other businesses, to maximize land value. As a mode of investigation, Mostafavi first had his students transpose “more than 100 buildings, landscapes, and urban assemblages from around the world onto the site at 1:1 scale,” including civic gathering spaces such as the Shanghai Bund and London’s Barbican Centre. Through this process of montage and photo-collage, they created unexpected architectural arrangements. Each student then chose as their focus a single fragment on the site, which, Mostafavi adds, “is never completely independent of its relationship to something bigger.” Every human, animal, inanimate object, and natural system that comes into contact with that fragment, he explains, sees and interacts with that space, and through it the entire site, differently. These exercises use the palimpsest as a tool, which Mostafavi describes as enabling “the students to start imagining multiple narratives, multiple stories, and essentially multiple descriptions of that site. It’s also a form of excavation. They have to do some digging to imagine how these things might work, fit, be there.” The introduction of foreign, and in many ways unexpected, architecture onto the site in the initial montages, and the process of making them fit together, forced the students to participate in a kind of archaeology that expands the capacities of their imaginations. “Part of this studio is how one constructs the circumstances for certain forms of imagination to take place,” says Mostafavi. “We’re not just relying on the pure intuition of the students. I prefer the concrete and described to going immediately to poetic associations and references.” The site for Mira Henry and Matthew Au’s “Underground” module also functions as a palimpsest: the Crenshaw Discount Store, located at the western border of Los Angeles’s Leimert Park neighborhood. It shares the shell of the original Grayson’s Women’s Fine Apparel (1941), designed by Victor Gruen. Adjacent to it is OneUnited Bank, notable for providing Black and brown families with home loans to combat redlining, as well as the currently under-construction Crenshaw Corridor, which involves an extension of the metro system and retail and residential developments. While Mostafavi’s studio focuses on the relationship between the palimpsest and the strange to create new conditions of possibility for the students’ imaginations, Mira Henry and Matthew Au’s module foregrounds pleasure. Their students will design a subterranean nightclub at the Discount Store site, which in turn will inspire their designs for two street-level facades. “We’re putting on the table that there are things that are valuable but not always seen as visible. It’s a counterargument to the hyper-visuality of a lot of architectural goals,” explains Henry. The project, she says, also riffs on the relationships between the historical demographics of the neighborhood, its history filled with underground clubs intended for a specific public, Black space, and the Underground Railroad. “The building itself is a little anonymous; it doesn’t present itself,” she says. “It plays with the idea that there is some sort of discreet network, a flow of communication, a set of resources, and a culture that is not in full view.” In contrast to Kim’s Harvard Square studio, where the relationship between the above and below ground will likely be made more legible, here the students will preserve the underground’s hiddenness. The effects of this choice, Au suggests, extend beyond the aesthetic to the social, political, and existential. “The club is out of view and can internalize itself without the external pressure of having to display or show itself,” he says. “It becomes a space where a mythology can form.” The party as a ritual event will serve as the genesis of that mythology. “We’re hoping to engage in a conversation about social practice and pageantry,” says Henry, who will incorporate works by artists Maurice Harris and Nikita Gale as further design inspiration to students of “highly generative and theatrical things embedded in pleasure.” She and Au also intend to probe the unique multi-sensorial aspects of nightclubs, which often invert traditional design practices and expectations due to being underground. These include limited lighting, which reduces visibility; unique lighting designs throughout the environment; and sound dampening. Together, such features create a highly embodied experience and support intimate relationships between occupants and with the elusive space. Henry hopes that “this rich interior will exist as information which, dialectically, will move in some manner to the exterior design.” Just as the Tsukiji fish market challenged power through its perceived uncleanliness, the club’s celebration of darkness and excess counters a hegemonic demand for surveillance and control. Like the other subterranean sites explored in these studios, it also resists capitalist injunctions for regimentation and order. As we build more and more into the earth, the challenge will be to retain these spaces’ potential resistance to such forces. By treating the underground not as a space in which to copy the world above but as a unique stratum whose symbolic dimensions resist fixity, its fugitive character can enable transformative design.

The Black New Deal: Bryan C. Lee on challenging the power structures that use architecture and design as tools of oppression

When asked about the theoretical touchstones for his new studio, “The Black New Deal,” Design Critic Bryan C. Lee references almost exclusively the work of Black liberation thinkers and activists: Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Black abolitionists, and leaders of the Black Panther Party and the Black Lives Matter Movement. Each understood the importance of space, place, and community-building in determining the overall condition of Black people in America. Lee is a practitioner of Design Justice, a movement to eradicate structural inequalities in design to create spaces of racial, social, and cultural equality. Its members include a growing cohort of architects, urbanists, and planners who are also deeply engaged in social justice discourse. They are as concerned with the societal impact of a designed product as with how it came into being. Traditionally marginalized communities are not just consulted—they lead the creative process in a collaborative exchange with designers. “The Black New Deal,” which was introduced at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in spring 2021, prepares students to develop a professional practice that interrogates space using an anti-racist lens. In conversation, Lee cites the five questions that guide his pedagogical approach and his professional work as founder of Colloqate Design, a nonprofit multidisciplinary studio in New Orleans: Who holds power in a particular condition? What is the injustice that results from that power? Who is directly and disproportionately impacted by that injustice? How does it physically manifest in the built environment? And where are the opportunities to challenge those systems and envision new ones that actually serve those who have been impacted by those injustices? To appreciate the need for courses like “The Black New Deal,” it helps to understand what they are responding to. Lee points to examples from history where space and design have been used to propagate racial oppression. He cites policies that govern land and its use—forcibly removing Black people from it or forcing them to work it for free; the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation in public spaces; legal or de facto segregation that limits where Black people can live or generate wealth through home ownership; the crime prevention through environmental design agenda of the 1970s that used the built environment to establish a police state in urban areas; the slashing of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s budgets in the 1980s that effectively ended the affordable housing program; and something as everyday as a design studio parachuting in to develop a site without acknowledging local realities. “What Design Justice is asking us to do first is to challenge the privilege of power structures that use architecture and design as a tool of oppression,” Lee says by way of explaining how to spot structural inequality. “We have to recognize the combinatorial condition of policies, procedures, pedagogy, practice, projects, and people as methods for using the built environment to maintain systems of power.” During the course module, studio time is divided between studying the connection between racial and spatial violence, and community engagement methodologies. There are weekly guest lectures from members of the community—organizers, advocates, activists, artists, and elected officials. “They are invited to be a part of the conversation,” Lee says, “not just to be extracted from, but to get feedback from and for them to express their likes, dislikes, and narratives.” The course culminates in a community-based project. There are important parameters: Students can collaborate, but final projects are individual. The design site must be within Trenton, New Jersey, because it is Lee’s hometown and a place where he can support students as they link up with the local community. Finally, students will be graded not on the standard GSD criteria, Lee cautions, but rather on the extent to which they have privileged the meaningful inclusion of the community voice in the final product. After all, according to the course description, the studio “is an exercise in deep listening and cultural understanding.” “The Black New Deal” focuses on eradicating harmful practices as well on imagining what could come in their place. Design Justice is ultimately future-facing, envisioning a reality in which design not only ceases to be a deterrent to Black advancement but becomes an agent in its realization. The first time Lee taught the course, blueprints emerged for these “new typologies of liberation,” as he calls them. One student’s project involved abandoning the New Jersey governor’s mansion in Princeton, a space rarely used by governors. Inspired by a call once issued by the Black Panthers to eliminate the executive branch, Edward Wang (MArch ’22) adopted a similarly radical response to New Jersey’s governors. To challenge their outsized political influence—as embodied in the unoccupied mansion—Wang proposed instead locating an “Office of Governors” in Trenton, for those who govern at the neighborhood level and catering to the needs of everyday people. An official state structure is thus transformed from a seat of exclusive political power into a democratic house of public service and pluralistic representation. Wang’s project exemplifies the concept of mutual aid—a dependence on and obligation to one another for social and political progress. It is another of the foundational tenets of Design Justice, borrowing from the central role of mutualism in social movements for more than 200 years, from safe houses that gave refuge to enslaved people escaping along the Underground Railroad, to the Black Panther Party’s free lunch and breakfast programs, to mutual aid organizations that have cropped up during the current pandemic. Lee explains how the ideals of mutualism come to bear on his approach to the course: “Architecture that scaffolds and supports notions of mutualism is something that we’re seeking to pronounce as valuable. When we look for some version of liberation in the built environment, we’re really seeking to understand the collective narratives of place.” He continues, “Acknowledging a collective narrative and history centers us so that we can move to a point where we are creating spaces of mutual aid. That kind of mutuality is necessary for the built environment to actually serve the broader community more than it currently does.” Lee takes a deep, contemplative breath when asked about the course name. It comes from the association he makes between the ideals of the New Deal of the 1930s and the failed but audacious promise of the Freedmen’s Bureau. A short-lived government agency established following the Civil War, the bureau was tasked with providing land, health care, food, education, stable jobs, and decent housing to nearly 4 million formerly enslaved people in the South. To Lee’s mind, the Freedmen’s Bureau—which was abandoned by Congress in 1872—could have been the most radical and revolutionary New Deal premise ever imagined for Black people. The course then asks, If we were to bring that premise forward to today, what would it look like in the built environment? Lee says, “How do we translate the collection of demands that exist in movements that wrapped themselves around those same set of principles into design? It is about holding ourselves to a contemporary understanding of what the Freedmen’s Bureau was attempting to do and trying to see what it might look like if we were to win these battles.” For students, potentially the most challenging aspect of the studio is that the work of dismantling extends to—or starts with—their own ideology. Western culture teaches us to privilege the individual idea as, Lee says. That can make it difficult for students to acknowledge and eliminate internalized white supremacy and become radical in how they view the social ramifications of their work. Similarly, it can be hard for them to understand the pain and traumas of communities if there is no precedent in own their lives. The risk is that, in the absence of a personal experience, they will revert to standard operating procedures. In this sense, the course is highly ambitious. Its sphere of influence aspires to move from the unconscious biases of budding designers, to their conscious creative practice, out to the lives of individuals often disconnected from having a say in the shape of their environment, and on to fueling a movement for systemic change. Indeed, the work of Design Justice is itself monumental. That is made clear by Lee’s argument that while not every designed space has a role in propagating oppression, most are somehow implicated. “There are spaces that don’t have injustice inherently built into them. But there are very few that don’t inherently have prejudice or bias built into them. And the threshold to which bias becomes injustice is very thin,” he explains. In that sense, almost the entirety of our built world is up for scrutiny. Module by module, at the GSD and beyond, the army of well-trained scrutinizers is growing.

Shading Sunset: Charles Waldheim on reimagining the streets of Los Angeles for a warmer future

In 1965, Ed Ruscha stood on the bed of a moving pickup truck and photographed Sunset Boulevard. Through this process he calls “motorized photography,” he captured the entirety of a mile-and-a-half long segment of the street with mechanized precision. These images were then collaged for Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), a book whose accordion-folded pages unfurl over 27 feet. The experience was not a one-off. Ruscha would soon traverse different thoroughfares in Los Angeles, including Wilshire and Sepulveda Boulevards, and perform the same operation. Every few years, he—and now others in place of the 83-year-old pop artist—returned to these streets to photograph them again and again. The cumulative result of the ongoing endeavor, which could be classified as a long-duration artwork as much as data collection, is an archive of over one million images. The Getty Institute recently acquired this unique history of Los Angeles’s built environment in pictorial form and, to date, has digitized over 60,000 photographs. Their goal is to make it both accessible to the public and, as Charles Waldheim’s spring studio, “Shading Sunset: Reimagining the Streets of Los Angeles for a Warmer Future,” exemplifies, useful as a tool for imagining alternative futures of the city. Ruscha’s deadpan documentation of American vernacular design did not begin in 1965. Two years prior, he published his first book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, which features black-and-white photographs of monuments located between his native Oklahoma and Los Angeles. Form and function fascinated him. “I would look at a building and disregard the purpose of that building (in this case a commercial outlet to sell gasoline). I was really more interested in this crazy little design that was repeated by all the gas companies to make stations with an overhang to create shade for their customers,” Ruscha has said. “It seemed to me a very beautiful statement.” Gas stations would appear in his paintings at the time, too. In the 1960s, this respect for the quotidian was echoed by many non-American architects, urbanists, and theorists. Denise Scott Brown and Reyner Banham were among those who came to the United States in part because its cities were viewed from elsewhere as illegitimate, lacking good taste, and even degenerate. “They were looking for evidence of the contemporary city,” says Waldheim. “In Ruscha’s work, especially the Streets of Los Angeles project, they find a kind of Duchampian readymade. It’s not only a city and the documentation of that city but a way of seeing which confounds architectural criticism. Without judgment, Ruscha documented everything. In that, there’s a kind of empathy as well as a kind of empiricism.” Scott Brown and Robert Venturi visited Ruscha’s studio with their Yale students, who were directed to apply Ruscha’s nonjudgmental, indexical aesthetic to their work on Las Vegas. This work led to the duo’s seminal 1972 study, Learning from Las Vegas. And Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles (1973), a BBC documentary shot in the manner of a European travelogue which takes a cheeky but almost reverent look at Los Angeles, even guest stars Ruscha. The initial motorized photography ventures inspired these figures. Now no one, not even Ruscha, can reasonably view every image in the series. The Getty had to double its server size upon acquiring them. To Waldheim, this archive represents a form of big data avant la lettre. Compared to traffic surveillance footage or social media posts, however, these images are less clouded by concerns regarding big data’s problematic biases, which allows for more freedom in utilizing them as research material. The Getty convened a group of art and architectural historians to analyze the archive. “Among the challenges of interpretation associated with the archive is the impulse toward making these images sensible to traditional modes of human cognition—the notion that if I can see it, I can understand it. That leads to making them searchable by address, building type, etc.,” Waldheim explains. But the sheer number of images recommends, if not requires, novel technology and methods, he argues. “Unlike cartography or public health, for example, design is by definition speculative. Big data sets like this give us an opening to a way of working that can be described as machine- and rule-based. They allow us to put less pressure and cognition on our own biases and produce an environment in which nonlinear and unexpected outcomes are generated. It’s outside the immediate what/where of the architect’s faculty cognition. That’s an enormous advantage because it allows us to get past preconceptions and organize other forms of information to inform design decisions.” To this end, Waldheim proposed a form of Style Generative Adversarial Network, or StyleGAN, modeling as the studio’s foundational tool. This workflow for the studio was developed by Waldheim, Aziz Barbar, and Min Yeo from the GSD’s Office for Urbanization in collaboration with a team led by Jose Luis García del Castillo López and the GSD Laboratory for Design Technologies. A form of machine learning built on facial recognition, the technology entails feeding images with a particular pattern into a system, training it to comprehend this pattern, and then feeding it a different set of images featuring a new pattern so it can learn difference. By processing thousands of Ruscha’s photographs, for example, the machine recognizes the precise visual composition of certain neighborhoods, structures of space, and building typologies—a task that exceeds human cognition. After doing so, it generates strikingly real images, similar to deepfakes, that are uncanny fictions. “I think of it as akin to alternative fiction in a literary sense,” says Waldheim. “It also has similarities to distanced or delayed authorship in the historical avant-garde, in which artists produced and generated forms that were not under their control.” Waldheim considers using technology in this way as an iteration of da Vinci’s advice to stare at clouds or stains on walls for inspiration. This comparison becomes explicit in Los Angeles–based artist Refik Anadol’s animations, such as those he created of Stockholm harbor or New York City architecture. Called “machine hallucinations” by Anadol, these animations begin by feeding a StyleGAN sometimes over 100 million images of a specific place from many different time periods. From this input, he creates a slowly morphing video of that particular area, as if reflected in a rippling pool of water. At first, all seems recognizable and accurate; upon further inspection, it’s evident that the buildings featured do not exist in reality. Rather, they are various iterations or manipulations of what is technically referred to as the “latent space” (forms, lines, proportionality) of the images fed into the network. What we see, in Waldheim’s reading, are “parallel worlds that could have happened based on these rules but didn’t.” While a design process that utilizes StyleGAN does not eliminate the designer’s subjectivity from the process—the images the system receives must be curated—it undercuts a normative sense of authorial agency. “Instead of starting with a blank page, a declaration that ‘I will do this,’ questions of taste or culture, and a virtuosic exhibition of drawing, this places more emphasis on the designer’s reflective and interpretive qualities,” Waldheim explains. “I find it incredibly productive for architects to produce imagined realities. It doesn’t mean those realities are good things or that we should realize them in the real world, but it calls on different faculties of the designer to make judgments about them. It triangulates the curatorial agenda, the making of images of alternative futures, and the architect’s interpretation of those images.” The process simultaneously supports and rejects the traditional association of technology with efficiency. StyleGAN’s automation accelerates the process of coding and analyzing an archive that exceeds human capacities, but only as a tool to give the designer time and freedom to engage in other tasks. “It changes the relationship between the architect and the object of their study,” says Waldheim. “We’ve gone from a paradigm of representation to a paradigm of automation of the imagination on behalf of the designer. The architect used to be pictured with their drawings, and that’s falling away to workflows and processing. Early digital drawings were themselves simulacra for things we used to do. This way of working, with technology like StyleGAN modeling, is a different form of representation that multiplies the faculties of the designer and changes their labor. We have to become data scientists, in a way, and focus much more on judgment, advocacy, and curation around what these images portend or afford.” For the studio, this curation requires identifying certain themes in Ruscha’s images that need urgent attention, among them homelessness and disparities of environmental justice related to race and ethnicity. These issues are among the many examined in the Future of the American City project, an urban-study initiative at the GSD funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which spotlights Miami, Detroit, and Los Angeles. One theme that unites many of these concerns has become increasingly important in recent years: shade. In Los Angeles specifically, shade has become a scarce resource, with the city’s iconic palm trees providing little cover from increased heat-island effects. A public health concern that results from global warming and is exacerbated by public policies and design ideologies, this lack affects the most vulnerable populations who have limited access to the tree canopy. Mayor Eric Garcetti acknowledged a need for intervention and, in October 2019, began a Cool Streets project that includes planting 90,000 by the end of this year, building covered bus-stop benches, and installing cool pavement. “The unconditional positive regard for more and more sunlight is deeply steeped in the way architects and urbanists have been trained in the West for at least a century,” says Waldheim. “The oldest regulations about what you could build in the Anglo tradition—the English ‘right to light’ laws and the origin of city planning in New York—all come back to the fundamental issue of not wanting to die in the shadow of someone’s enormous building constructed for profit.” This ideology perhaps has reached its terminus, as greater concern is placed on low-carbon energy construction and structures that provide shade. The backlash against police surveillance cameras, which require unobstructed sight lines and connect darkness with criminality, also critiques this ethos of total visibility. Ruscha’s archive, an unintended precursor to Google Street View with similarities to surveillance footage, metaphorically exemplifies this long-term obsession with pure knowledge and illumination. But as a tool for imagining a more shade-filled future, it can be read negatively—by identifying what it doesn’t represent or what its focus makes invisible. The images’ pure horizontality implies an equalization across class, race, and ethnic groups. Close examination, however, reveals the distinct shifts between municipal boundaries and the extent to which disparities like decreasing percentage of tree canopy have been exacerbated over multiple decades. The images provide substantial evidence for where plant material once was, its height, how much shade it produced, and how it changed over time. Seeing this evolution provides evidence for where vegetation might be increased, with StyleGAN modeling employed as a tool to give a realistic glimpse of how that could appear. Even more fundamental is the absence of people in the photographs, which goes unnoticed in part due to the viewpoint from a car that diminishes the presence of the sidewalk. This establishes the automobile, not the human body, as the primary actor in public space, which suggests speed and movement’s supremacy over stasis. Not every Angeleno owns a car though, and regardless, every person deserves space on the sidewalk to exist without enduring intense sunlight and its resulting stresses. COVID-19 has made explicit that most humans long for contact and time in public. But the built environment in American cities is increasingly hostile to occupation, as anti-homeless technology like dividers on benches and a lack of covered seating generally demonstrate. The Ruscha archive may show where generous, equitable spaces once were and what happened to them over time, in addition to revealing the panoply of spaces most people avoid. “The goal of the studio might be to reconceive the street fundamentally by returning to the Ruschaian vocabulary in a perverse way to examine what it affords, who it accommodates, who it surveils, how much sun there is, and who is authorized to be there,” says Waldheim. “Without being stylistic, regional, or contextual, we’re asking if there is something to draw from Ruscha that is Angeleno in its ‘essence.’ I believe there is, for example, an infinite number of latent Ruscha Sunset Boulevards. If we develop the latent spaces available within Ruscha’s archive which address issues like shade and shelter, that can inform what we project forward when imagining an alternative to the current conditions on the streets of the city.”  

Students in Dialogue: A conversation with MDE candidate Nupur Gurjar

What is it like to be a Master in Design Engineering student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences? In this series of candid conversations between students, Tomi Laja (MArch II ’22) speaks with Nupur Gurjar (MDE ’21) about her journey from an architect and set designer in India to Harvard student, taking courses at the Law, Kennedy, and Business Schools, and career paths in MDE.

What drew you to the GSD and the Master of Design Engineering program?

After finishing my architecture undergrad degree, I stepped into design roles that were a bit unconventional, but ones that enabled me to explore critical design thinking. The Master of Design Engineering program is about applying design thinking into various fields, not necessarily just for architecture or the built environment but for design in a broad sense. The approach applies systems of thinking across cultural experience, collaboration with teams, learning by doing. The students in my cohort are not all from a design background; in fact, their backgrounds range from engineering to economics. Here, design means problem-solving and using critical thinking, innovative ideas, and principles of design to apply the right kind of approach to a project. Within MDE, I can bring in skills that are creative, critical, analytical, technical, and non-technical, and this gives me the freedom and flexibility to wear different hats and enter career paths as a designer who has the ability to understand problems and people.  

I really like what you’re saying about this multi-dimensional view on both what design is, but also your role as a designer. What was your experience before entering the program?

I’m from Bangalore, India, and in my final year studying architecture, I decided to intern in Mumbai. That internship really gave me a deeper idea of my passion, likes, and dislikes. At that point, large-scale commercial architecture jobs stopped holding their appeal to me, so I started exploring. I am also a performer and have been trained in classical dance and music. I entered the field of production design as a set designer for the media industry. I saw my training as a designer and a performer come together. Being a set designer was like looking at design and interiors through the lens of a camera that stretched beyond my drawings and 3D visualizations. I worked on a music video for Puma which was really colorful and cultural and for a web series with Amazon Prime. My second year of work experience was as a design research assistant in the city of Ahmedabad at CEPT University, Design Innovation and Craft Research Institute. I was part of a number of ethnographic field studies on vernacular furniture in northwest India. That opened doors to my interests in design research and engaging in a methodology to understand the influence of furniture design that has seamlessly integrated into the traditions, space, and life in communities.

You really took an opportunity to explore your path as a designer whether it was through architecture, set design, or research. Was a portfolio required for the MDE program?

Yes: Design Engineering accepts candidates from all different backgrounds, so the content of portfolios ranges. Some students have architecture projects, and others might emphasize research/ policy studies/ economics/ science and technology, etc. in their portfolio. The MDE program is very broad, and I tried to connect my diverse set of experiences and understanding of design to the vision of this program. When submitting your portfolio, I would recommend that you show your process of learning, discovering, and thinking that led to certain decisions; include low-fidelity prototypes, sketches, and mock-ups for products/ services or experiences designed. This could depend on the kind of project being showcased, but ultimately, it is important to include why a certain intervention matters and what value or impact it has on society.

Was there a specific subject that you wanted to study when entering the GSD?

I looked forward to studying at the GSD, and to be frank, I did not have a specific focus at first. It was my first time traveling internationally, and I was looking forward to absorbing a new outlook on my student life experience. I remember my admiration while walking the halls of the GSD with professionals that I’d read about in publications. That was truly exciting for me. I wanted to immerse myself in experiences that would help me grow as a designer, within the conventional boundaries of where designers thrive but also beyond it, at the intersection of other emerging fields and technologies.

How is the MDE program structured, and what projects excited you?

The MDE program is semi-structured with some mandatory courses but also a considerable amount of flexibility. We have Design studios in our first year with exposure to a system of working in cross-functional teams on quick design sprints as well as longer projects on Product, Service, Experience design with a hint of Data visualization and UI/UX design based on project demands along different themes that is set for every MDE incoming cohort. The first year can be exhausting, but it paves the way for our year-long Independent Design Engineering Project (IDEP) in the second year. I am working on designing an experiential service design intervention on climate migration in Bangladesh for vulnerable communities impacted by gradual climate events.

Have you taken any courses outside of the GSD?

Last semester I took “Conducting Negotiation on the Frontlines” at the Kennedy School of Government. It taught me about negotiation in a relational environment. It was an amazing course, and I think I was the only design school student. The experiential course design enabled the intersection of design thinking in humanitarian response. I met a lot of new people and made a lot of new friends. Another course I cherished was at Harvard Law School, a place where I had never imagined design to be applicable. My interest in climate design led me into a project where we were looking at reducing artificial synthetic nitrogen fertilizers for farmers, and we were even able to visit Wisconsin for our research. I enjoyed the challenge of addressing a complex challenge for the farmers to enhance or maintain their yield while reducing the fertilizer application through a tool kit designed for fertilizer calculations and modeling.

That’s exciting. I’ve taken some courses outside of the GSD as well, focusing on Gender Studies and Curatorial Studies. I’ve been thinking of the Law School but find myself feeling intimidated: you’ve inspired me to go for it.

It is. It’s just amazing. Again, you meet a whole new bunch of people that you would not typically meet.

Do you have any specific advice for international students about life on campus and careers after MDE?

In terms of campus life, Harvard has endless opportunities, including incredible research and innovation labs. And relationships with the amazing faculty are invaluable. Living abroad can be expensive, but there are some great research and work opportunities on-campus for employment as an international student. As for career paths after MDE, there is no single answer—it depends on your background, project experiences, or even entirely new skill sets that are learned here which may lead to a whole new career pathway. MDE students have typically taken up jobs as product designers, UI/UX designers, system engineers, consultants, strategists, or even started their own venture post-graduation. Our path will be less about the job title and more about what we can bring in terms of design and problem-solving.

I’d love to hear about organizations you’ve been involved with at Harvard.

Firstly, I would like to tell any future student to balance your school time with your passions and interests beyond the classroom. Events happen on a daily basis in the form of conferences, lectures, social networking, and more. It can be overwhelming, but it is important to keep reminding yourself to prioritize and think of the value you seek during your time here. In March 2020, I participated in the Harvard Circular Economy Symposium with students from the GSD, the Business School, and the Kennedy School; we organized the inaugural conference and worked on building an exposure and awareness of what “circular economy” means as a concept. I am still actively a part of that group. I also was a Community Service Fellow at the GSD last summer (2020). It is a fellowship for students at the GSD to work on a project with a nonprofit or a public organization in the US or abroad. I worked with Boston organizations on designing a Green Innovation district strategy to strengthen climate resiliency. For the term 2020-21, I was elected as the Student Groups chair at the Student Forum GSD. I’m the liaison for the approximately 40 student groups at the GSD. We also have meetings with the dean and learn about the administrative side of the school. Being on the leadership side has always been very enriching for me. I am also involved with the GSD Alumni Council’s Design Impact event series. I curated and moderated a panel in the Design Impact for South Asia event in February 2021 on climate migration, and I am using this opportunity to broaden my own passion and interest for climate migration in line with my thesis. I was also involved with the India Conference at Harvard, 2021 which led to some valuable connections to meet professionals working in this area. It is the largest student-led conference in the US, and is organized by students of the Business School and Kennedy School every year. Finding ways to engage in programs outside of my coursework that complement my scholarship has been a real highlight of my time in the MDE program, and something I would recommend to any incoming student. “Students in Dialogue” is a series of candid conversations between students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Interviewer Tomi Laja is currently a Master in Architecture II degree candidate at the GSD and Editorial Assistant with Harvard Design Magazine. Her interests include research-based architectural design, exhibition, and writing. Her independent research includes afro-futurist and eco-feminist perspectives as they relate to agency, consciousness, and the built environment.

Design collaborative colab-19 is changing how we think about post-pandemic architecture

Late last year, a scaffolding structure rose to abut the facade of the popular La Concordia market plaza in Bogotá—but the building wasn’t under construction. The three-story framework—a temporary intervention developed by architecture studio colab-19 with the Colombian Society of Architects and Taller Architects—was part of a city-sponsored campaign to support COVID-safe civic life during lockdown. As colab-19, architect Alejandro Saldarriaga (MArch II ’21) and urban designer German Bahamon designed the U-shaped La Concordia: Amphitheater to host a flexible program of outdoor dining, retail, and entertainment, all open to the public. While designers worldwide grappled with shortages of plexiglass and plywood as they scrambled to design for our new everyday life, colab-19’s multi-use installation was constructed with materials that are purposefully easy to source, assemble, and reuse—like the scaffolding, which was donated for the project by manufacturer Layher.

“We see existing systems as the opportunity—how can we use those resources to create architecture?” says Bahamon, of colab-19’s practice. “Scaffolding’s properties adapt very well to the realities that we’re living right now, in that you need a very cheap, quick, sustainable material,” notes Saldarriaga. Textiles that nod to the region’s culture augmented the structure’s rigid tectonics: a safety scrim of soccer goal netting wrapped around the third-floor observation deck, artificial turf lined the “green” roof, and local burlap fabric used to bag coffee and potatoes was hung to form soft walls. Though Amphitheater La Concordia was only up for several months, it conveyed a lasting message about temporary architecture’s role in creating a happier and healthier city.

Saldarriaga, currently based in his native Bogotá, and Bahamon, a Bogotano living in London, launched their remote practice in the summer of 2020 over Zoom, and the two have yet to meet in person. The same pandemic constraints that have dictated the terms of their virtual collaboration also inspire their approach to design. “It’s very special that we were born mid-pandemic, because we were asked to question all of the traditional models about practicing architecture,” says Saldarriaga. For colab-19, that means championing the ephemeral over the permanent, the readymade over the cast-in-place, and the sustainable over the disposable. Taking advantage of existing systems, processes, and materials, and engaging in partnerships between public, private, and academic sectors allows them to create resilient and responsive designs with minimal environmental and economic impact. With many construction infrastructure systems available universally, they hope their approach can be adopted (with regional adaptations) by other designers across the globe.

We’re strongly arguing for ephemeral architecture for emergency solutions—not only in the pandemic, but also for sustainability, and for social equality issues.

Alejandro Saldarriaga (MArch II ’21) on applications for ephemeral and resourceful architecture in a post-COVID era

For colab-19, that means championing the ephemeral over the permanent, the readymade over the cast-in-place, and the sustainable over the disposable.

Colab-19’s first built project, an outdoor dining area for popular Bogotá market plaza La Perseverancia, was completed last summer and marked the team’s first experiment with scaffolding. Capitalizing on the material’s intrinsic verticality, they were able to create a two-story sidewalk eatery, expanding upward to allow greater capacity while preserving physical distance between patrons. And in their Cloud Parks concept, routine lawn care is adapted to demarcate socially distant picnic zones with cumulus-shaped patches mowed directly into the grass. As pandemic restrictions ease, the clouds can assume different sizes and configurations, or disappear altogether when the lawn regrows. After Hurricane Iota pummeled the Colombian islands of San Andrés and Providencia, colab-19 proposed (In)Habiting Rubble, a building system in which remnants from the islands’ devastated buildings are pulverized and bagged to create modular “bricks,” readily accessible materials for constructing new homes that simultaneously eliminates debris from the storm.

“Before going to the GSD, I wouldn’t have thought about cutting grass or scaffolding as architecture. Being exposed to that environment really opened my mind to a broader part of design,” Saldarriaga says. Recently, the pair have been exploring the design possibilities of slab concrete formwork systems to construct a temporary chapel for a COVID-safe Easter Mass, and are already working on a pandemic-ready, self-contained house that features its own gym, salon, and market.

Though founded in response to the specific needs posed by the global pandemic, colab-19 sees many emerging applications for ephemeral and resourceful architecture in a post-COVID era. “We’re strongly arguing for ephemeral architecture for emergency solutions—not only in the pandemic, but also for sustainability, and for social equality issues. Populations and cities are growing everywhere in the world,” Salarriaga points out. Speaking to Toshiko Mori’s “Temporary and Ephemeral Structures” studio at the GSD recently, Salarriaga and Bahamon encouraged students to question and challenge architectural conventions, and to embrace ephemerality as a tool for experimenting with full-scale prototypes and practicing “tactical architecture.” “As a profession, we need to start rethinking how we’ve been doing design. It’s something that’s healthy to do, every decade or so,” Saldarriaga says. Bahamon agrees: “This is the best time to redesign the world, and architects have a huge opportunity in front of us.”