Fall 2021 Welcome Address from Dean Sarah M. Whiting

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Ian Grohsgal (MArch ’21)

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

Reexamining the Hidden Figures of Design: A Class on Belonging by Hansy Better Barraza

“‘How many Black urbanists can you name? How many Latinx architects from the 20th century do you know? Maybe one? None?’ These are the questions we started with,” says Hansy Better Barraza, outlining the impetus for her spring class, “Hidden Figures: The City, Architecture and the Construction of Race and Gender.” “By the end of the course you should come away with at least 10,” she told her students, aiming to redirect focus to the field’s marginalized practitioners and give them space to shine. The course turned out to be a particularly productive one: it generated Transforming the Timeline, a student-led initiative that features a diverse set of women who have shaped the world through their leadership in design, activism, and art. The students built an Instagram account and a website, and the class sparked a subsequent panel discussion—funded by a grant from the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Racial Equity and Anti-Racism Fund—with the goal of investigating and reinstating authorship over histories of the built environment. Better Barraza, a visiting professor, is both an architect and an activist. A cofounder of Studio Luz Architects in Boston, she also cofounded BR+A+CE: Building Research + Architecture + Community Exchange, a nonprofit that joins artists and designers with community members to create new spaces and events that benefit the communities in which they are located. Her communal design approach wove its way into the course: “A research paper is only read by the student and their instructor and is then stacked in a folder,” Better Barraza says. “I thought instead, Let’s post our panel discussion online, let’s do a website, let’s make an IG page, let this knowledge be free and dispersed. It’s just so much more powerful when made public.” With Transforming the Timeline, the students have launched a website that reexamines the historical trajectory of design and architecture. They write, “Since its conception, the academy has convinced generations of architecture students to trust in the white male voice as a neutral, universal norm.” And they highlight the constructed nature of the historical narrative—a narrative with a position and a point of view that reflects canonized figures. But what, and who, lies beneath? The website marries the contemporary and the historical to document and “amplify women whose names are not included in architectural discourse, curriculum, syllabi, or survey text.” Looking back at the mid-19th century, the students have unearthed female, Black, queer, Latinx, and other marginalized architects that were present, engaged, and contributing to the development of the urban form. Likewise, the panel discussion included female and nonbinary powerhouses in touch with past and present.  Architect Roberta Washington lectured on the history and contribution of Black architects, for example, and artist Marcela Pardo Ariza touched on artistic gestures that can infiltrate art and cultural institutions. While researching case studies for the course, the students used their own ethnic and geographical identities as touchstones. “You come from somewhere, those roots have shaped who you are,” Better Barraza says. She finds that contextualizing via personal background can be a compass to locate others that came before. “Belonging is key!” she emphasizes, for young designers and artists. To contribute to the discipline, “to find and acknowledge (one’s) culture. . . these are the histories that need to be talked about.” When students tie their own histories and origins to earlier working architects, it helps them to not only exist within the field, but to push it further. “Ultimately,” she explains, “these alternative bodies of knowledge will help transform the discipline.”

 

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The @transformingthetimeline Instagram account includes a series of blurry photos and asks viewers to “swipe left to reveal the hidden figure.” Each caption tells the story of the featured woman. Click on the Instagram post above to learn more about Abra Lee, a horticulturist, writer, educator, and historian.

GSD faculty participate in Venice Architecture Biennale’s 17th installation, “How Will We Live Together?”

The Venice Architecture Biennale has returned with its 17th installation, “How Will We Live Together?,” featuring 114 participants representing 46 countries and a variety of perspectives on the titular question from curator Hashim Sarkis—a prompt that he had established before the various events that marked 2020. “The current global pandemic has no doubt made the question that this Biennale Architettura is asking all the more relevant and timely, even if somehow ironic, given the imposed isolation,” Sarkis observes. “It may indeed be a coincidence that the theme was proposed a few months before the pandemic. However, many of the reasons that initially led us to ask this question—the intensifying climate crisis, massive population displacements, political instabilities around the world, and growing racial, social, and economic inequalities, among others—have led us to this pandemic and have become all the more relevant.” Broadly considered the world’s premier event of its kind, the Venice Biennale originated in 1895 as a set of art exhibitions, expanding to include biannual shows dedicated to other cultural production, including architecture. The Venice Architecture Biennale generally has been held every two years since 1980. This year’s Biennale of Architecture represents a reschedule from its original May 2020 start date, opening to the public on May 22, 2021. On view until November 21, the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale’s main exhibition is organized into five scalar categories of work, exhibited across the Arsenale and the Central Pavilion: Among Diverse Beings, As New Households, As Emerging Communities, Across Borders, As One Planet. The main exhibition also includes a series of research stations that complement and enrich projects on display with in-depth analysis of related topics. This year’s show commenced with an inaugural ceremony and presentation of the famed Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement award, presented to Harvard GSD’s Rafael Moneo. In addition to Moneo’s honor, a variety of Harvard GSD faculty and students are participating throughout the 2021 Biennale’s programming; they include: Rahul Mehrotra, Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design and the John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization, and his practice Rahul Mehrotra Architect are participating in the Arsenale-sited “Co-Habitats: India” installation. Mehrotra’s 12-minute video installation, “Becoming Urban: Trajectories of Urbanization in India” presents research on India’s emerging urban trajectory, as shaped by the proximity of cities to a densely populated hinterland, and as defined in the project as the urban-agrarian field. The installation hypothesizes that, in the future, low-rise and self-built typologies of informal settlements and urbanizing villages will house the majority of India’s urban population, not only within large metropolitan cities but across tens of thousands of transitioning settlements. The installation suggests that, invoking the Biennale’s guiding theme, living together in India’s cities will require architects and designers to acknowledge and empower the lived experiences of millions of households who traverse the imagined political and ideological borders of urban-rural and formal-informal that are reinforced by planning and policy. Farshid Moussavi, Professor in Practice of Architecture, and her practice Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA) have installed “Separation and Unity: Îlot 19 Residential Block, La Défense–Nanterre” in the Biennale’s “As New Households” show within the Arsenale. Curated collaboratively with FMA’s Guillaume Choplain, Marco Ciancarella, and Yotam Ben-Hur, the installation presents interviews with residents of the FMA-designed, 11,500 square-meter Îlot 19 residential block in Paris’s La Défense-Nanterre, completed in 2017—the first new housing to have been built in La Défense for 30 years. Projected on two large-scale screens, FMA’s films (produced by Tapio Snellman) present reflections from Îlot 19 residents on the connectedness they feel among neighbors, a connectedness enabled, they observe, by the housing’s architecture and Moussavi’s specific design decisions. In designing Îlot 19, Moussavi drew inspiration from Roland Barthes’s 1977 lecture “How to live together,” which questioned the balance between collective sociability and individual freedom as shaped by physical distance and design, as well as from a 1979 project by Pierre Bourdieu: a stratified map of social space that suggested social capital is not uniformly and democratically inherent, but rather, dependent on an individual’s social status. As FMA describes, Îlot 19 combines private apartments, student lodging, and commercial and public spaces within a single project, striking toward social cohesion and inclusivity and absent of visual cues that suggest hierarchy. Apartments are arranged to be laterally accessed in pairs by an elevator and stair core, regardless of tenure type; both the student lodging and the private residences feature private outdoor spaces, and throughout, homes benefit from natural cross-ventilation as well as natural light and views of Paris. Allen Sayegh, Associate Professor in Practice of Architectural Technology, has co-curated the Armenian pavilion “Hybridity: a machine for living together,” which opens in the Pallazzo Ca’Zenobio on August 28 and is on view through November 21. “Hybridity: a machine for living together” presents three large-scale installations, interspersed among the Pallazzo’s grounds and designed by INVIVIA. Drawing upon elements of augmented reality and physical and digital manipulation, the installation seeks to evoke the connections among 80 different communities of Armenian descent, currently located across the world. The installation culminates in a hall of mirrors that generate an opulent baroque ballroom, filled with fresco paintings that, as Sayegh notes, play with the visitor’s perception of the architecture and the space in view, and how one’s body occupies the space. A large, floating reflective surface coupled with elements of augmented reality further provoke the viewer. “We wanted to create the feeling of slight discomfort or unease but at the same time, through a combination of augmentation and physical installations, give the visitor an experience that allows them to see the spaces anew and more than the sum of the parts,” Sayegh says. These effects, in turn, evoke some of the global effects of the Aremenian diaspora, through which millions of Armenians have spread out all over the world, adapting to new socio-cultural contexts while keeping strong relationships to their Armenian identity and sharing share a rich culture community strengthened through intangible qualities, especially the senses. Malkit Shoshan, Lecturer in Architecture, and her practice FAST have installed “Border Ecologies and the Gaza Strip: Watermelon, Sardines, Crabs, Sand, and Sediment” in the Biennale’s Central Pavilion, one manifestation of FAST’s ongoing “Border Ecologies” project. Exploring the emergence of unexpected spaces in response to stresses and war at the Israeli-Palestinian border, Shoshan and FAST curated more than a dozen oral histories of daily life on a farm in Khuza’a, a Palestinian agricultural village in the Gaza Strip situated along one of the territory’s most militarized borders with Israel—a village that Israel has been attacked numerous times in recent decades. In particular, Shoshan and FAST engaged in ongoing conversations with 27-year-old Khuza’a resident Amir Qudaih about his family farm and the destruction it has endured. Collecting these and other stories, “Border Ecologies and the Gaza Strip” manifests as a dining table and a custom-made tablecloth, designed by Shoshan with Sandra Kassennaar and in collaboration with the Qudaih family. The physical installation narrates layers of stories about daily life and ongoing atrocities in the region, complemented by a pair of film projections link everyday farm life with footage of the perpetual violence the villagers face, as captured on mobile phones by Khuza’a farmers. As Shoshan and FAST were preparing the Biennale installation in May, violence erupted anew at and around Khuza’a and the Gaza Strip, destroying the Qudaih family farm and forcing the family to shelter in their home. “It was emotionally challenging to install the show and present it to the world,” Shoshan observes, “as during the preview and opening of the Biennale, both the community of farmers I worked with in Gaza and my family in Tel Aviv were literally under fire and at the midst of war.” (“Border Ecologies and the Gaza Strip” was profiled by ABC News in May 2021, alongside select other Biennale moments.) Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture, has authored an essay entitled “Linger, for a Moment, in the City” for the Biennale’s official publication, Expansions. Therein, Whiting meditates upon how, in an evermore public and urban world, people across societies may slacken the pace of life in order to truly live more publicly shared lives. “The chaotic exuberance of our growing density offers extraordinary opportunities to render urbanity public in its very gaps and uncertainties,” Whiting observes. “Opportunities lie between our front doors and the street, in lobbies, and between floors; they lie along streets and in the entrances to parks. Rather than succumb to the homogeneous efficiencies of Otis, Schindler, and JCDecaux, design can produce prospects for an ornery notion of exchange. … Contemporary public life might better be understood as a kind of discursive cigarette—without smoke or nicotine, but with plenty of metaphorical fire—over which one can linger while sharing the exotic air of so much new and intense urban life.” Whiting is also Creative Director of the “Border Choreographies: Identity, Body, Personhood” film that is part of the “City x Venice: Italian Virtual Pavilion,” collaborating with Harvard GSD students Adriana David, Eva Lavranou, and María Gracia San Martín, and video editor Angela Sniezynski. “Border Choreographies” presents research initiated at Harvard GSD examining the experience of bodies crossing international borders, focusing on air and land and taking as case studies the US International Airports and the Caravana Migrante route from South America to the Mexico-US border. The project foregrounds a human-scale view amid broader geopolitical dialogue in order to connect personhood and identity with territory and nationhood. Jungyoon Kim, Assistant Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture, presented a public lecture as part of the ongoing research and dialogue informing the Korean Pavilion’s “Future School” installation. As described by the Korean Pavilion’s curator Hae-Won Shin, “Future School” converts the pavilion site into a new sort of virtual academy: an “international incubator for radical thinking and the exchange of ideas and projects that actively explore the notion of building a better future.” The “Future School” installation offers more than 50 programs and lectures exploring issues that range from cooling urban environments and the futurology of schools to innovative spatial interventions and borders as spaces of integration. This series of programs forms the so-called first academic cycle of “Future School,” a cycle that launched in summer 2020 with several preliminary programs held in Seoul, including Kim’s lecture, “Border as Territory,” which was broadcast live to a global audience during its July 9, 2020 presentation. The various programs and interventions taking place during this year’s Biennale will then inform and compose a final “semester back” in Seoul, offering an exploration of the archive and dialogue being generated via the pavilion. Marc Angélil, Kenzo Tange Visiting Professor in Architecture and Urban Planning and Design, is among the exhibitors participating in “Co-Habitats: Addis Ababa” in the Arsenale. The installation presents coexisting spatial layers that each representing a particular political regime whose traces remain in Addis Ababa’s socio-spatial fabric, gesturing toward the context upon which future urban and regional development for the city will depend. Kersten Geers and David van Severen, each a Design Critic in Architecture, are exhibiting in the Bahrain pavilion entitled “In Muharraq: The Pearling Path.” As described in the official Biennale curatorial statement, the exhibition “presents both the results and the process of making, through models, objects, minutes of meetings, artefacts, drawings, and conversations, showing the project in its current state. It explores the challenges in reviving the memory of pearling, as a backdrop to a culturally-led development approach and as a binder between the physical makings of the city and its identity, and questions whether pearls, oysters, coral stones, cars, and humans can sustainably and generously cohabit in the city today.” Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Assistant Professor of Urban Design, is among the curatorial team behind the German pavilion “2038: The New Serenity.” The pavilion presents a series of original films that depict a world in the year 2038, fictional but based on current realities as well as idealized visions.

Reclaiming Asian-American Garden History: Yoni Angelo Carnice researches the work and legacy of Demetrio Braceros at San Francisco’s Cayuga Playground

When Yoni Angelo Carnice (MLA ’20) first visited Cayuga Playground in San Francisco, he was struck by a wooden sculpture of a woman dressed in the traditional Filipino Maria Clara gown, with a graceful elegance that reminded him of his grandmother. The distinctively personal atmosphere of the park stayed with Carnice, and later became the basis of his year-long research project, “Eden of the Hinterlands: Reclaiming Asian-American Garden History,” under the Douglas Dockery Thomas Fellowship in Garden History and Design, sponsored by the Garden Club of America and the Landscape Architecture Foundation. Before coming to the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Carnice worked in ecological restoration and climate-based policy work. “I was doing very regimented invasive plant removal, and planting native plants, in a more binary way.” He sought a more fluid, holistic approach to landscape architecture. His time at the GSD and his experience at Cayuga Playground, which “weaves landscape narratives, plants, and architecture together in a beautiful way,” was a revelation. Located in the Outer Mission district, it is an unexpected, idiosyncratic gem in a city dominated by “mow and blow” parks. And it is largely the work of one man, Demetrio Braceros, a Filipino immigrant who became Cayuga’s gardener in 1986. Over 23 years, Braceros devoted himself to the park, often cultivating plants at home before bringing them to work. On lunch breaks, he carved hundreds of sculptures from cypress wood, acting as artist, craftsman, and gardener. “Because of Braceros’s care and attention,” Carnice says, “he shifted the park into something the community valued.” The American immigrant dream is often defined as settling into one’s own house and garden. Cayuga Playground represents a different kind of dream, where an immigrant gardener can cultivate a community space that represents his own Filipino American heritage. A Virgin Mary sculpture evokes Filipino Catholic traditions; a sculpture of Barry Bonds, who played on the San Francisco Giants, celebrates San Francisco sports. “You can see that his joy of being an American, of being Filipino, of being a part of this community—it’s all physically represented in the landscape,” Carnice says. The park is also a testament to the potential for landscape architecture to activate and sustain community. Braceros’s sculptures included memorials for neighborhood friends (and dogs) who passed away. “His art,” Carnice writes, “comes out of a Filipino sense of duty to cultivate familial relationships with those around you.” Braceros’s generosity and care is reflected in the community’s love for the garden, which Carnice experienced firsthand when beginning his research. “The scale of the project was going to be very small,” Carnice reflects. “But as the work started to expand and more and more excitement was generated around it, I realized it was becoming a lot bigger.” Since Braceros’s retirement in 2008, community members have been active advocates of Cayuga Playground. [Video Description: Hands open and flip through a package containing a postcard, catalog, and the book Sunlight Entered His Hands.] Their stories are part of Carnice’s publication, Sunlight Entered His Hands, an exuberant and intimate history of the park and the community’s ongoing preservation efforts. The book is “for the community, first and foremost,” Carnice says. “Design work often feels very extractive: you go into a community, get something there, and present [it back] to a very small design audience.” An extractive approach was inadequate here, where community members were as generous to Carnice’s work as Braceros was to them. Instead, Carnice printed copies of his book for a community event in early July, which brought the community together after a difficult, isolating year of COVID-19. It was both a joyful and difficult commemoration, as the garden has changed significantly since Braceros’s retirement. “The horticultural paradox of the garden is fascinating to me,” Carnice says. Braceros’s ornamental horticulture approach brought together tropical and Mediterranean plants in a vivid, improvisational planting. But the use of water-intensive hydrangeas posed a problem. The hydrangeas are a living symbol of the community’s cultural memory: a beloved community member passed away while tending to them, and for Carnice, hydrangeas are particularly evocative of an older Asian community and their gardening practices. But nearly all of them have been removed by the park’s new gardener. Carnice is sensitive to the difficulties of the city’s restoration efforts, having talked to both city employees and community members. But his research has convinced him of the need to fuse ecological and aesthetic concerns together. “These [sculptures], these landscapes, are a manifestation of the community,” he says. As the community and city consider preservation of objects and place (physically restoring Braceros’s wooden sculptures, questioning how to restore or depart from the original planting plan), Carnice thinks about how to preserve the cultural and institutional memory of Cayuga Playground. “I wanted the book to be a representation of different ways to look at preservation: through interpretation, memory, writing.” Sunlight Entered His Hands reflects Carnice’s commitment to a deeply personal approach to landscape architecture, one that shifts between different scales and mediums. “Right now I’m designing a botanical garden—but then I might be making collages for another project, or planting someone’s garden, or writing about another person’s garden.” And Carnice’s next project involves a shift in geography: working with Soft Spot, a spatial design collective, in the Philippines. What ties these projects together is Carnice’s dedication to landscape expression, no matter the form, and to centering alternative garden histories, like the work—and legacy—of Demetrio Braceros at Cayuga Playground.

Small Institutions: On rediscovering the emotional conditions of architecture

The city, according to Louis Kahn, arose through the establishment of institutions. By extension, he defined its “greatness” as “how sensitive [those institutions] are to renewed desire for new agreement.” Agreement, in this context, does not necessarily entail a declaration or even a conscious decision on behalf of any party. Instead, it may arise from a shared recognition of an ephemeral condition that creates “a center around which existential space is organized.” For example, Kahn believed “agreement. . . is what made the school a school, or what inspired the first room. It was an undeniable agreement that this man who seems to sense things which others don’t should be near the children so they can benefit from such a man.” When held to this standard, most, if not all, cities lack greatness. As Foucault and others have observed, many of our institutions, from schools to hospitals, have become manifestations of and tools for power instead of sites of cooperation, dialogue, and exchange. Their architecture and design atomizes by intention, separating people into individual cells or precisely demarcated spaces where they are sequestered and observed, and thereby controlled. Our institutions, from Kahn’s perspective, have “lost their inspirational impact of their beginning and have become operational.” For the spring 2021 studio “Small Institutions,” Roger Tudó Galí, Josep Ricart Ulldemolins, and Xavier Ros Majó—three partners at HARQUITECTES in Sabadell, Spain who served as the John C. Portman Design Critics in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design for the semester—took Kahn as their inspiration and asked students to identify the primordial essences of various institutions: library, museum, school, temple, town hall, market, theater, hospital, swimming pool, and courthouse. By focusing students’ attention on determining and responding to the Kahnian agreement from which these institutions arose, the rituals inherent to these spaces become constitutive of their designs. In turn, this exercise illuminates how forms of communal interaction and public engagement have been lost and how they could be resuscitated. Moreover, it encourages a wholesale reconceptualization of architecture in which the plan begins with nothing, to which only the necessary is added. “A lot of new institutions are losing the emotional conditions of architecture, becoming too functional and rational, and just working to avoid practical problems,” says Tudó Galí. “We are very much about going against these preestablished ideas and the pragmatic approach to building. Instead, we try to rediscover the platonic idea of a place and its activities.” A novel methodological approach was fundamental to achieving these objectives, beginning with the non-architectonic meditation on agreement rather than a site-specific design problem like those typically given to students. “In general, from our experience teaching in Spain, we are always short on time in the projectural process when deciding what is really essential in architecture,” explains Ricart Ulldemolins. “We feel that students waste energy in terms of their approaches, whether academic, social, or personal. Here, we’re talking about institutions, not specifically about building, in order to put students into a very specific situation to come, from the very beginning, to the essential in architecture.” The site chosen by the trio aided their directive that the students eradicate any dependence on established forms. Located within a high-density block in the Sant Pere, Santa Caterina i la Ribera neighborhood in the oldest area of Barcelona, the long, narrow plot between party walls measures just 493 square meters. Connected to adjacent streets, it was created through the hypothetical demolition of existing buildings. Ros Majó describes their selection as “a kind of trap for the students,” as the size, especially when considered with its irregular geometry, is too small to accommodate a conventional-size institution. More radical than its challenging dimensions, however, was that the site wasn’t disclosed until about halfway into the semester. Unbound by location or other restrictions, the students could first concern themselves solely with their unique institutions, the elemental aspects of which, the professors hoped, would become more definable with each task assigned. The first assignment foregrounded introspection. Each student chose four photographs and built a collage as a means of creating an individual and unexpected hypothetical institution. “We didn’t want the project to focus just on the visual, but this was the fastest way to produce a personal approach rather than one based in a very abstract, general, or ambitious concept,” says Ricart Ulldemolins. With the library, for instance, Alexis Boivin (MArch ’22) fused street images with Étienne-Louis Boullée’s epic proposal for the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. Boullée’s vaulted ceilings are here made transparent, declaratively introducing the urban into the space. At the same time, perambulators heighten a sense of the library as a free and open public institution as they evoke those browsing or just walking by the bouquinistes stalls along the Seine. Following this warm-up exercise, the students began historical research in order to determine what parts of institutions had been retained over time, with an emphasis on typologies. “The delivery was not only to understand an evolution in history but to understand what is and is not important, and to propose what should be included in the next step of that evolution,” says Ricart Ulldemolins. As well as providing a generative cultural-historical perspective on these institutions, the assignment, Tudó Galí explains, helped reveal the negative aspects of these spaces that have persisted. “The most boring part of the institutional idea is when it becomes a building that is repeated a lot and becomes part of an automatic system. The specificity of the design is lost,” he says. “The idea for the students was to stop this evolution and take a more open point of view, to try to produce something which defines a very specific solution and not a repetition of the same kind of buildings.” This in turn led to designing archetypes of their institutions inspired by this research—models that illustrate the main performance that takes place in each space and that define their need to exist (as opposed to site-specific concerns). The emphasis on performance remained central in the subsequent assignment, when the site was revealed but not yet addressed as it typically would be. “We asked the students not to do a very conventional research process to understand the site but instead a short exercise that we call ‘the ephemeral project,’” says Ricart Ulldemolins. “It should be something that is not exactly a building but something that can be removed, to make the definition of the ritual stronger. It was quite a difficult moment for them, to try to expose them to the institution not as an object but as a happening,” says Tudó Galí. “Most of them work on buildings or objects but not on the activity,” adds Ros Majó. Ricart Ulldemolins notes that not only graduate students but architects broadly have difficulty projecting the performatic part of the institution onto a site. “I think it’s a general misunderstanding of the profession to confuse the shape of the object and the object itself with the experience of people,” he says. “Our experience in a building is not exactly the design of the object. It’s the design of the experience produced by the object.” The next step—“the primordial space,” as the professors referred to it—brought together the studies of archetype and ritual, with specific emphasis on the atmosphere of the space and haptic experiences related to temperature, materiality, natural light, and proportions. Tudó Galí believes it was the most important delivery, as it asked the students “to define what could be considered the most essential space in these institutions” and relate that to the site itself. It was the first time that the students’ assumptions of what was inherent to their institutions were brought into conversation with the material and geometrical realities of the constrained site. This confrontation stripped away additional notions of what is necessary, further distancing the designs of the institutions from the status quo. As if this process were not surprising and confounding enough for many, the trio had a final twist—“the strategic detail”—that would further ask the students to rethink their approach to architecture in and beyond this studio. “The strategic detail is a combination of the main strategies and the smaller definition of a building,” explains Tudó Galí. “The detail cannot be understood without the general idea, and the general idea cannot be understood without the detail. In this holistic idea, everything is the same, just at a different scale or dimension. It’s not a fragment or a part that goes after the main decisions. It’s a detail that holds the possibility of changing everything.” This directive required the students to determine an aspect of the total design from the previous assignment that was connected to the essence of the institution as developed throughout the semester. Once identified, that detail would then need to solve smaller problems through its incorporation into the space. “It started to shake everything for them a little bit, to determine if their previous ideas were a little naive,” Tudó Galí adds. Boivin, with the library, and Diandra Rendradjaja (MArch ’22), who was assigned the market, both agreed that the methodology the professors developed forced them to question constantly how they approached their designs. “Normally in studios, you’re given a prompt at the start and work at your own pace, defining by yourself the small steps you’re taking,” says Boivin. “But the professors were precise in setting goals for us, which really helped throughout the process. Libraries are usually humongous spaces placed in flat, unbounded plots. The assignments, such as narrowing the task and focusing on the evolution of libraries throughout time, really forced the project to take a radical approach and refine what the essential qualities of a library are. The site made almost irrelevant the canonical libraries that I looked into because they wouldn’t accept or fit into this kind of space. Instead I had to achieve monumentality through small spaces or aspects of light that adjusted to those smaller spaces.” At first, Boivin sought to play with movement, with a design that carried people throughout the library, and specifically around books, in a dynamic manner via stairways and ramps. But the process encouraged a more concentrated design, built across three levels. The ground floor resembles an agora, almost empty and fluid with low bookcases on which people can sit and that encourage communal engagement. The second floor—with individual reading and storage rooms—creates a more intimate relationship with the book. Openness returns in the third floor’s grander reading room. It features a table which follows the perimeter of the room and large windows that create a sense of suspension for occupants between the courtyard and the multistory surrounding buildings. In Boivin’s words, the plan emphasizes “circulating, browsing of books, and reading as a celebration of knowledge” as well as “the activity of encountering its physical form.” Rendradjaja also focused on public access and openness but further emphasized the site’s street-like nature. “In Barcelona, specifically in the context of the Old Town, the street is the only public ground,” she says. “Unlike the nearby Cerda blocks, which have courtyards, people here have less access to common space. The street-facing windows and balconies of neighbors are used as laundry-drying racks and plant hangers, as they are the only exterior space they have. The streets are the void between private properties. Because markets are public spaces, I felt the need to leave mine, which is almost the size of the streets around it, as empty as possible. It could be seen in multiple ways: the backyard to the surrounding buildings, a new plaza that’s half-covered, or a new courtyard that was missing from the neighborhood.” Just as Boivin’s historical research and the initial ideas for the library it prompted became largely irrelevant, Rendradjaja experienced significant shifts in her understanding of the market. “What I thought about at the beginning of the semester didn’t transfer at all,” she says, addressing how the methodology led to an understanding that the essence of the institution should dictate form and that the site should not restrict an architect from upholding that essence as primary. “Roger, Xavi, and Josep’s approach to the studio and in their work is always to try to find the most precise solution—not in the sense that there’s only one ultimate answer but finding one out of many possibilities to do something that’s simple, straightforward, and smart. It’s about doing something with very minimal effort but maximum effect,” she explains. “So the ephemeral exercise, which for me was the most eye-opening, was about discovering the ritual of an institution—the activity, not the building itself or its construction. In my case, that was market exchange and maintenance, and the minimum elements you need in order for that to happen. That was the moment I realized what the studio was about, and I thought it was very helpful throughout the semester.” Rendradjaja’s design reclaims the market from the enclosed hall, which she characterizes as “selective of its merchants and detached from the public surroundings as it forms a private entity,” and returns it to the open-air street as a “universal public space.” The design’s central facet is “a series of roofs, held by engaged columns that are structurally supported by and dependent on the existing walls.” These hang over the rows of stone tables permanently installed on the ground. At different elevations, they enable palpable light and shadow changes. Situated much higher than in traditional markets, they also instill an awareness of being within the city rather than confined within a form of transplantable architecture. Arguably most crucial though, in terms of the studio and the professors’ hopes for its methodology, is how these roofs also fulfill the “strategic detail” assignment. “The strategic detail is meant to be a precise response to something that facilitates the performance of your institution,” Rendradjaja says. In her case, that performance concerns water, a required resource for a market. “The roofs evolved from being protection from rain and for shade to being water-collection devices. In the final assignment, the structure that holds them up in compression are at the same time pipes that move water down from the gutter to a collection tank. In order to separate rainwater from the used water of the market, two independent routes are installed, sectionally. Both routes culminate at the center point of the project, where a tank underground stores water throughout the year and reveals itself aboveground in the form of a resource fountain.” Thus the roofs, through their multifunctionality as infrastructure for a water system integral to the institution, bring balcony and market together in a holistic design. The surprises experienced by the students at each step in the studio somewhat echo the need for shocks, gentle or otherwise, in our large-scale understanding of institutions. What is conventionally considered “institutional” refers to material facets—often linked to power rather than style—that become unoriginal through their repeatability and which reduce the institution to these typological details. The essences of these institutions—their “invisible conditions” as framed by Tudó Galí, Ricart Ulldemolins, and Ros Majó—are ephemeral, however, and therefore resist codification. To design with Kahn’s formulation of the agreement as one’s impetus is a rebuke against a society that has forgotten why our institutions exist and the rituals at their genesis. The only demand it makes is the continual questioning of the status quo and the stripping away of the superfluous. “It’s necessary to demolish the conventional building of the institution in order to understand what is essential to that institution,” says Ricart Ulldemolins. “The success of the course, for me, was that most students discovered this by themselves.  

GSD experts on a major barrier to climate crisis mitigation: “The majority of Americans have little experience with the land and its rhythms”

If Earth’s biosphere is in crisis, it is a peculiar sort of crisis. To human eyes, it appears drawn out in slow motion over decades and spread almost invisibly across vast tracts of land. A difficult cognitive leap is required to grasp such a diffuse phenomenon. Landscape architects face a further complication: while disasters like hurricanes and wildfires can focus attention, our natural response begins with triage and mourning—far from the sort of visionary optimism that helps propel longer-term projects. And where does recovery figure into future decades of a warmer globe? To understand these issues in the field of landscape architecture, I spoke with three professors at the GSD who taught courses on the subject this spring. Steven Apfelbaum, an ecologist and founder of the ecological restoration firm AES, began our conversation by noting the tendency in conservationist discourse to focus on charismatic megafauna—“big animals that we know and love for one reason or another, usually because we fear them.” We tend to notice megaflora as well, and major weather events like heat waves and floods likewise capture our attention. But this fascination with the large, the beautiful, and the fearful does not always translate into the sort of sustained engagement required to develop a deep ecological understanding, Apfelbaum says. This is a foundational conundrum of ecology: the majority of Americans have little experience with the land and its rhythms, and as a result we have insufficient understanding of ecological processes and principles. “We are ecologically illiterate as a civilization,” as he bluntly puts it. Apfelbaum’s course at the GSD, “Altered Rural and Urban Landscape Restoration,” takes steps to address this lacuna. Like the conservationist Aldo Leopold before him, Apfelbaum encourages a land ethic that comes from engagement with the whole complex biotic pyramid encountered in a particular locale.[1] He says that “it really takes people that are more knowledgeable and connected to these ecological understandings to deploy ecological principles” in the right way. The question of expertise arose repeatedly in my conversations. Silvia Benedito, a design critic at the GSD and founder of the multi-disciplinary design firm OFICINAA, emphasizes the need for community engagement and Indigenous knowledge rather than simply deferring to experts. This spring she taught “The Anatomy of (Wild)fire, a Design Quest?,” a course centered on rural communities in the Mediterranean. Benedito explains that a postwar exodus led to “rural areas becoming the back porch of cities—in many ways they became monocultures and sites of extraction.” The inter-generational transfer of ecological knowledge was interrupted and institutions stepped in to fill the void, often misunderstanding what they encountered. Benedito describes the case of one of America’s most beloved national parks: “There are reports that when John Muir arrived in the Yosemite Valley, he thought that what he was seeing was wild nature and that it should be controlled and maintained in the condition he found it. But it had actually been managed over many centuries by people indigenous to the area, who used it for food, for rituals, and—when it came to fire—they managed it for the safety of their communities.” Colonists brought with them their own ideas of fire as a destructive force to be managed from afar and eliminated from the valley when possible. Designers, by the very nature of their profession, are usually outsiders to the geographical areas in which they work—and thus ongoing place-based education is crucial. Cultivating in-the-field knowledge was among the goals of a course taught by David Moreno Mateos, an ecologist and assistant professor at the GSD. “Ecosystem Restoration” focused on land in New England that had been cultivated by settlers, but which has been abandoned for several hundred years. This situation has created a sort of natural laboratory for understanding the recovery process. Due to the pandemic, students were offered a framework for self-guided field trips to document local ecosystems. Extrapolating from these observations and correlating with research by ecologists, Moreno Mateos identified “the specific tools—combinations of soil fungi, plant species composition, plant traits—that promote recovery by increasing the functionality and resilience of any ecosystem, which if brought to landscape architecture will help design more functional and resilient landscapes.” The course dovetails with Moreno Mateos’s primary research. His major project this summer takes place at the site of an ecological catastrophe that occurred long ago. Swaths of Greenland were transformed by Norse farmers from Iceland beginning around the year 1000, and, for reasons still under debate, these settlements were abandoned about 500 years later. For the past five centuries, many of these landscapes have been left to recover on their own. His scientific research aims to understand the details of how these former Norse settlements have recovered from ancient anthropogenic impacts—which ought to offer us clues about how humanity can deal with the ecological disasters caused by anthropogenic climate change. Landscape architects, Moreno Mateos says, should be “armed with the powerful tool of ecosystem restoration that could be used in any landscape architecture project, conservationist tragedies, or management activities.” Like Moreno Mateos, Apfelbaum emphasizes the importance of experiencing functioning ecosystems in person. His own restoration practice begins at home, on his 80-acre farm in Wisconsin, the transformation of which is documented in his book, Nature’s Second Chance. Readers follow along as Apfelbaum restores a patch of fallow and semiwild farmland, coming to understand and appreciate the relationship between species in a diverse ecosystem that includes wetland, prairie, savanna, and spring-fed brook. But reading this or any other book is no substitute for field courses, Apfelbaum says. “When I went to school, I took field courses every semester, and I was out in the woods learning about nature a couple of days a week. Now, it’s very challenging to go get that sort of field exposure.” This lack of exposure has affected the way designers conceptualize the land, he says: “The landscape architect has focused on parcels, oftentimes small, and the ecologist has become less focused on systems, and more focused on smaller scale thinking… How can we work in a systematic way across scale, across boundaries of ownership, and across disciplinary subject matters?” Apfelbaum, Benedito, and Moreno Mateos all agree that landscape architects have a role to play as mediators in multi-scalar, multidisciplinary ecological discussions. Benedito points to invaluable lessons in the work of James Corner and his firm, Field Operations (where Benedito previously worked). Corner’s drawings focused on processes, helping landscape architects to see that narratives can be embedded in landscapes. Many of Benedito’s own projects conjure elusive sensory dimensions of landscapes. This sensitivity is crucial when dealing with phenomena such as fire, which are themselves fleeting but which leave traces on the land and in collective memory that can be rekindled in the course of design. Benedito emphasizes that “the potentials of landscape as a discipline of telling stories is fundamental when we have to interact with communities.” Apfelbaum concurs, mentioning that, at his firm, “the first function of the landscape architects, on many projects, is translation—the ability to convert ideas, including often complex scientific ideas, into graphic communication that builds a conversation between stakeholders from myriad backgrounds and with different things they care about.” The next step after translation, he says, is “creative ideation: how do you take people that are locked in a frame of mind and begin a conversation where anything you say might trigger a knee-jerk negative reaction against any sort of change?” Participation in map-making can be a key step in overcoming NIMBYism. “Neighbors see neighbors. Neighbors participate with neighbors. Neighbors draw,” Apfelbaum says. “They might not be able to say exactly what they’re thinking, and they might not really be able to draw it very well, but if they can get something down—a few words and then a few little scribbles—we can begin playing off it.” The importance of drawing communities into the decision-making process highlights a difficulty at the heart of many restoration projects: people may want to conserve what they have and to restore damaged areas to a previous state, but that is not always feasible. Events can push landscapes into new ecological states—a forest can become a grassland, or a coastal wetland environment can find itself under water. It can be difficult to gauge whether restoration is the best route to take. Fire, for instance, is a cyclical part of some ecosystems, but sometimes a burnt landscape doesn’t bounce back. Rising global temperatures are causing biomes to shift—and sometimes wildfires are “the last piece placed on top of a precarious wooden tower that unbalanced everything and topples it over,” as Benedito puts it. Moreno Mateos emphasizes the “need to have an open mind about restoration. Ecosystems are in a dynamic stable state—they are always adapting to the ever-existing environmental changes.” As a result, “restoration must be understood in a dynamic way, and that any restoration projects must be as adapted as possible to the current changing conditions, which may involve alternative states.” This is a frightening sort of openness. Moreno Mateos notes that we are experiencing a general biodiversity crisis; the United Nations has declared the current decade as the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. For Benedito, it is important to engage with landscape disasters as cultural phenomenon. She points out that while fire management practice belongs, for the most part, to the field of silviculture, much of the literature comes from anthropology and sociology. Stories abound of fire and the birth of humanity and the importance of hearths and sacred flames in domestic and religious architecture. “The cultural domain of fire,” she says, “has been suppressed in landscape management, but not lost.” Benedito gives the example of the herding of goats and sheep in Portugal, a practice which has been displaced by industrial farming. Livestock provide a few things: meat and wool, certainly, but also fertilizer and the clearing of undergrowth. “They were providing ecological service—they were actually mowing these territories, reducing the biomass fuel for the reduction of wildfires,” she explains. Such cultural practices often have a long history. Fire management today should involve, Benedito says, “recuperating a culture: the ceremonies, the meaning, the symbolism associated with rural practices.” So while disasters—fires, floods—may appear limited in time, space, and in the factors involved, they really must be seen as only the most tangible moments of processes that occur across much broader scales. Landscape architecture may be among the best-equipped disciplines for engaging with such processes. Apfelbaum argues that engineering is too narrow. “Engineering solutions have done a great job for 150 or 200 years to help us with water quality and sanitation,” he says, “but they’re not addressing the larger, more complex solution sets that we need to address now. Engineering solutions are kind of single purpose—stop the flooding, you know. Whereas when you stop the flooding with the ecology, you get all sorts of secondary benefits: you get water quality improvements, biodiversity improvements, the replenishment of groundwater resources.” Apfelbaum makes a compelling case, supported by decades of successful projects: “With an ecological solution, the benefits are amplified. With an engineering approach, the benefits are usually narrow and the benefits are oftentimes short- lived—they’re best on the day the project is completed, and then they progressively deteriorate while the cost of maintenance increases. An ecological solution is weakest on the day of installation as a practice, and it improves over time while the cost of maintenance decreases.” Wide recognition of these benefits may be leading to a shift in perspective, and enthusiasm for ecological restoration following landscape disasters may be translating into broad public enthusiasm for ecological thinking. We should hope so. Ecological literacy is a crucial force for good in a world facing a crisis of a magnitude that is difficult to fully comprehend. [1] Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (Oxford: 1949)

“How can a building just collapse?” Hanif Kara shares lessons in building safety

On Thursday, the partial collapse of a residential building in Surfside, Florida, left 11 dead and 150 still unaccounted for. While we await answers about what caused this tragedy, we are left asking the question: What could cause a building to simply fall down? The answer, usually: exceptional circumstances. In modern times and in developed countries, where buildings and other structures are well designed and a lot of checks are undertaken during the design and construction stages, the cause of failure can often be complex and multifaceted. It bears repeating that we won’t know the reason behind this particular building’s collapse, but, speaking generally, a single reason for structural failure is uncommon. It is also worth recognizing that advances in technologies—structural theories and calculations—have extended our knowledge of architecture and engineering and reduced the failures. These advancements have allowed us to make exceptionally strong materials and develop a capacity to understand their limitations, a vast improvement on empirical building methods of ancient times. So, while these types of building collapses are tragic, they are also relatively rare in buildings that utilize new innovations. Still, even just 40 years ago, the exchange of essential information from design to construction relied heavily on the human hand, increasing the risk of mistakes; today the use of computer aided production and communications has rapidly improved the safety with which we exchange information and build (though this, of course, does not negate the need for qualified designers and competent constructors deployed in all construction projects). When buildings do collapse, however, it is sometimes due to unusual external forces—such as wind, earthquakes, gas explosions, fires, hurricanes, unpredictable snow and ice accumulation or impact that exceed the assumed loads which the structure was designed for. In these circumstance it’s not hard to understand why a building might fall. But other general causes can be less obvious. Unsuitable ground conditions below the structure, for instance, can pose a threat to the integrity of a building. All structures are supported by soils or rock of different capacity and strengths. These are not immune to failure in themselves, often caused by heavy storms, earthquakes, climate change and other environmental events. This can cause a building’s foundation to fail slowly (like the tilting Tower of Pisa) or without warning, bringing down the structure. Poor workmanship and badly constructed buildings, or the use of deleterious materials that do not comply with what was specified in the design, can also be a cause of failure. This can arise from undeliberate incompetence, but in rare cases can be considered criminal negligence. In the last several decades we have also seen the impact of chemical changes in materials that can cause local failure initially and then large-scale failures that, over time, render buildings unsafe. Rusting steel expands six or seven times its original shape and when embedded in concrete it can expand and weaken the structure of a building. So, with the possibility of unforeseen events, or structural issues that are invisible to the untrained eye, how can we be sure our buildings are safe? All structures are designed with code safety factors that have been developed over decades and with much care to ensure a certain amount of safety and tolerance for accidental loads or poor workmanship. If a building is up to code, it is generally deemed safe. Unusual structural failures have provided better understanding of how we design and construct, and have even changed codes of practice in some cases. Once such example is what is commonly known as progressive collapse or chain reaction when a small part of a structure fails but transfers its load (often weight in case of towers) to the next part of the structure. As the load aggregates, it becomes too much for the remaining structure to bear and a catastrophic collapse of the whole system takes place. The 1968 collapse of Ronan Point, a 22-story tower in the UK, is an early example of a progressive collapse. It led to a root and branch review of the cause, changes in codes of practice and the discovery of many buildings that had to be strengthened to prevent repetition of such a catastrophe. While Ronan point did not collapse in its entirety, the failure gave birth to the term progressive collapse of whole or large parts of the structure. As a result, today engineers throughout the world design with some redundancy—that is to carry loads by more than one mechanism to guarantee that if one part of the structure fails the loads will redistribute safely to other parts of the system to prevent a progressive collapse. Though building codes have evolved to better guard against collapse, when structural failures are first noticed, its paramount that test are undertaken, and proper remote and timely monitoring actions are put in place to check for such things as crack propagations. It’s also good practice to undertake non-destructive surveys, chemical tests and sometimes even small destructive tests to establish the nature and scale of the problem. Such actions require expertise, but tenants must bring issues to the attention of authorities and owners when they see warning signs; such as large cracks in the structure, fragmenting of material, vibration of floors and walls, or excessive changes in shape of the structure. It is not uncommon to undertake surveys when property is purchased, but it’s less common to survey a property that has been in the same possession for a long time. With the economic costs of new technologies such as drones, which can examine the elements of a building that were once inaccessible, structures that are showing distress or are above a certain age should be examined as a matter of course to prevent as best as we can more failure and tragic loss of life. So, while we can’t yet ascribe a cause to the tragedy in Miami, we can learn a lesson in building safety. Designers, builders, owners and tenants must all be vigilant and investigate the root cause of structural issues when they arise and more readily survey their properties to ensure that buildings that were once safe, remain safe. Hanif Kara is a professor of the practice of architectural technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the cofounder and design-director of the interdisciplinary engineering practice AKT II in London. He is a member of the UK’s National Infrastructure Commission Design Group and was previously appointed to the UK Design Council’s Commission of Architecture and Build Environment. This opinion piece originally appeared on CNN, posted June 29, 2021. Courtesy CNN.  

John Rahaim on the California Housing Crisis: What are planners to do?

In the past decade, San Francisco has become the poster child for income inequality, housing costs, and homelessness. The regional growth that fueled this national attention has been caused by a perfect storm of two factors: renewed interest in urban living combined with the explosive growth of technology companies. This has led to a worsening condition of economic inequality largely along racial lines. While the same phenomenon is also occurring in other coastal cities, the exorbitant cost of housing in the Bay Area has made the situation more acute. As a planner, urban designer, and former Planning Director for the City of San Francisco from 2008–2020, I was a key player in managing dramatic changes to the city, which saw the most growth in nearly a century during my tenure. It seems clear that in the Bay Area, the price of housing and the associated repercussions are both a cause of, and an almost direct result of, economic inequality and homelessness. In this politically charged environment—where housing policies, homelessness, and housing costs factor into almost every dinner conversation—the task most often put to planners is how to make more housing happen, and happen faster. There is broad agreement that California, and the Bay Area in particular, has fallen woefully behind in housing production. In 2018, Governor Gavin Newsom set a state goal to produce 500,000 new housing units per year. The state has only produced about 100,000 per year since (and only some of that shortfall can be blamed on the pandemic). It is not hyperbole to say that California is in the midst of a housing crisis. And in spite of the changes in living patterns brought by the pandemic, the housing shortage will likely continue. What are planners—and state and local governments—to do? First, cities must revise single-family zoning to allow multiple units. If cities don’t make this change, the state should require it. Single-family zoning was largely intended to keep out people of lower incomes, and therefore people of color. It largely worked, and still does. Today, the typical rationale for resisting changes to single-family zoning is to “maintain neighborhood character.” Minneapolis and Portland, which recently revised single-family zoning, are receiving a lot of attention in the planning media for taking this bold step. Low-density, detached housing zoning must change to open all neighborhoods to a variety of incomes. As any Black resident of San Francisco can tell you, the lower density neighborhoods are those with access to quality public services, especially parks and better schools. If the physical character of the neighborhood is truly the concern, alternative types of housing can be produced through better design and a robust design review process. But we must not kid ourselves into believing that changing single-family zoning will result in significant new housing production. It will not. Land assembly, delaying tactics by residents, and the cost of existing houses will hamper production. Further, residential neighborhoods, even in dense urban neighborhoods, are removed from public transit. Change zoning for the right reasons, but don’t assume it will increase housing production. Second, create minimum zoning requirements along all commercial corridors—but not more broadly. There have been several efforts in recent years by the state legislature to mandate higher density zoning around transit stations and other public amenities, regardless of the existing underlying conditions. These efforts caused enormous public backlash, and have generally failed. If the goal is housing production, the vast majority of production will, and should, occur along commercial corridors where there are public services, better public transit, wider streets, and more eclectic design conditions. In the Bay Area, zoning provisions in many suburban jurisdictions do not allow housing on commercial corridors. But based on building codes, the most economical housing type is a structure of 6 or 7 stories, allowing for wood frame construction; this is a building type and size well suited to commercial streets. Third, speed up the approval process—but don’t expect this to magically produce a lot of housing. The approval process is absurdly slow, and time delays are a factor in housing production. Among other delaying tactics, the California Environmental Quality Act has been turned on its head and used as a tool to stop housing production in precisely the locations where it is the most environmentally friendly—urban areas with access to transit and services. But let’s be clear: housing approved is not housing built. As of two years ago, San Francisco had 60,000 entitled housing units in the pipeline, with only 10,000 actually under construction. The housing approval process is the bogeyman cited by every real estate reporter and elected official in the state, because it is far easier to blame public sector agencies than to cite the private development industry which—even in the hottest economic climate in a century—was unable to produce the housing that was already approved. Finally, and most importantly, get government at all levels back in the housing business. President Biden has acknowledged that housing is an essential component of our infrastructure. We don’t think of our roads, sewers, and transit stations as private commodities—they are available to all. In America, housing is a commodity to be bought and sold like a car. The result is that those with means have a place to live, and those without means do not. We must change this paradigm. In San Francisco, 6 percent of housing is controlled by the public/nonprofit sectors, and that is higher than in most US cities. In Hong Kong and northern Europe, the comparable number is about 50 percent. In Singapore, it’s 80 percent. The provision of social housing in these places is based on a fundamentally different paradigm—that housing is indeed part of necessary public infrastructure. This combination of public and private provision of housing accommodates all income levels, which the private market alone simply cannot do. Further, governments must get involved in private housing production after it is approved, and not assume that the private market will simply take care of it. Why are so many approved projects stalled? Could the state provide revolving loans, via a mechanism such as an infrastructure bank, to kick-start horizontal development on large projects? More provocatively, should the state restart a form of redevelopment to allow cities to take control of large sites? The California housing crisis is a key, if not primary, component of economic inequality in the Bay Area, and many other regions. As the most populous state, California has on outsize impact on the national economy; and the state’s policy initiatives have often set the stage for other states and on national policies. If we are to realistically address this crisis, it is time for California planners to work with communities and elected officials at all levels of government to change our housing policy paradigms. John Rahaim is an urban designer and city planner. He was the Planning Director for the City of San Francisco for twelve years, the longest contiguous tenure of any Planning Director in the city’s history. He serves as a Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard GSD where he led the studio “Building Respect on San Francisco’s Third Street” in the spring of 2021.

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.