Students in Dialogue: A conversation with MLA candidate Xinyi Chen

What is it like to be a Landscape Architecture student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design? In this series of candid conversations between students, Tomi Laja (MArch II ’22) speaks with Xinyi Chen (MLA II ’21) about her journey to the GSD, her interests and experiences studying landscape architecture at Harvard, and how she has grown as a student and designer.

What brought you to the GSD and what were you doing before coming here?

I graduated one year early from Penn State, and decided on a gap year before graduate studies. During the first half of the year, I was preparing my graduate school applications and then I went to Copenhagen to intern with Bjarke Ingels Group. What attracted me to the GSD is its multidisciplinary approach to education, which provides a great platform for designers with different backgrounds to connect.

What did you study at Penn State?

Landscape architecture, so the same field as I am studying now.

Is a portfolio required in the application for a Master’s in Landscape Architecture?

We do have a portfolio requirement, and I think the portfolio plays an important part in an application because it shows the skill of storytelling, the style of your diagrams, and your talent for design.

Was there a moment when you knew the GSD was where you wanted to continue your studies?

I really wanted to attend the open house, but at that time I was in Copenhagen for my internship. I did visit the GSD while I was at Penn State, though, and the GSD was always my first choice. The moment I received the offer, I knew that I would be a student here for sure. I also received financial aid that further assured me.

Was there a specific topic or subject you wanted to study?

Initially I was interested in climate change, because at the GSD we often discuss how landscape architects play a role in alleviating the effects of climate change. Then, I took a seminar with Martha Schwartz during my second semester where we learned about the root cause of climate change and some mitigation methods. That furthered my interest. To what extent can we mitigate climate change and what actions should be in place are big questions that need to be answered.

Do you have a favorite course? What has been exciting or challenging with your studies?

I do have a favorite course: “Paper or Plastic: Reinventing Shelf Life in the Supermarket Landscape” with instructors Teman and Teran Evans, which I took in the fall of 2020. In that course, we worked as a team of eight to rebrand a very common product: Dial antibacterial soap. We redesigned the logo, the tech line packaging, looked at the target consumer, etc. I think the most challenging part was working in the virtual environment as a large group. It was also difficult to produce a 3D print product when Gund Hall was not open. Fortunately, even though we were from different programs, schools, and had distinct schedules, we were always punctual and efficient . . . most of the time. We were also very satisfied with our end product and presentation. A critic even offered us an opportunity to propose our ideas to Dial. This semester we are pushing our idea forward and sharing the work with Harvard’s Office of Technology Development, which helps protect intellectual property, in case we want to turn it into a business.

It seems like you enjoyed learning about product design. At the beginning of your graduate work you were interested in climate change: is that still your focus?

I’m still focused on climate change. I’m taking a studio related to the topic with Chris Reed this semester. Although I enjoyed exploring product design and rebranding, mostly because of the course I just mentioned. I’m considering both options when I think about my career.

Are you working on a thesis?

I’m not working on a thesis because I prefer to take more classes from different schools and programs to explore many fields of interest.

Have you taken courses outside of the GSD?

I took a course at the Harvard Kennedy School called the Science of Behavior Change taught by Todd Rogers. The primary focus is on how people’s tendency to make decisions deviates from optimal choices, as well as how the consequences of such deviations can inform the design and the development of welfare-enhancing interventions. In short, we were studying how people make decisions and interventions to nudge people into making ideal choices. My team was working to devise an intervention based on behavioral science to reduce the current racial disparity in police issuing traffic tickets to drivers in Suffolk County, New York. I am also taking another course this semester at MIT. So there are lots of opportunities both within the GSD and outside of the GSD.

Could you talk a little bit about the community culture at the GSD? I know you’ve been in-person and virtually: have there been any special moments or qualities that you would like to share?

I would say that the GSD is a very inclusive community and everyone can find a spot where they belong. There are many clubs you can join: China GSD, Womxn in Design, Career in Design, GSBee, GSTea, and RED (Real Estate Development Club), just to name a few. During the Mid-Autumn Festival, which is a traditional Chinese festival, I received a mooncake from China GSD. There is also always a spot in the trays or the library and many activities and lectures that students can participate in.

You were part of the GSD’s first studio in Thailand. Were you able to travel there?

We were very lucky because we traveled early—right before the outbreak of the pandemic. We collaborated with the local community and investigated the water quality conditions there. We were working in pairs to devise a purifying system locally in Thailand because the Chao Phraya River is highly polluted. Our designs are trying to use vegetation as a medium to help purify the area over time.

Reflecting on your time here, how have you grown as a student and designer since attending the GSD?

The GSD has offered me many opportunities to explore my interests. Not only have I grown as a designer, but the most important quality I’ve learned is how to work with a team. This is something that I rarely did as an undergraduate—my studio work typically consisted of individual projects. After graduation, teaching is one of my first choices, and the GSD has offered me a lot of resources that I can use to facilitate and go forward with this goal. I have been provided with a great platform that allows designers with different backgrounds to communicate and design together. Everyone at the GSD is like a drop of water converging into Gund Hall, which is like an ocean generously absorbing provocative thoughts, debates, and even conflicts. I would like to be that drop of water pushing forward the waves of landscape architecture. “Students in Dialogue” is a series of candid conversations between students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Interviewer Tomi Laja is currently a Master in Architecture II degree candidate at the GSD and Editorial Assistant with Harvard Design Magazine. Her interests include research-based architectural design, exhibition, and writing. Her independent research includes afro-futurist and eco-feminist perspectives as they relate to agency, consciousness, and the built environment.

Can Parkitecture Heal? Jeanne Gang on making American National Parks “more accessible, more inviting, and more welcoming”

Early federal policies that set aside land for the national parks focused mainly on the preservation of objects with “historic or scientific interest.” Protections against incompetent archaeologists and unscrupulous resource speculators encoded in the Antiquities Act of 1906 were essential and powerful safeguards of the public interest. Later legislation expanded these protections and, crucially, provided for the public “enjoyment” of federal lands. With its emphasis on recreation, the founding of the National Park Service in 1916 officially oriented the parks to the people. While they had long been places of contemplation, enjoyment, and solace, Title 16 made the parks a manifestation of the nation’s humanity, and a legacy to be preserved “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” But in the early 20th century, many of the national parks were remote and difficult to get to, making them accessible only to the ruggedly independent. This has changed, of course. The National Parks recorded 237,064,332 recreational visits in 2020, which entailed more than a billion hours of enjoyment. By facilitating and framing visitors’ experience of nature, architecture and landscape architecture have played a significant role in the rising popularity of the national parks. The familiar, rustic style of architecture developed for the national parks is one of the most visible legacies of the New Deal of the 1930s. During that era, the National Park Service established high standards for construction of roads and trails, placement of viewpoints, and provision of park amenities. The 120,000 employees of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) provided a workforce to complete the job. Not only did the program offer young unemployed laborers productive work, it did the parks “immeasurable good,” according to then parks director Arno Cammerer. CCC roads, trails, visitor centers, lodges, and picnic shelters greatly improved access to the parks. At the same time, the park architecture—based largely on late-19th-century principles of Andrew Jackson Downing, the Olmsteds, and the arts and crafts movement—became widely familiar. The craggy masonry, rugged carpentry, and simple forms seem naturally compatible with the wild settings of the parks. American “parkitecture,” as it is often known, is deeply appealing, almost symbolic of vacationing, adventure, and enjoyment of nature. It also recalls the social contract of the New Deal—park construction helped raise thousands out of poverty after the Great Depression. However, even as the parks welcome millions of visitors, not everyone feels equally at home in them. As GSD Professor in Practice Jeanne Gang and Instructor Claire Cahan point out in the brief for their Autumn 2020 studio, “Can Parkitecture Heal?,” the legacy of the parks is not all positive: “While these places and their beneficial qualities are intended to be accessible to everyone,” they write, “the parks continue to struggle with inclusivity and their histories of racism, including displacement of Native peoples and segregation.” Rustic park visitor centers and other facilities offer easy, welcoming access to many people; however, for others the close symbolic association of parkitecture with the history of the parks can tie it just as closely to these social ills. A central challenge of the studio, then, was to seek ways to “redefine” parkitecture, Gang explains, and to make park buildings “more accessible, more inviting, more welcoming.” The studio focused on Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the most frequently visited park in the system. A regular flood of visitors puts immense pressure on the park facilities, and its two aging visitor centers have become inadequate. More critical, Gang emphasizes, is that even though the park is close to some adjacent towns that can bring in more a diverse population, there is not much programming to introduce the park to people who would not normally visit. Park Superintendent Cassius Cash, who met with the students early on, has begun to address this problem. He recently inaugurated Hikes for Healing, a program which brings visitors from local communities to enjoy the park while working with a moderator to discuss persistent social conflicts that deeply affect them—and the nation—in a time of strife: “The Smokies Hikes for Healing (SHFH) initiative is designed to use Great Smoky Mountains National Park as a place of sanctuary… where crucial conversations about race will occur in one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world.” Gang and Cahan challenged their students to consider this type of cultural programming while designing park facilities. They asked students to think about events that might broaden the park’s appeal, particularly to those who do not generally turn to nature for enjoyment and solace. “The way it is presented in the park, nature is culture,” Gang emphasizes, “so bringing more kinds of culture into the visitor center site” gives people a chance to come in and participate in the storied “healing experience” of nature. Accordingly, the studio’s building program included a new visitor center and a “gathering pavilion” for the SHFH hikes. The studio brief also proposed that these new buildings would share a site with the Sugarlands Visitor Center, which would be remodeled as “an interpretive exhibition hall,” to form a “renewed park village that retains the past and introduces new types of spaces for learning, gathering, and healing.” The students addressed the gathering pavilion first, developing a range of solutions that included primordial elements of shelter, open air, and fire but that also proposed novel details. In some cases, Cahan explains, “part of this idea of healing and coming together was to physically operate the building.” In other words, the pavilions would function not merely as spaces for gathering, but as mechanisms to bring people together. In developing proposals for the new visitor center, the students continued to explore architecture’s capacity for healing while extending their concern into other consequential issues. As participants in the national Green New Deal Superstudio, the GSD studio members also considered architecture’s capacity to take on the global challenges that are central to the 2019 Green New Deal legislation: “decarbonization, justice and jobs.” For the “Parkitecture” studio, this was a natural fit. Acknowledging the lasting manifestations of the New Deal in CCC-built park facilities, they asked themselves how the Green New Deal could similarly advance the role of architecture in causes vital to our own era. In particular, the Superstudio calls for designers to “meaningfully engage in a response to the climate crisis at local, regional, and national levels” by reexamining “their roles in civil society and lead a national conversation about the nation’s future at a critical time in history.” Gang recalls, “One of the students said something really interesting, which was: Those issues are so big, and the studio felt like a way that one could use one’s skills as a designer to address them in a direct way that could make a difference—just a small step. . . .” In addressing these big questions, the students focused on effective programming, small-scale design, and careful detailing. Each of the six pairs of students emphasized the potentially great consequences of small-scale work. For example, Jack Rodat (MArch ’22) and Nima Shariat Zamanpour (MArch ’22) proposed “distributed interventions” that expand “the narrative of the park by highlighting an observed contradiction”—a classroom in the trees, a composting facility with welcoming signage, a fireplace gathering center, and a basketball court. They write, “Just as the Green New Deal tethers seemingly distinct issues of jobs, justice, and decarbonization together, we believe this multifaceted approach is necessary in the design of the new visitor experience at Sugarlands.” Stephanie Lloyd (MArch ’22) and Ada Thomas (MLA ’21) proposed a distributed system of gathering centers carefully integrated into the park’s ecological systems. Their construction would use selectively removed trees as the formwork for labor-intensive, low-carbon rammed-earth walls. “While a single building cannot heal racial and climatic crises,” they explain, “architectural processes—construction methods, material ethics, and project phasing—can effect institutional change and promote justice.” Just as “America’s best idea” began with the preservation of artifacts, a new approach to big societal issues through design must begin with small-scale efforts. As ambitious as the Green New Deal Superstudio is, the participants in the GSD’s “Parkitecture” studio found that if architecture is going to contribute to healing it must do so at a human scale.

Excerpt from Pairs Issue 01: “On the Foundational Spirit: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits” by Sara Zewde with Kimberley Huggins

Pairs is a student-led journal at the Harvard Graduate School of Design dedicated to conversations about design that are down to earth and unguarded. Each issue is conceptualized by an editorial team that proposes guests and objects to be in dialogue with one another. The following is an excerpt of a conversation from Issue 01 between Pairs co-founder Kimberley Huggins (MLA I ’20) and Sara Zewde, Assistant Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at the GSD, titled “On the Foundational Spirit: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits.” KIMBERLEY HUGGINS So, “Cotton Kingdom, Now”: your return to and inaugural class at the GSD! Your class is occurring during a time when the dominant narratives of history and their intended values are being seriously questioned. In the context of the education of landscape architecture, this sentiment often materializes in the student body as a desire to toss the canonical history and start anew. Students struggle to see how it is equipping them in the face of contemporary social and environmental realities. Subsequently, there is a desire to excise it. It is not uncommon to hear students say, “I do not want to hear about Olmsted anymore. I do not want to talk about gardens anymore.” And so while many are asking for the focus to be moved from Frederick Law Olmsted with a belief that the more relevant lessons are elsewhere, what was it that drew you in further to focus on his time as a young journalist? SARA ZEWDE  The landscape architecture that is taught at the GSD now is significantly different than the landscape architecture I learned when I started in 2011. Even a comparison after a few years is mind-boggling. Things are rapidly changing and it is not like that change started in 2011. When I speak with students who studied before me, it becomes clear that there have been a number of significant shifts within the last 15 years in landscape architecture education. I don’t think there was a single Black person referenced in my three years of landscape architecture education. Be it in a syllabus, a chance to read their writing, to learn about their thoughts on the world, or to study their projects as precedent. On the other hand, there were many slave holders celebrated. Thomas Jefferson was presented unproblematically for his brilliant innovations in landscape design. And so I was perpetually, in those three years, very lost about my place in this profession. In fact, I took a year off and went to work for Walter Hood and came back having more confidence in my ability to see myself in this profession and understanding about how my experience in the world can influence design. Because, otherwise, when I would ask certain questions in school, it was often met with, “You’re in landscape architecture; why would you bring that up?” In my third year, we had a guest lecturer in our “Professional Practice” class who, in passing, mentioned that Olmsted visited the South. That was the first I had ever heard of that. We had already learned a lot about Olmsted, but I had never heard that he traveled through the South to write about the conditions of slavery. I followed up with the guest lecturer, and with my two professors—I still have this email. I often revisit that email chain because it has led me to this point in my research. I asked for further reading material about Olmsted’s travels and they sent me a reference, but what I really wanted was to be able to reflect on the connection between his abolitionist thoughts and his practice of landscape architecture. If that book had existed, I would have read the book and kept moving on with my life. But it didn’t exist and I couldn’t resolve the fact that this had never been brought to my attention, and how much we could possibly learn from mining this part of Olmsted’s biography. So, I got a fellowship and spent four months at Dumbarton Oaks researching this. After that, I spent three months in a car retracing his steps through the South. I proposed, as part of my research methodology, that visiting the sites would offer some reflections on the relevance of Olmsted’s travels and the profession today. Now, I’m writing those reflections into a book. The seminar I am teaching this semester investigates Olmsted’s original writings on the South not only as a historical document, but as a methodological proposition. The students develop research and representational methods to make assertions about the factors underlying the change witnessed on the site over the course of the past 165 years, since Olmsted’s visit. Because ultimately, I think Olmsted’s story has implications for what our practice of landscape architecture can be today. I think that looking at the places he visited and taking stock of the changes they’ve undergone, as well as the ways they’ve stayed the same, presents opportunities for considering the potential of contemporary landscape architecture and methods. KH There is a persistent question of relevance felt within the field, and maybe even perceived by outsiders, but in either case, it is not always clear what our fundamentals are. What has researching the methods used by Olmsted prior to entering landscape architecture revealed to you about our foundations, and why should this text be a grounding force in contemporary landscape architecture? SZ It actually starts with challenging the idea that this was something that he did before landscape architecture. What my research is revealing to me is that they were actually simultaneous endeavors in a way, not subsequent to one another. In fact, he steps down from his position as superintendent of Central Park in order to rewrite his work about the South and republish it. It is not a fair portrayal of Olmsted to hold these endeavors of his separately. What was powerful about Olmsted, and can be seen in this text, was his way of being able to toggle between a site and into its larger economic, social, and ecological dynamics. We have hundreds of pages of Olmsted in conversation with enslaved people where he took extra care to record dialect. He takes great care to record details of light qualities, topography, tree species, and soil conditions. He was very tuned into the here and now, and at the same moment, engaged in analysis of the underlying macroeconomics, macropolitics, and macroecologies of each place. This carried forward into his practice of landscape architecture where he thinks in a very material way, but always in the context of the wider concerns of society. Something happened in the transition from Olmsted Sr. to the next generation of landscape architects. The wider range of concerns fell away and the idea of landscape architects as technicians took hold essentially. The reality is that shaping landscapes is a very powerful tool. To wield that power without an understanding of the larger context or an acknowledgement or sensitivity or methods, there’s a lot of damage that can be done. It’s an incredible power, right? We have decades of landscape architecture, architecture, and urban planning that demonstrate what kind of damage can be done if you don’t have the proper methods or considerations. So, it’s interesting to see how landscape architecture is grappling with its relevance in these contexts of late, whether environmental, ecological, social, political, or economic. Some of the answers may be found in the origin story of the profession, if we claim The Cotton Kingdom as part of it, as I aim to do with my book. I’m perplexed as to why landscape architecture has avoided historicizing this text as part of its origin story. In fact, landscape architects often reference Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England, which predates The Cotton Kingdom. So, you could argue it’s less relevant to Olmsted’s practice of landscape architecture, but it’s in England, so maybe that is easier to talk about, if you assume that’s why. But I will say that among historians, Olmsted is considered the most cited witness of slavery in the 19th century. There’s no doubt about the significance of Olmsted’s writing in the South in history. It is landscape architects who are kind of quiet about it. KH It was so surprising to find that Malcolm X cited this writing as one that was influential to him. This idea that a landscape architect could create anything that would be found relevant to someone like Malcolm X is incredible. SZ Yeah! Like, Olmsted might have sparked the career of one of the foremost activists in the civil rights era? What? KH Yeah, unbelievable. SZ Without Olmsted, we may not have had an awakened Malcolm X to spark Black nationalism and all of these important Black philosophical frameworks. KH But now, we just pass over this book. When you consider that the field never truly embraced this writing, even from a canonical figure like Olmsted, but did embrace writings that termed the field as being one of, “the polite arts,” like Humphrey Repton’s Art of Landscape Gardening, for example, it produces a jarring realization about our blind spots; the parts of our history that we’re able to handle and that which we are not. SZ Yeah, exactly. The English were a major part of the transatlantic slave trade. Where was all that capital coming from that would fuel the Picturesque movement? Because the Picturesque was all about labor and this dominion over the landscape that slavery was honestly a major driver of. And so to me, you can’t separate all of these movements in Europe from the history of slavery, dispossession, and colonization. KH In The Cotton Kingdom, there is one map that takes what is otherwise an argument made in a long and complex text, and summarizes the research as simply and succinctly as possible through its spatial reality. It illuminates connections. How might this drawing stand in relation to the data portraits of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Paris Exhibition of 1900? Both of these documents together convey some sense of the realities in the United States immediately before and 37 years after abolition. There is a lot that can be said about these documents that is difficult in such a short time, but broadly, what does the pairing of these drawings make you think of given your research, your practice, and your background in sociology? SZ One thing that we’ve been talking about in class is the idea of both representivity and singularity. Black literature in the United States is really birthed in the idea of the slave narrative and people writing their personal experiences of being enslaved. We just read a Toni Morrison essay called “The Site of Memory,” where she explains the challenge of Black literature, which is to both express and articulate the specifics, the singularity of experience: “This happened to me. This is my story.” But at the same time as they’re expressing their singular experience, these authors would try to reflect a representivity. In other words: “This is happening to me, but imagine the scale at which this is happening to other people—millions of them—broadly, who are enslaved and/or oppressed.” It was always a dual mode in which they wrote. Olmsted and a man named Daniel Goodloe made the map you are referencing to be included in the third publishing of the writings, which was his most staunchly abolitionist editing of the work. The book is structured with the large macro-conclusions as bookends to the travel notes in the middle chapters. The travel notes are all about that singularity: I went here. I had this conversation. This site, this site, this site. But then the intro and the conclusion chapters are about that representivity, making large-scale analyses of the region. This map is included in that. Du Bois too. Du Bois has these sociological studies where he spends time in a very specific Philadelphia neighborhood, for instance, and is doing very similar qualitative analysis of singularity, but at the same time is toggling out to this sort of representative mode of working, which his drawings reflect. And so both Olmsted and Du Bois are grappling with the productive space between representativity and singularity. That is, in my mind, one of the biggest takeaways for landscape architects whereas we generally work more exclusively in the singular, site-scale mode. Both Du Bois and Olmsted work between the two as social scientists, designers and journalists, but are also evolving those methods. It’s interesting. It’s compelling to pair the two in that way. KH I’d also like to point out that you share this point of comparison with the two. Du Bois was, among many things, a social scientist; Olmsted operated as a social scientist; and you yourself have a background in sociology and statistics prior to entering design. What was it that sparked this transition in you? SZ Yeah, I’m realizing that’s not very common. Most of my friendsand colleagues entered into design from another creative field, but I read my way into design. Reading Du Bois, Lefebvre, de Certeau, and bell hooks, I just became fascinated with the spatial dimensions of this social world they’re so interested in. So, from sociology, I went to city planning, and more and more inched my way into landscape architecture. What I take away from sociology is the methods question. I think there’s something productive about that for designers. I believe we need to have a discourse on methods that we’re testing and evolving if we’re going to engage with major issues beyond the silo of our discipline. It is a question of balance. How do we keep design and research as a culture and tradition that’s productive for us but, at the same time, are able to ask other people to hold us accountable? That’s something that I bring from sociology into my work as a landscape architect. KH Given that, what does an ideal practice look like to you? SZ I think research and exploratory work integrated into the process of building landscapes is important in an ideal practice, but finding the appropriate financial mechanisms to support this in private practice is something we’re testing right now in my office. We really push in the scope for a heavy front-end that is engaged politically and with community members. And, if I find myself in a room with elected officials or civic leaders or philanthropists, I try to make the case for creating funding opportunities for designers to get involved in work that happens before an RFP: the shaping of an RFP, the shaping of its scope, the strategizing around investment. That’s what we learned at the GSD. Landscape architecture at the GSD is taught in a multi-scalar fashion, and often the students are positioned to identify their site and their project, which are the skills you need to be an advocate. Advocacy is embedded in the scales that we’re working in the Landscape Architecture department at the GSD. And we sort of accept that this mode of working and thinking ends when you leave the GSD, but I would like to see expanded formats for us to employ those methods and tools in the real world. KH Olmsted wasn’t a passive participant in his time as a young journalist. Through this document, he was actively advocating for the abolition of slavery and rushing to complete and publish it in time to shape the minds of a very divided country on the brink of civil war. In a contentious context and on a charged topic, he builds his argument in opposition from an economic point of view. What do you think of this choice? SZ It’s funny. This is often a conversation of fierce debate in the class. Is Olmsted’s voice adaptive? He writes about slavery with a very matter-of-fact tone about issues and observations that are anything but. Speaking personally on my own behalf, I feel that this can be productive when working in highly charged contexts. In my practice, we work on a lot of sites with contested narratives—very charged sites. I often find that it is productive to keep things matter-of-fact, just to keep projects moving and going, and not to repel anyone who might actually gain some knowledge from listening to the conversation. You have to be strategic about when you use a different tone and when it might be effective. Olmsted talks about this in his personal letters—that he does want to have slave owners in the South as an audience. He wants to convince them. He wants to challenge their logic about slavery. He does aspire to that. As the years go on he became less convinced that it’s even possible, and then comes to the conclusion when he rewrites for The Cotton Kingdom, “Subjugation is the only way we can bring the South into giving in with the North and rid them of slavery.” Basically, war is the only way that this is going to get solved. He’s just like, “There’s no talking to these people.” But that was his intention initially with his tone, and he was explicit about that. I think that there’s something there, especially if you live a life within the implications of this history every day. Then there is a kind of matter-of-factness to these topics that you have to rely on in order to just live your life every day. Being overtaken emotionally by this is somewhat of a privilege, because you can do that and then go back to your regular life. But if you’re thinking about it every day, and you don’t have a choice about that, that’s where matter-of-factness is less disturbing, because it’s life. It’s everyday life. It is your life. KH Because urban planners, architects, and landscape architects are working in public spaces, the work has an inherently political element. As you said earlier, you really wield a power in the ability to shape land. So, I am curious about how you view politics and design. If we don’t silo Olmsted-as-a-political-writer from Olmsted-as-a-designer, then there is something exciting in seeing someone successfully synthesize politics and design into one—research and practice into one. Your practice is also managing to synthesize social research and design in ways that are exciting to see, given how many students and young professionals struggle to do both well. When it comes to effectively engaging social issues, are there some things that you achieve as a politically engaged citizen that you can’t through design? SZ One thing that we aim to do in my office is synthesize our social and cultural analyses with detail and construction. Those larger understandings of work can and should influence a landscape’s material expression. The built landscape is ultimately what makes people feel like they belong. In this way, a garden is just as political as a large-scale, regional infrastructure project. What is it that was built and how does it feel to be in it? Is it acknowledging and supportive of my well-being or is it not? Does it feel reflective of my identity or not? And so I hope that the suggestion here about understanding the macro is not the conclusion reached. I think the actual building of things at any scale is important, and given Olmsted’s level of detailed involvement in writing as well as building landscapes, I would say he shares that. So, I would say they are separate, but I don’t think of a citizen and designer as entirely different. I guess I haven’t really thought of that distinction. Part of this is due to the fact that there are only 12 or 13 licensed Black women in landscape architecture in America. KH Wow. SZ Isn’t that crazy? It’s insane. And so just being a landscape architect in my case is often politicized by people. They project things onto me. I often don’t have the luxury of separating the two. I’m always asked, “How did your experiences in life influence your landscape?” People project that, and so that separation is not afforded to me. In reality, probably nobody can separate the two, but other people are never or rarely asked to articulate the connection between who they are and what they do. Have you ever heard somebody on a panel or a lecture say, “How has being a white male influenced the way in which you work as a designer?” Nobody ever asks that. And I always, every single day, get that question. I think reflecting on the inextricable nature between who you are as a person, as a citizen, and how you work as a designer should be reflected on by everyone, not just people of color or women. KH Designers are working in a particularly entangled reality. With the entirety of Olmsted’s career in view, what lessons of what to do and what not to do might we learn? SZ Well, Olmsted was 31 when he went on this journey, which is the same age as a lot of people at the GSD. KH That’s a great point. SZ There’s a boldness to what he does. He is a very confident person. There is a boldness and an ability to envision his role and his impact in the world at a young age that is something to admire. And I think for me as Black woman, born and raised in the South, I had to do some of that too: envisioning things that don’t really exist in order to be where I am at, to have an office, to be on the faculty at a school like the GSD; these are things that I did not see. I didn’t even know landscape architecture existed until, frankly, relatively recently. It’s kind of crazy, but I guess dreaming big and doing what you profess is a lesson we can all take away from his career in view. In his personal letters as early as age 22, he would often write to friends about his ambitions: “I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life, but I do know that I want to do big things. There are a lot of really big issues in the country, and I have this knowledge of the land and agriculture, but I’m also interested in politics.” And he’s just like, “What is this thing? How do I do this? How do I bring these things together? I want to make an impact.” And that’s the energy that our profession was founded on. KH It’s a beautiful idea. And it never gets old to find these writings of almost mythological figures when they were young and they’re just like, “I have no idea what I’m doing.” [laughs] It is always a relief. SZ [laughs] Yes . . . Ah, I feel like Fred and I are old friends. Pairs is co-founded by Kimberley Huggins (MLA I ’20), Nicolás Delgado Alcega (MArch II ’20), and Vladimir Gintoff (MArch I ’21, MUP ’21), and supported by Dean Sarah M. Whiting and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.  

Stephen Gray talks “Shaping Equitable Cities” in Harvard magazine cover story

Associate Professor of Urban Design (and GSD alumnus) Stephen Gray defines his design philosophy in Harvard magazine’s March 2021 cover story, “Shaping Equitable Cities.” By revealing moments that stoked and influenced his approach to urban design—some while a GSD student, some as a GSD professor, and many in between—Gray illustrates his vision for integrating equity into core design decisions, especially those shaping the public realm. He also discusses ongoing work and dialogue underway at his Boston-based Grayscale Collaborative, including projects in Boston’s evolving Seaport District. As writer Jacob Sweet observes, many design firms demonstrate—or aspire to demonstrate—a signature look or style, while Grayscale Collaborative aims instead toward “establishing a signature process.” As Gray explains, that process means incorporating everyday residents and community leaders into discussions of a project or a design from inception. More specifically, Gray discusses the need to consider questions of equity, racial justice, outcomes, and community when budgets and fundamental parameters of a project are still being decided. “That’s really where the center of power is,” he says. “Once a project is funded. . . you’ve already made it exclusive.” Gray amplifies that philosophy: “The pre-distribution of power means finding and identifying points of a process where power is exercised and decisions are made,” he says, “and making sure that people are involved centrally at that point.” It’s a principle that lay at the heart of Gray’s GSD thesis: the study of a streetcar project in downtown Cincinnati—his hometown—that had been approved after multiple ballot efforts. Through his thesis study (advised by then-professors of urban planning Susan Fainstein and Richard Sommer), Gray realized the need for a so-called “urban growth regime.” He saw that public investment had to enrich the local community as much as it enriched businesses and developers. Years later, Cincinnati was implementing its mixed-use downtown Innovation Corridor development, and Gray was among the Sasaki Associates urban designers working on the project. He got the chance to experience his design philosophy at work: after various economic analyses, presentations, listening sessions, and public conversations, Gray and his colleagues saw community organizations switch from opposing to supporting the project. The trust- and relationship-building mechanisms that Gray had centered in the design process would later help advance two other city initiatives, too. “By the end of the project, not only did we have consensus,” Gray says, “but also all of the community-based organizations wrote letters of support to the Cincinnati Planning Commission.” Read Harvard magazine’s March 2021 cover story, “Shaping Equitable Cities.”

Excerpt: The Incidents: Inhabiting the Negative Space by Jenny Odell

Three time zones and three thousand miles away, artist and writer Jenny Odell was invited to be the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s 2020 Class Day speaker in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. In her forward to Inhabiting the Negative Space, which presents Odell’s speech in print as the ninth title in The Incidents book series, Dean Sarah M. Whiting notes that Odell brought “a combination of frankness and optimism that made each of us feel like we were in conversation with someone who knew every one of us individually.” Within the text, Jenny states that she herself finished her undergraduate studies in 2008— straight into a recession. Ten years following her graduation, she wrote the book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, rethinking the meaning of productivity and observing individual and collective attention and will.

Excerpt from The Incidents: Inhabiting the Negative Space

By Jenny Odell

I believe that we individually have the ability to direct our attention—for example, to see in multiple time frames at once, or at the very least outside of the default temporality of everyday life. But I also believe that we need help doing this, and that’s why the role of the artist and designer that’s most important to me right now is indeed one as an orchestrator of attention, someone who can create the lenses with which we can see a completely different reality—not one that is imaginary or fabricated, but that has in fact been there all along. ——— Of course, doing this requires close attention on the orchestrator’s part as well, which is what brings me to the second idea I mentioned, of design as response—not to the world as you want it to be or expect it to be, but a response to the world as it really is, right now, in all of the detail that unfolds if you just give yourself time to see it.   One of my favorite practitioners of this mindset is the Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka. Fukuoka is known for perfecting a system in the 1970s that he later called “do-nothing farming.” Flouting the established protocols for traditional rice farming, he devised a way of farming that used far fewer inputs and less labor. Instead of flooding fields and sowing rice in the spring, he scattered seeds directly on the ground in the fall as they would have fallen naturally. In place of conventional fertilizer, he grew a cover of green clover and threw the leftover stalks back on top when he was done. ——— In the end, Fukuoka’s farm was more productive than neighboring farms, and it also rehabilitated the soil instead of depleting it, as so many farms do over time. The system was even capable of creating farmable soil on inhospitable strips of land. ——— What I want to stress here is time. It took Fukuoka decades of observation and failed experiments to arrive at this system. Rather than imposing an abstract will on a compliant piece of land, what he was doing was more akin to patient collaboration. As you can imagine, for someone who finally figured out how to do more by doing less, Fukuoka had a great sense of humor. In his book The One-Straw Revolution, he wrote, “Because the world is moving with such furious energy in the opposite direction, it may appear that I have fallen behind the times,” and, “That which was viewed as primitive and backward is now unexpectedly seen to be far ahead of modern science. This may seem strange at first but I do not find it strange at all.” In that book, Fukuoka talks about an experience he had as a young man, when he was studying plant pathology under a brilliant researcher. Fukuoka essentially overworked himself to the point of hospitalization, and when he was discharged he wandered to a hill overlooking the local harbor and fell asleep underneath a tree. When he woke up in the early morning, he was shocked into awareness by the flight of a night heron—incidentally one of my favorite birds. He wrote, “Everything I had held in firm conviction, everything upon which I had ordinarily relied was swept away with the wind. I felt that I understood just one thing. Without my thinking about them, words came from my mouth: ‘In this world there is nothing at all. . . .’ I felt that I understood nothing.” It’s easy to read despair into that phrase—“understood nothing”—but what Fukuoka is describing is a moment of exhilaration, and the underpinnings of the humility that eventually led to do-nothing farming. To understand nothing is to see everything—to have an empty enough mind to observe what is actually there. After all, it was humility with respect to the land and its inhabitants that allowed Fukuoka to design a successful system, one that made use of and did justice to the already-present intelligence in the ecosystem. To come back to Pauline Oliveros, you could say that he was practicing a form of deep listening. The Incidents is a book series based on events at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Learn how to purchase Inhabiting the Negative Space, copublished by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Sternberg Press, Spring 2021.

Five design initiatives celebrating Black creativity, from host of The Nexus podcast

In February 2020, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the first Black History Month celebrations in the United States, the GSD’s African American Design Nexus (AADN) invited the community to recommend books that contribute to our collective conversation on race and design. Those submissions became “A Call To Explore: Design, Race, and the Built Environment,” an open-access bibliography aimed at uplifting “diverse voices and perspectives of the past and present while also inspiring a paradigm shift for the future of pedagogy and practice.” Learn how to submit a title for inclusion. This Black History Month, we asked Tara Oluwafemi (MArch I ’22), host of The Nexus podcast and member of the team that established “A Call To Explore,” to expand the resource list by curating a series of various design-minded media centered on the work of Black creatives. Including exhibitions, events, podcasts, and more, this collection highlights a range of projects and initiatives that celebrate Black creativity all year round.

Black Reconstruction Collective

The Black Reconstruction Collective (BRC) is a group of artists, designers, and scholars working to dismantle white supremacy through art, design, and academia. They are dedicated to engaging with the public by providing support for projects that are in line with their stated mission and through public events, publications, and exhibitions. As part of the Fall 2020 public program at the GSD, BRC presented “Ten Responses to One Question: What does it mean to imagine Black Reconstruction today?” Members of the BRC will be part of Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, an exhibition that will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art from February 27, 2021–May 31, 2021.

Noname Book Club

Founded by the Chicago rapper Noname, Noname Book Club selects two books each month written by writers of color to uplift the voices of people of color. The book club uses social media to make their materials and discussions widely available and accessible. Through their community-supported prison program, the selected books are also sent to incarcerated individuals each month. Learn more about the program, including how to contribute, on the group’s Patreon.

Black Art: In the Absence of Light

In 1976, David Driskell’s Two Centuries of Black American Art—an exhibition foregrounding African American artists and their contributions to American visual culture—opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Fifty-five years later, the show served as inspiration for the HBO documentary Black Art: In the Absence of Light. The film traces the lasting impact of Driskell’s exhibition on contemporary Black artists including Kerry James Marshall, Theaster Gates, and Kara Walker. In a recent Instagram post, Kehinde Wiley, who is featured in the documentary, describes it as “a testament to the indelible contributions of Black American artists in today’s contemporary art world.” To continue the conversations in this documentary, HBO has created a curriculum and an appendix of art activities. They are available on the documentary’s webpage.

Revision Path

Revision Path is a weekly podcast showcasing Black designers, developers, and creatives from across the world. Guests featured on the podcast span the world of design—from animators to web developers. There are currently almost 400 episodes to check out! Revision Path made history as the first podcast with episodes added to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture permanent collection.

Black in Design

Every two years, beginning in 2015, the African American Student Union at the GSD has presented the Black in Design conference. Organized around a rotating central theme, the conference gathers designers whose practices focus on dismantling institutional barriers confronting members of the African diaspora and recognizes the historical contributions of this community. Watch recordings of past programs on the Harvard GSD YouTube channel: Black in Design 2019: Black Futurism: Creating a More Equitable Future Black in Design 2017: Designing Resistance, Building Coalitions Black in Design 2015

Silvia Benedito’s new book Atmosphere Anatomies explores weather, climate, and atmosphere as mediums of design

Much of modern civilization has been shaped by a fundamental need for shelter, and much of design by a fundamental need to provide it. Designers throughout history have taken climate and weather as obstacles—a domain from which to shield inhabitants, or an infinite void that mystifies scientists and evades control. Conversely, though, designers have also imagined or created spaces in which weather and atmosphere are components or even foundations of a project, integral to the individual and collective experience. GSD professor Silvia Benedito maps out such a shift in her new book, Atmosphere Anatomies: On Design, Weather, and Sensation, exploring how weather, climate, and atmosphere are considered principal mediums of design. It’s a project that Benedito summarizes as “curating the meteorological parameters of wind, heat, sunlight, humidity, and rain through built form and materiality.” Collaborating with photographer Iwan Baan, Benedito immerses readers in 10 projects, sourced from different eras, designers, and climatic zones around the world. She “dissects” each project in order to demonstrate how often-invisible atmospheres can be reconsidered as measurable, shapeable forms, with the human body as design arbiter. “A paradigm shift must be considered,” Benedito says, “one that realigns design’s disciplinary inquiry toward the recognition of air and atmosphere as spatial media and the body as an anatomico-physiological sensor in the all-enveloping environment.” “By feeling, breathing, and touching architecture and its landscape, by opening our buildings more to the wind and sounds, a new topology of architecture could be born into something never before conceived of, in which landscape could regain a central role,” writes Christophe Girot in the book’s introduction. “The world of sound, space, smell, and touch is part of a spatial continuum that has only recently been interrupted by contemporary planning, engineering, and architectural practices. This realization should be an open invitation to rethink architecture as something no longer divorced from our bodily experience.” Le Corbusier’s “model city” at Chandigarh in India, designed alongside Pierre Jeanneret between 1951 and 1966, emerges as a case study in design-as-anatomy. Corbusier had long conceptualized cities as bodies or biologies, Benedito notes. Tasked in 1951 with designing a new capital for the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana, Corbusier took particular interest in how a city or space “breathes.” Such a reconceptualization led to tangible design decisions, as well as an expansion of the architect’s fundamental scope. As Corbusier became increasingly tuned in to the intersections between architecture and landscape, he developed new approaches toward tempering the environment in order to promote physical and emotional well-being. (Benedito summarizes the Chandigarh project as “a disciplinary synthesis where architecture, landscape, and climate converge into a unified idea of space for human nurturing.”) Courtyards, patios, porticos, arcades, terraces, passageways, arbors, pergolas, and open pavilions allow residents to negotiate climate differences in comfort, while expanding the sheer volume as well as the varieties of shared, public-private space. Buildings are studded with detached roofs, parasols, sleeping terraces, projecting shades, and super-sized scuppers; the surrounding landscape comprises rills, ponds, reflecting pools, canals, groves, follies, green belts, artificial hills, and water basins. In effect, Corbusier resisted boundaries between inside and outside, architecture and landscape and city. “At Chandigarh, [Corbusier] turned the architectural membrane, previously sealed and ‘neutralizing,’ into a deep space that includes landscape,” Benedito explains, “broadening his understanding of the scope of the discipline.” Likewise, in William Kent’s Rousham Garden—a mid-1700s project in Oxfordshire, England—landscape is treated as “weather theater,” Benedito writes, in which the amplification (or the softening) of temperature, humidity, and other meteorological elements are foundational, dramatic design factors. Throughout the garden, the visitor comes across cooling retreats, warming shelters, shaded rooms, humid and ventilated passages—what Benedito calls “a meteorological journey.” Benedito and Baan’s tour through Geometric Hot Springs, deep within Chile’s Villarica National Park, is grounded by Benedito’s conversation with the architect, Germán del Sol. Since ancient times, del Sol tells Benedito, the region’s Indigenous Mapuche people had talked about the waters and hot springs near the Villarica Volcano; they spoke of the waters as gold, buried like treasure. “The Mapuche are people of the land; their tradition is one of being in touch with the whole territory, not with a small house or town,” del Sol says. “They live outside rather than inside. Not because they weren’t able to build houses—open spaces are just more important than enclosures. So, direct contact with surrounding nature became very important for the Geometric Hot Springs.” As del Sol explains, excavation for the springs was performed with simple shovels and brooms to avoid damaging rock. He and his colleagues also innovated gentle ways for reading ground temperature and discovering where hot springs might lie within the site. Del Sol details the geothermal research and precision-maneuvering that helped create the hot springs, and Benedito annotates the discussion with thermal imagery and mappings of select project sections. Visitors to the springs travel between pools via elevated walkways, which are warmed by radiant heat to prevent thermal shock—in other words, to keep people comfortable. The book illustrates how atmospheric elements perform and interact with each other and with their human visitors. And Baan’s photographs layer another vital narrative atop this analysis: snapshots of dense mists shrouding lush greenery, as well as of informal, human reactions of visitors, evoke both the project’s atmospheric characteristics and its influence on human emotion. The technical and the emotional, the natural and the human, are distilled into different frames, their synthesis reflected in Baan’s candid documentation. An architect trained also in landscape architecture and urban design, Benedito positions a climate-minded paradigm shift as essential for designers across all scales and specific disciplines. She sees particular implications for landscape and urban designers, however, given their focus on mediation of atmospheric forces as well as on resource conservation and public health. Despite such a disciplinary orientation, Benedito senses potential for a tighter braiding of landscape and urbanism’s tangible, physical outcomes with the less-familiar, hazier context of atmosphere. “An obliviousness to air, although justified by its ubiquity, is nonetheless paradoxical, as inherent to being outdoors is the de facto condition of living with and within the meteorological elements and their constant variability,” Benedito writes. “How, then, can one design with meteorological elements that escape ‘appearing,’ when design is, conversely, about making apparent—about building and constructing? How does one design for the collective milieu while accounting for sensation, so personal and particular?” As climate-related concerns rise in intensity and frequency, Benedito reminds designers of their agency in shaping the uncontrollable. In the book’s introduction, she discusses the case study of postwar Stuttgart, Germany, which needed to ventilate its valley-basin setting. She explains that Stuttgart’s solution—which achieved natural climate control at the urban scale, while also sustaining well-being and economic growth—is one reason the city emerged as a model of urban development. “A hazy comprehension of weather may reside in its ubiquitous but nonetheless paradoxical nature; weather is not only subjectively sensed and invisibly felt but also analytically registered and scientifically categorized in a complex manner,” Benedito writes. “This apparent antagonism makes the task of designing with weather a puzzling enterprise. Despite such challenges, the act of building for humankind is indisputably a project of acclimatization for the sustenance of life.”

Power and Justice in the Lone Grid State: Abby Spinak and Sarah Stanford-McIntyre on the crisis in Texas

Newspapers this week are swamped with headlines like, “What Went Wrong with the Texas Power Grid?” To anyone not intimately concerned with the details of American electricity distribution, this may seem like an odd way of referring to the current electricity crisis in Texas. Isn’t there one national grid? Actually there are three: the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and Texas. Energy scholars sometimes refer to this, tongue-in-cheek, as an infrastructural form of “Texas nationalism.” This week, the apocalyptic images coming out of Texas of icicles hanging from ceiling fans and long lines for grocery rations show the limits of Texas isolationism, but also the ways its energy sovereignty has been steadily undermined since the 1970s.   The reason that Texas is a lone grid state is both a fascinating political history and mind-numbingly bureaucratic. In the mid-20th century, electric utilities were the corporate giants of their era. Flush with capital and the perception of unlimited growth, these companies began to consolidate into multistate “holding companies”—or “octopuses,” as pro–public power politicians maligned them—and they learned to take advantage of their ability to shift costs and profits across state lines. Ultimately, the federal government under Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded with legislation to govern interstate electricity sales and, ideally, maintain electricity as a reliable and affordable public good. Texas avoided much of the federal oversight that came with these new regulations by agreeing not to sell electricity across state lines. In place of federal regulation, in 1970, the state created the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to manage the Texas grid. While ERCOT does maintain some connections out of state, Texas has largely remained a power island. As Rice University Professor Dan Cohan recently told CNN, “When it comes to electricity, what happens in Texas stays in Texas.” By the end of the 20th century, however, Texas’s infrastructural borders could no longer keep financial investments from flowing across state lines. New federal legislation starting in the 1970s and continuing through the 1990s steadily eroded the “regulatory compact” that had normalized government oversight of private power monopolies and encouraged competition in both electricity generation and distribution. This new deregulated power landscape unsurprisingly drew the attention of investors from outside the state. Financial partners from elsewhere in the country and Europe began to reorganize the Texas grid according to market logic. New investments in wind, “natural” gas, and other energy resources began to generate and sell power for a just-in-time model–driven ERCOT that then allocated electricity to customers through a myriad of competing private retail providers. By the 2010s, electricity in Texas had earned the reputation (at least locally) for being “the most volatile commodity in the world.” While energy deregulation was championed in Texas for everything from making renewable alternatives more competitive to reducing prices for consumers, it has had mixed results on both fronts. Though it has made both renewable energy and distribution sales more profitable for corporations, the physical infrastructure connecting producers to consumers in Texas has received decidedly less attention. Texas is actually one of the leaders in the country in energy generation, both renewable and otherwise, but lack of investments in cold weather protection has limited its ability to act as an energy safety net in extreme weather conditions. Again, the (infra)structural condition demonstrates how, in the deregulated grid, corporate cost-accounting eclipses public safety. Thus, as profits from electricity sales move freely out of the state, the physical risk of grid failure has remained territorialized within Texas. Last week, in the GSD Urban Planning and Design seminar “Experimental Infrastructures,” students debated the logic of redundancy in public utilities. On the one hand, it’s good to have legislation that prevents the massive tangles of wires that competing power companies enthusiastically built over each other in the early 20th century. On the other hand, lean, just-in-time production for critical infrastructure seems destined to fail catastrophically. Excess capacity may not be “efficient,” but maybe it’s not such a bad thing to have the ability to keep millions of people alive in extreme winter weather events. Calling for reinforced or duplicated energy infrastructure may seem like an argument that is antithetical to climate action. But it actually reflects recent thinking on “energy justice” as a multifaceted problem that has to balance action on energy poverty with historic accountability for the production of high-energy lifestyles, or “luxury emissions.” What is fascinating and horrible about the current Texas blackout is that it shows that these two manifestations of energy injustice—energy poverty and energy luxury—can occur in the same location. The lean market reorganization of Texas’s historic energy abundance has created a landscape where, in a climate of increasingly volatile weather events, the line between luxury emissions and energy poverty has grown very thin. Dr. Abby Spinak is an energy historian and lecturer at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She is also area head of the GSD’s Master in Design Studies Risk and Resilience area group. Spinak’s current research ties the history of electrification in the rural United States to the evolution of twentieth-century American capitalism and alternative economic visions. Dr. Sarah Stanford-McIntyre is an assistant professor in the Herbst Program for Engineering, Ethics & Society at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Trained primarily as a U.S. historian, her work focuses on how new technologies impact communities, shape social worlds, and change local environments.

The African American Design Nexus’ Harlem StoryMap traces the neighborhood’s Black-designed places

Black Harlem, storied and resilient, has been chronicled from many perspectives. Missing until now has been a thoughtful look at what is right before any visitor’s eye: its rich built history. A new project from the GSD’s African American Design Nexus, the Harlem StoryMap, considers the neighborhood’s many designed spaces created by Black architects and urbanists. The work of these professionals began before Harlem’s famous Renaissance in the 1920s and continues today. The StoryMap documents and celebrates this body of work, connecting each design with more familiar narratives about what American writer and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson called the mecca of “colored America.” The StoryMap is not a single map, but rather an interactive digital catalog of images, archival material, maps, news clippings, quotations, and audio footage. Users are able to study not only Black designs but also the communities and events that constitute their milieu. “The StoryMap is meant to peel back a layer of Harlem and engage with the stories behind the trailblazing designers that contributed to this place,” explains Thandi Nyambose (MUP ’21), who created the Harlem StoryMap. The web page opens with census and zoning maps depicting Harlem’s Black population boom between 1910 and 1930, before moving on to the first designs: two neo-Gothic churches by largely unknown Black architects. The first is St. Philip’s Church, the oldest Black Episcopal parish in the city, designed by Vertner Tandy in 1911; the second is George Foster’s 1923 Zion AME Church. “Using this style, they’re almost subverting traditional understandings of architecture and proving that in 1911, a Black architect is more than capable of designing a building like this, “Nyambose says. It is the first of the map’s many lessons. Of course, well-known projects and facts are also represented: Black Astor Row, which became a magnet for African Americans migrating to Harlem in the 1920s and is being restored by Black architect Roberta Washington; the Adam Clayton Powell Building, designed by Ifill Johnson Hanchard at Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s behest; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, both the original—designed by J. Max Bond, Jr., one of New York’s most prominent Black architects—and the ongoing project for the new building, which is in the hands of the celebrated Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye. But the map is also full of surprises. There are the first large-scale housing projects in New York City built by an African American (Tandy) expressly for African Americans in 1948, and the Heritage Health and Housing Headquarters (2002) by the architecture firm Caples Jefferson. Founded in 1987 by Sara Caples and Everardo Jefferson, a Black Panamanian, the firm planned the building to house a nonprofit that provides social services to the community. There is also Harlem’s first green building, 1400 Fifth Avenue, designed by Roberta Washington in 2004. Because African American architects represent only about 2 percent of all licensed architects in the United States, Nyambose did not expect to find so many examples of Black-designed places in Harlem, especially so far back in history. “Every time I discover the history of a Black person who’s created something, who’s left a mark on culture, it’s energizing. The value of these stories being told cannot be underestimated—and told beyond the confines of the industry that they’re related to,” says Nyambose. Familiar or not, the designs recorded in the StoryMap are all considered alongside the social, economic, and demographic shifts taking place when they were created. As the page scrolls through history, an image of each project is accompanied by eloquent, contextualizing text that adds to our appreciation of the vitality but also the vulnerability of the place and its Black residents. Nyambose reflected on the constructions “not just as static buildings or sites, but also as points of intervention that existed in Harlem, a very complex web of social, cultural, economic ecosystems.” Some of the designers brought these forces to bear on the designs themselves. John Louis Wilson’s 1937 Harlem River Houses were an experiment in public housing and a way to create quality housing options for Harlem’s low-income residents at a moment when there weren’t any. More recently, this purpose-driven approach has been responding to the threats of gentrification, the disempowerment of Black Harlemites, and the repositioning of Harlem away from its rich, Black cultural history. The StoryMap points out that while Harlem has seen an explosion in commercial development, there has been a steady decline in quality of life for many—poor schools, lack of jobs, decaying cultural capital. Four projects in particular are presented as working to counter these trends: The Heritage Health and Housing Headquarters, 1400 Fifth Avenue, the 2007 Kalahari Condominium Complex by Jack Travis, and David Adjaye’s 2015 Sugar Hill Development. The StoryMap itself serves to push back against the erasure of Black Harlem and the living legacy of Black-designed Harlem. Nyambose explains: “There definitely is a dimension to this work that starts to engage with the conflict surrounding this rebranding, which is ultimately a pretext for the duration of the old, Black Harlem.” Nyambose graduates this spring, but this digital archive will be preserved. Ideally, it will be expanded to include work from Black designers imagining the city’s next landscapes—not only in service of the African American Design Nexus’s mission to highlight African American designers and redress decades of their obfuscation, but also for Harlemites themselves. Nyambose reflects: “It’s my hope that although the neighborhood is transforming, demographics are shifting, and buildings have been erased, that Harlem residents feel pride in their neighborhood and its ability to foster creativity and elicit community and joy. I hope that Black Harlemites feel that they’re at the center of this narrative.”

Groundscrapers: Exploring the logic behind long, low buildings

A visionary architect of the modern metropolis surveyed the vast urban scene unfolding from his high office window in 1920s New York. His awe mixed with an unsettling realization: “On a close scrutiny of the streets, certain minute, moving objects can be unmistakably distinguished. The city apparently contains, away down there—human beings!” The thought “gives one pause,” Hugh Ferriss mused, because “between the colossal inanimate forms and those mote-like creatures darting in and out among their foundations, there is such a contrast, such discrepancy in scale. . . .” Descending to the street, he declared, is “like Dante’s descent into Hades,” where one could perceive a deep inhumanity in the urban scene that adversely affected people’s “facial expressions, their postures, gestures, movements, tones of voice. . . .” Although Ferriss, like many architects at the time, was deeply impressed by new trends in high-rise buildings, he criticized their “thin coating of architectural confectionary disguises,” and acknowledged “that they were fashioned to meet not so much the human needs of the occupants as the financial appetites of the property owners.” Over the last hundred years, not much has changed. Tall buildings continue to exert a powerful pull on designers and property owners. Their heights continue to increase, and skylines in cities throughout the world now bristle with competing forms reaching upward, indifferent to people and context. In their 1995 manifesto, S, M, L, XL, Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau explained that this indifference is a natural consequence of contemporary large-scale architecture. “Bigness [is] incapable of establishing relationships with the classical city . . .” it “no longer needs the city; it competes with the city. . .” and “It is no longer part of any urban tissue.” The result is that “the street has become the residue,” and people seem to matter hardly at all. Camilo Restrepo Ochoa, founder of Agenda Architecture in Medellín, Colombia, and studio instructor at the Harvard GSD, declares that this situation calls for new thinking about the architecture of cities and the predominance of the high-rise building type. For the users of skyscrapers, their immense height means “somehow you’re trapped in the air,” he says, and “you condemn relations to take place in a vertical manner. . . .” Social and environmental relationships become tightly constrained by an enclosed lobby, elevators, sealed windows, and great distance from the ground. Restrepo argues that “other ways of social spatial organizations are needed . . . a new type is required,” so that architecture can “protect and create a more horizontal relation with an endangered community and ecosystem.” In “Specific Ambiguity: Groundscrapers,” a studio he taught at Harvard last fall, Camilo and his 12 students explored the possibilities of large, low buildings whose scale and complex programs necessitate deep thinking about how architecture can “operate as a mediator between social and environmental conditions.” Unlike a tall building, which seeks a relationship with an ineffable abstraction—the sky—a long, low building challenges designers “to redefine our relation to the ground,” the field of public and ecological relationships. If the “groundscraper” constitutes a building type, it is neither new nor well defined. As Camilo points out, its examples are extremely varied in appearance, scale, program, and architectural merit: the Royal Crescent in Bath, Le Corbusier’s sinuous Plan Obus project for Algiers, Alison and Peter Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens public housing in London (“the largest failure of them all,” Camilo says), Constant Nieuwenhuys’s chaotic New Babylon project, and innumerable long, low office buildings and housing blocks help to establish the type. All of these diverse examples share the formal characteristics of extreme length and repetitiveness, but the type opens itself to broad interpretation. To begin, the students studied examples of groundscrapers built over the last 70 years by Affonso Reidy in Brazil, Aldo Rossi and Herzog and de Meuron in Italy, Peter Zumthor in Norway, and Craig Ellwood in California. These relatively modest examples, ranging from 120 to 260 meters (400 to 850 feet), invest long, low buildings with a range of programs—offices, apartments, galleries, classrooms—as well as public spaces and building infrastructure. Their contexts also vary; they occupy urban, suburban, and rural sites. Camilo challenged his students to incorporate a diverse, mixed-use program in a single, very long, horizontal building, to develop a strong relationship between the building and the ground in order to foster social relationships, and to design “ambiguous” building enclosures responsive to the tropical ecology in Colombia. Camilo explains that an essential problem for an extremely long building is that its program loses some command over the building form, which tends to be fixed and repetitive. “The program cannot repeat constantly,” he says, and to make the building work well, “it’s not only about mixing programs; it is the way you place them.” In other words, the character of the building develops from “continuous questioning of the system versus the exception in the way we organize the space.” Connecting the parts of the program also presents challenges in a groundscraper. Unlike in a skyscraper—where a bank of elevators controls movement—a long, low building demands more creative circulation patterns. These include multiple vertical connections between the ground and the roof, as well as very long horizontal passageways, which might become social spaces like sidewalks or streets, rather than just circulation infrastructure. Camilo explains that the varied functions, multiple points of access, extended passageways, and indeterminate public spaces in the groundscraper building type presented students with important questions about the nature of building programs. “We tend to give a program to everything,” he says, “and we tend to over-program our layouts.” But in these large, low buildings the insistent repetition of program calls for relief—for “spaces for doing nothing,” or rather, “spaces where anything can happen.” Camilo argues that architects don’t understand these types of unprogrammed spaces well, but they are essential for the social dynamic of buildings. If the groundscraper type challenges the nature of building program, the building sites Camilo chose for the project help challenge the capacities of architecture. The students designed buildings with a maximum footprint of 30 meters by 300 meters on two sites in Medellín, Colombia, one urban and one semi-rural. In each condition the building is, Camilo explains, “not as big as a neighborhood, but bigger than a block.” At that scale, “architecture cannot solve it all. . . . You have to support it on landscape design and urban design.” The buildings’ large scale and insistent rhythms naturally vie with adjacent building fabric, sidewalks, and streets, as well as unbuilt portions of the site. This compelled the students to work simply and strategically to balance the competing factors of the project, and, “to question a limit of architecture as a discipline.” The tropical climate opens other questions about the physical limits of architecture. Most important, it allows an “ambiguous” sense of enclosure, because, Camilo explains, often “in the tropics interior space doesn’t exist. Somehow it’s the transition that matters.” That is, a building envelope that supplies continuous enclosure is not necessary, and public space in particular often spans interior and exterior. Tropical architecture, he says, “is mainly driven by shade and air,” so its emphasis shifts away from enclosing curtain walls: “facades are not so important; the most important thing is always the roof.” In the studio, an indistinct sense of enclosure and an emphasis on horizontal protection from weather became essential components of the building type. This porosity also set up an ironic condition: as an earthbound alternative to the skyscraper, the groundscraper is much better suited to address the sky and its atmospheric conditions. Camilo points out that in the tropical context the students were addressing, permeability of buildings also corresponds with a reduction of their mechanical systems. The students—many of whom live in temperate climates—were amazed, he says, at the freedom this permitted. The ambiguities of space and reduced systems allowed them to “strip away all the technical stuff” to “produce a very honest architecture that’s as simple as possible.” They were able, he says, to “touch a little bit of utopia—a pragmatic utopia, let’s call it. . . .” Hugh Ferriss’s utopian vision of a hundred years ago evoked astounding images of great edifices reaching to the sky—“Buildings like crystals. Walls of translucent glass. . . . A mineral kingdom.” But we have to question whether the immense skyscrapers built in that image over the intervening years have fulfilled his hope that architecture would contribute “to the harmonious development” of humanity and its “potentialities of emotional and mental well-being.” Perhaps, as Camilo contends, a new type of “horizontal building, belonging more to the ground and the horizon, rather than the sky and its psychological detachments,” is worth exploring—a building type that can act more effectively “as a mediator between social and environmental conditions.” While his students’ renderings may not carry the dreamlike quality of Ferriss’s ethereal graphite visions, their precise rhythms—portrayed boldly against the fabric of Medellín and the distant mountains beyond—offer a place for people together on the ground in the fresh tropical air.