The Future of Air Travel: Toward a better in-flight experience

Anyone remember air travel? In early 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe and international flights were hurriedly cancelled, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Laboratory for Design Technologies (LDT) pivoted its three-year focus project, The Future of Air Travel, to respond to new industry conditions in a rapidly changing world. With the broad goal of better understanding how design technologies can improve the way we live, the project aims to reimagine air travel for the future, recapturing some of its early promise (and even glamour) by assessing and addressing various pressure points resulting from the pandemic as well as more long-term challenges. The two participating research labs—the Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab (REAL), led by Allen Sayegh, associate professor in practice of architectural technology, and the Geometry Lab, led by Andrew Witt, associate professor in practice of architecture—“look at air travel from an experiential and a systemic perspective.” As part of their research, the labs consulted with representatives from Boeing, Clark Construction, Perkins & Will, gmp, and the Massachusetts Port Authority, all members of the GSD’s Industry Advisors Group. So far, the project has resulted in two research books: An Atlas of Urban Air Mobility and On Flying: The Toolkit of Tactics that Guide Passenger Perception (and its accompanying website www.airtraveldesign.guide). On Flying, by Sayegh, REAL Research Associate Humbi Song, and Lecturer in Architecture Zach Seibold, seeks “to facilitate a rethinking of how to design objects, spaces, and systems by putting the human experience at the forefront”—and in so doing “prepare and design for improved passenger experiences in a post-COVID world.” The book’s accessible glossary covers topics including the design implications of the middle armrest (“What if armrests were shareable without physical contact?”); whether the check-in process could be improved by biometric scanners; the effect of customs declarations on passengers; how air travel is predicated on “an absence of discomfort” instead of maximizing comfort; and the metaphysical aspects of jet lag. The project “examines and provides insight into the complex interplay of human experience, public and private systems, technological innovation, and the disruptive shock events that sometimes define the air-travel industry”. Consider, for instance, the security requirements of air travel in a post-COVID world—how can the flow of passengers through the departure/arrival process be streamlined while incorporating safety measures such social distancing? On Flying acknowledges that it’s hard to quantify many of the designed elements—ranging from artifacts to spaces and systems—that affect our experience of air travel. So the toolkit methodically catalogs and identifies these various factors before speculating on alternative scenarios for design and passenger interaction. A year into the project, Phase 2 will more overtly examine the context of COVID-19, considering it alongside other catastrophic events, such as 9/11, in order to better understand and plan for their impact on the industry as a whole and on passenger behavior. Meanwhile, An Atlas of Urban Air Mobility, by Witt and Lecturer in Architecture Hyojin Kwon, is “a collection of the dimensional and spatial parameters that establish relationships between aerial transport and the city,” and it aims to establish a “kit of parts” for the aerial city of the future. Phase 1 considered the idea of new super-conglomerates of cities, dependent on inter-connectivity of air routes—specifically looking at the unique qualities of Florida as an air travel hub. The atlas investigates flightpath planning and noise pollution and other spatial constraints of air travel within urban environments. One possible solution it raises is the concept of “clustered networks,” where electrical aerial vehicles could be used in an interconnected pattern of local urban conurbations, reflecting a hierarchy of passenger flight, depending on scale and distance traveled. Phase 2 will move into software and atlas development, expanding the atlas as well as their simulation and planning software. One intriguing aspect will be a critical history of past visions of future air travel: a chance to look back in order to look forward with fresh eyes. By studying our shared dream of air travel, the hope is to rediscover and reboot abandoned visions that may yet prove to inspire new innovations. It’s a reminder that, not so long ago, international flight excited and inspired us—before the realities of delayed flights, lost luggage, rude customs officials, and poorly planned infrastructure stole our dreams. And that’s before we ever stepped onto the plane itself. According to the Air Travel Design Guide, the social contract of air travel has now become so skewed from the original glamorous proposition that today, “the passenger can feel as if they are at the mercy of nature, airport security personnel, or the airline cabin crew. They are directed where to go, how to move, and even when to go to the bathroom on the plane.” Surely it can—and should—be better than this? “We may not arrive more on time,” the team concludes, “but thanks to the introduction of better design practice—we might enjoy the experience better.” Learn more about the Laboratory for Design Technologies and its Industry Advisors Group (IAG) partners at research.gsd.harvard.edu/ldt/

Spring 2021 All-School Welcome from Dean Sarah M. Whiting

On Tuesday, January 19, 2021 Dean Sarah M. Whiting joined the GSD community on Zoom to deliver a virtual welcome to start the spring term. A transcript of the Dean’s remarks is below. Good morning, afternoon, and evening everyone, and happy new year. I hope you all tried to have a restful holiday break. I just have to say, it’s so heartening to welcome everyone back to school for the spring semester. Many of us had been looking forward to the new year—I know I was—and I could not wait to put 2020 behind me. Twenty-twenty, though, is clearly not going away so easily. Today is January 19th, almost two weeks after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. I’m still reeling from that day and I’m sure many of you are, too. By nature, I’m an optimistic person, but I admit I’m finding it very hard to find any silver linings right now. Yes, we have tomorrow’s inauguration to look forward to and yes, the vaccines are promising. (Speaking at a virtual conference of arts professionals over the weekend—and even dressing the part by wearing a black turtleneck—Dr. Anthony Fauci suggested that we might reach herd immunity this fall.) And yes, my surgery over break was successful, so I’m entering the new year in good health. All of these are positive, very positive, starts to the new year. But I can’t get the images of the rioters who broke into the Capitol out of my head. The vision of the confederate flag being carried within that space is particularly seared in my memory, confirming the work that this country has to do in reckoning with its structural racism, past and present. The U.S. Capitol, was designed by a succession of architects—the original competition, held in 1792, was won by Dr. William Thornton, who, according to the history on the Capitol’s website, was a “gifted amateur architect who had studied medicine but rarely practiced as a doctor.” Thornton’s original design was modified by Benjamin Henry Latrobe and Charles Bullfinch, among many others over time. Having partially burned in the war of 1812, it was rebuilt by European laborers working with American slaves. In short, this building embodies our country’s history as well as architectural history. In 1850, the building was expanded to create the House and Senate chambers—the two wings that swarmed with rioters early this month. Barton Gellman, one of my favorite columnists, described in The Atlantic what happened on January 6th as attempted “democracide.” Gellman concluded that “The republic survived a sustained attempt on its life because judges and civil servants and just enough politicians did what they had to do.” In other words, our system of checks and balances worked…just barely. Just barely because we discovered that facts, evidence, and history can be hijacked more quickly and more thoroughly than anyone could have ever imagined. We all need to be vigilant to prevent that kind of hijacking. It’s so important, so urgent, for us to pay close attention to what is happening politically, socially, economically, here in the U.S. and around the world, because yes, it does affect us. It is equally crucial for each one of us to be sure to base our research, our work, and our opinions on facts and on history that are backed up by evidence. I point you again to our event last September with Danielle Allen and Michael Murphy discussing “Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century,” the report issued by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that Allen co-authored. It’s available on the American Academy website. The report issues 31 recommendations, ranging from ranked voting to independent citizen-led redistricting in all 50 states, to subsidizing projects to reinvent the public functions that social media have displaced. While I would argue that every recommendation speaks to each of us as individuals, some, like redistricting and the ones challenging the space that social media has consumed, also speak to us as designers, planners, historians, and theorists. Susan Glasser, the New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, recently recounted that in her first job out of college working on Capitol Hill as a reporter for Roll Call Newspaper, every time she walked into the Capitol building it had awed her. The building’s solidity and its spaces inspired, utterly resonating with its civic mission. How often does someone refer to buildings that way today? Successful design (architecture, landscape, urban design, information design, product design) resonates. That doesn’t mean that it has to look like the U.S. Capitol—our world is a whole lot different from what it was in 1792. But it does mean that we have to consider the effects of what we do, and how we shape the world. Even if right now I’m challenged to find much to be optimistic about, I am unswerving in my conviction about our role. Toward that end, we have an extraordinary array of classes this semester intended to engage us in this work: courses looking at how housing has been affected by changed notions of family, changed practices of the workplace, and changed expectations about climate impact. We have courses laying the grounds for design justice. We have courses positing the impacts of neoliberalism, of material extraction, and of symbols, ranging from confederate monuments to the national park service’s monuments. We have courses covering a dizzying range of techniques, ranging from gaming technology to optical strategies to acoustic ones. We’re looking at materials: their lifespans from extraction to building units; their agency; their heterogeneities; their burning; and their symbolisms. We’re looking at Tar Creek, Oklahoma; Sao Paolo, Brazil; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Tokyo, Japan; Harvard Square, and Nantucket Island. Despite having fewer students this semester, we have as many if not more courses than we’ve ever had. In response to feedback from students and the Innovation Task Force, we have committed this semester to capping studios to 10 people and capping seminars and limited enrollment workshops at 12 to ensure a better “Zoom world” for everyone. We have also reworked the class schedule—the Academic Affairs staff, working with the faculty, deserve a lot of thanks for this huge effort—to ensure that classes better accommodate the 14 different time zones we find ourselves teaching to. Smaller classes ensure stronger conversations—we even have a seminar devoted to that topic, “Talking Architecture,” focused on the art of the interview. Having witnessed the utter collapse of conversation and communication at the hand of those who believe that simply repeating falsehoods with greater volume or greater social media spread will somehow make them true, nothing could be more urgent right now than real conversation. I’ll be continuing my weekly office hours this semester, and I look forward to those conversations as well. To facilitate even more conversation within the school, we’ll be launching a new, internal website in the coming weeks. Called GSD NOW, this website can be understood as a digital Gund Hall, and will give everyone a direct window onto so much of the activity happening across the school at any given time. It will also include virtual “trays” that encourage formal and informal collaboration. Stay tuned for more details, but for now I can say that I’m super excited by it. GSD NOW will stay with us well past the pandemic as a source for information and collaboration within the school. And speaking of collaboration and conversation, if you weren’t tuned into the launch of Prada’s Fall Winter 2021 Menswear collection on Sunday morning, I encourage you all to go to the website. The runway show was followed by an intimate online conversation between a selection of students across the world with co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons. It was a remarkable acknowledgement of the value of all students, the up and coming creative generation. The GSD was represented by Celeste Martore, Ian Erikson, and Isabel Strauss. Many thanks to Assistant Professor Sean Canty for making that happen on very short notice. And as always, we have an incredible roster of lectures, conferences, and conversations in our public events calendar this term. See what happened? Just talking about what’s going on this semester has brought my optimism back. Indeed, while we have some seemingly insurmountable challenges right now, I’m really excited by what’s going on this spring—it’s all giving 2021 a good horizon. I want to end on a very personal note, though not related to me. Determined not to let 2020 go down in history as the worst year ever, Assistant Professor Jacob Reidel and his partner Laura took it upon themselves to end 2020 on a positive note. Characteristic of his talents as a writer, Jacob tells the story perfectly—you should hear it from him directly, but I’ll just share a couple lines: “Thanks to New York City’s ‘project cupid’ it became possible to meet with a clerk over Zoom. I’ll admit that jumping into a Zoom with the City Clerk on a random workday sandwiched between our own back-to-back work Zoom meetings was a whole new level of dissonance for us, but certainly special and memorable in its own way. Once we had that precious PDF license in hand, we only had until December 22 to complete the marriage with an officiant before it expired. We snuck an officiant, a laptop, and Laura’s parents into the old unused Williamsburgh Savings Bank Hall downstairs from our apartment, loaded up Zoom, exchanged rings, said our vows, smashed a glass, and got married!” I suppose that I should note here that I don’t condone breaking into spaces, but the story does continue (again, quoting Jacob): “and yes, at one point a doorman caught us using the space, but when I explained to him what we were up to, he immediately melted and said ‘let me get the lights on for you!'” A picture, a space, and a happy couple says a thousand words. Congratulations to Jacob and Laura and cheers to everyone for a light-footed and dance-filled 2021!

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

“The mountain ranges, the valleys, and the great waters of America, all trend north and south, not east and west,” says Frederick Law Olmsted in the introduction to his 1861 book, Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom. “An arbitrary political line may divide the north part from the south part, but there is no such line in nature—there can be none socially.” Long before Olmsted mulled over the landscape of Central Park or pondered the potential of shared green space in the urban fabric of American cities, the father of modern landscape architecture was a curious 30-year-old unsure of his purpose. In 1852, following travels from China to England, where he came to understand the complex relationship between landscape and class, power, ecology, and identity, Olmsted was dispatched to the Southern slave states by the New York Times. For the next two years, against the volatile backdrop of the Compromise of 1850—five bills that served as a temporary truce on slavery and territorial expansion after the Mexican-American War—Olmsted reported on the cultural and environmental qualities of the region in scintillating detail. He traversed the networked web of slavery, society, and economy, and unpicked the myriad ways that these forces played out in the sweeping landscapes of the American South. Across two trips, Olmsted visited tobacco plantations in Virginia and the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. He happened upon slave burial grounds in Savannah, Georgia and journeyed the Emigrant Road of East Texas to the borderlands separating the US from Mexico. He witnessed Black burials outpouring with song and emotion; he also saw the hanging of an enslaved woman who had killed her own child, for whom she feared a life of unending suffering. He spoke to both enslaved people and slave owners, abolitionists running free-labor plantations and racist drunks in small-town bars to probe the heart of the South’s cotton complex: to not only describe the region, but to carve out a space for a more nuanced understanding of the South in order to find common ground and a path to abolition. Olmsted remained committed to his research on the Cotton Kingdom throughout his career as a landscape architect, even stepping down from his demanding position as superintendent of Central Park to rewrite portions of the text ahead of its 1861 publication. His research methodology, visceral narration, and sensitivity toward the South and its many discrete agents remain powerful tools for reading the built landscapes of past and present. And this proposition is precisely where Sara Zewde’s Fall 2020 seminar “Cotton Kingdom, Now,” begins. “Olmsted is considered the father of landscape architecture, but this body of work is rarely talked about,” explains Zewde, assistant professor of practice in the department of landscape architecture at the GSD and founding principal of Studio Zewde. “It was very clear to me how the discipline’s actual founding was propelled by the South. And if we are to refer to Olmsted as the father of anything, we should be looking at the historical value of this document and its methodological proposition—the question of how a landscape architect can conceive of a practice that’s in line with larger social and economic readings of a place.” In “Cotton Kingdom, Now,” Zewde presented a cross-temporal pedagogical approach derived from her own experience of retracing Olmsted’s route through the Southern states in 2019. Twenty students embarked on this experimental seminar, which drew upon Olmsted’s original text and other primary historical documents from Black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northup alongside a range of contemporary authors including historians, journalists, and social psychiatrists, from Toni Morrison to Alexander Manevitz and Mindy Thompson Fullilove. Working in pairs with their pick of one of 10 sites visited by Olmsted, the students’ challenge was threefold. First, they conducted a visual literary analysis of Olmsted’s text, paying close attention to the details in the landscape, the characters he meets, and the language he utilizes to render these scenes vivid and alive. Second, they developed a comparative visualization of their chosen site, then and now. Finally, the students re-presented the Cotton Kingdom, tracking the political, ecological, and environmental changes to their site over the past 165 years. Part three is where the real challenge and opportunity to develop a cross-temporal, cross-country research methodology truly kicked in. While COVID travel restrictions remained in place, students grappled with multiple scales and narratives by using Google Maps and other geographic information system software, applying remote research strategies, and making contact with locals “on the ground” to garner a more nuanced understanding of physical space. They followed the ebb and flow of topographic transformations and the challenge of re-presenting this history. “Perhaps because of the physical impossibility of visiting these sites, not in spite of it, the students’ work became a lot more ambitious and locally focused,” reflected Zewde. From Google Maps hacktivism to bootleg social media accounts and guerrilla publishing, the final projects of “Cotton Kingdom, Now” employed a variety of new and experimental media to embody the multidisciplinary approach of the seminar. The students’ outreach to local agents who sustain a direct relationship with their chosen sites—and whose own family histories are often intertwined with these storied landscapes—resulted in an intimate collaborative bond that transcended the walls of the (virtual) classroom. Attending the final review on December 2 were special guests Justin Plummer III and Haki Kweli Shakur, who were involved in Rachel Coulomb and Cynthia Deng’s “Mount Rose Homestead” project and Caroline Craddock and Charles Burke’s “Second African Burial Ground” project, respectively. In the former, Coulomb and Deng created a Google Maps pinpoint for the family homestead in Maryland and an Instagram account for Mount Rose which serves, in the students’ words, as a “virtual museum and archive of stories to re-present the Cotton Kingdom through this dearly cherished family home.” Adding the “missing place” to Google Maps generates a digital-physical palimpsest of architectural history—while a memorial poster echoes this sentiment on the ground. In addition to spotlighting the stories of the Plummer family—formerly enslaved people who owned and lived in Mount Rose since Adam Plummer purchased the land in 1868—the Instagram archive presents letters, architectural drawings, and excerpts from a book published in 1927 by Nellie Arnold Plummer on her family history. As the course comes to a close, Coulomb and Deng plan to pass the account on to Justin Plummer III and the rest of the family, so the story may live on in their own hands. “Many of the projects created in this seminar have long lifespans—what you’re seeing today is one step in a long trajectory,” said Zewde. In “Second African Burial Ground,” Craddock and Burke teamed up with Shakur, a Richmond-based historian, researcher, and activist, to unearth the lost history of the Burial Ground located at Richmond’s 5th & Hospital streets. Between 1816 and 1879, 22,000 Africans were buried in the cemetery with no historical recognition. Today, it sits beneath the sprawling I-64 freeway, denoted by an abandoned auto service building and a yellowing billboard. Against state plans for highway expansion and additional train infrastructure that would overwrite this history yet again, activists are attempting to have the site declared a national historic landmark. The project also examines, through a series of videos in which Shakur serves as narrator, the many ways in which the Shockoe Creek Ravine splits Richmond in two and reinforces historic structures of control. “You have to be here to experience it,” shared Shakur in the review. “When you come to this area and you see the things that are still there—the Richmond Slave Trail, the Burial Ground—even down to the bricks you walk on, they still have the bricks they took from London to America to build up this area in order to sell human Black bodies.” Other students utilized experiential media and compelling storytelling to trace a line between Olmsted’s vision and the present. Aria Griffin and Kanchan Wali-Richardson’s project, “From Womb to Womb,” unpacks the terrible legacy of the Calhoun Plantation—the most violent and exploitative space that Olmsted saw during his travels. In the four-minute-long film, Griffin and Wali-Richardson connect the brutality toward enslaved women on the plantation to the disproportionately high Black maternal mortality rate in the United States today—which ranges from two to eleven times more than white women across the country. The contrast between the aesthetic delicacy of the film—the projected light pooling and shaking over skin, the layering of family histories onto the body—and the horror that it portrays results in a powerful work. The film viscerally presents the politics and poetics of the Black body as landscape, as a history of embodied exploitation, and as haunted by structural racism today, particularly in its life-giving capacity. “Cotton Kingdom, Now” was taught in the run-up to the bicentennial of Olmsted’s birthday in 2022. Zewde is also writing a book that reflects on her four months spent retracing Olmsted’s steps through the South, following her time as a Mellon Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. “Visiting the sites Olmsted writes about really brought to life the degree to which the social and economic conditions he describes are still present today,” said Zewde. “Excepting those incarcerated, people are not in physical bondage—that’s a clear difference. But the power dynamics I witnessed on my travels still strongly echo what he witnessed.” Conceived as a dialogue with Olmsted, Zewde’s upcoming publication will incorporate her interest in carving out a new approach to embodied landscape design, while also addressing the need to properly historicize landscape architecture in both teaching and practice. “When you’re born in a Black body in the South, you are prompted to an awareness about the histories of landscape that may not be taught or memorialized. Yet and still, the very visceral experience of going to these spaces and being able to so clearly track the past through Olmsted’s words and the present with my own eyes offered new levels of understanding to me about these places, and in fact, this history,” said Zewde. “Continuing to unearth and reflect on the degree to which owning, shipping, and selling millions of humans was a centrifugal force in the creation of our cities, industry, and socio-politics is crucial in shaping what we do as designers, and as citizens, today.”

Mexican Cities Initiative in 2020: Essays, Conversations, and Events

Harvard Graduate School of Design’s  Mexican Cities Initiative (MCI) aims to guide, through research, the shifting urban landscape of Mexico. In order to aid this urban transformation, research done with the MCI is made entirely public on their website to engage various current and future collaborators into the conversation. MCI also publishes other coursework, faculty projects, and student research to their public archive that is related to Mexico. Student research is supported by an annual summer fellowship and by partnerships inside and outside of Mexico. The initiative is advised by Diane Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism, alongside the MCI advisory board. The past year brought a robust and exciting array of essays, conversations, and events to the MCI platform. The following are excerpts from some of MCI’s 2020 offerings.

Aron Lesser Chats with Lorenzo Rocha about Public Spaces and Urban Planning Trends in Mexico City

Lorenzo Rocha: “Currently there are two main trends in Mexico City’s urban development. The first one is an outstanding re-densification of traditional neighborhoods in central areas and the second is the vast creation of new land subdivision in peripheral zones both for affordable or expensive housing. The densification process, that affects the three neighborhoods referred to in the text, takes advantage of preexisting conditions to generate value by designing taller buildings in the traditional urban fabric, further diversifying them. The new peripheral neighborhoods are generally monocultural and dependent on private and public mobility. They are the answer to our massive necessity of housing and security, which the original urban fabric can no longer provide.” Keep reading…

Feike de Jong Undertakes Photojournalistic Walk of the Tijuana/San Diego Border 

“Feike de Jong has begun BORDE(R), a photojournalistic walk of the Tijuana/San Diego border. The project explores Global South-North relations by observing the nexus of these cities’ geopolitical—and cultural—boundaries. Paying close attention to urban planning and design, Feike’s approach is rooted in his belief that city borders deserve more attention because they reveal urban realities that city centers may not.” Keep reading…

Mexican local government’s interventions against COVID-19: virtues and flaws 

The COVID-19 health crisis creates opportunities to analyze state government activity in Mexico. The social and economic impact faced by each of the country’s state governments demonstrates their responses to the cultural, social, and economic particularities of each locality, but also to their institutional capacities to respond to these growing demands. In this sense, the Mexican case has detonated the unrest of the past, making visible the complications that have historically existed in shaping the federalist puzzle, which should be autonomous and able to exercise its capacities to meet the demands of the moment. Keep reading…

Kiley Fellow Lecture: Seth Denizen, “Thinking Through Soil: Case Study from the Mezquital Valley” 

Seth Denizen is a GSD Kiley Fellow and design practitioner trained in landscape architecture and human geography. In his lecture “Thinking Through Soil: Case Study from the Mezquital Valley”, which took place on September 21, 2020, Denizen explores the relationship between land politics in the Mezquital Valley and Mexico City. He discusses both his research and the work that GSD students produced in conjunction with UNAM students in a studio course focused on the region. Watch the lecture…

Navigating the Journey of Latinas to the United States 

Carolina Sepúlveda: “While migration from Mexico to the United States diminished in recent years, the number of migrants from Central America has increased substantially since 2010[1]. As a result, Mexico has consolidated as the primary transit route for migrants from the Northern Triangle countries, including El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The migration journey through Mexico is particularly violent for women[2]. At the different stages, women are subject to extortion, human trafficking, sexual violence, and even murder in the hands of gangs and organized crime groups. The paths and tactics used by women on the move present an unstable and shifting landscape reinforced by anti-migration policies and criminal groups’ presence along the routes.” Keep reading…

Del Temblor al Arte 

Antonio Moya-Latorre: “Artists’ responses to the earthquake in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec are a perfect example of how art can contribute, in an extreme situation like the one triggered in 2017, to expand community awareness by leveraging the potential of local culture.” Visit the exhibition…

Oaxaca – Beyond Reconstruction

“Harvard GSD faculty and students published a report based on two years of research and studio practice focused on Oaxaca, Mexico after its devastating 2017 earthquake. Based on work with partners at MIT and elsewhere, and through comparative reflection on Chile’s disastrous earthquake a few years prior, the contributors to this publication analyzed what went wrong in the initial disaster recovery in Oaxaca and proposed alternative frameworks for moving forward.” Keep reading…

Remembering pioneering Black architect Donald L. Stull (1937–2020)

The Harvard Graduate School of Design honors Donald L. Stull, FAIA (MArch ’62), a groundbreaking architect who led noteworthy, award-winning, transformative design projects and who supported and amplified the unique contributions of Black architects and designers. In a remarkable career, Stull founded two firms that were owned and led by Black architects, through which he would shape cityscapes, harmonize architecture and social change, and inspire countless colleagues and mentees.

Stull died on November 28, 2020, at his home in Milton, Massachusetts. He was 83 years old.

Stull was born in Springfield, Ohio, on May 16, 1937, and took an early interest in architecture while accompanying his uncle, a bricklayer, to construction sites. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Ohio State University in 1961, then received a master’s in architecture from Harvard GSD in 1962. In 1970, he received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Ohio State; Boston Architectural College awarded him an honorary degree in 2011.

After graduating from the GSD, Stull would go on to work with the Architects Collaborative in Cambridge, co-founded by Walter Gropius, as well as Samuel Glaser Associates in Boston. In 1966, Stull established Stull Associates, at a time when, it is believed, there were only a dozen Black architects in the United States. In 1969, Stull hired M. David Lee, who was a GSD student at the time; the firm became Stull and Lee Incorporated in 1986.

“There was a confidence about him that radiated. And people liked to listen to him,” Lee told the Boston Globe. “He was so skillful in terms of his thinking and his ability to draw and frame design opportunities that I think people enjoyed being brought into that discussion.”

Stull and Lee Incorporated grew its practice from residential design to major building projects across Boston, earning awards at the highest level of the profession. Stull and Lee received the American Planning Association/Massachusetts Chapter Social Advocacy Award, and earned the American Institute of Architects Honor Award for Architecture as well as the Boston Society of Architects Honor Award for Design for their Ted Williams Tunnel design. Stull and Lee coordinated the design of nine of the city’s Orange Line subway stations, as well as a miles-long park running above them; this work earned them the Presidential Design Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. In particular, Stull and Lee designed the Orange Line’s Ruggles Station, which would emerge as a Boston landmark; the vaulted walkway at the Ruggles Station, connecting Columbus Avenue and the Northeastern University campus, was a particular point of pride for Stull.

Among other projects, Stull and Lee designed Boston’s Roxbury Community College and the Harriet Tubman House, and were lead architects and master planners for the $747 million Southwest Corridor project. In 2004, Stull discussed his design philosophy behind the Roxbury Community College project:

“He was a brilliant draftsman, a wonderful designer, and a thoughtful, philosophical practitioner,” Lee observes in the Boston Globe. “He enjoyed the respect of his peers.”

Alongside built work, Stull devoted his focus and energy to amplifying the contributions of Black architects and designers. Of note, he helped establish the New DesigNation conference; the inaugural session in Philadelphia in November 1996 gathered over 500 Black designers to examine and address the issues faced in the design professions.

Stull leaves two daughters, a son, a sister, and two grandchildren. He was predeceased by his mother Ruth Callahan Stull and his father Robert Stull of Mississippi, and longtime companion Janet Kendrick of Roxbury, Massachusetts.

Womxn in Design on shifts in design pedagogy: “The conditions in which we learn become the conditions we practice and reproduce.”

It’s been almost three years since the #MeToo movement started launching public awareness around the architecture industry’s many fault-lines. While dismantling a culture that has been troublingly hierarchical, sexist, racist, and sometimes predatory is slow, grinding work, the unprecedented events of 2020 seem to be inspiring a kind of sea change at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. “The main changes have been in the coursework, public programming, guest critics on reviews, and who is coming to teach,” says Shira Grosman of the GSD’s Womxn in Design (WiD). The student group has been highlighting the need for a revised pedagogy since first organizing Convergence, a two-day conference in late 2018 that explored the intersection between identity and design—and especially how, in the group’s words, “the conditions in which we learn become the conditions we practice and reproduce.” The conference’s workshops and panels inspired WiD to commission a separate annotated bibliography of identity theories it believes must play a greater role in design education. With sections on Feminist, Cyber-Feminist, Post-Humanist, Critical Indigenous, National Identity, Intersectionalist, Class, Critical Race, Postcolonial, Queer, Critical Disability, and Spirituality theories, the bibliography provides intentionally bite-sized excerpts rather than comprehensive texts. “It was an effort to make things accessible and digestible,” says 2019–20 cochair Fiona Kenney—“articles you could read on the bus in whatever spare time you have as a graduate student.” Currently in its second iteration, the “Bib,” as it’s colloquially called, now seems entirely prescient. Before this summer’s widespread protests and heightened awareness of systemic racism, attempts to integrate new perspectives into the curricula had been uneven across departments at the GSD. “For much of 2019 and 2020, we brainstormed with architecture professor Lisa Haber-Thomson about how to move the Bib into mainstream discourse,” says WiD’s Yashada Wagle, though COVID put a hold on any progress at the time. “The subject matter students are asking to be taught is outside what most faculty know,” adds Grosman. “We want to know about non-Western, non-Eurocentric ideas and projects, practitioners, and scholars.” The most recent Bib, coedited by Grosman and Wagle, substantially increased the content of previous editions and was available in both a color-coded print version for $35 and as a digital PDF for $5. Not only did students and faculty at the GSD buy the publication, but the Bib reached a number of other schools in the US, Canada and, interestingly, Kuwait. “We were also able to archive it at the Barnard Design Library,” notes Grosman. As with any attempt to encapsulate complex issues, the matter of what to include and exclude is a constantly moving target and things are sure to be missed—which is exactly why the bibliography is an ongoing project whose editorial leadership and research group changes every year. Although no new categories are slated for the Bib’s 2021 iteration, it will expand beyond strictly scholarly texts and include film, oral histories, podcasts, images, and articles. “I think in order to teach some subjects differently we need to consider new types of material,” explains Grosman. While the bibliography may have been an offshoot of WiD and a reflection, in part, of the GSD’s many identity-based groups, the hope has always been to benefit the school’s entire community, regardless of identity or affiliation. If introspection is key to changing the industry’s power imbalances, then this seems like a great start. “A number of public programs have responded to the moment,” says Grosman. “I think it’s too early to say that this will continue, but I hope it does.”

How Not to Write About Design: A guide for anyone looking to move beyond form, space, order, and structure

Architects are often reluctant writers, choosing instead to express themselves in other ways. Perhaps this is because architectural education strongly emphasizes graphic over verbal communication, or because the proliferation of overly complex prose in architectural theory engenders distaste for writing among architects. There are many reasons, but one convincing argument is that it is the result of intentional neglect—a symptom of modernist thinking in architecture. Adrian Forty argues, in Words and Buildings, that modernism developed a deep suspicion, even a “horror of language,” in all of the visual arts. “The general expectation of modernism that each art demonstrate its uniqueness through its own medium, and its own medium alone,” he says, “ruled out resort to language.” In other words, modernists insisted that their work should speak for itself. Modernism therefore developed a very limited vocabulary (Forty lists “form,” “space,” “design,” “order,” and “structure” as its key words) and a distinctive “new way of talking about architecture” that was extremely taciturn. It made the difficult task of writing almost superfluous for architects, and they simply chose not to do it. Clearly, though, written language is essential for architects. Architectural drawings do not speak for themselves: any set of drawings is full of essential labels, descriptions, explanations, and disclaimers. And in professional practice, Forty emphasizes, “Language is vital to architects—their success in gaining commissions, and achieving the realization of projects frequently depends upon verbal presentation and persuasiveness.” Much of this happens orally, but client communication, project documentation, press releases, and advertising copy are all routine, indispensable forms of writing in architecture. What might not be vital to architecture, however, is a specifically “architectural” language, vocabulary, or writing style. In a 2013 Arch Daily article, “Why Good Architectural Writing Doesn’t Exist (And, Frankly, Needn’t),” writer Guy Horton asks, “If writing about architecture is to serve the profession on some level, wouldn’t it be best if it reached out to the popular imagination, beyond the confines of institutionalized insularity where architects and ‘architectural writers’ merely talk amongst themselves?” So, he proposes, “Let us posit that there should be no architectural writing, but merely writing that happens to be about architecture.” This might eliminate the jargon and excess complexity that plague architectural writing. It might also embolden architects’ thinking. Sociologist Howard Becker claims that in his own discipline, excess verbiage is a symptom of uncertainty: “writers routinely use meaningless expressions to cover up” weak claims, and timid thinking leads almost inevitably to bad writing. Reluctance to take on the task of writing, suspicion of the communicative potential of language in the arts, and unease with making bold assertions about design all intensify the difficulties of writing about and for architecture. This is especially acute for students in design courses, where writing is rarely a priority. Faculty in three GSD courses in spring 2020 challenged this model, pushing students to face the task of writing boldly. Mack Scogin, Merrill Elam, and Helen Han’s studio, “King Tut’s Skull,” George Legendre’s “Digital Media: Writing Form,” and Pier Paolo Tamburelli and Thomas Kelley’s seminar, “Book Project Number Zero,” each encouraged students to consider writing from a starkly different perspective, but they all started with the assumption that writing plays an essential role in architecture. At the first meeting of “King Tut’s Skull,” students were asked to recall and describe their first spatial memory. Scogin marvels at the results of this simple assignment: “It’s really remarkable what comes out of that writing exercise—the memory and how it’s constantly visited and revisited. . . it’s probably one of the most defining elements in the course.” The extended exercise works two ways: the students build a clear, sophisticated vision around a vague impression, and the faculty establish mutual trust with the students. They “develop a belief in us,” Scogin says, “and we’re really serious about trying to understand them as individuals.” The writing is so remarkable, Han notes, because the students “know that it’s not like ‘Oh, make a form of a building or anything like that.’ It relieves that pressure.” The writing is not “architectural,” in other words. “And so then,” Han says, “they just [write] what they instinctively want to write or how they want to write.” Through the process, the students use writing to understand their own thinking. It becomes, Han explains, “an initial very intuitive way for them to expose themselves in terms of both their interest, but also how they see things.” The writing “opens their mind up . . . . It’s a way for them to discover their own architecture,” Scogin says. However, when they must produce more discipline-specific writing later in the studio—a design thesis statement—the students struggle. “It becomes a hurdle,” Scogin explains, “and they freeze up a bit because all of a sudden: Oh! You’re talking about architecture.” And the challenge for the faculty is to remind them of their fluency. “We just keep putting it back in front of them,” Scogin says, and Han laughs, “Yeah, we keep telling them to write it again, write it again . . . .” Writing about “architecture” was hard until it became, instead, writing about what they know, which is more natural, more powerful. If “King Tut’s Skull” demonstrated that fluency with one kind of writing can help with other modes of expression, “Digital Media: Writing Form” amplified that notion, challenging students to understand architecture by using deeply unfamiliar idioms. They put themselves “in the mindset of the software designer, looking under the hood” of software, Legendre explains. Their task, he says, is more like “writing things” than sketching or modeling them, and they have many ways to do this. The course used calligraphy, haiku, statements in simple mathematical terms, and other modes of writing. Legendre compares the students’ effort to the Exercises in Style, by Raymond Queneau, “where a meaningless incident is retold 100 ways, using a completely different idiom, and the only idea is to help you focus on the variation.” The course therefore approached “computation as a problem of comparative literature.” Legendre asked students to position their writing somewhere between machine language (“which is gibberish to us,” he says) and the user interface of “buttons and sliders” (“which enable us to do whatever we want”). In this unfamiliar place, “the struggle with the opacity of instruments is somehow bringing back the question of literacy,” Legendre says. The students used a language in which they could invent things, where they could get at “the essence of what we are trying to do” in design. They reached this position gradually, first becoming attentive to how architects read space, and moving “through the process of understanding how to write space in all three dimensions.” They struggled in this territory between incomprehension and free expression to learn again how to use writing to say important things in architecture. Meanwhile, in “Book Project Number Zero,” students focused on a largely unwritten, imaginary text to develop a richer understanding of architectural design. The seminar began from the assumption that “architecture is inseparable from bookmaking,” that “books are the main instrument of architectural propaganda.” And, despite the challenges they might face as writers, “It’s quite important for an architect to write,” Tamburelli explains, because “it makes his or her architecture better—more conscious, more intellectually sophisticated.” Students wrote a short introduction and an index for a book they envisioned (themes varied broadly, from ideas about the personhood of rivers to the lamentable state of architecture in China). However, the main concern of the course was not the writing—it was the book itself, as a designed object, an object “with weight,” Kelley says, “stronger” in some ways than a building. Through the process, the students came to understand the book as “a sort of a tool to actually make architecture,” Tamburelli observes, as well as a tool of self-reflection. Whether architects are bad or excellent writers is immaterial to the understanding that emerged in each of these courses: that a “horror of language” inherited from modernism is deeply misguided. Writing is an essential creative medium and a vital tool for making architecture.

Excerpt: A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg, by Benjamin Bradlow

“Five years ago, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Just City Lab published The Just City Essays: 26 Visions of Inclusion, Equity and Opportunity. The questions it posed were deceptively simple: What would a just city look like? And what could be the strategies to get there? These questions were posed to mayors, architects, artists, philanthropists, educators and journalists in 22 cities, who told stories of global injustice and their dreams for reparative and restorative justice in the city. These essays were meant as a provocation, a call to action. Now, during these times of dissonance, unrest, and uncertainty, their contents have become ever more important. For the next 26 weeks [starting June 15, 2020], the GSD and the Just City Lab will republish one essay a week here and at designforthejustcity.org. We hope they may continue conversations of our shared responsibility for the just city. We believe design can repair injustice. We believe design must restore justice, especially that produced by its own hand. We believe in justice for Black Americans. We believe in justice for all marginalized people. We believe in a Just City.” —Toni L. Griffin, Professor in Practice of Urban Planning, founder of the Just City Lab, and editor of The Just City Essays

A Democratic Infrastructure for Johannesburg

By Benjamin Bradlow

There are two main legacies that define urban inequality in South Africa: housing and transport. Apartheid was not only a racial ideology. It was also a spatial planning ideology.

Johannesburg’s development into a wealthy, white core of business and residential activity, with peripheral black dormitory townships, was a result of specific legislation and government action accountable only to white citizens. Black people were confined to houses in townships that had little economic value. Black townships were synonymous with urban poverty. These houses were far away from business activity and jobs. As population movement controls eroded in the late 1980s, informal settlements began to concentrate next to formal townships. The story of Johannesburg, the financial center of South Africa, can help understand how the struggle to build these connections defines the extent to which Johannesburg can be considered “just.”

Today, Johannesburg offers unique insights into the prospects for other cities in Africa. This is not because most cities in Africa are similar to or are likely to become similar to Johannesburg. But Johannesburg has a basic historical characteristic that resembles that of many African cities: it was planned for inequality. Johannesburg’s uniqueness also marks it as a lodestar for other African cities. It is a meeting point of migrants from all over the continent, and an economic engine of growth on the continent. These flows of people, money, and goods, in and out of the city, mean that the impact of the city is continental.

The notion of a just city in Africa will have to accommodate the extent to which the hopes of earlier generations of social scientists and policy-makers for rural-led development on the continent have now been rendered moot by economic patterns that are both global and local. In Johannesburg, one of the most industrialized cities on the African continent has become a magnet for rural South Africans, and international migrants from other African countries. The primary infrastructural challenge is not only about identifying technical shortcomings or mere numbers of delivery. It is about generating the voice from below to demand that infrastructure reach those who need it most, and to ensure the political will to manage contentious distributional decisions about land and public finances.

I want to show why this is so difficult, and how, in order to make the decisions that are “just,” we need to first make sense of the history that lies behind those decisions. Continue reading on designforthejustcity.org… 

Land for a City on a Hill: Alex Krieger’s iconic tour of Boston

 

Watch as Alex Krieger, professor and former chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design, takes viewers on his iconic tour of Boston. Stopping at locations key to the growth of the city—from East Boston, which was once five islands that were consolidated in the late 18th to 19th century, to the Shawmut and South Boston Peninsulas—Krieger speaks of the historic and contemporary geographical, infrastructural, and racial conditions of Boston, a city in “constant need to create land.”

Landscape Architecture Magazine discusses “Dismantling the Design Syllabus” with GSD’s Sara Zewde, Anita Berrizbeitia

Amid a year of design introspection on issues of race, culture, identity, and equity, Landscape Architecture Magazine’s November 2020 issue takes up “Dismantling the Design Syllabus,” presenting faculty from various landscape architecture programs and their thoughts on what an anti-racist pedagogy looks like. The magazine spoke with, among others, Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Sara Zewde (MLA ’15), Assistant Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture, and Anita Berrizbeitia (MLA ’87), Professor of Landscape Architecture & Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture. Upon her GSD faculty appointment this past summer, Zewde became the first tenure-track Black woman professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture (According to the magazine, Zewde is one of 19 Black landscape architecture professors at accredited programs in the United States). As reporter Zach Mortice writes, landscape architecture programs across the United States are confronting questions of race and social justice that have been deepened in the months following the May murder of George Floyd by police, and months of protests thereafter. With discussions and dialogue around structural racism shifting toward questions and reassessments of design curricula and reading lists—in landscape architecture programs and throughout design schools—Zewde tells the magazine, “I have never seen this kind of conversation around the actual curriculum, and that’s what excites me.” In the feature, Berrizbeitia offers additional observations on ways the landscape architecture field can and should continue to evolve in light of recent cultural dialogue. Mortice observes that the field’s broad focus on ecological frameworks is evermore relevant, but that without equivalent focus and attention given to social considerations, including community, economics, and culture, landscape architecture can encourage gentrification and displacement. “By focusing so much on ecological practices, [landscape architects have] put these ecological practices where the money is, rather than where the money is not,” Berrizbeitia says. “The field has not understood that ecology also has social content embedded in it.” Following reconsideration of the landscape architecture curriculum this summer, Berrizbeitia committed the Department of Landscape Architecture to a close, introspective look at issues of race and justice, including the introduction of intra-departmental facilitated discussions on race and gender and a departmental diversity committee. Within the curriculum, faculty committed to re-centering disciplinary questions throughout core and elective courses by expanding precedents and situating projects within a broader set of discussions in order to more carefully interrogate and address these concerns and issues. In this summer’s GSD series Architecture, Design, Action, Berrizbeitia offered further expansion on these plans. “To demonstrate the relevance of the field, we often boast of the multivalence of landscape architecture, how it touches on all aspects of the natural and the social spheres,” she said. “Yet as often as we explain the many ways that landscape relates to everything, we neglect to explain what landscape hides behind its physical manifestation, its appearance. We do not as often discuss the histories, processes, and practices that have led to the present state of landscape, to the climate crisis in all its manifestations, to pandemics, and to social injustice and exclusionary public realms.” Zewde is founding principal of Studio Zewde, a design firm practicing landscape architecture, urbanism, and public art. Her practice and research start from her contention that the discipline of landscape architecture is tightly bound by precedents and typologies rooted in specific traditions that must be challenged, and her projects exemplify how sensitivities to culture, ecology, and craft can serve as creative departures for expanding design traditions. In 2014, while a GSD degree candidate, Zewde was named the annual National Olmsted Scholar by the Landscape Architecture Foundation, among other awards and honors. Returning to the GSD as a member of the faculty, she is currently leading the GSD option studio “Cotton Kingdom, Now” and teaching in the landscape architecture core sequence. Presently the chair of the GSD’s Department of Landscape Architecture, Berrizbeitia—who, like Zewde, earned her MLA from the GSD—focuses research on design theories of modern and contemporary landscape architecture, the productive aspects of landscapes, and Latin American cities and landscapes. “Landscape architecture, landscape, land itself—this is where, simply put, life and all of its conflicts takes place,” Berrizbeitia said in the GSD’s Architecture, Design, Action. “This means that, as long as the capitalist spatial mode prevails, landscape is always a contested ground.”