The Art in Architecture

Spanning the length of Gund Hall’s sunny back patio stands a life-size black-and-white drawing of a stone wall, a cluster of students and critics squinting to assess its merits. This is the final review for Ewa Harabasz’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) course “Drawing for Designers 2, Human Presence: Appearance in Natural and Built Environments.” Students spent the semester observing closely and developing drawing techniques, capping off their work with the final collaborative stone wall project. Each student created a single frame 1:1 scale drawing on large sheets intended for watercolor—bumpy and uneven, creating more texture—which were then pieced together to create a continuous wall.

The range in styles that students developed this semester is evident in the shifting image of the whole from section to section. Tosin Oshinowo , a practicing architect and 2024-2025 Loeb Fellow at the GSD  who was enrolled in the class, aimed to capture the “materiality of the stone,” she said, “without copying its patterns of darkness and lightness.” Junye Zhong (MLA ’25) relied on the texture of the paper and the bumpy tack board on top of which it was created to layer texture and strong contrasts, emphasizing the cuts in the stone. One student captured in meticulous detail the ivy at the top of the wall; another portrayed the patches of sunlight on the stones, encouraging the eye to move across the drawing.

The project is the culmination of what Harabasz defined as a semester-long focus on “an expressive and playful supplement to computer-based labor.” Because architecture and design students inevitably spend hours working with various software systems that help them realize their designs, meticulously mapping out structures and landscapes on computer screens, said Harabasz, it’s equally as important that they develop their creativity and drawing skills.

“I want students to gain sensitivity and imagination,” she added, “and to strengthen their perception of the human body and architectural space and design.” She noted that the skills they develop by observing closely and learning to draw will enrich their work across the span of their careers.

Harabasz  is a working artist who hails from Poland. Her drawings, paintings, and mixed-media projects are part of the permanent collection of the National Museum in Poznań, Poland, and have been exhibited in museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in Vaasa, Finland and the Kulturzentrum bei der Minoriten in Graz, Austria. Much of her work is created in large-scale formats, and deals with the violence of war and domestic abuse. Her recent series, “Icons,” for example, features stark photographs of people in the midst of conflict and grief, set on top of gold-leaf backgrounds. The images are reminiscent of medieval portraits of saints, the Madonna, and other religious figures, perhaps inspired in part by her work, earlier in her career, restoring paintings and frescoes in Poland and Italy.

This semester’s work in “Drawing for Designers 2” began with charcoal drawings. Harabasz asked students to hone in on an emotional experience, gathering photographs to prompt memories, and to use charcoal in an “additive/subtractive process”—layering it onto the page as a gray base, and then erasing it to create highlights. The subject matter students chose to focus on ranged widely. Oshinowo explained that she had used charcoal in the past, “but never for abstraction.” In composing an image of a braid, she appreciated the challenge to approach the project with a different aesthetic in mind. Sabrina Madera (MArch I ’25) used the assignment to reveal to the group a recent surgery. “I felt I had to show the drawing publicly,” Madera explained. “Drawing the self-portrait forced me to have it out there.”

To offer more insight into the artistic process, Harabasz invited Polish abstractionist Urszula Śliz , PhD, to speak with the class from Poland, via Zoom. Śliz’s work, in mediums from drawing and painting to sculpture and collage, has been exhibited in museums around the world, including the Pavilion of the Four Domes Wroclaw Poland, the Nowich Museum UK, and many other cultural institutions in Europe.

For the last ten years, she’s been working on “Transposition,” a series of collages made from her own photographs of everyday materials, such as construction tape. In one collage, the tape, with red, pink, and white stripes, is criss-crossed over flowers fallen on the ground. Viewers might make their own associations—for Śliz, the red and white make her think of her Polish roots—but, she says, the tape creates its own random shapes and forms, and the photograph serves to re-process the large-scale collage. Part of her inspiration, she explained, was the first known photograph, View from the Window at Le Gras (1826 or 1827) by Nicéphore Niépce, which, she says, transforms the black-and-white rooftops and buildings into abstract forms, estranging the houses from reality—abstract art. Śliz walked students through her process so that they could think about their own place in the art world, sources of inspiration, and how their own work might evolve across mediums.

As Harabasz instructs students on how to quickly and accurately reveal what they see, she also encourages them think about perspective and form in public contexts. Each semester, she and her class install collaborative, mind-bending spatial experiences on the fifth floor of Gund Hall. This winter, their black-and-white optical illusions were made by painting stripes and laying down tape to change the perceived shape of the walls and floors: Here, a new door appears. There, a bulge pushes out. A blue cat perches at the top of wall, playing with a spool of strings. Step to the left or right, and it splits apart on a corner. The installation invites a sense of play, and engagement with other students, faculty, and staff in the space.

For the stone wall critique, several former students of Harabasz’s returned to share their insights. Paul Mok  (MArch I ’18) a New York–based architect and artist who was named 2024-2025 GSD Alumni Mentor of the Year , showed the class an in-process drawing that he created using a technique he developed back in 2017, during an independent study with Harabasz (one of four courses he took with her). He’s completed two other highly detailed pen and ink drawings  with the same methods, starting with marking the page with unplanned strokes, and then slowly filling to make the image.

“We always ask design students what their concepts are,” he explained, “and critique whether their designs are justified by their rationales. But what about intuition? I started this process of putting random strokes on paper without any preconceived ideas.”

For Mok, drawing is about “letting the mind wander,” an internal counterpoint to his work as an architect creating well-planned structures for others to inhabit. Similarly, two of Harabasz’s former students, Yuetong Li (MDes ’25) and Eva Cao (MDes ’25), spoke to the importance of the drawing classes they took at the GSD in developing their ability to “look not just at one part of an image,” said Li, “but to see the picture as a whole.” Cao appreciated the sense of narrative she developed in the course, combining image and text. They both found that drawing by hand is a useful tool, in addition to digital drawing.

Harabasz argued that developing their hand drawing skills grants designers the power to more clearly share their vision with others, and, perhaps even more importantly, to express who they are and what they value: “How do you view the world? What’s important? What do you see first, and second? How do we push the viewer to read the image as we want them to? This is what I teach.”

When the High Tech Abounds, the Low Tech Shines: A Review of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale

Across from the main entrance to the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale  stands a courtyard lined with bamboo scaffolding. An ancient Chinese structure fashioned with lashed bamboo poles, such scaffolding dates back thousands of years and remains ubiquitous throughout Hong Kong, wherever construction is underway.

This particular bamboo scaffolding, erected in a Venetian courtyard, serves a different purpose: it is both set piece and enticement, part of a collateral event called Projecting Future Heritage: A Hong Kong Archive , curated by GSD alumni Fai Au (MDes ’11) and Ying Zhou (MArch ’07) with Sunnie Sy Lau. The scaffolding draws in visitors, showcasing its artful existence while leading to an adjacent warehouse-turned-gallery that catalogs examples of Hong Kong’s post-war building typologies and infrastructures.¹ Employing natural materials and collective practices, the bamboo scaffolding evokes a sense of ingenuity and timelessness.

This year’s architecture biennale, also known as the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, carries the theme “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. ” Explaining this title, curator Carlo Ratti aligned the Latin intelligens with multiple forms of knowledge available to humankind. (Gens, after all, is Latin for people). Nevertheless, since the biennale opened last month, reviews—including “A Tech Bro Fever Dream”  and “Can Robots Make the Perfect Aperol Spritz?” — have largely focused on the omnipresence of technology. True, the high tech abounds in a range of guises, from algae-infused building materials to sensor-ladened space skins. Yet, even as the dangling automatons and LiDAR maps underscore the “Artificial,” an expansive understanding of intelligence, one that embraces the “Natural” and the “Collective,” remains palpable, especially among contributions by members of the GSD community. This undercurrent surfaces through visitors’ “low tech” experiences with sensorial input, animal encounters, and communal engagement.

A Multisensory Biennale

The 2025 Architecture Biennale encompasses 300 installations, 66 National Pavilions, and 11 collateral events (as well as more than 100 GSD-affiliated contributors). Given this concentration of projects, one would anticipate an array of sights, sounds, scents, and atmospheric conditions. What appears striking, however, is the number of projects that rely on visitors’ immersive and multisensory involvement for full effect.

While most installations discourage hands-on interaction (“non toccare!”), tactile sensation nonetheless reigns supreme. This begins with Ratti’s main exhibition, staged primarily in the Arsenale’s Cordiere (a former rope factory/warehouse), which opens with the project Terms and Conditions . Here visitors move from the bright Venetian sunlight to a dim, muggy vestibule containing the waste heat from the air conditioning system that maintains the vast hall beyond at a comfortable 23 degrees Celsius (73.4 degrees Fahrenheit). The oppressive heat envelops visitors, offering them a glimpse of Venice’s projected future climatic conditions as they move beneath suspended air conditioning units, finally emerging into the Cordiere’s cool, light-filled, low-humidity interior where hundreds of exhibits await.

The immersive experiences continue with installations that cloak visitors in sound—dripping water; awe-inspiring music reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey; humming frequencies, and more. One such exhibit—Oxyville  by Jean-Michel Jarre, Maria Grazia Mattei, and GSD professor Antoine Picone—uses electronic music to explore the relationship between 3D audio and architecture. Within a space illuminated by glowing blue lights, visitors experience soundtracks that conjure different “sonic architectures,” such as that of a cathedral or, perhaps, a nightclub.

Other exhibits involve perceptible odors. Their inclusion isn’t necessarily intentional, although it is for some installations, such as Sound Greenfall   and Grounded , the Türkiye Pavilion. Still, in many circumstances, discernable aromas become integral experiential components of a given project. For example, with its dense concentration of indoor microclimate-producing plants, Building Biospheres —the Belgium Pavilion, curated by GSD professor Bas Smets and Stefano Mancuso—proves incredibly fragrant. Meanwhile, the rectangular blocks of earth (chinampas) that populate Chinampa Veneta , the Mexico Pavilion, evoke the shallow-water environments in which these life-supporting landscape elements traditionally float.

The exhibits are diverse visually, with intriguing dynamic elements and textured surfaces—smoke, water, lava, wood, vegetation—to catch one’s eye. Film features prominently, at times animating wrap-around enclosures to immerse visitors in the imagery. Stresstest , the German Pavilion (which includes a projects by GSD alumni Frank Barkow [MArch ’90], Regine Leibinger [MArch ’91], and design critic in landscape architecture Silvia Benedito [MAUD ’04]), employs this strategy, filling three walls of the pavilion’s soaring main space with infrared heat maps and alarming news footage of warming city centers. (A tolling bell—our planet’s death knell?—sounds in the background). Former GSD Loeb Fellow Tosin Oshinowo (LF ’25) harnesses a similar approach on a smaller scale for Alternative Urbanism: The Self-Organized Markets of Lagos . This installation’s screens surround visitors with the bustling activity of three Nigerian markets that recirculate so-called waste items from industrialized societies (clothing, auto parts, and more)—repairing, altering, and reusing them to create a sustainable system that transcends conventional patterns of consumption.

While planning the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, Ratti and his curatorial team no doubt recognized that all this sensory input could prove overwhelming. Perhaps this is one reason behind the minimalist AI descriptions that appear, in English and Italian, alongside the designers’ longer project explanations. Some may be disturbed by these pared-down depictions, at times a mere two sentences versus the designers’ original multi-paragraph text; have critical nuances been lost? Is this a commentary on the human attention span? Does architectural discourse really require such CliffsNotes? All these may well be the case. Yet, after experiencing a few dozen installations and realizing hundreds more await, it becomes clear that, whatever else they may be, the AI descriptions are a kindness, a “low-power mode” for visitors’ mental stamina as they undertake this endurance event. An added bonus: the AI text ruthlessly eliminates the discipline’s notorious archi-speak, in theory making the biennale more accessible to the public, including the mass of tourists who roam the Venetian cobblestone streets.

Animal Encounters

Aside from thieving seagulls and Piazza San Marco’s iconic winged lion, animals aren’t often associated with Venice, by said tourists or locals. A number of biennale installations seek to change this, including The Living Orders of Venice  by Studio Gang, led by GSD professor Jeanne Gang. This project uses iNaturalist , a citizen science app, to enact a Biennale Bioblitz : a crowd-sourced field study to document local animal activity during the show’s 6-month run. In addition, the firm’s exhibit in the Cordiere showcases prototypical habitats to accommodate Venice’s non-human residents—the birds, bats, and bees displaced throughout centuries of construction, which destroyed their natural architectures. Instrumental for the planet’s health, these creatures require appropriate homes in increasing crowded urban centers, and Studio Gang proposes species-specific abodes to complement Venice’s existing classical architecture.

Architecture for animals likewise plays a role in Song of the Cricket , which models a rehabilitation effort for endangered species—in this case, the Adriatic Marbled Bush-Cricket, believed extinct for fifty years before its 1990s rediscovery in the wetlands of northeastern Italy. Alongside integrated research and monitoring programs, Song of the Cricket offers modular, floating islands as portable breeding stations that reintroduce healthy cricket populations to the Venetian Lagoon. Emblazoned with “BUSH-CRICKETS ON BOARD,” these temporary habitats support multiple cricket lifecycles, reducing threats of predation and disease. Other components of the project include a sound garden featuring the crickets’ song, described “as a bioindicator of ecosystem health,” unheard in Venice for over a century.

Similarly, animals emerge as crucial contributors in the Korea Pavilion, titled Little Toad, Little Toad: Unbuilding A Pavilion . With the project Overwriting, Overriding , exhibitor/GSD alumna Dammy Lee (MArch ’13) turns to the structure’s non-human occupants—a large honey locust tree and Mucca, “the [cow-spotted] cat who roams the space as if it were its own home”—to interrogate the pavilion’s history, highlighting the “hidden entities that have silently coexisted with the pavilion.” The installation 30 Million Years Under the Pavilion , by artist Yena Young, complements this narrative with a camera mounted beneath the structure to document unexpected visitors. The footage reveals that Giardini critters regularly frequent this and presumable all pavilions, which typically remain closed to the public when a biennale is not in session. (One is reminded of Remy the Cat, the unofficial GSD mascot who trapses through Gund Hall at will.) Thus the Korea Pavilion, built in 1995 yet reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s designs of the 1920s, serves as a home for not just the architects, artists, curators, and works they produce, but also cats (Mucca and two others), mice, birds, spiders, flies, and even a hedgehog—all cataloged by hand in pencil below wall-mounted Ipads that depict their visits. Amid the hi-tech fanfare that characterizes much of the 2025 Architecture Biennale, the ease, simplicity, and whimsy of Lee’s and Young’s projects, in conception and execution, feels particularly powerful.

The Power of Community

The Polish Pavilion, Lares and Penates: On Building a Sense of Security in Architecture , offers another commanding and clever presentation that shines among the National Pavilions. Infused with its own dose of whimsy, this exhibition zeros in on the ways in which architecture creates a sense of security, relying on two concepts from two very different communities: solutions derived from conventional building and health regulations, such as roofs, electrical codes, and evacuation signs; and others rooted in traditional Slavic cultural practices like brandishing dowsing (divining) rods to determine fortuitous home placement, installing horseshoes in doorways for luck, and burning smudge sticks to banish negative energy from a space. Lares and Penates, defensive household deities of Ancient Rome, lend their name to the exhibition while its designers present these security-bestowing practices as equally valid, complementary elements that, as a brochure accompanying the pavilion states, “help people feel more secure in a swiftly changing reality.” This non-judgmental approach is exemplified by the placement of a bright red fire extinguisher at the heart of a stone-and-shell encrusted niche. Fire codes, after all, are sacred in their own way.

While highlighting the human desire for security, the Polish Pavilion also alludes to our innate tendency to find strength in community, to connect with others to share ideas, resources, and support. Since its inception in 1980, Venice’s International Architecture Exhibition has embodied this urge for the cultivation of community on a global scale. That people today continue to congregate for the biennale, even though digitalization makes it possible to distribute knowledge without transcontinental trudging, indicates that many still yearn for actual (versus virtual) contact. Two installations openly address this impulse, as they provide platforms for present-day gathering and discussion. At the same time, they offer clear connections to the biennale’s communal past.

The Speakers’ Corner , by Christopher Hawthorne, former Loeb Fellow Florencia Rodriguez(LF ’14), and GSD design critics Sharon Johnston (MArch ’95) and Mark Lee (MArch ’95), who comprise the firm Johnston Marklee, offers a forum for workshops, lectures, and panels within the Cordiere. The inspiration for this sixty-person grandstand, made of unfinished white pine, stems from the 1980 Architecture Biennale—specifically, I Mostri d’Critici, curated by architectural historians/critics Charles Jencks, Christian Norberg-Shulz, and Vincent Scully, underscoring the disciplinary role of criticism and discourse. Throughout the 2025 biennale’s run, the Speakers’ Corner is hosting a series of events focused on future possibilities for architecture criticism—including those posed by the emerging role of artificial intelligence, as signaled by the biennale’s AI project descriptions.

The other installation that highlights collective gathering and this biennale’s connection with the past is Aquapraça by CRA – Carlo Ratti Associati and Höweler + Yoon (founded by GSD professor Eric Höweler and alumna J. Meejin Yoon [MAUD ‘02]). Envisioned as a floating plaza to prompt discussions around climate change, this 400-square-meter entity will debut in the Venice Lagoon on September 4 before migrating across the Atlantic Ocean to join COP30 in Belém, Brazil, in November of this year. (A large model of the floating platform is currently on display in the Cordiere.) Aquapraça’s pure geometries recall those of Aldo Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo  of 1979, a floating wooden theater that became an icon of the First Architecture Biennale before traveling via tugboat to Dubrovnik.

It is no accident that both the Speakers’ Corner and Aquapraça echo the aesthetic simplicity and communal intent of Rossi’s aquatic building. These projects illustrate the human desire to gather, to experience sights, sounds, and environments in real life. The sustained existence of the biennale attests to the continued significance of collective intelligence as well as creating places and events that bring people together.

1. In addition to Fai Au (MDes ’11) and Ying Zhou (MArch ’07), Projecting Future Heritage includes many GSD affiliates. Jonathan Yeung (MArch ’20) and Wing Yuen (MArch ’22) are part of the curatorial team. Exhibitors include Max Hirsh (PhD ’12) and Dorothy Tang (MLA ’12) with Airport Urbanism: Remaking Hong Kong, 1975–2025; Su Chang (MArch ’17) and Frankie Au (MArch ’16) of Su Chang Design Research Office with Made in Kwun Tong: Between Type and Territory; and Betty Ng (MArch ’09), Chi Yan Chan (MArch ’08) and Juan Minguez (MArch ’08) of Collective with Pixelated Landscapes. ↩︎

Remembering Graham de Condé Gund (1940–2025)

Graham de Condé Gund (MArch ’68, MAUD ’69), FAIA, architect, arts patron-collector, and philanthropist, died on June 6, 2025. He was 84. It is widely known that he was one of the warmest, gentlest, and most generous architects anywhere.

Those adjectives don’t always align with the kind of accomplishment achieved by Graham Gund. He had a gift for persuading clients, collaborators, and contractors toward his point of view. Twenty-five years ago, my partner Doug Reed led our firm’s work on Gund’s family residence in Cambridge. Doug, who is like Graham highly intuitive, experienced occasional differences of opinion with Graham over ideas, materials, and details. But they left every meeting with accord and respect.

Doug and I reflected on this on the day we learned of Graham’s passing. Just two years ago, we’d completed some adjustments to the garden, now mature, and Doug was recalling Graham’s joy at the growth of the trees over a quarter century, and he was decisive about removals and radical pruning required to maintain the original design intent. That same year, I enjoyed a summer evening there with the Gunds and a handful of guests. After dinner, Graham brought out a mounted illustrative landscape plan and sweetly reminisced about his satisfaction working with the firm over the years—and for his deep appreciation for the resulting garden.

The firm known today as Gund Partnership (formerly Graham Gund Architects) began early in its founder’s career. After receiving his MArch and MAUD degrees at the GSD, Gund crossed Harvard Square to work for Walter Gropius, founder of The Architects Collaborative (TAC). Gropius died that same year, perhaps foreshadowing that Gund would open his own firm just two years later. The architectural writer Paul Goldberger, who authored the firm’s 1999 monograph, notes that Gund was a devout modernist who had the energy and commitment to build big. Indeed, one of the earliest realized ground-up projects from Graham Gund Architects was the 1976 brick ziggurat Hyatt Regency Hotel on the Charles River in Cambridge—an ambitious translation of the Pritzker family’s penchant for shaping the identity of their hotels through the drama of a grand atrium.

As an architect–developer in the 1970s, Gund applied his resources to preserving historic buildings that had fallen into ruin. In 1972, he saved the 1814 Cambridge Courthouse by Charles Bullfinch from demolition, renewing it with mixed-use spaces of unusual grace and beauty, including space for his own practice, where Gund Partnership remains more than 50 years later. In this project and in the Church Court Condominiums (1983) in Boston, his rescuing of historic resources aligned with a commitment to adaptation through the juxtaposition of historic and contemporary building languages. Gund’s work in this period led the famed Yale historian Vincent Scully to call him “a convinced preservationist” in his forward to the 1999 monograph.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Gund’s work became animated by an interest in surface pattern and composition. Boston Globe critic Robert Campbell wrote in 1989 that Mr. Gund was “quite possibly the most playful architect of any importance” in American history. “Playful” isn’t exactly right, and Gund himself rejected the term. A more useful way of thinking about this interest learns from Gund’s profound love of sculpture and painting and composition. Gund’s own introduction in the Goldberger monograph is the only proof we need that it was his dedication to fine art that animated his architectural expression.

Gund spends nearly all that text describing his “passion for art and . . . a fascination with the artistic notions of our time.” He relates his devotion to the shapes of Ellsworth Kelly; the lines and colors of Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and Hans Hofmann; the agitated compositions of Frank Stella’s mid-period work; and the scale and gesture achieved in projects by Christo and Jean Claude. These are just a few of the artists he collected. But his interpretations of this work seem to become part of a personal manifesto that aims to “erode the edge between art and architecture” toward a heightened “engagement of the person in the experience of the place created.”

While his life in architecture in those years was driven by an artistic sensibility, so too was his collecting—paired with immense philanthropy in the arts. Gund and his wife Ann raised the bar in the arts community with their decades of lead gifts to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), decades of giving and building at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and the Westminster School in Simsbury, Connecticut, decades of support for the American Repertory Theater, and many more institutions, including the leading public broadcasting organization GBH. He helped bring Ellsworth Kelly’s colorful Boston Panels to the Joseph Moakley Courthouse in Boston and contributed to collections at the US Mission at the United Nations. He was a trustee of the MFA, the National Building Museum, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and founder and trustee of the Boston Foundation for Architecture.

Perhaps the most remarkable illustration of this beneficence is Gund Partnership’s work on dozens of projects at Kenyon College, where Gund received his undergraduate degree in psychology in 1963. Beginning in 1999, the firm completed spaces for classrooms and study centers, dining, housing, recreation and athletics, and the arts. In all, Gund’s architectural contributions to Kenyon’s campus totals 18 projects, which comprise 45 individual buildings; another two are currently under construction. Most prominent in this one-of-a-kind dedication to improving campus life and the quality of education at Kenyon is the Graham Gund Gallery (2011), which houses 80 works donated by the Gunds, including objects by Picasso, Frank Stella, Kiki Smith, Paul Manship, and Christo and Jean-Claude. A massive Richard Serra tower stands next to the gallery—also a gift from Ann and Graham Gund.

Kenyon President Julie Kornfeld said this upon Gund’s passing: “It is impossible to capture in words the mark Graham made on Kenyon. It is, however, visible everywhere on campus—from the ambition of our campus master plan, to the brilliant and subtle details of the buildings he lovingly designed and restored, to the masterful works of art he created homes and sites for, to the breathtaking view corridors he spotted and preserved.”

The idea of a single firm producing the programmatic and expressive identity of a campus harkens to an era long gone, when architects such as Ralph Adams Cram (Princeton University, Sweet Briar College), McKim, Mead & White (Harvard Business School), William Welles Bosworth (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Horace Trumbauer and Julian F. Abele (Duke University) produced entire campus precincts. What makes Kenyon College distinct among these is that the architect’s design services were accompanied by hefty philanthropic contributions to set it all on course toward a promising future.

A coda

The GSD’s George Gund Hall, completed in 1972 by architect John Andrews, was named for Graham’s father, George Gund II (A.B. ’09); he also graduated, simultaneously, in the first class of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration (eventually Harvard Business School). Later in life, after amassing great wealth, George Gund II served as a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, from 1954 to 1960, and became a major American philanthropist. He endowed two professorships at Harvard. George Gund’s grand fortune was left in trusts that were to be managed by his children. It was the siblings that determined, after their father’s death, that a lead gift to the school that had recently granted Graham his degrees in architecture and urban design would enable the GSD project to succeed in the face of the early 1970s economic recession. That legacy of generosity is what Graham and Ann, and the entire Gund family, have always stood for.

Malkit Shoshan on Design as an Agent of Change

Class Day at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) is a celebratory time for graduating students and their families, a day to honor achievements and reflect on the potential of a design education to impact the world beyond Harvard. In past years, invited speakers from outside the GSD community have joined the proceedings to share perspectives on design shaped through their own professional, academic, and philanthropic pursuits. The Class of 2025 will hear from someone who is already well-known at Gund Hall, and whose work is at the forefront of what design means for the world today—a world in conflict.

Malkit Shoshan, a design critic in Urban Planning and Design at the GSD, has built a practice and pedagogical methodology that foregrounds how designers can understand the sources of conflict and ultimately envision a more just and peaceful world. Much of her early work originated in the specific histories and geographies of Israel and Palestine. As founder and director of the architectural think tank Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (FAST) , Shoshan explores spaces of conflict in the region, foregrounds their histories, and envisions possible futures.

Over the past year, Shoshan has shared her perspective with the GSD in the role of Senior Loeb Scholar, another position that, in the past, has been filled by visiting scholars and practitioners. In this vital role Shoshan, presented her work and led a series of conversations that brought together interdisciplinary participants. She challenged the community to think deeply about how design can both address conflict in the present and define spaces of care and repair. Shoshan’s visually rich presentations featured layered images that evoke the complexity of her subject. Archival materials, detailed geographic studies, and personal stories came together to drive new narratives.

An ethos of design informed by a commitment to human rights underlies Shoshan’s courses at the GSD, including Forms of Assembly, an advanced research seminar for Master in Design Studies (MDes) students to prepare open projects. The course encourages approaches to design that inspire democratic processes and broad participatory discussions. It is in that spirit that Shoshan will address her students and the wider community. In advance of her address, Shoshan spoke with the GSD’s William Smith about her work and her message to the Class of 2025.

Given the many projects that you currently have underway as a teacher, scholar, and practitioner, why was it important to you to take on the additional role of Senior Loeb Scholar?

My work is situated at the intersection of spatial design and human rights. We at FAST use architecture, urban planning, and participatory design processes to make visible and address public concerns, co-developing alternative visions through design. We primarily collaborate with institutions such as UN agencies but also work directly with local communities in conflict-affected regions. Our initial projects, which started decades ago, were in Israel-Palestine, my homeland.

The Senior Loeb Scholarship, I believe, was a response to the events following October 7th. The brutal Hamas attack on Israeli civilians was devastating, as was the subsequent Israeli response. We are part of an international community, interconnected by shared humanity. Moreover, the technologies available us today project the news in eerie high resolution and in real-time, straight into our mobile devices. Even at a distance, we are close to each other.

This period was overwhelming and deeply personal. It was especially painful for me: most of my family is in Israel, and I have friends in Gaza. I have been working on a project since 2020 with a group of Gazan farmers, studying how the Israeli blockade and occupation protocols impact daily life on their small farm. This project was awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Sadly, the farm has now been destroyed; many farmers have been killed, and those who remain are living in tents, surviving each day, hour by hour, minute by minute.

All of this is part of my personal background, but I was not alone in feeling overwhelmed. At the GSD, I had students eager to talk about these issues. They wanted a safe space for conversations—personal and professional. Because we are all driven by hope, I used the Senior Loeb Scholarship as an umbrella to organize a series of lectures, events, conversations, and workshops with students and practitioners—including scholars, policymakers, civil servants, artists, architects, and human rights lawyers. The goal was to explore how injustice manifests at different scales and in various spaces and to learn how spatial design can contribute to addressing these complex issues.

One of the discussions you organized focused on the theme of “care.” How does care manifest in design?

An important aspect for me was emphasizing not only the humanization of each other but also care amidst the violence that surrounds us. We cannot ignore or suppress these narratives. In her book The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit writes:

“What’s your story? It’s all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and prisons out of them. To be without a story is to be lost in a vast world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.”

I often cite this quote, as well as the long and important essay of Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others. Sontag discusses the role of empathy and imagination, with a virtual meditative conversation with Virginia Woolf—highlighting the challenge we face in truly understanding and imagining others’ experiences and suffering.  These writings inspired the framework for my events: how can we, during the most difficult times, put ourselves in someone else’s story? How can design help foster empathy and expand our imagination?

Design represents a way to imagine what else is possible, to speculate on a future beyond violence and despair. It provides a space where we can rethink and reimagine our possibilities, offering hope in a very challenging world. Escaping this sense of helplessness is difficult, but I believe that engaging with design as a form of active hope can be part of the solution.

By sharing your work and leading discussions informed by decades of practice, you gave the GSD community and important perspective. What did you learn through the conversations you inspired as Senior Loeb Scholar?

The role was an opportunity to create a space for meaningful dialogue around complex, often contested issues. These conversations are inherently challenging because they touch on deeply held beliefs, systemic inequalities, and emotional investments. The nature of these discussions underscores the difficulty in addressing contentious topics; many individuals tend to be entrenched in their opinions or operate within echo chambers, facilitated by social media and technological platforms that often reinforce rather than challenge individual perspectives.

Through guiding these discussions, I learned that while the space for dialogue can be fraught with discomfort, it is also profoundly necessary. It’s a space where confusion and vulnerability are not only inevitable but also valuable. Encountering students and community members who are initially shy or unsure about forming opinions reminded me that many people need time, patience, and a safe environment to engage meaningfully with complex issues. It became clear that the process of questioning, openness, and active listening are essential components of growth—not just for individuals but for the collective community. It is not about having answers, but about listening, and that is something that I also had to work and need to keep working on myself; it is so much easier to speak than to listen and just realize that there are always so many narratives at place, and that’s OK.

My main goal with these events was to hold space—creating an environment where difficult conversations can take place ideally without judgment. This meant acknowledging the emotional labor involved and recognizing that meaningful engagement requires time and care. The Senior Loeb Scholars program provided a valuable umbrella for these efforts, demonstrating that institutional commitment to such dialogue can build trust and slowly encourage a deeper understanding of the situations and of ourselves.

Importantly, I feel that we need to find ways to embed these kinds of spaces in a more systemic way to allow sustaining these formal and informal critical conversations beyond isolated events. Designing intentional structures which is also not overly institutional and prescribed in advance within academic and professional communities can enable ongoing engagement with uncomfortable knowledge.

How do you, as a designer, work with archival materials and historical sources to understand today’s conflicts?

The archive emerges as an essential, yet complex, tool for understanding and intervening in contested spaces. It isn’t merely a collection of past documents; it functions as a living infrastructure for knowledge production, memory, and power. Navigating the archive requires care, criticality, and awareness of its inherent contours—since archives are often political spaces that both preserve contestation and serve as sites of potential intervention.

The landscape on which we design is fundamentally non-neutral. It is a terrain layered with histories, claims of ownership, power dynamics, and social conflicts. The lines we inscribe on this terrain—whether literal boundaries or symbolic demarcations—are rendered visible through archival materials such as maps, photographs, governmental records, or historical narratives. These lines both reflect and shape ongoing territorial disputes and social struggles, serving as contested evidence of ownership and control.

In this context, the act of working with archives becomes an act of engagement with these underlying conflicts. As Saidiya Hartman has extensively discussed, archives hold evidence not only of victory but also of subjugation, erasure, and exclusion. Recognizing this, I approach archives with an ethical awareness: they reflect histories of dominance and resistance, of displacement and resilience. To neglect this complexity is to risk reproducing or silencing parts of these histories.

My own engagement with archives has been shaped by historical materials from my country, Israel. For example, I have studied the archives of the architecture faculty at the Technion, where old national atlases from the post-World War II era (which were not exclusive to Israel), exemplified rapid processes of nation building. In my case, I wanted to understand the history of my country, so I studied these atlases and the associated material (such as regional masterplans) which documented not only physical rebuilding but also the reconstruction of national identity through master plans and territorial delineations. Maps, in this context, are more than representations—they are sites where the national project unfolds at an unprecedented pace, often implicating complex processes of displacement, exclusion, and territorial assertion.

In my teaching and practice, I emphasize that designing in such environments demands sensitivity to these histories. It requires recognizing that spaces carry stories of belonging, displacement, and resilience. Our interventions must be aware of their capacity to reinforce existing structures or open pathways toward repair and inclusion.

Beyond academia, I direct a foundation based in Amsterdam dedicated to engaging with archives as infrastructures for knowledge and intervention. Each project we undertake integrates archival research—collecting stories of often-invisible realities, histories, and cultural practices. For example, our research on the impact of UN peacekeeping missions is stored in the national architecture archive of the Netherlands, serving both as documentation and as a resource for future inquiry. Similarly, our studies of Gaza’s farming communities are preserved within a textile museum archive, reinforcing the importance of diverse, community-driven histories.

Archives can reveal stories that challenge existing narratives, highlight marginalized voices, and offer pathways toward understanding and reconciliation. They remind us that spaces are not merely physical entities but are constructed through histories, memories, and social struggles. As designers, our role is to navigate these complexities ethically, critically, and creatively—using historical sources not as definitive answers but as avenues for engaging deeply with the present and envisioning more just futures.

Many of the MDes open projects presented in your Spring 2025 course “Forms of Assembly: All Things Considered” grappled with difficult challenges related to environmental degradation or longstanding conflicts. But there was also an overarching belief in the power of public assembly and collective expression. How do you encourage students to maintain that sense of hope and purpose as designers amid seemingly overwhelming challenges?

I don’t need to encourage the students. They are extremely motivated and concerned, and they are eager to discover what tools they have and what they can do with design to contribute to society and their communities.

I started offering this course during the Covid-19 pandemic, when all of us were confined to our homes, often living in different countries, cultures, and time zones. The GSD’s international makeup is one of its strengths; we are exposed to so many cultures and languages. As we met via Zoom at the time, the question of assembly became very relevant. How do we assemble under these conditions? We explored spaces of dialogue, exchange of ideas, and solidarity; spaces which perhaps resemble the description of the world by Hannah Arendt—the invisible table that we humans gather around to exchange our ideas and make them public.

Students began sending postcards and items they cared about across the globe to connect more intimately with each other. They developed lasting friendships and eventually made parts of these stories public. A student shared a key to her art studio in Shanghai with a student from Brooklyn while exploring how to share both her process and her exhibition with the group. They exchanged recipes and hosted online dinner parties, which I liked because it allowed us to share more of our personal backgrounds than when we meet in person.

In that first class, two students—one from Bangalore, India, and another from Santa Fe, New Mexico—looked into the archives of the Peabody Museum and created a two-day international symposium online. Both students come from communities that have been oppressed under imperialism—India and the Navaho Nation—so each looked into different entries and provenance items shown at the museum. The symposium they initiated was beautiful, bringing together so many diverse voices.

How has the class evolved since the pandemic?

In a peculiar way, given recent news regarding the risks of academic freedom and the international make up of our school, this question has received a new sense of relevance. How to assemble? What are the forms of effective assemblies we can enact under stress?

We can only face the challenges of today as a collective, an assembly, as practitioners, as human beings, which are part of a bigger web of actors. The stresses we are under, whether the climate crisis, diminishing democracies, polarization, growing inequality, or the fact that even mentioning the word “justice” as a value and direction we should all aspire toward has become contested, we can, of course, address these issues—and need to address these issues—at a personal level. But these are collective, societal challenges, and to contribute to change, the assembly is important.

Yet this assembly should not be considered a homogeneous group. Forms of Assembly: All Things Considered, the course from Spring 2025, is about the power and beauty of diverse voices and opinions, of the different forms of life that inhabit this planet and the importance of situated knowledges –the depth of knowledge that exist in each site we engage with. In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour suggests that we should begin thinking about a new constitution that is more inclusive, representing not only humans but also nonhuman objects and things: all those who inhabit this planet.

Many of the projects in this class originated from a very personal place and turned it into something much bigger. Students are often much more passionate and can understand how to navigate such complexity better when working on issues they care about. They can learn how to engage design and apply it to their cause because of their familiarity with the context. After that, the methods they develop can be used in other cases and places.

This year, for instance, one student spoke about order and freedom in contested times. Building on her Jewish heritage and family ritual of the Passover Eve Seder and its tale of physical and spiritual transformation from slavery to freedom, she saw an opportunity to speak about what liberation means for everyone else. Another student investigated, for the first time, the impact of a dam on her community in India and the protracted environmental degradation it caused. She looked at it from multidisciplinary perspectives, from labor conditions to agricultural practices to gender and class disparities.

Another student worked with a women’s NGO from Mexico that is working continuously to address cartel violence, trace the hundreds of thousands of missing people (some of whom are their family members—sons, husbands, brothers, fathers), and campaign for policy change. The student from Mexico worked with them to create a nomadic exhibition that helps raise awareness, creating a space of gathering/assemblies in different spaces that function not only as a representation tool but also as a dynamic archive, a memorial, and a space that brings victims together. It was a beautiful project that also creates a direct bridge from the academia to the real world.

How you see the role of the designer in today’s world of multiple, overlapping crisis, from climate change to military conflict to the rise of authoritarianism?  

 In our increasingly complex, siloed, and fragmented world—what many now refer to as a “polycrisis”—the role of the designer is more vital than ever. Design can serve as a bridge—connecting ideas, sectors, communities, and ecological systems that are often seen as isolated or incompatible. In a world rife with fragmentation, design can demonstrate the relationality between elements, highlighting our blind spots while expanding our collective imagination of what is possible. It becomes a lens for understanding and intervening in the interconnected webs that shape societal and environmental outcomes.

Our world is composed of complex ecosystems—built environments, social networks, natural landscapes—that are shaped by socio-economic, cultural, historical, and financial factors. These factors influence the quality of our lives and are often invisible or overlooked in traditional approaches. When we use design to examine these interconnections, it opens entirely new possibilities for insight: understanding how policies influence environments, how technology shapes urban life, or how financial mechanisms impact ecological stability. Design is thus a tool for generating knowledge in the in-between spaces—those zones where disciplines, ideas, and stakeholders converge.

This approach transforms design from a static object into an active agent—one that can reveal past and present damages, stimulate dialogue, and propose alternative futures. For example, in the classroom we often addressing migration and environmental challenges. Students explore the complexities of migration—designing support systems, informational tools, and policy proposals that for instance facilitate safer journeys for migrants from Latin America to the United States. These projects involve engagement with NGOs, legal experts, and local communities, demonstrating how design can serve as a strategic instrument—amplifying voices and fostering tangible change

Design has the power to act as a catalyst for systemic change. I encounter this both through my practice and the ongoing collaborations, as the director of FAST with UN agencies—one of which influenced a UN resolution on peacekeeping missions in 2017, as well as important policy papers—and through my pedagogy, the work we do in class, where students are developing innovative proposals. The design of the built environment and design thinking are uniquely suited to help us navigate complexity because of their multi-scalar, multi-temporal, and interdisciplinary nature.

This semester, in another course I taught—Spatial Design Strategies for Climate and Conflict-Induced Migration—we worked closely with UNHCR and UN Habitat to gain a deeper understanding of the spatial challenges faced by a world in motion. With hundreds of millions of displaced persons, the question of how we design homes for people on the move has received new salience.

What would you say to those who might downplay the importance of design in the face of seemingly more urgent or pressing issues?

In a world of urgent crises, dismissing design as irrelevant or secondary is a mistake. Instead, we must recognize that design is a potent agent—one that can connect fragmented systems, empower communities, and foster innovative pathways toward a more resilient, equitable, and sustainable future.

What’s in a Grid?

Each year, the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) creates a visual identity for commencement exercises and related events and exhibitions. This year’s design, developed by art director Chad Kloepfer and graphic design consultant Willis Kingery, uses color to define grids of varying widths that frame text in GSD Gothic, the School’s custom typeface. The pattern appears on tickets for commencement events, exhibition title walls, banners throughout the school, and website graphics.

For the past several years, the commencement identity has utilized formal graphic treatments: repeating forms, eccentric shapes, and geometric patterns. In 2024, for example, the design featured off-cast forms found in the trays. Moving in a different direction for the Class of 2025, Kloepfer chose to emphasize color. 

 Seeking to “deploy color in a meaningful way,” Kloepfer and Kingery devised each grid pattern with a “core color” linked to the GSD’s identity system. The School’s signature green, pink, blue, and yellow anchor the rest of the color choices in a given iteration, with the designers working toward a harmonious palette. The visual identity leads to surprisingly complex results, especially in areas where bars of color overlap, creating a woven effect. Some of the title treatments for end-of-year exhibitions in the Druker Design Gallery, for example, feature a combination of translucent tape and paint to achieve the right intensity of color where the vertical and horizontal elements of the grid meet.The grid structure was inspired in part by tartans, distinctive woven patterns created by intersecting strips of varying width. The specific variations of color and weave in tartans have historically carried symbolic meanings. In architecture, the “tartan grid” refers to a grid system where the vertical and horizontal elements are not necessarily aligned or spaced evenly. The irregular features of these patterns create a sense of dynamism, whether in space or textiles.

Another inspiration comes from Karel Martens, the Amsterdam-based designer who developed the visual identity for the GSD’s public programs for the 2024–2025 school year. Marten’s monoprints in particular, on which two colors overlap to create a third, served as a point of reference for Kloepfer and Kingery. “The monoprints are all about time,” says Kloepfer. “The ink dries and then you can print again a day or two later. It’s a beautiful way to work in our era of high-speed.”  

Nina Chase on Building Connections through the Harvard GSD

Not so long ago, Nina Chase (MLA II ’12) stood beside her Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) classmates, enjoying commencement week activities. This year on Class Day, Chase—co-founder of Merritt Chase Landscape Architecture —will be a featured speaker at these activities, welcoming new graduates to the alumni community.

Co-chair of the GSD Alumni Council for the past three years and a council member since 2018, Chase has been engaged with the GSD in varying capacities since 2010, when she entered the master of landscape architecture II program. The years as a GSD student, she notes, “had an outsized impact on my career overall, especially my view of how landscape architecture fits into the design world. The people I met, and the expansion of what I knew landscape architecture could be . . . it was transformative.” Indeed, two principles imparted at the GSD—the significance of building connections and the value of communication—continue to guide Chase’s practice today.

Approaching the end of a four-year bachelor program in landscape architecture at West Virginia University (WVU), Chase decided to pursue a master’s degree. “The GSD,” she recalls, “was the only place I wanted to go. In an undergraduate professional practice class at WVU, we each researched a different national firm—Michael Van Valkenburg Associates, OLIN, EDSA. . . .” Chase researched the only woman-led firm on the list, Martha Schwartz Partners. “At the end of the project, a classmate presented a slide listing the firms’ principals and their education credentials, and every single principal had gone to this place called the GSD. I vividly remember thinking, ‘I have to go to there!’” Ultimately Chase did, and she soon experienced a “full-circle moment”: her first studio, which explored ecotourism in Greece, was taught by Schwartz.

Nearly 15 years later, Chase still finds herself drawing on concepts encountered in her GSD classes. The course “Leading the Design Firm,” which addressed the logistics of opening and running a practice, has served her well as a business owner; in 2017, after gaining experience at the Boston-based practice Sasaki, she established Merritt Chase Landscape Architecture with Chris Merritt (MLA ’17). As a principal and a designer in general, another GSD lesson has proved crucial for Chase. “The class ‘Communications for Designers’ was just incredible,” Chase recalls, in that it taught her a range of techniques to distill the complexity of her projects and convey their value to different audiences. “I learned how to communicate at the GSD, and how to build connections outside the world of landscape architecture,” says Chase.

What’s more, the MLA curriculum broadened Chase’s understanding of the discipline’s reach. “The GSD allowed me to expand the grounded, traditional landscape architecture education I received at WVU to an urban scale. At the GSD we were thinking about natural systems and cities,” she explains. Referencing a studio on sea level rise in New York City and another on the Chicago River, Chase continues, “I took many classes about urban American post-industrial landscapes; those projects really shaped much of my current work.”

Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, (where Chase resides) and Indianapolis, Indiana, (Merritt’s home turf), Merritt Chase holds a unique appreciation for the challenges faced by post-industrial urban areas, and the firm has garnered widespread acclaim for creating public spaces across Middle America. Recently Chase and Merritt were named fellows of the Emerson Collective , an organization that, among other initiatives, supports innovators dedicated to strengthening communities through site-specific interventions. As part of the Local Leaders cohort, Chase and Merritt will continue their work in downtown Indianapolis refashioning Monument Circle , the city’s civic center, from a traffic circle into a human-scaled environment for interaction and connection.

As the initial project in Indianapolis’s South Downtown Connectivity Vision Plan , part of the city’s resiliency strategy, Merritt Chase installed a temporary park in Monument Circle, which will soon return for its third summer as the firm works on the area’s long-range plan. Monument Circle Park consists of a series of verdant circles, trees, and plantings that providing garden-like and shaded places for play, activities, and community engagement within a space formerly dedicated to auto traffic. In addition to enlivening the social realm, this recurring pop-up park doubles as an advocacy tool; as Chase explains, “we are trying to show that by investing in public space on a traffic circle in the middle of downtown Indianapolis, by making the space a park and partially closing it to traffic, there can be a huge benefit.”

Chase’s earliest foray into short-term installations came in 2015, prior to cofounding Merritt Chase, with the award-winning Kit of Parks —a portable kit that, in five minutes, assembles into a flexible pop-up parklet and play area. Such tactical urbanism or temporary placemaking now features regularly in Merritt Chase’s projects, as part of larger planning work or projects that have longer timeframes. “When we are working with a community to fundraise for a project and we need to get funders and people excited about the project,” says Chase, “we’ll do a short-term installation or prototype of the permanent project to build momentum for the long-term vision. It’s very much part of how we think about planning and built work. The short-term work is about communication and advocacy.”

Vision plays a role not only in Chase’s design work, but also in her efforts as a disciplinary ambassador for landscape architecture. A primary avenue of Chase’s advocacy is volunteer service, in Pittsburgh and nationally, as well as for the GSD. For eight years she has served on the GSD Alumni Council, the main representative body of the school’s 15,000 alumni. Such work allows Chase “to continue to advocate for the profession and the value of landscape architecture. The process of urban design and city building has sometimes, but not always, included landscape architects,” she notes, “but it should always happen with landscape architects at the table. If we’re thinking about the future of a city, collectively we should be thinking about how to integrate natural systems and cultural systems, and to ensure that the identity of places is reflected in the public realm.”

In addition to providing a platform for advocacy, board service offers opportunities to make connections within and beyond the discipline—a critical component of a successful designer’s career. For Chase, being part of the GSD community has been “an incredibly life-changing experience—just being able to tap into this network of people who are leaders at firms and other schools across the country, and becoming part of that supportive community.” Chase initiated this process while she was a student at the GSD, and she advises current students to do the same. “Becoming part of that community starts with the design work you do in school, learning as much as you can from your incredible professors and classmates, and then there is the other side of it . . . getting outside the trays, off your computer, and participating in events like lectures, the Halloween Party, the Beaux Arts Ball. It may seem silly in the moment,” Chase concedes, “to spend time at Beer & Dogs at the end of the week. It’s just happy hour, right? But that’s where lifelong connections get made. For us as a firm, those connections became relationships that have continued to expand our interests and support our practice. So much of our work today was made possible because of connections from when we were at the GSD or because of the GSD,” asserts Chase.

Reflecting on her Alumni Council participation, Chase notes that “it’s been a wonderful way to stay connected with the GSD.” As co-chair, she has worked to increase the council’s visibility among alumni, students, and school’s leadership and faculty. “The alumni are such an incredible resource, and we’re everywhere. On the council, we continue to build out the GSD network. We’re a constellation of people who are leaders in our communities; we meet twice a year at Gund, and then we all go back to our home regions and continue to make connections locally. To me, that’s the power of the GSD,” says Chase. “My goal has been to help facilitate those connections.”

 

*All images courtesy of Merritt Chase.

Whispered Stories: Le Corbusier in Chandigarh

In 1950, the Indian government commissioned Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier to design the city of Chandigarh. The project is often seen as marking a new era of modern architecture in South Asia. Records housed in the Frances Loeb Library at the GSD reveal the challenges of the monumental project as well as its influence and legacy. This semester, Graduate School of Design students Rishita Sen (MArch II 2025) and Neha Harish (MArch II 2025) organized a conversation on India’s rich history in modernist architecture, inspired by the Le Corbusier collection in the Frances Loeb Library Archives and Le Corbusier’s design of Chandigharh.

In collaboration with Rahul Mehrotra, John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization, and Ines Zalduendo , Special Collections Curator, the group met one evening to view historic objects and share stories that Mehrotra gathered as a result of his proximity to Le Corbusier’s community in India. The gathering is part of a series of “Archives Parties” that Zalduendo offers to the GSD community in collaboration with professors, student groups, and others interested in focusing on a particular theme or subject within the library’s collections.

“We represent a group of South Asian nations at the GSD,” said Sen, “and, because Neha and I are both so familiar with how modernism came to India, we wanted to pay homage to what we know, while setting the stage for future conversations focused on a range of South Asian nations and themes.”

The story of modernism in India starts with its independence from Britain in 1947, when the nation embraced the opportunity to define its identity through architecture and design. While “revivalists” attempted to reinvigorate older forms of Indian architecture to signify this new moment, Jawaharlal Nehru, the nation’s first prime minister, “embraced modernism as the appropriate vehicle for representing India’s future agenda,” writes Mehrotra in Architecture in India Since 1990. Modernism was free of associations with the British Empire and symbolized the pluralistic nation’s desire to be “progressive” and globally connected. Earlier in the century, Art Deco had become popular, introducing the use of reinforced concrete by the Maharajas, explained Mehrotra, and aligning Art Deco with opulence. At the same time, starting in about 1915, Gandhi constructed ashrams with a an aesthetic that grew out of frugality, creating an association between modernism and Gandhi’s ethics of  “minimalism,” and the ethos of today’s environmentalism and sustainability.

In 1950, Nehru commissioned Le Corbusier to design Chandigarh, setting in motion the country’s nascent development program and national identity under the era’s premise that, writes Mehrotra, “architects could shape the form not only of the physical environment but of social life.” A culture could be determined by its design.

At the Frances Loeb Library Archives, Harish, Sen, Mehrotra, and Zalduendo gathered with staff, faculty, and students to discuss a range of objects from the university archives as well as Mehrotra’s personal collection. Mehrotra noted how refreshing it was to be able to speak conversationally about these histories, within the context of the typically more formal archives at an institution.

“We were interested in engaging with oral histories,” said Harish, “which have been reiterated over the years.”

“Having grown up in Bombay,” said Mehrotra, “and having known architects who worked in that time, I heard many stories about who went to receive Corbusier at the airport when he travelled from Paris to make his connections to Delhi, or for his projects in Ahmedabad, etc.. Also how in his stays in Mumbai, Doshi and Correa walked with him on Juhu Beach, discussing architecture.” Some of the “whispered accounts” that circulated in the community between Le Corbusier and other architects and contractors in India from the 1950s to 1970s were evident in letters Mehrotra shared. In one, from Le Corbusier to the Indian government, the architect stridently requests an overdue payment. “Everyone believes that Le Corbu received incredible patronage in India,” said Mehrotra, “but, in fact, it was an uphill task, and, as was evident in the letter I shared, the man was going to go bankrupt.”

In other correspondence, notes Harish, “we saw the concept of jugaad,” a Hindi word meaning “make do with what you have,” as Le Corbusier had to “mend and mold the concrete every step of the way. Once he’d had this experience with the concrete looking so handcrafted in India, he could never replicate it anywhere else.” Le Corbusier used concrete for the construction of Harvard’s Carpenter Center , the only building he designed in North America , completed in 1963.

Mehrotra’s revised and updated Bombay Deco (Pictor Publishing), written with the late Sharada Dwivedi, was released in December 2024, and speaks to the history of Art Deco in India. In 2018, Mumbai’s collection of Art Deco buildings, the second largest in the world, was named a UNESCO World Heritage site. Le Corbusier’s use of concrete in Chandigarh rose out of that Art Deco tradition in Mumbai.

“Art Deco resulted in the creation of a whole industry that could produce reinforced concrete,” Mehrotra explained. “So, for Le Corbusier, the technology developed over 30 years. If Art Deco hadn’t happened [in Mumbai], and we weren’t using reinforced concrete, he couldn’t have built Chandigarh—because that’s the material he knew.”

The group also discussed Le Corbusier’s relationship with other key figures, including his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, who collaborated with him on building Chandigarh. Jeanneret and Le Corbusier had practiced together in France for over a decade, until 1937, and then, alongside the couple Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, reunited to design and construct Chandigarh.

Finally, the group celebrated the role that British urban planner Jacqueline Tyrwhitt played in developing architectural projects and discourse in South Asia in the 1940s and ’50s. Trywhitt worked with urban planner Patrick Geddes, editing Patrick Geddes in India, published in 1947, and was a United Nations technical assistance advisor to India and member of the 6^th Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in 1947. She served as a professor at the GSD from 1955 to 1969, and, as Dean Sarah Whiting explained, “helped establish and fortify the urban design program in its founding years.” An urban design lectureship named in her honor continues to support visiting scholars at the GSD today.

A Quilt Makes a Home

Rosie Lee Tompkins’s quilts gained worldwide acclaim when the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) mounted an exhibition of some of the more than 700 of her works that were donated by collector Eli Leon. Known for her bold use of color in an improvisational piecing style that breaks conventional bounds, Tompkins’s work was first shown in 1988 and has since been included in the Whitney Biennial, among many other museums and galleries. While William Arnett famously drew an alliance between quilts and architecture in his 2006 book, The Architecture of the Quilt, about the African American quilting collective Gee’s Bend, a spring studio at the GSD led by Sean Canty, assistant professor of architecture at the GSD, played with the inverse of this idea. 

In “Soft Slants, Mixed Gestures” students took inspiration from Tompkins’s work to create designs for housing and green space in the Portola neighborhood of San Francisco—an area known as the city’s Garden District for its history of nurseries and greenhouses that supplied the city with flowers.

In a region fraught with NIMBYism and gentrification, the site has become a flashpoint for conversations around development, the history of colonization, and racism—even appearing in the opening scene of the 2019 film The Last Black Man in San Franscisco, which the class viewed this semester. 

Like most of the western United States, Lipsky explains in her book, San Francisco was colonized and designed with “the Jeffersonian grid,” or Public Land Survey System, established in 1785 to divvy up vast acres into organized, heterogenous squares and rectangles.

In most cities and towns across the United States, the grid meshed relatively seamlessly with the landscape.

“The problem Lipsky defines,” explained Canty, assistant professor of architecture at the Graduate School of Design (GSD), “is that most cities in the United States aren’t as topographically diverse as San Francisco, so a survey system originating in river towns, coastal cities, and plains doesn’t work in the same way here.

In a series of what Lipsky calls “urban episodes,” she argues that the grid is forced to bend and change with San Francisco’s unique natural setting. As Canty summarized, the grid is “incommensurate with the topography.” Urban planners had to innovate to maintain through-lines along streets and neighborhoods, thereby disrupting or softening the grid. “In a grandiose landscape,” writes Lipsky, “where bridges and highways unite sea and land and where every hill forms a neighborhood, Nature and Architecture blend to compose a city that is alternately triumphant, modest, and familiar.” 

For example, Canty explained, a sidewalk accommodates a hill by transitioning into a stairway, a switchback is paired with a tunnel to move through the hill, a road dead-ends and “overlooks the street that runs perpendicular to it, underneath.” Such idiosyncrasies “produce something spatially exceptional,” Canty said—a surprising, sometimes even slightly dizzying, delight, not so unlike Tompkins’ quilts. 

“This became the concept of the slant for me—something that’s slightly off-kilter or new, as a subject-position in terms of queerness, and as a spatial practice within the city.”   

The “queer slant” is described by cultural theorist Sarah Ahmed in her book Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, an excerpt of which Canty and his students read at the outset of the semester, along with bell hooks’ “An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional.” Ahmed speaks to orientation and defines the “queer moment” as a time when things are “out of line” and “appear at a slant,” asking how the slant moment can inform our subject-positions, our relationships to objects and the world around us. 

bell hooks similarly considers the objects in her domestic space as they define her aesthetic. “Black domestic life,” she writes, “cultivates a rich, oppositional aesthetic rooted in everyday acts of homemaking.” Canty noted that hooks grew up with a grandmother who made quilts. hooks argues that her creation of the domestic space was its own art: “The way we lived was shaped by objects, the way we looked at them, the way they were placed around us,” and that, “we ourselves are shaped by space.”  

In class, Canty discussed work by Diller and Scofidio in which the designers fold and crease work shirts in unconventional ways, so that the functional objects transmute into sculptural forms—just as Tompkins’s quilts extend beyond their medium into the realm of abstract art. Both offer a way of thinking about fiber that Canty sees as a bridge to architectural forms. He explained that Diller and Scofidio’s work shirts, like Tompkins’s quilts, they “reveal how architectural thinking can be embedded within complex formal systems beyond the discipline itself.”

The creases and folds created with work shirts become “allegories for architecture—sites where social, formal, and political conditions are folded together and made visible.” This idea of translating quilted pieces and shirts to architecture became evident in the students’ initial exercises in the class as well as their final projects, where the buildings they designed opened and layered upon one another in mimicry of fabric. 

As Canty was designing the course, he was also at work on his book, Black Abstraction in Architecture , forthcoming from Park Books in November 2025, in which he analyzes “modes of abstraction that are outside the traditional canon,” which he explained the profession is still wrestling with in the years since George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement. In search of “an urban imaginary that comes from a Black aesthetic,” he studied the work of Theaster Gates, David Hammons, and Amanda Williams.  

In Color(ed) Theory , Williams, an artist and architect (and one of Canty’s professors as a graduate student) painted condemned houses in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood in a range of vivid colors that reflect Black experience and consumerism. Canty’s studio makes the argument that Tompkins’ work falls within the realm of Black Abstraction as well, and, with its asymmetrical blocks and color schemes, offers a creative space in the spirit of the “queer slant,” through which students can reimagine housing typologies in the Portola neighborhood—a site with a literal slant, rising 40 degrees from one side to the other.  

Armed with this theoretical background that connects African American art and theory, queer theory, and urban design, students headed into the field. The site, 770 Woolsey Street, sits in a diverse neighborhood that has been home to a wide range of immigrant communities ever since the indigenous tribes of the Ramaytush Ohlone were displaced by settlers in the eighteenth century.

The plot holds remnants of eighteen greenhouses, on more than 20,000 square feet, where roses and marigolds flourished. From the 1920s to 1990s, greenhouses around the neighborhood provided all the cut flowers for the city, giving the neighborhood its moniker, “The Garden District.” 

Now, the remaining twelve greenhouses sit dilapidated, portions of the roofs broken or sagging to the ground, untended weeds rising high. In a city that’s rapidly being gentrified and developed, with a desperate need for housing units, the site has become hotly contested. Community groups such as The Portola Green Plan and 770 Woolsey have advocated for accessible green space and affordable housing that retains the plot’s history, even as the developers who own the site have vacillated between selling and building for the last several years. 

Invited studio critics Lisa Iwamoto, chair and professor of architecture at California College of Art (CCA), and Craig Scott, professor of architecture at CCA, created a series of proposals for the site, and Mark Donahue, associate professor and chair of the BArch program at CCA, taught two studio courses on the site, sharing his survey with Canty’s students. Also invited to offer student critiques was Matthew Au, faculty member at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), whose studio Current Interests creates quilts together as part of their practice. 

The studio’s program required 40–80 residential units, integrating and repurposing the existing green space, establishing a public commons, and exploring the concept of a ceramic enclosure. Local ceramic manufacturer, Heath, opened its doors to the class so that they could explore using tile—a material that’s “mass-produced but carries the feeling of being bespoke,” said Canty—in the facade and enclosure of the buildings and site.   

The resulting designs included playfully oversized red siding, housing units situated as triangles rather than squares, using the concept of the fold to create multi-directional skins, and carefully curated interiors intended to foster community art-making and creativity.

Ashleigh Brady (MArch ’26), “Common Threads”

“This project explores domesticity through a formal language inspired by the geometric logic and improvisational ethos of Black American quilt making traditions, particularly through the work of Rosie Lee Tompkins, Chaney Ella Peace, and other Black women whose textile practices operate as radical acts of care, memory, and spatial invention.

Rooted in the programmatic design of ‘Common Threads’ is the legacy of Black San Franciscans whose resilience manifested through the transformations of the domestic sphere and public realm alike.

Porches, yards, and improvised additions became expressions of cultural identity and spatial autonomy. Citizens reclaimed land as communal infrastructure-spaces where food, kinship, and memory were cultivated side by side. These improvisational programmatic practices formed a spatial language of care and adaptability that this project adopts as both historical precedent and evolving methodology.”

“Garden in a Courtyard in a House in a City,” Sangki Nam (MArch ’25)

“This project engages the urban condition of San Francisco as a site of spatial and ideological tension, where the Cartesian imposition of the grid onto a dramatically sloped terrain has produced a landscape of unintended urban phenomena. Taking 770 Woolsey in Portola as a site of intervention, the work negotiates between competing imperatives: the preservation of local historical identity as a cultivated “Garden District” and the systemic pressures of the city’s housing crisis. Drawing on the conceptual framework of quilting, the proposal rethinks ground and form as interdependent, generating a domestic topography that dissolves binary distinctions between public/private, interior/exterior, and formal/informal, generating a spatial fabric that softens divisions between opposing realms and proposes a new model of domestic living.”

“House-fold: Playing with Household,” by Brandon Soto (March ’26) “This project reads the quilts of Rosie Lee Tompkins as a starting point for spatial exploration, seeking alternative but familiar form. Drawing from Tompkins’s quilts and Sara Ahmed’s Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology, the project challenges conventional domestic aesthetics through a queer, oppositional stance.

The pre-existing gabled bar is transformed by the stitches in Tompkins’s work, mirroring and folding figures in the interest of the off-center and non-uniform. The facade reacts similarly, reflecting topographical conditions as distortions to tile compositions, highlighting ‘seamlines’ between building and ground.”

These acts of folding and layering imagine a new queer domestic identity, answering to underlying visual traditions and cultures not fully realized in built domestic space.”

“Threaded Ground, Tending the Seam,” by Meagan Tan Jingchuu (March I ’26)  

“Structuring collective housing through two spatial datums, Threaded Ground refers to how architecture navigates San Francisco’s extreme topography—slipping between indoor and outdoor, residential, and shared space—through a plan-driven strategy of adjacency and maneuvering. Tending the Seam describes a sectional logic: a continuous roof seam that generates difference, connection, and circulation.

Together, they frame an architecture shaped by Sara Ahmed’s notion of orientation—attuned to how bodies move, align, and relate within space—and guided by a quilt logic of variation through aggregation, scale, and tactile differentiation. Across three scales of courtyard voids and long, shared seams, publicness drifts. By shaping spatial thresholds and shared seams, the architecture enables life to accumulate and unfold organically—through repeated gestures, material traces, and collective use over time.”

“Arrangements between Garden and Grid,” by Emanuel Cardenas (March II ’26)

“Along with the greenhouse history, vivid residential color palette, and sprawling gardens that make the Portola neighborhood known as San Francisco’s Garden District, the project draws from the act of quilting and San Francisco’s first master planning, in which Market Street acts as a converging line between two regular but misaligned organizational grids. The fragmented in-between spaces adjacent to Market Street are reminiscent of imperfect singular patches stitched together to form a quilted whole. Lone star quilts are traditionally constructed with Y-seams, where three separate fabrics fold onto one another and are stitched together to form a Y. The project adopts a similar strategy to quilt a figure ground from a standard perimeter block organization. These Y-seams become the central circulation within each cluster of homes and shared spaces, seaming together multiple fabrics of architectural orientation nestled in a cascading landscape of gardens.”

Harvard Graduate School of Design Community Makes a Strong Showing at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale

As spring emerges in Venice, Italy, so too does the 2025 Architecture Biennale, also known as the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, opening to the public on May 10. Curated by Italian architect/engineer Carlo Ratti and titled Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. , this prestigious event showcases design solutions to climatic adaptation, transcending disciplinary boundaries to address this urgent global issue. The exhibition includes installations, National Pavilions, workshops, and related programs staged throughout the Giardini, Arsenale, and other Venetian locations. The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) is well represented, with more than 90 affiliates—faculty, alumni, and students—taking part in the grand exhibition.

The 2025 Biennale begins with a clear premise: adaptation. As the climate shifts, so must the spaces we inhabit. Architecture is no longer a question of appearance—it is a matter of resilience. Meeting this reality means reimagining not just our cities, but also our methods, tools, and modes of collaboration.

Academic institutions are central to this transformation. Their capacity to nurture diverse forms of intelligence—natural, artificial, and collective—is essential, especially in an era marked by new forms of obscurantism.

We are proud of the GSD’s strong presence in this year’s exhibition, not just as participants either. The GSD’s Anna Lyman is directing our public program, and Master of Design (MDes) student Dana Barale is public program assistant for our curatorial team. I hope the exhibition inspires students—present and future—to see design as both a responsibility and an opportunity. Architecture still matters, but only if we allow it to evolve.

                                     ­–Carlo Ratti, curator of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition

 

FACULTY AND CURRENT STUDENTS

Martin Bechthold—Kumagai Professor of Architectural Technology and academic dean—with Marina Sartori, Maroula Zacharias, and Juan Pablo Ugarte Urzúa present Material Perceptions: Ceramics in the European Cultural Centre’s Time Space Existence exhibition. The project draws on research conducted by the Material Processes and Systems (MaP+S) group at the GSD, which Bechthold leads. Material Perceptions creates unexpected encounters with ceramic tiles, including prototypes of dry-pressed flat tiles designed as hyper-realistic imitations of other materials. Floor mounted installations use the tiles as “cairns,” demonstrating that these products, once removed from walls or floors, can attain unique structural and spatial design qualities.

Silvia Benedito (MAUD ’04), design critic in landscape architecture, has contributed to Stresstest, the German Pavilion, which also includes a project by GSD alumni Frank Barkow (MArch ’90) and Regine Leibinger (MArch ’91).

Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti, assistant professor in practice of architecture, has contributed Continuously Becoming Home: Design at the Intersection of Climate Crisis and AI to Time Space Existence. The title Continuously Becoming Home refers to the emerging reality that the nature of our mundane domestic activities, and the simple solidity of the home as a shelter that holds them, is changing due to continuous streams of invisible information that flow through our environments. The installation imagines the emerging 21st-century domestic landscape through the lens of eight small vignettes that explore the disposition of the home as a living, systems-linked architecture defined by a choreography of friction and cooperation. HouseZero® —the living laboratory and headquarters for the Harvard Center for Green Building and Cities—is featured in Christoforetti’s installation, showcasing its data-driven infrastructure and innovations in adaptive design. Christoforetti, who is principal investigator for the Laboratory for Values in the Built Environment (ViBE Lab) at the GSD and founding principal of Supernormal, is also speaking and hosting a workshop as part of the GENS Public Programme .

Gareth Doherty, associate professor of landscape architecture and affiliate of the Department of African and African American Studies, and Washington Fajardo (LF ’19), former secretary of urban planning and president of the Pereira Passos Institute for Urbanism in Rio de Janeiro, are part of a team presenting Data Clouds. Developed in collaboration with the MIT Senseable City Lab, Data Clouds uses LiDAR scanning and digital twin technologies to map informal settlements. Centered on Vidigal, a favela in Rio de Janeiro, the installation fuses physical and digital representations to immerse visitors in the complexity of this urban landscape. Through high-resolution 3D visualizations and an immersive LiDAR experience, the project explores how emerging technologies can document, analyze, and inform interventions in informal settlements, advocating for bottom-up, data-driven strategies to advance more inclusive and climate-resilient urban development.

Craig Douglas, assistant professor of landscape architecture; Max Piana, visiting lecturer in landscape architecture; and Kate Orff (MLA ’97) of SCAPE Landscape Architecture worked with Marco Scano to create Cool Forest, a project exploring themes of urban heat, adaptation, and biodiversity. As a window into Venice’s future climate, Cool Forest is an interactive journey through a lush, planted microenvironment. The plants are future visitors, foreshadowing the species that will eventually join the current ecosystem as the climate of Venice shifts. As visitors walk along the promenade, they learn about the biodiversity of the forest, engage with urban cooling methods, and consider our climate-changed future. Embedded sensors track the growth and change of tree species within the installation, while other sensors monitor microclimate conditions within and around the installation. Collectively, the installation presents a digital repository of heat data, harnessing the power of technology to understand our changing climate.

Nicolas Fayad (MArch ’10), of EAST Architecture Studio, has contributed an exhibition and book that highlight how traditional design principles can shape future practices in Islamic architecture. The exhibition, titled Rooted Transience, showcases the inaugural AlMusalla Prize’s winning design—On Weaving—for a space of prayer and reflection, which was built for the second edition of the Islamic Arts Biennale 2025 at the Hajj Terminal in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. On Weaving was designed by EAST Architecture Studio in collaboration with artist Rayyane Tabet and engineer Hanif Kara, GSD professor in practice of architectural technology for a competition organized by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation. The jury, chaired by Prince Nawaf Bin Ayyaf (MDes ’22), included GSD professor of architectural technology Ali Malkawi, Lina Ghotmeh, Azra Aksamija, and Farrokh Derakhshani. The exhibition in Venice is curated by Faysal Tabbarah and hosted by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation. An accompanying publication, co-edited by Bin Ayyaf and Tabbara and published by KAPH, that focuses on the transient nature of musalla spaces. 

Studio Gang, founded by professor in practice of architecture Jeanne Gang (MArch ’93), presents The Living Orders of Venice, a site-specific installation that explores how architecture can foster urban biodiversity by supporting wildlife and people. The installation features three animal nesting structures created for important species in Venice. Designed in conversation with biologists and fabricated in collaboration with a ceramic artist, the structures are designed to be integrated into human architecture, while supporting the specific conditions that each species needs to thrive. In addition, the project launches the Biennale Bioblitz , a crowd-sourced field study of the biennale grounds. Studio Gang’s work also appears in the national pavilions of the United States, France, and Albania.

Chuck Hoberman, Pierce Anderson Lecturer in Design Engineering, and Hanif Kara, professor in practice of architectural technology, collaborated with CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati on Teatro Verde.

 Eric Höweler, professor of architecture and director of the Master of Architecture I Program, and J. Meejin Yoon (MAUD ’02) have developed AquaPraça, a traveling floating platform that serves as a meeting place for conversations about the climate crisis’s challenges. The designers’ Boston-based firm Höweler + Yoon worked with CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati to develop to the 400-square-meter floating plaza for the biennale. The structure levels with the tidal buoyancy system that operates by siphoning water into basins. As its adaptive design responds to tides in real time, the platform rises and falls in sync with the water system’s ebb and flow. Conceived as a global public space to reflect on climate, AquaPraça will travel to COP30 in Belém, Brazil, following the biennale.

Daniel Ibáñez, design critic in architecture, worked with Carla Ferrer (MDes ’17) and photographer María Azkarate on a section within the Spanish Pavilion, which has been curated by Manuel Bouzas (MDes ’24) and Roi Salgueiro (MDes ’14) [see below]. Ibáñez and his collaborators focused on the role of materials in the decarbonization of architecture. Their research analyzes the value chains of natural and regenerative materials in the Cantabrian coast, from forestry practices to the wood industry.

Christopher Hawthorne, Florencia Rodriguez (LF ’14), and GSD design critics Sharon Johnston (MArch ’95) and Mark Lee (MArch ’95), who comprise the firm Johnston Marklee, devised the Speakers’ Corner, one of the biennale’s featured Curator’s Special Projects. The project takes the form of a grandstand with seating for more than 50 and hosts talks, panels, and other public events during the exhibition, most prominently “Restaging Criticism,” a discussion series organized by Hawthorne and Rodriguez on the future of architecture criticism. The structure’s base contains a small, soundproofed room that can act, variously, as the setting for more intimate talks and interviews, an archive of earlier Speakers’ Corner events, a curated library, and a space of respite. In ways more implicit than explicit, the Speakers’ Corner positions itself in dialogue with the inaugural Architecture Biennale in 1980. For that exhibition Paolo Portoghesi invited Charles Jencks, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Vincent Scully to participate in a Mostra dei critici, or Critics’ Exhibition.

Alberto Kritzler (LF ’23), lecturer in landscape architecture and founder of Polistudio, presents Laguna, in collaboration with Productora. The project transforms a former textile and lace factory built in the 1920s in central Mexico City into a vibrant hub of activity, production, and social encounter. Its model informs the future of urban manufacturing revitalization by creating a “factory of factories” where people work, design, and fabricate. While the exterior facade remains unchanged, the previously cluttered interior patios have been opened to create community spaces and green areas. Specific architectural interventions improve horizontal and vertical circulation, generating a promenade that encourages visitors to explore the complex. The site seamlessly blends new and historic elements into a cohesive composition.

The reconversion strategy was designed to be implemented gradually over several years, with a flexible group of tenants actively using the complex—a process that remains ongoing. This phased approach allows for continuous recalibration and adaptation. The adaptability built into the design—through educational and trade skill workshops, engagement with former factory workers, and an artist-in-residence program—has made Laguna a coveted cultural hub that more than 30 creative and productive firms now call home.

Tosin Oshinowo (LF ’25) presents Alternative Urbanism: The Self-Organized Markets of Lagos, an immersive experience of three specialist markets from Lagos, Nigeria, as part of a broader research project on what we can learn from the city. These markets operate as factories processing “waste” or “end-of-life” items from industrialized economies and showcase the principle of circularity prevalent in African cities through the ingeniousness of iterative self-organizing initiatives. The markets tend to be foreign to their host environments and not structured by the state. Yet, they coexist with and, in some cases, re-appropriate these urban fabrics, speaking to the realities that enable the African city to function in modernity. These markets resonate with the theme of communal intelligence, highlighting an alternative urbanism that contributes sparingly to our global carbon challenge while offering an optimist conversation on circularity. The International Jury awarded Alternative Urbanism with a special mention .

Marina Otero, lecturer in architecture and 2022 Wheelwright Prize winner, has multiple projects on view in Venice this year. The video installation Building for Quantum, created with Manuel Correa, Emil Nygard Olsen, and Manu Sancho Sánchez, documents the construction of a building designed to house one of the world’s only quantum computers. Wetland Enmeshments. Water Cables and Data in Quilicura, Chile, with Serena Dambrosio and Nicolas Diaz, focuses on the community impacts of data center construction. Otero is also the curator of the Holy See Pavilion. The presentation, titled Opera Aperta, features the work of Tatiana Bilbao Studio and MAIO Architects, including Anna Puigjaner, 2016 Wheelwright Prize winner. The International Jury awarded the Holy See Pavilion with a special mention for National Participation. In addition, Otero served on the scientific advisory committee for Chile’s national pavilion.

Antoine Picon—G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology, director of Doctoral Programs, and director of the PhD Program—contributed an essay titled “Learning Differently from Nature” to the catalogue for the 19th International Architecture Exhibition and serves as an advisor to composer Jean-Michel Jarre who created the Oxyville 360 sonic structure.

 Shweta Ranpura (DDes ’26) presents Tracing the Voids: Adapting the Ordinary. Produced under the auspices of Ranpura’s Mumbai-based firm replace architecture urbanism, the project traces the absences and gaps between a century-old house and trees, their canopies and roots. By allowing the voids to shape the architectural forms of the vaults and arches, the design accommodates uncertainty, negotiates absences, and transforms the ordinary through deeply connections to its environments. As historical traces, the vaults and arches reminiscent of past construction techniques reveal to the present spaces that address the current climate crisis. In so doing, they trace the voids of knowing, doing, and being in a time marked by realities that redefine architecture as adaptation. Ranpura collaborated with technical advisor Raaj Ranpura, client Harshal Parekh, and master masons Azad Singh and Mohan Pateliya.

Emma Sheffer (MArch ’27) and team including alumni Charles Kim (MArch ’21), Stephanie Rae Lloyd (MArch ’22), Sam Sheffer (MArch ’22), Emily Ezquerro, and Jero Ezquerro, have developed SpaceSuits.US: A Case for Ultra Thin Adjustments. The project, which features a 1:4 scale fragment of a typical American timber framed house and a tailored “Space Suit,” rethinks how we can improve building and insulation techniques for existing housing stock. Drawing parallels between astronauts in extreme environments and urban dwellers facing extreme environmental shifts, the project explores how heat reflection, thermal insulation, and ultra-thin adjustments to existing buildings can provide an architectural solution for impending climatic emergencies.

On May 12, Sheffer and collaborators will deliver a GENS Public Programme workshop titled “Soft Tactics: Tailored Assemblies.” The session addresses how soft knowledges can be leveraged against architectural technologies to produce tailored assemblies for social and environmental pressures.

Bas Smets, professor in practice of landscape architecture, and biologist Stefano Mancuso have transformed the Belgian Pavilion with the installation of Building Biospheres. Initiated by the Flemish government and the Flanders Architecture Institute, this thought-provoking exhibit explores architecture through the lens of plant intelligence. Building Biospheres imagines a future where buildings are redefined as dynamic microclimates, with plants taking on a central role in purifying air and regulating temperatures. This vision of architecture positions nature not as a passive element but as an active and intelligent partner in urban spaces. Drawing from the latest research into plant behavior and intelligence, the project proposes a world where nature and built environments seamlessly integrate to create healthier, more sustainable, and more habitable cities.

 Andrew Witt (MDes ’02, MArch ’07), associate professor in practice of architecture and co-director of the Master in Design Engineering program, and Tobias Nolte of Certain Measures have developed the installation Machine View of the City.

 

ALUMNI

Celina Chinyere Abba (MLA ’23) and Enrique Cavelier (MLA ’23) have created Plantation Futures, an experimental video installation that envisions the future of Louisiana’s “Plantation Country.” The intertwined legacies of chattel slavery and ecological degradation in the lower Mississippi region have long marginalized the voices of the enslaved, their descendants, and the land itself. This video, which draws on their thesis research at the GSD, challenges colonial narratives and proposes an alternative future for the region that recognises suppressed histories and non-human entities as essential forms of natural intelligence. A new version of Abba and Cavelier’s thesis project is included in the Time Space Existence exhibition staged at the Palazzo Mora, organized by the European Centre of Culture.

 Anthony Acciavatti (MArch ’09) of Somatic Collaborative, presents Grounded Growth: Groundwater’s Blueprint for Intelligent Urban Form, an exhibition focused on one of the world’s largest distributed freshwater reserves: aquifers. Today, hydrologists estimate that nearly half of the global population drinks groundwater daily and more than half of the world’s irrigated crops rely on it. As population increases and demand for food grows, aquifers are declining, cities are sinking, and the agricultural workforce is shrinking. Using two of the most over-pumped landscapes in the world, the Indo-Gangetic Plains and Sonoran Desert, Acciavatti designed new agrarian communities in each region. Drawing on lessons learned from Venice’s system of cisterns and South Asia’s stepwells, the models and drawings foreground aquifers as a shared commons that can collectively shape farms and cities.

Fai Au (MDes ’11), Ying Zhou (MArch ’07), and Sunnie Sy Lau are the curators for Projecting Future Heritage: An Archive of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Pavilion, which showcases Hong Kong’s post-war public architectures through the media of an archive, together with the construction of bamboo scaffolding in an adjacent outdoor courtyard. Jonathan Yeung (MArch ’20) and Wing Yuen (MArch ’22) are part of the curatorial team. Exhibitors include Max Hirsh (PhD ’12) and Dorothy Tang (MLA ’12) with Airport Urbanism: Remaking Hong Kong, 1975–2025; Su Chang (MArch ’17) and Frankie Au (MArch ’16) of Su Chang Design Research Office with Made in Kwun Tong: Between Type and Territory; and Betty Ng (MArch ’09), Chi Yan Chan (MArch ’08) and Juan Minguez (MArch ’08) of Collective with Pixelated Landscapes.

Frank Barkow (MArch ’90) and Regine Leibinger (March ’91) of Barkow Leibinger have created Map of Glass, which rescales the urban island fragments that comprise Venice as an abstracted topographical model of incremental densities, shapes, and sizes. This three-dimensional map, composed of cement blocks containing waste glass fragments from Murano-based artisans and located in the sunken garden adjacent to the Austrian Pavilion in the Giardini, acts as a self-referential installation and a reference to the city beyond the site. The reproduction offers a gestalt view of the city as a complex and yet comprehensible entity, while offering a landscaped space for play, leisure, and rest. At the end of the biennale, the map can be disassembled and the individual pieces can be recycled or sold singularly or in groups.

Alexis Boivin (MArch ’22) served as project lead for Boucaneries, by Atelier Pierre Thibault. In the Saint Lawrence River, on an island called Île Verte, twelve boucaneries (smokehouses) testify to local ingenuity and collective resilience amidst the harsh climate of Quebec, Canada. Using a participatory design process, Boucaneries explores how adaptive reuse of those smokehouse-inspired structures can promote the island’s food self-sufficiency, cultural development, and traditions.

Manuel Bouzas (MDes ’24) and Roi Salgueiro (MDes ’14) have co-curated the 2025 Spanish Pavilion, Internalities: Architectures for Territorial Equilibrium. The project explores how architecture can (and should) respond to the environmental externalities associated with production processes to advance the decarbonization of the built environment. Internalities highlights the work of a new generation of Spanish architects—including contributor Carla Ferrer (MDes ’17)—that rigorously and radically examine how the practice of construction can balance ecologies with economies.

Xiaojun Bu (MArch ’05) and Yingfan Zhang (MAUD ’06) of Atelier Alter Architects have contributed two projects to the Biennale and collateral events. The first, Dunhuang Con-stella-tion, is one of twelve works featured in Co-Exist, the China Pavillion, curated by Yansong Ma. Dunhuang Con-stella-tion reimagines Cave 285 from Dunhuang’s Mogao Grottoes as a celestial archive of civilizational fusion. The second project, Dali Transformer Park Theater, is part of an exhibition titled No Doubt About It: Projects from Armenia, China, Georgia, Germany, Latvia, and Poland, curated by Vladimir Belogolovsky and on view in Dorsoduro, tracing the intentions and design strategies of six projects by six architects from six countries.

Armando Carbonell (LF ’93) will moderate “The Relevance of Land in an Era of Adaptation: A conversation with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy,” a GENS Public Programme workshop, on May 11.

The 2025 United States Pavilion, organized by co-commissioners Susan Chin (LF ’99), Peter MacKeith, and Rod Bigelow, is called Porch: An Architecture of Generosity . As the project’s website notes, “The porch is an unheralded American icon of architectural character, an American architectural place-construct persisting across scales, geographies, communities, construction methods, and histories.” This iteration of the US Pavilion “spotlight[s] the American porch’s multi-layered character, value, and contemporary purpose through the exhibition of contemporary projects from across the nation, accomplished by practices of distinction, inventiveness, and diversity.” GSD-affiliated participants include Julie Bargmann (MLA ’87), Stephen Burks (LF ’19), James Carpenter (LF ’90), Andrew Freear (LF ’18), Walter Hood (2021 Senior Loeb Fellow), Susan Jones (MArch ’88), James Leng (MArch ’13) and Jennifer Ly (MArch ’14) of Figure, Matthew Mazzotta (LF ’18), Christopher Meyer (MArch ’16) of Atelier Mey, David Perkes (LF ’04), Dan Pitera (LF ’05), James Shen (LF ’18, also participating in the China Pavilion), and Jennifer Yoos (LF ’03).

Tatjana Crossley (MArch ’15) and George Guida (MArch ’22) in collaboration with Daniel Escobar and Giovanna Elizabeth Pillaca present Designing Zero-Carbon Future: AI and the Power of Collective Imagination, an AI-powered design platform that reimagines urban spaces through dynamic data visualizations. Users transform digitized 3D neighborhoods with generative AI, while AI agents assess environmental and carbon metrics. Challenging traditional bottom-up construction methods, the platform fosters a participatory, AI-augmented approach to sustainable and resilient urban design.

Natalia Dopazo (LF ’23) presents a conversation about “My Grandfather’s House,” part of the GENS Public Programme on Monday, May 12th.

Alex Felson (MLA ’01) and a cross-disciplinary team from biosciences, landscape architecture, engineering, and fine arts at the University of Melbourne have developed Song of the Cricket, a performative research exhibition that introduces the public to an endangered species of cricket while instituting a long-term cricket translocation and habitat rehabilitation program for the Venice Lagoon. The biennale exhibition includes a breeding population of crickets, a cricket sound garden, mobile breeding population life rafts to support future cricket generations, and landscape elements that foster public education. The project uses art and science to promote wetland conservation and recognition of the cricket song as an indicator for wetland health.

The Perimeter of Architecture: Amid the Elements, a project curated by Sylvia Lavin in the James Stirling Pavilion, hosts an array of GSD alumni participants including Rania Ghosn (DDes ’10) and El Hadi Jazairy (DDes ’10) of DESIGN EARTH, Andrew Atwood (MArch ’07) and Anna Neimark of First Office, Michael Meredith (MArch ’00) and Hilary Sample of MOS, and DK Osseo-Asare (MArch ’09).

ChengHe Guan (DDes ’16) and Ying Li have developed AI for Climate Resilient Urban Planning: Making of Meta Park and Community. This project explores an emerging climate narrative centered on physical and virtual human perception, envisioning China’s concept of “urban climate park and community” not simply as green infrastructure, but as a spatial and strategic response to climate challenges. By integrating AI-powered urban sensing, the project reimagines parks and communities as adaptive environments responsive to contextualized socioecological systems, foregrounding six case studies that demonstrate unique approaches to localism, inclusiveness, ecological endowments, and social structures.

Julia Hedges (MLA ’24) has created the project Keep on Truckin’.

Olivia Heung (MArch ’97) and Scott March Smith (MArch ’97) present Extant Leaves. Digital imaging and archiving produce massive databases of ecological data, open-access yet inaccessible without specialized technical training. Extant Leaves excavates archives of fossilized leaves, buried under complicated search queries and cryptic cataloging. Through the archives’ re-animation, ancient intelligence and resilience inscribed in the geology of the Earth becomes tangible for everyone.

Max Hirsh (PhD ’12) and Dorothy Tang (MLA ’12) present Airport Urbanism: Remaking Hong Kong, 1975-2025. This installation is part of the Hong Kong Pavilion, Projecting Future Heritage: An Archive of Hong Kong, which features projects that demonstrate Hong Kong’s multifaceted public infrastructure.

Jeffrey Huang (DDes ’97), Frederick Chando Kim (MArch ’16), Mikhael Johanes, and Muriel Waldvogel (GSD ’88) have developed Planet Brain, an urgent call to action against the escalating climate crisis. The installation confronts the paradox of a world inundated with data yet paralyzed by inaction, increasingly reliant on artificial intelligence to interpret signs of planetary distress. Sixteen rotating orbs evoke the “overview effect,” a cognitive shift akin to that felt by astronauts when beholding Earth’s vulnerability from space. Despite decades of accumulating satellite imagery, sensor data, and global surveys, synthesizing this vast information into actionable insights remains a challenge. By leveraging big data and Urban GPTs to analyze complex geospatial datasets, Planet Brain traces the patterns of resource extraction and environmental collapse, bringing attention to vulnerable cities poised on the brink of ecological crises.

Mitchell Joachim (MAUD ’02) of Terreform ONE, Wendy W. Fok (DDes ’17), Peder Anker (PhD ’99) with Melanie Fessel and Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) present Coding Plants: An Artificial Reef and Living Kelp Archive. This project proposes a living archive embedded within a synthetic kelp reef: an architectural ecosystem that stores design intelligence—blueprints for homes, civic structures, and ecological infrastructure—within the DNA of engineered vegetation, enabling future generations of plants to grow pre-configured structures attuned to environmental conditions. Within translucent vitrines, visitors encounter suspended fragments of this reef, hybrid organisms in which botanical life merges with coded information. These active archives, capable of regeneration, mutation, and adaptation, offer a glimpse into an architecture that eats, breathes, and remembers. Rather than resisting nature, Coding Plants proposes a system where urbanism is symbiotic—an evolution of the built environment toward a coauthored future with the living world.

On May 14, Joachim will participate in a GENS Public Programme titled “Manifesto for the Rights of the Venice Lagoon,” which explores how spatial disciplines can respond to “more-than-human” realities.

Eliyahu Keller (MDes ’16), Mark Jarzombek, and Eytan Mann as the Augmented Historiography Collaborative have created Venice in Conversation, an AI-driven “seminar” that orchestrates a conversation between avatars of historical and contemporary figures about real and generated Venices. Employing archival and manipulated images, the project aims to soften the boundary between fact and fiction to enrich and confuse the historiography of a place like Venice. With each changing image, Venice appears as both fantastical and realistic, and forever elusive.

Areti Kotsoni (MDes ’23) presents Born of the Land: The Typology of the Cretan House. The Cretan house typology emerged in direct response to the land and available raw materials. Shaped by local techniques, its form and articulation are defined by simplicity, adaptability, and modular growth. Inherently sustainable, it offers insights into how architecture once harmonized with the environment, serving as a lesson for contemporary design.

Dammy Dami Lee (MArch ’13) presents Overwriting, Overriding, a project that reimagines its site—the Korean Pavilion—from beyond the nation-state framework, exploring an architecture that crosses boundaries, connects, and disperses into a landscape. The installation appropriates elements traditionally considered outside the realm of “pure” architecture—awnings, curtains, bedding, and kitchen scenes, once dismissed as women’s home styling—foreground their soft and capricious presence. Diaries, letters, and photo albums overlay the official archive, seeking out the periphery and attempting to weave together yesterday and tomorrow anew. Here, in a place that represents the nation, Overwriting, Overriding draws out the personal spaces often obscured by the modern publicness of architecture.

Thandi Loewenson, 2024 Wheelwright Prize winner, has contributed to the Great Britain Pavilion, GBR: Geology of Britannic Repair. The International Jury awarded this pavilion a special mention  for National Participation.

Mpho Matsipa (LF ’22), South African architect, teacher, curator, and associate professor at the Barlett School of Architecture, with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Paola Antonelli comprise the International Jury of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia .

Tomohisa Miyauchi (MArch ’04) is part of the multidisciplinary team behind T-an, the Art of Utushi, an installation that highlights the art of Utsushi, or reverent reconstruction of medieval teahouses, maintaining their integral character while reconfiguring them to suit present circumstances. Emphasizing the teahouse’s material and spiritual qualities, the project offers insights into long-established building methods that can inform current discourse, demonstrating how traditional intelligence can be reinterpreted and redesigned to suit contemporary contexts in an open, inclusive process. The resulting environment welcomes everyone, promoting a collective heritage as a solid basis for adaptability and resilience in an ever-evolving world. T-an, the Art of Utushi aims to demonstrate the timeless qualities of an ancient teahouse’s aesthetic balance, reinterpreting the use of materials, contemplative interaction within small spaces, and spiritual profundity as timeless wisdom shared across generations.

Eric Owen Moss (MArch ’72) has contributed an installation called 708/02.

Andreas Nikolovgenis (MArch ’15), who with Costis Paniyiris (MArch ’92) co-curated the Greek Pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 2023, this year presents Cultivating in Shallow Waters: The Messolonghi Saltworks Production Landscape. This project explores how production landscapes like the Messolonghi saltworks in Greece shape the countryside. Since 1500 AD, locals have managed a shallow lagoon with intricate water circulation to produce salt. This collective process relies on simple yet sophisticated systems, passed down through generations, reflecting urban patterns in a rural context.

Mary Anne Ocampo (MAUD ’10), Laura Fregolent, Rebecca Ocampo, Sabrina Meneghello, and Cale Wagner have created BeLieving in the Mountains, a project examining the intersection of climate change, depopulation, and heritage within the Dolomite municipality of Cibiana di Cadore.  Developed as an interdisciplinary research collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Università Iuav di Venezia, Comune di Cibiana di Cadore, and Studio RO, the urban design and planning project draws from community interviews, field observations, and workshops. Through film, drone mapping, and data analytics the exhibition translates larger themes of socioecological systems, abandonment, and adaptation into Alpine alternatives for collective living.

Georgios A. Panetsos (MArch ’86) and Le Città di Villard present AMARE (Atlas of Migrations, Crossings, and Rootings in Europe), an installation that explores the spatial dimension of these phenomena in Europe. Through traces recorded across the European territory and maps that depict routes and settlements, AMARE uses analytical and projective tools to address the transformative effect of migration flows and settlements, and the new territorial, cultural, and social balances they create.

Robert Gerard Pietrusko (MArch ’12), Space Caviar, and Ersilia Vaudo present A Satellite Symphony. A reflection on space-based technologies, the installation operates as an experimental, immersive documentary in which data science and remote sensing play equal roles. Inspired by Charles and Ray Eames’s 1977 film Powers of Ten, the project takes the Veneto region—in particular Venice and its lagoon—as the starting point for an exploration that traverses multiple scales, from the Earth’s core to its orbit. Along the way, Veneto and the Venice Lagoon serve as compelling case studies for the capabilities of space-based Earth observation. Built from storm-felled wood, the installation supports local reuse efforts while linking physical materiality to data visualizations of the effects of extreme weather events, highlighting the intersection of digital analysis and sustainable design in addressing climate crises. More broadly, the project exposes visitors to the wealth of data provided by the numerous orbital observation stations that have been developed and deployed since the 1970s.

Alan Ricks (MArch ’10) and Nadia Perlepe (MArch ’16) of MASS Design Group are part of the team behind the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture (RICA), a climate-positive campus in Bugesera, Rwanda, built with local materials and craftsmanship. On view at the biennale, RICA leverages a unique agricultural model, sustainably sourced materials, and off-grid power sources to restore native biodiversity and train future generations of leaders in conservation agriculture. Partnering with the RICA to envision, design, and build their new campus, MASS led the master planning, architecture, landscape, engineering, and construction for the new campus. The project was conceived and funded by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and supported by the Government of Rwanda.

Sonia Sobrino Ralston (MLA ’23) presents Uncommon Knowledge: Plants as Sensors, a series of drawings that explore the informational capacity of plants as a counter to extractive computing infrastructure that harm water-stressed communities. Responding to Google’s water-hungry data center on the Columbia River, data is expanded into a speculative landscape where digital hardware and plant wetware intertwine. In these new drawings that build on her MLA thesis research, plants are represented as naturally intelligent, low tech components of a collectively managed informational system. Ralston will be expanding on this work of representing bioindicator plant life and death as the incoming 2025–2026 Daniel Urban Kiley Teaching Fellow in Landscape Architecture.

Kotchakorn Voraakhom (MLA ’06) and Watcharapon Nimwattanagul of LANDPROCESS are responsible for Thammasat Urban Rooftop Farm.

 

Are you a GSD affiliate with a project in Venice that’s not included here? Please email [email protected].

The ReefLine: An Unprecedented Underwater Sculpture Park Brings Art, Marine Habitats, and Public Education to Miami Beach

A 7-mile underwater sculpture park and hybrid reef will soon trace the shore of Miami Beach. Known as the ReefLine , this first-of-its-kind project fuses public art, science, and conservation to address threats posed by the climate crisis, in particular sea level rise and warming ocean temperatures. At the same time, the ReefLine offers an innovative model for cooperation, situating art as a catalytic force that transcends disciplines and fosters wide-spread environmental stewardship. As the project’s founder and artistic director Ximena Caminos recently asserted in a lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), the ReefLine “forces alliances between artists, scientists, engineers, architects, and communities. . . . Through storytelling, cultural practice, and knowledge, we translate complex science into shared emotional understanding and collective responsibility.”

Charles Waldeim, John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture at the GSD and co-head of the MDes program, introduced Caminos to the GSD audience. “Beyond the importance of Ximena Caminos’s work, what’s so powerful about the ReefLine is that it is a new paradigm,” Waldheim declared, “a new category of work that hadn’t existed before at the intersection of arts, design, and environmental stewardship.”

Throughout her career as a curator, artistic director, and cultural placemaker, Caminos has used art to foster community development and raise awareness about topics she holds dear. For example, in her homeland of Argentina, Caminos worked with conceptual artist Jenny Holzer to highlight the abuses of the country’s former military government. Two decades later, she orchestrated a commentary on the climate crisis with Leandro Erlich’s Order of Importance (2019), a traffic jam of 66 full-size automobiles, sculpted from sand, in Miami Beach. More recently, she curated the art master plan for the UnderLine , a 10-mile linear park on formerly fallow land beneath Miami’s Metrorail.

“To me, everything starts and ends in the ocean,” says Caminos. It seems natural, then, that with the ReefLine, Caminos has focused her attention on the marine world. Following preliminary funding from the Knight Foundation’s Knight Arts Challenge in 2019, Miami Beach residents voted in 2021 to issue a $5 million bond for the project. This sparked years of collaboration between disciplinary experts (art, architecture, technology, science), governmental authorities (city, state, federal), and local communities—all stakeholders in the ReefLine, which Waldheim aptly described as an “audacious adventure.”

Located 600 feet offshore at a depth of 20 feet, the ReefLine begins off South Beach and runs north, featuring large-scale installations that simultaneously comprise a public sculpture park and a hybrid reef, intended to enhance biodiversity in an area ravaged by decades of sand replenishment and dredging operations. Experts estimate that, since the 1970s, 90 percent of the Florida coral reef tract has been destroyed , harming the underwater ecosystem and leaving the land even more vulnerable to rising sea levels and storm swell. Caminos and her team envision the ReefLine as providing much-needed coastline protection and, of equal importance, encouraging public interaction with—and education about—the marine environment.

The first sculpture/hybrid reef will be installed in early September. Designed by Erlich and called ConcreteCoral, the work reprises the artist’s earlier land-based installation with 22 automobiles, which have been cast in environmentally friendly concrete using 3D-printed molds. Innovative insets (Coral Loks ) will attach living coral to vehicles, fostering a vibrant submerged garden for marine life to explore alongside willing snorkelers, who can simply venture out from the beach, no boat or fee required.

In the next two years, more sculptures will follow Concrete Coral, adding to the ReefLine’s “snorkel trail.” British artist Petroc Sesti modeled Heart of Okeanos on the heart of a blue whale and fashioned the sculpture from CarbonXinc , an experimental eco-concrete that acts as a carbon sink. Coral scientists will seed living corals in the 17-by-9-foot module, while sea creatures colonize its plentiful openings. With the Miami Reef Star, fifty-six 3D-printed concrete starfish congregate in the shape of a giant star. Designed by artist Carlos Betancourt and architect Alberto Latorre, the 90-foot-wide sculpture will be public artwork, marine habitat, and visual icon, visible via air upon approach to Miami International Airport. And a series of interlocking concrete elements—designed by OMA/Shohei Shigematsu, also responsible for the ReefLine’s master plan—will form a protective barrier against sand migration and serve as another surface on which coral may grow. Additional eco-conscious sculptures by artists from around the world, selected through a new Blue Arts Award competition, will join this collection in the future.

The ReefLine encompasses more than underwater sites, with educational components that connect the submerged installations with events on land. For example, in December 2024, the annual Art Week in Miami Beach featured a version of the Miami Reef Star arranged on the sand, as well as physical signage and digitally accessible images of the corals that will soon flourish offshore. Temporarily installed on the beach, the Miami Reef Star received more than one hundred thousand visitors throughout the festival’s seven-day run. It also drew the attention of officials organizing the 2025 United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice, France, which will now feature a twin reef star on its Mediterranean beach.

In Miami Beach, Caminos’s team has plans for the ReefLine Pavilion & Biocultural Center, situated along Ocean Drive in the popular waterfront Lummus Park. The structure, to be 3D-printed like the Miami Reef Star, will house a learning space, coral demonstrations, gift shop, and multipurpose event space. Caminos also envisions the ReefLine Salon, a regular meet-up modeled on the social salons of early modern France where individuals across disciplines will gather to informally share ideas.

Following her presentation, Caminos spoke with Pedro Alonzo, a curator, art advisor, and GSD lecturer who recently taught a course for MDes students on curation in the public realm. The discussion focused on the power of art, with Caminos commenting that “art has the power to open doors where doors don’t exist. I think that’s a hack,” she explained, and the ReefLine offers a perfect example. An incredibly complex project, the ReefLine doesn’t fall into any neat category; funding comes from a cultural grant, while a hybrid reef permit allows for its creation. Yet, Caminos emphasized that, while the ReefLine straddles art and science, art—not science—“actually unlocked the funds and the imagination of the people,” the citizens of Miami Beach who overwhelmingly support the project. “Neuroscience now confirms what artists have always known,” Caminos declared earlier in her talk; “empathy and narrative move people much faster than numbers do.”

Caminos also highlighted how the ReefLine sculptures are “doing the work and not representing it; [the art] is the environment and is serving the environment.” Alonzo echoed this sentiment. “Art tends to be symbolic, representational, and the ReefLine transcends that. Some of this work functions as a carbon sink,” he commented. “This is all very important.”

 Waldheim agrees. “A mix of habitat creation, biodiversity, addressing the climate crisis directly, the ReefLine is absolutely as innovative and progressive a model for the arts and design as I’ve seen anywhere else in the world. And we are so very thrilled that Ximena came to share it here with us.”