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.”

 

Harvard Graduate School of Design Honors Alumnus J. Max Bond Jr. and Reckons with the University’s History of Racial Discrimination

Widely known during his life as the “dean of African American architects,” J. Max Bond Jr. (AB ’55, MArch ’58) commanded respect in the field as much  for designs that privileged the people who inhabited them as for his leadership fighting for racial justice in cities. Earlier this year, the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) renamed the largest classroom in the school’s Gund Hall in honor of the prominent alumnus, whose work includes the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, the Harvard Club of New York, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York.

Members of Bond’s family, Harvard classmates, former business associates, and those invested in his legacy gathered last week in Piper Auditorium, steps away from the J. Max Bond Jr. Room, to celebrate his life and work. The gathering was equally an opportunity to confront the truth that Bond’s many accomplishments in the field of design came despite the racism he faced in his chosen profession as well as at Harvard. While intended to honor Bond as an “architect and urban activist,” Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at the GSD, made clear in her introductory remarks that the classroom renaming was also about reckoning with the “extreme ugliness” of Bond’s time at Harvard, “making sure the community remembers both.”

The event centered on a lecture by Brian D. Goldstein (AB ’04, AM ’09, PhD ’13), a historian of architecture and urbanism at Swarthmore College whose forthcoming book on Bond grounds his work in broader currents of design and social justice movements in the second half of the twentieth century. (A recording of the talk and subsequent panel is available online.)

Bond attended Harvard College and then the GSD at a time when racial discrimination was rampant even while the institutions promoted liberal values. As Goldstein eloquently recounted of Bond’s time at the GSD, for example, Bond undertook a course of study shaped by Dean Josep Lluís Sert that emphasized modes of modernist design rooted in egalitarian social commitments and humanistic intentions. Yet, the aspiring architect’s experiences at the school and life in Cambridge often contradicted these ideals. This “place of possibility,” as Goldstein called Harvard, was also a site of “discouragement and violence unlike anything Bond had experienced in the Deep South.”

Entering the College in 1951 at the age of 16 while his family lived in Monrovia, Liberia, Bond was among 15 Black students in his freshman class. Arnold Howe (AB ’55), the only living graduate of this pioneering cohort, was in attendance at the event. The challenge of settling into the university environment at such a young age was intensified for Bond by the antagonism of classmates and instructors alike. One especially horrifying incident occurred outside the freshman’s dormitory on Harvard Yard; as Goldstein put it, “the iconic built environment [became] an instrument in the project of racial terror.” One night, several Harvard students set a cross on fire in front of Stoughton Hall, the dormitory where the majority of the Black students in the class lived at the time in an “effectively segregated space.” Active in civil rights organizations on campus, Bond refused to dismiss the attack as a mere “prank.” He co-authored a letter to the editor in the Harvard Crimson decrying racism on campus, and the story was eventually picked up in Boston newspapers and other publications around the country.

Bond spent his undergraduate years majoring in architectural sciences, an academic track that allowed him to spend his undergraduate senior year at the GSD. Speaking on the panel, Moe Feingold (AB ’54, MArch ’58) recalled Bond’s quiet studiousness within the program as well as his willingness to take risks, for example designing a kindergarten classroom with open fireplaces to gather around. Like any student, Bond faced struggles in the academic environment as well. Yet the already rigorous course of work was made more harrowing by open discrimination. One professor, Goldstein explained, pulled Bond aside to let him know that a Black man could not succeed as an architect and to admonish him to pursue a different profession. Goldstein cited census figures from the time that count only 180 Black architects in the United States compared to more than 23,000 white people in the field.

Bond earned his degree and only rarely returned to the university, though he did come back to Cambridge in 1968 to lecture in his capacity as executive director of the Architects’ Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH), an organization dedicated to community-driven renewal efforts. This initiative stood in contrast to the dominant strains of urban design that Bond encountered at the GSD, which often seemed blind to the racial disparities in the top-down “renewal” projects that led to mass displacement of Black residents in particular.

Several of the speakers noted that, as an architect, Bond focused first on how inhabitants would experience the spaces he created. David Lee (MAUD ’71), a colleague of Bond’s, observed that “architecture for him was about the people rather than the form,” and that he “found form that reflected the condition and the people that he was working with.” Illustrating this approach, a selection of photographs from the J. Max Bond Jr. Papers at Columbia’s Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library has been installed in the classroom. These images, many likely taken by Bond himself, depict his buildings filled with people, emphasizing the everyday use of space.

Through Goldstein’s presentation and the subsequent discussion, a portrait of Bond as a person emerged. Steven Davis, a former partner of Bond’s at Davis Brody Bond, described how Bond’s intense work life was balanced by a “wicked sense of humor” and concerns for the prospects of other Black architects until the end of his life. “You mention Max’s name and you pause for a moment,” said Lee, “He had that kind of presence.” Indeed, many of the people who knew Bond personally have supported efforts to continue his legacy. Isabel Strauss (AB ’13, MArch ’21), an incoming faculty member at Smith College, and Shawn L. Rickenbacker, director of the CCNY J. Max Bond Center for Urban Futures, spoke about the ways they have attempted to create resources for design students today to understand Bond’s work and create initiatives in urban design that are true to his vision.

Bond was a skeptic about institutions, as Goldstein noted, yet the spirit of his work can also continue in settings that now carry his name. Bond’s name, as Dean Whiting argued, will be a constant reminder for the community of its fraught past and potential futures. In that sense, the renaming is not a capstone on the experiences Bond had at Harvard, but the start of ongoing work to remember and repair.

Yen-Ting Cho on Transdisciplinary Practice: Interweaving the Human and the Digital

“Video installation, sculpture, ceramic, printmaking, textile—our work spans various media,” explains Yen-Ting Cho (MDes ’09) of his design studio’s creations, which range from luxury scarves to vast public artworks, the most recent for the new Terminal 3 in Taiwan’s Taoyuan International Airport. Despite the diversity in type and scale, these projects all derive from a singular underlying notion: human-computer interaction. “I always focus on combining human and computer-based thoughts,” says Cho. “For me, it’s a dialogue between the two, not an either-or question.” Cho’s blurring of boundaries integrates techniques from architecture, computer science, and other fields, exemplifying the transdisciplinary outlook he developed during his time at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD).

From a young age, Cho cultivated multiple disciplinary interests. He naturally embraced technology and engineering, having been raised near Taiwan’s Hsinchu Science Park (an environment akin to California’s Silicon Valley). Simultaneously, Cho gravitated toward artistic creation; encouraged by his family and high school curriculum, he explored sketching, painting, traditional paper cutting, and calligraphy, as well as package design and music. Cho then studied architecture at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), becoming well versed in analog and digital design tools while earning his bachelor of science degree (completed in 2005) and interning with architectural firms. “By this point,” he recalls, “I wanted to explore additional types of media, which I hoped could be more expressive and engage with a wider audience.” Thus, after completing his mandatory military service, in 2007 Cho entered the GSD’s Master of Design (MDes) program focusing on design and technology, eager to delve into alternative methods of creation.

“Crossing traditional disciplinary boundaries is never easy,” Cho declares. “Most training prepares students to fit into the so-called real world, which does not tend to favor disruption.” Fortunately, Cho found that the MDes program challenged this trend by encouraging multidisciplinary exploration. During his two years at the GSD, he took advantage of Gund Hall’s rich offerings as well as those at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the neighboring Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Cho began by learning parametric design and computer programming, and then moved on to human-computer interaction courses at both the GSD and the MIT Media Lab. Within Harvard’s Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (now known as the Department of Arts, Film, and Visual Studies), Cho received fellowships to explore animation. He took photography courses, built his first robot, worked on an interactive installation for the Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward exhibition (2009) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and won several international awards for his experimental films.

In retrospect, Cho characterizes his time as an MDes student as truly formative. He found “Sculpting in Motion,” a course taught by then associate professor of practice Allen Sayegh, to be particularly impactful. “The tools used in the course were similar to those used for architectural design, but for different artistic expressions. I started to see the grey areas between design and art,” Cho says. By graduation, Cho had expanded his “interests from spatial design to temporal creation and had started to seriously think about, and tentatively build, creative digital tools.”

Inspired by Sayegh’s mentorship as well as a course at the MIT Media Lab called “New Paradigms for Human-Computer Interaction” (taught by Hiroshi Ishii ), Cho decided to explore creations arising from human-computer interaction. Following his graduation from the GSD, Cho enrolled in London’s Royal College of Art (RCA) to pursue a PhD in Innovation Design Engineering. This program foregrounded practice-based research, and a diverse group of advisors—a cybernetician/design theorist, a film theorist, and an aeronautical engineer/design—helped Cho integrate his assorted interests.[1]

While a doctoral student, Cho collaborated with two Taiwanese researchers to develop mov.i.see , a digital software that “uses body movement to reconstruct inputted digital data.” This software would become integral for Cho; after completing his PhD in 2009, he started YEN TING CHO , a studio that uses mov.i.see to generate unique patterns, initially for textiles. Cho also began teaching at the Institute of Creative Design at NCKU, where he is now a professor.

With offices in London and Taipei, YEN TING CHO now describes itself as a digital design studio and consultancy that produces unique artworks, public installations, and contemporary designs for fashion accessories, interiors, and exteriors. Their creations feature colorful patterns that arise from running images through mov.i.see. The resulting designs are finished by hand, playing with color, space, and form, and are ultimately digitally printed onto a given surface, such as textiles or ceramics. With his studio, Cho intentionally fosters “an open and dynamic environment for creatives interested in transdisciplinary and practice-based research.” This breadth and experimentation allow the studio to tackle projects in a unique way, as is the case for its current focus: Gateway to Taiwan: Island Tales, a public installation for the north hall of the Richard Rogers–designed Terminal 3 at Taoyuan International Airport.

Cho fashioned Gateway to highlight aspects of Taiwan beyond its technological renown. To comprise the installation, he created seven artworks, each representing a different theme within Taiwanese history and culture—for example, spiritual life, the natural world, or the cityscape. The works, which collectively total over 300 meters, “show Taiwan’s creativity, interweaving technology and culture,” Cho explains. This interweaving plays out in both the process and products of creation. Following a phase of in-depth research, Cho manipulates his human reflections with his software to generate the semi-abstract thematic patterns. The abstraction encourages travelers of all cultures—visitors and locals—to engage with the works, to develop their own interpretations of Gateway and the island of Taiwan.

When Gateway opens in late 2025, the project will showcase the potential inherent in transdisciplinarity, which Cho initially encountered during his time as an MDes student at the GSD. “Perhaps that’s the beauty of the MDes program,” Cho says. “It’s not just architecture. It’s not just landscape. It’s not just urban design. It’s everything everywhere.”

[1] Aligning with these specialties, Ranulph Glanville, Al Rees, and Neil Barron were Cho’s advisors at RCA.

Kengo Kuma Urges a Return to Nature

In early April, nearly a decade after his previous speaking engagement at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), Kengo Kuma delivered this year’s John Hejduk Soundings Lecture to a full Piper Auditorium. With an address titled “Return to Nature,” Kuma guided the audience through a selection of his prolific work, dynamic compositions that bridge tradition and innovation, the artisanal and the computational, ranging in scale from wooden toy blocks to a 68,000-seat stadium . Nature provides the logic, and often the materials, that comprise these designs. Indeed, welcoming Kuma to the podium, Grace La—professor of architecture and chair of the Architecture Department—noted that “Kuma composes forms and materials to appear as nature itself.” As Kuma encouraged architects to reconnect with nature, three themes rose to the fore: the connection between forest and city, the use of the small particle, and the value of experimentation.

Kuma began his discussion by highlighting an historical shift in focus from the forest to the city; whereas for centuries people turned to the forest for food, fuel, and construction materials, the twentieth century witnessed an increasing reliance on the city as sustaining force. Proposing a reversal of this trend, Kuma positioned the Hiroshige Museum in Bato, Japan, as a literal and figurative gateway between town and satoyama (village mountain). Sourced from this forest, the building’s materials—cedar planks, artisan-made paper, and quarry stones—forge an indelible link with the surrounding environment. These materials, produced by area craftspeople, tie the museum to the local culture and economy, refashioning a bond between residents and the natural world.

In the case of the Hiroshige Museum, Kuma’s “return to nature” encompasses several contextually specific elements, which change in other projects depending on variables such as site and scale. Yet, throughout Kuma’s oeuvre, the use of the small particle (or unit) remains remarkably consistent. To illustrate the potential of “particlization,” as it has come to be known in the past few decades, Kuma referenced the Hōryū-ji pagoda, constructed in the 7th century in Nara, Japan. Rising five stories, this wooden tower still stands today “as if by magic,” Kuma says. “The secret of the magic,” he explains, “is small, replaceable pieces” that, in aggregate, create a dynamic whole. A damaged piece of the pagoda can be replaced without destroying the larger entity. This accretion-of-small-pieces approach is a planned obsolescence that, ironically, promotes longevity, allowing the building to endure use, weather, and time in ways not possible for a monolithic concrete structure.

Particlization as employed by Kuma is inherently sustainable. Smaller pieces of wood—for example, the 6-by-6-centimeter-thick members used in the GC Prostho Museum Research Center—can be fabricated from immature trees, forestalling deforestation by leaving old growth areas untouched. In addition, these young trees require less time to reach the desired height, allowing for more rapid production of construction materials. And as a building’s pieces are replaced, the older elements can be recycled; wood becomes fuel, while thatch becomes animal feed or compost.

In Kuma’s designs, particlization brings other benefits. Building with small pieces of wood in earthquake prone regions increases seismic resistance due to the flexibility of multiple joints, which absorb shocks more effectively than rigid concrete and steel. An accretion of smaller units also lends itself to a human scale—a quality evident in even Kuma’s larger buildings, including the Japan National Stadium (2019) in Tokyo, employing wooden planks, and the Portland Japanese Garden (2017) in Oregon, which relies on an aggregation of smaller buildings to create an intimate courtyard. Such arrangements, whether of material or spatial elements, encourage different forms of maintenance and care that may tap into traditional cultural practices like that of the Ise Shrine, ritualistic rebuilt every 20 years as a signal of impermanence and renewal.

Within his thriving international practice, Kuma holds a place for architectural experimentation. These investigative forms abide by a similar logic of particlization, yet the particle itself continues to vary. The Casa Umbrella (2008), a Milan Triennale installation inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s tensegrity structures, uses a Tyvek umbrella as the unit; when joined with others via zippers, the umbrella becomes part of a larger temporary shelter, resistant to seismic shocks and easily erected in disaster situations. The Mêmu Meadows Experimental House (2012), a prototypical cabin in Hokkaido, Japan, features a double-layer membrane stretched over a multi-piece wood frame; geothermal energy warms the uninsulated enclosure in freezing temperatures. And now there is Domino 3.0, an installation fabricated for the 2025 Venice Biennale that utilizes soft 3D-printed joints to position and secure living trees. Like Kuma’s other works, this most recent project reflects the interdependent relationship between humankind and nature. In La’s words, “abstract assemblages of small pieces produce a simultaneity of parts and wholes in a unified ecological phenomenon—mysteriously precise, ineffable, and sublime.”

Paperwork: An Interview with Karel Martens and the Martens and Martens Studio

A pair of colorful calendars appeared around Gund Hall during the 2024–2025 academic year to announce the full schedule of public programs at the Graduate School of Design (GSD). Designed by Martens and Martens studio in the Netherlands, the posters reflect the typographical experiments undertaken over the past six decades by Karel Martens, the studio’s founder.

Martens created the visual identity for the GSD’s public programs as he prepares for a retrospective at the Stedeljik Museum Amsterdam , drawing from a design career spanning from the days of punchcutters to the Creative Cloud. Throughout, Martens has maintained a meticulous focus on the interactions of color, typography, and printing techniques, balanced by an infectiously playful attitude toward the conventions of design.

Known today primarily as a graphic designer, with much of his influential work collected in the now-classic volume Drukwerk, Martens began his career when design was an inherently interdisciplinary pursuit. Architecture in particular has served as a source of inspiration as well as the subject of legendary projects he produced and oversaw, including the journal OASE. Trained as a fine artist, Martens also creates textiles, design objects, and kinetic sculptures, a selection of which will be part of the Stedeljik exhibition.

For decades, pedagogy has been integral to Martens’s design work, which is often produced collaboratively and through trial-and-error. This ethos is at the heart of the school he founded, Werkplaats Typografie, and also extends to the dynamic of the studio itself. Today, Martens and Martens includes Diederik Martens, Klaartje Martens, and Susu Lee, all of whom contributed to the visual identity for the GSD’s public programs.

For nearly twenty years, the GSD has commissioned outside designers to create posters and other materials to announce public programs. Chad Kloepfer, art director at the GSD, and Willis Kingery, graphic design consultant for the school, spoke with the Martens and Martens team about their collaboration with the GSD and how the work environment in the studio often flips the roles of instructor and student in a playful yet intensive search for new forms and modes of expression.

Willis Kingery: We wanted to start with an impossible and kind of silly question. How many posters have you designed, Karel?

Karel Martens: [laughs] Too many! More than a hundred. My first was for a movie theater.

WK: Do you still find challenges to be met in designing posters? Has anything in your approach to making a poster changed from your early career to now? Are you surprised by the endurance of the format?

KM: There’s been a departure from some past media. You used to make sketches with your pencil, then it went out to an official printer, and you had to make films and do all that kind of thing. So now it’s much more direct, and much easier in a way. That doesn’t always mean that the results are better, but it’s completely different from when I started my career in the time of letterpress. In that time, you had to work with material, to work with a printer and what they had in their collection. I used to deal with small printers and whatever typefaces they had in their drawers.

WK: And have there been any changes in the thought process that goes into the designing of a poster?

KM: I always try to imagine what kind of public I’m addressing, and who and what kind of public the poster should be for. A public for me is one of the players in the game. You have a designer and a printer, but also the public, and of course the commissioner. There has to be a kind of harmony between these. Working with the GSD, I had a feeling we understood each other very well. The challenge in this case, of course, is the distance. You don’t smell the ink.

WK: One of your earliest teaching assignments to your students in Arnhem in the late 1970s was to design a typographic layout for one month of a calendar page, which was then printed by letterpress in Futura. Curiously, upon receiving the commission from the GSD in 2024 and 2025, you gave yourself your own assignment, creating a calendar system using Futura as the primary typeface. Can you tell us what motivated this?

KM: I’ve always been fascinated by numbers and time. Time for me is a mysterious thing. A calendar is a magical thing, and a daily calendar really makes you see that time is going. [The two GSD posters represent] two parts from a whole year. You see the panorama of the whole year, all the numbers, all the days, and from those there are a few you pick out. Exciting days. I can imagine that for students you can be confronted with the highlights of the year.

WK: The release of your two posters line up elegantly with an auspicious anniversary: Paul Renner began working on the typeface that would become Futura in the summer of 1924, and this was later picked up for commercial development by the Bauer type foundry in the winter of 1925 and eventually released in 1927 as Futura. So, on its unofficial 100th anniversary, can you tell us about your selection of Futura for the GSD posters? Futura feels like a typeface you’ve fallen in and out of love and trust with over the course of your career, but it seems to have enduring relevance for you in architectural contexts.

KM: Futura still contains a kind of thesis about the future in my opinion. As a designer you can go crazy looking at all the typefaces. I see typefaces as a kind of representation of the human voice. And a human voice can be reflected on a poster depending on what someone would like to tell. A poster for a professor of mathematics might use another typeface, and it would be different again if it were for a book or magazine.

Diederik Martens: You’re aiming for a tone of voice?

KM: It’s also connected to the creation of hierarchy, which acts as a guide. A caption should be different than a footnote, through size or position. In that way I always learned a lot from the catalogues that Wim Crouwel made for the Stedelijk Museum. There’s only one typeface, one size, one leading. Only the position on the page is important. In this way you create your own rules. I remember reading Jan Tschichold for the first time—his book on book design. After two pages, I closed it. I thought I can never act that clever. I later saw there was a distinction between his falsch und richtig (“good” and “not good”). Sometimes “not good” is better than “good.” When you make rules for something it is already dead.

Chad Kloepfer: Given that the poster you’ve designed for the GSD neatly outlines the days of a semester at a design school, could you each tell us what a day on the Silodam at Martens Martens looks like?

KM: I’m a workaholic.

DM: [laughs] You, no! So, you wake up in the morning and you go to the gym.

KM: Yes, I do some exercises, have some breakfast, and then I go to the studio around half past nine, which is in the same building, so I don’t have to walk far.

Susu Lee: Me and Diederik come to the studio at 10. I come three days a week. We always check what we’re going to do for the day. I make a schedule in my head, otherwise I get lost because there are a lot of things to do here. Then me and Karel work together behind one computer. It’s always nice to be here. And Diederik is working on typefaces, making fonts, animations.

DM: If they start working here in the studio I can always go next door to Karel’s house, because it’s quiet, and I can make phone calls, handle the administration and Karel’s calendar, make a typeface or animation. Then we have lunch together around 1 o’clock, baking eggs or something like that. Susu likes to bring a Korean lunch.

SL: Working here with Karel—I don’t know if this is the right word for it—but it always feels like a playground. There’s so much to see, and Karel’s ideas are crazy. He keeps thinking of new stuff and is always willing to try out something new every time. From trying everything out, we of course make some mistakes, but then it somehow becomes the work.

DM: It’s always a lot of trial and error. It might sound repetitive, but it somehow never repeats. Sometimes you might think one work is a copy of another, but we’re always looking backwards in order to go forward. We don’t believe there’s one best way. We’re always taking one step forward, two steps backward, and so on. Every design process here is like that, reinventing almost the same thing.

WK: Do you ever take a break from designing every day?

KM: For me it’s an ongoing process: the client has a question and I have to find an answer. I have to find the ingredients that I can use for it, and I’m always analyzing that. Then you get an idea, and try it. If it’s good you keep it. If it isn’t, you put it in the trash can and you start again.

DM: It’s like you’re a detective. A detective has to be a workaholic, they can’t hide behind their desk and wait to start working. They’re always gathering information.

WK: Do you remember the moment that you developed a sense of vocation as a designer?

KM: It was from the moment when I began studying at art school. That was the nicest part. You develop things yourself, in collaboration with other people or not. I was around 20, and at that time art school was five years, and in my case the curriculum of the school was really broad. It was more of a general art education. The term “graphic design” didn’t exist yet for us at that time. So you took classes from all the teachers, developing ideas in whatever medium you wanted. In my opinion design education today is too focused on design, design, design. It should result from a way of thinking. I don’t see a difference in the kind of thinking that is needed to make a dress or a poster or a stamp or whatever. You’re facing a problem. Graphic design may be the ingredients for the technical realization of the problem, in combination with materials, but I try to see everything as new—as a possibility for new work. It’s surprising how so much is all the same. But now we are preparing for the Stedelijk exhibition, and I discovered that I too did a lot of things too many times.

CK: We know that not just the practice of design, but also the teaching of design is very important to you. In 1998 you founded the post-graduate school Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem, Netherlands, with the purpose of learning through working on practical design assignments and commissions. Do you still think this is the best model for a design education?

KM: What was nice about the Werkplaats was that from the beginning my studio was in the school as a permanent location. We were always thinking when we created the Werkplaats Typografie that we should do real things. When you can create ideal situations for yourself, then it’s not so difficult, and also not so exciting in my opinion. In this way I was able to work less and also do a lot. For example, I always made the architectural journal OASE with a student. In fact, the student did it and I was guarding them. The students were always motivated to make the best possible work, in contact with the architects, who were also designers. The students would hear the architects’ comments, make their own strategies, and go to the printer with their own ideas.

CK: What do you think Susu? What’s your sense from working in the studio?

KM: Don’t tell all the secrets!

SL: I studied at the [Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam], and I would say it has a similar educational program to the Werkplaats. We had a lot of applied assignments, such as designing a poster for the Rietveld or other institutions in Amsterdam. I don’t know if it’s the right answer, but whenever I’m in Karel’s studio I feel like Karel is teaching me. I was actually thinking a few weeks ago what it would have been like to be at the Werkplaats while Karel was at the Werkplaats. But now I’m at the studio and can just talk to Karel about commissioned work and assignments and how to develop them. I really appreciate it. I also appreciate how Karel directs. He doesn’t say, “this poster should be like this,” or “this poster should read in this way.” He always puts it in a really poetic way. For example, with the GSD poster Karel told me that the front and back layers of the typography have to fight each other. The front and back layers need to be in a fight. At first, I was like, what does that mean? Then I looked back at his work in Drukwerk and started to understand, oh, this is what Karel means.

CK: You had mentioned something about time as a component of your thinking and work, and looking back at your books we see everything from overlapping numbers and dingbats to graphic patterns and typeface design where there is a real kinetic quality to the work. We have even seen this translated into videos and sculptures. What is the relation of time and movement to your work, and is it a conscious component as you are engaged on a project?

KM. It’s all based on choreography I believe. I remember already as a child I was interested in how a watch worked. I remember my father had a type writing machine; I could not read in this time, and as he was typing I was wondering what is a typeface, and what are letters? And that with 26 characters from an alphabet you can make so many kinds of meanings? That for me is still a kind of mystery. Same with colors. With basically a few colors you can make all the colors of the world. You can take this for granted—and this is also okay—but for me it’s still a mystery that you can make from yellow and blue—green! Three! Two makes three.

DM: Has time something to do with it?

KM: Yes, even in printing. With the monoprints you are printing, and then you cannot touch them. And the next day you can touch them again. I never have a fixed plan, only a beginning. I start printing something, and then it is asking me for something more. And sometimes they go to the trashcan, and sometimes they receive more and more. I still have the feeling that I’m the student. That I’m the one who has to learn.

DM: And we feel like the ones who are the teachers!

SL: Sometimes I have the feeling that Karel is really like a child. In a good way! Always wondering, finding new things—in his crazy collections, his crazy shelves.

WK: Karel, you’ve mentioned that the 2mm grid structure for OASE was inspired by watching a documentary about the architect Dom Hans van der Laan. Similarly, you’ve cited the work of Auguste Perret as a point of inspiration for the vertical strips in your beach installation in Le Havre. Have you experienced any other moments of interdisciplinary connection after a lifetime of working with architects? And conversely, have any of your collaborators in architecture translated lessons learned from you and your work into their own projects?

KM: Life is a process. I was never even intending to study design. The word “design” didn’t exist at that time. I was intending to study mathematics, but everything then depended on the teachers. On the last day of the semester the teachers would give a kind of speech, and I had this teacher that was always explaining the failures of mathematics. He was playing with his ideas about what mathematics should be, and I thought this is the forefront of the future. But then, I’m dyslexic, so I could not finish my high school and therefore advance on to university. So, I had to do something else. My sister was in the art school and she always said, “you have to come to the art school.” From the moment of joining the art school I felt happy. There were all kinds of things that you could do.

DM: But you never recognized that an architect was inspired by you?

KM: No.

DM: Did you ever think about being an architect?

KM: Why? To save money? No. There are so many things to do. But I have a feeling that education is too focused on disciplines. As a young person you could learn just as much from a person who is teaching aviation or, I don’t know, anything! As a young person you need a full color of opportunity. Not only graphic design, not only architecture.

CK: That sounds similar to a Bauhaus form of education. Not a single discipline, but a bigger, circular idea. I had a question about the tools designers use. The tools we use have changed dramatically over the course of your career. I feel like when a new tool is invented, it’s easy to become a victim of it. How have you stayed above that?

DM: Yes, victim of tools.

KM: [smiling] That term “victim” is very strong. I had said my career started with letterpress. I remember I had to teach my students the way monotype was working approximately. It was a very big thing, so I split it up in parts, and I started telling them about how it works, how fantastic it was as a system for translating compositions onto this hole-punched paper. Then there was a lecture at the time at the school from the designer Gerard Unger, a Dutch type designer. And he starts his lecture, “Of course, all of you know how Monotype works…” Nobody. I was also in the audience and I was looking around thinking, what have I done wrong? For me that was a learning process in teaching. You have to deal with curiosity, and you have to make students curious. That tool was not much longer in use. Tools are always changing. After that we went to the IBM Composer, for example. In a way not a serious instrument, without special control over spacing, but you still had to deal with it because you’d have clients without large budgets. And then came cameras and phototypesetting, that came with its own rules which you then had to deal with.

DM: I think you never became a victim of tools because you’re always thinking, “What can I do in a certain kind of situation?” You can use a special tool or not, but you’re never thinking in tools. You’re thinking through your search for solutions. You find the tool for it through the searching.

KM: And I’m always thinking, can we do more with this tool than what it’s made for?

DM: It’s like when you first started using the computer. You didn’t know what to do with it. But then you started to do things with it that no one had done before, because everyone else was thinking, “computers are for this or that,” but you found things outside of the intended uses.

WK: To address another kind of circularity, many designers speak through a consistent vocabulary or approach. In a way you’ve been uniquely committed to a consistent set of visual interests and formal expressions throughout your career, and you continue to possess an almost monastic devotion to developing your craft and personal explorations. Do you ever make things—small experiments in the studio—that you discard because they don’t feel like they fit into your larger body of work? 

DM: No!

KM: It’s happening very often at the moment because I have to dive into my own past: 60 years of work. Save everything. I’m seeing things I made 60 years ago and I’m now thinking—more than at the moment when I did it—”Wow, not so bad!”

CK: Since preparations for your retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum are so much about the past, if we’re looking forward, is there anything you wish you could still do? Is there anything that you haven’t had the opportunity to do yet?

KM: This is the beginning of my worries, especially at my age. It’s for sure that I don’t have so many more years in life. I’d like to use them for my work. But the strange thing is—apart from that my wife has sadly passed away—there’s a kind of strange world that you get in, where you’re then working on your own portrait. To be honest, I was so surprised that they were asking me for such a show, that it actually motivated me to go ahead, to show myself in the best way.

DM: But what do you still want to do in the future?

SL: This I know. Because I also asked it to Karel one time. Karel always wants to do something. I asked him what do you want to do besides graphic design? Besides making books and publications? And he said he wants to make BIG sculptures. So I said, we can do it after we’re done with the Stedelijk! But he said, no, it will be too much work.

DM: The exhibition consumes a lot of energy and time and concentration and space, but we still think when the preparations for the exhibition end, we’ll have time to do lots of other kinds of stuff. But it always goes on and on, and then something else comes up, and you think you can start something new, but you can’t plan for anything. It’s like we’re on a train that will never stop, and you have to live with it in a way. But we want to do a LOT. When? We’re always willing, but where is the time?

KM: You cannot do everything. I’m interested in 3D printing, but I may not get the chance to do it. I have a small studio now. The machines are too big. I have at most the space to make something at the scale of A3. That’s the maximum. But from the other side, limitation can point your energies into small things. I sometimes wish to make a big thing, in concrete for example. You can now 3D print in concrete. What’s happening in your school with this kind of thing?

DM: He wants to use your school’s concrete printer!

CK: We’ll talk to facilities about that! 

KM: Well, this is the nice thing about education, that you see young people taking decisions. I always had the feeling that I was the student and they were the teachers. Students are always inventing things. It’s amazing to see that you’re in a positive environment, so you should work with young people and see how they are making things. That’s really a privilege, I believe.

CK: That’s a really beautiful and perfect way to close this out. Thank you so much.

WK: Karel, on behalf of many designers, I’m very glad that you didn’t study mathematics!

Rest Stops at the Top of the World

For the last 30 years, motorists in Norway have driven winding roads into the mountains and fjords along the country’s 18 National Scenic Routes , many of which skirt stunning coastlines, and are home to Arctic foxes, whales, and reindeer. Norway began developing these routes in the 1990s, by competitively selecting architects to design viewpoints and rest areas in the often fragile terrain. Now, with tourists flocking to witness the views—as well as the internationally renowned toilets, rest stops, viewing platforms, and other service facilities—and escape the quickly warming Mediterranean, the government faces the challenge of managing traffic along the narrow, winding roads, many of which, explains Luis Callejas, visiting professor in landscape architecture at the Graduate School of Design (GSD), were first traced in the eighteenth century for their views rather than efficiency.

In 2022, LCLA OFFICE , the firm Callejas directs together with Swedish-Norwegian architect Charlotte Hansson, was selected from an applicant pool of 81 design teams to develop sites on the Scenic Routes for the next six years. The beach where they’ll design a rest stop and bathroom is on the Lofoten Route , an archipelago above the Arctic Circle. With craggy, snow-topped peaks and shimmering teal-blue water, it remains in almost complete darkness all winter, except for frequent northern lights that draw visitors, and then becomes resplendent in 24-hour summer sunshine, a “paradise for arctic surfers, with fjords as the backdrop,” Callejas explained.

As part of his studio this spring, “Landscapes of the Norwegian Scenic Routes,” he traveled with GSD students throughout southern Norway, exploring some of the most important architectural designs along several routes with diverse landscapes, from wide sandy beaches to snowy fjords. Students have spent the semester creating their own speculative interventions, which Callejas says would need to endure under changing environmental conditions.

“One of the key questions of the studio,” he explained, “is how climate change and climate policies will affect the projects of the Scenic Routes.”

Callejas asked students to consider how their designs might marry environmental savvy with the durability the road conditions demand. And, because small communities along the Scenic Routes are impacted by tourists who arrive en masse each season, students’ sites must also lighten tourists’ impact—for example, limiting where they walk and directing how they spend their time during a rest stop—while allowing them to experience landscapes that are both magnificent and fragile. The paradox of the country, Callejas noted, is that it has “very sophisticated climate policies in terms of pollution and the standards in which infrastructures can be built,” but because it’s also geographically complex, it’s not connected by rail as are other European countries. Thus, rest stops need to include fill stations for today’s gas and electric cars, with the ability to be adapted for the near-future when all cars are electric.

The scenic routes are sections of roadways that were cleared hundreds of years ago, meandering through the country’s most beautiful landscapes, with narrow stretches etched into rocky fjords. Water constantly moves across the rock and roads, which can trigger disasters such as avalanches and floods. “Students learn that this is a design opportunity,” Callejas said, “as opposed to an engineering problem.” Additionally, the public is very sensitive to any visible interventions in the natural world, and will only accept well-designed solutions. This problem-solving, he says, is one of the elements of the studio that he most enjoys.

Students were tasked with designing three projects, the first without ever having visited Norway, a feat made possible thanks to what Callejas calls Norway’s “digital twin.”  The country’s publicly accessible surveys map the land down to 20 points per square meter. He asks his students to consider “what happens when the digital twin is so high resolution that it starts to challenge the idea of direct experience as something that is always necessary?” Drawing a comparison to medicine, in which diagnoses can be made with scans and imaging, he argues that students can use sophisticated technologies to design from afar: “I’m interested to see what happens when the students suddenly come up with attitudes towards the landscape that the locals, who know the landscape very well, may not find as easily.”

 

Norway’s sophisticated roadway technology also includes an app with live cameras and a range of maps and alerts on road conditions and obstacles, from avalanches to animal crossings, facilitating travel along remote routes that change rapidly in the winter. Callejas’ studio required the app’s constant and updated road condition information to move through southern Norway this February, traveling about 1,500 miles from Oslo to Geilo, southwest to Stavanger, and back to Oslo.

Along the way, they stopped at the Allmannajuvet zinc mines, which were operational in the late 1800s and reinvented by Peter Zumthor & Partner as a café and gallery, with an available guided tour of the mine. They took in the impressive Vøringfossen , designed by Hølmebakk Øymo, and visited the whimsical “fairytale toilet” at Tryvefjora , designed by Helen & Hard, where a series of pine trunks support a concrete rooftop. This is one of many celebrated bathrooms that have attracted curious tourists along the scenic routes; at Stegastein , visitors can use a bathroom that juts out over a precipice.

With many projects on the routes relying on concrete and steel for durability, Callejas encouraged students to build without the “heavy handedness of the infrastructural works,” and to consider alternative materials. Students created rest stops at Jossingfjord, a site well known to Callejas as his team had already proposed a rest area there. The port is unique for its “landscape defined by the presence of ilmenite, a rock type similar to the composition of the moon,” he said, and “the raw matter for titanium dioxide.” It’s been mined from this area in Norway for nearly a century.

 

 

 

For his part, Callejas is at work on the Lofoten beach rest area. With so many visitors arriving by car and van year-round, the roadway commission has asked Callejas’ firm to design a new public bathroom, which will need to be durable in the face of the beach’s “beautiful white sand” that will pummel it all year long. LCLA OFFICE will also design a space for “wind protection and perhaps even overnight shelter,” with access to a potable water source.

The building will be constructed of raw aluminum by local ship builders, as the area doesn’t have a traditional construction work force. Treated with a “sandblast gradient” to make the aluminum appear weather-worn, the structure will be reminiscent of the silos that still stand from the region’s industrial days. Today, at Lofoten beach, travelers might spot otters, puffins, cormorants, and dolphins—just some of the wildlife protected by Norway and accessible along age-old roads that now boast some of the region’s most interesting contemporary architecture.

The Final Experience is Beyond Our Control

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, a time An-My Lê remembers vividly. As she recalled during her Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture at the Graduate School of Design (GSD) this month, Lê and her family were among the hundreds evacuated from Vietnam by US soldiers. When she left, she was just fifteen years old, and, because of the war, had never had access to the Mekong Delta. Her only memories of the place were images she’d seen of GI’s being airlifted out. Nearly twenty years later, working under a grant after graduate school, she went back to photograph it.

“Exploring the landscape was a complete adventure,” said Lê, describing her return in 1994, when the United States re-established relations with Vietnam. “Living in exile,” she explained, “means not having access to your culture. For many years, we did not think we could return to Vietnam, and once I got there, I realized that all these memories were not very reliable.”

Speaking at the GSD on April 1,  Lê described how she made repeated visits to make landscape photographs with a view camera. The cumbersome but essential tool allows her to capture vast landscapes and poignant portraits, with long exposures that often create “happy accidents.” Back in Vietnam, she quickly found resonances of not only her childhood and the war, but also centuries past emerging in her images. The blurry palm trees above a flock of ducks, depicted in “Untitled, Mekong Delta, 1994,” could have been preserved from another lifetime, long before the war made travel in the Mekong Delta unsafe and damaged the landscape.

Lê pointed out the similarity between her work as a photographer and that of landscape architects in terms of time and history. Landscape architects design spaces we experience in the moment that also make reference to history and suggest potential change. According to Lê,  photographers layer their images with “notions of the past” and future. She said she looks at the landscape like a designer when she thinks about the separation between earth and sky, or questions of scale.

“I love the freedom,” she said of her medium. “You can start anywhere. And yet, we do our best to provide specific elements—whether a landscape architect designs a particular hill or curve, or how I choose to frame an image—but, the final experience is something we can’t control.”

In 1999, at the invitation of a group of Vietnam War reenactors who stage battles in Virginia and North Carolina, she began to photograph images of war—or at least, a mimicry of it. She often participated in the events herself so that she could remain close to the action, posing as a spy or soldier. The resulting images—a cluster of soldiers converging in a small opening in the woods blurred by a stand of bamboo they’d planted, the sparks of a bomb splashing into the air like a fountain—reveal the moments she found most interesting, which, she reminded the audience, is not the same as the photojournalistic impulse to record what’s “most pressing.”

Since then, she has observed military trainings in the Southern California desert that prepared soldiers for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, traveled on US navy ships across the Pacific, visited army training sessions in Ghana, and observed earthquake relief efforts in Haiti. Images from these travels became part of her series “29 Palms” (2003) and “Events Ashore” (2005–2012). She has also continued to attend war reenactments and was invited to shoot at the Louisiana filming of Free State of Jones, about the Civil War. While she often pursues “hot button topics,” she approaches those issues not from a documentary perspective but with poetic language, explaining that the building blocks of language and the photographic worlds she creates are very similar in terms of establishing tension, perspective, and the marriage of form and content.

In 2022, Lê began to experiment with the cyclorama, a form popular before the moving image that surrounded viewers with monumental paintings on the walls of a circular room. She reimagined the genre by hanging a series of large-scale photographs side by side around a circular room, allowing people to read them in linear and nonlinear fashions.

She used the cyclorama to present narrative photographs in the 2024 series “Dark Star” and “Grey Wolf.” Shot at a national park in Colorado near a nuclear missile test site, the images in “Dark Star”  depict the vast night sky, capturing with a long exposure the thousands of stars invisible to the naked eye, and urging the viewer to consider “civilization and the infinite world beyond us”—perhaps even offering comfort, Lê explained. “Grey Wolf,” a series of photographs shot from a helicopter over the missile installations set amid farmland in Montana and Nebraska, was inspired in part by the history of Land Art. The sites and their context evoke the monumental earthworks and concrete structures that comprise artist Michael Heizer’s Nevada project City, which stretches across over a mile of the desert. “The size of the stones on the path, the color of the stones, the height of the sidewalk, the borders, the plants—it’s very specific.” Lê cites Heizer as a contemporary influence.

She also engages deeply with the history of her primary medium and acknowledges nineteenth-century war photographers Timothy O’Sullivan and Roger Fenton as influences as well. Because war and its aftermath has been her subject for much of her career, Lê has had to wrestle with the question of whether she’s rendering violence “beautiful.” Her landscape photographs have been compared to the work of Robert Adams, and challenge our perception of the narrative a war image can tell. She argued that she’s in search of something beyond beauty—the sublime, or ineffable.

Her use of the view camera helps advance that goal. While she tried a smaller camera that allowed her to move with more agility, she was dissatisfied with the images; cumbersome though the view camera was, it allowed her to capture the landscape as she perceived it, with its many layers of space, time, and the valances of memory. And as she experimented with portrait photography—for example in her portraits of women on the carrier ships in “Events Ashore”—she also found that the view camera created different experiences with her subjects. When she went under the dark curtain to snap the shot, people posed for the camera, looking into its lens but unable to see her looking back.

Lê concluded her talk at the GSD with discussion of recent work in a new medium, embroidery, in which she considers the “ecstatic sublimity and quasi-religiosity of the frenzied performance.” She creates embroideries based on stills from a pornographic movie ostensibly set during the Vietnam War, in which performers stage an encounter between American soldiers and Vietnamese sex workers. She explained that she’s drawn to needlework because it completely absorbs her attention. “I find comfort when I lose myself in the work.”

She previously made weavings for her “đô-mi-nô” series, and was drawn to embroidery after finding a cross-stitched landscape in the basement of her apartment building. In Lê’s printing process, she edits her photographs at the level of the pixel, and began to think, “maybe that’s the way for me to control the image.” She was also influenced by medieval tapestries that “hang as decorative pieces while also suggesting a narrative. They’re about storytelling.”

Inspired by the long tradition of embroidery in Vietnam, Lê and her studio assistants create painterly palettes for the images that Lê expanded and cropped, abstracting them beyond the pornographic realm. “It’s not easily decipherable at first,” she explained. “I chose moments when the action is more obscure, which was important to get people to stop and think about the origin of the piece.” For her, the series is about how women “hustled during the war,” as well as the “spoils of war,” sex workers, and how the makers of the Vietnam War–themed porn film took a historic and painful time and turned it into entertainment.

Like all of her work, however, she leaves the embroidered images up to the audience to interpret. “Ultimately, you provide an experience that only the audience or the viewer or participant can experience themselves, and you just have to let go.”