Harvard GSD Faculty and Alumni Feature Prominently in Chicago Architecture Biennial

As a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) more than a decade ago, Florencia Rodriguez (LF ’13) researched modes of architectural criticism. This theme remains uniquely relevant to Rodriguez in her current role as artistic director of the sixth Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB), on view September 19 through February 28, 2026. An editor, writer, and assistant professor and director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois Chicago, Rodriguez has fashioned the biennial—titled SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change—as an exploration of our uncertain era’s generative and transformational possibilities.

“Architecture is fundamentally about engaging with change—understanding it, responding to it, and proposing ways to improve the conditions we inhabit,” Rodriguez explains . “We always have choices, and the decisions we make define what becomes possible tomorrow. As Artistic Director of the Chicago Architecture Biennial on its 10th anniversary,” she continues, “I hope to foster a critical platform where bold, imaginative ideas can surface and be shared with the public.” 

For the next five months, SHIFT will present installations, capsule exhibitions, programming, and events throughout Chicago, collecting the work of over 100 creative designers, practitioners, and artists who hail from 30 countries. This international assemblage features contributions by more than two dozen GSD affiliates that investigate new, alternative models for our built environment, housing, future resiliency, and more.  

FACULTY (in alphabetical order)

Stan Allen, design critic in architecture, presents Building with Writing, an installation of Allen’s work examining the relationship between drawing and the written word. Specifically, 48 drawings from 12 buildings and 12 pieces of writing are (re)presented as pamphlets and displayed in an installation designed by Michael Meredith (MArch ’00) and Hilary Sample, conceived as a reading room. Writing and design are distinct yet parallel practices, usually kept separate. This exhibition presents writing and buildings together, juxtaposed on folded metal bookstands. Visitors are encouraged to engage with the work—rearrange the drawings, take down the pamphlets, sit and read, and spend time in the space, together. Originally shown at the Princeton School of Architecture Gallery, for this iteration at the CAB, the reading room is installed on the second floor of the Graham Foundation. 

Associate professor of architecture Sean Canty (MArch ’14) presents Regal Reverb, a semi-circular public forum designed for the CAB’s Speaker Corners. The project draws from the Regal Theater (by Edward Eichenbaum, 1928), once a celebrated center of Black performance and cultural life in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. Adorned with velvet drapes, gilded ornament, and a monumental proscenium, the Regal regularly featured musical performers such as Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong, securing the theater’s place on the Chitlin’ Circuit and in the cultural memory of Chicago’s South Side. Demolished in 1973, the theater remains an enduring figure of collective experience and architectural presence. 

Canty’s installation translates this history into a contemporary spatial register. A sweeping arc, drawn from the theater’s façade and proscenium, organizes the plan. In elevation, three brass-edged, color-blocked arches open onto the central space, evoking the ornamental profiles and window figures of the demolished theater. The composition is structured by a consistent datum that links each module, establishing order while leaving room for open occupation. Regal Reverb is not a reconstruction but a reverb: an architectural echo of a vanished landmark. 

Grace La (MArch ’95), professor and chair of the GSD’s Department of Architecture, and James Dallman (MArch ’92), co-principal of LA DALLMAN Architects, present SHIFTING REUSE AND REPAIR: the Door County Granary. The installation contemplates emerging strategies to reuse and repair derelict buildings—not only to prolong their useful life but to transform and extend their historical and civic meaning. Using the reclamation of an abandoned granary in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, as a case study, LA DALLMAN demonstrates how strategic excisions and insertions within existing structures produce new modes of habitation. A comprehensive architectural model suspended within an occupiable fragment of a grain storage bin comprises the installation. LA DALLMAN’s exhibition team includes Elias Bennett (MArch ’25), Oonagh Davis (MArch ’23), Belle Verwaay Delatour (MArch ’18), Sigmund Seongyun Jeong, Min Ho Kim (MArch ’26), Brian Lee (MArch ’22), and Go Nakao (MArch ’28). 

Iman Fayyad (MArch ’16), assistant professor of architecture, presents In The Round, part of a larger line of work that deals with the effects of standardization in building materials on architectural typology, addressing formal exploration as a function of material waste. This installation invites visitors to contemplate the spatial potentials of material transformations from thin, planar sheets to volumetric form. The space is composed exclusively of uncut 4-ft x 8-ft rectangular sheets of plywood bent into composite cylindrical forms. The radial assembly allows the membrane to operate as a compressive structure in both plan and section (similar to a dome), while the oculus opens the interior to its surroundings above. Seating elements around the interior and exterior serve as structural anchor points for people to rest and gather. The structure offers an intimate, collective inward-facing space as well as outward-facing individualized spaces that are simultaneously contemplative and exposed. 

The capsule exhibition Inhabit Outhabit brings together over 30 housing projects from around the world that explore new solutions and challenge traditional models in response to contemporary needs. French 2D, led by assistant professor in practice of architecture Jenny French (MArch ’11) and Anda French, contributed material on Bay State Cohousing, a 30-unit community developed by its residents in Malden, Massachusetts. Each individual unit provides the amenities of a private home, while shared spaces and resources promote the creation of a vibrant, multigenerational community. 

To mark the 10th anniversary of the CAB, Harvard Design Magazine  and biennial leadership invited GSD design critics in architecture Lap Chi Kwong (MArch ’13) and Alison Von Glinow (MArch ’13) to imagine a new future for the Chicago Horizon, a temporary pavilion—by the architecture firm Ultramodern and structural engineer Brett Schneider—commissioned for the inaugural CAB that, despite original intentions, still exists. Kwong Von Glinow’s proposal, Forget-Me-Not, preserves the pavilion’s essential structural character while responding thoughtfully to its site, materiality, and context. Kwong Von Glinow consulted closely with the original team, modeling a collaborative approach to architectural practice that considers a building’s evolution from conception through execution and beyond. 

With Living Histories: Space for Reckoning, Mónica Ponce de León (MAUD ’91) of MPdL Studio, Mark Lamster (LF ’17 ), and STOSS Landscape Urbanism—founded by Chris Reed, GSD professor in practice of landscape architecture and co-director of the Master in Landscape Architecture in Urban Design program—propose a new way of approaching commemorative space. Their installation addresses questions of how public space might tell the complex and interconnected histories that shape culture and inform who we are vis-à-vis a proposal for memorializing political and racial violence at Dealey Plaza and Martyr’s Park in Dallas, Texas. 

ALUMNI (in alphabetical order)

RADDAR, led by Sol Camacho (MAUD ’08), presents the glass pavilion Our Second Skin. More than 2,200 glass pieces comprise the pavilion, forming a translucent skin that simultaneously evokes the omnipresence of glass facades in contemporary cities and the invisible materiality of the industrial process that produces them. Inside the pavilion, an audiovisual essay presents excerpts from several interviews Camacho conducted with 23 leading international architects, engineers, and artists whose expertise spans design, research, construction, and technology. These individuals reflect on our contemporary indiscriminate use of glass, highlight its unparalleled and enigmatic qualities in architecture, and propose ideas for the material’s future. 

Abigail Chang (M Arch ’16) presents Liquid Glass for the CAB exhibition Melting Solids, located at the Stony Island Arts Bank. Liquid Glass examines a larger question about the boundary between our interior and exterior worlds. The work reflects on water as a resource whose invisible presence in air and vapor has the potential to materialize as condensation on windows. The installation, composed of hanging resin objects with various lenses, asks visitors to reflect on the fragility in our ever-changing surroundings as they move between and peer into opaque windows that seemingly stream, drip, and puddle.

Ignacio G. Galán (MArch ’10) with David Gissen and Architensions (Nick Roseboro, Alessandro Orsini) offer Fragments of Disability Fictions. Presented as a discontinuous description of a fictional disability world mixing different scales and times, Fragments of Disability Fictions highlights how disability and impairment offer alternatives to conventional representations of the past and future. The installation’s fragmentary character also disrupts the connection between the crafting of physical models and the pursuit of totalizing forms of control that produce “model” (i.e., “ideal”), streamlined worlds. The latter are often ableist (if not eugenic) representations of life. Unlike many visions of urban health and well-being, the architectural and urban histories we explore include messier, more complex, and more inclusive embodiments, materialities, cultures, socialities, technologies, and ecologies. Developed with the guidance of a group of disabled scholars, activists, and policymakers, such histories conceptualize physical and emotional well-being in complementary, contrasting, and even contradictory ways. 

Fragments of Disability Fictions includes contributions by Neta Alexander, Victor Calise, David Serlin, and Eman Rimawi. The exhibition team includes Sharona Cramer and Yotam Oron, Thomas Gomez Ospina, Lauren Jian, Norman Keyes, Yuna Li, Lajja Mehta, Natalia Molina Delgado, Nur Nuri, Aistyara Charmita Shaning, Sherry Aine Chuang Te. Voice is provided by Sophie Schulman; ASL interpreting is provided by All Hands in Motion / Diana Abayeva (DI on screen) and Maria Cardoza (HI).

SHIFT’s curatorial team includes co-curators Chana Haouzi (MArch ’14) and Igo Kommers Wender and artistic director Florencia Rodriguez (LF ’13).

Johnston Marklee, led by Sharon Johnston (MArch ’95) and Mark Lee (MArch ’95), presents Speaker Corners. Located on the second floor of 840 N. Michigan Avenue, this project takes the form of a grandstand with seating for more than 50 people. This small arena will host talks, panels, and other public events during the full run of the CAB. Speaker Corners was conceived as part of a series of spaces that promote discussions, presentations, and exchange, which began with Speakers’ Corner—an installation by Christopher Hawthorne, Florencia Rodriguez, and Johnston Marklee—one of the featured curator’s special projects at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2025.

Two Foundations, presented by Alex Yueyan Li (MArch ’21) and Mahsa Malek of 11X17, examines the dichotomy of stability/instability through two everyday construction practices—house lifting and underpinning—that accept instability as a perpetual architectural condition. The installation reconstructs these techniques through a series of technical objects; cribbing stacks, shoring posts, plumb bobs, and formwork are arranged as a structural diagram, enacting the physical operations they are designed to perform. Taken together, they reveal the mechanisms that allow an existing structure to pause, frame, and accommodate acts of repair. In doing so, the installation foregrounds instability as a fundamental aspect of architecture’s life, despite the persistent quest to create stable, unchanging buildings. Aging is a material fact that requires continuous care, and architecture will only endure through ongoing acts of adjustment and maintenance that sustain it over time.

Michael Maltzan (MArch ’88) of Michael Maltzan Architects has contributed materials on 26 Point 2 Apartments to the Inhabit Outhabit exhibition. Completed in 2023 in Long Beach, California, 26 Point 2 Apartments is a five-story permanent supportive housing apartment building that bridges a busy commercial zone and a residential neighborhood, providing 77 units plus amenities, staff, and supportive services that address the needs of chronically unhoused people.

To Inhabit Outhabit MASS Design Group has contributed materials on their Maternity Waiting Village in Kasungu, Malawi. Completed in 2015, this complex offers a housing model for expectant mothers. Alan Ricks (MArch ‘10), Michael Murphy (MArch ’11), and Matt Swaidon (MArch ’12) took part in the design of this project.

Susannah Sayler (LF ’09) and Edward Morris (LF ’09) of Sayler/Morris present The Crystal Forest, a body of linked works (photography, collage, a short film, animation) that meditates on the Amazon as a mosaic of symbolic meanings and a place where humans and other beings dwell. The work circles around the remains of a building the artists encountered on the edge of the jungle that inspired the title. The Escuela Superior Politécnica Ecológica Amazónica in Tena, Ecuador, was part of an ambitious 1997 endeavor to create a network of universities across the Amazon that would educate indigenous people and other citizens in subjects like business management and computer science. The “modernization” enterprise failed almost immediately, the jungle quickly overgrowing and re-absorbing its remnants, authoring its own architecture of entropy. The title The Crystal Forest also references the Crystal Palace built in London (1851) to house the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, which has been cited as an epochal moment in the development of integrated world capitalism. In this sense, The Crystal Forest is the inverse or shadow of the Crystal Palace.  

As part of the Inhabit Outhabit exhibition, Tosin Oshinowo (LF ’25) of Oshinowo Studio presents the film Nagarannam: Home Coming, which shares the story of a community displaced by the insurgency group Boko Haram operating in Nigeria, Chad, Niger, Cameroon, and Mali. In addition, to the capsule exhibition Ecologies, opening November 6, Oshinowo has contributed Alternative Urbanism, a continuation of her research exhibit from the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale that explores specialized markets in Nigeria. 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. Often foreign to their host environments and not structured by the state, these markets coexist with and may re-appropriate the urban fabric, speaking to the realities that enable the African city to function in modernity. 

The Embellished, the Transient, and the Critical, presented by Alejandro Saldarriaga Rubio (MArch ’23) of alsar-atelier, explores an architecture of post-pandemic magical realism within the context of temporary exhibits. The installation uses quotidian plastic pallets as a primary compositional element and speculates on the spatial possibilities behind a single vertical partition built from this ordinary object, critically addressing the economic and environmental implications of experimental ephemeral design. By embracing “off-the-shelfness” and “dryness” as structural principles, the installation embellishes the ordinary, accepts its own impermanence, and challenges norms through critical material choices. 

Oscar Zamora (MArch ’23) in collaboration with Michael Koliner worked on AIR VAPOR BARRIER, a piece that juxtaposes vernacular archetypes with Western envelope technologies by reinterpreting the tropical roof through mass-produced air-and-vapor-barrier (AVB) shingles. This material transposition critiques the persistent framing of the tropical as primitive while exposing the entanglement of indigenous practices and imported standards. The project demonstrates how industrial materials gain new significance when recontextualized through local construction logics. Positioned beyond nostalgia or technical determinism, it proposes a “third space” of contradiction, improvisation, and critique, reclaiming the tropical roof as a site of cultural negotiation and architectural imagination. 

How GSD Students Design For Wildfire Prevention

Five months after California wildfires killed 29 people and devastated neighborhoods in Los Angeles and surrounding areas, three Graduate School of Design students interned at the Southern California offices of landscape architecture and urban design firm SWA , to learn how to leverage design for fire prevention and remediation. Facundo Soraire (MUP ’26), Enrique Lozano (MAUD ’26), and Eleanor Davol (MLA ’27) spent six weeks learning about complex issues around fire risk, prevention, and remediation, and generated proposals for parcels that sit at the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) , where human communities meet undeveloped land and fire risks run high. This was the most recent of many collaborations between the firm and members of the GSD.

This summer’s program built on research undertaken by Jonah Susskind  (MLA ’17), SWA director of climate and sustainability. Over the last decade, he’s conducted extensive research and taught a series of summer programs at SWA on the connections between climate change and fire risk, and how people and communities can best prepare, resulting in his book, Playbook for the Pyrocene , winner of a 2025 American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) merit award  in communications. Susskind writes that large segments of the population are moving to city outskirts. While residents once appreciated the suburbs for their access to nature and recreation, now, what draws them is the more affordable housing available further from the city due to “NIMBYism and local zoning restrictions.” 

Thus, more and more people are seeking out homes in the WUI, which, because of the dire need for affordable housing, is growing by about 2 million acres per year . Almost 100 million people in the US, Susskind notes, live in the WUI. This zone is especially vulnerable to wildfires as it’s often populated by “woodpiles, propane tanks, trees and shrubs, roof and gutter and deck debris,”^[i]  as well as housing materials that may be especially vulnerable to fire. Susskind writes that, “[d]uring the past three decades, more than 80% of California’s fire-related structure loss has occurred in these high-risk zones.” Millions of people are likely experience the losses inflicted by ever more powerful wildfires. 

Planners must “balance affordable housing with environmental conservation,” explains Susskind, especially because “the minute you get into the WUI, you also come up against entrenched histories of environmental conservation.” Susskind argues that suburban land use planning hasn’t changed much since the 1930s, and we need a new “suburban design ethos” that would allow for those communities to be “better resourced” in the face of fire risks and other climate change impacts.      

“This is a design and planning challenge as much as it is a policy and economic challenge as much as it is a social and equity challenge,” he noted.  

Each of the students in this summer’s cohort focused on a different aspect of wildfire prevention and remediation. Soraire, for example, envisioned a Community Land Trust (CLT) that would be led by the Santa Ynez Chumash tribe NGO, the local Indigenous nation, in support of co-governance and land stewardship that centers on the nation’s ancestral knowledge, including fire management techniques. The project includes affordable housing for the community. 

Soraire took inspiration from his home province in Argentina, Jujuy, which borders Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina, and is known as the “lithium triangle,” a mining territory. He investigated questions around land use, extraction, and the role of Indigenous voices in shaping land use. He started by mapping pre-colonial histories around Santa Barbara. Because several communities live in the region, “governance fragmentation and jurisdictional boundaries exacerbate fire risk.” His proposal, therefore, creates a central infrastructure for the many agencies already working in partnership with the Chumash, to share ideas and resources and center the nation’s presence and leadership on the land. 

Davol took a different approach, studying soil composition to think about post-fire resiliency for humans and non-humans. In a mega-fire, she explained, the soil’s composition changes, often leaving it impermeable to rainfall. Later, instead of sinking into the soil, rain slides over the slick surface and causes floods and mudslides, further threatening the ecosystem and people’s homes and communities. 

“The health of the earth and soil, and its ability to recharge and become permeable again,” she explained, “is really important for the long-term success of these landscapes.”   

Davol mapped the soil and created corridors both to prevent fire and rehabilitate the earth, for example, with chapparal plantings. The corridors also give species in the region, such as the mountain lion, safe access across human infrastructure in the WUI. “I thought about this region as a “patchwork of green spaces that could be connected for people and wildlife.” As we “expand into the wildlands, we’re often bisecting and covering up and burying natural systems like rivers.” Her project addresses biodiversity loss and interactions between humans and nonhumans. 

Finally, Enrique Lozano framed the WUI “not as a liability, but as a multiplier—a design tool that catalyzes infill development while preserving critical open space.” Instead of looking at the WUI as a “zone of vulnerability,” he saw it as an opportunity, using Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) from a nearby golf course to a 327 acre plot called Giorgi Farm. In the process, his proposal would increase affordable housing and restore resident access to Ygnacia Creek while also “enhancing biodiversity, using landscape as a fire buffer, promoting the wildfire corridor, and minimizing greenfield development.” 

He started by mapping the residents who are most vulnerable to fire risk, and found that it’s the people “pushed out of the urban core, to the peripheries.” In addition, he found that many of the Housing Element updates in the city, which mark new housing units, fell within the WUI. Applying lessons he learned in the MAUD program and a recent Architecture and Real Estate course collaborative, he looked at the site from different scales, studying the territory at large, and using TDR’s to build affordable housing within the city while also increasing biodiversity and usable green spaces. 

The complexity of wildfire prevention and remediation that Soraire, Davol, and Lozano address in their projects is why Susskind believes it’s so critical to establish bridges between firms like SWA and academic programs like the GSD. SWA has a long legacy of GSD collaborations, beginning with its founding in the 1950s by GSD professor Hideo Sasaki  and his student, Pete Walker  (MLA ’57), both of whom went on to prodigious careers. Today, Susskind regularly guest lectures at the GSD in the “Climate by Design” course, and the SWA summer cohorts often include GSD students. For example, in 2022, Slide Kelly (MLA & MDes ’24) worked on fire remediation with Susskind at SWA, and now serves as a design critic in landscape architecture at the GSD.

The GSD has long served as a site of experimentation where designers can explore issues around wildfire management and remediation, with increasing attention in recent years as climate change causes more frequent megafires. In recent years, three professors at the GSD taught classes on wildfires, and this fall, two option studios focus on fires: a new iteration of Silvia Benedito’s option studio, “Canary in the Mine,” co-taught with Kelly, takes students to the Jack Dangermond Nature Preserve in Santa Barbara County as part of their study of the aftermath of the January Los Angeles wildfires. James Lord and Roderick Wylie’s studio “Fireworks,” focuses on the Napa Valley in California, using the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art to inspire thinking around how art and landscape might, together, create a “speculative vision for the future hand in hand with design.”

These courses, along with the work that GSD students undertook in partnership with SWA this summer, mark significant opportunities for designers to intervene in the climate crisis, alleviating its impacts for humans and nonhumans alike. SWA encouraged students in the summer program to first consider “ecological systems before development,” explained Lozano. He thought first about restorative landscapes and fire buffers, and how to maximize affordable housing and resident mobility and open space, in two sites across the city.

“I wanted to show that, even though the urban core is very dense and active, and then, moving outward, there’s suburbia and then the woodlands—all of these seemingly disparate things are interdependent.” Fire mitigation requires looking at the city and suburbs as a unified system. 

^[i]  Katherine M. Wilkin, David Benterou, Amanda M. Stasiewicz, “High fire hazard Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) residences in California lack voluntary and mandated wildfire risk mitigation compliance in Home Ignition Zones,” International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, Volume 124, 2025, 105435, ISSN 2212-4209, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2025.105435 .

How a Collaboration Between Design and Real Estate Advances Equity in Mumbai

Students in Rahul Mehrotra’s “Extreme Urbanism Mumbai” Graduate School of Design (GSD) Spring 2025 option studio faced a challenge that was intended to take them “completely outside their comfort level,” said Mehrotra. “We set a wicked problem that exposes them to an unfolding of interconnected issues.”  

Mumbai, set on a peninsula on the northwest coast of India, is one of the largest and densest cities in the world, with a population of about 21.3 million residents and more than 36,200 people per square kilometer—most of whom face a stark housing crisis. Approximately 57 percent of Mumbai’s population lives in informal homes, many of whom work in nearby housing complexes where they’re employed by the upper-class residents. Most of the students in the studio had never been exposed to what Mehrotra describes as “extreme conditions, in terms of density, poverty, and the juxtaposition of different worlds in the same space.”

“Mumbai is like nothing I’d ever seen before,” said Enrique Lozano (MAUD ’26), who had previously traveled to other parts of India. “There’s no designed urban form; skyscrapers are scattered throughout the city. It’s on a former wetland, so there are issues with water, one of my research areas.”

He and his classmates were introduced to Mumbai’s coastal Elphinstone Estate neighborhood and a site owned by the Port Authoritiy of Mumbai  that includes 40 acres of warehouses as well as iron and steel shipping offices, bounded on one side by a rail line and on the other by the harbor and P D’Mello Road, a major city street. “The Eastern Waterfront will be one of the city’s most contested land parcels to be opened for urban development in the next few years,” writes Mehrotra. “It plays a catalytic role in connecting the city back to the metropolitan hinterland….” The 900 or so people who work in this area and live in sidewalk tenements stand to be displaced once development progresses.

Students were tasked with working at three scales: regional, district (the “superblock”), and site (urban development policy). Rather than displacing workers whose lives are strongly rooted in the neighborhood, students were asked to invent schemes that would newly house those 900 families in tenements by “cross-subsidizing from market-value housing.” The studio offered a counterpoint to the government’s designation of the site as a commercial district. Students’ proposals served what Mehrotra terms in reference to his research, “instruments of advocacy,” creating a way to keep the city’s most vulnerable residents where they have always lived, while also offering needed market-value homes.

This studio differs from many others at the GSD, in that it involves collaboration between the studio and a Master in Real Estate course titled “The Development Project.” Jerold Kayden, Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design and founding director of the Master in Real Estate Program, and Mehrotra brainstormed about the idea of such a collaboration and launched the idea in spring 2024. David Hamilton, a real estate faculty member at the GSD, co-instructed this year’s version in the spring 2025 semester.

“I think of real estate as the physical vessel in which people live, work, and play,” Kayden explained. “And if we can apply our multidisciplinary skills and knowledge to shape real estate in ways that create a more productive, sustainable, equitable, and pleasing world, then I can’t think of a more noble cause than that.”

The magic of the combined studio and real estate class, as Kayden, Mehrotra, and Hamilton saw it, was that students from the two programs would be interdependent and could only solve the on-site housing challenges by working together. “The real estate students couldn’t own the problem because the designers didn’t design it in a way that would work in terms of real estate sense,” said Mehrotra. “And the designers couldn’t think of the design unless the real estate folks came up with a model of financing for that cross-subsidy.”

              
Hamilton concurred that the studio set up a collaborative tension that replicated real-world challenges: “We can imagine a path that gets us from having bright ideas and a beautiful piece of land, to a proposed future that’s both appealing and realistic enough to attract investment capital to be built. Then, we get to what we call stabilization, where the new neighborhood is working physically and financially in a sustainable way. Getting there involves a million different variables, from government action and public subsidies, to the needs of the market and investors and other financial considerations.”

Lozano saw the benefits of designing in Mumbai, where “the street is an even playing ground. Everybody takes the metro, walks the Plaza, buys street food in the markets.” At the same time, like most collaborators, his group had their share of challenges as they moved through the design process. “The entire studio was a negotiation between the students—of judging our values and understanding that the real estate students want to make a return on investment, but the subversion is the social mission, and the designers had to convince them that social space is an asset.”

He described a beautiful 19th-century clock tower on the Elphinstone site, which one of his real estate group members wanted to demolish, and how they negotiated the “iterative design process” and “pushed against the blank slate idea.” They kept the clock tower, which they saw as a cultural asset, and “turned it into an incredible public amenity with restrooms, civic spaces, and movie screenings. It’s an anchor and memory of the site itself, with the maritime history and labor organizing that occurred there.” Through the collaborative process, building trust by drawing and talking through their design plans, the design students developed a final project of which they’re proud.

“As we become surrounded by the madness and complexities of the world we inhabit,” said Mehrotra, “it’s important to have multiple perspectives on the same problem, and to synthesize those multiple perspectives into a proposition.”

The final review mirrored the lively discourse the students experienced all semester, as critics discussed the merits of each proposal and the possibilities for the Elphinstone Estate. Sujata Saunik, Chief Secretary of the Government of Maharashtra, participated throughout the final review and helped bring to the conversation a sense of Mumbai’s realities. As the student groups together advocated for shared public access to the site and investing in dignified housing for people living in tenements, they presented to the government a more equitable approach to developing a site that’s unique as well as profitable.

“It’s not the solution,” said Mehrotra, “but it’s a conversation changer.”

Student Propositions

Grafting the Aquarium

Overlooking the Boston Harbor on Central Wharf stands the New England Aquarium, a local landmark and an icon of Brutalist architecture. It is also the subject of “Grafting the Aquarium,” a studio course held during the spring 2025 semester at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) that addressed complex issues of climate change, aging building stock, and institutional transformation—themes critical to this aquarium and numerous others throughout the world.

The studio’s name, “Grafting the Aquarium,” references the horticultural practice of grafting that has been embraced by Jeanne Gang (MArch ’93), founding partner of Studio Gang  and professor in practice of architecture at the GSD, as a model for sustainable design and adaptive reuse. As described in her recent book The Art of Architectural Grafting  (Park Books, 2024), “grafting is a design philosophy aimed at upcycling existing building stock by attaching new additions (scions) to old structures (rootstock) in a way that is advantageous to both. The practice of architectural grafting connects the two to create an expanded, flourishing, and distinctive work of architecture.” Rather than engage in the carbon-intensive cycle of demolishing existing buildings and rebuilding from scratch, grafting extends a structure’s life for greater capacity and utility. Taught by Gang and Eric Zuckerman (MArch ’18), project leader in Studio Gang’s New York City office, “Grafting the Aquarium” channeled this design approach to investigate possibilities for the New England Aquarium, a distinguished Boston organization with a celebrated past and an uncertain future.

The New England Aquarium, Then and Now

A cornerstone of the city’s waterfront revitalization plan, the New England Aquarium opened in 1969 to much fanfare. The robust concrete edifice, designed by Peter Chermayeff (MArch ’62) with Cambridge Seven Associates, sits a mere half mile from another Brutalist paragon, Boston City Hall (1963).¹ 

The aquarium’s central feature, around which African and southern rockhopper penguins caper, is the cylindrical Giant Ocean Tank, 40-feet wide and four-stories tall, home to Caribbean marine life ranging in size from tiny reef fish to a 550-lb green sea turtle.² Nearly five hundred thousand locals and tourists visited the aquarium the year after it opened; now, more than 1.3 million people annually frequent this regional attraction. 

To accommodate more visitors and create space for new exhibits, the aquarium has grown in the past half-century, with the original building remaining largely untouched. The Marine Mammal Pavilion appended to the water-facing (east) facade accommodates sea lions; a metal-paneled addition to the west (by Schwartz/Silver Architects, completed in 1996) provides a harbor seal habitat, external ticketing windows, lobby, gift shop, café, and additional exhibit spaces; and the Simons IMAX Theater (2001), constructed on the southwestern portion of the wharf, boasts a six-story 3-D film screen and 378 seats. 

Alongside these physical changes to its Central Wharf site, the New England Aquarium’s mission has evolved over the years, moving beyond the expectation for aquariums to serve, first and foremost, as venues for human entertainment. Aquariums previously offered a glimpse into elusive underwater realms; today, images and videos of these foreign ecosystems are accessible through the internet, with the click of a mouse. Furthermore, in recent decades, ethical concerns around keeping animals in captivity, especially incredibly sentient and intelligent species like dolphins and octopuses, have prompted shifts in aquarium programming, as has growing awareness of the deleterious impact of climate change on the ocean and its inhabitants. For these and other reasons, many aquariums—including the New England Aquarium—have become increasingly focused on research and conservation operations.

With this expanded scope come financial and spatial demands that exceed the limited facilities currently available at Central Wharf. Thus, the aquarium’s rescue and rehabilitation site in Quincy, 10 miles south of Boston, houses ethical breeding programs and acute care for injured animals (whether they be ailing residents or cold-stunned wild turtles). Another struture on the coast of Maine serves as homebase for a multi-decade North Atlantic Right Whale research project, one of the aquarium’s many marine science efforts. Mindful of the need for more revenue and additional space, aquarium leadership is keen to explore potentially advantageous programming and partnership opportunities beyond those that currently exist. 

Underscoring the mandate for increased funding is the stark reality that the New England Aquarium’s Central Wharf properties require interventions to address the near- and long-term impacts of climate change—in particular, rising sea levels and storm surges. These days the aquarium experiences regular basement flooding, which threatens the animals’ mechanical and filtration life-support systems, and erosion around the Simons Theater’s foundational pilings requires mitigation. Recent resiliency planning  calls for flood protection systems to withstand the inevitable tidal and storm flooding that will accompany the rising seas, predicted by 2050 to exceed four feet over current day levels. This knowledge goes hand in hand with climate-driven questions around how and when to protect against, accommodate, or retreat from the water. Consequently, in tandem with refining the institution’s mission and increasing revenue, aquarium officials must contend with aging buildings that need attention to remain operational and survive into the future.

Grafting the 21st-Century Aquarium

Under the guidance of Gang and Zuckerman, twelve GSD students from the master of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design programs undertook an in-depth analysis of the New England Aquarium. Visits to its facilities, discussions with its leadership, targeted design exercises, and expert-led workshops informed the students about the aquarium and its site as they grappled with the complex themes surrounding the project, ranging from considerations of embodied carbon and vulnerability to sea level rise to designing for biodiversity and non-human species.

The main aquarium building posed an additional challenge. Consultations with Chermayeff provided rare insight into the design intent that shaped the concrete building, the first of the many aquariums in the architect’s portfolio. With its carefully choreographed interior circulation (winding around the Giant Ocean Tank) and its distinct, otherworldly interior (sans daylight, with strategic accent lighting), the New England Aquarium set the standard for Chermayeff’s aquariums that followed, including the National Aquarium (1981) in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Oceanarium (1998) in Lisbon, Portugal. Thus, as they devised their grafting operations to address the New England Aquarium’s future needs, students had to parse Chermayeff’s original vision for the building alongside its historic significance, material nature, environmental impact, and future needs. 

As a design philosophy, architectural grafting is especially well suited to urban contexts, which are often marked by decades—if not centuries—of accretion. In her book, Gang notes that, in terms of environmental impact, “all renovations are better than building new. However, certain approaches prove more effective in reducing carbon pollution than others. In order to end greenhouse emissions in the critical period leading up to 2050, delaying the demolition of buildings saves the most carbon over any other single strategy, followed closely by increasing existing buildings’ intensity of use.”³ This holds true for the Brutalist New England Aquarium, making it and its Central Wharf campus perfect candidates for grafting. Following a strategic assessment of the existing site, the benefits it brings, and the challenges it faces, the designer then crafts sustainable solutions that honor the past, minimize carbon expenditure and waste, and build toward a resilient future. This compelling approach merges preservation and innovation to create a new whole greater than its parts.    

Building on the concept of grafting, the students’ projects address climatic, economic, and spatial concerns, designs differ in terms of resiliency strategies, envisioned revenue streams, and physical interventions within the Central Wharf site.⁴ Yet, despite the diversity of approaches, the projects all position architecture as a key force in responding to these pressing issues and in shaping the New England Aquarium’s future. Whether establishing a greater connection with the city or the islands offshore, or highlighting education and animal care, the resulting designs foreground the aquarium as a steward of the marine environment and its resident species, the health of which impacts us all.

The Art in Architecture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Multisensory Biennale

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

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

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

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

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

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

Animal Encounters

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

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

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

The Power of Community

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remembering Graham de Condé Gund (1940–2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A coda

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

Malkit Shoshan on Design as an Agent of Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How has the class evolved since the pandemic?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s in a Grid?

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

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

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

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

Nina Chase on Building Connections through the Harvard GSD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

*All images courtesy of Merritt Chase.