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

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

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

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

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

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

Groundscrapers: Exploring the logic behind long, low buildings

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

Designing for Disability Justice: On the need to take a variety of human bodies into account

Disability ought to be an exciting subject for architects: it’s about lived experience, problem solving, and designing a better built environment. While the topic engages with critical theory and aspirations for collective life, it’s often seen as a field that requires checking boxes and fulfilling requirements, or worse, a touchy subject strewn with outdated terms and outmoded habits of thought. The typical routines of design don’t always take the variety of human bodies into account. But I recently had the chance to talk to four practitioners who are changing minds and moving the field forward: Aimi Hamraie is associate professor of Medicine, Health, and Society and American Studies at Vanderbilt University; Sara Hendren (MDes ’13) is a professor at Olin College and the author of What Can a Body Do?; Sierra Bainbridge is senior principal and managing director at MASS Design Group; and Jeffrey Mansfield (MArch ’14) is a design director at MASS. In our interview, Hamraie says that engaging the design disciplines with the subject of disability requires epistemic activism. “When disability activists entered the profession of architecture, they showed that architects do not just design buildings, they also design curricula, licensing requirements, research, and fields of discourse that give meaning to their work. To shift the treatment of disability in architecture required intervening in all these ways, in addition to lobbying Congress to pass the Americans With Disabilities Act.” This sort of epistemic activism is occurring at the GSD. In the fall, Bainbridge taught “Seeking Abundance,” a studio which aimed to reframe the topic of disability as a source of diversity and potential. The studio relied on the expertise of Mansfield , who recently received an award from the Ford and Mellon foundations for his research into schools for the Deaf. While discussing how architects ought to think about disability, Mansfield, Bainbridge, Hamraie, and Hendren highlighted many examples that provide rich food for thought. Hendren points to De Hogeweyk, a “dementia village” in Weesp, the Netherlands. “It proceeded from the board of directors at a nursing home for memory care asking itself a simple but crucial question: Would the status quo for memory care be a kind of environment we’d want to live in, were we to acquire this condition? They created a list of values for promoting the kind of life they wanted for their residents, and their value of ‘favorable surroundings’ resulted in a cityscape structure for the redesigned site: a locked facility with streets and storefronts, a plaza, theater, grocery store—even bikes inside! And best of all: a restaurant that’s both publicly accessible to the town and internally, securely accessible to residents,” she says. “There’s an understanding among staff and customers that some of the residents will wander in from time to time, creating some unusual interactions. But the semi-porous structure is ingenious, lightening the barrier between public and private.” It sounds like a dream project for architects: reimagining public and private space while grappling with the nature of memory and human social interactions. Meanwhile, Hamraie mentions several notable figures: Jen White Johnson, who does graphic design work centered on #BlackDisabledLivesMatter and “Autistic Joy,” and Corbett O’Toole, a queer disabled elder and author of Fading Scars: My Queer Disability History. Hamraie says, “O’Toole has been a lifelong designer and pushed me in so many amazing directions when I first started to think about crip technoscience and DIY disability design. She recently retrofitted a school bus as an accessible space for living and traveling, and it is beautiful.” Hamraie cites precedents in theory as well: “The person whose work I always come back to is the feminist science scholar and activist Michelle Murphy, who writes about built spaces and vernacular designed objects in the context of eugenic, colonial, and imperialist projects.” Hamraie suggested two books by Murphy to start with: Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty and The Economization of Life. No doubt the greatest wealth of insight comes from the disability community itself. While a student at the GSD, Mansfield, who has been deaf since birth, initiated historical research into the design activism that occurred at schools for the Deaf in the United States. This has now become a multi-year research project exploring how Deaf schools became a node of design activism. His historical recap is illuminating: “Deaf spaces were typically designed by state agencies under the idea of benevolence. These schools were built with significant state investment, and they were built as symbols of societal virtue. They were not really designed for their deaf users—their sensorial needs are not accommodated by the spaces. It doesn’t help that they were built far from home communities.” But this segregation had an unintended side effect: “Clustering together deaf people at these schools allowed them to develop their own culture, their own awareness, their own value system. When it came time to assimilate back into society, it felt like a deprivation of this culture. Self-determination became a form of resistance.” Mansfield emphasizes how working within this framework can be a productive challenge for designers: “How can we identify unique forms of sensory knowledge, amplify them, and support these various experiences to allow communities to decide for themselves how they relate to the world?” DeafSpace is one example of how a form of sensory knowledge has been systematized into concepts that are useful for designers—e.g., paying attention to lighting and color to reduce eye fatigue. Mansfield explains that “DeafSpace emerges from a set of Deaf-centric spatial considerations that are uniquely inherent to how deaf people navigate and claim space.” Hendren develops this concept in her book. “Problem-solving is a pattern of attention that gets pretty rote and rigid in design education, especially when it comes to matters like disability. DeafSpace is not a program for ‘inclusion’ in the flattened sense of ‘making room’ for deafness. Instead, DeafSpace is built on a very close observation of behaviors that are already happening among deaf folks: linguistic and social behaviors, spatial relationships, visual fields, and the way sound functions somatically, not just aurally,” she says. “All of these are evidence of the magnificently adaptive human being, doing its thing minute by minute. It’s a wonder just as it is! So architecture might proceed more like DeafSpace does—paying attention to and drawing up an envelope that formalizes the assets of a given population and its uses of space, and then, yes, adding the challenges and problems to that mix when they’re identified by that population itself. It’s a many-dimensional idea of human agency, which ‘inclusion’ doesn’t usually encompass.” One reason that disability has not been more thoroughly integrated into design education is that it is not usually formulated as an exciting challenge. The need to adhere to standards and “check boxes” can instill a sense of somber rectitude that stifles creative thinking about how to provide meaningful access. Hendren gives an example: “A bathroom with a threshold at the right width measurement for a wheelchair user to get through, but not to turn around once inside; or no handles for transferring.” But mistakes and misapplications are not the most significant problem, Hendren says. “I think the biggest barrier, of course, is the limited imagination that standards tend to create. Because it’s a checklist and a liability matter, the rhetorical framing of disability gets subsumed under that logic: a cloud over the excitement of a project, or a ‘don’t forget’ matter of inclusion.” Standards should not be dismissed, however. Hendren emphasizes that “standards are useful as a benchmark, and for creating legally actionable codes for compliance (that is, when they are in fact actionable, and not just recommendations!). I think the International Symbol of Access is a terrific example of standardization. It’s an isotype that creates an instantly recognizable sign that accessible architecture like ramps or automatic doors are close by. It can also function as a symbol that does something pretty profound: protecting parking spaces or seating for folks who need proximity to a building or a bathroom or a fire exit. Knowing what you can expect and knowing it’ll be the same internationally, recognizable at a distance and without relying on text of any kind—that’s what you want in a solid standard.” Even so, ubiquitous standards are not set in stone. Hendren co-founded the Accessible Icon project with Brian Glenney, a philosopher and graffiti artist, to update the accessibility icon in a way that, to me, hints at the thrill of racing around in a wheelchair. The alternative to rote standardization is design—or, as Hamraie puts it, “the initiation of critical processes toward iterative world-building.” This is something architects are trained to do: questioning the assumptions that frame a project. “From my perspective, accessibility is an open-ended project because what we know or claim to know about who uses accessible design is always changing. Sixty years ago, it was barely thinkable to design with wheelchair users in mind, let alone people with chemical sensitivities or mental disabilities. The shifting landscape of legibility for disabled people always yields new approaches to design,” Hamraie says. “I would say that my work intervenes in these processes of knowing and making. This is a strategy that builds on my training in the tradition of feminist new materialism—which is concerned with the relationship between knowing, making, and ethical acting—and also the field of discourse around critical design. These help me understand that standards can be material and critical; they do not always have to be reductive.” Bainbridge’s studio at the GSD also takes aim at reductivism. She notes: “We have been taught in the last 30 or 40 years to rely heavily on ecology and science-based research, which sometimes misses the point. It is important to understand that landscape architects design for unique cultural communities. Different communities have different relationships to the vegetal world; how do we uncover what those are?” She also asks, “How do we understand and create a sensory interface that is specific to the community we’re working with, rather than defaulting to something that is either aesthetic or ecological? Designers should be accounting for all of our sensory experiences, and yet we usually design quite visually. By designing for people with different abilities, we can understand how to design for all abilities, which creates a more abundant experience for everyone.” What this means, first of all, is that Bainbridge’s students conduct a lot of research. When I ask her about the many pre-design phases in her course description, Bainbridge smiles and says, “Students asked: is this how we actually design? Do we come to a project and have a conversation with our partners without having a set idea about what the project actually is? ‘Seeking Abundance’ is reflective of how MASS works as a nonprofit organization. We start way upstream from where a typical architect would start. We seek out partners and amplify their mission. Often this means we’re working with partners who have not had access to design services and don’t have a budget yet. If we come to projects early, we can help understand what the mission of the project is and how something built would support their work.” Because studios have been taught remotely to students located around the world, Bainbridge encouraged her students to seek out partners near where they were located. They came up with an eclectic list: “Perkins School for the Blind, a very well attended Deaf gathering space in Wuhan, China, more marginalized communities like the Abenaki in New Hampshire, and many others. Students talk with members of these communities to uncover aspects of their spatial sensory awarenesses. This engagement helps create a common language around sense between the students and their ‘clients.’” Adding depth to this investigation, students were asked to set up specific situations for their classmates to experience. “Each student is creating an experience with one aspect of sensory intake that they are inviting others to. Having them experience the world through that sense in that particular way has created an expanded vocabulary for design in the studio. Now the question is, how can it create a more abundant palette for creating landscapes?” It is worth reflecting further on why the usual methods of design do not address the variety of human bodies. As a historian, Hamraie notes that “during the period in which the design disciplines have been professionalized, there have not been many efforts to enable disabled people to become designers or—until recently—to recognize disabled people as designers and inventors even when they have not had professional training. This is likely because of long histories of centering idealized bodies in disciplines such as architecture, and of more recent histories of measuring and standardizing bodies in fields such as industrial design.” Mansfield echoes Hamraie’s observations, commenting that “There have, of course, been many attempts to change this, starting in the 1970s with interventions in design curricula and professional licensing. But ableism is entrenched and takes more than a class or a continuing education credit to uproot.” MASS has come to specialize in projects at the intersection of multiple complicating factors, disability included. They have been commissioned to design a symbolic Black Deaf space and memorial at Gallaudet University, which is the only university that is designed to be barrier-free for deaf and hard of hearing students. It will honor Louise B. Miller, the mother of a Black Deaf child who sued the Washington, DC, Board of Education in 1952. Her son could not attend the Kendall School for the Deaf at the time because Washington was segregated. Miller sued, and she won her case at the Supreme Court. Although the suit did not successfully desegregate the school itself, it represented an early blow to the Plessy v. Ferguson principle of “separate but equal” by ruling that the school district could not deny its Black Deaf students the right to free public education. As a result, the Kendall Division II School was created—a segregated school for Deaf children at Gallaudet University. Despite its part in the larger fight against segregation, this story has been largely overlooked on campus, which propelled student and community activists to demand a memorial that could convey the significance of this historical moment and “honor the Black Deaf community’s fight for educational justice in America.” The parameters of the project have made for a productive challenge, Mansfield says. “If you look at the architecture of Gallaudet—the Olmsted landscape and the high Victorian neo-Gothic architecture—it’s very symbolic of this idea of abundance, in terms of public investment and grandiosity, which really stands in contrast with the hastily built utilitarian architecture of the Division II School, which was eventually demolished. The memorial will be on a challenging site, but it represents a unique opportunity to remap the cultural landscape of the university.” The hope is that the memorial will lead to racial reckoning and healing—an active, collaborative process that would have never happened if Black Deaf people did not demand it. The long-term goal of cultivating a critical mass of designers—a design community—that maintains a shared interest in disability can begin as simply as listening to the same podcasts. Hamraie has been doing disability justice organizing for 10 years alongside work as a scholar. “It began with my participation in the Occupy movement. Since then, I have been very embedded in disability culture and community. My podcast, called Contra*, addresses design from a disability culture framework, which means that it highlights the knowledge and practices of disabled designers, artists, researchers, curators, and activists working toward a more accessible world. But it is not ‘Disability 101.’ You can think of it as a window onto a community that does not actually try to do translation work to bring others into that community so much as it notes its existence, without euphemism or apology.” Hamraie continues, “This work builds on many activist and scholarly podcasts I admire—Alice Wong’s Disability Visibility, Cathy Hannabach’s Imagine Otherwise, adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown’s How to Survive the End of the World, and others. Podcasts have a way of building communities through their audience, and so I have been interested in them as sites of intervention. There are new ones being created every day, which expands our community and the conversations we can have.” As a profession, architecture can do more to include designers with varying abilities in its ranks. Hendren says that she “would certainly like to see more kinds of expertise encouraged—more illuminated pathways for young people to get into architecture. Not just young folks who are interested in parts-and-systems, like engineering, and then want to do something vaguely aesthetic with that technical expertise. Some of the best designers are, at heart, generalists—by which I mean voraciously curious, wide readers, drawing from an interest in people and interactions and patterns of sociality, a commitment to public and civic spaces as a form of shared life.” Hendren is cautiously optimistic about the future: “I’ve been heartened to see the emphasis on maintenance and care get more formalized design attention in recent years. It’s a matter of attention: drawing up and formalizing some of the labor, artifacts, and interactions that are already happening and using a rhetorical spotlight to say: ‘Look over here! This counts too!’ ‘This Counts Too’ is actually the title of an essay I wrote with an anthropologist colleague, Caitrin Lynch, on a digital archive of low-tech prosthetics called Engineering At Home. That’s a design project in that same spirit: drawing a frame around design that’s not usually recognized as such.” Hamraie emphasizes that “interventions can take place in all sorts of sites—the political process and in public spaces, but also in institutional spaces where knowledge is created and disseminated.” The global pandemic and the shift to remote learning may be just the right impetus for the GSD to bring underserved users and communities more systematically into design processes. Everyone is relying on technological augmentation; everyone is “remote” from centers of power. Let’s not miss this opportunity to continue asking ourselves how the design disciplines can be made more inclusive. 1. The National Disability Authority offers a helpful list of appropriate terms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Navigating the Journey of Latinas to the United States 

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

Del Temblor al Arte 

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

Oaxaca – Beyond Reconstruction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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