Architecture, Design, Action: Krzysztof Wodiczko on Dismantling Systemic Racism in Pedagogy and Practice
Architecture, Design, Action: Krzysztof Wodiczko on Dismantling Systemic Racism in Pedagogy and Practice
Krzysztof Wodiczko, Professor in Residence of Art, Design and the Public Domain
Your interests lie in a critique of the historical preservation of power through architecture, and the potential of collective memory in shared spaces, so I’d love to begin by discussing your thoughts on the current racial justice protest movement and calls to challenge the monuments adorning public spaces. How can individuals with a social art practice use their work to fight against systems of racial oppression?
Monuments are a powerful symbol in the public domain; they are major cultural machines. They reproduce and perpetuate a certain idea of culture. And it’s not only about who is commemorated, but also how it is remembered—it’s what Walter Benjamin calls the “history of victors that keeps erasing the tradition of the vanquished.” Knowing this, it’s not a surprise that monuments are objects of attack. They’ve perpetuated white supremacists’ ideology and their related view on history. For too long we heard calls to remove sculptures, and nothing was done. In the context of more regular violence and injustice against their communities, Black leaders, activists, and community members had no choice but to take actions into their own hands.
The question now is what to do next. How do we come together with the Black Lives Matter movement to create a collective memory project? How do we keep informing, honoring, and venerating key leaders and communities in those works? It’s an active and participatory memory project—the exact nature of participation needs to be proposed and arranged collaboratively with members of the movement.
I’m having this conversation a lot in my own practice. The architect Julian Bonder and I designed the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes, the former epicenter of the French slave trade. This memorial reclaims the banks of the Loire and serves as a new space of collective memory. I also work on existing monuments that are implicated in the history of racism, war trauma, domestic violence, and mass displacement; I use them to project an alternative history that honors and gives a voice to living war veterans, refugees, immigrants, and people of color.
My projects involve the stories of these people, so of course the Black Lives Matter protest movement is in my heart and mind. Isn’t the destruction of monuments to white supremacists an act of spatial justice? Of course it is. The symbolic built environment is as important as housing projects. Urban and design projects fighting against systemic racism are noble and I admire them, but we should not forget about statues and monuments, which perpetuate a certain regime and ideology of power. For ages, artists and architects have been profoundly involved in designing such ideological symbols. It is now time for us, and for Black community members and activists as well as civic institutions, to work together on new, collective memory projects.
Understanding this project in relation to social progress and movement, it’s essential to work with people, not just on behalf of people. How can we become close colleagues and friends and collaborators with those communities? We cannot simply propose monuments and memorials that will remain as stable fixed monoliths. That’s why I’m bringing participatory, interactive media up, and calling upon artists and designers to see themselves as agents in this process.
Likewise, students are thinking more about their own future—and not in the textbook sense, but really considering what artists and designers can do to inspire, promote, and amplify the voice of social change, and how to be an agent for that voice. What will bring you into a neighborhood or into conversation with a community rather than putting you behind a desk, or alone in the art studio? I’m not against more traditional studio-based and commission-based work; in fact, very good projects can be done in that space, but at this time, like any period of revolution, it’s just not enough. Alternative artistic and design practice—including temporary and non-commissioned work—is needed. It’s important to remember that the struggle of Black Americans in this country is singular. The movement for Black lives is the most important and urgent topic. At the same time, we are also learning a new framework to think about other marginalized groups.
What are your thoughts on the call to topple monuments that’s happening around the world? What do you think should be done with the statues of known racists?
I am discussing this matter with my colleague Kirk Savage, a historian of Reconstruction-era Civil War memorials, and we both believe that the more significant question is not what to do with the statues, but how to remember—and carry forward—the movement that has toppled them. How do we heed the protesters’ call to action and use these empty or defaced monumental sites to continue the struggle against systemic racism? We hope that communities will commemorate the very process of protest and advocacy that has brought about the disgrace and removal of these statues.
Many of these sites have already witnessed an explosion of creative commemoration. The monochrome setting of the Lee Monument in Richmond has been transformed into an amazing patchwork quilt of paint, slogans, placards, and projections. The fencing around the White House became a huge spontaneous memorial now being archived by the Smithsonian. These creative interventions document the Black Lives Matter movement but also inspire others to carry it on.
For that reason, do not erase the graffiti; do not clean up ruined monuments. These ruins have now become indispensable objects of our collective memory—transitional memorials in the development of anti-racist democracy.
Whether the statues stay or not, whether they are replaced or not, the sites of disgraced monuments can live on and flourish as interactive spaces of collective discussion and action. Designers have a role to play in this new phase of commemoration. They can work to create effective gathering spaces and to facilitate dialogue as well as reflection. New media technology can connect one monumental site to another across the country or globe and bring social movements together to share insights and strategies.
If we forget the activism that has brought down these markers of white supremacy, we will have lost the opportunity this moment has created. New strategies of commemoration that encourage the spontaneous expression and collaboration already on display at these sites can point toward a future in which monuments do not demand obedience but inspire social justice.
What’s the link between design and protest?
Everything I said responds to protest; my work stands for protest. Pro-test; “test” is from the Latin testis—a witness (to something wrong), and “pro” is to move forward, to pro-ject (demand or propose something better). Protest and design (and monument) are related. Monument (from moneo, memento—warning) should help us to beware and do something so the past injustices will not repeat themselves. There is a rich relationship between design and all kinds of protests—designers and artists can be useful, inspiring, and make protesting more effective and safer for those involved. You see this extension in digital media, in the way the process can be disseminated beyond the actual event.
In Barcelona, for example, during anti-globalization and other massive protests, the Guerrilla Fashion Group—part of Las Agencia movement—incorporated skills and knowledge from various fields of design and art, including fashion, graphic design, multimedia, industrial design, and performance art to make protests safe and more effective. They provided cultural and technical assistance—and prevented the protests from being too quickly destroyed by “forces of order.” I’m in favor of those projects, and am happy to see new designs such as the ones developed to fight back against facial recognition software used by those who want to control and arrest protestors. The Hong Kong protestors have been an inventive force in new media protests and I think we have a lot to learn from them in how to protest safely and intelligently. My own interest in projection technology is inspired by the use of some of the projections that these protesters used to anonymize themselves.
One technique that has been used recently in the US is where white protesters are on the front line as a way of preventing police from violently attacking POC demonstrators. It’s a kind of “white screen” protest design, and there is a room there for designers to contribute. Showing solidarity and using one’s privilege to fight back against racist profiling is a good way of thinking about design projects. Hopefully this conversation can happen again in the next academic year, because there will be more things done in terms of design and art’s role in protest. Right now, it’s a fantastic moment with incredible potential.
How could the Master in Design studies program (MDes) be a part of this conversation at the GSD?
The conversations surrounding racial justice have been a wake-up call to changing the way we will teach and learn at the GSD, including the MDes. I’m interested in thinking about Johannes Itten’s introductory course in Bauhaus, “Unlearning”—albeit with a different, present day agenda. It’s an important way to approach systemic racism: Learn how to undo it through design, while also “unlearning” it ourselves, since we are products of our still racist cultures. Perhaps there is something to be learned here from the Bauhaus. I think we all agree that at the GSD we also need to collaborate with other disciplines and fields of knowledge at Harvard and beyond. The situation is too urgent and complex to work on alone.
This could be a special opportunity to look at MDes as a unique intellectual and critical resource, and also see how MDes can exchange experience and thinking with the rest of the school. It can be a two-way system, for research students to work with studio culture in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning, as well as with philosophy, history of design, real estate, and other disciplines. Of course, it’s important to develop projects that take students outside of Boston and the US, but we must also nurture projects that engage with our territory and culture in the US, especially those projects focusing on the marginalization of Black communities, including in the Boston area. Students must learn to see evidence and symptoms of racial segregation in urban areas, and work collaboratively with community activists and researchers, cultural geographers, and urban anthropologists, among others. We have the resources here to work with all sorts of figures beyond the academy, but we need to go further in realizing these connections.
We must be open to the possibility that we might require a different structure altogether. Actually, we’ve already been considering this kind of idea in MDes—that students should be involved in discussing the way their final projects can go, and whether we take a new approach to the discussion and choice of thesis topics and method. In terms of immediate changes to make to the GSD’s pedagogy and structure, I—along with all our faculty—was extremely impressed by the Notes on Credibility statement. It was clear, cogent, and considered, with actionable consequences. I was inspired reading the demands, and wholeheartedly thank the students for opening this door and the discussions that will follow.
Krzysztof Wodiczko is professor in residence of Art, Design and the Public Domain at the GSD. He is renowned for his large-scale slide and video projections on architectural facades and monuments.
Architecture, Design, Action: Alex Krieger on Dismantling Systemic Racism in Pedagogy and Practice
Architecture, Design, Action: Alex Krieger on Dismantling Systemic Racism in Pedagogy and Practice
Alex Krieger, Professor in Practice of Urban Design & Interim Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design
What immediate steps can architects, planners, and urban designers take to advocate for more just cities?
Here is a very hard step: All practitioners of the design and panning disciplines need to be able to discuss matters of equity and justice more intelligently with clients. We need to find better ways to advocate for these issues, especially with private and corporate clients, for whom such concerns may not be in the foreground as they endeavour to undertake, finance, and deliver a particular project. These are difficult but important conversations, and are key to inculcating such awareness into a project.
The American Institute of Architects, American Planning Association, and American Society of Landscape Architects must also figure out ways to promote these issues to make clients more alert. Under the typical pressures of getting a project done, enhancing the quality of life for the most vulnerable communities will not always be the highest priority. For younger designers—or those not yet in a position of confidence to say no to projects that directly and negatively impact the lives of underserved communities—it’s a Solomonesque dilemma. When do you clench your teeth and go on, and when do you leave the project?
There are certain practices committed to only taking on work from socially minded non-profits, but this cannot be true for all of us, or most of us would be out of work. Urban designers face a particularly difficult hurdle. In theory, they’re interested in a context broader than the assignment presented. For any project, they would want to research and come to understand another square mile around it. But most clients would say, “Hey, I don’t need you to do that, and I’m not paying for it.” Getting clients to become more responsive to undertaking a project through a wider geographic and social lens is tricky but necessary.
How rapid will the pace of change be? For many it may remain too slow. Practitioners across disciplines must think more critically about whom their buildings and urban developments are built for and whom they affect. Do you really need another 50,000 square feet of premium office space downtown, or high-end condos? This is a conversation that’s already happening, and one positive thing about the current crisis is that no one can remain oblivious to social and racial injustices. Awareness requires response—not only contemplation—in order to forge a more just future.
As chair of Urban Planning and Design, can you tell me what kinds of conversations are happening in your department?
We did draft several statements, but some on our faculty said, “OK, this acknowledges past wrongs, but beyond “apologizing,” where are the steps being proposed, where are the actions?” One faculty member reminded us that actions speak louder than words. That’s why a statement from our department has not come out yet. Under the leadership of incoming chair Rahul Mehrotra, our department is taking the summer to develop a statement of actionable items. We are also proud of the activism of our MUP students: After more than a year of discussions and research, they have drafted a lengthy and powerful statement which Dean Whiting has just released to the broader GSD community as an exemplar.
In your opinion, what additional pedagogical and structural changes ought to happen at the GSD?
I spent my first two decades at the GSD in the Architecture Department, and I can tell you that the differences between the Architecture and UPD departments run parallel with the nature of the disciplines. Planning inherently involves direct contact with many stakeholders at any one time. As an architect, you’re mostly (not always, of course) dealing with and responding to specific clients. Planners are immersed in a community almost instantly, and most communities involve a range of people and opinions. At the risk of generalizing, I’d say that folks who are inclined to pursue a planning career are generally more socially inclined, and thus open to embracing social matters.
Our students have been the driving force on topics of social and racial justice for the last decade. The student-led Harvard University Planning Organization (HUPO) has repeatedly challenged faculty and staff on these issues. And by no means should they work for free; it’s not their job to educate their educators pro bono. For example, I provided funds to a group of students at HUPO to undertake research on courses dealing with professional ethics (which became part of their position statement). I firmly believe that we should undertake and support more of that kind of research.
The prizes the GSD confers are mostly a result of philanthropy—donors get to decide the subject matter. It’s often a housing prize, a thesis performance prize, or a travel itinerary to study urbanization, which is all well and good. But there is a new intention to gain support for one or more prizes related to spatial justice. The GSD must seek new funds or refocus existing funds and redirect them to endeavours that directly engage spatial justice, racism, inequalities, and so forth. Likewise, a fellowship or scholarship to motivate students to explore such issues during the course of their studies would be a good idea. It would be especially valuable in the second half of their studies—once they understand what they need to learn, but before they bury themselves in a specific area of research.
I am skeptical of the idea of a GSD-wide core class on racial justice, for two reasons. The first falls in line with my response to other proposals for school-wide courses about climate change and environmental justice. We must be careful not to unduly dismantle our core curricula required to train able professionals. Secondly, I believe we need to inculcate matters of social justice and diversity throughout the curriculum, not just in an assigned course or two. I’m not suggesting that the Urban Planning and Design Department is a paragon of virtue here, but such issues do tend to be part of our overall curriculum. Our core studio assignments, for example, often deal with underrepresented neighborhoods, so from early on in their studies, students confront places, people, contexts, and institutions that may be outside their own experience.
Nonetheless, as racial indifference has tended to be the case across the history of the GSD, and since there have been few African American students, and fewer Black faculty, we remain only at the cusp of transformation. Thus a pilot course may be a good idea, but it would have to be structured in a very careful way.
You will soon become a professor emeritus. Reflecting back on your time at the GSD, and looking toward the future, how do you hope architecture and design education and culture will continue to change?
Even a decade ago, there was no real pressure to do much about the issues addressed in the Notes on Credibility , or most of the ideas that we’ve talked about today. At that time, faculty tended to mentor or advance younger colleagues with interests and projects similar to their own. That’s human nature at work. But there was a need to expand curiosity. Now the agendas of younger faculty—and students—have acquired more weight in the daily life of the school. This is now happening—I’m sure of it. In the years ahead, I know that much deeper engagement with matters of racial justice and spatial inequality will occur across the school.
In previous years, the lack of diversity in our student body and our faculty kept us kind of oblivious. It’s no excuse. And even recently, before the Notes on Credibility document, and the national call for racial justice, there was a sense that we were doing better: there are more Black students; there’s a course on Black designers. Small steps forward may have made us feel OK and relax. But the challenge now is to cultivate awareness that pervades the curriculum overall. That’s an important distinction. I believe we are on our way to implementing that change. And there must be a shift in perspective that extends from pedagogy to practice. Only changing a course or two, or seeking more Black students, is insufficient to change the present culture of the design disciplines outside of academia. Change must be holistic if it is to be worthwhile.
Alex Krieger, FAIA, is professor in practice of Urban Design at the GSD, where he has taught since 1977. He served as chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design (1998–2004, 2006–2007, 2019–2020), director of the Urban Design Program (1990–2001), and associate chair of the Department of Architecture (1984–1989). He has combined a career of teaching and practice, dedicating himself to understanding how to improve the quality of place and life in our major urban areas. Mr. Krieger is also a principal at the global design practice NBBJ.
Architecture, Design, Action: Daniel D’Oca on Dismantling Systemic Racism in Pedagogy and Practice
Architecture, Design, Action: Daniel D’Oca on Dismantling Systemic Racism in Pedagogy and Practice
Daniel D’Oca, Associate Professor in Practice of Urban Planning
As an urban planner working in the realm of social equity, how do you think design can be used as a tool of racial justice? What experiences stemming from your own practice at Interboro speak to this idea?
The first step is to understand how design has been used as a tool of racial injustice. My office, Interboro Partners, wrote a book called The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion in part for this purpose. It’s an encyclopedia of sorts of the policies, practices, and physical artifacts that have been used by planners, policymakers, developers, real estate brokers, community activists, and other urban actors in the United States to draw, erase, or redraw the lines that divide. In it, we tried to very plainly call out, name, and visualize the violence that is done to maintain segregation. For too many, this violence is experienced day in and day out. But for others, the violence is not so easy to see.
Thanks primarily to the Fair Housing Act, the traditional weapons of racial exclusion—racial covenants, racial steering, racial zoning, mortgage discrimination, etc.—have been outlawed. But if the removal of traditional weapons of race-based exclusion from the battlefield has made it more difficult to divide along race lines, it certainly hasn’t made it impossible. In the book, we show how the post–Fair Housing Act era has seen an extraordinary proliferation of loopholes and counter policies and practices that effectively neutralize anti-discrimination laws with remarkable (and remarkably sinister) creativity. For example, we look at how, in recent years, white communities have proposed “blood relative ordinances” that require tenants to be related by blood to their landlords; kinship ordinances that require tenants to secure a letter of recommendation from an existing resident; and “exclusionary amenities” that members of a community pay to maintain because the willingness to pay for it is an effective proxy for other desired membership characteristics (for example, race). Racism has proven remarkably resilient.
So one thing we do in the book is try to show that things aren’t always what they seem. A rather hackneyed example is the superfluous armrest on a bench: the nominal purpose is to make you more comfortable, but the actual purpose is to make you much less comfortable so that you don’t, say, lie down. There are a lot of examples like this in the book, from superfluous fire hydrants (installed to keep people from parking near a beach), to fake garages (which result in fake curb cuts, which result in no-parking zones), to classical music–blaring speakers (installed to keep skateboarders away), to fake parks (to keep sex workers away), to a street hockey rink in a white community that was built on the ashes of basketball courts that had been popular with people of color from a neighboring town. We’re very interested in these artifacts of exclusion—in these things that are out there in the built environment that you can read as a sort of Rosetta stone.
One of the best things designers can do for racial justice is to undesign—or dismantle—this machinery of racial segregation. Segregationists popularized the phrase “forced integration,” but it’s really segregation that was forced. Segregating the population along race lines necessitated an arsenal of exclusionary weaponry, a massive army, and a government that was ready, willing, and able to declare war. Yes, we have to be proactive by, for example, promoting fair housing. Yes, we have to design public spaces that make Black people feel welcome. But demilitarization is essential.
How can public exhibitions and exhibition-making, as a form of transient information design, be used to convey complex issues of systemic inequity to a broad audience?
I probably put too much stock in the agency of exhibitions, because I put too much stock in the agency of artfully arranged data. That said, exhibitions have their place. The most memorable one I organized was in Baltimore in 2010-2011. I had the good fortune to work with 30 or so amazing MICA students to produce Baltimore: Open City , a student-led exhibition about the causes and consequences of racial segregation in Baltimore. To make a long story short, we found an old abandoned market space, fixed it up, and had a student-produced, student-curated exhibition. Our goal was to explore the legacy of racial segregation, and also stimulate a discussion about how to make a more open city in which more people would have more access to more places.
We had lots of great events in the space, starting with an opening party, in which the neighborhood marching band paraded through the space. We also used the space to raise money for local nonprofits that were combating racism. And we had historians lead tours of historic sites of segregation in the city. The work itself was varied. We had a timeline of segregation in Baltimore. There was a map that showed current NIMBY battles being fought across the city. One student did portraits of “Open City” heroes—people who fought for integration in Baltimore. We encouraged people to become activists, either by helping us build a house out of predatory “We buy houses” signs that we asked people to remove from poles around the neighborhood, or by getting involved with local groups combating segregation and inequality.
There was a public component too: one student—Andrew Pisacane—made amazing murals of planners on the infrastructure they planned, along with some incriminating quotes about why they planned it. The goal wasn’t to turn the students into planners (although it did turn photographers into architects, sculptors into urban planners, and painters into geographers), but to infuse their work as artists with a spatial and racial conscience, which is something it definitely did.
Why is it particularly important for GSD faculty to advocate for spatial justice and to stand up against racism in their pedagogy and practice?
To riff on the report of the Kerner Commission, planning and design created, maintained, and condoned racial segregation. And racial segregation has been absolutely devastating. A few years ago, I taught a studio about St. Louis’s 3rd Ward. The ward—which is 94 percent African American—has some of St. Louis’s lowest home values and median incomes. Physically, block after block after block appear abandoned. We compared St. Louis Place (a neighborhood in the ward) with the neighboring white suburb of Ladue. People born in Ladue are twice as likely to survive infancy and six times more likely to graduate college; they will live in households that earn over $75,000 more every year and live in a house worth more than 10 times as much. People born in Ladue live, on average, 16 years longer.
Myron Orfield and Will Stancil had a great op-ed in the New York Times that suggested that the same sort of disparities fueled the George Floyd protests. The gist of it is that the Minneapolis region was once racially integrated, in part because of a progressive “fair share” program that prevented wealthy, white suburbs from excluding low-income residents. When that program was effectively disbanded, the city resegregated. To quote from the article, “The population of segregated census tracts, where more than four-fifths of the population was nonwhite, grew 108 percent between 2000 and 2018; the number of K-12 schools more than four-fifths nonwhite grew nearly 200 percent over the same span.”
With increased segregation came increased Black-white welfare gaps, which in Minnesota, are some of the widest in the nation. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, it is “a very tragic thing for young people, children, to grow up [in] association, communication [with] only people of their race. Prejudices develop from the very beginning because of this. Narrow provincial views emerge because of this. I think the only way to break this kind of provincialism is to bring people together on a level of genuine inter-group and interpersonal living.”
It’s important for GSD faculty to advocate for spatial justice and to stand up against racism in our pedagogy and practice because 1) the abovementioned disparities are far from OK, and 2) the disparities are, in part, a result of bad planning decisions made by our professional predecessors. I think most people in design and planning today acknowledge the racial violence that was done in the name of planning, and I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in the profession who longs for the days of Harland Bartholomew and others who made these bad decisions. Fewer are willing to ask: how do we reckon with the past? How do we make amends?
What role does the architecture and design culture play?
I’ll mention two things. One: elitism. Let’s face it—architecture and design culture can be a little elitist. What we do impacts everyone, but we sometimes behave as if it only impacts Gund Hall. Why do we so often speak in esoteric gibberish? Why don’t we strive to make drawings that non-designers can understand? Why don’t we have more exhibitions in Gund Hall that engage the average Cambridgian passerby? Why don’t more option studios deal with everyday problems? There’s an idea that “hard to understand” means “good,” or that, conversely, “accessible” means “unsophisticated.” This idea is unequivocally false.
Two: the fetishization of nonstop work, which is unrealistic for all but a few individuals who don’t have to work additional jobs or have families to take care of. I believe Dean Whiting has taken some progressive measures to undermine this aspect of architecture culture, which is great.
What changes need to be made to architecture and design pedagogy at the GSD? Which skill sets should students leave the GSD with?
In the GSD’s Urban Planning Department, students have been a key voice. An example is the student-led Equity Curriculum Initiative , drafted by the 2019-2020 Harvard Urban Planning Organization (HUPO) co-presidents Ayesha Mehrotra, Evita Chávez, and Emily Klein in consultation with faculty and alumni. It calls for the GSD to hire more tenure-track faculty of color, the teaching of power and privilege workshops, and that students graduate with awareness of the racial violence that has been done by planners in the past. It’s an important document; we will strive to implement many of its recommendations.
I also think it’s imperative that students at the GSD openly, earnestly, and respectfully engage with people whose ideas they dislike or even find offensive. I’ve frankly spent too much time in an ideological bubble, and probably haven’t done enough to challenge my own beliefs and those of many of my students who share them.
I’ll add that it’s really important that we encourage students to not spend all their time in Gund Hall; students need to get out, go to community meetings, and be good citizens. They need to learn how to communicate with—and make work that’s relevant for—people who aren’t their critics.
We should teach students to be politically literate and understand that the built environment is a major cause of inequality and a driver of a lot of the systemic injustices that people are protesting right now. Our students should be able to grasp the role design disciplines have in shaping the built environment, and understand that the built environment is a result of decisions that people made and that could have been made differently. And regardless of their chosen discipline, students should leave the GSD with a working knowledge of the tools they have at their disposal for building more equitable and just cities.
Daniel D’Oca is an urban planner. He is associate professor in practice of Urban Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and principal and co-founder of Interboro Partners, a New York City–based office that has won numerous awards for its participatory, place-based planning and design projects.
Dismantling Systemic Racism in Pedagogy and Practice: An Interview Series
Dismantling Systemic Racism in Pedagogy and Practice: An Interview Series
In this interview series, faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Design discuss systemic racism and anti-Black violence embedded in and facilitated by the disciplines of design and planning in the United States. Conducted over the past eight weeks, these conversations followed the ebb and flow of events both at the GSD and nationally, from the energy of the national racial justice movement and protests rippling across US cities to the release of Notes on Credibility, a statement by the African American Student Union and AfricaGSD, and the subsequent responses from the dean and departmental statements of solidarity.
Interviewees discuss the need to rebuild pedagogies, institutional structures, and forms of professional practice across the design disciplines, and the accountability of leading institutions like the GSD in moving forward. They offer their individual experience, ideas, and pedagogical and professional suggestions for dismantling white supremacy in the design disciplines.
Architecture, Design, Action: Erika Naginski on Dismantling Systemic Racism in Pedagogy and Practice
Excerpt: The Long Ride, by Scot T. Spencer
Excerpt: The Long Ride, by Scot T. Spencer
“Five years ago, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Just City Lab published The Just City Essays: 26 Visions of Inclusion, Equity and Opportunity. The questions it posed were deceptively simple: What would a just city look like? And what could be the strategies to get there? These questions were posed to mayors, architects, artists, philanthropists, educators and journalists in 22 cities, who told stories of global injustice and their dreams for reparative and restorative justice in the city.
These essays were meant as a provocation, a call to action. Now, during these times of dissonance, unrest, and uncertainty, their contents have become ever more important. For the next 26 weeks [starting June 15, 2020], the GSD and the Just City Lab will republish one essay a week here and at designforthejustcity.org . We hope they may continue conversations of our shared responsibility for the just city.
We believe design can repair injustice. We believe design must restore justice, especially that produced by its own hand. We believe in justice for Black Americans. We believe in justice for all marginalized people. We believe in a Just City.”
—Toni L. Griffin, Professor in Practice of Urban Planning, founder of the Just City Lab , and editor of The Just City Essays
The Long Ride
By Scot T. Spencer
If you have never been to Baltimore, you should come to visit. From Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, you can ride the light rail to downtown in 25 minutes for one of the best deals in the country. If you ride the train between Boston and Washington, you can walk out of Pennsylvania Station and board the Charm City Circulator to downtown, and it’s free! However, if you live in the city of Baltimore and you want to rely on transit to get you to all of life’s functions, you need to recalculate your aspirations for life’s necessities and ambitions. For the 30 percent of people who live in Baltimore without a car (which, coincidentally corresponds with the percentage of people between 16 and 64 not in the labor force), the pursuit of economic opportunity, particularly beyond the confines of downtown, comes with limitations.
The above example serves as powerful reminder of how access to opportunity, transit mobility and the missing luxury of transportation choice is a critical gap in the path to shared prosperity for many in places like Baltimore. It is equally important to understand and underscore that fostering a more just place that includes all, especially those with the most limited means, is not a zero-sum game, but can create greater benefits for everyone. Continue reading on designforthejustcity.org …
Student-organized Design Yard Sale raises $126,000 to benefit anti-racism organizations
Student-organized Design Yard Sale raises $126,000 to benefit anti-racism organizations
With Design Yard Sale , a cohort of five Harvard Graduate School of Design students and recent graduates aims to both raise awareness of social and racial justice in design, and directly support anti-racism organizations.
Officially launched on July 1, Design Yard Sale has operated like a virtual auction and gift shop. Its catalog has included a curated range of original sketches, paintings, furniture, books, and apparel, many of which have been both donated and autographed by their designers—among them, Virgil Abloh, Denise Scott Brown, and Frank Gehry.
Design Yard Sale raised $126,000 through its four weeks of sales, with all proceeds benefiting a pair of non-profit organizations dedicated to anti-racist efforts.
Design Yard Sale’s organizers—Grace Chee (MArch ’21), Tessa Crespo (MDes ’20), Edward Han (MArch ’21), Izzy Kornblatt (MDes ’19), and Yaxuan Liu (MArch ’21)—first began conversing via GSD community emails and listservs in late May. Motivated by ongoing social-justice conversations, and catalyzed by the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer, the team felt driven to rewire design’s agency amid a national reckoning on race and justice, one in which the design fields have been directly implicated.
The Design Yard Sale cohort set up the project with no prior fundraising experience, learning and organizing on the fly. Proceeds of Design Yard Sale will benefit two organizations: nonprofit The Bail Project and New Orleans-based architecture and design justice practice Colloqate Design , each of which is dedicated to fighting systemic racism.
“In the face of such deeply rooted violence and oppression, we questioned what role we could play, and as minority designers and students ourselves, we wanted to contribute to the movement in whatever small way we could,” says Chee. “As Jerome Byron, one of our contributors, put it, Design Yard Sale is about promoting strategies for personal spending and redirecting cash to where it matters most.”
The auction’s final lot, which closed last Saturday, August 1, included a signed X-Rocker stool from Herzog & de Meuron and a print of Simone by Farshid Moussavi. Individual works of particular interest have included a a sketch of Queens Public Library by Craig Dykers; photographs of 1960s Las Vegas by Denise Scott Brown; and a sketch of Beekman Street Housing by Frank Gehry, each framed and signed by their respective designer. Jerome Byron offered a glass-fiber-reinforced concrete stool, infused with pink pigment. Other standout items included a Virgil Abloh™ x IKEA MARKERAD Chair from Abloh’s personal archive, to be illustrated on and signed by Abloh with the purchaser’s name, as well as Perry Kulper prints and Harvard GSD’s Womxn in Design Takeout Tote.
Among other ideas, the concept of offering distinctive design items—including furniture and other consumer goods, but also books, sketches, and other works that evoke design’s pedagogical and conceptual undercurrents—arose as a constructive way to celebrate both design’s tangible fruits, and its potential for social agency.
“It was a call to action with a direct, tangible way to help, and that really appealed,” says Crespo. “We all felt a strong obligation to fight against systemic racism and we wanted to do so in a way that provided immediate assistance to leaders on the front lines of the movement.”
For Design Yard Sale’s five organizers, the month of June was a warp-speed crash course in establishing a non-profit organization. Liu initiated e-mail conversations in May; as the team took shape, Han began establishing and deepening an online presence for the growing effort. A first public call for donations went out on the Design Yard Sale Instagram on June 18.
Before and following this first activation, the team strategized Design Yard Sale’s entire scope, from establishing an e-commerce platform to sourcing design objects—not to mention pricing, marketing, and shipping them—as well as studying the relevant international laws and policies governing commercial transactions.
The group secured fiscal sponsorship from the Architectural League of New York with less than 24 hours to spare before the July 1 launch; they set up a bank account that morning, and by that afternoon were starting to ship orders.
Sourcing the auction’s exquisite, unique wares was a similarly collaborative process, if less manic: organizers both tapped into professional and academic networks in order to solicit donated works, but also were approached by various members of the Harvard GSD community as word spread. Among Harvard GSD faculty efforts, Toshiko Mori and Oana Stănescu provided mentorship to the organizers, as well as connections to other designers; Jerold Kayden and colleagues at Harvard’s Transactional Law Clinic helped guide the team through legal considerations; and a variety of faculty—among them Jennifer Bonner, Sean Canty, Jon Lott, Chris Reed, Jeannette Kuo, Malkit Shoshan, Jenny French, Sara Zewde, and Zeina Koreitem—donated works of their own. A full list of Design Yard Sale contributors is on view at the project’s homepage .
At the project’s roots, foregrounding student work was a cornerstone of the cohort’s organizing vision. First batches of donations included models and drawings from fellow Harvard GSD students, while faculty grew involved as word spread. While early conversations among organizers involved questions of which types and mediums of items to include, the team ultimately chose an open approach, inviting works from a range of designers and at a range of price points, enhancing the auction’s accessibility.
“For us, it has always been really important to have student and young-practitioner work be presented on an equal footing with that of better known designers, because so often student work goes unnoticed,” says Kornblatt. “We know of the high caliber of work that happens at the GSD and other design schools, but so much of it ends up just gathering dust. Design Yard Sale allows students to use what they’ve already created to make a difference.”
In serving anti-racist priorities and missions, the team wanted to support both smaller, grassroots work, and broader efforts tackling systemic, anti-Black racism in the criminal justice system. Amid conversations with social-justice-minded colleagues, as well as a poll among Harvard GSD students, organizations the Bail Project and Colloqate Design emerged.
Beyond the July auctions, Design Yard Sale aims to educate and inspire awareness of social justice and systemic racism, especially within but also beyond design. The organizers are considering the project’s future, whether that involves making it an annual tradition, extending it into the Fall 2020 term, or other avenues toward expansion. And, individually, each is conceptualizing other projects geared toward promoting racial justice and equality within the field; Chee recently began developing an Instagram-based storytelling and archival project to chronicle designers of color and their work.
“While the DYS store is closing today, the fight does not end here,” the project’s website reads. “We hope that we can all continue to take part in the long-term battle against racism, both within the design field and in the wider society. In the face of such deep-rooted, systemic violence and oppression, we should never forget the implications that our everyday choices—be it what we read, where we spend, or who we hire—have on creating a better and more equitable future.”
Excerpt: An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, by Mindy Thompson Fullilove
Excerpt: An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay, by Mindy Thompson Fullilove
“Five years ago, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Just City Lab published The Just City Essays: 26 Visions of Inclusion, Equity and Opportunity. The questions it posed were deceptively simple: What would a just city look like? And what could be the strategies to get there? These questions were posed to mayors, architects, artists, philanthropists, educators and journalists in 22 cities, who told stories of global injustice and their dreams for reparative and restorative justice in the city.
These essays were meant as a provocation, a call to action. Now, during these times of dissonance, unrest, and uncertainty, their contents have become ever more important. For the next 26 weeks [starting June 15, 2020], the GSD and the Just City Lab will republish one essay a week here and at designforthejustcity.org . We hope they may continue conversations of our shared responsibility for the just city.
We believe design can repair injustice. We believe design must restore justice, especially that produced by its own hand. We believe in justice for Black Americans. We believe in justice for all marginalized people. We believe in a Just City.”
—Toni L. Griffin, Professor in Practice of Urban Planning, founder of the Just City Lab , and editor of The Just City Essays
An Antidote for the Unjust City: Planning to Stay
By Mindy Thompson Fullilove
In 1993 or thereabouts I entered a contest for women to depict what they did on a particular day. That day, I went to meetings early in the morning at Harlem Hospital. I took photos of the abandoned buildings on West 136th, where I parked my car, and photos of a huge plastic bag in one of the stunted trees. Later, on my way back to my office on W. 166th Street, I stopped to take a photo of man who was selling nuts on the street in front of a burned-out building. He smiled with tremendous pride—when I took him a copy of the photo a few weeks later, he grinned and said he’d send it to his mother so she would know he was trying to make something of himself. There were photos of the Stuyvesant High School students that I was mentoring for the Westinghouse Science Competition, and photos at home in Hoboken with my daughter Molly and some chocolate chip cookies fresh out of the oven. We were reading Ian Frazier’s New Yorker article about plastic bags in trees. I didn’t win the contest, but the exercise etched what I saw in memory.
Harlem had been devastated by decades of policies of disinvestment. Walking the streets was a painful experience because so many of the buildings had been burned out, and garbage blew in the courtyards and rats ran in and out. Working people were struggling to control the neighborhood, but drugs and violence were the order of the day. Most of my research was focused on describing the problems in front of me—filling out our understanding of a terrible statistic reported in 1990 by Drs. Harold Freeman and Colin McCord: that a black man living in Harlem had a shorter life expectancy than a man in Bangladesh, at that time the poorest country on earth. Some of what I wanted to describe was the historical process that had stripped this neighborhood of its life-giving qualities. I was describing an unjust city. Continue reading on designforthejustcity.org …
Work in Progress: Edgar Rodriguez’s Cross-Laminated Timber Experiments
Edgar Rodriguez (MArch ’20) describes his final project for the option studio “Mass Timber and the Scandinavian Effect” led by Jeniffer Bonner and Hanif Kara, spring 2020.
Excerpt: Resistance, Education and the Collective Will of the Just City, by Jack Travis
Excerpt: Resistance, Education and the Collective Will of the Just City, by Jack Travis
“Five years ago, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Just City Lab published The Just City Essays: 26 Visions of Inclusion, Equity and Opportunity. The questions it posed were deceptively simple: What would a just city look like? And what could be the strategies to get there? These questions were posed to mayors, architects, artists, philanthropists, educators and journalists in 22 cities, who told stories of global injustice and their dreams for reparative and restorative justice in the city.
These essays were meant as a provocation, a call to action. Now, during these times of dissonance, unrest, and uncertainty, their contents have become ever more important. For the next 26 weeks [starting June 15, 2020], the GSD and the Just City Lab will republish one essay a week here and at designforthejustcity.org . We hope they may continue conversations of our shared responsibility for the just city.
We believe design can repair injustice. We believe design must restore justice, especially that produced by its own hand. We believe in justice for Black Americans. We believe in justice for all marginalized people. We believe in a Just City.”
—Toni L. Griffin, Professor in Practice of Urban Planning, founder of the Just City Lab , and editor of The Just City Essays
Resistance, Education and the Collective Will of the Just City
By Jack Travis
“What has happened is that in the last 20 years, America has changed from a producer to a consumer. And all consumers know that when the producer names the tune, the consumer has got to dance. That’s the way it is. We used to be a producer—very inflexible at that, and now we are consumers and, finding it difficult to understand. Natural resources and minerals will change your world. The Arabs used to be in the third world. They have bought the second world and put a firm down payment on the first one. Controlling your resources will control your world. This country has been surprised by the way the world looks now. They don’t know if they want to be Matt Dillon or Bob Dylan. They don’t know if they want to be diplomats or continue the same policy—of nuclear nightmare diplomacy. John Foster Dulles ain’t nothing but the name of an airport now… . The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia. They want to go back as far as they can—even if it’s only as far as last week. Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards. And yesterday was the day of our cinema heroes riding to the rescue at the last possible moment. The day of the man in the white hat or the man on the white horse—or the man who always came to save America at the last moment— someone always came to save America at the last moment—especially in “B” movies. And when America found itself having a hard time facing the future, they looked for people like John Wayne. But since John Wayne was no longer available, they settled for Ronald Reagan and it has placed us in a situation that we can only look at like a ‘B’ movie.”—Gil Scot Heron, “B-Movie,” 1981 “If the Negro is not careful he will drink in all the poison of modern civilization and die from the effects of it. Ultimately it will do us very little good to simply get more opportunities in the Global South or elsewhere if we do not ask ourselves and resolve the question, ‘Do we really want to continue to design while mimicking the kinds of socio-political society that marginalized us in the first place?” —Marcus Garvey
What makes great buildings, spaces and places? It is when those structures or spaces reflect and serve the people of the community for which they are intended. It is when they lift the spirit while providing shelter and functional use; when they foster positive aesthetic and tactile relationships between the buildings, spaces and/ or places themselves and the people they are intended to serve.
I penned that statement more than 20 years ago at a moment when I was striving to define my practice as an architect and interior designer. It was relevant then and remains so today as we struggle to imagine a just city being born out of the troubled world we occupy today. Continue reading on designforthejustcity.org …