Excerpt: In It Together, by Lesley Lokko

“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

In It Together

Lesley Lokko

“[A city where] everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the trans-disciplinary, everyday life and unending history.” —Edward Soja No other city that I know of piques the imagination quite like The African City, wherever in Africa that is. I live in Johannesburg; I grew up in Accra: two African cities that have as little—or as much—in common as Chicago or Shanghai, but whose broad geography binds them together in ways that are both entirely fictitious and entirely real. By their very nature, cities are both generic and astoundingly, endlessly specific. The same broad categories of infrastructure, environment, equality and access to amenities apply to all urban centres, almost irrespective of scale. Yet there’s something in—or of/about—The African City that defies easy categorisation. African cities, to paraphrase Soja above, are places where “everything comes together,” in an almost dizzying panoply of contradictory binaries. Black/white; rich/poor; chaotic/controlled; hi-tech/lo-tech, as though there is no space or appetite for the nuance, the in-between, or the subtleties that make up any urban narrative in which most citizens somehow locate, negotiate and recognise themselves. When the invitation to contribute to the Just City essays project arrived in my Inbox, I was struck by its timing. It’s probably just over ten years ago that I met Max Bond in Accra, sadly for the last time, as it turned out. He was visiting the Ghanaian architect Joe Osae-Addo, and the three of us had dinner at the Golden Tulip Hotel on Independence Avenue whilst waiting for Accra’s terrible, gridlocked in a physical sense) of African cities. What could African American architects and urban designers bring to the table? What had Americans learned about race, class and culture that might prove useful to a new generation of African architects, planners, city-makers? Bond was better placed than most to answer the question: Ghana had been his home in the 1960s, in the first heady decade after independence. He’d seen more of the country than many Ghanaians, myself included, and his views were wide-ranging and broadly cosmopolitan, yet at the same time deeply personal and intuitive. We were joined a little later by another African American architect, Jack Travis, also a close friend of Bond’s. Four architects, two continents, one-and-a-half generations between us and many, many questions, though perhaps fewer answers. Continue reading on designforthejustcity.org… 

Redlining, Green Books, Gray Towns, High Yellow

Architect and artist Amanda Williams is best known for her bold public art project, Color(ed) Theory , produced for the 2015 architecture biennial in her native Chicago. Williams and a team of volunteers painted seven houses that were slated for demolition in the city’s predominantly Black Englewood neighborhood. Each building was coated in one color chosen from a palette Williams developed of culturally resonant hues for the surrounding community: Pink Oil Moisturizer, Ultrasheen, Harold’s Chicken Shack, Flamin’ Red Hots, Currency Exchange, Safe Passage, Crown Royal Bag. The vibrant paint conferred new life and meaning to each house, even as the dilapidated structure remained underneath.

A graduate of Cornell’s “extremely theoretical and conceptual” architecture program, Williams practiced for several years before yielding to a lifelong desire to pursue visual art full-time. After experimenting with abstract art, she eventually made her way to the intersection of art and architecture with projects like Color(ed) Theory that explore color and race and their relationship to space and value. Here, in lieu of her Open House Lecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design on April 2, 2020 that was cancelled due to the Covid-19 outbreak, Williams takes a moment to reflect on her work, purpose, and path, each of which has straddled multiple divides.

What drew you to architecture?

I grew up on the South Side of Chicago; the city is historically very segregated and continues to be. Before I had language for what was going on, I understood that there were inequities in space as we would move daily from Auburn Gresham—a predominantly Black and working/lower class neighborhood at the time—to Hyde Park, where I went to a private school. Seeing that shift piqued my interest about why and what was possible. I knew something wasn’t quite right.

At the same time, I loved art, drawing, color. There was a love of making things, of imagining people and how they would interact. I would draw houses or structures as a way to narrate stories. As I progressed, architecture seemed like the vehicle for exploring both. And when I told my parents I wanted to be an artist, my mother said, “Artists who can make a living are called architects.”

What prompted your move away from architecture in a strict sense of the discipline into visual art?

There was a long moment where my love of theory and the conceptual, and of thinking about architecture speculatively felt like a luxury I didn’t have because there was a need to actually change things. There was a bit of guilt that I could make these beautiful things and have these conversations with classmates and colleagues that I knew would be completely foreign to the environment that I had grown up in. So I practiced for about six and a half years in San Francisco during the height of the dot-com boom. We did interesting industrial projects, schools, and other civic buildings in addition to large-scale master plans for corporations. But I asked myself: Is this what you’re supposed to be doing? That transition into art full-time was that ideal moment when you could go from something you love to something you love more. Also, I really wanted to come back to Chicago and reinterrogate those early thoughts about my relationship to my creative self in the city that I love.

You’ve said that color, race, space, and value are the four things you’re constantly preoccupied with in your work. Are there patterns to how these four things interplay?

Yes. I would say that recently the idea that I can always lead with a color—and that it will have a spatial and racialized spatial corollary—is really strong. I didn’t see that early on. Color(ed) Theory led me to that: redlining, green books, gray towns, high yellow. Now I can see a whole kind of color palette that’s synchronous with color theory.

Is your exploration of color as a medium a way to get around gridlocked discussions about race? Or is it another way into those conversations?

My interest in the color gray is potentially a way to explode the kind of dead ends that we tend to fall into [around race], especially in Chicago. But the idea of race as just Black and white, for example, completely ignores the Asian community, Latinos.

When I was an artist-in-residence at Smith, I took much of the summer to think about this. What came to the fore is this idea that black and white can be combined into gray, but I also thought about other ways that you can get to gray. Another way is this tertiary—or what they call chroma—gray, where you make three colors turn into gray. That seems very powerful also as a metaphor for complicating the ways we tend to want to talk about race: if gray is not black and white but actually at least three things, then it not only expands how we have to position it, it also opens the door for trans and immigrant and others. You won’t end at the same place because now you’ve introduced a new element. People won’t be able to do what they usually do in discussions about race—ignore it and reduce the conversation. And it can help bring about potential strategies for getting out of this never-ending system that exists.

You bring art and architecture together to talk about larger social and economic and political issues. How do they serve one another?

In my mind, the art is leading. But I would say that in most people’s minds—both the everyday person and also those in the contemporary art and architectural worlds—the architecture is leading. There tends to be much more interest in the spatial implications of my work or the fact that this is a very different way of talking about space than people are accustomed to. And the artistic realm is not used to architecture being a medium as opposed to a functional thing. (I’m being very general and broad.)

Personally, I find agency in the art; there doesn’t always have to be a rationale. There’s room to think through it, to not have a conclusive answer, whatever the final product. Whereas there is an expectation that traditional architecture writ large actually needs to function: it has to stand up. People have to be able occupy it. There are rules about how it needs to operate.

There is a very distinct kind of discourse around contemporary architecture and art. They have their overlaps and there are people who have straddled those before me. But there’s not a synergy in the way one might imagine. So I’m always leading with the question, and the question is always spiraling around those four elements. I’m not thinking ahead of time what that matrix is, but it always seems to end up with those. And then if there were some kind of spectrum, you could think about whether one would initially label the final work art or architecture.

Amanda Williams was invited to lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design on April 2, 2020. Due to the Covid-19 outbreak, public programs at the GSD were cancelled, including Williams’s Open House Lecture. 

Four Native Designers Make GSD History

Excerpt: Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, by Darnell L. Moore

“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

Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives

By Darnell L. Moore

It was close to midnight. A youngish, jovial-looking white woman with russet colored hair ran by me with ostensive ease. She donned earphones and dark, body-fitting jogging attire. I was walking home from the A train stop and along Lewis Avenue, which is a moderately busy thoroughfare that runs through the BedfordStuyvesant neighborhood in central Brooklyn, where I live. Lewis runs parallel to Marcus Garvey. Black. Two avenues to the right is Malcolm X Boulevard. It’s Black. Fulton Street. Atlantic Avenue. The B15 bus. Bedford Avenue. Marcy Projects. Brownstoners. The C train. Working class renters. Peaches Restaurant. June Jordan. Livery taxis. Restoration Plaza. Jay-Z. Bed-Stuy is quite black. I am, too. Encountering the strange sight of a white woman running without care on a street in a section of our borough once considered an unredeemable “hood” terrified me. She ran past the new eateries and grocery shops that sell organic and specialty foods. Within a span of a few blocks, residents and visitors now have their choice of premium Mexican eats, brick oven pizza or freshly baked scones with artisanal coffee. Citi Bike racks and skateboard-riding hipsters adorn the now buzzing thoroughfare. To many, our part of Bed-Stuy may appear safer, cleaner, and whiter. And yet, I was still terrified. It was midnight. Black boys and men have been killed throughout the history of the U.S. for being less close to and observant of white women’s bodies as I was that late evening. Shortly after I passed by the white woman jogger, my close friend, Marcus, who lives within walking distance from me—closer to a densely populated public housing development—lamented lingering tremors of gentrification. Citing the presumed changes in racial demographics, renovated housing options and increased business development efforts, Marcus hinted at the frustration of black communities undergoing rapid and contested transformation. He came upon a flier that was fastened to a tree. According to Marcus, the New York Police Department precinct near his building created a “wanted” sign that was posted not too far from where he lived. The “wanted” were a few black men who allegedly robbed a neighbor. The neighbor was white. Never before, in the several years Marcus had lived in Bed-Stuy, had he seen anything similar. There were no signs made after black teens were shot or robbed. There were no cries for the “wanted” after black women and girls were sexually assaulted or followed home by a predator. There was no indication of concern for black people besides the ever-present anxiety black bodies seem to cause both to the state and to white people when they dwell en masse in the hood. A cursory review of NYPD’s data on the disproportionate and deleterious impact of stop, question and frisk procedures and broken windows policing on black communities is but one example. Marcus’s critique resonated because it illuminated the ways the state and its citizenry afford value to white lives. Hence, the reason for selecting the vignettes I’ve opened with here. In both scenes, white bodies signify worth and, therefore, are always centered in our collective imagination. They are esteemed commodities, especially in black spaces—that is, neighborhoods and other publics mostly inhabited and culturally shaped by a majority black populace. Thus, any dreamed and invented “just city” that is structured by a set of race ideologies that do not factor in the hyper-mattering of white lives and the perceived worthlessness of black and brown lives is not “just” at all. That is why catch phrases such as “community development” or “urban planning and design” can be counterproductive if, in fact, one’s praxis is not guided by a commitment to a type of transformative work grounded in the belief that black lives actually matter. Continue reading on designforthejustcity.org… 

Design as Protest: How can designers stand for, fight for, and build an anti-racist future?

“For nearly every injustice in the world, there is an architecture that has been planned and designed to perpetuate it,” writes the architect and activist Bryan Lee Jr. in his latest piece on CityLab. Lee spells out the ways that white America has militarized architecture and design reinforce its white supremacist ideologies and anti-Black violence in the built landscape of its cities, neighborhoods, and communities. How cities are laid out, the logics of zoning, the flow of transportation infrastructures, access to green space and the precise coordinates of urban renewal initiatives are all conceived to systemically exploit and perpetuate violence against communities of color, particularly Black Americans. Lee calls for the dismantling of the physical and political conditions that have allowed this structural and systemic racism to persist for as long as the United States is old. Now is the time, he says, to acknowledge the ways “in which our profession’s silence is assent,” so we can “stand for, fight for, and build a just future.” This call to action lays the groundwork for Design as Protest (DAP), a collaborative, Black-led organizing effort by Lee and five other interdisciplinary designers, architects, artists, organizers, and activists: De Nichols, Michael Ford, V. Mitch McEwen, Sunni Patterson, and Taylor Holloway. Mobilizing in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, they are calling upon design professionals to work collectively and creatively within their networks to dismantle the power structures and privilege that has allowed design and its contingent fields of architecture and urban planning to be utilized as a tool of oppression and violence against Black Americans for too long. Through a series of national calls held online, in which participants can share resources and brainstorm new and ongoing actions, projects, and strategies to mobilize the design industries, DAP organizes across the many platforms that such injustices are perpetuated. Together, the five co-organizers have put forth nine Design Justice Demands, copied in full below, which they are asking participating design professions to commit to, advocate for, and disseminate in their immediate networks. Some demands require immediate personal action, like refusing to design prisons and police stations, while others call for revisions in public policy such as defunding the police, handing power and resources to community-led public projects, and protecting the place-keeping of Black cultural spaces. DAP also calls for pedagogical and structural shifts in architecture and design, as well as a reworking of core terms like “public space” and “affordability”. The co-organizers emphasize that so many facets of the design disciplines–from how they are taught, evaluated, and implemented–need to be dismantled so that new structures and platforms can be built collaboratively from the ground up, ultimately enabling a more just future. There is much to be done, and DAP is the place to get to work. Design As Protest’s Nine Design Justice Demands:

1. That our cities and towns reallocate funds supporting police departments and reinvest in the critical needs of disinherited neighborhoods and communities.
2. A cease to all efforts to implement defensible space and (CPTED) crime prevention through environmental design tactics.
3. We cease support of the carceral state through the design of prisons, jails, and police stations.
4. We cease the use of area mean income to determine “affordability” in our communities and instead root the distribution of state and federal resources in a measure that reflects the extraction of generational wealth from black communities.
5. We advocate for policies and procedures that support a genuinely accessible public realm free from embedded oppression.
6. We ensure communities’ self-determination through an established procedure that incorporates community voice-in-progress and community benefits agreements in action for all publicly accountable projects.
7. We detangle our contractual relationships with power and capital to better serve neighborhoods and communities from a position of service and not from a place of extraction.
8. We invest and secure the place-keeping of black cultural spaces.
9. We proactively redesign our design training and licensing efforts to reflect the history of spatial injustice and build new measures to ground our work in service of liberating spaces.

“Think about how the things you’re already working on can connect creatively to what’s happening on the ground, how you can get your network advocating en masse for social justice and fighting against police brutality,” suggested co-organizer Nichols on the first meeting. So far, two DAP meetings have occurred on June 3 and 5. The second meeting launched a ‘day of action’, in which those involved with the movement are asked to 1. Commit to the Design Justice for Black Lives Demands and 2. Share the Design Justice Demands with prominent organizations, governments, practices, and academic institutions through a set of pre-filled emails. Participants are asked to add on contacts from their own networks. In the second meeting, Lee led an immediate feedback session wherein participants were asked to respond to the Design Justice Demands with outstanding questions and personal reflections on each demand. This data is being collated by the co-organizers and will be used to plan future DAP events and actions. “The more clarity we have from you, the more we’ll have for the world as we move forward,” explained Lee. The co-organizers are cognizant of the ways these conversations will scale upwards and outwards beyond the architecture and design industries; establishing a collaborative process together, here and now, is just the beginning of a durational fight for justice. “What is the just future, the just world we are envisioning?” asked Nichols. “It’s not just the vision of designers but the vision of the people.” New recruits are asked to fill in the following Direct Ideation Action form, through which DAP co-organizers can learn of their skills and coordinate further calls to action. There is also an open-source Resource Library available for those involved. Additional Action Campaign Calls will be happening weekly, with topics including Digital Histories + Futures, Buildable Memorials, and Tactical Protest Design happening the week through June 14, and more on the way. “Over the past weeks, we have witnessed various organizations and universities issuing statements of solidarity, but they are still abusing Black lives,” suggests Lee. For students and staff of architecture and design schools reading this and wanting to get involved, begin by using Design As Protest’s pre-filled email template to demand concrete action from your institution. The specific demands for institutions work across different planes of injustice, from reallocating police funding and ending CPTED tactics to restructuring all curriculum to acknowledge the history of spatial violence against Black communities and implementing anti-racist design strategies/knowledge. Dismantling design injustice begins in pedagogy and collaborative learning, so that students can leave their education equipped with the tools and language necessary to fight for spatial justice in their chosen professions. In the words of Nichols: “Seeking justice is a continuum. It’s not simply about removing barriers, but reconciling with the past, so we can move forward with strategies for success.” Design as Protest is co-organized by Bryan Lee Jr., Design Principal at Colloqate Design, an architect, writer, organizer, and activist of Design Justice; De Nichols, a current Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Principal of Design & Social Practice at Civic Creatives in St. Louis, an artist-organizer, social impact designer, and keynote speaker; Michael Ford, founding Director of Hip Hop Architecture Camp, a national collaborative education initiative aimed at introducing and empowering under represented youth in the architecture, design, and planning disciplines; V. Mitch McEwen, a practicing architect and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Princeton SOA and Founding Director of Black Box Research Group; Sunni Patterson, a poet, singer, activist, and spoken word artist; and Taylor Holloway, an architect and educator.

An Anti-Racist Reading List: Five Essential Titles for Designers

How can design contribute to the fight against racism? As a place to start, the African American Design Nexus—an initiative developed by the Frances Loeb Library in collaboration with the GSD African American Student Union—has curated five essential titles for anti-racism reading. The recommendations come from a list of over 45 books on race and design crowdsourced from the GSD community in honor of the 50th anniversary of the first Black History Month celebrations. The open-access bibliography is designed to “showcase and initiate conversation about the work of Black designers throughout the world and to critically re-examine the legacy of racial discourses in modern and contemporary design thinking and practice.” It is a living document fueled by submissions from the GSD community. Learn how to submit a book or other printed media.

For more recommended reading, visit A Call To Explore: Design, Race, and the Built Environment book suggestions from the GSD community.

The Fire Next Time

by James Baldwin

“At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two ‘letters,’ written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both Black and White, to attack the terrible legacy of racism.”

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America

by Richard Rothstein

“Richard Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create Whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in White neighborhoods.”

How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

by Peter Moskowitz

Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors

by Carolyn Finney

Excerpt: Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White, by Toni L. Griffin

“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, 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

Defining the Just City Beyond Black and White

By Toni L. Griffin

When I think about the Just City, it’s always Black and White.

I was born in Chicago the evening before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. Growing up on the south side of Chicago meant that on an average day, I rarely saw or interacted with a person who didn’t look like me. All of my basic needs were met on the south side of Chicago—schooling, shopping, summer jobs, recreation and entertainment. My teachers were predominately black, and my classmates were 98 percent black. This environment did not make me feel isolated, segregated or unusual—I just felt normal. Television was my only reminder that I was a “minority.” While I did not regularly see people who looked like me on TV, this didn’t stop me from deciding at the age of 14 that I wanted to be an architect—just like Mike Brady, patriarch of “The Brady Bunch.” By the time I entered college at the University of Notre Dame—and the field of architecture—my context became the exact opposite. For the first time in my life, I actually felt like a minority. And today, professionally, I remain a minority in my chosen field. I am the only African-American full-time faculty member at the City College of New York’s School of Architecture, and one of less than 300 AfricanAmerican women to be licensed in the United States.

My Just City is Black and White because I grew up in a racially segregated city.

I certainly did not realize how much of an impact Chicago’s urban form and spatial patterns would have on my perspective about cities. Nor was I aware of the profound impact that Chicago would have on my interactions with fellow urbanites and the work to which I would come to devote my career.

My work in architecture, urban design and urban planning spans several cities in the U.S., including Chicago, New York, Washington, Newark, Detroit and Memphis. All of these cities have similar racial patterns of segregation, and all have similar urban conditions, thanks to the impact of segregation on people and place. I would eventually come to know these urban conditions as the environments of social and spatial injustice. I now simply call them the conditions of urban injustice or justice. I define urban justice as the factors that contribute to our economic, human health, civic and cultural well-being, as well as the factors that contribute to the environmental and aesthetic health of the built environment. There are three conditions of urban injustice that I always seem to confront in my work in cities—conditions that began to reach the height of national awareness at the time of my birth in 1960s Chicago.

The first urban injustice conditions is concentrated poverty.

On the ground, spatial segregation has created pockets of concentrated poverty in our cities that, in turn, have created spatial and social isolation of those cities’ residents. Over multiple generations, this isolation has had a devastating impact on family structures, social networks, educational systems and access to economic opportunity.

For example, in Newark, N.J., where I served as the director of planning and community development for newly elected Mayor Cory Booker between 2007 and 2009, nearly 50 percent of all the people living in the central ward of the city lived in poverty, a condition that has persisted since a federal slum clearance boundary was drawn around the same area in 1961 and which suggests multiple generations of concentrated poverty.

The second urban injustice condition is disinvestment, crime, and the architecture of fear.

In the mid-1960s, attempts were made to revitalize the center city through programs such as Model Cities, a federal program that brought funding for redevelopment into communities with the greatest social and physical deterioration. However, the civil unrest of 1967 deepened disinvestment, and the city’s reputation for high crime and political corruption limited its ability to attract widespread capital investment for many decades. At the height of disinvestment and the federal programs designed to reverse this trend, including Model Cities and Urban Renewal, developers and institutions that felt unable to control the disinvested and crime-ridden environments around their land holdings directed architects to protect them from the adjacent urban decay via windowless recreation centers to keep children safe, elevated and enclosed skywalks from Newark Penn Station to the Gateway Center office campus that removed people from the dangerous streets, and a public community college constructed with uninviting, barrier-like building materials that created a fortress, protecting knowledge from the very public it was situated to serve. Continue reading on designforthejustcity.org … 

Toward a New GSD

Dear GSD community,

Four days ago, I received an ardent and thoughtful message from the GSD’s African American Student Union (AASU) and AfricaGSD, laying out 13 directions for change in response to the structural racism that has directly impacted this country’s Black population. This message coincided with communications across the faculty, also asking ourselves how we might change. I am writing you today with the beginning of a response, a response that we must all usher forward in unison. GSD students, faculty, staff, and alumni share one humanity, and the only human response to this moment is to recognize that changes need to be enacted that are real and targeted. Black Lives Matter at the GSD, and I am committed to taking the steps necessary to make sure that this becomes a lived reality for everyone at our school.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” James Baldwin wrote in 1962. This was his powerful conclusion to a call for the writers of his generation to “remake America into what we say we want it to be.”

Today, almost sixty years later, Baldwin’s call to action is ever more urgent. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many other Black Americans, have led to a powerful wave of protests and a shared call to overturn injustices that ripple through every facet of our country and that have been borne disproportionately by the African American community.

In that same piece, Baldwin writes that “…we will never remake those cities…we will never establish human communities – until we stare our ghastly failure in the face.” We as designers, architects, urban planners and designers, and landscape architects, have contributed to that ghastly failure. We have failed by contributing to policies and designs that have concretized structural racism in our cities; compromised definitions of “public” in our public spaces, places, and buildings; and technologies that have increased, even inadvertently, environmental and economic inequities across the globe. As a school, we have also failed to meaningfully increase our numbers of Black students, faculty, and staff.

On behalf of the GSD community, I apologize that we have not served our Black community members better, historically and at present. I resolve that the school will make progress, not just with words, but with actions. I propose that we work together as a community, including our faculty, students, staff, and alumni, to enact real change, beginning with the following six measures:

• Establish for all departments and programs across the school a shared agenda, to be reviewed annually, for instilling anti-racist practices in their hiring, their visitors, their communication, and their curricula, and create a permanent page on the school’s website that includes our shared values as well as resources that advocate for racial understanding.
• Create specific programming for new student orientation and training for new faculty and staff to educate all members of our community on the specific racial context of the United States, as well as of the immediate Boston area, and how to better engage in race-related discussions and actions inside and outside the classroom. These topics will also be included within the introductory core curriculum of every program.
• Establish a GSD Gift Fund in support of anti-racism. This fund, already in the process of being created, addresses a number of demands shared in the statement from the African American Student Union (AASU) and AfricaGSD to the GSD’s administration. The school is committed to supporting initiatives aimed at combating racism, and plans to initiate this fund immediately, as a part of many actions that we will take to acknowledge that design pedagogy has a cultural obligation to address injustice and discrimination. It is our hope to engage our alumni and friends with a strong call to action that addresses the immediate needs of the GSD’s Black community, and leverages this moment in time to create systemic change.
• Identify and commit to new ways of recruiting and retaining students of color writ large, with specific efforts to recruit and retain Black students, faculty, and staff, including but not limited to expanding our numbers of Black speakers and visitors to our classes; establishing close relationships to the HBCUs; strengthening our outreach to Black communities in the Boston area; expanding Design Discovery and Design Discovery Young Adult; expanding our Community Service Fellowships; and proactively cultivating a strong network of Black professionals, alumni, and students.
• Expand faculty bias training beyond search committees to include bias issues related to grading and awards. We will also introduce a graduation prize for a student who has engaged with issues of equity in a sustained way throughout their years at the GSD, and an annual prize for a faculty member who has engaged in such issues and through their work have made a demonstrable impact.
• Review these measures annually to ensure that we are indeed remaking the school into what we want it to be.

For the GSD to stop “staring our ghastly failures in the face,” we must lead by example. We must lead by design. We must lead by conscience.

Yours kindly,
Sarah

Daniel Fernández Pascual Wins Harvard Graduate School of Design’s 2020 Wheelwright Prize

Harvard GSD is pleased to name Daniel Fernández Pascual the winner of the 2020 Wheelwright Prize , a grant to support investigative approaches to contemporary architecture, with an emphasis on globally minded research. With his winning proposal Being Shellfish: The Architecture of Intertidal Cohabitation, Fernández Pascual will examine the intertidal zone—coastal territory that is exposed to air at low tide, and covered with seawater at high tide—and its potential to advance architectural knowledge and material futures.

Observing that seaweed and shellfish have served as key sources of both nutrients and building materials for millennia, Fernández Pascual argues that their ongoing role in coastal circular economies opens new possibilities for contemporary architecture. He posits that shellfish waste shells and seaweeds may provide a basis for a new type of concrete, and could offer that and other clues to rethinking the construction sector and its impact in and on the built environment. While exploring such material futures, Fernández Pascual aims also to advance knowledge on sustaining more equitable social structures, while caring for coastal environments and cultures.

Amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Harvard GSD has prioritized the safety of all members of its community. Given the Wheelwright Prize’s fundamental connection between travel and research, Fernández Pascual has offered avenues for adapting his research to accommodate travel restrictions, envisioning a two-phase strategy whereby he would initiate or continue conversations with contacts at each site of interest, then travel to and visit sites during a second, later phase. He also connects the present pandemic to ongoing concerns relevant to his proposed topic, with regard to how his proposal may serve as a lens on how the human and natural worlds may cohabitate.

“We live immersed in ecologies that are eroding and changing at a rapid state, and the current global pandemic is just another sign of that environmental crisis,” Fernández Pascual observes. “As awareness about the environmental footprint of construction increases, there is an urgency to find materials that are responsive to dynamic ecosystems, to support eco-social innovation and architectural ingenuity along coastal zones, and to understand forms of cohabitation between humans and more-than-humans in order to support thriving ecosystems and societies. The Wheelwright Prize will allow me to investigate how the intertidal zone, in all of its complexity, may advance architectural knowledge in an era of climate emergency.”

“I am thrilled by the selection of Daniel Fernández Pascual as this year’s Wheelwright Prize recipient,” says Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at Harvard GSD, who served on the 2020 Wheelwright Prize jury. “By focusing on the potential of natural resources in the intertidal zone, Daniel’s proposal directly addresses one of the greatest threats our globe faces—climate change—by tackling one of architecture’s greatest contributors to that threat—concrete. Daniel has planned a dynamic research effort, reaching out to territories and societies that lie outside much of the architectural canon but that each offer variations on a theme: alternatives to using concrete as a building material. The potential for an investigation to play out so globally, and to draw in sites that offer such specific contexts, is rare, while the relevance of this topic and the care with which Daniel has organized his research agenda make me confident that this work will have a profound and widespread impact.”

Fernández Pascual was among three remarkable finalists selected from more than 170 applicants, hailing from 45 countries. The 2020 Wheelwright Prize jury commends finalists Bryony Roberts and Gustavo Utrabo for their promising research proposals and presentations.

Fernández Pascual holds a Master of Architecture from ETSA Madrid, a Master of Science in Urban Design from TU Berlin and Tongji University Shanghai, and a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2013, Fernández Pascual co-founded Cooking Sections with Alon Schwabe. Based in London, their work explores systems that organize the world through food. Using installation, performance, mapping and video, their research-based practice operates within the overlapping boundaries of architecture, visual culture, and ecology. Since 2015 Cooking Sections have worked on multiple iterations of the long-term, site-specific CLIMAVORE project, exploring how to eat as humans change climates.

Cooking Sections was part of the exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion in the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. Their work has also been exhibited widely; upcoming solo exhibitions will take place at Tate Britain and SALT Istanbul, as well as a new commission for P.5 New Orleans Triennial. In 2019, Cooking Sections won the Future Generation Special Art Prize and were shortlisted for the Visible Award for socially-engaged practices. Cooking Sections currently lead a studio unit investigating critical questions around refuse and the metabolization of the built environment at the School of Architecture, Royal College of Art, London.

With Being Shellfish, Fernández Pascual posits that, as awareness about the environmental footprint of construction increases, especially concerning the use of concrete, the intertidal zone can offer more-responsive ways to inhabit the planet and provide regenerative materials. Seaweeds and shellfish are key sources of nutrients and have been used in construction over millennia, he observes; by looking at waste shells and seaweed material cultures in Chile, Taiwan, China, Turkey, Japan, Zanzibar, Denmark, and New Zealand, Fernández Pascual plans to extend and expand an ongoing investigation on ecosocial coastal innovations in the intertidal zone, as initiated via Cooking Sections’ CLIMAVORE project. Within these proposed case studies, Fernández Pascual plans to look at historical and contemporary innovations, such as seaweed thermal insulation and waterproof roofing, as well as the use of waste shells used as cementless binding agents, cladding, and flooring systems in different parts of the world.

Ultimately, Fernández Pascual hopes to apply the knowledge gathered via his Wheelwright research to a built project that, in turn, will incorporate and illustrate the material innovations he discovers and serve as an educational facility on coastal ecologies.

As with past Wheelwright winners, the $100,000 prize is intended to fund two years of Fernández Pascual’s research travel.

Fernández Pascual follows 2019 Wheelwright Prize winner Aleksandra Jaeschke, whose Wheelwright project UNDER WRAPS: Architecture and Culture of Greenhouses is in its travel-research phase.

Now in its eighth year as an open international competition, the Wheelwright Prize supports travel-based research initiatives proposed by extraordinary early-career architects. Previous winners have circled the globe, pursuing inquiries into a broad range of social, cultural, environmental, and technological issues. The Wheelwright Prize originated at Harvard GSD in 1935 as the Arthur C. Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship, which was established to provide a Grand Tour experience to exceptional Harvard GSD graduates at a time when international travel was rare. In 2013 Harvard GSD opened the prize to early-career architects worldwide as a competition, with the goal of encouraging new forms of prolonged, hands-on research and cross-cultural engagement. The sole eligibility requirement is that applicants must have received a degree from a professionally accredited architecture program in the previous 15 years.

The 2020 Wheelwright Prize jury consisted of 2016 Wheelwright Prize Winner Anna Puigjaner; Harvard GSD’s Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture, Sarah M. Whiting; Harvard GSD’s Chair of the Department of Architecture, Mark Lee; Harvard GSD Assistant Professor of Architecture Megan Panzano; ETH Zurich Professor of Architecture Tom Emerson; and Belgian architect Wonne Ickx.

2020 Wheelwright Prize Finalists

The Wheelwright Prize jury commends the 2020 finalists for their outstanding applications:

Bryony Roberts
Wheelwright proposal: The Architecture of Childcare: A Global Study of Experimental Models

Bryony Roberts is an architectural designer and scholar. Her practice Bryony Roberts Studio, based in New York, integrates methods from architecture, art, and preservation to address complex social conditions and urban change. The practice has been awarded the Architectural League Prize and New Practices New York from AIA New York as well as support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Graham Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the American Academy in Rome, where Roberts was awarded the Rome Prize for 2015-2016. In tandem with her design practice, Roberts instigates research and publication projects about designing in response to social and cultural histories. She guest-edited the recent volume Log 48: Expanding Modes of Practice, edited the book Tabula Plena: Forms of Urban Preservation published by Lars Müller Publishers, and co-guest-edited Log 31: New Ancients. She has also published her research in Harvard Design Magazine, Praxis, Future Anterior, and Architectural Record.

Roberts earned her Bachelor of Arts at Yale University and her Master of Architecture at the Princeton School of Architecture, where she was awarded the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Thesis Prize and the Henry Adams AIA Medal. She teaches architecture and preservation at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in New York.

With The Architecture of Childcare, Roberts proposes an analysis of experimental models of care that hybridize programs to improve conditions for children, families, and care workers: childcare plus housing, childcare plus workplace, and childcare plus landscape. Comparing projects in Scandinavia, the UK, the US, Japan, and Southeast Asia through analytical drawings and contextual research, Roberts seeks to yield a global catalogue of new typologies.

Gustavo Utrabo
Wheelwright proposal: Rethinking Nature, Assembling Matter

Born in Curitiba, Brazil, Gustavo Utrabo received a degree in architecture and urbanism from the Federal University of Paraná in Curitiba, Brazil, in 2010. In 2014, he also completed a specialization course in National History and Literature from UTFPR. Through his studio, Estúdio Gustavo Utrabo, he intends to expand the architecture field, connect people, and imagine the future through sustainable and inclusive approaches. These approaches come together in an extensive portfolio that has earned significant awards as the RIBA International Prize (2018), RIBA International Emerging Architect (2018), finalist status in Harvard GSD’s 2018 Wheelwright Prize, and a “Highly Commended” award in the Architectural Review Emerging Architecture Awards (2019), among others. Utrabo has contributed to lectures and other actions in institutions including IIT Chicago, University of Hong Kong, Future Architecture Platform at MAO museum in Ljubljana, RIBA London, and FAU-USP in São Paulo, among others. Utrabo recently served as a visiting professor in the Master of Arts program at the University of Hong Kong.

Eyeing intersections between culture, nature, and economics, especially amid ongoing climate change, Utrabo proposes an investigation into merging nature and culture through matter. With “Rethinking Nature, Assembling Matter,” he seeks an understanding of how wood, from its natural, raw status to its final use in architecture, can be used as a primordial resource to compose a cultural manifestation.

“Minneapolis Affects Us All”

Congratulations to all, especially our Class of 2020, for finishing out the academic year with the flourish of a truly memorable Commencement yesterday. While this week has been filled with mirth for so many, it has been marred by violence and injustice for others across our country, pain of various forms that directly and indirectly affects countless among us. As we celebrate our GSD community, it is equally imperative that we pause to acknowledge the events of racial violence and degradation that were permitted to take place in this week.

The death of a black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis has resurfaced a national conversation about race in America. His murder, coupled with other racially charged occurrences this week, has reminded us that race textures the American experience. As a community of shared values, the GSD strives to recognize diverse perspectives and experiences, and to create spaces for them and their stories; this is an integral part of our mission as a design school. I asked our graduates yesterday to go out and lead the conversations that unite us as global citizens. This conversation happening right now across the country is one that needs all of our voices, and needs it now.

The GSD teaches students how to shape our world, engaging not only buildings, technologies, infrastructures, landscapes, and spaces, but also what it means for us to live together in the world. The death of Mr. Floyd and the events of this week have been tragic, with implications for every corner of our community and for each of our disciplines. It is important that while we have been forced to reframe what community looks like spatially in the face of COVID-19, we never lose sight of what community should feel like. No element or facet of your design work is too small or too isolated to impact our broader world.

As designers and as citizens of the world, I urge you to recognize and acknowledge the injustices that remain so persistent and so ingrained across our globe, and I ask you always to take the time to consider how the work we do as designers impacts how we live together.

In this moment, and as we move forward, I ask that you recognize and talk with one another about the different experiences, the different forms of pain and of understanding, that people may feel given what we’re seeing in the news and on social media. I recognize that the recent events may cause additional emotional distress and anxiety, and I urge you to be in touch with either Harvard Counseling and Mental Health Services or the Harvard Employee Assistance Program if you need assistance.

I so look forward to us all uniting again and continuing our work: educating and inspiring leaders who will create a more resilient, more beautiful, and more just world.

With respect and reflection,
Sarah

 

*This posting has been modified slightly from the original in response to criticism from a student who questioned the lack of reference to Mr. Floyd as black or as African American. I appreciate and acknowledge that criticism.