Alex Krieger remembers François Vigier (1931–2020)

François Claude Denis Vigier, the Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning Emeritus, died on February 7, 2020, shortly after his 89th birthday. Frank joined the Harvard Graduate School of Design faculty in 1962 and remained a distinguished member of the faculty until 2005. He was an early contributor to the emergence of urban design as a discipline—the program was founded just two years prior to his arrival—and was instrumental during the early 1990s in the return of urban planning to the GSD from its 14-year sojourn in the Kennedy School of Government. He served as the first chair of the then reorganized Department of Urban Planning and Design between 1992 and 1998. From 1987 until 2005 he also served as the director of the Center for Urban Development Studies at the GSD. Retirement for Frank in 2005 marked the start of a new phase: the research undertaken at the Center of Urban Development continued and broadened under a new nonprofit, the Institute for International Urban Development, dedicated to the same humanitarian values. Frank was its its founder and its president for the past 15 years. The Institute has helped communities, often poor or minority, pursue neighborhood or regional development frameworks, finance strategies, and provide upgrades to disinvested or slum areas. Most importantly, it has helped such communities in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe to establish methods to negotiate with local and regional partners in the government and the private sector to improve an area’s quality of life. The institute is a leader in the development of technical assistance and capacity building for urban populations. Another passion of Frank’s was the preservation of non-monumental cultural heritage sites, including the rehabilitation of the medina in Fez, an area of medieval Baku, and portions of old Damascus. His lifelong commitment to such work led the French government to honor him as Knight of the Order of Merit in 1995. The same dedication to improving the interaction between people and places marked Frank’s decades of teaching. When the American planning profession began to distance itself from physical planning in the 1970s, and the GSD’s planning program moved to the Kennedy School of Government, Frank was the one member of the planning faculty who chose to remain, convinced that the GSD must remain committed to and influential both in matters of design and planning. He understood that design ideas, and even aesthetic choices, were not independent of political, economic, and social values. His was a voice for engagement and collaboration, favoring more interaction among all of the disciplines at the GSD. His courses and studios always emphasized such interaction—planning perspectives influencing design ideas / design insights able to influence plans and policies. Upon the return of planning to the GSD, Frank strongly supported incorporating studio education into the planning curriculum, still one of the unique features of Harvard’s program. Frank also studied at the GSD. After earning a bachelor in architecture from MIT, he received a master of city planning degree from the GSD in 1960, and shortly after was asked to join the GSD faculty. He was awarded a PhD from Harvard in 1967. Frank was an accomplished author as well. His first major book, Change and Apathy: Liverpool and Manchester During the Industrial Revolution (MIT Press, 1970), continues to offer insight about the forces unleashed during the initial period of modern industrial-era urbanization. Those issues still require our attention: protecting natural resources; minimizing pollution; stemming sprawl in some contexts and reducing egregious density in others; and striving to reduce economic inequalities. Inculcating such values in decades of students was just one of Professor Vigier’s indispensable contributions.

Remembering Henry N. Cobb (1926–2020): A Letter from Dean Sarah M. Whiting

Dear GSD community: I write to share the sad news that we have lost Harry Cobb (Henry N. Cobb), who passed away Monday, just a month shy of his 94th birthday. Harry’s long relation to the GSD extends back to 1947, when he began his MArch studies here. His greatest impact on the school was undoubtedly his tenure as chair of the Department of Architecture from 1980 to 1985. In his inaugural lecture as chair, he noted that he brought “to the school a mind burdened with a few biases and a great many questions, but no preconceived answers.” That quote captures him perfectly: actively engaged until his last days, Harry always had opinions, but his insatiable curiosity about architecture, pedagogy, the city, and design more broadly, was never curtailed by preconceptions. A great tribute to Harry would be for all of us to carry this attitude forward. The last surviving namesake partner at Pei, Cobb, Freed & Partners, Harry’s designs were sharp, his output was towering—quite literally—and, above all, his soul was generous. His buildings punctuate cityscapes and our shared canon alike, offering us the enduring legacies of Montreal’s Place Ville Marie (1962), Portland’s Museum of Art (1983), and of course the John Hancock Tower (1971) here in his birthplace of Boston. Harry would go on to contribute other remarkable projects to his hometown, among them the John Joseph Moakley Courthouse & Harborpark (1998) and Harvard’s own Center for Government and International Studies (2005), which many of you can likely see by looking out from the trays. As steadfast as ever, Harry remained active to the end, with recent works like Boston’s commanding One Dalton (2019) and 30 Dalton (2016), New York’s 7 Bryant Park (2019), and Charleston’s International African American Museum (in progress). In 2017, he received the Harvard Medal, the highest honor presented to a member of the Harvard Community and recognition of Harry’s commitment to the university–as an alumnus, teacher, administrator, and architect–over five decades. As the Architect’s Newspaper put it, Harry “seemed to have never considered retirement as an option.” Among other characteristics, what sets Harry apart from other legends of architecture is his commitment to the discipline as a holistic art. In 2018, Harry joined Peter Eisenman and Rafael Moneo in Piper for an event entitled “How Will Architecture be Conceived?” In his remarks, Harry delicately unpacked each word of that proposition—does “architecture” mean discipline? practice? built form? Does “conceived” imply imagined? or directed? or brought into being? As Harry thoroughly dissected the question, he demonstrated his belief that, in his words, “the discipline and practice of architecture are inseparably comingled.” His dedication to a synthesis of pedagogy and practice was at the heart of his GSD teaching and leadership. We are all so very lucky that only a couple of years ago, at the age of 91, Harry published Henry N. Cobb: Words & Works 1948-2018, a 548-page tour de force capturing the multifarious manifestations of his extraordinary career—architectural, pedagogical, critical, and otherwise. This thick but small tome has been at the top of my list of recommendations since it first came out. Every GSD student should read it. It captures his talent, his intelligence, and his curiosity, but above all, it gives some suggestion of the deep and generous humanity that so marked Harry Cobb. Many of the tributes that have poured in over the past day have noted Harry’s dedication to teaching, to supporting a new generation of designers. Those of us who had the luck to know him over these many years he had with the GSD can hear the methodical but precise way that he articulated his always relevant observations, occasionally punctuating them with a little chuckle, revealing his delight at talking about architecture, at learning from all of us, particularly the students. As a community, the GSD stands in admiration of and gratitude for Harry’s manifold contributions and inspirations, and for his thoughtful, generous humanity. He is greatly missed. Sadly, Sarah

Exhibition Preview: First the Forests on view through March 15 in the Druker Design Gallery

Listen to Günther Vogt describing three of the six projects featured in the exhibition First the Forests.

Architecture has always played an important role as a mediator between humans and the environment. This separation, achieved through the basis of architectural form–walls, doors, roofs and windows–enabled humans to contemplate the outside from the comforts of architectural space. This relationship has marked the way in which we view and experience nature. Perception became mediated through architecture as doors and windows turned into pin-hole devices through which we could project ideas of nature. The exhibition explores the plant imaginary by bringing landscape into the confines of the architectonic space, turning inside-out the landscape-architecture relation. The cabin in the woods–a reference to Thoreau’s temporary home in the adjacent woods and what many consider to be the birthplace of the environmental movement – becomes a surrogate architecture through which the relationship between humans and their environment is explored.  The result is a series of experiments in observation and analysis that create a wide variety of environmental experiences. What we see on the walls of the exhibition space are windows into the workings of VOGT Landscape Architects, vignettes into the methodologies, exercises, and projects through which we explore and analyze vegetation as a central element of our practice.  The gallery becomes a shelter for the landscape that we seek to understand – a space to explore the relationship between humans and nature through experiment and experience.

Learn more about Günther Vogt’s project Traveling Landscapes in the Zürich Zoo:

Learn more about Günther Vogt’s project Collective Memory in Hamburg, Germany:

Learn more about Günther Vogt’s project Drifting Giants for Drägerwerk in Lübeck, Germany:

Behind the Scenes at the GSD: Maricris Herrera on designing the public programs poster

Commissioned annually or seasonally, the Harvard Graduate School of Design Public Programs poster is an opportunity for an illustrious designer to bring a unique vision to the project of featuring and promoting a series of public talks, while also representing the ethos of the GSD community. One poster publicizes the full series, and additional posters give details on specific speakers and events, together using visual language to emphasize a cohesive series, and expressing the artist’s perspective on the entire program. While the designs have all served to present the program’s calendar, they have offered highly distinct perspectives. Often inspired by the themes and content of the featured talks, the concepts behind each poster are shaped by the vision and particular approach of each artist. But they all share a commitment to the power of paper. While digital ads and e-mail promotions inundate us every day, the paper poster brings us back to the material world. It takes into consideration time and space as physical fabric, and provides a break from the abstract glow of our screens. In turn, the community is encouraged to join in on the public events, interacting face-to-face with designers. This spring, the program is promoted through a design that offers minimalism with a wink. While clearly communicating key information about the series, the posters also offer layers, friendliness, and space for reflection. They are intended to preserve a “human moment,” says Maricris Herrera, founder and creative director of Estudio Herrera in Mexico City. We’ve invited Herrera to discuss her pieces and explain how they came to be. She tells us about how her background in architecture informs her graphic design, explains why she sees content as the driving force behind design, and defines the relationship between substance and form. How would you describe your vision for the poster designs? The first thing we did was to take a step back from the traditional idea of a poster saturated with images and information. Our initial question was: how can our posters draw the attention of the person standing before them? We decided that our starting point would be to focus on production and printing techniques, putting aside formal and aesthetic decisions until later. Our goal was to generate visually attractive solutions from a technical point of view. How did your varied background in design (architecture, books, fashion, and more) inspire or inform the posters? What kinds of tools do you use to experiment with your ideas and express them? I approach any concept through architecture. I was trained as an architect, so I never overlook conceptualizing under the three-dimensional premise. Regardless of the fact that graphic design is considered a single plane practice, any project takes up time—and time happens in space as a fourth dimension (x, y, z + time). My sources of inspiration are the contents themselves. That is why my work’s starting point is always classification, and takes on construction later. Positioning and understanding the contents as an essential part of an invisible framework supports a visual narrative. GSD commissioned a project for a time-based document—it needs to communicate a series of events that will happen over a determined period of time. Ultimately, it will also serve as the documentation and archive of something that happened, like a diary. To think of becoming a part of history is one more concept that I could add to the “background” of my graphic design practice. What role does erasure play in the design? I always mention the deliberate “lack of design” in my work; that phrase is my lifesaver when I have to explain myself. And I’m only now realizing—as I read your question again—that it is indeed a deliberate explanation. That “lack of design” means that the contents are of utmost importance to me. I take them into consideration before even considering showing my own work. My focus is on depicting them as clearly and in the most reader-friendly way possible. The information leads to the design and not the other way around. Once again architecture finds its way—it’s substance versus form. Here’s how I see the relationship between the two: substance is what we say, and form is how we say it. Form is a cover letter, a first impression of undeniable importance. The role of the design—the form—is subjective, and therefore risky. I once read something along the lines of, “If you don’t have anything to say, don’t say it at all, because no matter how witty you are, or how dark your metaphors can be, the reader will eventually close your book.” I’ve taken that advice to heart because the same thing happens with graphic design. The advice translates to: don’t design what doesn’t need to be designed. In my case this applies to information; my role as a graphic designer is simply to understand the information and know how to contain or display it. What does negative space reveal? In graphic design, negative space is present, meaning that the time when nothing occurs is just as important as when things actually happen. So, the “dead times” become spaces for reflection that allow us to process the information. That is why I found it so important to depict an actual timeline that is impossible to break, whether something happens or not. Why did you use transparent cellulose paper for the poster?  It allowed us to work in layers and to structure the contents according to their unmovable position in time. In this case, there is a grid that indicates what exists and cannot be modified: it shows time—in months, days, and hours. This will remain in its corresponding position in all the applications, and is printed in reverse on the back side of the paper. This first “layer” appears in orange on the program as well as on the individual events. In the front, as the other layer of time, the GSD seasonal program is printed according to—and overlapping—the fixed months, days, and hours. By taking advantage of all the spaces available on the paper (front and back), and thanks to the see-through option that we selected, we had the opportunity to create a visual effect on several dimensions. It’s hard to believe that the simple printing of a paper can have that effect . . . but it’s quite true. We also printed a bunch of tests, which allowed us to confirm that our original idea could actually be translated from the digital window to reality and become a space itself. Your style could be described as minimal and tidy but also playful. There is always some kind of a surprise. For example, the design has a sort of hidden grid, but it gets interrupted by a little hand-drawn clock at one point. You seem to like adding elements that are lighthearted and friendly. Why is that important to you? In this case, my response is actually implicit in your question. It’s more than just playful moments in our design . . . something that is always present at Estudio Herrera is a good mood and a good sense of humor (at least I like to think so). In a way, it’s a matter of personality and compatibility among team members. We are minimalists—orderly, friendly, and with a twist of fun—that’s how we dress and that’s how we behave. Whether we manage to reflect that in our work or not, it is not something we do consciously, it’s just the way we are. We like to call it el guiño de remate (the top-it-off-wink). It’s about seeking and maintaining the “human moment,” so that we can understand and flow—not only as a team, but as human beings. It gives us a certain freedom. When designing the poster, did you think about how to make it stand out against a sea of other posters, or in a visually cluttered space? What were some other challenges of designing this particular piece? Rather than trying to stand out, it became clear that the value of our proposal lay in the fact that it was respectful toward other posters and their information. The transparency allowed for whatever was underneath it to remain in sight, instead of obscuring it altogether. The underlying sign would probably be of a recent event or an upcoming one, so the fact that it is still visible means it’s still valid. The challenge was to design something without a preconceived concept. As my practice is focused on art and culture, I generally receive content loaded with concepts, and that is why I always insist at the studio that our goal is “only” to create structures that contain, support, and justify what comes next: design. We fret about content. We see our role not only as designers, but as art directors as well. To me, this project was more of a collaboration than a commission. It’s not about communicating the design, it’s about communicating a prestigious program with an objective—and graphic design is only a tool to achieve this. The full public program can be viewed on Harvard GSD’s events calendar. Please visit Harvard GSD’s home page to sign up to receive periodic emails about the School’s public programs, exhibitions, and other news.

ReDesign Miami: In a city defined by water, how does design turn threat into opportunity?

Each December, the art world descends on Miami Beach for Art Basel’s American installment, Design Miami. In late 2018, Cuban-American artist Xavier Cortada wanted to loop a social statement into the cresting euphoria. Cortada created blue and green yard signs; each listed a number, designating how many feet of sea level rise would submerge a given property in his Pinecrest Gardens neighborhood. He incorporated designs from “Ice Paintings,” an artwork he had completed in Antarctica that was composed of sediment from melting glaciers. Cortada and his neighbors staked these signs in their front yards, and with that, his Underwater HOA project punctuated Design Miami with a reminder of looming danger. “By mapping the crisis to come, I make the invisible visible,” Cortada says. “Block by block, house by house, neighbor by neighbor, I want to make the future impact of sea level rise something no longer possible to ignore.” Among American cities, Miami emerges as a particular case study in how and where we will house people as climate pressures mount. Its famous beaches and waterfront condominiums will struggle with sea level rise in the next 50 years—and inland regions will feel pressure, too, as coastal residents search for dry ground. Already, salt water routinely floods Miami’s streets and bubbles up in family yards, permeating the porous limestone bedrock deep underground. While basements and garages flood, developers proceed headfirst into seaside condo projects. As temperatures, oceans, and anxieties rise, might designers help anticipate—and adapt to—what is now considered the inevitable? In Miami and Miami Beach, what will happen to neighborhoods, like Cortada’s, expected to be underwater within their residents’ lifetimes? Can new buildings, and new strategies, emerge from competing dialogues? Stoked by this dilemma, Harvard Graduate School of Design professors Eric Höweler, an architect, and Corey Zehngebot, an urban designer and architect, organized a GSD investigation into issues of housing, resilience, and adaptability, using Miami as an urban laboratory. Their investigation, the Fall 2019 option studio “Adapting Miami: Housing on the Transect,” engaged a cohort of 12 GSD students in months of research, site visits, and critical review. Students generated housing-focused proposals that offer a portrait of Miami’s risks and opportunities. They collaborated with and drew research insights from a concurrent seminar led by Jesse M. Keenan, recognized as a leading researcher on questions of climate and real estate; he has worked to shape a global discourse on the relationship between climate change, social equity, and applied economics. The geographical and conceptual heart of their study is a periscopic transect of the city created by two of Miami’s most iconic streets—Flagler Street to the north, and 8th Street, also known as Calle Ocho and the Tamiami Trail, to the south—which bracket a swath of Miami’s fabric, cutting westward from the City of Miami’s high-density eastern coastline, through Little Havana, West Miami, and Tamiami, and into the Florida Everglades. This transect captures a range of natural ecosystems and urban conditions while representing the constraints of Miami’s built and natural environments: hard boundaries of high-density urban development at some edges (east, north, and south) and water everywhere else—the Everglades to the west, the Atlantic to the east. It is along and between these corridors where interesting opportunities for different housing typologies emerge, opportunities that are intertwined with mobility, streetscape design, density, infrastructure, ecology, resiliency, and adaptation, Zehngebot observes. “We are invoking the transect in order to provoke a concept rooted in the New Urbanist ideology of Andreas Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zybek, whose firm is appropriately based in Miami,” Zehngebot says. “We are appropriating the transect from the New Urbanists just as they appropriated it from ecology and environmental planning because it is a useful framework for understanding the transition from urban to rural and how might housing typologies manifest themselves at different moments or zones along a streetscape continuum. This is further complicated in Miami, a city that feels the effects of water from all sides, and whose areas further from the coast are counterintuitively more vulnerable where the water is coming not from the sea, but from the ground.” With the constraints of space and time, and the limits of human and financial resources, where might there be opportunities to rethink how we plan the buildings, cities, and regions of the future? An American City’s Formative Years: The Legacy of the Automobile As American cities go, Miami is young. The City of Miami was officially incorporated in 1896 and named for the Miami River—derived, in turn, from Mayaimi, the historic name of Lake Okeechobee and the Native Americans who had lived in the region for centuries. So-called lot-and-block development took hold of the city’s early planning, with civic infrastructure like transit and public space an afterthought. Despite its youth, Miami is a city with an organic relationship to change—natural, political, and otherwise. The city’s tradition is to live on or with water, and with nature. As the seas ebb and flow, so does Miami’s urban rhythm. But today, Miami’s freedom to change is increasingly constrained. It is arguably one of the few cities in the United States with a truly limited supply of land. Its 1920s-era “garden cities,” like Coral Gables, began percolating along the eastern shore and spread westward, growing more densely packed as they approached the Everglades. Now, out of necessity, the city is looking to move eastward back toward the sea, infilling its limited land with higher-density housing. With a renewed interest in fitting as many people as possible on limited land, many Miamians are realizing that the city’s traditional housing forms may no longer be sufficient. The single-family, low-rise house that dominates Miami’s urban fabric—a herald of the “American Dream”—may fail to sustain successive waves of younger, more transient citizens and new, expanded forms of family. Meanwhile, the high-rise towers that stand along the shoreline will be exposed to rising seas and stronger, more frequent storms. The modernist, Art Deco styles that flavor the city with clean, simple geometries don’t lend themselves to climate-resilient architecture, either. Compounding these pressures is the city’s lack of cohesive, holistic city planning. Miami offers a mix of vibrant, diverse communities, but they have competing municipal priorities and policies. Then there’s the legacy of the car. As Miami matured into the 1900s and the so-called era of the automobile, the car shaped the city’s spatial dimensions: long, straight avenues and single-family houses with driveways. One result is that rather than an urban center with spokes and connective tissues, Miami’s urban design resembles a large city composed of multiple, smaller cities—a sort of architectural accident. “Miami didn’t have the chance to develop without the impact of the automobile,” says Juan Mullerat, founder and director of urban design firm PlusUrbia. Among the projects that Mullerat and PlusUrbia have developed are Miami’s Little Havana Revitalization Master Plan and Transit Oriented Development (TOD) Guidelines for the City of Miami. The firm’s work on Miami’s Wynwood Neighborhood Revitalization District earned the American Planning Association’s 2015 America’s Great Places Award. Overlooking a lush Little Havana tree canopy from PlusUrbia’s offices, Mullerat explains to the GSD studio that, in his native Spain and throughout Europe, cars and parking are considered amenities, like a swimming pool, rather than standard elements. When you allot less space for cars, he continues, you get more space for people. “The neighborhood itself becomes the amenity,” he says. As Mullerat guides the studio through neighboring Little Havana, MArch candidate Aria Griffin pays attention to a series of hulking parking garages, standing like monuments to a car-centric history—unavoidable, but also largely unused. She’s wondering if residents might benefit from something other than parking. Griffin’s concurrent research on medical care had led her to the conclusion that, in essence, hospitals are the most expensive form of housing in the nation. She turned this equation into opportunity by proposing a mid-rise tower, containing both housing and a hospital, at the corner of 12th Avenue and Flagler Street in East Little Havana. Griffin proposes replacing the currently existing Walgreens with the tower, also modifying the current on-grade, covered parking lot surrounding the store in order to generate a friendlier streetscape. Griffin’s project would work to combat issues of loneliness and disenfranchisement in addition to promoting healthier living for those most at-risk ahead of the climate disasters expected to loom in Miami’s future: the elderly, the disabled, and the homeless. “I knew I wanted to propose a project that would provide housing, integrated health services, as well as public space to East Little Havana,” Griffin says. “I believe that such institutions must be integrated in the city’s fabric to better serve its communities.” Griffin observed other considerations at play. Building inland helps defray flood risk—a theme observed throughout the studio’s investigation—while the character of East Little Havana, marked by a lively streetscape and vibrant community life, makes it appealing for residents. She also addressed questions of mobility and accessibility issues. Rather than densifying the entire Calle Ocho corridor with a transit line, she instead prioritized nodal transit connections that would improve circulation. Westward down the transect, MArch candidate Don O’Keefe saw a similar opportunity locked within the Florida International University (FIU) campus. Three large parking decks greet visitors at FIU’s main entrance. By replacing these with low-rise but high-density housing, O’Keefe aims to transform FIU into a transit- and pedestrian-oriented community in which student housing, classrooms, and public space is intermingled. As Griffin seeks to integrate medical infrastructure with housing—literally and conceptually—O’Keefe sees a parallel opportunity with higher education, a staple of Miami’s economy. O’Keefe’s project also anticipates coming storms, with housing designed to be adaptable: classroom and public spaces allow for the expansion of FIU’s existing so-called “Living Learning Community” scheme. Meanwhile, common areas within the dorms could be flexibly rearranged and partitioned for use as overflow housing for nearby residents in the case of disaster, expanding FIU’s existing policy on neighborhood assistance during major storms. O’Keefe’s proposal also responds to two nearby transit stations proposed by the City of Miami. These will serve as “the new front door to FIU, with housing and mixed academic programs eventually replacing the massive parking structures at the north end of the campus,” O’Keefe says. “The plan reenvisions FIU in the post-automobile era.” Removing parking, though, reignites long-standing questions over mobility and accessibility, especially for aging populations. The East Little Havana intersection of Calle Ocho and Flagler Street offers a snapshot: it throbs with commercial activity, but to get there, pedestrians need to cross the wide, constantly trafficked Seventh Avenue, a vestige of Miami’s car-centric urban design. Instead, Höweler asks the studio, could Flagler emerge as a transit corridor, facilitating urban nodal connections and opening Little Havana to greater mobility and connectivity? This question speaks to how space and typology interact: why start at the scale of the house and scale upward from there instead of planning larger, more connective institutions or infrastructures first and embedding housing within? How does the urban fabric respond when cities and regions invert the scale at which they design? In Miami, questions like these intersect where so much of the city finds inspiration: at the water. Living with, and on, Water Miami’s tropical climate invites comparison to cities like Bangkok and Singapore, where high-density buildings sit beside broad, rainforest-like public spaces. Accordingly, throughout Miami’s urban growth, buildings have been spaced far enough apart to enable air circulation between plots. Extra space around buildings, though, means less collective space for public commons—and today Miami, like many American cities, is renewing its interest in public space. A trio of GSD students saw Miami’s city waterfront, where the Miami River meets Biscayne Bay, as an opportunity to add public space at the water. With their proposal, “Loop Within,” Adam Jichao Sun, Pengcheng Sun, and Shunfan Zheng pursued the chance to connect Miami more with nature, and to symbolically and literally unify water with people. They also wanted to experiment with the concept of a “vertical city,” extending the concept of high-rise towers into a more urbane and public, rather than cloistered, experience. “Loop Within” presents three high-rise towers on top of an undulating podium, with a single, publicly accessible walkway connecting the towers at varying heights, forming a continuous physical loop within the building. The walkway would be accessed by an oblique elevator facing the Miami River waterfront, as well as an elevated railway station at the project’s podium platform. The platform itself, with its physical ebbs and flows, navigates people from the river walk upward toward cultural and other public programming within the towers. The proposal’s connectivity works at the master-plan scale as well. Rather than an enclave-type development, “Loop Within” bridges what are currently segmented city blocks to generate a connected river-walk experience. Cultural programming is distributed at nodes along the waterfront in the interest of creating a destination out of the waterfront. “Articulated as a cultural loop, our proposal emphasizes physical accessibility and visual attraction to the urban context,” the team writes. “The juxtaposition of public and private development, as well as a broad spectrum of dwelling units, renders the super-block into a ‘city within one building’ concept.” The team also sensed the needs that building projects in Miami must resolve—namely, limited housing and rising seas. “Loop Within” fills the bulk of its towers’ interiors with housing, while the walkway’s physical infrastructure includes a seawall to mitigate flood risk. “Loop Within” stands as a bit of a metaphor for Miami today: incorporating both people and water, it synthesizes questions of economics, culture, and the risks of the future, pulling them together in new ways to make or suggest new forms of city-making. With a sense of temporality and adaptability baked into the design, the project both represents and responds to the city’s relationship with change. It also pivots away from the possessive, land-centric model of previous real estate development. “The project’s dynamic relationship with water is largely achieved by articulating its podium as one undulating typography with programmatic flexibility under different water height conditions,” the team observes. “The undulating surface presents a welcome gesture to the potential sea-level rise and unveils different modes of flow: flow of water, and flow of people. Both the existing multi-ground-level condition and the potential sea-level rise spontaneously render the feasibility of a ‘vertical city’ that dynamically interacts with the water.” Colleague Yuebin Dong, an MAUD candidate, offered a complementary project that would extend this symbolism further: a school on the water. Currently existing KLA Kindergarten and Elementary School, near Brickell City Center, has been threatened with demolition; in maintaining its physical presence, Dong advocated for civic democracy, prioritizing education among the various features of Miami’s iconic waterfront while also building in spaces that could double as public amenities, like a library or a gymnasium. Water presents opportunity in Miami, but also threat—and inland regions will feel the pressure, too. MArch candidate Grace Chee followed the transect to its Everglades terminus, arguing that development into the Everglades is inevitable in the near future, as suggested by the proposed expansion of the Urban Development Boundary in Miami-Dade’s 2020/30 Land Use Plan. Her proposal, “Sub-Urbia,” proposes an environmentally responsible model of housing development that minimizes disruption to the natural ecology and explores the implications of living in a state of both suspension and floatation. She drew design inspiration from traditional housing in the Mekong floating villages of Vietnam, seeking to replicate the complex and ephemeral relationships between different housing types within the village, with varying degrees of permanence and attachment to land. “With its daily and seasonal tidal fluctuations, the marshland provides an opportunity to create a prototype for amphibious living in Miami in response to rising sea levels, one that also offers an alternative suburbia to that which lies on the other side of the UBD,” Chee writes. Fellow MArch candidate Kofi Akakpo brought a similarly critical eye to the relatively inefficient land usage of cemeteries, especially those located in urban cores where land is at an increasingly high premium. Thus, Akakpo’s studio proposal, “Can the Living Live with the Dead?,” reinvents the horizontal cemetery as vertical, a phenomenon already happening in countries like Brazil and India. With this reinvention, Akakpo asks another vital, if macabre, question: with cemeteries and other burial grounds, what happens to all of those bodies as water creeps inland? “Aside from the inefficient use of land that is ground burial in traditional cemeteries, as flood waters come and ground waters rise with the sea-level, we run the risk of a lot dead bodies, particularly from old caskets, siting within the water table, contaminating ground water sources,” Akakpo writes. “A lot of these bodies will have to be moved to protect our fresh water sources.” It’s an observation that gets at some of the less-obvious but unquestionably threatening impacts of rising waters. Akakpo’s project would deliver a ring of housing, centered by publicly accessible green space and adjacent to a grid of vertical ossuaries into which bodies would be relocated from underground burial plots. A retaining pond at the middle of the ossuaries would provide both a slice of visual beauty, as well as a floodwater safety valve. Akakpo’s proposal highlights the reality that water may prove unstoppable, its march inland carries various layers of risk, and our waterfronts are hardly the only consideration at stake. Art as Instigator If Miami is shaped by water, it is fueled by art. Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood looks a lot more colorful, and welcomes many more visitors, than it did a decade ago. Abandoned lots and buildings have been transformed into a sort of ever-evolving outdoor museum, with masterfully designed graffiti art covering almost every available surface. Funky dining spots and retail shops have sprung up. Some would say Wynwood actually feels like a neighborhood. Its transformation started with little more than creativity and paint. “Art is energizing, it creates a sense of place, and it brings people together,” says Jessica Goldman Srebnick as she guides the GSD studio through Wynwood Walls. Srebnick is founder and CEO of Goldman Global Arts, which operates Wynwood Walls; her father, Tony Goldman, collaborated with art curator Jeffrey Deitch to spark Wynwood Walls in 2009. In recent years, Srebnick started inviting graffiti artists from around the world—many of them never before exhibited—to color Wynwood, literally and otherwise. As Srebnick worked to make Wynwood a new Miami destination, businesses started paying attention. She turned down Starbucks and 7-Eleven and, instead, kept looking for talent from around the world who might want to bring their slice of creativity to Miami. Today, Srebnick and Goldman Global Arts welcome millions of visitors to Wynwood Walls each year, free of charge. The result is a neighborhood where, Srebnick says, you can feel a sense of place, not unlike New York’s SoHo or Los Angeles’s Arts District. “You see a lot of people wandering around Wynwood now,” Srebnick observes. “Art has made the neighborhood itself an amenity.” She adds that not a single Miami resident has been displaced in the process. Historically, Miami has lacked a single, unified cultural district, though the city’s cultural and artistic production is globally renowned. Streams of intense creative production and spirit thread through the city, and individuals like Srebnick have established their own sorts of pocket districts, which in turn attract business and cultural attention. It’s a pattern that jibes with the city’s generally laissez-faire, homegrown attitude toward city development. A few blocks north of Wynwood Walls, the Bakehouse Art Complex hums with a quiet focus. Bakehouse was founded by and for artists in 1986 and, with support from the City of Miami and Miami Dade County, transformed an industrial, Art Deco–era bakery in a then-blighted neighborhood into a home for talented artists, helping address the difficulty of finding space for creating and developing a practice. Now, more than 30 years later, Bakehouse is trying to maximize use of its 2.3-acre campus in the heart of Miami’s urban core to address the city’s affordability crisis, says acting director Cathy Leff. As a result of the organization’s access to and engagement with its community of artists, city officials, and surrounding neighborhood—as well as with Harvard GSD’s ongoing “Future of the American City” initiative—the organization is on a path to rezone its site to be able to add residential uses, specifically affordable housing for artists, Leff says. “If successful, Bakehouse can become a true cultural anchor in a multigenerational and multicultural community, embedded in and embraced by the community to become a more robust and public commons for critical discourse, community dialogue, and exchange,” Leff observes. MArch candidate Brian Lee saw such opportunity with the famed Miami–Dade County Auditorium, at the corner of West Flagler Street and 27th Avenue. Opened in 1951, the auditorium’s architecture shouts Art Deco revival, while the surrounding neighborhood bears vestiges of an automobile era: a relentlessly square grid that serves cars but complicates connectivity among the area’s art and cultural destinations and transit options. Lee saw an opportunity for greater neighborhood connectivity as well as higher-density housing. Lee proposed a new theater to replace the auditorium after its lifespan, with a cap on parking spaces and a diagonal-cutting route that connects much of the area’s neighborhood development with local rapid-transit nodes. Housing would be integrated with Lee’s new auditorium, creating a courtyard that would double as an outdoor lobby. “More often than not, such multi-use developments are broken into their component parts, each of which is stacked or separated into large podium-tower configurations or segregated buildings,” Lee observes. “My project tries to challenge these types, by attempting to integrate the programs more closely so that residents can participate in this larger performance.” In today’s Miami, art can offer a foundation, a catalyst, and a sustaining force for housing and sense of place. But art has also played the role of activist: the Bakehouse rose from the need to offer sustainable living for artists and their practices, while cultural institutions like Miami’s Knight Foundation have worked for decades to convene dialogue and programming that stirs debate and tackles urgent social and political issues. (Knight was founded by newspapermen seeking new ways to communicate and thus to stoke public awareness; as Knight’s Victoria Rogers observed during a panel discussion at Bakehouse, “engaged communities have always been critical to democracy.”) In parallel, themes of climate change and rising seas have permeated the Miami art world—as the activism of Cortada’s Underwater HOA exemplifies. Artists and designers like Cortada have emerged as powerful communicators to herald the urgency and possible solutions around Miami’s issues. With so many of the city’s famed institutions perched on the water, art, climate, and dialogue work together in a circular feedback loop, each informing and driving the others. The Immigrant Experience and the “New American Dream” In considering Miami’s waterfront as a democratic space, studio members emphasized a stitching together of segmented blocks. Indeed, throughout much of Miami’s urban fabric, segmentation and separation appear as rules—perhaps another vestige of the tropical-climate planning that favored spacing and subsequent air circulation, or more broadly of the city’s lack of holistic urban planning. Regardless of cause, one effect of physical segmentation is social and community isolation. Single-family homes and high-rise towers alike are generally private experiences with private or individual entrances, and lack of public spaces compounds this effect. For waves of immigrants and other newcomers, this urban fabric is hardly welcoming. Hua Tian and Jungeun Goo, both candidates for the MArch in Urban Design, and Haey Ma, an MLA candidate, saw this as a stimulus for a typology refresh. Tian’s “A Piece of Life: Collective Housing for New Immigrants” takes up the intersection of 8th Street and 12th Avenue. Marked by lively street life, authentic human interaction, and nearby public transit, it is also comprised of segmented, incoherent housing. She took inspiration from the architectural language of Havana, Cuba, to design a housing project incorporating repeated, arched facades and centered around a communal courtyard. Not unlike the “Loop Within” waterfront project, Tian’s creates a sort of micro-city of a housing complex. In addition to a library and community center, she designed the project’s courtyard to provide a miniaturized street life within the housing complex, opening up the possibility for more human interaction. Westward down the 8th Street transect, Goo proposed “The New American Dream,” eyeing a low-density, suburban neighborhood near FIU for its opportunities. It’s close to Miami’s airport as well as planned transit, and is at a lower flood risk than much of the rest of the city. She considered it an appropriate spot to densify. Goo proposed making better use of front-yard and side-street space, using the former to accommodate more housing and the latter to create connectivity between main thoroughfares. She offered a housing solution that presents a more communal vision, and one that is better integrated into the neighborhood and city’s urban fabric than the set of single-family homes that currently sprawl. Goo also gestured toward solutions and typologies that could be repeated in other cities and regions. In reconfiguring typical housing-block elements—front and back yards, parking spaces, alleyways—Goo aims to suggest a new urban fabric, one that “gives livable neighborhood amenities, like walkable streets and urban-scale amenities, inside the residential block. “This project can be adapted to other suburban areas in Miami and become a ‘new American dream,’” she says. Now or Never? In 2008, the City of Miami approved Miami 21, a form-based zoning code that reacted to the city’s suddenly accelerating urbanization and ever-decreasing amount of available land. Following the implementation of Miami 21, developers and community groups alike created overlay plans, such the Wynwood Neighborhood Revitalization District and Special Area Plan and Mullerat’s Little Havana Revitalization Master Plan, to help facilitate neighborhood-appropriate zoning. “Miami 21’s revisions at the neighborhood scale demonstrate both its flexibility and imperfections,” wrote The Architect’s Newspaper in October 2016, “but it clearly creates a nuanced framework for the city that’s simultaneously logical citywide and hyperlocal to the human scale.” Today, though, as Miami 21 turns 10 years old, questions linger: Do we update Miami 21? Start over? While the plan addresses the impact of the private automobile, among other vestiges of the past, what about the question of how to design for the future—specifically, for rising seas? In responding to, if not resolving, pressing demands and limitations facing nearly every global city—a growing, changing population; limited land and other essential resources; rising climate-related threats—Miami will offer guidelines and insights that could become integral to urban planning, landscape architecture, and architecture well into the future. Communicating these ideas and policies—and these opportunities and threats—to the public will remain critical in stoking the dialogue and securing the political and financial support needed to actually enact change. Similarly, demonstrating the sorts of new typologies or formats that housing and homes might assume is the designer’s key to bringing opportunities and solutions forward. As Cortada accomplished in 2018, illustrating what a sea rise of two feet—or of 22 feet—would do to actual homes, actual neighborhoods, and actual people may prove the most potent contribution that designers can offer today. ## “Adapting Miami: Housing on the Transect” and its concurrent advanced research seminar form Part Two of a three-part investigation series, “Future of the American City: Miami,” generously supported by Miami’s John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

A Moveable Feast: Milliøns designs a living archive of modern ceramics for the Everson Museum

Collector Louise Rosenfield had a bold dream for her vast assemblage of modern ceramics. Two years ago, she envisioned almost all of it going “to a restaurant and that it would be used until it’s all broken, except for the last piece,” which, she imagined, “could go to some archive or some historical place with the story of the Rosenfield collection.” When Rosenfield donated more than 3,000 pieces to the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse this past year, that vision took one crucial step toward reality. Her one stipulation: The pieces must be used. This audacious gift coincided with an architectural competition to design a new café for I.M. Pei’s astounding Everson Museum building. Last month, the museum awarded the commission to Milliøns, an experimental architecture practice in Los Angeles founded by the Graduate School of Design’s John May and Zeina Koreitem. Their proposal introduces brilliant crystalline “curatorial towers” to house and display the collection in the café. So, in fractured light under Pei’s audacious concrete cantilevers, patrons will eat and drink from artworks by Mark Pharis, Molly Hatch, Betty Woodman, Sam Clarkson, or another of the more than 500 artists represented by the collection. May explains that Rosenfield’s extraordinary stipulation of use became the launching point for their design proposal. It immediately dictated an atypical understanding of art curation and display. Rosenfield has described unused ceramics as “sleeping” or “dead”; May and Koreitem’s first aim was to avoid this fate. “To place a piece of ceramics, especially a piece of functional ceramics… behind a glass wall,” May says, “is to completely dissociate that piece from everything that makes it meaningful to culture.” As they dove into research for the project, they learned that the glazes used on the vast majority of the modern pieces in the collection are stable under UV light, which means they can be safely stored, displayed, and used in the open, in daylight. The proposed café space in Pei’s remarkably sculptural 1968 museum building—“our favorite of Pei’s work,” May says—also drove their thinking. Construction photos May and Koreitem discovered early on revealed it to be a “pitch-dark” space beyond some of the building’s massive concrete piers, which are fronted by “really intense light wells.” In that strong contrast of light and dark, they saw the possibility of a powerful chiaroscuro using “some kind of glass insert that is simultaneously storage and, through prismatics, will bend the light… into the space of the café.” From this idea they developed the five curatorial towers that reach up to the sunlight between the heavy piers and cast it into the café. A similar “curatorial vestibule” will open under one of the building’s four immense cantilevers to connect the café with an exterior courtyard. These “prismatic machines” will consist primarily of open glass shelving, so that, May explains, “people will be able to reach in and touch” the works of ceramic art stored on them. Patrons of the museum will be able to hold and examine the pieces, as well as using them to drink coffee and eat pastries. As May sees it, this expands the use value of the ceramics beyond even what Rosenfield proposed. The furniture pieces Milliøns designed for the café also work to bring the ceramic pieces into the open, while becoming sculptural objects on their own. Consisting of inverted aluminum pyramids (which subtly pay respect to Pei’s indelible association with the form), they stand in balance with each other to create horizontal surfaces that May describes as “too deep.” In the space beyond arm’s reach, museum curators will place ceramic pieces on temporary display. Café patrons, meanwhile, will sit around the periphery, legs protected under the tables’ projecting angles. In addition to the powerful presentation of light and dark in the café and the bold geometries of its furniture, one particularly notable aspect of Milliøns’s competition entry for the project was a set of user scenarios. These consist of timelines paired with images of architectural dioramas that depict people using the café—a docent, the museum director, a curator, a donor, a visitor to the museum, a school group. Each scenario demonstrates an expanded definition of program in the project and depicts the fluid relationships between the ceramic pieces, the furniture, and the users who interact with them. These images boldly set Rosenfield’s dream in motion. Hopefully, once the café opens next year, that dream will move slowly, allowing a very long time before the last unbroken piece in the collection heads to the archives.

The Harvard Graduate School of Design community shares what made them fall in love with design

In honor of Valentine’s Day, we asked members of the Harvard Graduate School of Design community to share what made them fall in love with design. Here is what a few of them had to say:

Jacobé Huet (PhD Year 4) on the Unité d’Habitation, Marseille, France

“I believe I first fell in love with design in the 1990s while spending time at my uncle’s when he lived in Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. I visited this building many times as an adult, but I love to nostalgically grab on to the last bits of memories I have from experiencing it as a child—as if they were remnants of a more fundamental experience of its forms, unmediated by academic knowledge. I remember most sharply the building’s spectacular plays on scale—from the ground upward next to the front yard’s gigantic pilotis and from the rooftop looking down into the shrunken city. I also remember endless corridors drawn toward faraway vanishing points and how it would always take me so long to walk to my uncle’s unit. Le Corbusier designed the Unité d’Habitation following the Modulor, a mathematical ratio he inferred from dimensions of the human body. Seems like my tiny legs had not been part of the equation.”

Jimmy Pan (MDes RR ’20) on the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption, San Francisco, California

“I had to decide: Lombard Street or the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption? It was not an option to miss my six-hour San Joaquins Amtrak train to Irvine. My whole itinerary depended on catching that train. I stepped out of my Lyft and onto the plaza of this beautiful Nervi / Belluschi building just as a group of tourists exited it. I entered into its stillness. I was lucky to be the only visitor, catching it in an interval of heavy silence. I felt the colors of the stained glass windows casting spirit onto the cold faceted forms of concrete. As I made my way to the center of the building, the organ began to sound and surprisingly reverberated softly on the hyperbolic paraboloid surfaces above me. I placed my Nikon N2000 on the ground, set it to f11 for 3s, manually focused it to infinity, and hoped it would be centered. (Spoiler: it was not.) I took another photo with my LG Nexus 5, just in case. The weight of the space held me in a trance—a gravity that only beautiful spaces have. I spent more time than I should have there. The experience of this building reconfigured my love of design. Elegant form in emptiness still has an ambience that withdrew my curiosity from the influence of schedules. I was almost late for my train, but—hey—I was just in time.”

David Hashim (MArch ’86) on growing up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Hashim is principal at VERITAS Design Group and a member of the GSD Alumni Council

“When I was about 10 years old, we lived in a neighborhood of Kuala Lumpur with no parks but lots of new houses being built. After school, I would wait for all the workers to leave before sneaking into the empty construction sites and making them my personal playgrounds. As a child, none of this construction stuff made sense; it was just jumbled piles of space and playthings to me, without order or reason. One day, as it was getting dark, a fancy car appeared from which emerged a well-dressed person who I had never seen. He toured the site with a roll of drawings accompanied by the construction supervisor. As I hid behind half-built walls and temporary works in the dwindling light, I listened to this gentleman explaining the design of the building and issuing instructions. He referred to his drawings and made sketches while the supervisor nodded dutifully. Through his commanding and matter-of-fact explanations, I suddenly realized that this playground of mine wasn’t merely a random clutter of stuff, because someone had conceived it all and could make sense of what it was becoming. That someone was in charge of its ‘design’! It was a eureka moment for me. Later that evening at dinner, I described this experience to my mother, who explained that the person I had encountered was the architect. It was the first time that word had any meaning to me. And it was at that moment that my destiny was clear.”

Wilfred Guerron (MDes HPDM ’20) on the neighborhood gardens of Manhattan’s Lower East Side

“I am in love with the gardens in my home neighborhood of the Lower East Side of New York City. Although I do not have a background in design, I have always been drawn to my local gardens. They have served as social spaces for my community for decades, inviting people to walk around, sit, relax, and hang out with neighbors. As a child, I would always walk by La Plaza Cultural, enamored of the murals, sculptures, and various other art objects that marked the boundary of the garden. Since coming to the GSD, I have taken an interest in these gardens from a historical perspective. Outside of being pockets of green spaces in the neighborhood, the gardens serve as important monuments of grassroots activism on the Lower East Side during the late 1900s and the vibrant Puerto Rican and im/migrant communities that started and continue to maintain the gardens and the neighborhood at large. For me, the gardens of the Lower East Side represent the physical manifestation of love for one’s community and place.”

Panharith Ean (MArch ’20) on the Institute of Foreign Languages, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

“There are always students chatting and walking below the elevated walkways and buildings. The tropical breeze moves through every corner of the buildings, while the sunlight is casted away by the vertical louvers. When I was little, I would frequently visit my sister on campus, running around the ponds and dozing off in the garden. In recent years, I’ve gone back to visit friends and enjoyed the same easy breeze and dramatic shadows casted from the buildings. Now, about to finish my degree at the GSD, when I return I am reminded of why I started studying architecture in the first place. Inspired by the complex of Angkor Wat, Vann Molyvann’s design marries traditional site planning and modern sensibility. The design was part of the New Khmer Architecture movement, a modernist movement in Cambodia in the 1960s. To me, this building represents a perfect harmony between tradition and modernity, form and function.”

Eulàlia Gómez-Escoda’s “Feeding Boston” addresses the staggering rate of food waste in the US

The entrance to an urban supermarket and its adjoining parking lot wouldn’t captivate the attention of many architects. But for Eulàlia Gómez-Escoda, the design of commercial spaces in urban American centers is just the thing that gets her excited. “In American cities the supermarket and its entrance, even if it is next to a sidewalk, set the doors opening onto the parking lot”—giving preference to people with cars over pedestrians. “In Barcelona, for example, half of the population only has to walk five minutes to get to a public market that sells very fresh food. In Cambridge, many people must walk at least fifteen minutes to get to a supermarket where the food is not always fresh.” Markets and their maneuverings were just one tiny node in “Feeding Boston,” Gómez’s comprehensive course at the GSD last semester that explored urban food chains in a typical metropolitan area, using Boston as a case study. Gómez was born and bred in Barcelona and has done much of her work as an architect and urban designer there. Her work has focused on retail, commerce, and how commercial spaces—even digital ones—have the ability to shape the cities in which they are located. Food production and consumption, from an architect’s perspective, have captivated her for years. She says, “I’ve been using the term ‘food print’ to refer to all of the establishments that sell or serve food in a city because the way in which they are distributed on a map looks similar to a fingerprint. Each city is different.” “Feeding Boston” analyzed the temporal, spatial, and relational patterns of food production, transportation, storage, and sale for the greater Boston area. The course was structured with a two-tiered approach. First, there was pure learning and absorption: the students analyzed the complex web of food supply systems to understand how food gets into the city and to Bostonians. Second, each student focused on a specific area of the food system and then presented ideas on how design and architecture can shape, influence, and perhaps solve some of the intricate problems of food access and inequality. Gómez explains that the students were “retrofitting” the various neighborhoods’ relationships to food. As the students tussled with urban space by way of food exchange, the individual projects took shape. For example, Boston is known for its deep ties to fishing culture and the consumption of seafood. “But there is no fish market!” says Gómez. “All of the fish we eat in Boston comes from New England, all of the main ports are in the north or the south, and they truck into the city.” She explains, “If you want to eat a lobster in downtown Boston, you will probably be eating a lobster fished from Portsmouth [New Hampshire], which is trucked inland to Massachusetts and then driven into Boston. The sea that we see next to us is not the one that has provided us with the lobster.” This discovery prompted a student to propose plans for a new, centrally located fish market that would allow a more direct food chain from sea to plate. Other students started with the impediments created by broken links in food distribution. After learning that over 40 percent of food produced in the United States goes to waste—from farm to factory to store to home or restaurant—a student chose to focus on urban gleaning. Boston has an array of organizations dedicated to recovering food waste in the city. They accept and collect donations of unsellable but perfectly edible food from stores, supermarkets, and restaurants. “These organizations depend on volunteers working during their free time to drive around in vans and collect the donations,” says Gómez. “They desperately need a backing from public systems to help them fulfill these jobs.” So the project connected gleaning organizations with public transportation systems of the city; the student proposed that a small number of buses be dedicated to carrying donated food. “Why not use the public transportation system which involves already existing public infrastructure?” asks Gomez. Because the food print of Boston, like other American cities, is so large and complex with many moving parts, unraveling the interlocking nature of the processes, food pathways, and production lines was key for the study. Gómez prefers to start with a wide focus. She explains, “I see this as the only way to approach food in the city, to explore all avenues and problems, because we will have time to narrow it. And sometimes the obvious or maybe just really small changes or shifts in design can be really important and have a big impact.” This in-depth comprehension allowed the course to discover weak links in the supply system and then to look for innovative solutions. Gómez argues that we should reevaluate the food supply chains, designs of supermarkets and outdoor farmers markets, and shipping and train infrastructure that make food import possible, because they give new consideration to design dilemmas. She says, “When we design, urban logic shows that to plan well and to think about what the neighborhood needs is important. We must be careful with the city.” The food system, like the city itself, must respond to a dense mixture of needs and uses by overlapping communities. Global challenges such as climate change and structural socioeconomic inequality are directly related to food production—it is impossible to consider one without the other. As Gómez says, “When we look at the city using food as a lens, we discover new things.”

Land-Use Strategies for a Purple State: Studio considers ways of protecting Virginia’s Eastern Shore from devastating sea rise

A lone farmstead is perched on the edge of a creek on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Dozens of acres of cornfields unfurl behind the structure, eventually blending into a swampy marshland lined with salt hay. On first glance, the house and its manicured lawn are a postcard of idyllic coastal living. But they also inhabit a deeper role, as a barrier between the residents’ increasingly precarious livelihood and the area’s continued coastal erosion. Each year, exaggerated salinity in the soil creeps a foot further inland, threatening the survival of the Eastern Shore’s farming industries even before the land is actually claimed by the sea. In the next 40 years, two-thirds of the land mass of Saxis Island, where this farm is located, will disappear into the adjacent Chesapeake Bay. With just three to four feet of additional sea level rise, Saxis will be swallowed by water on all sides, rendering its approximately 230 inhabitants isolated and stripped of their farming resources. Yet many residents of Saxis and other high-risk towns dotted along the 70-mile peninsula refuse to budge. Is continued human settlement of a coastal area poised for such extreme and potentially devastating change truly worth fighting for? What sort of circumstances—both practical and ideological—anchor the drive to remain? And how can new land-use strategies enable the continued occupation of a region whose residents largely don’t believe in climate change? It’s a challenging, fascinating premise with no easy answer. Gary Hilderbrand, the Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, devoted his option studio last term to uncovering the stakes of these questions—for Virginia and beyond. “This was unlike any studio I’ve done in my 30 years of teaching at Harvard,” says Hilderbrand. “It was much more expansive and experimental—the students chose the sites and topics for their research, which resulted in a wide-ranging atlas of ideas.” As per usual in Hilderbrand’s studios, the dozen fourth-year students in Adrift and Indeterminate: Designing for Perpetual Migration on Virginia’s Eastern Shore hit the ground running. A four-day visit to the Eastern Shore in the third week of the semester enabled them to get close to their sources and stake out the nature of their projects. A shared camp site nurtured communal discussion, while the support of a sponsor family drew the students intimately into the lives and stories of the local farmers, fishermen, scientists, and employees of the Barrier Islands Center who call the peninsula home. An induction to proper fieldwork methodology from the GSD’s Gareth Doherty—who teaches at the intersection of landscape architecture and anthropology—helped prime students for the task at hand. Background knowledge on climate change in coastal cities, gleaned from a full year of core studios the year before, coupled with the regional expertise of local coastal geologist Chris Hine, nudged the students’ projects into a unique terrain. The students designed interventions—both specific and speculative—for sustaining human habitation of precise areas along the Eastern Shore, while also responding to the broader issue of future coastal life in the throes of climate change. “As the studio kicked off, the topic of migration was and continues to be very timely in US politics,” Hilderbrand explains. “Farmers and watermen have been migrating away from the edge of land here for generations. It also scales up and presents a picture of coastal climate change as a long-term phenomenon that has witnessed centuries of human movement.” The studio’s outcomes—both an “atlas” of investigation and a collection of design projects that look both forward and back in time to propose ideas for the future survival of the area—is a layered and dense body of work that belies the short time frame of the course. The atlas work is loosely divided into 10 categories: Settlement, Ecosystem, Atmosphere, Place, Economy, Property, Building, Sand, Protection, and Displacement. The subsequent design projects interlock through their shared ambition to unearth a dense network of political, cultural, technological, and religious histories of the area that frame the residents’ position on climate change and the future survival of the region. Beginning with the region’s self-determined infrastructures built in the 19th and 20th centuries (such as stick-built barns raised by entire communities), to the first signs of federal intervention (including light houses and post offices), and finally, to the introduction of transportation infrastructure (including the railroad in the 1880s and later, highways), we witness a land of self-selected and resourceful residents who have carved out a life in a region many of us would write off as remote and inhospitable. Tracing the cultural influence of American Methodism (which was founded here) and contemporary conservative politics (more than 50 percent of voters in the region supported Trump in the 2016 presidential election, with some local districts reporting far higher), the atlas gracefully traverses the social conditions underlying the area’s general resistance to notions of climate change. But it burrows deeper than party lines, examining the narrative of constant displacement that has framed life here on the Eastern Shore for as long as anybody can remember. From erecting 12-foot-high platforms to elevate their homes, to annual “sand nourishment” initiatives aimed at stabilizing the coastline, residents undertake elaborate measures to sustain life in a place that, on an almost daily basis, recasts its boundaries between wet and dry. The economy section of the atlas examines the transition of a place that was once considered a breadbasket of America into an area that now mostly produces poultry and soy products in addition to the ubiquitous blue crab. Those industries persist despite the fast erosion of the shoreline, the breaking apart of the 23 barrier islands strung across the peninsula’s east coast, and the unstoppable salination of what’s left of farmable land. The atlas also investigates the complex understanding of the landscape among residents. People have been moving upward and away from the barrier islands for the last 200 years; climate change has always been happening here, albeit a lot more slowly than it is now. For these locals, the perpetual shape-shifting of the landscape has been a part of life; as such, they are hesitant to view the increased severity of change in recent years as anything out of the ordinary. With this context in mind, the studio worked to design possible means of managing the impact of climate change that are, in Hilderbrand’s words, both real and speculative. “There are essentially two stances on sea level rise right now,” explains Hilderbrand. “One says that resiliency is not an option and that we have to retreat, while the other suggests that there are reasonable ways of protecting these assets—indeed, peoples’ lives and livelihoods—for some admittedly questionable period of time.” Hilderbrand’s studio wanted to posit a third way by seeing those beliefs as two end poles of a spectrum. How might fresh land-use strategies mitigate the impact of climate change on the coast by encouraging alternative ways of inhabiting it? Is it possible to carve out a new understanding of the intensifying forces of erosion and salination that does not inherently clash with the residents’ perception of these processes? The students offer up a variety of innovative ideas, some of which read as clear architectural interventions while others are more ideologically oriented and suggest revamped notions of civic space and understandings of heritage. A particularly fascinating project ditches the coast for a through line that unfurls across the peninsula. Selecting a site bookended by the Barrier Islands Center on the ridge of the peninsula and the Box Tree Farm (owned by the Nature Conservancy) on the shore to the east, the student suggests this space as a new kind of public commons, on what was formerly private property. With a focus on building up the inland area while the coastline is changing, this forward-looking proposal—along with several others—encourages residents to remain aware what it means to work as a collective with respect to land tenure and to continually build on higher ground. While students were predominantly drawn to the studio because of its rural subject (“I am committed to turning our students into urbanists, but this studio became irresistible to me,” remarks Hilderbrand), two of the ten projects focus on Cape Charles, a historic city built by a 19th century developer at the termination of the Eastern Shore Railroad. The majority of Cape Charles is predicted to be underwater in 60 years. One student suggests sacrificing two blocks of the city spilling out onto the beach that were not part of the original design, in order to buy time for a 30-year migration of the historical houses. Another suggests rebuilding the city entirely and densifying it on higher ground. There are also projects that propose working with the eventual flooding of the land rather than against it. Fisherman Island, which grew from a 19th-century shipwreck at the southernmost reach of the barrier islands, is the only landmass on the Eastern Shore that’s increasing in size. One student proposes an elevated walkway that transforms the disturbed land of the highway side-slopes into a visitor experience through a new observatory that would also enable a protected species of turtles to pursue their natural migration patterns. Arriving by boat would allow more explorers to visit than the current six-person daily quota, and it would potentially provide more jobs in an area with a higher-than-average unemployment rate. Another project reimagines Willis Wharf in Little Hog Island, on the seaside, some 80 years in the future: thick forests of mangroves suppress wave action, with additional help from a dyke, elevated buildings, and residents who have transitioned from land-based agriculture to aquaculture. “I try to root my teaching in real problems, direct evidence, and real places, with real experts helping us frame the work and measurable data backing up our suppositions,” says Hilderbrand, who maintains a similar approach at his landscape architecture practice, Reed Hilderbrand. “But it must be speculative, too. We have to imagine a future that we cannot quite predict. This is especially true with regard to the dire predictions we face on the climate front.” Hilderbrand’s studio offers up solutions for remaining connected to the landscape in both work and life, and proposes design interventions that take on board the dominant ideologies of those inhabiting this increasingly precarious peninsula. The atlas can be understood as something of a roadmap for a more mindful and experimental approach to landscape architecture. In the face of an unpredictable future, more generous speculation, and the entanglement of opportunities it conjures, might just be exactly what we—as well as the residents of Virginia’s Eastern Shore—so desperately need.

Work in Progress: Sarah Fayad’s strategy for equitable distribution of affordable housing in Los Angeles

Sarah Fayad (MLAUD ’20) describes her final project for the option studio “Affordability Now!” led by Daniel D’Oca, fall 2019.