Kuehn Malvezzi on liberating institutional design from all that is “dark, serious, and deeply moral”

This spring, Berlin-based architects Johannes Kuehn, Wilfried Kuehn, and Simona Malvezzi asked Harvard Graduate School of Design students to imagine a new kind of museum for the 21st century, one that acknowledges, even if it rejects, the history and structure of the modern museum. For this, Kuehn Malvezzi’s three principals connected the students with a client of sorts: German collector Julia Stoschek, who has been showing her private collection of performance and time-based art since 2007. Kuehn Malvezzi is not currently working with Stoschek, but the firm renovated a 1907 industrial building in Düsseldorf for part of her collection. Their work for curators, collectors, artists, and art institutions has constituted much of their portfolio since their founding in 2001. Last year, they converted the Prinzessinnenpalais on Berlin’s Unter den Linden Boulevard into a new cultural venue for Deutsche Bank’s considerable art collection. And they won the design competition for Montreal’s redesigned Insectarium, now under construction.

In an introduction to the visiting critics’ recent lecture at the GSD, Mark Lee (MArch ’95), chair of the department of architecture, quoted Viennese essayist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and related that von Hofmannsthal never felt any conflict “between the dark, serious, deeply moral Teutonic ideal, and the spritely, festive, Latin asceticism” of Vienna at the end of the 19th century. Kuehn Malvezzi’s work similarly grapples with combining playfulness and gravity. Their House of One project—a mosque, synagogue, and church under the same roof—will be built on the historic foundations of one of Berlin’s earliest churches, and they are collaborating with the artist Michael Riedel on a new facade for the Moderne Galerie in Saarbrücken, Germany. We spoke with Wilfried Kuehn about their studio and recent projects.

Why did you choose to focus on museology for your GSD studio?

Should the museum move away from the treasure house and toward a space where it’s not so much the precious object at the center, but rather the experience between visitors? We are now witnessing the fact that more and more private collectors have a lot of important work in storage and we have this huge amount of art that is not public. The class collaborated with collector Julia Stoschek, who owns the largest digital art collection in Germany and is expanding quite rapidly. She collects video and time-based media and shows them in Düsseldorf and Berlin. She’s very interested in the fact that the museum could become a space that is less driven by the objects. We interacted via Skype and then our students visited her in Berlin.

A project like this challenges the whole notion of fundamentalism. It’s risky to be avant-garde and not conform to the anxieties and darkest emotions available.

Wilfried Kuehn on his firm’s latest project, House of One, a mosque, synagogue, and church under one roof. 

We challenged the students with conceptual art texts on the role of the museum in society, feminist discourse in the ’60s and ’70s, and art being an experience that is liberating and political, rather than just objectified. They surprised us with spaces we are not accustomed to seeing as art spaces.

The firm has a long tradition of working with artists and within the art world. Is that something you deliberately sought out?

We have been collecting art and working with artists on buildings, so our relations are manifold. I see in art not so much an addition to architecture as a tool and method to think about architecture. We have done many art and building projects where you can’t disentangle the two. This is something that architects don’t usually like to do, because it basically diminishes their role in many eyes. We have never thought about our role like this. We have always thought that the maximum experience is to come together with other arts. We think this is very contemporary once again because of the specialization that took place in the 20th century and the alienation of all the different fields of knowledge that need to be reassembled. And we have a good way forward with art and architecture.

Why do you think your entry for the House of One won the competition?

Our three sacred spaces are all on one level without being the same—they are three individual extruded shapes that come from the historical floor plan. They are equal but not the same. This was what the three clergymen intuitively wanted. The other entries had less of a conceptual approach to the relationship between the three religions.

What have been your conversations around acts of terrorism that happen all too often in religious spaces? How did that play into your design and conversations if at all?

It is a conversation that took place, of course—you cannot avoid it. A project like this challenges the whole notion of fundamentalism. It’s true that you have to provide minimum levels of security in order to make it a public building, but also there is the very strong idea that if we make a building that is high security through and through—like a shelter or bunker—then it would not express the idea of House of One anymore. You have to expose yourself to a certain degree and accept risk. It’s risky to be avant-garde and not conform to the anxieties and darkest emotions available.

Another project, the Insectarium in Montreal, seems very different on the surface than your other work.

The Insectarium is the largest insect museum in North America. It is one of my favorite projects and one that the firm has been working on for many years. They are starting construction now [the museum is currently closed and will reopen in 2021]. It’s a scientific and museological space centered on biodiversity—which is such an important theme. The whole idea of the museum is that architecture and museology meld, which is something very rare. This is why we did it. Our design brings visitors underground and then they emerge into a glass vivarium with live butterflies. Even in the cold Montreal winters you’ll be in a tropical garden. It’s a very experiential “parcours.” The space will develop into an important hub for artistic and scientific encounters.

How would you characterize the core of your work right now?

The question of how society can live together, especially in artificial places such as the metropolis, is our theme now. We have to confront diverse societies in concentrated places. Somehow we have to find a way to live together. In the House of One, for example, each religion maintains their own identity and also reaches out to say, “We want to actively live our differences.” The same openness and interest in the other has to be our way of living in cities. If we don’t win that challenge, it will be very problematic to live on planet Earth, which is too small to avoid each other.

Work in Progress: Xiaotang Tang’s egalitarian museum

Xiaotang Tang (MArch ’20) describes her final project for the option studio “A Novel Museum” led by Johannes Kuehn, Wilfried Kuehn, and Simona Malvezzi, spring 2019.

Work in Progress: Melissa Naranjo’s exploration of regenerative practices in Les Alpilles, France

Melissa Naranjo (MLA ’19) describes her final project for the option studio “RHIZOSPHERE” led by Teresa Gali Izard, fall 2018.

Work in Progress: Aimilios’ bridge

Aimilios Davlantis Lo (MArch ’19) describes his final project for the option studio “The Anamorphic Double: A Bridge for DC,” led by Grace La  and James Dallman, spring 2019.

What we think we know about architecture: A conversation with Sharon Johnston

Unsettled ground is familiar territory to Sharon Johnston. Her firm with partner Mark Lee (MArch ’95), Johnston Marklee , has long sought to disrupt established conventions in architecture. Their buildings incorporate typical forms but then challenge them, question regular patterns of occupation, and push zoning envelopes. In the introductory essay to a highly innovative monograph on the firm’s architecture and collaborations, House is a House is a House is a House is a House, Reto Geiser explains that their projects offer a “reevaluation of modernist dogma,” a “contamination of known idioms.” That is, they put the familiar into doubt, destabilizing what we think we know about architecture. This is not only a powerful tool for architectural design, but also a provocative way to orient a graduate design studio. We talked about the studio Johnston taught at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in Spring 2019, as well as the projects and ideas that Johnston is pursuing with her firm.

In the description for the studio you taught at Harvard this past semester—“The New Generic”—you suggest that it is partly about “a dialog between the economy of the grid and the value of spatial exception.” Can you say more about that?

From the outset, I asked the students to consider how architecture can colonize the 99%—the background fabric of the city. How can we face down the ubiquitous, economical urban grid to insert something different? Visiting the site in Miami, we kept an open brief looking at many building types and considering cultural and business models, landscapes and environments. The goal for the studio was to design new versions of workspace/residential buildings that are materially efficient, structurally effective, and programmatically flexible but without overt complexity.

You and Mark Lee have put a huge commitment into teaching; how do you see that impacting the direction of the firm?

We have taught since the beginning because we really value education and the reciprocity between teaching and the profession. We did step back from teaching for three or four years as the firm grew and we moved from designing primarily houses to bigger projects. But we have found that teaching helps us with our more sustained research projects, particularly our strong interest in new models of housing and dwelling in general.

Does this interest bring you back to houses, then, even though your firm has taken on some prominent institutional projects lately?

Yes, we always do a few houses because moving between scales and programs keeps us alert. And connection to what it means to make intimate space informs the public spaces we design, where we try to balance intimacy and a generosity of scale.

House is a House is a House is a House is a House results from some fascinating collaborations with photographers and writers. How did these come about? Are they still part of the firm’s practice?

The collaborations essentially formalized what we already do. Working with artists and designers of different kinds helps us move outside our preconceptions and reframe our projects, so their feedback and participation have been important to us. These collaborations help us see our work from the inside out, but also show us how to connect with an audience and incorporate input from diverse groups.

Our engagement with designers in other fields also introduces provocations. For a project to design a new workplace, we’ve assembled a think tank that includes a fine artist, an industrial designer, a curator, a cultural programmer, and the clients. In one meeting the industrial designer asked, “What does it mean to think about the desk in the future?” This kind of question goes beyond the functional; it adds other voices that help us to contextualize our design questions and go deeper with them. By considering the indeterminate qualities of how we work and dwell, we can make places more adaptable and more responsive to the essential nature of diverse design requirements.

How have your recent large cultural commissions, major exhibitions, and ongoing commercial relationships affected the firm’s evolution?

In contrast to residential work, which is so closely tied to the people involved, cultural and commercial projects allow us to draw on large constituencies. They help us think about the city in different ways too, charging us to practice urbanism through architecture. Some of our newer cultural commissions are also helping us develop stronger ties with the East Coast and with Europe, which positively impacts our teaching.

We are just finishing up the Graduate Arts Campus at UCLA. Being in an industrial part of Los Angeles, part of the urban fabric rather than an enclave, it has helped us emphasize that cultural projects don’t need to be temples separate from cities. In the UCLA building we have also been able to experiment with familiar materials and construction techniques, using tilt-up construction, for example, in a new way.

Janette Sadik-Khan on creating bike- and pedestrian-friendly cities

In 2016, Janette Sadik-Khan published Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution, drawing lessons from her time as commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation under mayor Michael Bloomberg. Three years later, she presented an optimistic view of the battle for a more human-scale, walkable city at a lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. “Before we got started, there wasn’t a public vocabulary for the kinds of changes New York—and many other cities—needed,” she says. “Today city residents worldwide are becoming fluent in the language of place-making and parking-protected bike lanes.”

Sadik-Khan’s modus operandi has always been to show, not tell. The interventions she presided over between 2007 and 2013 as transportation commissioner demonstrated the potential hidden in plain sight. “When your street stays the same for so long, it’s hard for people to look at it differently,” she explains. “Just because they’re built in concrete, asphalt, and steel doesn’t mean they are trapped in amber, forever unchanged.” Among her most notable achievements were closing Broadway to cars in Times Square, building nearly 400 miles of bike lanes, introducing seven rapid bus lines, launching the largest bike share program in North America, and creating more than 60 plazas around the city.

In the past, developers didn’t want to have protected bike lanes, bike stations, and plazas next to their developments, but now they advertise them and have seen property values soar as a result.

Janette Sadik-Khan whose data showed that retail sales improved by 49% on 9th Avenue in New York City when bikes lanes were introduced

And the impact has gone beyond New York. “Since we transformed Times Square ten years ago, we’ve seen the same concept put into action in dozens of cities: Atlanta, Athens, Addis Ababa, Mexico City, Milan, Mumbai. Cities you wouldn’t expect, like Detroit—Motor City—recently rolled out 25 miles of protected bike lanes. Nobody has a patent on pavements. Don’t be shy about stealing solutions.”

In New York, Sadik-Khan says, she witnessed a mindset change among policymakers and private developers, as well as citizens. “In the past, developers didn’t want to have protected bike lanes, bike stations, and plazas next to their developments, but now they advertise them and have seen property values soar as a result.” This was partly because her team made their argument using hard data that had not been gathered before. “Previously we’ve only really used metrics like how fast traffic was moving and how many cars could get through an intersection.” A wider evidence base—that retail sales improved by 49% on Ninth Avenue when bikes lanes were introduced, for example—is crucial in countering anecdotal disinformation, she says.

The projects Sadik-Khan champions are targeted and relatively small-scale. “We still need to plan big, but we’d forgotten about the spaces trapped between the lines. It’s about reimagining one block at a time and that doesn’t have to cost billions of dollars—it’s something any city can do with materials they have on hand—paint, brushes, cones.” The other essential ingredient is people. “You need to reimagine the community involvement process as well. We asked communities to submit their own proposals, for example on where to put bike share stations, which was important for building trust.”

This community engagement appears to be missing as we enter the next era of cities: While investment is being made in driverless car technology, Sadik-Khan says, little is being done to prepare cities for its impact. “We’re just starting to undo mistakes made 100 years ago, razing neighborhoods and expanding highways to overhaul outer cities and make way for cars—we can’t afford to hand over the keys to our cities again.”

How to prevent this? Sadik-Khan says, “It starts with a question: What do we want the streets of the future to look like? It’s about making technology fit into our cities rather than designing them to accommodate new technologies.” It’s a battle that’s just begun but one we must all prepare for. After all, “Our streets are worth fighting for.”

Teju Cole on the unpredictability and potential of the city

The work of novelist, essayist, and photographer Teju Cole is a genre-defying exploration of race, governance, migration, justice, culture, music , and privilege. It is defined by a comfort with uncertainty and a commitment to defending the freedom and autonomy of others.

The city is the motif that recurs most frequently in Cole’s work. He is drawn to the unpredictability and potential of the urban environment and its endless narrative material. And he is intrigued by the “continuities” between cities—what makes them similar, regardless of size, median income, or hemisphere—as well what makes each one unique. He describes these peculiarities as “smaller zones of interest that, once you give up insisting on stereotypes, you can really start to see.”

“The guidebooks might say, ‘Check out fabulous Florence.’ Or, ‘Kinshasa’s a mess,’” Cole says. “The reality is that teenagers in Florence hang out at the mall, teenagers in Kinshasa hang out at the mall. People in both places who have money can go to nice restaurants. Florence has a trash problem, so does Kinshasa. It’s the same story. The task of insisting on that continuity feels to me like a writerly ethical responsibility. What makes one city different from another is the subtleties, the smaller things you notice when you relinquish the task of exaggerating.”

Cole spent nearly two decades each in Lagos and New York, and he says that they are examples of cities that serve “intellectually as a source of exploration of thinking for my work.” He explains, “If you draw a map around New York, Zurich, Lagos, and São Paulo, they represent the extremes of what cities are and what they do, and each in its own way precisely represents some interests of mine. New York, Lagos, and São Paulo are all part of what I consider the Black Atlantic, places that have been shaped by the black creative presence to a very large extent.” His 2007 debut novel, Every Day Is for the Thief, takes place in Lagos, while his second novel, Open City, and a number of essays are set in New York.

 

Cole’s writing has been translated into more than 15 languages and has earned him numerous awards, including the prestigious Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. His photography has led to guest curating opportunities and solo exhibitions in seven countries on three continents. In addition to his two novels, he has published Known and Strange Things, a collection of essays on art, literature, photography, and politics; Blind Spot, a singular collection of photographs and writing; and Human Archipelago, a meditation on refugees and displaced people with photographer Fazal Sheikh. He has written for the New Yorker, Granta, and other magazines, and served as the photography critic of the New York Times Magazine from 2015 to 2019.

This afternoon, Cole, Harvard’s first Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing, will deliver the Class Day address for the Graduate School of Design. He plans to use his address to encourage graduates “to think about our life together” and to imagine how a future can be conceived and built . Cole himself is a model for a cross-disciplinary creative practice that is at once intellectually rigorous, politically and socially engaged, and unbound to any singular medium.

 

Cole’s fluidity between forms of expression can be credited, at least in part, to a background that has elements of multiplicity and movement, trial and error, switchbacks and reboots. Born in 1975 in Kalamazoo, Michigan to Nigerian parents, his life began with two passports, cultures, and languages. At four months old, Cole moved with his family to Lagos, Nigeria, where he lived until he returned to Michigan to pursue studies in art and art history at Kalamazoo College. Later he would go on to study African art history at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London and art history at Columbia University in New York.

“It was an important fact mentally to know that I belong to Nigeria and the United States,” he says. With time, that comfort with the in-between of dual identities evolved into a confidence in belonging to both places. “It’s always interested me, this idea of, ‘Oh, we don’t say it that way in America.’ To which my response is, ‘Well, we do now.’ Whatever I am, whatever I do, that’s part of America now. This imagined community that we call a nation is ever-expanding and ever-complexifying, and that’s a good thing. We’ve expanded the possibilities.”

Although he first made a name for himself as a novelist, Cole has always identified equally as a writer and a photographer. “I got into both at the same time, around 2004. With whatever I had studied, with whatever my education was, there was a certain voicing that I knew I wanted to explore more in writing. At SOAS, I started what I would say were the very first glimmerings of Open City. I wrote maybe five pages, but it was Mad Libs, no sentences. It was like a fever dream,” he remembers. “But by 2005, I started to feel like, ‘No, I need to write clear sentences’ and let the clarity convey the energy, just have it be cumulative. Around the same time, I started shooting with a film camera.” In Every Day Is for the Thief, a novella that follows a young Nigerian returning to Lagos after years in the US, Cole weaves black and white photographs throughout the narrative.

 

In Blind Spot, images and photographs also have equal footing in a series of single-spread couplets—on one page a full-color image, on the other, prose. Inspired by the six months Cole spent living in Zurich, the book is a call-and-response between a snapshot of a place and a burst of associations. His aim is to come at a subject in such a way that the audience experiences something unexpected that, as he once said, “detonates on some deeper level.”

Cole credits his time writing monthly photography criticism for the New York Times Magazine with growing his photography practice. Reading the photographs of others opened him up to taking his own. Called “On Photography,” his column also gave him an opportunity to engage in a deeper dialogue with the history of photography and to consider himself in relation to artists including Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, Luigi Ghirri, and Guido Guidi. He says that contemporary Italian photographers like Ghirri have had an especially significant and validating influence on his work.

 

Yet Cole says that the most life-defining experiences behind his work have been purely interior. Becoming a born-again Christian at age 13 injected heaviness and seriousness into his life; coming out the other side as an atheist at age 28 changed his “relationship to the world and ethics.” And, at 33, he found what he calls an “even keel” spiritually, outside of religion. “Open City came out in 2011 and that was really what got the public aspect of my career going. But what was important happened eight years before [at 28]: discovering that I had a sense of how to move forward in my life. The pivotal moments have had to do with my relationship to my own being in the world. Some of the external stuff is nice, but I will never define myself around that. Ever. It could all be gone tomorrow. It doesn’t matter because that’s not the definition.”

Cole left New York to take up his teaching role at Harvard in January 2019. Being back in academia, on the other side of the lectern, is right for him, right now, he says. He clearly enjoys nudging his students toward the difficult interior places to find voice, material, and meaning.

“I’m trying to be free. I was influenced by people who are free, including Toni Morrison and John Berger, great artists…. Learning to prioritize that freedom is what led me to this work. Not in a glib ‘I could do anything’ way but in an ‘I have a responsibility to expand the field, to move the center’ way. So, what I say to students is not, ‘You can do anything,’ but ‘You can do a lot, if you’re serious about picking up the necessary skills for each of the things you want to do.’”

Thing Tank exhibition imagines a parallel history of 20th-century Italian industrial design

“Often research in design involves going to Google Images and looking at a page of out-of-context thumbnails,” says Jeffrey Schnapp, faculty director at Harvard Graduate School of Design’s MetaLAB , which explores the ties between design, engineering, society and culture. “I believe a deep and sustained engagement with different moments in the history of design is a force for unleashing the imagination and a valuable and humbling experience that gives a more nuanced understanding of the different factors that come together in a successful design.”

The first course Schnapp taught at Harvard GSD in 2009 was designed to put this philosophy into action, encouraging students to take an in-depth look at various objects in the canon of 20th-century Italian industrial design. For an associated exhibition, students created fictional, but plausible, objects of their own, each with a history and story spun around it.

A decade later, another exhibition–Thing Tank: 18 Design Fictions, opening May 28, 2019–takes a similar approach, this time displaying 18 student projects that engage in a dialogue with some of the defining works of 20th-century Italian design, from Carlo Bugatti’s 1902 Cobra Chair to the Olivetti calculators of the 1980s. “The idea is to get students to think about how design practice is deeply intertwined with storytelling and social narratives.”

Among the exhibited works is a pair of shoes for the early 1980s, inspired by the work of Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis movement, and a fan made out of aircraft aluminum designed for the 1930s, a time when there was much excitement about electric table fans. Each artifact in the exhibition was analyzed with respect to its materials, properties, the broader family of objects to which it belongs, and the socio-historical context in which it was produced. The resultant gallery of fictional facsimiles includes period advertising campaigns, patent drawings, and other forms of “historical” documentation.

One of the central lessons for the students was the fact that many of the objects we think of as iconic were actually failures. “It was often a surprise that designs that eventually entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art or the Victoria & Albert Museum were not necessarily commercially successful.” He points the famed Bialetti Moka Express coffee maker, which was made by a metallurgist with limited design skills, as an example. “For the first 15 to 20 years it sold an extremely small number. Then his son came along and turned it into the coffee maker we know today.”

This sense of history has informed Schnapp’s own design work with the Piaggio automotive group : Gita, which goes into production this year, is a robotic vehicle conceived to support pedestrianism by carrying heavy objects that would normally lead people–particularly older individuals and those with mobility constraints–to use a car. “We’re trying to create what we see as a missing link in the mobility models that have characterized the world we live in, where something like 75% of the trips that people take in automobiles are at pedestrian distances.”

The project seems entirely driven by contemporary concerns, but it builds on research in Piaggio’s archives into vehicles like the Vespa. “We spent a lot of time thinking about how the Gita fits into the history of light mobility vehicles and the close intertwining of design and engineering.” Over the next few years, a whole family of related vehicles will emerge around this design, creating a new typology–and, in doing so, forming a design history of its own.

Visit the Thing Tank exhibition page for more information and a full list of student projects, or keep reading about the innovations underway at Piaggio Fast Forward . 

Harvard Graduate School of Design redefines the post-Brexit landscape of the Irish Northwest

Ireland’s northwestern borderland is a place that has changed a lot over the last two decades. For those living there, recent memory includes a time when the border was “hard,” meaning that it was marked-out with customs posts and military checkpoints. Until twenty years ago, two authorities–those from Northern Ireland on one side, and the Republic of Ireland on the other–could stop, question and search border-crossers, including locals whose daily commutes involved twice-daily crossings. Hassle and delay were facets of everyday life for residents, many of whom lived on one side and commuted to a job or school on the other. There was a degree of emotional discomfort to crossing the border, and it was an experience that could provoke a question that had no easy answers: Where do you think you belong? A distinction between the two sides of the landscape was reinforced by border infrastructure, which for many created an artificially-divided common ground.

Nowadays it is possible to cross the border without even realizing you have done so. Often the only indications are road markings that change from yellow to white, and most of the border’s 200+ roads are too small to have such markings. Two important international agreements are responsible for rendering Ireland’s border invisible: In 1993, the United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland) and the Republic of Ireland joined the European Union’s Single Market, which meant goods or services could be sold to member states within the EU without fuss. Customs posts closed, and the economies of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland began to grow together. The question of whether Ireland should have a border at all remained a key issue in Ireland’s politics even after 1993, especially in Northern Ireland, where the debate had spurred violence. That violent phase was known as the Troubles, and it drew to a close in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement. This peace accord finally took guns and bombs out of Northern Ireland’s politics. The military checkpoints disappeared almost as quickly as the customs posts had, and the border became invisible. As a symbol on the map, the border remains contested but is no longer a confrontational element in the landscape.

As complex and fraught as cross-border communication and identity is, today the fate of the border region in Ireland is further complicated by the potential outcome of Brexit, the attempt to untangle the United Kingdom from the European Union. Leaving the EU is something the UK decided to do in a referendum three years ago, and after many setbacks it is now slated for October, 2019. It will make Ireland’s border the only land frontier between the UK and the EU. It is possible that the UK will leave the single market that day too, undoing the work of 1993. This could mean the return of custom checks at the border. Brexit could also damage the work of 1998, as the Good Friday Agreement allows for both Irish and British citizenship for the people of Northern Ireland, an arrangement that was more easily workable within the shared context of the European Union.

Harvard design and anthropology students arrived in Ireland’s northwestern borderland in March 2019 as part of a research trip to where the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland meet, to understand the landscape and its potential within the framework of impending political and social transformations. They visited the northwestern borderland, including the city of Derry/Londonderry, north Donegal and Lough Foyle. I met Gareth Doherty, assistant professor of landscape architecture and principal investigator of the research project Atlas for a City Region: Imagining the Post-Brexit Landscapes of the Irish Northwest, in a café near Derry/Londonderry. As part of the research project, Doherty is leading a seminar at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Design Anthropology: Objects, Landscapes, Cities, as well as a studio with Professor Niall Kirkwood, Field Work: Brexit, Borders, and Imagining a New City-Region for the Irish Northwest, which imagines how the region will develop over the next 50 years or more.

An underpinning idea was that researchers can gain a lot by living in communities and trying to understanding them from the inside, from the ground up. “This can be a useful complement to the planning processes,” he explained. Traditionally, ethnographers and anthropologists work alone, and often spend extensive amounts of time in the places they are studying. The field research did not have much time–just a few weeks–but they had plenty of people–a dozen landscape architecture students and seventeen design anthropology students.

The students traveled to the borderland to explore, talk to locals and then pool what they had gathered. The team was embedded in urban zones like Derry/Londonderry, in villages and on farms. They were looking at practical issues–food systems, transportation, border technology and the fishing industry–but also at more abstract factors, such as sexuality, music and concepts of home. Anthropologists, said Gareth, are good at asking why, but this project was also about getting them to think into the future and consider where a society’s dynamics may lead. Architects, planners, and landscape architects, on the other hand, are well-practiced in imagining futures, so during this project they were encouraged to consider the rationale for their creations.

The students arrived with some set tasks and issues to investigate. Firstly, they were asked to identify if the area they were exploring could be accurately described as a region, a region with an international border running up the middle, but nonetheless a coherent place. “What do you think the limits of this region might be?” I asked. Gareth unfolded a map of the area, ran his finger around it, indicating an area spread equally across both sides of the border about 70 miles wide and 70 miles high. It encompassed Derry/Londonderry, Strabane and Letterkenny, but the outer edges of this proposed region were deliberately vague. “We didn’t want to simply draw another border,” says Gareth.

It seems fair to call this area a region: The economic pull of Derry/Londonderry is felt across the border in rural Donegal, and cross-border roads are busy (Derry/Londonderry was where we often went to shop when I was a child, despite the checkpoints. Once we had got beyond the dislocating experience of the border there was not much that was alien about what we discovered on the other side).

The students were asked to consider how this region could be affected by climate change. Broadly speaking, as it runs from east to west, Ireland’s border goes from high and hilly to flatter and more open. To the northwest, horizons get lower; the sky gets bigger and the border joins its one major river, the Foyle, which widens on its way to the sea. Because of its low elevation and the fact that it’s hemmed by water on three sides, this land and economy will be hugely affected by a rising sea level. The landscape’s delicacy is suggested in old maps of the area. In the 1600s, a large headland called Inishowen, now firmly attached to the rest of Ireland by a neck six miles wide, was considered a separate landmass. This shift is reflected in the area’s original name: Inish means island. The landscape was likely boggy and prone to flooding before the advent of drainage systems. Now, several miles from the sea, round pebbles as if from a beach are still to be found beneath a shallow layer of soil, an indication that once upon a time the tides came much further in.

On their daily explorations, the students were encouraged to rely on chance, as Gareth reasoned that chance encounters can be very rich. At first this might seem a haphazard way of going about things, but if there are two dozen people out there relying on chance every day for a couple of weeks, then you can be confident of returns. Planning too much, Gareth suggested, can lead to bias. How can one plan without relying on the preconceived? Chance means freshness and immediacy. Chance also means being unprepared, so students had to rely on their humanity and instincts to simply get along with the people they met and learn things from them. The students did not hand out questionnaires; they talked and listened. One student reported that walking their host’s dog was a great way to get into conversations with locals. Sohun Kang, from South Korea, went to places open for visitors, such as community groups, public libraries, and a boxing club. He found that one encounter could lead to another. Kiran Wattamwar, who is from India, called into a community center on a lucky day and within an hour she was “engaged in a discussion with eight people, friends of friends who had all been called over by someone else they knew.”

Another of the students’ tasks was to examine how people live on a cross-border basis. Kiran wanted to find out how people’s use of telecommunications was shaped by the border. Despite the fact that there are no additional roaming or cellular charges across the border region, Kiran discovered that some people preferred having two phones, compartmentalizing their lives on either side of the line. Having two phones is indeed the mark of many borderland citizens, as is having two separate currency pockets for British Pounds and Irish Euros.

Ashutosh Singhal, originally from Mumbai, examined the aquatic border and the rules around national fishing rights, visiting fishing villages like Greencastle and Buncrana. For generations, fishing has been an important part of the region’s economy. Fishing fleets are permitted anywhere around the UK and Ireland. Singhal mapped opportunities for socio-economic development in the fishing communities of Inishowen; “opportunities that could be used to by-pass the implications of Brexit”.

The students’ final task was to consider how Brexit might affect their research area and people’s lives in the region generally. It is certainly a concern for the fishing fleets. Ashutosh warned that, “the consequences of a Hard Aquatic Border on these fishing communities will be dire.” Meesh Zucker, a City Planning graduate student at MIT, focused on the visibility of marginalized identities in the region, particularly LGBTQ+ people, and spoke to many who would rather see Brexit cancelled. Some fear identity profiling at the border, while transgender individuals were concerned that they may be stopped from receiving healthcare on one side of the border or the other. Some told Meesh that they feared Brexit “might lead to events similar to those that took place during the Troubles.”

This is far from a minority concern. In the region these students visited, and all along the borderland, there is real anxiety that the frontier’s invisibility will turn out to have just been a 20-year phase—a short, productive hiatus from the border’s overarching story: confrontation. This would be a real shame because, as this group of students and researchers discovered, so much is just getting started.

Work in Progress: Sunmee Lee and Yuebin Dong’s public transit system in Los Angeles

Sunmee Lee (MLA ’19) and Yuebin Dong (MAUD ’20) describe their final project for the option studio “Future of Streets in Los Angeles” led by Andres Sevtsuk, spring 2019.