Regenerative Empathy exhibition shares studio’s findings with the French community that inspired it

Humans have exploited soil—truly, much of nature—for millennia. Soil can hold eras’ worth of stories and history, human and natural. And the soil surrounding plants’ roots, teeming with microorganisms and their constant activity, provides a particular design space. This space of life—called the rhizosphere—is the platform for delicate interactions between climate and geology, a site of layering of events and histories over time.

It was with interest in this design space that Teresa Galí-Izard, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, conceived her Fall 2018 Harvard Graduate School of Design option studio “RHIZOSPHERE.” The studio sought to investigate the rhizosphere and the stories it can tell, taking up the Mediterranean region of La Camargue, France, as its site of focus. And thanks to engagement from the Luma Foundation, the studio’s findings have been brought back to the ground that inspired them, in the form of an exhibition that was on view for the month of May at Luma’s Parc de Ateliers space in Arles, France.

Framing the studio’s work was the question of how, as seen through the rhizosphere, living things—human and animal alike—can foster regenerative agriculture as a means of managing and improving the land. As Galí-Izard writes in the course’s resultant Studio Report, she and her studio have sought to regenerate the rhizosphere as a biological, living entity by creating new associations and synergies between humans and other living systems.

“Although the studio has a strong technical component, it is ultimately a political project that pursues more equal status between all forms of life,” says Anita Berrizbeitia, Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture. “It thus raises the larger question of the relationship between humans and the natural world, and the role of landscape architecture in creating a more distributed agency of, and collaboration between, people, animals, vegetation, weather and other abiotic factors, technology, and energy in the era of climate change and the aftermath of environmental ruin.”

The exhibition, entitled Regenerative Empathy, joined a series of other installations for Luma’s show “A School of Schools: Design as Learning.” True to the studio’s general approach, the “Regenerative Empathy” exhibition shares student findings through a shared language: black-and-white line drawing, which Galí-Izard calls a “restrictive lens” that begets common ground for different sources of knowledge and information, be it geological maps, data from climate, field observations, scientific articles, or other material.

The findings presented by the studio and exhibition span approaches, scales, and materials. Animals prove fundamental to many proposals: One suggested a continuous system of anchored pastures in the Les Alpilles mountains, from which goats—outfitted in a seasonal “wardrobe”—disperse seed and regenerate soil. Elsewhere, a landscape of pigs and peach trees finds harmony between the formality of pruned, carefully maintained trees and the messy, unpredictable natural habits of pigs. Rabbits, bulls, and other animal species figure prominently in various proposals, illustrating the dynamic natural feedback loops that characterize agricultural processes in the region.

Elsewhere, students proposed new or modified bodies of water as change agents. One project illustrates a system of collection ponds along existing draining channels, working together with Italian cypress and sheep, cattle, fruit trees, and rice to create a dynamic and life-providing landscape on what had been forgotten margins.

Throughout, Galí-Izard urged students to wonder how their proposals might encourage a new form of empathy—a regeneration and a new system of maintenance and care for land that has been taken advantage of for millennia.

“In the search for what our contribution to La Camargue could be, we found that empathy and freedom were critical,” she writes. “Empathy as an elastic trajectory that brought us from here to there; and freedom as an open window to imagine a different future without prejudices, and with our spirits alive.”

Exhibition views, “A School of Schools: Design as Learning.” Luma Arles, Parc des Ateliers, Arles (France). © Joana Luz.

Excerpt from Harvard Design Magazine: “The Interior as Setting”

The interior was always part of the modernist agenda. From Le Corbusier’s dictum “The plan is the generator” to Ernst Neufert’s Bauhaus-inspired Architects’ Data (1936), the interior, and how it was to be occupied or possibly “standardized,” was an indispensable part of how architects thought about and planned their buildings. The inside was typically measured in relation to the organization of human habitation. The precision of these activities or “functions” assumed an objective and rational dimension and was reduced to the bare bones of an Existenzminimum. In much of the housing stock of the postwar period these ideas oscillate between the beauty and purity of monastic frugality— the relinquishing of earthly goods—and the sheer meanness of cramped living conditions. The reduced scale of this type of architecture is a direct reflection of the minimum dimensions and measures of the inside: its living rooms and bedrooms, its tiny bathrooms and “Taylorist” kitchens. Life is reduced to the mere reenactment of functional routines, stripped of any form of spatial pleasure.

The situation has changed. No one questions that one of the main tasks of architecture today is to provide as much space as possible within a given budget. Architects such as the distinguished French firm Lacaton & Vassal have made some extraordinary adjustments to a number of classic social housing projects, expanding the building envelope and providing the inhabitants with a more generous footprint and a more pleasurable spatial experience. In London, some local councils are entrusting creative private practices with the design of a new generation of public housing: well-built, light-filled schemes that provide the internal features, such as balconies and winter gardens, that tenants want—all of it cross-subsidized by the addition of market-rate housing.

On the whole, however, the interior is no longer a territory of explicit and intentional exploration, as it was for architects such as Le Corbusier or Adolf Loos. In the context of the academy, it has become the domain of specialized study in interior design and interior architecture programs and essentially translates to interior decorating in everyday practice and common parlance. The links to life have been supplanted by the practice of decoration.

It is imperative for architecture to reclaim the interior and to once again make it an inseparable part of its discourse. The interior requires an entanglement of art and design, of aesthetic pleasure, and of the fulfillment of everyday functions. How a building is used is not solely rational but requires a consideration of the daily rituals of sitting, sleeping, conversing, eating, cooking, bathing, dining, reading. Each of these activities, and others, demands imaginative spatial responses, designs that will enable the occupant of the interior to be located within a specific environment. These spaces house furniture as well as other artifacts—equipment—that provide an appropriate setting for the actions and uses that are to take place within its boundaries.

The positioning of furniture enables multiple traces of the choreography to be performed within a given space. Akin to a theatrical setting, the furniture and its arrangement within the space should open up possibilities, rather than close them in the way Architects’ Data often does by making the minimum standards of organization the norm.

It is perhaps not surprising that time and time again one is drawn to the interior’s presence within the context of cinema—and, more specifically, to how different cinematographers capture the interactions among actors, and their relationship to and use of indoor settings. The artifice of cinema renders the relationality between the figure and the space more explicit, “denaturalized,” unlike the often-fleeting nature of this encounter within everyday life.

A decade after Harvard Design Magazine’s first issue on the topic of the interior, it is only fitting that it should remind us all once again of the importance of what lies inside architecture and how it helps to frame and shape our habits and actions.

“The Interior as Setting” is excerpted from Issue No. 47 of Harvard Design Magazine: Inside Scoop . It was written in response to Architecture’s Inside by Mohsen Mostafavi, which was originally published in 2008 as part of Issue No. 29: What About the Inside? .

A momentous year: Highlights from 2018–2019 at Harvard Graduate School of Design

A look back at a few of the projects and moments that marked the past year at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

June 2018

Thirty-five students are awarded fellowships through the GSD’s Community Service Fellowship Program (CSFP). The Program provides opportunities for GSD students to apply the skills they have developed in their academic programs through direct involvement with projects that address public needs and community concerns at the local, national, and international level.

“Wavelength,” a public art installation designed by the GSD’s Daniel D’Oca (MUP ’02) and his colleagues at Interboro Partners, Tobias Armborst and Georgeen Theodore (both MAUD ’02), brings color and shade to Harvard’s Science Center Plaza.

Farshid Moussavi is recognized with an Order of the British Empire award amid the Queen’s Birthday Honours. Moussavi receives an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire award in recognition of her contributions to the field of architecture.

July 2018

The GSD selects the Basel-based architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, design consultant, and New York-based Beyer Blinder Belle (BBB), architect of record, to design a significant transformation of the School’s primary campus building, Gund Hall, into a twenty-first-century center of design education and innovation.

The GSD-Courances Design Residency names its inaugural participants: Mariel Collard (MLA, MDes ’19) and Juan David Grisales (MLA, MDes ’20).

Andres Sevtsuk talks autonomous vehicles, Future of Streets research during a keynote address at the Strategic Visioning Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles conference in Minnesota.

August 2018

The Fall 2018 public program is announced, offering a lecture from Michael Van Valkenburgh, a conversation with Hannah Beachler, and an evening with Hans Ulrich Obrist, among many others.

“I hope my students will leave class seeing themselves as more empowered citizens.” Urban Planning and Design’s Abby Spinak discusses the courses she is leading this fall, what she hopes students will take away from them, and her design inspiration outside the classroom.

The American Planning Association (APA) honors two GSD candidates as recipients of each of its two APA Foundation Scholarship awards: Gina Ciancone (MUP ’19) and Henna Mahmood (MUP ’20).

September 2018

Talking Practice podcast—the first podcast series to feature in-depth interviews with leading designers on the ways in which architects, landscape architects, designers, and planners articulate design imagination through practice—debuts. Hosted by Grace La, initial guests include Reinier de Graaf, Jeanne Gang, and Paul Nakazawa.

The Guardian taps the GSD’s Jesse M. Keenan for a series on “climate migration” in America.

The culmination of a four-year investigation funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Druker Design Gallery exhibition Urban Intermedia: City, Archive, Narrative argues that the complexity of contemporary urban societies and environments makes communication and collaboration across professional boundaries and academic disciplines essential.

October 2018

Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design, announces his intention step down at the end of the 2018-19 academic year. “I am proud of what we have accomplished together over the past 11 years, and I look forward to witnessing the School continue its collaborative ethos and engagement with Harvard and the world in the years to come.”

Nine GSD students and recent graduates are among the recipients of 2018 American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) Student Awards.

Sou Fujimoto discusses the relationship between nature and architecture as well as that between nature and man-made environment as part of the fall public program.

UPD’s Ann Forsyth is named Editor of Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA). “Professor Forsyth is a visionary among her peers in the planning profession, with an impressive record in both academia and professional practice,” says APA President Cynthia Bowen.

November 2018

Friends of The High Line, 2017 Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design winner, is honored through an exhibition in the Druker Design Gallery.

Internationally renowned graphic designer Irma Boom delivers the 2018 Open House Lecture.

Platform 11: Setting the Table, the first student-led installment of the series, debuts at Open House.

Womxn in Design hosts “A Convergence at the Confluence of Power, Identity, and Design.” It marks the formation of a regional network of equity-focused design-centric student groups focused on re-imagining the intersection between identity and design.

December 2018

The Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities (CGBC) announces the completion of HouseZero, the retrofitting of its headquarters in a pre-1940s building in Cambridge into an ambitious living laboratory and an energy-positive prototype for ultra-efficiency that will help us to understand buildings in new ways.

“No Sweat,” the 46th issues of Harvard Design Magazine, takes on the design of work and the work of design.

The six winners of the 2019 Richard Rogers Fellowship are announced. The cohort includes a range of participants from academia, architecture, and media arts.
Students in studio courses present their work to critics from the GSD and around the world during final reviews. Image (above) from the final review for “Natural Monument” led by Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen.

AIA awards the 2019 Topaz Medallion to Toshiko Mori, Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture. The award is considered the highest honor given to educators in architecture.

January 2019

Students participate in a range of J-Term workshops, including “Making the Industrial Basket at Three Scales” led by 2019 Loeb Fellow Stephen Burks.

Taking up social and spatial equity in New York, the “Design and the Just City” exhibition opens at AIA’s Center for Architecture. The exhibition debuted in the GSD’s Frances Loeb Library as part of the Spring 2018 exhibitions program.

The Spring 2019 public program is announced, opening with a conversation led by  Michael Jakob to introduce the exhibition Mountains and the Rise of Landscape.

February 2019

Dean Mohsen Mostafavi talks John Portman, Atlanta architecture, and Portman’s America with Georgia Public Radio.

Ahead of her lecture at the GSD, architect Beate Hølmebakk discusses her paper projects and rejecting the dominance of user-friendly architecture.

2018 Rouse Visiting Artist Hannah Beachler reflects on her history-making Oscar nomination.

March 2019

The Department of Architecture, and department chair Mark Lee, launch two new lunch talk series: “Books and Looks” and “Five on Five.”

“We were never considered fully human, so why should we care about this crisis?” Philosopher Rosi Braidotti discusses collective positivity in the face of human extinction ahead of her public program lecture.

The Library’s “Multiple Miamis” exhibition presents the city’s multiple personalities, with lessons for cities across the country.

“Streets are what make some cities great, and some cities not so great.” Janette Sadik-Khan addresses the GSD community to discuss her book Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution.

The 11th annual Platform exhibition, Setting the Table, goes up in the Druker Design Gallery.

The Department of Landscape Architecture announces the 2019 Penny White Project Fund recipients.

April 2019

Sarah Whiting is named the next dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. A leading scholar, educator, and architect widely respected for her commitment to integrating design theory and practice, Whiting comes to the GSD from Rice University School of Architecture, where she has served as dean since 2010. She previous taught at the GSD early in her career.

The New York Times joins the GSD’s Jesse Keenan for a look at the future of Duluth as a “climigrant friendly city.”

Pioneering conceptual artist Agnes Denes addresses GSD students online. To accompany the piece, Denes created an original object, a six-foot-long scroll of the manifesto she composed in 1970 and which has guided her practice ever since. An artist edition of 1,000 copies of the manifesto designed by Zak Group is offered as a gift to students from Denes.

The Plimpton Professorship of Planning and Urban Economics is made possible by a gift from Samuel Plimpton (MBA ’77, MArch ’80) and his wife, Wendy Shattuck. The position will explore a wide range of urban issues and data, including development, evolving land use patterns and property values, affordability, market and regulatory interactions, open space, consumer behaviors and outcomes, and climate change, and will help inform the decisions of future architects and planners.

The community comes together to celebrate Dean Mostafavi’s 11 years leading the GSD with a “Final Revue.”

May 2019

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus School of Design, contributor Charles Shafaieh looks back at the history of Bauhaus performance and the contemporary ways in which GSD students interpreted Oskar Schlemmer works for a Spring 2019 course and event.

Polish architect Aleksandra Jaeschke wins the 2019 Wheelwright Prize. Her proposal, Under Wraps: Architecture and Culture of Greenhouses, focuses on the spatiality of horticultural operations, as well as the interactions between plants and humans across a spectrum of contexts and cultures.

Instigations, speculations, and platforms: Dr. Catherine Ingraham commemorates Dean Mohsen Mostafavi’s lasting contribution to the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

“You belong here.” Naisha Bradley, the GSD’s first Assistant Dean of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging, shares her vision for community-building.

Class Day speaker Teju Cole discusses the unpredictability and potential of the city ahead of his 2019 address.

The GSD launches the African American Design Nexus (AADN), a virtual collection that illuminates African American architects and designers from various generations, practices, and backgrounds. Its debut represents four years of research and development, a collaboration among Harvard GSD’s African American Student Union (AASU), Harvard GSD dean Mohsen Mostafavi, architect Phil Freelon (Loeb Fellow ’90), and Harvard GSD’s Frances Loeb Library, where AADN is housed.

The GSD awards 364 degrees during Harvard’s 368th Commencement.

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.’”