In Memoriam: Philip Goodwin Freelon (1953–2019)

Philip Goodwin Freelon (1953–2019) died on July 9 at the age of 66. The renowned architect, designer, husband, and father of three left an indelible mark on the world of architecture and design, most recently with the opening of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, for which he served as lead architect.

An esteemed member of the Harvard Graduate School of Design community, Freelon first came to the GSD in 1989 as a recipient of the Loeb Fellowship. More recently, he established the Phil Freelon Fellowship Fund, which expanded opportunities for African American and other underrepresented students, and collaborated on the creation of the African American Design Nexus .

Freelon was a passionate and committed advocate for equity, access, and representation in design and the arts. In establishing the Freelon Group in 1990, he sought to bring inspiring design to people and places that had often been overlooked. The Freelon Group would eventually become one of the nation’s largest African American-owned architecture firms. Freelon believed that diverse teams can produce remarkable results. His most celebrated projects include the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta , the Harvey B. Gantt Center in Charlotte , the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco , and Emancipation Park in Houston.

Philip Goodwin Freelon was an architect whose influence transcends his landmark projects, his decades of teaching and mentorship, and his focused, committed activism for diversity and representation in design. The design world has suffered an enormous loss, and the GSD community honors and celebrates Phil and his profound legacy.

Remembering Pei: Tracing the architect’s legacy to the Harvard Graduate School of Design

Ieoh Ming (I.M.) Pei died on May 16, 2019, at the age of 102. Over six decades, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect developed an inimitable sensitivity to form, light, environment, and history that transcended the rationalism of his Bauhaus education. The ideas he pursued and refined throughout his celebrated career can be traced back to his time at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

Pei came to the GSD in 1942 to study with Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and his protégé Marcel Breuer, and he stayed on after graduating in 1946 to teach for two years. His architecture thesis, a project that culminated his time as a student, was a design for a Chinese art museum for the city of Shanghai. It proposed a series of small galleries conjoined with gardens at a scale that evoked a sense of privacy traditional to Chinese art museums. But it also represented a thoroughly modern design and foretold a deepening interest in the interdependence of physical space, light, and environment—the built environment and the natural world.

“It was at that moment that I said I would like to prove something to myself, that there is a limit to the internationalization of architecture,” said Pei of the project. “There are differences in the world, such as climate, history, culture, and life. All these things must play a part in the architectural expression.” In modernism, the measure of successful architecture could be somewhat absolute, eliding cultural, historical, and ethnographic concerns, which would return to the fore in the following decades. Designing a museum for Chinese art created an opportunity for Pei to test the limit of this “internationalization,” owing to the culture-specific differences in how art objects in China and the West were commissioned and shown. Western museums housed art objects intended to be on continual public display and required vast galleries and copious wall space. Chinese art museums, by contrast, housed art objects historically intended to be brought out of storage and shown only on rare occasion and as an intimate, private experience.

Of the hundreds–if not thousands–of theses presented during Walter Gropius’ 15 years at the GSD, Pei’s stood out for the way in which it resolved a fundamental tension between the cultural and historical exigencies of a Chinese art museum and the imperatives of modernist design. Gropius sang its praises, describing Pei’s project as the best student work to come out of the GSD during his time at the school. He later published Pei’s thesis across a two-page spread in the February 1950 issue of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, writing that Pei’s project “clearly illustrates that an able designer can very well hold on to basic traditional features—which he has found are still alive—without sacrificing a progressive conception of design.”

Pei’s project, titled Museum of Chinese Art for Shanghai, was memorably described by Henry Cobb (AB ’47, MArch ’49)—Pei’s longtime partner at Pei Cobb Freed & Partners and friend of more than 70 years—at a celebration of Pei’s 100th birthday held at the GSD on March 30, 2018. In explaining the significance and enduring relevance of Pei’s thesis, Cobb said that the project “was not just something he did on a whim. It was something of fundamental importance to him, which became directive of his subsequent professional life in a very real way… I doubt there’s ever been a piece of student work that was more predictive of a professional life to come than this project.”

Pei’s coursework at the GSD was interrupted by a two-and-a-half year stint with the National Defense Research Committee beginning in 1943—at the height of World War II—and the birth of his first son, T’ing Chung. He finished his degree in 1946, and in 1948 he began working for the real estate developer William Zeckendorf at Webb & Knapp in New York City. The 12 years that Pei worked for Zeckendorf undoubtedly was an extraordinary complement to his GSD education. He not only found himself designing skyscrapers and other large-scale projects, but in working for a developer he also was exposed to the kinds of financial and regulatory strategy, deal-making, and governmental stewardship that make substantial building projects possible. Taken together with the charm and urbane sophistication he was known for, it was an education that helped Pei secure competitive projects like the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and the addition to the Louvre Museum, a project that was initially met with fierce opposition.

In 1955, Pei founded I.M. Pei & Associates (later to become I.M. Pei & Partners, then Pei Cobb Freed & Partners), and formally broke from Webb & Knapp in 1960. As the firm gradually became independent from Zeckendorf, more and more of Pei’s own architecture became realized in building projects. Kips Bay Plaza—a low-income housing project in Manhattan undertaken for Zeckendorf—was opened in 1963 and marked an advancement in the level of aesthetic consideration then thought possible within the financial constraints of low-income housing construction. The offset composition of the site plan allowed for parks and gardens for residents, echoing the pairings of galleries and offices with Chinese gardens in Pei’s thesis project.

Kips Bay is also exemplary of Pei’s intense, career-long focus on materials and his mastery of concrete. In this case, poured-in-place facades made up of grids of delicately formed, deeply recessed windows cast crisp shadows, lending residents privacy while visually softening each building’s overall magnitude. According to Pei, the use of concrete was made possible by the tenacity of Zeckendorf himself. The cost of concrete through conventional builders was too high, but Zeckendorf’s commitment to Pei’s idea drove him to extreme alternative measures: He acquired an industrial engineering company that specialized in building highways, just to keep the cost of concrete within budget. The poured-in-place facades showed up again in projects including the Society Hill Towers in Philadelphia (1964) and the Silver Towers in New York (1967).

The years following saw the development of some of Pei’s most celebrated buildings. The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, was completed in 1967 and was an important opportunity for Pei to explore the radical extent to which architecture could be integrated into its environment. Viewed from a distance, the complex all but disappears into the mountain it occupies. His first art museum in the U.S.—the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York—was completed in 1968. In his 2018 talk at the GSD, Henry Cobb noted in the building a consistency and evolution in composition and balance that, again, began with Pei’s thesis. Opened in 1968, the Everson Museum of Art put Pei on track to win important commissions for cultural institutions like the East Building of the National Gallery in Washington, which in turn led to his commission for the Louvre.

Over the course of his career, Pei designed a wide variety of buildings, many of them now essential fixtures of their cities—the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas (1989), the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong (1990), and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland (1995), to name a few. But he is perhaps best known for his art museums. Following the Everson Museum of Art, the East Building of the National Gallery was, at the time, Pei’s most high-profile museum commission, and also one of his most challenging sites. The building not only needed to fit a difficult trapezoid-shaped parcel of land and correspond to the museum’s original West Building, but it also needed to reflect the monumentality of the National Mall and respect the projection of federal power embodied in the geometry of its plan. Pei resolved all of these high demands with one simple, elegant stroke: dividing the trapezoid site into two triangles, one isosceles and one right triangle. The base of the isosceles triangle serves as the East Building’s entrance, and opens to face the West Building, with its midpoint located to create a continuous east-west axis across the entire museum complex. The base of the right triangle faces east to the United States Capitol building and houses administrative offices and a study center. The pairing of these two triangles was an ingenious way of integrating the building within the overdetermined context of the National Mall while also preserving its distinct identity. On the surface, such decisions reflect a sensitivity to urban design that Pei no doubt honed during his time working with Zeckendorf, but they also reveal his keen insight into the relationship between architecture and its environment that, again, can be seen germinating in his GSD thesis and evolving throughout his career.

The East Building of the National Gallery was a near-unanimous critical and popular success, with the New York Times declaring the building one of the greatest of all time and Pei one of America’s best architects. In later years, Pei would go on to design other museums that earned global acclaim—the Miho Museum in Kyoto (1997) and the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha (2008), for example. His 1989 addition to the Louvre in Paris, however, will be viewed as his crowning achievement. Perhaps recognizing the daunting stakes of the project, he did not immediately agree to take it on, even after a personal entreaty from the president of France, François Mitterrand. More than 300 years earlier, French architect François Mansart had submitted at least 15 proposals to renovate the Louvre, all of which were rejected. Subsequently, at the invitation of Louis XIV, Italian architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini submitted four proposals that met the same humiliating fate. After a series of secret research trips to Paris to visit the museum, however, Pei came to believe that he should accept the commission, and he also concluded that “something must be done” about the Louvre’s dire condition.

Built in successive waves since the 12th century, originally as a fortress for soldiers and munitions, the Louvre has been adapted to accommodate a range of functions, and it presented Pei with many steep challenges: The main entrance was located along the Seine, facing south and away from the museum’s neighboring buildings and streets; the central courtyard, Cour Napoléon, was relatively neglected and being used as a parking lot for the Ministry of Finance; the serpentine floorplan was disorienting for visitors; and only 10% of the building’s square footage was dedicated to non-gallery uses like storage and administration (in the 1980s, the standard was 50%).

Much like his approach to the East Building of the National Gallery, Pei’s idea for the Louvre was at once amazingly simple and brilliant in the way it resolved a highly complex set of issues into a celebrated national icon. In excavating Cour Napoléon and adding a subterranean main entrance below the glass pyramid at its center, Pei created desperately needed space for museum staff, opened the museum to greater public access from neighboring buildings and adjacent streets on the Right Bank, and simplified navigation for visitors. He shifted the museum’s center of gravity to its central courtyard, thereby transforming what had been the inhospitable and neglected heart of the U-shaped complex into a welcoming and active public square that showcased the Louvre’s existing architecture as its backdrop.

The project drew on all of Pei’s powers as an architect, urban designer, cultural sophisticate, and political tactician. His plan fully depended on—indeed, was set in motion by—President Mitterrand’s order that the Ministry of Finance, which occupied the Louvre’s northern wing (Richelieu), would be relocated elsewhere, and that the museum would expand to become the building’s sole occupant. Mitterrand’s authority to order such a drastic reorganization of the museum, however, was predicated on the consolidation of his political power, which was diminished after Jacques Chirac, leader of one of the opposition parties, was elected prime minister. Meanwhile, even though the most significant aspects of Pei’s plan would occur underground, it was the glass pyramid that became the main focus of swift and intense public outrage. The design was loudly derided as a “gigantic ruinous gadget,” an “annex to Disneyland,” and perhaps most acerbically, at least in 1980’s Paris, “a fake diamond.” The director of the museum, André Chabaud, resigned over it. When Pei unveiled the design to the Commission Supérieure des Monuments Historiques, the assault on his proposal became so intense that the translator is said to have burst into tears and withdrawn from the meeting.

Pei, however, remained undeterred and doggedly confident in the quality and logic of his plan, and rode the waves of critique while advancing his own strategy to reverse the tide of public disapproval. He hedged his good relations with President Mitterrand by cultivating a rapport with Chirac, one of Mitterrand’s leading political opponents who, prior to being elected prime minister, was mayor of Paris. As political fortunes shifted back and forth, Pei was able to steer a course forward as excavation and construction proceeded. He also was able to enlist some of France’s most prominent cultural figures to his cause: Pierre Boulez, the orchestra conductor, and Claude Pompidou, the widow of former prime minister and president Georges Pompidou, both rallied for Pei’s plan.

The turning point came when Chirac requested that a full-scale mock-up be prepared and shown to the public. For this, a crane was brought to Cour Napoléon to hoist cables to show the pyramid’s size and outline. The cables were left suspended from the crane for four days, during which an estimated 60,000 people visited the Louvre to see the mock-up firsthand. In response, Chirac declared the design to be “not bad”—an unequivocal gesture of approval, coming as it did from President Mitterrand’s political adversary—and praise for the project gained momentum and began spreading. Media outlets that once lambasted Pei’s proposal expressed their admiration. In March 1989, the pyramid and the new underground entrance to the museum opened to the public, making the Louvre the largest museum in the world and garnering enthusiastic international acclaim.

The Louvre will likely remain Pei’s most well-known achievement—certainly the most popular—but it also stands as the culmination of his developed sense of history and tradition and their role in modernism, the composition of space and light, and the relationship between architecture and its environment. The contrasting figure of the pyramid in particular represents a formal perfection that at once foregrounds, reflects, and disappears among the centuries-old buildings and Parisian sky that surround it. No less than the soul of France had been trusted to Pei’s hands, and he succeeded famously in elevating its history and prominence while bringing the building up to late 20th-century standards.

Ieoh Ming (I.M.) Pei (MArch ’46) was married to Eileen Loo Pei, who studied landscape architecture at the GSD. They had been married 72 years when she died in 2014. I.M. is survived by their two sons, Chien Chung (Didi) Pei (AB ’68, MArch ’72) and Li Chung (Sandi) Pei (AB ’72, MArch ’76), their daughter Liane Pei, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I.M and Eileen’s eldest son, T’ing Chung Pei (AB ’65), was an urban planner and died in 2003.

A Message from Dean Sarah M. Whiting

Dear community of the GSD:

I’m thrilled to be joining you today, July 1st, as the GSD’s new dean. My excitement has everything to do with the distinction and breadth of the faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends that make up this School and its community—your intellectual strengths and cultural generosities give me ever more enthusiasm for what lies ahead at the GSD and, more broadly, for the role of design as we steer our way into a now-maturing 21st century.

If the future is daunting—and it’s hard not to see the environmental, social, political, and economic horizons ahead as anything but—I remain steadfast in the belief that our horizon is also exhilarating. And I’m certain that the parts that will make up our new future are alive and well at the School.

Our days and semesters are filled with indispensable tools that live under headings like research, history, theory, policy, and technology. These tools shape, and rattle, our respective pursuits across the field of design. They also connect our departments and programs to each other and, more ambitiously, allow us to assert an elastic constellation signaling our greater ambitions as citizens in a world that has never needed us more—a world that taunts us with its promise even as it shows us its jagged edges.

I relish being part of our collective future and, most importantly, I’m provoked and inspired as I anticipate working with all of you to make it happen.

Til soon,
Sarah

Sarah M. Whiting
Dean
Harvard University
Graduate School of Design

Work in Progress: Soledad Patiño’s fishing villages

Soledad Patiño (MAUD ’20) describes her final project for the option studio “Extreme Urbanism 6: Designing Sanitation Infrastructure” led by Rahul Mehrotra, spring 2019.

June 2019 News Roundup

Krzysztof Wodiczko’s technological installation LORO (THEM) , which features drones equipped with digital screens and loud speakers, was launched during Milan Photo Week. “For More Art’s premiere international commission, Krzysztof Wodiczko has worked closely with members of Milan’s growing immigrant population to explore the complexities of life as a refugee on a continent that is increasingly hostile towards foreign newcomers.”

Bing Wang is profiled and interviewed in the American Planning Association’s Special China Report , the first in a series of APA’s nation-specific reports covering planning-related issues and projects developing outside the United States.

The 2019 American Institute of Architects Wisconsin Honor Award recognized LA DALLMAN, the practice of Grace La and James Dallman for their project, the Levatich House, also known as the Flat Top House. The project was one of three projects to receive an Honor Award for overall architectural design excellence from among 100 submissions, and the only single family home to be so recognized.

The Knight Foundation has named Chelina Odbert a winner of its inaugural Knight Public Spaces Fellowship. The co-founder and executive director of Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI), a nonprofit design and planning firm, Odbert has led the design and development of public spaces across the U.S. and around the world, including a network of public spaces in California’s Coachella Valley, a “Play Streets” program with the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, and an ongoing multi-phase public space project in Nairobi, Kenya.

Have questions about a news item, or have something to share with us? Write to the GSD News desk. 

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.