At Therme Forum, John May considers the balance of localism and globalism as designers envision the city of the future

Architects and urban designers, in shaping the built environment, are increasingly tasked with addressing urgent social and political issues, including climate change, social equity, and aging infrastructure (and populations), alongside emerging questions of who informs urban design, and what sorts of perspectives and knowledge are fundamental to “good” urban design. Together with architects and engineers, might artists have a parallel role in steering our cities toward sustainable, inclusive futures?

Such interweaving of design perspectives lies at the heart of the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Master in Design Studies program. In presenting at June’s Therme Forum, “The City of Artists–Cities Between Crisis, Catharsis and Creation ,” MDes program codirector John May framed some of today’s urgent concerns around urbanization and globalization as questions of calibration, balance, and imbalance.

“We have to reimagine what it actually means to be local in such a way that it understands the value of global politics of cosmopolitanism, while recognizing the real material impacts of the history of globalization, in particular the 20th-century history of globalization and the environmental footprint that it has left on our cities,” May observed during the June 11 event in Basel. “This is, I think, a massive experimental political project going forward that’s just a huge open-ended question and we need more experiments like this to begin to answer those questions.”

This latest edition of Therme Forum was presented within Design Miami/Basel’s 2019 curatorial theme of Elements: Earth, responding to the impact of human activity on the nature of our planet. The public event gathered a series of noted theorists and practitioners toexamine how artists can share responsibility with urban planners, architects, and engineers in reenvisioning the cities of the future as they germinate today.

Among other considerations, the conversation raised the need to rethink city planning to counteract the pervasive effects of globalization and increasing digital technologies with solutions that enhance interpersonal experiences and social connections. Weighing these issues, panelists considered whether city design, as well as existing city environments, could emerge as a platform from which artists may stimulate significant cultural transformation.

“So now you wanted to know is nature important in an artist’s project? Yes. Is sustainability important? Yes. It’s important for the whole planet to become sustainable,” observed panelist Maja Hoffmann, founder and president of Luma Arles. “Now, what is the artistic gesture… you were saying it’s not enough to observe, you want actually to be active. So that means that if you take a role in society you become an activist. As an artist you can be an activist.”

Hoffmann and May were joined by co-panelists Lonneke Gordijn (artist, Studio Drift); Jon Gray (cofounder, Ghetto Gastro); Arthur Mamou-Mani (architect); Studio Swine (art collective); and Hans Ulrich Obrist (artistic director, Serpentine Galleries), with moderator Mikolaj Sekutowicz (curator, Therme Art Program).

At the GSD, May’s MDes program ties together a variety of disciplinary interests with one central question: How do we prepare for challenges that no longer conform to the boundaries of disciplines? MDes students and faculty experiment with this idea through a series of pedagogical lenses. The program’s Art, Design, and the Public Domain track asks questions similar to those raised at May’s June panel; most fundamentally it examines how art can intervene in civic crises or debates. Elsewhere in the MDes program, students and faculty consider ecology, conservation, technology, and philosophy as they bear on the design of buildings, communities, cities, and environments.

And, like the June Therme panel, the MDes program explores how alternative or non-traditional methodologies might cultivate novel approaches to design for this century.

In addition to his MDes directorship, May is an assistant professor of architecture and a founding partner, with the GSD’s Zeina Koreitem, of MILLIØNS , a Los Angeles–based design practice. Their experimental work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at Friedman Benda Gallery, the Storefront for Art and Architecture, The Architecture + Design Museum of Los Angeles, and Jai & Jai Gallery, among others.

Similarly situated at the intersection of philosophy, technology, and the politics of environmentalism, May’s writings aim at a continual articulation of the conditions surrounding the contemporary design fields. His most recent book, Signal. Image. Architecture  (Columbia, 2019), contemplates the psychosocial effects of transmissible electronic images, and their consequences for architecture and urbanism.

 

 

Facing the nation’s largest-ever infrastructure investment, GSD students ask: Who stands to benefit from a less car-centric LA?

UPDATE, 10/18/19: The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) has awarded the project Mobility As Equality: Building Towards the Olympic/ Post-Olympic LA Transit (profiled below) the 2019 Award of Excellence in the Analysis and Planning Category of its annual ASLA Student Awards . Read more about the project and its design team (Amanda Ton, WeiHsiang Chao, Xin Qian) in the following feature.

There’s a movement underway in Los Angeles to rediscover public spaces, to reconsider the city’s focus on cars, freeways, and single-family homes, and to engage public transit as an integral rather than supplementary urban element. It’s a moment of reckoning that’s being fueled, in part, by the largest infrastructure investment in United States history: In passing Measure M in 2016, Los Angeles approved an additional sales tax that will provide $120 billion for new rail lines in the LA Metro system by 2047.

In other words, Angelenos voted to tax themselves in order to fund and improve the city’s public transit. It’s a noteworthy gesture from the “car capital” of the country, an acknowledgment that a growing metropolis needs good public transit. Rather than continual expansion at its edges, LA is dedicated to strengthening its urban core.

In 2016, in the glow of Measure M and its milder predecessor, Measure R—which Measure M extends in perpetuity—then–Los Angeles Times architecture critic (now LA’s chief design officer) Christopher Hawthorne declared that the city is on the threshold of being the “Third LA.” According to Hawthorne, the First LA spanned the late 1800s through World War II, and the Second LA, with its stereotypes of car culture and suburban sprawl, covered the rest of the 20th century.

The Third LA is interested in the model of a shared city, with the future of its streets, its public transit, and its people forming the heart of this equation. The city has reignited the pioneering, growth-minded spirit of the First LA and has grown newly interested in the physical infrastructure, especially the streets, of the Second LA. Many of the concerns inherent to the Third LA center on public space, including those many streets and highways, as the city grows and changes and as it finds itself needing to accommodate more people.

Yet even as LA progresses toward a more transit-oriented future, it is simultaneously a battleground for private-sector technologies like ride- and bike-share companies and autonomous vehicles. And accompanying the city’s growth are the familiar problems of higher cost of living, displacement, and economic anxiety.

In the spring of 2019, Future of Streets in Los Angeles—Andres Sevtsuk’s Harvard Graduate School of Design studio—examined how LA might maximize the opportunities at stake. The studio sought strategies to creatively optimize investment in public transit in an increasingly hot market for private-sector services. How can technology complement, rather than compete with, public transit? And, as LA reshapes itself, can it improve equity, sustainability, and quality of life as it aggressively redevelops its transit systems?

Sevtsuk and students met with stakeholders across the city. They held closed-door meetings with the Department of City Planning, LA Metro, and other agencies. They workshopped and codeveloped proposals with members of the LA community, and experimented with LA’s terrain with help from Renault-Nissan’s Future Lab and Ford’s Smart Mobility Team. The ensuing dialogue and proposals get to the heart of how Americans view transit decisions and civic investment, drawing instructive contrasts between simple, shovel-ready fixes and visionary, fundamental transformation.

Streets Are for People

Sevtsuk focused the early weeks of Future of Streets in Los Angeles on LA’s historical and contemporary contexts, in which roadways and highways loom large. From this, studio members Sunmee Lee and Yuebin Dong asked: With such an expansive, interconnected system of highways, and one that’s so ingrained in Angelenos’ minds, why not start our current transit conversations there?

Dong and Lee’s proposal, “Highways as Public Transit Infrastructure,” reimagines the Los Angeles County highway system as the backbone of a public-transit network. The project would repurpose HOV-Express lanes on area highways as a series of bus stations, with local “Micro-Dash” connector shuttles to ease transfers between the new, highway-based stations and existing Metro hubs, ultimately creating almost door-to-door commutes. New transit stations along the highway would gradually be enhanced with community-focused amenities, resolving a long-standing frustration over the often uncomfortable, neglected bus stations that LA residents are accustomed to.

The proposal aims to expand the advantages of the already existing system, as well as the new Measure M budget, to more and more people. Dong and Lee crunched the numbers, looking at demographic, financial, and traffic-flow data. As an alternative to the purely rail-focused investments of Measure M, their highway-based bus system would achieve 5.4 times more new transit coverage for LA County and its residents, and would reach 3.5 times more low-income households—all under the same budget as Measure M’s current plan.

Dong and Lee seek to promote both equitable and efficient mobility by fundamentally reconsidering how the highway is used. In bringing transit access to more people—especially low-income families—they also seek restorative justice, addressing the aggressive red-lining and dismantling of neighborhoods that accompanied the highway boom of the mid-1900s. “Since the automobile era began, transportation injustice in LA has been reinforced,” Dong and Lee write. “Our proposal suggests bringing public transit to the places in most need, while avoiding the displacement of existing communities.”

Part of their vision springs from a workshop the studio conducted in February in LA, alongside the Renault-Nissan Future Lab. Studio members were assigned fictional identities, fixed budgets, and an errand to accomplish by using various transit modes. Students realized how difficult—if not impossible—it can be for many Angelenos to carry on their daily lives with such unpredictable, expensive, or inconvenient transit options.

“This project offers an incredible potential social experiment,” said Josefina Aguilar, Executive Director of T.R.U.S.T. South LA. (Aguilar and her colleagues held an afternoon-long, community-exchange workshop with Sevtsuk and the studio at T.R.U.S.T. South LA’s offices in February.) With Dong and Lee’s plan, Aguilar was especially excited about the opportunity to solicit community input toward station-based amenities, imagining possibilities like street vendors operated by local residents.

A map of LA bus routes can resemble a pile of spaghetti more than a structured system. Bringing rail-system regularity to a bus schedule, while also opening highways to uses beyond cars and trucks, allows Dong and Lee to alter how passengers weigh buses in their transit decisions. By layering transit atop LA’s extensive system of highways, the designers aim to bring the transit to where people already live, or where their travel routes currently weave, instead of the more common method of trying to coax people toward where transit hubs are placed.

Similarly, Dong and Lee’s colleagues Andrew Yuzhou Peng and Solomon Green-Eames sought ways to revisit the densify-around-transit typology. Their proposal, “Change the Street, Transform the City,” brings bus rapid transit (or BRT) closer to community centers where density and amenities already exist, and seeks targeted, community-led street transformations, coupled with increased affordable housing, to create more walkable and bikeable neighborhoods.

Green-Eames and Peng consider LA a city of dense sprawl, one that is running out of the land that has sustained dreams of single-family homes on a hillside. They explain that LA’s urban form does not respond well to population density: With commercial land use that is based largely on strip malls, walking is inconvenient, and adding more people to the mix only compounds these difficulties. While Green-Eames and Peng see a current model of intense development around LA Metro hubs, they observe that those very transit centers aren’t necessarily where the actual cultural centers of neighborhoods may be.

“The existing model of transit-oriented development has failed to create truly walkable communities,” they write. “Our project proposes an alternative approach, through radical community-driven transformations, seeking to imagine how existing neighborhood commercial centers could become mixed-use, dense, and walkable centers, connected via a network of transit boulevards.”

Zooming in on LA’s Jefferson Park and the nearby Crenshaw station on the LA Metro’s Expo Line, Green-Eames and Peng propose starting with low-cost, tactical, street-based recreational facilities by 2021, and making these temporary transformations permanent by 2027. Then, with a goal date of 2047, they propose inclusionary upzoning, adding new incentives to 2016’s Measure JJJ, which lays out affordable housing mandates and hiring restrictions around residential projects that require a zoning change or an amendment to the city’s General Plan.

More broadly, Green-Eames and Peng also propose a network of “transit boulevards” that include bike lanes, ride-share pick-up spots, and linear parks, all in one. The underlying concept is connecting transit hubs like Crenshaw to others, making it easier to hop from center to center via bus or bike.

Like Dong and Lee, Green-Eames and Peng seek to reimagine what “street” means: They envision the street as a more dynamic, urbane element, rather than just a conduit of cars and cars alone. They believe it can be a public platform that holds and enables a variety of uses, ideally maximizing both the efficiency and accessibility of travel and the quality of community life.

In adopting this view of “complete streets”—prioritizing pedestrians, bicyclists, and other users beyond single-passenger cars—these designers engage in an approach that has been taking root at the LA city-planning level. In 2016, LA’s Department of City Planning (LADCP) updated the city’s Mobility Plan 2035 with a stronger emphasis on the plan’s transportation section, which had last been touched in the late 1990s. Over the last two decades, new developments including bike-shares, ride-shares, scooters, and other mobility patterns have arisen alongside traditional transit systems, motivating city planners to apply a complete streets approach. What do pedestrian crossings and sidewalks need to include, for instance, in order to make people feel safe whether they’re inside a car or not?

“For the so-called ‘car capital’ to have policies that embrace complete streets, was a fundamental change,” said Claire Bowin, Senior City Planner at LADCP, during the studio’s February meeting in LA. “The city has been going through these growing pains—which is why this is a good moment for Andres and the studio to be here.”

Transit as Civic Instigator

In reinventing LA streets, Sevtsuk’s studio gestures toward a fundamental reconsideration of the city’s elements, where public and civic spaces emerge as the glue between those elements. With an eye to the value this can add, various Future of Streets proposals pursue transit as a way to provoke new investment, both financial and cultural, in LA’s public space.

“We could fit several Central Park–sized spreads in LA if we really wanted to,” observes the studio’s Bailun Zhang. Zhang and his partner, Lanchun Zeng, proposed “Less Parking, More City” as both the title and the mission of their LA reinvention. The design students investigated the LA Metro’s Expo Line—and specifically its Pico station—considering how many of the virtually countless parking spaces along the line could be reclaimed as public space, affordable housing, or other civic amenities. Zeng and Zhang started thinking beyond just parking spaces: Where does affordable housing exist today in LA, and where is it needed?

At the meeting with the LADCP in February, Sevtsuk’s studio learned that, as LA’s population continues to grow—currently at 4 million people, the population is projected to hit nearly 7 million by 2050—housing policy is of paramount concern. So Zeng and Zhang built housing into their formula, and also focused on LA’s “green-space deserts” and other critical needs, and how these needs might be addressed with pocket-park–sized parcels of land.

A common obstacle for both housing and transit development is displacement: Establishing a new transit station often makes the surrounding neighborhood more appealing, increasing demand and prices and forcing longtime residents to move out. The question of how to balance the interests of community members and real-estate developers is an essential component of the dialogue about urban development today. Students Dora Du and Sangyoon Lee analyzed current housing and zoning policy and proposed a clear mechanism through which to reinvest rising housing profits into the community. Their proposal, “Mutualism: A win-win model for communities and developers,” would subject new housing to new tax rates, and would accumulate the revenue into a fund to be collected and distributed through a community board.

Olympic Potential Looms

Amid LA’s continued expansion, one significant catalyst looms in the coming decade, promising economic growth but also possible displacement. With the 2028 Summer Olympics approaching, LA has the potential to inspire civic pride and engagement, but it also faces the complex questions of building and maintaining a massive amount of infrastructure—along with the parallel concern over what happens to all that infrastructure when the party’s over.

The city has some experience with this. The 1984 Summer Olympics instigated an extraordinary regional cooperation effort, in which Metro provided more than 500 buses to create a temporary transit network. Might the upcoming Olympics, and the infrastructural lift it inevitably demands, provide stronger—and sustained—momentum for transit-oriented growth?

Amanda Ton, Ollie Xian, and Weihsian Chao think so. Their Future of Streets proposal, “Mobility as Equality: Building Towards the Olympic/Post-Olympic LA Transit,” leverages the Olympics as a means of coordinating transit planning and public housing development, eyeing the street design around the Expo Line’s Vermont station. The team argues that a mismatch between transit and its users has fueled low transit ridership: Many low-income transit riders have been displaced from transit hubs and forced outward, into the city’s margins and into cars, further marginalizing disadvantaged communities.

Anticipating 2028, they envision a next-generation bus system that can persist well after the last medals are awarded, while newly built Olympic housing is converted into public housing, managed by LA’s Housing Authority. They look to London’s 2012 Summer Olympics as a precedent: In London, so-called Olympic Villages were converted into affordable housing and integrated into transit rather than separated from it.

Transit that Connects, not Divides

As part of its goal of improving public transit, the Future of Streets studio was also interested in bettering the transit experience itself. Linyu Liu and Finn Vigeland looked at specific modal connections, transfers, and the time spent waiting for each—a tall order, given that two-thirds of LA Metro users make at least one transfer each trip. They saw transfer points that are neglected and difficult to use: Many lack signage, seating, or shelter, especially stations along the Expo Line, which runs down the center of major LA boulevards. A number of these stations are also very narrow and force transit users to cross wide streets and dodge traffic. They look and feel like afterthoughts because, in many cases, they are. Liu and Vigeland argue that such poor experiences, specifically with transferring between modes or lines, may explain why cross-modal transit use is so low in the LA Metro system. “A lot of small details can add up to a bad overall experience,” says Vigeland.

The history of LA’s development has generally clung to an east-west axis, and many boulevards and transit lines run in this direction today. But LA has become a more polycentric city, and north-south bus routes serve as vital circulators for huge numbers of Angelenos. Liu and Vigeland thus isolated north-south transit—which, incidentally, underlies many of Measure M’s proposals—as a principal need.

After weeks of mapping and data analysis, they targeted Vermont Avenue for its heavy bus use, as well as its interaction with the Expo Line. Their proposal, “Re-Designing the Multi-Modal Transfer System,” eases those transfer pain points: Flexible-use lanes would accommodate ride-shares and commercial loading areas; ramps would maintain an even grade between station platforms and sidewalks; and pedestrian and bicyclist crossing zones would be established. Their proposal reduces some of the seemingly minor, but collectively inhibitive, barriers to transferring lines or modes.

Investing in Transit for the Benefit of Everybody

For LA’s transit future, some of the most pressing questions are related to access: Who are “transit users,” and who might become transit users if it can improve, by becoming more efficient, accessible, comfortable, and reliable? The Future of Streets studio and their proposals aim to enhance the transit experience, while creating a new, more equitable, more accessible version of the LA that millions of people have chosen as home.

In all the dreams and visions of what transit can look like, in LA and beyond, LADCP’s Bowin distilled the equation succinctly. “We went out to voters and said, ‘When you pay more, this is what you’ll get in return.’”

In the wake of Measure M’s passing, LA Metro produced an advertising campaign that’s now mounted throughout the system’s stations. “There’s a movement in LA,” the text-only posters read. “It’s a movement fueled by people coming together to create the best life possible for our families and our communities. Our movement is leaving the smog and stress behind, saying Yes to dozens of new transportation projects that connect us to jobs, schools and opportunities to explore everything LA has to offer.”

“Yes, there’s a movement in LA,” the ad concludes. “We are the movement. And our time is now.”

Radical geometry: With Haus Gables, Jennifer Bonner proposes a new urban typology

On the first day of the construction of Haus Gables—after 11 trucks had ferried 87 panels of cross-laminated timber from Savannah to Atlanta—Jennifer Bonner was stuck in Cambridge due to a last-minute travel snafu. So she watched her first built project come to life via security camera from a thousand miles away.

“The whole thing looked like an architectural model being assembled in place,” the designer recalls. “If you squint your eyes, watching the panels being installed at that scale, one could imagine, ‘This is the way we cut up materials—chipboard, foam core, and whatever else is on our desks—and make models.’”

Sitting on an 18-by-55-foot floor plate in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward, Haus Gables represents the third physical iteration of a research agenda that Bonner has been pursuing at her firm, MALL , over the past decade: What happens when architects start with the roof? If we let roof typology organize the rest of a building, might we start generating new forms of urbanism?

It’s a concept Bonner first presented in her 2014 exhibition, “Domestic Hats.” After studying roof typologies throughout Atlanta, she cataloged 50 different houses and milled their roofs as foam “hats.” Her next iteration, “The Dollhaus,” presented a 1-to-12-scale wooden model of a suburban home topped by oddly gabled rooflines. In producing each exhibition, Bonner researched, metabolized, then reframed the common language of suburban roofs, in a nod to the unseen complexities and cultural residues embedded within something so ordinary.

Haus Gables is “The Dollhaus” brought to life. And it was an enormous risk: Bonner took on the role of designer-as-developer-as-financier, shouldering all project liability on her own.

“The process was actually incredibly liberating,” Bonner says. “This is what the architect should be doing: building, but also conceptualizing architecture, with one foot in academia, in experimentation.”

MALL is an acronym for “Mass Architectural Loopty Loops,” and with Haus Gables, Bonner has produced the sort of project that the firm promises and celebrates. She began by taking three pairs of gables and organizing them such that, from the front-curbside view of the house, the roof appears at a typical gable pitch. However, thanks to a clever rotation, the observer sees that the traditional gable outline is a bit clipped, making something feel slightly off.

The underside of this multi-gabled roof is a folded, geometric ceiling on the home’s interior. In the interest of revealing this ceiling geometry, Bonner manipulated cross-laminated timber (CLT) like a piece of origami. This non-traditional approach required a rethink of the horizontal structural systems common to roofs, like the eave-to-eave connections that often double as an attic or loft floor. Bonner tackled this challenge alongside Haus Gables’s project engineer Hanif Kara, a longtime mentor as well as Professor in Practice of Architectural Technology at the GSD and design director of structural engineering firm AKT II.

“With Haus Gables, there are no ties in the roof, but the roof’s form acts as a shell structure through the folding of the CLT,” Kara observes. “This system is rigid in itself. We then have to take care of externally applied horizontal forces, such as wind.”

It is from this roof geometry that the inflections and space of the rest of the house follow, allowing Bonner to max out the modestly-sized floor plate. This effect, in turn, satisfied Bonner’s ambition to create wide, airy volumes within the 2,200-square-foot space. A viewer can see up to the ceiling from a few points on the first floor, and the inverse applies on the second floor: Someone standing there can see a periphery of spaces on the ground level.

“It’s four times bigger inside than it is outside,” says Mack Scogin, in an interview with Metropolis. Scogin is Bonner’s colleague at Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he is the Kajima Professor in Practice of Architecture. “As we say in the South, she’s somethin’ else.”

The CLT panels composing Haus Gables’s roof were among the 87 that Bonner had flip-milled at KLH in Austria. Each panel was designed digitally to the millimeter—Bonner checked the final design file by hand six different times—and numbered one through 87—“like cartoon panels,” Bonner observes.

“Precise industrialized off-site manufacture is one of the biggest advantages we have, since we have to have fully drawn, designed, and calculated systems, helping us avoid lack of fit on site,” says Kara. “This means there is no casualness at all in the binding of macro and micro detailing of connections. The brute force of computation and digital manufacturing is now so powerful it allows us to examine forensically the structural stresses and manufacturing constraints all in one model. This collapsing of process is all very exciting.”

After milling, the CLT panels were loaded onto three open-top containers and shipped to the Port of Savannah in Georgia, where they were packed onto hot-shot trailers heading to Atlanta. All 11 trucks were staged to receive and deliver the panels in the order in which they were to be installed, with a crane on site ready to lift the panels into place.

Bonner smiles when confessing that nearly every subcontractor who walked through the door of Haus Gables immediately scratched their head. She explains this was because not many were accustomed to working with CLT—plumbers and electricians wondered where their pipes or wires would go within walls that are solid. But perhaps the real issue was that they couldn’t find the front door.

“Yeah, there’s no front door,” Bonner admits. Instead, visitors enter through the garage, a bright-white, glossy space that reads more art gallery than automobile storage. From first glance, Haus Gables defies ordinary expectations of “house.” Faux finishes dash across the interior, with material elements including vinyl, terrazzo, and ceramic tile placed like massive stickers on the CLT walls. The master bedroom is set off by gray vinyl that resembles concrete; the dining room is bathed in a yellow vinyl that looks like marble; the kitchen is all black terrazzo. The CLT walls were whitewashed to achieve a milky hue, in effect freezing them in time to avoid yellowing.

Things get weirder on the outside. Eschewing wood siding, Bonner sought an abstract material for the exterior facades, wanting something ordinary that could be found in big-box stores. She settled on cementitious stucco. On two facades, she applied a brick stencil, an eighth of an inch thick, to the final trowel of stucco. Then, at the last second of application, she blew millions of tiny glass beads—the material used in reflective traffic paint—in a “dash finish,” creating a shimmering, reflecting façade.

In other words, the exterior is composed of fake bricks that shine like diamonds. Here, Bonner references Mary Corse, an American artist fascinated by perceptual phenomena and light, who “painted” with glass beads in the 1970s.

“I wanted to be just a little devious,” Bonner observes, noting she was unsure how brightly a 55-foot wall would shine until she saw it in action. The phenomenon doesn’t photograph: “You’ve got to be there to see it,” she says.

These various elements serve basic representational purposes, but they also get at a Southern tradition that fascinates Bonner: faux finishing, a practice with historical roots in the American South—originally a manifestation of a “fake it ’til you make it” philosophy. “There’d been an idea of, ‘We can’t afford certain materials, so let’s paint it, or apply an appliqué, or get a really thin veneer of real material,’” she says. “This was part and parcel of the notion of the house as built in the South.”

A native Southerner, Bonner waxes poetic about an early-career experience she had in deep-rural western Alabama with Rural Studio’s Samuel Mockbee, who instilled in her the notion that there can be immense intellectual value in nearly any place. She also points to Southern projects like Paul Rudolph’s Tuskegee Chapel and Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam’s Clayton County Library—projects of profound experimentation that lie outside today’s architectural canon.

“There are all kinds of radical projects that have happened in the South,” Bonner observes, “but that aren’t a main reference in our teaching. They are these very specific, radical experiments. I think they motivated me to create more of a dialogue around architecture in the South.”

Take Haus Gables out of its Old Fourth Ward site and, with its all-white exterior, it may read as high-modern, Japanese residential. Or, with its monolithic, overhang-free exterior, something from Switzerland. The dominance of CLT evokes Scandinavia. But we’re in Atlanta—the “Dirty South,” as Bonner reminds me. (She’s authored a book series entitled A Guide to the Dirty South, with editions focused on Atlanta and New Orleans.)

“These materials, these stickers, these colors, this kind of pop, the faux finishes—these were my ways of shaking things up a little bit,” Bonner says. “If I would say one thing about the South, it’s that it’s complicated. There needed to be a lot going on with the house to make it complicated.”

In her office, Bonner shows me a drone-filmed video of Haus Gables at dusk. As the lens pans upward, Haus Gables looks more and more like a model, sitting in front of an Atlanta skyline largely shaped by another of Bonner’s Southern design heroes, John Portman.

“I admire the invention of a typology—the super atrium—out of downtown Atlanta, and of Portman working away on his kind of architect-developer model in inventing things,” Bonner says. “He was inventing, and I’m trying to invent. To build this in Atlanta was a very important move for me.”

Developing and constructing Haus Gables involved a fair share of 20-hour days, in which Bonner would travel from Cambridge to Atlanta and then back, allowing her to teach studio at the GSD while also leading her inaugural built project to fruition. If Haus Gables is conceived as a model, a representational device, then it proved instructive for both its architect and her students.

“My students knew what I was undertaking, knew how big it was, and were so excited to hear about the process, to see a member of the junior faculty building this project,” Bonner says. “They asked me to show them the behind the scenes, the difficulties of doing such a project, what was I coming up against. I wasn’t giving them an academic lecture about a house; I was giving the down-and-dirty version.”

In a continuous braiding of research, practice, pedagogy, and mentorship, Bonner and Kara are currently planning a Spring 2020 option studio entitled “Mass Timber and the Scandinavian Effect.” Haus Gables stands as only one of a handful of CLT-composed houses in the US (the first, in Seattle, was designed by Susan Jones, a fellow GSD alumna). With Haus Gables as a real-life model, Bonner’s experimentation with CLT, like her decision to design from the roof, questions the very rudiments of how we design.

“One interesting thing that Hanif and I have always been discussing is how this house is really a proof of concept,” Bonner says. “To build a domestic hat at one-to-one, out of an innovative wood product like CLT, in a place that has not yet built with it—there’s a lot to figure out. It’s literally throwing all of our energy and resources into building a proof of concept.

“Maybe I’m demonstrating or rehearsing the same kind of thing the students do, which is to have a position on architecture, an agenda, a thesis,” she continues. “Work it conceptually and intellectually, and then try to deliver it. It’s like working in studio, where you’re trying to dig at the conceptual thesis of an architectural project, and then you culminate in a final review. Haus Gables is the culmination of a body of work that I’ve been working on for the past five years.”

Work in Progress: Melissa Green’s future Captiva Island

Melissa Green (MLA ’19) describes her final project for the option studio “The Monochrome No-image” led by Rosetta S. Elkin, spring 2019.

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.