Vanishing Soundscapes is a stark but beautiful reminder of the fragility of the urban soundscape

According to a recent report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the world’s ecosystem are at an “unprecedented” level of decline. “We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health, and quality of life worldwide,” commented Sir Robert Watson, the IPBES Chair.

The report’s findings are alarming: One million animals and plants are threatened with extinction, among them nearly half of all amphibian species, 10% of insects, and 33% of reef-forming corals; pollution of the oceans has caused the formation of 400 “dead zones” totaling over 245,000 square kilometers; raw timber production has increased by 45% since 1970; and numerous other unsettling statistics.

Prominent among those voices suggesting ways to avert this human-caused destruction is George Monbiot, a weekly columnist for The Guardian and author of books including Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. Monbiot is an ardent supporter of rewilding, the process of ecological restoration through reintroducing species to environments which were once their homes as a means of re-cultivating our natural world, the consequences of which include lowering carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. In a 2013 TED Talk, he discusses, as an example, the catalogue of positive changes that arose when wolves were brought back to Yellowstone National Park. The transition may not even be a shock to the existing ecologies, he details, because in many cases, various instances of support for these long-absent megafaunas may already exists. Consider Europe, where hippopotamuses, lions, and rhinoceroses once roamed. “You can still see the shadows of these great beasts in our current ecosystems,” he observes and details flora whose current forms can be traced back to a time of cohabitation with megafauna, such as the still-thriving deciduous tree species that can survive great bark loss because of a possible adaption caused by European elephants. Yet these visible inscriptions of extinction have not motivated enough people to act.

This failure makes the work of Elitza Koeva (DDes ’21) and Spyridon Ampanavos (DDes ’20) that much more valuable, as it creates an iteration of the shadows to which Monbiot refers—not through visual stimuli but through sound. For the three-day ARTS FIRST Festival held earlier this month, Koeva and Ampanavos designed a four-channel audio installation entitled Vanishing Soundscapes that was affixed to a tree in Harvard Yard. Each speaker played birdsong soundscapes taken from collections of recordings at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology which Koeva combined, manipulated, and subtly distorted into 154-second compositions. Each of the 48 birds represented, from the Eastern Meadowlark to the Ovenbird , are species local to the area. In addition, Ampanavos designed an app with which visitors to the tree could scan playing cards bearing the images of the birds and generate their respective soundscape compositions in random combinations, and in unison with anyone else’s devices if they were not using headphones. The app creates a personal aspect to the performance, Koeva says, because through your devices “you become these birds—the sounds we are going to lose.”

By using only species that still exist, the work acts as a cautionary, but not pessimistic, injunction to participants about the precariousness of the these soundscapes.

On the birdsong experienced in Vanishing Soundscapes

Sound and the emotional reactions it can generate might wrest people from the stupor created by the bombardment of negative news, and predominantly visual stimuli, regarding the health of the planet. “There is a lot of information about the consequences of global warming and the rate that our habitats are disappearing, but we are not acknowledging it because we’ve become resilient and numb,” Koeva comments. “I want to address this [issue] in a different way so that it’s more surprising and subtle, that you feel it more deeply. Sound is ephemeral. It’s also a sculpture, with time as a medium.”

A major inspiration throughout Koeva’s oeuvre is composer John Cage . In this piece, she drew on his use of chance operations which allowed her to remove herself from the piece to a great extent and gave her an opportunity to speak with anyone engaging with it. “Some people said that while approaching the site, they could hear sounds and knew something was going on but not what exactly. Then when they approached the tree, they felt they needed to close their eyes,” she recounts. “Some came to meditate. Some returned many times. Many children climbed the tree. On the grass, we put several banana-fiber stools, and people just came to sit on them. With those small interventions, the space become activated.” And humans were not the only animals attracted to the work. “Birds were quite interested and coming to the tree, too.”

While each birdsong that played on Harvard Yard comes from species that are still alive, the actual birds’ absence turned the soundtrack into a haunting soundscape, a ghostly series of calls that both entice us towards a variation of a world that exists while also reminding us of that world’s fragility and impermanence. Another of Koeva’s inspirations, the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, speaks to a phenomenon in cinema that also applies to Vanishing Soundscapes: “As soon as the sounds of the visible world are removed from [film], or that world is filled, for the sake of the image, with extraneous sounds that don’t exist literally, or if the real sounds are distorted so that they no longer correspond with the image—then the film acquires a resonance.”

Koeva’s recordings draw on birdsong captured during multiple times of day, in separate seasons, and from different birds of the same species, all joined together by her in a way that collapses time and space. In this way, the performance is not only evocative but utopic in that it creates, by virtue of sound, a kind of three-dimensional no-place in which these birds seem to thrive. In the future, Koeva says that she might experiment with sounds of birds that have become extinct, which would add another layer of impermanence to the piece. But by using only species that still exist, the work acts as a cautionary, but not pessimistic, injunction to participants about the precariousness of the these soundscapes, and it is up to each person to determine which outcome we will hear in our collective future.

Listen to birdsong field recordings used in Vanishing Soundscapes:

Instigations, speculations, and platforms: Dean Mohsen Mostafavi’s lasting contribution to Harvard Graduate School of Design

Mohsen Mostafavi’s deanship has been booked-ended by publications: The first was Ecological Urbanism and the last, or almost the last, was Platform 11: Setting the Table. The latter now sets the table for the new Chair of the Architecture program and the new Dean of Harvard Graduate School of Design. Between the two books, there have been approximately 90 publications produced during Dean Mostafavi’s tenure, ranging from expansive studies and scholarly research to internal registrations of student and faculty work at the school. There have been, for example, 11 Platform publications, which are annual reviews of projects across the spread of the GSD’s various programs. These platforms are proposals and ledges or viewing points into the pedagogical work underway in Gund Hall trays and classrooms.

The arc between Ecological Urbanism and Platform 11: Setting the Table has been central to Mohsen’s leadership. It maps his interests in the scope of contemporary urbanisms and reflects both his administrative and creative attention to the intellectual life of the school. It also encompasses changes made at Harvard under Drew Faust’s presidency, and the earliest publications were inaugurated in the shaky period following the 2008 global financial crises. The publications are a series of linked analogs for how the GSD might look if it took the form of a book. Ranging from periodic journals to 700-page volumes, each book is meticulously designed, filled with drawings and images, attentive to civic responsibilities, diversity, and academic integrity, supportive of evidence-based and theoretical scholarship that fosters broad spectrum inquiries, and funded. They are, above all, hospitable to the professions they call upon.

What of the 88 other publications? Mohsen made a diagram for me. He first drew a circle and put the GSD inside it. A solar system, so to speak. From this center many arrows radiate. One arrow goes to a circle saying “Platform books,” another to a circle for “journals,” referring to the Harvard Design Magazine , among others (the last issue under his watch is called “Inside Scoop” and is due out in the spring of 2019). There are arrows to circles for New Geographies—#10, entitled “Fallow,” is coming out later this month—and “Polemics,” for books on ethics and politics. There are 26 publications in the “Studio Report” series including three on Jakarta, Manila, and Kuala Lumpur regarding Asia’s commitment to larger projects, and three transitional studies on China, published together as Christopher C. M. Lee’s Common Frameworks: Rethinking the Developmental City in China. “Transforming Omishima,” was a collaboration between GSD Studio Abroad in Tokyo with Toyo Ito and his students to restore the spiritual presence of Omishima. There are also studies of architects such as Kenzō Tange and John Portman. And more.

The research resulting from many of the projects, which the books are distillations of, has been compiled and archived in the Dean’s office. The publications thus register a decade of the GSD’s collective research into deep urbanism. They are not ends in themselves. As Mohsen wrote in Ethics of the Urban: “It is in part the responsibility of the designer to imagine alternative ways of actualizing the relationship between various dimensions of society. To understand both the given condition of things and their potential transformation, however, requires constant collaborations and reciprocities between the users and the designer.” Another manifestation of collective intellectual hospitality.

Mohsen mentioned, in an interview, that when he became Dean in 2008 his first action was to reorganize the program offices—Landscape Architecture, Architecture, Urban Design, Planning—to bring them closer to each other. His next action was to reorganize the school in relation to the University, and his third was to point the GSD collectively toward global engagement with the pressing issues of our day. He introduced this third initiative through Ecological Urbanism. Urbanism—urban design and urban planning—is often subordinated to architecture programs in large schools. The first degree program in Urban Design in the world was instituted at the GSD by Josep Lluís Sert, a Spanish architect and city planner who was the last president of CIAM and Dean of the GSD from 1953-1969. This legacy plus the contemporary urgency of global crises—climate change, migrations, political turmoil, urban infrastructures and housing—prompted Mohsen, in concert with members of the GSD faculty and colleagues both in and outside Harvard, to orient the school toward a different urbanism, now aligned with the ecological.

“In… the urban,” he wrote, “as a physical artifact, is the built representation not just of our creative and technical knowledge but also of our societal values.” Citing Chantal Mouffe’s concept of “agonistic pluralism,” Mohsen argued that the urban artifact provides a “crucial setting for promoting democratic values.” The ecological part of the project refers not only to the impact of climate change but also to the vast networks of energy, transportation, and financial systems that continue to expand and diversify definitions of urban and rural landscapes, political borders, peoples and the academic assemblies that shape practices such as architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning. The ecological urbanism initiative eventually altered, in particular, the DNA of the Landscape Architecture program at Harvard and enlisted other programs in large-scale, cross-disciplinary studies of cities, architecture, infrastructures, technological and socio-political forces. Landscape architecture, in Mohsen’s words, now negotiates “an increasingly important zone between architecture and urbanism.” To accommodate new subject matter arising from the GSD’s exposure and participation in the “global,” other degree programs—the Doctor of Design and Master of Design programs—were redirected, and several new programs were created. In Instigations: Engaging Architecture Landscape and the City, Mohsen writes that the “academy must be at the forefront of new ideas for rethinking our habitus, the built environment” and that “[s]uch a task cannot be achieved without rethinking the roles, responsibilities, and potential impact of each discipline.” Such a task depended on an unprecedented commitment of the GSD to design research. This concentrated shift in orientation resonated through architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanist programs and practices everywhere.

 

There are different kinds of deans. Some remain in the background of a school, tending to its financial and social well-being. Others, like Mohsen, enact ideas about the overall intellectual vitality of a school as part of their administrative work. Deans are custodians of the standing of their school in relation to other schools, but the GSD, like Harvard, is an ocean liner, as I have heard people say. It is a large machine that keeps its engines in top condition and goes ever forward. Mohsen’s stewardship thus did not directly or specifically concern the status of the school. Instead, he used his Deanship, and the GSD’s already strong presence, to ask what the school was going to do, what the school could and should do, for Harvard on the one hand, and in response to the issues of its time on the other. What Mohsen meant by bringing the GSD to the attention of the University was to “make itself useful” to Harvard at large.

When Mohsen returned to the GSD to become its Dean, he said it felt like coming home. He had been a professor in the school earlier, before he became Chairman of the Architectural Association in London and, later, Dean of the School of Architecture at Cornell University. Being useful to Harvard was, thus, an extension of Mohsen’s familiarity with the university. He felt that the GSD had become insular, which can happen to professional schools in large research universities. Further, Harvard, under President Faust, was interested in revitalizing the arts, diversifying the university, increasing financial aid for students and building common spaces for the campus community. There were, as a result, numerous joint projects with University, including the Science Center Plaza, which became an event space, and a new Student Center. Mohsen often facilitated relationships with other departments, centers, and institutes in the university, and served on multiple boards and committees.

Amidst all of Mohsen’s ambitious changes there was a conscious decision not to grow the architecture program per se. Architecture, he says, is the mothership of the school, which it is. Instead he re-balanced the other departments and programs around the nucleus of the architecture program. He encouraged the participation of all the departments in the life of the school, including the Ph.D. program, which is an integral part of the GSD but officially belongs to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. As with other universities and colleges across the United States, the GSD, and Harvard at large, has increasingly been charged with hiring diverse faculty and admitting a more diverse body of students. Mohsen has supported these mandates and worked with the University to change admission and hiring systems. Along with other associates and faculty, he has also increased the role of junior faculty, who represent important generational shifts in architectural and landscape thinking. Mohsen said that he is most proud, both personally and professionally, of his role in fostering a series of conversations and interactions that allowed the school to engage, with intellectual acuity and imagination, with people and places in complex environments throughout the world. And conversely, in the process, to continuously welcome people from many different disciplines and interests into the GSD. Urbanism is a form of hospitality, as is the ecological. Hospitality is not an easy thing to accomplish. It signifies a meaningful relationship to culture and cultures. Various philosophers have argued that this concept, in multifaceted ways, has been worked into science, disciplines, aesthetics, concepts of “open cities,” and ethics. Culture, made manifest in the many forms of hospitality that Mohsen has facilitated—conversations, artifacts, research, design, administrative styles, publications, exchanges, common ground—can transcend socio-political boundaries and offer new horizons. That kind of Dean.

Dr. Catherine Ingraham is lecturer in architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design. She has lectured and published widely in architecture and architectural history and theory. She was an editor, with Michael Hays and Alicia Kennedy, of the critical journal Assemblage and is currently a professor of architecture in the graduate architecture program at Pratt Institute in New York City, a program which she chaired from 1999-2005. Her publications include Architecture, Animal, Human (Routledge Press, London 2006) and Architecture and the Burdens of Linearity (Yale University Press, New Haven 1998).

“You belong here”: Naisha Bradley’s vision for community-building at Harvard Graduate School of Design

When Naisha Bradley was appointed Assistant Dean of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at the Graduate School of Design in 2019, it marked the first time in the school’s history that a role was created solely to ensure that women, underrepresented minorities, first-generation and LGBTQ+ community members–and anyone else from historically underrepresented communities–would have an equal place among the arbiters of culture at the GSD.

In her new role, Bradley serves as an advisor and resource for students, faculty and staff, a position that draws on her 13 years of experience working at Harvard as an advocate for women. As the former director of the Harvard College Women’s Center, an appointment she held since 2015, Bradley had been notable in spearheading the establishment of Harvard College’s Office for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion . Prior to that she worked at the Kennedy School of Government, where she started as a staff assistant and ended her tenure nine years later as program manager of the Women and Public Policy Program. In May 2018, Bradley graduated from the Kennedy School with a Master’s in Public Administration.

“When you come [to Harvard] and you are a person who has never navigated this type of space before, you have to be reminded that it’s possible, even when you’re already here,” she says. In 2016, Bradley was recognized as one of Boston’s 25 Emerging Leaders by Get Konnected and named one of the 40 Under 40 top professionals by the Boston Business Journal. Today, she has a message for current and prospective students: “You belong here. This space is for you. The opportunities that are here are yours.”

You’ve been at Harvard for over 13 years. I imagine that you’ve seen many different facets of the Harvard prism over those years. How does that experience inform your work at the GSD?

I’ve been able to see Harvard from various vantage points, which gives me a different perspective on what’s possible. I know what a student feels like when there’s not a critical mass of their identity in the classroom. I know what it feels like to lead a team that looks different from me, but has a lot of the same desires for advancement and change. I’m a firm believer that in order for Harvard to continue to live up to its promise of excellence we have to create spaces within the Harvard ecosystem where all people can thrive.

You are also Harvard alumnus. There is a powerful photograph of you at commencement wearing a mortar board that reads “I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams.” How does your personal history at the school affect your approach to creating inclusive spaces?

I’m the first Ivy League graduate in my family. Commencement was a really emotional time and moment for us. My family’s from the South, and we’re the descendants of slaves. When my grandparents migrated up north, they couldn’t read. Growing up, I would go to their home and read the newspaper to them, read their bills for them. My mother was a housing activist, but she never graduated from college; my father was a police officer, and he had graduated from high school, then returned to college as an adult learner. They would remind me that there were times our ancestors would have been killed for trying to learn to read. So for me to get to this space, after my parents sacrificed so much to get me through school, and to have grandparents who couldn’t read—I, in that moment of graduation, felt like I had stood on the backs of so many people. I hoped, if my grandparents were looking down on me, that message, “I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams,” would be the first thing they would see from above.

Now, I also attended a historically black college. It’s where I started my higher education experience, and it’s a huge part of what’s made me who I am. But to be at Harvard felt like a familial accomplishment. It wasn’t just about me. It was about my family that went back several generations who wanted to read but couldn’t, who wanted to learn but couldn’t.

When you come here and you are a person who has never navigated this type of space before, you have to be reminded that it’s possible, even when you’re already here. If we’re in spaces where there’s not a critical mass of us here, no matter if you’re LGTBQ-identified, if you’re gender-nonconforming, if you’re black, if you’re Latina, if you’re a woman studying a STEM field—whatever those dynamics are, I think we have to be reminded that we’re living a dream. No matter how many times the world is telling us that it can’t be done, we need to remind ourselves that it is. We’re living it and we have to take it all in.

What changes have you seen during your time at Harvard?

I’m excited about the momentum of change at this moment. The changes that President Bacow has made, some of the appointments that he’s made across schools—I think that those changes have been really inspiring for me, in particular as a black woman.

Beyond that, the changes that we’ve experienced in our society over the last couple of years have prompted a certain level of activism and advocacy, and a lot of people are being positioned to look at hard truths that they might previously have been blind to. It’s no longer about “I’m trying to do something”; it’s now about, “What are you doing?” So I’m excited to be at Harvard during a time where people are focusing on action, not just reaction. Something that excites me here is that I didn’t need to convince anyone that diversity, inclusion, and belonging needed to be here—people see its value, whether faculty, staff, or students.

I recognize that it’s also a challenging time because as a society we’re thinking about how the country has been built, and here at the GSD we’re thinking about building places for the future, engaging with concepts like sustainability and social justice.

When we talk about creating a more just world, a more resilient world—that project requires voices from everyone.

There are so many perspectives on what “just” means. “Justice” requires intentionality. In the pursuit of justice–a just city, a just society–there needs to be an openness and a respect for one another, and a willingness to listen to each other’s definitions of justice, fairness, and progress. As I approach my work, I assume good intent from those I’m engaging and listening to. We have to create the space for more conversations and do so with forgiving ears and with the understanding that people are going to make mistakes.

This is the first time in the GSD’s history that we’ve had a diversity, inclusion, and belonging officer. One of the ways that you’ve framed this position is that it’s a win already for students. What do you mean by that?

The GSD is at a ripe time for change, and this position is going to be a part of the change that’s needed. It’s really important to me that students in particular recognize that their voices are being heard. A lot of different people came together to create this role, and the dean listened to them, and now a person is here ready and willing and dedicated to doing the work. I also want to create a structure so that, long after I’m gone from the GSD, this position will be here and there will be a flexible, adaptable structure here to get this work done, so that it no longer has to land on the backs of people who were doing so many other things to keep this community thriving and flourishing.

As I approach my work, I assume good intent from those I’m engaging and listening to. We have to create the space for more conversations and do so with forgiving ears and with the understanding that people are going to make mistakes.

Naisha Bradley on advocating for diversity, inclusion and belonging at the GSD

This is an inaugural position, and I recognize that the work of diversity, inclusion, belonging has previously been carried out by people who were doing lots of other things, too. So it’s tempting to look at this position and say: Here is what’s been done before and here’s what you should be doing. We can look at this role from that perspective, looking at a deficit—here’s this new administrator, and here’s the work that hasn’t been done and that needs to happen—or we can look and say, “This is the beginning.”

What are some of the core principles or approaches in a role like yours?

Listen to the concerns people have and what they feel like needs to get done. In every space, there’s a system in place that has made it look the way it does, made it operate the way it does. Understand what that system is. Here at the GSD, I have to look and see what kind of culture and system has created some of the challenges we face, and figure out how to penetrate that culture in a way that’s strategic, intentional, and feels respectful.

What about prospective students who are curious about Harvard?

I would say, “You belong here.” I would say, “This space is for you. The opportunities that are here are yours, here for you to take.” I remembered a feeling of imposter syndrome when I was accepted into the Kennedy School. When I got my letter, I didn’t want to tell my parents. I wanted to call admissions first and ask them if it was true. I was in a space where I was like, Could this be for me? But what I’ve learned is, Harvard is no longer for one type of person, and that is the key to true excellence.

In Space, Movement, and the Technological Body, Bauhaus performance finds new context in contemporary technology

More so than any other art form, the theatre creates apocalypses, the destruction of worlds. It provides a means by which audience and performer alike can experience a shock—a transformative event at the level of the unconscious. This fact has long been understood in politics, as director Peter Brook explains in his seminal book, The Empty Space. “Instinctively, governments know that the living event could create a dangerous electricity,” he writes. “The theatre is the arena where a living confrontation can take place. The focus of a large group of people creates a unique intensity—owing to this, forces that operate at all times and rule each person’s daily life can be isolated and perceived more clearly.” The destruction of worlds can beget their creation as well though, as Walter Gropius understood when, in 1919, he formed the Bauhaus school in the immediate aftermath of World War I.

Gropius took inspiration from the medieval practice of craftsmen in the service of building cathedrals. Each with their own specific task, these guilds worked towards a common aesthetic, social, metaphysical, philosophical, and spiritual project: the construction of a symbol of the Kingdom of Heaven, a simulacrum of the world of Paradise in which they one day hoped to reside. The Bauhaus had a similar, though one could argue even grander, goal that extended beyond the walls of a single church. “Let us strive for, conceive, and create the new building of the future that will unite every discipline, architecture and sculpture and painting, and which will one day rise heavenwards from the million hands of craftsmen as a clear symbol of a new belief to come,” Gropius wrote in his manifesto . Championing clean, rational, and formal principles as a foundation for all design in part as a palliative to the devastating effects of war, he and his peers envisaged nothing short of building their own cathedral writ large—the “building of the future” not just as a physical site but as a total reconceptualization of both inner life and society.

The admirable interdisciplinary quality of Gropius’s conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk as a synthesis of architecture, craft, and technology notwithstanding, his project had a critical gap: a lack of attentiveness to the human body itself and the phenomenological experience of space it engenders. It was this absence that the theatre workshop, led primarily by the German painter, sculptor, and choreographer Oskar Schlemmer, would fill when it was introduced into the curriculum in 1921 and given equal importance as other Bauhaus disciplines including sculpture, weaving, and ceramics. In abstract pieces such as Stick Dance and Hoop Dance, Schlemmer’s students donned oversized costumes that, through the performers’ movements within them, renegotiated both their and the spectators’ understanding of space and the body by virtue of a visual confrontation between stage and audience. Schlemmer “transform[ed] dancers and actors into moving architecture,” Gropius commented. Yet despite this and, more broadly, the theatre’s unique means of realizing the Bauhaus’s goals of transforming consciousness, Schlemmer is often marginalized in discussions of the school, now celebrating its 100th anniversary, and the awareness of the body that his work engenders is forgotten in many contemporary design and architecture departments.

As a corrective, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Professor in Residence of Art Design and the Public Domain, and Ani Liu, a Lecturer in Architecture, have led a seminar-workshop at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design this semester entitled “Entanglement of Movement and Meaning: The Architect, Spatial Perception, and the Technological Body” that takes Schlemmer as its chief inspiration.

“The Bauhaus has always been celebrated for being interdisciplinary, but we do find that traditional education in architecture is quite focused on specific history, theory, or technology, and that all forms of art are not often encompassed,” Liu says. “While architects design so much for humans, there’s often little in the curriculum that makes you think about the body—how it moves, how it feels in different configurations and in relation to space. This is where Schlemmer is so interesting, because he brings theatre into architecture education. Take Stick Dance, which [our course] focused on, in which a dancer is strapped with twelve sticks that extend their limbs into space. It speaks to the relationship with the body and the environment around it, and how it feels to have radical extensions of your body.”

An attentiveness to the corporeal was far from aberrant to the early Bauhaus. Johannes Itten, the mystical artist known in particular at the school for his foundational preliminary course on form and color theory, led his students in gymnastics at the start of his classes, as did his colleague Gertrud Grunow, whose calisthenics also incorporated music. Itten, with Georg Muche, popularized amongst their peers the Neo-Zoroastrian religion Mazdaznan, which prescribes breathing and glandular exercises as well as a strict vegetarian diet punctuated by fasting. Lively parties and dances were a regular facet of Bauhaus life, too, with inventive themes such as “Beard, Nose, and Heart” and “Metal.”

Schlemmer’s intervention through his conception of theatre as ultimate Gesamtkunstwerk—the fusion of sound, light, color, form, and movement in his case—was unique at the Bauhaus, however, in that it formulates an ontology centered on the body. “He was on the right track to acknowledge that through bodily experience and experiment we learn who we are, who we are becoming, and who we might or should become,” Wodiczko says.

Schlemmer and others at the Bauhaus believed that industry, nature, and the human shared a form of geometry, and if they could find that, then they could produce new projects that you’ve never seen before.

K. Michael Hays on the history of Bauhaus performance

Schlemmer’s theatre did not succumb to what his fellow Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy criticized as the popular habit of “literary encumbrance.” Moholy-Nagy describes this misguided approach to theatre as “the result of the unjustifiable transfer of intellectualized material from the proper realm of literary effectiveness (novel, short story, etc.) to the stage, where it incorrectly remains a dramatic end in itself.” Rather, Schlemmer grounded his theatre in formal, mathematical principles. He believed that cubical space, like a stage, is governed by a complex geometric web that he referred to as “the invisible linear network of planimetric and stereometric relationships.” The human body also represents a mathematical system which creates a dialogue with that of the cubical space. Balance between them, he writes, arises from “movements, which by their very nature are determined mechanically and rationally. It is the geometry of calisthenics, eurhythmics, and gymnastics.” Space Dance is a quintessential example of this fusion: a precise grid visible on the stage determines the path of movements made by three performers; each dancer travels at a different, regimented pace while wearing exaggerated costumes of different colors, each of which represents a specific archetype; they each also wear uniform, robot-like masks which, with the costumes, hide all individual physical characteristics.

As indicated by the different speeds with which theses dancers moved, Schlemmer also believed that mathematics, color theory, and formal logic cannot alone access those higher truths he considered the theatre capable of illuminating. This rational system was a foundation onto which a no-less important “invisible” system could be mapped: “the laws of organic man”—“heartbeat, circulation, respiration, the activities of the brain and nervous system.” The synthesis of what he termed the Apollonian and Dionysian was encapsulated by his conceptualization of the Tänzermensch, or man-dancer who “obeys the laws of the body as well as the laws of space; he follows his sense of himself as well as his sense of embracing space.” Through this multi-pronged approach, transcendental truths previously unknown could be accessed. As K. Michael Hays, the Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory at the GSD, explains, “Schlemmer and others at the Bauhaus believed that industry, nature, and the human shared a form of geometry, and if they could find that, then they could produce new projects that you’ve never seen before.”

This Dionysian element was central to Schlemmer’s project. “He was very preoccupied by meeting the metaphysical needs of the spectator,” explains choreographer and scholar Debra McCall , who reconstructed the Bauhaus Dances using Schlemmer’s original notes and toured them internationally in the 1980s. “My teacher Martha Graham said that where the dancer stands ready is hallowed ground. She understood the sacred aspect of theatre, and Schlemmer felt very much the same. He believed that walking, standing, and sitting are very serious, and that [just] to see a figure on a stage is serious as well. The Stick Dance, for example, is the extension of the golden mean into space because our anatomical form is based on those proportions; it is sacred geometry in motion. When you see it and the other pieces performed, it’s like being in church. You will not hear a sound in the theatre.”

Perhaps surprising to many, Schlemmer saw play and experimentation as vital to achieving these goals. His characters were meant to be humorous, argues McCall, who discovered the dances’ lightness and their marionette qualities as she rehearsed them. Such a position was a political as much as an aesthetic act in a post-war Germany plagued by poverty and misery as well as the increasing sense of alienation brought about by industrialization and new technologies. “People were unprepared to see how they were going to live through this, but Schlemmer advocated play instead of melancholic reflection,” Wodiczko explains. “He recognized the alienation this world brings but acknowledged that there is not much we can do about these constraints. While we should not be unconditional technoenthusiasts, he argued that we have to try and move on without miserable isolation [from technology] or escapism. Instead, we should do the opposite: appropriate and engage with it, playfully, and try to figure out what good might come about and to what degree we can achieve some sense of ourselves, our abilities and capacities, with what we thought of as constraints.”

Wodiczko sees Schlemmer’s simultaneous skepticism and recognition of a potential crisis, a fugue with optimism and doubt in counterpoint, as a rare gesture and one which poses challenges in a design environment, such as any that inculcate the dominant ethos in Silicon Valley of celebrating new technologies without sufficient critical reflection regarding their effects. “There’s too much about ‘Let’s make it happen! Let’s do it!’” he continues. “That’s a kind of escape from [our] problems into a phantasmatic world of design. [Schlemmer teaches us] that these propositions have to be challenged once you are wearing a design or technology, once you are living with it.” This is especially the case today because, as Liu notes, “our technological landscape has moved beyond industrial and architectural design to the design of biological systems—design not just for the body but design of the body itself.”

The Stick Dance is the extension of the golden mean into space, because our anatomical form is based on those proportions; it is sacred geometry in motion. When you see it and the other pieces performed, it’s like being in church. You will not hear a sound in the theatre.

Debra McCall on the sacred aspects of Oskar Schlemmer’s theatre

This ambivalence dissolves the oft-held preconception that design, and new technology in particular, always works in our favor. “Most of us assume that in any art, the real artist would have a certain freedom of expression and control of materials. But what begins to happen in the Bauhaus is the recognition that the objects of the external world—new material and new experiences—impact the individual and shape them more so than they shape the objects,” Hays says. Take mobile phones, and the cellular networks in which they envelope us, as a contemporary example and one which students explore in Liu and Wodiczko’s course. Hays considers Schlemmer at the forefront of understanding this relationship. “The idea that the object world has a determining force as much as the subject world does, and finding that balance, doesn’t seem to happen in painting in the same way. It happens more when furniture, design, and theatre come together.”

In keeping with his refusal to lapse into melancholy regarding the state of the world, Schlemmer took this critical awareness and employed it towards design that illuminates existential and metaphysical truths not despite of but rather through constraints.

“Liu and Wodiczko’s students and I discovered that in Schlemmer’s dances, the body is so constrained by some of these devices that he applies to the dancer’s body, such as the sticks, that they actually impede movement, and the dancer must recalibrate their own body and adjust to the technology so that it can do what they think it should,” Hays describes. “The awareness of the body and its limits becomes more important than the awareness of the technology supporting the body or facilitating its movements. It’s the interruption and impediments that produce the artistic expression—which is not the current way of thinking about technology.”

“Design does not only solve problems or respond to some preconceived points and needs,” Wodiczko adds. “It can allow us to recognize what we think is natural and what is technological, with our bodies and in the world of artificial objects. Prosthetics are not simply there to ameliorate or perfect some deficient aspect of our body; they also create conditions for us to surprise ourselves with our abilities as humans and to create conditions for us to become new persons and to discover ourselves.” As Schlemmer writes in his essay “Man and Art Figure,” “Everything which can be mechanized is mechanized. The result: our recognition of that which cannot be mechanized.” Technology, playfully if not perversely, becomes a tool like any other by which we can not only reacquaint ourselves with the physical body but develop entirely new understandings of it and, by extension, ourselves.

Prosthetics are not simply there to ameliorate or perfect some deficient aspect of our body; they can allow us to recognize what we think is natural and what is technological, with our bodies and in the world of artificial objects.

Krzysztof Wodiczko on technology as a tool by which to develop new understandings of the body

In these ways, Schlemmer’s choreography and costumes foreground the human element that McCall considers central to his project and which was deteriorating in society through the accelerated rise of machines during his lifetime. “When Schlemmer was creating his dances in the 1920s, he was coming from a time when everything was three-dimensional: they were riding horses; people shaped and spaced their environment around the house, where outside they chopped woods and did things that made them use space with their bodies,” she outlines. “But with the advent of the machine—the lever, the pulley, the gear—the body began to work much more two dimensionally with its environment. And now we’ve lost that dimension as everything becomes digital. Our whole lives are lines, and we’re really using only one dimension in space. But when we’re gardening, cooking, playing with our dogs—when we’re doing pleasurable things—we feel that three-dimensionality that’s lacking in our functional, everyday life.”

The audience becomes aware of this three-dimensionality as well, as the entire space of the stage and its surroundings becomes a total unit, as if a kind of soup, in which movement into and around seemingly empty space is anything but. The sticks that extend from the body alter as much the body as the area around it, and in turn the spectators’ perception of and interaction with that space changes too. This is not theatre kept at a safe distance, with action confined only to what Schlemmer called the common “peep show stage.” This is a theatre that envelopes all who come into contact with it, and in turn demands new subjectivities from its participants. “The audience has to reeducate themselves about what an audience is,” Hays says. “They have to rethink their own participation and watch theatre in a way that’s different from watching a traditional narrative play.”

This type of reeducation is one of the apocalypses, one that enacts a total reconceptualization of oneself and one’s relationship to the world. It is never an easy change though. To quote Peter Brook once again, however hard the theatre tries to achieve this metamorphosis—an appropriate word, considering Schlemmer appreciated being thought of as a kind of magician—such a cataclysmic event cannot occur “so long as culture or any art is simply an appendage on living, separable from it and, once separated, obviously unnecessary.” Schlemmer tried to circumvent this attitude by connecting the theatre as close to the substance of living as possible, by infusing it with new, modern archetypes and incorporating all elements of being into the theatrical event. The result for the audience and performer, Wodiczko believes, calls for an adaptation of Descartes: “I dance, therefore I am.”

Students of Jeanne Gang’s architecture studio seek redemption for the concrete behemoths of Brutalism

Cold, alienating, unfriendly; an architectural abomination, one of the world’s ugliest buildings. Although these are the epithets tossed casually at Boston City Hall, the same terms land on many outwardly similar concrete buildings wherever they are. Add abrasive, forbidding, Stalinist, bunkerlike, and hideous, and a sense of intense public dislike for these buildings becomes clear. Countless major institutional structures like Boston City Hall emerged from behind plywood formwork in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s—gray assemblies of reinforced concrete. Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, Kenzō Tange’s Kagawa Prefectural Office in Japan, Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 in Montreal, Paul Rudolph’s Yale University Art and Architecture building in New Haven, as well as multitudes of hospital, campus, and government buildings like them, have struck critics as callous, aggressive, frigid. That these buildings fall conveniently under the stylistic term “Brutalism” seems to confirm their inhumanity: The word “brutal” so well encompasses all of the unsettling adjectives that swirl around these concrete behemoths.

As these buildings age, as their surfaces accumulate grime and stains, as their roofs begin to leak, intense public dislike makes them vulnerable, and the quick impulse so often is to get rid of them. Most of the time this is a bad idea, not only because it is wasteful, but also because the buildings are not as horrible as they seem. This is the contention behind Jeanne Gang (MArch ’93) and Claire Cahan’s Spring 2019 architecture studio at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, “Recasting the Outcasts.” Gang and Cahan argue that “at a time when it is more essential than ever to conserve resources and prevent carbon pollution, we find that buildings are frequently discarded rather than being reinvented to serve contemporary life. . . One group of architectural outcasts that are particularly vulnerable to being erased and replaced—and their embodied carbon thereby released—are the Brutalist structures of the 1960s and ’70s.” An important reason for their vulnerability is the language that surrounds them, starting with their now almost unavoidable designation as “Brutalist.”

At a time when it is more essential than ever to conserve resources and prevent carbon pollution, we find that buildings are frequently discarded rather than being reinvented to serve contemporary life.

Jeanne Gang on Brutalist buildings, a group of architectural outcasts that are particularly vulnerable to being erased and replaced

As with most stylistic labels, serious misunderstandings have crept in. The first and most important in this case is that the real root of Brutalism is the French term “brut” (raw) rather than the English word “brutal” (savagely violent). Béton brut, variously translated as “rough concrete” or “raw concrete,” became the material of choice for progressive architects of the 1950s. Concrete gave them opportunities to repudiate a reductivist version of steel and glass modernism that was developing after World War II. As a modern material, however, concrete also fortified their disavowal of reactionary trends in architecture that reached toward nostalgic regional sensibilities. These architects of concrete quickly appeared to represent a movement. The British architectural critic, Reyner Banham, who announced this movement as “The New Brutalism” in 1955, stressed later that the label came about somewhat facetiously, as a nod toward a favorite material (béton brut), and as a verbal parody of current anti-modernist movements: “The New Humanism,” a revival of arts and crafts construction and ornament in England, and a similarly sentimental revival in Sweden sometimes called “The New Empiricism.” Whatever its origins, the name captured some important shared ideologies. The early proponents of The New Brutalism sought to reassert the goals of modern architecture: reduction of cost, honesty with regard to material, simplicity of form, clarity of expression. Its most important practitioners in England, Alison and Peter Smithson, insisted that in essence, the movement was “ethical” rather than stylistic. Even so, Brutalist buildings tended to express themselves visually: in the exposure of modern building services and building structure, and most prominently in the unapologetically bare surfaces of raw concrete.

While the Smithsons focused on straightforward articulation of architectural assemblies, other “New Brutalist” architects became intensely interested in the potentials of concrete as a medium of expression. Matthew Nowicki, an influential young architect in the 1950s, claimed that a “sense of medium” reflected the maturation of modern architecture. He explained that the careful detailing of concrete manifested a shift from the formalism of early modernism to a more subtle kind of architectural expression. Similarly, Louis Kahn considered material—especially mundane materials like raw brick and concrete—to establish the basis of architectural expression. “But how right it is to think about material!” he exclaimed to a roomful of Boston architects in 1966. He explained to the group that, for concrete in particular, the construction must accommodate the expressive behavior of the material, so that the formwork “gives the opportunity for the concrete to be relaxed in… forming itself.” In another talk, he suggested in more specific terms that by carefully anticipating the behavior of concrete at the Yale Art Gallery and assuring that “in every way, how it was made is apparent,” he was striving toward the “beginning of ornament.”

This is all to say that to appreciate Brutalist architecture, it is important to look at it closely, which is what so many of its critics fail to do. Postmodernist critic Kent Bloomer complained that Brutalist architecture was “monofigural,” that it conveyed only one message, and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown contended that it “twisted the whole building into one big ornament.” By focusing only on the whole building, however, these normally perceptive critics betrayed a curious lack of attention toward the subtle, expressive qualities of the buildings’ materials and surfaces. Certainly, Brutalist buildings are formally arresting, perhaps too aggressively so, but their most intriguing attributes are in their surfaces and details, in their textures, in the way the catch and play with light.

Notwithstanding all of their subtlety—most evident in carefully organized formwork lines and tie holes, or in taut fine-grained precast elements—Brutalist buildings contain a lot of concrete. This makes them impractical to demolish but also challenging to renovate. Boston City Hall, for example, contains roughly 2.5 million pounds of concrete. So, much as some critics and politicians would have liked to get rid of this “architectural abomination” long ago, the impracticality of doing so has been one important factor in saving it. Designer Chris Grimley, who has been active in supporting the preservation of Boston City Hall, quips that “as they’re wont to say, it would take a controlled nuclear device to bring it down, so we have that on our side.” There is also a rising consciousness of the environmental benefits of re-using, rather than destroying, existing buildings, which has no doubt helped rescue other Brutalist buildings from oblivion, at least temporarily.

This is the opportunity Gang and Cahan are exploiting in this semester’s studio. Recognizing that people are beginning to understand that simply destroying and replacing Brutalist buildings is wasteful and environmentally harmful, they wanted, Gang says, “to wake our collective brain to the situation,” and “to become creative with something that is already there.” So, they had their twelve students begin by carefully studying examples of Brutalist architecture—some from the Boston area, others from South America, Asia, and Europe. The students’ task was to “zoom into qualities: light and shadow… how scale operates in these buildings,” to study how the buildings reveal program and structural behavior. Making analytical models of these buildings focused their attention even more closely. The studio group also toured Boston City Hall, with the guidance of Professor Mark Pasnik, co-author of the 2015 book Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston . Then, they visited the site for the studio: Swope Center, the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. The students and studio faculty spent a night in its dormitories taking in views of the campus through concrete framed windows. They ate breakfast in its dining room under an expansive concrete waffle-slab ceiling, and looked out over Eel Pond through immense strip windows.

Designed by Pierce, Pierce & Kramer and completed in 1974, Swope Center is a more modest concrete building than some of the more heroic examples the students studied earlier in the semester. Nevertheless, it offers some of the same challenges that many other Brutalist buildings present. It aggressively occupies its site. It stands in strong contrast to the older buildings around it. It is not ADA compliant. Its air handling systems are inadequate. It contains a huge amount of concrete. And, Gang points out that the building presents an additional challenge—that in contrast to other Brutalist buildings “it doesn’t have a strong enough identity; it is not heroic enough” to demand strict preservation, nor even to suggest a specific approach for renovation. So, Gang and Cahan are challenging the students to “strip back to essentials, then invade with a new idea,” to “make a building about today.” Cahan emphasizes that “Woods Hole is helping us see climate change,” and because “Brutalist architecture can be very expressive of environmental systems,” the Swope Center building provides a strong platform from which to explore the goals of the studio. So, rising to the “challenge of recasting this specific architecture toward a viable, extended future” the students in “Recasting the Outcasts” are taking on a concrete behemoth and urging it to better ends.

Landscape studio Superbloom mines speculative art for new ways of imagining earth’s harshest regions

About once every decade, a display of colorful wildflowers erupts across the California desert. Called a “superbloom ,” this cornucopia of red, orange, and yellow occurs on the rare occasion when circumstances–rain, sun and cloud–align perfectly. “These phenomenal moments of beauty that happen in extreme environments bring a heightened awareness of the fragility, but also the potential, of the desert,” says James Lord, founding partner of San Francisco-based landscape architecture and urban design practice Surfacedesign Inc . Along with the practice’s co-founder Roderick Wyllie, Lord is leading a studio at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design named after this floral spectacle. The seemingly miraculous appearance of flowers in a climate that people tend to think of as barren and lifeless is an example of what can flourish in the harsh climate of the desert if conditions are just right.

Similarly, Lord and Wyllie argue, design is most successful when it’s perfectly suited to its context, whether that’s a densely populated inner-city neighborhood, the rolling countryside or, in this case, the desert. Far from being a dull and monolithic environment, Lord explains, the desert is actually ever-changing and therefore provides a unique opportunity for architectural experimentation, one that lends itself to free-thinking. “It seems completely static, but when you get there, you understand its subtlety–that it’s actually a super-dynamic landscape and even more so when impulses like rain, fire or wind affect it. Being thrown into an exotic place like the desert, where survival is key, you have to use your wits to make it work.”

The implications of designing for this specific environment are also far-reaching: The desert presents a case study in how to design for and live in increasingly harsh conditions. “In California, we’ve had massive wildfires and suffered from serious droughts in recent years, and it’s getting worse,” Lord says. “So maybe we should be looking at the communities that already live in extreme environments and think about how they are handling this new world.”

He points to a series of precedents that demonstrate the range of responses that the desert can elicit. Among them is Italian architect Paolo Soleri’s experimental utopian community Arcosanti in Arizona, which proposes sustainable ways to exist in the desert through “archology”–a combination of architecture and ecology–including concrete panels that blend in with the sand and the orientation of buildings so that they capture light and heat in winter but are sheltered from them in the summer. Lord and Wyllie also cite as examples the monumental artworks that comment directly on their surroundings–for example, French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle’s sculptures in The Tarot Garden in Tuscany; Michael Heizer’s ongoing City project of earth, rocks, sand and concrete in Nevada; James Turrell’s Roden Crater within a volcanic cinder cone in Arizona; and Harvey Fite’s Opus 40 sculpture park in a quarry in New York state, in which all the works were made out of materials found on site.

Alongside these, Lord and Wyllie presented students in the Superbloom studio with a more speculative reference point: Italian design practice Superstudio’s 1969 conceptual architecture work Continuous Monument: An Architectural Model for Total Urbanization , a technological and infrastructural grid that everyone would be able to plug into around the world, forming the basis of our future lifestyle–an idea that seems eerily prescient today. “It was fascinating for the students that these visionary utopian ideas have the potential to become a reality,” Lord says. “Part of the challenge is for students to come up with their own utopian environments and think of how you could make it happen and be relevant beyond this time.”

Students were asked to respond to three different contexts. The first, an untouched patch of land, was an exercise in basic survival and a direct response to the need to create shelter from the elements and confront the desert’s vast openness. The second assignment was to respond to one of a series of sites that had already been touched in some way by human development: the small, one-strip town of 29 Palms; the Joshua Tree National Park; and Desert Queen Mine, an old gold mine. The final project was to design a series of homes for women artists within an existing desert community, where people live outside of mainstream society and where “characters express themselves using whatever means they have available.”

The responses were varied. One student considered a failing mall-like development in 29 Palms, and proposed carving it up into a series of gardens and courtyards. “It abstracted moments within the desert in ways that heightened your awareness and captured its emotive qualities: its danger, beauty or disorienting quality,” Lord says. A design for a residential scheme was inspired by the notion of the mirrored surface of the Air Stream, the enabler of so many desert adventures; a canopy reflected the sky and ground, framing views around it while also disappearing into the landscape. Another student was fascinated by a small local rodent called the Kangaroo Rat and its strategy for water preservation. “Her pavilion was a series of objects that go under and above ground to collect water for long-term survival.”

What was striking was the variety of responses to this one context, a fact that seems to provide a glimmer of optimism in the face of the bleak prospects facing humanity in the near future. “Historically, many desert interventions have been more about bravado and pushing your vision forward at all costs, almost rejecting the landscape that the project was set within,” he says. He contrasts the male-dominated view of the world–and architecture–that prevailed during the 1960s and 70s, as well as the heavily engineered solutions that the modernist movement proposed, to the more plural, subtle and inclusive notions of cultural value that are taking hold today.

“All the different approaches to this situation highlight the fact that there is no one way to fix all of our current problems or to address how we live in extreme environments. Rather, there are multiple solutions that combine together and point at each other and make something new, while showing respect for the poetry of place-making.”

Work in Progress: Lina Karain’s day-care center for Rohingya children in Bangladesh

Lina Karain (MArch ’20) describes her final project for the option studio “Architecture as a Tool to Improve Lives: Development of a Day Care Centre for Rohingya Children” led by Anna Heringer, fall 2018.

Pioneering conceptual artist Agnes Denes addresses the students of the Harvard Graduate School of Design

For more than 50 years, artist Agnes Denes has dedicated herself to unifying disparate trajectories of knowledge across the arts and sciences into radically new forms of seeing and engaging with the world. Her work spans a range of media and scales, and engages a variety of academic disciplines, including philosophy, mathematics, and the natural and social sciences. Denes’s large-scale ecological interventions are among her most well-known projects, in particular Wheatfield–A Confrontation  (1982), the now-iconic work in which she planted a two-acre wheat field in what was then a derelict lot in Lower Manhattan. No less impressive and important are her conceptual prints, which have explored among other things variations on earth’s mathematical form and visual experiments with Pascal’s Triangle. In Spring 2019, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design invited Denes to give a lecture as part of its Rouse Visiting Artist Program. When schedules did not align, she offered instead to address students through a piece of writing.

Below is her address to students, written in April 2019. 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 was designed by Zak Group and is offered as a gift to students from Denes.

“Hello you brilliant young people ready to change the world and make it a better place because you are in it, saving it from its self-inflicted wounds and self-propelled doom.

Ask yourselves: Where are you, at your age of wanting to change things?

A few words as you go on your journey:

Every word uttered today is political. There is no escaping it. The atmosphere has become contaminated.

People are fighting to be heard, using big words, tugging at heartstrings, fighting for some truth, while language itself is losing its precision.

Saying something meaningful is difficult when everybody says some of it to a degree, when all has been touched on or becomes meaningful by who says it—someone with power or a famous person. You listen to a friend, a relative, someone you trust and admire.

I am not sure how well you know me, because I am not a self-promoter, abhor politics and because we are separated by disciplines, even though we shouldn’t be. Art, science and philosophy should be together and part of all else in spite of specialization, which is the subject of one of my books.

I’ll try to offer you one true language of communication that cannot be corrupted. My art and philosophy.

When I set out on my journey I wanted to change the world, re-evaluate all knowledge and put it into visual form for better understanding. This process of evaluation and visualization would probably have taken 1,000 humans and at least as many libraries to even begin. An impossibility, so I began. This was the onset of my Early Philosophical Drawings and became my art of Visual Philosophy.

As I worked, I came to realize that my task was a little more complex than what could be accomplished by a single mind without help or funds. This did not faze me a bit and I kept going, setting and reaching milestones as I went.

I was inexperienced and fearless, willing to give up all else but my goal.

Many people do that. Scientists wanting to discover, writers educating in special terms, inventors, leaders whose motives are still pure, a few artists.

It was only when I got much older that I realized I had changed very little, that some of what I wanted to change had changed by itself. Not to say that I was useless or unneeded, just that this is the way of things. You don’t move a behemoth, it moves by its sheer volume.

Change is the only thing you can count on. You learn how to walk without crutches, and with very little to depend on.

Even the truth, that great challenger, because it is beyond the long end of your telescope even in the land of ultimates, changes meaning, leaving many truths, and nothing to depend on.

Wanting to change the world morphed into a unique artistic output of a lifetime of creation, and the visualization of invisible processes, such as math, logic, thinking processes, and so on.

This process of re-evaluation and visualization became a process of offering humanity benign solutions to some of its problems and involved a multitude of disciplines.

So now ask yourselves, where are you at your age of wanting to change things? What mountain is left to climb, move over or eliminate?

I will not pretend to tell you ultimate truths or aims, only that you should seek them. It is this seeking that is the journey, and it is as precious as the destination.

Even if the words we seek to describe our condition have already been worked over. Even if your hope is already waning, and your innocence has already been lost, many of you still might believe you can change the world. And some of you might. A little.

Question everything. Not just because you should, but so that you might hone your ability to do so. The best creativity comes from questioning the status quo.

While you’ll never be fully free of the influences of your environment and your upbringing, deep thinking and evaluation are a necessary part of the development of your own mode of thought, be that good or bad.

Your mind will be your salvation in a troubled world, and there will never be a time when our world is not troubled.

But don’t just live within the walls of your own mind, but also DO, because overthinking can also bring downfall. Abused, unused or overused organs offer little benefit.

Read my Manifesto that accompanies this writing. I live by it and hope you will too.

Good luck, dear future and fellow travelers on our journey of life.

Have you guessed yet what that ultimate language of communication is?

Go find your goal and create.”

Agnes Denes
April 19, 2019

 

The first ever retrospective of Agnes Denes’s work to be organized in New York City—Agnes Denes: Absolutes and Intermediates —will open at The Shed on October 9, 2019.

Top photograph: John McGrail. All artworks © Agnes Denes & Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York. Introduction by Ken Stewart. Photographs of “Manifesto” by Maggie Janik. Special thanks to Penelope Phylactopoulos.

The Trans-Siberian Railway: A borderless landscape ripe for reimagination

It is hard to avoid superlatives when discussing Siberia: Covering over five million square miles, the region comprises 77% of Russia’s land area yet has a population of only 36 million; the hyper-clear Lake Baikal, located in southern Siberia near Mongolia, is the world’s largest freshwater lake and its deepest, containing 23% of the earth’s fresh surface water; in winter, temperatures can reach lower than -90°F. It seems appropriate then that the most significant connective tissue across this vast land, the Trans-Siberian Railway, is itself enormous. The world’s longest train route, this 5772-mile-long railway line traverses eight time zones from Moscow to Vladivostok. A journey between the two cities takes at least seven days.

The railway’s origins are no less monumental. In 1891 during the reign of Tsar Alexander III, the 25-year construction project began under the direction of future prime minister Sergei Witte. Witte understood the economic opportunities of Siberia’s untapped natural resources, as well as the geopolitical potentials that a shift eastward could provide Russia—a move only possible with a reliable means of transportation. The construction that followed would subsequently exploit the labor of a significant number of migrants, principally from China but also from Japan, Korea, and as far away as the Mediterranean. It would also facilitate Russia’s occupation of Manchuria in 1890, which irritated Japan due to its own imperial predilections. This prompted Japan to attack Russian-controlled Port Arthur in 1904, launching the Russo-Japanese War that killed between 130,000 and 170,000 soldiers. The railway’s connection with extreme violence would continue, as thousands died in Stalin’s gulags that were spread across Siberia.

Its tragic history notwithstanding, the line is one of the primary means of transporting goods across Russia, as well as through to Europe. The latter passage may become even more integral to both Russia and East Asia following recent political developments.

In September, 2018, at the Eastern Economic Forum, North Korean Deputy Railways Minister Kim Yun Hook announced that North Korea intends to connect the railways between the Koreas. A Korean partnership has already led to some repairs of the North’s railways, which could then connect to Russia’s network. Should this project be successful, shipments by land along the popular trade route from Seoul to Rotterdam would take just 10 days, as opposed to the 30 days needed by sea. Combined with the construction of a trans-Korean gas pipeline utilizing Russian gas, this could make the Korean peninsula a much more dominant actor in the region.

Any extension of the railways would also necessitate building new stations. This potentiality prompted landscape architects Jungyoon Kim and Yoon-Jin Park to lead a studio at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in which the students examine a future route that connects London to Seoul—with specific focus on the Trans-Siberian Railway—to determine what interventions landscape architects could perform on such a system.

“Rather than being involved at the very beginning of building a station, landscape architects are often invited at the last minute,” Kim explained. “Architects are first going to think about the building itself, but landscape architects think about nature and then determine where a station should be and how it should look. In this way, the station comes out of nature and is not being imposed onto or into it. We chose Siberia because of its extreme natural conditions, where little human intervention has been made.”

Architects are first going to think about the building itself, but landscape architects think about nature and then determine where a station should be and how it should look. In this way, the station comes out of nature and is not being imposed onto or into it.

Jungyoon Kim on developing new stations along the Trans-Siberian Railway: These interventions can take myriad forms, and they occasion different ways of conceptualizing stations than the industrial- and imperial-based concerns that dominated the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway. For example, students in the studio identified that the Chita Station in Eastern Siberia might be redesigned to assist in curbing global warming. Around this area, significant thawing of the permafrost occurs, which releases highly damaging amounts of carbon dioxide and methane deposits into the atmosphere. Reversing this trend may be possible. Based on research by biologists such as Sergey and Nikita Zimov, grazing animals might be introduced to the area to walk over this ground—as wooly mammoths and many others did in nearby areas during the Ice Age—and in doing so could potentially compact the snow and thus increase the threshold temperature for thawing. The station and its vicinity, the students propose, could be altered to provide a wildlife corridor for these animals as well as provide them shelter.

Such projects acknowledge the ways in which the people served by these stations, and the expansive natural landscapes surrounding them, are bound together. In doing so, the work illuminates that however isolated these communities may be in terms of other societal connections, they are embedded in a landscape, both above and below ground, which in many cases extends in every direction and connects communities not just with cities and towns on the train line but also with those in Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, the Koreas, and beyond. Unlike the rigorous visa processes required by many traveling in the region, the landscapes do not recognize borders. “Transnationality is not possible for humans, but it is for landscapes, no matter where the borderlines are drawn,” Kim says. “The steppe, for example, goes from Mongolia to Lake Baikal.” A simple continuous view from the window of the train captures this truth in ways that the discontinuity of photographs, for example, cannot convey.

This sense of borderlessness is conjured elsewhere on the train as well, and again through an element of design. The third-class carriages, with 54 bunks squeezed into just 600 square feet, have an open plan, and the lack of dividers between people encourages a kind of communal living that is likely foreign to train passengers not just in America or Japan but also in first class on the same train. “The unspoken ground rules [in third class] are not unlike those in second class,” author David Greene describes in his travelogue Midnight in Siberia. “If you have one of the upper berths by the window, it’s entirely okay to spend time sitting on one of the lower berths—call it a communal couch. If someone in a lower berth is sleeping and you need to climb to your upper berth, it’s fine that you may need to step on your neighbor’s bed—perhaps his or her feet or legs—to reach yours.” Sharing space naturally leads to other types of connection, principally conversation and sharing food that was either brought on the journey from home, bought from the dining car, or procured from the many women selling traditional, mostly potato-based offerings seemingly at all hours at every station.

The latter experience may soon disappear however. These third-class carriages are scheduled to be updated in conjunction with a $10 billion investment in modernizing the tracks. The new carriages, with a projected installation in 2025, will offer privacy in the forms of capsule-like beds and will also contain showers, vending machines, and USB sockets. They will likely be more expensive too. No doubt the Russian government hopes that these innovations will help boost tourism on the route, but they will likely hurt those passengers who depend on the railway as their sole mode of transportation throughout the country, and in turn further isolate them from communities along the line. But regardless of any such changes, these local passengers will not be separated from their home stations or the surrounding landscapes, which could make interventions that further intertwine them that much more necessary.

Pattern-making is a tool for meaningful change in Toni L. Griffin’s pursuit of justice in American cities

About four miles from downtown Pittsburgh along the Monongahela River, the neighborhood of Hazelwood suffers acutely from forty years of economic decline following the collapse of the steel industry. Its once-beating heart, LTV Coke works, is a two-mile-long industrial complex that at its peak provided around six thousand jobs. LTV downsized drastically in the 1980s and closed for good in the 1990s. As a result, high unemployment, closing schools, and crumbling infrastructure proliferate in a neighborhood that has lost about half of its peak population of 13,000. Meanwhile, impoverished populations priced out of nearby gentrifying neighborhoods have moved in, compounding Hazelwood’s need for resources.

Though LTV’s 188-acre riverside tract is long since bulldozed except for a few isolated structures, a consortium of Pittsburgh’s leading non-profit foundations is redeveloping the site. Now renamed “Hazelwood Green,” the sustainability-driven and community-minded masterplan by architects Perkins + Will imagines a densely-built district of office buildings, housing units, green infrastructure, and a connective street grid. But the first project for a warehouse-turned-high-tech-lab is only partially complete, separated from the rest of Hazelwood by acres of still-blank remediated brownfield. A build-out will take years.

The underserved neighborhood with the vast post-industrial acreage adjacent make a compelling urban design case study, and Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Professor in Practice of Urban Planning Toni L. Griffin is studying Hazelwood as one of four Pittsburgh neighborhoods with students in her master’s level design studio, Patterned Justice: Design Languages for a Just Pittsburgh. Her studio is underwritten by The Heinz Endowments.

Even with the Perkins + Will plan in hand, Hazelwood Green is irresistible for speculation. More typical urban design studios might respond to the clean slate with utopian megastructures beyond the dreams of the real estate market. By contrast, Griffin and her multi-disciplinary studio frame the design process as an issue of justice, rather than strictly a project for real estate or form-making. Its aim more broadly is to confront America’s history of legislated and de facto segregation and make visible its associated discriminatory real estate and banking practices. Griffin’s definition of justice extends beyond racial and class parity to concerns of “economic recession, health and environmental issues–women’s health in particular–women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, [as well as] violence against black bodies.”

A graduate of Notre Dame, Griffin practiced architecture and gradually moved into urban planning and design over a ten-year career in S.O.M.’s Chicago office. After a Loeb Fellowship in urban planning and design at Harvard, she held a series of urban planning and design positions on the East Coast: Vice President of Planning for the Upper Manhattan Development Zone; Deputy Director of the D.C. Office of Planning; and Director of Community Development for the City of Newark, New Jersey. These provided additional material for her developing approach.

“What drove investment to some parts of the city, and what didn’t?” Griffin recalls questioning. “I kept seeing these patterns in every city that I worked in the United States, [which] I began to frame as conditions of injustice.” She cites Newark, where policies of municipal disinvestment and real estate discrimination have led to severe ghettoizing, as a reinforcement for her developing conviction “that the issues of a place and people were distinctly intertwined.”

As an educator, Griffin has refined her inclusive view of justice. She began teaching at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 2006. From 2011 to 2016 she taught at City College of New York, where she was the first director of the J. Max Bond Center for Design and the Just City. Now back at Harvard, she has founded the Just City Lab , where a cadre of student research assistants translates the ideas that underpin Griffin’s pedagogy and design practice into exhibitions and publications, such as “Design and the Just City ,” which was on display at New York’s Center for Architecture, or the upcoming publication of her St. Louis studio, Urban Disobedience: 99 Provocations to Disrupt Injustice in St. Louis. Griffin’s professional practice also thrives. Her consulting with the City of Detroit culminated in a comprehensive city-wide plan, Detroit Future City Strategic Framework , and she is on the team that recently won the Chouteau Greenway competition in St. Louis.

One of Griffin’s most important innovations is also one of her most concise. The Just City Index is a roster of “50 values that we have intended for use by different communities and cities to develop their own visions for what it would take for their locales to be more just.” The Just City Lab mission statement describes the Index’s purpose: If a community articulated what it stood for, what it believed in, what it aspired to be—as a city, as a neighborhood—it would have a better chance of creating and sustaining healthier, more vibrant places with more positive economic, health, civic, cultural and environmental conditions.

Other such frameworks circulate in architecture and urban design as measures of community success, most often with fewer criteria. Griffin finds those too limited. “If you are not those ten or 15 things, then you are not living up to the aspiration of [their] framework,” she says. With its 50 entries, the Just City Index aims to cast a wide net and let participants choose and prioritize the values they think apply to their particular condition of injustice. The real difference is the starting point. Most such frameworks begin with the designers. The Just City Index instead empowers its users, allowing them “to assign themselves the values that are most important for them and that are needed to address the conditions of injustice on the ground at that moment in time.” Just City Lab researcher Natasha Hicks comments: “The beauty of the index [is that] it’s an accessible tool that communities can use to create a shared values system.” The Just City Index is a foundational tool for study in Patterned Justice: Design Languages for a Just Pittsburgh, and plays an increasingly integral role in Griffin’s work.

The other tool for Patterned Justice: Design Languages for a Just Pittsburgh is Christopher Alexander’s book, A Pattern Language, an eccentric classic first published in 1977. It identifies conditions that make spaces more welcoming, comfortable, and useful. Alexander’s patterns are vignettes of common-sense design–active shopping streets and houses with sheltering roofs; offices with windows and benches with good views–rather than complex or prescriptive forms. A Pattern Language covers scales from large to small–“towns and neighborhoods, houses, gardens, and rooms”–with nested interrelationships from one scale to the next. With 253 chapters, it is more effective as a reference than a narrative, but the language, says Laura Greenberg, a Master’s student in the Pittsburgh studio, “is easily accessible to people. It’s not in any kind of design jargon.” Alexander’s late-hippie egalitarianism meshes well with Griffin’s emphasis on inclusivity and diversity. “[T]owns and buildings will not be able to come alive,” Alexander writes, “unless they are made by all people in society, and unless these people share a common pattern language, within which to make these buildings.”

Griffin’s Pittsburgh studio engages four different sites: The Hill District is a traditionally black community that has a rich history, but has faced decades of struggle after being decimated by urban renewal projects in the 1960s. East Liberty and Garfield are neighborhoods where rapid redevelopment is causing gentrification. Beechview is a traditionally white working-class neighborhood where the Latinx population is growing but redevelopment is slow. And Hazelwood, with the massive Hazelwood Green redevelopment just beginning, is about to undergo significant change.

The combination of the Just City Index and A Pattern Language leads to expectedly principled-yet-amorphous patterns at a variety of scales. In a studio of twelve students, each one is responsible for producing four or five patterns. Greenberg’s are exemplary for their variety. She documents “a pattern of school vacancy which looked at closings of public schools from 2006 through 2012 and noting that nearly 70% of public schools in majority-black neighborhoods were closed, versus 20% in majority-white neighborhoods. There is still a large number of schools that remain vacant, especially in black communities, and the ones that have been redeveloped tend to be targeted for luxury condos, and don’t replicate the public good that a public school creates.”

Another pattern arising from the studio is that of the so-called “porch stigma” faced by residents in Hazelwood and other Pittsburgh communities who may have less of an ability to maintain their porch, or who use their porches in ways that run counter to dominant standards of urbanism. These factors leave residents vulnerable from a legal perspective to 2006 and 2009 porch furniture ordinances, as well as the stigma that surrounds a porch that doesn’t adhere to institutionalized norms.

By May, these patterns will take their final form, a pattern book describing policy, program and design strategies. Though she has a portfolio of tangible projects, evidenced in the “Design and the Just City” exhibit, Griffin emphasizes the roles of process and enfranchisement as true determinants of meaningful change. She says, “When I can step back and see that there are multiple types of leaders of the community having real ownership of both the process and the outcomes, that is success.”

On Thursday, April 11, 2019, Toni L. Griffin will join Rip Rapson, president of the Kresge Foundation, and urban planner and designer Maurice Cox in a discussion about the complex design, economic and political innovations required to create transformational change for Detroit.