Work in Progress: Miriam Alexandroff’s climate collective for a future Framingham, MA

Miriam Alexandroff (MArch ’19) describes her final project for the option studio “UTOPIA/DYSTOPIA: Living Post-Work” led by Annabelle Selldorf, fall 2018.

The Pete Walker and Partners Fellowship: Advancing Understanding of Landscape Design, Scholarship, and Practices

Sophia Geller (MLA ’17) lived and worked at the Château de Courances, a 16th-century domaine located in the Ile-de-France region of France working in its farm, forest, and park. Paola Sturla (MLA ’11) considered how technology influences the way we design through her travels in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Geller and Sturla shared their experiences at a celebration of the Pete Walker and Partners Fellowship, which was created by a generous gift from Pete Walker (MLA ’57) and his firm PWP Landscape Architects. The Fellowship offers recipients the rare opportunity to travel anywhere and in a time frame that works with their careers and artistic inquiry. Established in 2004 and awarded annually by the Landscape Architecture faculty to a graduating student for accomplishment in landscape design, the Fellowship has become one of the most prestigious awards in the Department and the School.

Pete was the recipient of the Jacob Weidenmann Prize when he graduated from the GSD, and he credits the travel made possible by this prize as essential to his development as a designer. Over his five-decade career, Pete Walker has been influential on the field of landscape architecture. The range of his projects is expansive—from the design of small gardens to the planning of cities, with a particular emphasis on corporate headquarters, plazas, cultural gardens, academic campuses, and urban-regeneration projects. In 1983, he formed Pete Walker and Partners, now known as PWP Landscape Architecture. At the GSD, Walker served as Chairman of the Landscape Architecture Department and the Acting Director of the Urban Design Program.

While Pete was at the GSD for option studio final review, Geller and Sturla and other recipients of the Pete Walker Fellowship gathered with Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture Anita Berrizbeitia (MLA ’87), GSD faculty, and other distinguished guests at the Harvard University Faculty Club to celebrate this unique award.

Sophia Geller is a 2017 graduate of the GSD’s MLA program; through her hands-on research, she gained an intimate understanding of the Château de Courances and furthered her understanding of the landscape architect’s role in historical sites with the desire to evolve. What drew her to Courances is its unique standing as a privately-owned historic site that is actively engaged in experimentation with sustainable farming and land management techniques. Her presentation “Devant le Chateau” translates to in front of or, before the chateau, a term inspired by a map Geller found in an old laundry house in the maintenance yard. This phrase became a mantra of sorts as she set out to gain an intimate understanding of the areas surrounding the chateau. Through the four seasons, she familiarized herself with the ways each of Courances’ landscapes is designed, used, managed, and maintained.

She shared the following sentiment as part of her presentation to Pete Walker and guests: “The Pete Walker and Partners Fellowship gave me the chance to live and work directly in the landscape I was studying. Never would I have developed such a deep and layered knowledge of place without the time and direct engagement that the fellowship afforded me, something all too often lost in standard landscape architecture pedagogy. These experiences, and the relationships and skills I have developed are fundamentally shaping my definition of what a landscape architect can and should do, just as I hope they will for many others to follow.”

Other GSD students now have the opportunity to follow her in footsteps at Courances. As part of her time as the Pete Walker and Partners Fellow, she developed the GSD-Courances Design Residency program, which allows for two MLA students each summer to be exposed to new modes of thought, discourse, and engagement on such topics as sustainable land management, agriculture, conservation, stories of place, and the role of historic sites in contemporary society.

Paola Sturla is the 2011 recipient of the Pete Walker and Partners Fellowship and has returned to the GSD as the 2018–2019 Daniel Urban Kiley Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Landscape Architecture. At the GSD, she teaches courses on artificial intelligence and landscape core, as well as serves as the Content Curator for the exhibition “Mountains and the Rise of Landscape” in the GSD’s Druker Design Gallery. She is a registered Architetto and Paesaggista in Italy and a Ph.D. candidate in Urban Planning, Design, and Policy at Politecnico di Milano. For Sturla, the Fellowship uniquely enabled her to frame her viewpoint on infrastructure and its grounding. Her presentation “Grounding the Flows: Exploring the Aesthetics of Infrastructure” considered her travels in China, Spain, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Qatar by looking at the question: how does technology influence the way we design? “I kept questioning what I was experiencing, asking myself what’s the agency of technology in designing such spaces,” she said. The Fellowship inspired her to begin her Ph.D., which investigates infrastructure, technology, artificial intelligence, and landscape.

Sturla is thankful for the Fellowship and its influence on her professional path. When reflecting on the Fellowship, she commented: “Thank you, Pete Walker, for this Fellowship, which has had an incredible impact on my career and my identity as a designer. It has been about having the strength, sense of appreciation, and self-esteem to keep framing my viewpoint on the world and the impact of our actions as humans and designers working at the intersection between the measurable and the experiential.”

The legacy of Pete Walker will endure through environments that he has built and enhanced, and through the example and opportunity that Pete Walker and Partners provides for the next generation of landscape architects via the Fellowship. For more information on the Pete Walker and Partners Fellowship for Landscape Architecture, please visit the webpage.

The full list of Pete Walker and Partners Fellows

1. Rachel Laszlo Tait MLA ’06
2. Jason Shinoda MLA ’07
3. Elizabeth Woodruff Randall MLA ’08
4. Mary Lydecker MLA ’09
5. Emily Bonifaci MLA ’10
6. Paola Sturla MLA ’11
7. Emily Schlickman MLA ’12
8. Anne Weber MLA ’13
9. Hope Strode MLA ’14
10. Michelle Franco MLA ’15
11. Foad Vahidi MLA ’16
12. Sophia Geller MLA ’17
13. Sonny Xu MArch ’18, MLA ’18

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

Of the seven Oscar nominations that Marvel Studios’ blockbuster Black Panther received this year, two are historic firsts: It is the first superhero movie to contend for best picture, and Hannah Beachler , its production designer, is the first African-American ever nominated in that category. Beachler, who was a Rouse Visiting Artist at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design last fall, conceived and oversaw creation of every element of the complex environments in which the Afrofuturist feature plays out, from individual rooms to urban and natural landscapes and the now-famous fictitious African nation of Wakanda.

Since Black Panther’s release in February 2018, an estimated 170+ million people have journeyed from their theater seats to the lush and high-tech world Beachler created with her team. Black Panther was by far the greatest triumph–and test–of her career, she says. The film’s director, Ryan Coogler, with whom Beachler had worked on Fruitvale Station (2013) and Creed (2015), trusted she could deliver. But to secure the job, she had to give a live presentation of her concept to Marvel Studios. “I needed to prove to the executives and producers that I could design and manage a department of that magnitude on a tent-pole blockbuster, with the biggest film I had done at that point being Creed at approximately $35 million,” she remembers. (Black Panther had a $200 million budget.)

Her presentation was the result of two intense weeks of research, which, as she described in conversation with Jacqueline Stewart and Toni L. Griffin in 2018, forms the basis for all of her projects in “pre-pre-production.” She started with the scenes that moved her most as she read the script, storing them as “screen shots” in her mind. Those images became richer in subsequent days as she poured over literature and images, and as songs, passing scenes, or flashes of color inspired her and added texture to those mental snapshots.

For Black Panther, she started with the history of the comic, going back to the superhero’s creation in 1966 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby all the way through to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2016 comic book series illustrated by Brian Stelfreeze. Knowing that the set had to reflect both African-American and African cultures, she went looking for the right African influences to incorporate—“the countries, tribes, languages, geography, economics, trade, militaries, conflicts, on and on, specifically before colonization, but also through time,” she says.

Next came Wakanda, its landscape, architecture and defining details, such as how Wakandans would use technology and interact with nature. It was a values-driven and iterative process: “I just kept creating a place where there was a sense of agency, where the people did not carry the weight of their skin color on them, where the future was their past and is their present.”

For her final presentation to Marvel, Beachler worked with illustrator Vicki Pui to develop a one-minute animatic and preliminary drawings of Golden City, capital of Wakanda. With Coogler in the room offering moral support, she won over the executives and seized the opportunity to spend a career-defining 13 months working on Black Panther. Beachler is not new to important projects or to accolades. In addition to Coogler, she has worked notably on Barry Jenkin’s Moonlight (2016), which won the Best Picture Oscar, and with director Melina Matsoukas on Beyoncé’s powerful 2016 visual concept album, Lemonade, which earned Beachler two major design awards.

I hope that diversity doesn’t just fade out as another buzzword, but that we enact the things we’ve been committed to talking about so that, soon, there will no longer be firsts. ~Hannah Beachler on her Oscar-winning production design for Black Panther

It was her final year in film school at Wright State University when Beachler decided to become a production designer. Since then, she has found her way into the work using what she calls “story design,” an approach that places the characters at the heart of creative decision making. “I always enter into the design through the people that inhabit or inhabited the spaces. For instance, on Creed it was understanding the people of Philly, the history of the city, its current state, people’s stories, accents and colloquialisms.” From there, Beachler makes the links to the design: What social, cultural, emotional and economic environment could yield these characters? And what does that environment look like in a living space? Each answer, honed in collaboration with the director, costume designers and cinematographer, brings her closer to the final set design.

Regardless of the outcome of Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony, Beachler’s Oscar nomination is a huge endorsement of her work and another important win for diversity in the film industry courtesy of Black Panther. “The nomination means everything–it’s the highest honor you can get in the American film industry, so it’s quite humbling and breathtaking. I hope it means more opportunities are given to people of color in below-the-line positions. That diversity doesn’t just fade out as another buzzword, but that we enact the things we’ve been committed to talking about so that, soon, there will no longer be firsts.”

Photography by Chris Britt. Sketch art for Black Panther courtesy of Marvel Studios. 

Design course opens students’ eyes to “plant blindness”

Just beyond the old iron gates of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, a creative experiment in pedagogy has been bringing the concept of plant sciences to growing, changing life.

For three years now, master’s degree candidates in Field Methods and Living Collections, led by Rosetta S. Elkin and the Arboretum’s William “Ned” Friedman, have used social theory and a methodology that examines plant evolution, morphology, built neighborhoods, and landscape design to address “plant blindness”—the human tendency to take plants for granted, reducing them to a green fuzz in the background.

“There is quite a history of human exceptionalism, and that we are the absolute species. On Maslow’s ladder [the hierarchy of needs] … plants were so low they barely made the rung. The whole class hinges on this diagnosis of plant blindness, that people assume that plants are just there, and they will always be there,” said Elkin, an associate professor of landscape architecture and faculty fellow at the Arboretum.

Yet, “We’re an entirely plant-dependent species. Plants were here way before we were; they will be here way after. They move, grow, communicate, behave, and adapt in magnificent ways and have a very different relationship with time. Once you start to appreciate that, the world around you does become a little more articulated,” she said.

Plants can be bellwethers of environmental risk, which often is overlooked by urbanists or architects focused on parcels of land whose confines are determined by economics or politics. High risk from and to the environment, such as drought, transcends manmade boundaries, however. This means that studying the effects of climate change requires acknowledging that where ecology is at risk, so is all of the area that the local environment defines, Elkin said. Continue reading at the Harvard Gazette…

Words by Deborah Blackwell & photography by Maggie Janik. 

Work in Progress: Amirah Ndam Njoya’s vision for a new neighborhood in Allston

Amirah Ndam Njoya (MUP ’19) describes her final project for the option studio “A Campus in a City – A City in A Campus: Harvard and Allston” led by Shaun Donovan and David Gamble, fall 2018.

Artist David Hartt on the relationship between ideology and the built environment

Montreal-born artist David Hartt uses the built environment as a tool for exploring pivotal moments, ideas and movements in history, and in doing so raises questions about postcolonial nation-building, racial identity and the ideologies that shape planning policy. In his recent work he has turned his camera on modernist ruins in Puerto Rico, the offices of an era-defining business in Chicago, and the relationship between the urban plans of Athens and Detroit. Currently assistant professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, Hartt has held exhibitions at the Graham Foundation, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Ahead of his talk at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, he outlines the thinking behind some of his most notable works, explaining how complex ideas are contained within these controlled glimpses of the physical environment.

Why did you choose to call your lecture “Urban Futures of the Recent Past,” the subtitle of Reyner Banham’s 1976 book, Megastructure?

I love the irony in Banham’s title. The text is a critique of a book by Justus Dahinden called Urban Structures for the Future, which is a celebration of mega-structures–vast projects like the Grands Projets in France, New Towns in Britain and those surrounding Olympics or World’s Fairs. There was an incredible optimism surrounding these projects, but they took a perverse turn in the 1970s when private developments adopted the strategies of state projects, in terms of claiming space and taking on a scale completely disproportionate to the cities they were located in.

These structures still define the majority of the built environment. In my work, I’m trying to have a conversation with these historical moments. It deals with the relationship between ideology and the built environment–I don’t say architecture, because “built environment” is more open-ended and involves shifts in scale from object, to room, to building, to block, to square, to city, to region, which I find exciting.

Your recent work in the forest  (2017) focuses on Moshe Safdie’s Habitat ’67 in Montreal and another of his Habitat iterations, a failed development in Puerto Rico. What interested you about this scheme?

After the Habitat scheme in Puerto Rico was abandoned, tropical forests reclaimed it. Many of the prefab units were sold and now exist in several places around the island, clustered together in different configurations. My film features four of these, plus the main site in San Juan, presenting a dialectic between the two Habitat developments–one that’s held as a successful example of many of the tenets of modernism; the other that encapsulates many of its failures. The original scheme was built as a celebration of Canada’s independence and nationhood, while the second is in a territory that’s still under the yoke of colonialism. I am interested in why so many postcolonial countries used the vocabulary of modernism to build their institutions and how it acts as a distancing mechanism from both their vernacular and colonial architectural roots.

Your work Negative Space/The Last Poet (2017) draws on ideas explored by Robert Rauschenberg during a journey from Long Island to Florida in 1980, as well as observations about urban sprawl by Jean Gottmann, Peter Blake and William Gibson, among others. Why did you decide to use Francis Fukuyama, who is often thought of as instrumental in the rise of neoconservatism, as the narrator of the images you depict?

I went to Fukuyama because I was interested in the fact that [political opinion] has become so polarized. In one sense, the work functions as a way of bridging that gap and finding common ground by addressing a prominent figure with a deep sense of historical perspective, but one who is very much on the other side of the political spectrum from me.

In an opinion piece in the Guardian in 2007, Fukuyama characterized the EU as the closest we have to his idea of the “end of history.” His argument was that liberal democracy and free market economics are symptomatic of the final stages of human development. In many ways the United States is similar, in terms of being a contiguous geographic expanse. I traveled along a similar route to the one Rauschenberg had taken. He took photos using what was at the time an innovative technology–a new Canon SLR. I thought about how I might look at the same landscape with the tools I have available today, and decided on using a drone, which immediately gives a different perspective.

Again, I’m using the built environment as a proxy to address other broader or historical concerns, to annex the ideas other contributors and researchers had in mythologizing space. I was much more interested in the political landscape than the actual physical landscape. This was a way of situating and contextualizing the work and trying to address the backdrop within which our discourse around the emergence of the far right is taking place.

Photography courtesy of the artist, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Corbett vs. Dempsey and David Nolan Gallery.

Mountains and the Rise of Landscape exhibition reconsiders what it means to see and experience mountains

The totemic nature of mountains creates a paradox: Their overwhelming size makes them an unavoidable and seemingly understandable part of our image of the earth, and yet this very grandness causes them to resist total visibility and, with that, any notion of comprehension. Mountains’ terrifying splendor, which conjures an attraction not unlike our long-held fascination with the “far side of the moon,” could in turn be credited with the persistent urge to represent them—as painters, writers, and others have done for centuries. But how do you even measure a single mountain, for example? Instead of starting from sea level, why not begin at the earth’s core, closer to the geological forces which created it? What constitutes a mountain range, and what is lost and gained through depicting them as a stenciled line of peaks, as was common in 19th century guidebooks? Such drawings neglect mountains’ complex interior lives—though the tunnels bored through them for roads, military purposes, and mineral excavation raise the question whether many mountains can still be considered natural at all. And the even greater—and constant—violence against nature by humans that defines the Anthropocene, including the destruction of glaciers at an ever-increasing pace, may have made depicting the natural world through any static form of representation too great a lie to accept any longer.

The exhibition Mountains and the Rise of Landscape, curated by Michael Jakob, asks these and a panoply of related questions, not through an impulse to neatly define the object we call a “mountain” but rather to problematize the ways in which these awesome structures have long been incorrectly reduced to a univocal definition. In seven distinct sections, which highlight numerous modes of representation including maps and other models, scientific instruments, drawings, photographs, film, sculpture, and even the soundscape of a melting glacier, the exhibition charts the evolution of mountains in the cultural imagination and, through this, the broader relationship between humans and the environment.

“Historically, and especially in Europe for over one thousand years, mountains had been largely invisible because nature was interpreted as negative—the realm of the devil, the site of the Flood and original sin,” explains Jakob. “Then in the 18th century, scientists, mathematicians, travelers, and artists changed the interpretation. In part through measurement, modeling, and reliefs, mountains were no longer seen as disgusting and disgraceful; they became objects of love and reverence because people discovered what was sold to them as a miracle of the sublime forms of nature.”

Foundational to this sense of sublimity and the philosophical and aesthetic shift it occasioned was the “serpentine line” praised by William Hogarth in The Analysis of Beauty (1753). In this seminal work, the English artist and writer argues that the S-shaped line—an inherent abstraction of a mountain chain’s undulating peaks—“leads the eye in a pleasing manner along the continuity of its variety.”

Co-curator Pablo Pérez-Ramos plays with this concept in the most monumental facet of the exhibition: a 100-foot-long wall featuring a Sol Le Witt–like mural in which the profiles of thirteen mountain ranges generated using various digital mapping tools were drawn by hand at a scale of 1:150,000. “We’re looking at mountains at a scale at which they’re normally not looked at—in relation to the earth as a whole. The panoramas are so long that they’re not able to be horizontal anymore but curved, to represent the curvature of the earth,” says Pérez-Ramos. “The profiles are in a way indexes of the history of those mountains, and this exercise can tell us how different geological forces construct the surface of the earth.”

Humans, too, alter the earth’s skin and in turn elicit changing perspectives on mountains. Consider grandiose feats of engineering such as dams. Like the “false mountains” featured in the exhibition such as pyramids, these sites can diminish mountains in our collective imagination by virtue of their serving as a beacon of human development, especially when built near or even on mountains. “You can read this entire exhibition as related to the Anthropocene, and highlighting these processes highlights the fragility of different perspectives of our sense of mountains,” details Jakob.

Emblematic of this vulnerability of perspective is the work of photographer Yao Lu, whose images appear in co-curator Edward Eigen’s intervention How to Model a Mountain in the Frances Loeb Library, which explores aesthetic, philosophical, and other thematic approaches to mountains throughout history. At first glance, Lu’s photographs appear as classical Chinese landscape paintings, but upon closer investigation, the grand structures reveal themselves as another kind of “false mountain”: piles of trash.

This illusion and subsequent realization illustrates what Eigen considers one of the entire exhibition’s chief virtues. “Mountains are so ‘there’ that even if we have positive or negative associations with them, we think they’re just mountains,” he says. “This exhibit forces people to reconsider what it means to see and experience mountains, to defamiliarize them.”

Work in Progress: Varat Limwibul’s Oaxaca Valley

Varat Limwibul (MLA ’19) describes his final project for the option studio “The Agency of Mezcal in the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico” led by Elisa Silva, fall 2018.

Beate Hølmebakk discusses her paper projects and rejecting the dominance of user-friendly architecture

In 2004, Norwegian architect Beate Hølmebakk co-founded Manthey Kula with Per Tamsen, and the practice has since become known for small but beguiling architectural interventions that play with form and context in unexpected ways. From a heavy steel restroom overlooking Norway’s scenic Moskenes Island, to a transparent ferry port with a distinctive, U-shaped roof–both of which were nominated for the Mies van der Rohe European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture–their work transforms humble briefs into arresting shapes uniquely suited to their site and purpose.

A significant part of Beate’s practice are her “paper projects”, works that are deeply considered but never intended to be built. In Virginia, a series of houses were conceived around the lives of four female literary characters; in Archipelago, the stories of five people living in isolation on remote islands were used to develop a set of architectural forms. Through these speculative explorations, Manthey Kula pushes the boundaries of architecture as a medium for exploring fictional states of mind, body and form.

Today, Holmebakk is a professor of form, theory and history at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Ahead of her lecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, she discusses her philosophy and approach to both these types of projects, explaining how she measures the success of an idea and why architecture needs to “dare to have character”.

How do the two elements of your practice, the built and unbuilt works, relate to each other?

With the built work, we’re concerned with the site: how the building can make it more interesting, solve its problems or foreground its most beautiful elements. The unbuilt projects don’t have a site, so the internal story becomes the context. There’s always a narrative and an existential theme in the paper projects, which the architecture is built around. Whether a project is ultimately built or unbuilt, we’re interested in sculptural forms that have character. What ignites the form varies, but how we develop it is similar; it’s like the difference between prose and poetry.

Do you think of architecture as an artistic medium?

Absolutely. When we work as architects, we have a lot of measurable constraints and we’re trained to be logical in the way we develop a project, to show there’s a reason for our choices. But it’s the mix of personal, irrational elements that dictates if a project is going to be this or that. In the end, it’s about feeling trusted and believing in your own ideas.

At its best, I think architecture is a state of mind. There’s something about the experience of space that has been with us since we were small–a basic understanding that has to do with our personal story. I believe that’s an important factor in the way we work: the search for something eternal in our experience that we’re trying to recreate. When you enter a building or a space that is well made, it’s an existential experience.

Without rational parameters–for example with your paper works–how do you measure success?

In our paper works we create self-imposed constraints; it’s hard to develop anything without any limitations. In the beginning, it was more about trying to find a theme that could be dealt with architecturally, whether it was the relationship between people or between inside and outside. With the Virginia project, the architecture developed from personal interpretations of literary texts. Later on, for example with the Archipelago project, we imposed specific, almost mathematical constraints–for example, scales and measurements that were in use during the time when these historical protagonists lived.

You’ve said in the past that you don’t particularly like terms such as “user friendly” or “humane” as architectural aspirations. Why is that?

If you want a project that people can relate to, it has to have a core that people can agree or disagree with. It has to dare to have character. I think it would be a mistake to overlook the complexities that exist in our discipline and attempt to make architecture digestible for everyone. There are so many nuances in the world, so if one is only seeking a norm for what is “humane” or “user-friendly” in architecture, that would be incredibly boring.

Images courtesy Manthey Kula. 

Work in Progress: Jiyun Jeong’s Arlington National Cemetery

Jiyun Jeong (MLA ’19) describes her final project for the option studio “Arlington National Cemetery: Engaging Hallowed Ground” led by Marty Poirier, fall 2018.