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. 

Diane E. Davis speaks on the power of design schools to shape local communities

The Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Diane E. Davis joined fellow design-school leaders from the University of Buffalo last month to discuss how their various programs both contribute to and benefit from their local communities. Davis spoke alongside Deborah Berke, dean of the Yale University School of Architecture, and Robert Shibley, dean of the University of Buffalo (UB) School of Architecture and Planning, in a March 21 panel moderated by Architectural Record editor Cathleen McGuigan and held at the Ford Foundation in New York City.

The panel followed a screening of “See It Through Buffalo,” a cinematic tribute to that city’s urban landscapes and transitioning neighborhoods, produced by UB’s School of Architecture and Planning and exhibited during the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. The film helped frame a discussion of the dynamics of community engagement and how a design school might interact with the urban context in which it’s situated.

Davis has served as chair of the GSD’s Department of Urban Planning and Design since 2015. During the March 21 panel, Davis spoke to the GSD’s metropolitan Boston surroundings, in which, she observed, a relatively compact urban size coupled with complex city-region dynamics mean students must work at smaller scales.

“Boston is a divided city and region, with pockets of poverty and neglect,” she said. “We have to teach our students to think strategically with acupunctural interventions rather than comprehensive interventions.”

Davis also noted GSD programs like the recently announced Community Design and Learning Initiative, as well as fellowships that enable students to exercise their design and planning know-how while serving at-need local communities.

“You become a better architect and designer by knowing one place well,” Davis said. “It’s a special opportunity for students who care about changing the cities they live in to go to an institution that has that partnership.”

Davis’s observations harmonized with those from deans Berke and Shibley. Berke noted a partnership between a Yale School of Architecture housing studio and New Haven housing nonprofit Columbus House, in which intensive community engagement was instrumental to siting and designing a house for the studio to build.

“As important as it was to build the house,” Berke said, “seeing how the machinations of community engagement work with the planning process was probably the more valuable lesson.”

What’s in a basket? Students explore industrial weaving in Stephen Burks’ workshop

“I think I have a basket, but is it one?” asks first-year Master in Design Studies student Jimmy Pan as he considers the multi-colored vessel he’s fashioned out of interlocking card stock and tape. Pan is one of five students to participate in the J-Term workshop “Making the Industrial Basket at Three Scales” led by 2019 Loeb Fellow Stephen Burks . Over two weeks in January, students focused their attention on the ancient craft of basket weaving, taking a close look at how baskets have been made over the centuries and studying how traditional methods can be translated into digital fabrication systems without losing their artistry.

In order to achieve this, Burks, an industrial designer whose ongoing project Stephen Burks Man Made seeks to bring artisanal methods into the future, had students each bring a basket into class. Baskets came from their homes, second hand shops, and, in one case, from the netting used to hold fruit in the grocery store. They then made a series of drawings to better understand the design elements of their chosen basket. From the drawings, students decided on a part of the basket—scale, materiality, legibility—to study through building their own handmade basket. The final products, created from everyday materials, used techniques gleaned from the original baskets but were not meant to be recreations. “The only goal is to for them to arrive at a basket, and an original one. One that has a little bit of invention,” said Burks.

 

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

The sunset orange that frames “Multiple Miamis” gradually deepens as the exhibition progresses, a gesture that its curators hope is both evocative and objective—a tropical palette appropriate for Miami, but that resists prioritizing any one of the range of ideas and projects presented. As its name suggests, the exhibition presents Miami as the site of multiple overlapping cities grappling with a complex network of social issues.

“Multiple Miamis,” now on view in the Frances Loeb Library, follows a Harvard Graduate School of Design option studio by the same name, led by Sean Canty and Chris Reed. The studio took up a tale familiar to the American city—neighborhoods reshaped by decades of redlining and segregation, often leading to disinvestment and disrepair—and examined how this narrative has played out in the Miami neighborhood of Overtown.

“The studio and exhibition present an opportunity to focus on a set of issues that are relevant to many large-scale American and global cities today,” Reed says. “And even though we took on some tough social issues, the key was to do so through the tools that designers have.”

The “Multiple Miamis” exhibition draws from the studio’s months of dialogue and design iteration, punctuated by a week-long site visit in October, 2018, in which students met with local government officials, community organizations, and residents. Canty and Reed curated the exhibition alongside two of the studio’s participating students, Ting Liang (MLA/MAUD ’19) and Zishen Wen (MLA ’19).

Like the “Multiple Miamis” studio, the exhibition explores questions of inequity, race, affordability, and resilience, and how policy and the built environment shape or complicate them through housing, transit, and other infrastructure. The studio examined in depth how models of urban development might better support underserved communities.

Near the downtown area, Overtown is home to a predominantly black population and has one of Miami’s lowest median household incomes. Overtown’s cultural fabric was torn by two interstate highway projects in the 1960s. Today, the effects of real estate speculation and boom in greater Miami, coupled with a warming climate and subsequent sea level rise, have compounded the pressures faced by the neighborhood.

It’s a pattern that emerges throughout the Miami area, in inland neighborhoods like Little Haiti, Liberty City, and Allapattah, and in other American cities facing questions of affordability and displacement. When juxtaposed with Miami’s rosier, palm-tufted representations, these patterns can generate a complicated, even distorted reality.

The “Multiple Miamis” studio’s output takes varied approaches to these questions, pursuing ideas that respond specifically to Overtown’s—and Miami’s–context and culture, but that might be applicable to other regions or cities.

The installation’s entrance wall greets viewers with a showcase of study models, revealing glimpses of the studio’s process and iteration as participants steeped themselves in Overtown’s historical and current social issues.

“It’s an entire display of possibilities,” Reed observes, embedded with quintessentially Miami details. Dominant themes include the hybridization of building, landscape, and infrastructure types—affordable housing or a parking garage mixed, for instance, with a park in a unified project.

Several projects look at how to densify and diversify housing choices on existing sites, some of which have been individual and privately-owned, others larger and publicly-owned—but with an emphasis throughout on providing useful, productive outdoor spaces, taking advantage of Miami’s favorable year-round climate. Many of these housing-driven projects also respond to today’s evolving, often hybridized family configurations and living situations.

Other emergent themes include resilience in the face of climate change, as well as a rethinking of housing as a public good rather than as a market-dictated commodity. Transit also looms large in “Multiple Miamis”: Several projects propose extending transit lines or establishing new transit stops, orienting the additions as the center of a redevelopment strategy. Transit options not only become closer and more accessible to users, but can be leveraged to create new, connective open spaces, as well as housing and mixed-use opportunities.

“Since the studio really leveraged different parts of the school, there’s a little something for everyone to look at and think through,” Canty says.

Liang and Wen proposed “Ephemeral City,” which holistically examines Overtown’s physical fabric, then recontextualizes it within a more urbanistic framework. This embeds the neighborhood with “ephemeral moments,” Liang says, that are in tune with social needs.

The studio’s models generate a physical and pedagogical constellation that illustrates the diversity of disciplinary approaches. As viewers move through the installation, they follow the studio’s conceptual progress, reaching final models at the show’s rear wall. A third component presents policy and reading material culled from the studio’s concurrently run urban planning and design seminar, led by Lily Song.

While “Multiple Miamis” grapples with heady, pressing issues, it also suggests that collaborations between design fields is integral to enhancing urban equity and resilience.

“In gathering and discussing work during such an interdisciplinary studio, I grew much more open to new ideas and was able to generate new possibilities for solving such persistent issues,” Liang says. “From philosophy to methodology, there’s always so much to learn from other fields.”

Keep reading about the course Multiple Miamis: Infrastructure, Affordability, Identity & the Public, learn more about the exhibition “Multiple Miamis,” or watch a work-in-progress video about Ting Liang and Zishen Wen’s “Ephemeral City.”

A Pattern Language: A user’s guide to the seminal architectural handbook

“A complex of buildings with no center is like a man without a head.” This sentence conveys the ethos of A Pattern Language (1977), the instructional tome written by architect, design theorist and Harvard Graduate School of Design alumnus Christopher Alexander (PhD ’63) along with five of his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure at the University of California, Berkeley. The bestselling architectural handbook is itself in many ways a man without a head: a sprawling guide to building and planning that has seen renewed relevance lately as a model for marrying physical spaces with ideological frameworks.

A Pattern Language lays out over 1,100 pages how our buildings—and by proxy our cities—are not entities at a remove from human beings, but rather their manufactured extensions. And as with any body (headless or otherwise), the whole structure is only as healthy as its individual parts. No facet of our cities and towns should be unwelcoming to their citizens, and no room in a house should feel neglected. A space should “feel right,” the authors argue, and that feeling is tied to the congruence between physical and social spaces.

Separated into three sections, Towns, Buildings, and Construction, the book contains 253 patterns defined as “problem[s] which occur over and over again in our environment.” Problems like how to orient the rooms in a home around naturally-occurring light and dark, so that the flow of movement “guides people toward the light whenever they are going important places: seats, entrances, stairs, passages, [and] places of special beauty.” Or the problem of the lack of intimacy between couples when children are present. “Their role as parents rather than as a couple permeates all aspects of their private relations.” The solution: the creation of a private “couple’s realm… a world in which the intimacy of the man and woman, their joys and sorrows, can be shared and lived through.”

For each of the archetypal facets of our homes and communities, the authors offer a solution for living well in the form of gentle-yet-pointed advice that can be adapted to individual circumstances. This in turn creates a diagnosis-and-solution rhythm that continues throughout the dense—if charming, and frequently idiosyncratic—book. Not every pattern will be useful or applicable to every individual home or community, the authors point out, but a good portion could potentially be—every home has a main door; every city has a system of roads—and how they build off of and influence each other will determine the unit’s health.

Every society which is alive and whole will have its own unique and distinct pattern language. Every individual in such a society will have a unique language, shared in part, but which as a totality is unique to the mind of the person who has it. In this sense, in a healthy society there will be as many pattern languages as there are people—even though these languages are shared and similar.

A Pattern Language

The authors are primarily concerned with the alienating effects of poor architecture and design, which leads them to recommend means by which life at work—as well as in the city and at home—involves contact with others. With entries such as 140. Private Terrace on the Street, the authors aim to facilitate happiness and tranquility by virtue of a delicate fusion of public and private areas. When combining this goal with an equally emphasized desire to put humans in constant proximity to nature, they demonstrate their focus on physical and mental wellbeing in the form of a balance between social interaction and Zen-like serenity. For this reason, Modernism and Classicism alike have no place in these pages, as their aesthetic and philosophical foundations, the authors imply, have little concern for their inhabitants’ health.

A Pattern Language, in large part due to its encyclopedic nature, stimulates introspection and healthy debate about what environments, both personal and professional, we currently inhabit and how they might be improved. One can cast aside the given prescriptions at will, but Alexander and his coauthors encourage readers to contemplate their reactions to nearly every aspect of the built environment.

A Pattern Language has been used as a reference in research and coursework at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Continue reading about Toni L. Griffin’s 2019 course Patterned Justice: Design Languages for a Just Pittsburgh and the Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture by Fritz Haeg, Nils Norman, and Julieta González.