Housing, By and For the Public

Bounded by the Blackstone River, a vital artery for industry since the late eighteenth century, Central Falls, RI, has a long history as a manufacturing center. The arc of that history—spanning from the city’s role as a catalyst for regional growth to its resident’s pivotal actions in the labor movement to the region’s slow decline as an industrial hub—is reflected in a now-vacant property off Broad Street, near Central Falls’ northern edge. Corning Glass started production on the site in the 1920s. Eventually, Osram Sylvania took over and manufactured lighting equipment until shuttering the facility in 2014. Today, the property is an expanse of blacktop awaiting a new future.

What that future will look like is a pressing question for Mayor Maria Rivera, who took office in 2021. Her administration wants to fill the gaps in the city’s urban fabric left by twentieth-century industries to address a pressing twenty-first-century need: affordable housing. To further this goal, the city aims to purchase a 1.8-acre portion of the Osram Sylvania site, pending approval of a federal grant. This spring, city officials gathered in City Hall with Rhode Island state administrators and housing activists to hear rapid-fire proposals for the property from students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). The presentations summarized the research students conducted in an option studio led by Susanne Schindler, design critic in urban planning and design at the GSD. “One impetus to do this studio was that there’s urgency now to build and to build affordably,” she said. “Rather than just focus on quantity, which is what policy makers tend to do, I wanted students to develop ways to also focus on the quality and longevity of this public investment.”

I believe the public should benefit directly and in the longer term because the costs for affordable housing are ultimately paid by the public, the taxpayer,

Susanne Schindler

A city of about 23,000 residents, many packed into the kind of triple-decker residential building found throughout urban New England, Central Falls is experiencing a similar housing crunch as municipalities around the country. Jim Vandermillen, director of planning and economic development in Central Falls, noted that many residents are underhoused; that is, they are members of households too large for the dwellings they inhabit. With the new Pawtucket/Central Falls commuter rail station providing direct access to Boston and Providence, the mismatch between current housing stock, which is still relatively affordable, and potential growth, which would make overall prices rise, could become increasingly severe.

In a wood-paneled meeting room adorned with large-scale portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, GSD students from across the school’s departments detailed plans for building dense, affordable housing on the Osram Sylvania site and elsewhere in Central Falls. The cross-disciplinary makeup of the studio reflected the complex challenges inherent in creating such housing. In addition to envisioning beautiful apartment buildings in a lushly planted, walkable area, the proposals grappled with how such structures could actually be built and maintained. Students advocated tweaks to zoning regulations and building codes while detailing viable financing models that take advantage of state tax incentives and federal grants.

“You’ve got planners who are thinking about design, you’ve got designers who are thinking like planners,” observed Vandermillen. “It’s not hypothetical,” he said of the proposals. “There’s a huge push under the leadership of the current [Rhode Island] house speaker to make changes in legislation that will drive more housing production. We’re very much in a mode where changes are being made.”

The Return of the Public Developer

This promise of change is what attracted Schindler to Rhode Island. The spring 2024 studio was an extension of her ongoing engagement with Central Falls, where she had previously led a similar course focused on city-wide strategies rather than a single site, although several students focused on Conant Thread, a sprawling 50-acre complex of former mill buildings, some dating to the nineteenth century. In 2020, a fire tore through many of these historic structures. Despite its prime location a short walk from the regional rail station, the property remains a forest of ruins as the owner, a private development firm, weighs its options. The dilemma raised a question at the core of Schindler’s research: if commercial developers are not providing high-quality housing at affordable rates, what options might a municipal government have to address the needs of residents?

Despite its small size, Central Falls has been unusually proactive in the housing field. Through its nuisance laws, it has pressed private landlords to maintain their properties, and has also developed new homes for affordable homeownership. It has successfully pursued various state and federal funding streams to acquire land and buildings for redevelopment or rehabilitation, generally then turning a property over to a nonprofit to develop and manage the property. In turning over properties, however, the city also cedes significant control over what gets built. “To make a public-private partnership work,” says Schindler, “you really need people on the public side who know how to negotiate, who know what to ask for. And you need similar capacity on the private side, and a range of development partners to work with.”

Schindler sees another option becoming viable in this environment. “At least since the mid-1970s, it’s been politically impossible to talk about public housing,” she said, acknowledging an often-repeated narrative of mismanaged, under-funded public developments. “Over the past five years, in a very short time, the conversation has completely changed. The fact that the affordability question is so much on everyone’s mind, it may now be a political moment where there’s a window of opportunity to try direct public action again.” Schindler, who has studied nonprofit housing cooperatives in Switzerland as well as the history of housing in the United States, sees the potential to develop new models for public entities in the US to directly finance, build, and own housing units. “I believe the public should benefit directly and in the longer term because the costs for affordable housing are ultimately paid by the public, the taxpayer,” she said. The Central Falls Housing Authority is, in fact, about to develop its first new building with more than 60 apartments.

On a research trip, the studio studied examples of public development that challenged outdated, skewed notions of housing agencies as moribund bureaucracies. The group travelled to Atlanta to understand one of the nation’s oldest public developers, the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA). The AHA has worked with private developers  over the past thirty years, and it has also partnered with  its new nonprofit subsidiary, the Atlanta Urban Development Corporation, set up in 2023. The latter implements  innovative strategies for investing in mixed-income development on city-owned land,  thereby maintaining long-term control over the housing. As Noah Kahan (MUP ’24) observed, this strategy “allows the city to be more creative in the production of affordable housing.”

Whereas private developers typically seek returns within five years, public developers can manage a site for generations, extended timelines that allow for more flexibility not just in building but in addressing specific needs. Back in Central Falls, one of these specific needs is for housing units of a certain size: especially scarce are studios as well as large, four- and five-bedroom apartments for extended families. “It’s not all about just more, more,” said Vandermillen. “Let’s make sure we’re developing the right types of housing, and we get the mix of bedroom sizes and get the opportunities for home ownership as well as for rental.”

The possibilities opened by public development extend beyond the housing units themselves, allowing for investments in substantial amenities that provide long-term benefits. Students developed nine proposals, working individually or in pairs. Approaches ranged from redesigning the process to redesigning the product.

Landscape architecture student Dora Mugerwa (MLA ’24) proposed standards that prioritized tree planting and landscape in lieu of standards focused on the building interior only in an effort to make the Osram-Sylvania site a healthier living space overall.

Noah Kahan (MUP ’24) and Naomi Mehta (MAUD ’25), who collaborated on a project, envisioned a network of bike paths helping to weave together adjacent riverfront sites as well as the connecting residents with existing services in the city, including medical centers, community businesses, and recreation facilities.

Designing the Conditions

Students in the studio created proposals for affordable housing, but the assignment required that they also take a broader view, grappling with city, state, and federal programs that could impact their designs. They also assessed how a new development would fit within Central Falls’ existing infrastructure, planning initiatives, and community priorities.  “I call this studio ‘designing the conditions,’ because design is not just about designing a physical object, in this case a building or a floor plan or facade,” Schindler explained. “There are rules that govern what we can produce as architects or planners. There are formulas, metrics, codes, and conventions that decide what gets funded, in what way, and on what timeline. Those are the conditions that shape what gets built, and architects, planners, and landscape architects should be at the table in designing those conditions.”

As a group, the studio met with Mayor Rivera, city solicitor Matt Jerzyk, deputy director of planning Diane Jacques, and Frank Spinella, the city’s housing consultant. Individually, students conducted interviews with developers and organizations as needed for their research. Taking these conversations into consideration, students proposed designs informed by real building codes, legal structures, and data about the urban context. “We were able to work across scales,” said Mehta “looking at a larger, comprehensive plan without compromising on the design.”

For students coming from a planning or urban design background like Mehta and Kahan, some of the details about financing, mortgages, and tax codes may have been relatively familiar territory. For architecture student David Shim (MArch I ’25) digging into state laws was a new and challenging experience. “As an architect, you’re usually given the prompt and you go from there,” said Shim. In the studio, he was given Rhode Island’s Qualified Allocation Plan, a document outlining the state’s criteria according to which affordable housing proposals are evaluated to receive public funding. “To parse this document and find your pain points is quite a daunting task.”

On his first visit to Central Falls, Shim was struck by the contrast between the city’s brand-new rail station and the nearby Conant Thread site. “The sheer scale of it, and the state of disarray that it was in—I just couldn’t keep my mind off it,” he said. Turning his attention away from the Osram Sylvania parcel, Shim decided that Central Falls could most effectively meet its housing goals by focusing on development at the expansive Conant Thread site.

Since a private developer owned the property without taking steps to build on it, Shim began looking into state eminent domain laws. He found a startling detail: Rhode Island requires that the state pay property owners 150 percent of fair market value in eminent domain cases, a poison pill seemingly designed to dissuade the government from taking over private property. Yet with the state in a mode to make changes, as Vandermillen said, perhaps this eminent domain policy, an outlier among nearby states, could be adjusted as well.

Mill buildings similar to those on the Conant Thread site had been renovated elsewhere in the state, most often for luxury housing. Shim’s plan for Conant Thread emphasized affordable housing, pedestrian walkways, and new community recreational facilities. “If a public developer in the state of Rhode Island were to step in and reimagine these mill buildings as something other than high-end residential, I think it’s certainly an exciting route,” said Shim, “a building typology that speaks to the city’s history, adaptively reused to create a redefined way of living.”

In the final review for the studio, Vandermillen observed that Central Falls had a reputation as a city where people establish themselves before moving elsewhere. The proposals put forward by GSD students, however, were meant to establish a lasting community. For now, the plans for building and financing at the Osram Sylvania and Conant Thread sites will serve as valuable inputs as the city continues its planning and community engagement process.

Summer Reading 2024: Design Books by GSD Faculty and Alumni

Building your summer reading list? This selection of recent publications by Harvard Graduate School of Design faculty and alumni—organized alphabetically by title—includes design-related topics from wildfires to the Tower of Babel.

In Absolute Beginners (Park Books, 2022) Iñaki Ábalos, design critic in architecture, addresses innovation in architecture, examining the ways in which architectural creation, like philosophical thought, intertwines with reflections on the past and appropriations of recurring challenges.

Approaching Architecture: Three Fields, One Discipline (Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2023) interrogates the relationship of research, pedagogy, and professional practice. Edited by Miguel Guitart (MArch ’03), the book collects 18 contributions from around the globe that challenge the discipline’s compartmentalization. One reviewer characterizes the compilation as “a thoughtful and engaging set of arguments, provocations, and reflections that work collaboratively, curiously, and critically to help reconsider the necessary entanglements of architecture’s ‘three fields.’”

In Architecture After God: Babel Resurgent (Birkhäuser, 2023), Kyle Dugdale (MArch ’02) explores the Tower of Babel as a concept aligning architecture and morality from ancient Babylon to twentieth century Europe, where early modernism’s idealism collided with the rising nationalism that prefigured World War II. “Dealing in structural metaphor, utopian aspiration, and geopolitical ambition, the book’s narrative”—in the words of the publisher—”exposes the inexorable architectural implications of the event described by Nietzsche as the death of God.”

Architecture and Micropolitics: Four Buildings 2011-2022 (Park Books, 2022), by professor in practice of architecture Farshid Moussavi (MArch ’91), investigates the relationship between architecture and society, using Moussavi’s work to highlight the architect’s enduring relevance and demonstrate how buildings can be grounded in the micropolitics of everyday life. The book includes essays by GSD design critic in architecture Iñaki Ábalos and others.

Architectures of Transition: Emergent Practices in South Asia (Edicions Altrim S.L., 2023), written by John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization Rahul Mehrotra, Devashree Shah (MArch II ’23), and Pranav Thole (MArch ’23), draws on a conferences series that took place from March 2022 to March 2023. The publication foregrounds conversations around architecture and evolving models of practice in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives.

Armadillo House: A Conversation between Marc Camille Chaimowicz and Roger Diener (Walther König, 2023), edited by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen—John Portman Design Critics in Architecture—with Cristina Bechtler, presents a discussion between artist Chaimowicz and architect Diener covering their collaboration on The Armadillo House in Basel, Switzerland. The book details their respective artistic visions and differing approaches to spatial arrangements.

The established horticultural practice of grafting connects two living plants, one old and one new, to grow and thrive as one. In The Art of Architectural Grafting (Park Books, 2024), professor in practice of architecture Jeanne Gang (MArch ’93) applies the notion of grafting to existing buildings and urban lands as a paradigm for rethinking adaptive reuse and addressing climate change. Through theoretical essays and architectural examples, Gang explicates the concept of architectural grafting, urging her peers to “renew our role as cultural leaders who envision and create a different future” by “add[ing] capacity to what already exists, caring for the old and simultaneously making original contributions to it.”

In Atlas of the Senseable City (Yale University Press, 2023), Antoine Picon, G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology, and Carlo Ratti explore how sensing technologies associated with digital mapping impact everyday life. Ubiquitous sensors offer new ways to visualize cities with implications that touch on many areas, from making municipalities more efficient to assisting in the support of vulnerable urban populations.

Edited by Michael Van Valkenburgh—Charles Eliot Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture, Emeritus—and Elijah Chilton, Brooklyn Bridge Park: Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (Monacelli, 2024) chronicles the transformation of 85 acres of Brooklyn’s post-industrial landscape into a waterfront park that stretches 1.3 miles along the East River. This book explores the firm’s efforts, over 23 years, to convert parking lots and derelict piers into a public recreational space and living ecosystem.

For a century, Zurich—a center of global finance and Switzerland’s largest city—has embraced, within its for-profit real estate market, a cooperative model that supports nonprofit housing. Cooperative Conditions: A Primer of Architecture, Finance, and Regulation in Zurich (gta Verlag, 2024), edited by design critic in urban planning and design Susanne Schindler with Anne Kockelkorn and Rebekka Hirschberg, examines the interplay between housing’s architectural, regulatory, and fiscal instruments, rendering aspects of Zurich’s cooperative model applicable for other locations.

Design by Fire: Resistance, Co-Creation, and Retreat in the Pyrocene (Routledge, 2023) by Emily Schlickman (MLA ’12) and Brett Milligan addresses our relationship with, and vulnerability to, wildfires. Nearly thirty case studies categorized into three approaches—resisting, embracing, and retreating—offer possible design strategies for building in fire-prone landscapes. One reviewer described Design by Fire as “the essential guidebook and atlas for the pyro-future that is already here,” offering “a foundation for understanding—and living in—the world to come.”

With Design Thinking and Storytelling in Architecture (Birkhäuser, 2024) Peter Rowe—Raymond Garbe Professor of Architecture and Urban Design and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor—and Yoeun Chung (MAUD ’19, DDes ’22) explore design thinking, posited as “a fundamentally different way of knowing the world and a particular form of addressing creative problems.” The authors assert that designing rests on underlying principles of inquiry, and storytelling is preceded by a process involving empathy or careful listening. The book illustrates examples of testing and prototyping that generate a deeper understanding of architecture.

Flowcharting: From Abstractionism to Algorithmics in Art and Architecture (gta Verlag, 2023) by Matthew Allen (MArch ’10) investigates mid-twentieth-century experimentation that harnessed serial effects to create art and architecture. As Allen writes, “by adopting flowcharting procedures from scientific management, [the avant-garde] enacted a paradigm shift that had long been a cherished dream of modernism, replacing composition with organization as the basis of design.”

Design critic in architecture Andrew Heid penned the introduction to Glass Houses (Phaidon Press, 2023), a lavishly illustrated publication presenting 50 homes, dating from the early modern era through today, built almost entirely from glass. Featured architects include Tatiana Bilbao, Lina Bo Bardi, Ofis Architekti, Herzog & de Meuron, Hiroshi Nakamura, Kazuyo Sejima, Philip Johnson, Mecanoo, John Lautner, Richard Rogers, and Mies van der Rohe.

Lina Ghotmeh, Kenzo Tange Design Critic in Architecture, worked closely with editors Alexa Chow and Natalia Grabowska to document her firm’s pavilion at the Serpentine Galleries in Kensington Gardens, London. Titled Lina Ghotmeh – Architecture – À Table!: Serpentine Pavilion 2023 (Walther König, 2023), the catalog contains illustrations and contributed essays, as well as a lengthy interview with Ghotmeh conducted by renowned critic and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist.

In The Multiplex Typology: Living in Kuwait’s Hybrid Houses (DOM Publishers, 2022) authors Joaquín Pérez-Goicoechea (MArch ’02), Sharifa Alshalfan, and Sarah Alfraih issue a call for alternative approaches to housing that are rooted in cultural specificity and adaptability. They focus on the multiplex—a ubiquitous yet officially unacknowledged form of multi-family housing that hides behind the facades of the single-family villa—arguing that this unique type offers a viable option for contemporary housing development in Kuwait.

Sarah Oppenheimer: Sensitive Machine (DelMonico Books/Wellin Museum of Art, 2023), edited by Tracy L. Adler, details four interactive artworks created by Sarah Oppenheimer, design critic in architecture, for the Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College. As Adler notes, “Oppenheimer’s work challenges us to consider how interactions with the built environment shape not just those who occupy a particular space, but how their presence impacts the space itself: how we fill and move through a space, how we adapt a space to our needs even when we are subject to its limitations.”

In Silt Sand Slurry: Dredging, Sediment, and the Worlds We are Making (AR+D, 2023), Gena Wirth (MLA ’09, MUP ’09), Rob Holmes, and Brett Milligan explore sediment’s role in shaping and facilitating modern life. As the book’s description notes, “Anthropogenic action now moves more sediment annually than ‘natural’ geological processes—yet this global reshaping of the earth’s surface is rarely discussed and poorly understood.” The authors outline an adaptive approach to designing with sediment as opposed to continuing current management practices, which often negatively impact larger ecological and human systems.

John Portman Design Critics in Architecture Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen edited Sylvie Fleury: Double Positive (Jrp Ringier Kunstverlag Ag, 2022) to accompany an exhibition on the artist’s work that ran from October 2022 through March 2023 at the Bechtler Stiftung in Zurich. The book offers new insight into Fleury’s 1990s fashion collection, which the artist arranged as intentional mises-en-scène concerning consumerism and fetishization.

Segregation and Resistance in the Landscapes of the Americas (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2023) draws on a 2020 Dumbarton Oaks symposium, assembling essays on the histories of segregation and resistance. Edited by Eric Avila and Thaïsa Way, lecturer in landscape architecture and director of Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, this collection considers how cultural and spatial practices of separation, identity, response, and revolt are shaped by place and inform practices of place-making.

Sharing Tokyo: Artifice and the Social World (Actar, 2023) collects essays and drawings focused on the theme of sharing Toyko’s urban space. Co-edited by Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor Mohsen Mostafavi and Kayoko Ota, the book offers insights, new perspectives, and speculative experiments in Tokyo’s urbanism and architecture that can be transferred to other contexts.

Technical lands, spaces united by their “exceptional” status, range from demilitarized and disaster exclusion zones to prison yards, industrial extraction sites, and airports. Edited by Charles Waldheim, John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture, and Jeffrey S. Nesbit (DDes ’20), Technical Lands: A Critical Primer (JOVIS, 2022) assembles writings representing diverse disciplines, geographies, and epistemologies to illuminate the meaning, political implications, and increasing significance of these spaces.

In Thinking and Building on Shaky Ground  (Birkhäuser, 2023), Yun Fu (MArch I AP ’15, DDes ’20), design critic in urban planning and design, explores strategies for earthquake-resilient architecture. Marrying technical knowledge with social and cultural understanding, these approaches allow for the development of contextual solutions applicable to all scales, from furniture to urban plans.

Urban Natures: A Technical and Social History, 1600-2023 (Pavillon de l’Arsenal, 2024), by G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology Antoine Picon, examines the history of nature’s place in cities through the lenses of urban planning, public health, food systems, and aesthetics. The publication accompanies an exhibition at Paris’s Pavillon de l’Arsenal mounted from April through September 2024.

Vincent Scully: Architecture, Urbanism, and a Life in Search of Community (Bloomsbury, 2023) by A. Krista Sykes (PhD ’04) details the life, career, and legacy of the architectural historian and critic Vincent Scully (1920–2017). Emerging in the 1950s as a guiding voice in American architecture, Scully investigated topics ranging from ancient Greek temples and Pueblos of the American Southwest to the work of Robert Venturi, Aldo Rossi, and New Urbanism. Scully believed that architecture shapes and is shaped by society, and that the best architecture responds to the human need for community and connection.

Resourceful Urbanism: Dan Stubbergaard’s Adaptive Reuse of Cities

Even before the last flight had taken off from Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, in 2008, the future of the historic airport’s 355-hectare site was the subject of intense dispute. Competing plans to transform the area into new residential neighborhoods and commercial areas, integrating the vast airfield into the surrounding urban fabric, stalled amid protests against development. Instead, the airport reopened as Tempelhofer Feld, the city’s largest public park. The proximity to the city center that had made the airport a commuter hub also contributed to the park’s popularity, even with intact runways crossing the open greenspace. Yet amid demands for more affordable housing and increasing concerns about sustainable growth amid the climate crisis, the future of the vast Tempelhof site and its surroundings remains unclear.  

In the Spring 2024 option studio City as Resource, GSD Professor in Practice of Urban Design Dan Stubbergaard challenged students to develop plans for new housing in an area surrounding the Teltow Canal, which runs just south of Tempelhofer Feld. The concept of adaptive reuse is at the core of Stubbergaard’s studio, as well as his own practice. Rather than seeking proposals to tear down existing structures or build new ones, Stubbergaard asked students to explore how “retrofitting existing situations can contribute to the creation of neighborhoods with improved living conditions, sense of community, and social balance.” Beyond conserving resources, wise applications of adaptive reuse can support growth that reflects established communities, especially in a city like Berlin that has an existing tradition of repurposing buildings.

 In an April 9 talk at the Graduate School of Design , also titled “City as Resource,” Stubbergaard described himself as “a very strong believer in the city and also the city as a design phenomenon, which can solve and deal with many of these challenges we have faced, but also are facing in the future.” He pointed to targets set by the European Union to eliminate net carbon emissions by 2050 while also restricting the use of new land for development. These parameters make adaptive reuse a necessity since existing structures constitute embodied carbon—an investment in emissions made by previous generations. Adaptive reuse is especially effective when combined with planning approaches geared toward density, which allows for more efficient transportation and energy use. Stubbergaard described his mission to define “how we live closer, live smarter, and also create better social solutions in a much more dense environment than we have used to before.”

Stubbergaard presented an overview of work being done by Cobe, his Copenhagen-based firm. Since its founding in 2006, Cobe has built more than 36 projects in its home city alone. Some of the firm’s most iconic projects are in Nordhavn, a former industrial waterfront that Cobe won the competition to masterplan in 2008. This multi-decade project is adaptive reuse at an urban scale, with a network of docks to create a new neighborhood of dense housing connected by transit and bike lanes. The 160 architects, landscape architects, and urban designers who now make up Cobe live out the group’s principles by working together in an office in a repurposed warehouse in Nordhavn.

The firm’s work focuses on seven thematic areas: resilient urban development, infrastructure for a changing climate, adaptive reuse, longevity and adaptability, new ways of building, social capital, and urban nature. “I think we need to see our profession as creators of solutions for the future,” Stubbergaard said. Among the most stunning efforts at adaptive reuse is The Silo, a former grain silo that Cobe transformed into a residential complex with public facilities on the ground floor and roof. The project reused 2700 cubic meters of concrete. Cobe’s plan for the Frederiksberg School of Culture and Music repurposed parking space into a series of courtyards on the grounds of the Radio House, the former headquarters of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation. The Roskilde Folk High School, another arts-focused high school, sits on the site of a former concrete factory whose existing structures have been transformed into space for art workshops, dance halls, and music studios. 

In Stubbergaard’s studio, students began the semester by dividing up into teams of two, each focusing on one of six themes: vacancy and obsolescence, urban expansion, underutilization, density, land use, and zoning. During the studio’s trip to Berlin in February, they were able to visit the site and choose a section of the site to focus on. In addition to the site visits, the studio spent time at several architecture firms to observe their approaches to sustainable practice. They climbed 22 floors of an old industrial building to reach the offices of b+, a firm specializing in adaptive reuse. They had a guided tour of Lokdepot, a residential area featuring recycled brick facades. At the offices of Bauhaus Erde, they made their own bricks out of compacted soils.

 Despite having studied maps of the site and the city in the first part of the semester, Christopher Oh and Somin Lee (MAUD ’24) found that their experiences walking around Berlin brought home why Stubbergaard had chosen this city in particular. “In Berlin [adaptive reuse] is part of the culture,” said Oh, “but it didn’t come from a climate perspective.” Rather, it was a financial necessity after the war. Their eventual project proposed reuse of over 60 percent of the existing buildings on their section of the site, which connected the airport to the canal via a long strip, to provide housing; meanwhile, they added green spaces to promote community agriculture and pedestrian connectivity.

Gyu-Lee Hwang and Hui Li (both MAUD ’25) proposed relocating a mixed-use development currently being developed on the site of the Tempelhof airport to the former industrial area along the Teltow Canal. They explained, “Berlin is well known for applying mixed-use developments, but still they have this kind of zoning – residential and industrial [are] separated. Our site is located to the south of the Tempelhof airport along the Teltow canal. It’s very historic and is open to the public now. But they have this plan of using that green space to develop the housing because they have this population growth [projected to increase by nearly 200,000 inhabitants by 2040] and housing shortage problems.” They were inspired by the time they spent on their trip observing Berlin’s Höfe, linked courtyards that can be used as parks, playgrounds, retail businesses, or other community spaces for the residential housing that surround them. Hwang and Li proposed to turn the existing airport parking area into a series of Höfe.

As Stubbergaard noted in his talk, the construction industry accounts for 40 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, 60 percent of resource consumption, and 40 percent of waste generation. Stubbergaard believes that adaptive reuse is an ideal tool to help mitigate these problems. Indeed, more than 50 percent of Cobe’s current projects involve adaptive reuse on some level. The growing impact of adaptive reuse on the design fields has made students eager to learn about the topic as well. Christopher Oh says that “[Adaptive reuse] is definitely going to be a huge part of the profession in the future. I feel that there’s a huge push not just amongst us as students, wanting to engage more with it, but also people working in governments.”

The lessons that Stubbergaard and Cobe learned in their ongoing project of rebuilding the Nordhavn district are ones that he has tried to help the students apply to their Tempelhof sites. Like the reimagined Nordhavn, the studio projects prioritize pedestrian access and intersperse green space among residential areas, cultural and community space, and businesses. 

Rethinking I.M. Pei’s Legacy

For his 1946 thesis at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), Ieoh Ming (I.M.) Pei proposed a museum in Shanghai. Intended to display Chinese art, the structure embodies a proposition about the changing nature of cultural and civic institutions in the cosmopolitan city where Pei spent his early life—a city that had since been transformed by war and was on the verge of revolution. The project’s modernist form attests to Pei’s time studying under Walter Gropius while its spatial layout, organized around courtyards, recalls precedents in Chinese architecture. Such subtle transcultural sensitivity characterizes Pei’s six-decade career, which is now set for a major reassessment.

“He was always interested in trying to find buildings that would enliven the community in which they existed,” said I.M. Pei’s son Li Chung (Sandi) Pei (AB ’72, MArch ’76). On May 15 at Cooper Union in New York, Sandi Pei shared reflections on his father’s life and work with Calvin Tsao (MArch ’79) in a conversation moderated by architecture critic Paul Goldberger.

The event, organized by the M+ American Friends Foundation, previewed the architect’s first major retrospective, I.M. Pei: Life is Architecture , opening this summer at M+ in Hong Kong. Curated by Aric Chen and Shirley Surya, the exhibition has roots at the GSD, where “Rethinking Pei: A Centenary Symposium” took place in 2017. Several of the papers presented at the symposium have been adapted for the publication that accompanies the exhibition.

Sandi Pei and Tsao shared memories of working with I.M. Pei on now-seminal projects. Tsao joined the firm Pei Cobb Freed as a fresh graduate of the GSD. He jokingly recalled how, as a junior staff member, he received an assignment “counting bathroom tiles” for the design of the Javits Center. Yet his work eventually caught the attention of the firm’s principal, and Tsao joined the project team for the Fragrant Hill Hotel in Beijing, one of the first significant international projects developed during the period of economic reform in China.

I.M. Pei was as adept at navigating the world of New York developers as he was in conveying his design philosophy to members of the public where he worked. Both Tsao and Sandi Pei had roles on the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, a building notable for its imposing structure of triangular supports designed to withstand typhoon winds. Yet as Tsao recalled, I.M. Pei understood the skyscraper in terms of a Chinese saying, “the bamboo shoot rising ever higher under the spring rain.” As Tsao said, “It’s not just technical engineering, but also it derived from that cultural, literary context.” Tsao also recalled Pei sharing Chinese landscape paintings as part of the design research process for the Fragrant Hill Hotel.

I.M. Pei did not return to the academy after he started his practice, but as Sandi Pei noted, “we often said working in the office was like being in a university,” with employees earning a rigorous “I.M. degree.” He recalled his father bringing strong ideas to a project but also allowing them to evolve through the design process, often with crucial input from others, as on the CAA building in Los Angeles. “He felt that the way to teach was through his buildings,” said Sandi Pei, “and he welcomed people to look at what he was doing and challenge the ideas.” As Tsao added, “I think he would make an incredible teacher. Not one who lectures, but someone who could actually sit side-by-side with you.”

While the panelists shared such candid reflections on the man who mentored them, they also alluded to another side of I.M. Pei as a public figure and veritable diplomat responsible for high-profile projects like the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the renovation of the Louvre in Paris. Almost transcending his role as an architect, Pei courted political favor from successive French politicians and American elites, including Jaqueline Kennedy (one section of the M+ exhibition is titled “Power, Politics, and Patronage”.)

Yet one member of the audience voiced a question that was also raised at the GSD symposium: despite his legacy of iconic buildings, is I.M. Pei, in fact, underrated? “In the Venn diagram of architects who work for developers and architects who are widely admired,” Goldberger speculated, “I think there’s only one tiny bit of overlap”—just enough for I.M. Pei. The architect’s once-controversial decision to work for the real estate developer William Zeckendorf early in his career is one of the prime areas ripe for reassessment today. A study of Pei’s business acumen, as a complement to his visionary designs, suggests in particular possible strategies for the development of high-quality affordable housing.

As Sandi Pei noted, this experience with Zeckendorf was a crucial foundation for later projects and allowed him to build a professional network that eventually served as the basis for his own firm. “He did many low-cost housing buildings,” Sandi Pei said, which “allowed him to explore the possibility of using reinforced concrete in a way that was cost-competitive with brick buildings. By using new technologies, and new structural engineering techniques, he was able to really advance the housing as a result.”  With a focus on large-scale housing, I.M. Pei had less interest in single-family private dwellings, though the retreat he built for his own family just north of New York is a stellar, if under-known, example, which Goldberger ranked alongside Philip Johnson’s Glass House and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House.

Based in New York, I.M. Pei maintained strong ties to Greater China. During a Q&A session, one audience member spoke of his influence as a prominent Chinese American figure whose culture-spanning influence transcended the profession. Almost exactly 60 years after his GSD thesis project, Pei, working with his sons, opened a museum for Chinese art in Suzhou, China. With gallery spaces defined by fundamental geometry and arranged around a network of courtyards and gardens, the project exemplifies aspirations that Pei held throughout his career.

Pete Walker & the GSD: Nearly 70 Years of Connections

For almost 70 years, the landscape architect Pete Walker (MLA ’57) has maintained strong ties with the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), a relationship that has evolved alongside his career, from student to world-renowned designer and GSD benefactor. Since 2004, the Peter Walker & Partners Fellowship, conferred on Class Day, has supported travel for promising Landscape Architecture graduates.

Walker’s introduction to the GSD dates to the mid-1950s when he was a graduate student at the University of Illinois, studying with the landscape architect Stanley White. After his first term, Walker asked his professor what courses to take the next semester. White’s response? “Well, you’re not going to be here,” Walker recalled. “You’re going to be at Harvard.” Indeed, White had arranged with his former student Hideo Sasaki, then a GSD faculty member in the Department of Landscape Architecture, for Walker’s transfer.

Encouraging Walker’s move east, White had characterized Sasaki as a mastermind—an assessment Walker would soon share. “Sasaki saw the future in a way that I had never even imagined,” Walker says. “He gave this view of the world—an incredibly dynamic postwar view, talking about transportation, expansion of education, corporate expansion, urban expansion, world trade, airplanes. . . . I had never thought of landscape in those terms, likely because no one had really described it like that. And Sasaki was just beginning to.” Walker was thus exposed, though his time at the GSD and in Sasaki’s office, to a perspective that broadened landscape architecture’s reach to an urban scale.

Walker graduated from the GSD with an MLA in 1957 and, funded by the school’s Jacob Weidenman Prize, undertook his first trip to Europe to visit the continent’s historic gardens. After returning home, he continued to work with Sasaki, cofounding Sasaki, Walker, and Associates (eventually the SWA Group), which soon added to its initial location in Watertown, Massachusetts, an office in San Francisco, with Walker at the helm. He left SWA in 1983, establishing a small practice with his then-wife and partner Martha Schwartz (currently Research Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at the GSD). Since then, the firm has undergone a series of iterations culminating in Peter Walker and Partners, which now operates as PWP Landscape Architecture .

In the midst of celebrated design activity—including projects such as Harvard University’s Tanner Fountain (1984) and New York’s National September 11 Memorial (2011), with architect Michael Arad, and awards like the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) Medal in 2004—Walker maintained a robust presence in the educational realm. While firmly ensconced at SWA in the mid-1970s, Walker returned to the GSD, initially as visiting critic and adjunct professor before serving as the acting director of the Urban Design program in 1976. (“My job was to replace myself,” Walker recalls. He succeeded, convincing his friend Moshe Safdie to become the new program head.) Walker then served as chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture from 1978 through 1981. He remained on the GSD’s faculty through 1991, after which time he moved on to UC Berkeley, his undergraduate alma mater, where he would lead the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning in the late 1990s.

Despite Walker’s move to the West Coast and the subsequent passage of time, his presence continues to resonate at the GSD, especially through his former students, three of whom have chaired the Department of Landscape Architecture: Gary Hilderbrand (MLA ’85 and current chair), Anita Berrizbeitia (MLA ’87), and George Hargreaves (MLA ’79). Contributing another layer of connection, sons David E. Walker (MLA ’92) and Jacob S. Walker (MDes ’24) have cemented Walker’s position as alumni parent.

Finally, Walker has expanded his relationship with the GSD by becoming a benefactor. In 2004, his firm established the PWP Fellowship for Landscape Architecture to provide “young landscape architecture designers [with] an opportunity to spend a concentrated period of time studying landscape design in various parts of the world.” The roots of this annual award rest in Walker’s own post-graduate experience—namely his Weidenman Prize–sponsored European travels, which exposed him firsthand to a historical component of landscape design that complemented the modern perspective introduced by Sasaki. Walker sees the PWP Fellowship as an opportunity for emerging designers to further broaden their global outlook. “For me, in a sense,” Walker says, these graduates “represent what design could mean in a changing world.” This year Walker will attend the GSD’s Class Day for the conferral of the PWP Fellowship.

In various capacities, Walker has witnessed—and played a discernable role in—the Harvard GSD’s evolution. And from his unique vantage point, Walker recognizes the diverse, mind-expanding views amassed at the GSD as an enduring gift for students and alumni alike, even long after they have departed campus. As Walker notes, “through family and close friends”—many former students turned colleagues—“Harvard has kept me in touch with these things.”

A Public Artwork by GSD Students Embraces Enclosure

Near the south entrance to the Radcliffe Yard, a structure of fir beams clad in grey translucent polycarbonate defines an intimate public space. A gently curving U-shape enclosure emerges from a wall, forming an entrance and defining an exterior. Light filtered through the smoky plastic takes on a sepia tone, giving the interior an ambient quality distinct from that of the yard outside. The space feels quiet even as it opens onto the well-trafficked Radcliffe gardens.

Both a site for gathering and a space of partial seclusion, HOLD is a public artwork by Curry J. Hackett (MAUD ’24) and Gabriel Jean-Paul Soomar (MArch II ’24, MDes ’24). Exploring “the complex relationship Black communities have had with enclosure,” according to a text panel near the work, HOLD was realized through the Radcliffe Institute Public Art Competition .

Animated by a tension between open and confined space, the work developed from a historical understanding of “the ways that Black folks have been restricted and then the ways that they have subverted that restriction in an effort to find community and joy for themselves,” said Soomar in an interview.

As both designers observed, the curving form of the structure can suggest an embrace even as it pointedly evokes the hold of a ship used for transporting enslaved people. As Hackett said, the work is “an opportunity to put joyful moments of Black gathering in context with harder, more difficult, more complicated and darker histories where Black bodies have been contained.” Hackett and Soomar were developing the project when the University released the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery report, which details the University’s financial ties to the slave trade and exploitation of enslaved people.

“We’re offering this as a space for communities across Harvard’s campus to find fellowship with one another,” Soomar said, emphasizing an intention to welcome communities that have been historically marginalized at Harvard. The two designers found that extending this invitation to gather involved creating an area that was partially closed off. This dynamic is underscored by the obscured views through the translucent polycarbonate. HOLD “plays with the visibility of Black bodies gathering in the public space,” according to Hackett.

The work responds to subtle architectural cues in its surroundings, especially the U-shapes repeated in the dormers and doors of Radcliffe buildings. There is a give-and-take to this relationship as HOLD also transforms the broader environment. Augmenting the physical structure, Hackett and Soomar have curated a program of soundscapes that play daily at dusk. Respective audio pieces by Hackett and Soomar will inaugurate a series that extends through the year and include contributions from other designers, artists, and musicians. More than a sculpture or a work of architecture, HOLD was conceived as a platform for collaboration.

Hackett is a transdisciplinary designer who has created public artworks and design installations in Washington, D.C., and New York with his studio Wayside . He and Soomar were aware of each other’s practices prior to meeting at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). Plans for HOLD emerged from their discussions of shared cultural traditions recognizable in both the Southern United States, where Hackett is from, and Caribbean nations like Soomar’s home country of Trinidad and Tobago.

One early touchstone for the piece was the antebellum tradition of the hush harbor. Typically located on the periphery of plantations, hush harbors were secluded spaces where enslaved people would gather for religious worship, spiritual music, and dance. With roots in African traditions, these practices were subversive expressions of agency.

Hackett and Soomar noted that hush harbors offer key precedents for the modes of worship distinctive to Black churches. As much as the U-shape recurs around Radcliffe buildings, Soomar observed that similar forms are evident on Boston’s African Meeting House, among the oldest Black church buildings in America. In addition to the curated soundscapes, HOLD includes chime sounds at set intervals, including at 11 AM every Sunday, the traditional time for church.

As an architect, Soomar approached the project through the study of cultural practices that have defined Black spaces. The distinctive shape of HOLD developed in part through a study of gatherings, including those depicted in Carrie Mae Weems’s “Kitchen Table Series” of photographs centered on Black domesticity.  For Soomar, bell hooks’s writings on “architecture as a cultural practice” provided an essential intellectual foundation for his work on HOLD. “Black folks equated freedom with the passage into a life where they would have the right to exercise control over space on their own behalf,” hooks writes in a passage that Soomar shared, “where they would imagine, design, and create spaces that would respond to the needs of their lives, their communities, their families.”

Grounded in joy while reflecting on a history of despair, HOLD confronts the history of its site while retaining a highly personal address. “The whole thing is responding to the scale of the human body,” said Hackett. The first soundscapes playing at dusk reflect the stories of HOLD’s creators. Hackett’s work is an abstract interpretation of a baptism in a river, inspired by his own family’s history. Soomar’s work relates to his own experience with and research on Carnival traditions. In this sense, HOLD is a public work embedded with deep personal resonance.

How Bio-Based Building Materials Are Transforming Architecture

A colorful grid of bio-based tiles rests atop a black surface. Created as sustainable alternatives to products ranging from acoustic cladding to frosted glass, the tiles derive from eggshells, expired lentils, and other green waste. These palm-sized squares, despite their origins in food scraps, invite tactile investigation. The same lure emanates from a neighboring rug swatch woven from Abaca fiber; a masonry-like block composed of sugarcane; and textile strips made from apple pomace. This enticing display accompanied “Material Time,” a day-long symposium at the Harvard Graduate School of Design held in mid-April that explored our emerging relationship with bio-based materials.

Amelia Gan (MDes ’23) organized “Material Time” in her capacity as the GSD’s 2023–24 Irving Innovation Fellow. She collaborated with Ann Whiteside, Assistant Dean for Information Studies at the GSD, and Margot Nishimura, Dean of Libraries at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), who had previously cofounded Material Order , a knowledge-sharing resource for design materials collections in academic libraries. Conceptualizing the symposium, the three organizers identified practitioners, researchers, and educators at various stages in their careers whose work touches on design scales from microbes to building systems to outer space. The resulting discussion foregrounded the urgent need for transformations in how we think about and interact with the materials that comprise our built environment.

Concrete, aluminum, and steel rank among the most prevalent materials in contemporary construction. They are also quite costly in terms of their environmental toll. Developed from dwindling non-renewable resources, such conventional engineered building products inflict widespread ecological harm, from their extractive, carbon-intensive manufacturing processes to their final disposal in landfills where they languish, leaching pollutants into the earth. Bio-based counterparts offer a potential alternative to these destructive materials.

In her introductory remarks to the symposium, Gan announced that the time has come for design professionals to “critically rethink our material choices.” Indeed, “the prevailing ethos, which celebrates idealized, unchanging form, finds itself at a crossroads challenged by materials sensitive to environmental changes,” Gan continued. “How do we reconsider the way we represent and construct our environment?” Fortunately, bio-based materials offer a compelling lens through which to reexamine construction techniques as well as expectations about how materials look and what they can do.

Consider bacterial biocement, as fabricated by Laura Maria Gonzalez, founder of Microbi Design and former researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. Utilizing computational design and 3D printing, Gonzalez creates sculptural molds infused with sand and bacteria. As the microbes are fed, the mixture hardens into solid forms that, with continued nourishment, become stronger over time. If fractures occur, these living bricks heal themselves through microbial growth. They may even be programmed to signal, through a change in color, the presence of environmental toxins such as lead or arsenic. For Gonzalez, bacterial biocement promises more than a sustainable replacement for more carbon-intensive materials; it presents an opportunity to think about “how we integrate these organisms as living systems to engage more deeply with our environment.”

Paul Lewis, principal of LTL Architects and Professor at Princeton University School of Architecture, emphasized a different behavior we could seek from bio-based materials—that of performing multiple functions. As opposed to aggregated thin, lightweight, single-use products that comprise the typical modernist building section—structure, insulation, waterproofing, and so on—Lewis has experimented with using straw in bale-like configurations that act simultaneously as insulation and load-bearing structure, from which space can be carved. Lewis advocated embracing ideas that are “fundamentally at odds” with the “given values we’ve inherited from modernism,” aligning his explorations with the growing recognition that buildings as constructed throughout the past century have played a significant role in our current ecological predicament. John May, cofounder of MILLIØNS and Associate Professor of Architecture at the GSD, echoed this sentiment as he characterized the term, and the very concept of, “waste” as a vestige of a past industrial capitalist era. Rather, that which has been previously seen as waste should now be embraced as raw materials for other processes.

Underscoring the significance of terminology, Lola Ben-Alon, Assistant Professor and Director of the Natural Materials Lab at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), cautioned that “bio-based” materials are not necessarily less extractive or energy intensive than conventional materials. To ascertain environmental impact, she advocated examining a product’s entire life cycle, with a focus on a system’s inputs and outputs. “How are these bio-based materials produced?” Ben-Alon asked. “And where? What are the processes involved in the extraction of these materials? Where are they extracted? And can we pose other means or methods of locally creating these materials?” Such systems thinking—understood as a holistic approach that views component parts in relation to the broader dynamic systems to which they belong—emerged throughout the symposium.

For example, systems thinking came to the fore with Lina Ghotmeh’s presentation, which focused on her design firm’s use of bio-sourced materials. Ghotmeh—currently Kenzo Tange Design Critic in Architecture at the GSD—featured the recently completed Hermès Maroquinerie de Louviers, a leather workshop constructed with locally manufactured low-carbon bricks that showcase the skill of Normandy’s brickmakers. This project is the first industrial building to earn the French E4C2 label, denoting the country’s highest recognized levels of energy efficiency (it is a positive energy building) and operational efficiency (in terms of carbon footprint reduction).

Drawing on concepts resonant with systems thinking, Martin Bechthold, Kumagai Professor of Architectural Technology and Director of the Material Processes and Systems Group (MaP+S) , discussed the iterative processes of science and design, highlighting their similarities and differences, particularly that designers tend to work at a larger scale. And later, Pablo Pérez-Ramos, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the GSD, expanded the conversation beyond our planet with a consideration of thermodynamics and ways in which these universal laws may help us grapple with conditions of extreme heat in certain landscapes.

Yet another instance of system thinking emerged in the position of Jennifer Bissonnette, Interim Director of RISD’s Nature Lab, who called for “artists and designers to have a certain level of eco literacy.” Design programs, Bissonnette argued, have a responsibility to “turn out people who have a sense of how ecosystems function,” the “cycles, flows, nested systems, development, dynamic balance” that serve as “organizing principles of the natural world.” Likewise, she advocated that scientists be schooled in studio methodology and design thinking to broaden their investigative repertoires. Such pedagogical shifts would go a long way in facilitating the multidisciplinary cooperation—from conceptualization and experimentation through scaling up to real-world manufacturing and application—that bio-based materials necessitate.

Reflecting on “Material Time” a few weeks later, Gan reiterated the need to overcome disciplinary silos. “These conversations shouldn’t happen in a vacuum, yet that often tends to occur,” especially when operating in the complex realm of bio-based materials, which encompasses design, biology, engineering, politics, ecology, sociology, and more. “The challenge is,” Gan continued, “how do you move from a high-level conversation to productive action?” Formulated to further interdisciplinary and intergenerational discussions within the GSD and beyond, “Material Time” offered an exemplary step in the right direction.

 

What Oysters Can Teach about Life in the Climate Crisis 

On the southern coast of Taiwan, groundwater pumped from the earth flows through dense tangles of pipes to supply industrial-scale fish farms. This intensive aquaculture has had a dramatic effect on the surrounding land of Pingtung County. Daniel Fernández Pascual, winner of the 2020 Wheelwright Prize, noted that the pumping of groundwater has caused some areas to sink 6 to 8 centimeters each year. Speaking at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in March, Fernández Pascual described how “buildings keep losing their ground floors. Living rooms become garages. Doors become stairs. Roofs touch the street.”

Taiwan’s fish farms exemplify the “extractivist” logic of aquaculture—and its long-term consequences. Pingtung County is one of the areas that Fernández Pascual studied during his Wheelwright term, which brought him in contact with coastal communities in ten countries, from the Isle of Skye in Scotland to the shores of Chile to coastal towns in China. The $100,000 award enabled him to take a global perspective on the risks of intensive aquaculture while identifying alternatives that could become the basis for a sustainable future. Resisting extractivism, Fernández Pascual aimed to foster a “tidal commons,” which he defined as a “framework of shared assets and shared stewardship of ecological structures in the planet’s shoreline.”

The title of Fernández Pascual’s talk, “Being Shellfish: Architectures of Intertidal Cohabitation,” reflects the central place of oysters, mussels, scallops, and other bivalves within his vision for the tidal commons. “Oysters filter the sea,” he said, “and in so doing their shells record histories of coastal habitation as material witnesses of the Anthropocene.” The natural habitats of these creatures comprise the same coastal regions that fish farms can spoil. “Bivalves and other foods have been a tool for us to understand the impact of intensive food production,” Fernández Pascual said, “while also supporting the different struggles and solidarity networks across communities in the ruins of extractivism.”

The scope of Fernández Pascual’s research extends far beyond encouraging the consumption of more ethical seafood—though bivalves are indeed tasty, sustainable alternatives to farmed fish. At the GSD, he put forward a holistic vision for new models of economic development and strategies for navigating a changing climate. In addition to rethinking food supply chains, bolstering restaurant menus, and undertaking educational initiatives, “intertidal cohabitation” means harvesting resources, such as shells and seaweed, that have long been used in traditional building practices and imagining new uses for them in the present.

Fernández Pascual may be best known for his collaborations with Alon Schwabe as Cooking Sections. Their work, often featured in international biennials, includes performative meals that foreground urgent ecological questions. CLIMAVORE, one of their research initiatives, aims to “transition to alternative forms of nourishment in the climate crisis.” In 2017, ATLAS Arts, a cultural organization based in Skye, Raasay, and Lochalsh in northwest Scotland, invited Cooking Sections to the area, where salmon farming dominates the local economy. Fernández Pascual and Schwabe developed a project that eventually became a long-term engagement with the community. One aspect of their work is an installation constructed from metal oyster cages. Built in an intertidal zone, the structure is submerged at high tide and inhabited by bivalves. At low tide, it becomes a communal table for the performative meals that Cooking Sections organizes as well as a public forum for discussions and workshops.

One fundamental question raised at these forums is how the economies of Skye, Rassay, and Lochalsh might transition away from fish farming. Enhancing the role of bivalves in the food supply chain is part of the answer. At the GSD Fernández Pascual also highlighted potential uses of oyster shells as building materials. He has been collaborating with a team to create tiles from oyster shells that have been cleaned, ground up and processed.  A pair of murals depicting bivalves that he and Schwabe created demonstrate the potential of this material. They employed similar techniques for Oystering Room (2020), their contribution to the 2020 Taipei Biennial. Visitors to the installation could recline in lounge chairs crafted in a material inspired by a Taiwanese technique of mixing oyster shells, glutinous rice, and maltose sugar to create a binding paste. Visitors could also sample an exfoliating skincare product derived from oyster shells—a luxurious demonstration of how bivalve cultivation could counter the sinking economics of fish farming.

Oyster shells have long served as a source of fertilizer and as a key component of tabby concrete. Fernández Pascual surveyed building traditions in Southern China, where oyster shells are employed directly as siding, as well as in Japan, where walls made of oyster-derived plaster keep interiors well ventilated. Seaweed harvested from intertidal zones has also served as roofing material in Denmark, China, and elsewhere. In revisiting these traditions Fernández Pascual was not attempting to recover a lost pastoral ideal. The goal is “cohabitation” in the present, a concept that challenges us to “learn how to produce an ecological future that enables us to live well beside toxicity and unstable, shifting seasons.”

In gathering information from around the world, Fernández Pascual also facilitated a global exchange of information about what learning to live beside toxicity might mean. “Research conducted as part of the Wheelwright Prize has tied together different experiences from communities dealing with pollution from intensive farming,” he said, emphasizing how these communities were interested in “sharing lessons on collective usership of the coast and architectures of intertidal stewardship and resistance.” While the Wheelwright Prize supports such an international outlook, Fernández Pascual’s award was announced just as the world shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Speaking about his research process prior to his public talk, Fernández Pascual noted the importance of local collaborators, many of whom he contacted remotely. “Especially when we’re talking about extractivism,” he said, it’s vital to ensure that you “don’t become extractive in the research.” The ethics of working as “the outsider coming to learn,” especially during the pandemic, were at the forefront of Fernández Pascual’s process.

The pandemic also altered the focal point of the project. Initially, Fernández Pascual and Schwabe envisioned restoring a building on Skye that could serve as a permanent hub for their Climavore work. Yet with rural real estate in high demand, the project fell through. This shift proved fortuitous, however, allowing the project to take the form of an “assemblage of formats” that span different practices and fields of knowledge while engaging a wider range of stakeholders, from educators to activist groups to chefs. “Precisely because we did not have to take care of a building,” he said, “we could rethink allyship and make the project much more open and diverse.”

This fluid approach also forced Fernández Pascual to take an expansive view of his own role as a designer, researcher, artist, and activist. He described learning “how to jump boundaries across disciplines, especially when talking or thinking about the food supply chain.” His research incorporates vernacular techniques and technological innovation in material projection. “There are many networks of knowledge involved in figuring out what it means to live besides toxicity and to imagine an alternative scenario,” he said, encouraging design students in particular to look beyond their disciplines to “find the necessary allies to join in the quest for alternatives.” 

From Drought to Flood: Solutions for Extreme Climate Events in Monterrey, Mexico

In 2022 and 2023, Monterrey, Mexico’s second largest city, experienced a critical shortage of water and, like Cape Town in 2018, was close to a Day Zero of water provision. The emergency made international headlines , as the state government rationed water for many of the city’s five million residents. While struggling at times to supply water to residents, Monterrey is also well-known for its severe floods that have peaked in intensity during deadly hurricanes, such as Gilbert in 1988 and Alex in 2010. In recent years the fluctuation between these extreme events has been intensified by a changing climate.

Like many other cities, Monterrey is not prepared for a warming planet with increased volumes of water in its atmosphere and extended droughts. The impervious urban ground that covers much of the city is designed to drain water as quickly as possible. Agriculture, industry, and citizens overexploit water unsustainably. As a result, during much of the year the Santa Catarina riverbed remains dry. Yet at times of heavy rain, it is prone to overflowing, with potential catastrophic results.

In the fall 2023 studio “AQUA INCOGNITA: Designing for extreme climate resilience in Monterrey, MX,” GSD Design Critic Lorena Bello Gómez worked with students to devise design strategies along the Santa Catarina watershed to increase water security and to reduce flood risk. Bello was invited to Monterrey after her work on the first iteration of AQUA INCOGNITA, in 2021 and 2022, which focused on the Apan Plains, a region that shares a basin with Mexico City and also struggles with its water supply.

For Bello, every studio is an opportunity to expose students to real-world climatic problems and inspire efforts to restore a lost balance with the water cycle. “Traveling with students for field research and engagement is a fundamental part of the pedagogy,” she explained. “The territorial scale of a project dealing with water risk in an urban region through the lens of an urban river, requires the ability to constantly telescope from macro to micro scales.” According to Bello, digital tools like Google Earth and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) cannot recreate the experience of “inhabiting and crossing the river with your own feet to understand its ecology and scale, and that of its surrounding infrastructures.”

Bello’s focus on the Santa Catarina River watershed developed through a yearlong engagement with the regional conservation institution Terra Habitus , which sponsored the studio. In addition to giving students firsthand experience, Bello’s studio was also an opportunity to help those fighting to change the status quo on the ground. “Deciphering where to insert the needle in this impervious skin is the first incognita to solve,” Bello said. “We know that there is the potential to recover this river as an ecological corridor and climate resilience infrastructure for the city, but we also need to know that there are local academics, organizations, and citizens that could benefit from our work to push the political will.”

Bello’s fieldwork in advance of the studio included meetings with a variety of stakeholders. She gathered input from representatives of community groups and planning agencies as well as political leaders such as Monterrey’s mayor, Donaldo Colosio, and the mayor of neighboring San Pedro Garza García, Miguel Treviño. She also met with Juan Ignacio Barragán, the director of the local water operator Servicios de Agua y Drenaje de Monterrey. Other important preparation included a Spring 2023 research seminar, “Resilience Under New Water Regimes: the case of Monterrey Day-Zero”, supported by PhD candidate Samuel Tabory (PhD ’25).

Daniella Slowik (MLA II ’24) chose to take the studio because she is already focused on climate- and water-related projects and sees herself working on these topics after she graduates. “Different parts of the world are going to continue to experience massive extremes,” she said, “and we have to learn how to work within those constraints in our design field.”

Students toured the riverbed with two local conservation groups as soon as they landed in Monterrey. They examined the soil and plant life in a dry section of riverbed running along one of Monterrey’s major highways before visiting Los Pinos, an informal settlement along the river. Locals shared memories of playing soccer, riding motorbikes, or attending parties on the riverbed, but they also expressed their new understanding of the river as a unique healthy ecology in otherwise desertifying Monterrey. The value of being on the ground, as Bello said, was in “sensing citizens’ empathy towards its river when they walk with us, learning about agricultural practices in the mountains, or understanding from local experts on policy and cultural challenges to overcome.” She continued, “This physical and personal exchange propels students’ imaginations, while their questions make locals aware of hidden aspects that they were overseeing.”

The group later drove to La Huasteca, the first canyon in the Parque Cumbres National Park in the nearby mountains that is the source of the Santa Catarina. The area has also become a site of unregulated settlements despite its protected status. “Traversing the lengthy river,” Bello explained, allowed students to “understand the duality between its urban condition downstream—today a flood-control channel—and its powerful upstream condition along the monumental Huasteca and Cumbres National Park, or by its flood control dam Rompepicos.”

The studio also spent several days participating in the Urban Hydrological Adaptation symposium and workshop sponsored by the Tecnológico de Monterrey with GSD former graduate Ruben Segovia (MArch II ’17). Organized by Bello and Segovia, the gathering of architects, landscape architects, and other academics built on conversations she had at the Tec de Monterrey on her previous fieldwork visits. Over the course of several days, students presented case studies of other cities with rivers that they had prepared earlier in the semester.

Several afternoons were devoted to site visits to locations ranging from parks such as the upscale Paseo San Lucia, an artificial canal offering boat rides, to Centrito, a neighborhood in the process of being rebuilt, where the group navigated several blocks of construction sites in 95-degree heat. A highlight that was both fun and educational was a hike in Chipinque National Park, which offered breathtaking views of the Sierra Madre Oriental and the ability to view the city within the context of the mountain landscape.

Inspired by the knowledge gleaned from the site visits and motivated by meetings with representatives from the municipalities of Monterrey and nearby San Pedro to address urgent needs, students’ final projects displayed a variety of alternative futures for the Santa Catarina River. While working individually, they also tackled collectively the myriad of challenges to overcome at the Rompepicos flood control dam, at the Cumbres National Park, and along the Santa Catarina River from the Cumbres to the urban park Fundidora. The final projects displayed a wide variety of solutions.  Some students chose to center their work on the mountainous area around La Huasteca; others took as their focus the highways or parks closer to the urban center. (See an overview of the projects below).

As climate change becomes an unavoidable concern in the design disciplines, the GSD’s Department of Landscape Architecture has pledged its “abiding commitment to climate mitigation and adaptation through its curriculum, faculty research, and design culture.” Indeed, many students cited the urgency of climate change as a primary reason that they chose this particular studio. Bello’s career has also focused on climate. In addition to her previous research in Mexico, she has used her background in landscape, architecture, and urbanism in her work with environmentally vulnerable communities in India, Colombia, and Armenia. Weather permitting, she says with a smile, she plans to expand the Monterrey studio next fall.

For the final review, students presented their work in a sequence arranged geographically along the river transect, presenting the different challenges and opportunities to overcome by design such as:

Reciprocity at Cumbres National Park

• Jianing Zhou (MLA II ’24)’s project proposes an alternative network of almost invisible “incognito dams” as a counterpoint to mega-projects meant to control flood risk
• Emily Menard (MLA II ’24) explores reciprocal relationships between those who visit and inhabit the park, towards a more mutualistic and regenerative land use for water conservation

The ephemerality of flooding

• Lucas Dobbin (MLA I AP ’24) created “room for the river” at a key bend and point of risk inflection for extreme water flows entering the city from Parque Cumbres
• Pie Chueathue (MLA II ’24) uses the time in between floods to introduce a temporary/light-footprint tree nursery to promote urban tree canopy and work

Vertical and horizontal capillarity

• To reduce flood risk in the larger watershed, Boya Zhou (MLA I AP ’24) proposed starting to recover the network of streams while reconnecting them to the urban fabric

Circularity

• Responding to the near-shoring boom in Monterrey, Sanjana Shiroor (MAUD ’24) explored principles of circularity for brownfields along the river’s corridor to counter low-density sprawl

Bridging and descending to bring the edge of the city to the river

• Ashley Ng (MLA I ’24) designed a promenade
• Sophie Chien (MLA I AP/MUP ’24) proposed an inhabited bridge
• Using bridges as a river entrance to descend to a newly terraformed riverbed, allowing for habitat and inhabitation between storms, was the design vision of Annabel Grunebaum (MLA I ’24), Miguel Lantigua Inoa (MArch II/MLA I AP ’24) and Bernadette McCrann (MLA I AP ’24)

Climate justice

• Daniella Slowik (MLA II ’24)’s project emerged from a deep engagement with the history of Independencia, a marginalized community near the river, and asked what it would mean to convert the river into a community asset rather than just a source of vulnerability and risk

A New Future for a Colonial Fort in Ghana

The village of Ada Foah sits on the coast of Ghana where the Volta River flows into the Atlantic. Its name—a centuries-old vernacular adaptation of “fort”—acknowledges an erstwhile landmark: Fort Kongenstein. Constructed by Danes in the eighteenth century, Fort Kongenstein facilitated trade in goods and, for a period of about a decade, enslaved people. It is one of many such forts erected on the West African coast by European traders and settlers. These foreign structures, often built from materials imported from Europe along proto-globalized trade routes, stand as remnants of the complex and brutal colonial history that has shaped the region.

Though other forts in Ghana, such as Cape Coast Castle, have been preserved and rehabilitated, Fort Kongenstein today is at risk of being forgotten. Its historical significance is belied by its current physical condition. Most of the original stone fort has washed into the ocean, destroyed by the severe coastal erosion that has accelerated in a changing climate. What remains of the site includes a trading post, built in concrete and timber sometime after the British took power in the area, as well as a brick residential structure for the fort’s captain. In recent years, members of the Ada Foah community have taken steps to reclaim the site, adorning its walls with murals and occasionally hosting cultural events in the ruins.

While the fort has fallen into disrepair, tourist facilities and villas have sprung up in the area, catering to those drawn to the area’s natural beauty and seeking respite from the bustling capital Accra, a three-hour drive away. Caught between tourist development and relentless coastal erosion that has only accelerated with climate change, Ada Foah’s namesake has an uncertain future.

Yet this uncertainty also presents opportunities to transform the site into a facility with contemporary meaning. “Forgotten Fort Kongenstein,” an option studio led by Olayinka Dosekun-Adjei, John Portman Design Critic in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, challenged students to grapple with the compound’s past while envisioning a new future for it at the heart of the Ada Foah community. Dosekun-Adjei, a Lagos-based architect and Creative Director of Studio Contra , aimed to embrace the fort as a “symbolic site of contact between European settlers and traders and the local population,” rather than “rejecting the ruins as part of a painful past and contentious or problematic history.”

With support from the Open Society Foundations, Dosekun-Adjei led a group of students on a trip to Ghana to study the site. In addition to proposing an adaptive reuse of the fort structures that would address unforgiving erosion, students were tasked with developing a cultural program for the adapted site that would be historically sensitive, relevant to Ada Foah residents, and connected to the burgeoning ecosystem of regional arts institutions. Instead of preserving a monument or recovering a ruin, the goal was to transform the existing conditions into what Dosekun-Adjei calls a “generator” that will enrich the cultural life and economy of its surrounding community.

We used a European building constructed in Africa as a site for hybridizing what could be a rediscovered Indigenous approach to architecture and material culture.

Olayinka Dosekun-Adjei

“When we first arrived at the site after a long drive, the sun was blaring, but it was beautiful,” recalled Mariama M. M. Kah (MArch II ’24). “Everyone was taken aback by the sensory and auditory experience: wind gusts were coming off the Atlantic, the air was full of sea salt.” This stunning setting also posed challenges for envisioning resilient material conditions for the studio project. Fort Kongenstein has been worn down over time, defined today as much by absence as by monumentality.

Kah, who had worked in Ghana prior to studying at the GSD, described the fort as a palimpsest characterized by a “layering of history.” The structures that remain embody historical discontinuities: the captain’s house, the oldest extant structure, is built of brick imported from Denmark. The concrete trading post, meanwhile, was constructed sometime after 1850, likely when the British dominated the area. Timber used in each structure has mostly rotted away or been repurposed elsewhere. Recent paintings on the structures’ walls are evidence of community-driven attempts to discover meaningful uses for the building.

Dosekun-Adjei views these challenging conditions as an impetus to critically evaluate the contemporary West African architecture. “We used a European building constructed in Africa as a site for hybridizing what could be a rediscovered Indigenous approach to architecture and material culture.” Looking at the historical fort through the lens of globalization also offered a genealogy of contemporary practices in West Africa, “where so many materials are produced elsewhere, imported very much like this building.” Tracing the histories of these practices back to colonial periods can help architects today rediscover materials and techniques that retain deep local meaning precisely because of their hybridity.

In guiding students through their studio projects, Dosekun-Adjei encouraged them to take imaginative approaches to this hybridity while also foregrounding the need for resiliency. “The idea of a museum or an archive became complicated because we were situated right in front of the sea and coastal erosion was happening at such a rapid rate,” Kah said. “The inevitable reality was looming: the site would succumb to the Atlantic.” Some projects accepted this reality by envisioning temporary structures that would last only as long as the terra firma. Kah addressed this challenge by proposing a robust sea wall structure that would be the centerpiece of similar measures developed in the area.

Courtney Sohn (MArch I ’24) also envisioned a permanent cultural center on the site. “I was thinking about materials in relation to temporality,” she said. “We projected a future for the site in which the materials were going to fall into the ocean. I wanted to build in materials that had resilience even if the rest of the site was lost.” That meant employing techniques from marine architecture to create a structure over the site. As the sea approached, the historical fort would be washed away, representing “a part of the history that we could let go of,” while the new structure, with its new community-centered purpose remained.

The historical legacy of the fort, as Dosekun-Adjei sees it, could help create needed public spaces and institutions in Ada Foah, a village dominated by private tourist development. A re-imagined fort complex could transform Ada Foah into a new kind of public space: a cultural center in the community and a node in the emerging network of small cultural institutions in Ghana. To generate ideas for the building’s program, studio participants visited a number of arts organizations in Accra. With little government support for the arts available, institutions like the Dikan Center and the Nubuke Foundation Art Gallery depend on the ambition and vision of future cultural leaders. This ethos is reflected in the physical structures that house many new arts organizations, many of which employ strategies of adaptive reuse. The Dikan Center, for example, is a photography gallery and library in a refurbished housing complex.

Many of the arts organizations that inspired student projects had hybrid identities, offering their communities more than spaces to contemplate visual arts. The Nubuke Foundation complex is a mix of exhibition galleries and studios, co-working spaces, and other facilities intended to provide broad support for the creative economy.

Partly in acknowledgment of this local need and partly as an exercise in working with different architectural scales, Dosekun-Adjei prompted students to envision both exhibition spaces and other facilities for the community such as classrooms and workshops. Inspired by the role of film production in decolonizing struggles, Kah proposed a program for the fort that included an art house cinema. “I looked at photography and cinema as both a decolonizing method as well as a method for people [in West Africa] to construct their own narratives and archive their history and memories. Photography and cinema are a means of creating beautiful dialectic stories that span generations but still hold true.” Sohn drew upon course discussions about cultural restitution—the repatriation of artifacts removed during the colonial period—as well as her conversations with Ada Foah community members to propose a space for archaeological finds that could stimulate historical and cultural research. Other projects included spaces for a community radio station and production facility, as well as art galleries, classrooms, and workshop spaces.

The GSD student projects, compiled by Dosekun-Adjei and her studio, will become part of a discussion with local leaders and potential funders about the future of the site. The work undertaken as part of the GSD studio suggests that the future of Fort Kongenstein will exemplify an expanded notion of adaptive reuse. Any project that modifies the ruins of the fort will have to address questions of sustainability while engaging with contested historical narratives. As Dosekun-Adjei says, the project will “uncover histories, both architectural and material,” providing new foundations for building in the region and beyond.