Remembering George Baird, 1939–2023

The architect and scholar George Baird served on the faculty at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design as the G. Ware Travelstead Professor of Architecture from 1993–2004. He died on October 17, 2023, at the age of 84.

George Baird invented architectural semiotics in the essay, “’La Dimension Amourese in Architecture,” published in arena in 1967 and reworked in the book Meaning in Architecture, which he edited with Charles Jencks in 1969. George’s preliminary study of the semiotics of architecture elaborates the basic structuralist insight that buildings are not simply physical supports but artifacts and events with meaning, and hence are signs dispersed across some larger social text. That insight is then trained on two of the most enduring of late-modernist myths, the building as a totally designed environment (exemplified by Eero Saarinen’s CBS Building, New York) and the building as a value-free servo-mechanism (exemplified by Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt project, Staffordshire).

The repercussions of George’s critique of modernist dogma would prove enormous, of course, extending over the next decade of architecture theory. But if the linguistic analogy—building as text—was perhaps inevitable (semiotics is designed to explain all cultural phenomena, including architecture) and in certain ways already latent in earlier models of architectural interpretation (those of Emile Kaufmann, John Summerson, or Rudolf Wittkower, for example), one must still decide on the most pertinent and fruitful level of homology between architecture and language. That is, is the individual building like a language, or is architecture as a whole like a language? The first view has affinities with traditional treatments of buildings as organic units whose origins and intentions of formation must be elucidated, whereas the second view, which George adopts, shifts the interpretive vocation considerably. No longer is the interpreter’s task to say what the individual building means (any more than it is the linguist’s task to render the meanings of individual sentences) but rather to show how the conventions of architecture enable buildings to produce meaning. Questions are raised about users’ and readers’ expectations, about how a structure of expectation enters into and directs the design of a building (now thought of as a kind of work of rhetoric), about how any architectural “utterance” is a shared one, shot through with qualities and values, open to dispute, already uttered—questions, in short, about architecture’s public life, to which George would turn to fully in The Space of Appearance in 1995.

In semiotic terms, if architecture as a whole is like a language (langue) then the individual building or project is like a speech act (parole), which entails that the architect cannot simply assign or take away meaning and meaning cannot be axiomatic. Rather architecture becomes a readable text, and the parameters of its legibility are what we mean by rhetoric. Rhetoric operates within the structure of shared expectations and demands an ethical, even erotic relationship with the reader: an “amorous dimension,” a phrase George borrowed from Roland Barthes. But rhetoric is not subjective expression. Its procedures are inseparable from processes of argument and justification with respect to the worldly function of architecture’s making sense.

In all this, George approached his study as a scholar-architect. In this role, he had precedents in Alan Colquoun, Kenneth Frampton, and others, then in London. George and Elizabeth Davis married and moved to London, where George basically began to train himself in semiotics and critical theory. It was in London that George was introduced to Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition, about which he wrote,

While she was not a writer about architecture, over the span of subsequent years, she shaped my thinking about architecture more than any other single figure. I remember distinctly the tingle that ran through my body when I first read her scornful comparison of Jeremy Bentham – the very figure whose corpse I passed by most mornings at University College London – with David Hume, who, she sneered, ‘in contradistinction to Bentham, was still a philosopher.’ Arendt’s discussion of utilitarianism confirmed once and for all in my mind, the pernicious influence of contemporary efforts to revive ‘functionalism’ as a basic premise of compelling architectural theory…. All in all, Arendt, [Ivan] Illich, and [Michel] Foucault together created for me a picture of skepticism of, not to say hostility to, the instrumentalized version of enlightenment rationality, which underpinned my critique of architectural functionalism and has stayed with me to the present day.

As I say, I will always think of George as first and foremost a scholar of architecture. I tried to celebrate this conviction when I was invited to introduce his Preston Thomas lectures at Cornell in 1999. I explained that George’s theory placed Claude Perrault’s concepts of positive and arbitrary beauty into active equivalence with the linguistic distinction between langue and parole, or the generalized grammar (langue) and an individual instance (parole) of speech. For what is achieved should not be understood as a simple simile of architecture as a language but rather as the creation out of two previous codes (beauty and linguistics) an entirely new one, unique to architecture, which is capable of recoding vast quantities of discourse, from eighteenth-century French theory’s concern with the natural basis of architecture, to modernism’s mimetic relationship with industry, to postmodernism’s loosening of the classical order. Rewriting such interactions as components in a complex fraction—positive beauty / arbitrary beauty : langue/parole—enables the enlargement of architectural interpretation to include an Arendt-like social communicative function of architecture’s handling of style, materials, and technology, and to measure the social unconscious of different, competing architectural representations in their specific contexts. Indeed, as George uses it, this feature seems to anticipate postmodernism as a kind of revenge of the parole—of the specific utterance, of personal styles and idiolects. Henceforth, worry about empirical method and total design would be completely eclipsed by concerns with the contexts and instances of meaning.

But during my introduction at Cornell, my bad pronunciation of the French “r” destroyed my attempt to explicate Baird’s Barthes-ian reading of Perrault’s parole! George thanked me for the intro, but left it at that: “Michael, thank you, but I just don’t know what else to say.”

George and I talked much about his theory but surprisingly little about his building, substantial though his professional practice was. Once when Martha and I visited George’s Toronto office on a weekend, George projected what struck me as an odd neutrality toward some of the important projects of the firm. About the wonderful Butterfly Conservatory in Niagara Parks Botanical Garden, a completely unprecedented program in a cold climate, he opined, “We should have thought more about being the bugs. Perhaps we thought too much about the children.” George used the same voice he uses at studio reviews. Engaged but neutral, critical yet open minded, reading the project with an Eames-like “Powers-of-Ten” zoom-out to reframe the butterfly’s narrative and recontextualize the architectural object’s confrontation with the world. Perhaps he was performing for Martha and me; George knew we liked his theatricality. But perhaps, on the other hand, this is what a weekend in the office was for him. He was the office consultant in criticality and social aspiration. He was the in-house philosopher.

George was a well celebrated professional, but his habits are those of a scholar.

Design and Time: An Interview with Offshore

The public program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design features speakers in the design fields and beyond. The series of talks, conferences, and conversations offers an opportunity for the public to join members of the GSD community in cross-disciplinary discussions about the research driving design today.

Each year, in an effort to extend an invitation to these programs as widely as possible, the GSD asks graphic designers to create a visual identity that conveys the program’s spirit and mission. For the 2023–2024 academic year, Offshore , the design practice of Isabel Seiffert and Christoph Miler, took up that challenge. They created print and digital materials featuring a swirling motif and a spiral-like typeface that distill the energy and intellectual curiosity of the School’s events. To better understand how graphic design relates to the GSD’s public program, Art Director Chad Kloepfer exchanged questions with Miler and Seiffert over email.

Chad Kloepfer: Through innovative printing and custom typography, this year’s poster is a literal whirlwind of color and type. What did you hope to convey through this treatment?

Offshore: A whirlwind of color and type—that is such a nice description. The graphic language for architecture-related projects often features monochrome or more toned-down and serious visual gestures. Additionally, the pandemic years have felt very monotonous in many ways. We wanted to bring some energy and liveliness to this project. It was important for us to convey a vibrant, dynamic, and, to some extent, action-oriented mood.

There is a structured but organic feel to both the typeface and layout, the spiral being a predominant gesture. How did you arrive at this graphic device?

During the design process, we were very focused on striking a balance between sharp, clear, and bold graphical forms while allowing movement and avoiding rigidity. To us, this represents a commitment to precision that does not feel “square,” if that makes sense. The gesture of the spiral comes from the idea that this visual identity lives for one academic year, one cycle, so to say. It can be a very intense and dense period, with a lot of things happening at the same time. We wanted to convey that visually.

I really love the typeface, especially when the circular glyphs are animated. Can you speak a little bit about the development of this typeface?  

There are quite a few typefaces out there that feature spirals in their glyphs. But all of those felt either too retro or too organic for this purpose. We were keen to be precise and playful at the same time–to simultaneously create something very constructed and quite dynamic. We made a few hand drawn sketches to find the general proportions and feeling. We also asked our friend Jürg Lehni, who created paper.js and the Scriptographer plugin for Illustrator back in the day, to create a small spiral tool for us. This made it easier and faster to draw very precise spirals with the parameters we needed for the various glyphs. We hope to extend the glyph set with lowercase and more punctuation later this year.

Could walk us through the printing process for the poster?

We used offset printing to produce the poster. This gave us access to radiant spot colors, which was essential for creating the vibrancy we were aiming for. The first step was to print the background layer and the big spiral in black and fluorescent red. The silver layer with all the typographic information cut-out was applied in the second step. This way the typography is displayed by revealing the first printing layer, thereby creating a vivid interaction of the overlapping elements.

Something I really admire in your body of work—and this year’s poster is no exception—is how layered it all feels. I mean this both visually and conceptually. Like a root system, we are taking in what is above ground, but it also hints to non-visible layers that are fun to unpack. Could you discuss the conceptual side of your process? What was the thinking behind this public program identity?

The deeper roots of our approach might be found in our latest fascination for the contemporary discourse around time. Today, many artists and writers are challenging the conventional Western idea that history moves in linear fashion. They are emphasizing the non-linear nature of time instead, thinking of history in loops, dialectics, time bangs, and spirals. For example, Ocean Vuong writes in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: “Some people say history moves in a spiral, not the line we have come to expect. We travel through time in a circular trajectory, our distance increasing from an epicenter only to return again, one circle removed.” We think many of those alternative notions of time are beautiful and fascinating, since they imply a more complex, long-term and intertwined relationship of humans, more-than humans, and the environment. In many ways, these concepts are counter-chronologies, challenging today’s prevalent version of standardized and linear time that serves efficiency, productivity, and a mainly economic perspective on progress and growth. These alternative, nonlinear views on time–some of them in the shape of a spiral–propose a less anthropocentric position, which might help us to synchronize ourselves with a world that is made up of multiple rhythms of being, growth, and decay.

Your portfolio has a striking visual range. Rather than following a set stylistic approach, you seem to generate a vernacular response to the subject matter of each project. What are the underlying continuities within your stylistically diverse body of work?

One underlying continuity within our work is our ongoing interest in multilayered narratives. Stories define who we are, sociologist Arthur W. Franke writes. They do so because they always “work on us, affecting what we are able to see as real, as possible, and as worth doing.” The aesthetics of each project develop from this and similar questions. What style communicates the story we want to tell? What tools do we need to use in order to create the aesthetics we envision? What production processes emphasizes our idea?

In the last five years, we have built manifold narratives, tackling issues ranging from migration, ecology, and interspecies relations to visual histories and design education. Working with various media—publications, websites, drawings, and exhibitions—we are interested in telling stories in an engaging, often multilayered fashion. Unfamiliar maps, vibrant visuals, symbols that expand and challenge the written language, photography, and illustration can coexist in our plots; they create rhythm, intertwine, and unfold unfamiliar perspectives. We tell stories by exploring, questioning, and transgressing the defined spaces of the discipline of Graphic Design while still staying committed to form, aesthetics, and craft.

One of the projects that brought your studio to our attention is the publication Migrant Journal , which ran from 2016–2019. You were not just the designers of this publication but also helped found it and were co-editors. Can you speak a little bit about what Migrant Journal was/is and what it meant for your studio?

Migrant Journal was a six-issue publication exploring the circulation of people, goods, information, ideas, plants, and landscapes around the world. Together with our contributors, we looked at the transformative impact this circulation has on contemporary life and spaces around us.

Our endeavor with Migrant Journal has been from the start to look at the world through the lens of these migratory processes—dealing with questions of belonging, national identity, cultural shifts, financial systems, but also landscape transformation, the weather, movement of animals, and global food networks. The idea was born in 2015 when the so-called migrant crisis in the Mediterranean Sea was seemingly the only topic in the news. We felt that there was a huge lack of in-depth information about the complexity of the issue, global interrelations, and the broader concept of migration. In a world of a polarized and populist political climate and increasingly sensationalist media coverage, we felt that it is more important than ever to re-appropriate and destigmatize the term migrant.

In order to break away from the prejudices and clichés of migrants and migration, we asked artists, journalists, academics, designers, architects, philosophers, activists, and citizens to rethink the approach to migration with us and critically explore the new spaces it creates. A printed journal provided a platform for multiple disciplines and voices to talk about an intensely interconnected world that creates a multitude of interdependent forms of migration.

The decision to produce a magazine, and not make a website or a book, was purposeful. We strongly believe that printed publications can create a reading experience that lasts longer than most ephemeral bits of information on the internet. As soon as it’s online, it’s lost in the stream of information, and we didn’t want this. Print is still the technology that ages better than any other carrier of information.

Maps are an integral component of migration. They are all about movement, territory, and space. So it felt very natural to use the technique of mapmaking as a narrative tool for our publication. Maps, as one major component of Migrant Journal, are woven into a diverse set of editorial formats, like essays, images, infographics, reports, and illustrations. Through the materiality of the object we were able to translate complex issues into a format that provides various points of entries in a multilayered manner.

It’s our founding project and has heavily shaped our way of working in many aspects of the practice. At the same time, it defined our studio profile and influences, until today, the projects for which we receive commissions.

 

Disguised Density: An Excerpt from “The State of Housing Design 2023”

This essay is an excerpt from The State of Housing Design 2023, a book published by the Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) and available to purchase through Harvard University Press. A research center jointly affiliated with the Harvard Kennedy School and the Graduate School of Design, the JCHS has published a widely read annual report, The State of the Nation’s Housing , for over 35 years. The State of Housing Design 2023 provides a design-focused complement to this initiative and was the impetus for a half-day event of talks and panels at the GSD. Edited by Sam Naylor, Daniel D’Oca, and Chris Herbert, The State of Housing Design 2023 is organized around 25 themes that characterize design practice today.

In 2016, architect Barbara Bestor used the term “stealth density ” to describe a multifamily residential development that her firm, Bestor Architecture, designed in Los Angeles’s Echo Park. The neighborhood, historically a mix of Latinx families and bohemian artists and writers, was slowly, then very rapidly, gentrifying in LA’s overheated housing market. Any new construction was bound to be suspect—both as a harbinger of displacement and disruption of the old, streetcar-era urban fabric. Although the term “stealth” conveys a contextually sensitive approach, a way to fit into an existing condition, it also reflects the anxieties of a neighborhood in transition. Changing a neighborhood’s physical character threatens both longtime and recent residents.

Bestor drew inspiration from the modest single-family homes and occasional low-rise courtyard apartment buildings  that line Echo Park’s hilly streets. Named Blackbirds, Bestor’s complex combines these two typologies to organize a  series of duplexes and triplexes around a central parking court. Each building stealthily resembles a single-family home; the design uses pitched roofs and exterior paint color  to break up the bulk of larger volumes, so new construction blends into the surrounding scale. “Two free-standing houses are connected by flashing, and the roofline creates the illusion of one house mass,” Bestor explained to the online publication Dezeen. “Three houses, whose separation is masked, has the illusion of being two houses.”¹

Stealth density is just one possible expression of this strategy. The editors of this book chose “disguised density,” and a 2019 Brookings Institution report used the term “gentle density” to argue that replacing detached single-family houses with more homes on a lot could help reduce housing prices in desirable locations without disrupting the neighborhood. This “missing middle” between the stand-alone home and the dreaded apartment tower takes the form of multifamily townhouses, duplexes, and semi-detached structures packed tightly on a lot. “Building more housing on single-family parcels doesn’t require skyscrapers,” noted the report’s authors, Alex Baca, Patrick McAnaney, and Jenny Schuetz.²

Stealth. Disguised. Gentle. With each, language is used to deflect the fears and misconceptions that have accumu- lated around multifamily housing—biases that align multiunit buildings with the past specters of bleak public housing projects. That new development must slip quietly into a neighborhood underlines the long-held entitlement of home ownership and bias of single-family zoning. The Brookings Institution report, for example, notes that Washington, DC, requires special permission for higher density in areas zoned single-family. Zeroing in on zoning-code terminology, the report identifies how the language of the code privileges low-density to “protect [single-family] areas from invasion by denser types of residential development.” Words like “protect” and “invasion” suggest that code is weaponized against  outside threats. Indeed, the report’s authors stress that “‘protection’ entrenches economic and racial segregation.”³ Both Blackbirds and Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects’ (LOHA) multifamily housing development, Canyon Drive, follow City of Los Angeles policy guidelines.

The Small Lot Subdivision Ordinance, first adopted by the city in 2005 and amended in 2016, was touted as a solution to increase affordability in a tight market via infill housing. The ordinance included reduced setback requirements and lot sizes. Building more units—in the form of detached townhouses—on a lot zoned multifamily or commercial was meant to target first-time homebuyers, although it is arguable if this plan was truly successful. In early 2022, two-bedroom, two-bath units at Canyon Drive were sold for around $1.4 million each. Although the price is conceivably less than a ground-up, single-family home on the same lot, the units sold for considerably more than the $1 million average home price in Los Angeles.

The authors of the ordinance recognized that increased  density and potentially bulky massing indicative of multifamily housing would set off alarms, so a series of design guidelines dictates specific articulations of facades, entryways, and rooflines to prevent blank and boxy edifices ill-suited to the surrounding context. At Canyon Drive, for example,  each unit has a unique identity. LOHA inflected the roofs of the townhouses so that each facade resembles a mid- century-modern A-frame perched atop the garage podium. Similarly, in Greenville, Mississippi, the pitched roofs and shaded front porches that characterize the 42 townhouses of The Reserves at Gray Park suggest that individuation is neither simply an appeasement to NIMBYs  nor a market strategy, but also a way of establishing identity and dignity for residents.

Composed of one-, two-, and three-bedroom units, the afford- able housing project by Duvall Decker with the Greater Greenville Housing and Revitalization Association serves low- and very-low-income renters.  It’s the city’s largest single-unit housing development in more than 30 years.⁴ Here, disguised density works to deflect the stigma historically associated with affordable housing, while demonstrating that an alternative to a detached single-family home might offer more than the suburban ideal. What if the American Dream was not about individual ownership and a green front lawn but, as illustrated at The Reserves at Gray Park, found in shared public spaces designed to foster community interaction and sustainable site planning?

In many ways, disguised density is a study of aesthetics and perception: both a design exercise in vernacular typologies and a strategic game of hide-and-seek. But camouflage can’t always ward off NIMBY critiques. Opponents of the Ashland Apartments in Santa Monica accused Koning Eizenberg Architecture of “shoe-horning too much building into the site” and brought concerns about increased traffic to Santa Monica’s Architectural Review Board.⁵ The opponents were large neighbors—Santa Monica homeowners concerned about the project’s direct impact on their quality of life and property values. Considered a “preferred project” by the  City of Santa Monica, the 10-unit development on a terraced hillside reflects higher density than normally allowed under code but was given an exception to incentivize more family housing to the area. Studios and two- and three-bedroom apartments are divided among four structures. According to the architects, the project achieves a density of 30 units/acre by bridging scales between a residential neighborhood (the source of the complaints) and a high-density, mixed-use development along Lincoln Boulevard to the west.

In 2019, the same year that Ashland Apartments opened, Architecture Australia ran an article about architects Hank Koning and Julie Eizenberg, describing their work as “smart, generous and empathetic,”⁶ which is  best embodied at Ashland in the abundance of private and shared outdoor spaces that allow residents room to socialize and take advantage of Southern California indoor-outdoor living.

Ashland Apartments sits on a previously unbuilt lot in the center of the block and is edged on three sides by the backyards of adjacent properties. With no street frontage of its own, the other houses in this highly desirable  neighborhood mask its overall density. A long, narrow (and contentious) driveway connects from the curb to the under- ground parking lot. The multiyear clash was, literally, a skirmish over “not in my backyard.”

Although density triggers fears of “too big,” “too much,” or “invasive,” at the heart of these kinds of fights is a battle over the continued viability of single- family zoning in neighborhoods, cities, and states where homelessness is on the rise, affordable housing is out of reach, and sprawl is no longer an option. As a paradigm, single-family zoning was built on pastoral fantasies and systems of social and racial exclusion. Bursting the fever dream of individual homeownership and the loose-fit urbanism it produces is bound to provoke conflict. During an event hosted by Laboratory for Suburbia that  questioned what “house” means—both as a spatial product and as home— Gustavo Arellano, an Orange County–based journalist who writes on issues of politics, race, and suburbia, suggested we shatter our collective intoxi- cation, using language that verges on revolution. “[I have to] throw this rock into the windows of the dream I have, and other people have, about where we’re at right now” he said, holding up a painted rock from his childhood.⁷

The sanctity of the American Dream is now undergoing arguably radical, even heretical, change. Across the US, states are rethinking the primacy of single-family zoning, which makes it possible to build multifamily housing in residential neighborhoods—with or without stealth, gentle, or disguised density. Oregon passed legislation eliminating exclusive single-family zoning in 2019. California followed in 2021 with SB 9: The California Home Act, which allows for  up to four units on a single-family parcel and promotes infill development.⁸ Its passage was not free from pushback. Under SB 9, landmarked and historic districts are exempt, so the City of Pasadena, a place known for both beautiful craftsman homes and racist histories of redlining, proposed an urgency ordinance declaring the entire city a landmark district, a move that garnered critical media attention and a warning by California Attorney General Rob Bonta.⁹

The Outpost, a four-story, 16-unit project in Portland, Oregon, takes advantage of the state’s higher-density policy and sets a new paradigm for both preservation and how we live together. Beebe Skidmore Architects preserved an existing nineteenth-century home on the property and worked with real estate developer Owen Gabbert and co-living platform Open Door to build a mini-tower: two handsome board-and-batten-clad cubes stacked with a twist.

From the outside, The Outpost’s density doesn’t appear particularly disguised. Its contemporary design displays few tropes of contextual sensitivity, like pitched roofs or vernacular overhangs, even though the other house on the site has both. What is concealed, however, is an experiment  in communal living. Shared spaces include the kitchen plus dining and living areas. The project also offers a greater lesson, as disguised density asks us to question the sanctity of the single-family home. As reported by Jay Caspian  Kang, suburban neighborhoods are more diverse than our collective imaginary.¹⁰ Existing homes contain multiple generations, older single people, or groups of TikTok influencers. Designing multifamily housing within single-family neighborhoods challenges the notion of the nuclear family as the default resident.

Designing with disguised density strategies allows housing to respond to shifting social and urban planning realities. But is it enough? Well-designed, dense, “missing-middle” housing is necessary to address scarcity and affordability; our language shouldn’t hide the urgency. Disguised density may yield too much agency to NIMBY anxieties and, in doing so, favors modesty over the true need for larger, multiunit buildings.

1. “Bestor Architecture Uses ‘Stealth Density’ at Blackbirds Housing in Los Angeles,” https://www .dezeen.com/2016/09/28/bestor-architecture-blackbirds-housing-stealth-density-echo-park-los-angeles/.
2. “‘Gentle’ Density Can Save Our Neighborhoods,” https://www.brookings.edu/research/gentle-density-can-save-our-neighborhoods/.
3. Ibid.
4. “$224K Grant from Planters Bank and Trust and FHLB Dallas Creates 42 Homes,” https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/2018061500 5840/en/224K-Grant-from Planters-Bank-and-Trust-and-FHLB-Dallas-Creates-42-Homes.
5. Construction of Santa Monica Apartment Building Appealed,” https://www.surfsantamonica.com/ssm_site/the_lookout /news/News-2015/January -2015/01_23_2015_Construction_of_Santa_Monica _Apartment_%20Building _%20Appealed.html.
6. “‘Smart, Generous and Empathetic’: The Housing Projects of Koning Eizenberg Architecture,” https://architectureau.com/articles/hank-koning -and-julie-eizenberg/.
7. “Sprawl Session 3: House as Crisis,” https:// laboratoryforsuburbia.site /SS3.
8. “Senate Bill 9 Is the Product of a Multi-Year Effort to Develop Solutions to Address California’s Housing Crisis,” https://focus.senate .ca.gov/sb9.
9. Attorney General Bonta Puts City of Pasadena on Notice for Violating State Housing Laws,” https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases /attorney-general-bonta-puts-city-pasadena-notice-violating-state-housing-laws.
10. “Everything  You Think You Know About the Suburbs Is Wrong,” https://www.nytimes.com /2021/11/18/opinion/suburbs-poor-diverse.html.

The Plan for a More Sustainable and Accessible Gund Hall

This fall, teams of workers at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design began the first stage in an ambitious renovation of Gund Hall that will be underway through summer 2024. While preserving and updating the School’s iconic main building, the renovations will also vastly increase its energy efficiency. Beyond enhancing the GSD’s core facility, the overall project will model best practices for updating and sustaining mid-twentieth-century buildings.

Designed by John Andrews, Gund Hall first hosted students and faculty in 1972. At the heart of the building are the trays, a five-storey glass-enclosed studio block that serves both as work space and as a center of student community and engagement. In his recent book John Andrews: Architect of Uncommon Sense, Paul Walker writes, “Gund Hall’s famous ‘trays’ came from the priority that Andrews himself gave to the studio as the center of design education.” The trays have retained their vital role at the GSD as one of the most innovative spaces for design pedagogy even as building technology has advanced over the decades. Gund Hall is “largely sheathed in extensive uninsulated glazing systems and minimally insulated exposed architectural concrete,” according to David Fixler, lecturer in architecture at the GSD and an architect specializing in the conservation and rehabilitation of twentieth-century structures. Gund Hall’s existing uninsulated envelope contributes to high energy consumption that translates directly to expensive energy bills, occupant discomfort, and elevated maintenance costs.

Fixler is chair of the Building Committee, which consists of GSD faculty representing the three core disciplines at the school and is charged with overseeing the renovation project.¹ “One of the great rehabilitation challenges of our era,” he said, “is to dramatically improve the durability and sustainability of mid-twentieth-century structures while maintaining the architectural essence and character-defining features of these buildings.”

The project’s design is being led by Bruner/Cott Architects, a firm specializing in adaptive transformation and historic preservation. Expert in working with buildings of this period, Bruner/Cott Architects have previously worked with Hopkins Architects and Harvard Real Estate to convert the 1960–1965 Holyoke Center into the Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Campus Center. They are part of a large, multi-disciplinary design and construction team that has developed a highly iterative and collaborative process to ensure sound, timely delivery of a state of the art product.²

The renovation process began this fall with a phase to test the design and installation strategies for the upcoming reglazing of the trays. A temporary walled-off “laboratory” has been built in the Pit, a multiuse space in Gund Hall. The mock-ups installed in this laboratory—located on the southeast corner of the building, and including one clerestory section—will be used to assess three replacement glazing systems.

The systems under evaluation include a high-performance double glazing at the east facade slope; a triple glazing at the vertical east facade and clerestories; and a hybrid vacuum-insulated glass (VIG) composite that adds a third layer of insulating glass to the north and south curtain walls. Expectations are especially high for the VIG hybrid, which is not used widely in the United States, but has a strong track record in Europe. By leveraging the insulating properties of the internal vacuum in a glass sandwich that is overall only a few millimeters thicker than conventional double glazing, the hybrid VIG is capable of unprecedented thermal resistance. These hybrid units can deliver energy performance that is two to four times better than standard insulating glass and up to 10 times more efficient than single-pane glass.

Following this testing phase, the project work will begin immediately after commencement in the spring and finish by the fall semester. The trays will be inaccessible during this period.

Replacement of the glazing systems creates an opportunity to make other needed enhancements, including widening the exits onto the outdoor terraces and making them fully accessible. Improvements made to door, sill, hardware, and exterior landing elevations, along with other studio block modifications, will address accessibility issues and bring the building into compliance with current standards where practicable. New under-tray lighting will provide better illumination and upgrade the working environment for these portions of the studio. In addition to the glazing upgrades, a new system of automatic and manual shades for the south and east curtain walls will help mitigate heat gain and control glare.

While temporarily disrupting this core studio activity during the summer, the renovation project will be instructive in other ways, allowing students to view a renovation project in-action, and ultimately leading to improved workspaces. Fixler calls the renovation “a poster child” for rehabilitating buildings of the 1960s and 1970s, “both in the replacement of the studio glazing with state-of-the-art high-performance systems specifically developed for this project, lighting upgrades, and a campaign of careful, targeted concrete conservation.” He continued, “the revitalized studio block will stand as a proud statement of the GSD’s commitment to honor and enhance the legacy of John Andrews, while delivering a significant upgrade in energy performance and occupant comfort.”

1. 1. Past and present members of the Building Committee include, Anita Berrizbeitia, professor of landscape architecture; Gary Hilderbrand, Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture and chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture; Grace La, professor of architecture and chair of the Department of Architecture; Mark Lee, professor in practice of architecture; Rahul Mehrotra, professor of Urban Design and Planning and the John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization; Farshid Moussavi, professor in practice of architecture; Holly Samuelson, associate professor of architecture; and Ron Witte, professor in residence of architecture. ↩︎
2. 2. Other members of the design and construction team are Vanderweil, mechanical and electrical engineers and energy modeling; LAM Partners, lighting; Simpson Gumpertz & Heger (SGH) structural, waterproofing, and façade engineering; Shawmut Construction, construction management and prime general contractor; A&A Window Products, Design Assist and installation; Redgate Real Estate, project management; and Heintges, BECx services. ↩︎

How Public Health Methods Can Bolster Socially Conscious Urban Development

Cities today are faced with complex challenges that require careful decisions about the future of the built environment. Development projects hold the potential to strengthen communities by helping to combat inequality, repair a legacy of environmental racism, improve health outcomes, and adapt to a changing climate. Developers, designers, and city officials alike need sophisticated tools and methodologies to ensure that projects can positively impact their communities while meeting the needs of all stakeholders.

In cities such as Boston, public review processes already exist that aim to foster conversation about the costs and benefits of new development; however, these processes can be slow and contentious. The field of public health offers new tools and insights that can help city leaders, community members, and designers understand the full range of impacts that a given project might produce. Adele Houghton , president of Biositu LLC and instructor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, has been working to bridge these fields for much of her career, most recently by applying a technique known as health situation analysis to real estate development. While pursuing a doctorate at the School of Public Health, Houghton collaborated with Matthew Kiefer, Lecturer in Real Estate at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Their work resulted in the recent article “How Real Estate Development Can Boost Urban Health, ” published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Houghton and Kiefer spoke with the GSD’s William Smith about how health situation analysis can be a tool for aligning with the needs of communities, the business aims of real estate developers, and the mandates of city agencies charged with overseeing equitable development.

How did this project come about?

Matthew Kiefer The article grew out of a collaboration between Adele and me in a class I taught at the GSD last year called Developing for Social Impact. The premise of the course was to harmonize purpose and profit in real estate development and harness economically feasible projects to accomplish social and environmental goals. We used active Boston development sites as case studies, and student teams working on one site got very interested in the health situation analysis that Adele introduced.

Adele Houghton I reached out to Matthew because I was interested in the dual business model he presented through the course. I was a Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) student at the time, studying at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The DrPH degree is designed for mid-career professionals who want to translate research into action in the field. In my case, as an architect who has specialized in green and healthy building for about 20 years, I returned to school to learn how to apply public health methods to the design and real estate development process.

In architecture school you spend a lot of time learning about design, building codes, building engineering, and building systems. The business side is focused on how to create a firm; I wish I had learned more about real estate development. As part of my DrPH, I wanted to learn more about how real estate development happens: how you choose a site, how you decide what its highest and best use is, how you finance it. Matthew’s course did that—and brought environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations into that financial calculation.

How does public health relate to real estate development?

AH The work we do as architects and developers affects not just the people inside the building, but also the surrounding neighborhood. Our colleagues in the urban planning and community planning departments are learning about those systems, but architectural design often focuses exclusively inside the property line.

When I pivoted to studying public health about 15 years ago, it was to learn more about methods and data sets that would allow architects and developers to fill in some of the gaps in the site assessment process. I wanted to look not just at how a project site connects to utilities, or whether we need to include a sidewalk along the edge of the site, but really at how a site leverages its surroundings to create a positive ripple effect in the community.

The core of your method is health situation analysis. Could you explain what that entails?

AH The methodology takes data sets and makes them actionable by providing design strategies that a developer or an architecture team could use in response to the conditions in the surrounding neighborhood.

Health situation analysis is already used by local health departments to assess what’s going on in a community and create an evidence-based plan for what to do about it. For example, the Covid-19 pandemic started in clusters around the country. We weren’t sure what it was. We weren’t sure how it was going to impact the community. We didn’t know who was going to be most impacted. Health situation analysis allowed local health departments to understand what was happening and make best use of their resources by implementing the smallest number of interventions—while ensuring that those interventions were not in conflict with each other.

We regularly do site assessments at the start of every design and real estate project. By incorporating health situation analysis into that process, we can pull together data sets to understand the demographics on and around the site, the environmental conditions, and the prevalence of underlying health conditions. For example, an elderly person exposed to a heat wave or power failure is at higher risk of going to the hospital than a younger, healthier person. Health situation analysis helps us tailor the design of an individual real estate project to support the health needs of vulnerable groups inside the building and in the surrounding community so it can have the biggest possible positive impact across multiple priorities–whether environmental, social, or financial.

What kinds of data sets do you look at?

AH When we perform a health situation analysis, we sift through publicly available data sets and look for trends in an entire population–whether inside the building or in the surrounding neighborhood.

We can divide the data sets we look at into three different groups. The first is called social determinants of health: factors outside a person’s own body that can influence their health. Most of that data comes from the US Census. Some people in our community are at higher risk of negative health outcomes because of their age—particularly young children and the elderly—or because they have less robust immune systems, such as cancer patients. We particularly assess factors related to how our society is set up—such as differences in access to health care, to clean air, to education, and healthy housing across income levels and the legacy of racist land use policies like redlining. Over time, those differences lead to disparities in health outcomes, and even in life expectancy. The social determinants of health help us understand which groups of people in the building and surrounding neighborhood are more likely to have a negative health outcome, say, if they’re exposed to a lot of air pollution, heat, or flooding.

The second category of data is community health indicators that are influenced by the built environment—such as asthma rates, cancer rates, mental health, and obesity rates. Every year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conducts representational surveys at the national level and then creates estimates at the census-tract level about the prevalence of those health risks.

The third data set relates to the health effects of climate change, and that’s mostly taken from an index created by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). It combines a list of about a dozen natural disasters with social determinants of health to analyze the vulnerability of a census tract to each hazard.

Combining these three types of data sets, we end up with a mosaic picture of a neighborhood’s current health conditions and potential risks that could be modified through design.

The paper describes three components of a design process that includes health situation analysis. You define these as data analysis, community engagement, and cost-benefit analysis. How do these aspects fit together?

MK Our article applies this methodology to the public approval process that every real estate development goes through. The larger the development, the more rigorous the approval process and the greater the opportunity to affect public health positively or negatively. Health situation analysis helps you understand how all the publicly available data applies to your site. That leads to decisions about how to design your project. And it can lead to changes in everything from building design, to programming, to mitigation commitments surrounding your site.

Health situation analysis is also a useful way to frame communications with neighbors and with community members who participate in the approval process, allowing you to explain why you’re designing the project the way you are. We use the example of a building that has reduced carbon emissions to adhere to a city-wide net zero mandate. If I’m living a block away, how much do I care about that city-wide mandate? But if there are high asthma rates in the neighborhood, and maybe my child has asthma, then the effect of the project on asthma rates might be a better frame for helping me evaluate the project. Health situation analysis is a way to ground those community discussions that every real estate development project has anyway in data that is specific to the neighborhood and informs the community engagement process.

Of course, the real estate developer’s primary objective is not to address public health in the neighborhood; it’s to develop a feasible project and in the process take prudent measures to address public health effects. How do you figure out whether given measures are sensible when you’re trying to harmonize those two objectives? Cost-benefit analysis is the standard way to do it. How much is it going to add to the capital or operating cost of the project and what benefits will it produce, even if those benefits flow to others?

It may be that the developer bears the cost while the benefits flow to the neighbors. But, if the developer is trying to make the case for density on the site, for public approvals, for financing from mission-oriented investors who care about social impact, then health situation analysis is a useful mechanism to test the efficacy of the measures the developer is proposing.

AH What you’re doing inside the property line is creating value beyond the property line. Health situation analysis helps expand the value proposition and answer the question: How could the developer and the design team benefit from providing benefits to the surrounding community?

How do you see health situation analysis mitigating broader housing problems specifically?

AH I’m talking right now to two city housing authorities that are interested in the idea of health situation analysis. They’re thinking about how a development project fits into larger systems, whether they’re environmental systems, social systems, or economic systems.

They consider questions beyond design and construction, such as: What do you do after the building is constructed? How is it operated? A lot of the benefit to the community happens after the building is operational. Affordable housing has to be an affordable place to live once you’re in it. It also has to be well-maintained with amenities like childcare facilities, a playground, maybe even a pharmacy or a primary care facility. We can’t think about housing as just the dwelling. It needs to be thought of as fitting into a larger system. Health situation analysis allows for that conversation to happen in a structured, data-driven way.

MK You could apply the health situation analysis methodology to any kind of project, but it’s particularly powerful for housing. In Boston and many cities with strong economies, housing attainability is a significant issue for many households. In Boston we’re creating jobs faster than we’re creating housing units for the people who are taking those jobs. That drives up prices for middle-income households, young families, first time home-buyers. Health situation analysis doesn’t solve that problem, but it can help overcome barriers to housing production by situating the public review and community-engagement processes in an evidence-based framework that communicates how a project is going to benefit a neighborhood. If this were adopted more broadly, it could help to ease the production of more housing to satisfy rising demand.

Your paper focuses on a case-study development site in Boston called P3. How were you able to apply the health situation analysis method in that instance?

MK P3 is a large publicly owned site in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. It was cleared in the urban renewal era and has sat mostly unused ever since. It’s near Nubian Square, the heart of Boston’s African-American community, and across from a major transit node. The Boston Planning and Development Agency was doing a development competition—they’ve since designated a developer. So it was a fruitful case study site in my Developing for Social Impact course.

AH Boston is a great place to do this kind of project because it has an open data portal that has information on a wide range of topics related to the environment, social services, and demographics as well as a lot of qualitative information—interviews with residents in the Boston area. But the data sets are not interconnected. By doing the health situation analysis for P3, I was able to explain how that particular parcel situated within its census tract in Roxbury could help the city or at least the neighborhood address its high vulnerability to heat and its high vulnerability to flooding. The corner of the site is also located at an intersection with a high incidence of pedestrians and cyclists being injured by cars. It’s a place where a lot of elements intersect, but their relationship with each other is not obvious if you only look at each set of information separately.

The students in Matthew’s course picked up on how important it is to see the larger system. Matthew also made sure that the students had access to community members representing residents as well as businesses and institutions that were important in the neighborhood. There’s a real concern in Roxbury about displacement. The health situation analysis and conversations with the community helped students answer the question: How do you redevelop this important large site in a way that is responsive to the needs of the people that are already in that neighborhood, and help to bring jobs and economic opportunity and additional housing for them, while also recognizing that this could be an economic draw for other people in Boston?

Beyond the classroom, how have you been able to translate health situation analysis into real-world action?

AH I’ve been consulting throughout my career at Harvard. My dissertation, which was funded through the AIA Upjohn Research Initiative, was a proof-of-concept pilot working with three active real estate projects: one in Albany, New York; one in Buffalo, New York; and one in Waterford, Virginia. The health situation analysis is part of a larger engagement I call The Alignment Process, which uses health situation analysis as the first step in a multi-stakeholder conversation seeking common ground across three groups who often do not see eye to eye in the development process: the real estate development team, neighborhood residents and businesses, and local officials.

At the end of the process, stakeholders from all three pilots had co-developed aligned visions for their projects, as well as supportive design strategies. The process also produced metrics that the different stakeholder groups could use to keep track of the project and hold each other accountable to the actions to which they had committed to make sure that the project would achieve the agreed-upon vision.

One of my goals coming out of the pilot is to train designers, real estate professionals, local officials, and community groups so that The Alignment Process, and health situation analysis specifically, become standard practice. To that end, I have released a playbook walking stakeholders through the process step-by-step. With funding from the Boston Society for Architecture, Caroline Shannon (another GSD and Harvard Chan alum), and I recently ran the first two train-the-trainer workshops on this topic in Massachusetts. I’m also actively fundraising to turn the process of generating a health situation analysis, the data part of The Alignment Process, into an automated tool so that any designer, real estate team, community group, or municipality could make use of this approach.

MK One of the great virtues of the tool is that it brings stakeholders together. I sometimes describe the public approval process as a three-legged stool. The first leg of the stool is the proponent: the real estate developer or sponsor of the project, whether for-profit or nonprofit. Community stakeholders are the second leg of the stool. There are many community stakeholders and they have different viewpoints, but all of the outside parties affected by decisions about the project are part of the approval process. And the third leg of the stool is the public agency that approves the project. We try to make clear in the article that The Alignment Process generates benefits for all three of those legs of the stool.

It may be most obvious how the community members would benefit from health situation analysis. But project sponsors can also benefit by using it as an organizing framework for their mitigation decisions and discussions with project neighbors. It helps rationalize the approval process and can also benefit the way they do business and build relationships with their lenders and investors as well as their neighbors beyond the project.

The public agency also benefits. The approval process is often very contentious and it’s ultimately the public agency that needs to make a decision about whether to issue a permit. We live in a time of eroding faith in government as an effective agent of positive social change. In this environment, The Boston Planning and Development Agency—the agency most involved in development decisions for large projects—is eager to reach a successful resolution of development approvals, both so that worthy projects go forward, and to demonstrate its own effectiveness as an arbiter and decisionmaker on behalf of Boston’s citizens.

GSD How did the GSD facilitate this research?

AH It was an incredible experience for me as both an architect and doctoral student at the School of Public Health to be so welcomed at the GSD and basically recruited by Matthew as both a student and a teaching fellow in the course. The faculty here recognize their students’ strengths and the fact that so many students are experts in fields outside of design. They see that there’s an opportunity to incorporate broader fields of knowledge into the discussion around design. My more recent research on transdisciplinary curricula at the intersection of climate change, health, and equity reinforced my personal experience in Matthew’s course. There are very few schools that can provide this level of transdisciplinary education, and Harvard is at the top of the list, both in terms of having that capacity and actually starting to use it.

Architect of the Two-by-Four: Jean-Louis Cohen on Frank Gehry’s Drawings

In 2020, Cahiers d’art published Frank Gehry: Catalogue Raisonné of the Drawings Vol I, 1954–1978 , the first in a planned eight-volume series devoted to the Los Angeles–based architect. Gehry studied city planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and received an honorary doctorate from the school in 2000 and the Harvard Arts Medal in 2016. The monumental project of cataloging Gehry’s drawings was overseen by the preeminent scholar Jean-Louis Cohen , who served as the Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. A frequent guest at the GSD, a cherished mentor for students in the design fields, and an incomparable historian, Cohen passed away in August 2023. Upon the publication of the first volume of the Gehry catalogue raisonné, Cohen spoke at the GSD with Antoine Picon, G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology and Director of Doctoral Programs. Cohen’s remarks, edited for length and clarity, are presented here.

Why Gehry?

Why spend an enormous amount of my time working in detail on the work of Frank Gehry? I will simply say that Gehry is unquestionably one of the few architects who have completely revolutionized the discipline of architecture in the past 40 years. I will give two obvious examples: his own house in Santa Monica, of 1978, completely challenged the very core of domestic architecture. It introduced a totally shocking aesthetic register in what was then considered a materially conservative realm. Then, of course, the Bilbao Guggenheim: a building that completely changed the perception of a city. At the same time, it provided a different way of looking at the museum itself, with the design and construction both innovating in many ways. Gehry has left game-changing buildings, both small and big, throughout his career, including his latest projects.

Frank Gehry was also an old acquaintance of mine. For many years in the ’70s, as a student and young teacher, I couldn’t come to this blessed country because of my political affiliation. I was a Red, and Reds were not given serious visas. Suddenly, with the election of Mitterrand, this rule was lifted, and I made my first trip to the US. I met Peter Eisenman in New York. As I was going on to Los Angeles, he advised me to visit with a guy who was doing strange things in his backyard. This was July 1981, and Gehry and I became friends and have remained friends.

Why this book project? This brings us to a Parisian scene of the 1920s, the creation of a journal called Cahiers d’art by Christian Zervos, who was a Greek-born critic and historian with some independent wealth. He was behind the famous 4th Congress of International Architecture and its travel from Marseilles to Athens in 1943. Zervos created a journal in which art, architecture, ethnography, cinema, and music were discussed, with great people writing on architecture. More importantly, he produced between the ’30s and the ’60s, a 46-volume catalogue raisonné of Picasso’s paintings.

Cahiers d’art was resurrected around 2010 by Staffan Ahrenberg, a Swedish-Swiss art dealer and philanthropist. He developed other projects while republishing the journal, including a catalogue raisonné of Ellsworth Kelly’s paintings, curated and written by Yve-Alain Bois. (As you see, it’s a sort of French story all around.)

In architecture, the idea of doing traditional oeuvre complete is less common than in the visual arts. The concept of a catalogue raisonné based on architect’s drawings arose. It would catalog projects by drawings, and, preferably, hand drawings–not the drawings of the computers in an office—and in particular the study sketches.

There were only two obvious candidates, Álvaro Siza and Gehry. We decided to work with Gehry, and what followed was a very complex story. The number of volumes was set at eight from the beginning, and since we began Gehry has made many more projects. To give you a figure, Frank Lloyd Wright built 400 projects. Le Corbusier built 75, if you count Pessac, with its 150 dwelling units, as one. Gehry has built probably 170 out of 400-plus he has designed. (No one beats the world record of Albert Kahn in Detroit, who built 2,000 structures in the mid-twentieth century.)

Gehry was extremely generous in opening his drawers, at first in his office and in his huge Los Angeles warehouse. Then, a few years ago, the Getty Research Institute bought the first part of Gehry’s production: as he says, from his bar mitzvah to the competition for the Walt Disney Concert Hall in 1987. So, 30 years of work, mostly Los Angeles–related. These materials were later photographed by the Getty when the archives moved up to their Brentwood hill.

I had at my disposal masses of boxes and masses of rolls from the age of paper architecture, of analog architecture. It was a process of opening of the tubes, finding the sketches, and trying to tell a story. Gerhy did not obsessively date drawings day-by-day, so there is some guesswork. I had to enter into the logic of the project by trying to cross-reference drawings with related correspondence and reports to understand how a project came about, what the turning points were, and what were the moments when a project changed.

The first volume is a massive book, 550 pages, printed on very thick paper. It centers on 75 projects, starting with Gehry’s diploma thesis at the University of Southern California in ’54. I tried to document the process for each of them as well as I can. Gehry’s house is the lead project at the end of the first volume. I have also written an introduction on how Frank became “Gehry.” The text is not a mini-biography, but it still takes into account the various features of his training at USC in close contact with landscape designers such as Garrett Eckbo, as well as his later experience with Victor Gruen Associates, working on shopping malls and commercial projects, which had a major impact on his early practice.

The book goes through all the early works, which are relatively unknown, from this first apartment house in Santa Monica, which is documented by relatively small number of sketches, to the more interesting commercial projects. One of my hypotheses is to insist on the sensuality of the commercial projects, in which we find the hand of Frank and the hand of Gregory Walsh, his partner of the time. Walsh had studied with Gehry at USC, and they had trained each other to draw in exactly the same manner in order to fool their instructors and to be able to replace each other for juries. It’s extremely difficult to differentiate the drawings because all the usual tricks for assigning authorship—how trees are made, how figures are made, how the lettering is done—don’t work.

Many drawings in the catalogue, candidly said, are drawings Greg made in the dynamic process of design work. When I had a doubt about a drawing, both guys—Gehry is 93 now; Greg is more or less the same—were unable to decide. “Oh, this must be by you, Frank.” “No, you’re kidding. It’s by Greg.” Then going to Greg, “Oh Come on. This can only be by Frank.” I was sometimes in trouble until the moment when Frank started self-consciously to work on smaller size sheets and really found a language that was only his own.

One of the interesting commercial projects is a department store for Magnin done in a series of iterations, the main one being in Costa Mesa in Orange County. Gehry worked at eliminating what he called “the clutter around the goods.” There is a very interesting reflection about the ordering of commercial space, the handling of light, the handling of sound, all of which comes from his training with Victor Gruen. Gehry had the ability to coalesce lots of consultants and work with them over a long time, and this is something that comes from the matrix of Gruen’s design work. He developed an integrative device called a “tree” in the Magnin store. He organized hangers, hanging clothes or shoes, lettering, and direct and indirect lighting all together, to avoid the dissemination of these elements around the space. The handling of the commercial space was, for Gehry, excellent training for the design of museums at a later stage. Dresses were replaced by sculptures, but the same preoccupation at cleansing the space in the museums is evident.

There are moments in this volume we see a sort of anxious quest for an identity, for language. When we look at the projects themselves, we see a series of echoes of other architects. We have Schindler. There is a lot of Wright, even some Le Corbusier. In one project designed for a woman sculptor in Brentwood, it’s clear that Gehry had been impressed by Le Corbusier’s church in Ronchamp, which he had visited during his long stay in France around 1960 or 1961.  We see Gehry trying to observe Japanese architecture, but this was mostly the work of Walsh observing Frank Lloyd Wright. He knew everything about Wright, even if he disliked him as a person and was totally hostile to his political positions.

The Danziger House, which is very interesting project of ’65, is the first project of Gehry’s that I ever saw, as it was for many others in my generation, precisely because it was published on a page of Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture Four Ecologies in ’71 with an analysis connecting Gehry to Schindler. Banham says that Gehry was the first architect in Los Angeles to return to and to engage with Schindler’s preoccupation with geometry. But one could also see an echo of [Irving J.] Gill’s scheme in Santa Monica here.

Gehry tells interesting stories about Schindler, whom he had known and with whom he had a real friendship. Throughout the book, one sees how Gehry begins to appropriate what observers, beginning with Banham, have called the “dumb boxes” of Los Angeles: the nearly windowless boxes that line up the boulevards of the city. This is his first, I would say, relatively cubistic project: the Faith Plating Company, which he built even before the Danziger Studio.

Gehry developed contacts with Los Angeles artists. They were friends. He knew their work. They sometimes became patrons, as in the case of Ron Davis. They became role models in his attitude as an architect, and they sometimes provided him more concretely with aesthetic devices and aesthetic patterns, which he would integrate in his work. This is evident in the unbuilt version of a Santa Monica mall: Gehry’s last big commercial project.  I can’t help but parallel with Johann Geist’s legendary book of Passagen [Ein Bautyp Des 19. Jahrhunderts], which was being translated into English at that time. If we look at the famous sign of the same Santa Monica mall supergraphic, it’s tempting to imagine a parallel with Ruscha, whose lithograph Gehry had on top of his fireplace, and still has it there.

There were failures also, and I’m mentioning them. Sylvia Lavin has written somewhere briefly about the failure of Gehry to build the house for Ruscha, who was arguably the Los Angeles artist who could be considered as closest to him.

We can also see Gehry building a persona and a discourse based on the rejection of rules, the breaking of rules. He was extremely skeptical about the discourse of architectural aesthetics. Le Corbusier published more than 45 books. Mies wrote maybe 40 articles. Gehry wrote probably three or four articles. He wrote fantastic letters where you find extremely precious lines. The one I prefer is in a letter to a PR person in Los Angeles, a parody of Mies van der Rohe. Gehry writes, writing with a German accent, “I don’t want to be good; I just want to be interesting,” echoing the famous and opposite statement of Mies. There is a corpus of Gehry’s declarations and hundreds of interviews, if there are few articles to speak of.

In one of those articles, for the National Architectural Press in ’76, Gehry says that he’s at a loss to differentiate between what is ugly and what is beautiful. He theorizes what he calls “cheapskate architecture,” saying that he’s working with materials which are in general, considered as discards. This is clearly something which echoes the work of Rauschenberg in painting.

The beginning of the discourse of fragmentation starts with the idea of breaking down the domestic project into specific spaces, with specific boxes corresponding to the various components of the residents. This unbuilt project, for a Santa Monica gallery owner, is a major one, as is the project for the Jung Institute, which shows autonomous volumes put over a mirror of water.

And of course, there are the drawings of the house in Santa Monica. I found a set of unpublished drawings. One is a very curious attempt I would interpret as using this fence around the initial bungalow, with vertical wood planks that seem to echo of Aalto’s project of the 1930s for Paris and the New York pavilions. Gehry is known for repeating to everyone that he had an early epiphany about architecture in Toronto while listening to an unknown, at least to him, Finnish architect who turned out to be Aalto.

There are many, many sketches of the house, which is a very complex demonstration of all his skills. It’s the project that concludes this first volume—and also the one that brought Gehry into the headlines. Allesandro Mendini’s Domus cover story discussing the project was probably the first really perceptive essay on Gehry.

Volume One is also the history of Gehry discovering, using, and manipulating, and in a way, challenging, teasing the typical frame of Los Angeles domestic architecture. And I will end on a hypothesis, which is probably one of the hidden ones, the many hidden ones in the book: I don’t think that Gehry would have emerged as he did with these first decades of design in a building culture based on steel, or, even less, concrete. A lot of his architecture, many of these architectural decisions and provocative proposals, were based on the freedom given to him by the wood frame. He is an architect of the two-by-four.

“A Radical Obvious Idea”: “Carceral Landscapes” Confronts the Role of Design in Mass Incarceration

A photograph from the 1950s depicts Chicago’s Cook County Jail in a fragile state. An imposing wall had crumbled, leaving bricks—many of which were produced by inmates themselves—scattered in the yard. Melanie Newport , Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut, shared the image as part of “Carceral Landscapes,” a symposium at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in October that aimed to foreground the role of architects, designers, and planners in confronting mass incarceration in the United States. The photo of the jail in ruins served as an evocative touchstone for discussion throughout the event. Speakers and audience members alike reflected on the imposing facilities designed by architects to detain millions of people as well as the effort required to unmake that architecture.

Organized by GSD faculty members Lisa Haber-Thomson , Lecturer in Architecture, and Dana McKinney White, Assistant Professor of Urban Design, and co-sponsored by Harvard Law School’s Institute to End Mass Incarceration , the symposium focused on the physical infrastructure of incarceration, highlighting its histories and present conditions as a step toward dismantling an oppressive system. As Newport said, “the gradual escalation of mass incarceration happened brick-by-brick.” Bringing legal expertise and sociological studies together with research on the built environment, the symposium sparked an interdisciplinary conversation about a social problem with multilayered origins and impacts.

“We as designers are culpable in part for the issue of mass incarceration in America,” McKinney White explained in an interview, noting the active role that architects, including major firms, have played in building prisons and jails. “It’s critical that this conversation take place at the GSD because we are in a very influential position,” McKinney White continued, “not just as a school of architecture, landscape architecture, and planning and urban design, but also as a part of Harvard, where conversations about mass incarceration are happening at the Law School and at the Kennedy School of Public Policy. This is a moment of leaning into that conversation and actively talking about our role in it.”

The scope and urgency of the problem became clear through a series of bracing charts shared by Andrew Manuel Crespo , Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Executive Faculty Director of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration. With a per capita incarceration rate dwarfing that of other developed nations, the United States carceral system is an extreme outlier among peer countries. On any given day, nearly 2 million people are incarcerated in US facilities, and millions enter the system every year. Mass incarceration impacts an astonishing number of people: Crespo estimated that the half of Americans have been affected, either by entering the system themselves, living under supervision of a criminal justice system, or having an immediate family member who has. As a phenomenon, mass incarceration is both a widespread and hyper-focused, disproportionally impacting people of color and those living below the poverty line.

While the present justice system may seem intractable, buoyed by appeals to public safety, Crespo emphasized that mass incarceration is a recent phenomenon. Incarceration rates started to spike only in the 1970s and peaked in 2009. Over that time, confinement became a “backstop for problems we can tie to social conditions and social inequality.” He described the need to end mass incarceration as a “radical obvious idea,” one that would require a direct confrontation with deep social problems rather than a continued reliance on carceral “solutions.”

While lawyers and law enforcement officials animate the criminal justice system, architects had a crucial role in creating it. Haber-Thomson introduced the symposium with a critical history of the emergence of carceral architecture. She noted how studies by Michel Foucault and Robin Evans have shaped contemporary perspectives on how modern prison building typologies, including the notorious panopticon design, emerged in industrializing Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. Haber-Thomson argued, however, that such histories of prison must now be augmented by the recognition of longer continuities between mass incarceration and enslavement.

The full history of incarceration is a daunting account of oppression. But it also reveals moments of subversion and strategies of resistance that people in the present can recover. “Every history of these spaces contains contestation,” Newport said. Her study of the Cook County Jail, the largest single-site jail in the country, shows that the facility is far from monolithic and stable. Instead, it contains heterogenous architecture and variable land use patterns that reflect evolving ideas about the role of the jail in society. At times, Newport detailed, “jailed people maintained a degree of public visibility,” with information flowing in and out of the structures. Though increasingly isolated today, Newport emphasized the importance of moments of “porousness,” which exist in living memory, as productive counterpoints to the present.

Some particularly dysfunctional jail facilities in urban centers have attracted national attention, notably Riker’s Island in New York and Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles. While acknowledging the struggles at these sites, Sarah Lopez , Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, drew attention to the rapid expansion of migrant detention facilities in Texas, which have received relatively little public scrutiny.  For those constructing this carceral infrastructure aimed at migrants, “remoteness and invisibility is like a science,” Lopez said. Difficult for journalists and activists to access, these facilities are also embedded in rural communities with few other economic prospects. The promise of revitalizing rural areas is one selling point for the prison industry, though Lopez noted that the anticipated benefits rarely materialize, with profits extracted by major companies. Still, the dependency of rural political districts on the detention economy helps perpetuate the system overall.

How can designers hope to make a difference in these conditions? Crespo noted that the infrastructure built during the prison boom of the 1980s is now aging, with some facilities reaching the ends of their anticipated lifecycles. According to Crespo, architects may have an opportunity to force a change by withholding their expertise, essentially letting the walls of jails crumble, like those in Newport’s photograph. In this environment, disputes about “vocational ethics” will surely arise within the field. Crespo mentioned a pressing example: Should designers help make jails and prisons more humane, for example by bringing the facilities into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act? Or should the sole focus be on arguing against the incarceration of disabled people in the first place?

The time for pondering such ethical quandaries may be running out, Lopez suggested. She pointed to the rapid pace with which carceral facilities can be constructed in Texas, with sites for more than a thousand detainees erected in as little as a year. She sees a “dystopian future” of scaled-up, dehumanized imprisonment already coming into existence while the architecture profession lags behind. Only in the past few years, Lopez noted, did the American Institute for Architects ban designing for execution facilities and solitary confinement.

As McKinney White said, however, “until we see more development in solution-building, we’re going to have to try out lots of different approaches, innovate, and be willing to go out on a limb with ideas that may not always be favorable.” Such innovations are the subject of respective courses at the GSD that she and Haber-Thomson will lead to foster further discussion among GSD students. The symposium included a workshop for students focused on the writings of imprisoned people and their experiences with architecture, a project that Rachel Fischer, a first-year MUP student, discussed during a brief presentation.

The symposium was a call for designers to stay engaged in finding alternatives to mass incarceration. Far from an abstract problem, the system comprises concrete spaces that are inhabited by people and situated in communities, and that have transformative effects on the land. Still, just as architects and designers played a role in building this infrastructure, the symposium suggested that they can be unbuilt just as readily. As Crespo said, invoking the crumbling walls of Cook County Jail, “things that seem inevitable feel that way until the moment when they aren’t.”

 

 

Theaster Gates and Karel Miler’s “Actions”: An Excerpt from “Pairs 4”

Pairs is a student-led journal of conversations that matches subjects with objects, interview with archive. The journal is organized around a diversity of threads and concerns relevant to our moment in the design disciplines, bringing forth candid exchanges and provisional ideas.

For this conversation, featured in Pairs 4 , Isabel Lewis spoke with Theaster Gates, an interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on social practice and installation art. Trained as a potter and an urban planner, Gates is the founder of the Rebuild Foundation, a nonprofit cultural organization that aims to uplift under-resourced neighborhoods. He is based in Chicago.

At the center of the conversation is Karel Miler’s Actions, a series of photographs of the artist in semantic translation. Made in Czechoslovakia in the early 1970s, these images were intended to be a form of visual poetry exploring corporality and spatial constriction. A Zen practitioner, Miler is concerned with representations of universal and individual forms.

Theaster Gates Let’s begin.

Isabel Lewis The first time I saw your work, I was nineteen and living in Portland, Oregon. I was taking a sculpture class, and the professor showed us a documentary about your practice. At the time, I was thinking about the way space is affected, how there’s always a social aspect to spatial construction. Your work helped me open the door to the field I’m in now, design and landscape architecture.

Recently, this came full circle, because I went to see the film Showing Up, which is about a young woman, a sculptor, who works at an art school in Portland, which I think is based on the Oregon College of Art and Craft.¹ It brought me back to this very specific time and place, this memory of living in that city and trying to figure out what sculpture meant to me. So it had a great impact on me when I saw in the end credits that you contributed art to the film. I was thinking we could start by talking about how memory informs your work.

TG This happens for me, too. Art and artists, they follow us through our lives. The more we learn about ourselves and the more experiences we have, sometimes a work of art shows up and carries a different meaning. It might mean more, it might mean less, but it continues to haunt us and be a part of us. For me, buildings, spaces, and materials also have that haunting effect. No matter what an object is, even the paint that you buy at a store, everything has history. It has an origin story. It has an eternity that precedes you. When you think about acrylic paint or oil paint, even if it’s new, it has a history: the tube that it’s in wasn’t made today. Those processes are in fact part of a found or reclaimed identity, even though it’s a new paint. You buy new wood at Home Depot, and it is not new wood. It’s sometimes preexisting wood that’s been planed again, it’s a tree that has a history, an origin story. For me, saying that a thing is new or has history, it’s everything. You can connect the fact that everything has a history and a narrative to, let’s say, a Buddhist or an Africanist religious belief around animism, or the idea that things have life inside of them. I think what I’m interested in is participating in the truth of the life that is within things.

The more I spend time with materials, the more I think, “Oh, yes, my dad was a roofer. Yes, roofing paper and the materials of roofing are important to me because of that history.” But I also think that those materials have a life of their own, and that if I spend time deeply thinking about that life, then great things could happen with those materials. The South Side of Chicago wasn’t born impoverished. The buildings that are currently abandoned, they weren’t always abandoned. Those buildings have life in them, and it feels like my job is to recognize, exhume, and celebrate the great lives of these spaces. The more I believe the life these buildings have lived was important, the more I want to preserve this, the more I feel like, “This thing deserves to live, deserves to continue to live.”

IL I love that idea of reembodying a place or an image. The striking thing about this set of photos is how physical they feel. I have this bodily response where I imagine myself in these positions and how these things feel. There’s a natural tendency to want to bring life into inanimate objects.

TG Absolutely.

IL It also reminds me of paint, oil paint in particular. We have these names like Siena or Umbrian brown, and those come from the land. That’s the color of dirt in Siena. These materials are defined by their most fundamental origins.

TG Yeah. For every color that’s a natural color, there’s a plant or a mineral or an insect or a bark or a root that’s being crushed and ground to produce the thing that then allows us to produce beauty. I think that those processes and those roots, they have their own beauty. Let’s pull up an image, Isabel.

IL I’m drawn to Limits, as with many of these images, because there’s so much movement that’s implied but not ever shown. You see the beginning and the end of an action, but everything in between is just inferred. I think it goes back to what we were saying about time and timelessness, too. We think of performance as a time-based art, but in its documentation, it becomes a moment completely out of time. When I look at this, I feel it in my body, and it becomes much more spatial than anything else, much more corporeal.

TG I also think that we’re not necessarily analyzing the photograph itself, but the choices behind it. In 1973, Ektachrome was already available.² We were already in good and saturated color, but to have this image in black and white adds to the austerity, meditation, simplicity, it makes those contrasts pop even more.

IL The artist, Karel Miler, was a Zen Buddhist. That stayed with him throughout his life, even after he stopped working as an artist. A lot of these images are meant to be a translation of poetry or meditation into a representative image. I wonder what you would end up with if you were to translate these images back into language.

TG Measurement is language in that you’re taking a somewhat arbitrary sense of space, and you’re codifying space with lines, and then you’re giving those lines a shared understanding, so that we all agree to what a foot is or what a meter is, what a yard is, we agree to what a millimeter is, and as a result of our shared vocabulary, we’re able to then translate information across time.

IL Does translation feel like an adequate way to describe how you move through different scales, from pottery to neighborhoods to larger urban structures?

TG I think about translation all the time, Isabel. I do. Sometimes when I’m making a work of art and I sit down with a journalist and they look at a tar painting, the first thing they say is, “So your dad was a roofer?” It’s like, “Well, yes,” but the thing that I’m trying to convey is not necessarily about my relationship with my father. There are other, more sophisticated codes embedded in these materials, not just one prescription.

Translation also has to do with our ability to deeply interpret the meaning of a word or moment. I think about translation in the sense that art is a stand-in for my words. It’s a set of codes that goes without the need for my body, and it’s able to say things, sometimes simple things, sometimes more complicated things. That’s cool.

I recently wrote an essay about a dear friend of mine named Tony Lewis, an artist who uses language in his drawings, and it led me to look up the history of shorthand.³ It seems like an abstraction, but people who understand it can translate shorthand into language. If people across languages learn the same shorthands, then you can sometimes know universal shorthand without having to know the language. All of these modes are modes of translation and interpretation. It requires that you have a base knowledge of something, and then you add to that base knowledge a symbol that is universalized. In that sense, Tony’s work reminds me of this international code. It reads as abstraction, but only because most people don’t read shorthand. I’m saying so much right now, Isabel, I’m so sorry.

IL No, no, it’s really wonderful.

TG If we go back for a second to measuring in this image, what I love about it is he’s trying not only to set up the limits of his body, like the length of his hand, but also to show the deep correlations between his body and a crevice, or a crevice and the rise of a stair. I think these things are so relevant for landscape architecture in that sense, because the rise seems incredibly human. When you think about stately stairs, the rise is often short, sometimes the run is super deep. You actually have to take two or three steps for each tread, and it’s interesting to think about how when it gets past the foot, when it gets to three feet or five feet, it reads as grand because it’s bigger than our body.

IL Form and the body have such an interesting relationship to scale. All those books of the architectural standards say that a countertop is going to be this high and a cabinet is going to be this high because a typical body looks like this, but then my mother can’t reach any glasses from the top shelf because she’s not a five-foot-nine male. It’s worth subverting those expectations to measure space by atypical metrics. I made a Klein diagram a little while ago about tables and chairs.⁴ A baby sitting in a highchair, that’s a chair and a table in one element, with a very prescribed use. But if you’re perched over the kitchen counter, eating takeout from a container, you’re not in a chair nor at a table, and you’re not using the counter as intended. It’s that individual expression, I think, that really makes a place belong to someone.

TG Well, last summer just before going to Japan, I went to a yoga class and the yoga instructor asked, “What do you want to get out of the class?” I said, “I need to be able to sit cross-legged for two to three hours.” What I needed most from yoga was to help me respect the social customs of the dinner table. I knew that moving from my cultural predisposition to a Japanese cultural predisposition would require work, exercise, stretching. I think that sometimes architecture and landscape architecture can inform our new cultural norms. It could allow us ways of getting out of ourselves and maybe new ways of thinking about what dinner could be.

IL The reason why I ended up including this one was because it made me reevaluate the simple idea of holding something in your hand, a perfect weight, a textural variation. By taking a record out of its sleeve or by thinking about how you’re going to shape a pot or play an instrument or cook a meal, all of these things are fundamentally about how we touch the world. It’s not something that’s exportable or translatable.

TG Touch is important because it is one of our first phenomena. Whether it’s the first touch when a baby is born, or consistent touch as a baby ages, or the ability to process information like hot and cold, it’s the way we learn to be in the world and encounter our limits. These images speak to my own interests in the ways they demonstrate how having a sense of how texture affects a viewer of art. People don’t want to just see things; they also want to touch them and know them. To see is to know, but to touch is to also know.

IL Yes, and with the Archive House and the Johnson Publishing Company artifacts, you could make the argument that these objects should be preserved in a museum. But there’s something about flipping through an object that’s very different.

TG Yes, and back to this conversation about the different ways that architectural archetypes show up, who’s to say that the Listening House isn’t a more perfect museum?⁵⁵ Because we have the ability to touch things—turning the pages of a book, looking closely at a glass lantern slide—we can be more than just witnesses to them by being witnesses through them.

The truth is, when you advance in your research at universities like Yale and Harvard and the University of Chicago, you can gain access to special collections and touch things that other people can’t. I think that sometimes touch is also about who has access and who doesn’t.

IL Even with this magazine, it’s partly because we’re all at the Harvard Graduate School of Design that we are able to have access to these people and to these objects. It’s a privilege. I think the hope is that by doing and sharing this work, we’re making the process at least somewhat more accessible. But it is true that touch is something that you’re very lucky to access. I think there’s probably a lot of lack of touch in the world right now.

TG For me at least, as I was building the Listening House, Archive House, and Black Cinema House, and ultimately the Stony Island Arts Bank, I was definitely thinking about a person’s experience of these different spaces. The experience of that has everything to do with trying to create more access to the place, more access to people. I feel like we’ve at least been successful in helping people gain access. I’m quite proud of that.

IL I’ve been thinking a lot about the way that clay in particular holds memory. It holds fingerprints, and the act of throwing a pot is so intensely physical, really, really hard work. When you hold something in your hands like that and it’s shaped by your hands, it has your imprint on it. But it’s interesting to think about the way that that is scalable through other materials as well.

TG Absolutely. It’s reasonable that when we’re doing renovation projects, if we take out a stone, like a terra-cotta cornerstone, from a building, we can see the marks of the maker. But they might also put in some funny anecdote, or write their name or the date, because these are not actually anonymous objects. They’re anonymous to us because the histories of those materials haven’t always been carried forward. But in fact, from a pot to a large structure, objects often carry the remnants of people’s touch. If you look close enough at most buildings, you’ll see the traces of the people who made them.

IL This is relevant to something I was working on last semester about Julie Bargmann’s work in rehabilitating toxic landscapes. In a landscape project, there’s this dual action of not erasing history but honoring it while also acknowledging that land often has a complicated past. How do we preserve memory in built environments or urban landscapes in a way that feels authentic?

TG I think sometimes art and conceptual practices can help us on that journey. Sometimes, and I think this is what we’ll get to with these photographs, performance and conceptual ideas help us tackle these bigger questions by putting the body present in ways that implicate a site, make you feel more compassion toward the site because of the complexities of the things that happened there.

I remember when Cabrini-Green in Chicago was being torn down.⁶ There was concern that poor people were being displaced, largely poor Black people, because that land had become some of the most important land in the city for its adjacency to downtown. It’s like, “Well, Black people still deserve the right to live in a place that they’ve been living in for the last fifty years, sixty years, for which nobody gave a damn.” The site has changed over time, but the people haven’t. What do you do when time has shifted people’s stigma of a place?

People who lived in Cabrini Green deserve the right to continue to live there, even if the land is now worth a lot of money. When they were excavating, there was a lot of clay underground. I remember just trying to get access to that site and that clay, to use it as a stand-in for the people who once lived there.

IL I think there’s this notion that a landscape intervention won’t do harm. It’s complicated because there’s one lens that focuses more on the rights of the biome and another on the rights of people. Of course, they go hand in hand.

TG We look to landscape architecture as the solution to neutralizing space and time. It starts with large projects that are government or municipality projects, but then you have private developers and privately owned public spaces.⁷ In these moments, we need landscape to give us something that is not an office building, not a residential thing. But that safe passage route or that new bike lane or that grove of trees is sometimes still a disruptive act of transferring a community space from one of people in need to one of people that have a tremendous amount. I think protecting green and public spaces is important, and also not using green space or landscape as the thing that disintegrates a certain community continuity is important.

IL What I’m trying to get across is that people can think of landscape as very politically neutering. It’s like, of course, who wouldn’t want landscape beauty in their neighborhood? But I do think that there’s a tendency when any project is approached with this developer-down, top-down approach that erases the individual user. Maybe the only way to really approach this idea is from the inside out, moving from what you can shape with your hands to eventually what can shape you.

TG I think we’re saying the same thing, Isabel, that every urban tool can be a divisive, derisive device that separates and disconnects as much as it can be a tool that aggregates and reconnects. There is no neutral tool, including landscape architecture, and I think it’s really powerful that you’re able to see that. There will be moments where you’ll be on big projects, and it’ll be like, “Fuck!” When we build these new cities, we haven’t given any thought yet to where people are going to commune.They’re building apartment buildings and they’re building bus depots and transit things, but they haven’t thought about places of worship. They haven’t thought about the park where people might do yoga.

IL Yeah, at least in the US, I feel like it can be a very capitalistic way of thinking. We consider how people can get to work but not about where they can get together. How do you think the work you’ve done in creating cultural archives supports community?

TG Well, right now, I’m in the center of downtown Chicago. You get used to seeing the same shit in every city, you know what I mean? We could be in New York right now, we could be in LA, we could be in Paris, we could be in London. One thing that’s interesting about the Arts Bank is that it shows up as an unexpected and autonomous form.⁸ Its use is so different from the typical use that’s evident on our urban streets. What makes the city special to me is the fact that there are things autonomous to that city. It’s not enough just to have the archive, it needs to populate the block in the same way that any other storefront could.

I think the Dorchester Projects gave me an opportunity to install my own interpretation of the architectural image of a block.⁹ Inside that architectural image are a set of things that are totally specific to what I care about. I love looking at images. I love looking at images with others. I love making music with images behind me. I love learning about other people’s histories through objects. In that sense, the bank became a place of congregation and shared values. Then it leads you to realize, “Oh, I don’t even have to go to the bank to look at these kinds of images. My grandmama has images on her wall that I never pay attention to—who are those old people on my grandma’s wall?” Before you know it, you start to have a new appreciation, not only for other people but for your own freaking family.

IL I think one of the things that’s particularly beautiful about photography is the dissonance between the original event and the reception of its documentation. Sometimes the documentation can spark a reimagining of its own in which you start building a narrative around the things that came together.

TG Absolutely. Images test the limits of a person, but they’re also about the deep recording of a specific moment. When you’re making the image, you don’t necessarily know that it is going to be important, but we’re looking at curbs and streets that may not exist anymore, buildings for performances that don’t exist anymore. But an artist punctuated this site, and we have proof of its existence. With the artist, we have a way to remember a thing that occurred.

IL We take these things as ready-made. The photograph is there, the paint is there, the canvas is stretched, et cetera. But then, when you remove an action from its documentation, it’s something completely independent. I’m thinking back to something you said in a TED Talk, that when you started the Archive House in the Dorchester Projects, even just sweeping it became a performance.

TG There’s a tension and a relationship between the gesture that one performs and the document that captures that gesture, and then eventually, what that documentation means for the future. I sometimes want to be able to go back and show people a moment when all I could afford was eggs and mushrooms and potatoes from the local market. It was food you had to eat that day, it was almost on its way out. As a result, the cost per pound was so cheap that I could buy five pounds of mushrooms for $2.50 and I could make a big frittata. I wish I had evidenced those days more. I wish somebody had taken a picture of me making my frittata and slowly letting that pan get hot, because people assume I’ve always had a chef, or I’ve always had handlers or some shit. I’m like, “No, that’s actually the last five years that I’ve had help.” But those gestures, those moments really matter. Me, when I could drop it like it’s hot, I could dance. It’s difficult for my nephews to imagine me partying, because the gestures that I make today as an older adult, they’re so different from the gestures that I made when I was 25. All I can say to them is, your uncle was the life of the party, trust me.

 

1. Showing Up, directed by Kelly Reichardt, with performances by Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, and Andre Benjamin (2023; New York, A24). ↩︎
2. Ektachrome was a high-quality color film first produced by Kodak in the 1940s. ↩︎
3. Tony Lewis is a Chicago-based artist whose practice concerns semiotics, abstraction, and site specificity. He has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; Museo Marino Marini, Florence, Italy; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. ↩︎
4. The Klein Diagram is a four-group graph describing how elements are related to each other and their opposing forms. It was famously used by Rosalind Krauss in her seminal 1979 essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” to describe the relation of sculpture and architecture. ↩︎
5. The Listening House is one of several abandoned properties on the South Side of Chicago whose use Gates reimagined. Today, it houses a record collection of over 8000 LPs with cultural significance to the Black community in Chicago. ↩︎
6. Cabrini-Green was a public housing development built by the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) following the Second World War. Due to neglect and a lack of financial support from the CHA, the development fell into disrepair and became a symbol of urban blight. Its demolition was completed in 2011. ↩︎
7. Privately owned public spaces (POPS) are plazas, atria, or similar areas, typically in urban centers, that are open to the public while being owned and maintained by private corporations, often as a way to circumvent zoning restrictions or floor–area ratio regulations. ↩︎
8. The Stony Island Bank was vacant from the 1980s until 2015, when it was reopened by the Rebuild Foundation, a nonprofit founded and led by Gates to rehabilitate abandoned spaces on the South Side of Chicago. Today, the Bank serves as a local hub for artistic innovation and archival research, housing collections of music, film, magazines, and other significant cultural artifacts. ↩︎
9. The Dorchester Projects is a foundational expression of Gates’s interdisciplinary practice, in which urban design, archival preservation, and neighborhood engagement come together. In 2009, Gates purchased and then rehabilitated a set of neglected houses on Chicago’s South Side into vibrant cultural spaces, including the Archive House, the Listening House, and the Black Cinema House. In addition to serving the local community, these spaces are a model of positive urban restoration and collective action. ↩︎

Experiments with Memory: Reflections on the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale

Euro-American conceptions of the future often disregard the past—or, worse, reject it. From the Bauhaus to contemporary techno-utopianism, novelty continually underpins the dreams of what could be, particularly those dreams proclaimed by architecture’s loudest voices. The 18th Venice Architecture Biennale—on view through November 26 and featuring a range of work by students, alumni, faculty, and affiliates of the Harvard Graduate School of Design—does not condemn these efforts; rather, the exhibitions and national pavilions imply that such visions are impoverished because they are amnesic. We must not build for tomorrow without understanding and acknowledging all that came before—a position that many less-lauded practitioners globally have long championed.

Memory is one of the strongest, if not often explicitly stated, topics of this Biennale, curated by Ghanian-Scottish architect, academic, and novelist Lesley Lokko. Counterintuitively titled The Laboratory of the Future, the exhibition focuses less on showcasing models of what will be and more on the foundational material and conceptual conditions from which structures arise, from the transnational extraction of minerals on which projects like New York City’s Hudson Yards development depend to a display of the banal correspondence that all building projects and exhibitions such as this require. Process is privileged over product. Totemic structures, which loudly declare singular futures, are replaced by displays of vast archives, such as a collection of every issue of The Funambulist . Studio workshops occupy a cavernous room in the Arsenale as if in situ, messy and overstuffed. These rich displays’ too-muchness suggests multiple paths forward rather than didactic solutions. As a result, the conversations Lokko convenes equalize the exhibition’s participants. In particular, those from Africa and the African diaspora, women, and younger practitioners are treated as prominently as those architects whose names typically dominate the most prestigious architecture competitions, festivals, and building contracts.

Many projects highlight instances of success without singular architects. The Ecuador-based design agency Estudio A0, whose co-principal Ana María Durán Calisto (Loeb Fellow ’11) has served as Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design at the GSD, challenge colonial narratives of “primitive” Amazonian cities in Surfacing–The Civilized Agroecological Forests of Amazonia . Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology used for gold prospecting helped produce maps of 26 ancient urban areas, which featured waterways, suburbs, and other complex structures.

These discoveries reject notions that the forest was entirely “wild” and indicate that inhabitants of the Amazon River basin had both advanced understandings of their natural surroundings and the ability to shape them. Woven tapestries (a recurring mode of expression throughout the Biennale) depict imagined representations of life and the built environment in these cities, which in turn make material the interlocking nature of the urban and ecological.

The earth again acts as a depository of novel notions of the city in The Nebelivka Hypothesis, presented by David Wengrow and Eyal Weizman with Forensic Architecture and the Nebelivka Project. Eleven settlements from 6000 years ago, each with domestic buildings built in a ring encompassing a vast open area, were discovered in central Ukraine using modern archaeological technology. What the curators describe as the “centerless” configuration of Nebelivka is not just a banal characteristic. “No evidence of palaces, central storage, administration, rich burials, nor any other signs of top-down control” were found in excavations, the presentation details—a discovery that contradicts the early scholarly consensus that cities require “hierarchical form and structure.” Additional evidence was found that inhabitants’ farming had a gentle relationship with the surrounding land. This relates to the area’s chernozem, a remarkably rich soil, which the researchers argue may not have arisen by chance. It may be anthrosol—soil formed through human activity—which could demonstrate that cities can not only sustain but improve ecological health.

High-tech research is not required in order to learn from the past, though. The Slovenia Pavilion’s exhibition, +/-1 °C: In Search of Well-Tempered Architecture, goes so far as to criticize high-tech intervention in solving ecological concerns. Rather than dismiss vernacular buildings as charming ethnographic curiosities, curators Jure Grohar, Eva Gusel, Maša Mertelj, Anja Vidic, and Matic Vrabič showcase dozens of traditional buildings that are remarkably energy efficient architecturally, without requiring complex engineering solutions hidden behind walls. The exhibition implies that learning from these structures is not an issue of embracing nostalgia but rather common sense, as myriad solutions to regulating building temperatures already exist: the central stove that dried clothes, cooked food, and served as a gathering space for sleep and sociality in Slovenian homes; micro-sleeping cells in German cottages that could be closed and heated by an individual’s own body heat; a smaller room for social activities within Slovenian huts that could be heated separately from the pantry and the other less-used spaces surrounding it.

Edgar’s Sheds, an installation by GSD Assistant Professor of Architecture Sean Canty and his firm, Studio Sean Canty, also celebrates the vernacular. It features a fragmentary and poetic reconstruction of two sheds built by his great-grandfather Edgar in Eliott, South Carolina, enacting what Canty calls “retroactive reproduction.” The partial buildings “draw attention to the holes and ruptures of our collective history of black experience,” he writes, which is “a direct consequence of slavery.”

In each of these examples, and throughout much of the Biennale, the definition of “architect” is challenged. There is no single mind to whose genius these vernacular innovations can be attributed, for example.

Recognition instead must go to collective memory, which the Great Britain Pavilion designates a space maker in its own right. Curated by Joseph Zeal-Henry (LF ’24), Jayden Ali, Meneesha Kellay, and Sumitra Upham, Dancing Before the Moon argues that ritual practices, which depend on sustained and embodied collective memory, act as “spatial portals.” The artworks on display address hybrid identities in their reflections on rituals both ancestral and contemporary. Monumental vessels by Jayden Ali evoke Cypriot cuisine and Trinidadian steel-pan bands. Mac Collins’s abstract sculpture made of ebonized ash timber, at once anthropomorphic and otherworldly, celebrates the dominoes popular amongst British Jamaicans.

For diaspora communities especially, cooking, music, games, and similar actives help dissolve distance and time, bridging international borders psychically and collapsing temporalities. “They rethink the past and imagine alternative futures where architecture is agile and spontaneous and communities are bound together by social (rather than economic) practices,” the curators assert in their introduction. To dismiss these ritual participants as non-architects is in turn to delimit the possibilities of how space is understood and who has the authority to claim as well as design for it.

In striving to define new futures, the Biennale foregrounds a history in which too many voices have been dismissed and too many details about both the births and deaths of built spaces have been cast aside. Even the awards at the Bienniale sought to address this past occlusion, including Nigerian architect Demas Nwoko’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. Despite designing “forerunners of the sustainable, resource-mindful and culturally authentic forms of expression now sweeping across the African continent—and the globe,” Lokko writes, Nwoko remains “largely unknown, even at home.”

The casting aside of whole populations is reflected in Synthetic Landscapes, a project by Stephanie Hankey, Michael Uwemedimo and Jordan Weber (all Loeb Fellows ’22)  that details the violent extraction of oil near the Niger Delta. Chevron and other oil companies’ interventions in Nigeria have forever changed the local ecosystem, destroying villages as well as the natural environment. The carbonized soil that resulted from this ecological violence “cannot be remediated, only removed, contained, moved and moved again,” writes the team, who illustrate this by using this soil itself in the exhibition’s floor. The act is a physical reminder of a warning from Amitav Ghosh about how we consider the past, which the trio quotes: “Those at the margins are now the first to experience the future that awaits all of us.”

The need to acknowledge those too-long disregarded is also poignantly addressed in unknown, unknown, an installation by Eric Howëler (Associate Professor in Architecture at the GSD), Mabel O. Wilson, and J. Meejin Yoon (MAUD ’97). The multifaceted immersive work arises from Höweler+Yoon’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia, which opened in 2020. It commemorates the approximately 4000 enslaved peoples on whose labor the university was dependent from 1817 to 1865. Rather than honor the dead in stereotypical monumental forms such as sculptures, the work makes visible these men and women’s erasure and their lack of recorded identities. Videos illustrate the scale of this violence by depicting a list of their limited descriptors, recorded in ledgers and similar archival materials, such as “Peter, Unknown,” “Runaway, Unknown,” and “Unknown, Unknown.” This is in turn accompanied by a recitation of these “names,” read in part by three of their descendants. The exhibition is made even more haptic by the projection surfaces themselves: muslin sheets hanging from the ceiling, which specifically reference the cotton-centric labor forced upon this enslaved population.

As these and the majority of the projects on display in Venice emphasize, the question of the future must not remain the restricted domain of only a few architects’ fantastical speculations. Rather than provide solutions, this Biennale instead strives to engrain a basic understanding of how to answer the question at all. It does not ask us to stop dreaming. It merely proposes that in order for dreaming to succeed, we must first understand who designs, who builds, and how the materials they use affect us all.

Black in Design 2023 Creates a “Home Away From Home” at the GSD

Where is home for you? It’s an ice-breaker question we all get asked at some point, especially at the start of a new academic year. For many it’s a city, a street, a building, or a community. For attendees at this year’s Black in Design conference (BiD), held at the Graduate School of Design from September 22nd through the 24th, answers ranged from Chicago to Nigeria. But home could also be much closer and subtler; for many attendees, home could be evoked by the familiar bottles of Nivea shea lotion the conference organizers added to the GSD’s main floor restrooms.

The African diaspora remains critically underrepresented in traditional design fields such as architecture, landscape design, and urban planning. Since its inaugural session in 2015, the Black in Design conference has worked to create a space where Black designers from all fields, beyond credentialed architects—from visual artists to DJs to family archivists—feel welcome and celebrated.

“I think we all came into the planning process knowing that it was important to reflect on the precedents that we use in our work, and a lot of that was not design-based,” said Kai Walcott (MLA I ’24), one of the conference co-chairs. She noted that despite having professional training in design, a lot of what she draws on to inform her own work and thesis research comes from Black visual and performing arts from outside the academy. Those disciplines, Walcott said, “reflected more of the ideas that I want to… grapple with to understand how Black people use space and make space.” These sources and ways of creating and preserving knowledge are often missing from traditional design curricula, the conference organizers noted, and they sought to develop conference themes that would make practitioners from a wide range of formal and informal disciplines feel comfortable alongside each other.

This year’s theme, the Black Home, came out of listening sessions held between the organizing committee members (current GSD students Dora Mugerwa [MLA I ’24]; and Walcott; and recent alumni Tobi Fagbule [MDes ’23] and Michael Johnson, [MUP ’23]); representatives of Africa GSD; the GSD African American Student Union; and Black GSD students generally, who were asked what topics they wanted to see represented. These sessions revealed a number of themes that ultimately coalesced around the idea of home not just as a building to be designed, but as a synthesis of objects, scents, colors, or feelings. Taken together, these are elements that can make an experience of home simultaneously unique and a source of commonality across a diaspora.

When it came time to choose keynote and panel speakers, Mugerwa said it was important that there was a mix of invitees from both inside and outside the boundaries of what is traditionally considered “design” in the professional field. “We wanted to focus on folks whose work was new to us,” she said, “and show how artists and designers can take inspiration from people outside of the discipline. But we tried to have a balance of design practitioners and non-practitioners as well that could have cross-disciplinary conversations.”

In addition to coming from diverse professional and curatorial backgrounds, the conference organizers invited speakers who also had different visions of what home meant to them. In the keynote panel, “Legacy: Defining the Black Home (Past, Present, Future),” the first question asked by moderator Toni L. Griffin, a Professor in Practice at the GSD and Founder of urbanAC, was: Can home be designed? Panelist Bryan Mason, Co-Founder and Creative Director of AphroChic , responded that like everything in our daily lives, a home and the objects within it can be designed, and that Black people have been doing so for centuries. In contrast, panelist Germain Barnes (the Principal of Studio Barnes , and Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Architecture Graduate Program at the University of Miami School of Architecture) was more skeptical, noting that designers could facilitate other people’s ability to create home, but that for him home ultimately came down to people, feelings, and sensory experiences that cannot be explicitly designed. Renata Cherlise, Founder of the Black Archives multimedia platform and author of Black Archives: A Photographic Celebration of Black Life (2023), drew from memories and how they imbue art, objects, and spaces. “I know Great Grandma’s house is not there but I still go back in my dreams,” she said, noting that her recent book celebrates memories and sensory experiences of place through photographs in Black family archives.

In addition to panels, Black in Design conferences feature  hands-on workshops hosted throughout the weekend. This year’s workshops included “Black Feminist Imagination and the Black Home,” led by BlackSpace Urbanist Collective , and “Archiving the Black Home,” led by Wayside studio Founder, public artist, and educator Curry J. Hackett. The sessions gave conference participants a way to not only form cross-disciplinary connections with each other, but to approach their own design practice through potentially new methods such as incorporating artificial intelligence or curating multimedia archival exhibitions.

In searching for workshop leaders, Walcott said, “We wanted people who were doing this work but may not (yet) have the platform of Harvard, to try and connect them,” with the GSD community and a broader design audience.

Between workshops, panels, and food catered by the local restaurant Jamaica Mi Hungry , the conference organizers wanted to ensure the GSD felt like home as well, hence the bottles of lotion in the bathrooms—an immediate hit with attendees. Nina Cooke John, a keynote panelist and Founding Principal of Studio Cooke John Architecture and Design , noted that while she has created architectures of home, recently through Obsidian House , home is also found in gestures of care just like that.

While BiD is a temporary experience, one piece of it remains in Gund Hall in the form of an exhibition called Stories That Take Me Home, on view until October 18th. Curated by the conference co-chairs and designed by Àrà Lab, a project of Fagbule and Sumayyah Súnmàdé Raji (MArch ’23), the exhibition seeks to reclaim images and theorizations of the Black Home in Africa from negative associations with conflict or destitution, or “as mere artifacts, objects for study, or curiosities to be sampled,” according to the curators’ statement. Instead, the exhibit demonstrates “their profound multidimensionality… (reflecting) culture, identity, and traditions and generate(s) spaces of the home that transcend the physical realm.”

Visually, the exhibition is anchored by an outline drawing of a home with an arch and porch yard. “That was something that was very close to our hearts,” Fagbule said. She grew up in Nigeria and said her context for home is always changing, but that there are elements of home that start to appear in different ways throughout her daily life wherever she happens to be living. She wanted viewers to share in that and recall their own stories of home, or treasured objects, over time.

One of the things that made Black in Design successful, Mugerwa added, is the feeling of commonality it fostered. While people may think their home or neighborhood is unique, they could come to this exhibition, and the various conference events, and recognize a sofa, a cabinet in the front room that they were never allowed to touch as a child, a glass figurine, a familiar brand of lotion, and so on. “So we wanted to reinforce that multiplicity, that we are not a monolith,” she said, “but it was nice to see those moments where there was overlap, where we could all identify with something similar.”