I.M. Pei’s Museum of Chinese Art, Shanghai: Modernism between East and West

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, I. M. Pei concluded his stellar progress through the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) with a thesis project that marked an original position in debates of the period over the renewal of civic space and on the form of a modern museum. Pei’s choice of subject, a museum of Chinese art for Shanghai, made clear enough his ambition to take his new design training home to his native China and to contribute to debates on the appropriate form for a modern Chinese architecture. With this choice, he raised the fascinating question of cultural relativity: does Chinese art require a distinctive type of architectural frame for viewing? This question extended the then current debate among architects and museum curators over whether or not modern art was better shown in new types of spaces. In his complex, two-story frame of widely spaced reinforced-concrete piers, featureless so as to make reference neither to Western colonnades nor to Chinese timber traditions, Pei proposed a museum space that was as much community center as museum, and equally as much landscape, with its garden flowing through the building and interior tea pavilions. Pei’s remarkable design catapulted him onto the international stage—before he had ever built a building—when his thesis project was published in two of the leading architectural journals of the day: Progressive Architecture in New York and L’architecture d’aujourd’hui in Paris.¹

Pei had left China at a moment when Shanghai was in the throes of discussing the creation of a new civic center, of which a museum would be a key component. Throughout his studies in the United States, Pei had kept an eye on the situation at home, even during the height of the war. His undergraduate thesis project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), submitted in 1940 and titled “Standardized Propaganda Units for War Time and Peace Time China,” was in essence a design for an itinerant cultural center to be deployed by the “Ministry of Propaganda” in rural areas. The design paid homage in its tensile structures as well as in its conception of cultural propaganda, referring to both Soviet revolutionary architecture and Le Corbusier’s Pavillon des temps nouveaux at the Paris Exposition universelle of 1937.²

Early on, Pei viewed architecture as an impetus for cultural transformation and community-building, with a sense of the urgent need to contribute to a spirit of nationalism in a country resisting Japanese invasion. In the text accompanying his MIT thesis, he underscored the political and social basis of his design with technical descriptions of the system of lightweight bamboo construction uniting Chinese tradition and a burgeoning interest in prefabrication. Two aspects of this project are relevant for his decision six years later to design a museum for Shanghai: the fact that the space would be modifiable, with equal weight given to exhibitions and to theatrical events, and that bamboo could be used in a mixed assembly to become a modern structural material, locally available and relying on existing labor know-how. Pei proposed a largely open-plan space with flexible partitions, notably so that the space could be changed from a darkened theatre to a light-filled display.³

When Pei enrolled at the GSD in December 1942—only to interrupt his studies almost immediately to work for the National Defense Research Committee in Princeton—his young wife, Eileen, was already studying landscape design there. Art periodicals were filled with articles on the need for museums to respond to the challenges of modernist art and of a changing society. In New York, Alfred Barr Jr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), conceived of an entirely different concept of a museum and of its architectural space, influenced by his first-hand experiences at the Bauhaus and with the experimental installations undertaken by Alexander Dorner in Hanover in the late 1920s. After Dorner’s emigration from Hitler’s Germany, Barr was instrumental in finding him a position as director of the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design. With his concept of the “living museum,” Dorner promoted museums as active parts of a community. Walter Gropius, likewise newly installed in the United States, would frequently assign museums and cultural facilities as studio assignments at Harvard.

In 1939, MoMA opened in its permanent home—a building designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone that represented a radical departure from the neoclassical temple type most recently promoted for a new national gallery of art in Washington DC. At MoMA, Goodwin and Stone discarded the conventions of classical columns in favor of a translucent curtain-wall facade, transparent on the ground floor to allow views from the street. Visitors entered at ground-floor level rather than ascending a flight of ceremonial stairs; they also had immediate access to an outdoor sculpture garden behind the museum that could be seen from the street through the glazed vestibule. Transparency and flexibility were to be hallmarks of a new generation of museums, qualities that were soon seen as echoing the stakes of national cultural politics. In his radio broadcast on the opening of MoMA’s building, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared: “As the Museum of Modern Art is a living museum, not a collection of curious and interesting objects, it can, therefore, become an integral part of our democratic institutions—it can be woven into the very warp and woof of our democracy.”⁴

In 1943, two radically new, if diametrically opposed, visions of a future art museum were proffered by Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe. Wright had drawn up a variety of schemes for the future Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s famous spiralling ramp suspended above an open ground floor penetrable from the street by both pedestrians and vehicles. In September 1945, as Pei was returning to complete his graduate work at the GSD, Wright’s model was unveiled at the Plaza Hotel and heralded in the New York Times: ‘Museum Building to Rise as Spiral, New Guggenheim Structure Designed by F. L. Wright Is Called First of Kind’.⁵ Few knew that Le Corbusier had been working on a similar concept since 1929, although it is likely that, given Pei’s enthusiasm for Le Corbusier, he was familiar with the project, titled Musée à croissance illimitée, which had been published in 1937 in the first volume of the architect’s OEuvre complète.

 In 1943, Architectural Forum published a special issue of designs by leading American architects that posited the form and institutions of a post-war city under the rubric “194X,” since no one knew when the Second World War would come to an end. Together with its parent publication, Fortune, the magazine modeled all aspects of a medium-sized post-war city, choosing Syracuse, New York, imagined as if it had been bombed. Fortune proposed the economic and social dimensions of the city and Forum its architecture and urban layout, including a civic center where city hall and museum would be brought into a taut composition at the core, something with echoes of the Greater Shanghai Plan debated during Pei’s high-school days in China.⁶ The future museum was entrusted to Mies van der Rohe, whom Architectural Forum called the nation’s chief “exponent of the ‘open’ plan.”⁷ Ironically, Syracuse would be remodeled in the 1950s and 1960s by bulldozers in the name of urban renewal, rather than by German or Japanese bombs. Syracuse’s new Everson Museum of Art would be designed not by the elder statesman Mies—then at work on a new museum for West Berlin—but by the virtually untried Pei.⁸

To represent new display conditions for modern art, which had discarded all the perspectival traditions of painting, Mies used collage, a method that had become his standard teaching technique for the courtyard house projects with students at Illinois Institute of Technology, and which Pei would emulate in his GSD thesis. Mies collaged photographs of works of art that might be displayed—poignantly Picasso’s Guernica, which depicts the horror of the Spanish Civil War—and enlarged color details of nature, cut to represent the uninterrupted view of the landscape from his glazed box. All is held in place in the collage by thin ruled pencil lines, which represent the delicate steel frame of the future structure. Most importantly, Mies’s building would be a new frame for looking at art from different vantage points. He writes: “A work such as Picasso’s Guernica has been difficult to place in the usual museum gallery. Here it can be shown to greatest advantage and become an element in space against a changing background.”⁹

Mies captured the larger ethos of the future city: “The first problem is to establish the museum as a center for the enjoyment, not the interment of art. In this project the barrier between the artwork and the living community is erased by a garden approach for the display of sculpture.” (This element of the project corresponds interestingly with the sculpture garden in Goodwin and Stone’s 1939 design for MoMA.) Mies concludes: “The entire building space would be available for larger groups, encouraging a more representative use of the museum than is customary today, and creating a noble background for the civic and cultural life of the whole community.”¹⁰

Both Mies’s design approach and his rhetoric would find echoes—emulation and critique—in Pei’s design for Shanghai. Pei’s project was published in Progressive Architecture in February 1948 together with a number of short texts, the editors noting that “This remarkable graduate-school project strikes us as an excellent synthesis of progressive design in addition to providing a much-needed architectural statement of a proper character for a museum today.” As background, they add: “Planned to replace an inadequate structure that occupies a site within the city’s new Civic Center, plans for which were completed in 1933, this design for a museum “befitting the dignity of the city of Shanghai” is developed as an integral part of the civic plan.”¹¹

Published under Gropius’s guidance, the project is accompanied in both Progressive Architecture and L’architecture d’au jour d’hui by a statement from the former Bauhaus director that reflects some of his concerns in the 1940s, even if they perhaps overlook the extent to which Pei has taken on the museum debate that I am sketching in here. As Gropius explains:

[The project] clearly illustrates that an able designer can very well hold on to basic traditional features—which he has found are still alive—without sacrificing a progressive conception of design. We have today sufficiently clarified our minds to know that respect for tradition does not mean complacent toleration of elements which have been a matter of fortuitous chance or a simple imitation of bygone esthetic forms. We have become aware that tradition in design has always meant the preservation of essential characteristics which have resulted from eternal habits of the people.¹²

This text could apply as easily to Gropius’s relationship to New England clapboard houses as to Pei’s evolving vision of a relationship between Chinese tradition and modernity. “When Mr. Pei and I discussed the problems of Chinese architecture,” Gropius continues,

he told me that he was anxious to avoid having Chinese motifs of former periods added to public buildings in a rather superficial way as was done for many public buildings in Shanghai … We tried then to find out how the character of Chinese architecture could be expressed without imitating … former periods. We decided that the bare Chinese wall, so evident in various periods of Chinese architecture, and the small individual garden patio were two eternal features which are well understood by every Chinese living. Mr Pei built up his scheme entirely on a variation of these two themes.¹³

Pei designed a two-story concrete frame, entered by means of a dramatic ramp, cutting into it as needed to create sectional richness. The frame is clad in marble, an honorific befitting Shanghai’s civic center. The expansive roof is pierced with many more openings than those programmed by Mies in his steel frame and would be visible from taller buildings nearby, since the building is embedded in the ground by half a level. Influenced by both his wife’s study of landscape architecture and his own memories of the gardens of Suzhou, Pei weaves a garden through the open courts of the lower level. Gardens could be enjoyed both at eye level and from above, where the section of the building is opened to the sky. In place of Mies’s pictorialized landscape in the distance, Pei interweaves a commemoration of the garden as one of the high forms of Chinese art-making and considers it for use, labelling it a tea pavilion on the plan. He notes of the landscaped courtyards: “All forms of Chinese art are directly or indirectly results of a sensitive observation of nature. Such objects, consequently, are best displayed in surroundings which are in tune with them, surroundings which incorporate as much as possible the constituting elements of natural beauty.”¹⁴ As is clear from photographs of the model, now lost, Pei set out to capture the essence of Chinese domestic architecture using the courtyards, gardens, and semi-enclosed rooms that are present at every scale, from the hutong to the palace. “This section looks toward the entrance garden court, at right of which is a modern translation of the traditional Chinese Tea Garden,” the editors note. “Usually located in the market place, or near the temple grounds, to serve men of all classes as a social center and place for intellectual exchange, its inclusion here in a museum is with the hope that it will help make the institution a living organism in the life of the people, rather than a cold depository of masterpieces.”¹⁵ The incorporation of a Chinese-style garden, which fragments experience towards greater enjoyment, enlightenment, and discovery of multiple facets of reality, makes it clear that Pei was conscious of the ways in which Chinese pictorial traditions with nature or ink and brush often incorporate multiple perspectives, rather than the unified construct of linear perspective.

As Pei was designing a museum to take home, the civil war between Nationalists and Communists made an immediate return impossible. In the next few years, he would teach at Harvard instead, notably a foundation course, Architecture 2b: Architectural and Landscape Design, which clearly underscored the interdependence of building and site, construction and nature, and which also, according to the 1946 course bulletin, assured that “the social and economic factors underlying the design are constantly considered.” In 1947, Dorner was invited as a guest to work with students at the GSD on the design of a living museum. He took it as the occasion to pen a veritable manifesto on the role of the museum in relation to the specific spiritual state of mankind in modernity. The classroom brief was even reprinted in its entirety in Dorner’s influential The Living Museum: Experiences of an Art Historian and Museum Director, published in 1958, a year after his death. The brief also served as the point of departure for his 1947 book The Way Beyond Art. “The new type of museum,” he wrote,

would begin to partake of that energy [of the modern movement in art and architecture]. It would not only be more alive and stimulating but also much more easy to establish, for it would depend much less than the current type on quantitative accumulation, i.e. wealth. It would not require any gorgeous palaces of absolutistic ideal art but would be constructed functionally and flexibly of light modern materials … Like all new movements this new type of museum would then be an important factor in the urgently needed integration of life and in the unification of mankind on a dynamic basis.¹⁶

In his Museum of Chinese Art for Shanghai, Pei synthesized a series of concerns: his ongoing desire to intervene in the civic center in Shanghai, his commitment to imagining a cultural politics for his home country, and his attentiveness to the debate in the United States on the spaces and functions of an art museum. With its emphasis on landscape, the design possibly shows the influence of his wife, Eileen, who was at the time fully immersed in landscape architecture at the GSD. The first product of what would prove to be a lifetime engagement with museum design stood at the intersection of Pei’s memories of the cultural needs of pre-war China and the debates about the appearance of a post-war United States. When he was suddenly catapulted to national attention with an innovative built design for the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, his interest in changing perspectives on space was largely internalized. He created a building that could take its place not in dialogue with the larger liberated landscape but in the hard realities of an American city being reconceived for urban renewal. It was the first sketch in many ways of the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, where the Chinese émigré architect would be one of the first to bring a modernist vision of exhibition space to the landscapes of the American National Mall.

I.M. Pei: Life is Architecture (2024) is published by Thames & Hudson.

1. “Museum for Chinese Art, Shanghai, China,” Progressive Architecture 29 (February 1948): 50–52; and “Chinese Art Museum in Shanghai”, L’architecture d’aujourd’hui 20 (February 1950): 76–77.
2. Le Corbusier’s 1935 trip to the United States had an enormous impact on Pei, who recalled the Swiss architect’s visit to Cambridge as “the two most important days in my professional life.” See Gero von Boehm, Conversations with I. M. Pei: Light Is the Key (Munich: Prestel, 2000), 36.
3.  I. M. Pei, “Standardized Propaganda Units for War Time and Peace Time China,” BArch diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1940.
4. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speech was reprinted in full in the Herald Tribune (New York) on 11 May 1939, and can be found on the website of the Museum of Modern Art: https://www.moma.org/research-and-learning/archives/archives-highlights-04-1939, accessed 7 September 2021.
5. New York Times, 10 July 1945, quoted in Hilary Ballon et al., The Guggenheim: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Making of the Modern Museum (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2009), 156.
6. “New Buildings for 194X,” Architectural Forum (May 1943): 69–189. See also Andrew M. Shanken, 194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); and Barry Bergdoll, “Architecture of 194X,” in Mark Robbins, ed., American City “X”: Syracuse after the Master Plan (New York: Princeton Architectural Press with Syracuse Univeristy School of Architecture, 2014), 18–25.
7. “Index of Projects and Contributing Architects,” Architectural Forum (May 1943): 72.
8. On the Everson Museum of Art, see Barry Bergdoll, “I. M. Pei, Marcel Breuer, Edward Larrabee Barnes, and the New American Museum Design of the 1960s,” in Anthony Alofsin, ed., A Modernist Museum in Perspective: The East Building, National Gallery of Art (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 2009), 106–123.
9. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, quoted in “Museum, Mies Van Der Rohe, Architect, Chicago, Ill.,” in ‘New Buildings for 194X”: 84.
10. Mies van der Rohe, ‘New Buildings for 194X”: 84.
11. “Museum for Chinese Art, Shanghai, China”: 50–51.
12. “Museum for Chinese Art, Shanghai, China”: 52.
13. “Museum for Chinese Art, Shanghai, China”: 50–51.
14. I. M. Pei, quoted in “Museum for Chinese Art, Shanghai, China”: 51.
15. “Museum for Chinese Art, Shanghai, China”: 52.
16. The winning project responding to Dorner’s brief to the Harvard students was by Victor Lundy, for a “Living Art Museum,” a design that clearly drew on Pei’s earlier project in its interweaving of a landscape garden under and through the spaces of a museum and its development of a partially sunken section.

 

Interview with Allen Sayegh: A Spotlight on Mediums

Students in Allen Sayegh’s seminar at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) installed an array of sensors on a tree in the yard behind the School’s iconic Gund Hall. The project aimed to collect data about phenology, the tree’s biological responses to changing seasonal temperatures. Integrating technology with the landscape, the effort is an example of a responsive environment, or a space augmented with digital tools and content. The concept of responsive environments is at the heart of Sayegh’s research. A design critic and senior interaction technologies fellow at the GSD, Sayegh specializes in technology-driven design and media arts in architecture and urbanism. He directs the research unit Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab (REAL) at the GSD and is also the founder and principal of the Cambridge-based design firm INVIVIA

Sayegh brings this background to his role as the domain head for Mediums in the Master in Design Studies (MDes) program at the GSD. The program explores how design shapes the underlying processes of contemporary life. Students the Mediums domain focus on emerging technologies to design hybrid digital-and-physical environments. For example, in Sayegh’s project-based seminar, “Responsive Environments: Poetics of Space,” students to work at various scales to create projects ranging from wearable digital devices and interactive objects to architectural installations driven by network technologies. Some of these projects, like the sensors embedded on the tree, aim to collect real-world data that might inform the work of designers. Others are closer to digital art, such as a conceptual installation featuring a shallow pool of water onto which is projected the image of an orb that can be manipulated with acoustic frequencies.

The rapid advance of Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, and other interactive technologies have the potential to reorient our relationship to the built environment. Through the Medium’s domain, Sayegh focuses on how designers can use new tools to enhance our cities and foster deeper forms of citizen engagement. In a recent interview, Sayegh described the aims of the MDes program and how the Mediums domain creates a space for students to explore advanced fabrication techniques and pursue a broad spectrum of inquiries at the intersection of technology, art, and architecture.

Why do you think the Mediums domain is of interest to architects who are still in the early parts of their professional careers?

I believe the Mediums domain holds significant appeal for designers and architects in the early stages of their professional careers for several compelling reasons.

Firstly, the Mediums domain provides a dynamic platform for exploration and experimentation with various digital tools, physical models, and emerging technologies. Early-career architects are often in a phase of self-discovery and skill development, and the Mediums domain offers them a diverse range of expressive channels. This domain encourages architects to push creative boundaries and to think beyond the design approaches they might have been trained on or accustomed to.

Moreover, the domain facilitates a multidisciplinary approach, which is invaluable for architects seeking to develop a holistic understanding of the built environment and collaborate effectively with professionals from various fields.

Finally, the Mediums domain provides a space for architects to engage with the latest trends and advancements in representation, form-making, and communication. With the rapid evolution of technology in AI and mixed realities, designers can leverage these tools to convey their ideas in compelling and immersive ways. This exposure enhances their adaptability and ensures they remain at the forefront of the industry’s evolving landscape.

The recent exhibition Our Artificial Nature at the Druker Design Gallery celebrated ten years of research at the Harvard Center for Green Building and Cities (CGBC). The exhibition features ongoing research from across the School in response to the environmental imperatives facing the globe today. How does the MDes Mediums program prepare students to contribute to the important discourse around environmental design? 

The MDes Mediums program promotes critical thinking and robust research skills, encouraging students to analyze and contribute to current debates and emerging trends in environmental design. This is very evident in the “open projects.” These capstone projects for the degree requirement are collaborative in nature, and students learn to synthesize their ideas and communicate them effectively, preparing them to engage with the broader architectural community and influence the ongoing dialogue. Furthermore, the GSD offers many courses with a strong emphasis on sustainability and environmental consciousness that is part of the wide range of electives. Mediums students bring a unique perspective on how different technologies, new ways of expression, and methods can be leveraged to address emergent environmental concerns and contribute positively to the creation of responsible built environments.

Transdisciplinary thinking is a critical part of contemporary problem-solving in design. Can you explain more how this approach is integrated into the MDes program? 

Transdisciplinary thinking is an approach that draws on multiple fields of knowledge and expertise to develop a more holistic understanding of complex issues. In design, transdisciplinary thinking is becoming increasingly important because many of the challenges we face today are complex and require solutions that go beyond the scope of a single discipline. MDes, by design, is uniquely situated to draw on insights from multiple fields, break down silos between disciplines, and encourage collaboration and communication between students from different backgrounds. This can lead to more innovative and effective solutions that consider a range of perspectives and factors. Additionally, the transdisciplinary approaches can help identify hidden connections and interactions that might not be immediately obvious.

MDes has grown in size and diversity in recent years with students from at least 15 countries and five continents represented in the program. How has this impacted the student experience? What do you think contributes to this increase in international applicants?

The increased size and diversity of the MDes program over the years has had a significant impact on the student experience. First, students are exposed to a wider range of perspectives, cultural backgrounds, and ways of thinking, which enriches their peer-to-peer learning experience and broadens their understanding of design. This exposure to diverse perspectives also helps students develop skills in cross-cultural communication, collaboration, and problem-solving, which are increasingly important in our globalized world. Secondly, the presence of students from different parts of the world enhances the social and cultural experience of MDes students. They have opportunities to build relationships and networks with people from diverse backgrounds, which is very valuable for personal and professional growth.

I think several factors have contributed to the increase in international applicants. One of the main factors is the growing recognition of the importance of design in solving complex global challenges. There is a demand for designers who can work across cultures and boundaries to create solutions that are effective and culturally sensitive.

Also, a very important factor is the reputation of the MDes program itself. As the program has grown and evolved over the years, it has become one of the most widely known and respected transdisciplinary programs in the world. This attracts talented designers from all over the world who are interested in studying at a highly competitive, top-ranked program.

How has the MDes curriculum shifted as climate change and climate resilience take center stage in design thinking?

While core transdisciplinary approaches have remained largely unchanged, some of the focus of the courses has shifted to address the urgent challenges presented by climate change. One way the MDes addresses this is through our open projects courses and by placing greater emphasis on research addressing climate change. This includes a wide range of topics on designing for resilience, energy efficiency, and sustainability, and speculative investigations on unveiling some of the causes and complexities of the perception of climate change.

A System of Gaps and Linkages

For almost two decades, Sarah Oppenheimer has investigated the conditions that enable us to act upon and recondition the built environment. The artist is best known for her dynamic architectural interventions, or more precisely, insertions, as her work tends toward partial modifications rather than total disruptions in the structural fabric of a given space.

In spring 2024, Oppenheimer was a design critic in architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), where she led O(perating) S(ystem)1.1, an advanced research seminar in the Mediums domain of the Master in Design Studies (MDes) program. Though Oppenheimer’s work is insistently analogue, the students in OS1.1 modified the interior lighting of the GSD’s Gund Hall with digital and wireless means to relay haptic, kinetic, and visual information across a site-specific, networked system. Nonetheless, the course was directly informed by many tendencies that have long been consistent throughout Oppenheimer’s practice, even as they have evolved over distinct periods.

In an early work titled 610-3365 (2008), permanently installed at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, a vista of an area immediately outside the museum appears embedded into the gallery floor on the fourth level of the building. An elongated, narrow aperture opens into a plywood tunnel, the smaller end of which is placed inside a window frame on the third floor. Downstairs, one can experience the work as a sculptural volume: an oblique, truncated pyramid with smoothed edges descending from a “wormhole” in the ceiling , as Oppenheimer refers to it. The “existing architecture,” listed on the work’s label as a medium, is indivisible from the work itself. However, back on the upper level, the acute perspective resulting from the cone-like design is offset and virtually flattened by the optical effect of two pairs of diverging grooves carved along the structure’s interior, flanking the openings at both ends, while the ultra-Eamesian curvatures of the form also help to minimize sharp shadows. This sleek viewing device offers a crisp but disorienting image that equally adheres to the logics of immediacy and hypermediacy, rearticulating the perception of proximity between interior and exterior spaces.

Currently on long-term view at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) , S-334473 (2019) is exemplary of another well-known series of Oppenheimer’s works. An iteration of an earlier project titled S-337473 (2017), exhibited at the Ohio University’s Wexner Center for the Arts, the MASS MoCA work consists of a pair of interactive, kinetic sculptures grafted onto the existing architecture. Visitors can rotate and reorient the sculptures along a predetermined arc. Each device features a beam made of glass and black steel that can pivot around the 45-degree axis of a slanted pole. When turned vertical, the beam stands parallel to the columns in the space; it aligns with the wooden ceiling joists when turned horizontal. The instrument’s structural support and rotary actuator are revealed on the gallery floor above, at the other end of the rotational axis that extends through the ceiling. Such instruments are like “conduits for energy transmission,” Oppenheimer says. Activating the devices with their movements, audience members experience the environment through the lens of transient images framed by the machine’s choreography and reflected in its surfaces.

While Oppenheimer’s work might readily recall the aesthetics of Lygia Clark, Nancy Holt, or Daniel Libeskind, she also points out resonances between her practice and that of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The duo’s monumental wrapping of iconic buildings with temporary structures made of fabric was always accompanied by an archive documenting a bureaucratic trail, the process of negotiations with implicit yet all-too-present policies and protocols. For Oppenheimer, Christo and Jean-Claude’s temporary overlays can, in fact, foreground a sense of touch by other means, a kind of sociality that exceeds or extends the limits of haptic grip or optical grasp.

Particularly important for Oppenheimer is “grasping what systems already exist before we start thinking about the overlay of another system,” that is, before the so-called design process begins. In fall 2023, Oppenheimer was an artist-in-residence at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), an experienced that expanded the scope of her thinking about how exactly change takes place within an environment. Through studies that include edible robotics and autonomous ornithopters, researchers at EPFL aim to develop task-based technologies that can be integrated with the dynamics of an existing organic system. “Once the organism is reframed as a locus of emergent and adaptive patterns rather than a closed-off thing, a robot would no longer need to mimic an object per se,” Oppenheimer explains, “but learn the living entity’s way of existing in its larger social network.” Developing this interest in larger social and biological systems, she has sought deeper and more dynamic insertions into the existing architecture or, more precisely, orchestrations of evolving architectonic ensembles.

Exhibited at von Bartha gallery in Basel , N-02 (2022) is a more recent piece that incorporates several interlinked elements in motion. Visitors could activate an expansive pulley system by sliding horizontal black bars attached to custom-made freestanding walls, adjusting the vertical position of several rows of linear lighting fixtures hanging from the ceiling. A change in one corner of the room could trigger effects of different degrees elsewhere, allowing for several trajectories of causation to be possibly traced between what seem like inputs and outputs. The shifting reflections of the luminescent strips in the glass facade of the gallery—which sits in a converted garage with an active gas station still outside—marks yet another layer of change in one’s environmental perception when looking out from the inside.

Given the largely infrastructural and therefore hidden underpinnings of a lighting system, N-02 and related projects highlight the relationship between what meets the eye, what can be touched, and what can be sensed and identified as a mechanism of change in the environment. Light is here both a medium and a metaphor for the “perceptibility of cause and effect,” as Oppenheimer puts it, “because if something cannot be sensed, visually or otherwise, then it can hardly figure in our understanding of causation at all.”

Many of these ideas set the scope for OS1.1. The seminar aimed to experiment with lighting hardware to redirect sensory registers. “Illumination blurs a building’s boundaries,” reads the course description. The Gund Hall lobby served as the main site of exploration, where students conducted light systems analysis, surveys of wiring diagrams, studies of reflectivity on different surfaces, research into the legal limits of occupation, as well as interviews and walkthroughs with the facilities staff and regular occupants of the space. With backgrounds ranging from media arts to computational and industrial design, the students brought their expertise in programming, modeling, and fabricating, among others, to bear on the principle of adaptation. Seminary participants designed several prototypes with each iteration exploring reciprocities between bodily gestures, environmental perception, and the rhythms of machinic modulation.

The final exhibition of student works includes a collectively designed kinesthetic ensemble. Three wooden rings affixed around one of the columns in the Druker Design Gallery control three bespoke spotlight fixtures lodged into the ceiling, each with a rotating reflector. Each ring, which Kai Zhang (MDes Mediums ’24) refers to as an “architectural knob,” is equipped with optical sensors, an RGB color strip, and ball bearings. By turning a ring in one or the other direction, one could adjust the x-coordinates of one mirror and the y-coordinates of another, moving and modulating the three spots of red, green, and blue across the space.

Technically, the system resembles the inner workings of projectors and 3D printers that use movable micromirrors to control the direction of light beams. As one of the group’s guiding observations, this was suggested by Quincy Kuang (MDes Mediums ’24), who brought professional experience in the Digital Light Processing (DLP) industry. Conceptually, the comparison also indicates the project’s attempt to reframe images and objects as gestures with reprogrammable contours and coordiantes. OS1.1 developed as Oppenheimer’s own focus in recent years has shifted away from what she calls an “object-oriented” approach. She has become increasingly interested in questioning “how we could set in motion something whose gestalt cannot be seen as an enclosed totality; how we could sense linkages or effects of linkage across spatial gaps.”

On the note of filling in the gaps, Kuang’s personal residence, only a stone’s throw from the Gund, also remained accessible to everyone in the class to use as an invaluable, shared studio and fabrication lab. After all, experimentation with the variable materialities and mechanics of common spaces can itself serve as a context for cultivating an alternative, even if amorphous, sense of collectivity adjacent to institutional settings. While visitors to Gund Hall could manipulate the system produced in the course of OS1.1, the complex interaction of input and output devices made it difficult to anticipate the effects produced by the set of spinning rings. As in Oppenheimer’s own practice, the project staged a feedback loop between human interaction and environmental affordances. Her methods, as an artist and instructor, eventually foreground a sprawling network of variably perceived inputs and outputs, where causation is neither linear nor zero-sum.

Remembering Fumihiko Maki (1928–2024)

A graduate of the University of Tokyo and Harvard Graduate School Design (GSD; MArch ’54), Fumihiko Maki was among the most distinguished Japanese architects of the past century. Yet, despite all his laurels and awards—the second Japanese recipient of the Pritzker Prize, after Kenzō Tange; the Praemium Imperiale; and the GSD’s own Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design—Maki-san was uniquely approachable, eager to listen and generous in sharing. Studying under Tange in Tokyo and then Josep Lluís Sert at the GSD, Maki’s intellectual formation coincided with the halcyon days of postwar reconstruction. While indebted to his teachers, both giants of this particular epoch of CIAM modernism, Maki came of age as part of the postwar cohort that strove for a more nuanced, sensitive view of the relationship between architecture and the urban environment, bringing him into the fold of the Team 10 group together with the likes of Jaap Bakema and Aldo van Eyck.¹

Maki’s legacy to the world of architecture and urban design is undoubtedly his theorization of Group Form as a spatial idea, bringing together the scale of the room with that of the city while anticipating movement, even growth and change. A project that first began in 1967, not long after Maki’s return to Japan from the US, Hillside Terrace in Tokyo’s Daikanyama Neighborhood exemplifies Maki’s idea of Group Form. Evolving over a period of three decades, the project saw a series of internally coherent parcels that gradually extended along Tokyo’s Old Yamate Avenue, each articulated with a gentle, nuanced transition from the busy thoroughfare to quiet, intimate mixed-use spaces toward the back. Now more than a half century later, Hillside Terrace still exudes a remarkable sense of vitality and contemporaneity—celebrating the atmosphere and spatial qualities of a traditional residential neighborhood in a language that is unmistakably modern.

I first met Maki-san not long after arriving in Japan, in 2005, to begin my research on Tange. In those first months I talked to as many people as I could about Tange, Metabolism, and modern architecture in Japan in general. The vast majority of those I met simply repeated well-trodden, seemingly perfunctory tropes. That was not the case with Maki-san, who was easily the most distinguished figure I encountered. He showed genuine interest in first hearing why I was interested in Tange, and he went on to share stories of his time together with Tange, matter-of-factly. Maki spoke of his experiences as an undergraduate in Tange’s studio and subsequent interactions through the Metabolist Group and other occasions, such as at a dinner related to the Kennedy Presidential Library project, when he was seated between Tange and Paul Rudolph as something of a translator for his former mentor. More than any of the others I met, Maki had a profound appreciation for the global dimension of Tange’s work and understood the importance of making an architecture that is for the world.

Some years later, when I took up a teaching position at Washington University (WashU) in St. Louis, this connection with Maki-san was renewed. My favorite perk was my office on the second floor of Steinberg Hall, built in 1960 by the then 32-year-old Maki for the university art gallery and art and architecture library. Maki joined the faculty at WashU in 1956, staying until 1962 when he was called by his other mentor, Sert, to rejoin the GSD as a faculty member.

Maki’s urban formulation had its origins in the round-the-world travels he undertook in 1959–60, courtesy of a fellowship from the Graham Foundation. Rejecting earlier, modernist conceptions of urban assemblages as either Compositional Form or Mega Form, Group Form entailed a freer, more open, dynamic—even a democratic relationship—in the spatial arrangement of urban elements. He found inspiration in the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens, hill towns of Greece and Italy, and charbaghs of Isfahan and Damascus.

The travel bug stayed with Maki his whole life, and he indulged in the anonymity and freedom of the solitary traveler. Unlike many other Japanese architects of his stature, Maki-san seldom traveled with an entourage, not even a kabanmochi, or briefcase carrier. The Graham travels had a profound impact on him, and he retained an almost childlike pleasure in planning his own business trips. This was mirrored in the daily routine that he continued well into his late eighties: walking from his home just south of Tokyo’s center to the local train station, taking the Yamanote Line to Shibuya, and then transferring to the neighborhood shuttle bus to his office in Daikanyama. The silhouette of Maki-san, wearing his dark navy blazer and walking in a light but determined gait, will forever be part of the mental scenery of Hillside Terrace, which he helped create.

1. For more on Maki and Metabolism, see Fumihiko Maki, Investigations in Collective Form (St. Louis: School of Architecture, Washington University, 1964); and Eric Paul Mumford, Defining Urban Design: CIAM Architects and the Formation of a Discipline, 1937–69 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). ↩︎

Housing, By and For the Public

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

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

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

Susanne Schindler

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

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

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

The Return of the Public Developer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Designing the Conditions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summer Reading 2024: Design Books by GSD Faculty and Alumni

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resourceful Urbanism: Dan Stubbergaard’s Adaptive Reuse of Cities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rethinking I.M. Pei’s Legacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Walker & the GSD: Nearly 70 Years of Connections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Public Artwork by GSD Students Embraces Enclosure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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