Sameh Wahba: Expanding the Canvas of Sustainable Development

Sameh Wahba (MUP ’97, PhD ’02) navigates one of the most complex landscapes in global development. As the World Bank’s Regional Director for Sustainable Development in Europe and Central Asia, Wahba heads efforts to eradicate poverty and promote inclusive development in an area stretching nearly 5.5 million square miles, from Kazakhstan’s desert and steppes to the Mediterranean coasts. Within this vast territory, his mandate covers a diverse population and an extraordinary range of issues—helping countries strengthen agriculture and food systems, manage water and natural resources, adapt to climate change, build resilient cities, and foster social inclusion. With a $10 billion portfolio and a team of 200 experts over 23 regional offices, Wahba is tasked with creating a vision of sustainable growth that can withstand both the pressures of today and the uncertainties of tomorrow.

“For me, the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) was a good entry for this work; it gave me a place to build on my background in architecture while pushing me toward new ways of thinking,” Wahba reflects. Indeed, over the course of his studies in the GSD’s master of urban planning and doctoral programs, he came to embrace design as inseparable from economic, sociological, and environmental concerns. Whether in his efforts with the World Bank or his sustained engagement with the GSD, this expansive framework continues to guide Wahba’s work today.

The GSD as Springboard: From Architecture to Global Development

Wahba’s professional path began in Cairo, Egypt, where he completed a master’s degree in architecture with a focus on engineering. Interested in housing, he was inspired by the work of Hassan Fathy, whose pioneering low-cost housing projects demonstrated that affordability, culture, and beauty could align. But Wahba also recognized the limitations of such community development initiatives; for example, Fathy’s vernacular-inspired work didn’t always resonate aesthetically or functionally with the needs of those for whom he designed.

Arriving at the GSD, Wahba began to further explore the complexities of housing and community development. “My first couple of years, I complemented my existing design and spatial perspective with more quantitative tools, understanding the economics, the real estate finance dynamics, and the urban politics,” he recalls. The academic freedom allowed him to experiment broadly as he deepened his knowledge, drawing from design studios, planning courses, and policy seminars at the GSD, other Harvard schools, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This latitude proved transformative. “The GSD was a place where I could take Alan Altshuler’s ‘Urban Politics and Planning’ at the same time as Rem Koolhaas’s ‘Harvard Project on the City,’ and then take Rafael Moneo’s ‘Design Theories in Architecture,’” Wahba notes. For his PhD committee, Wahba assembled diverse thinkers, working with Jerold Kayden on public-private development, Bill Doebele  on international development, and Tony Gómez-Ibáñez on economics and public policy. Drawing from all three areas of expertise, he ultimately devised his own formula for work on land and housing policy. “The breadth of choice, within the GSD as well as across Harvard and MIT,” Wahba reflects, “gave me the intellectual flexibility that continues to shape my work.”

Overall, at the GSD, Wahba reframed his approach to urban and development challenges. “The school became a springboard for me; it let me experiment and connect design with the real forces shaping cities,” he explains. Wahba began to see design as a framework that could connect with economics, policy, and governance to create holistic solutions. As Wahba notes, the GSD’s multidisciplinarity “allowed me to expand the canvas. Whether it’s working on land policy, housing, or resilience, I’m always drawing from that foundation of ‘design-plus’.”

Integrating Insights to Create Solutions

Through his work with the World Bank, Wahba applies this “design-plus” concept within an amazingly broad context. While he currently directs efforts in Europe and Central Asia, throughout his 22 years with the institution he has been part of sustainable growth initiatives in regions around the world facing the pressures of rapid urbanization, environmental degradation, social inequality, and the intensifying impacts of climate change. Reflecting this complexity, Wahba’s portfolio encompasses projects across sectors, from improving land administration to supporting agricultural resilience to advancing energy and water sustainability. His work also includes helping governments strengthen disaster preparedness and recovery, a responsibility that has grown in urgency as extreme weather events increase in severity.

Crucially, Wahba emphasizes cooperation across domains, balancing technical expertise, policy advice, financing, and diplomacy—aspects that draw directly on the intellectual foundation he built at the GSD. “You cannot solve the housing crisis only with architecture,” he observes. “You have to think about finance, about land markets, about politics, about resilience, and you must integrate them all.” It is this perspective that Wahba brings to the World Bank. “Mainly we’re financiers,” he explains, “so we support governments in doing things. Yet with our research and the analytics, we’ve expanded the boundaries of the practice. And I’ve managed to introduce a stronger design lens to our work.” Since Wahba has joined the World Bank, he has helped countries grow significantly into issues of climate action, decarbonization, and adaptation. “We have moved into urban design, public spaces, nature-based solutions such as wetlands and mangroves—which serve decarbonization and flood mitigation purposes, but also in terms of creating green spaces, accessible spaces, thinking about mobility in the city.”

For Wahba, “expand the canvas” is more than a metaphor—it is a method of integrating insights across disciplines to generate practical, impactful solutions. It also means rethinking systems rather than simply delivering projects. For instance, in disaster prevention efforts, Wahba’s team helps rebuild infrastructure with embedded resilience measures that allow communities to emerge stronger. An example of such work is Beddagana Wetlands Park , part of the larger Metro Colombo Urban Redevelopment Project in Sri Lanka, which Wahba headed during an earlier role as Global Director for Urban, Resilience, and Land at the World Bank. His team transformed an 18-hectacre garbage strewn area into a thriving urban wetland that provides a recreational zone, regulates flooding, moderates atmospheric temperatures, and hosts an array of flora and fauna. At the same time, this regenerated wetland offers educational opportunities for local children and, through the development of concessions, generates revenue. Envisioned as a nature-based solution for flash floods, Beddagana Wetland has become a major amenity in the city, increasing biodiversity, residents’ property values, and their quality of life.

Another remarkable project occurred in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, following a massive mudslide that killed hundreds of people and displaced thousands more. In addition to rehousing the affected population, the Sierra Leone Urban Resilience Program  involved planting more than a million trees in the city for soil stabilization. This tree planting and care campaign  simultaneously doubles as an income transfer program to alleviate poverty, with poor households engaged as environmental stewards. In exchange for pay, they plant the trees, grow them, and document their growth. Such creative programs support urban improvements while bolstering opportunity. 

In many cases, Wahba’s team introduces new practices—such as the recently established Türkiye Water Circularity and Efficiency Improvement Project , which expands wastewater treatment and addresses water scarcity through the reuse of that water for agriculture and irrigation. And even seemingly small interventions can have a huge impact. Wahba cites an informal settlement upgrading program in Kenya where the installation of high mast lighting has changed communities: shops stay open later, kids without electricity at home bring books and study under the light, and crime rates drop. “It’s a complete transformation just because you put in a single light pole,” Wahba says. 

These initiatives reflect the interconnectedness of sustainable development and the imperative to bridge realms that, at times, have been treated as distinct. They also echo the GSD ethos of design as a framework that unites physical form with social, economic, and political realities.

A Continuing Conversation with the GSD

Even as he leads an expansive portfolio at the World Bank, Wahba remains closely connected to the GSD. Since July 2024 he has served as co-chair of the GSD Alumni Council, first with Nina Chase (MLA ’12)  and now with Alpa Nawre (MLAUD ’11). Through the Alumni Council Wahba co-created Design Impact —a global speaker series in which practitioners share their visionary work on critical yet often overlooked topics, including upgrading slums and accessible design. Wahba is also a member of the Dean’s Council, through which he takes part in high-level discussions that help further the GSD’s reach within the university and beyond. He also recently began as an appointed director of the Harvard Alumni Association, representing the GSD. Indeed, Wahba sees the GSD as a vital incubator for the next generation of urban and development leaders—individuals who will tackle the increasingly complex challenges of climate adaptation, migration, housing crises, and social equity. 

Looking back, Wahba positions his GSD experience as a reframing of design and the opportunities it brings. His wide-ranging explorations prepared him for a career where architecture merges with policy, spatial design intertwines with economic systems, and resilience demands creativity across disciplines. As Wahba affirms, “that multidisciplinary approach formed at the GSD comes to life in everything I do now.”

“Bright Harvest” Documents Efforts to Harvest Solar Power From Space

Isaac Asimov’s 1941 short story “Reason” imagines the possibility of powering earth from a solar station in outer space. “Our beams feed these worlds energy,” a human explains to a robot, “drawn from one of those huge incandescent globes that happens to be near us. We call that globe the Sun…”

More than 80 years later, Asimov’s vision is edging closer to reality, as the short film “Bright Harvest: Powering Earth from Space ” explains. The film was screened at the Graduate School of Design (GSD), with the support of the Master in Real Estate (MRE) program, after which Jerold Kayden, MRE founding director and Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design, led a discussion with the film’s producer, Brigitte Bren and producer, director, and writer Steven Reich . 

The film’s narrative begins over a decade ago, when three California Institute of Technology scientists  came together to talk about the possibility of powering earth continuously with solar energy from outer space. Harry Atwater, Caltech Otis Booth Leadership Chair in the division of Engineering and Applied Science, says in the film, “I thought it was a crazy idea to begin with.” Still, citing a commitment to projects with the potential to help the world as an established researcher, he began collaborating with Ali Hajimiri, Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering, and Sergio Pellegrino, Joyce and Kent Kresa Professor of Aerospace and Civil Engineering. Hajimiri and Pellegrino now co-direct the space-based solar power project at Caltech. 

While governments and large-scale corporations typically control energy collection and dispersal, explains Hajimiri, this project could give access to energy to anyone, with the capability to distribute it to various sites around the world depending on where the needs lie.  “It has the potential to democratize access to energy,” says Hajimiri “the same way that wireless access democratized information.” 

The trio explains that the system is “green” and the closest we can get to clean energy, as it’s gathered from the sun. They note that their design differs from others under production, as it beams energy in a non-ionizing way, which is how microwaves and radio waves distribute energy, and therefore poses low risk to humans. Additionally, it is set up in geospace, further out than near-earth orbit, which is heavily trafficked by existing satellites.

One of the greatest challenges the team faced in designing the solar panels was weight: the panels had to be light enough to pack and launch easily, and then expand once in space. “The system we envisaged,” says Pellegrino, “is a system of extreme lightness.” 

In addition, since the panels would be exposed to the elements in space, they had to be weather-resistant and durable. They designed a panel made of a series of microchips that could be curled and bent. Once the team had refined a paper-thin panel, they turned to the ancient Japanese practice of origami to fold it into a small cylinder. 

On January 23, 2023, using one of SpaceX’s rockets, they launched a prototype into space, and on March 3, successfully transferred energy . The film’s tension rises as we watch the team set up, in May, on the roof of the Gordon and Betty Moore Laboratory of Engineering at Caltech, to see if they would be able to receive power from the device as it passes overhead. One of the undergraduate students, Raha Riazati, professes her doubts as they watched the clock tick with no sign from above. Then, thirty seconds later, they see the signals come through: it worked. Graduate student Ailec Wu, the programmer, explained that he had forgotten to delete a bug that caused a delay. The audience laughed in appreciation of the very human moment in an almost surreal demonstration of how photovoltaic energy can be transmitted from space. 

During the discussion after the screening, producer Brigitte Bren noted that 18 people—including the foundational trio—have been working on the project for the last decade; several PhD students have graduated and moved on, with new students coming on board. The project was funded by her husband, philanthropist Donald Bren, chairman of The Irvine Company. 

Every year for the last decade, Brigitte and filmmaker Steven Reich visited the lab to gather information and document the team’s progress. On one such visit, she recounted, she arrived to find paper origami pieces taped up all over the walls, as a student had been researching how best to fold the panels. Grace La, professor of architecture and chair of the architecture department at the GSD, noted that origami was a source of interest for  students, including some who were experts in the practice and who could be excellent cross-disciplinary collaborators.

Kayden sees the drive for interdisciplinary work among MRE students as well. “All students and practitioners of real estate understand that success depends on insights and contributions drawn collaboratively from multiple fields and disciplines such as design, finance, law, planning, management, and public policy, among others,” he noted. “From its inception several years ago, the curriculum and pedagogy of the GSD’s MRE program have imparted the value of collaborative multidisciplinary efforts.”

Sarah Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture, emphasized the importance of recognizing the research that happens only at universities, and how discoveries made by academics and scientists contribute to humanity. One of the purposes of this film, noted Reich, in addition to advocating for space solar energy and highlighting the work happening at academic institutions, is to inspire more students to go into science research; this is why they made sure to feature an undergraduate.

Looking ahead to the project’s next steps, Bren and Reich explained that, in the service of providing “energy to anyone” with solar power from space, the team estimates that it would cost 10 cents per kilowatt hour. They are also considering questions such as how the system will be disposed of once it has run its course. Bren and Reich hope to persuade the US government to invest in the program. Other countries are also working towards harnessing outer space solar power, she says, but the Caltech team believes they still have an edge. Soon, perhaps, we’ll be living the reality of which Asimov dreamed.

Harvard Graduate School of Design Students Win 24-hour Hack-a-thon with Creative Solution to Address America’s Housing Crisis

A team of Harvard Graduate School of Design students has won the Ivory Innovations  2025 Hack-A-House  competition in the Construction & Design category. Hack-A-House, an annual virtual competition, gives students a chance to win $5,000 while creating novel solutions to tackle America’s housing crisis. The One Block Away team—composed of Justin Joel Tan (MRE ’26), Marko Velazquez (MRE ’26), Noah Garcia (MRE ’26), Tejas S (MRE ’26), and Pranav Subramanian (MDes ’27)—won for their project “NeighborCore ,” which consists of a new housing typology that makes housing more affordable through shared spaces, modular construction, and flexible layouts.

“Hack-A-House uniquely empowers students from colleges and universities nationwide to create real-world solutions to address today’s housing crisis in a 24-hour period,” said Ian Cahoon, director of Innovations at Ivory Innovations. “It is truly amazing to see the innovative ideas and solutions teams like One Block Away can produce in such a short time. In addition to One Block Away’s winning entry, this year’s competitors presented solutions ranging from improving lending to first time buyers to increasing access to affordable housing.”

Combining off- and onsite construction techniques, One Block Away’s “NeighborCore” proposes an alternative to traditional single-family homes, which are often too big and too expensive for today’s changing population demographics. “Together, we explored a new housing typology aimed at bridging the gap between apartment living and home ownership by leveraging innovative design, efficient construction methods, existing distribution, and financial feasibility,” said One Block Away team member Tan. “We believe our solution, ‘NeighborCore,’ delivers a vision that can be scaled, producing densification while still blending into the character of existing neighborhoods.”

The Ivory Innovations 2025 Hack-A-House  recognizes winners in three areas—Finance, Policy & Regulatory Reform, Construction & Design. Participants were tasked with addressing specific challenges impacting housing affordability. After selecting a topic, contestants spent the next 24 hours strategizing with their teams, meeting with industry experts, and preparing a short live presentation for judges and other competitors. A panel of judges that included real estate industry experts, startup founders, academics, and leaders of major companies selected winning teams in the three categories.

The Hack-A-House winners will attend the upcoming 2025 Ivory Prize Summit  on October 29, at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and present their ideas in person. After the teams present, the audience, which includes a live stream , will vote to select the grand prize winner.

​Both an operating foundation and an academic center based at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, Ivory Innovations catalyzes high-impact innovations in housing affordability. They bridge research and industry to support cross-sector solutions, provide recognition and funding for groundbreaking ideas, engage a global student population, and contribute directly to the development of affordable housing.

Joe Russell and Emma Sheffer Win Architizer A+ Vision Award 

Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) students Joe Russell (MArch ’27) and Emma Sheffer (MArch ’27) have been named as winners of the 2025 Architzer A+ Vision Award . The jury selected Russell and Sheffer’s project “Theseus ” as winner of the Vision for Reuse and Renovation category. The project will be published in Architizer’s How to Visualize Architecture book.

In addition, for the 2025 Vision Awards, “Theseus” has received the special title of “Best of Year” and will be featured in the November/December issue of Metropolis . 

Russell and Sheffer developed “Theseus” as part of their Core IV studio. A 150-bed housing project across from the port of Chelsea, MA, “Theseus” adapts cargo holds from decommissioned bulk-carrier ships, which are typically retired after 25 years. The project transforms maritime steel infrastructure into resilient housing superstructures. Suspended floor plates allow the ground to remain open for communal use, creating a floodable, adaptable civic space. The units offer elasticity; residents can open walls to expand or merge households, adapting to shifting domestic needs. Located along Marginal Street, the five-building complex buffers the community from industrial noise while creating east–west public passageways. The project addresses climate adaptation, material scarcity, and long-term housing stability. By reusing locally sourced steel and integrating public programming, “Theseus” reframes housing as civic infrastructure. Scalable to other port cities, it proposes a new architectural typology rooted in industrial heritage, designed not just to shelter but to support life, work, care, and community over time.

Gund Hall Receives 2025 Modernism in America Award From DOCOMOMO US

In 2024, the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) undertook an ambitious renovation to upgrade Gund Hall’s energy performance, sustainability, and accessibility while conserving the building’s original design. This week, Docomomo US —a non-profit organization dedicated to the documentation and conservation of works of the twentieth-century modern movement—announced Gund Hall as the recipient of the 2025 Modernism in America Award for excellence in the civic design category. 

“This year’s Modernism in America Awards highlight the enduring power of excellence in design and the ability of historic preservation to respond to the evolving needs of society,” Docomomo explained . Designed by John Andrews (MArch ’58) as a home for the GSD, Gund Hall opened in 1972. Fifty years later, a design team led by Bruner/Cott Architects  harnessed innovative technology to renew Gund Hall’s distinctive glass curtain wall. By improving the building’s energy efficiency, thermal performance, and light quality, the renovation created a more functional and comfortable environment for the school’s occupants while offering a model for the stewardship of mid-twentieth-century architecture. As the award announcement noted, “The restoration of Gund Hall’s curtain wall demonstrates how modern landmarks can improve usability and extend building life while meeting the urgent demands of climate responsibility through thoughtful, sustainable interventions.”

Other structures to receive Modernism in America Awards of Excellence this year include Boston City Hall  (Kallman, McKinnell, and Knowles, 1968; advocacy award); and Harlem River Houses  (by Archibald Manning Brown and funded by the Public Works Administration, 1937; residential design award) in New York City; and the Transamerica Pyramid Center  (William Pereria, 1972; commercial design award) in San Francisco, California. The award ceremony will take place on November 6, 2025, in Chicago.

In addition to the 2025 Modernism in America Award of Excellence bestowed by Docomomo US, since the completion of its renovation Gund Hall has also received the 2025 Robert H. Kuehn Award  from Preservation Massachusetts and a Preservation Award from the Cambridge Historical Commission .  

Remembering Kongjian Yu (1963–2025)

Kongjian Yu (DDes ’95) was a tireless advocate for the “new art” of landscape architecture as a means of improving people’s lives in tangible, material ways. He was a charismatic speaker, a dedicated teacher, and a role model for a generation of designers. He leaves a global legacy of consequential works and lasting impacts. He was characteristically kind, empathetic, and funny. He was my friend, as he was a friend to countless others around the world who were illuminated by his generous light.

Yu’s personal origins and professional aspirations illustrate the potential for modernity as an incomplete project. His life and work illustrate the vital role of higher education, knowledge transfer, and international exchange in addressing our contemporary challenges. This is particularly timely as those institutions and practices are under threat by many who would close our borders and our programs to international exchange.

Yu was born the second son and third child to peasant parents in a rural farming village in Zhejiang Province, in eastern China. His birth in 1963 coincided with Premier Zhou Enlai’s announcement of the “Four Modernizations.” Among those reforms was university admissions via national placement examinations. Another early implication of the “Four Modernizations” was the return to Beijing in 1979 of Beijing Forestry University’s landscape architecture program. The program had been among those exiled to Yunnan Province in the remote southwestern corner of the country during the 1960s in the context of the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” Yu’s abundant intelligence, as evidenced by the national placement exam, placed him into the Beijing Forestry University in where he completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees in landscape architecture.

While a student at the newly restored Beijing Foresty University, Yu had access to English texts on landscape architecture that survived the Cultural Revolution. During his graduate work, Yu read seminal English language books on urban planning and landscape architecture by Kevin Lynch, Ian McHarg, and Richard Forman. Given his literacy, his growing grasp of English, and his status as a top graduate student from his program, Yu was asked to translate a series of three lectures delivered by Harvard professor Carl Steinitz at Beijing Forestry University in 1987. Steinitz encouraged the young Yu to apply to the newly formed Doctor of Design degree, first offered in 1986 at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

Yu was the first Chinese student to matriculate into the new program in 1992 where he worked closely with Steinitz on geospatial planning and with professor Richard Forman on landscape ecology. Yu successfully defended his dissertation on the topic of “Security Patterns in Landscape Planning” in 1995. That work would inform his large-scale landscape planning projects in China over the next several decades.

 Following several years of professional experience working as a landscape architect and planner in California, Yu returned to China in 1997. Once there, Yu published a small pamphlet, Advice to Mayors, advocating landscape planning as a means of managing the negative impacts of rapid urbanization. He sent copies to the mayors of 500 cities across China. That same year he founded the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at Peking University, where he served as dean. In 1998, Yu founded a Western-style landscape architecture and planning practice, Turenscape. Through the subsequent decade, Yu delivered lectures to the Chinese Ministry of Construction’s Conference of Mayors and published an influential treatise The Road to Urban Landscape: A Dialogue with Mayors. Through these initiatives, Yu effectively advocated a scientifically informed ecological planning agenda at a national scale. He also built an internationally significant practice through hundreds of projects across China, and beyond.

Yu’s influence extended well beyond his native China. He was a perennial contributor to professional societies, conferences, and convenings globally. He was a singularly effective advocate for the role of landscape architecture in insulating populations from human and natural disasters. His work was recognized by major international bodies as the highest form of professional achievement. Yu was awarded the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize by the Cultural Landscape Foundation and the Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award by the International Federation of Landscape Architects, two of the highest honors bestowed by our field.

China’s most prominent and influential landscape architect on the world stage, Yu was at the forefront of the nation’s efforts to mitigate the adverse impacts of rapid urbanization and manage adaptation to climate change. Yu and his colleagues at Turenscape built hundreds of experimental landscapes, gathering invaluable evidence of environmental performance across wildly disparate regions and contexts. These case studies offer a menu of strategies and tactics for human adaptation in the face of a rapidly changing climate. Several years after his return to China—amid a wave of rural development under the aegis of the New Socialist Countryside—Yu was asked by the Environmental Protection Bureau to use his method of ecological analysis as the basis for a national ecological security plan. This concept was later adopted by the Ministry of Land Resources and became the foundation for the national Ecological Red Line Regulation. The resulting plan, the 2008 National Ecological Security Pattern Plan for China, established a framework for ecological urbanization that addressed issues of water management and conservation, soil erosion, and biodiversity. The framework outlined an approach described as “negative planning,” in which planning processes began not by identifying sites for development but by mapping high-risk sites to be protected from development. Once such sites had been established, urbanization could proceed within the remaining lower-risk regions. Yu’s recommendations were subsequently adopted as part of China’s broader development of four major national regulations for ecological protection and the Beautiful China Campaign.

Yu was the most prominent advocate of the “Sponge City ” strategy of living with water, which has become an influential framework for urban adaptation efforts in China. Responding to the persistent and worsening problem of urban water management and flooding in China’s cities, the Sponge City model uses landscape as a form of “green” infrastructure that provides many different benefits at once: water regulation and purification, flood mitigation, habitat conservation, and the like. Yu argued that these green infrastructures are cheap, sustainable, and scalable compared to traditional, single purpose “gray” infrastructures. They also tend to draw on place-specific and culturally significant traditions of landscape adaptation (such as terracing, ponding, and islanding) that had often been cast aside amid rapid urbanization and modernization. Yu often described this return to traditional methods as “learning from the peasants.” The Chinese Communist Party adopted the Sponge City model as a framework for urban adaptation pilot projects at the 2013 National Urbanization Meeting and in its 2016 Action Plan. Many of these adaptation approaches are far from new; they are informed by indigenous knowledge and practices. Yet the scope of this national adaptation campaign is unprecedented.

From 1998 to his untimely death in 2025, Yu and his colleagues produced an extensive catalog of place-based approaches toward habitat restoration, maintaining biodiversity, stormwater management and flood control, green building techniques, and other crucial adaptation agendas. These are fully realized experiments: not simply speculative models but on-the-ground responses to unprecedented threats. Spanning many different scales, biomes, climate zones, and urban contexts across China, these case studies offer diverse adaptation strategies derived from the firm’s considerable experience and expertise. While each project necessarily responds to specific environmental and civic contexts, collectively, they constitute an invaluable body of work on the urgent and shared threats posed by climate change. As such, the precedents, practices, and lessons they offer are relevant to any region facing climate change impacts globally. Yu argued that the crucial work of landscape adaptation means rediscovering the “ancient art of survival.”

As we mourn our collective loss, we should remember that we have benefitted from Yu’s exemplary life and works. His boundless enthusiasm and relentless optimism remain with us. Despite our grief he would encourage us all, with his characteristic good humor and enthusiasm for our collective project, to persist in this important work in his wake.

A New Life Offered

In 1970, Peter Smithson made the lofty promise that, at Robin Hood Gardens , the social housing complex he and his wife, Alison, designed, “you’ll be able to smell, feel, and experience the new life that’s being offered .” Two years later, the complex was complete, spanning two city blocks, with so-called “streets in the sky” that gave residents access to community, expansive views, and sunlit apartments—at least, that was the hope. 

The detailed documentation the pair made of the site, with early sketches and photographs, as well as drawings and plans made throughout the design and construction process, can be viewed in the Frances Loeb Library’s Smithson Collection , the only publicly-accessible repository of the couples’ life work. Selections from the collection have been utilized for a wide range of scholarship activities, from books to exhibitions, including, last fall at the GSD, “Towards a Newer Brutalism: Solar Pavilions, Appliance Houses, and Other Topologies of Contemporary Life,” curated by Emmett Zeifman, a former GSD faculty member. Zeifman writes that the Smithsons understood new brutalism as “an ethic, not a style,” and hoped to “meet the changing needs and desires of postwar society through an architecture that directly expressed the material conditions of its time.”  

In addition to offering a historical framework for understanding architecture today, the Smithson collection holds never-before-published drawings, photographs, sketches, and ephemera that bear testimony to more than fifty years of their vocation, including their philosophy of seamlessly integrating family life with work. There’s a landscape design by their twelve year old daughter, Soltana, for example, and childrens’ book manuscripts the couple co-wrote, along with pedagogical materials about the historical significance of Christmas imagery. “Innocent imagination, children’s books, and the responsibility of the architect,” writes M. Christine Boyer in Not Quite Architecture: Writing Around Alison and Peter Smithson , which draws from the library’s collection, “are continuously intermeshed in the Smithson’s writings…” 

The Smithsons’ utopian design of Robin Hood Gardens, with its central hill created for children’s play, protected by a building made to support families in community, ended in controversy. While some residents advocated for the rich sense of connection facilitated by the “streets in the sky,” others argued that they became ideal tucked-away passages for crime. After decades of neglect, the dilapidated building was demolished starting in 2017, with the final portion completed in March of this year, though the V&A Museum preserved a small portion  for its collection.

The Smithsons’ legacy, however, and their dreams of the benefits of social housing, helped propel forward the conversation around how to best ensure safe, affordable housing for all. The GSD, in partnership with the Joint Center for Housing Studies , has long addressed issues around social housing, expanding affordable housing access in the face of the climate crisis, and centering care in housing—some of the same threads of thought that led the Smithsons to build the iconic, if ultimately flawed, Robin Hood Gardens.  

Harvard GSD Faculty and Alumni Feature Prominently in Chicago Architecture Biennial

As a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) more than a decade ago, Florencia Rodriguez (LF ’13) researched modes of architectural criticism. This theme remains uniquely relevant to Rodriguez in her current role as artistic director of the sixth Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB), on view September 19 through February 28, 2026. An editor, writer, and assistant professor and director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois Chicago, Rodriguez has fashioned the biennial—titled SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change—as an exploration of our uncertain era’s generative and transformational possibilities.

“Architecture is fundamentally about engaging with change—understanding it, responding to it, and proposing ways to improve the conditions we inhabit,” Rodriguez explains . “We always have choices, and the decisions we make define what becomes possible tomorrow. As Artistic Director of the Chicago Architecture Biennial on its 10th anniversary,” she continues, “I hope to foster a critical platform where bold, imaginative ideas can surface and be shared with the public.” 

For the next five months, SHIFT will present installations, capsule exhibitions, programming, and events throughout Chicago, collecting the work of over 100 creative designers, practitioners, and artists who hail from 30 countries. This international assemblage features contributions by more than two dozen GSD affiliates that investigate new, alternative models for our built environment, housing, future resiliency, and more.  

FACULTY (in alphabetical order)

Stan Allen, design critic in architecture, presents Building with Writing, an installation of Allen’s work examining the relationship between drawing and the written word. Specifically, 48 drawings from 12 buildings and 12 pieces of writing are (re)presented as pamphlets and displayed in an installation designed by Michael Meredith (MArch ’00) and Hilary Sample, conceived as a reading room. Writing and design are distinct yet parallel practices, usually kept separate. This exhibition presents writing and buildings together, juxtaposed on folded metal bookstands. Visitors are encouraged to engage with the work—rearrange the drawings, take down the pamphlets, sit and read, and spend time in the space, together. Originally shown at the Princeton School of Architecture Gallery, for this iteration at the CAB, the reading room is installed on the second floor of the Graham Foundation. 

Associate professor of architecture Sean Canty (MArch ’14) presents Regal Reverb, a semi-circular public forum designed for the CAB’s Speaker Corners. The project draws from the Regal Theater (by Edward Eichenbaum, 1928), once a celebrated center of Black performance and cultural life in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. Adorned with velvet drapes, gilded ornament, and a monumental proscenium, the Regal regularly featured musical performers such as Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong, securing the theater’s place on the Chitlin’ Circuit and in the cultural memory of Chicago’s South Side. Demolished in 1973, the theater remains an enduring figure of collective experience and architectural presence. 

Canty’s installation translates this history into a contemporary spatial register. A sweeping arc, drawn from the theater’s façade and proscenium, organizes the plan. In elevation, three brass-edged, color-blocked arches open onto the central space, evoking the ornamental profiles and window figures of the demolished theater. The composition is structured by a consistent datum that links each module, establishing order while leaving room for open occupation. Regal Reverb is not a reconstruction but a reverb: an architectural echo of a vanished landmark. 

Grace La (MArch ’95), professor and chair of the GSD’s Department of Architecture, and James Dallman (MArch ’92), co-principal of LA DALLMAN Architects, present SHIFTING REUSE AND REPAIR: the Door County Granary. The installation contemplates emerging strategies to reuse and repair derelict buildings—not only to prolong their useful life but to transform and extend their historical and civic meaning. Using the reclamation of an abandoned granary in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, as a case study, LA DALLMAN demonstrates how strategic excisions and insertions within existing structures produce new modes of habitation. A comprehensive architectural model suspended within an occupiable fragment of a grain storage bin comprises the installation. LA DALLMAN’s exhibition team includes Elias Bennett (MArch ’25), Oonagh Davis (MArch ’23), Belle Verwaay Delatour (MArch ’18), Sigmund Seongyun Jeong, Min Ho Kim (MArch ’26), Brian Lee (MArch ’22), and Go Nakao (MArch ’28). 

Iman Fayyad (MArch ’16), assistant professor of architecture, presents In The Round, part of a larger line of work that deals with the effects of standardization in building materials on architectural typology, addressing formal exploration as a function of material waste. This installation invites visitors to contemplate the spatial potentials of material transformations from thin, planar sheets to volumetric form. The space is composed exclusively of uncut 4-ft x 8-ft rectangular sheets of plywood bent into composite cylindrical forms. The radial assembly allows the membrane to operate as a compressive structure in both plan and section (similar to a dome), while the oculus opens the interior to its surroundings above. Seating elements around the interior and exterior serve as structural anchor points for people to rest and gather. The structure offers an intimate, collective inward-facing space as well as outward-facing individualized spaces that are simultaneously contemplative and exposed. 

The capsule exhibition Inhabit Outhabit brings together over 30 housing projects from around the world that explore new solutions and challenge traditional models in response to contemporary needs. French 2D, led by assistant professor in practice of architecture Jenny French (MArch ’11) and Anda French, contributed material on Bay State Cohousing, a 30-unit community developed by its residents in Malden, Massachusetts. Each individual unit provides the amenities of a private home, while shared spaces and resources promote the creation of a vibrant, multigenerational community. 

To mark the 10th anniversary of the CAB, Harvard Design Magazine  and biennial leadership invited GSD design critics in architecture Lap Chi Kwong (MArch ’13) and Alison Von Glinow (MArch ’13) to imagine a new future for the Chicago Horizon, a temporary pavilion—by the architecture firm Ultramodern and structural engineer Brett Schneider—commissioned for the inaugural CAB that, despite original intentions, still exists. Kwong Von Glinow’s proposal, Forget-Me-Not, preserves the pavilion’s essential structural character while responding thoughtfully to its site, materiality, and context. Kwong Von Glinow consulted closely with the original team, modeling a collaborative approach to architectural practice that considers a building’s evolution from conception through execution and beyond. 

With Living Histories: Space for Reckoning, Mónica Ponce de León (MAUD ’91) of MPdL Studio, Mark Lamster (LF ’17 ), and STOSS Landscape Urbanism—founded by Chris Reed, GSD professor in practice of landscape architecture and co-director of the Master in Landscape Architecture in Urban Design program—propose a new way of approaching commemorative space. Their installation addresses questions of how public space might tell the complex and interconnected histories that shape culture and inform who we are vis-à-vis a proposal for memorializing political and racial violence at Dealey Plaza and Martyr’s Park in Dallas, Texas. 

ALUMNI (in alphabetical order)

RADDAR, led by Sol Camacho (MAUD ’08), presents the glass pavilion Our Second Skin. More than 2,200 glass pieces comprise the pavilion, forming a translucent skin that simultaneously evokes the omnipresence of glass facades in contemporary cities and the invisible materiality of the industrial process that produces them. Inside the pavilion, an audiovisual essay presents excerpts from several interviews Camacho conducted with 23 leading international architects, engineers, and artists whose expertise spans design, research, construction, and technology. These individuals reflect on our contemporary indiscriminate use of glass, highlight its unparalleled and enigmatic qualities in architecture, and propose ideas for the material’s future. 

Abigail Chang (M Arch ’16) presents Liquid Glass for the CAB exhibition Melting Solids, located at the Stony Island Arts Bank. Liquid Glass examines a larger question about the boundary between our interior and exterior worlds. The work reflects on water as a resource whose invisible presence in air and vapor has the potential to materialize as condensation on windows. The installation, composed of hanging resin objects with various lenses, asks visitors to reflect on the fragility in our ever-changing surroundings as they move between and peer into opaque windows that seemingly stream, drip, and puddle.

Ignacio G. Galán (MArch ’10) with David Gissen and Architensions (Nick Roseboro, Alessandro Orsini) offer Fragments of Disability Fictions. Presented as a discontinuous description of a fictional disability world mixing different scales and times, Fragments of Disability Fictions highlights how disability and impairment offer alternatives to conventional representations of the past and future. The installation’s fragmentary character also disrupts the connection between the crafting of physical models and the pursuit of totalizing forms of control that produce “model” (i.e., “ideal”), streamlined worlds. The latter are often ableist (if not eugenic) representations of life. Unlike many visions of urban health and well-being, the architectural and urban histories we explore include messier, more complex, and more inclusive embodiments, materialities, cultures, socialities, technologies, and ecologies. Developed with the guidance of a group of disabled scholars, activists, and policymakers, such histories conceptualize physical and emotional well-being in complementary, contrasting, and even contradictory ways. 

Fragments of Disability Fictions includes contributions by Neta Alexander, Victor Calise, David Serlin, and Eman Rimawi. The exhibition team includes Sharona Cramer and Yotam Oron, Thomas Gomez Ospina, Lauren Jian, Norman Keyes, Yuna Li, Lajja Mehta, Natalia Molina Delgado, Nur Nuri, Aistyara Charmita Shaning, Sherry Aine Chuang Te. Voice is provided by Sophie Schulman; ASL interpreting is provided by All Hands in Motion / Diana Abayeva (DI on screen) and Maria Cardoza (HI).

SHIFT’s curatorial team includes co-curators Chana Haouzi (MArch ’14) and Igo Kommers Wender and artistic director Florencia Rodriguez (LF ’13).

Johnston Marklee, led by Sharon Johnston (MArch ’95) and Mark Lee (MArch ’95), presents Speaker Corners. Located on the second floor of 840 N. Michigan Avenue, this project takes the form of a grandstand with seating for more than 50 people. This small arena will host talks, panels, and other public events during the full run of the CAB. Speaker Corners was conceived as part of a series of spaces that promote discussions, presentations, and exchange, which began with Speakers’ Corner—an installation by Christopher Hawthorne, Florencia Rodriguez, and Johnston Marklee—one of the featured curator’s special projects at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2025.

Two Foundations, presented by Alex Yueyan Li (MArch ’21) and Mahsa Malek of 11X17, examines the dichotomy of stability/instability through two everyday construction practices—house lifting and underpinning—that accept instability as a perpetual architectural condition. The installation reconstructs these techniques through a series of technical objects; cribbing stacks, shoring posts, plumb bobs, and formwork are arranged as a structural diagram, enacting the physical operations they are designed to perform. Taken together, they reveal the mechanisms that allow an existing structure to pause, frame, and accommodate acts of repair. In doing so, the installation foregrounds instability as a fundamental aspect of architecture’s life, despite the persistent quest to create stable, unchanging buildings. Aging is a material fact that requires continuous care, and architecture will only endure through ongoing acts of adjustment and maintenance that sustain it over time.

Michael Maltzan (MArch ’88) of Michael Maltzan Architects has contributed materials on 26 Point 2 Apartments to the Inhabit Outhabit exhibition. Completed in 2023 in Long Beach, California, 26 Point 2 Apartments is a five-story permanent supportive housing apartment building that bridges a busy commercial zone and a residential neighborhood, providing 77 units plus amenities, staff, and supportive services that address the needs of chronically unhoused people.

To Inhabit Outhabit MASS Design Group has contributed materials on their Maternity Waiting Village in Kasungu, Malawi. Completed in 2015, this complex offers a housing model for expectant mothers. Alan Ricks (MArch ‘10), Michael Murphy (MArch ’11), and Matt Swaidon (MArch ’12) took part in the design of this project.

Susannah Sayler (LF ’09) and Edward Morris (LF ’09) of Sayler/Morris present The Crystal Forest, a body of linked works (photography, collage, a short film, animation) that meditates on the Amazon as a mosaic of symbolic meanings and a place where humans and other beings dwell. The work circles around the remains of a building the artists encountered on the edge of the jungle that inspired the title. The Escuela Superior Politécnica Ecológica Amazónica in Tena, Ecuador, was part of an ambitious 1997 endeavor to create a network of universities across the Amazon that would educate indigenous people and other citizens in subjects like business management and computer science. The “modernization” enterprise failed almost immediately, the jungle quickly overgrowing and re-absorbing its remnants, authoring its own architecture of entropy. The title The Crystal Forest also references the Crystal Palace built in London (1851) to house the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, which has been cited as an epochal moment in the development of integrated world capitalism. In this sense, The Crystal Forest is the inverse or shadow of the Crystal Palace.  

As part of the Inhabit Outhabit exhibition, Tosin Oshinowo (LF ’25) of Oshinowo Studio presents the film Nagarannam: Home Coming, which shares the story of a community displaced by the insurgency group Boko Haram operating in Nigeria, Chad, Niger, Cameroon, and Mali. In addition, to the capsule exhibition Ecologies, opening November 6, Oshinowo has contributed Alternative Urbanism, a continuation of her research exhibit from the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale that explores specialized markets in Nigeria. These markets operate as factories processing “waste” or “end-of-life” items from industrialized economies and showcase the principle of circularity prevalent in African cities through the ingeniousness of iterative self-organizing initiatives. Often foreign to their host environments and not structured by the state, these markets coexist with and may re-appropriate the urban fabric, speaking to the realities that enable the African city to function in modernity. 

The Embellished, the Transient, and the Critical, presented by Alejandro Saldarriaga Rubio (MArch ’23) of alsar-atelier, explores an architecture of post-pandemic magical realism within the context of temporary exhibits. The installation uses quotidian plastic pallets as a primary compositional element and speculates on the spatial possibilities behind a single vertical partition built from this ordinary object, critically addressing the economic and environmental implications of experimental ephemeral design. By embracing “off-the-shelfness” and “dryness” as structural principles, the installation embellishes the ordinary, accepts its own impermanence, and challenges norms through critical material choices. 

Oscar Zamora (MArch ’23) in collaboration with Michael Koliner worked on AIR VAPOR BARRIER, a piece that juxtaposes vernacular archetypes with Western envelope technologies by reinterpreting the tropical roof through mass-produced air-and-vapor-barrier (AVB) shingles. This material transposition critiques the persistent framing of the tropical as primitive while exposing the entanglement of indigenous practices and imported standards. The project demonstrates how industrial materials gain new significance when recontextualized through local construction logics. Positioned beyond nostalgia or technical determinism, it proposes a “third space” of contradiction, improvisation, and critique, reclaiming the tropical roof as a site of cultural negotiation and architectural imagination. 

How GSD Students Design For Wildfire Prevention

Five months after California wildfires killed 29 people and devastated neighborhoods in Los Angeles and surrounding areas, three Graduate School of Design students interned at the Southern California offices of landscape architecture and urban design firm SWA , to learn how to leverage design for fire prevention and remediation. Facundo Soraire (MUP ’26), Enrique Lozano (MAUD ’26), and Eleanor Davol (MLA ’27) spent six weeks learning about complex issues around fire risk, prevention, and remediation, and generated proposals for parcels that sit at the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) , where human communities meet undeveloped land and fire risks run high. This was the most recent of many collaborations between the firm and members of the GSD.

This summer’s program built on research undertaken by Jonah Susskind  (MLA ’17), SWA director of climate and sustainability. Over the last decade, he’s conducted extensive research and taught a series of summer programs at SWA on the connections between climate change and fire risk, and how people and communities can best prepare, resulting in his book, Playbook for the Pyrocene , winner of a 2025 American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) merit award  in communications. Susskind writes that large segments of the population are moving to city outskirts. While residents once appreciated the suburbs for their access to nature and recreation, now, what draws them is the more affordable housing available further from the city due to “NIMBYism and local zoning restrictions.” 

Thus, more and more people are seeking out homes in the WUI, which, because of the dire need for affordable housing, is growing by about 2 million acres per year . Almost 100 million people in the US, Susskind notes, live in the WUI. This zone is especially vulnerable to wildfires as it’s often populated by “woodpiles, propane tanks, trees and shrubs, roof and gutter and deck debris,”^[i]  as well as housing materials that may be especially vulnerable to fire. Susskind writes that, “[d]uring the past three decades, more than 80% of California’s fire-related structure loss has occurred in these high-risk zones.” Millions of people are likely experience the losses inflicted by ever more powerful wildfires. 

Planners must “balance affordable housing with environmental conservation,” explains Susskind, especially because “the minute you get into the WUI, you also come up against entrenched histories of environmental conservation.” Susskind argues that suburban land use planning hasn’t changed much since the 1930s, and we need a new “suburban design ethos” that would allow for those communities to be “better resourced” in the face of fire risks and other climate change impacts.      

“This is a design and planning challenge as much as it is a policy and economic challenge as much as it is a social and equity challenge,” he noted.  

Each of the students in this summer’s cohort focused on a different aspect of wildfire prevention and remediation. Soraire, for example, envisioned a Community Land Trust (CLT) that would be led by the Santa Ynez Chumash tribe NGO, the local Indigenous nation, in support of co-governance and land stewardship that centers on the nation’s ancestral knowledge, including fire management techniques. The project includes affordable housing for the community. 

Soraire took inspiration from his home province in Argentina, Jujuy, which borders Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina, and is known as the “lithium triangle,” a mining territory. He investigated questions around land use, extraction, and the role of Indigenous voices in shaping land use. He started by mapping pre-colonial histories around Santa Barbara. Because several communities live in the region, “governance fragmentation and jurisdictional boundaries exacerbate fire risk.” His proposal, therefore, creates a central infrastructure for the many agencies already working in partnership with the Chumash, to share ideas and resources and center the nation’s presence and leadership on the land. 

Davol took a different approach, studying soil composition to think about post-fire resiliency for humans and non-humans. In a mega-fire, she explained, the soil’s composition changes, often leaving it impermeable to rainfall. Later, instead of sinking into the soil, rain slides over the slick surface and causes floods and mudslides, further threatening the ecosystem and people’s homes and communities. 

“The health of the earth and soil, and its ability to recharge and become permeable again,” she explained, “is really important for the long-term success of these landscapes.”   

Davol mapped the soil and created corridors both to prevent fire and rehabilitate the earth, for example, with chapparal plantings. The corridors also give species in the region, such as the mountain lion, safe access across human infrastructure in the WUI. “I thought about this region as a “patchwork of green spaces that could be connected for people and wildlife.” As we “expand into the wildlands, we’re often bisecting and covering up and burying natural systems like rivers.” Her project addresses biodiversity loss and interactions between humans and nonhumans. 

Finally, Enrique Lozano framed the WUI “not as a liability, but as a multiplier—a design tool that catalyzes infill development while preserving critical open space.” Instead of looking at the WUI as a “zone of vulnerability,” he saw it as an opportunity, using Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) from a nearby golf course to a 327 acre plot called Giorgi Farm. In the process, his proposal would increase affordable housing and restore resident access to Ygnacia Creek while also “enhancing biodiversity, using landscape as a fire buffer, promoting the wildfire corridor, and minimizing greenfield development.” 

He started by mapping the residents who are most vulnerable to fire risk, and found that it’s the people “pushed out of the urban core, to the peripheries.” In addition, he found that many of the Housing Element updates in the city, which mark new housing units, fell within the WUI. Applying lessons he learned in the MAUD program and a recent Architecture and Real Estate course collaborative, he looked at the site from different scales, studying the territory at large, and using TDR’s to build affordable housing within the city while also increasing biodiversity and usable green spaces. 

The complexity of wildfire prevention and remediation that Soraire, Davol, and Lozano address in their projects is why Susskind believes it’s so critical to establish bridges between firms like SWA and academic programs like the GSD. SWA has a long legacy of GSD collaborations, beginning with its founding in the 1950s by GSD professor Hideo Sasaki  and his student, Pete Walker  (MLA ’57), both of whom went on to prodigious careers. Today, Susskind regularly guest lectures at the GSD in the “Climate by Design” course, and the SWA summer cohorts often include GSD students. For example, in 2022, Slide Kelly (MLA & MDes ’24) worked on fire remediation with Susskind at SWA, and now serves as a design critic in landscape architecture at the GSD.

The GSD has long served as a site of experimentation where designers can explore issues around wildfire management and remediation, with increasing attention in recent years as climate change causes more frequent megafires. In recent years, three professors at the GSD taught classes on wildfires, and this fall, two option studios focus on fires: a new iteration of Silvia Benedito’s option studio, “Canary in the Mine,” co-taught with Kelly, takes students to the Jack Dangermond Nature Preserve in Santa Barbara County as part of their study of the aftermath of the January Los Angeles wildfires. James Lord and Roderick Wylie’s studio “Fireworks,” focuses on the Napa Valley in California, using the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art to inspire thinking around how art and landscape might, together, create a “speculative vision for the future hand in hand with design.”

These courses, along with the work that GSD students undertook in partnership with SWA this summer, mark significant opportunities for designers to intervene in the climate crisis, alleviating its impacts for humans and nonhumans alike. SWA encouraged students in the summer program to first consider “ecological systems before development,” explained Lozano. He thought first about restorative landscapes and fire buffers, and how to maximize affordable housing and resident mobility and open space, in two sites across the city.

“I wanted to show that, even though the urban core is very dense and active, and then, moving outward, there’s suburbia and then the woodlands—all of these seemingly disparate things are interdependent.” Fire mitigation requires looking at the city and suburbs as a unified system. 

^[i]  Katherine M. Wilkin, David Benterou, Amanda M. Stasiewicz, “High fire hazard Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) residences in California lack voluntary and mandated wildfire risk mitigation compliance in Home Ignition Zones,” International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, Volume 124, 2025, 105435, ISSN 2212-4209, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2025.105435 .

The GSD Speaks Your Language

 
Students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design come from more than 60 countries and speak at least 56 languages, with 34 of them being students’ first or preferred languages, according to a survey of current and incoming students in July 2025. The visual identity of our fall 2025 public programs is translated into those 34 languages, celebrating the internationality of the GSD community.

The project was possible only with the assistance of student and alumni volunteers who translated and reviewed the posters. Among them is Adria Meira (MDes ’26), a Brazilian student who translated the Portuguese version of the poster. “Ensuring that the poster appeared in Portuguese was important to me as a representation of my culture, language, and country,” says Meira.

Valentine Geze (MDE ’26), worked on the French version. “I wanted to support this project because I see translation as a way to both welcome and celebrate the diversity of the GSD,” says Geze. “Supporting immigrants and honoring the languages spoken here feels especially important now; making space for many voices expands the perspectives that shape our academic and personal experiences.”

In past years, the GSD has collaborated with designers to create unique visual identities and promotional materials for the public programs. This year, the GSD’s own art director Chad Kloepfer, and Willis Kingery, graphic design consultant, designed the posters to represent the linguistic diversity of the GSD.

This multilingual project highlights the GSD’s commitment to welcoming students from around the world. “The GSD is one of the most international schools at Harvard,” said Dean Sarah Whiting in spring 2025. “Our international makeup goes back to the founding of the GSD. It is part of our DNA—our student body, our faculty, our staff, and the discipline and practice of design all thrive on this internationalism. The extraordinary breadth of experience and perspectives that the international members of our community provide is essential to who we are.”

Meira is part of the international community that Dean Whiting described. For her, participation in the poster project is “a way to highlight the contributions of the Brazilian community, which has 12 members at the school.” The student organization Brazil GSD, of which Meira is a part, “enriches the life of the school for everyone and provides much needed support to those of us studying far from home at such a challenging time.”

Language	Translators
Amharic	Anonymous
Arabic	Sara Abduljawad (MLA ’27)
Armenian	Shant Armenian (MArch ’28)
Bangla	Anonymous
Burmese	Htet H Hlaing (MArch ’26)
Chinese (Simplified & Traditional)	Anson Leung (MLA ’26)
Dutch	Emma van Zuthem (MDes ’27)
Farsi	Soroush Yeganeh (MArch ’26)
Filipino	Maita S. Hagad (MLA ’28)
French	Valentine Geze (MDE ’26)
German	Robin Albrecht (MArch ’26)
Greek	Styliani Rossikopoulou Pappa (MDes ’19) & Alkiviadis Pyliotis (MArch ’20)
Gujarati	Aum Gohil (MAUD ’27)
Hebrew	Anonymous
Hindi	Malvika Dwivedi (MDes ’27)
Japanese	Anonymous
Korean	Jeongjoon Lee (MArch ’27)
Kurdish	Leyla Uysal (MDes ’24, MLA ’27)
Malay	Joshua Teo (MDes ’26)
Marathi	Riddhi Kasar (MDE ’26)
Portuguese	Adria Meira (MDes ’26)
Punjabi	Anonymous
Spanish	Dana Barale Burdman (MDes ’26)
Swahili	Martha Oloo (MLA ’27)
Swedish	Hannah Ahlblad (PhD ’30)
Thai	Sirinda (Kaew) Limsong (MDE ’26)
Tsonga	Xiluva Mbungela (MDes ’26)
Turkish	Defne Ergun (MArch ’28)
Urdu	Omer Yousuf MUP ’26
Vietnamese	Tuân Cao (MAUD ’27)

Translation of Albanian and ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian) was provided by We Are Very.