GSD Faculty Appointed to Emma Bloomberg Chairs

Two faculty members at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) have been appointed to new endowed chairs established with a gift from Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Nestor M. Davidson, Emma Bloomberg Professor of Real Estate, and Rachel Weber, Emma Bloomberg Professor of Urban Planning, are among five Harvard University faculty members to receive the new appointments. Weber is also the director of the Master in Urban Planning program and chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design. Named for Emma Bloomberg, (MBA ’07; MPA ’07), the chairs support leading scholars who advance the study and practice of city governance. The recipients will hold Emma Bloomberg chairs for the next five years.

“The extraordinary support of Bloomberg Philanthropies acknowledges Nestor, Rachel, and Maurice’s exceptional work,” said Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture. “As researchers and practitioners, they are shaping the future of our cities and communities. This gift helps ensure not only that our students learn from leaders who are redefining how we build, finance, and sustain the urban environments of tomorrow, but also that the Bloomberg Center continues to thrive as a Harvard-wide nexus for exploration of urgent issues related to our urban, designed environments.

In receiving these appointments, Davidson and Weber join Maurice Cox, who was appointed Emma Bloomberg Professor in Residence of Urban Planning and Design in fall 2024. Five other Harvard faculty are current Emma Bloomberg chairs.

“Harvard is a proud partner in the work of building more resilient communities and serving the public good,” said Harvard President Alan M. Garber. “The Emma Bloomberg chairs, supporting talent from across the University, exemplify our commitment to cities and the people who inhabit them. I am grateful, as always, to Bloomberg Philanthropies for supporting academic excellence at Harvard and eager, as ever, to see what my faculty colleagues accomplish in the years to come.” 

 “I am deeply honored to receive this appointment,” said Davidson, “and it will be an inspiration to recommit to research on improving urban governance and our built environment at a moment when cities are at the center of our most important policy challenges.”   

Professor Davidson, who is also an affiliated faculty member at Harvard Law School, has published widely in leading law journals. His current book project, Cities in Law: Urbanism as a Legal Phenomenon, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

About Rachel Weber

Weber is an urban planner who explores how finance shapes the urban landscape by changing the ways cities budget, fund infrastructure, and manage their assets. Her professional experience includes helping non-profits to negotiate and implement redevelopment plans and appointments to governmental task forces such as then-mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Tax Increment Financing Reform Task Force.  Weber is the author of more than 50 peer-reviewed journal articles, as well as numerous book chapters and published reports. Her latest book, From Boom to Bubble: How Finance Built the New Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2015), won the Best Book Award from the Urban Affairs Association. She is the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning (2012), a compilation of 40 essays by leading urban scholars.

“It’s an honor to be recognized with the Emma Bloomberg professorship,” said Weber. “As a scholar of urban development, I have long been interested in how cities evolve and in the forces that drive change in their built environments. This recognition affirms the importance of that work and inspires me to continue exploring how policy, finance, and design can shape more equitable urban futures.”

Weber’s current research spotlights the predictive knowledge practices that allow real estate investors to create and extract value from the built environment, often to the detriment of communities. Titled “The Urban Oracular: Speculating on the Future City,” this book project is based on years of interviews with “quants” and forecasters at global asset managers and investment funds. Focusing on the period from the Global Financial Crisis through the Covid-19 pandemic, Weber is examining the role of ever more complex models, algorithms, and data sources that enable investors to de-risk and convert the future into capital.

GSD Alumni Council 2025 Newsletter

The 50-member strong GSD Alumni Council represents a multigenerational, diverse community of graduates who work to connect and engage GSD alumni, current students, and the larger Harvard community.  

In this year marked by extraordinary challenges, the GSD Alumni Council remains committed to fostering a culture of inclusion and excellence through special programs, events, and partnerships.

Learn more about last year’s initiatives and the opportunities that lie ahead.

In this newsletter:
News and Announcements
GSD Alumni Features 
Upcoming Events
More Opportunities to Connect!

GSD Alumni Features

Upcoming Events

J-Term Regional Gatherings  

The Alumni Council will host regional events during J-Term, January 5–16, 2026, for current students and local alumni. Stay tuned for more details!

GSD Comeback: Alumni & Friends Celebration 2026

Mark your calendars! The GSD Comeback: An Alumni & Friends Celebration returns to campus on September 25–26, 2026. Enjoy a weekend of conversation and connection here in Cambridge. Official registration will open by June 2026.

Professional Association Annual Meetings  

The Alumni Council Ambassadorship Committee, in partnership with the GSD Office of Development and Alumni Relations, organizes an alumni reception in conjunction with each professional association meeting; these annual events are one of the best ways to connect in-person with alumni nationally. 

• APA | Detroit, MI | April 25–28, 2026  
• ULI Spring | Nashville, TN | May 5–7, 2026
•  AIA | San Diego, CA | June 10–13, 2026
• ASLA | Los Angeles, CA | September 16–18, 2026

Refer to GSD Alumni & Friends Events for the latest information about GSD gatherings near you. If you’re interested in helping coordinate an alumni reception around a professional association meeting or want to host a gathering in your city, contact us. 

The GSD’s History of Teaching Equitable Development in Allston

Harvard is not only an urban campus, but it is a campus in a congested city . . . . The acquisition of new land implies a careful study, not only of prices, taxation, and location of parcels, but also of size and shape of those parcels in terms of their future use. The programming and needs of new buildings and a rough calculation of the size and type can be of great help in an intelligent policy for Harvard’s future purchases.

—Jose Lluís Sert, 1957, as quoted in “Campus Harvard + Allston,” by Richard Marshall and Linda Haar

Faculty and students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) have studied the prospect of developing a campus in Allston since the 1990s, after it was revealed that Harvard had been buying land in the neighborhood. But even before that, GSD studios such as “The Beacon Yards, New Urban Structure,” taught in 1987 by Associate Professor Jonathan S. Lane, considered the neighborhood as a site with rich potential for future equitable development that benefits the Allston community.

At the initiation of a developer who approached the GSD and sponsored the studio, Lane looked at 200 acres in Allston, “including the Allston Landing truck depot, a section of the Mass. Turnpike and its Toll Plaza, as well as considerable frontage on the Charles River.” The studio aimed to create connections between the site and the Charles River, allowing access to green space for residents and Boston University students, who were hemmed in by the transportation depots.  

In considering how the site might be developed, the studio studied comparable examples of projects that transformed transportation depots into livable neighborhoods, including Philadelphia’s Penn Center and 30th Street Station, Boston’s Prudential Center over the old Boston and Albany Yards, and Pittsburgh’s “Golden Triangle.” Lane notes that some examples are more successful than others. For example, he cautions that the “inhumane” scale of the Prudential Center in Boston should be avoided.

On the heels of the news about Harvard’s purchase of Allston lands, in 1999, GSD instructors Richard Marshall and Linda Haar co-taught “Campus Harvard + Allston,” which recounted the history of development in Allston and offered a range of proposals for the campus. They note that as early as 1925, Harvard founded its campus in Allston, when Henry Lee Higginson proposed to President Eliot “developing the ‘unsavory stretch of brackish mud flats and marsh.’” A competition was held in 1924 to select the architect for the new Graduate School of Business Administration. McKim, Mead, and White—one of the nation’s leading architectural firms at the time—was selected, and Frederick Law Olmsted’s firm designed the landscape. 

The 1999 studio asked students to consider three concerns in Allston: “Housing, the redevelopment of Western Avenue, and the expansion of the Campus.” As students looked at each aspect of development, they would need to consider how Harvard would interact with its neighbors, for example, in ensuring sufficient housing for residents. Today, housing remains a pressing issue, and a housing complex is a significant portion of the Enterprise Research Campus that has recently opened in the neighborhood. 

In 2002, Alex Krieger, Professor in Practice of Urban Design, Emeritus, taught a course  on the development of Allston’s campus, in which one of the students proposed a “science hub” for the neighborhood. The group spent the semester grappling with concerns around how the university would interface with the community.  Several years later, in 2008, GSD students gathered in another Allston studio, this one led by instructor Jonathan Levi , to focus on student and community housing in the neighborhood. Looking back to Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell, who changed Harvard’s conception of student housing in the early 20th century, Levi noted that the “attempt was to democratize the benefits of living on campus.” After consulting with Allston residents and community members, students in the studio designed housing for Harvard students in Allston. 

The subject arose again in 2018, when Shaun Donovan and David Gamble co-taught “A Campus in a City—A City in a Campus: Harvard and Allston,” an urban planning and design studio that interwove “architecture, urban design, planning and landscape architecture to transform and grow a new neighborhood in Allston at the intersection of campus and city.” Exploring what Harvard’s “100 acres will become,” the studio emphasized the importance of equitable access to the neighborhood’s “innovation economy.” 

GSD students were also part of the conversation around Allston’s development in the 2017 competition  for an art installation at The Grove, and in a series of public events such as a 2020 conversation between Marika E. Reuling and Thomas Glynn, moderated by Stephen Gray, with Martin Zogran, Courtney Sharpe, and Rustom Cowasjee. Reuling is the Harvard’s Managing Director for Allston Initiatives, Glynn is the Chief Executive Officer of the Harvard Allston Land Company, and Rustom Cowasjee (MAUD ’82), is a part of Tishman Speyer, the developer for the Enterprise Research Campus. Most recently, in 2025, Martin Bucksbaum Professor in Practice of Urban Planning and Design Joan Busquets taught “Harvard Campus and the Changing Nature of the University,” focusing on both Cambridge and Allston. As construction progresses in Allston today on the ERC campus, GSD students will continue to help innovate and design in partnership with Allston residents. 

Alex Krieger on the History of Harvard’s Allston Enterprise Research Campus

For nearly 50 years, Alex Krieger, professor in practice of urban design, emeritus, taught at the Graduate School of Design (GSD). For about half of those years, he was committed to helping Harvard in the development of the Allston campus , serving on work groups, task forces, and design review committees focused on the project. First working with Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers and his administration in the early 2000s, Krieger helped to initiate a master planning process that, through various iterations over the years, ushered in the Allston campus. The first phase of the Enterprise Research Campus is now nearing completion. 

In addition to his scholarship, he’s well-known for his “iconic tour” of Boston that focuses on how the city, which was originally settled on an island, created land to accommodate its growth. He dedicated his career to the study of urbanism, with books including City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present (2019), Urban Design (with William Saunders, 2009), and Mapping Boston (with David Cobb and Amy Turner, 1999).

Here, he recounts the history of the Allston campus and how he’s witnessed—and helped shape—its evolution into the landscape we see today, with the opening of the David Rubenstein Treehouse conference center , the “front door to the Enterprise Research Campus.”

How did the idea for a campus expansion originate?
 
Upon assuming the presidency, and with the then-recent public acknowledgment by the university that it had been acquiring land in Allston, Larry Summers announced the need for an ambitious master plan to prepare Harvard for its next decades of growth. He would reveal his own ambition that Allston would enable Harvard to establish “the Silicon Valley of the East,” given the university’s leadership in the sciences, and its researchers’ role in the mapping of the human genome that had just been completed by the International Human Genome Project. At the president’s direction, an international search for architects and planners ensued. 
 
My first significant role was advising on the start of the overall planning process and becoming a member of the architect/planner selection committee for the master plan. I worked with Harvard Vice President for Administration Sally Zeckhauser, who directed the search process. We visited firms around the world, and in 2005, selected Cooper Robertson, Frank Gehry, and the Olin Partnership. At Sally Zeckhauser’s request, I began to serve on the design advisory committee as the master plan commenced and proceeded. 
 
Concurrently, I was asked to develop initial programming guidelines for the future campus, which, late in 2005 was released as Programming for the Public Realm of the Harvard Allston Campus. The Cooper Robertson plan was made public in 2007. It gained much attention and publicity, even as we all knew that it would evolve significantly over the years. Several subsequent planning efforts with other planners followed.

 
When did construction in Allston begin?

The next significant event, in my memory, was the commissioning of the firm Behnisch Architeken, from Germany, to design what, in nine long years, would become the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. However, it was initially planned to be a research and teaching facility for continuing stem cell, genome and life/health sciences innovation. Again, I served on the architect selection committee and on the design review committee that followed. 
 
The “Great Recession” of 2008-10 led to a substantial decline in Harvard’s endowment, and construction had slowed during 2009 and halted in 2010. Three underground levels had been built, intended for a large garage and a district energy facility. The District Energy Facility (DEF), was later built separately, designed by Andrea Leers of Leers Weinzapfel Associates, a frequent visiting faculty at the GSD. For much of the next five years, only the roof of those underground levels was visible, with four humongous construction cranes left idle and visible from afar. This was great fodder for The Boston Globe.
 

I remember; it was infamous. How long did it take for construction to get back on track?

 Drew Galpin Faust became Harvard’s President in 2007. Because of the national economic downturn, she became less concerned with expanding Harvard and focused on projects such as the adaptation of Holyoke Center to a student union. In Allston, President Faust focused on the reuse of some of the properties left vacant by Harvard’s earlier acquisitions, helping to attract new tenants to provide neighborhood services and amenities. 
 
Katie Lapp who became the Executive Vice President for Administration shortly following Zekhouser’s retirement in 2009, began to encourage President Faust to restart planning for Allston. I was part of various informal conversations about what to do with the unfinished project. A science facility had in the interim been built in Cambridge and so different uses needed to be identified before construction could resume. 
 
There were various ideas. One thought was that one of the Longwood Medical Area (LMA) hospitals, or the School of Public Health might relocate to sit on top of the “shortest building,” since there was little space for additional growth at the LMA. Some might find that idea unlikely, but, at the time Chan Krieger & Associates was planning in the LMA, and I heard such conversations there, not just in Cambridge. Ultimately, of course, the Science and Engineering Complex (SEC) , home of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), was the result.
 
There was also some discussion about a long-term future for Harvard’s acquisition of the Beacon Rail Yards and adjacent land under the Mass Pike, slated for eventual reconstruction. President Faust and Harvard leadership were becoming aware of just how much land was under Harvard’s control and cognizant that not all of it would be needed for Harvard’s academics.

How did the university decide they’d manage that land, and shift towards a new vision for the ERC?
 
 These informal conversations and brainstorming sessions culminated in the formation of a new Allston planning committee, the Allston Work Team in 2010. I became one of the three co-chairs of that committee, along with Bill Purcell, former Mayor of Nashville, then at the Kennedy School, and Harvard Business School Professor Peter Tufano. The Work Team included the participation of most of Harvard’s Deans, Drew Faust herself, invited urban development experts, and of course, Katie Lapp. 
 
Notions about a new kind of research campus, perhaps to compete with booming Kendall Square (which was beginning to be referred to as “the smartest square mile on the planet”) were already in the air. In Boston, Mayor Menino began to develop the concept of the Seaport Innovation Center. Underway were early phases of what, a decade later, would become the Cambridge Crossing innovation district, under the leadership of former Harvard planner Mark Johnson (MLAUD ’82). Harvard realized they’d better get into this game. 

How did they balance community and university needs in the final design?
 
The Allston Work Team commenced serious discussion about what an Enterprise Research Campus (ERC) might become; supported the resumption of construction for what would become the Engineering School; initiated plans for graduate student and faculty housing, which led in 2015 to the Continuum Residences in Barry’s Corner, with Trader Joe’s at the base; explored how a needed hotel and conference center might become part of early phases; and continued exploring how to revive retail and community facilities around Barry’s Corner and along Western Avenue. 
 
What can you tell us about the selection of Tishman Speyer  as the developer, and Jeanne Gang as the architect of the David Rubenstein Treehouse conference center ?
 
In 2018, Tom Glynn became the founding CEO of the Harvard Alston Land Company, and I helped Tom get up to speed on prior Allston planning efforts. We knew each other, as Chan Krieger had served Massport and earlier Partners Healthcare, both institutions he had led. We also had informal conversations about the Boston area development community, as, under his leadership, Harvard was getting closer and closer to proceeding with the selection of a development team for the ERC. I was not involved in that selection process but was quite pleased when Tishman Speyer announced that Jeanne Gang would play a major design role, including, of course, in the design of the Treehouse conference facility. 
 
So, the Allston Work Team helped shape today’s Allston campus, with the November 2025 opening of the David Rubenstein Treehouse conference center, and the ERC now well underway ?
 
Yes, right now, Phase One is nearing completion, which encompasses nine acres. This first mixed-use cluster includes space for research, housing, a hotel, and the conference center. It will form “the prow” or “beacon” for future phases of the ERC, as the economy allows.
 
In 2010, the ERC  was just emerging as an idea, and seemed like a way to complement the future Science and Engineering Complex (SEC) , once construction resumed. Behnisch Architekten , the architect for the initial construction, had made the brilliant decision to maintain construction liability during those years. Without a building mass on top there was the possibility that those three unfinished levels would begin rising out of the ground due to groundwater hydrostatic pressure. So, it made sense to bring Behnisch Architekten back, though some at Harvard felt that the design was too modern and unlike Harvard. The building has acquired iconic status, and as Stefan Behnisch promised, is one of the world’s most energy efficient science facilities.
 
I remained on the design review committee for the project, alongside former GSD Dean Mohsen Mostavi, and later Jeanne Gang, as well. 
 
How would you characterize Harvard’s relationship with the Allston community?
  
The relationship  has improved over time, beginning rather badlywhen it was first revealed that Harvard had secretly bought 52.6 acres of Allston land in the late 1980s and 1990s . Harvard has since substantially invested in Allston especially along the Western Avenue corridor. As I mentioned, President Faust and Katie Lapp began to focus more attention on neighborhood concerns and needs, and this has continued under Presidents Bacow and Garber. 
 
Of course, expressions of impatience on the part of the Allston community remain, citizens always asking Harvard to reveal any additional plans, plus deliver on some now-old promises. For example, mention the Greenway, and residents will say, ‘Those Harvard people, they promised that to us two decades ago.’ Indeed, a greenway was identified in the initial Cooper Robertson master plan, a continuous pedestrian park-like corridor from the Allston Public Library to the Charles River. Parts of it have been realized, but one long segment remains missing.  
 
The ERC is adding a segment at its center; it is beautifully designed. The trouble is, this segment is separated from the portions of the Greenway that exist, by those not yet built.  As the ERC fills with users and tenants, it may make this space seem like it’s proprietary to the ERC. Allston folks may not understand that it’s part of the long-promised Greenway, until Harvard builds the rest of it. I’ve been very vocal about this issue, to the point where everyone was sick of hearing it. Harvard will soon, I hope, complete the missing segments and it will all turn out okay.
 
Harvard deserves more credit than it sometimes gets from Allston neighbors. As far as I know, Harvard has committed something like $50 million at least three times—once for the Beacon Yards transit station . The current ten-year Allston plan promises an additional $53 million in community benefits. Another large sum is slated towards the reconstruction of the Turnpike. Finally, less publicly so far, another $50 million-or-so has been quietly promised for the eventual realignment of a portion of Storrow Drive to enable the widening of the Esplanade along the Charles River. 

How do you feel about handing off the Allston project, now that you’ve stepped back from the planning process?
 
Well, I still get to offer opinions, such as pressing the Business School to do something with its huge parking lot right across the street from the ERC, and cajoling Harvard to complete the Greenway. My last role was to serve on the design review committee for the A.R.T. project. This will be a truly wonderful addition to North Harvard Street and Barry’s Corner. The Allston Campus and the revitalization of the Allston neighborhood are progressing well.
 

 

GSD Faculty and Alumni Integral to the Creation of Harvard’s Enterprise Research Campus

After more than a decade of orchestration, the first phase of Harvard’s Enterprise Research Campus (ERC) —a vibrant mixed-use district in Boston’s Allston neighborhood—is nearing completion, culminating the coordinated efforts of stakeholders from Harvard University, the City of Boston, local resident groups, and design professionals. Notably, faculty and alumni of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) have played integral roles in the ERC, from conceptualization and planning through design and construction.

Envisioned as an innovation hub to foster collaboration among academia, industry, and the surrounding community, the ERC occupies a 14-acre swath of land across the Charles River from Harvard University’s historic campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, adjacent to the university’s Business School and the Science and Engineering Complex. GSD faculty have contributed significantly to the ERC, including Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang , which led the master plan of the neighborhood-scale project with Henning Larsen ; Tim Love of Utile , which served as master plan coordinator; and Alexis Landes (MLA ’10) of SCAPE , responsible for landscape design throughout the project.   

Stewarded by Harvard Allston Land Company (HALC)  and developed by Tishman Speyer , the ERC encompasses two phases. Construction on the first portion, Phase A, officially began in November 2023; its 900,000 square feet of facilities began opening this summer and will continue into early 2026. This includes:

• David Rubenstein Treehouse: a university-wide conference center offering meeting and special event space  
• One Milestone East and One Milestone West: two cutting-edge laboratory buildings offering 440,000 square feet of lab and office space 
• Residences at Verra:  343 residential units over two buildings, an 8-story mid-rise tower and a 17-story high-rise that feature a green roof-top terrace, ground-floor retail, and resident amenities 
• The Atlas Hotel: 246-rooms in a 16-story tower with ground-floor restaurants, shops, and cafes 
• Greenway and flexible outdoor space: more than 2 acres of publicly accessible green space to host events including farmer markets, musical performances, and fitness classes 

ERC’s Phase B, located on a 4.8-acre parcel to the west and south of Phase A and not yet scheduled for construction, will contain an additional 720,000 square feet of lab and office space, 320,000 square feet of residential housing with a mix of ground-floor retail and community spaces, and public landscaping.

With a variety of contributions, GSD faculty and alumni have helped shape the ERC through all stages of its evolution.  

Conceptualization and Overall Development

Alex Krieger (MCU ’77), professor in practice of urban design, emeritus, was deeply involved in the conceptualization and evolution of the university’s Allston strategy and properties, including the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences complex, the American Repertory Theater, and the ERC. Krieger consistently served on design advisory, review, and selection committees related to the Allston expansion. A close advisor to former Harvard president Drew Faust and executive vice presidents for administration Sally Zeckhauser and Katie Lapp, Krieger co-led Harvard’s Allston Work Team, whose 2011 recommendations established the groundwork for, among other things, what would become the Harvard Allston Land Company. 

Stephen Gray (MAUD ’08), director of the Master of Architecture in Urban Design program, associate professor of urban design, co-director of the Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design degree program, is founder and principal of Grayscale Collaborative . Gray worked with HALC to explore detailed development scenarios prior to drafting the developer request for proposals (RFP); help select Tishman Speyer, the design team, and the master developer; lead a cross-team facilitated process across various client heads and designers, including a reimagined design review; and provide direction from the ERC equity and inclusion framework. 

Mohsen Mostafavi, Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design and Harvard University distinguished service professor, served as dean of the GSD from 2008 to 2019 and took part in university-wide advisory committees on Allston’s development.

Shaun Donovan (MArch/MPA ’95) worked directly with President Faust and Harvard leadership to establish the vision and planning for Allston, as well as create the land company that is now developing that vision. This includes projects such as the ERC, American Repertory Theater, and more affordable housing.

Harvard Allston Land Company (HALC): In 2018, Thomas P. Glynn III was named founding chief executive of the HALC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Harvard University established to develop the ERC. Under Glynn, who taught at the GSD in urban planning and design as well as at the Harvard Kennedy School, HALC issued a call for developers in 2019 and selected Tishman Speyer the following year. 

Following Glynn’s retirement in 2021, Carl Rodrigues, GSD lecturer in real estate, became chief executive officer of the Harvard Allston Land Company. Rodrigues has overseen securing project entitlements, construction financing and financial close on the ground leases, construction, and the opening of Phase A buildings.

Tishman Speyer : For more than five years, Rustom Cowasjee (MAUD ’82) has directed the overall development of the ERC and all aspects of the project’s design and construction for Tishman Speyer, a global corporation in real estate investment, development, and management. This includes orchestrating the distinct design and construction teams responsible for the ERC’s Phase A buildings alongside the cohesive landscaping approach that unites this new mixed-use neighborhood. 

Halls Lane Studio : As a consultant to Tishman Speyer working closely with Cowasjee, Halls Lane Studio—led by Jay Berman (MArch ’98)—served as a strategic design and planning advisor, helping to select and onboard architecture and engineering teams, map design processes, frame stakeholder engagement, and guide design evolution of lab/office, residential, hotel, conference center, and overall site planning during program confirmation, concept, schematic, and design development phases of the project.

Urban Design and Landscape 

Studio Gang : Led by founding partner Jeanne Gang (MArch ’93), Studio Gang took part in multiple facets of ERC  including serving as co-design lead with Henning Larsen  for the mixed-use district’s master plan, covering 14 acres of land adjacent to the Harvard Business School and Harvard’s Science and Engineering Complex. Other GSD alumni at Studio Gang who contributed to the ERC plan include design director Ana Flor (MArch ’10), Arthur Liu (MArch’13), and Spencer Hayden (MArch ’17). 

Henning Larsen : With Studio Gang, Henning Larsen served as co-design lead for the ERC’s master plan as well as the architectural design for One Milestone East and its connector. Harvard alumni engaged in one or both aspects of the project include Bomin Park (MAUD ’20), as senior designer; Kritika Kharbanda (MDes ’23), on sustainability; Evan Shieh (MAUD ’19), as urban planner; and Ece Comert-Fisher (MArch ’18), as designer. 

Utile : Utile, founded by Tim Love (MArch ’89), coordinated the master plan for the ERC. Love—GSD lecturer and senior fellow in real estate and urban planning, and assistant director of the Master in Real Estate program—is Utile’s principal-in-charge on master plan coordination; Jessy Yang (MAUD ’17), project manager; Loren Rapport (MAUD ’18), urban designer; and Andrew Nahmias (MArch ’16; now at Boston Planning Department), urban designer.  

SCAPE : Established by founding principal Kate Orff (MLA ’97), SCAPE is responsible for the greenway, central plaza, open space surrounding multiple buildings and on-structure landscapes, multi-modal streetscapes incorporating stormwater management infrastructure, and a laneway connecting Western Avenue to the greenway. Gena Wirth (MLA/MUP ’09) is SCAPE’s design principal-in-charge of the ERC; Alexis Landes (MLA ’10), management principal; Brad Howe (MLA ’15), design lead; and Rose Lee (MLA ’18), designer and construction administrator. Adopting a creative palette of pavers, plantings, and other elements, SCAPE’s landscaping strategy unites One Milestone East and West, the Verra Residences, the David Rubenstein Treehouse, and the Atlas Hotel into a cohesive, vibrant mixed-use development.

Sasaki : As an urban design principal at Sasaki, Martin Zogran (MAUD ’99) has actively led planning and urban design support for Harvard University’s Planning and Design (HUPAD) Allston Initiative (AI) planning group. Alongside the leadership of Marika Reuling of HUPAD AI, Sasaki has been engaged for over five years, helping to shape Harvard’s long-term land planning and community engagement objectives for the ERC, areas within the Institutional Master Plan, Beacon Park Yards, and greater Allston. GSD alumni at Sasaki also involved with this work include Dennis Pieprz (MAUD ’85), Mary Anna Ocampo (MAUD ’10), Laura Marett(MLA ’06; now at SCAPE), Rodrigo Guerra (MAUD ’17), and Gabriel Ramos (MUP ’19). 

Gamble Associates : Founded by David Gamble (MAUD ’97), Gamble Associates has been an urban design consultant for the HALC since 2018. In this capacity, the firm has consulted in the review process, conducted urban design studies, collaborated with selected architecture and landscape designers, and have been involved with design review.

Level Infrastructure : Level Infrastructure, led by founding director Byron Stigge (MDes ’08), acted as infrastructure consultant for the ERC master plan.

Architecture

Studio Gang : Led by founding partner Jeanne Gang (MArch ’93), Studio Gang designed the David Rubenstein Treehouse and One Milestone West. Managing partner Mark Schendel (MArch ’89) contributed to the David Rubenstein Treehouse. Eric Zuckerman (MArch ’18), Art Terry (MAUD ’14), and Shunfan Zheng (MAUD ’20) took part in designing One Milestone West.

Henning Larsen : Henning Larsen designed One Milestone East, the connector between One Milestone East and West, and served as co-design lead with Studio Gang on the district’s master plan. Harvard alumni engaged in one or both aspects of the project include Bomin Park(MAUD ’20), as senior designer; Kritika Kharbanda (MDes ’23), on sustainability; Evan Shieh (MAUD ’19), as urban planner; and Ece Comert-Fisher (MArch ’18), as designer. 

Marlon Blackwell Architects : Led by Marlon Blackwell, former visiting faculty at the GSD, Marlon Blackwell Architects designed the Harvard ERC Hotel, formally called the Atlas Hotel.

Moody Nolan : In his current role on the Harvard ERC Hotel/Atlas Hotel with Moody Nolan, Kevin Y. Lee (MArch ’09) has applied his design expertise to the construction administration process coordinating with HALC, Tishman Speyer, and construction manager Consigli-Smoot to ensure Marlon Blackwell Architects’ design vision is faithfully executed, bridging conceptual rigor with technical precision.

MVRDV : Nathalie de Vries, former visiting faculty at the GSD and one of the founders of MVRDV, led the firm’s design team for the ERC’s residential complex, Verra. 

Arrowstreet : For One Milestone West, Arrowstreet served as architect of record and sustainability consultant. Amy Korte (MArch ’01), president of Arrowstreet, worked as a consulting partner, contributing early in the project during the entitlement phase as well as supporting the coordination with HALC. Andrea Brue (MAUD ’91), senior associate, provided early-phase design support as a project architect, contributing to programmatic layout and the development of schematic designs. Architectural designer Chi-Hsuan (Vita) Wang (MArch ’19; no longer at Arrowstreet) also contributed to the project.

Acentech : Benjamin Markham, president of Acentech and formerly a lecturer on acoustics at the GSD, led the firm’s involvement as acoustic consultant for One Milestone West. 

*Please contact us if you or your firm should be included in this article.

Jeanne Gang on the David Rubenstein Treehouse and the Future of Sustainable Design

As a child, architect Jeanne Gang built treehouses in the woods of her hometown— Belvidere, Illinois—so it was, perhaps, inevitable that she would one day design a building inspired by a place where she once felt so free. 

“Growing up, I loved building treehouses,” Gang said. “There were several trees I’d climb to hang out in—and then,” she laughed, “I’d jump down when I was farther up than I’d realized. I love trees and feel there’s a deep connection between trees and humans.” 

That sense of wonder and freedom became central to her design of the David Rubenstein Treehouse conference center for Harvard’s Enterprise Research Campus (ERC) in Allston. It is the university’s first project employing mass timber, an engineered wood product used in the structures of large-scale buildings. Walk into the ground floor, and you will find an open central atrium, with wooden columns that rise and seem to branch out to the ceiling, operating as structural supports—but with the lightness of tree branches, notes Gang (MArch ’93), Kajima Professor in Practice of Architecture at the Graduate School of Design (GSD). 

“Mass timber not only allowed us to make the building visually lighter, but also reduce its mass,” she explained. “As we explored the idea of using mass timber, it made sense to let our design be informed by trees. The structure has a logical yet dynamic quality to it that creates this feeling of being in a forest while you’re inside,” she said.

Gang has always been inspired by relationships found in the natural world. Her recent book, The Art of Architectural Grafting, explores how the horticultural practice of grafting can be used as a metaphor for adapting existing buildings into architecture with increased longevity. Her recent studios at the GSD have focused on the cultural and environmental aspects of buildings’ reuse. This past spring, she taught “Grafting the Aquarium,” prompting students to create an “expanded, flourishing, and distinctive work of architecture” using her concept of architectural grafting. In 2020, she taught “Béton Brut and Beyond,” a studio that focused on extending the life and capacity of an existing Brutalist mixed-use social housing complex in Paris’s La Défense neighborhood, and in 2018, she taught “After the Storm: Restoring an Island Ecosystem” in St. Thomas, following Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017. This fall, with historian Lizabeth Cohen, she guest edited issue 53 of Harvard Design Magazine , on “Reuse and Repair.

Recent projects completed by her firm, Studio Gang , based in Chicago with offices in New York, San Francisco, and Paris, include the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The building’s central atrium, whose design is informed by geological formations shaped by wind and water, draws visitors in, encouraging them to explore and learn. The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts , with a design that recalls a very different form found within nature, was “conceived of as a stem that blossoms to the north and south.” Both projects are an example of her grafting technique, which expands the capacity of existing structures with new and strategic additions. And, the design for Populus , a hotel in Denver, draws from the characteristic patterns found on the region’s Aspen trees to create a distinctive façade. Her iconic Aqua Tower,  in Chicago, offers opportunities for connection to the city and neighbors along its exterior balconies.

Gang is not only inspired by nature but also has a keen interest in “how the things we do as architects can either support or harm the living beings around us.” She is an avid hiker who loves bird nests for their “beauty, humility, and efficiency” as structures, and advocates for biodiversity and protection of creatures with whom we share the natural and urban environments. For instance, architectural elements such as fritted glass can be deployed to protect migratory birds from collisions with windows that are often fatal—especially as they navigate through cities on waterways like Boston and Chicago. 

“I’m interested,” said Gang, “in the feeling of being up in the canopy. Within the crown of a tree, you get both a vista to beyond and a sense of protection at the same time.”

The building is intended to serve as the welcoming point of the ERC, a decades-long project. Once the first phase of the campus is completed, it will also include a hotel, residences, and commercial lab space (including one designed by Gang), all intended to be connected by Allston’s Greenway, which will extend from the west, through the ERC, and onto the Charles River. At the Rubenstein Treehouse, Gang and her team wanted to leave room for human-scaled spaces between the building and the neighborhood around it. These include the Laneway, a pedestrian corridor between the Rubenstein Treehouse and the hotel. She emphasized the importance of fostering a sense of community in the neighborhood and creating opportunities for the public to take advantage of the conference center and ERC more broadly. 

The Rubenstein Treehouse marks Harvard’s first mass timber building and Gang’s most ambitious use of the material. For over two decades, she has used mass timber, most recently in projects such as the expanded campus of the California College of the Arts as well as academic and residential buildings at Kresge College at UC Santa Cruz. When she began designing the Rubenstein Treehouse, the “idea of creating social spaces around the vertical circulation, came first,” said Gang, “and very soon thereafter, we considered using mass timber.” 

In addition to the aesthetic potential of mass timber, of course, it gives Harvard the opportunity to meet its high environmental standards. The wood structure helps to reduce the building’s embodied carbon by 55 percent compared to a similar building. Using the material for a large conference center has its challenges. “The hardest thing about using mass timber,” Gang said, “is that you want to expose it,” which requires a great deal of organization of the various building systems that would otherwise be hidden behind closed ceilings. The team had to balance the airy aesthetic of the mass timber design along with the complex mechanical systems required to support the building with the most sustainable means. 

The Rubenstein Treehouse is also one of the first buildings in Massachusetts to use concrete made with ground glass pozzolan, another element that helps reduce the building’s embodied carbon. Modern pozzolan is a glass aggregate that reacts with water, not unlike the volcanic pozzolan that ancient Romans added to concrete, Gang explained. The pozzolan employed in the Rubenstein Treehouse is derived from post-consumer glass containers, making the material cleaner than fly ash, a byproduct of coal combustion often used in concrete. 

The conference center’s design minimized basement space in order to use less concrete, and, to reduce energy, also makes use of solar panels, natural daylighting and self-shading, and a connection to Allston’s District Energy Facility. 

“It was really exciting,” said Gang, “to work on something that offers a peek into the future of what sustainable buildings can achieve.”

GSD Students Win Second Place at APA Student Planning & Design Competition

Students from the 5280 Planning Collective at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) won second place at the 2025 American Planning Association Student Planning & Design Competition . The team consisted of Oliver Oglesby (MLA/MUP ’26), Matthew Thibodeau (MUP ’26), Cameron Hull (MUP ’26), Christopher Cahill (MUP ’25), and Lindsay Crockett (MUP ’25).

The competition focuses on a significant development site or an area in the National Planning Conference host city, asking students to consider all the steps planners and designers need to take when developing plans and recommendations. Finalists present their proposals to a jury at a public session of the National Planning Conference.

The 2025 competition site was the Colfax & Federal Clover Leaf, a 46-acre parcel in Denver, CO, this year’s host city. The team’s project, “The Colfax Core,” reimagined the competition site as a new urban center that connects surrounding communities with walkable amenities, diverse housing, cultural spaces, and family necessities.

Inaugural Experimental Postdoctoral Fellows at the GSD Research Health, Wellness, and Sustainable Materials

The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) is pleased to announce the inaugural Experimental Postdoctoral Fellowship for sustainable architecture: Experimental Fellowship—Harvard GSD . Supporting practice-oriented researchers working with the GSD’s Laboratory for Design Technologies (LDT), the year-long fellowship has a thematic focus on health, wellness, and sustainable material systems for buildings, landscapes, and cities.

The two participating fellows, Juan Pablo Ugarte (MArch ’14, DDes ’23) and Noam Attias, are conducting their research in the context of the LDT. Ugarte has begun work with Martin Bechthold, Kumagai Professor of Architectural Technology, and Allen Sayegh, design critic and senior interaction technologies fellow, on a project assessing how workspaces that include wood and other natural materials can alleviate stress and promote wellness. Attias’s research with Karen Lee-Bar Sinai, assistant professor of landscape architecture, focuses on studying new approaches to bio-fabrication with fungi. She recently shared some of her research in a talk at the Arnold Arboretum, “Mycelium Modified Wood: Design for Sustainable Habitats .”

“At the GSD, we are particularly interested in knowledge that is consequential for practice,” says Bechthold of the fellowship’s goal. “We acknowledge that faculty and students must engage in research, discourse, and learning that advance innovations on topics including, but not limited to, material solutions.”

The LDT is a collaborative platform for the GSD’s design technology research units. Areas of specialization include responsive technologies and sensing, sustainable material systems, robotics and additive manufacturing, computational design and modeling, urban data analytics, and transport systems design. In addition to Bar-Sinai, Bechthold, and Sayegh, GSD faculty affiliated with the LDT include Elizabeth Christoforetti, Carole Voulgaris, and Andrew Witt.

The fellowship is supported by the Experimental Foundation , a Berlin-based nonprofit organization founded in 2022 by the architect Prof. Regine Leibinger (MArch ’91). Leibinger co-founded the architectural practice Barkow Leibinger with Frank Barkow. From 2022 to 2025, she was a design critic in architecture at the GSD and currently serves as a member of the Dean’s Council. Experimental provides financial and organizational support to early career practice-oriented researchers who are committed to fostering sustainability while going beyond technical solutions to focus on the spatial quality and aesthetics of the built environment.

Harvard Faculty and Alumni Among Winners of 40 Under 40 North America

Faculty and alumni of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) are among the winners of the inaugural 40 Under 40 North America competition. Curated by the World Architecture Festival  (WAF) and The Architect’s Newspaper , 40 Under 40 North America recognizes outstanding young architects from the United States, Canada, and Mexico. In addition to receiving a complimentary ticket to WAF, to be held November 12 through 14 in Miami Beach, Florida, the winners’ work will be highlighted in a special exhibition at the festival—on view to the gathering’s nearly 2000 global attendees—and featured in The Architect’s Newspaper.  

The winning GSD alumni are Daniel Feldman (MAUD ’15) of ZITA in Long Island City, New York; Armida Fernandez (MDes ’20) of Estudio Ala in Guadalajara, Mexico; Taehyung Park (MLA ’14) of Field Operations in New York City, New York; Juan Sala (MArch ’18) of Sala Hars in Anzures, Mexico; and GSD design critic in architecture Khoa Vu (MArch ’19) of Studio KHOA VU in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Vu’s project, which will be on display at WAF alongside the works of the other 40 Under 40 architects, addresses issues of adaptive reuse and sustainable design—themes that are central to Vu’s teaching and practice. With Ts Veil, Vu transforms an existing villa in Ho Chi Min City into a social dining space, reinterpreting the relationship between old and new through material economy and climatic responsiveness. In addition to being exhibited at WAF, Ts Veil has been shortlisted for the Dezeen Awards 2025 .

International Conference Takes a New View on Latin American Cities

This month, scholars from the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) gathered with researchers from across the Americas to explore how new approaches to visualizing Latin American cities can produce insights about the historical, geographic, social, and economic factors driving urban growth. The conference “Visualizing, Representing, and Interrogating Latin American Urbanism: Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Mexico City” suggested both the contexts these cities shared and the specificity required to understand their unique histories.

The GSD’s Diane E. Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism, and Eve Blau, adjunct professor of the history and theory of urban form and design, co-organized the colloquium with Heliana Angotti-Salgueiro of the IEA-University of São Paulo. Presentations spanned topics from the use of satellite imagery to assess urbanization in the Amazon to creative activations of archives related to São Paulo’s growth to the cultural imagination of water in Mexico City. Introducing cutting-edge digital tools while reassessing historical sources, the colloquium overall pointed to new trajectories in understanding Latin America’s largest and fastest-growing metropolises.

The Harvard colloquium, co-sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS), and the GSD, built on a previous conference on a similar topic that took place in São Paulo in 2024. Both had roots in longstanding research undertaken at the GSD as well as Angotti-Salgueuiro’s time at Harvard, first in 2018 when she was researching the representation of cities, and then as a visiting scholar at DRCLAS in 2021–2022.

In 2018, she encountered the Druker Design Gallery exhibition Urban Intermedia: City, Archive, Narrative . That media-rich presentation was the culmination of the four-year Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, co-directed by Blau. Focused on bringing together scholarship, design, and new media, the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative fostered interdisciplinary research on four cities: Berlin, Boston, Istanbul, and Mumbai. The project aimed to use new media tools to better understand patterns of growth, migration, and the tensions between urban design and unplanned human behavior. One outcome of this Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, the 2018 exhibition featured rich animations that wove together maps, drawings, photographs, films and textual accounts to represent complex, multilayered urban centers.

Speaking at the plenary session of the conference, Blau provided a methodological foundation for the convening, describing how the approach behind Urban Intermedia could be applied to Latin American cities. As the conference brief explained, the aim of the gathering was two-fold: “understanding of media as a tool for storytelling, argumentation, and reinterpretation in urban studies,” as the Harvard Mellon Urban initiative demonstrated, as well as “the interrogation of particularities of Latin America’s cities and environments as captured through imagery.”

Some of the project shared at the conference could be as visually stunning as they were informative about urbanism. Gabriel Kozlowski, a doctoral candidate at the GSD and founding partner of POLES–Political Ecology of Space, shared his research on “critical cartography.” Using satellite imagery and new mapping techniques, Kozlowski captures vivid representations of the urbanization of the Amazon to counter prevailing myths about the area. “The project makes visible the multiple layers composing the region,” he notes. “From the footprint of present societies to centuries-old territorial manipulation, the mapping presents the Amazon as a complex, human-shaped landscape rather than a homogeneous, pristine forest.” Produced as a collaboration between POLES and AO—Architects Office, the maps, presented as “Forest Gens” in this year’s Venice Biennale, convey vital knowledge about the region and stand as compelling aesthetic objects.

The particulars of Latin American urbanism were the focus of a conference session, moderated by the GSD’s Ana María Léon Crespo, associate professor of architecture, devoted to comparing urbanization in Buenos Aires and São Paulo, noting how “progress” in each context was often accompanied by violence and destruction. Beatriz Picollotto Siqueira Bueno of the University of São Paulo examined the city’s explosive growth during the early twentieth-century coffee boom. Using university archives, Bueno visualized the rapid urbanization of São Paulo as a metaphorical piano. She presented an animation that represented different buildings rising or being demolished (sometimes within as little as seven years) as keys on a cityscape keyboard.  Virginia Bonicatto of the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, examined the development of skyscrapers in Buenos Aires and the kinds of cultural products—advertisements, films, even songs—that emerged in tandem with the profit-driven creation of the city’s skyline. 

The emphasis on images in the conference also raised questions of what might be overlooked in visual histories of urbanization. Most directly, Davis presented research about the historical place of water in the cultural imagination of Mexico City, part of a larger project to narrate “the history of urbanization through the entanglement of cities and water.” As Davis described it, the development of Mexico City from an ancient pre-Colombian capital on a lake to a sprawling metropolis involved the infrastructural and visual suppression of water. Vast infrastructure projects removed water from the urban core as the role of water in everyday life receded from the cartographic representations of the city. Yet, in a changing climate, this collective overlooking has come at a cost, with water returning in the form of catastrophic flooding.

Bueno’s archival history of Brazil’s largest city also sought to reveal hidden aspects of urban development. The archive she oversees includes detailed construction photography depicting the multiracial members of the working class—Afrobrazilians and Japanese immigrants prominent among them—who actually built the city, yet whose contributions have been largely written out of narrative histories.

Following the conference was an exhibition of video works focused on Latin American cities, including work by filmmaker Pablo Martínez-Zárate, who had previously led a workshop for students at the GSD. In his talk at the conference, “The City Through Its Cracks,” he argued for the “crack” as a compositional strategy to visualize aspects of urban life that had previously been invisible. Looking back at the history of radical filmmaking, he proposed a “liquid montage” to emphasize fissures of meaning between images. Martínez-Zárate’s evocative approach to documentary film served as an appropriate capstone to a conference focused on interrogating historical lacuna. The scholars convened by Davis, Blau, and Angotti-Salgueiro sought out blank spaces and omissions from the historical record, areas that today urgently need to be seen.