Plug-In Pastoral

A vertical garden in the backyard of 40 Kirkland Street on the campus of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) promises sanctuary to insects, relief from the late-summer heat, and new insights for how cities around the world can mitigate the effects of climate change. More than 1400 local plants hang in grow bags from a cylindrical scaffolding tower that rises nearly as high as the surrounding buildings. Titled Polinature , the project is spearheaded by Belinda Tato, associate professor in practice of landscape architecture at the GSD. “Polinature has been designed as a low-cost, low-tech temporary solution to bring climatic comfort to urban areas that currently lack it,” Tato explains in a text about the work.

Funded by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard, Polinature is, on the one hand, harmonious with its immediate surroundings. Grown from seed in Massachusetts nurseries, the plants are similar to those found in yards and fields all over Cambridge, and the name refers to Tato’s aim of bolstering the local population of pollinating insects. On the other hand, Polinature has a singular aesthetic and self-sufficient function that sets it apart from its context. The steel tubes of the scaffolding and the counterweight system that keeps it stable attest to Polinature’s temporary status—the structure will be disassembled within a few weeks with minimal waste—while highlighting the project’s overall character, which is as much technological as pastoral.

Polinature is a machine for producing climate relief. Solar panels that cap the tower are capable of providing the project with its own source of off-the-grid electricity. In addition to powering digital displays with information about the project aims and data about Polinature’s climatic performance, the solar panels are adequate to support a set of twelve inflatable pods that ring the tower. Six of these pods are permanently inflated and embedded with LEDs to provide illumination. Another six are what Tato calls “climatic bubbles.” Apart from providing shade, these pods inflate and deflate in response to environmental conditions. Nozzles in the undersides of the climatic bubbles produce a cooling breeze for anyone below to enjoy.

For the past two decades, Tato has investigated how designers can address the deadly effects of heat in urban areas. Climate scientists have warned that cities are becoming hotter more quickly than rural areas, a divergence that is even more pronounced in megacities with populations over 10 million. “Urban greening” can play a role in mitigating these effects, though tree canopies dense enough to have a significant cooling function are often distributed unevenly, making excessive city heat a tangible index of social inequality.

Tato stresses that no single architectural intervention can compensate for the structural factors driving climate change. Still, Polinature has the potential to address acute dangers immediately while permanent solutions come to fruition. As a prototype, Polinature offers an opportunity to study “how the structure is creating a better climatic comfort in the space compared to the outside,” Tato says. Sensors placed inside and outside the structure provide comparative data, allowing Tato and her team to assess the project’s performance quantitatively and optimize it in future iterations. Polinature is the result of years of careful study, not only of the nature of the plants that are most suited to such a growing arrangement, but also of mechanisms that can modulate the airflow from the climatic bubbles, producing the perfect breeze.

Tato stresses that the Cambridge location, which was already verdant, is far from the end point for the project. “In an ideal world, this should have been placed on a parking lot,” she says. Polinature has the potential to provide instant urban greening and convert disused, asphalt-heavy areas into climatically comfortable public spaces. The designs for the project are open-source, shareable with urban planners, architects, and builders as well as policymakers and communities around the world. To Tato, the iteration of Polinature at the GSD represents a “kit of parts” that could be quickly and inexpensively mass produced.

Polinature extends Tato’s longstanding work investigating how landscape architecture can support efforts toward climate justice. With Jose Luis Vallejo, Tato is a founding member of Ecosistema Urbano , a group of architects and urban designers with offices in Madrid, Florida, and Massachusetts. Polinature refines and develops concepts at the heart of their Eco-Boulevard project for Madrid (2004–2008), described as an “urban recycling operation.” Tiers of trees arranged on a cylindrical tower provide both cooling through evapotranspiration and an inviting social space.  While Eco-Boulevard became a permanent fixture in Madrid, Polinature is about providing immediate impact with zero waste. Tato designed it as what she calls a “plug-in” structure, easy to erect and dismantle in any context. That terminology evokes the work of avant-garde collective Archigram, whose members envisioned cities comprising flexible, mobile, high-tech structures that could respond to inhabitants’ changing needs.

While Archigram’s work channels the consumerist tendencies of postwar mass culture, Polinature is wholly sustainable and community oriented. When the tower comes down in mid-September, Tato and her team will give away all the plants that ring the structure to people in Cambridge. In that way, this temporary garden could have a long-term effect on the city’s urban ecology. Polinature will live on in other ways as well, especially as a learning and teaching opportunity about how we must contend with a changing climate. “The goal is that we pollinate Cambridge with the idea of the project,” says Tato.

GSD Announces Fall 2024 Public Programs and Exhibitions

The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) announces its fall 2024 schedule of public programs and exhibitions, many of which offer interdisciplinary perspectives on conflict, power, and design as a means of communication.

In the series of events Democracy and Urban Form (October 9–10), Michael Sandel, Richard Sennett, and Diane Davis discuss how the design of our cities can empower citizens and facilitate modes of discourse essential to democratic societies. Senior Loeb Scholar Malkit Shoshan hosts “Reconstruction and Redestruction” (October 24), a discussion about the complexities of postwar reconstruction with Andrew Herscher and Daniel Serwer. In “Building with Care” (September 24), Shoshan develops similar ideas, speaking with Tatiana Bilbao and Elke Krasny about how a powerful shift in worldview can follow from displacing the use of the word “war.”

Foregrounding global perspectives on the power dynamics underlying design history and practice, on October 7, Germane Barnes presents “Where This Flower Blooms,” his Wheelwright Prize research that reinserts North African building practices that were critical to Italian architecture throughout antiquity but erased in Eurocentric histories of design. The talk coincides with Barnes’ first solo exhibition, which opens at the Art Institute of Chicago on September 21. In the 2024 Aga Khan Program Lecture, Iraqi landscape architect Jala Makhzoumi (October 22) searches for a grounded language for landscape architecture in the Middle East that captures the complexity of the English term “landscape.”

Fall programs explore the role of design in mitigating environmental degradation while bolstering social equity and deepening our connections with nature. Anne Whiston Spirn poses direct questions about the connection between climate change and urban landscapes in her lecture, “Restoring Nature, Rebuilding Community” (October 29), while Chelina Odbert (September 12) addresses 15 years of her “mission-driven,” community-engaged design. Surveying the practice of landscape architect Bas Smets, the exhibition Changing Climates (October 28–December 20) demonstrates the power of urban micro-climates in confronting ecological crisis. And Sean Godsell, the Kenzo Tange Visiting Critic, reflects on the Australian bush, a “mystical, mythical” place where water is a most precious commodity (October 17).

Focusing on the practice of design and the tools architects use to develop their work, the exhibition Architecture as an Instruction-Based Art (August 26–October 14), curated by Farshid Moussavi, features construction coordination drawings created by practitioners from around the world. These detailed composite drawings, which Moussavi and exhibition contributors discuss on September 3, are conceptual tools architects use to think through their buildings. Selections of the drawings are also featured in Harvard Design Magazine 52: Instruments of Service (launching October 16), guest edited by Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti and Jacob Reidel.

The complete public program calendar appears below and can be viewed on the GSD’s events calendar.

Architecture as an Instruction-Based Art
Exhibition
Druker Design Gallery
August 26–October 14

Exhibition Opening: Architecture as an Instruction-Based Art
Farshid Moussavi and guests
September 3, 6:30pm

Eric Höweler, “Clay: Pedagogy and Practice”
Lecture
September 10, 6:30pm

Chelina Odbert, “Situating Justice: Reflections on Mission-Driven Practice”
Margaret McCurry Lectureship in the Design Arts
September 12, 6:30pm

Perfect Days (2023)
Film Screening
September 19, 6:30pm

GSD Comeback: Celebration of Alumni & Friends
September 20–22

 Malkit Shoshan, Tatiana Bilbao, and Elke Krasny
“Building with Care: Feminist Perspectives on Design in Conflict”
Senior Loeb Scholar Conversation
September 24, 6:30pm

Signe Nielsen, “Parks and Monuments: A Cultural Evolution”
Lecture
September 26, 12:30pm

RealTimeNature
With opening remarks by Peter Galison and closing keynote by Daniel Barber
DDes Conference
September 27, 9am

Germane Barnes, “Where This Flower Blooms”
Wheelwright Prize Lecture
October 7, 6:30pm

Wheelwright Prize Jury with Germane Barnes
David Brown, David Hartt, Mark Lee, Megan Panzano, and Sumayya Vally
Conversation
October 8, 12:30pm

Democracy and Urban Form
Michael Sandel, “Democracy’s Discontent”
Lecture
October 9, 6:30pm

Democracy and Urban Form
Richard Sennett, Diane Davis, Claire Zimmerman, Markus Miessen, and Guests
Panel Discussion
October 10, 12:30pm

Theodore Spyropoulos, “Quantum”
Rachel Dorothy Tanur Memorial Lecture
October 15, 6:30pm

Harvard Design Magazine 52: Instruments of Service
Issue Launch
October 16, 12:30pm

Sean Godsell, “Your Feet Against My Feet: Upside-Down Architecture”
Kenzo Tange Visiting Critic Lecture
October 17, 6:30pm

Jala Makhzoumi, “Landscape, Garden, and a Colonial Legacy”
Aga Khan Program Lecture
October 22, 6:30pm

Malkit Shoshan, Andrew Herscher, and Daniel Serwer
“Reconstruction and Redestruction: Post-War Antinomies”
Senior Loeb Scholar Conversation
October 24, 6:30pm

The 2024 Ivory Prize Housing Innovation Summit
October 25, 12:30pm

Changing Climates
Exhibition
Druker Design Gallery
October 28–December 20

Anne Whiston Spirn, “Restoring Nature, Rebuilding Community”
Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture
October 29, 6:30pm

Exhibition Opening: Changing Climates
Bas Smets
October 31, 6:30pm

Laurie Olin, “First We Read, Then We Write”
Sylvester Baxter Lecture
November 7, 6:30pm

Sheila O’Donnell, “Conversations with Place”
Lecture
November 12, 6:30pm

A Round Table
Loeb Fellowship Symposium
November 15, 12pm

Symposium in Honor of Giuliana Bruno
With Keynotes by Isaac Julien and Emanuele Coccia
Gund Hall and Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
November 21

All programs take place in Gund Hall, are open to the public, and will be simultaneously streamed to the GSD’s website, unless otherwise noted.

Contemporaries, Now and Then

Los Angeles’ Alameda Street cuts a north-south line through the city. Potholed by time, traffic, and freight trucks, the roadway stretches from Chinatown to the Port of Long Beach. At the northernmost end, the broad, commercial street marks a boundary between Little Tokyo, a pedestrian-scaled historic district of Japanese-American culture dating to the late nineteenth century, and the Arts District, a steadily gentrifying neighborhood where with each passing decade light industry gives way to artist studios, which are then replaced by galleries, restaurants, and new condo developments.

The two sides exist in a quiet equilibrium, connected by the Little Tokyo/Arts District metro station. In a metropolis often derided as traffic congested sprawl, this recently reopened underground hub for public transit links this corner of Los Angeles to the farther flung edges of the basin. For GSD associate professor of architecture John May, Alameda Street is a seam between two urban fabrics, each in states of considerable transformation.

This past spring, May led the option studio “The Temporary Contemporary: Assembling a Public in Downtown Los Angeles.” His course brief frames the stark, shadeless plaza around Little Tokyo/Arts District metro station as a “missed opportunity” for creating a space where folks might assemble—and that with such a gathering of bodies comes a vibrant connection of political and aesthetic life. “This does not imply that the content of aesthetic work must become explicitly political, but rather that ‘art’ (very broadly conceived) and the institutions where it is housed, can form spaces, arenas, and backgrounds for publics,” writes May in his introduction to the studio.

The Geffen Contemporary, a satellite of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, is located along Alameda Street and exemplifies the kind of institution May describes. On one side of the converted warehouse a message from Barbara Kruger— Untitled (Questions) (1990/2018)—queries passing drivers in all caps. “WHO IS BEYOND THE LAW? WHO IS BOUGHT AND SOLD?” her mural asks, demonstrating a necessary conflation of art, politics, and urban space.

Conditions of publicness are embedded in the museum’s history, as is its ambiguous relationship to Little Tokyo. Although The Geffen Contemporary shares the block with the Japanese American National Museum, it is located at the end of a long pedestrian plaza, which serves both institutions, and is set back from the street. One of the challenges posed to students was to address the urban connection between the museum and the metro station, where they were to develop a mixed-use building designed to support a residency for performance artists. The program grew out of a very real necessity: Wonmi’s Warehouse is a 14,500-square-foot facility that is part of the Geffen Contemporary but only occasionally used for exhibitions.

Connected to MOCA, but originally a separate industrial structure, it was never outfitted for any specific program. Inflexible in its raw flexibility, the space lacks facilities, such as dressing rooms, showers, and rehearsal space. “[Associate curator Alex Sloane] described the warehouse as a space for bodies and the MOCA Geffen as a space for objects—in her view the warehouse is woefully inadequate for bodies,” notes May. As such, the bipartite brief reimagines two sites—the warehouse interior and the Metro station—to better accommodate invited artists, dancers, musicians and forge new understandings of audience.

May also suggests that performance art defies the financialization of the art market. As such, the art form itself is aligned with contestations in public space, be them aesthetic or political, both suggest a kind of urban choreography that manifests, draws people together, and then fleetingly dissipates. Artist Suzanne Lacy, writing in the 1995 collection Mapping the Terrain , outlines a trajectory of what was then termed “new genre public art”—artist and collectives like Judy Baca, Martha Rosler, and Ant Farm (Lacy’s examples) to Postcommodity, Crenshaw Dairy Mart, and the The Los Angeles Urban Rangers (mine) that engage urban space as a call to action. “This construction of a history of new genre public art is not built on a typology of materials, spaces, or artist media, but rather on concepts audience, relationship, communication, and political intention.”[1]

MOCA Geffen was initially conceived as an exercise in temporality. In late 1983 when it first opened as a provisional outpost, some 1,500 architects and designers showed up for a preview party. Los Angeles Times urban design critic Sam Hall Kaplan reported the movement of attendees as a “parade.” It’s easy to imagine this creative murmuration flocking to what was then called the “Temporary Contemporary,” to mingle, network, and ogle the pair of old warehouses renovated by Frank O. Gehry, then, as now, LA’s homegrown star architect.

The architect’s rising fame, coupled with his penchant for bricolage made him a perfect choice to tackle the 55,000-square-foot retrofit. His scrappy, light touch approach to the industrial building (originally designed by AC Martin in 1947) contrasted the studied postmodern geometries of Arata Isozaki’s plans for MOCA , which was then under construction on Bunker Hill and wouldn’t open until 1986.

The convening was orchestrated by a short-lived nonprofit, the Architecture and Design Support Group, whose mission was to raise design consciousness in the city. Kaplan was skeptical, writing in the LA Times, “The question raised by the group’s stated intent is how relevant the architecture and design exhibits and programs will be under the aegis of the museum, whether they will be just another forum for the new cadre of avant-garde architects and designers who are self-consciously pretending to be artists, or whether they will indeed help redirect the profession toward fulfilling its obligation as a social art to enhance the quality of life.”[2]

His critique, however narrowly cast, points to a larger concern, one echoed by the themes of The Temporary Contemporary studio: What is the agency of museums, of architecture to serve a community? The necessity of an architecture of assembly was made urgent during the racial reckonings following Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. In the years since, performance has emerged as a tool of rapid response—a means to bring underrepresented bodies into the institution and unsettle staid relationships between viewer and art. The venues where these performances happen are potentially transformative places.

May recasts the role of the museum from passive to active. His sentiments echo ones made decades earlier by Bernard Tschumi.  “There is no architecture without action, no architecture without events, no architecture without program,”[3] wrote Tschumi in 1981, prefiguring Gehry’s Temporary Contemporary. Revisiting these ideas again, the architect was part of the jury for the studio’s final review in late April.

By imagining that MOCA might cultivate a spectrum of places along the public-to-private spectrum as site of free expression and refuges for queer, transgender, and BIPOC people—people often excluded or policed in public, The Temporary Contemporary studio envisions an architecture of resistance. Says May, “If we’re losing the right to protest and enact certain kinds of behavior in our ‘public space’, which isn’t really public, then maybe museums are going to have to take on this role more emphatically going forward.”

 

[1] Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, Seattle: Bay Press, 1995, p. 28.

[2] Sam Hall Kaplan, “’Temporary Contemporary’ Agenda: Architects Tie Design Goals to L.A.” Los Angeles Times (1923-1995); Nov 25, 1983; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Los Angeles Times, pg. OC_C23.

[3] Bernard Tschumi, “Violence of Architecture,” Artforum, 1981. Accessed June 6, 2024. https://www.artforum.com/features/violence-of-architecture-2-215475/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A System of Gaps and Linkages

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remembering Fumihiko Maki (1928–2024)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Housing, By and For the Public

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

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

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

Susanne Schindler

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

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

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

The Return of the Public Developer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Designing the Conditions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The GSD Announces 2024–2025 Faculty Promotions

The Harvard Graduate School of Design announces three faculty promotions: Michelle Chang to associate professor of architecture, Eric Höweler to professor of architecture, and Carole Voulgaris to associate professor of urban planning, effective July 1, 2024.

Michelle Chang joined the GSD as assistant professor of architecture from Rice University in 2019 and has taught architecture core studios, lecture courses on digital media, and seminars tied to her research. Two concerns recur in her syllabi: an inquiry into “vagueness” or indetermination as a counterbalance to the positivistic specificity required by many architectural design activities, and an exploration of how the conceptual structures underlying everyday design tools—especially, yet not exclusively, digital software programs—subtly inflect how design concepts translate into built forms, and how these tools’ structures inevitably affect us all. Chang researches the techniques and histories of architectural representation, investigating how optics, digital media, and modes of cultural production influence translations between design and building. In her practice, similarly, she goes beyond conventional building projects to work through ideas by curating exhibitions, creating installations that include performative elements, and producing video and sound recordings. Chang also writes in various genres, from the scholarly exposition to the evocative aphorism. Her teaching draws skillfully upon her many types of practice and is enriched by her understanding of how all aspects of the design process—including mundane and media-specific details that are often neglected—contribute to the built environment and can be engaged with creativity. She earned a Master of Architecture degree from the GSD and a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations (now called “International Studies”) from Johns Hopkins University, where she also completed a minor in French. This wide-ranging educational base makes her especially responsive to the concerns of architecture graduate students entering the discipline from other fields.

Eric Höweler, who first taught at the GSD in 2005 and was appointed assistant professor of architecture in 2011 and promoted to associate professor of architecture in 2017, has consistently taught foundational courses, including the Core 3 INTEGRATE studio, which guides students to integrate a building’s systems, envelope, program, and spatial concerns. This “comprehensive building” design studio plays to Höweler’s interest in creating designs that respond to many competing forces, programmatic as well as practical. Höweler completed his architectural training at Cornell University, where he earned a Bachelor of Architecture and a Master of Architecture. Along with partner Meejin Yoon, he founded Höweler + Yoon (H+Y) in 2005. He has designed buildings across a wide variety of types—housing, institutional, memorials, civic space. What underlies all of them is his focus on new material uses and an interest in forging identities that connect cultural heritage and contexts. H+Y’s recent projects include the MIT Collier Memorial, a milled granite compression structure that commemorates the life of Officer Sean Collier, who was killed in action after the Boston Marathon Bombing; the UVA Memorial, a landform structure dedicated to enslaved laborers at the University of Virginia; 212 Stuart Street, a multi-family residential tower in Boston; and the new MIT Museum in Cambridge, MA. H+Y’s work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the 2006 Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and has been published and reviewed broadly. Additionally, Höweler and Yoon have co-authored two monographs: Verify in Field: Projects and Conversations | Höweler + Yoon (Park Books, 2021) and Expanded Practice (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009). Höweler’s receptivity to differences among audiences and users, his ability to expand on vernacular construction techniques and materials, and his generous capacity for inclusivity all respond to vital needs in today’s global professional and pedagogical practice. He looks backward, forward, and all around, to discover new ways to make buildings, generating novel and robust outcomes through his inventive use of materials, innovative building assemblies, and collaboration with non-traditional stakeholders. At a time when so many variables impact design, Höweler demonstrates the interconnectedness of issues, from tectonic and sustainable considerations to inclusive and participatory practice.

Carole Voulgaris joined the Department of Urban Planning and Design as assistant professor of urban planning in 2019. Her scholarship focuses on the use and misuse of data in transportation and travel planning, with a specialized interest in forecasting and measurement. Voulgaris has a critical perspective on how popular transportation metrics are defined and analyzed to predict the future and address, or ignore, issues of equity. Deeply skeptical about the forecasts that transportation agencies provide to funding agencies and the public, she demonstrates through specific examples how forecasts are reliably unreliable and convincingly speculates that all the incentives push toward forecasts of greater, rather than lesser, use of transportation modes. The greater the forecast of demand, the greater the ability to get the project approved and secure more funding. In this way, she extends work by other analysts, who have identified that such overestimation occurs, by examining how it happens and whether changes in programs and regulations can make a difference. Voulgaris’s prolific publication record since coming to the GSD includes articles that directly and insightfully examine the forecasting issue, including “What Is a Forecast for? Motivations for Transit Ridership Forecast Accuracy in the Federal New Starts Program,” published in 2020 in the Journal of the American Planning Association, and “Crystal Balls and Black Boxes: What Makes a Good Forecast,” published in 2019 in the Journal of Planning Literature. Voulgaris teaches transportation courses for the department, playing to her research focus, as well as teaching three courses that are part of the urban planning core curriculum, including the modules on quantitative analysis for planners and spatial analysis for planners. A testament to her teaching, Voulgaris received the 2021 Student Forum Faculty Award. Previously, she was an assistant professor of civil engineering at California Polytechnic State University where she taught courses on sustainable mobility, public transportation, transportation system planning, and intelligent transportation systems. Voulgaris holds a PhD in Urban Planning from UCLA, a Master of Business Administration from University of Notre Dame, and Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Civil Engineering from Brigham Young University.

Announcing New Faculty Appointments for the 2024–2025 Academic Year

The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) announces eight new faculty appointments for the coming academic year. Reinforcing the existing strengths of the GSD, these new faculty members bring expertise ranging from the management of contemporary city governments to the history of ancient landscape design, and from cutting-edge robotics to sustainable construction techniques. The new faculty members effective July 1, 2024 are: Karen Lee Bar-Sinai, assistant professor of landscape architecture; Maurice Cox, Emma Bloomberg Professor in Residence of Urban Planning and Design, Iman Fayyad, assistant professor of architecture; Elisa Iturbe, assistant professor of architecture; Magda Maaoui, assistant professor of urban planning; Angela Pang, assistant professor in practice of architecture; and Kaja Tally-Schumacher, assistant professor of landscape architecture. Rachel N. Weber joins the GSD as professor of urban planning, effective January 1, 2025.

 

Dr. Karen Lee Bar-Sinai comes to the GSD after serving as a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow and a visiting lecturer at the School of Engineering and Design at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) since 2021. A former Loeb Fellow (class of 2013), her research explores the evolving relationships between matter and technology at the intersection of landscape architecture, robotic construction, and the environment. Co-founder and design director at SAYA/Design for Change, a Jerusalem-based design studio that has drafted hypothetical solutions to brick-and-mortar problems in disputed territories around the world, she specializes in the use of design and design tools to be used in conflict resolution processes. Bar-Sinai’s recent writing includes co-authored articles “Toward Acoustic Landscapes: A Digital Design Workflow for Embedding Noise Reduction in Ground-forming” in the Journal of Digital Landscape Architecture (2023), and “Editing Landscapes: Experimental Frameworks for Territorial-Based Robotic Fabrication” in Frontiers of Architectural Research (2022). Bar-Sinai is a recipient of the British Chevening scholarship a Rothschild Fellowship, and the America-Israel Cultural Foundation (AICF) award. She earned a BArch (cum laude) from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology; an MSc in Cities, Space and Society from the London School of Economics; and a PhD from the Technion. Bar-Sinai’s background in a succession of research and teaching venues of excellence, coupled with her commitment to innovative and rigorous research, will aid the Department of Landscape Architecture in their determination to continue to exert even greater impact in the topic of materials and design in landscape architecture. At the GSD she will advance the topic in concert with other pressing issues such as climate adaptation, the repair and recovery of landscape sites, and the shaping of landscapes for public amenity and engagement.

Maurice Cox’s career, spanning from private practice to academia to public service, has been dedicated to demonstrating how design excellence can be at the center of transformative urban innovation that drives social and environmental justice. An award-winning urban designer, he has been the planning and economic development director of two major cities in the United States: Detroit and Chicago. He served as mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, held the federal appointment of Design Director for the National Endowment for the Arts under two United States presidents, and has taught at several design schools, including as a tenured faculty member at the University of Virginia and at Tulane University. At Tulane, he also served as the university’s first Associate Dean for Community Engagement, responsible for strategic initiatives between the university’s community outreach design programs of the university and city and state governmental agencies, cultural institutions, and community organizations. As director of the Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design, Tulane School of Architecture’s community design center, he operated at the intersection of design and civic engagement pursuing projects for the rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Cox’s unique range of of experience reflects his profound and equal commitment to merging architecture, design, and politics. Upon completing a BArch from the Cooper Union in 1983, Cox moved to Italy where he practiced architecture and urban design for ten years in partnership with his wife, architect Giovanna Galfione, while also working as an assistant professor of architecture at Syracuse University in Florence, Italy. Cox’s numerous awards and accolades include, among others, the Cooper Union Presidential Medal (2004), the John Q. Hejduk Award for Architecture (2006), the Congress for New Urbanism Charter Award (2006), an honorary doctorate from the University of Detroit Mercy (2008), the Edmund N. Bacon Urban Design Award (2009), the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence (2009), an AIA Collaborative Achievement Award (2018), and the Henry Hope Reed Award (2024). Cox was a 2005 Harvard GSD Loeb Fellow, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2023 for lifetime achievements in architecture, and recently received an Honorary Doctor of Architecture from Illinois Institute of Technology. In the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the GSD, he will help create new dialogues and pathways across our various departments and programs and help enhance our visibility at Harvard as a school addressing important challenges of our time—particularly with respect to disinvested communities, growing racial, class, and ethnic inequality, and the positive role that design excellence in the urban built environment can play in meeting these challenges. Additionally, as the Emma Bloomberg Professor in Residence of Urban Planning and Design, Cox will play an integral role in connecting the school to cities around the world.

Iman Fayyad rejoins the GSD from Syracuse University, where she served as assistant professor of architecture, coordinating the first-year design studio curriculum and overseeing a research lab in spatial geometry with a focus on tectonics, construction, and representation. Fayyad is founding director of project:if, an award-winning research practice that explores the relationship between architectural geometry and material economy, sensory perception, and the politics of physical space and building practice. Her public work and research on zero-waste geometric construction techniques has been funded by grants through the MetLife Foundation and the Lender Center for Social Justice, and has received recognition by the Architect’s Newspaper Best of Design Young Architects Prize, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) Faculty Design Award, and Architizer‘s Architecture For Good Award. She has published in Technology | Architecture and Design, Nexus Network Journal: Architecture and Mathematics, Log, Pidgin, Archinect, Advancements in Architectural Geometry, the New York Times, and has exhibited at the Yale Architecture Gallery, Carnegie Museum of Art, citygroupNY, and the Roca London Gallery. She is a 2024 MacDowell Colony Fellow. Fayyad holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from MIT and a Master of Architecture with Distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she was the recipient of the AIA Certificate of Merit, Faculty Design Award, and the Araldo A. Cossutta Prize for Design Excellence. Prior to Syracuse, Fayyad served on the faculty at the GSD, MIT, and Princeton, and was the inaugural John Irving Innovation Fellow at Harvard. She has practiced in offices in Boston, New York, and Paris. As a leading voice in articulating the significance of geometry as an underlying force in spatial discourse, Fayyad will advance the knowledge of the disciplinary interrelationships between geometry and architecture, including fundamental issues of structure, tectonics, materiality, and climate resilience.

Elisa Iturbe, who earned dual master’s degrees from the Yale School of the Environment and the Yale School of Architecture, joins the Department of Architecture as assistant professor of architecture. Previously, Iturbe served as assistant professor at the Cooper Union; she has also taught at the Yale School of Architecture and Cornell AAP. Additionally, Iturbe is co-founder of Outside Development, a design and research practice. Through her work, Iturbe interrogates the relationship between energy, power, and form, working across theory and design to lay bare the allegiance between architecture and carbon modernity. Her research and practice offer an alternative history of architecture’s role in the climate crisis, linking the adoption of fossil fuels to the emergence of specific spatial and formal concepts—most of which are still taught and used, leaving the fundamental tenets of carbon modernity fully intact, despite contemporary improvements in building technology. Recently, she co-curated and co-produced the exhibition Confronting Carbon Form at the Cooper Union, which exhibited original works in various media that define the spatial concepts of the carbon age. In tandem, she curated a year-long lecture series titled “Architectures of Transition” and a symposium titled “Order!: The Spatial Ideologies of Carbon Modernity.” This work builds on Iturbe’s guest-edited issue of Log, titled “Overcoming Carbon Form,” published in 2019. Her writings have been published in AA Files, Log, Perspecta, e-flux, and the New York Review of Architecture, and she co-authored, with Peter Eisenman, Lateness (Princeton University Press, 2020). Because the subjects of spatial thinking and climate change are often disconnected, Iturbe offers a unique voice that interrogates how architecture, space, and form participate in processes of epochal change.

Dr. Magda Maaoui recently served as a GSD design critic in urban planning and design and as a postdoctoral researcher at the Joint Center for Housing Studies. Maaoui’s research has been used in campaigns for good governance, affordable housing provision, and public and environmental health reform in France and in the United States. Her work has been featured in popular news sources including Le Monde, Architectural Review, Ouest France, Bondy Blog, La Gazette des Communes, and France Inter and France Culture public radio. While her research emphasizes housing policy and real estate development, she also studies related issues of healthy urban planning, neighborhood and community development, sustainability, planning regulation, and planning research methods. A member of the American Planning Association, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and the Urban Affairs Association, and a reviewer for the Revue Urbanités, Maaoui maintains an active stream of collaborative research, thanks to the support of institutions like the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Albertine Foundation. She has written or co-written peer-reviewed articles for the Journal of Planning Education and Research, Housing Studies, Urban Studies, and the Berkeley Planning Journal, and contributed to the books Pour en finir avec le petit Paris (2024), Habiter l’indépendance (2022) and Zoning: A Guide for 21st-Century Planning (2020). Maaoui co-founded the participatory design practice Ateliers d’Alger, a collective focusing on urban planning solutions for neighborhoods in Algeria and in France based on local participatory workshops, civic engagement, and the curation of expertise from local and transnational professionals. Ateliers d’Alger has received awards and grants from the Mairie de Paris, the Davis Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. She has a PhD from Columbia University, a master’s degree in Geography and Planning from École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, and bachelor’s degrees in Planning and Geography, and English Literature and Civilization from École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and Universités Lyon 2 and 3. She has been an urban planning research associate at the Atelier Parisien d’Urbanisme (APUR) in the Paris Mayor’s Office, and acted as an external expert consultant for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) working in Morocco. A former Fulbright Fellow and Normalienne Agrégée civil servant, Maaoui has been an adjunct professor at the University of Paris Cité and the University of Paris-Cergy and was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley during her master’s training. Her ability to link theory to practice, extensive knowledge of multiple planning systems, and commitment to good governance will bolster the Department of Urban Planning and Design.

Angela Pang, recent GSD design critic in architecture and the founder of PangArchitect, will join the faculty as assistant professor in practice of architecture. Guided by site and program with the integration of tectonics and structure, she challenges conventions through design and research, always balancing intellectual scrutiny and pragmatic solutions. Her firm’s recent design work includes the completion of several university libraries in Hong Kong, including the Polytechnic University, the Lingnan University, and the Chinese University. Other recent works include the Hong Kong Literature Archive and Research Center, as well as a student dormitory at the New Asia College for 300 students, both at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The firm’s major research projects include a research consultancy on building program for M+, a museum of contemporary visual culture in Hong Kong, and a series of exhibitions on Shinohara Kazuo, funded by the Graham Foundation and the Japan Foundation, done in collaboration with Washington University in St. Louis, the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, and the GSD. PangArchitect has received numerous design awards including the Architect’s Newspaper Award for Best Library Design, the Green Building Award from the Hong Kong Green Building Council, APIDA Top 10 Public Space in Asia Pacific, the FuturArc Green Leadership Award, the HKIA Cross-Strait Architectural Design Award, and multiple recognitions from Dezeen Design Award, the World Architecture Festival Award, and the Hong Kong Institute of Architects. Before establishing PangArchitect in 2010, Pang worked for Rafael Moneo in Madrid and SANAA in Tokyo. She received a MArch II from the GSD and a BArch from Cornell University. The Department of Architecture will be further enriched by her remarkable success in practice and extensive experience in building integration, from concept to execution.

Dr. Kaja Tally-Schumacher joins us as an assistant professor in landscape architecture with a focus on environmental history. She was previously a visiting scholar in Cornell’s Institute of Material Studies and Archaeology, a faculty associate in the Institute for European Studies at Cornell’s Einaudi Center, and assistant director of the Casa della Regina Carolina Excavation, Pompeii (Cornell-Bologna). Trained as a historian of ancient landscape architecture, her primary area of expertise is the archaeology and analysis of designed landscapes and environments in the Roman world (ca. 2nd century BCE to 4th century CE) across Western Eurasia and Northern Africa. Most recently she has been awarded the Ellen and Charles Steinmetz Endowment for Archaeology from the Archaeological Institute of America for her work on the gardens at Pompeii, a prestigious early-career award within the field of Classical Archaeology. Placing equal emphasis on previously unrecognized makers of landscape and minute investigation of artifactual, literary, and paleo-topographical evidence, Tally-Schumacher’s research advances a conceptually challenging and meticulously documented approach to the history of landscape architecture as co-produced by social, material, and climactic factors. Tally-Schumacher’s first book project, Gardeners, Plants, and Soils of the Roman World, draws an ambitious but finely detailed transect from antiquity to the Early Modern and Antebellum periods. Tally-Schumacher has a B.A. from the University of Minnesota with a double major in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology and Political Science and she earned an MA with distinction from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with a major in Roman art with a minor in nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture. She earned her PhD in Ancient Art and Archaeology from Cornell University in 2020. At Cornell she was runner-up award for the James F. Slevin Assignment Sequence Award (2017), granted for designing an innovative sequence of assignments in her course on Ancient Pompeii; promoting foundational, transferable skills; and actively addressing different learning styles. Tally-Schumacher’s approach to history presents several exciting paths forward for the department of landscape architecture, in addition to making new connections between and across diverse questions and fields of inquiry which are not typically seen to be connected.

Dr. Rachel N. Weber will be joining us in January 2025 from the University of Illinois at Chicago where she has taught and conducted research in the fields of economic development, real estate, city politics, and public finance since 1998. Weber is best known for her pioneering work unearthing how municipal government engagement with financial markets significantly affects the way cities operate and develop. She is the author of over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles, as well as numerous book chapters and published reports, and is the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning, a compilation of 40 essays by leading urban scholars. Her latest book, From Boom to Bubble: How Finance Built the New Chicago, won the Best Book Award from the Urban Affairs Association in 2017. Weber’s current research project spotlights the predictive knowledge practices that allow real estate investors to create and extract value from the built environment. Titled “The Urban Oracular: Speculating on the Future City,” this work builds on her previous insight that those involved in urban development too often are overconfident in their forecasts about supply and demand. Focusing on the period from the Global Financial Crisis through the Covid-19 pandemic, Weber is examining the role of ever more sophisticated models and algorithms that enable investors to convert the future into capital. This work holds the promise of extending beyond urban development to the very nature of planning itself, which necessarily relies on projective techniques that themselves are routinely applied yet often understudied. In addition to her academic responsibilities, Weber has served as an advisor to planning agencies, political candidates, and community organizations on issues related to financial incentives, property taxes, and neighborhood change. She was appointed to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s Urban Policy Committee in 2008 and by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to the Tax Increment Financing Reform Task Force in 2011. She has been cited and quoted extensively in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, The Economist, Crain’s, the Chicago Tribune, and other news outlets. She holds a master’s and PhD in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University and an undergraduate degree in Development Studies from Brown University. We are thrilled to welcome her to the Department of Urban Planning and Design and to the GSD.

Thandi Loewenson Awarded 2024 Wheelwright Prize

Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) is pleased to name Thandi Loewenson  the winner of the 2024 Wheelwright Prize . The $100,000 grant supports investigative approaches to contemporary architecture, with an emphasis on globally minded research.

Loewenson’s project, Black Papers: Beyond the Politics of Land, Towards African Policies of Earth & Air, engages a dynamic terrain of social and spatial relations in contemporary Africa. Whereas the importance of land in the context of African liberation movements and subsequent postcolonial governments has been analyzed mainly in terms of private property, dispossession and redistribution, and agriculture and mining, Loewenson pushes our understanding in radically new directions with the introduction of an analytic framework she calls “the entanglement of Earth and Air.” Through this framework, Loewenson expands these interpretations of land to include many overlapping terrains above and below ground, spanning rare metals buried far below the Earth’s crust and reaching up to the digital cloud and Earth’s ionosphere, and ranging in scale from a solitary breath of air to entire weather systems.

Ultimately, Loewenson’s project will examine how colonial capitalist systems of racialization, dispossession, and exploitation are co-constituted and endure across multiple, entangled Earthly and airborne terrains. The Wheelwright Prize will support her study, which will include aerial techniques for surveying and prospecting, as well as the mining of “technology metal,” minerals employed in networked devices that also underwrite a global system of digital dispossession. Among the forms her findings will take are the Black Papers, studies that aim to shape both policy discourse and public perception. Incorporating drawings, moving image, and performances as well as critical creative writing, the Black Papers are designed to reach broad audiences through popular media including video, radio, and social platforms like WhatsApp.

“The question of land, and its indelible link to African liberation and being, echoes across the continent as a central theme of liberation movements and the postcolonial governments that followed. Instead of solely engaging land as a site of struggle, this work situates land within a network of interconnected spaces, from layers deep within the Earth to its outermost atmospheric reaches,” says Loewenson. “This research presents a radical shift: developing a new epistemic framework and a series of open-access, creatively reimagined policy proposals—the Black Papers—in which earth and air are not distinct, but rather concomitant terrains through which racialization and exploitation are forged on the continent, and through which they will be fought. The Wheelwright Prize is uniquely placed to support such ambitious inquiry, enabling me to bring together seemingly disparate yet closely bound parts of our planet, and agitate for a more just and flourishing world.”

The Wheelwright Prize will fund two years of Loewenson’s research and travel. She plans to focus her work in seven African nations: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

“Expanding what constitutes architectural research, Thandi defines a sectional slice of inquiry that spans from the subterranean to the celestial. Her project is nothing short of a full reconceptualization of land and sky as material realities, sources of value, and sites of political struggle,” says Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at the GSD. “Such vision exemplifies the kind of ambition the Wheelwright Prize is meant to support. Along with the rest of the jury, I could not be more thrilled that she is this year’s winner.”

In addition to Whiting, jurors for the 2024 prize include: Chris Cornelius, professor and chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning; K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory and co-director of the Master in Design Studies program at the GSD; Jennifer Newsom, co-founder of Dream the Combine and assistant professor at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning; John Peterson, curator of the Loeb Fellowship at the GSD; and Noura Al Sayeh, head of Architectural Affairs for the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities.

“Loewenson’s research examines our planetary section, reaching from the probative violence of mining and extractive terrains to the fog of particles in the air we breathe and the digital fragments ricocheting in our outer atmosphere. Building from a necessary set of scholarly research about the entanglements of earth, air, bodies, and dispossession (on multiple timescales), her work extends these arguments into a material practice rich with layers—the matter that matters to our time,” says Newsom. “Loewenson promises to think with the materiality of place, collapsing the spaces of poetics and the landscapes of policy with the literal terrain of the context these projections shape. Her proposal was clear-headed about its purpose, research methods, and outputs, yet remained nimbly open to the propulsive capacity for her work to fractal outward in ‘activist academic practice’—to new audiences, interlocutors, policymakers, students, and neighbors. Loewenson constructs a relational field of inquiry essential for our discipline.”

The Wheelwright Prize supports innovative design research, crossing both cultural and architectural boundaries. Winning research proposal topics in recent years have included the environmental and social impacts of sand mining; the potential of seaweed, shellfish, and the intertidal zone to advance architectural knowledge; and new paradigms for digital infrastructure.

Loewenson was among four distinguished finalists selected from a highly competitive and international pool of applicants. The 2024 Wheelwright Prize jury commends finalists Meriem Chabani, Nathan Friedman, and Ryan Roark for their promising research proposals and presentations.

Born in Harare, Loewenson is an architectural designer/researcher who mobilizes design, fiction, and performance to stoke embers of emancipatory political thought and fires of collective action, and to feel for the contours of other, possible worlds. Using fiction as a design tool and tactic, and operating in the overlapping realms of the weird, the tender, the earthly, and the airborne, Loewenson engages in projects which provoke questioning of the status-quo, whilst working with communities, policy makers, unions, artists, and architects to act on those provocations. A senior tutor at the Royal College of Art, she holds a PhD in Architectural Design from The Bartlett, UCL. Loewenson is a co-founder of the architectural collective BREAK//LINE —an “act of creative solidarity” that “resists definition with intent”—formed at The Bartlett in 2018 to oppose the trespass of capital, the indifference towards inequality, and the myriad frontiers of oppression present in architectural education and practice today. She is also a contributor to EQUINET , the Regional Network on Equity in Health in East and Southern Africa, a co-founder of the Fiction, Feeling, Frame  research collective at the Royal College of Art, and a co-curator, with Huda Tayob and Suzi Hall, of the open-access curriculum project Race, Space & Architecture.