Interview with Toni Griffin: A Spotlight on the MDes Degree Publics Domain

How is a public constituted, both spatially and socially? How does the public become legible and desirable? For whom does it exist? These are some of the questions that animate Toni Griffin’s proseminar “Of the Public. In the Public. By the Public” at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). Toni Griffin, Professor in Practice of Urban Planning at Harvard GSD, specializes in leading complex, transdisciplinary planning, and urban design projects for multi-sector clients in cities with long histories of spatial and social injustice. The proseminar course draws from scholars, practitioners, and urban planners to build foundational intelligence and provocative interpretations of the plural meanings of public.

Griffin is Domain Head for Publics, one of four concentrations in the Master in Design Studies (MDes) at GSD. The program challenges conventional ways of learning and prepares students to understand how design shapes and influences the underlying processes of contemporary life. The program is uniquely situated at the GSD to draw on insights from a multitude of fields and expertise to break down the silos between disciplines and develop a holistic understanding of complex issues. Through fieldwork, fabrication, collaboration, and dissemination, the program is aimed at those who want to develop expertise in design practice while gaining tools to enable a wide range of career paths. Students select one of four domains of study—Ecologies, Narratives, Publics, and Mediums—and undertake a core set of courses, including labs, seminars, workshops, initiatives, publications, and ongoing projects that connect advanced research methods and related topical courses. Uniquely, trajectories within each domain allow students to construct their own interdisciplinary tracks and take part in course offerings across the GSD, as well as other schools and departments at Harvard.

Many of these core concepts resonate with Grffin’s practice. She is founder of urbanAC , based in New York, and leads the Just City Lab , a research platform for developing values-based planning methodologies and tools, including the Just City Index and a framework of indicators and metrics for evaluating public life and urban justice in public plazas.

Harvard GSD’s Joshua Machat spoke with Toni Griffin about the MDes program, open projects, and how the Publics domain set out to explore the socio-spatial design, planning, implementation, and advocacy.

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

Toni Griffin: They appear to be architects who are no longer satisfied with traditional modes of architecture, which tend to focus on the building and the outcome. They’re more interested in the forces that shape architecture and the built environment. And they’re interested in the impact of that architecture on society, people, and place. Architecture, particularly in its pedagogy in undergraduate and graduate programs—and sometimes even in practice—doesn’t address those issues sufficiently. I’m finding that applicants are looking to round out their understanding of how the built world is produced through architecture and/or other disciplines. Who is involved in that work, who’s impacted in that work, who does that work benefit, and who gets to decide, are all part of their curiosities.

Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary thinking is a critical part of contemporary problem-solving in design. Can you explain how this approach is integrated into the Publics domain?

I do it perhaps in a couple of ways in the proseminar, which is divided into six modules. “To be Public”, which is about how we bring our individual identities, cultures, and backgrounds into the public realm. “Of the Public”, which is about the data, knowledge, memories, that we place into the public realm. “By the Public”, which is about public governance. “For the Public”, which is about the things that the public sector provides for society, cities, and neighborhoods. “With the Public” is about engagement, participation, and power. “In the Public” is about how creatives and designers place things in the public realm.

We have two guest speakers who come and speak on each of those modules. They tend to come from two disciplinary perspectives: two different disciplines are in dialogue about a particular topic every other week. Secondly, the students are put into teams, and they have to co-facilitate a class where they lead the discussion, not me. This requires them to work together. Because the students come from different backgrounds and experiences—whether different genders, ethnicities, nationalities, or disciplines—they often forge a cross-identity and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

The advance of the just city is at the core of your Publics proseminar. The Mayors Imagining the Just City Symposium was held in April and MICD Fellows discussed strategies for using planning and design interventions to address racial injustice in each of their respective cities. How did this conversation support the Publics proseminar learning objectives?   

The Mayors Imagining the Just City public event is a part of the Mayor’s Institute on City Design (MICD) Just City Mayoral Fellowship program, which I lead through the Just City Lab. This is the third year of the fellowship in which eight mayors participate in an eleven-week online curriculum centered on best practices and examples of how urban planning, design, and development—the work that mayors lead—can achieve greater social and spatial justice.

During the closing session, when the mayors come back to Cambridge to present their projects and get feedback from eight resource experts, we end the program with a public program and presentation to give the GSD community exposure and access to city leaders and the roles that they play in building cities in collaboration with practitioners of the disciplines we offer at the GSD.

The learning objective is to create greater understanding around how public government, and specifically mayors, lead and shape this type of work. The event exposes students and the rest of the GSD community to the complexity of decision making around resources, choices, policies, and priorities that are helping to address issues in chronically disinvested neighborhoods and/or populations that have historically been marginalized through racially exclusionary and discriminatory practices.

It’s always my interest to expose students to other modes of practice, like the public sector, and the ways in which architects, landscape architects, and urban planners might find themselves situated in a public sector role—even running for mayor—and the ways in which their expertise can be useful within government, and not always as a consultant to government.

What do you think are the most distinguishing qualities of the MDes degree program at the GSD?

What makes the MDes program so attractive to students, and to me, is that it’s the most entrepreneurial design degree that we offer. Being a part of the program requires students to be comfortable with self-directing their journey through the four semesters. Students’ ability to choose a substantial number of your courses, across the departments at the GSD, across Harvard, and even some at MIT, is just amazing. It parallels how you might do a doctorate. It’s very self-directed. The beauty is in all the choices you get to make to inform your own intellectual curiosity. The challenge of that is all the courses on offer that you just won’t have time to do. It’s an embarrassment of riches and an extraordinary luxury students have that sometimes causes them a little bit of angst. But ultimately, they end up quite satisfied with the volume of choices.

I also like that the program includes students who have been out in the world working for some time alongside some students who are just coming out of their undergrad. I think that world experience, whether it’s two years or fourteen years, adds a lot to the depth of conversation. Students don’t realize that we as teachers are just as engaged in what they bring to the discussion as we give to them; in fact, it is a reciprocal relationship that makes for the best classroom environment.

The GSD is one of the most student-engaged design programs that I’ve ever been a part of. Students are very proactive through clubs, volunteer efforts, the production of their own events, and discussion groups. That brings a unique energy to the school and can drive change within the school. Students have a level of agency that allows them to feel very connected to each other and the GSD community, both during their time in the program and even after as alumni.

Harvard GSD Shortlists Four Architects for 2023 Wheelwright Prize

Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) is pleased to announce four shortlisted architects for the 2023 Wheelwright Prize. The Wheelwright Prize is an international competition for early-career architects. Winners receive a $100,000 (USD) fellowship to foster intensive, innovative architectural research that is informed by cross-cultural engagement and can make a significant impact on architectural discourse. Winning research proposal topics in recent years have included the potential of seaweed, shellfish, and the intertidal zone to advance architectural knowledge and material futures; how spaces have been transformed through the material contributions of the African Diaspora; and new architecture paradigms for storing data that can reimagine digital infrastructure.

The 2023 Wheelwright Prize drew a wide pool of international applicants. A first-phase jury deliberated in April; a winner will be announced in June.

Jurors for the 2023 prize include: Noura Al Sayeh, Head of Architectural Affairs for the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities; Mira Henry, design faculty at Southern California Institute for Architecture; Mark Lee, Chair of the Department of Architecture and Professor of Practice at Harvard GSD; Jacob Riedel, Assistant Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard GSD; Enrique Walker, Design Critic in Architecture at Harvard GSD; and Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at Harvard GSD.

The four finalists for the 2023 Wheelwright Prize, and their proposals, are:

Isabel Abascal: “Mother Architecture: Shaping Birth”

Isabel Abascal is a Mexico City–based architect and writer. In 2015, she founded the architecture studio LANZA Atelier, along with Alessandro Arienzo. From 2015 to 2017, Abascal was the Executive Director of LIGA, Espacio para Arquitectura, a platform dedicated to the dissemination and discussion of Latin American architecture. There, she curated myriad exhibitions, and co-edited the book Exposed Architecture, published by Park Books. She has also contributed to publications such as DOMUS, Avery Review,Arquine, Wallpaper*, and the UNAM Journal, among others. Abascal studied architecture at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, the Technische Universität in Berlin, and at the Vastu Shilpa Foundation in Ahmedabad, under Balkrishna Doshi.

The World Health Organization estimates that almost 800 women died from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth every day in 2020. Almost 95% of these deaths occurred in low and lower middle-income countries, and most could have been prevented. The high number of maternal deaths in some areas of the world reflects inequalities in access to quality health services and highlights the gap between rich and poor. With “Mother Architecture: Shaping Birth,” Abascal examines how rethinking architecture and spatial design can impact maternal mortality through case studies of matriarchal societies, home waterbirths, Pritzker-Prize maternity centers, and floating hospitals.

The Wheelwright Prize would expand research through case studies from the Americas and Europe to Western Africa and Southeast Asia, including Bolivia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Bangladesh, Senegal, and the United Kingdom.  The research will inform the design of a  space model for birth that could be implemented in both rural and urban areas by international health organizations and NGOs. The fieldwork, data collection, and prototype development, among additional research, will be disseminated amongst health practitioners and planning authorities, specifically for the places where the research was conducted.

Maya Bird-Murphy: “Examining Architectural Practice Through Alternative Methodology and Pedagogy”

Maya Bird-Murphy is a designer, educator, and the founder of Mobile Makers, an award-winning non-profit organization bringing design and skill-building workshops to underrepresented communities. She was selected by Theaster Gates and the Prada Group as an Experimental Design Lab awardee, featured as one of 50 people who shape Chicago in Newcity Magazine, and received the 2022 Pierre Keller Prize at the Hublot Design Prize ceremony in London. In 2018, she was named as an AIGA Design + Diversity Conference National Fellow.  The same year, she was featured in The American Institute of Architects’ (AIA) Emerging Professionals Exhibition 2018 for Mobile Makers. Bird-Murphy attended Ball State University and received an M.Arch from Boston Architectural College.

Through her research and practice, Maya Bird-Murphy, investigates the connection between architecture and identity. She cites that the mounting challenges the architecture field faces, including the climate crisis, social inequality, and land equity, can no longer be ignored. With “Examining Architectural Practice Through Alternative Methodology and Pedagogy,” Bird-Murphy aims to investigate the friction that exists between the traditional and alternative design practices, to document the nuances of individual practices, and ultimately, to gather and share knowledge through architectural storytelling. The research proposal takes a critical look at how to accelerate systems change in the architecture field, and what United States–based firms can learn from alternative practices around the world, specifically by exploring innovative methods to collect, store, and share open-source knowledge and stories that foster authentic connection and dialogue in the field.

With the Wheelwright Prize, Maya-Murphy plans travel to eight international cities to research and gather stories and data, visit firms and project sites, and conduct interviews with alternative practitioners, including Material Cultures in London, Fernanda Canales Arquitectura in Mexico City, Atelier Masomi in Niamey, and Estudio Guto Requena in Sao Paolo. The research will result in a published anthology that features stories, interviews, and original works of art and design that amplify alternative practice models and methodologies. A collection of portraits will be housed on a project website for individuals who want to establish an alternative practice of their own, designers looking to work for a firm doing more meaningful work, or clients looking for mission-driven firms to work with. She will also schedule in-person curated experiences in select cities, including dinner salons, roundtables, panel discussions, and other related events.

Jingru (Cyan) Cheng: “Tracing Sand: Phantom Territories, Bodies Adrift”

Jingru (Cyan) Cheng works across architecture, anthropology, and filmmaking. Her practice follows drifting bodies—from rural migrant workers to forms of water—to draw out latent relations across scales, confronting intensified social injustice and ecological crisis. Cheng received commendations from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) President’s Awards for Research in 2018 and 2020. She is also a 2022 Graham Foundation Grantee. Her work has been exhibited internationally, as part of Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany (2020-22), Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2019), Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), among others, and included in the Architectural Association’s permanent collection. Cheng holds a PhD by Design and M.Phil in Architecture and Urban Design (Projective Cities) from the Architectural Association (AA), and was the co-director of AA Wuhan Visiting School (2015–17). She co-led the MA architectural design studio Politics of the Atmosphere (2019–22) and currently teaches an interdisciplinary module across all schools at the Royal College of Art in London.

From airports to beaches and river basins to hydroelectric dams, sand has an unnoticed yet significant impact on the built environment and human communities. Sand is a key component of concrete, glass, asphalt road, and artificial land, supporting modern cities and modern life. The act of dredging from underwater systems and channels, sand mining erodes riverbanks and disrupts ecosystems, resulting in a long chain of consequences and dependencies. Colossal amounts of sand are mined and moved to shape one habitat while destroying another. With “Tracing Sand: Phantom Territories, Bodies Adrift,” Cheng  dissects iconic sand sites that give form to spatio-cultural territories that have been fueled by colonial globalization and high consumption. Her proposal aims to establish a reflexive framework for architecture towards a paradigm shift in the value system: what does it mean to build today amid ecological crisis and social injustice?

The Wheelwright Prize will support travel to airports in Singapore, beaches in Florida, rivers in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, and rural immigrant communities in China. Cheng will conduct interviews with key stakeholders and research design decisions, procurement routes, contractual relations, financing, regulations, and policies. Combining her research across architecture, anthropology, and filmmaking, Cheng plans to develop educational and public programs and a multi-media archive that will be open access and made available for the affected communities, activist groups, and associated researchers.

DK Osseo-Asare: “Bucky in Africa: Remembering the Chemistry of Architecture”

DK Osseo-Asare is a Ghanaian American designer who makes buildings, landscapes, communities, objects, and digital tools. He is a co-founding principal of the transatlantic architecture and integrated design studio Low Design Office (LowDo), based in Austin, United States, and Tema, Ghana. He holds an appointment in Humanitarian Materials at the Pennsylvania State University, where he directs the Humanitarian Materials Lab, a transdisciplinary research lab architecting materials for human welfare. He is a TED Global Fellow; member, Ghana Institution of Engineering (GhIE); and received A.B. in Engineering Design and M.Arch degrees from Harvard University, with a focus on kinetic architecture and network power.

With “Bucky in Africa: Remembering the Chemistry of Architecture,” Osseo-Asare seeks to decolonize the practice of architecture using a mixed methods approach of action research to investigate the African roots of “design science” from an architectural perspective. The proposal’s focus starts with the decade-long itinerary of the American design scientist R. Buckminster Fuller’s transdisciplinary teaching and research in Africa. By studying the links between indigenous African technologies of design and established conventions of architectural production, Osseo-Asares incorporates linguistics, archival research, fieldwork, and community-based making with academic and community partners across Africa, the Middle East and Europe. The collected research constitutes a sequence of temporary outputs that will also contribute to the development of the next generation of African architects and designers, considered in the context of the global African diaspora.

Osseo-Asare’s Wheelwright proposal research stems from his finalist proposal for the 2019 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, “Bambot: Fufuzela,” which reconceived architecture as living structure with independent agency, understood from an African perspective, in which all material is alive and “spiritually active.” The Wheelwright Prize will support Osseo-Asare’s fieldwork throughout North Africa and Middle East, East Africa, West, Central and Southern Africa, and result in a publication, public lectures, and exhibition content as well as a series of workshops in various African communities.

     

Sean Canty Receives Architectural League of New York’s 2023 Prize for Young Architects + Designers

The Architectural League of New York  (ALNY) has awarded Sean Canty (MArch ’14), Assistant Professor of Architecture at Harvard GSD, with the Prize for Young Architects + Designers , a competition open to architects and designers less than ten years out of a bachelor’s or master’s degree program. The 2023 Prize applicants were asked to consider the theme of “Uncomfortable,” engaging architects to consider the distressing aspects of the contemporary design world by “dismantling architectural legacies, challenging traditional paradigms, grappling with the costs of comfort, responding to ecological concerns.”

Sean Canty is the founder of Studio Sean Canty (SSC), an architecture practice based in Cambridge, MA. The work of the studio engages formal combination and juxtaposition at a variety of scales, from objects to interiors, and explores a range of programmatic types, from domestic environments to cultural spaces. Canty is also one of the founding principals of Office III (OIII), an experimental architectural collective that spans New York, San Francisco, and Cambridge.

The jury for the 2023 Prize for Young Architects + Designers, now in its 42^nd cycle, includes José Amozurrutia, Germane Barnes, Jennifer Bonner, Barbara Bestor, FAIA, Wonne Ickx, Int. Assoc. AIA, Kyle Miller, Tya Winn, and the Young Architects + Designers Committee.

Winners will create installations of their work onsite in a location of their choice or in an entirely digital format. Projects will be presented in an online exhibition on the ALNY website opening June 13.

In March, Canty was among the recipients of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2023 Architecture Award , for work being characterized by a strong personal direction. This year’s winners were chosen from a group of 36 individuals and practices nominated by the members of the Academy. The jurors were Toshiko Mori (chair), Deborah Berke, Marlon Blackwell, Steven Holl, Annabelle Selldorf, Nader Tehrani, Billie Tsien, Tod Williams, and Meejin Yoon.

Ryan Gerald Nelson on Designing Iconic Typographic Moments

Within the work of graphic designer Ryan Gerald Nelson there is a persistent thread of experimentation. He experiments with images, typography, materials, and printing techniques, often manipulating all these elements at once. The compelling results range from the elegant and spare exhibition catalogue for Merce Cunningham CO:MM:ON TI:ME to the aggressive, overloaded posters he created for the Walker Art Center and Yale University. The attention to both big ideas and small details made his Studio Xee a perfect fit for designing the posters and related materials for the Fall 2022–Spring 2023 public programs at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). As we look back on the academic year, Chad Kloepfer, art director of the GSD, caught up with Ryan. The two met years ago when Ryan was a design fellow at the Walker.

Chad Kloepfer: We began discussing the past year’s public programs identity on a conceptual level, looking at how the project’s intellectual foundations could inform the design. Paige Johnston, associate director of public programs at the GSD, brought up The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013), a collection of essays by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney that draw on a radical Black intellectual tradition to critique academia. Moten and Harney write about ways to create the worlds you want to inhabit, outside of or adjacent to the existing world and its systems of knowledge. These are not easy concepts to formalize into a poster, but I wonder how, or if, Moten and Harney’s text ultimately fed into the final design?

Ryan Gerald Nelson: I did have some early moments of feeling a bit lost in all the potential ways and paths of interpreting The Undercommons and trying to land on certain ideas that I felt could propel my design decisions within the poster.

But as I dove deeper into the text I couldn’t help but notice the extent to which Moten and Harney’s observations and discourse feel so relevant to so many different spaces and aspects of society. A public programs and lecture series at a major university certainly felt to me like one of those spaces.

Ultimately, I felt like there was so much to glean from The Undercommons, and certain ideas from the book led me down a path that I wouldn’t have otherwise taken. As a graphic designer, that is something I always hope for in a project—some combination of collaborators, content, and reference material that expands my ways of thinking and making.

But to give some detail of how The Undercommons influenced certain design decisions of mine, we can look at how the authors define the idea of study. As Jack Halberstram observes in his introduction, Moten and Harney suggest that study is “a mode of thinking with others separate from the thinking that the institution requires of you.” Moten goes on to say that “It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice.”

I love this definition, and it’s clear to see how study is pervasive and already happening, and that we’re building a world through the acts of sharing space and ideas with one another (which is certainly something that the public programs and lectures at Harvard GSD become vectors for). So there’s an energy and potential in these notions that I attempted to capture within the poster through a sort of graphic/typographic density, overlap, and cross-pollination. The idea of study can be broad, but it prompted me to think about how I could use the design to reflect a sense of movement, momentum, a gathering of a chorus, a decentering, a deconstruction.

Something that attracted me to your work is that you are not exclusively a graphic designer. You also have a visual arts practice that runs parallel to your design practice. From the outside I can make formal connections between the two but I’m curious what the relationship of these worlds is for you?

These days the relationship is more separate than it has been in the past. Or at least in my conscious mind I’m always “switching” between the two: graphic designer mind and artist mind. Maybe that’s because these two worlds still, to this day, seem like oil and water.

But if I start to examine things more closely, I can see a relationship between certain approaches or aesthetic sensibilities that I have in both my art practice and my graphic design practice. Like gravitating toward a certain formal starkness or austerity, or a level of high contrast (tonally, typographically, relationally between forms and elements), or even just a very granular level of detail.

The use of images is crucial to your work—both as a designer and visual artist—and you have specific ways that you use and manipulate them. We don’t have artworks or photographs in our poster, but you have almost treated “GSD” as an image and manipulated its presence in multiple cases. Can you talk about using images beyond their representational value?

I definitely seek out more formal and aesthetic ways to use images, or as elements that feel or act as texture or tone. Or maybe it’s just a desire to use them less conservatively. Having worked mostly in and around the world of contemporary art I’ve often bumped up against the preciousness or strictness that surrounds images. Rules like: no cropping, no altering, no going across a gutter, etc. I understand it of course, but it does make me want to rebel against those rules when the opportunity arises.

I’m also a big proponent of using type as image or type as texture. There’s a very type-centric or type-first mentality that’s pretty firmly embedded in the way I approach design, which definitely pushes me to be more inventive with type and to find certain type moves that can do some of the heavy lifting in terms of conveying ideas and content. That said, I’m often aiming to create typographic moments that feel very integrated (i.e., not just floating or slapped on top), and weighty, and iconic.

Repetition plays a large role in the posters, emails, and related materials for this year’s public programs. How did this come about as a visual device?

I started using repetition throughout the visual identity as a simple strategy to reference space, scale, and expansion, which of course felt very appropriate for a graduate school revolving around architecture and urban planning.

Repetition as a visual device most noticeably plays out within the poster where there are three relatively prominent “GSD” graphics that are descending in scale from top to bottom. I repeated the GSD “tag” not only to establish these different spaces or levels, but also to represent two ideas at the same time: the idea of ascension representing expansion or growth on the one hand, versus the idea of descension representing a zooming or zeroing in on the other.

The vertically stacked grid spaces on the poster also nest with or mirror this structure. Whereas the three “GSD” graphics are descending in scale from top to bottom, the vertically stacked grid spaces are ascending in their column structure from top to bottom starting with the one big “block” column on top, then the two “block” zones in the middle creating two columns, and finally the three columns of listings on the bottom of the poster.

The day numbers from the calendar are also repeated and overprinted on the top half of the poster. The core parts of the poster were already locked in this nesting, symbiotic structure, so I wanted to bring in a similar, connective gesture to reinforce the repetition. In this instance I felt that the overprinting red day numbers become more of a representation of time as a space, presence, or structure.

You have a wonderful sense for type and typeface choices. Even the simplest typeface, in the right hands, can be used to great effect. How do you go about choosing a typeface (our poster is set in Helvetica Neue) and then using it?

I love a simple typeface! To me there are some absolute classics that I would probably be happy to use forever. I feel fortunate that when I was first being introduced to typography that my instructors were showing me the work of a lot of amazing Dutch graphic designers. That had a major influence on me, and I definitely noticed the typefaces they used, the sort of calculated unfussy-ness of their approach to type, and even their loyalty to using just a handful of typefaces for all their projects, or even a single typeface.

Just some of the typefaces I’m thinking of are: Gothic LT 13, Grotesque MT, Univers LT, Akzidenz Grotesk, condensed cuts of Franklin Gothic, more obscure cuts of Times New Roman like MT or Eighteen, Gothic 720 BT, Pica 10 Pitch, Prestige Elite, AG Schoolbook, and of course Helvetica Neue, among many others.

As far as choosing a typeface goes, I like to keep that process simple as well. I think the width of the strokes are a major factor. Sometimes I’m trying to find stroke widths that feel in harmony with other elements like images, content, format, the proportions of the format, etc. But in other instances, it makes more sense for the stroke widths to have a lot of contrast or weight difference in comparison to the other elements. Lastly, I think the letters used in the main title of the design project play a big role in how I make my typeface selections.

With the uppercase letters in “HARVARD GSD”, I’m primarily looking at the “R” and the “G”: both great letterforms that I happen to find pretty irresistible when they’re typeset in Helvetica Neue. With a Helvetica Neue “R”, it’s the curve of the leg. It’s a super elegant curve with a slight outward taper down on the baseline that I think sets Helvetica Neue apart. With the Helvetica Neue “G”, it’s almost all about that downward spur in the bottom-right of the letterform that’s perfectly balanced and gives the “G” such an iconic stance.

Had the main title of this project not included an “R” and a “G”, I’m sure I would’ve chosen a different typeface. It all comes back to content and what you’re working with—even down to the letters being used.

I don’t imagine you have a traditional studio structure as a designer, but the desk-job portion of running a studio is not something they teach in school. Is there any kind of learning curve when it comes to practicing design for clients and what it takes to “manage” a studio?

I think there can be a fairly steep learning curve considering that being an independent or small studio graphic designer can often require you to possess so many graphic design adjacent skills. You might only be working on actual graphic design for 20 percent of the time during a project, while the other 80% of the time is dedicated to aspects like pre-production, editing content, communicating with collaborators and vendors, ensuring quality final production, etc. Like you mention, design schools barely and sometimes never teach these aspects of graphic design to students, but they’re obviously important.

These types of skills tend to live in the background which is probably why they go untaught in design schools and, frankly, are not even spoken about very often. But I wouldn’t trade them for anything simply because skills like these give me the confidence to handle just about any project thrown at me and allow me to focus more on the actual graphic design.

Ajay Manthripragada and Miranda Mote Among the Recipients of the American Academy in Rome’s 2023–2024 Rome Prize

Ajay Manthripragada, Design Critic in Architecture at GSD, and Miranda Mote (MDes HPD ’15) have received a 2023–2024 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (AAR). These highly competitive fellowships support advanced independent work and research in the arts and humanities. This year, the gift of “time and space to think and work” was awarded to 36 American artists and scholars. The fellows will each receive a stipend, workspace, and room and board at the academy’s 11-acre campus on the Janiculum Hill in Rome, starting in September 2023.

Ajay Manthripragada is principal of an eponymous design practice, based in Los Angeles. He has taught at several schools, including Rice University School of Architecture, where he was a Wortham Fellow. His writing has appeared in Log, Cite, and Domus, among other publications. In 2018, Manthripragada was nominated for a Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize as an emerging practitioner. Current work includes private and public projects in California and India.

Manthripragada is the recipient of the Lily Auchincloss Rome Prize in Architecture. His project Imbrex and Tegula, which takes its name from the ubiquitous roof tiles of Rome, will forge a dialogue between ancient and new applications of architectural terra cotta. The imbrex (a hollow half-cylinder) and the tegula (flat with raised edges) work together in overlap to create an impervious roofing assembly, versions of which are seen the world over. Manthripragada’s proposal views the imbrex and tegula technology as a means for understanding and leveraging the interplay of environment, craft, and geopolitics in building materials.

Miranda Mote is currently Visiting Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at Pratt Institute and Lecturer, Program in Architecture, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania. Mote received the Garden Club of America/Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture for her project Botanography and Botanic Gardens: The Italian Art of Nature Printing and Its Influence on Early American Gardens and Botanical Language. She will be focused on archival work related to the history of nature printing in Italy as it was brought to Philadelphia before 1720, making a narrative series of botanical prints about the gardens of the Academy in Rome, and working with children of the Academy and local schools teaching nature printing as a part of literacy and botany lessons.

Rome Prize winners are selected annually by independent juries of distinguished artists and scholars through a national competition. The 11 disciplines supported by the Academy are: ancient studies, architecture, design, historic preservation and conservation, landscape architecture, literature, medieval studies, modern Italian studies, music composition, Renaissance and early modern studies, and visual arts.

Established in 1894, the American Academy in Rome is America’s oldest overseas center for independent studies and advanced research in the arts and humanities. It has since evolved to become a more global and diverse base for artists and scholars to live and work in Rome. The residential community includes a wide range of scholarly and artistic disciplines, which is representative of the United States and is fully engaged with Italy and contemporary international exchange. The support provided by the academy to Rome Prize winners, Italian fellows, and invited residents helps strengthen the arts and humanities.

For information on this year’s winners, please visit 2023 Rome Prize Fellowship Winners and Jurors.

 

 

The American Museum of Natural History Reveals Gilder Center Designed by Studio Gang with Landscape Architecture by Reed Hilderbrand

The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City has revealed its Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation. The center is designed by Studio Gang, the international architecture and urban design practice led by Jeanne Gang (MArch ’93), Professor in Practice of Architecture at GSD. Scheduled to open May 4, the Gilder Center is the latest in a series of major projects over the last three decades that have transformed the Museum’s campus. The 230,000-square-foot $465 million Gilder Center project was announced in 2014 and includes six floors above ground, four of which are open to the public, and one below. It creates 33 connections among 10 Museum buildings to link the entire campus and establishes a new entrance on the Museum’s west side, at Columbus Avenue and 79th Street, in Theodore Roosevelt Park.

In a press release, Gang said, “The Gilder Center is designed to invite exploration and discovery that is not only emblematic of science, but also such a big part of being human. It aims to draw everyone in—all ages, backgrounds, and abilities—to share the excitement of learning about the natural world. Stepping inside the large daylit atrium, you are offered glimpses of the different exhibits on multiple levels. You can let your curiosity lead you. And with the many new connections that the architecture creates between buildings, it also improves your ability to navigate the Museum’s campus as a whole.”

Upon entering the Gilder Center, visitors are surrounded by the grand five-story Kenneth C. Griffin Exploration Atrium, a space illuminated with natural light admitted through large-scale skylights. The center houses more than 4 million scientific specimens and visitors will be able to explore three levels of spectacular displays featuring more than 3,000 objects and representing every area of the Museum’s collections in vertebrate and invertebrate zoology, paleontology, geology, anthropology, and archaeology.

The five-level facility includes three floors of floor-to-ceiling exhibits that showcase the breadth of the Museum’s collections. Located along the south side of the Griffin Atrium, the Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. Collections Core establishes the central role of scientific collections as evidence from which knowledge is derived. Along the north side of the building, on the Gilder Center’s first floor, visitors will find the 5,000-square-foot Susan and Peter J. Solomon Family Insectarium. Directly above the Solomon Family Insectarium, on the second floor is the 2,500-square-foot Davis Family Butterfly Vivarium, housing 1,000 free-flying butterflies. On the third floor of the Gilder Center is Invisible Worlds, a 360-degree immersive science-and-art installation designed by the Berlin-based Tamschick Media+Space with the Seville-based Boris Micka Associates.

In addition to the Gilder Center project, NYC Parks has worked alongside the Museum to make significant improvements to sections of Theodore Roosevelt Park, creating new gathering areas, expanding circulation, adding seating and plantings, and enhancing park infrastructure. The design of the renovated portions of the park was developed by landscape architecture firm Reed Hilderbrand with input from community organizations, elected officials, and government agencies including NYC Parks and Community Board 7. Gary Hilderbrand (MLA ’85) is the founding principal of Reed Hilderbrand and the Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at GSD.

In a review of the Center for the New York Times, architecture critic Michael Kimmelman writes, “…Gilder is spectacular: a poetic, joyful, theatrical work of public architecture and a highly sophisticated flight of sculptural fantasy.”

Why the Digital World Needs Sustainable Architecture: An Interview with Marina Otero

Data centers located around the globe function 24 hours a day to support digital networks. These facilities consume vast energy resources, occupy fragile ecosystems, and emit prodigious amounts of CO2. Marina Otero, winner of the 2022 Wheelwright Prize , is researching new architectural methods and systems for storing data, and reimagining how digital infrastructure could meet the unprecedented demands facing the world today. Through field research, data collection, and prototype development, Otero aims to publish the first open-source manual for global data center architecture design, featuring examples of ecological, sustainable, and egalitarian data storage models. By looking at cases in Australia, Chile, China, Iceland, Netherlands, Nigeria, Singapore, Sweden, and the United States, she investigates spatial and material innovations. This work is especially urgent at a time when digital-data production is outpacing the scalability of today’s storage solutions, and AI usage is on the rise. We caught up with Otero to discuss the progress of her globe-spanning research project, Future Storage: Architectures to Host the Metaverse.

Sweden is an international leader in renewable energy with the digital infrastructure sector making up a large percentage of the economy. In the past year, you have toured several data centers in the country. What did you discover?

Yes, in December 2022 I visited several data centers in the North of the country. One of them is the Infrastructure and Cloud research & test Environment (ICE) Data Center in Luleå. ICE is one of the main data center research institutions in Europe and a testbed focusing on digitalization and information technology infrastructure. During my visit, I learned of several prototypes being tested at ICE to recover data center heat in subarctic climates. One of them involves growing mealworms in a heat box, whose heat comes from the server cooling system. In the long run, these mealworms ultimately become chicken feed. They can replace the soy concentrate that has been until now used to feed chickens in the region, and which is largely produced in the Amazon. According to ICE, this can become an economical and environmentally friendly solution. And, apparently, the chickens are quite happy. ICE also repurposes heat from data centers to dry firewood and heat water for their own office consumption and for local fish farms. Together with the company Containing Greens, ICE has designed a facility that uses excess heat inside vertical hydroponic systems, harvesting produce that is delivered to local restaurants. Our emails can feed chickens and grow lettuce!

How are data centers in Sweden using solar, wind, and hydro power?

Data center providers are attracted to the possibility of using renewable energy for their functioning, which grants them green labels. I visited Ecodatacenter Piteå , powered by hydropower, and Ecodatacenter Falun , a facility that is powered entirely by wind and hydropower and built in wood with the frame, interior walls, and ceiling in cross-laminated timber and glulam. The data center uses a heat recovery system that pumps surplus energy into a district heating system for the municipality of Falun, as well into a wood pellets factory.

In the country’s capital I visited Stockholm Data Parks in Kista. This is a joint initiative by the City of Stockholm, district heating and cooling provider Stockholm Exergi, power grid operator Ellevio, and fiber network provider Stokab. The operation contributes to the City of Stockholm’s objective to be entirely fossil fuel free by 2040. This public-private partnership model that involves energy loops between data centers and the urban energy grid is becoming a reference for cities around the world.

However, the Swedish data center “boom” has also sparked national protest. During my visit I participated in debates on how the development of this digital infrastructure in the Nordic countries is occurring at the expense of indigenous peoples. The expansion of wind farms to provide renewable energy for industries such as data centers is having an adverse impact on the Sami people’s culture and environment, raising concerns of “green colonialism.”

Iceland is one of the only place in the world where a data center can operate with 100% sustainable green power. You visited the Verne Global campus, which relies on local geothermal and hydroelectric sources. What did you learn about the use of geothermal energy during the site visit?

I was interested in experiencing first-hand how geothermal energy is used in the country, and how it powers data centers. I travelled to one of the largest single-site geothermal power plants on the planet, Hellisheiði power plant . The area also includes carbon capture infrastructure. I then followed the power lines that cross and power the country. The journey took me to the Verne Global campus, which relies on local geothermal and hydroelectric sources. With Halldór Eiríksson, a partner at T.ark Architects, the architects responsible for the Verne Global data center design, I learned about the interconnections between geothermal energy sites and data centers. Eiríksson is also the designer of the Sky Lagoon, a human-made geothermal bath complex in Kópavogur.

I also met with Marcos Zotes, partner at Basalt Architects, who are responsible for the design of the Blue Lagoon . The lagoon is located in a lava field near Grindavík and is supplied by water used in the nearby Svartsengi geothermal power station. In fact, the Blue Lagoon was formed from water spilling from the geothermal power plant.

In these architectures where people undress and bath together in the hot waters coming from the entrails of the earth, one could comprehend how our bodies connect to others and to the planet. These embodied experiences help us question the intricate energy processes that keep bodies and data centers up and running.

The Humboldt Cable in Chile will be the first submarine cable linking Latin America and Oceania. The project will make the country a preferred data center location in the Southern Hemisphere. When you return to Chile, what do you intend to research?

I was invited by the Chilean Senate to participate in Congreso Futuro , the main scientific-humanist dissemination event in Latin America and the Southern Hemisphere. I had the opportunity to present the research and meet representatives from the government, universities, companies, and other Chilean institutions. Together with members of the government, I travelled to Chilean Antarctica. I will be back in Chile in May and June to visit data centers and related infrastructures in a field trip and program jointly organized with the Master of Architecture at the Universidad Católica de Chile. I will visit the site selected for the construction of the Humboldt Cable. I will also meet with members of a network of academics and activists who oppose data colonialism, and work closely with communities protesting data centers around the world.

For example, I will meet with representatives from the Cerrillos community, who opposed a Google data center megaproject due to the project’s shortcomings in its environmental processing. The community successfully demonstrated that the project contributed to the overexploitation of the Santiago Central aquifer in a context of drought. I will also meet with representatives from ALMA observatory, a state-of-the-art telescope that studies light from some of the coldest objects in the Universe. ALMA comprises 66 high-precision antennas, spread over distances of up to 16 kilometers. I am interested in learning about data processing and data storage connected to their activities.

What other site visits are planned for 2023?

This August I travel to Australia. My aim is to meet Stewart Stacey, managing director of Binary Security, who developed the world’s first Indigenous-operated data center at Charles Darwin University in Darwin. I am also planning to meet with representatives of Kalinda IT, an indigenously owned Australian IT services business formed in 2018, which recently partnered with TRIFALGA DC to develop a network of hyperscale and edge data centers across Australia, of which Toowoomba, Queensland-based Pulse Data Centre, is their first location. I am also interested in the work of the Maiam nayri Wingara Indigenous Data Sovereignty Collective, which advocates for Indigenous data sovereignty.

In October I travel to California to meet experts working on DNA data storage (Illumina, Microsoft, Twist), hologram data storage (Microsoft), and floating data centers (Nautilus). On my return, I will be in Cambridge and hope to meet with George Church, who leads Synthetic Biology at Harvard’s Wyss Institute . I am looking forward to learning more about their DNA data storage experiments and about the Whitesides Research Group’s research on fluorescent dye storage. Later in the year I travel to Singapore, China, and Nigeria.

Has the Wheelwright Prize grant generated other research opportunities or collaborations?

Absolutely! I am conducting research on the future of data centers alongside NASA Senior Research Scientist Eduardo Bendek. I will study the possibilities and implications of building data center in orbit around the Earth. We will look into how these facilities could harness energy through solar panels, and benefit from the lack of gravity and absence of air to avoid cooling problems and reduce the impact on energy consumption. We will also explore the ecological implications and possible geopolitical and urban transformations that such infrastructures could unleash. There is a trend of locating data centers in increasingly remote and extreme locations, such as underwater or in space, and it is important to inspect its repercussions.

With the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC), in the context of an invitation by Tabakalera, Spain, an international center for contemporary culture located in Donostia / San Sebastián, I will look at how quantum computing will transform the design of data centers. The Center has received European investment for the study of superconductors (essential in quantum computing) and will soon celebrate the opening of the IBM quantum computing center that will host one of the most advanced quantum computers in the world. I am interested in study two main aspects. On the one hand, data centers can take advantage of the power of quantum computing to accelerate and improve their operations and optimize resource allocation and the simulation of complex systems. On the other hand, quantum computing requires new hardware and software solutions and a highly controlled and isolated environment from the outside world to reduce interference and errors. Cooling and energy management are also important in this context, as qubits, the building blocks of quantum computing, require extremely low temperatures to function properly. This is way beyond my area of expertise but that’s precisely why I am so eager to learn about it.

In Fall 2023, I will lead a clinic at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, focusing on the case of Tuvalu. The island nation has an interest in creating a digital twin to preserve its heritage in the face of rising sea levels. The team will comprise a group of students from architecture, theory, historic preservation, urbanism, as well as leading experts from the fields of data storage, archiving, and computing. We will consider how to approach the storage of different types of data, their access, ownership and governance, their ecological cycles, as well as processes of preservation, celebration, decay, and mourning.

Hannah Teicher awarded MURI research grant to study climate resilience

Hannah Teicher, Assistant Professor of Urban Planning, will be part of a research team receiving a $5.6 million grant through the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program, funded by the United States Department of Defense (DoD). Teicher will act as co-principal investigator for Sea-Level Rise in the Indo-Pacific Region: Building a Framework for Interdependent Resilience, a five-year project that will develop adaptation pathways for military island communities vulnerable to sea-level rise.

In case studies in Hawaii and Guam, the team will develop a decision-making framework that integrates social and organizational factors with awareness of sea-level rise risks to utilities, transportation, and infrastructure. Considering a long history of military engagement in these urban communities, the team will investigate previous joint decision-making efforts, barriers and enablers to adaptation planning, and how the disproportionate impacts on vulnerable communities can be addressed in this context. The project will have implications for the broader region and small island nations facing dramatic sea-level rise impacts.

Teicher will join Christine Kirchhoff, Associate Professor in the School of Engineering Design and Innovation at Penn State University; Peter Ruggiero, Associate Professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University; and Mark Merrifield, Principal Investigator, Director of the Center for Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation at the University of California San Diego.

In March, the DoD announced $220 million in awards for basic research projects as part of the MURI program. At an average award amount of $7.1 million over five years, these competitive grants will support 31 teams located at 61 U.S. academic institutions.

Alumni Spotlight: Corey Zehngebot

“You can be an ambitious person who’s had a robust professional career, but also be self-aware enough to know when you need to take a break—because of whatever is happening in the world or in your life. The choice was clear to me once I sat down and really thought hard about what the best decision was, and I don’t want to be self-conscious or apologetic about that.”

— Corey Zehngebot (MArch ’09)

We are continuing to share conversations we have had with several of our alumni, each of whom pursued different areas of study at the GSD and have gone on to lead impactful careers in design.

We recently spoke with Corey Zehngebot, AIA, AICP, MArch ’09. Corey is an urban designer, architect, and planner. She has worked for the past 20 years in both the public and private sectors and remains captivated by cities. Most recently, Corey worked as the Director of Urban Design at Graffito SP , a consultancy that works with landlords, tenants, and developers focused on ground floor activation of mixed-use projects. Prior to joining Graffito, Corey worked as a Senior Urban Designer and Architect for the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA, formerly the Boston Redevelopment Authority). Corey has also worked as a senior urban designer, architect, and planner for Utile in Boston. In addition, she has taught at Harvard and MIT, and served as a design critic at many area colleges and universities. She received a B.A. with distinction from Yale University and a Master of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Corey is currently a member of the GSD Alumni Council .

When did you know that you wanted to pursue a career in design?

I wasn’t one of the people who knew from birth. I took a long, roundabout way to figure it out. In college, I double majored in behavioral neuroscience and history of art, but I was very interested in architecture. Also, I went to Yale, which has two of the best designed art museums in the country: The Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art—the latter of which, in particular, was one of the first buildings where I really understood how design can profoundly impact the way people feel about space.

After college, I got a job working in master planning and construction at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. This museum is a classical stone civic building that sits in a park, not unlike The Met in New York City, and it was embarking on a large-scale expansion project. I was part of the in-house team that was working with the architects and landscape architects; I had always struggled to figure out how to combine the sciences with the arts until I had a front row seat to this design process. The proverbial light switch flipped on in my head, and I thought: “This might be something that I want to do.”

You studied architecture, but have gone more into planning, correct?

I’m both an architect and a planner. Ultimately, I consider myself an urban designer in the sense that I’m very interested in the buildings themselves, but I’m more interested in how they operate within the space of the city. My focus has been in urban design, meaning the space between buildings and the first floor of those buildings—the public spaces that most people in cities would occupy and interact with.

I could care less about curtain walls and detailing certain aspects of a building; I want to play a role in creating the space of the city. I like to think about how buildings meet the sky and how the buildings meet the ground, and if they don’t meet the ground in a way that is sensitive to a vibrant urban context, then they’re failures to me.

Is there a specific GSD experience that you look back on as significant in shaping how you practice now?

Exploring other curricular options in my final two years [at the GSD] was really important to me, which does mirror how I approach things today. I took two high-level option studios where I traveled to Mumbai and São Paulo. In both cases, I was very deliberate in not choosing to take an architecture studio. I took an urban design studio and a landscape architecture studio. My final year, I took a course called Real Property at Harvard Business School and a course on smart cities and transportation at MIT. [At the GSD] I took a Field Studies in Real Estate course with students in other disciplines. It was a team-based project, and I worked with people in the real estate program who built financial modeling for projects. In many ways, that course most closely resembles what I ultimately wound up doing.

Could you talk a bit about your practice or projects that you have worked on?

I left working at the city of Boston Planning and Development Agency to join a firm called Graffito, which is predominately a retail broker but was expanding its consulting practice into advising on early-phase development projects. I was advising developers, architects, and consultant teams that were working on large-scale development projects on the design of the ground floor and how it interfaces with the public realm.

I have pretty extensive knowledge of the city of Boston at this point, because I worked more than six years for the city. When you’re in government, you know all of the projects that are in the pipeline, many of which may not be publicly known. They’re still percolating in that pre-permitting stage. My approach to the work involved trying to connect the dots between projects that might be proximate to one another and to other city initiatives, while thinking about how best to create a well-designed, high-quality, consistent, and safe public realm. At Graffito, I was really able to get into the specific uses on the ground floor of these projects—both retail and, as the firm liked to call it, “non-retail ground floor active spaces.” Everything from libraries to COVID testing sites (at the time) to uses related to the arts. There are a lot of creative professionals like architects that prefer to operate out of a storefront location, as opposed to being in some commercial office tower way up in the sky. All of these uses bring vibrancy and life to the street. I would summarize the mission statement of the firm as “using ground floor space as a way to create value rather than revenue.”

How are you spending your time lately?

I’m taking a self-imposed sabbatical at the moment. I prefer the term sabbatical as it implies both intellectual pursuit and an endpoint. I’ve been working for 20 years, basically, nonstop, and I really needed a break. For me, it was more about the physical burnout than the mental burnout. Between two kids, working, teaching, and a global pandemic, I was exhausted. But I also had gotten to a point where I was reviewing development projects that I had seen earlier iterations of years prior because I had been working in government for so many years, and it was becoming difficult for me to get excited about some of these projects. That was another clear indication that I needed to step away.

Being on sabbatical has given me time to reflect and take care of myself, which was long overdue. I’ve done an enormous amount of reading about social injustice, race, feminism, and parenting. I have two young daughters; when they’re little, their needs are very custodial. But they’re getting older, and this time has given me an opportunity to recalibrate how I approach parenting.

What would you say to fellow alumni about your experience taking a sabbatical? Specifically, how has it been valuable for your life and career moving forward?

I don’t feel old or wise enough to impart wisdom, but I can offer my perspective, which is that my sabbatical has allowed me to see my career as a number of different chapters. I really subscribe to the notion of a nonlinear career path, and I think that my interest in design and cities is very broad; it’s become clear to me that I can enter the field from a number of different angles. To young people, I would say: The first job you have (or whatever job you’re currently in) is probably not going to be the only job you’ll ever have. I’ve found it’s a useful framework to think about the things you learn in school or on the job as seeds being planted that may not bear fruit for a long, long time, until the conditions are just right—even though that can be really frustrating.

I would like to note that I’m extraordinarily privileged to be able to make the decision to take a sabbatical. Architecture as a profession does not compensate people nearly as well as it should, and I know that there are many folks out there who are burdened by substantial loans and may not have the luxury of being able to take time off.

What happens to our society if initiative and progress in the design world stop moving forward?

As I said, I have two daughters, and I’m fearful that they’re going to grow up in a world where they have fewer personal freedoms than I did. On one hand, it’s important to advocate for and acknowledge how important design is to the world. But on the other hand, we’re living in a moment where many are realizing that the world’s problems are enormous and we’re all trying to put out fires left and right. I am a pathological optimist and don’t want to be dramatically pessimistic, but I worry that if the bottom falls out for a while, we’re going to have bigger problems. That said, I think there is much more awareness and acknowledgment about the value of design—certainly among sophisticated developers. They absolutely appreciate and understand the value of design, and they’re much more inclined to hire skilled and competent designers. “Value of design” is now a phrase that has infiltrated other discourses (like in business schools) and other spaces where that vocabulary didn’t always exist.

Do you see designers as leaders?

Absolutely. Designers have the ability to visualize tangible outcomes, which can inspire all sorts of people. They are trained to take in diverse information, synthesize it, and come up with a solution that’s tangible in the world. It is truly a remarkable skill set. I think that designers are recognizing that in order to show leadership, they have to speak multiple vocabularies and know how to operate in diverse contexts in order for what they’re saying to resonate with people.

The younger generation of architects has shown tremendous leadership around big issues like climate change, resiliency, and social justice—even with projects that are not generating money, or projects that people are pursuing independently because they feel that they’re important.

Diane Davis Named Co-director of the Humanity’s Urban Future Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research

Diane Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism, has been named program co-director of the Humanity’s Urban Future program, part of the Global Call for Ideas initiative at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). For this third cycle, CIFAR invited proposals for new research programs to address the theme Future of Being Human, a call to confront the dynamic problems facing the world and develop potential solutions to transform the planet for the better.

Davis, also a CIFAR fellow, will lead the Humanity’s Urban Future program and share directorship responsibilities with Simon Goldhill, A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. The research initiative is created to drive dialogue and envision a more just and unified city of tomorrow. The program will consider many important factors, including infrastructure (both material and institutional), political divisions, questions of scale, climate change, and other crises. In seeking answers to these pressing general questions, the program will take six cities as test cases: Calcutta, Toronto, Shanghai, Naples, Mexico City, and Kinshasa. By studying what constitutes a good city of the future, the researchers aim to make a transformative impact on urban policy and planning, regulation and infrastructure, inspiring collective deliberation and learning around how one should work towards a better urban future. Through engagement with policy makers, political advisors, and civic actors, the Humanity’s Urban Future program will also establish a platform to publish research that will lead to changing the discourse of planning and the understanding of cities.

“I am thrilled to be working with a global team of historians, planners, anthropologists, geographers, and architects to interrogate how a ‘good urban life’ is conceptualized and produced,” says Davis. “We frame our deliberations around two main questions. The first is not merely ‘what is a good city?’—a question that has motivated city builders and philosopher’s since at least Plato’s Republic—but more specifically, ‘How do you plan for an urban future when you know that the city is a palimpsest of the past? The second question follows from the first: ‘How do cities inhabit time, and how can the future be planned with urban pasts in mind?”

CIFAR bring together international, interdisciplinary researchers who work together for five-year terms. Programs are led by a director or two co-directors, engage approximately 20-40 fellows and advisors from around the world, and include two or three CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars for two-year terms. Target areas for impact emerge from the program’s core research agenda, and the strategy is informed by long-term, iterative exchanges of ideas and perspectives between program members and non-academic stakeholders. Programmatic commitments support funding of approximately 10 million (Canadian) dollars for the five-year project, with the possibility of renewal.