Building a Future at Harvard

Henry B. Hoover (March ’26) is considered a pioneer of New England modernist architecture. He designed more than 50 modern houses in his hometown of Lincoln, Mass., and other suburbs west of Boston, as well as houses in New Hampshire, Georgia, and Florida.

The quality of his GSD education and the financial assistance Hoover received at Harvard inspired his three children—Henry B. (Harry) Hoover, Jr., Lucretia Hoover Giese PhD ’85 (1937-2018), and Elizabeth Hoover Norman PhD ’05 (1937-2010)—to establish the Henry B. Hoover Fellowship at the GSD in 1989. Since then, further outright, planned, and estate gifts from the siblings ensure that their father’s legacy lives on.

A portion of the sale of the family home in Lincoln, which their father designed in 1937, was added to the Hoover Fellowship in 2020 through a bequest from Lucretia’s estate and this year a charitable gift annuity from Harry brought the endowed fund to full fellowship status. This  long-term commitment has made it possible for the GSD to award the fellowship to a student every year.

“I’ve been honored to meet these awardees and even give them a tour of my father’s architectural work in my town of Lincoln and other communities,” Harry said. “They come to know Hoover as a person who had aspirations and experiences just like they have now.”

“The training he received at Harvard was so important to him,” Lucretia had said. “That’s why we decided to establish a fund to provide scholarships to students who would not otherwise be able to attend Harvard. Our father had received a scholarship that enabled him to study at Harvard. The support of his professors, especially George H. Edgell (then dean of the School of Architecture), profoundly affected his career.”

“All three of us revered our father,” Harry said of himself and his sisters. “This fellowship was a natural outpouring of our affection and respect.”

Hoover won the Charles Eliot Prize and two traveling fellowships, the Frederick Sheldon and Nelson Robinson, Jr. Fellowships. He also became the first recipient of the Eugene Dodd Medal for excellence in draftsmanship.

“He had a really direct relationship with buildings—buildings he designed, as well as those he experienced,” Harry said. “After graduation, Hoover produced a series of drawings of Harvard buildings. His architectural drawings were not mere elevations; he was able to relate buildings to their sites with extraordinary clarity, producing drawings of consummate draftsmanship and liveliness.”

“One legacy of our father was to create houses that would enhance quality of life. Now we’ve had the opportunity as a family to celebrate his life,” Harry says.

That celebration is now carrying through to the next generation and inspiring others with connections to Hoover to support the fellowship.

“My wife and I have preserved one of Henry Hoover’s houses and are privileged daily to enjoy that enhanced quality of life to which Harry refers,” said Brooks Mostue March ’76. “The nuanced views, careful siting, and beautiful utility of the house and its setting attest to Henry’s talent and vision. As a GSD fellowship recipient, I am keenly aware of the positive impact endowments have on students’ careers and the built environment. I am grateful to the Hoover family for their generosity.”

Harry added, “We’re fortunate that through my father’s legacy, we can bring this opportunity to well-deserving and accomplished people who are the best qualified to carry our father’s work, vision, and spirit onward.”

Kay O’Neil and David Nelson Find Love, Give Back at the GSD

Statistical analysis and love don’t usually go together, but Kay O’Neil (MCRP ’78) and David Nelson (MCRP ’78) have found success with this unique pairing.

The couple, who met at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), have been together for 42 years. They are thankful to the GSD both for the foundational skills it provided in city and regional planning and for bringing them together. To formalize that gratitude, Kay and David have provided a generous gift to the school through their life insurance policy.

“Harvard has always been training talented people in a way that will allow them to make changes and contribute to society in remarkable ways,” David said. “We were very happy at the GSD, and we’ve been very happy together for the last 42 years. It was a wonderful experience, and we want others to have it.”

Kay and David’s journeys toward their GSD experience date back to their childhoods. Kay grew up in Northwoods, the first planned unit development in the state of Georgia. The neighborhood, which is now on the National Register of Historic Places, informed what she thought a community should be. “It was very accessible for kids,” she said of Northwoods, which also had its own elementary school. “We had the run of the entire community.”

In high school, Kay heard a presentation about planned communities, which solidified her ambition to become a city planner. She received her undergraduate degree in urban planning at Michigan State University before coming to Harvard and the GSD for her master’s degree in city and regional planning.

At the GSD, she attended her quantitative analysis classes, where she saw a classmate that often questioned the faculty on statistical approaches. She saw him again at a Halloween party, where Kay’s friend said, “Oh, that’s David Nelson. He’s always challenging the professor.”

“She said that, and I thought, ‘Well, he’s always right!’” Kay said with a laugh. “We ended up studying together, and we both liked going for ice cream in the afternoons, and soon one thing led to another.”

“When I arrived at Harvard, I was a bit of a pain to the faculty,” David said, acknowledging that some of his professors were only a year or two older. He had spent time in high school working with his father, a municipal public works manager, and became interested in the public service element of forming the built environment. Studying sociology at Bates College led to a fondness for data and statistics. After a couple of years away from school, he applied to Harvard “on a wing and a prayer.”

“It’s still a huge honor,” David said of his graduate alma mater. “Everybody wants to go to Harvard, and nobody figures they can get in. I arrived there intimidated and confused, but two years later, I came out more confident.”

“I first noticed Kay in the lobby at Gund Hall waiting for a ride, and she gave me the biggest smile. I said to her, ‘You’re the girl in stats class.’ We became fast friends. And now here we are, 42 years, three children, and two grandchildren later.”

Both Kay and David went on to careers in public transit, focusing on subways and commuter railroads. Kay credits the GSD with providing the confidence and skills she needed to launch her own company, KKO and Associates, in 1984. That company, which David also worked for, offered software and planning structures for public transport and commuter rail systems domestically in cities like Boston, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Miami, as well as overseas in countries like Poland, Argentina, and South Africa.

“When we were at the GSD, it was an egalitarian program with a lot of women,” Kay said. “I went to work in the railroad industry, which is male-dominated. But I had come out of Harvard believing I could do anything I wanted.”

Kay closed the company in 2015 and now works for Keolis, a French company that operates the Massachusetts commuter rail system. David is at a large engineering firm, working with cities like Toronto, Miami, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, on their ambitions for expanding public transit. He has also spent the last 10 years teaching a once-a-year graduate course in Paris about the railroads.

As a way of giving back to the educational institution that they say formed their lives, Kay and David named the GSD as a beneficiary of a life insurance policy they established. The couple pays a premium to a charitable foundation, which purchases and holds the life insurance policy for them, and Kay and David designate the beneficiaries and amounts. This planned gift makes them members of the H. Langford Warren Society, and they also give to the GSD as members of the Josep Lluís Sert Council.

“When earning money, you can make relatively modest contributions; when you’re gone, the money goes to your designated charities and philanthropic interests,” David said of the policy.

I couldn’t have gone to Harvard without financial aid. It’s important to us to give back and give forward so that people who might find attending Harvard a challenge can have that opportunity. The students are interesting, fascinating people.

“I couldn’t have gone to Harvard without financial aid,” Kay said. “It’s important to us to give back and give forward so that people who might find attending Harvard a challenge can have that opportunity. The students are interesting, fascinating people.”

This giving mechanism provided a simple, impactful way for Kay and David to support the passion, engagement, and initiative of GSD students—qualities that the two of them have carried forward in the four decades since leaving campus.

“As the twig is bent,” David said, “so grows the tree.”

A Lasting and Significant Impact at the GSD

Thomas Holtz MArch ’77 made his first mark on the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) library as an architectural draftsman. Holtz’s drawings in the Frances Loeb Library’s Special Collections trace the arc of his life and design career: the Cologne and Munich cathedrals in Germany, a country where Holtz studied as a Fulbright scholar under a German government grant and worked before and after his time at Harvard; Italian churches, reflecting Holtz’s Catholic faith and membership in the Secular Order of Discalced Carmelites and volunteer work with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity; and the National Gallery of Art and other iconic buildings around Holtz’s birthplace and current home in the Washington, DC metro area.

Holtz’s generosity and creativity built his second contribution to the library. The retired architect wanted to honor those who most influenced his graduate education and career: his parents and his design teacher Jerzy Soltan, the esteemed architect and beloved GSD professor who died in 2005. Through a charitable gift annuity and a future bequest, Holtz established the Jerzy Soltan Fund in memory of Leslie and Helen Holtz for the Frances Loeb Library at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

“At the beginning of Soltan’s class, we did research in architecture libraries, especially the GSD library, so we could do presentations of both modern and historic art and architecture before going into the design. Even though it was a design class, we made ample use of the library,” Holtz said. “I wanted to give back to Harvard since they gave me fine teachers, and to honor both my parents and Soltan.”

A charitable gift annuity is a great option for alumni who, like Holtz, built an accomplished career but never thought of making a significant gift to the School. Holtz established the annuity with a simple contract with Harvard University. He received an immediate tax deduction for the gift, and Harvard will provide him with a regular income stream throughout his retirement. At the end of his lifetime, whatever money remains from the annuity comes to the GSD for the Jerzy Soltan Fund. Holtz elected to make an additional gift to the Soltan Fund by including a gift for the GSD in his will.

Through this fund, Holtz will honor his parents and help with the acquisition, maintenance and other costs associated with a renowned collection of printed and other materials by and about Le Corbusier, in tribute to his collaborations with Soltan. “Anything to honor the collection is great,” Holtz said. “Le Corbusier was his master.”

As Le Corbusier influenced Soltan, Holtz credits his parents with building a lifelong emphasis on learning. “We had plenty of books in the home, including National Geographic Magazine, and as a child, I would study different countries and different buildings,” Holtz said. “They took us often to the National Gallery, and I learned to love the pictorial arts and inherited my mother’s love of classical music.”

His parents also made an impression on him with their kindness toward others, Holtz said, helping children in his neighborhood and inviting sanitation workers into their kitchen for hot soup during a particularly cold winter. His mother would later volunteer with Harvard’s Semitic Museum and sometimes host lunches for his fellow GSD students when Holtz was at Harvard, he said. When Holtz arrived at the GSD, he saw these qualities in Soltan as well.

“He was very compassionate, and he had a great sense of humor,” Holtz said. “When our studio started with him, he came in at the beginning of the semester and said, ‘Whoever of you doesn’t want to be in my studio is fine with me. I have no lust for power!’”

“Former GSD librarian Mary Daniels once wrote to me about him that it was ‘unusual to find someone who embodied both chic (by the broadest definition) and charity!’” Holtz added. “He was very kind to students.”

After earning his master’s degree, Holtz held positions at private firms in Germany and Maryland before joining the U.S. Department of the Navy as an architect. He worked for the Navy in Carderock, Maryland, and the Washington Navy Yard, where he handled many large and small projects before his retirement in 2013. Holtz’s career recognitions include Employee of the Year in the Senior Engineer/Scientist category in 1994 at Carderock, a finalist for the Civilian of the Year Award in the public works department at the Navy Yard, and a certificate for participation in the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition in 2003.

A number of Holtz’s drawings and prints were also presented to Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis, and Holtz remembers Soltan’s appreciation for his drawings, including Le Corbusier’s Convent Sainte Marie de La Tourette in France.

“We were thrilled to receive Mr. Holtz’s gift to the library,” said GSD Librarian and Assistant Dean for Information Services Ann Whiteside. “The connection to Le Corbusier runs deep here at the GSD, and we appreciate what this fund will do for our collection of his works. Professor Soltan was a wonderful man, and Mr. Holtz is truly honoring his legacy.”

Holtz encourages alumni who remember Soltan’s kindness and mentorship to join him in honoring this remarkable educator with a contribution to the Jerzy Soltan Fund and making their own mark on the library. “I would encourage students not only in Soltan’s studio but also those who had experienced him in the juries for other studios that he was invited to critique on, to consider giving to this fund,” Holtz said.

With this unique and accessible giving method, all GSD alumni who want to support the School can have a lasting and significant impact.

Designing a Multidisciplinary Future at the GSD

Bart Voorsanger MArch ’64 understands the value of connected multidisciplinary design. The founding partner and principal of Voorsanger Architects PC in New York City, his firm works on projects ranging from small residential interiors to multi-million dollar residential and institutional buildings, many of which involve collaborations within other design disciplines. Voorsanger sees a future in which design disciplines increasingly intermingle. To ensure that students at the GSD are at the forefront of these intersections, he established the Voorsanger Fellowship Fund. The fund will support four top-performing students, one from each of the GSD’s disciplines—architecture, urban planning, landscape architecture, and design studies—who hold “great promise for making a significant contribution to these fields.”

“The future of design is this absolute, multidimensional world of integrating design disciplines. We’re all overlapping, and there are fewer barriers between them,” he says. Harvard has an ambitious, kaleidoscopic mix of professional talent at the GSD that will not only contribute to the quality of the students’ educational experience but will also sustain a level of excellence and reputation to assure the future of significant design contributions in the public realm.

Voorsanger believes that creating synergies and producing outcomes across disciplines is vital to the mission of the GSD. The Voorsanger Fellowship Fund stipulates that the four selected finalists come together annually to present to the GSD community in the connected fields of their studies. Voorsanger’s ultimate wish is that the fellows be able to focus on their passion for their work, unhindered by concerns about student loan debt. “The GSD has continued to excel in both the art and practice of architecture, which are two very different things, keeping them in a state of colloidal excellence,” he says. “It’s really extraordinary, and I hope my gift will inspire other architects and those who love design to support the GSD and encourage the best to come to Harvard.”

“Seeing Ukraine, Then and Now,” by Jerold S. Kayden

At the time of this writing, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is front and center in the news. The mounting numbers of dead and wounded stun the imagination. The creation of millions of refugees crossing into Poland and other Eastern European countries testifies to the indiscriminate brutality of war. Those of us in the professions of planning and designing cities cannot fathom the immense physical devastation being visited upon them. Homes, civic structures, and physical infrastructure have been wantonly destroyed. Billions of dollars will be needed to rebuild. Now is decidedly not the moment to ponder how to rebuild, but there will be a time, hopefully in a not too distant future, when Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian planners, designers, and other professionals will be pressed into action. As I watch the unfolding horror, I can’t help but be reminded of an earlier period in my life.

On January 1, 1995, I flew from Kyiv to Boston to start my new position as an associate professor of urban planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. For more than two years, I had been shuttling between Boston and Ukraine as a United States Agency for International Development–funded advisor to Ukraine’s new government on issues of land reform. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine sought to introduce private market reforms to its state-controlled economy. Land and housing, among other state-owned assets, were on Ukraine’s privatization agenda. How much land should be privatized and how it should be accomplished were two of many questions confronting the government.

It cannot be emphasized enough that no one—Ukrainian or non-Ukrainian—had experience with mass-scale privatization. The former Soviet states and republics, along with former Eastern bloc countries, were suddenly flooded with foreign consultants, funded by various multilateral and bilateral donor organizations (USAID, World Bank, International Finance Corporation, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, among others), many claiming to have the secret sauce that would ignite mixed market economies. When it came to laws that could enable such transformations, the proposals too often involved cut-and-paste jobs on laws from the consultant’s home country. I remember seeing verbatim excerpts from Connecticut’s housing condominium law being circulated for adoption in an Eastern European country as it worked to privatize hundreds of thousands of housing units in multifamily buildings. That type of copying of laws and policies from an entirely different context constitutes the worst kind of technical assistance delivered by international consultants.

My early visits to Ukraine involved a deep dive into existing laws, institutions, and on-the-ground practices, accompanied by the forging of trust relationships with key government counterparts who could enable or scuttle any changes. I remember well many meetings with Volodymyr Gusakov, first deputy minister of the Ministry of Construction and Architecture; Boris Chepkov, chairman of the State Committee on Land Resources; and Anatoly Dron, chairman of the State Committee on Housing and Communal Services. Volodymyr Nudelman, one of Ukraine’s leading planning experts, joined many of the meetings. Between disquisitions drawn from his encyclopedic knowledge of Ukrainian planning policies, he would plaintively ask, “Would it be all right if I told a joke?” His repertoire of Slavic humor, deeply ironic, equaled his planning knowledge and created a relaxed atmosphere that enhanced our collective work.

Our approach was expressly collaborative: my counterparts were the experts on state ownership of urban land while I was invited to consult about private land markets. None of us were expert in how to transition from one to the other. Consequently, we needed to pool our respective knowledge banks and imagine the path forward together.

One of my first steps was to convene a conference in Kyiv about land policies worldwide. Hundreds of Ukrainian government officials, professionals, and academics joined speakers from the United States and elsewhere to hear about everyone’s real estate systems. Speakers were exhorted not to advocate but to describe and, yes, to offer judgments of strengths and weaknesses. Grasping how a fully state-owned and state-administered land system worked seemed as alien to the private market country representatives as did private ownership to the Ukrainians. Boris Chepkov kept asking me how much land was privately owned in the United States. I was initially evasive, fearing that the ratio might become a Ukrainian goal. Of course, I ultimately told him (it is roughly 60 percent); thankfully it did not become official policy.

An early step desired by the Ukrainians involved changes to their laws to authorize private ownership of urban land. As an initial foray, Ukrainian counterparts and I prepared a ministerial decree enabling that type of ownership in advance of the broader legal changes that would have to navigate a much more difficult path through the Ukrainian parliament. Prime Minister Leonid Kuchma signed and issued the decree; it was a victory of sorts, but one that would hardly guarantee action on the ground.

To that end, with a primary team composed of a private Ukrainian lawyer (Volodymyr Nosik), an MIT student (Alex Gamota), a USAID official (Amy Osborne), the consulting firm PADCO, and my simultaneous translator (Valeriy Ponomerov, who was as close to a right arm as my actual right arm), along with Kharkiv mayor Yevhen Kushnaryov and land manager Lubov Pogulayeva, we designed one of the first-ever open competitive land auctions in the former Soviet Union. Our idea was to create a demonstration project that would be widely publicized, demonstrably successful, and ultimately replicable throughout the country.

Auctions could be a particularly effective way to accomplish privatization. They were relatively transparent, governed only by the highest responsible bid, and speedy. The Kharkiv auction preparation took roughly six months. We readied the legal and institutional framework to sell ownership and lease interests in a number of land parcels in downtown Kharkiv. [1]

The lead television station in Moscow, Ostankino, promised to broadcast the event. USAID officials from Kyiv and Washington were scheduled to attend. Two weeks before the auction, not one bidder had registered. I remember sitting in Ms. Pogulayeva’s office, distressed, saying how this would be an embarrassing disaster if the auction failed. She looked at me and said, in Russian, “Jerold, don’t worry. There will be bidders.” And there were. The auction went off without a hitch, with actual competitive bidding and long-term land leases sold. I never asked what happened in the two weeks to produce bidders. I didn’t really want to know.

My work took me to many Ukrainian cities. We rolled out the auction model to Lviv, Odessa, and Chernihiv. Chernihiv also served as the site for a demonstration project on zoning. I talked about housing condominium laws in Zaporizhzhia before hundreds of state-owned housing managers. The country seemed on the move, albeit slowly. Understanding the mechanisms of change, however, was not the same as effecting change. None of the essential infrastructure of land markets was present. There were no private real estate brokers, appraisers, lenders, developers, and other actors crucial for functioning land markets. There was no system for registering private titles to land. The judicial system was not geared to resolution of private conflicts. There was no history or culture of market-determined competition, without which all the legal and institutional changes would be that much harder to implement.

One of the most interesting collaborations involved a week-long tour of American real estate markets from Boston to Washington, DC, by roughly five percent of the Ukrainian parliament. I served as tour guide. Seeing is believing, but we didn’t sugarcoat the experience. As much as our visitors were impressed by the variety and quality of housing types, we showed them places where, as economists would say, market failures and inequitable outcomes proliferated. How could it be, in one of the richest countries in the world, that far too many families lacked adequate housing and other services? At least in Ukraine, the state provided housing for all. That reality could temper even the most ardent advocates of private ownership.

Looking back this many years later, our efforts at technical assistance seem idealistic and naive. We didn’t accomplish anything near what I had initially hoped. Demonstration projects did not scale out as planned. Adoption of laws did not mean implementation on the ground. The infrastructure needed to create functioning real estate markets remained incomplete. Generations of experience with state ownership would take generations to unlearn, even for those deeply motivated to move in that direction. The very idea that systems working in one country could be readily transferred to another would be challenged. Globalization in many respects has its limits. Seeing buildings in which I worked damaged or destroyed by Russian bombs shakes me to the core. I don’t see silver linings in the rampant destruction, but the idealistic and naive part of me also hopes that, if and when the horror ends, there will be opportunity for renewal which, if done well, can create a better future for Ukrainians.

[1] For those interested in learning more about the legal and institutional framework of land auctions in Ukraine, see Jerold Kayden, Volodymyr Nosik, and Alex Gamota, A Guide to Land Auctions in Ukraine (1995).

This piece was originally written for and printed in Harvard Design Magazine #50: “Today’s Global ,” in spring 2022

Jerold S. Kayden is the Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Founding Director of the Master in Real Estate Program, which will welcome its inaugural cohort of students in fall 2023. He previously served as co-chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design and director of the Urban Planning Program. His teaching and scholarship address issues of land use and environmental law, public and private development in cities, public space, urban disasters and climate change, and design competitions. His books include Privately Owned Public Space:The New York City Experience; Urban Disaster Resilience:New Dimensions from International Practice in the Built Environment; Landmark Justice:The Influence of William J. Brennan on America’s Communities; and Zoning and the American Dream:Promises Still To Keep.

Christina E. Crawford is assistant professor of architectural history at Emory University. Her research focuses on the transnational exchange of ideas about housing and urban form in the 20th century. She is the author of Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union (2022) and co-editor of Detroit-Moscow-Detroit: An Architecture for Industrialization, 1917-1945 (2023). Crawford holds a PhD and MArch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and was a Fulbright student in Ukraine in 2001-2002.

Announcing the 2023 MICD Just City Mayoral Fellowship

The Just City Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD) are pleased to announce the launch of the 2023 MICD Just City Mayoral Fellowship , taking place in a hybrid virtual and in-person format in Spring 2023.

The 2023 Fellowship will help mayors develop and strengthen approaches to embedding justice and equity goals within government policy and practices, as well as help mayors design strategies for achieving more just and equitable outcomes within their communities. This year’s cohort of mayors will be introduced to the concepts of social impact and justice-centered design, equity framework measurement tools, and innovative design practices that increase just and equitable outcomes. Building from past Fellowships, this year’s program will continue to explore ways to create lasting, transformational impacts from new federal funding streams such as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the American Rescue Plan Act.

The Just City Lab is a design lab located within the GSD and led by architect and urban planner Toni L. Griffin. The Lab has developed nearly 10 years of publications, case studies, convening tools and exhibitions that examine how design and planning can have a positive impact of addressing the long-standing conditions of social and spatial injustice in cities. The Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD), the nation’s preeminent forum for mayors to address city design and development issues, is a leadership initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the United States Conference of Mayors . Since 1986, MICD has helped transform communities through design by preparing mayors to be the chief urban designers of their cities.

The Lab’s Just City Index will frame dynamic presentations and dialogues with experts in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, art activism, housing, and public policy. Over the semester-long program, mayors will identify how injustices manifest in the social, economic, and physical infrastructures of their cities and develop manifestos of action for their communities.

The 2023 MICD Just City Mayoral Fellows are: Albany, NY Mayor Kathy Sheehan; Albuquerque, NM Mayor Tim Keller; Arlington, TX Mayor Jim Ross; Kansas City, MO Mayor Quinton Lucas; Monroe, LA Mayor Friday Ellis; Pensacola, FL Mayor D.C. Reeves; Santa Fe, NM Mayor Alan Webber; and St. Louis, MO Mayor Tishaura O. Jones.

“I’m delighted to see this powerful collaboration between the Just City Lab and the Mayors’ Institute on City Design continue for a third year,” said Sarah Whiting, dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. “This year’s cohort of mayors comes from the most diverse group of cities yet–from the southwest to the northeast, with a wide range of population sizes. We welcome them to the Graduate School of Design, where they will have an opportunity to engage with our faculty and students, learning from our justice-centered curriculum and research, and leaving with new expertise to further equity and opportunity in each of their cities.”

“The Just City Mayoral Fellowship is a powerful example of how arts and design help us to examine our reality, imagine a better future, and ensure our cities reflect the ideals we aspire to as a nation,” said Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD, chair of the National Endowment for the Arts . “This program recognizes the critical role that mayors play in driving local change and I look forward to seeing how they use this experience to bolster justice and equity in their communities.”

“Mayors are leading our cities through a transformative time, using new federal funding streams to create once-in-a-generation change,” says Tom Cochran, CEO and executive director of the United States Conference of Mayors . “They are tasked with uniting their communities around real solutions and making the most of these transformational investments. The traditional MICD experience, with its candid, small-group format and access to national design experts, is so often transformative for mayors. There is no better model for empowering mayors to find solutions in our nation’s cities, and the United States Conference of Mayors is proud to partner with the Just City Lab to help guide mayors through this important chapter of American history.”

On April 21, the 2023 Fellows will come together for Mayors Imagining the Just City: Volume 3 to discuss strategies for using planning and design interventions to address racial injustice in each of their cities. The program will be free and open to the public.

Learn more about the host organizations at www.micd.org and www.designforthejustcity.org .

Parts of this press release also appeared on the MICD website .

A Moratorium on New Construction?

“Yet what we need is a voluntary cessation, a conscious and fully consensual interruption. Without which there will be no tomorrow.”¹

The concept of sustainable construction does not hold meaning any longer. Real sustainability is an impossible endeavor and a delusion in the present modus operandi of global construction. From land consumption to material use, building is a destructive process: urbanization devours hectares of unbuilt land every year, and the construction industry relies intensively on resource extraction.²  Through mining, manufacturing, and building, the energy used in construction impacts the planet at a tectonic scale. Water bodies, ecosystems, topography, geology, climate, food systems, labor conditions, humans, and nonhumans everywhere are destroyed or damaged to propel voracious global supply chains.

The end of the world has been ongoing for many. From the tons of toxic bauxite residue stored in unstable pools in Hungary to the devastated social landscapes surrounding the coltan mines of Chile, this damage is a prerequisite of designed spaces, affecting all non-constructed surfaces—from forest to farmland.³ Despite loud calls to reexamine our faulty growth model, the expansionist global enterprise of land and resource exhaustion fueled by both construction and real estate development goes on relentlessly.⁴

Stop Building? 

The call for a moratorium on new construction emerges from these global urgencies and from the palpable lack of action on the side of the building industry and planning disciplines beyond flaccid corporate strategies (green labeling, carbon compensation, material reinvention, and LEED, for example). Devised to cover up ongoing devastation, construction’s greenwashing of its toll on the environment is deployed in full force. Little is done to curb the damage done through commodified and speculative real estate development and construction schemes. Moreover, global material use is expected to rebound with post-pandemic economic policies and to double by 2060; a third of this rise is attributable to construction materials.

And this is but a fraction of what ultimately makes up the built environment. The transformation of raw resources into exploitable architectural elements (aggregates to concrete; sand and silica to glass; petroleum to insulation foam) not only necessitates the combustion of fossil fuel at every turn, but also relies on a host of facilitating technologies. Automated mining systems and computer-aided drawing software, for example, steer an increase in the extraction of critical minerals including aluminum, cobalt, copper, graphite, lithium, manganese, nickel, platinum, tin, titanium, tungsten, and zinc, among others.

The front lines of extraction are moving in all directions, and rapid devastation is ongoing. Paradoxically described as unavoidably necessary in order to transition to less carbon-intensive lifestyles in selected parts of the planet, this commodity shift toward rare materials suggests that sustainable oil rigs and e-Caterpillars will be undertaking the greener enterprise of destruction we design.

Against the propagandizing of ecological concerns both for eco-fascist agendas and as a business driver of technofixes, a moratorium on new construction calls for a drastic change to building protocols while seeking to articulate a radical thinking framework to work out alternatives.

House Everyone 

Because housing is a human right and the mandate of the design disciplines, our fields stand at the difficult threshold between housing provision and devastation: How does one navigate the need for housing as well as the destructive practice of its construction? According to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) census of 2021, the median size of new single-family homes was 2,273 square feet, compared to 1,500 square feet in the 1960s, despite the shrinking of the median household size, down from 3.29 in the 1960s to 2.52 persons today.⁵ This trend sees more land, more materials, more appliances, and more infrastructures directed toward larger homes built to host fewer people, with debt at the core of its financing. In a talk at the GSD in February 2022, HUD secretary Marcia L. Fudge said that the days when one can have a plot to build a house were numbered—despite her lecture being titled “Building the World We Want to See.”⁶

If we jettison the maxim that the solution to the housing crisis is to build, myriad other possibilities come into view: decent minimum living wages, just protocols to housing access, rent control, zoning reforms, purchase of private property to provide public housing, fostering of collective ownership and forms of cohabitation, and alternative value generation schemes. These solutions allow us to move beyond the struggles and dichotomies that plague the debate: renting vs. ownership, YIMBYs vs. NIMBYs, nature vs. humans, and housing crisis mitigation vs. zero net emission, among others.

If new construction were to stop completely, even for a short while, the current built stock—buildings, infrastructure, materials—would have to be reassessed, and the productive and reproductive labor that goes into it necessarily would be revalued. Varying widely from well-paid skilled workers to exploited manual laborers, the labor force involved in construction remains mainly unautomated—and overlooked. We could anticipate the emergence of new societal and ecological values and a reevaluation of the labor involved in caring for buildings, from surveying the existing stock to engaging in reparative works to acts of daily upkeep.⁷

The effort ahead is immense; a different way of designing the world emerges, one that demands a careful assessment of present and vacant inventory, strong policies on occupancy and against demolition, anti-vacancy measures, densification plans, maintenance protocols, end-of-life etiquette for materials, and overall upgrading tactics. These will all need to be imagined, formulated, planned, and implemented—according to the needs of the context.

Who Is to Say Build or not Build? 

At the same time, a moratorium’s global validity must be interrogated. The geography of harmful extraction and the political economy of construction are mirrored in today’s neocolonial modes of extraction capitalism, with gendered and racialized populations most affected. Assuming that the bauxite extracted in Guinea ends up on the facades of pencil towers in New York, shouldn’t a moratorium be limited to new construction where a consolidated stock already exists? Indeed, the integrity of the sustainability narrative is belied by the extent to which environmental laws have been successfully weaponized and how unpersuasive frugality arguments continue to be.

As Peter Marcuse argues, “the promotion of ‘sustainability’ may simply encourage the sustaining of the unjust status quo and how the attempt to suggest that everyone has common interests in ‘sustainable urban development’ masks very real conflicts of interest.”⁸ Achille Mbembe spells it out: “In Africa especially, but in many places in the Global South, energy-intensive extraction, agricultural expansion, predatory sales of land, and destruction of forests will continue unabated.”⁹ Thus, with overbuilding and resource consumption on one side and lack of housing and material extraction on the other, a new construction moratorium could be restricted to extractive built nations and adopted by countries incrementally along GDP lines.

Upon closer inspection, the need for nuance emerges. In Cairo, there are 12 million vacant units, high vacancy rates grounded in locally specific conditions such as questionable rent control laws, proactive suburban development state programs, and a lack of trust in banking institutions.¹⁰ In Costa Rica, the bulk of new construction consists of coastal residential units aimed at tourists or expatriates, fueling socio-environmental issues of displacement and degradation.¹¹ In South Africa, the demolition of scarce public housing to make way for market-rate units shows the limitation of the construction-as-solution storyline.¹²

Nevertheless, building more is heralded everywhere as the sole answer, a debatable leitmotif served up from the Bay Area to Mumbai that conceals the reality of the commodification of housing fueled by debt financing. Housing needs are not the question when home insecurity is such an acute problem for many, and when it is true that crucial infrastructures are lacking in some regions.¹³ Thus, construction is not to be condemned outright when there are such vast disparities in what different countries can provide. But while contextual complexities require a deeper investigation into where and what is constructed and what should not be built, a moratorium on new construction challenges the incapacity of the sector to envision alternative large-scale housing provision schemes beyond building new.

Beyond GDPs and other faulty measurements, beyond moral confines and neo-Malthusian indictments, how are we to grapple with sustainability as a contested concept, legacies of degrowth theory, green capitalism, and problematic CO₂ reduction policies becoming the stuff of riots?¹⁴ How many of the thousands of new housing units built every year everywhere are accessible to those who need them most? How can we optimize and maximize our existing stock before extracting new materials? How do the design disciplines face their complicit role in environmental degradation, social injustice, and climate crisis, and challenge the current system of global construction?

Imagining Possibilities 

The following vignettes play out in various locations to answer some of these interrogations. Drawing from A Moratorium on New Construction, an option studio that took place at the GSD in spring 2022, these ideas point to what must stop and what needs to change, from India to the United States. In contemplating redistributive modes of ownership and communing and  questioning the standard claim of building right, predatory real estate practices, high-tech-heavy solutions, and the assumption that architects must build anew rather than practice methods of repair and prolonging, a vision for a material future relying on our current built stock emerges.

In Mumbai, a city where affordable housing is in high demand, the ongoing demise of chawls—collective units built in the 1930s for mill workers, and now home to active but modest communities—epitomizes the rapid destruction of affordable housing at the hands of the state and the private sector. High-rises for wealthier owners replace the chawls, and the tenants are displaced. Devashree Shah (MArch ’22) argues for a moratorium on the demolition of chawls and all subsequent new construction. But because aging chawls’ structures require upkeep, Shah proposes a post-moratorium design strategy that envisions physical and social repair as a unified design task.

From maintenance protocols (cleaning, clearing trash, painting, and re-plastering), to reparative works (replacing broken shingles, sistering, straightening structures), to strategic interventions (co-living arrangements, shared amenities), to additions aimed at increasing social capital (community kitchens, daycare centers), to strengthening neighborhood networks (pooling capital, sharing facilities), the design of an entire repair strategy at every scale advocates for a value shift, one that privileges care labor above newness. Primarily undertaken by gendered and ostracized populations, upkeep work is considered belittling to many. Shah’s project challenges this perception through a socio-spatial tandem design by illuminating the crucial relevance of repair work both for buildings and communities—in a context where new construction is halted.

On the shores of the Yucatán Peninsula, Tulum is the latest Instagrammable ecotourism destination, with its pristine beaches overlooking the Caribbean Sea, which already is dotted with so-called eco-resorts and sustainable Airbnbs. Tourism growth is highly contested by local communities who oppose the construction of a high-speed Mayan Train aimed at ushering in more visitors. Indigenous voices have pointed to the harm caused to the area’s fragile ecosystem by constant growth within their economies. Turning these calls into a radical design brief, Gerardo Corona Guerrero (MAUD ’23) designs the gradual recess of tourism activity in Tulum.

The project disputes the success story of ecotourism and imposes as a first step a moratorium on tourism-oriented infrastructure. Considering that the “reconstruction of nature” is an equivocal concept bordering on eco-fascism, the project embarks instead on an incremental approach, phasing measures across a time span of 70 years, from reparative ecologies to deconstruction and material reuse. It articulates a decolonial understanding of degrowth toward a negotiated human stewardship of the land.

Going against the grain, Aziz Alshayeb (MAUD ’23) proposes a critique of the current trend of demolishing highways. He exposes a national agenda of hardcore gentrification and CO2-heavy development operating under the auspices of post-oil mobility and community betterment. In this context, the project proposes a moratorium on the demolition of Highway I-45 in Houston and puts forward a counternarrative to highway demolition that is based on Sara Ahmed’s concept of “complaint as resistance.”¹⁵

Taking community grievance as mandate, the project seeks to listen to all—from anyone who has registered a complaint, and from children to bees—to articulate an alternative program to the kind of solutionism that currently plagues design. With tools including legal frameworks and ecological measures, the project pushes against the evils of urbanization, including environmental degradation and gentrification and their manifold consequences. What emerges is a future of peaceful cohabitation between nonhumans, humans, and our obsolete infrastructures.

Starting from the perspective that the single-family home is an unsustainable, energy-intensive housing type that is itself fundamentally grounded in colonization, Bailey Morgan Brown (MArch ’22, MDes ’22), a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, proposes a moratorium on suburban sprawl for Edmond, Oklahoma, a site she describes as being paradigmatic of settler-colonialism. She argues that the single-family house exemplifies the combined burden of legal, economic, environmental, social, and environmental pressures, in the form of mortgage financing, lawn care, air conditioning, car infrastructure, normativity, materialism, and low occupancy rates, among others.

Going further, Brown develops a protocol for establishing a sovereign suburban space, articulating a plan for how “land back” would actually play out. Her plan unfolds into a multilayered strategy that includes a land transfer of “unassigned lands” to a Tribal Cooperative Council; a mandate against the displacement of existing residents; the termination of property lines and of zoning and the creation of new land use definitions; and the development of ambiguous, contested, fluid, and temporal spaces for energy production, medicinal vegetation, nonhumans, crop production, and new models for taxation.

These few examples speak of the incredible potential of what design can do if new construction is not an option—the potential to confront the built environment’s past, present, and future and to engage with existing building stock to question the current economic model of development and to move forward toward a better industry. Pausing construction problematizes the narrative of progress and techno-positivism that propel capitalist societies as well as the mandates for their design. Buttressed by an imperative for boundless economic growth proffered by postcolonial powers, those mandates sell “a better life for all humanity—a mentality that continues to structure global asymmetries,” as articulated by Anna Tsing.¹⁶ 

Nubian architect and decolonial scholar Menna Agha frames the call to “stop building to start constructing” as a prerequisite to setting off the reconstruction and rehabilitation of the built environments of the racialized, gendered populations bearing the brunt of ecological and social devastation.¹⁷ A pause would also allow the design professions to pivot toward resource stewardship, to remodel what we do and deploy design’s organizational capacity to (begin to) think about new forms of emancipated practice, to engage in remedial work, and to establish the care of the living as our sole priority.¹⁸ Somewhere between a thought-experiment and a call for action, a moratorium on new construction is a leap of faith to envision a less extractive future, made of what we have. It’s about building less, building with what exists, and caring for it.

 

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is an architect, urban designer, and Assistant Professor of Architectural and Urban Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Most recently, she was Assistant Professor of Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she taught studios and seminars and, in 2021, launched the initiative A Global Moratorium on New Construction, which interrogates current protocols of development and urges deep reform of the planning disciplines to address earth’s climate and social emergencies.

 

¹ Achille Mbembe and Carolyn Shread, “The Universal Right to Breathe,” Critical Inquiry 47, no. S2 (Winter 2021): S58-S62, https://doi.org/10.1086/711437.

² See David Harvey, Explanation in Geography (Jaipur, India: Rawat Publications, 2015).

³ See Martin Arboleda, Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2020).

⁴ “A Global Moratorium on New Construction” was an initiative started in April 2021 and undertaken with B+, in the form of four roundtables that generated a wealth of ideas instrumental to articulate this work. I would like to thank for their generous inputs: Cynthia Deng & Elif Erez, Noboru Kawagishi, Omar Nagati & Beth Stryker, Sarah Nichols, and Ilze Wolff (1st roundtable, April 2021); Menna Agha, Sarah Barth, Leon Beck, Silvia Gioberti, and Kerstin Müller (2nd roundtable, June 2021); Connor Cook, Rhiarna Dhaliwal, Elisa Giuliano, Luke Jones, Artem Nikitin, Davide Tagliabue, and Sofia Pia Belenky, (Residents of V—A—C Zattere with Space Caviar (3rd roundtable, July 2021); Manuel Ehlers, Saskia Hebert, Tobias Hönig & Andrijana Ivanda, Sabine Oberhuber, Deane Simpson, and Ramona Pop (4th roundtable, August 2021); as well as Arno Brandlhuber, Olaf Grawert, Angelika Hinterbrandner, Roberta Jurčić, Gregor Zorzi, and Rahul Mehrotra for supporting this experiment.

⁵ Unites States Census Bureau, “Highlights of Annual 2020 Characteristics of New Housing,” Census.org (2020), https://www.census.gov/construction/chars/highlights.html .

⁶ Marcia L. Fudge, “Building the World We Want to See: What Do We Want Our Legacy to Be?,” in John T. Dunlop Lecture (Harvard University Graduate School of Design: 2022).

⁷ Thanks to Sarah Nichols for articulating this idea in the frame of the first roundtable, “Stop Building?” in April 2021 at the Harvard GSD.

⁸ Peter Marcuse, “Sustainability Is Not Enough,” Environment and Urbanization 10, no. 2 (October 1998).

⁹ Mbembe and Shread, “The Universal Right to Breathe.”

¹⁰ Yahia Shawkat and Mennatullah Hendawy, “Myths and Facts of Urban Planning in Egypt,” The Built Environment Observatory (2016). Omar Nagati and Beth Stryker in Stop Building? A Global Moratorium on New Construction, eds. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes and B+ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2021).

¹¹ See Andreas Neef, Tourism, Land Grabs and Displacement: The Darker Side of the Feel-Good Industry (London: Routledge, 2021).

¹² Ilze Wolff in Stop Building? A Global Moratorium on New Construction, eds. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes and B+ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2021).

¹³ See Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (New York: Crown/Archetype, 2016).

¹⁴ Marcuse, “Sustainability Is Not Enough.”

¹⁵ See Sara Ahmed, Complaint! (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).

¹⁶ Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 23.

¹⁷ Menna Agha in Pivoting Practices. A Global Moratorium on New Construction, eds. Charlotte Malterre-Barthes and Roberta Jurčić (Zurich: Swiss Institute of Technology, 2021).

¹⁸ Elif Erez and Cynthia Deng, “Care Agency: A 10-Year Choreography of Architectural Repair” (Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2021).

Announcing the Harvard GSD Spring 2023 Public Program

The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) launches its spring 2023 public program with the opening of the exhibition Grand Paris Express: Reconfiguring the City through Radical Infrastructure, on display through March 31, 2023. A lecture and reception are scheduled for March 2, and an afternoon of workshops surrounding the large-scale transit project will follow on March 3. The Grand Paris Express is the winner of the 2023 Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design .

Other highlights include: Kotchakorn Voraakhom, who will present a lecture on the challenges that water-based cities face when addressing climate change (January 31). Adèle Naudé Santos will deliver the Jaqueline Tyrwhitt Urban Design Lecture entitled “Narrative Maps: A Design Process” (February 14). For the John Hejduk Soundings Lecture, Stan Allen will discuss his recent book Situated Objects (February 7). Kofi Boone will speak on environmental injustice in landscape architecture and urban planning for the Sylvester Baxter Lecture (February 16).  Andrew Bernheimer will present the annual John T. Dunlop Lecture (March 28), with a talk titled “Where is the Architecture? Finding Design and Community Amidst Constraints,” followed by a discussion with Jill Crawford, Marc Norman, and Daniel, D’Oca. And Rouse Visiting Artist Abraham Cruzvillegas will present a lecture titled “Centring: A Definitely Unfinished and Temporary Structure for Art Making” (April 13).

The complete public program calendar appears below and can be viewed on Harvard GSD’s events calendar. Please visit Harvard GSD’s home page to sign up to receive periodic emails about the School’s public programs, exhibitions, and other news.

Spring 2023 Public Program

Kotchakorn Voraakhom, “LANDPROCESS: The Global and Local Climate Adaptation Design”
Lecture
January 31, 6:30pm

Yung Ho Chang, “Form, Content, and Total Design”
Lecture
February 2, 6:30pm

Stan Allen, “Situated Objects”
John Hejduk Soundings Lecture
February 7, 6:30pm

Ana María Durán Calisto, “The Deep History of Amazonian Agroecological Urban Forests: Why Do They Matter Today?”
Lecture
February 9, 6:30pm

Adèle Naudé Santos, “Narrative Maps: A Design Process”
Jaqueline Tyrwhitt Urban Design Lecture
February 14, 6:30pm

Kofi Boone, “Recognition, Reconciliation, Reparation”
Sylvester Baxter Lecture
February 16, 6:30pm

Grand Paris Express: Reconfiguring the City through Radical Infrastructure
Celebration for the 14th Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design
March 2, 6:30pm

High Performance Public Transportation: Models and Strategies
Green Prize Workshop, Gund 112 (Stubbins)
March 3, 12:30pm

New Stations as Urban Projects: Multiple Dimensions
Green Prize Workshop, Gund 112 (Stubbins)
March 3, 3:00pm

International Womxn’s Week Keynote Address
March 7, 6:30pm

Bas Smets, “Biospheric Urbanism”
Daniel Urban Kiley Lecture
March 23, 6:30pm

Andrew Bernheimer, “Where is the Architecture? Finding Design and Community Amidst Constraints”
John T. Dunlop Lecture
March 28, 6:30pm

Mark Lee, “Five Footnotes Toward an Architecture”
Walter Gropius Lecture
April 4, 6:30pm

Rachel Meltzer, “What We Miss When We Look at Everything: Global Shocks and Local Impacts”
Lecture
April 11, 6:30pm

Abraham Cruzvillegas, “Centring: A Definitely Unfinished and Temporary Structure for Art Making”
Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture
April 13, 6:30pm

Tosin Oshinowo, “Aṣẹ: Intentional Contextuality and Adaptability in Design”
Aga Khan Program Lecture
April 18, 6:30pm

“Mayors Imagining the Just City: Volume 3”
Symposium
April 21, 1:00pm

All programs take place in Piper Auditorium, are open to the public, and will be simultaneously streamed to the GSD’s website, unless otherwise noted. Registration is not required.

Closed captioning will be available for livestreamed events. CART captioning is available for in-person attendees. To request other accessibility accommodations, please contact the Public Programs Office at [email protected].

 

2022 Holiday Book Round-up: Recent Publications by GSD Faculty and Alumni

Looking for a design-related book this holiday season? Look no further than this list of recent and upcoming publications by Harvard Graduate School of Design faculty and alumni. From artificial intelligence and postwar Japanese architecture to real estate development and the architecture of UN peacekeeping missions, this roundup showcases the wide range of books published by members of the GSD community.

Through the triple lens of history, application, and theory, Artificial Intelligence and Architecture: From Research to Practice   (Birkhäuser, 2022) by Stanislas Chaillou (MArch ’19) provides a survey of artificial intelligence’s encounter with architecture and unveils the promise and challenges AI holds within the field and beyond.

BLUE: The Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions (Actar, 2023) is part of the ongoing activism, research, design, and advocacy work of Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (FAST). Author Malkit Shoshan, design critic in urban planning and design, explores the UN peacekeeping mission as an urban phenomenon and shows how designs rooted in local cultures and empowerment can address a history of violence. The book builds on earlier presentations, including the exhibition BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions for the Dutch Pavilion at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale.

In his new book, Constructing Latin America: Architecture, Politics, and Race at the Museum of Modern Art (Yale University Press, 2022), Patricio del Real  (MArch ’92) examines multiple architecture exhibitions and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) as a cultural weapon. The book looks at MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design as it navigated the thorny politics of Pan-Americanism and the cultural conflicts of the second postwar era.

In Cyberfeminism Index , hackers, scholars, artists, and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology. Edited by Mindy Seu (MDes ’19), the book celebrates the multiplicity of practices that fall under this imperfect categorization and makes visible cyberfeminism’s long-ignored origins and its expansive legacy. “This book served as my doorway to cyberfeminism and I now see what an energetic continent awaits me. Anywhere I stepped it burned my hair off, it’s that brilliantly intense,” writes Kevin Kelly, founding editor Wired magazine.

In Designing Landscape Architectural Education: Studio Ecologies for Unpredictable Futures (Routledge, 2022), Rosalea Monacella, design critic in landscape architecture, asks designers and academic practitioners to describe their own work through an ecological lens, and then to articulate design approaches for developing new practices in landscape architecture teaching. The book draws on the manifold issues of the climate crisis as a set of drivers to examine a range of innovative design approaches to address the current and future priorities of the discipline.

Birkhäuser Press has released an expanded second edition of Drawn to Design: Analyzing Architecture through Freehand Drawing by Eric Jenkins (MDes ’99). The book examines research in fields outside of architecture, such as the cognitive sciences and physiology, to further understand how sketching fosters design thinking.

Formulations: Architecture, Mathematics, Culture (MIT Press, 2022) is an investigation of mathematics as it was drawn, encoded, imagined, and interpreted by architects on the eve of digitization in the mid-20th century. Author Andrew Witt, associate professor in practice of architecture, draws from the seminar “Narratives of Design Science” and examines the visual, methodological, and cultural intersections between architecture and mathematics. Through an intercultural exchange with other disciplines, he argues, architecture adapted not only the shapes and surfaces of mathematics but also its values and epistemic ideals.

Inscriptions: Architecture Before Speech (Harvard Design Press, 2022) presents a theory of contemporary architecture that spans the work of 112 practices in 750 images. Against the popular characterization of contemporary architecture as a centerless field where anything goes and everything is possible, K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory and director of the Master in Design Studies Program, and Andrew Holder, associate professor of architecture and director of the Master in Architecture I Program, argue that much recent work belongs to a collective undertaking. The ensuing work is nothing less than democratically optimistic in its wide appeal and challenging in its cuts against convention.

ORO Editions published Live Learn Eat: Architecture (2022) by Anthony Poon (MArch ’92). Architectural Digest contributor Michael Webb writes, “Anthony Poon’s passion for music inspires a vibrant architecture that engages its users and the environment. This monograph explores three fields in which Poon Design has excelled: housing, schools, and restaurants. It explains how they enrich the experience of living, learning, and eating, and promote social interaction. Affordability and sustainability are hallmarks of Poon’s designs, which fuse quality and innovation.”

Originally published in Italian in 1964, Manfredo Tafuri’s book L’Architettura Moderna in Giappone explored Japan’s postwar architecture, including its metabolist movement. Tafuri, who had never visited Japan before writing the book, used photographs, articles, and texts to explore the country’s modern architecture. Edited and introduced by Mohsen Mostafavi, Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, Modern Architecture in Japan: Manfredo Tafuri (MACK, 2022) introduces English speakers to the influential book for the first time.

Featuring historical and contemporary images of architecture at the threshold between water and land, Occupation: Boundary: Art, Architecture, and Culture at the Water (ORO Editions, 2022) by Cathy Simon (MArch ’69) examines the social, political, and cultural factors that influence the evolution of the urban waterfront as seen through production created from art and design practices. Together, the instincts, reflections, and architectural production collected here evidence the role of art and design in the creation of an equitable and inviting public realm.

Now in its fourth edition, Professional Real Estate Development: the ULI Guide to the Business (The Urban Land Institute, 2023), co-authored by Richard Peiser, Michael D. Spear Professor of Real Estate Development, covers the nuts and bolts of developing all types of real estate, including multifamily, office, retail, and industrial projects. Thoroughly updated, this new edition includes numerous case studies of actual projects as well as small-scale examples that are ideal for anyone new to real estate development.

John Ronan (MArch ’91) has written Out of the Ordinary (Actar Publishers, 2022). This publication on the work of John Ronan Architects explores the firm’s spatial-material approach to architecture and the underlying themes of its typologically diverse output. Out of the Ordinary proposes an architecture of innovation rising from ordinary concerns about relationships, not form.

John Gendall (MDes ’06) released Rocky Mountain Modern: Contemporary Alpine Homes . Published with Monacelli Press (2022), this book presents 18 new and recent houses built in the Rocky Mountain region, from Canada to New Mexico, examining the relationship between aesthetics and the functional demands of what can be an extreme environmental context. It situates these projects in a broader historical arc by presenting a brief history of architectural modernism in the region, including designs from Mies van der Rohe, Breuer, and Neutra.

Verify in Field: Projects and Conservations with Höweler + Yoon (Park Books, 2022), Höweler + Yoon Architecture’s second book, highlights verification as an integral part of the design process and demonstrates it as a productive tool to test ideas and act on the world. The book examines the discipline’s pressing questions, as they relate to verification, uncertainty, and design agency.  Essays by Eric Höweler, associate professor of architecture and architecture thesis coordinator, and J. Meejin Yoon cover topics including means and methods, the public realm, energy and environments, the construction detail, and social media.

Grand Paris Express Wins 2023 Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design

The Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) is pleased to announce that the 14th Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design has been awarded to the Grand Paris Express, a large-scale transit project currently being built in and around the Paris metropolitan area. Through carefully articulated design interventions, the Grand Paris Express illustrates the potential for the planning and execution of mobility infrastructure to transform a city and its region. Société du Grand Paris , a national agency responsible for designing, creating, and implementing the Grand Paris Express, will receive the $50,000 USD prize and recognition for the continued stewardship behind the project.

Established in 1986, the biennial Green Prize recognizes projects that make an exemplary contribution to the public realm of a city, improve the quality of life in that context, and demonstrate a humane and worthwhile direction for the design of urban environments. Eligible projects must include more than one building or open space constructed in the last 10 years.

With 68 new stations and 200 kilometers of additional tracks, as well as extensions of existing metro lines, the Grand Paris Express is currently the largest urban design project in Europe. Its four new lines will circle around the capital and provide connections with Paris’s three airports, developing neighborhoods, business districts, and research clusters. It will service more than 100 municipalities, 165,000 companies, and the daily transport of 2,000,000 commuters. Construction work began mid-June 2016 and is due to last until 2030.

The overarching goals of the Grand Paris Express are to address the issue of the Paris monocentric model and to conceive a more open-minded design for urban mass transportation. It also strives to prioritize efficient forms of mobility by diminishing reliance on private automobiles and lowering the carbon footprint of this megalopolis. As a large-scale enterprise, the project aims to improve mobility patterns to make Paris more sustainable by creating rapid and nonpolluting connections between existing outskirts and new emerging developments. These connections, in turn, generate new centralities within the knowledge-based economy. The infrastructure layout is logical, with a signature external double loop partially overlapping the city center to provide connections between external sectors without crossing through the central area.

Architectural projects tied to the Grand Paris Express are fully independent, and are undertaken as collaborations between architects, designers, and artists, with individual sites addressing the specific conditions of each stakeholder. Every sector is committed to participatory processes in which the community considers issues of social inclusion and programming aspirations. And all projects adhere to an overall brief and principles, taking into account the public plaza and future programs developed at each location. The overall organization of urban projects is demonstrated through steps that ensure goals can be met on a realistic and well-defined timeline.

The Grand Paris Express is expected to contribute particularly to the “banlieue” zones, or suburbs of Paris, and create room for new housing programs and economic initiatives. By employing environmental practices, the construction process will also encourage biodiversity and effectively merge sites into the built landscape. After being extracted during tunneling, for example, soil is recycled throughout the sites, and low-carbon concrete is used to reduce building emissions.

Infused with a dedication to experimentation, realized through constant negotiation between city officials, motivated designers, and mobilized citizens, and committed to educating other cities about implementation pathways, the Grand Paris Express sets a new standard for innovation in the field of urban design and the construction of sustainable territory

This year’s jury committee includes Eve Blau, adjunct professor of the history and theory of urban form and design at the GSD; Maurice Cox, commissioner of the Department of Planning and Development of the City of Chicago; Gary Hilderbrand, Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture and chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the GSD; and Ron Witte, professor in residence of architecture at the GSD; and chaired by Joan Busquets, Martin Bucksbaum Professor in Practice in Urban Projects at the GSD.

Grand Paris Express: Reconfiguring the City through Radical Infrastructure, an exhibition coinciding with the prize, will be on display at Druker Design Gallery from January 23, 2023, through March 31, 2023. Curated by Joan Busquets, Martin Bucksbaum Professor in Practice of Urban Planning and Design, the exhibition showcases models, renderings, documentary photographs, and video footage of this vast and ambitious urban design project. A public lecture and reception for the exhibition is scheduled for Thursday, March 2 (6:30 p.m.) at Piper Auditorium.

For more information about the Prize and to see a list of previously awarded projects, please visit the Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design website.