Gary R. Hilderbrand Appointed Chair of the GSD Department of Landscape Architecture

Harvard Graduate School of Design announces Gary R. Hilderbrand (MLA ’85) as new chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture, effective July 1, 2022. Hilderbrand is the Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor-in-Practice at the GSD, where he has taught since 1990, and Founding Principal and Partner of Reed Hilderbrand.

Hilderbrand succeeds Anita Berrizbeitia (MLA ’87), Professor of Landscape Architecture, who joined Harvard GSD as a Design Critic in Landscape Architecture in 1991. Appointed in 2015, Berrizbeitia is the 14th chair of the oldest landscape architecture department in the world, and only the second woman to hold the position.

“Gary’s sensibilities as a teacher and as a practitioner are one and the same—his unyielding efforts to reconcile imminent, often intractable forces of urbanization with ecological sustainability, cultural history, vegetative regimes, and thoughtful kindness are central to his pedagogy and practice both. I could not be more delighted he has accepted this appointment, and I am excited for what is to come under his leadership of the department. I also look forward to celebrating Anita’s important tenure as chair of the department and thank her for all that she has brought to the school,” says Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture.

“I’m humbled and honored in equal measure by this appointment, and I am grateful to Dean Whiting for her confidence and support,” Hilderbrand says. “For more than a century, Landscape Architecture at Harvard has positively shaped discourse in research, teaching, and practice in the field. We continue that legacy forward with renewed urgency in the face of ever more dramatic environmental and social upheaval. I’m grateful for Professor Anita Berrizbeitia’s remarkable and humane intellectual stewardship over the past seven years, and I look forward to working with my colleagues in the department and the school to uphold the commitment to design leadership that is demanded of us in this time. We stand well prepared.”

Gary Hilderbrand is a Founding Principal and Partner of Reed Hilderbrand. Works by Reed Hilderbrand have received more than 100 design awards to date. A committed practitioner, teacher, critic, and writer, Hilderbrand’s honors include Harvard University’s Charles Eliot Traveling Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture, the Architectural League’s Emerging Voices Award with Douglas Reed, and the 2013 ASLA Firm of the Year award. DesignIntelligence named Hilderbrand one its “25 Most Admired Educators” of 2016. Gary is the recipient of the 2017 ASLA Design Medal, the highest design honor available to an American landscape architect.

Hilderbrand is committed to positioning landscape architecture’s role in reconciling intellectual and cultural traditions with contemporary forces of urbanization and change. Over the course of his prolific career, Hilderband has collaborated with Tadao Ando, Annabelle Selldorf, and Gensler on the expansion of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA; developed four phases of revitalizing the Hudson River waterfront at Long Dock Park, Beacon, NY; and led the Cambridge Urban Forest Master Plan for the City of Cambridge, MA. More recently, Reed Hilderbrand were part of five firms participating in the Tidal Basin Ideas Lab, a design ideas competition that reimagines the future of Washington, D.C.’s iconic Tidal Basin. Current works include the repositioning of New York City’s Lever House, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the new Farrand House at Dumbarton Oaks, and major interventions at the Storm King Art Center.

Hilderbrand’s essays have been featured in Landscape Architecture, Topos, Harvard Design Magazine, Architecture Boston, Clark Art Journal, Arnoldia, New England Journal of Garden History, and Land Forum. Hilderbrand is co-author of Visible | Invisible, a Reed Hilderbrand monograph (2012), and he has produced two other books: Making a Landscape of Continuity: The Practice of Innocenti & Webel (1997), which was recognized by ASLA and AIGA (50 Best Books); and The Miller Garden: Icon of Modernism (1999).

He has served on the editorial boards of Spacemaker Press, Harvard Design Magazine, and Landscape Architecture Magazine. As a competition juror, he’s participated in Harvard’s Green Prize for Urban Design (2006, 2013); I Premi Europeu de Paisatge Rosa Barba Barcelona (2000, 2002, 2003, 2018); and “Suburbia Transformed” for the James Rose Center (2010). He chaired the ASLA National Awards Jury in 2005 and the ASLA Annual Student Awards Jury in 2006

“From Virtual by Emergency to Virtual by Design,” the 2020–2021 Irving Innovation Fellows Advance Virtual Pedagogy

Each year, the Irving Innovation Fellowship enables recent Harvard Graduate School of Design alumni to pursue ambitious research, teaching, and collaborative projects in design, architecture, urban design, and landscape architecture. Fellows receive a full year of post-graduate funding and resources, and their projects often expand on a thesis or capstone project developed during a GSD master’s degree.

For 2020–2021, the four Irving Innovation Fellows—Sarah Fayad (MLAUD ’20), Isabella Frontado (MDes ADPD/ MLA I ’20), Gia Jung (MArch I ’20), and Ian Miley (MArch I AP ’20)—were affiliated with GSD’s Innovation Task Force. Established in the wake of COVID-19, the task force researches, develops, and documents best practices for virtual design pedagogy. As Miley explains, their work “assisted with the transition from virtual by emergency to virtual by design.” Collectively, the fellows researched software and curriculum improvements for GSD courses, sharing their findings through workshops, an online guidebook, and a weekly newsletter.

“The transition to online teaching,” Frontado says, “provided the GSD community with an opportunity to pause and reflect on our teaching and learning practices . . . [how] courses are designed and how those designs may translate to a new medium.” This space for reconsideration, she continues, “provided everyone with the opportunity to experiment. It was exciting to see so much energy and effort come together from students and faculty.”

In addition to their collective tasks, the fellows also pursued individually directed research projects that drew from their disciplinary interests to make vital contributions to the GSD community.

The fellowship allowed Sarah Fayad to explore how virtual spaces—and virtual reality—could reinvent key aspects of design education. Fayad’s work is a considered, sensitive examination of how new technologies can facilitate collaboration and inclusion at the GSD. By partnering with two studio courses, Fayad developed a framework for using virtual technologies in online and hybrid courses. In the fall ’20 option studio “Extreme Urbanism (7): Imagining an Urban Future for Ishkashim, Afghanistan,” taught by Rahul Mehrotra and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Fayad and the task force examined how a fully virtual studio could experiment with site documentation (through interviews, imagery, and videography) and student engagement.

But it was the spring ’21 course “Dividing Bridges and Bridging Divides” taught by Heinrich Wolff, that allowed her to develop innovative approaches to using virtual reality (VR) in design studios. Fayad says, “The interlink between collaboration and space has been crucial to our pedagogy.” Earlier modes of teaching and collaboration relied on “coexisting in the same physical space,” such as studios or site visits. As online and hybrid learning models forced a physical separation, Fayad found that “technology and digital tools, such as VR, have enabled us to remain connected in a common reality.”

Throughout, Fayad sought to synthesize traditional methods—developed in physical contexts—with virtual methods that supported online and hybrid teaching. Virtual approaches, she found, could encourage greater access to sites and geographies that were difficult for GSD students to visit. And digital tools, intentionally and strategically deployed, could create a more collaborative and inclusive space: “The digital might exacerbate issues of inequality, [but] when used deliberately, these tools can in fact mitigate it.”

Fellow Gia Jung’s research considered how new virtual spaces could facilitate design discourse at the GSD. Her project addressed the impact of the pandemic on various modes of communication, including informal interactions and formal discourse, as well as expanded public engagement. “The remote semesters have highlighted the texts at the expense of contexts,” Jung writes, “which required all of us to be more deliberate—verbally, visually, and socially. The task at hand into the next year is clear: How do we become more deliberate and intentional about how we communicate, critique, and develop design?”

During his fellowship, Ian Miley worked with the Innovation Task Force to develop tools and principles for blending asynchronous and synchronous pedagogy. His investigations into changing practices of physical fabrication also showed how students and professors, in responding to online learning constraints, have enriched the GSD’s renowned fabrication culture.

One of Miley’s first projects addressed an immediate, tactical difficulty: with GSD students geographically dispersed, how could seminars accommodate a wide range of time zones? Miley contributed both a spreadsheet-based scheduling tool and principles for rearranging courses into asynchronous and synchronous sessions. He considered how the structure of different seminars—history/theory, design/technology, and professional practice—could be adapted to online teaching. He also delved into how technology could facilitate close reading and annotation of visual material and texts. These principles were applied to Domestic Logistics, a new fall ’20 course taught by Andrew Witt with Miley serving as a teaching associate. Miley also assisted with a spring ’21 option studio, Small Institutions, taught by Roger Tudó Galí, Josep Ricart Ulldemolins, and Xavier Ros Majó of H Arquitectes.

Our inability to access the typical tools and methods of physical fabrication instigated creative experimentation in how to create physical objects and why we create them.

Miley’s research also explored the enduring persistence and significance of physicality in virtual pedagogy—and how GSD students, working from home, developed new ways of prototyping and model-making. In the spring, he interviewed specialists Chris Hansen and Rachel Vroman at the Fab Lab, as well as current students and alumni on how they used physical modeling in studio and thesis projects. “Our inability to access the typical tools and methods of physical fabrication,” Miley wrote in an ITF newsletter, “instigated creative experimentation in . . . how to create physical objects and why we create them.” When presenting this research, Miley observed that the constraints of COVID-19 “liberated” students to “develop personal techniques and methods” that were resourceful and inventive. “Working from home transformed . . .the ends [and] means of model-making.”

The work of the 2020–2021 fellows, collectively and individually, exhibit the culture of research, innovation, and inquiry fostered by the Irving Innovation Fellowship. Toward the end of the fellowship, Frontado wrote: “I hope we can continue to collectively test, reflect, and critically engage . . . especially as we transition back to the more familiar in-person classroom environment.” In a time of upheaval and change in architectural and design education, new ways of teaching can inform innovative ways of working. “What we teach, how we teach, the questions we ask, and how we engage with varied material will shape future generations of designers and how they in turn shape the world. Together, we can take this moment to think carefully about what that future looks like.”

Sunghea Khil Receives Travel and Research Grant from the American Planning Association

Sunghea Khil, a joint degree Master in Urban Planning and Public Policy candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Kennedy School, is one of two planning students to receive 2022 student grants from the American Planning Association to support travel and research. Her proposal, “Planning for Sustainable Urban Infrastructure in Uganda: Revenue Solutions for Municipal Services,” will research strategies for successful municipal solid waste (MSW) management in emerging markets.

“Over 90% of waste in Africa is disposed of at uncontrolled dumpsites and landfills,” notes Khil’s proposal. “The city of Kampala, Uganda is also experiencing a need for adequate solid waste management, as well as developing a landfill site that can accommodate greater needs of MSW.” Her project will ask questions including: “How can Kampala’s waste management infrastructure be financed to generate sufficient revenue solutions?” And, “Considering the potential impact of surrounding communities, what are some strategies to repurpose the old landfill site?”

During her time at Harvard, Khil has concentrated on urban economic development through the dual lenses of policy and design. She is interested in infrastructure, cities, and development in the United States and globally. The APA grant allows for study through August 2022.

Learn more about Khil’s research and the travel grant program on the APA website .

Honoring the Legacy of Urban Design Pioneer Jaqueline Tyrwhitt

The GSD renamed the 50th Anniversary of Urban Design Program Lecture for Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, a GSD associate professor who worked to establish and fortify the urban design program during its founding years. The Jaqueline Tyrwhitt Urban Design Lecture will be delivered each year by a visionary urban planner, designer, scholar, or leader who has opened novel directions in urban-design thinking and traced new intersections between urban design and other disciplines. Moshe Safdie, Lee Cott (MAUD ’70), and Jay Chatterjee (MAUD ’65) played a key role in establishing the original lecture in 2010 and fortifying its energy since.

About Professor Jaqueline Tyrwhitt

Written by Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture 

Professor Tyrwhitt (1905–1983) served as an Associate Professor at the GSD between 1955 and 1969, and worked to establish and fortify the urban design program during its founding years. Professor Tyrwhitt—or Jacky, as she preferred to be called by friends—spent her early years in London and the English countryside. While taking a course at the Architectural Association, she found inspiration in the work of Patrick Geddes and his view of urban planning as organic rather than predetermined; her study and illumination of Geddes’s ideas would later prove seminal. After World War II, Tyrwhitt would stake out a transformative role in shaping the post-war Modern Movement toward decentralized urban, community, and residential design. She left England for Canada in 1951, working to establish a graduate program in city and regional planning at the University of Toronto. She arrived at the GSD in 1955, teaching here until her retirement in 1969.

Central forces throughout Professor Tyrwhitt’s pedagogy include her humanistic approach to urban planning and design, and her commitment to communicating and sharing design discourse. She translated and edited all major works by Swiss art historian Sigfried Giedion, and in 1955 launched a journal titled Ekistics to activate the influence of Greek architect and planner Constantinos Doxiadis. She moved to Greece after her GSD retirement, settling on an Attic hillside near the village of Peania; she passed away there in 1983, working on her final book. Our Frances Loeb Library offers a number of Professor Tyrwhitt’s publications; additionally, she was a focus of the library’s 2018 exhibition “Feminine Power and the Making of Modern Architectural History.”

Department of Landscape Architecture Announces 2022 Penny White Project Fund Recipients

The Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Department of Landscape Architecture has announced the 2022 recipients of the Penny White Project Fund . Established in 1976 by the family of Winifred G. “Penny” White who died suddenly during her second year as a landscape architecture student at the GSD, the program offers financial support for student projects with the goal to “carry forward Penny’s ideal of a culture which emphasizes a close relationship between people and nature in a cohesive living environment.”

This year’s 18 winning proposals were selected through an evaluation process that looked for “originality and innovation of projects, with an eye to their contribution to pressing challenges related to the fields of design, landscape, urbanism, and ecology.” Awards typically range from $200 to $4,500.

“From the impact of animist relationships with plants in the cultivation of ecosystems in Hawai’i to the analysis of rest stops and their impact in the US highway culture and leisure travel, from the role of the Luganda language in the construction and preservation of landscapes in south central Uganda to the shared cultural values and practices in the transcontinental landscape of the Strait of Gibraltar, from a prototypical experiment on the use of lichen as air quality bioindicator in Mexico City to a film documentary on the abandonment of wartime manufacturing plants in Central China, this 45th edition of the Penny White Project Fund has awarded an extraordinary set of proposals,” remarks the Fund’s 2022 selection committee. “Working with a wide variety of geographic conditions and research methods, these projects constitute a great reflection on the many different ways that design contributes to a more just distribution of the world’s resources, and will help to expand the Penny White Project’s legacy towards a better understanding of the complexities of our contemporary environment.”

The following GSD degree candidates will receive Penny White project funding for 2022:

Catherine Auger (MLA I AP ’23) for “Noise1”

Matthew Gorab (MLA I ’23) for “Rest Stopping Across America: An Investigation of Northeast and Midwest Rest Stops”

Diana Guo (MLA I ’22) & Tianwei Li (MLA I ’22) for “Berries of Abundance: Renewing Lifeways Through Cultural Foodscapes in Arctic Canada”

Julia Hedges (MLA I ’24) for “Immaterial Earth: Kentucky Karst Above and Below”

Yazmine Mihojevich (MLA I ’23) for “Recovering Roger Young Village”

Dora Mugerwa (MLA I ’24) for “Luganda and the Land: How Language Reimagines Landscape”

Chandani Patel (MLA I AP ’23) for “Environmental Commoning in Loktak Lake, Manipur”

Marina Recio (MLA I ’22) for “Seeing Through Lichen: Making Air Pollution Visible in Mexico City”

Scarlet Rendleman (MLA I ’22) for “Animate Entanglements: Spiritual Ecologies of Native Hawai’ian Land-based Ethics and Practices”

Kevin Robishaw (MLA I ’23) for “Never the Same River Twice: Un-Damming and Re-Designing America’s Rivers”

Berit Schurke (MLA I ’22) for “Of Shifting Coastlines: Articulating Arctic Coastal Adaptation Strategies in Anticipation of the Deep Thaw”

Rebecca Shen (MLA I AP ‘23) for “Tending Sanctuary: Exploring Entanglements of Land Stewardship and Multispecies Community at Vine Sanctuary”

Liwei Shen (MLA I ’22) & Ying Zhang (MLA I ’22) for “Atlas of Post-Afforested Desert Landscape: An Ecological Study of the Mu Us Desert’s Greening Effort in China’s Three-North Shelter Forest Program”

Elaine Stokes (DDes ’24) for “Dammed Landscapes: Riparian Infrastructure at the Mississippi’s Headwaters”

Juan Villalon (MAUD ’22) & Kawthar Marafi (MLA I AP ’23) for “Aceituna/Zaytoon landscapes: Olive Tree Cultivation Atlas across the Trans-Gibraltar Region”

Erin Voss (MLA I ’23) for “The Implication of Cultural Seascapes for the Design and Management of Polynesian Islands”

Rachaya Wattanasirichaigoon (MAUD/MLA I AP ’24) for “The Lightscapes of Fireflies”

Sijia Zhong (MLA I AP ’22) for “Land the Void”

New book from REAL considers Responsive Environments through a design manifesto

A new book from the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab (REAL), co-authored by Associate Professor in Practice of Architectural Technology Allen Sayegh, Stefano Andreani (MDes ’13), and Matteo Kalchschmidt, presents a design manifesto in response to the question: What makes an environment “responsive”?

Released by Actar Publishers, Responsive Environments: An Interdisciplinary Manifesto on Design, Technology and the Human Experience draws on years of research from REAL, design work by Cambridge-based research studio INVIVIA , and other innovative practices. It examines our “technologically-mediated relationship with space” and is divided into three parts: Situations, Experiences, and Interactions. For each section, the book includes a series of case studies.

REAL is dedicated to a “design-led approach for the development of alternative models, technologies, and processes to be applied to artifacts and buildings as well as to cities and landscapes, with the ultimate objective of mediating and augmenting the relationship between the individual and the urban environment.” Sayegh serves as principal investigator and Andreani is the lab’s research associate and project manager.

Browse and buy the book on Actar’s website.

First Comprehensive Assessment of HouseZero Demonstrates High Energy Efficiency

 

Newly published research in the peer-reviewed journal Energy and Buildings shows that the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities’ HouseZero achieves a high level of energy efficiency with a combination of natural ventilation and a thermally active building system (TABS). With TABS, water flowing through pipes embedded in reinforced concrete is used to heat or cool a building, minimizing temperature fluctuations. A year-long assessment of the building’s ventilation and TABS presents the first comprehensive look at HouseZero’s energy efficiency.

“The research supports the effectiveness and success of [HouseZero’s] integrated system configurations and control strategies,” writes the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities in a press release . “Specifically, the data demonstrates that the natural ventilation and TABS integration can effectively control the indoor thermal environment while achieving high energy efficiency. This is also reflected by the low annual energy consumption for heating and cooling described in the paper.”

HouseZero—which functions both as the headquarters for the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities and as an experimental laboratory—was unoccupied during the first year of data collection due to the pandemic. But the research contains valuable information about the building’s performance and will help to inform strategies to minimize gaps between design intents and building operation. It also includes a set of takeaways that can be applied to retrofitting and operating similar structures.

“Comprehensive Assessment of Operational Performance of Coupled Natural Ventilation and Thermally Active Building System via an Extensive Sensor Network” is co-authored by Bin Yan, Xu Han, Ali Malkawi, Tor Helge Dokka, Pete Howard, Jacob Knowles, Tine Hegli, and Kristian Edwards and appears in Volume 260 of Energy and Buildings (1 April 2022).

Heat Magnets: Jeannette Kuo on Mitigating the Harmful Effects of Glass Building Facades

Lever House, Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois (SOM), New York City, 1952. Photo © Ezra Stoller/Esto .

“More light!” Goethe reportedly said on his deathbed in 1832. At that time, the outer walls of buildings were load-bearing, so they tended to be thick and windows were necessarily small. In the decades after Goethe’s death, structural advances in architecture meant that these outer walls could be relieved of their weight; designers could increase window sizes and admit more light into building interiors. Glass came to be associated with the luxury of being able to pay for the most current building technologies. In the 20th century, this trend of increased transparency evolved into the curtain wall—a building’s outer envelope of sheer glass. Office buildings especially adopted this facade to signal participation in the high-tech world of global capitalism. Though curtain walls tend to look a lot alike, each carries an “aura”: an association with power.

Bringing in “more light,” unfortunately, has become associated with another kind of death: that of the planet. With sunlight comes heat, and the cooling systems that are needed to counteract that heat—aside from being costly—consume more energy and generate even more heat, both of which contribute further to global warming. Glass is also notoriously inefficient with insulation values, increasing energy loss. Now that so many skyscrapers feature all-glass curtain walls, the cumulative environmental effect has become troubling. In 2019, New York City responded with Green New Deal legislation that imposes severe restrictions on curtain walls in future construction. Existing large buildings (25,000 square feet or more) will be required to undergo redesign or retrofitting to reduce energy use, rendering them more environmentally sustainable.

Enter architect Jeannette Kuo, who this past semester taught “THICKER,” a seminar at the GSD about the curtain wall phenomenon. The title came from the possibility that alternatives to the all-glass curtain wall might emerge from the critical study of older and often “thicker” facades. Kuo, who cofounded the Karamuk Kuo firm in Zurich in 2010, had noticed that issues of sustainable facades have yet to be addressed in university curricula from a design theory perspective. Courses often focus more on technological solutions rather than greater conceptual, cultural, and design underpinnings. She imagined that the seminar could be a model for filling this gap in architectural education and practice.

The motivation for the course has roots in Kuo’s personal history. She watched as glass skyscrapers colonized the built landscape in Indonesia, the tropical country where she grew up, as well as in even hotter, sunnier areas, such as Dubai and Egypt. She noticed that global corporations were using all-glass facades to promote an image of economic advancement tied to the West. Yet the design choice ignores local contexts and is obviously unsustainable: cooling costs in desert climates are immense. Kuo wondered how the worldwide proliferation of these “heat magnets” could be addressed through a shift in architectural culture. She theorized that the curtain wall would remain an automatic design choice in a corporate landscape still driven by global capitalism until it becomes possible to craft alternative images of progress and even alternative structures of power.

Instead of leaving the outside of the building for last, what would happen if the building were designed from the outside in?

The curriculum for “THICKER” was not a technical survey of “green design” possibilities, but rather a discussion-based dive into theoretical and historical material. Kuo blended environmentalism with aesthetics and cultural studies to reconsider facade design altogether. Instead of leaving the outside of the building for last, what would happen if the building were designed from the outside in? If the pressing environmental issues related to the building envelope were treated as a design opportunity, the reconceptualization of the curtain wall could affect the entire building.

Kuo posed several questions to guide the inquiry: What have we found so seductive in the curtain wall’s transparency and reflectivity? How can we understand and call into question this cultural conditioning? Given the environmental concerns, what technical and visual strategies might be gleaned from earlier, “thicker” facades, and why are these older solutions now less popular? What kinds of cultural work does the building’s envelope perform? Finally, how might a facade which integrates cultural and aesthetic details with sustainable technical solutions propose creative visual and conceptual responses to global capitalism?

The course was conducted as a theory and design seminar in a hybrid format. Discussions were open-ended as Kuo encouraged a think-tank atmosphere. Some particularly engaging topics included contrasting the hermetically sealed glass envelope with design strategies that function in conversation with local social contexts. Also, whose vision of “progress”—and what kinds of “power”—does the all-glass curtain wall signify? The class interrogated the value of light in Western mythologies, given that in many non-Western cultures, it has historically been shadow and not light which gives comfort. How might prioritizing shade present a new view of strength?

Reading selections investigated theoretical contexts and case studies starting in the late 19th century, when Louis Sullivan was insisting that “the loftiness of the tall office building must be . . . made the dominant chord in the design.” Studies of buildings with classic curtain walls were contrasted with moments in the mid-20th century when some buildings’ more sustainable facades could be models for challenging the curtain wall, though these projects often were not recognized for the contributions they could offer. The 1962 Economist Building in London, for instance, is remembered for responding to the urban site with a multi-building campus featuring a public plaza, but Alison and Peter Smithson’s facade design featured mullions that channel rainwater flows. Paul Rudolph’s Blue Cross Blue Shield Building in Boston, also completed in the early 1960s, similarly features air distribution through prefab concrete “mullions.” Many of Le Corbusier’s postwar buildings featured brise-soleils and even pioneered the double-glazed “mur neutralisant,” which attempted to address the low insulative performance of glass. He had famously opposed the all-glass curtain wall that was installed at the United Nations headquarters in New York. But a “thicker” facade need not mean a heavier one. The more recent BBVA Tower in Madrid (1981) offered the class a model for using extended balconies to shade a building from the bright Spanish sun while at the same time presenting an image of lightness.

 

All of these histories and frameworks informed students’ proposals, in the last few weeks of class, for redesigning the Lever House in Manhattan. This choice of a site was thoroughly strategic. The building was declared New York City’s first modernist landmark in 1982; it had been the city’s first commercial building to use an all-glass envelope when it opened in 1952. The building at 390 Park Avenue, about a dozen blocks north of Grand Central Station, still houses the US headquarters of the international company now called Unilever. It has undergone updates to its iconic facade before, and there are plans for another redesign. The company, which spans many types of product brands beyond its original soap, has a clear commitment to sustainability in its buildings worldwide, and now of course it will be subject to New York City’s new energy guidelines for large buildings.

 

Students imagined various approaches to redesigning the facade. Yet the situation was also technically constrained: the enormity of the surface area and the building’s height meant that students couldn’t simply block light with heavy materials such as brick. The group researched the building, site, local environmental conditions, and corporate history, and each student developed a design proposal based on an aspect of the architectural situation that they found particularly compelling.

 

Several students attended closely to the aesthetics of Gordon Bunshaft’s original facade design for the Lever Building, which included an all-over grid and a color scheme to match the palette of the company’s signature soap packaging. Others proposed an outer layer of shading in the form of wraparound balconies, especially on the building’s sunny south side. Balconies had the additional benefit of incorporating the breaks that had become a recommended part of work culture since the building’s original design. Some students used in-depth studies of wind patterns to create subtle interventions in air circulation and to harvest wind energy; others looked to the building courtyard’s original landscape design by Isamu Noguchi to inspire ideas that would involve plant life. Inevitably, many designs featured light-blocking panels such as louvers, sails, retractable awnings, and moveable wall elements. These all had the challenge of making sure daylight could penetrate the building envelope while still creating reliable heat reduction and energy savings.

 

Student projects succeeded in suggesting new possibilities and visual languages for environmentally integrative facade design. Given the environmental damage that the all-glass curtain wall can cause, Kuo’s course demonstrated that there is no reason for remaining entrenched in this design cliché. And as we face an uncertain economic future—“Extreme capitalism is over,” notes Kuo—this course showed how the reconceptualization of the curtain wall could advance new images of corporate health as well as new paradigms for sustainable design.

Blank: Speculations on CLT, edited by Jennifer Bonner and Hanif Kara

When I began studying architecture in the 1980s, students would often get asked at crits what, exactly, those blank white or beige walls indicated on their drawings or models were intended to be made of. The answer, almost inevitably, was “concrete.” Concrete was the wonder material, the realizer of dreams. The reliable, universal one-word answer. The staff would, inevitably, roll their eyes. But that reliance on a blank material rendered as an abstract surface has been threaded through the history of the last century of so of architecture. In the beginning, even architects themselves could only dream of abstract planes of concrete. Le Corbusier, Rietveld, and the others built walls of brick, rendering them so they would appear as concrete—smooth, featureless, as if drawn rather than built. They made concrete through manifestation.

A century on, with the world more aware of impending climate crisis, that one-word answer of “concrete” might be dumber and even less acceptable than it was then. The response now, however, might well be “CLT.” Even more than concrete, big panels of cross-laminated timber, cut in a spotless factory by robots, far away from the mud, sweat, and swearing of the construction site, looks like the future. Prefabricated, clean, as much drawing as material, rendering as reality, it represents the new wonder material of our eco-aware, guilt-burdened age; the world-saving, carbon-soaking, multifunctional stuff sent to salve our consciences in the creating of new buildings we know to be wrong, in attempting to make architecture at all.

It is a heavy burden for one material to bear. And that is why Hanif Kara and Jennifer Bonner, who teach together at the GSD, have compiled a book that attempts to feel a way toward a new language for CLT, a material that looks like it has everything, but that hasn’t yet coagulated a sense of theory, meaning, or material culture around itself yet.

The book’s title, Blank (Applied Research and Design Publishing/ORO Editions, 2022), hints at this emergent identity, the still-unformed nature of a material that is both lumber and number, wood and data, a slab that exists between the forests and the digital. In one way, CLT is nothing new. It’s a close cousin of the plywood which emerged as a mass-market material a century or so ago and became a staple building product after having been adopted from other industries including aviation.

Clearing my parents’ old house out the other day, I took an ancient Singer sewing machine to the dump. Heavy as hell in cast-iron, it came in its own vaulted carrying case. I’d guess it was from the 1920s and that curved wooden top was probably the product that propelled plywood into a mass-market material. Singer’s slice of the market was so huge in the early 20th century that their adoption of bent plywood for their sewing machine cases gave this new wonder-material the scale to become an accessible material, one that subsequently came to define varying strands of modernism, from Aalto’s and Breuer’s ergonomic loungers via the streamlined bars and railway carriage interiors of Deco to the spartan studio-interiors of Case Study houses and artists’ studios.

Plywood however was mostly a surface rather than a structure. It’s true there were all kinds of laminated beams and ply products but we still probably think of it as a surface, a sheet. CLT is surface, too. But also structure. It is wall but also floor, ceiling, roof, insulation, internal finish, and the rest. Its versatility is almost comical. It holds, perhaps, a similar status in our age as not only concrete did to the modernists but as plastic did in the postwar era. It looks like the future; a total, wraparound environment.

On the other hand, it also smells like the past. It might be high tech in its manufacture but CLT is still lumber. Its future should seem assured then, particularly in the US, where the history of housing has been one of adopting the cheapest, easiest timber construction techniques. The American house is already an all-timber affair: the balloon frame, timber windows and doors, shingles, log cabins, lodges, sticks of timber nailed together. It should be simple to segue into CLT construction in which all of that comes in one package.

The writers here outline possible histories and futures, their texts interspersed with designs— plans, models, cutout kits of parts, propositions for a new language of architecture constructed around the capabilities of a material that does so many things at once. Along with the optimism, there is a sense of feeling a way toward new modes of expression. If the designs can look a little familiar, shot through with elements of deconstruction, wiggly walls, Swiss seriousness, and parametric ambition, many of the texts consider what the shift means. This kind of mass timber, Hanif Kara points out, is now being employed in ways more akin to how concrete is currently used in construction. It’s an odd shift—the move from the formwork leaving its imprint on the structure to the timber being employed directly—the return of the uninverted grain.

Erin Putalik puts mass timber back in its plywood context with a brisk potted history and Courtney Coffman chooses to look at the qualities of the book’s title, the curious blankness of the material. In his essay, Sam Jacob points out the cartoonish qualities of CLT, the ways in which cutouts and punched openings might resemble the cat-shaped holes in a wall through which Tom has fled at speed or the fake/real ACME tunnels constructed by Wile E. Coyote. There is something clunky in these cutouts, a super-graphic approach to the material as two-dimensional with extruded depth, rather than the complex strata of a more familiar wall or door frame with its codified layers. It has a weird confluence with foam board as a substrate for models, a super-simplified language blown up to 1:1 without translation in material quality.

It is also, as Elif Erez (March ’21/ MDes ’22) points out in her essay for Blank titled “Deadpan CLT”, impossible not to think of the scene from Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928, featured above) in which the facade of a house rips away from its walls and falls on the deadpan comic in the most perfect way so that his form is accommodated by an upstairs window. The scene was resurrected in Deadpan (1997) by British artist Steve McQueen, who subtly subverted it as an echo of the invisibility of the Black body in 20th-century popular culture. That delaminated elevation is a cipher for CLT, a thing both seriously substantial and comically weightless, sign and signified. There is something slapstick about an entire elevation built from a single sheet as it appears here (though of course this was frame and shingles). It reduces architecture to the condition of a stage set, a flat, something fake built only to represent reality and enable the suspension of disbelief.

Other contributors, including Jennifer Bonner, point to the condition of the blank as something already fully assimilated in fine art (she singles out Mavis Pusey; perhaps she might have also alighted on Richard Woods or even Roy Lichtenstein) who used the “plank-ness” of timber as a shorthand for materiality. Elsewhere Gehry, Rossi, Mies, and Corb appear, sometimes as plywood pioneers, at other times as adopters of the blank slab which could be concrete or marble—but why not CLT next? Even Lewerentz makes a guest appearance (in Nader Tehrani’s essay) as an architect who adopted one material—brick in his case—as if it were a contiguous surface, in often surprising and surreal ways, anticipating the way in which CLT is employed as a total environment, a laminated bubble.

Other writers here comment on the unsettling similarity of CLT structure to a supersized architectural model. Like the basswood or balsa wood architects meticulously incise to building miniature models in which everything is simplified, complex structural beams and details are stripped out and one material, one strip of wood is left to represent all surfaces and both internal and external finishes, CLT, with its clunky depth and chunky cutouts can look like a hypertrophied miniature. It has that quality of a photo taken with an endoscope in a tiny model or those mesmerizing snaps you sometimes see on social media of the inside of a musical instrument, a violin or a guitar suddenly appearing as a kind of Gehry phantasmagoria with a shaft of light piercing the F-holes and the struts and bracing: the everyday made suddenly unfamiliar.

Many of the authors point out something both curiously cuddly and unsettlingly uncanny about the material. In its grain, its feel, its smell, it is wood; but in its use it is concrete and in its manufacture it is digital. It is that hybridity that has made it simultaneously so attractive and so difficult to pin down, to position in the architectural palette.

Mass timber is, in its way, the architect’s dream material. It is (relatively) sustainable, a renewable resource, prefabricated, digital in its milled manufacture, precise, warm, and able to elude the requirements for the endless layers of finish and insulation which have made a mockery of Victorian and early modernist calls for “honesty” in construction and the show-and-tell approach to elevations. But perhaps sometimes, when we get what we dream of, we don’t know quite what to do with it. Regulation is still catching up, the notoriously conservative construction industry is still not quite convinced, and planners remain, despite endless screeds about sustainability, stuck in concrete.

Every new material, of course, provokes its own reaction. CLT’s super-sustainable halo is now being questioned by some for its liberal use of glue. Dowel-laminated timber (DLT) is occasionally touted as the next next big thing, avoiding petrochemical adhesives entirely. But it looks like CLT is, for the moment at least, here to stay. Blank is as much a comment on its newness, the lack of imprint on the culture, as it is on the character of those enigmatic slabs.

Concrete, Kara points out, had Le Corbusier’s 1914 Maison Dom-Ino—the ubiquitous image of the column and slab—that remains the model for almost all contemporary construction. The boosters of CLT have not yet emerged with an ur-model as elemental and memorable as this, perhaps because the results might just be too simple, too bizarrely familiar—a house-shaped house, a box. Ironically, Kara suggests, CLT would make a better Dom-Ino house than concrete ever could as planes provide more rigidity than reinforced concrete columns. There is no single image for CLT like Corb’s for concrete in this book, rather an increasingly complex series of explorations of form, each of which points in different directions as attempting to suggest that the possibilities are infinite.

The construction of the American balloon frame house, which still seems so simple, fragile, and astonishing to Europeans, was a result of a number of factors. First the availability of cheap timber, second the abandonment of the guilds and master carpenter networks of Europe which prescribed long apprenticeships and complex jointing techniques (along with the propensity of people to build their own houses using limited skills), and third the mass production of the nail as a machine-made and abundant good.

The construction industry since then has become specialized and exclusive, though the framing technique remains.

Perhaps CLT needs its barn-raising moment. Perhaps its real adoption will need not only the complex renders and undulating lines of attempts at a parametric city of CLT towers but a return to the cartoonish world of Tom and Jerry and Buster Keaton. Perhaps Spike’s doghouse is a better model than the most complex CLT skyscraper. The charm of the material lies precisely in its elemental simplicity. Anyone who has ever built a model, used Lego, or played with a dollhouse can understand how it works. The problem is not problematizing it, but making it legible. Should be easy.
Right?

Excerpt from Harvard Design Magazine, “South Side Land Narratives: The Lost Histories and Hidden Joys of Black Chicago,” by Toni L. Griffin

Publicly expressing Black pain can render reactions of solidarity, healing, and empowerment, or exhaustion, guilt, and helplessness. However, Black voice can be a powerful instrument of change—used as a currency to be saved or spent or as a carrier of demand and solution. The past year has unearthed untold knowledge that gives additional context to the root of what drives this voice—its trauma, its demands, and its joy. Making this knowledge more public can help to inform how we understand and engage one another; how we reframe harmful Black narratives that shape the public perception; and how the power of Black creativity and resiliency as a political device can produce spaces of Black-centered freedom and liberation.

This essay and the corresponding collages aim to represent and make public the confrontation of pain and quest for joy found in the Black public realm of Chicago’s Mid-South Side. Each collage illustrates the relationship between publicness for Black Americans and the current urban landscape of vacancy including southern migration in response to public denial; the public scars left by urban renewal’s land mutilation; and the relentless pursuit of public freedoms in the public realm. The series offers a reflection on the contests that exist over land, space, and place alongside the aspiration of Black Americans to simply occupy and be carefree in public, unencumbered by fear and liberated from self-consciousness.

The collages include present-day mapping, photography, and historic images, in combination with clippings from, and references to, the imagery and symbols of Chicago’s Black life and prosperity used in the work of notable African American artists. My objective was to create new portrayals of the South Side and its people by making public some of the lesser-known narratives about these neighborhoods over the last century.

The narratives, rooted in the ownership and occupancy of land, reveal the practices of institutional racism, exclusion, and extraction, juxtaposed against images of the undiminished spirit, ambition, productivity, and creativity of Black Chicagoans. Richard Wright describes this as the “extremes of possibility” in his introduction to Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, the seminal 1945 book by University of Chicago researchers St. Claire Drake and Horace A. Cayton on Negro life in Chicago: “There is an open and raw beauty about the city that seems either to kill or endow one with the spirit of life. I felt those extremes of possibility, death and hope, while I lived half hungry and afraid in a city to which I had fled with the dumb yearning to write, to tell my story.”[1]

BLACK MIGRATION | PUBLIC DENIAL

AVAILABLE WITHOUT FREEDOM | In the introduction to Black Metropolis, Richard Wright describes white Chicagoans questioning why Black migrants willingly uprooted themselves from the South, given the racial animosity and rapidly deteriorating built environment of Chicago’s South Side in the early 1900s. Between 1916 and 1970, six million African Americans migrated from the rural South to industrial cities in the Midwest and Northeast. In the first five years of the migration, Chicago saw a 50 percent increase in the Black population—from 46,000 to over 83,000 residents; by 1937, more than 237,100 Black Americans called the South Side home. [2]

Fleeing the Jim Crow South meant the possibility of industrial rather than agricultural work, with the promise of better wages and greater public freedoms to move about the city. Upon arrival however, migrant Blacks were confronted by a different form of public denial. Throughout the Jim Crow era, when separate but equal was the law of the South, northern cities maintained a different form of discriminatory practices perpetuated by white homeowners, real estate agents, lenders, and employers. Racial restrictive property covenants, redlining, and blockbusting formed an impenetrable barrier, intentionally constraining the geographic and economic mobility of Blacks in the city. These practices simultaneously and systematically devalued Black land assets and deepened the narratives of Black inferiority and Black neighborhood undesirability. The new Black Chicagoans found themselves spatially confined to an area that would become the Chicago Black Belt, unable to avail themselves of all the offerings of urban life.

Today, the Black Belt is simply referred to as the South Side. For a Black Chicagoan, growing up on the South Side is to be nourished in Black space, but often with little knowledge of the forced restriction that once bound people together in place. Nonetheless, the South Side now proudly belongs to Black Chicagoans, and their claim is validated by its history of confinement.

AN UNGUARANTEED EXISTENCE incorporates the three Great Migration routes used by Black Americans to access the greater personal freedoms and fortunes promised by cities outside of the southern states. The routes are intertwined with thorny cotton stalks representing the escape from chattel slavery and journey toward the Chicago Black Belt. Underneath is a 2020 aerial map of the Washington Park and Woodlawn neighborhoods, where over 200 acres of publicly owned vacant land appear as green voids on the map similar to the formal park spaces of the neighborhood. These vacant lands, the byproduct of urban renewal, disinvestment, and Black population exodus from the South Side, are demanding a new form of land care by remaining residents. Today, however, tending the land is not generating wealth for anyone; instead it is a temporary investment of sweat equity to cultivate greater safety, beauty, and mental well-being while residents wait for redevelopment.

Continue reading on the Harvard Design Magazine website…

“South Side Land Narratives: The Lost Histories and Hidden Joys of Black Chicago” by Toni L. Griffin is excerpted from Issue No. 49 of Harvard Design Magazine: Publics.