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.

Mise-en-Scène: A new book from Chris Reed and Mike Belleme explores the theater of urban landscapes

Conceived as a multidimensional investigation into “the social lives of urban landscapes,” Mise-en-Scène: The Lives & Afterlives of Urban Landscapes (ORO Editions) is a powerful collaboration between photographer Mike Belleme and landscape-urbanist Chris Reed, professor in practice of landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The book is centered around seven case studies: Los Angeles, Galveston, St. Louis, Green Bay, Ann Arbor, Detroit, and Boston. It intersperses photo essays by Belleme with selected maps, drawings, and wireframe renderings of projects from Reed-led landscape firm Stoss Landscape Urbanism , along with essays from guest contributors, quotes from contemporary and historical writings on the city, and interviews with residents. Reed describes Mise-en-Scène as “a bit of a scrapbook, a collection of artifacts and documents that are not necessarily intended to create logical narratives, more intended as a curated collection of stuff that might reverberate, one thing off another, to offer multiple readings, multiple musings, multiple futures on city-life.”

In the context of theater, “mise-en-scène” refers to the arrangement of scenery, props, and actors onstage, and in a broader sense, to environment or milieu. Reed draws out both of these connotations through the book, describing the work he does as “understanding the scripts and dialogues as they are playing themselves out; interacting with those on stage and the forces behind the scenes in ways that both respond to and shift what is at work; re-setting the trajectory of the play in ways that sometimes reveals what is hidden; and giving new voice to those who have been off stage—all allowing for new and healthier interactions among urban dwellers, their cities, and the environments in which they live.”

Through the triangulation of what is, what was, and what ought to be, photography and design prompt one to indulge in the kind of utopian imagination necessary to energizing activism.

The book features textural black-and-white photography, often shot at street level, and unwavering in its portrayal of gritty detail that highlight the many facets of a city. Candid images of people, landscapes, and built form are occasionally overlaid with sketches and annotations. Through his photography, Belleme captures small, everyday moments of joy or interest and finds commonalities across cities, despite differences in size, density, and environmental features.

The maps in the introduction of each of the cities make obvious the difference in scale, morphology, and geographical features of the cities, and yet an inherent interconnectedness emerges. Perhaps this can be explained by the quote from Teju Cole that the book opens with: “All the cities are one city. What is interesting to find, in this continuity of cities, the less obvious differences of texture: the signs, the markings, the assemblages, the things hiding in plain sight in each cityscape or landscape.”

And therefore, much as described by Jim Dwyer in Scenes Unseen: The Summer of ’78, or seen in William Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980), which Reed lists as two of the influences for the book, there is a dynamic relationship of people’s interaction with public space, impacted by time of day, and patterns of sun and shade. The influence of The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces is clearly perceptible in the photographs—portraying people adapting the space to their own needs and using it as they see fit. As Reed says, “Many of Mike Belleme’s Mise-en-Scène photographs capture the rich social dynamics and urban-environmental conditions that we play off as designers and urban strategists; they document the lives of the places where we work, the afterlives of some of the places we have designed.”

The photo essays are interspersed with five essays from a diverse and interdisciplinary group of collaborators, to further provide framework. Curator Mimi Zeiger grapples with the issues of climatic and socioeconomic disparities in edge conditions in Los Angeles. Artist and activist De Nichols (LF ‘20) delves into issues of social equity and identity, along linear demarcations in cities such as St. Louis and Cleveland. Julia Czerniak analyzes the aesthetics and experiential quality of Stoss’s work, and speaks to the importance of aesthetics, in addition to today’s preoccupation with performance and sustainability. Nina-Marie Lister contextualizes landscapes within the climate crisis, and touches on issues of resilience and adaptation, stressing the need to work collaboratively across boundaries. In the final essay, Sara Zewde, assistant professor in practice of landscape architecture, reflects on the parallels of photography to design, positing them both as “acts of shaping how someone views the world.”

The writing is specialized, yet accessible, catering to activists, sociologists, aficionados of art, culture and photography, and city-lovers in general. These are spatial observations, and analyses of urban landscapes, but they are also deeply personal accounts. Nichols writes of her experience on the frontlines of protests in St. Louis that she was “harassed by patrons at the most deluxe mall of the county. I was tear-gassed in one the neighborhoods most lauded for its diversity and safety,” and Zeiger writes of the implicit privilege of inhabiting a white body in Pasadena.

Though the photographs were taken pre-pandemic, and this project has been four years in the making, the writings are oriented to a post-pandemic world. They reflect the inequity, systemic racism, and police brutality that were exacerbated by the pandemic, made glaring by the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the country. The photographs and writings shine a light on what the last two years have meant, environmentally and socially—and on the importance of having equitably accessible landscape spaces in our urban environments.

As Reed explains, “[Mise-en-Scène] is at once an artful documentary project on contemporary cities, city people, and the forces playing out across cities and public spaces everywhere. But it’s also a creative project about the future, about identifying pathways forward; about how people as individuals and entire communities, with artists, planners, designers, thinkers, government leaders, citizens, and activists can collaboratively shape our futures.”

And Zewde echoes, “Through the triangulation of what is, what was, and what ought to be, photography and design prompt one to indulge in the kind of utopian imagination necessary to energizing activism. There are striking similarities in the analytical endeavors of remembering the past, analyzing the present, and imagining a future. What worked? What didn’t? What is working? What isn’t working? What shall we conserve, destroy, and build in our new world? And, how do we advocate for it?”

If the pandemic and the past two years have taught us anything, it is that despite human resilience, and moments of celebration captured by Belleme, cities as they are today do not work. As design professionals, we have a chance to pause, recalibrate, and pivot toward a more equitable and climate-resilient future for our cities, and we must take it.

Toni L. Griffin Honored with Edmund N. Bacon Urban Design Award from Center for Architecture and Design

Toni L. Griffin, professor in practice of Urban Planning and Publics Domain head, is the 2022 recipient of the Edmund N. Bacon Urban Design Award . Given by Philadelphia’s Center for Architecture and Design , the award recognizes professionals who have made significant contributions to the field of urban planning through expert articulation of vision, communication, and improvement in their communities. Griffin joins an impressive legacy of Edmund N. Bacon Urban Design Award recipients, including Theaster Gates (LF ‘11), Denise Scott Brown, and Paul Goldberger.

Griffin was selected as this year’s recipient for her focus on design justice in the built environment. A central question in her work asks, “Would we design better places if we put the values of equality, inclusion, or equity first?” A press release from the Center also acknowledged Griffin’s alignment with “conversations the Center is having about the future of our student design competition and how we can use it to help students become better designers with an ubiquitous lens of equity, inclusion and justice in their approach to urban design, planning and architecture.”

Griffin’s firm, New York-based urbanAC , consults on planning and design revitalization projects with a focus on “historical and current disparities involving race, class, and generation.” Cities Griffin and urbanAC have had their hand in include Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Memphis, and Detroit.

A graduate of the Loeb Fellowship Class of 1998, Griffin’s work to address, define, and stimulate the just city carry over to her engagements at the GSD. This semester, you can find her teaching “The Gentrification Debates: Perceptions and Realities of Neighborhood Change,” a seminar exploring the causes and effects of gentrification on national and city-specific scales. She is also the founder and director of the Just City Lab , a Harvard-based research center investigating the ways design can have a positive impact on addressing the conditions of injustice in cities.

Griffin will be honored in person and online and will give a talk at the Edmund N. Bacon Urban Design Award ceremony on March 24, 2022, in Philadelphia. Registration for the Zoom and in-person ceremony is required.

Stoss Landscape Urbanism Receives AIA Regional & Urban Design Award for Suffolk Downs Master Plan

Stoss Landscape Urbanism , the design studio founded by Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture Chris Reed, has received a 2022 AIA Award for Regional & Urban Design for the Suffolk Downs Master Plan. The annual AIA honors recognize “the best buildings and spaces—and the people behind them.”

Stoss received the award in partnership with Boston architecture firm CBT . The plan for the former horse racing facility in East Boston would create a highly resilient, mixed-use neighborhood oriented around transit. Studio director in the Boston office of Stoss and Design Critic in Landscape Architecture Amy Whitesides (MLA ’12) served as the director-in-charge for the project, with Reed acting as design director.

In addition to earning the AIA award, work by Stoss is featured as the cover story in the February 2022 publication of Landscape Architecture Magazine . The article reports on the design of a new central quad at the University of Michigan’s North Campus.

Reed also recently participated in an interview with the Canadian magazine Landscapes | Paysages , speaking with Snøhetta’s Michelle Delk and Dialog’s Doug Carlye about the future of landscape architecture. Asked to give advice for the new era, Reed says: “Embrace the challenges. Embrace the complexity. Don’t put it aside. And then find your own obsession, your own parallel obsession, and keep at that, too. Find your creative medium.”

Grace La and James Dallman Appointed First GSD Graduate Commons Program Faculty Directors

Grace La, professor of architecture and chair of the Practice Platform, and her husband, James Dallman (MArch ’92), have been appointed the newest faculty directors as part of Harvard’s Graduate Commons Program (GCP) . They are the first couple from the GSD to serve in the role, in which they will direct interdisciplinary, university-wide programs, serving as the intellectual leaders of the graduate residential communities of the GSD, HBS, FAS, and SEAS.

“We are thrilled to have our first GSD faculty directors joining us next year,” says GCP Director Lisa Valela . “In conversations with former HUH residents and interns, we learned that Grace and James share a commitment to mentoring and supporting graduate students.”

The couple will become the leaders of 10 Akron Street beginning in the fall of 2022. “James and I are delighted to join the distinctive GCP program, which enables us to contribute to the intellectual life at Harvard in new and expansive ways,” says La . “We look forward to collaboration across the university.” They will be joined by their two sons.

La and Dallman both hold degrees from the GSD. La graduated from Harvard College in 1992 and received her MArch from the GSD in 1995, and Dallman graduated with an MArch from the GSD in 1992. The pair are also principals and cofounders of the architecture practice LA DALLMAN .

This spring, La is leading the design research studio “Eco Folly” alongside Erika Naginski, Robert P. Hubbard Professor of Architectural History. The studio and corresponding seminar uses the folly opportunistically to create “a space of design experimentation in which participants will explore the behavior of materials, understand the life-cycle of buildings, and evaluate sustainable consequences.” The design work will be exhibited at the GSD’s House Zero this coming fall, and is generously funded by the Center for Green Buildings and Cities and the Department of Architecture.

Learn more about La and Dallman’s new leadership role in the Harvard Gazette .

Design Proposals for the Uncertain Future of American Infrastructure

As the world ground to a halt in the spring of 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic shuttering shops, schools, subways, and offices, a street in Queens opened itself up as a new site of social infrastructure. [1] Located in Jackson Heights, one of the most congested neighborhoods in New York City with among the least green space per capita, a 26-block stretch of 34th Avenue was transformed into a 1.3-mile-long “vertical park” by the grassroots 34th Ave Open Streets Coalition. For 12 hours a day, every day, the street closed down to cars, permitting weary workers, solo-living seniors, and working-from-home parents and their children to stretch their legs, join in socially distanced exercise classes, swing by a community-led food pantry, or tend to a communal median garden that was—finally—their own.

Heralded as a visionary prototype for a more equitable and sustainable future city, the project also underscored the importance of civic space in an era marked by increasing privatization of the public realm. Reclaiming the street within a pandemic that both exposed and exacerbated the stark inequities of access to healthcare, community support, and green space across the United States framed the necessity of such spaces, in the words of sociologist Eric Klinenberg, as a matter of life or death. [2] In a keynote lecture recently delivered at the GSD , Klinenberg highlighted 34th Avenue as a success story within a larger domestic policy movement toward an expanded definition of infrastructure, in part fueled by the pandemic. “The pandemic forced us to hunker down and maintain physical distance,” says Klinenberg. “But we also developed newfound appreciation for gathering places that we had taken for granted. My hope is that we channel that into support for social infrastructure. We’re living through a unique moment, and we’re poised to make transformative investments in the physical systems that sustain us.”

Such an investment may begin through the Biden administration’s Build Back Better framework. Viewed as one of the most significant domestic policy agendas since the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society of the 1960s, Biden’s original $3 trillion BBB plan comprises two pieces of legislation: the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, signed into law on November 15, and the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better (BBB) bill, which remains stalled after a firm rebuke from Senator Joe Manchin.

The infrastructure bill (also called the public works law) addresses what we typically think of as infrastructure, and offers the largest investment in the sector in over a decade. It includes funding for repairing and expanding roads, bridges, mass transit, and rail service, as well as upgrades to ports, electric grids, and water infrastructure. It casts a wide net across the country, including the replacement of lead pipes in Illinois, bridge repairs in Massachusetts, regional transit connections in Louisiana, and abandoned mine cleanup in Kentucky. In addition to bolstering material infrastructure, the bill hones in on the so-called “digital divide,” funneling $65 billion into expanding broadband access to rural and disadvantaged communities in the US.

The controversial BBB bill—focusing on what it terms “human infrastructure,” or social infrastructure—includes allocations of $150 billion for new affordable housing, $550 billion for climate-related policy and programs, $18 billion for universal pre-K, and $200 billion for childcare. For political reasons, however, many of these provisions will be absent from the bill, if it ever clears the senate. Both bills are the first pieces of federal legislation in over a decade to address the climate crisis and suggest solutions for mitigating the impact of global heating.

Across both bills, the idea of infrastructure expands to include social reform, digital telecommunications networks, climate justice, clean energy, and affordable housing. In addition to Klinenberg’s keynote, multiple studios and seminars at the GSD last term attempted to grapple with this multifaceted understanding of infrastructure. “That the Biden bill recognizes and supports social infrastructure, the economies of care, and reproductive labor, particularly at the household scale, is an exciting step for a country wherein everything has been relentlessly privatized,” says Malkit Shoshan, who taught “Reimagining Social Infrastructure and Collective Futures” in the fall. “By strengthening the household economy, stronger households can better interact with other households and create a commons. These issues should be essential to talking about the future of infrastructure—that it’s a matter of the values we preserve as a society.”

Shoshan framed her project-based seminar with key theories intersecting the social sciences, economics, feminist theory, and ecology, including those of economist Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics, and philosopher Sylvia Federici, whose writings on reproductive labor have found new relevance during the pandemic. Students were asked to envision a more intersectional social infrastructure, where the well-being of mothers, caregivers, the elderly, and other marginalized groups, as well as precarious public services, were integrated into a collective future vision of a healthier planet. Among the projects to emerge from the seminar was a reimagining of the post office infrastructure, which is at risk of privatization, as well as a mobile “Care-a-Van” that revitalizes the lives of the elderly and reintegrates them into public spaces, generating new social networks. A “school for the future” sought to support an underserved public high school in East Boston, the largest in the area, in a neighborhood expected to be flattened by sea-level rise as early as 2050. In addition to providing climate infrastructure, the project proposed opening up the physical infrastructure to community use in after-school hours.

Ron Witte’s studio, “ROOM,” took a micro-scale lens to the question of what constitutes good social infrastructure, from the design perspective of the public interior. Utilizing a new reading room for the Central Boston Public Library as a case study, students were asked to envision alternative design protocols for indoor institutional spaces in an era where the role of such spaces is expanding as social infrastructure. Proposals varied widely, from reimagining the cultural status of the library to a “high-tech medium,” where visitors are given a window into the guts of archival space through a series of tubes transporting reading materials, to cracking the institution open like an egg, making its processes visible from the outside and expanding the internal boundaries of the building. “Architecture has been pushed to the side in this conversation around the future of infrastructure,” says Witte. “We’ve tended to focus on broad questions around social infrastructure, economies, and public spaces, but without architecture to prompt them into a new state, nothing will happen.”

Additional federal efforts are necessary to ensure the Building Back Better framework’s climate resilience funds meet those who need it most. The new White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council is a step in the right direction, with 26 leaders from diverse communities appointed to judge applications for community-led climate infrastructure projects. [3] But there must also be increased support at the local level, to ensure these communities have no barriers to accessing funds and can realize these projects collaboratively. Responding to this condition, Dan D’Oca’s fall studio, “Highways Revisited,” was an exercise in reimagining the future of 10 cities and their surrounding highway systems. Each student was connected with a local activist or government official to envision an alternative use for that highway infrastructure while taking stock of its historical damage to disadvantaged communities.

Whittled down from a short list of 50 areas, the selected sites cover a wide range of topologies and racial and socioeconomic spectrums—they include El Paso, the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, Detroit, Oakland, and New Orleans. “The idea was to find examples of cities where there was already a conversation about highway removal, but where things weren’t so settled,” explains D’Oca. “It was important for students to be able to think big and dream, but also have the guidance of a good liaison, and the tenability of a pitch process.”

“When you destroy a neighborhood you don’t just destroy homes, you destroy vehicles for amassing generational wealth.” – Dan D’Oca

With guidance from a lifelong resident of the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans (one of the oldest Black neighborhoods in the US, and the birthplace of jazz), one student transformed a stretch of I-10 that decimated the neighborhood into a powerful piece of community infrastructure, complete with public housing, green space, events programming, and an arts and music venue. (The White House has proposed removing the expressway altogether). For El Paso, another student nixed the freeway running along the US-Mexico border, restoring the original landscape of a green river valley and building a new neighborhood alongside it. In the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, a student worked with local liaisons to envision the removal of an eight-mile stretch of I-94, replacing it with a parkway, a rapid transit system, and new neighborhoods. The studio explored the emerging concept of “right to return,” currently piloted by the city of Santa Monica , which specifies Black communities displaced by mid-century urban renewal policies should be at the front of the line in new affordable housing markets. “When you destroy a neighborhood you don’t just destroy homes, you destroy vehicles for amassing generational wealth,” explains D’Oca. “So this idea of a ‘right of return’ being implemented by some local policymakers integrates the idea of infrastructure as an opportunity for reparations.”

Tom Oslund and Catherine Murray’s studio, “Harnessing the Future,” looked beyond the US to address the social, ecological, and economic entanglements of digital infrastructure in the small west Irish town of Asketon and the surrounding Shannon Estuary, where a new data center is slated for development. With a local environmental engineer as steward, students were tasked with reimagining the design of the data center to support the local economies and histories of Ireland, while adhering to the region’s strict conservationist protocols, and achieving carbon neutrality. One of the proposals utilized the energy of cow waste and Atlantic wind turbine production to fuel the data center. Another restricted its size and energy consumption to the amount of energy needed to churn Ireland’s signature domestic export, Kerrygold butter (and recycling the energy to do so). And the third proposal divvied up the area into wind energy–producing parcels of land owned by locals to sell back to data providers, flipping the power hierarchy between opportunistic data companies and residents. Oslund cites the main challenge with equivalent projects in the US as “a problem of too much land and too little restraint”—but is optimistic that an industry-led initiative for ecological design alternatives could catch on across the Atlantic. “The paradigm change that must happen is the responsibility of these companies,” he says. “Data centers have already surpassed airlines in carbon emissions, and there’s too much at stake. This studio was put in place to showcase more environmentally conscious design alternatives that support local economies and culture.”

As the future of the BBB remains uncertain, and the real work of the Infrastructure Bill lies ahead, it’s crucial that in expanding our definition of infrastructure, we take care not to divide it. A truly democratic approach to infrastructure acknowledges its constituency and responsibility across all sectors and publics: in other words, digital infrastructure must be social infrastructure; climate resilience infrastructure must also impart a civic value. Closing out his keynote lecture, Klinenberg gave a simple example for how this might be achieved: by revamping the design of a levee, which will be an increasingly common piece of infrastructure amid rising sea levels, to include a public park on top. What’s required is a crucial shift of perspective that enables new infrastructure. As Oslund says, it needs to “provide the same function, but allow for a different story.” There must be a design sensitivity on both a micro and macro scale to ensure it benefits those it has a particular duty to serve. The future of infrastructure requires a feminist design approach that centers marginalized groups; an equitable approach that incorporates reparations to communities who bore the damage wrought by earlier infrastructure projects; an ecological approach that acknowledges the stakes of the climate emergency; and the support of a public resource system that ensures the longevity of grassroots initiatives. Despite its warranted criticisms, the BBB framework offers a vital first step in this direction. Now, it’s up to designers and policymakers to get to work.

[1] In his book, Palaces for the People, sociologist Eric Klinenberg defines social infrastructure as a loose category of public places—parks, playgrounds, libraries, and town halls, as well as grocery stores, cafés, and barber shops—that are the spatial glue of a healthy society. Formal and informal, organized and happenstance, these are the hang-out spots where communities are made and people learn to look out for each other, particularly in times of crisis.

[2] Klinenberg’s acclaimed research on the “high resilience” areas of the 1995 Chicago heatwave pinpoints the significance of robust social infrastructure in contributing to low death tolls in otherwise demographically similar neighborhoods.

[3] Both bills intend to jumpstart the Justice40 Initiative ordered by Biden just days after taking office. It outlines that 40 percent of federal climate spending must reach underserved areas (formally defined as low income, rural, and/or communities of color), as a climate justice initiative. Despite these promises, critics argue this money will largely benefit middle-class, white communities .

New Book by Andrew Witt Examines the Visual Intersections of Architecture, Mathematics, and Culture

A new book by Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture Andrew Witt examines more than 150 years of seeing, drawing, and modeling architecture mathematically. It presents a rich tour of the drawing machines, geometric patterns, crystal structures, and stereoscopic images that connected modern architecture to modern science and expanded spatial imagination. The book’s research builds on the GSD seminar “Narratives of Design Science” led by Witt in past years.

Released in January 2022 by the MIT Press, Formulations: Architecture, Mathematics, Culture bridges the art of science and design. The book studies architecture’s encounter with mathematical calculation systems that were ingeniously retooled by architects for design. To illustrate initial exchanges between design and science, Witt provides a catalog of pre-digitization drawings and calculations from mid-twentieth-century mathematical practices in design. Formulations also takes up the “formal compendia that became a cultural currency shared between modern mathematicians and modern architects.”

As a way of illustrating the many ways mathematics penetrated design thinking as we know it today, Formulations examines a variety of innovations, including early drawing machines that mechanized curvature, the virtualization of buildings and landscapes through surveyed triangulation and photogrammetry, and stereoscopic drawing.

Antoine Picon, director of doctoral programs and G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology at the GSD, describes the book as a “brilliant and thought-provoking navigation through complex mathematical notions, models and machines, spatial patterns, and construction techniques. A must-read for anyone interested in the relationships between architecture, mathematics, and digital techniques.”

Formulations is part of the Writing Architecture series, edited by Cynthia Davidson, which includes previous contributions from Harvard faculty members including Giuliana Bruno, Edward Eigen, and K. Michael Hays. It is the first book in a complete graphic redesign of the series, by graphic designer Ben Fehrman-Lee .

Trained as both an architect and a mathematician, and a graduate of the GSD’s MArch and MDes programs, Witt’s research explores the relationship between architecture, science, and visual techniques through the lens of mathematics. He is also editor of the trilogy “Studies in the Design Laboratory ,” jointly published by the GSD and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. The final installment of the series, Tange Lab: The Quantified Economy and Urban Futurism, will be available online soon.

Learn more about Witt’s Formulations from the MIT Press .