Germane Barnes wins Harvard GSD’s 2021 Wheelwright Prize

Fellowship to support Barnes’s research proposal Anatomical Transformations in Classical Architecture, an examination of classical Roman and Italian architecture through contributions of the African Diaspora

Harvard University Graduate School of Design is pleased to name Germane Barnes the winner of the 2021 Wheelwright Prize, a grant to support investigative approaches to contemporary architecture, with an emphasis on globally minded research. With his winning proposal Anatomical Transformations in Classical Architecture, Barnes will examine Roman and Italian architecture through the lens of non-white constructors, studying how spaces have been transformed through the material contributions of the African Diaspora while creating new architectural possibilities that emerge within investigations of Blackness. As with past Wheelwright winners, the 100,000 USD prize is intended to fund two years of Barnes’s research and travel. Barnes will commence his research project this summer, with archival research geared toward generating an index of the portico typology throughout Italy and Northern Africa, as well as maps that show the spatial mobility of the porch and the portico across continents and cultures. Central to Barnes’s proposal is the idea that porch-as-portico may offer a new frame on the spatial and conceptual terrain through which one finds inventions of race, identity, and the built environment. A gallery of select works by Barnes appears below. “The past year has shown the world that marginalized communities offer more than a cursory look, but a thorough excavation of their contributions and legacies,” Barnes says. “As a Black architect I have struggled with the absence of my identity in the profession, and there have been moments where I have questioned my talent and ideologies because they failed to gain recognition in prominent architecture circles. To believe that the only way to measure success is acceptance was a thought I had to exterminate. I am fortunate to have a support system that challenges these systems of exclusion because it gives importance and agency to Black spatial investigations. To be selected as the winner of this year’s Wheelwright Prize provides credibility that Blackness is a viable and critical discourse, and strengthens my resolve and confidence in my professional trajectory. My hope is that my win and the work that follows it will be a necessary accelerant to provide more opportunities and exposure to Black practitioners and researchers.” “Harvard GSD is proud and honored to award the 2021 Wheelwright Prize to Germane Barnes for a research proposal that is at once sweeping and nuanced,” says Sarah M. Whiting, Harvard GSD’s Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture. “His focus on the classical origins of a familiar type—the porch—is both potently precise and generously speculative. Importantly, Barnes positions his research in terms of overlooked or underacknowledged connections and contributions, focusing upon a specific architectural question and, from there, suggesting a constellation of revelations. Barnes delivers the specificity, the technical skill, the innovation, and the passion that promise to make his project significant both for architecture as a discipline and for architectural culture writ large.” Barnes’s Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears a Crown (2020) offers a celebration of Black hair and Black architecture, and a reflection on the porch as a distinctly Black architectural aesthetic The 2021 Wheelwright Prize is juried by: David Brown, Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture; David Hartt, Carrafiell Assistant Professor in Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design; Mark Lee, Chair of the Department of Architecture at Harvard GSD; Megan Panzano, Assistant Professor of Architecture and Program Director of Undergraduate Architecture Studies at Harvard GSD; Sumayya Vally, founder and principal of Counterspace Studio; and Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at Harvard GSD. Barnes was among four remarkable finalists selected from more than 150 applicants, hailing from 45 countries. The 2021 Wheelwright Prize jury commends finalists Luis Berríos-Negrón, Iulia Statica, and Catty Dan Zhang for their promising research proposals and presentations. Barnes follows 2020 Wheelwright Prize winner Daniel Fernández Pascual, whose Wheelwright project Being Shellfish: The Architecture of Intertidal Cohabitation is in its travel-research phase. Now in its ninth cycle, the Wheelwright Prize is an open international competition that awards 100,000 USD to a talented early-career architect to support expansive, intensive design research. The annual prize is dedicated to fostering innovative, boundary-driving architectural research that is informed by cross-cultural engagement, and that shows potential to make a significant impact on architectural discourse. Previous winners have presented diverse research proposals, including studies of kitchen typologies around the world; the architecture and culture of greenhouses; and the potential of seaweed, shellfish, and the intertidal zone to advance architectural knowledge and material futures.

About Germane Barnes and 2021 Wheelwright Prize proposal, Anatomical Transformations in Classical Architecture

Through his research and design practice Studio Barnes, Barnes investigates the connection between architecture and identity. Mining architecture’s social and political agency, he examines how the built environment influences black domesticity. He is Director of Studio Barnes in Miami and the former Designer-In-Residence for the Opa-locka Community Development Corporation, where he led a multi-site urban revitalization project. He is currently the Director of the Community Housing Identity Lab (CHIL) at the University of Miami School of Architecture. Learning from historical data and perspectives from within architecture as well as cultural and ethnic studies, CHIL posits that the built environment is manipulated by factors that extend far beyond conventional construction methods. Barnes’s design and research contributions have been published and exhibited in several international institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, Pin-Up Magazine, the Graham Foundation, The New York Times, Architect Magazine, DesignMiami/ Art Basel, the Swiss Institute, Metropolis Magazine, Curbed, and the National Museum of African American History, where he was identified as one of the future designers on the rise. With Anatomical Transformations in Classical Architecture, Barnes observes that, while Blackness in America carries a particular connotation, there is an absence of consideration as to how Roman and Italian architecture may be understood through the lens of non-white constructors. His Wheelwright proposal uses the porch, and the portico, as a lens to view issues of racism, classicism, criminalization, and colonization, proposing study of the porch and its different machinations as a lens of spatial mobility. Barnes points to classical architecture’s direct relation to the porch, materialized as the portico—which, like the porch, operates at multiple scales, including residential, civic, and human. Scale represents more than purely measurement, Barnes observes, arguing that the porch as portico will be an entry point to considering the spatial and conceptual terrain through which one finds inventions of race, identity, and the built environment. In particular, Barnes proposes a focus on the column as perhaps the most identifiable feature of the portico, asking: What would a columnar order derived from a Black body resemble? The evaluation of the human body as a system of measurement is required, Barnes observes, in order to propose new interpretations of bodily form that centers the unwritten history of the African Diaspora in Rome. Ultimately, Barnes will create an index of porticoes throughout Rome and Northern Africa, generating maps that show the spatial mobility of the porch and the portico across continents and cultures. He will also create maps that outline the diasporic enclaves within Italy as well as maps that articulate the Italian influence within Northern Africa. He will then utilize the same process specific to Italian column orders to create a new column order derived from Blackness, one that, he writes, provides clear authorship to Black building methodologies. An additional outcome will be the production of 1:1 scale Black column variants. This Black column variant, when placed alongside Corinthian, Ionic, Doric, and Tuscan orders, will be used to revise the form of Italian colonial architecture. The culmination of this research, combined with Barnes’s earlier porch documentation, will be used to create an exhibition and publication that posits the spatial mobility of this space from Africa to the United States.

About the 2021 Wheelwright Prize Finalists

The Wheelwright Prize jury commends the 2021 finalists for their outstanding applications:

Luis Berríos-Negrón: Remediating the Specularium: a deposition of colonial memory that may contribute to the geological timescales of the Anthropocene (so to learn to live, again)

Luis Berríos-Negrón is a Puerto Rican experimental architect and environmental artist investigating the forms of sculptural and spatial display being shaped by the forces of global warming. Recent exhibitions and installations include “Anarquivo Negantrópico” (Gammelgaard, Denmark, 2019), “Wardian Table at Agropoetics” (Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, 2019), “Impasse Finesse Neverness” (Museum of Ethnography and Archeology of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil, 2017), “Collapsed Greenhouse at Undisciplinary Learning” (District, Berlin, 2016), and “Earthscore Specularium at Experiment Stockholm” (Färgfabriken Konsthall, Stockholm, 2015). Berríos-Negrón received a PhD in Art, Technology, and Design from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) and Konstfack University of the Arts in Sweden. His dissertation is titled Breathtaking Greenhouse Parastructures, published by Konstfack Collection (2020). He holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from Parsons New School, and a Master of Architecture from MIT. Berríos-Negrón lives and works between San Juan, Copenhagen, and Berlin. With “Remediating the Specularium: a deposition of colonial memory that may contribute to the geological timescales of the Anthropocene (so to learn to live, again),” Berríos-Negrón asks: Is colonial memory the drive of global warming? In his PhD dissertation, Berríos-Negrón investigated this question through a critical deposition of the greenhouse technology from a Caribbean perspective. That approach was set to challenge and contribute to the scientific debate about the geological timelines and scales of the Anthropocene. For the Wheelwright Prize, Berríos-Negrón now looks to further that transhemispheric and decolonial contribution by making an intersectional repass of five medicinal gardens that he has worked with, on both sides of the Atlantic. Indirect and multi-perspectival methods are to be implemented, leading to comparative field work and reflexive documents. These will both inform, and be informed by, a process of careful, practice-based research interventions to take place in Puerto Rico. This iterative, complementary process is set to test the unfulfilled beginnings of—as well as more-than human divergences from—what Berríos-Negrón observes are the traumatic technics driving global warming and the messianic endings defining the current geological epoch.

Iulia Statica: Home and Beyond: Women, Care and the Architecture of Migration 

Iulia Statica is an architect and currently a Marie Curie Research Fellow at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Her research interests focus on the relationship between gender and domesticity in the development and transformation of housing infrastructures and urban landscapes in Eastern Europe and Latin America. She is the co-founder with Tao DuFour of the Office for Architecture, Urban and Environmental Research, a research-design practice based in New York and London. Their work explores questions of space and political ecology, most recently in their proposal, Together at the Table: Văcărești Park as Intergenerational Commons, as finalists for the competition for the Romanian Pavilion at the 2020 Venice Architecture Biennale. She employs documentary film as an integral aspect of both research and practice; her latest documentary — My Socialist Home — is forthcoming in 2021. Statica completed her PhD at the Department of Architecture at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” in 2016, and was awarded the Fellowship in Architecture at the Romanian Academy in Rome (2012-14). Between 2018 and 2019 she was a Visiting Scholar at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Latin American Studies Program, at Cornell University. She is the author of Urban Phantasmagorias: Domesticity, Production and the Politics of Modernity in Communist Bucharest (Routledge, forthcoming 2021). With Home and Beyond: Women, Care and the Architecture of Migration, Statica takes as a point of departure the deficit of care in developing countries due to the feminization of migration, seeking to explore new and changing patterns of domesticity. In doing so, Statica plans to interrogate the architect’s role today as both designer and humanist able to engage approaches to domestic space in the context of this global dynamic of migration. In light of current decolonial efforts in the theory and practice of architecture, the proposed research would contribute to understanding contemporary shifting practices of migration from the Global South to the Global North and their impact on the transformation of domesticity both as an everyday practice and as an architectural typology.

Catty Dan Zhang: Shared Air: Space, Automation and Humanity in Architectures of Meat Processing

Catty Dan Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research and practice explore the design of active atmosphere at the convergence of digital media and architecture. Employing atmospheric and computational mediums, her work translates ordinary objects into performative and synergistic systems to visualize and to modulate ephemeral forms. Zhang has practiced in the US and China. In 2020, she was selected as the winner of the inaugural Emerging Designer’s Exhibition Competition and had her solo exhibition entitled “The Moving Air” at the University of California at Berkeley, exploring a cultural-environmental paradigm of airflow as spatial agencies. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at venues such as the London Design Festival, Carnegie Museum of Arts, A+D Museum, Harvard GSD, among other institutions, and has received recognitions in international design awards and competitions including the AN Best of Design Awards and A+D Design Awards.  Zhang was a finalist of the 2018 Wheelwright Prize. She earned a Bachelor of Architecture from Tsinghua University, a Master of Architecture with Honors from Washington University in St. Louis, and a Master in Design Studies, Technology concentration, from Harvard GSD, where she was the 2017 recipient of the Daniel L. Schodek Award for Technology and Sustainability. With Shared Air: Space, Automation and Humanity in Architectures of Meat Processing, Zhang considers air as the spatial, sensorial, and psychological measure to offer an imaginary model unveiling the emergency and aftermath of the pandemic in meat processing plants across the global. Reflecting upon Sloterdijk’s criticism on fragmented atmosphere and individualized breathing spaces threatening social synthesis in contemporary architecture, the proposed research explores perceptions of shared atmosphere, making a case for humanity and automation. Through visual techniques and field studies, the investigation manifests current urgencies and contributes to the design culture as a critical lens through which we rethink infrastructural resiliency and longevity of technological adaptation.

A mixed-use proposal for historic Massachusetts site wins first place in affordable housing competition

Lancaster Commons, a project proposed by a team of Harvard Graduate School of Design and Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate students, won first place in the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston 21st Annual Affordable Housing Development Competition. The students, listed below, proposed a multiphase mixed-use project that reactivates a rural and historic site in Lancaster, Massachusetts. The 80-acre site, located in the oldest town in Worcester County, was previously occupied by the Lancaster Industrial School for Girls, the first reform school for girls in North America. Although they proposed an overall masterplan, the team’s project focuses on Phase One, which contains 48 affordable townhouse rental units that promote intergenerational communities and supportive programming and amenities. The design contains various layouts to accommodate and support diverse households with varied living arrangements. At an urban scale, the proposal creates a new center for Lancaster in support of its historical legacy while looking forward to more contemporary urban uses and community engagement. Lancaster Commons Team Members:

• Jiae Azad, Master in Urban Planning, 2021, Harvard GSD
• Angela Blume, Master in Architecture, 2022, Harvard GSD
• Cassie Gomes, Master in Architecture, 2022, Harvard GSD
• Andrea Grimaldi, Master in City Planning, 2021, MIT 
• Mengyao Li, Master in Urban Planning, 2022, Harvard GSD
• Mora Orensanz, Master in City Planning, 2021, MIT
• Jiwon Park, Master in Urban Planning, 2022, Harvard GSD
• Sharon Velasquez, Master in City Planning & Master in Business Administration, 2022, MIT
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Landscapes of the Void: Speculative design for tunnels, mines, cemeteries and other underground spaces

At once welcoming and foreboding, the underground realm has long captured our attention. When considered metaphorically and literally, it is simultaneously womb and tomb—infinitely expansive and claustrophobia-inducing. A well-organized infrastructure that challenges rationality by seeming outside time and space, it is also a storage space for human waste, computers, and even, in the Arctic, a plant-seed bank created in case of an apocalyptic event. In recent years, architects and designers have increased their focus on what lies beneath us. Necessity, in part, has driven attention downward: It is estimated that by 2050, about two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities, where space above ground is finite. Solving the needs of these future megalopolises by continuing to build into the sky is inadequate and dangerous. Not only does the fetish for ever-taller buildings privilege visuality and surfaces, it supports an ideology that ignores earthly and human-scale problems, such as climate change and inclusive community-building. The logical conclusion of this hubristic, isolationist, and individualistic predilection—leaving Earth itself—is no longer cast as a total fantasy either. Underground spaces need not always be built anew. Many already exist but have been abandoned or entirely forgotten—even steps away from the GSD. As a child, Jungyoon Kim walked to kindergarten across Harvard Square, where she passed a nondescript grate each day. Decades later, she learned that this portal leads to the Brattle Tunnel, a decommissioned section of America’s oldest subway system. Opened in 1897 and completed in 1912, the Cambridge section of the subway was in part built underground as a means to preserve the landscape of the area’s historic buildings. Since it was closed in 1981, the Brattle Tunnel portion of Harvard Square Station—a 450-foot-long, 45-foot-wide, and 18-foot-high space just two feet below ground—has remained an empty and, to most, hidden chamber. In her studio “Below and Beyond: Imagining the Future of Underground Infrastructure at Harvard Square,” Kim asks her students to imagine the site as a public space whose design is sensitive to the urban fabric at ground level as well as to the Charles River and its surrounding landscapes. “The main topic we’re dealing with is where you should open up the tunnel so that people can have access to it,” she says. “We are also reconceiving the infrastructure which was once monofunctional and illegible into something multifunctional and legible, for the pleasure of the public.” Any speculative redesigns for this enclosed, cavernous space require attention to the location of the bedrock, the soil type, and other structural and natural concerns around the site. But these elements should not be viewed as limitations. Edda Steingrimsdottir (MArch ’22), for example, considers the area’s geothermal-rich soil as an impetus for turning the site into a heated swimming pool—a destination rather than an incidental or, as is the case for many underground sites, a transitory space. Annie Hayner (MLA ’21), looks at using the tunnel as a water passage, whether for emergency use (like Tokyo’s flood-defense systems) or as a detention area to slow down run-off caused by increases in torrential rain. This water can then be used to recharge the soil and keep it moist. The run-off could also become an aesthetic feature, echoing the Hakka Indenture Museum in Lishui, China, where an irrigation channel on the site’s roof creates a water curtain in the interior. These structural concerns demand that an ecological framework be introduced to conversations regarding urban growth. The students’ interventions will make legible the existence of the tunnel to those moving across Harvard Square, establishing novel relationships between them and the spaces below their feet. The same legibility issues are not present with all underground spaces, however. The vast mining pits that surround Santiago, Chile, for example, are etched into the urban fabric and in many instances draw its boundaries. “Santiago is defined by its topography,” says Danilo Martic. “The city is flat, but we’re surrounded by mountains. There are also a number of hills which have been a part of life here for hundreds of years. The Native peoples used to dwell in them. These mining holes are a nice counterpoint, making the cross-section of the valley not just a flat line with hills.” The mountains and hills are not the only inverted relationship in the city that involves these gargantuan holes, which can be carved roughly 60 meters deep and hundreds of meters wide. The gravel, sand, and stones extracted from these sites become construction material for buildings, turning the subterranean spaces into visible marks in the earth that are materially linked to the built environment. Martic emphasizes this relationship in his studio “Landscapes of the Void: Urban Projects on Residual Topographies” with a quote by photographer Edward Burtynsky: “I remember looking at buildings made of stone, and thinking, there has to be an interesting landscape somewhere out there because these stones had to have been taken out of the quarry one block at a time.” Rather than acknowledge these ecological scars as scars, current laws dictate that the holes be refilled whenever mining activity ceases, typically after a few decades. This erasure creates another type of void, because after the filling process—which can also take decades—no new buildings can be constructed on these sites. The policy compounds what was initially a brutal act against the natural environment by foreclosing many future possibilities for these spaces. Martic asks his students to consider how these pits might be transformed and utilized in terms of their landscapes, which introduces questions of topography, planting, and programming. For many of the city’s inhabitants, the holes are embedded in their collective memory, and the sites evoke a sense of mystery. “These places are fenced off, but you can smell them, hear the machinery and the explosions, and see the dust flying and the trucks carrying sand and gravel. But you don’t see what is done there. Young people try to find out, by trespassing,” Martic says. “These sites can be just 10 meters away from your house. It’s only fair not to erase that aspect of people’s reality.” The disappearance of collective memory also concerns Mohsen Mostafavi’s studio “Fudo/Umwelt: Devising Transformative Environments in Japan,” in the context of the underground realm’s associations with darkness, the illicit, the disruptive, and play. The project’s site and focus is the location of the now-demolished Tsukiji Fish Market. Opened in 1935, it was the world’s largest fish and seafood market and a major tourist destination in a densely packed area of shops, stalls, and restaurants. The tuna auctions and other activities of the inner market, a site of commerce and spectacle, took place at night, beginning at 3:00 a.m. and finishing by 9:00 a.m. Now, in an effort by Japan to compete as a corporate business hub against other Asian cities in particular, the 23-hectare site will become a sterile convention center, with the fish market moving to nearby Toyosu. “This nocturnal affair happened out of view from the vast majority of people. Its operations were a little extraterritorial as well—not seen, in the dark,” explains Mostafavi. “The experience of the city was different there. The marketplace is a circumstance with its own theater and is against normative rules and regulations. With its disappearance, the citizens of Japan and tourists face certain forms of erasure because new markets, whether in Paris or Tokyo, are farther away, much bigger, and more and more hygienic, which includes not letting people inside them.” Hygiene has been a focus of urban design and planning since the 18th century. The relationship between the Enlightenment’s obsession with cleanliness and the city began with the purgation of cemeteries from urban centers and continued, for example, with pushing prostitution and drug selling to urban peripheries. “The fish market is still a component of that argument,” says Mostafavi. “Part of its removal is the idea of not being able to bear witness to it, and part of it is also not enabling citizens to participate in situations and scenes that are thought to be not clean. It is a denial of participation in those operations of the city which make it vibrant and dynamic. When you turn the market into a convention center, you deny the theater, joy, and excitement that it offered and replace it with something that’s hermetically sealed, interior, often without windows, and where events don’t take place every day.” In contrast to the proposed convention center, students are developing projects with a range of programs, compositions, and densities. The work draws on a multiyear research project at the GSD supported by Takenaka, a major Japanese design and construction firm. In the studio, the Tsukiji site serves as a means to examine the sectional city, which Mostafavi describes as similar to “the architectural section in that it doesn’t have to do with the facade or appearance but that which is drawn but not made visible.” This concept has particular resonance in a Japanese context, where developers have long looked to the underground as a space for retail, restaurants, and other businesses, to maximize land value. As a mode of investigation, Mostafavi first had his students transpose “more than 100 buildings, landscapes, and urban assemblages from around the world onto the site at 1:1 scale,” including civic gathering spaces such as the Shanghai Bund and London’s Barbican Centre. Through this process of montage and photo-collage, they created unexpected architectural arrangements. Each student then chose as their focus a single fragment on the site, which, Mostafavi adds, “is never completely independent of its relationship to something bigger.” Every human, animal, inanimate object, and natural system that comes into contact with that fragment, he explains, sees and interacts with that space, and through it the entire site, differently. These exercises use the palimpsest as a tool, which Mostafavi describes as enabling “the students to start imagining multiple narratives, multiple stories, and essentially multiple descriptions of that site. It’s also a form of excavation. They have to do some digging to imagine how these things might work, fit, be there.” The introduction of foreign, and in many ways unexpected, architecture onto the site in the initial montages, and the process of making them fit together, forced the students to participate in a kind of archaeology that expands the capacities of their imaginations. “Part of this studio is how one constructs the circumstances for certain forms of imagination to take place,” says Mostafavi. “We’re not just relying on the pure intuition of the students. I prefer the concrete and described to going immediately to poetic associations and references.” The site for Mira Henry and Matthew Au’s “Underground” module also functions as a palimpsest: the Crenshaw Discount Store, located at the western border of Los Angeles’s Leimert Park neighborhood. It shares the shell of the original Grayson’s Women’s Fine Apparel (1941), designed by Victor Gruen. Adjacent to it is OneUnited Bank, notable for providing Black and brown families with home loans to combat redlining, as well as the currently under-construction Crenshaw Corridor, which involves an extension of the metro system and retail and residential developments. While Mostafavi’s studio focuses on the relationship between the palimpsest and the strange to create new conditions of possibility for the students’ imaginations, Mira Henry and Matthew Au’s module foregrounds pleasure. Their students will design a subterranean nightclub at the Discount Store site, which in turn will inspire their designs for two street-level facades. “We’re putting on the table that there are things that are valuable but not always seen as visible. It’s a counterargument to the hyper-visuality of a lot of architectural goals,” explains Henry. The project, she says, also riffs on the relationships between the historical demographics of the neighborhood, its history filled with underground clubs intended for a specific public, Black space, and the Underground Railroad. “The building itself is a little anonymous; it doesn’t present itself,” she says. “It plays with the idea that there is some sort of discreet network, a flow of communication, a set of resources, and a culture that is not in full view.” In contrast to Kim’s Harvard Square studio, where the relationship between the above and below ground will likely be made more legible, here the students will preserve the underground’s hiddenness. The effects of this choice, Au suggests, extend beyond the aesthetic to the social, political, and existential. “The club is out of view and can internalize itself without the external pressure of having to display or show itself,” he says. “It becomes a space where a mythology can form.” The party as a ritual event will serve as the genesis of that mythology. “We’re hoping to engage in a conversation about social practice and pageantry,” says Henry, who will incorporate works by artists Maurice Harris and Nikita Gale as further design inspiration to students of “highly generative and theatrical things embedded in pleasure.” She and Au also intend to probe the unique multi-sensorial aspects of nightclubs, which often invert traditional design practices and expectations due to being underground. These include limited lighting, which reduces visibility; unique lighting designs throughout the environment; and sound dampening. Together, such features create a highly embodied experience and support intimate relationships between occupants and with the elusive space. Henry hopes that “this rich interior will exist as information which, dialectically, will move in some manner to the exterior design.” Just as the Tsukiji fish market challenged power through its perceived uncleanliness, the club’s celebration of darkness and excess counters a hegemonic demand for surveillance and control. Like the other subterranean sites explored in these studios, it also resists capitalist injunctions for regimentation and order. As we build more and more into the earth, the challenge will be to retain these spaces’ potential resistance to such forces. By treating the underground not as a space in which to copy the world above but as a unique stratum whose symbolic dimensions resist fixity, its fugitive character can enable transformative design.

Rafael Moneo to be honored with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale

Rafael Moneo has been named the recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, the highest award given by the board of La Biennale di Venezia (The Venice Biennale). Moneo will receive the Golden Lion at a May 22 ceremony, kicking off the 17th edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale. Moneo’s award was decided upon by the board of directors of the La Biennale di Venezia, at the recommendation of Venice Architecture Biennale curator Hashim Sarkis. At Harvard GSD, Moneo was the first Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture, and was chair of the Department of Architecture from 1985 until 1990. Born in Tudela, Spain, in 1937, Moneo established his eponymous studio, Rafael Moneo Arquitecto, in Madrid in 1965, and began teaching at Escuela Técnica Superior of Madrid, where he served as chaired professor of composition from 1980 to 1985. He continues to lecture at Harvard GSD as the Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture, Emeritus. The Golden Lion joins a roster of awards and honors that Moneo has garnered over his career, including the 1996 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2003 Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects. Among Moneo’s best known completed works are the Bankinter Building in Madrid, the Museum of Roman Art in Mérida, the L’Illa building in Barcelona, the Pilar and Joan Miró Museum in Palma de Mallorca, the “Kursaal” Auditorium and Congess Center in San Sebastián, the extension of the Prado Museum in Madrid, as well as the Davis Art Museum at Wellesley College, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. Read more about Moneo’s Golden Lion honor, including remarks from Hashim Sarkis, via Architects Newspaper.

Harvard GSD names Jia Tolentino the 2021 Class Day speaker

Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design has named writer and author Jia Tolentino as its 2021 Class Day speaker. Tolentino will address Harvard GSD’s Class of 2021 and their families during Harvard’s 2021 graduation exercises on Thursday, May 27, 2021. Tolentino’s talk is currently scheduled to begin approximately at 1:10 p.m. EST, to be streamed live on Harvard GSD’s YouTube channel. To see a full schedule of 2021 Class Day and Diploma Ceremony exercises, please visit the GSD’s Commencement webpage.

Harvard GSD and Perkins&Will celebrate inaugural Black in Design Mentorship Program

The Harvard Graduate School of Design and Perkins&Will recently concluded the inaugural Black in Design Mentorship Program, an initiative to promote greater representation of Black talent in the design industry. Starting on February 12, twenty-one Boston-area high school students completed a 10-week curriculum in which they were matched with GSD degree candidates and Perkins&Will designers. The mentorship program was conceived by GSD students and Perkins&Will professionals at the GSD’s 2019 Black in Design Conference. Featuring both academic and professional components, the program introduced the high school students to the possibilities and opportunities within architecture and design, and helped them develop their design skills. Following this inaugural cohort, future programs will be offered on an annual basis. “Design firms have a responsibility to be champions of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in the profession,” says Brooke Trivas (MArch ’88), a principal at Perkins&Will who serves on the firm’s Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Council (JEDI) and has been a part of the mentorship initiative since its inception. “Our vision for this program is to empower both high school and graduate students to understand what is possible, pursue their interests, and develop their strengths.” “I really believe in the importance of exposing Black youth to the planning and design fields so they know these fields exist, that planning and design careers are accessible to them, and that they have the power to shape the built environment of their communities,” adds Whytne Stevens (MUP ’22), an organizing member of the mentorship program. The program grouped participants into three-person teams, each composed of one GSD student, one high school student, and one Perkins&Will professional. This arrangement enabled GSD students to learn from Perkins&Will professionals and, simultaneously, hone their mentorship skills with their matched high school student; allowed participating high school students to learn from both seasoned professionals and budding designers; and gave Perkins&Will participants an opportunity to create valuable connections with their mentees. “What was really special is that the program had many lessons for everyone involved,” says Sebastian Schmidt Dalzon, administrative director of Initiatives and Academic Projects at the GSD. “High schoolers got to see the life and work of designers and were connected with graduate student role models who look like them, while graduate students had an opportunity to share their passion for design and make design more accessible and relatable for Black students, and seasoned design professionals were able to learn from the perspectives of younger generations of Black students and see the potential of a future of design that includes everyone.” Over the course of 10 weeks, each trio discussed themes including design research, effective collaboration, Black legacies in design, and how to network and set professional goals, among other topics. In discussion-driven sessions each Friday, participants shared their ongoing work and heard presentations from guests including GSD Dean Sarah M. Whiting and other faculty, as well as a variety of Perkins&Will designers. Homework assignments included creating plans to enhance underused spaces in students’ neighborhoods, writing a letter to a future Black designer, and preparing mock applications for jobs and internships. To form the inaugural cohort of high school mentees, program organizers extended invitations to select Boston-area schools. Harvard GSD participants comprised volunteers from the school’s African American Student Union (AASU) and AfricaGSD. And volunteers from Perkins&Will’s Boston studio made up the third leg. “We have been intentional in developing this program to lay a solid foundation for future relationships to flourish,” says Laura Snowdon, Harvard GSD’s dean of students and assistant dean for Enrollment Services. “We have paid careful attention to the development of the curriculum, and we look forward to incorporating thoughtful feedback from our pilot group to inform the future program.” The Black in Design Mentorship Program is the latest expression of the long-standing partnership between Perkins&Will and the GSD. Ongoing initiatives in support of diversifying the design profession include the Phil Freelon Fellowship and the Nagle-Johnson Family Fellowship, which was most recently awarded to Jonathan Boyce (MArch ’22). “Our firm is committed to diversifying the design profession,” says Gabrielle Bullock, who has served as director of Global Diversity at Perkins&Will since 2013, and who joined the program in one of its weekly sessions. “We actively and continuously seek new opportunities to be stewards of social equity in our projects, in the industry, and in the world around us.” “The program is rooted in the recognition that everyone benefits from mentorship, but not everyone has equal access because of racial inequality and histories of disenfranchisement,” Schmidt Dalzon adds. “The program recognizes that inequality exists not by accident, but by design, and that we can change the world by doing something as small as creating a community of people who share a passion for design that, thus nurtured, may ripple through generations.” ### The Black in Design Mentorship Program’s Executive Board: Brooke Trivas (MArch ’88), principal at Perkins&Will; Rania Karamallah, architectural designer at Perkins&Will; Laura Snowdon, dean of students at the GSD; Sebastian Schmidt Dalzon, administrative director of Initiatives and Academic Projects at the GSD; and Kelly Wisnaskas, Assistant Director of Student Support and Services at the GSD. The program’s 2021 Organizing Team: Kim Wong, human resources manager at Perkins&Will; Rachael Dumas, associate knowledge manager at Perkins&Will; Caleb Negash (MArch ’23); Megan Panzano (MArch ’10), program director of the Harvard Undergraduate Architecture Studies Track and assistant professor of Architecture at the GSD; and Whytne Stevens (MUP ’22).

“H.U.D., Sweat, and Tears” team is runner-up in affordable housing competition

Harvard Graduate School of Design student Avanti Krovi (MUP ’21) and teammates from the University of Michigan are the runners-up in the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2021 Innovation in Affordable Housing Student Design and Planning Competition. HUD’s annual competition, now in its eighth year, is designed to practice and promote the “design and production of livable and sustainable housing for low- and moderate-income people.” It encourages research and innovation in affordable housing, raises future practitioner capacity, and fosters teamwork in the design process. According to the project brief, “multi-disciplinary teams comprised of graduate students in architecture, planning and policy, finance and other areas” are asked to “address social, economic, and environmental issues in responding to a specific housing problem developed by an actual public housing agency.” This year, the competition focused on the rural community of Firebaugh, California. Krovi worked with University of Michigan graduate students Andrew Darvin, Katie Wheeler, Christopher Prinsen, and Alex Sulek on “H.U.D., Sweat, and Tears.” The proposal offers ways to physically connect five existing affordable and public housing sites owned by Fresno Housing that serve low-income families, seniors, and farmworkers. Their goal is to create a fluid, walkable community—”boosting resident engagement and positively impacting the quality of life, housing, and community.” During the final presentations and announcement of the winners, Jenn Jones, chief of staff for HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge, encouraged the participating students to maintain their enthusiasm and noted: “We need your ideas, innovation, and energy to help meet the significant challenges we face with regard to housing affordability in the United States.” Learn more about the 2021 HUD competition winning proposals.

The Black New Deal: Bryan C. Lee on challenging the power structures that use architecture and design as tools of oppression

When asked about the theoretical touchstones for his new studio, “The Black New Deal,” Design Critic Bryan C. Lee references almost exclusively the work of Black liberation thinkers and activists: Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Black abolitionists, and leaders of the Black Panther Party and the Black Lives Matter Movement. Each understood the importance of space, place, and community-building in determining the overall condition of Black people in America. Lee is a practitioner of Design Justice, a movement to eradicate structural inequalities in design to create spaces of racial, social, and cultural equality. Its members include a growing cohort of architects, urbanists, and planners who are also deeply engaged in social justice discourse. They are as concerned with the societal impact of a designed product as with how it came into being. Traditionally marginalized communities are not just consulted—they lead the creative process in a collaborative exchange with designers. “The Black New Deal,” which was introduced at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in spring 2021, prepares students to develop a professional practice that interrogates space using an anti-racist lens. In conversation, Lee cites the five questions that guide his pedagogical approach and his professional work as founder of Colloqate Design, a nonprofit multidisciplinary studio in New Orleans: Who holds power in a particular condition? What is the injustice that results from that power? Who is directly and disproportionately impacted by that injustice? How does it physically manifest in the built environment? And where are the opportunities to challenge those systems and envision new ones that actually serve those who have been impacted by those injustices? To appreciate the need for courses like “The Black New Deal,” it helps to understand what they are responding to. Lee points to examples from history where space and design have been used to propagate racial oppression. He cites policies that govern land and its use—forcibly removing Black people from it or forcing them to work it for free; the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation in public spaces; legal or de facto segregation that limits where Black people can live or generate wealth through home ownership; the crime prevention through environmental design agenda of the 1970s that used the built environment to establish a police state in urban areas; the slashing of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s budgets in the 1980s that effectively ended the affordable housing program; and something as everyday as a design studio parachuting in to develop a site without acknowledging local realities. “What Design Justice is asking us to do first is to challenge the privilege of power structures that use architecture and design as a tool of oppression,” Lee says by way of explaining how to spot structural inequality. “We have to recognize the combinatorial condition of policies, procedures, pedagogy, practice, projects, and people as methods for using the built environment to maintain systems of power.” During the course module, studio time is divided between studying the connection between racial and spatial violence, and community engagement methodologies. There are weekly guest lectures from members of the community—organizers, advocates, activists, artists, and elected officials. “They are invited to be a part of the conversation,” Lee says, “not just to be extracted from, but to get feedback from and for them to express their likes, dislikes, and narratives.” The course culminates in a community-based project. There are important parameters: Students can collaborate, but final projects are individual. The design site must be within Trenton, New Jersey, because it is Lee’s hometown and a place where he can support students as they link up with the local community. Finally, students will be graded not on the standard GSD criteria, Lee cautions, but rather on the extent to which they have privileged the meaningful inclusion of the community voice in the final product. After all, according to the course description, the studio “is an exercise in deep listening and cultural understanding.” “The Black New Deal” focuses on eradicating harmful practices as well on imagining what could come in their place. Design Justice is ultimately future-facing, envisioning a reality in which design not only ceases to be a deterrent to Black advancement but becomes an agent in its realization. The first time Lee taught the course, blueprints emerged for these “new typologies of liberation,” as he calls them. One student’s project involved abandoning the New Jersey governor’s mansion in Princeton, a space rarely used by governors. Inspired by a call once issued by the Black Panthers to eliminate the executive branch, Edward Wang (MArch ’22) adopted a similarly radical response to New Jersey’s governors. To challenge their outsized political influence—as embodied in the unoccupied mansion—Wang proposed instead locating an “Office of Governors” in Trenton, for those who govern at the neighborhood level and catering to the needs of everyday people. An official state structure is thus transformed from a seat of exclusive political power into a democratic house of public service and pluralistic representation. Wang’s project exemplifies the concept of mutual aid—a dependence on and obligation to one another for social and political progress. It is another of the foundational tenets of Design Justice, borrowing from the central role of mutualism in social movements for more than 200 years, from safe houses that gave refuge to enslaved people escaping along the Underground Railroad, to the Black Panther Party’s free lunch and breakfast programs, to mutual aid organizations that have cropped up during the current pandemic. Lee explains how the ideals of mutualism come to bear on his approach to the course: “Architecture that scaffolds and supports notions of mutualism is something that we’re seeking to pronounce as valuable. When we look for some version of liberation in the built environment, we’re really seeking to understand the collective narratives of place.” He continues, “Acknowledging a collective narrative and history centers us so that we can move to a point where we are creating spaces of mutual aid. That kind of mutuality is necessary for the built environment to actually serve the broader community more than it currently does.” Lee takes a deep, contemplative breath when asked about the course name. It comes from the association he makes between the ideals of the New Deal of the 1930s and the failed but audacious promise of the Freedmen’s Bureau. A short-lived government agency established following the Civil War, the bureau was tasked with providing land, health care, food, education, stable jobs, and decent housing to nearly 4 million formerly enslaved people in the South. To Lee’s mind, the Freedmen’s Bureau—which was abandoned by Congress in 1872—could have been the most radical and revolutionary New Deal premise ever imagined for Black people. The course then asks, If we were to bring that premise forward to today, what would it look like in the built environment? Lee says, “How do we translate the collection of demands that exist in movements that wrapped themselves around those same set of principles into design? It is about holding ourselves to a contemporary understanding of what the Freedmen’s Bureau was attempting to do and trying to see what it might look like if we were to win these battles.” For students, potentially the most challenging aspect of the studio is that the work of dismantling extends to—or starts with—their own ideology. Western culture teaches us to privilege the individual idea as, Lee says. That can make it difficult for students to acknowledge and eliminate internalized white supremacy and become radical in how they view the social ramifications of their work. Similarly, it can be hard for them to understand the pain and traumas of communities if there is no precedent in own their lives. The risk is that, in the absence of a personal experience, they will revert to standard operating procedures. In this sense, the course is highly ambitious. Its sphere of influence aspires to move from the unconscious biases of budding designers, to their conscious creative practice, out to the lives of individuals often disconnected from having a say in the shape of their environment, and on to fueling a movement for systemic change. Indeed, the work of Design Justice is itself monumental. That is made clear by Lee’s argument that while not every designed space has a role in propagating oppression, most are somehow implicated. “There are spaces that don’t have injustice inherently built into them. But there are very few that don’t inherently have prejudice or bias built into them. And the threshold to which bias becomes injustice is very thin,” he explains. In that sense, almost the entirety of our built world is up for scrutiny. Module by module, at the GSD and beyond, the army of well-trained scrutinizers is growing.

Harvard GSD announces establishment of the R. Buckminster Fuller Professorship of Design Science

Harvard Graduate School of Design announces the establishment of the R. Buckminster Fuller Professorship of Design Science, thanks to the generosity of Amy C. Edmondson (AB ’81, AM ’95, PhD ’96) and George Q. Daley (AB ’82, MD ’91). Edmondson and Daley each has long-standing ties to Harvard University—Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School (HBS) and worked with Fuller after her graduation from Harvard College, and Daley is the Dean of Harvard Medical School and the Caroline Shields Walker Professor of Medicine. Harvard GSD will begin a search for a visionary scholar to serve as the inaugural R. Buckminster Fuller Professor of Design Science.

R. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) was a renowned 20th-century inventor, designer, engineer, and philosopher, and a member of the Harvard College Class of 1917. Through a design-science approach, he worked to solve global problems related to energy, transportation, and education, among other fields. Fuller has influenced generations of designers, architects, scientists, and artists working to create a more sustainable planet. His most well-known artifact is the geodesic dome.

Edmondson came to know Fuller’s work through the Harvard course “Synergetics: The Structure of Ordered Space” along with a lecture Fuller presented at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Upon corresponding with him, he offered her a job as his Chief Engineer. This pivotal experience shaped Edmondson’s career and ultimately led her to her work at HBS, studying people and teams who seek to make a positive difference through the work they do. She describes Fuller as “an inspirational, joyful, brilliant, and invitingly inclusive person,” and she was influenced by his way of thinking that centrally involved design.

Edmondson and Daley connect with Fuller’s belief that designers can make a difference through their work and celebrate the role of responsible design for making a difference in the world. “Buckminster Fuller was interested in making a better world through the power of design. There is no more fitting place to honor his legacy than at the GSD by creating the R. Buckminster Fuller Professorship of Design Science,” said Edmondson and Daley. “Bucky’s spirit of innovation and invention lives on to inspire others to forge new discoveries and to take better care of each other and our planet for future generations.”

Named, endowed chairs are among the highest honors bestowed at Harvard. At Harvard GSD, they attract respected leaders in their respective design disciplines, support academic inquiries and innovative research, and ensure the position in perpetuity.

“Amy and George are championing a legacy of world-class scholarship at the GSD. I am grateful for their generosity to sustain a thriving academic community at the School,” said Sarah M. Whiting, Harvard GSD’s Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture. “Through their commitment, the R. Buckminster Fuller Professorship of Design Science will help the GSD to attract the best faculty and students and serve as a perpetual reminder of Fuller’s legacy in design innovation and sustainability.”

Edmondson serves on Harvard GSD’s Dean’s Leadership Council, working with Dean Whiting to advance the school’s visibility and importance within Harvard.

David Bemporad named Harvard’s Graduate Student Employee of the Year

David Bemporad (MUP ’21) has been named Harvard’s Graduate Student Employee of the Year for his work with Great Springs Project, Inc (GSP). The award is administered by the Harvard Student Employment Office as a way to “recognize and reward the vital work that our student employees perform both on and off campus, in a variety of different roles.” After moving back to San Antonio at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bemporad was inspired by the suffering he saw around him to help his hometown. “I decided that I needed to serve my neighbors and harness the skills I had learned in my first year as a transportation and public realm–focused master in urban planning student for a truly just cause.” Bemporad noticed that the city’s trail system was seeing record use. This brought him to GSP, a Texas-based nonprofit working to build a 100-mile-long network of hike-and-bike trails connecting San Antonio and Austin as part of an effort to secure a national park-sized preserve protecting the springs along the proposed trails. As an intern, Bemporad was part of the regional conservation and trail network vision team, reporting to the chief strategy & operations officer. “David’s authentic approach engenders trust and confidence which helps maintain a high-performing workplace for an organization dedicated to solving a very important problem on how to protect a critical water source, ensure public access to four of Texas’ iconic great springs and conserve beautiful open space for generations to come,” wrote GSP in their nomination application. In addition to his planning responsibilities, Bemporad was part of GSP’s equity task force and was integral in developing the organization’s inclusivity framework. He also provided support to GSP partner ActivateSA, a San Antonio–based organization with a focus on transportation infrastructure and wellness. “His role has been critical to the growth of ActivateSA and to the momentum of Great Springs Project,” noted GSP. “My urban planning studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design center around building new infrastructure to heal our world, support redlined and underserved communities, and promote transportation choice in American cities,” says Bemporad in a Q&A with the Harvard Student Employment Office. “GSP’s vision is aligned with these concepts and goals and allows me to apply my learned theory in a close-to-home, real-world setting.” Read more about David Bemporad’s work with GSP, how he manages his time as an intern and full-time student, and the importance of spaces for recreation in our cities.