Students in Dialogue: A conversation with MArch II candidate Selwyn Bachus

What is it like to be a Master in Architecture II student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design? In this series of candid conversations between students, Tomi Laja (MArch II ’22) speaks with Selwyn Bachus (MArch II ’22) about his decision to attend the GSD, cultivating Black space through design, and post-graduate aspirations.

What were you doing before you came to the GSD?

I graduated from college in May of 2019. And I didn’t know where I wanted to go to grad school, if I wanted to work, or what I was going to do. So I spent a year as an alumni volunteer at my high school in Omaha. I worked at the school for almost 60 hours a week with the robotics club, coaching football, and helping out with extracurricular activities—like keeping the gym open at night so that students would have somewhere to go. I used this experience as an opportunity to develop my own methodology of working with students.

What led to your decision to attend the GSD?

The reason I wanted to begin post-professional education was my desire to teach. As an undergraduate, I didn’t have any professors of color, and I only had one professor who was a female. So I saw a severe lack of representation in my own education, and moving forward I want to play a role in changing that. A lot of my professors in my undergraduate career came from the GSD, and the GSD has a reputation for producing great teachers who really understand and have a command of pedagogy.

How was your Open House experience—especially since it was virtual?

Open House was interesting, to say the least: I had never taken an online class before starting at the GSD last semester, and the simple thought of a virtual open house and virtual school was terrifying to me. But I appreciated the breaking down of the Open House into a week-long experience, as opposed to a one-day sprint. The multiple avenues of learning about the school throughout the Open House week was really helpful because I was able to talk to a lot of people. The thing that really solidified my choice to come to the GSD was a student-led virtual event I attended during Open House with other prospective and current students. It was so fun because people were being themselves, listening to music, and having a great time in the zoom chat. The students were really engaged, even in the virtual sphere.

I also remember the excitement from Open House. The students’ talent and passion have been such a big part of my graduate school experience. Was there a specific subject you knew you wanted to study before attending?

Yes—my entire statement for my application essay was about the making of Black space. I poured my soul into expressing my desire to create Black space and to understand what it means to craft those spaces. And it hasn’t changed at all. It’s only been amplified from my studios with Toshiko Mori, Scott Cohen, and Bryan Lee. The Master of Architecture II program gave me the opportunity to craft my own path and decide what I want to do and how I want to go about it. During my first semester, I took Toshiko Mori’s “House of Our Time” module studio and then Preston Scott Cohen’s “Cancel Architecture” for my second module in the first semester. Both allowed me to further my investigation of Black space.

Since your primary goal is to teach after your graduate studies, have you had a teaching assistantship during your first year at the GSD?

Yes—I asked Scott if I could be the TA for “Cancel Architecture.” Because I knew what I wanted to do, it was easy for me to identify the courses I wanted to be involved in. Not only was I able to engage in further defining what Black space is for me, I was also able to gain pedagogical experience. So the GSD has offered me the ability to combine the two.

Do you plan to do a thesis at the end of your master’s degree?

I want my thesis to be in line with what I wrote in my application essay and the conversations I have had in my first semester and a half at the GSD. My project is going to be about creating and fostering Black spaces in the city of Omaha, while highlighting the social, historical, and physical violence enacted upon Black people in the city. One hundred years ago, a black man was lynched for a crime that he did not commit. This past summer, a young man was shot during George Floyd protests. The deaths of these two men are separated by six blocks, on the same street. I would like to work on a thesis that confronts this history and exposes that it is ingrained in the physical fabric of the city and that brings people into direct contact with the history of spatial violence, physical violence, and socio-historic violence.

Have you taken any courses outside of the GSD yet?

I haven’t taken any courses outside of the GSD yet. I’m interested in taking courses at Harvard Divinity School to tie together spirituality, architecture, and Blackness because I feel like they are primordially intertwined.

Do you have a favorite course so far, and if so what did you find interesting or challenging about it?

All of my studios have been so powerful for my own maturation and my thinking. If I have to choose a favorite, I would exclude all the studios since I cannot pick one over the other. So actually my favorite class is one I am taking this semester: Jorge Silvetti’s “Regarding an Archive.” Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti are donating their entire archive of works to the GSD. As Silvetti’s final pedagogical exercise and teaching experience, he is offering a course that is a retrospective and a reflection on Machado Silvetti’s work over the decades. It is a deeper reading of their archive, a sort of biography. To have the opportunity to hear the why—why make certain moves in architecture, formally, programmatically, stylistically—from such a revered icon in modern and postmodern contemporary design is eye opening and greatly appreciated. It’s interesting to witness an architect reflect critically on his career. In the long run, it will be helpful not only for myself, but also for the other students in the course, to have witnessed that sort of reckoning with one’s self in order to define who we want to be moving forward as architects.

How have you grown so far through your graduate studies at the GSD?

As far as personal development, I would say that I’m not the same right now as I was six weeks into the semester or at the beginning of this semester. Graduate studies have expanded my own conception of what architecture is, what architecture can be, and what architecture can do. And I think that that’s pretty powerful. I think as architects, our strongest trait is our ability to dream. I believe it is our superpower actually, to dream of a better world and of better spaces. My time at the GSD has allowed me to dream, which I am thankful for. “Students in Dialogue” is a series of candid conversations between students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.Interviewer Tomi Laja is currently a Master in Architecture II degree candidate at the GSD and Editorial Assistant with Harvard Design Magazine. Her interests include research-based architectural design, exhibition, and writing. Her independent research includes afro-futurist and eco-feminist perspectives as they relate to agency, consciousness, and the built environment.

Shading Sunset: Charles Waldheim on reimagining the streets of Los Angeles for a warmer future

In 1965, Ed Ruscha stood on the bed of a moving pickup truck and photographed Sunset Boulevard. Through this process he calls “motorized photography,” he captured the entirety of a mile-and-a-half long segment of the street with mechanized precision. These images were then collaged for Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), a book whose accordion-folded pages unfurl over 27 feet. The experience was not a one-off. Ruscha would soon traverse different thoroughfares in Los Angeles, including Wilshire and Sepulveda Boulevards, and perform the same operation. Every few years, he—and now others in place of the 83-year-old pop artist—returned to these streets to photograph them again and again. The cumulative result of the ongoing endeavor, which could be classified as a long-duration artwork as much as data collection, is an archive of over one million images. The Getty Institute recently acquired this unique history of Los Angeles’s built environment in pictorial form and, to date, has digitized over 60,000 photographs. Their goal is to make it both accessible to the public and, as Charles Waldheim’s spring studio, “Shading Sunset: Reimagining the Streets of Los Angeles for a Warmer Future,” exemplifies, useful as a tool for imagining alternative futures of the city. Ruscha’s deadpan documentation of American vernacular design did not begin in 1965. Two years prior, he published his first book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, which features black-and-white photographs of monuments located between his native Oklahoma and Los Angeles. Form and function fascinated him. “I would look at a building and disregard the purpose of that building (in this case a commercial outlet to sell gasoline). I was really more interested in this crazy little design that was repeated by all the gas companies to make stations with an overhang to create shade for their customers,” Ruscha has said. “It seemed to me a very beautiful statement.” Gas stations would appear in his paintings at the time, too. In the 1960s, this respect for the quotidian was echoed by many non-American architects, urbanists, and theorists. Denise Scott Brown and Reyner Banham were among those who came to the United States in part because its cities were viewed from elsewhere as illegitimate, lacking good taste, and even degenerate. “They were looking for evidence of the contemporary city,” says Waldheim. “In Ruscha’s work, especially the Streets of Los Angeles project, they find a kind of Duchampian readymade. It’s not only a city and the documentation of that city but a way of seeing which confounds architectural criticism. Without judgment, Ruscha documented everything. In that, there’s a kind of empathy as well as a kind of empiricism.” Scott Brown and Robert Venturi visited Ruscha’s studio with their Yale students, who were directed to apply Ruscha’s nonjudgmental, indexical aesthetic to their work on Las Vegas. This work led to the duo’s seminal 1972 study, Learning from Las Vegas. And Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles (1973), a BBC documentary shot in the manner of a European travelogue which takes a cheeky but almost reverent look at Los Angeles, even guest stars Ruscha. The initial motorized photography ventures inspired these figures. Now no one, not even Ruscha, can reasonably view every image in the series. The Getty had to double its server size upon acquiring them. To Waldheim, this archive represents a form of big data avant la lettre. Compared to traffic surveillance footage or social media posts, however, these images are less clouded by concerns regarding big data’s problematic biases, which allows for more freedom in utilizing them as research material. The Getty convened a group of art and architectural historians to analyze the archive. “Among the challenges of interpretation associated with the archive is the impulse toward making these images sensible to traditional modes of human cognition—the notion that if I can see it, I can understand it. That leads to making them searchable by address, building type, etc.,” Waldheim explains. But the sheer number of images recommends, if not requires, novel technology and methods, he argues. “Unlike cartography or public health, for example, design is by definition speculative. Big data sets like this give us an opening to a way of working that can be described as machine- and rule-based. They allow us to put less pressure and cognition on our own biases and produce an environment in which nonlinear and unexpected outcomes are generated. It’s outside the immediate what/where of the architect’s faculty cognition. That’s an enormous advantage because it allows us to get past preconceptions and organize other forms of information to inform design decisions.” To this end, Waldheim proposed a form of Style Generative Adversarial Network, or StyleGAN, modeling as the studio’s foundational tool. This workflow for the studio was developed by Waldheim, Aziz Barbar, and Min Yeo from the GSD’s Office for Urbanization in collaboration with a team led by Jose Luis García del Castillo López and the GSD Laboratory for Design Technologies. A form of machine learning built on facial recognition, the technology entails feeding images with a particular pattern into a system, training it to comprehend this pattern, and then feeding it a different set of images featuring a new pattern so it can learn difference. By processing thousands of Ruscha’s photographs, for example, the machine recognizes the precise visual composition of certain neighborhoods, structures of space, and building typologies—a task that exceeds human cognition. After doing so, it generates strikingly real images, similar to deepfakes, that are uncanny fictions. “I think of it as akin to alternative fiction in a literary sense,” says Waldheim. “It also has similarities to distanced or delayed authorship in the historical avant-garde, in which artists produced and generated forms that were not under their control.” Waldheim considers using technology in this way as an iteration of da Vinci’s advice to stare at clouds or stains on walls for inspiration. This comparison becomes explicit in Los Angeles–based artist Refik Anadol’s animations, such as those he created of Stockholm harbor or New York City architecture. Called “machine hallucinations” by Anadol, these animations begin by feeding a StyleGAN sometimes over 100 million images of a specific place from many different time periods. From this input, he creates a slowly morphing video of that particular area, as if reflected in a rippling pool of water. At first, all seems recognizable and accurate; upon further inspection, it’s evident that the buildings featured do not exist in reality. Rather, they are various iterations or manipulations of what is technically referred to as the “latent space” (forms, lines, proportionality) of the images fed into the network. What we see, in Waldheim’s reading, are “parallel worlds that could have happened based on these rules but didn’t.” While a design process that utilizes StyleGAN does not eliminate the designer’s subjectivity from the process—the images the system receives must be curated—it undercuts a normative sense of authorial agency. “Instead of starting with a blank page, a declaration that ‘I will do this,’ questions of taste or culture, and a virtuosic exhibition of drawing, this places more emphasis on the designer’s reflective and interpretive qualities,” Waldheim explains. “I find it incredibly productive for architects to produce imagined realities. It doesn’t mean those realities are good things or that we should realize them in the real world, but it calls on different faculties of the designer to make judgments about them. It triangulates the curatorial agenda, the making of images of alternative futures, and the architect’s interpretation of those images.” The process simultaneously supports and rejects the traditional association of technology with efficiency. StyleGAN’s automation accelerates the process of coding and analyzing an archive that exceeds human capacities, but only as a tool to give the designer time and freedom to engage in other tasks. “It changes the relationship between the architect and the object of their study,” says Waldheim. “We’ve gone from a paradigm of representation to a paradigm of automation of the imagination on behalf of the designer. The architect used to be pictured with their drawings, and that’s falling away to workflows and processing. Early digital drawings were themselves simulacra for things we used to do. This way of working, with technology like StyleGAN modeling, is a different form of representation that multiplies the faculties of the designer and changes their labor. We have to become data scientists, in a way, and focus much more on judgment, advocacy, and curation around what these images portend or afford.” For the studio, this curation requires identifying certain themes in Ruscha’s images that need urgent attention, among them homelessness and disparities of environmental justice related to race and ethnicity. These issues are among the many examined in the Future of the American City project, an urban-study initiative at the GSD funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which spotlights Miami, Detroit, and Los Angeles. One theme that unites many of these concerns has become increasingly important in recent years: shade. In Los Angeles specifically, shade has become a scarce resource, with the city’s iconic palm trees providing little cover from increased heat-island effects. A public health concern that results from global warming and is exacerbated by public policies and design ideologies, this lack affects the most vulnerable populations who have limited access to the tree canopy. Mayor Eric Garcetti acknowledged a need for intervention and, in October 2019, began a Cool Streets project that includes planting 90,000 by the end of this year, building covered bus-stop benches, and installing cool pavement. “The unconditional positive regard for more and more sunlight is deeply steeped in the way architects and urbanists have been trained in the West for at least a century,” says Waldheim. “The oldest regulations about what you could build in the Anglo tradition—the English ‘right to light’ laws and the origin of city planning in New York—all come back to the fundamental issue of not wanting to die in the shadow of someone’s enormous building constructed for profit.” This ideology perhaps has reached its terminus, as greater concern is placed on low-carbon energy construction and structures that provide shade. The backlash against police surveillance cameras, which require unobstructed sight lines and connect darkness with criminality, also critiques this ethos of total visibility. Ruscha’s archive, an unintended precursor to Google Street View with similarities to surveillance footage, metaphorically exemplifies this long-term obsession with pure knowledge and illumination. But as a tool for imagining a more shade-filled future, it can be read negatively—by identifying what it doesn’t represent or what its focus makes invisible. The images’ pure horizontality implies an equalization across class, race, and ethnic groups. Close examination, however, reveals the distinct shifts between municipal boundaries and the extent to which disparities like decreasing percentage of tree canopy have been exacerbated over multiple decades. The images provide substantial evidence for where plant material once was, its height, how much shade it produced, and how it changed over time. Seeing this evolution provides evidence for where vegetation might be increased, with StyleGAN modeling employed as a tool to give a realistic glimpse of how that could appear. Even more fundamental is the absence of people in the photographs, which goes unnoticed in part due to the viewpoint from a car that diminishes the presence of the sidewalk. This establishes the automobile, not the human body, as the primary actor in public space, which suggests speed and movement’s supremacy over stasis. Not every Angeleno owns a car though, and regardless, every person deserves space on the sidewalk to exist without enduring intense sunlight and its resulting stresses. COVID-19 has made explicit that most humans long for contact and time in public. But the built environment in American cities is increasingly hostile to occupation, as anti-homeless technology like dividers on benches and a lack of covered seating generally demonstrate. The Ruscha archive may show where generous, equitable spaces once were and what happened to them over time, in addition to revealing the panoply of spaces most people avoid. “The goal of the studio might be to reconceive the street fundamentally by returning to the Ruschaian vocabulary in a perverse way to examine what it affords, who it accommodates, who it surveils, how much sun there is, and who is authorized to be there,” says Waldheim. “Without being stylistic, regional, or contextual, we’re asking if there is something to draw from Ruscha that is Angeleno in its ‘essence.’ I believe there is, for example, an infinite number of latent Ruscha Sunset Boulevards. If we develop the latent spaces available within Ruscha’s archive which address issues like shade and shelter, that can inform what we project forward when imagining an alternative to the current conditions on the streets of the city.”  

Students in Dialogue: A conversation with MDE candidate Nupur Gurjar

What is it like to be a Master in Design Engineering student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences? In this series of candid conversations between students, Tomi Laja (MArch II ’22) speaks with Nupur Gurjar (MDE ’21) about her journey from an architect and set designer in India to Harvard student, taking courses at the Law, Kennedy, and Business Schools, and career paths in MDE.

What drew you to the GSD and the Master of Design Engineering program?

After finishing my architecture undergrad degree, I stepped into design roles that were a bit unconventional, but ones that enabled me to explore critical design thinking. The Master of Design Engineering program is about applying design thinking into various fields, not necessarily just for architecture or the built environment but for design in a broad sense. The approach applies systems of thinking across cultural experience, collaboration with teams, learning by doing. The students in my cohort are not all from a design background; in fact, their backgrounds range from engineering to economics. Here, design means problem-solving and using critical thinking, innovative ideas, and principles of design to apply the right kind of approach to a project. Within MDE, I can bring in skills that are creative, critical, analytical, technical, and non-technical, and this gives me the freedom and flexibility to wear different hats and enter career paths as a designer who has the ability to understand problems and people.  

I really like what you’re saying about this multi-dimensional view on both what design is, but also your role as a designer. What was your experience before entering the program?

I’m from Bangalore, India, and in my final year studying architecture, I decided to intern in Mumbai. That internship really gave me a deeper idea of my passion, likes, and dislikes. At that point, large-scale commercial architecture jobs stopped holding their appeal to me, so I started exploring. I am also a performer and have been trained in classical dance and music. I entered the field of production design as a set designer for the media industry. I saw my training as a designer and a performer come together. Being a set designer was like looking at design and interiors through the lens of a camera that stretched beyond my drawings and 3D visualizations. I worked on a music video for Puma which was really colorful and cultural and for a web series with Amazon Prime. My second year of work experience was as a design research assistant in the city of Ahmedabad at CEPT University, Design Innovation and Craft Research Institute. I was part of a number of ethnographic field studies on vernacular furniture in northwest India. That opened doors to my interests in design research and engaging in a methodology to understand the influence of furniture design that has seamlessly integrated into the traditions, space, and life in communities.

You really took an opportunity to explore your path as a designer whether it was through architecture, set design, or research. Was a portfolio required for the MDE program?

Yes: Design Engineering accepts candidates from all different backgrounds, so the content of portfolios ranges. Some students have architecture projects, and others might emphasize research/ policy studies/ economics/ science and technology, etc. in their portfolio. The MDE program is very broad, and I tried to connect my diverse set of experiences and understanding of design to the vision of this program. When submitting your portfolio, I would recommend that you show your process of learning, discovering, and thinking that led to certain decisions; include low-fidelity prototypes, sketches, and mock-ups for products/ services or experiences designed. This could depend on the kind of project being showcased, but ultimately, it is important to include why a certain intervention matters and what value or impact it has on society.

Was there a specific subject that you wanted to study when entering the GSD?

I looked forward to studying at the GSD, and to be frank, I did not have a specific focus at first. It was my first time traveling internationally, and I was looking forward to absorbing a new outlook on my student life experience. I remember my admiration while walking the halls of the GSD with professionals that I’d read about in publications. That was truly exciting for me. I wanted to immerse myself in experiences that would help me grow as a designer, within the conventional boundaries of where designers thrive but also beyond it, at the intersection of other emerging fields and technologies.

How is the MDE program structured, and what projects excited you?

The MDE program is semi-structured with some mandatory courses but also a considerable amount of flexibility. We have Design studios in our first year with exposure to a system of working in cross-functional teams on quick design sprints as well as longer projects on Product, Service, Experience design with a hint of Data visualization and UI/UX design based on project demands along different themes that is set for every MDE incoming cohort. The first year can be exhausting, but it paves the way for our year-long Independent Design Engineering Project (IDEP) in the second year. I am working on designing an experiential service design intervention on climate migration in Bangladesh for vulnerable communities impacted by gradual climate events.

Have you taken any courses outside of the GSD?

Last semester I took “Conducting Negotiation on the Frontlines” at the Kennedy School of Government. It taught me about negotiation in a relational environment. It was an amazing course, and I think I was the only design school student. The experiential course design enabled the intersection of design thinking in humanitarian response. I met a lot of new people and made a lot of new friends. Another course I cherished was at Harvard Law School, a place where I had never imagined design to be applicable. My interest in climate design led me into a project where we were looking at reducing artificial synthetic nitrogen fertilizers for farmers, and we were even able to visit Wisconsin for our research. I enjoyed the challenge of addressing a complex challenge for the farmers to enhance or maintain their yield while reducing the fertilizer application through a tool kit designed for fertilizer calculations and modeling.

That’s exciting. I’ve taken some courses outside of the GSD as well, focusing on Gender Studies and Curatorial Studies. I’ve been thinking of the Law School but find myself feeling intimidated: you’ve inspired me to go for it.

It is. It’s just amazing. Again, you meet a whole new bunch of people that you would not typically meet.

Do you have any specific advice for international students about life on campus and careers after MDE?

In terms of campus life, Harvard has endless opportunities, including incredible research and innovation labs. And relationships with the amazing faculty are invaluable. Living abroad can be expensive, but there are some great research and work opportunities on-campus for employment as an international student. As for career paths after MDE, there is no single answer—it depends on your background, project experiences, or even entirely new skill sets that are learned here which may lead to a whole new career pathway. MDE students have typically taken up jobs as product designers, UI/UX designers, system engineers, consultants, strategists, or even started their own venture post-graduation. Our path will be less about the job title and more about what we can bring in terms of design and problem-solving.

I’d love to hear about organizations you’ve been involved with at Harvard.

Firstly, I would like to tell any future student to balance your school time with your passions and interests beyond the classroom. Events happen on a daily basis in the form of conferences, lectures, social networking, and more. It can be overwhelming, but it is important to keep reminding yourself to prioritize and think of the value you seek during your time here. In March 2020, I participated in the Harvard Circular Economy Symposium with students from the GSD, the Business School, and the Kennedy School; we organized the inaugural conference and worked on building an exposure and awareness of what “circular economy” means as a concept. I am still actively a part of that group. I also was a Community Service Fellow at the GSD last summer (2020). It is a fellowship for students at the GSD to work on a project with a nonprofit or a public organization in the US or abroad. I worked with Boston organizations on designing a Green Innovation district strategy to strengthen climate resiliency. For the term 2020-21, I was elected as the Student Groups chair at the Student Forum GSD. I’m the liaison for the approximately 40 student groups at the GSD. We also have meetings with the dean and learn about the administrative side of the school. Being on the leadership side has always been very enriching for me. I am also involved with the GSD Alumni Council’s Design Impact event series. I curated and moderated a panel in the Design Impact for South Asia event in February 2021 on climate migration, and I am using this opportunity to broaden my own passion and interest for climate migration in line with my thesis. I was also involved with the India Conference at Harvard, 2021 which led to some valuable connections to meet professionals working in this area. It is the largest student-led conference in the US, and is organized by students of the Business School and Kennedy School every year. Finding ways to engage in programs outside of my coursework that complement my scholarship has been a real highlight of my time in the MDE program, and something I would recommend to any incoming student. “Students in Dialogue” is a series of candid conversations between students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Interviewer Tomi Laja is currently a Master in Architecture II degree candidate at the GSD and Editorial Assistant with Harvard Design Magazine. Her interests include research-based architectural design, exhibition, and writing. Her independent research includes afro-futurist and eco-feminist perspectives as they relate to agency, consciousness, and the built environment.

Design collaborative colab-19 is changing how we think about post-pandemic architecture

Late last year, a scaffolding structure rose to abut the facade of the popular La Concordia market plaza in Bogotá—but the building wasn’t under construction. The three-story framework—a temporary intervention developed by architecture studio colab-19 with the Colombian Society of Architects and Taller Architects—was part of a city-sponsored campaign to support COVID-safe civic life during lockdown. As colab-19, architect Alejandro Saldarriaga (MArch II ’21) and urban designer German Bahamon designed the U-shaped La Concordia: Amphitheater to host a flexible program of outdoor dining, retail, and entertainment, all open to the public. While designers worldwide grappled with shortages of plexiglass and plywood as they scrambled to design for our new everyday life, colab-19’s multi-use installation was constructed with materials that are purposefully easy to source, assemble, and reuse—like the scaffolding, which was donated for the project by manufacturer Layher.

“We see existing systems as the opportunity—how can we use those resources to create architecture?” says Bahamon, of colab-19’s practice. “Scaffolding’s properties adapt very well to the realities that we’re living right now, in that you need a very cheap, quick, sustainable material,” notes Saldarriaga. Textiles that nod to the region’s culture augmented the structure’s rigid tectonics: a safety scrim of soccer goal netting wrapped around the third-floor observation deck, artificial turf lined the “green” roof, and local burlap fabric used to bag coffee and potatoes was hung to form soft walls. Though Amphitheater La Concordia was only up for several months, it conveyed a lasting message about temporary architecture’s role in creating a happier and healthier city.

Saldarriaga, currently based in his native Bogotá, and Bahamon, a Bogotano living in London, launched their remote practice in the summer of 2020 over Zoom, and the two have yet to meet in person. The same pandemic constraints that have dictated the terms of their virtual collaboration also inspire their approach to design. “It’s very special that we were born mid-pandemic, because we were asked to question all of the traditional models about practicing architecture,” says Saldarriaga. For colab-19, that means championing the ephemeral over the permanent, the readymade over the cast-in-place, and the sustainable over the disposable. Taking advantage of existing systems, processes, and materials, and engaging in partnerships between public, private, and academic sectors allows them to create resilient and responsive designs with minimal environmental and economic impact. With many construction infrastructure systems available universally, they hope their approach can be adopted (with regional adaptations) by other designers across the globe.

We’re strongly arguing for ephemeral architecture for emergency solutions—not only in the pandemic, but also for sustainability, and for social equality issues.

Alejandro Saldarriaga (MArch II ’21) on applications for ephemeral and resourceful architecture in a post-COVID era

For colab-19, that means championing the ephemeral over the permanent, the readymade over the cast-in-place, and the sustainable over the disposable.

Colab-19’s first built project, an outdoor dining area for popular Bogotá market plaza La Perseverancia, was completed last summer and marked the team’s first experiment with scaffolding. Capitalizing on the material’s intrinsic verticality, they were able to create a two-story sidewalk eatery, expanding upward to allow greater capacity while preserving physical distance between patrons. And in their Cloud Parks concept, routine lawn care is adapted to demarcate socially distant picnic zones with cumulus-shaped patches mowed directly into the grass. As pandemic restrictions ease, the clouds can assume different sizes and configurations, or disappear altogether when the lawn regrows. After Hurricane Iota pummeled the Colombian islands of San Andrés and Providencia, colab-19 proposed (In)Habiting Rubble, a building system in which remnants from the islands’ devastated buildings are pulverized and bagged to create modular “bricks,” readily accessible materials for constructing new homes that simultaneously eliminates debris from the storm.

“Before going to the GSD, I wouldn’t have thought about cutting grass or scaffolding as architecture. Being exposed to that environment really opened my mind to a broader part of design,” Saldarriaga says. Recently, the pair have been exploring the design possibilities of slab concrete formwork systems to construct a temporary chapel for a COVID-safe Easter Mass, and are already working on a pandemic-ready, self-contained house that features its own gym, salon, and market.

Though founded in response to the specific needs posed by the global pandemic, colab-19 sees many emerging applications for ephemeral and resourceful architecture in a post-COVID era. “We’re strongly arguing for ephemeral architecture for emergency solutions—not only in the pandemic, but also for sustainability, and for social equality issues. Populations and cities are growing everywhere in the world,” Salarriaga points out. Speaking to Toshiko Mori’s “Temporary and Ephemeral Structures” studio at the GSD recently, Salarriaga and Bahamon encouraged students to question and challenge architectural conventions, and to embrace ephemerality as a tool for experimenting with full-scale prototypes and practicing “tactical architecture.” “As a profession, we need to start rethinking how we’ve been doing design. It’s something that’s healthy to do, every decade or so,” Saldarriaga says. Bahamon agrees: “This is the best time to redesign the world, and architects have a huge opportunity in front of us.”

Harvard GSD shortlists four architects for 2021 Wheelwright Prize

Harvard University Graduate School of Design has announced four shortlisted architects for the 2021 Wheelwright Prize. 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 new forms of 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. The 2021 Wheelwright Prize drew applicants from over 45 countries. A first-phase jury deliberation was conducted in early March; a winner will be selected by late April. 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. The four finalists for the 2021 Wheelwright Prize, and their proposals, are: Germane Barnes: “Anatomical Transformations in Classical Architecture” Germane Barnes, through his research and design practice, 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 a woeful absence of consideration as to how Roman and Italian architecture may be understood through the lens of non-white constructors. His research proposal aims to examine African diasporic contributions and legacies while creating new architectural possibilities that emerge within investigations of Blackness. Barnes proposes travel throughout Italy and Northern Africa to further his study of how spaces have been transformed through the material contributions of the African Diaspora. 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.

Department of Landscape Architecture Announces 2021 Penny White Project Fund Recipients

The Harvard University Graduate School of Design’s Department of Landscape Architecture has announced this year’s recipients of the Penny White Project Fund. This grant program was established by the family of Winifred G. “Penny” White after White, a student in the GSD’s landscape architecture program, suddenly died of leukemia in 1976. The goal of the grant program is to “help carry forward Penny’s ideal of a culture which emphasizes a close relationship between people and nature in a cohesive living environment.” Now in its 44th year, the fund has announced 15 winning proposals selected through an evaluation process based on originality and innovation of projects, as well as their contribution to pressing challenges related to the fields of urbanism, landscape, and ecology. “From the role of female divers in the cultivation of submarine landscapes to the invisibility of disabled communities in urban environments, from big data analysis on the role of urban parks in pandemic times to archeological research in landscapes of self-determination and antislavery community construction, from the reconsideration of cultural identity in post-natural disaster recovery strategies to a prototypical farming experiment towards the restoration of Indigenous knowledge to the land, the research topics and strategies of this year’s selected student proposals address a range of conditions, technologies, and processes that are critical to the advancement of the discipline of landscape architecture today,” the Fund’s 2021 selection committee said in an email to the GSD community. The following GSD degree candidates will receive project funding for 2021: Ayami Akagawa (MLA I ’21) for “Feeling Rooted: Recovery from Natural Disaster and Identity Expression in New Home through Incremental Green Infrastructures in the Philippines” Chun Chen (MLA I AP ’21) & Sohun Kang (MArch I ’21) for “Landscapes of Women of Seas: Ama and Haenyeo” Echo Chen (MLA I ’21) for “Cultural Identities in Intangible Heritages: An Ethnologic Study of the Rural Communities Featuring the Covered Bridge in Southeast China” Jake Deluca (MLA I AP ’22) for “Un-Living Record: In Analysis of Our Social and Psychological Relationship to the Cemetery” Ian Erickson (MArch I ’24) for “On Becoming Productive: Representing Shifting Regimes of Value Extraction in the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Territory” Lianliu Guo (MLA I AP ’22) & Tianyu Su (DDes ’23) for “How Healthy Are They Doing in the Parks?: Understanding Urban Parks’ Perceived Health Impacts on Visitors Using Large-Scale Spatial Data” Aijing Li (MUP ’22) & Claire Wang (MUP ’22) for “Parks on the Edge: Big Data Analytics on Park Visits in Segregated Neighborhoods” Alison Maurer (MLA I ’22) for “Renewal and Reciprocal Labor: Exploring Iceland’s Ecologically Driven Economic Recovery” Caleb Negash (MArch I ’22) & Sam Valentine (MLA II ’21) for “Hope in the Dismal: Interpreting Landscapes of Self-Determination and Self-Liberation in the Great Dismal Swamp” Lara Prebble (MLA I ’23) for “Learning Through Play: Exploring the Roles of Outdoor Learning Environments in Finnish and Sámi Finland” Julia Rice (MLA I ’22) for “Perspectivist Agriculture: Reimagining Modern Food Systems through Indigenous Knowledge” Polly Sinclair (MLA I ’21) & Ada Thomas (MLA I ’21) for “The Spatial Imagination of Satoyama: Engaging Field Methods for Expanded Knowledge Production in Landscape Architecture” Shi Tang (MLA II ’21) & Xiaoji Zhou (MLA II ’23) for “Deaf Space in Landscape Design: Making Deaf Visible Through Spatial Investigation and Community Engagement in Wuhan, China” Michele Turrini (MLA II ’21) for “Sacrificial Land: Working with Peripheral Communities in Bangkok’s Decision-Making Watershed” Morgan Vought (MLA I ’22) for “If You Don’t Build Anything, You Don’t Exist: Redefining Tribal Recognition in Western Courts through Critical Ethnobotanical Cartography”

Students, Faculty Receive 2021 Harvard Mellon Initiative Awards for Urban-Focused Research

The Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative recently awarded 29 grants for urban-focused research projects undertaken by Harvard University undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and fellows. Of the 2021 grantees, four are affiliated with the GSD: Adriana David Ortiz Monasterio (MDes ADPD ’21), Steven Gu (MUP ’21), Thomas Shay Hill (PhD candidate in Urban Planning), and Assistant Professor of Urban Design Charlotte Malterre-Barthes. Part of HUMI’s larger initiative to advance cross-disciplinary approaches to urban studies, the program seeks to sponsor “sustained research projects that incorporate new visual and digital methods in the study of urban environments, contributing to the Harvard curriculum, producing publications and exhibitions, and generating a wide variety of urban studies programming and community-building,” according to its press release. David’s project, The Architecture of Food Sovereignty, investigates “the Milpa”—companion crops essential to the Indigenous cultures of North America. “This project will look at the evolution of Milpa’s supply chain for the Mexico City area, from precolonial times, until today. It intends to expose the land they are grown in, the seed variety used, the type of agriculture employed, the cycles needed, the industrial process, the packaging, the storage, the transportation and the final process for consumption in order to reveal the main reasons for today’s urban food instability,” writes David in her project statement. Gu’s HUMI grant was awarded for The Right to Consume: Human Rights, Protest, and Commodities in the Built Environment. With this project, Gu aims to “document and delineate the negotiation of protest movements, spaces of consumption, and role of commodities in the built environment. The research will focus on three cities: Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Philadelphia. Each case study will highlight how civic demonstrations engage with urban spaces planned for consumption.” Data and the Built Environment by Hill will “use GIS and other computational approaches,” in order to “synthesize historical datasets with archival material to visualize the urban transformations wrought by successive phases of intense development and contraction.” The project Material World from Malterre-Bathes looks to “engage in understanding the ways that design disciplines intersect with territories of extractivism and resource exploitation, and how seemingly irrelevant composition details fit in the global enterprise of ‘extractive neoliberalism’ that fuels injustice, social struggles, and climate change.” Read more about these and other HUMI funded projects.

LA DALLMAN Architects wins 2021 Progressive Architecture Award for transformation of 1901 Wisconsin grain elevator

The transformative new design for the Teweles and Brandeis Grain Elevator in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin by LA DALLMAN Architects, the firm of Grace La (MArch I ’95) and James Dallman (MArch ’92), is one of six projects honored with a 2021 Progressive Architecture Award by Architect magazine. Now in its 68th cycle, the annual awards recognize innovative unbuilt projects, with this year’s awardees celebrating “architecture in service of the greater good.” “This project shows how the structures that dot the landscape and are inherently recognized by us as a certain typology could be transformed for reuse, recognition, and a sense of place,” explains juror Daimian Hines, who was joined on the jury by GSD Professor in Practice of Architecture Jeanne Gang and Koray Duman. At the GSD, La is professor of Architecture, chair of the Practice Platform, and former director of the Master of Architecture Programs. She is currently teaching the option studio “BRIDGE WHERE YOU ARE: The Anamorphic Double” and previously led an option studio with Dallman in the spring of 2019. Built in 1901, the harbor-front Teweles and Brandeis Grain Elevator was decommissioned in 1960 and sat idle for the next 50 years. When it was facing demolition in 2018, a campaign to save the structure led to the involvement of LA DALLMAN Architects and its engineering team. With strategic subtractions and additions to the utilitarian structure, their adaptive reuse design reimagines the site as a new performance space and tourist destination. “Along with our client and engineering team, we are honored to receive such important recognition for this project. It epitomizes the potential of public spirit and catalytic, civic space,” says Dallman. “It is not often that a community-driven rehabilitation of an historic structure receives a PA Award, and that makes this very special for everyone involved. It suggests a more layered and transformative approach to design.” Learn more about the project.      

Harvard GSD announces Harvard Design Press

Harvard Graduate School of Design is pleased to announce Harvard Design Press, a book-publishing imprint based at Harvard GSD and distributed in collaboration with Harvard University Press. Harvard Design Press challenges, broadens, and advances the design disciplines and advocates for the value and power of design in making a more resilient, just, and beautiful world. In pursuit of new, original ideas on the research and practice of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and urban design, the Press seeks book proposals from researchers, practitioners, theorists, historians, and critics, among others. More information about submitting a proposal can be found on the Press’s webpage. “Long committed to the value of the written word for advancing the design disciplines as well as for broadening design’s impact, I am personally very excited about this new direction for the school’s book-publishing program,” says Harvard GSD’s Dean Sarah M. Whiting, who serves as a member of the Harvard Design Press Editorial Board. “I look forward to the great work that will come of it.” Harvard Design Press plans to publish its first titles in Fall 2022, beginning with a monographic book featuring the work of architect Frida Escobedo, titled Split Subject. Split Subject unpacks an early project of the same name, one that deconstructs a fraught allegory of architectural modernism in Mexico and that has exercised enduring and formative influence throughout Escobedo’s career and practice. Harvard Design Press is organized and edited by Harvard GSD’s Ken Stewart and Marielle Suba, and guided by an Editorial Board composed of Harvard GSD and Harvard University faculty. Alongside Dean Whiting, the Harvard Design Press Editorial Board includes Harvard GSD’s Martin Bechthold, Anita Berrizbeitia, Eve Blau, Ed Eigen, K. Michael Hays, Niall Kirkwood, Mark Lee, John May, Rahul Mehrotra, Erika Naginski, Jacob Reidel, and Sara Zewde, as well as Harvard University’s Lizabeth Cohen, Sarah Lewis, and Patricio del Real. To learn more about Harvard Design Press and explore submission guidelines, please visit the Press’s webpage. To stay up-to-date on new releases and general Harvard GSD news, please visit Harvard GSD’s homepage and subscribe to its Design News updates.

Can Parkitecture Heal? Jeanne Gang on making American National Parks “more accessible, more inviting, and more welcoming”

Early federal policies that set aside land for the national parks focused mainly on the preservation of objects with “historic or scientific interest.” Protections against incompetent archaeologists and unscrupulous resource speculators encoded in the Antiquities Act of 1906 were essential and powerful safeguards of the public interest. Later legislation expanded these protections and, crucially, provided for the public “enjoyment” of federal lands. With its emphasis on recreation, the founding of the National Park Service in 1916 officially oriented the parks to the people. While they had long been places of contemplation, enjoyment, and solace, Title 16 made the parks a manifestation of the nation’s humanity, and a legacy to be preserved “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” But in the early 20th century, many of the national parks were remote and difficult to get to, making them accessible only to the ruggedly independent. This has changed, of course. The National Parks recorded 237,064,332 recreational visits in 2020, which entailed more than a billion hours of enjoyment. By facilitating and framing visitors’ experience of nature, architecture and landscape architecture have played a significant role in the rising popularity of the national parks. The familiar, rustic style of architecture developed for the national parks is one of the most visible legacies of the New Deal of the 1930s. During that era, the National Park Service established high standards for construction of roads and trails, placement of viewpoints, and provision of park amenities. The 120,000 employees of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) provided a workforce to complete the job. Not only did the program offer young unemployed laborers productive work, it did the parks “immeasurable good,” according to then parks director Arno Cammerer. CCC roads, trails, visitor centers, lodges, and picnic shelters greatly improved access to the parks. At the same time, the park architecture—based largely on late-19th-century principles of Andrew Jackson Downing, the Olmsteds, and the arts and crafts movement—became widely familiar. The craggy masonry, rugged carpentry, and simple forms seem naturally compatible with the wild settings of the parks. American “parkitecture,” as it is often known, is deeply appealing, almost symbolic of vacationing, adventure, and enjoyment of nature. It also recalls the social contract of the New Deal—park construction helped raise thousands out of poverty after the Great Depression. However, even as the parks welcome millions of visitors, not everyone feels equally at home in them. As GSD Professor in Practice Jeanne Gang and Instructor Claire Cahan point out in the brief for their Autumn 2020 studio, “Can Parkitecture Heal?,” the legacy of the parks is not all positive: “While these places and their beneficial qualities are intended to be accessible to everyone,” they write, “the parks continue to struggle with inclusivity and their histories of racism, including displacement of Native peoples and segregation.” Rustic park visitor centers and other facilities offer easy, welcoming access to many people; however, for others the close symbolic association of parkitecture with the history of the parks can tie it just as closely to these social ills. A central challenge of the studio, then, was to seek ways to “redefine” parkitecture, Gang explains, and to make park buildings “more accessible, more inviting, more welcoming.” The studio focused on Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the most frequently visited park in the system. A regular flood of visitors puts immense pressure on the park facilities, and its two aging visitor centers have become inadequate. More critical, Gang emphasizes, is that even though the park is close to some adjacent towns that can bring in more a diverse population, there is not much programming to introduce the park to people who would not normally visit. Park Superintendent Cassius Cash, who met with the students early on, has begun to address this problem. He recently inaugurated Hikes for Healing, a program which brings visitors from local communities to enjoy the park while working with a moderator to discuss persistent social conflicts that deeply affect them—and the nation—in a time of strife: “The Smokies Hikes for Healing (SHFH) initiative is designed to use Great Smoky Mountains National Park as a place of sanctuary… where crucial conversations about race will occur in one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world.” Gang and Cahan challenged their students to consider this type of cultural programming while designing park facilities. They asked students to think about events that might broaden the park’s appeal, particularly to those who do not generally turn to nature for enjoyment and solace. “The way it is presented in the park, nature is culture,” Gang emphasizes, “so bringing more kinds of culture into the visitor center site” gives people a chance to come in and participate in the storied “healing experience” of nature. Accordingly, the studio’s building program included a new visitor center and a “gathering pavilion” for the SHFH hikes. The studio brief also proposed that these new buildings would share a site with the Sugarlands Visitor Center, which would be remodeled as “an interpretive exhibition hall,” to form a “renewed park village that retains the past and introduces new types of spaces for learning, gathering, and healing.” The students addressed the gathering pavilion first, developing a range of solutions that included primordial elements of shelter, open air, and fire but that also proposed novel details. In some cases, Cahan explains, “part of this idea of healing and coming together was to physically operate the building.” In other words, the pavilions would function not merely as spaces for gathering, but as mechanisms to bring people together. In developing proposals for the new visitor center, the students continued to explore architecture’s capacity for healing while extending their concern into other consequential issues. As participants in the national Green New Deal Superstudio, the GSD studio members also considered architecture’s capacity to take on the global challenges that are central to the 2019 Green New Deal legislation: “decarbonization, justice and jobs.” For the “Parkitecture” studio, this was a natural fit. Acknowledging the lasting manifestations of the New Deal in CCC-built park facilities, they asked themselves how the Green New Deal could similarly advance the role of architecture in causes vital to our own era. In particular, the Superstudio calls for designers to “meaningfully engage in a response to the climate crisis at local, regional, and national levels” by reexamining “their roles in civil society and lead a national conversation about the nation’s future at a critical time in history.” Gang recalls, “One of the students said something really interesting, which was: Those issues are so big, and the studio felt like a way that one could use one’s skills as a designer to address them in a direct way that could make a difference—just a small step. . . .” In addressing these big questions, the students focused on effective programming, small-scale design, and careful detailing. Each of the six pairs of students emphasized the potentially great consequences of small-scale work. For example, Jack Rodat (MArch ’22) and Nima Shariat Zamanpour (MArch ’22) proposed “distributed interventions” that expand “the narrative of the park by highlighting an observed contradiction”—a classroom in the trees, a composting facility with welcoming signage, a fireplace gathering center, and a basketball court. They write, “Just as the Green New Deal tethers seemingly distinct issues of jobs, justice, and decarbonization together, we believe this multifaceted approach is necessary in the design of the new visitor experience at Sugarlands.” Stephanie Lloyd (MArch ’22) and Ada Thomas (MLA ’21) proposed a distributed system of gathering centers carefully integrated into the park’s ecological systems. Their construction would use selectively removed trees as the formwork for labor-intensive, low-carbon rammed-earth walls. “While a single building cannot heal racial and climatic crises,” they explain, “architectural processes—construction methods, material ethics, and project phasing—can effect institutional change and promote justice.” Just as “America’s best idea” began with the preservation of artifacts, a new approach to big societal issues through design must begin with small-scale efforts. As ambitious as the Green New Deal Superstudio is, the participants in the GSD’s “Parkitecture” studio found that if architecture is going to contribute to healing it must do so at a human scale.