2021 Class Day Speaker Jia Tolentino: An Interview

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of the bestselling essay collection Trick Mirror, which has been translated into eleven languages. She was the recipient of a Whiting Award, a MacDowell Fellowship, and the 2020 Jeannette Haien Ballard Writer’s Prize. She graduated from the University of Virginia, received her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan, and lives in New York. Tolentino will present Harvard GSD’s annual Class Day Address during the School’s 2021 Commencement Exercises. Ahead of her address, Tolentino spoke with Harvard GSD’s Travis Dagenais about her writing, her pandemic experiences, and a cherished piece of personal art.

Let’s start with something I think a lot of people will want to learn more about: is that an original Ecce Homo in the backdrop of your headshot?

It absolutely is—thank you so much for noticing. I painted it several years ago while consuming three glasses of merlot on “free paint night” at a place in my neighborhood in Brooklyn called Wine and Design, which really sadly was a casualty of the pandemic. I’m not joking at all when I say that Ecce Homo speaks to me on a profound spiritual level—it is a reminder of the absurdity and transience of all human effort—and it was the ideal choice of subject for free paint night, because if I messed it up I would only honor its powerful energy even more.

Trick Mirror, like much of your writing, suggests clarity and conclusion amid chaos and conflict, though you write in the introduction that you are not always the “calm person who shows up on paper.” For you, what goes on in the space/s between thinking and writing?

For me, there is almost no space between thinking and writing, because I essentially can’t engage with my own thoughts outside a written form. My head is either empty or full of opaque gaseous substances. I can hardly even perceive properly without writing; I keep a notebook that’s mostly about the sky and the trees and the weather, because this is the best way to get myself to actually see the natural world. Outside writing, I have instincts, I feel conflict and trouble and dread and gravitation, but otherwise I have absolutely nothing—the only sense-making I am capable of always occurs in words.

You’ve observed that the pandemic has, among other things, altered your sense of the “possible rate of change.” That’s impressive, because I can barely remember what day it is. What sorts of events or phenomena have you seen accelerate, and what has slowed down?

In March of 2020, we shifted overnight to a way of life we’d thought of as unthinkable a week prior, and remained in that way of life for more than a year. Abolition and Universal Basic Income entered the Overton window, as did a near-unanimous acknowledgment that at least one specific form of healthcare, in COVID treatment, should be public and free. We stopped traveling, stopped using carbon in ways that many of us had thought of as completely essential. Not that I ever want to spend another year in one chair staring at my computer, but I have been galvanized by the reminder that we are capable of so much more than is typically expected of us, and that we are capable of reconstructing the way we live on other terms.

In an article in Elle—back in 2019—you were described as “extremely online.” How far did “extremely” expand last year?

It actually contracted—even as, like most everyone, I spent much more time looking at screens than I would have liked. I had been limiting my time on social media to 45 minutes a day for a while before the pandemic, but I had continued to excuse my participation in the world of memes and Twitter discourse with the fact that real life and real people were self-evidently and considerably more vivid and interesting to me, and the fact that I wrote about the internet for work. But in the pandemic, there was no real life to outweigh the internet; it was just the internet, and I was also shifting toward other kinds of work, like screenwriting. I eventually got off Twitter in summer 2020, shortly before having a baby, because I didn’t want to be up all night with her doing the numbing pleasureless scroll.

You’re intellectually omnivorous, and it’s enviable. The rest of us could probably use a revamp of our media hygiene, or some media hygiene to start with. What might you place in a starter pack for someone who wants to begin, or end, their day with a useful and enlightening periscope on social and cultural news of the day/moment?

I think that I’m probably underinformed right now, because I haven’t really looked for a workable substitute for Twitter in terms of finding and bookmarking new things to read; but reading books in the morning and evening has always been my main tactic for attentional hygiene. The most interesting way to think about the present almost never comes from the present, right? I try to indulge my passing curiosities, and read books about feudalism and cloud formation, and trust that nothing you go out of your way to learn is a waste.

You’ve been credited with revitalizing the essay over the last decade, and your writing is a pleasure, a master class, a therapy session, and a stand-up routine all in one. You’ve also deftly maneuvered what, in the early 2010s, felt like bit of a wall: the print-digital divide. You’ve taken on long-form writing and published a book, while also going viral somewhat regularly. What is it about the essay and long-form that suits your intellectual contours and desires? And what future do you see, or imagine, for long-form as our slightly bruised modern society continues tiptoeing through the 2020s?

You are very generous, and I can’t believe I wrote so much throughout the last decade. But I liked every kind of writing, from silly short blog posts to way-too-long essays in my book. It was a gift to be working at a time just before algorithmic flattening had completely taken over the internet, a time in which there was enough variety and flexibility in the media ecosystem to shift between flippancy and formality and giddiness and solemnity. I like writing long, because I like the depth and the challenge, and I think that readers, myself included, remain very eager for a winding, absorbing, consuming journey. But all types of worthwhile writing are disappearing right now because of the economics of publishing. Social media companies have made it impossible for publications to support themselves on advertising, venture capital is stomping local newspapers into the ground, and there are very few alternative or truly independent outlets for young writers to play around and develop a voice.

Your boyfriend Andrew Daley is an architect. You must, therefore, have some advice for our graduates. And maybe it’s advice on living with an architect, not being one.

My boyfriend and I historically do not speak about work with each other—he doesn’t read books and I don’t know what cement is. But there was one night that he brought home a 70-page drawing set and when I asked him to explain “what it was” I felt like I was a monkey being given a tour of a space station. I think (and hope, for the purposes of Class Day 2021) that there are parallels between writing and design in terms of mapping structure and identifying possibility and envisioning what does not exist yet, but I’ve always been kind of amazed at the way design work lives in the realm of the actual, when my work is just a sort of trick of direction in the mind.

Meet the GSD Class of 2021 Commencement Marshals

Graduating students from each program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design come together to nominate and elect a classmate to serve as their commencement marshal. Being selected as a commencement marshal is one of Harvard’s most beloved traditions and is a high honor for a graduating student. After Commencement, the marshals become the alumni liaisons for their class cohorts. Meet the graduates who will represent their program at the GSD’s virtual commencement ceremony:

Architecture: Brayton Gregory

A native of Greenville, SC, Brayton studied architecture at Clemson University before enrolling at Harvard to join the Master in Architecture I program. When not working on studio projects or other coursework, Brayton could be found on the pitch with teammates from GSD Soccer. In his free time, he enjoys going for bike rides, cooking, and traveling.

Landscape Architecture: Ciara Stein

Hailing from London, England, Ciara received her undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on urban studies. Upon graduating from Penn, she was awarded the Robert A. Fox Leadership Fellowship and worked for two nonprofits in New Orleans that focused on affordable housing and community development (Providence Community Housing and HousingNOLA). In addition to pursuing a dual degree in Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at the GSD, Ciara was the lead organizer for Womxn in Design’s International Womxn’s Week 2021, took part in the 2019-2020 Climate Leaders Program, and was a member of Harvard Urban Planning Organization and Organizers for Radical Climate Action at the GSD. In the summer of 2020, she served as a Community Service Fellow, working with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. Ciara has exhibited at the Kirkland Gallery and her work was part of the Design Yard Sale.

Urban Design: Adam Mekies

Adam is a licensed landscape architect whose work focuses on the role of computation and construction in environmental and ecological design. He is a graduate of Iowa State University and co-author, with Bradley Cantrell, of Codify: Parametric and Computational Design in Landscape Architecture. His recent work for the New York office of Sherwood Design Engineers focuses on ecological and technological infrastructure for public and private real estate. He is receiving a Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design from the GSD.

Urban Planning: Sarah Smyth

Sarah Smyth grew up in Alameda, CA, and studied political science at UCLA. Prior to graduate school, she spent a year in public affairs consulting as a Coro Fellow. Her work spanned public, private, and nonprofit clients across the topics areas of education, technology, diversity and inclusion, and environmental sustainability. Inspired by her experience growing up in the Bay Area, Sarah is interested in exploring equitable economic growth for communities of color and strategies for addressing the consequences of gentrification. At Harvard, she explored these topics through her work as co-president of the Harvard Urban Planning Organization, housing fellow for the Access to Justice Lab at Harvard Law School, and research assistant for the Just City Lab at the GSD. In her free time, she enjoys yoga, dancing, live music, and spending time in the outdoors.

Design Studies: Kevin Liu

Kevin is a native of Sydney, Australia. After receiving a Bachelor of Design in Architecture and a Master of Architecture at the University of Sydney, he worked as a registered project architect at an award-winning residential architecture practice on the central coast. Before that, Kevin was a partner in his own practice, TYP-TOP Architecture Office, which he set up with a friend from school after being shortlisted as one of five finalists out of 144 international entrants in a competition for a new aquatic center in Sydney. Awarded the Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship, Kevin enrolled at Harvard to pursue a Master in Design Studies with a focus on History and Philosophy of Design and Media. During his time at the GSD, Kevin served on Student Forum and was co-chair of the Design Research Forum, the student organization of the MDes program. Outside of his coursework, he is an avid printmaker, working mostly with copper etching and mezzotints.

Design Engineering: Arushi Saxena

After growing up in Sacramento, CA, Arushi attended UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, graduating with a BS in Business Administration. She then worked as an advisor to senior leadership in the technology sector on business strategy and financial insights at companies including LinkedIn and Formation.ai. Her overall professional experience spans strategy & operations, organizational behavior, and finance. At Harvard and the GSD, she focused her research on misinformation, privacy, data ethics, and positioning the technology industry to better manage unintended consequences on society, cities, and the environment. She was actively involved with Harvard Bloomberg City Leadership Initiative, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and Harvard’s Belfer Center, and served as a teaching fellow for MDE’s Core Interdisciplinary Studio. In her free time, she enjoys cooking, exploring the outdoors, and volunteering.

Doctor of Design: Julia Smachylo

Originally from Toronto, Canada, Julia studied at Queen’s University, University College London, and the University of Toronto before enrolling at Harvard. She then worked as an urban planner, designer, and adjunct professor before deciding to pursue her Doctor of Design. While at the GSD, Julia was involved in the Urban Theory Lab and New Geographies, and served as a DDes representative. In her free time, she enjoys running, reading, yoga, and gardening.

Excerpt from Kazuo Shinohara: Traversing the House and the City by Seng Kuan

by Seng Kuan (ed.)

Shinohara Kazuo created a series of sublimely beautiful, purist houses that have reconfigured and enriched our understanding of domesticity, tradition, structure, scale, nature, and the city— the dwelling redefined as a space where meaning can be generated, based on a raw, private relationship between the inhabitant and the surrounding environment. Interest in Shinohara’s work has been in steady ascendance in recent years, especially since his death in 2006 and the posthumous awarding of a Golden Lion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, which took him from being a cult figure for initiated connoisseurs to an architect who is now widely taught in schools around the world. As one surveys the state of architecture today, the aesthetic values he espoused and promoted with singular conviction appear more insightful and germane than ever. Younger generations of Japanese architects, especially those who came of age after the collapse in 1991 of the so-called economic bubble, are indebted to Shinohara for new paths he forged and traversed in approaching the problems of form and context. In a similar manner, the appeal of Shinohara’s architecture to young architects abroad lies in its potential for renewed faith in modernism after fatigue and disillusionment from the formal exuberances and moral relativism of recent decades. Shinohara belonged to the remarkable generation of Japanese architects to come of age as Japan emerged from the trauma of war and began its course toward economic prosperity. Born in 1925, Shinohara began studying architecture at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) in 1950, stayed on to join its architecture faculty, and remained until retirement from teaching in 1986. Having studied mathematics before turning to architecture and therefore being slightly older in age than Kikutake Kiyonori, Maki Fumihiko, Isozaki Arata, and Hara Hiroshi, Shinohara was nonetheless part of that cohort of Japanese architects and engaged in the same intense discursive confrontations with modernity and tradition and between the house and the city, helping to establish Japan as one of the foremost centers of international modernism of the last half century. Shinohara’s many aphoristic pronouncements, such as “A house is a work of art” and “Inscribe eternity in space,” represented a distinct vertex in the topography of modern Japanese architectural thought. Shinohara’s key tenets, especially those from his early career, were often critiques of Japan’s prevailing architectural practices and ideology, especially the strain of techno-rationalism centered at the University of Tokyo with Metabolism as its most emblematic offshoot. Throughout the 1960s he sharpened his polemical stance with concepts like house as art, eternity in space, autonomy of the architect, superfluous space, and symbolic space. While these ideas may appear contretemps to the ethos of postwar Japan’s developmentalist economy and the bureaucratic state, the validity of Shinohara’s architecture came into focus as the logic of growth and top-down organization, encapsulated in the architectural excesses of the 1980s, came to its sudden and disastrous close. Most secondary literature on Shinohara has until now focused on a handful of the most iconic houses, especially House in White (1966), Tanikawa House (1974), and House in Uehara (1976), often presenting them as distinct, one-off phenomena by an elusive and mercurial architect. While Shinohara’s writings are widely understood to be an integral part of his creative strategy—as Okuyama Shin-ichi’s chapter in this volume addresses—even in their Japanese originals the vocabulary and language, always employed with precision and placed in a structured framework, are often deemed abstruse and inaccessible. Translating these terms faithfully and accurately indeed has been one of the major challenges of this project. Building on a series of archival exhibitions and symposia, the collection of new scholarly essays and translations of Shinohara’s key texts included in this book reframes Shinohara’s architectural achievements in terms of his oeuvre as a whole and situates them in the broader cultural and social contexts in Japan and globally. The inclusion of institutional-scale projects of the Fourth Style, which have been largely overlooked until now, is crucial to establishing Shinohara’s insistence on the equivalation between the house and the city. More pointedly, the three key historiographical themes this volume attempts to address are (1) continuity and change through Shinohara’s four successive styles; (2) a mathematical framework in his spatial imagination; and (3) his engagement with artists as clients and collaborators.

CONTINUITY AND CHANGE

A major historiographical contention in studying Shinohara concerns the significance of the four successive styles, whether shifts between the ordinal numbers represented more disruption or more coherence. As Shinohara pursued distinct formal, technological, and even ideological strategies in each of the four styles, the individual styles invariably attract their own constituencies and followers. Those interested in a more overt dialogue with Japanese tradition, executed with great finesse and elegance, are naturally drawn to the First Style, whereas others seeking forceful structural expressions tend to focus on the Third. Each of the styles also encompasses a significant span of time—a decade or more with the exception of the Second—and bears the imprint of the broader context of its era. Several essays in this volume, especially those by Tsukamoto Yoshiharu and Shiozaki Taishin, underscore the coherence in Shinohara’s creative process, which specifically allows for different formal or even conceptual approaches. Tsukamoto describes a series of matrices, inherent in Shinohara’s method, as ontological spaces where specific design solutions can occur. Shiozaki’s chapter examines the dialogue between the earthen slope in two of Shinohara’s works, the famous Tanikawa House and the unrealized design of a mountain cabin for his own family, which are separated by almost thirty years. While Shinohara addressed the issue of style, or yōshiki in Japanese in his earliest writings, this nomenclature came with the Third Style, which emerged in the mid-1970s. He claims to have been inspired by Pablo Picasso’s periodization, the blue and the rose, and so on. For Shinohara the significance of style is rooted in the potential of a clear, rigorous framework of operation: “The creation of any style will axiomatically encompass any force that is opposed to it and [the result] is the consequence of the struggle to resolve that opposition.”¹ It is part of an ongoing process, an act that provides fresh nourishment to past achievements and affords the possibility of claiming as one’s own some uncharted territory of the future. Interspersed throughout this volume are image folios of Shinohara’s works. These drawings, sketches, and photographs are organized essentially chronologically, according to progression of the styles. Before delving into the thematic issues, it may be useful to introduce the key characteristics of the four styles here. “I would like for the houses I make to stand on this earth forever.” –“A Theory of Residential Architecture,” 1967²

THE FIRST STYLE

Shinohara’s First Style is an exercise in conversing with Japan’s architectural tradition, distilling compositional concepts such as frontality and division from his studies of prehistoric pit dwellings, minka commoner houses, and pedigreed shoin-style buildings like Katsura Villa and Jikō-in. Spanning one and a half decades, the First Style was the longest of the four phases. The first house in this series, House in Kugayama (1954), reveals a rudimentary interest in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and response to prevailing attitudes toward tradition as shown in contemporary works of Tange Kenzō and Shinohara’s teacher Seike Kiyoshi. Later works such as House in White and Suzushō House (1968) are far more abstract, as Shinohara turned to more symbolic aspects of space-making. The period also coincided with the peak of Metabolism’s popularity as he countered with a rhetoric of permanence, expansiveness, irrationality, and the emotive desires for dwelling. “I believe the world flows ceaselessly through the small spaces of the house.” –“Beyond Symbol Spaces,” 1971³

THE SECOND STYLE

For a brief few years between The Uncompleted House (1970) and Prism House (1974), Shinohara explored a series of formal and semantic themes, turning his focus to a new reductive, formalist approach and appearing to favor a system based on a series of abstract operative terms. The rigorous geometry of Shinohara’s Second Style emerged out of House of White’s cubic volume, and the idea of fissure can be found in the interstitial space between North and South Houses in Hanayama (1965, 1968). The tension between expansiveness and divisions that defined the First Style gave way to sequences of movement and volumes that are choreographed with an almost baroque theatricality. Narrow double-height crevices lead into light-filled courtyards shimmering in bronze-colored walls. These changes also call for different representational tools, notably emphasis on axonometric drawings and new photographic techniques. The Second Style was the briefest of the four styles, but the works from this period gave Shinohara his first major professional recognition and established his appeal to a rising generation of architects. In 1972, the annual prize from the Architectural Institute of Japan (AIJ), regarded as the most prestigious in Japan, was awarded to “the series of houses from The Uncompleted House onward.” Prior to Shinohara, the only other occasion on which the AIJ awarded its top prize to private residences occurred seventeen years before, to the works of his teacher Seike Kiyoshi. The timing of this public recognition of Shinohara’s architecture, following Osaka Expo ’70 and the student protests of 1968–69, also signaled a profound shift in the discursive context of Japan’s aesthetic culture. “In the city, the act of traversing has literal basic functions. I use traversing as a method of thinking simultaneously of the city and its antipode, the house.” –“When Naked Space Is Traversed,” 1976⁴

THE THIRD STYLE

In his design brief for a country house, written in verse, client Tanikawa Shuntarō described a summer room as “church for a pantheist.” Architecture is reduced to its most basic terms, like a geometric tent that drapes over a sloping landscape and raw earth. The 45-degree pitch in the roof and column struts clash with the gentler incline of the ground plane, resulting in a deeply unsettling space inside. In the Third Style, Shinohara pushed the dialogue between the inhabitant and the spatial environment to new levels of intensity, as a series of bare, brute confrontations. During this period Shinohara made extended journeys abroad. Traveling through these foreign lands, he was drawn to the rigors of the urban environment—the bodies and movement of people as formal elements that constitute, in their aggregate, space itself. Nakedness is to dispense with everything that obfuscates and confounds the basic ideas and shapes underneath. “The greatest probability for anarchy to produce vitality and liveliness occurs when buildings designed and produced on the basis of the most advanced technology of the age and replete with totally decorous beauty submerged in the planlessness of street.” –“Towards Architecture,” 1981⁵

THE FOURTH STYLE AND MODERN NEXT

Beginning in the 1980s Shinohara took on a series of larger-scale, institutional commissions. At the same time he came to embrace more overtly the generative potential of urban chaos, which he first commented on in the 1960s during his First Style. The pairing of Centennial Hall at Tokyo Tech and his own house in Yokohama collectively manifest his idea of the “space machine,” unmediated in its power and logic as a fighter jet. Shinohara’s rising notoriety abroad, with solo exhibitions traveling through Europe and North America beginning in 1979 and teaching appointments at Yale University and the Technical University of Vienna, led him to a series of international design competitions. These often more expansive site conditions yielded designs that play with basic geometric forms, in contrast with the complex programs within. This belated opportunity to intervene on an urban scale allowed Shinohara to realize fully his nuanced attitude toward the city. While this position was partly informed by his travels abroad, to Africa, the Americas, and Europe, it was also rooted in his earliest memories of suburban life in Tokyo, with his childhood home located in the environs of Shibuya Station. In an essay published in the journal Kenchiku bunka in 1988, Shinohara further introduced the term “ModernNext.” As a counterpoint to postmodernism, ModernNext is a commentary on the “contemporary enormous village” that Tokyo had ballooned into, as the scale and intensity of urban activity reached unprecedented heights. ModernNext is a decisively forward-looking attitude. In the same way tradition formed the basis of innovation for the First Style, chaos and randomness are to instigate a new vitality for architecture and the city. The essay is translated into English in its entirety for this volume.

SHINOHARA AS MATHEMATICIAN

Shinohara Kazuo was first trained in mathematics at Tokyo College of Physics.⁶ He turned to architecture in the immediate postwar years after a poignant moment of encounter with Tōshōdai-ji, one of the great ancient temples of Nara. Shinohara indeed looked back to mathematics for much of the architectural vocabulary he developed over time: division, transversality, discreteness, set theory, and chaos are the most salient appropriations. It is tempting for those in the Anglo-American world, where the writings of Rudolf Wittkower and Colin Rowe are widely taught, to draw parallels with the work of Andrea Palladio. This hypothesis becomes even more compelling as we consider Shinohara’s houses from the Second Style, abstract spaces such as The Uncompleted House and Shino House (1970), which give a hint of sympathy with the Renaissance master. In another fragment of this superficial affinity, the Institute for Architectural and Urban Studies (IAUS) in New York hosted Shinohara’s first solo exhibition in the United States in 1981. The title of Shinohara’s 1964 essay, “The autonomy of house design,”⁷ would have appealed to IAUS’s leadership. Still, Shinohara was not overtly driven by Kantian aesthetics, rather he was speaking entirely within the context of Japan’s postwar construction industry. Using the term shutaisei⁸ to stand for autonomy, Shinohara referred to such precepts as freedom from urban master plans, avoidance of too much attention to site context, expansiveness, and independence from the client. More provocatively, the essay also suggests that the realities of everyday life render detailed spatial planning of domestic interiors pointless; the architect’s strategy should be to elevate design to abstraction and pursue beauty in the realm of fictive spaces, citing Mies’s Farnsworth House as an example. There is no record of Shinohara referring to the work of Palladio, nor that of Wittkower or Rowe. In the late 1950s, as Shinohara was developing his theory of Japanese residential tradition as based on principles of division and frontality, he looked to the Western tradition for comparison and contrast.⁹ As he was mainly interested in defining certain cultural and formal archetypes, such as pit dwellings and elevated granaries, as the origins of the Japanese tradition, he referred to Tragic Poet’s House and House of Pansa in Pompeii and even older houses of Priene and Olynthus. The archetypical Western example from the early modern period Shinohara cites is Montacute House, one of the so-called prodigy houses from Elizabethan England. Shinohara makes no pronounced effort toward an absolute, “fictive” idea of natural order and mathematical beauty. His very first published writing was titled “A critique of the Modulor,” stating that the modern age of atomic energy operates on abstract mathematics, whereas ratio-based theories based on natural observations like the golden ratio or Fibonacci sequence have little to contribute.¹⁰ In his final book of architectural theory, Toward a super big-numbers set city (2001), Shinohara obliquely addressed the issue of architectural harmony in the musical sense—the topic of Wittkower’s famous chapter in Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism that situated Palladio’s proportions in sixteenth-century musical theory.¹¹ In praising twentieth-century advances in atonal music, Shinohara saw the same beauty in contemporary Tokyo, as the cacophonous, atonal manifestation of its underlying confusion and turbulences.¹² As a mathematician, Shinohara embraced the irrationality (higōriteki) of things around him as a necessary condition, but also employed mathematical tools to come to terms with these realities. Transversality (ōdansei) is the most powerful of these tools. It is the cutting across of different lines, spaces, and ordering systems, producing fragments and sections, but transversals also describe moments of intersection. In House under High-Voltage Lines (1981) we see this transversal vividly captured in the two swooping curves in the sky.

ARCHITECTURE AND ART

When Shinohara made the pronouncement in 1962 that “A house is a work of art,” it would have been immediately apparent to Japan’s architectural community that the antagonist was the techno-rationalism of the mainstream construction industry. In the postwar period Shinohara was hardly alone in recognizing the importance of working with allied disciplines in the fine arts—painting, sculpture, poetry, drama, film, and so forth.¹³ In 1949 the Shinseisaku Art Society expanded its membership to welcome architects, including Taniguchi Yoshirō, who was the éminence grise of Tokyo Tech; Tange Kenzō; and even Ikebe Kiyoshi, renowned for minimum dwelling prototypes for industrialized mass production. Throughout the 1950s, both Tange and Shinohara’s teacher Seike Kiyoshi were also highly active in exhibition designs, working alongside other avant-garde practitioners in the arts. Shinohara was more successful than his predecessors and peers in cultivating his artistic collaborators as patrons. This publication features interviews with some of the most loyal among Shinohara’s remarkable coterie of clients: poet Tanikawa Shuntarō (Tanikawa Houses of 1958 and 1974), painter Nomiyama Gyōji (Sea Stairway, House in Itoshima), and the widow and son of photographer Ōtsuji Kiyoshi (House with an Earthen Floor, House in Uehara). As Christian Kerez’s conversation with Tanikawa Shuntarō records, Tanikawa’s father had originally suggested the eminent Taniguchi for his son’s house, but was in turn referred to the slightly younger Seike, and the younger still Shinohara. Tanikawa, Ōtsuji, and Nomiyama all commissioned Shinohara with both a house in the city and one in the country. Shinohara’s clients indulged him with extraordinary liberties in reinventing domestic arrangements. Many of them are considered bunkajin, or people of culture, referring to a broad spectrum of well-educated individuals engaged in the arts, writing, or education. Shinohara also maintained a long friendship with painter and stage set designer Asakura Setsu. Their collaborations, beyond the house Shinohara designed for her in 1964, also included mingei-inspired designs on the shōji screens in Umbrella House (1961) and a two-person exhibition held in 1964 on their individual works. The identities of these clients are sometimes imprinted onto Shinohara’s designs in subtle ways, as in the shimmering bronze-color wallpaper in Shino House. Its owner was a publisher of encyclopedias. One of the hallmarks of Japan’s success in sustaining consistently high-quality architecture is the robustness of the infrastructure of architectural production and discourse—an extraordinary plethora of magazines, schools, design competitions, and professional organizations that defined and reinforced a strong community. Despite Shinohara’s reputation as a severe personality, he actively participated in these professional activities, not only through writings and publication of his personal work, but also by joining and hosting roundtables and other forums of discussion. This generous exception to his otherwise introvert demeanor was especially evident even in his later, post–Tokyo Tech years in bringing together younger generations. As the interviews make clear, the relationship between the architect and clients was not one of conventional patronage, as we understand of princely commissions of the Renaissance or those from bourgeois industrialists in the nascent days of modernism. Despite the paucity of specific design briefs, there was no lack of communication from these clients in conveying their beliefs and aspirations. The roundtable discussion translated for this volume documents a forum moderated by Shinohara. The clients were his peers and partners, and these houses were modestly scaled, typically located in new emerging suburbs in Tokyo’s periphery. What emerges from placing each of these houses in the context of its owners’ lives is a remarkable view into not only this bunkajin community as it evolved in postwar Japan but also Tokyo’s very urbanism. With few exceptions, the images of Shinohara’s houses presented in this volume are period photographs, meticulously staged with few visible traces of domestic life. Shinohara characterized architectural photographs as false images¹⁴ of spaces, but he noted that once we are accustomed to their conventions, “we are able to comprehend the true architectural spaces behind the false images.” Shinohara saw this true architectural space as a fictive space that becomes the new level of reality. Nomiyama Gyōji echoed this sentiment in the interview featured in this book: before he moved to France in 1952 he thought it was “a land that is not where humans lived,” but existed only as the place of paintings by Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse. Shinohara’s clients were his collaborators in this act of fiction writing.

LEGACY

In 1979 the idea of a “Shinohara School” was first floated in the monographic issue of SD devoted to Shinohara’s houses. The column “Notes on architecture in Japan” refers to Sakamoto Kazunari, Hasegawa Itsuko, and Itō Toyoo as representing a new generation in the propagation of Shinohara’s architecture. All three were in their thirties at the time and had received much critical attention for their recent works.¹⁵ Under the collective pen name Gruppo Specchio, the column was written by a handful of graduate students from the University of Tokyo, most notably Takeyama Kiyoshi Sey and Kuma Kengo. They were known for sharp, witty, and occasionally scathing commentaries, and one cannot help but suspect that the label “Shinohara School” was proposed with a little tongue-in-cheek, as its authors anxiously contemplated their own professional futures.¹⁶ Four decades after Gruppo Specchio’s initial conjecture, we may ask: What would a Shinohara School look like today? Certainly Sakamoto, Hasegawa, and Itō, as well as other protégés of Shinohara, have cultivated their own followers, and different generations of architects, from different countries, have found lessons from Shinohara’s work. Many Japanese architects now attribute the ideas of architects as auteurs and houses as art as principles that were created almost single-handedly by Shinohara. Such adulation is perhaps overly enthusiastic, but there is no doubt that Shinohara was one of the true masters of the past half century, standing as a beacon of a particular conviction in space-making that remains relevant today. As Shibuya undergoes another round of transformation, there is no better time to revisit Shinohara and take a closer look.  

1. Shinohara Kazuo, “Daisan no yōshiki,” Shinkenchiku, vol. 52, no. 1 (January 1977): 221–25. Translation used here from English version, “The Third Style, 1977,” in Kazuo Shionhara: Houses, ed. David B. Stewart, Okuyama Shin-ichi, and Shiozaki Taishin, 2G, no. 58/59 (2011): 268.
2. Shinohara Kazuo, “A Theory of Residential Architecture,” The Japan Architect (October 1967): 39–45.
3. Shinohara Kazuo, “Beyond Symbol Spaces: An Introduction to Primary Spaces as Functional Spaces,” The Japan Architect (April 1971): 81–88.
4. Shinohara Kazuo, “When Naked Space Is Traversed,” The Japan Architect (February 1976): 64–72.
5. Shinohara Kazuo, “Towards Architecture,” The Japan Architect (September 1981): 30–35.
6. The same school, now known as Tokyo University of Science, established its own architecture program in 1962.
7. Shinohara Kazuo, “Jūtaku sekkei no shutaise,” Kenchiku, no. 44 (April 1964): 52–55.
8. Typically the term “jiritsusei” is used to stand for autonomy in the Kantian sense.
9. These studies were presented at successive meetings of the Architectural Institute of Japan and subsequently published in its bulletins: “Kūkan no bunkatsu to renketsu: Nihon kenchiku hōhō (7),” (June 1960); “Kūkan bunkatsu kara mita heimen kōsei: Nihon kenchiku hōhō (8),” (October 1960); “Seiō no heimen kōsei tono taihi” (October 1961).
10. Shinohara Kazuo, “Mojyurōru hihan,” Nihon kenchiku gakkai Kantō shibu dai 17 kai kenkyū happyokai (February 1955): 19–22.
11. Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949; repr., New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), 132–42.
12. Shinohara Kazuo, Chō taisū shūgo toshi he (Tokyo: Kajima shuppankai, 2001), 127.
13. Seng Kuan, “Unity of the Arts at Sōgetsu Kaikan,” in Tange Kenzō: Architecture for the World, ed. Seng Kuan and Yukio Lippit (Zürich: Lars Müller Publisher, 2012), 127–41.
14. Shinohara Kazuo, “The Mechanism of Fiction Never Stops Functioning, Exchange of Letters with Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron,” trans. Watanabe Hiroshi, SD, no. 401 (February 1998): 115. (Shinohara’s italics).
15. Guruppo supekkio, “Shinohara sukūru no kenchiku,” SD, no. 172 (January 1979): 223¬–28. The works cited in the column include Sakamoto’s Machiya in Daita and House in Kumano-Nagareyama, Hasegawa’s House in Kakio and Stationary Shop in Yaizu, and Itō’s PMT Building and Hotel D. Of the trio, Sakamoto was the only one formally educated at Tokyo Tech. Hasegawa joined Shinohara’s lab as a research student after working for Kikutake Kiyonori, whereas Itō lacked any formal affiliation with Tokyo Tech.
16. Takeyama Kiyoshi, “Kenchiku sekkei jimusho to iu ‘ba’ wo tsukuru,” traverse shinkenchiku-gaku kenkyū, no. 14 (October 2013): 72–79.

Excerpt from Very Vary Veri: “Crowded” by Oana Stănescu

Very Vary Veri is a journal about the built environment and how it is produced. Created by students and alumni from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the annual publication provides an alternative platform for students and professionals to share diverse perspectives on architecture and design concepts more broadly. “Crowds,” the fourth and latest issue of Very Vary Veri, aims to shed light on the various, and often contradictory, interpretations of the word. The following edited excerpt is taken from an essay contributed by Oana Stănescu, design critic in architecture.

Excerpt from Very Vary Veri: “Crowded”

By Oana Stănescu

The first crowds I consciously remember are the big orchestrated ones. I had to wear a uniform and stand for hours in a specific spot in the central square of Reșița, Romania, a tiny piece in a giant puzzle with timing and movement choreographed to perfection, dancing and waving at the helicopter that was said to “have Ceaușescu, waving back.” In spite of the huge numbers of people, the whole affair felt rather unconvincing—even at a young age I couldn’t help but be skeptical about this choreography of affection toward a mechanical bird. I was about six, though, when I discovered the depth of voluntary collective experience. On a sunny December day a group of about 15 people were walking energetically on the main street, yelling things I couldn’t quite understand, holding signs I couldn’t yet grasp. This was a welcome distraction on a slow afternoon, but my grandmother told me to go inside and mind my own business. On the next night a much larger crowd had gathered in the city square, this time louder and with an energy I hadn’t witnessed before. The air was filled with voices screaming “Down with Ceaușescu.” I asked my mom what it meant and she explained that if Ceaușescu wasn’t president anymore, I could buy as much chocolate as I wanted. Considering that these were times when you had to wait in line for hours for bread, milk, and maybe meat on weekends, that sounded perfectly reasonable. Like dictators before and after him, the man in power made a desperate attempt to instill fear and distrust, but there were no individuals left to buy into it; there was only the crowd which had its truth. The once all-powerful president had been reduced to a tiny, helpless being—like a lifeless doll on the oversized balcony—facing a hungry animal that even the monumental plaza couldn’t contain. You can watch it online, that instant, barely a minute into his speech, when the crowd turned from an obedient, numb creature into a force that was stronger than the fragile abstract entities it was facing. Not the army, not the presidency, not even Christmas could keep individuals from putting themselves in harm’s way. Because when they’re with their crowd, people are willing to die so that the animal can live. Crowds are mesmerizing and, in an unsettling way, hard to resist. Your voice becomes amplified in the anonymity, as if the air were flammable. Once ignited, it leaves you wondering if it was really your voice shouting at all. When I was growing up, my mother had a crocheted German saying on the kitchen wall: “Shared pain is half the pain and shared joy is double the joy.” It is worth remembering that the verb “to share” is defined as “to split, or divide, to give a portion of” or “to use, possess or enjoy something jointly with another.” Today we seem to have taken the generosity out of sharing, reducing it to the act of pos(t)ing. One doesn’t need to use a real name, to show one’s face, or even to get out of bed to “share” things: it has turned from an intimate, intentional act to something anonymous and oftentimes accidental. Yet despite the noncommittal nature of these new forms of sharing, when you do it you likely have the attention of a crowd. And you are certainly part of many more virtual crowds yourself—a couple of hundred on average each day, whether you know it or not, some real, many fake (an average of 15 percent of Twitter accounts are estimated to be bots). Read the full essay in the latest issue of Very Vary Veri, available for purchase at veryvaryveri.info.

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).