GSD exhibitions turn “Inside Out”

Faculty Honored with 2021 ACSA Architectural Education Awards

The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) recently announced the recipients of its 2021 Architectural Education Awards, which honor “architectural educators for exemplary work in areas such as building design, community collaborations, scholarship, and service.” GSD faculty members Megan Panzano, Maryann Thompson, and Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Senior Loeb Scholar Walter Hood were all honored with Faculty Design Honorable Mentions. The award acknowledges “work that advances the reflective nature of practice and teaching by encouraging outstanding work in architecture and related environmental design fields as a critical endeavor.” “The award-winning professors inspire and challenge students, contribute to the profession’s knowledge base, and extend their work beyond the borders of academia into practice and the public sector,” says the ACSA. The winners will be celebrated virtually at the ACSA 109th Annual Meeting on March 24-26, 2021. Megan Panzano (MArch ’10), assistant professor of architecture and program director of Harvard’s Undergraduate Architecture Studies, was recognized for her design research project “Expanded Views, With Rooms.” The project critiques the limits of linear perspective asserting that “an architecture around the hegemony of one view misses the point.” Panzano is currently teaching a seminar at the GSD around this research topic. Walter Hood, Spring 2021 Senior Loeb Scholar; Maryann Thompson (MArch/MLA ’89), professor in practice of architecture; Krzysztof Wodiczko, professor in residence and area head of the MDes Art, Design and the Public Domain area group; and Julian Bonder were recognized for their project, “The Ripple Effects: Martin Luther King Jr. & Coretta Scott King Memorial.” The proposal—designed as a living memorial in the Boston Commons—embraces the “historic and unique task of creating a monument to the partnership of two extraordinary people.” It aims to “illuminate questions and to welcome the presence of others, by making ‘room’ in Boston Public Space for echoes and ripples coming from the Kings’ voices to be heard in an environment created for reflection and dialogue.” Hood recently presented a lecture at the GSD as part of the Spring 2021 Public Programs. Read more about this year’s Architectural Education Awards on the ACSA website.

Five design initiatives celebrating Black creativity, from host of The Nexus podcast

In February 2020, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the first Black History Month celebrations in the United States, the GSD’s African American Design Nexus (AADN) invited the community to recommend books that contribute to our collective conversation on race and design. Those submissions became “A Call To Explore: Design, Race, and the Built Environment,” an open-access bibliography aimed at uplifting “diverse voices and perspectives of the past and present while also inspiring a paradigm shift for the future of pedagogy and practice.” Learn how to submit a title for inclusion. This Black History Month, we asked Tara Oluwafemi (MArch I ’22), host of The Nexus podcast and member of the team that established “A Call To Explore,” to expand the resource list by curating a series of various design-minded media centered on the work of Black creatives. Including exhibitions, events, podcasts, and more, this collection highlights a range of projects and initiatives that celebrate Black creativity all year round.

Black Reconstruction Collective

The Black Reconstruction Collective (BRC) is a group of artists, designers, and scholars working to dismantle white supremacy through art, design, and academia. They are dedicated to engaging with the public by providing support for projects that are in line with their stated mission and through public events, publications, and exhibitions. As part of the Fall 2020 public program at the GSD, BRC presented “Ten Responses to One Question: What does it mean to imagine Black Reconstruction today?” Members of the BRC will be part of Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, an exhibition that will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art from February 27, 2021–May 31, 2021.

Noname Book Club

Founded by the Chicago rapper Noname, Noname Book Club selects two books each month written by writers of color to uplift the voices of people of color. The book club uses social media to make their materials and discussions widely available and accessible. Through their community-supported prison program, the selected books are also sent to incarcerated individuals each month. Learn more about the program, including how to contribute, on the group’s Patreon.

Black Art: In the Absence of Light

In 1976, David Driskell’s Two Centuries of Black American Art—an exhibition foregrounding African American artists and their contributions to American visual culture—opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Fifty-five years later, the show served as inspiration for the HBO documentary Black Art: In the Absence of Light. The film traces the lasting impact of Driskell’s exhibition on contemporary Black artists including Kerry James Marshall, Theaster Gates, and Kara Walker. In a recent Instagram post, Kehinde Wiley, who is featured in the documentary, describes it as “a testament to the indelible contributions of Black American artists in today’s contemporary art world.” To continue the conversations in this documentary, HBO has created a curriculum and an appendix of art activities. They are available on the documentary’s webpage.

Revision Path

Revision Path is a weekly podcast showcasing Black designers, developers, and creatives from across the world. Guests featured on the podcast span the world of design—from animators to web developers. There are currently almost 400 episodes to check out! Revision Path made history as the first podcast with episodes added to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture permanent collection.

Black in Design

Every two years, beginning in 2015, the African American Student Union at the GSD has presented the Black in Design conference. Organized around a rotating central theme, the conference gathers designers whose practices focus on dismantling institutional barriers confronting members of the African diaspora and recognizes the historical contributions of this community. Watch recordings of past programs on the Harvard GSD YouTube channel: Black in Design 2019: Black Futurism: Creating a More Equitable Future Black in Design 2017: Designing Resistance, Building Coalitions Black in Design 2015

Silvia Benedito’s new book Atmosphere Anatomies explores weather, climate, and atmosphere as mediums of design

Much of modern civilization has been shaped by a fundamental need for shelter, and much of design by a fundamental need to provide it. Designers throughout history have taken climate and weather as obstacles—a domain from which to shield inhabitants, or an infinite void that mystifies scientists and evades control. Conversely, though, designers have also imagined or created spaces in which weather and atmosphere are components or even foundations of a project, integral to the individual and collective experience. GSD professor Silvia Benedito maps out such a shift in her new book, Atmosphere Anatomies: On Design, Weather, and Sensation, exploring how weather, climate, and atmosphere are considered principal mediums of design. It’s a project that Benedito summarizes as “curating the meteorological parameters of wind, heat, sunlight, humidity, and rain through built form and materiality.” Collaborating with photographer Iwan Baan, Benedito immerses readers in 10 projects, sourced from different eras, designers, and climatic zones around the world. She “dissects” each project in order to demonstrate how often-invisible atmospheres can be reconsidered as measurable, shapeable forms, with the human body as design arbiter. “A paradigm shift must be considered,” Benedito says, “one that realigns design’s disciplinary inquiry toward the recognition of air and atmosphere as spatial media and the body as an anatomico-physiological sensor in the all-enveloping environment.” “By feeling, breathing, and touching architecture and its landscape, by opening our buildings more to the wind and sounds, a new topology of architecture could be born into something never before conceived of, in which landscape could regain a central role,” writes Christophe Girot in the book’s introduction. “The world of sound, space, smell, and touch is part of a spatial continuum that has only recently been interrupted by contemporary planning, engineering, and architectural practices. This realization should be an open invitation to rethink architecture as something no longer divorced from our bodily experience.” Le Corbusier’s “model city” at Chandigarh in India, designed alongside Pierre Jeanneret between 1951 and 1966, emerges as a case study in design-as-anatomy. Corbusier had long conceptualized cities as bodies or biologies, Benedito notes. Tasked in 1951 with designing a new capital for the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana, Corbusier took particular interest in how a city or space “breathes.” Such a reconceptualization led to tangible design decisions, as well as an expansion of the architect’s fundamental scope. As Corbusier became increasingly tuned in to the intersections between architecture and landscape, he developed new approaches toward tempering the environment in order to promote physical and emotional well-being. (Benedito summarizes the Chandigarh project as “a disciplinary synthesis where architecture, landscape, and climate converge into a unified idea of space for human nurturing.”) Courtyards, patios, porticos, arcades, terraces, passageways, arbors, pergolas, and open pavilions allow residents to negotiate climate differences in comfort, while expanding the sheer volume as well as the varieties of shared, public-private space. Buildings are studded with detached roofs, parasols, sleeping terraces, projecting shades, and super-sized scuppers; the surrounding landscape comprises rills, ponds, reflecting pools, canals, groves, follies, green belts, artificial hills, and water basins. In effect, Corbusier resisted boundaries between inside and outside, architecture and landscape and city. “At Chandigarh, [Corbusier] turned the architectural membrane, previously sealed and ‘neutralizing,’ into a deep space that includes landscape,” Benedito explains, “broadening his understanding of the scope of the discipline.” Likewise, in William Kent’s Rousham Garden—a mid-1700s project in Oxfordshire, England—landscape is treated as “weather theater,” Benedito writes, in which the amplification (or the softening) of temperature, humidity, and other meteorological elements are foundational, dramatic design factors. Throughout the garden, the visitor comes across cooling retreats, warming shelters, shaded rooms, humid and ventilated passages—what Benedito calls “a meteorological journey.” Benedito and Baan’s tour through Geometric Hot Springs, deep within Chile’s Villarica National Park, is grounded by Benedito’s conversation with the architect, Germán del Sol. Since ancient times, del Sol tells Benedito, the region’s Indigenous Mapuche people had talked about the waters and hot springs near the Villarica Volcano; they spoke of the waters as gold, buried like treasure. “The Mapuche are people of the land; their tradition is one of being in touch with the whole territory, not with a small house or town,” del Sol says. “They live outside rather than inside. Not because they weren’t able to build houses—open spaces are just more important than enclosures. So, direct contact with surrounding nature became very important for the Geometric Hot Springs.” As del Sol explains, excavation for the springs was performed with simple shovels and brooms to avoid damaging rock. He and his colleagues also innovated gentle ways for reading ground temperature and discovering where hot springs might lie within the site. Del Sol details the geothermal research and precision-maneuvering that helped create the hot springs, and Benedito annotates the discussion with thermal imagery and mappings of select project sections. Visitors to the springs travel between pools via elevated walkways, which are warmed by radiant heat to prevent thermal shock—in other words, to keep people comfortable. The book illustrates how atmospheric elements perform and interact with each other and with their human visitors. And Baan’s photographs layer another vital narrative atop this analysis: snapshots of dense mists shrouding lush greenery, as well as of informal, human reactions of visitors, evoke both the project’s atmospheric characteristics and its influence on human emotion. The technical and the emotional, the natural and the human, are distilled into different frames, their synthesis reflected in Baan’s candid documentation. An architect trained also in landscape architecture and urban design, Benedito positions a climate-minded paradigm shift as essential for designers across all scales and specific disciplines. She sees particular implications for landscape and urban designers, however, given their focus on mediation of atmospheric forces as well as on resource conservation and public health. Despite such a disciplinary orientation, Benedito senses potential for a tighter braiding of landscape and urbanism’s tangible, physical outcomes with the less-familiar, hazier context of atmosphere. “An obliviousness to air, although justified by its ubiquity, is nonetheless paradoxical, as inherent to being outdoors is the de facto condition of living with and within the meteorological elements and their constant variability,” Benedito writes. “How, then, can one design with meteorological elements that escape ‘appearing,’ when design is, conversely, about making apparent—about building and constructing? How does one design for the collective milieu while accounting for sensation, so personal and particular?” As climate-related concerns rise in intensity and frequency, Benedito reminds designers of their agency in shaping the uncontrollable. In the book’s introduction, she discusses the case study of postwar Stuttgart, Germany, which needed to ventilate its valley-basin setting. She explains that Stuttgart’s solution—which achieved natural climate control at the urban scale, while also sustaining well-being and economic growth—is one reason the city emerged as a model of urban development. “A hazy comprehension of weather may reside in its ubiquitous but nonetheless paradoxical nature; weather is not only subjectively sensed and invisibly felt but also analytically registered and scientifically categorized in a complex manner,” Benedito writes. “This apparent antagonism makes the task of designing with weather a puzzling enterprise. Despite such challenges, the act of building for humankind is indisputably a project of acclimatization for the sustenance of life.”

Newly launched GSD Now offers novel connections for the school community

Harvard GSD has introduced digital platform GSD Now to its community of students, faculty, and staff, offering a new space intended to show (and provide access to) the full breadth of activity happening across the school at any given time—course and studio activities, events, and public programs, alongside other kinds of activities open to the general GSD audience. A primary intention behind GSD Now is to connect the Harvard GSD community via shared interests through a digital platform that is responsive to individual and collective user activity. GSD Now is currently available to any currently enrolled Harvard GSD students, as well as staff and faculty; HarvardKey log-in credentials are required. Within GSD Now, users can overview the scope of school-wide activity taking place during a given day or moment, and can register for and join school events. GSD Now conveys information about and access to public events—the lectures and symposia that are part of the school’s public program—but also course workshops, student group meetings, and other activities. While standard course sessions are made available only to those enrolled in a given course, any user an elect to “follow” a course, so that GSD Now highlights ongoing information and new updates about courses within the user’s dashboard. GSD Now users can also create digital “Trays,” collaborative spaces shared by at least two people and up to as many people as desired. Within the Trays—an allusion to Gund Hall’s interior studio space of the same name—users can share and discuss their work, course readings, or other dialogue. Each Tray is made visible within GSD Now to the rest of the school, in the spirit of Gund’s open studio space, though users can elect to set a Tray as private. Throughout GSD Now, a running message ticker scrolls across the bottom of the user’s screen, sharing general notes about user activity with the intention of fostering serendipitous discovery—helping users become aware of a course that they might find interesting but didn’t know about, or reminding them that a Tray they are interested in has been updated. Like GSD Now’s virtual Trays, this user-activity ticker can be made private. GSD Now is among the features Harvard GSD has created in order to explore fresh means of dialogue and engagement. Harvard GSD has organized its entire series of public programs as virtual events, open and accessible to anyone in the world. This term, the school has converted its exhibitions program into a series of projections cast on the façade of Gund Hall; the exhibitions series, entitled “Inside Out,” rotating through a weekly roster of visual shows that exhibit some recent preoccupations among Harvard GSD faculty and students, as selected and curated from among an open call last November. Harvard GSD’s Innovation Task Force also continues to innovate and share findings around new approaches to virtual learning and dialogue.

Power and Justice in the Lone Grid State: Abby Spinak and Sarah Stanford-McIntyre on the crisis in Texas

Newspapers this week are swamped with headlines like, “What Went Wrong with the Texas Power Grid?” To anyone not intimately concerned with the details of American electricity distribution, this may seem like an odd way of referring to the current electricity crisis in Texas. Isn’t there one national grid? Actually there are three: the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and Texas. Energy scholars sometimes refer to this, tongue-in-cheek, as an infrastructural form of “Texas nationalism.” This week, the apocalyptic images coming out of Texas of icicles hanging from ceiling fans and long lines for grocery rations show the limits of Texas isolationism, but also the ways its energy sovereignty has been steadily undermined since the 1970s.   The reason that Texas is a lone grid state is both a fascinating political history and mind-numbingly bureaucratic. In the mid-20th century, electric utilities were the corporate giants of their era. Flush with capital and the perception of unlimited growth, these companies began to consolidate into multistate “holding companies”—or “octopuses,” as pro–public power politicians maligned them—and they learned to take advantage of their ability to shift costs and profits across state lines. Ultimately, the federal government under Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded with legislation to govern interstate electricity sales and, ideally, maintain electricity as a reliable and affordable public good. Texas avoided much of the federal oversight that came with these new regulations by agreeing not to sell electricity across state lines. In place of federal regulation, in 1970, the state created the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to manage the Texas grid. While ERCOT does maintain some connections out of state, Texas has largely remained a power island. As Rice University Professor Dan Cohan recently told CNN, “When it comes to electricity, what happens in Texas stays in Texas.” By the end of the 20th century, however, Texas’s infrastructural borders could no longer keep financial investments from flowing across state lines. New federal legislation starting in the 1970s and continuing through the 1990s steadily eroded the “regulatory compact” that had normalized government oversight of private power monopolies and encouraged competition in both electricity generation and distribution. This new deregulated power landscape unsurprisingly drew the attention of investors from outside the state. Financial partners from elsewhere in the country and Europe began to reorganize the Texas grid according to market logic. New investments in wind, “natural” gas, and other energy resources began to generate and sell power for a just-in-time model–driven ERCOT that then allocated electricity to customers through a myriad of competing private retail providers. By the 2010s, electricity in Texas had earned the reputation (at least locally) for being “the most volatile commodity in the world.” While energy deregulation was championed in Texas for everything from making renewable alternatives more competitive to reducing prices for consumers, it has had mixed results on both fronts. Though it has made both renewable energy and distribution sales more profitable for corporations, the physical infrastructure connecting producers to consumers in Texas has received decidedly less attention. Texas is actually one of the leaders in the country in energy generation, both renewable and otherwise, but lack of investments in cold weather protection has limited its ability to act as an energy safety net in extreme weather conditions. Again, the (infra)structural condition demonstrates how, in the deregulated grid, corporate cost-accounting eclipses public safety. Thus, as profits from electricity sales move freely out of the state, the physical risk of grid failure has remained territorialized within Texas. Last week, in the GSD Urban Planning and Design seminar “Experimental Infrastructures,” students debated the logic of redundancy in public utilities. On the one hand, it’s good to have legislation that prevents the massive tangles of wires that competing power companies enthusiastically built over each other in the early 20th century. On the other hand, lean, just-in-time production for critical infrastructure seems destined to fail catastrophically. Excess capacity may not be “efficient,” but maybe it’s not such a bad thing to have the ability to keep millions of people alive in extreme winter weather events. Calling for reinforced or duplicated energy infrastructure may seem like an argument that is antithetical to climate action. But it actually reflects recent thinking on “energy justice” as a multifaceted problem that has to balance action on energy poverty with historic accountability for the production of high-energy lifestyles, or “luxury emissions.” What is fascinating and horrible about the current Texas blackout is that it shows that these two manifestations of energy injustice—energy poverty and energy luxury—can occur in the same location. The lean market reorganization of Texas’s historic energy abundance has created a landscape where, in a climate of increasingly volatile weather events, the line between luxury emissions and energy poverty has grown very thin. Dr. Abby Spinak is an energy historian and lecturer at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She is also area head of the GSD’s Master in Design Studies Risk and Resilience area group. Spinak’s current research ties the history of electrification in the rural United States to the evolution of twentieth-century American capitalism and alternative economic visions. Dr. Sarah Stanford-McIntyre is an assistant professor in the Herbst Program for Engineering, Ethics & Society at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Trained primarily as a U.S. historian, her work focuses on how new technologies impact communities, shape social worlds, and change local environments.

The African American Design Nexus’ Harlem StoryMap traces the neighborhood’s Black-designed places

Black Harlem, storied and resilient, has been chronicled from many perspectives. Missing until now has been a thoughtful look at what is right before any visitor’s eye: its rich built history. A new project from the GSD’s African American Design Nexus, the Harlem StoryMap, considers the neighborhood’s many designed spaces created by Black architects and urbanists. The work of these professionals began before Harlem’s famous Renaissance in the 1920s and continues today. The StoryMap documents and celebrates this body of work, connecting each design with more familiar narratives about what American writer and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson called the mecca of “colored America.” The StoryMap is not a single map, but rather an interactive digital catalog of images, archival material, maps, news clippings, quotations, and audio footage. Users are able to study not only Black designs but also the communities and events that constitute their milieu. “The StoryMap is meant to peel back a layer of Harlem and engage with the stories behind the trailblazing designers that contributed to this place,” explains Thandi Nyambose (MUP ’21), who created the Harlem StoryMap. The web page opens with census and zoning maps depicting Harlem’s Black population boom between 1910 and 1930, before moving on to the first designs: two neo-Gothic churches by largely unknown Black architects. The first is St. Philip’s Church, the oldest Black Episcopal parish in the city, designed by Vertner Tandy in 1911; the second is George Foster’s 1923 Zion AME Church. “Using this style, they’re almost subverting traditional understandings of architecture and proving that in 1911, a Black architect is more than capable of designing a building like this, “Nyambose says. It is the first of the map’s many lessons. Of course, well-known projects and facts are also represented: Black Astor Row, which became a magnet for African Americans migrating to Harlem in the 1920s and is being restored by Black architect Roberta Washington; the Adam Clayton Powell Building, designed by Ifill Johnson Hanchard at Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s behest; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, both the original—designed by J. Max Bond, Jr., one of New York’s most prominent Black architects—and the ongoing project for the new building, which is in the hands of the celebrated Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye. But the map is also full of surprises. There are the first large-scale housing projects in New York City built by an African American (Tandy) expressly for African Americans in 1948, and the Heritage Health and Housing Headquarters (2002) by the architecture firm Caples Jefferson. Founded in 1987 by Sara Caples and Everardo Jefferson, a Black Panamanian, the firm planned the building to house a nonprofit that provides social services to the community. There is also Harlem’s first green building, 1400 Fifth Avenue, designed by Roberta Washington in 2004. Because African American architects represent only about 2 percent of all licensed architects in the United States, Nyambose did not expect to find so many examples of Black-designed places in Harlem, especially so far back in history. “Every time I discover the history of a Black person who’s created something, who’s left a mark on culture, it’s energizing. The value of these stories being told cannot be underestimated—and told beyond the confines of the industry that they’re related to,” says Nyambose. Familiar or not, the designs recorded in the StoryMap are all considered alongside the social, economic, and demographic shifts taking place when they were created. As the page scrolls through history, an image of each project is accompanied by eloquent, contextualizing text that adds to our appreciation of the vitality but also the vulnerability of the place and its Black residents. Nyambose reflected on the constructions “not just as static buildings or sites, but also as points of intervention that existed in Harlem, a very complex web of social, cultural, economic ecosystems.” Some of the designers brought these forces to bear on the designs themselves. John Louis Wilson’s 1937 Harlem River Houses were an experiment in public housing and a way to create quality housing options for Harlem’s low-income residents at a moment when there weren’t any. More recently, this purpose-driven approach has been responding to the threats of gentrification, the disempowerment of Black Harlemites, and the repositioning of Harlem away from its rich, Black cultural history. The StoryMap points out that while Harlem has seen an explosion in commercial development, there has been a steady decline in quality of life for many—poor schools, lack of jobs, decaying cultural capital. Four projects in particular are presented as working to counter these trends: The Heritage Health and Housing Headquarters, 1400 Fifth Avenue, the 2007 Kalahari Condominium Complex by Jack Travis, and David Adjaye’s 2015 Sugar Hill Development. The StoryMap itself serves to push back against the erasure of Black Harlem and the living legacy of Black-designed Harlem. Nyambose explains: “There definitely is a dimension to this work that starts to engage with the conflict surrounding this rebranding, which is ultimately a pretext for the duration of the old, Black Harlem.” Nyambose graduates this spring, but this digital archive will be preserved. Ideally, it will be expanded to include work from Black designers imagining the city’s next landscapes—not only in service of the African American Design Nexus’s mission to highlight African American designers and redress decades of their obfuscation, but also for Harlemites themselves. Nyambose reflects: “It’s my hope that although the neighborhood is transforming, demographics are shifting, and buildings have been erased, that Harlem residents feel pride in their neighborhood and its ability to foster creativity and elicit community and joy. I hope that Black Harlemites feel that they’re at the center of this narrative.”

Groundscrapers: Exploring the logic behind long, low buildings

A visionary architect of the modern metropolis surveyed the vast urban scene unfolding from his high office window in 1920s New York. His awe mixed with an unsettling realization: “On a close scrutiny of the streets, certain minute, moving objects can be unmistakably distinguished. The city apparently contains, away down there—human beings!” The thought “gives one pause,” Hugh Ferriss mused, because “between the colossal inanimate forms and those mote-like creatures darting in and out among their foundations, there is such a contrast, such discrepancy in scale. . . .” Descending to the street, he declared, is “like Dante’s descent into Hades,” where one could perceive a deep inhumanity in the urban scene that adversely affected people’s “facial expressions, their postures, gestures, movements, tones of voice. . . .” Although Ferriss, like many architects at the time, was deeply impressed by new trends in high-rise buildings, he criticized their “thin coating of architectural confectionary disguises,” and acknowledged “that they were fashioned to meet not so much the human needs of the occupants as the financial appetites of the property owners.” Over the last hundred years, not much has changed. Tall buildings continue to exert a powerful pull on designers and property owners. Their heights continue to increase, and skylines in cities throughout the world now bristle with competing forms reaching upward, indifferent to people and context. In their 1995 manifesto, S, M, L, XL, Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau explained that this indifference is a natural consequence of contemporary large-scale architecture. “Bigness [is] incapable of establishing relationships with the classical city . . .” it “no longer needs the city; it competes with the city. . .” and “It is no longer part of any urban tissue.” The result is that “the street has become the residue,” and people seem to matter hardly at all. Camilo Restrepo Ochoa, founder of Agenda Architecture in Medellín, Colombia, and studio instructor at the Harvard GSD, declares that this situation calls for new thinking about the architecture of cities and the predominance of the high-rise building type. For the users of skyscrapers, their immense height means “somehow you’re trapped in the air,” he says, and “you condemn relations to take place in a vertical manner. . . .” Social and environmental relationships become tightly constrained by an enclosed lobby, elevators, sealed windows, and great distance from the ground. Restrepo argues that “other ways of social spatial organizations are needed . . . a new type is required,” so that architecture can “protect and create a more horizontal relation with an endangered community and ecosystem.” In “Specific Ambiguity: Groundscrapers,” a studio he taught at Harvard last fall, Camilo and his 12 students explored the possibilities of large, low buildings whose scale and complex programs necessitate deep thinking about how architecture can “operate as a mediator between social and environmental conditions.” Unlike a tall building, which seeks a relationship with an ineffable abstraction—the sky—a long, low building challenges designers “to redefine our relation to the ground,” the field of public and ecological relationships. If the “groundscraper” constitutes a building type, it is neither new nor well defined. As Camilo points out, its examples are extremely varied in appearance, scale, program, and architectural merit: the Royal Crescent in Bath, Le Corbusier’s sinuous Plan Obus project for Algiers, Alison and Peter Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens public housing in London (“the largest failure of them all,” Camilo says), Constant Nieuwenhuys’s chaotic New Babylon project, and innumerable long, low office buildings and housing blocks help to establish the type. All of these diverse examples share the formal characteristics of extreme length and repetitiveness, but the type opens itself to broad interpretation. To begin, the students studied examples of groundscrapers built over the last 70 years by Affonso Reidy in Brazil, Aldo Rossi and Herzog and de Meuron in Italy, Peter Zumthor in Norway, and Craig Ellwood in California. These relatively modest examples, ranging from 120 to 260 meters (400 to 850 feet), invest long, low buildings with a range of programs—offices, apartments, galleries, classrooms—as well as public spaces and building infrastructure. Their contexts also vary; they occupy urban, suburban, and rural sites. Camilo challenged his students to incorporate a diverse, mixed-use program in a single, very long, horizontal building, to develop a strong relationship between the building and the ground in order to foster social relationships, and to design “ambiguous” building enclosures responsive to the tropical ecology in Colombia. Camilo explains that an essential problem for an extremely long building is that its program loses some command over the building form, which tends to be fixed and repetitive. “The program cannot repeat constantly,” he says, and to make the building work well, “it’s not only about mixing programs; it is the way you place them.” In other words, the character of the building develops from “continuous questioning of the system versus the exception in the way we organize the space.” Connecting the parts of the program also presents challenges in a groundscraper. Unlike in a skyscraper—where a bank of elevators controls movement—a long, low building demands more creative circulation patterns. These include multiple vertical connections between the ground and the roof, as well as very long horizontal passageways, which might become social spaces like sidewalks or streets, rather than just circulation infrastructure. Camilo explains that the varied functions, multiple points of access, extended passageways, and indeterminate public spaces in the groundscraper building type presented students with important questions about the nature of building programs. “We tend to give a program to everything,” he says, “and we tend to over-program our layouts.” But in these large, low buildings the insistent repetition of program calls for relief—for “spaces for doing nothing,” or rather, “spaces where anything can happen.” Camilo argues that architects don’t understand these types of unprogrammed spaces well, but they are essential for the social dynamic of buildings. If the groundscraper type challenges the nature of building program, the building sites Camilo chose for the project help challenge the capacities of architecture. The students designed buildings with a maximum footprint of 30 meters by 300 meters on two sites in Medellín, Colombia, one urban and one semi-rural. In each condition the building is, Camilo explains, “not as big as a neighborhood, but bigger than a block.” At that scale, “architecture cannot solve it all. . . . You have to support it on landscape design and urban design.” The buildings’ large scale and insistent rhythms naturally vie with adjacent building fabric, sidewalks, and streets, as well as unbuilt portions of the site. This compelled the students to work simply and strategically to balance the competing factors of the project, and, “to question a limit of architecture as a discipline.” The tropical climate opens other questions about the physical limits of architecture. Most important, it allows an “ambiguous” sense of enclosure, because, Camilo explains, often “in the tropics interior space doesn’t exist. Somehow it’s the transition that matters.” That is, a building envelope that supplies continuous enclosure is not necessary, and public space in particular often spans interior and exterior. Tropical architecture, he says, “is mainly driven by shade and air,” so its emphasis shifts away from enclosing curtain walls: “facades are not so important; the most important thing is always the roof.” In the studio, an indistinct sense of enclosure and an emphasis on horizontal protection from weather became essential components of the building type. This porosity also set up an ironic condition: as an earthbound alternative to the skyscraper, the groundscraper is much better suited to address the sky and its atmospheric conditions. Camilo points out that in the tropical context the students were addressing, permeability of buildings also corresponds with a reduction of their mechanical systems. The students—many of whom live in temperate climates—were amazed, he says, at the freedom this permitted. The ambiguities of space and reduced systems allowed them to “strip away all the technical stuff” to “produce a very honest architecture that’s as simple as possible.” They were able, he says, to “touch a little bit of utopia—a pragmatic utopia, let’s call it. . . .” Hugh Ferriss’s utopian vision of a hundred years ago evoked astounding images of great edifices reaching to the sky—“Buildings like crystals. Walls of translucent glass. . . . A mineral kingdom.” But we have to question whether the immense skyscrapers built in that image over the intervening years have fulfilled his hope that architecture would contribute “to the harmonious development” of humanity and its “potentialities of emotional and mental well-being.” Perhaps, as Camilo contends, a new type of “horizontal building, belonging more to the ground and the horizon, rather than the sky and its psychological detachments,” is worth exploring—a building type that can act more effectively “as a mediator between social and environmental conditions.” While his students’ renderings may not carry the dreamlike quality of Ferriss’s ethereal graphite visions, their precise rhythms—portrayed boldly against the fabric of Medellín and the distant mountains beyond—offer a place for people together on the ground in the fresh tropical air.

Designing for Disability Justice: On the need to take a variety of human bodies into account

Disability ought to be an exciting subject for architects: it’s about lived experience, problem solving, and designing a better built environment. While the topic engages with critical theory and aspirations for collective life, it’s often seen as a field that requires checking boxes and fulfilling requirements, or worse, a touchy subject strewn with outdated terms and outmoded habits of thought. The typical routines of design don’t always take the variety of human bodies into account. But I recently had the chance to talk to four practitioners who are changing minds and moving the field forward: Aimi Hamraie is associate professor of Medicine, Health, and Society and American Studies at Vanderbilt University; Sara Hendren (MDes ’13) is a professor at Olin College and the author of What Can a Body Do?; Sierra Bainbridge is senior principal and managing director at MASS Design Group; and Jeffrey Mansfield (MArch ’14) is a design director at MASS. In our interview, Hamraie says that engaging the design disciplines with the subject of disability requires epistemic activism. “When disability activists entered the profession of architecture, they showed that architects do not just design buildings, they also design curricula, licensing requirements, research, and fields of discourse that give meaning to their work. To shift the treatment of disability in architecture required intervening in all these ways, in addition to lobbying Congress to pass the Americans With Disabilities Act.” This sort of epistemic activism is occurring at the GSD. In the fall, Bainbridge taught “Seeking Abundance,” a studio which aimed to reframe the topic of disability as a source of diversity and potential. The studio relied on the expertise of Mansfield , who recently received an award from the Ford and Mellon foundations for his research into schools for the Deaf. While discussing how architects ought to think about disability, Mansfield, Bainbridge, Hamraie, and Hendren highlighted many examples that provide rich food for thought. Hendren points to De Hogeweyk, a “dementia village” in Weesp, the Netherlands. “It proceeded from the board of directors at a nursing home for memory care asking itself a simple but crucial question: Would the status quo for memory care be a kind of environment we’d want to live in, were we to acquire this condition? They created a list of values for promoting the kind of life they wanted for their residents, and their value of ‘favorable surroundings’ resulted in a cityscape structure for the redesigned site: a locked facility with streets and storefronts, a plaza, theater, grocery store—even bikes inside! And best of all: a restaurant that’s both publicly accessible to the town and internally, securely accessible to residents,” she says. “There’s an understanding among staff and customers that some of the residents will wander in from time to time, creating some unusual interactions. But the semi-porous structure is ingenious, lightening the barrier between public and private.” It sounds like a dream project for architects: reimagining public and private space while grappling with the nature of memory and human social interactions. Meanwhile, Hamraie mentions several notable figures: Jen White Johnson, who does graphic design work centered on #BlackDisabledLivesMatter and “Autistic Joy,” and Corbett O’Toole, a queer disabled elder and author of Fading Scars: My Queer Disability History. Hamraie says, “O’Toole has been a lifelong designer and pushed me in so many amazing directions when I first started to think about crip technoscience and DIY disability design. She recently retrofitted a school bus as an accessible space for living and traveling, and it is beautiful.” Hamraie cites precedents in theory as well: “The person whose work I always come back to is the feminist science scholar and activist Michelle Murphy, who writes about built spaces and vernacular designed objects in the context of eugenic, colonial, and imperialist projects.” Hamraie suggested two books by Murphy to start with: Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty and The Economization of Life. No doubt the greatest wealth of insight comes from the disability community itself. While a student at the GSD, Mansfield, who has been deaf since birth, initiated historical research into the design activism that occurred at schools for the Deaf in the United States. This has now become a multi-year research project exploring how Deaf schools became a node of design activism. His historical recap is illuminating: “Deaf spaces were typically designed by state agencies under the idea of benevolence. These schools were built with significant state investment, and they were built as symbols of societal virtue. They were not really designed for their deaf users—their sensorial needs are not accommodated by the spaces. It doesn’t help that they were built far from home communities.” But this segregation had an unintended side effect: “Clustering together deaf people at these schools allowed them to develop their own culture, their own awareness, their own value system. When it came time to assimilate back into society, it felt like a deprivation of this culture. Self-determination became a form of resistance.” Mansfield emphasizes how working within this framework can be a productive challenge for designers: “How can we identify unique forms of sensory knowledge, amplify them, and support these various experiences to allow communities to decide for themselves how they relate to the world?” DeafSpace is one example of how a form of sensory knowledge has been systematized into concepts that are useful for designers—e.g., paying attention to lighting and color to reduce eye fatigue. Mansfield explains that “DeafSpace emerges from a set of Deaf-centric spatial considerations that are uniquely inherent to how deaf people navigate and claim space.” Hendren develops this concept in her book. “Problem-solving is a pattern of attention that gets pretty rote and rigid in design education, especially when it comes to matters like disability. DeafSpace is not a program for ‘inclusion’ in the flattened sense of ‘making room’ for deafness. Instead, DeafSpace is built on a very close observation of behaviors that are already happening among deaf folks: linguistic and social behaviors, spatial relationships, visual fields, and the way sound functions somatically, not just aurally,” she says. “All of these are evidence of the magnificently adaptive human being, doing its thing minute by minute. It’s a wonder just as it is! So architecture might proceed more like DeafSpace does—paying attention to and drawing up an envelope that formalizes the assets of a given population and its uses of space, and then, yes, adding the challenges and problems to that mix when they’re identified by that population itself. It’s a many-dimensional idea of human agency, which ‘inclusion’ doesn’t usually encompass.” One reason that disability has not been more thoroughly integrated into design education is that it is not usually formulated as an exciting challenge. The need to adhere to standards and “check boxes” can instill a sense of somber rectitude that stifles creative thinking about how to provide meaningful access. Hendren gives an example: “A bathroom with a threshold at the right width measurement for a wheelchair user to get through, but not to turn around once inside; or no handles for transferring.” But mistakes and misapplications are not the most significant problem, Hendren says. “I think the biggest barrier, of course, is the limited imagination that standards tend to create. Because it’s a checklist and a liability matter, the rhetorical framing of disability gets subsumed under that logic: a cloud over the excitement of a project, or a ‘don’t forget’ matter of inclusion.” Standards should not be dismissed, however. Hendren emphasizes that “standards are useful as a benchmark, and for creating legally actionable codes for compliance (that is, when they are in fact actionable, and not just recommendations!). I think the International Symbol of Access is a terrific example of standardization. It’s an isotype that creates an instantly recognizable sign that accessible architecture like ramps or automatic doors are close by. It can also function as a symbol that does something pretty profound: protecting parking spaces or seating for folks who need proximity to a building or a bathroom or a fire exit. Knowing what you can expect and knowing it’ll be the same internationally, recognizable at a distance and without relying on text of any kind—that’s what you want in a solid standard.” Even so, ubiquitous standards are not set in stone. Hendren co-founded the Accessible Icon project with Brian Glenney, a philosopher and graffiti artist, to update the accessibility icon in a way that, to me, hints at the thrill of racing around in a wheelchair. The alternative to rote standardization is design—or, as Hamraie puts it, “the initiation of critical processes toward iterative world-building.” This is something architects are trained to do: questioning the assumptions that frame a project. “From my perspective, accessibility is an open-ended project because what we know or claim to know about who uses accessible design is always changing. Sixty years ago, it was barely thinkable to design with wheelchair users in mind, let alone people with chemical sensitivities or mental disabilities. The shifting landscape of legibility for disabled people always yields new approaches to design,” Hamraie says. “I would say that my work intervenes in these processes of knowing and making. This is a strategy that builds on my training in the tradition of feminist new materialism—which is concerned with the relationship between knowing, making, and ethical acting—and also the field of discourse around critical design. These help me understand that standards can be material and critical; they do not always have to be reductive.” Bainbridge’s studio at the GSD also takes aim at reductivism. She notes: “We have been taught in the last 30 or 40 years to rely heavily on ecology and science-based research, which sometimes misses the point. It is important to understand that landscape architects design for unique cultural communities. Different communities have different relationships to the vegetal world; how do we uncover what those are?” She also asks, “How do we understand and create a sensory interface that is specific to the community we’re working with, rather than defaulting to something that is either aesthetic or ecological? Designers should be accounting for all of our sensory experiences, and yet we usually design quite visually. By designing for people with different abilities, we can understand how to design for all abilities, which creates a more abundant experience for everyone.” What this means, first of all, is that Bainbridge’s students conduct a lot of research. When I ask her about the many pre-design phases in her course description, Bainbridge smiles and says, “Students asked: is this how we actually design? Do we come to a project and have a conversation with our partners without having a set idea about what the project actually is? ‘Seeking Abundance’ is reflective of how MASS works as a nonprofit organization. We start way upstream from where a typical architect would start. We seek out partners and amplify their mission. Often this means we’re working with partners who have not had access to design services and don’t have a budget yet. If we come to projects early, we can help understand what the mission of the project is and how something built would support their work.” Because studios have been taught remotely to students located around the world, Bainbridge encouraged her students to seek out partners near where they were located. They came up with an eclectic list: “Perkins School for the Blind, a very well attended Deaf gathering space in Wuhan, China, more marginalized communities like the Abenaki in New Hampshire, and many others. Students talk with members of these communities to uncover aspects of their spatial sensory awarenesses. This engagement helps create a common language around sense between the students and their ‘clients.’” Adding depth to this investigation, students were asked to set up specific situations for their classmates to experience. “Each student is creating an experience with one aspect of sensory intake that they are inviting others to. Having them experience the world through that sense in that particular way has created an expanded vocabulary for design in the studio. Now the question is, how can it create a more abundant palette for creating landscapes?” It is worth reflecting further on why the usual methods of design do not address the variety of human bodies. As a historian, Hamraie notes that “during the period in which the design disciplines have been professionalized, there have not been many efforts to enable disabled people to become designers or—until recently—to recognize disabled people as designers and inventors even when they have not had professional training. This is likely because of long histories of centering idealized bodies in disciplines such as architecture, and of more recent histories of measuring and standardizing bodies in fields such as industrial design.” Mansfield echoes Hamraie’s observations, commenting that “There have, of course, been many attempts to change this, starting in the 1970s with interventions in design curricula and professional licensing. But ableism is entrenched and takes more than a class or a continuing education credit to uproot.” MASS has come to specialize in projects at the intersection of multiple complicating factors, disability included. They have been commissioned to design a symbolic Black Deaf space and memorial at Gallaudet University, which is the only university that is designed to be barrier-free for deaf and hard of hearing students. It will honor Louise B. Miller, the mother of a Black Deaf child who sued the Washington, DC, Board of Education in 1952. Her son could not attend the Kendall School for the Deaf at the time because Washington was segregated. Miller sued, and she won her case at the Supreme Court. Although the suit did not successfully desegregate the school itself, it represented an early blow to the Plessy v. Ferguson principle of “separate but equal” by ruling that the school district could not deny its Black Deaf students the right to free public education. As a result, the Kendall Division II School was created—a segregated school for Deaf children at Gallaudet University. Despite its part in the larger fight against segregation, this story has been largely overlooked on campus, which propelled student and community activists to demand a memorial that could convey the significance of this historical moment and “honor the Black Deaf community’s fight for educational justice in America.” The parameters of the project have made for a productive challenge, Mansfield says. “If you look at the architecture of Gallaudet—the Olmsted landscape and the high Victorian neo-Gothic architecture—it’s very symbolic of this idea of abundance, in terms of public investment and grandiosity, which really stands in contrast with the hastily built utilitarian architecture of the Division II School, which was eventually demolished. The memorial will be on a challenging site, but it represents a unique opportunity to remap the cultural landscape of the university.” The hope is that the memorial will lead to racial reckoning and healing—an active, collaborative process that would have never happened if Black Deaf people did not demand it. The long-term goal of cultivating a critical mass of designers—a design community—that maintains a shared interest in disability can begin as simply as listening to the same podcasts. Hamraie has been doing disability justice organizing for 10 years alongside work as a scholar. “It began with my participation in the Occupy movement. Since then, I have been very embedded in disability culture and community. My podcast, called Contra*, addresses design from a disability culture framework, which means that it highlights the knowledge and practices of disabled designers, artists, researchers, curators, and activists working toward a more accessible world. But it is not ‘Disability 101.’ You can think of it as a window onto a community that does not actually try to do translation work to bring others into that community so much as it notes its existence, without euphemism or apology.” Hamraie continues, “This work builds on many activist and scholarly podcasts I admire—Alice Wong’s Disability Visibility, Cathy Hannabach’s Imagine Otherwise, adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown’s How to Survive the End of the World, and others. Podcasts have a way of building communities through their audience, and so I have been interested in them as sites of intervention. There are new ones being created every day, which expands our community and the conversations we can have.” As a profession, architecture can do more to include designers with varying abilities in its ranks. Hendren says that she “would certainly like to see more kinds of expertise encouraged—more illuminated pathways for young people to get into architecture. Not just young folks who are interested in parts-and-systems, like engineering, and then want to do something vaguely aesthetic with that technical expertise. Some of the best designers are, at heart, generalists—by which I mean voraciously curious, wide readers, drawing from an interest in people and interactions and patterns of sociality, a commitment to public and civic spaces as a form of shared life.” Hendren is cautiously optimistic about the future: “I’ve been heartened to see the emphasis on maintenance and care get more formalized design attention in recent years. It’s a matter of attention: drawing up and formalizing some of the labor, artifacts, and interactions that are already happening and using a rhetorical spotlight to say: ‘Look over here! This counts too!’ ‘This Counts Too’ is actually the title of an essay I wrote with an anthropologist colleague, Caitrin Lynch, on a digital archive of low-tech prosthetics called Engineering At Home. That’s a design project in that same spirit: drawing a frame around design that’s not usually recognized as such.” Hamraie emphasizes that “interventions can take place in all sorts of sites—the political process and in public spaces, but also in institutional spaces where knowledge is created and disseminated.” The global pandemic and the shift to remote learning may be just the right impetus for the GSD to bring underserved users and communities more systematically into design processes. Everyone is relying on technological augmentation; everyone is “remote” from centers of power. Let’s not miss this opportunity to continue asking ourselves how the design disciplines can be made more inclusive. 1. The National Disability Authority offers a helpful list of appropriate terms.

Jose Luis García del Castillo y López talks “tech to expect” in Architect Magazine

Last year brought staggering change to our lives, but the impact on technology—and the resulting tech trends we can we expect in 2021—are of particular interest to many designers. Lecturer in Architectural Technology Jose Luis García del Castillo y López was among 12 thought leaders to reflect on these questions in a recent feature for Architect Magazine. García del Castillo y López argues that the remoteness caused by the pandemic has impacted the way we interact with each other in digital spaces and how we present ourselves to the world. He predicts that “architects will have a bigger role in rethinking our new forms of presence, both physical and digital” and in designing how those two spheres can blend. “We are witnessing an increasing number of architects moving on to UX/UI design, software development, and generally thinking, designing, and building digital environments that are more pleasant to work, interact, and augment our physical selves in.” García del Castillo y López anticipates that 2021 will bring “a surge in the popularity of frameworks that streamline collaborative work among stakeholders in AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) enterprises.” Read García del Castillo y López’s full response in Architect Magazine.