Jennifer Bonner, Walter Hood among 60 awardees of United States Artists Fellowship

Harvard Graduate School of Design professor Jennifer Bonner (MArch ’09) and Spring 2021 Senior Loeb Scholar Walter Hood are among the 60 recipients of the United States Artists (USA) 2021 USA Fellowship. According to USA’s press release, the USA Fellowship is the organization’s flagship program, and is central to USA’s mission of supporting artists and their essential role in society. (Hood presents the GSD’s annual Senior Loeb Scholar Lecture on February 23, 2021.) The USA Fellowship is awarded to artists and designers at all stages of their careers and from all areas of the country through a rigorous nomination and panel selection process. The sixty recipients this year are distributed across ten design and creative fields, including dance, film, theater, traditional and visual arts, and writing; Bonner and Hood were recognized within the category of architecture and design. Each of the 2021 USA Fellows receives an unrestricted $50,000 award to support their ongoing artistic and professional development. Past recipients include painter and visual artist Howardena Pindell (2020), documentary flmmaker Laura Poitras (2010), writer Teju Cole (2015), potter Roberto Lugo (2016), multimedia artist Paul Chan (2007), dancer and choreographer Alice Sheppard (2019), fashion designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte (2009), flmmaker Barry Jenkins (2012), master Mardi Gras suitmaker Darryl Montana (2014), poet Claudia Rankine (2016), and multidisciplinary artist Martha Rosler (2008). Based in Chicago, USA is a national arts funding organization that raises funds and redistributes them in the form of unrestricted awards to “the country’s most compelling artists and cultural practitioners.” Since 2006, USA has awarded more than 700 individuals with over $33 million of direct support. Bonner is Associate Professor of Architecture at the GSD. After graduating from the GSD in 2009, she founded her design office MALL, and has since earned a range of awards and honors, including the Architectural League’s Prize for Young Architects + Designers, the AIA Young Architects Forum’s Emerging Voices Award, and Architect magazine’s Progressive Architecture (P/A) and Next Progressives awards. Bonner is the author of A Guide to the Dirty South: Atlanta, faculty editor of Platform: Still Life, and a guest editor for ART PAPERS special issue on architecture and design of Los Angeles. Bonner has exhibited work at the Royal Institute of British Architects, National Building Museum, WUHO gallery, HistoryMIAMI, Yve YANG gallery, pinkcomma gallery, Armstrong Gallery at Kent State), Yale Architecture Gallery, Istanbul Modern Museum, Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway, and the Chicago Architecture Biennial, among other engagements. Recently named the GSD’s Spring 2021 Senior Loeb Scholar, Walter Hood is the David K. Woo Chair and Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, and was recently the Spring 2020 Diana Balmori Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Architecture. He is Creative Director and Founder of the Oakland-based Hood Design Studio, which he established in 1992. Hood recently co-edited Black Landscapes Matter (2020, University of Virginia Press) alongside Grace Mitchell Tada. His Senior Loeb Scholar appointment follows a series of recent honors: He is a recipient of the 2017 Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award, 2019 Knight Foundation Public Spaces Fellowship, and 2019 MacArthur Fellowship. In December 2020, Hood Design Studio made its debut on the esteemed AD100 list.

The Future of Air Travel: Toward a better in-flight experience

Anyone remember air travel? In early 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe and international flights were hurriedly cancelled, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Laboratory for Design Technologies (LDT) pivoted its three-year focus project, The Future of Air Travel, to respond to new industry conditions in a rapidly changing world. With the broad goal of better understanding how design technologies can improve the way we live, the project aims to reimagine air travel for the future, recapturing some of its early promise (and even glamour) by assessing and addressing various pressure points resulting from the pandemic as well as more long-term challenges. The two participating research labs—the Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab (REAL), led by Allen Sayegh, associate professor in practice of architectural technology, and the Geometry Lab, led by Andrew Witt, associate professor in practice of architecture—“look at air travel from an experiential and a systemic perspective.” As part of their research, the labs consulted with representatives from Boeing, Clark Construction, Perkins & Will, gmp, and the Massachusetts Port Authority, all members of the GSD’s Industry Advisors Group. So far, the project has resulted in two research books: An Atlas of Urban Air Mobility and On Flying: The Toolkit of Tactics that Guide Passenger Perception (and its accompanying website www.airtraveldesign.guide). On Flying, by Sayegh, REAL Research Associate Humbi Song, and Lecturer in Architecture Zach Seibold, seeks “to facilitate a rethinking of how to design objects, spaces, and systems by putting the human experience at the forefront”—and in so doing “prepare and design for improved passenger experiences in a post-COVID world.” The book’s accessible glossary covers topics including the design implications of the middle armrest (“What if armrests were shareable without physical contact?”); whether the check-in process could be improved by biometric scanners; the effect of customs declarations on passengers; how air travel is predicated on “an absence of discomfort” instead of maximizing comfort; and the metaphysical aspects of jet lag. The project “examines and provides insight into the complex interplay of human experience, public and private systems, technological innovation, and the disruptive shock events that sometimes define the air-travel industry”. Consider, for instance, the security requirements of air travel in a post-COVID world—how can the flow of passengers through the departure/arrival process be streamlined while incorporating safety measures such social distancing? On Flying acknowledges that it’s hard to quantify many of the designed elements—ranging from artifacts to spaces and systems—that affect our experience of air travel. So the toolkit methodically catalogs and identifies these various factors before speculating on alternative scenarios for design and passenger interaction. A year into the project, Phase 2 will more overtly examine the context of COVID-19, considering it alongside other catastrophic events, such as 9/11, in order to better understand and plan for their impact on the industry as a whole and on passenger behavior. Meanwhile, An Atlas of Urban Air Mobility, by Witt and Lecturer in Architecture Hyojin Kwon, is “a collection of the dimensional and spatial parameters that establish relationships between aerial transport and the city,” and it aims to establish a “kit of parts” for the aerial city of the future. Phase 1 considered the idea of new super-conglomerates of cities, dependent on inter-connectivity of air routes—specifically looking at the unique qualities of Florida as an air travel hub. The atlas investigates flightpath planning and noise pollution and other spatial constraints of air travel within urban environments. One possible solution it raises is the concept of “clustered networks,” where electrical aerial vehicles could be used in an interconnected pattern of local urban conurbations, reflecting a hierarchy of passenger flight, depending on scale and distance traveled. Phase 2 will move into software and atlas development, expanding the atlas as well as their simulation and planning software. One intriguing aspect will be a critical history of past visions of future air travel: a chance to look back in order to look forward with fresh eyes. By studying our shared dream of air travel, the hope is to rediscover and reboot abandoned visions that may yet prove to inspire new innovations. It’s a reminder that, not so long ago, international flight excited and inspired us—before the realities of delayed flights, lost luggage, rude customs officials, and poorly planned infrastructure stole our dreams. And that’s before we ever stepped onto the plane itself. According to the Air Travel Design Guide, the social contract of air travel has now become so skewed from the original glamorous proposition that today, “the passenger can feel as if they are at the mercy of nature, airport security personnel, or the airline cabin crew. They are directed where to go, how to move, and even when to go to the bathroom on the plane.” Surely it can—and should—be better than this? “We may not arrive more on time,” the team concludes, “but thanks to the introduction of better design practice—we might enjoy the experience better.” Learn more about the Laboratory for Design Technologies and its Industry Advisors Group (IAG) partners at research.gsd.harvard.edu/ldt/

Regional Studies Association Honors Susan Fainstein with Award for Lifetime Contribution to the Field

The Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Senior Research Fellow Susan Fainstein has been awarded the 2020 Sir Peter Hall Award for Lifetime Contribution to the Field by The Regional Studies Association (RSA). The RSA is the global forum for city and regional research, development, and policy. “Within these unprecedented times, we feel that it is important to remember to celebrate the research and work that has been carried out in regional studies and its related fields, including urban and rural studies, city-regions and interstitial spaces,” notes the RSA on its website. “These awards demonstrate the aim of our association to be an authoritative voice of, and network for, academics, students, practitioners, policy makers via our diverse and international membership.” Professor Fainstein, a political theorist and scholar of urban planning, joined the GSD faculty in 2006 and retired from teaching in 2012. Her work centers around three values—democracy, diversity, and equity—and their interactions with spatial relations, as discussed in her book The Just City. John Agnew, the president of the RSA, describes Fainstein’s research and writings as being focused on “the distributive effects of urban development strategies and mega-projects, the role of democracy and community control in local public institutions, and in establishing a moral theory of the just city.” The 2020 awards ceremony was presented virtually and can be viewed on the RSA’s website.

Harvard GSD announces Spring 2021 public program

Harvard GSD continues its series of virtual public lectures for the Spring 2021 semester, inviting designers and other curious viewers from around the world to join the school’s dialogue. This spring program offers topical observations, as well as launches of two new Harvard GSD publications: its redesigned Harvard Design Magazine, as well as the to-be-revealed student-run journal Pairs. All programs will take place virtually, are free and open to the public, and require registration, and all times are listed in United States Eastern Time (ET). Please visit Harvard GSD’s events calendar for more information, including registration details. Live captioning will be provided for all programs. To request other accessibility accommodations, please contact the Public Programs Office at [email protected]. Kate Thomas, “Lesbian Arcadia: Desire and Design in the Fin-de-Siècle Garden” February 18, 7:30pm Senior Loeb Scholar Lecture: Walter Hood February 23, 7:30pm Wolff Architects March 1, 12pm Introducing Pairs 01: Giovanna Borasi in Conversation with the Founding Editors March 2, 7:30pm Daniel Urban Kiley Lecture: Julie Bargmann, “Modesty” March 4, 7:30pm Thaisa Way with Ed Eigen and Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto, “Think Like a Historian, Imagine Like a Designer: A Conversation on Landscape History and Design Education” March 5, 12pm International Womxn’s Week Keynote Address March 9, 7:30pm Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, “The Miasmist: George E. Waring, Jr. and Landscapes of Public Health” March 11, 7:30pm “Mayors Imagining the Just City” March 12, 1pm Harvard Design Magazine reveals “Harvard Design Magazine #48: America” March 23, 7:30pm Marc Angélil and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, “Migrant Marseille: Architectures of Social Segregation and Urban Inclusivity” March 29, 12pm Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture: Zoe Leonard April 1, 12pm Andrew Freear, Faranak Miraftab, and Todd Okolichany, “Small Town Urbanism in the 21st Century” April 5, 12pm Black Radical Space: The Black School and Bryan C. Lee, Jr. in Conversation April 6, 7:30pm Rebecca Choi, “White Man’s Got a God Complex” April 7, 12pm H ARQUITECTES, “Where the Invisible Becomes Visible” April 12, 12pm Cecilia Puga April 20, 7:30pm Achille Mbembe in Conversation with Joshua Comaroff and John May *Date to be Announced*

Spring 2021 All-School Welcome from Dean Sarah M. Whiting

On Tuesday, January 19, 2021 Dean Sarah M. Whiting joined the GSD community on Zoom to deliver a virtual welcome to start the spring term. A transcript of the Dean’s remarks is below. Good morning, afternoon, and evening everyone, and happy new year. I hope you all tried to have a restful holiday break. I just have to say, it’s so heartening to welcome everyone back to school for the spring semester. Many of us had been looking forward to the new year—I know I was—and I could not wait to put 2020 behind me. Twenty-twenty, though, is clearly not going away so easily. Today is January 19th, almost two weeks after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. I’m still reeling from that day and I’m sure many of you are, too. By nature, I’m an optimistic person, but I admit I’m finding it very hard to find any silver linings right now. Yes, we have tomorrow’s inauguration to look forward to and yes, the vaccines are promising. (Speaking at a virtual conference of arts professionals over the weekend—and even dressing the part by wearing a black turtleneck—Dr. Anthony Fauci suggested that we might reach herd immunity this fall.) And yes, my surgery over break was successful, so I’m entering the new year in good health. All of these are positive, very positive, starts to the new year. But I can’t get the images of the rioters who broke into the Capitol out of my head. The vision of the confederate flag being carried within that space is particularly seared in my memory, confirming the work that this country has to do in reckoning with its structural racism, past and present. The U.S. Capitol, was designed by a succession of architects—the original competition, held in 1792, was won by Dr. William Thornton, who, according to the history on the Capitol’s website, was a “gifted amateur architect who had studied medicine but rarely practiced as a doctor.” Thornton’s original design was modified by Benjamin Henry Latrobe and Charles Bullfinch, among many others over time. Having partially burned in the war of 1812, it was rebuilt by European laborers working with American slaves. In short, this building embodies our country’s history as well as architectural history. In 1850, the building was expanded to create the House and Senate chambers—the two wings that swarmed with rioters early this month. Barton Gellman, one of my favorite columnists, described in The Atlantic what happened on January 6th as attempted “democracide.” Gellman concluded that “The republic survived a sustained attempt on its life because judges and civil servants and just enough politicians did what they had to do.” In other words, our system of checks and balances worked…just barely. Just barely because we discovered that facts, evidence, and history can be hijacked more quickly and more thoroughly than anyone could have ever imagined. We all need to be vigilant to prevent that kind of hijacking. It’s so important, so urgent, for us to pay close attention to what is happening politically, socially, economically, here in the U.S. and around the world, because yes, it does affect us. It is equally crucial for each one of us to be sure to base our research, our work, and our opinions on facts and on history that are backed up by evidence. I point you again to our event last September with Danielle Allen and Michael Murphy discussing “Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century,” the report issued by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that Allen co-authored. It’s available on the American Academy website. The report issues 31 recommendations, ranging from ranked voting to independent citizen-led redistricting in all 50 states, to subsidizing projects to reinvent the public functions that social media have displaced. While I would argue that every recommendation speaks to each of us as individuals, some, like redistricting and the ones challenging the space that social media has consumed, also speak to us as designers, planners, historians, and theorists. Susan Glasser, the New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, recently recounted that in her first job out of college working on Capitol Hill as a reporter for Roll Call Newspaper, every time she walked into the Capitol building it had awed her. The building’s solidity and its spaces inspired, utterly resonating with its civic mission. How often does someone refer to buildings that way today? Successful design (architecture, landscape, urban design, information design, product design) resonates. That doesn’t mean that it has to look like the U.S. Capitol—our world is a whole lot different from what it was in 1792. But it does mean that we have to consider the effects of what we do, and how we shape the world. Even if right now I’m challenged to find much to be optimistic about, I am unswerving in my conviction about our role. Toward that end, we have an extraordinary array of classes this semester intended to engage us in this work: courses looking at how housing has been affected by changed notions of family, changed practices of the workplace, and changed expectations about climate impact. We have courses laying the grounds for design justice. We have courses positing the impacts of neoliberalism, of material extraction, and of symbols, ranging from confederate monuments to the national park service’s monuments. We have courses covering a dizzying range of techniques, ranging from gaming technology to optical strategies to acoustic ones. We’re looking at materials: their lifespans from extraction to building units; their agency; their heterogeneities; their burning; and their symbolisms. We’re looking at Tar Creek, Oklahoma; Sao Paolo, Brazil; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Tokyo, Japan; Harvard Square, and Nantucket Island. Despite having fewer students this semester, we have as many if not more courses than we’ve ever had. In response to feedback from students and the Innovation Task Force, we have committed this semester to capping studios to 10 people and capping seminars and limited enrollment workshops at 12 to ensure a better “Zoom world” for everyone. We have also reworked the class schedule—the Academic Affairs staff, working with the faculty, deserve a lot of thanks for this huge effort—to ensure that classes better accommodate the 14 different time zones we find ourselves teaching to. Smaller classes ensure stronger conversations—we even have a seminar devoted to that topic, “Talking Architecture,” focused on the art of the interview. Having witnessed the utter collapse of conversation and communication at the hand of those who believe that simply repeating falsehoods with greater volume or greater social media spread will somehow make them true, nothing could be more urgent right now than real conversation. I’ll be continuing my weekly office hours this semester, and I look forward to those conversations as well. To facilitate even more conversation within the school, we’ll be launching a new, internal website in the coming weeks. Called GSD NOW, this website can be understood as a digital Gund Hall, and will give everyone a direct window onto so much of the activity happening across the school at any given time. It will also include virtual “trays” that encourage formal and informal collaboration. Stay tuned for more details, but for now I can say that I’m super excited by it. GSD NOW will stay with us well past the pandemic as a source for information and collaboration within the school. And speaking of collaboration and conversation, if you weren’t tuned into the launch of Prada’s Fall Winter 2021 Menswear collection on Sunday morning, I encourage you all to go to the website. The runway show was followed by an intimate online conversation between a selection of students across the world with co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons. It was a remarkable acknowledgement of the value of all students, the up and coming creative generation. The GSD was represented by Celeste Martore, Ian Erikson, and Isabel Strauss. Many thanks to Assistant Professor Sean Canty for making that happen on very short notice. And as always, we have an incredible roster of lectures, conferences, and conversations in our public events calendar this term. See what happened? Just talking about what’s going on this semester has brought my optimism back. Indeed, while we have some seemingly insurmountable challenges right now, I’m really excited by what’s going on this spring—it’s all giving 2021 a good horizon. I want to end on a very personal note, though not related to me. Determined not to let 2020 go down in history as the worst year ever, Assistant Professor Jacob Reidel and his partner Laura took it upon themselves to end 2020 on a positive note. Characteristic of his talents as a writer, Jacob tells the story perfectly—you should hear it from him directly, but I’ll just share a couple lines: “Thanks to New York City’s ‘project cupid’ it became possible to meet with a clerk over Zoom. I’ll admit that jumping into a Zoom with the City Clerk on a random workday sandwiched between our own back-to-back work Zoom meetings was a whole new level of dissonance for us, but certainly special and memorable in its own way. Once we had that precious PDF license in hand, we only had until December 22 to complete the marriage with an officiant before it expired. We snuck an officiant, a laptop, and Laura’s parents into the old unused Williamsburgh Savings Bank Hall downstairs from our apartment, loaded up Zoom, exchanged rings, said our vows, smashed a glass, and got married!” I suppose that I should note here that I don’t condone breaking into spaces, but the story does continue (again, quoting Jacob): “and yes, at one point a doorman caught us using the space, but when I explained to him what we were up to, he immediately melted and said ‘let me get the lights on for you!'” A picture, a space, and a happy couple says a thousand words. Congratulations to Jacob and Laura and cheers to everyone for a light-footed and dance-filled 2021!

Honoring landscape architecture pioneer Carol R. Johnson, FASLA (MLA ’57)

The Harvard Graduate School of Design honors Carol Johnson, FASLA (MLA ’57), leading landscape architect and GSD alumna and professor, who died on December 11, 2020, at her home in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. She was 91. Johnson enjoyed a multifaceted and pioneering career, in which she turned abandoned urban sites into majestic civic spaces, and nurtured an office that would grow into one of the country’s largest and most influential landscape architecture firms. Carol Roxane Johnson arrived at the GSD almost organically. She was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, on September 6, 1929, and grew up in nearby Union, New Jersey, enjoying a connection with nature from a young age. After earning an English degree at Wellesley College in 1951, she bicycled through Europe, taking in designed and wild landscapes. In the years that followed, Johnson returned to the United States and took on gigs including as a tour guide at a wax museum in Florida, then at New England Nurseries in Bedford, Massachusetts, where she lived in a shack on the grounds. There, she met a cohort of GSD landscape architecture students, who would inspire her to pursue her own design degree. Johnson graduated from the GSD with a Master in Landscape Architecture in 1957, then took a job with the Architects Collaborative (TAC) in 1958, before opening her own firm in Cambridge in 1959. From those early days—when the office measured not much beyond a drafting table in her apartment—Carol R. Johnson & Associates grew to a staff of more than 100, taking on projects around the world. Johnson returned to the GSD to teach from 1966 to 1973. Among her honors, she became a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1982, and earned the American Society of Landscape Architects’ gold medal in 1998—the first woman awarded this prize. Over her career, Johnson’s landscape work converged around themes of the civic realm, the remediation of neglect and environmental harm, and respect for contextualism. In the early 1980s, she took on Cambridge’s John F. Kennedy Park along the Charles River, transforming the five-acre site from an oil-saturated train storage yard to a welcoming public park. Johnson cited New England streams as a contextual inspiration for her design, a project she would often note as a favorite of her career. (As the New York Times observes, Johnson would sometimes offer a different answer to the favorite-project question: “My favorite project is when something gets done.”) “Contextualism was the ruling principle behind much of Carol’s work,” says Jennifer Jones, a principal at Carol R. Johnson & Associates for over 30 years, in an interview with the New York Times. “She was respectful of the history of a place and the meaning of a place. Many designs were about healing the land.” Among Johnson’s noteworthy projects are the Mystic River State Reservation in Massachusetts, in which she turned a toxic site into a civic space, not unlike the John F. Kennedy Park; the John Marshall Park in Washington, DC, a project Johnson won via a national competition, turning a parking-lot site into a terraced landscape; and her contributions to the United States Pavilion for Expo 67 in Montreal, a collaboration with Buckminster Fuller and others. To create the pavilion’s supersized, tree-lined geodesic dome, Johnson, according to the New York Times, “barnstormed around rural Canada in a small plane, touching down when she saw [trees] she liked and buying them outright from farmers and landowners.” In 1972, Johnson worked as part of President Johnson’s Model Cities Program at the North Common in Lowell, Massachusetts, and later served as a member of the Treasury Department’s Commission on Small Business under President Carter. She focused a good deal of her attention on college and university campuses, including designs for Boston College, Duke University, Agnes Scott College, Harvard University, and her alma mater, Wellesley College. In the ethos of engaging design toward healing and remediation, Johnson also dedicated much of her career to public housing, most notably a trio of Greater Boston housing projects in the 1980s. “When she was working on public housing, she listened to what the tenants wanted, not just the bureaucrats,” Jones tells the New York Times. “While historically women landscape architects had worked primarily on residential and park projects in small offices, or as sole practitioners, she really pushed open the door for acceptance of a larger, woman-owned firm doing prestigious and complex projects in the public, institutional and corporate realm.” Today, Johnson’s firm is known as CRJA-IBI Group and has grown to include 10 principals and offices outside Boston. Johnson retired from practice in 2016 and leaves, as the Architect’s Newspaper observes, “an indelible legacy.” Learn more about Johnson via the Cultural Landscape Foundation’s oral history project.

Mexican Cities Initiative in 2020: Essays, Conversations, and Events

Harvard Graduate School of Design’s  Mexican Cities Initiative (MCI) aims to guide, through research, the shifting urban landscape of Mexico. In order to aid this urban transformation, research done with the MCI is made entirely public on their website to engage various current and future collaborators into the conversation. MCI also publishes other coursework, faculty projects, and student research to their public archive that is related to Mexico. Student research is supported by an annual summer fellowship and by partnerships inside and outside of Mexico. The initiative is advised by Diane Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism, alongside the MCI advisory board. The past year brought a robust and exciting array of essays, conversations, and events to the MCI platform. The following are excerpts from some of MCI’s 2020 offerings.

Aron Lesser Chats with Lorenzo Rocha about Public Spaces and Urban Planning Trends in Mexico City

Lorenzo Rocha: “Currently there are two main trends in Mexico City’s urban development. The first one is an outstanding re-densification of traditional neighborhoods in central areas and the second is the vast creation of new land subdivision in peripheral zones both for affordable or expensive housing. The densification process, that affects the three neighborhoods referred to in the text, takes advantage of preexisting conditions to generate value by designing taller buildings in the traditional urban fabric, further diversifying them. The new peripheral neighborhoods are generally monocultural and dependent on private and public mobility. They are the answer to our massive necessity of housing and security, which the original urban fabric can no longer provide.” Keep reading…

Feike de Jong Undertakes Photojournalistic Walk of the Tijuana/San Diego Border 

“Feike de Jong has begun BORDE(R), a photojournalistic walk of the Tijuana/San Diego border. The project explores Global South-North relations by observing the nexus of these cities’ geopolitical—and cultural—boundaries. Paying close attention to urban planning and design, Feike’s approach is rooted in his belief that city borders deserve more attention because they reveal urban realities that city centers may not.” Keep reading…

Mexican local government’s interventions against COVID-19: virtues and flaws 

The COVID-19 health crisis creates opportunities to analyze state government activity in Mexico. The social and economic impact faced by each of the country’s state governments demonstrates their responses to the cultural, social, and economic particularities of each locality, but also to their institutional capacities to respond to these growing demands. In this sense, the Mexican case has detonated the unrest of the past, making visible the complications that have historically existed in shaping the federalist puzzle, which should be autonomous and able to exercise its capacities to meet the demands of the moment. Keep reading…

Kiley Fellow Lecture: Seth Denizen, “Thinking Through Soil: Case Study from the Mezquital Valley” 

Seth Denizen is a GSD Kiley Fellow and design practitioner trained in landscape architecture and human geography. In his lecture “Thinking Through Soil: Case Study from the Mezquital Valley”, which took place on September 21, 2020, Denizen explores the relationship between land politics in the Mezquital Valley and Mexico City. He discusses both his research and the work that GSD students produced in conjunction with UNAM students in a studio course focused on the region. Watch the lecture…

Navigating the Journey of Latinas to the United States 

Carolina Sepúlveda: “While migration from Mexico to the United States diminished in recent years, the number of migrants from Central America has increased substantially since 2010[1]. As a result, Mexico has consolidated as the primary transit route for migrants from the Northern Triangle countries, including El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The migration journey through Mexico is particularly violent for women[2]. At the different stages, women are subject to extortion, human trafficking, sexual violence, and even murder in the hands of gangs and organized crime groups. The paths and tactics used by women on the move present an unstable and shifting landscape reinforced by anti-migration policies and criminal groups’ presence along the routes.” Keep reading…

Del Temblor al Arte 

Antonio Moya-Latorre: “Artists’ responses to the earthquake in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec are a perfect example of how art can contribute, in an extreme situation like the one triggered in 2017, to expand community awareness by leveraging the potential of local culture.” Visit the exhibition…

Oaxaca – Beyond Reconstruction

“Harvard GSD faculty and students published a report based on two years of research and studio practice focused on Oaxaca, Mexico after its devastating 2017 earthquake. Based on work with partners at MIT and elsewhere, and through comparative reflection on Chile’s disastrous earthquake a few years prior, the contributors to this publication analyzed what went wrong in the initial disaster recovery in Oaxaca and proposed alternative frameworks for moving forward.” Keep reading…

Remembering pioneering Black architect Donald L. Stull (1937–2020)

The Harvard Graduate School of Design honors Donald L. Stull, FAIA (MArch ’62), a groundbreaking architect who led noteworthy, award-winning, transformative design projects and who supported and amplified the unique contributions of Black architects and designers. In a remarkable career, Stull founded two firms that were owned and led by Black architects, through which he would shape cityscapes, harmonize architecture and social change, and inspire countless colleagues and mentees.

Stull died on November 28, 2020, at his home in Milton, Massachusetts. He was 83 years old.

Stull was born in Springfield, Ohio, on May 16, 1937, and took an early interest in architecture while accompanying his uncle, a bricklayer, to construction sites. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Ohio State University in 1961, then received a master’s in architecture from Harvard GSD in 1962. In 1970, he received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Ohio State; Boston Architectural College awarded him an honorary degree in 2011.

After graduating from the GSD, Stull would go on to work with the Architects Collaborative in Cambridge, co-founded by Walter Gropius, as well as Samuel Glaser Associates in Boston. In 1966, Stull established Stull Associates, at a time when, it is believed, there were only a dozen Black architects in the United States. In 1969, Stull hired M. David Lee, who was a GSD student at the time; the firm became Stull and Lee Incorporated in 1986.

“There was a confidence about him that radiated. And people liked to listen to him,” Lee told the Boston Globe. “He was so skillful in terms of his thinking and his ability to draw and frame design opportunities that I think people enjoyed being brought into that discussion.”

Stull and Lee Incorporated grew its practice from residential design to major building projects across Boston, earning awards at the highest level of the profession. Stull and Lee received the American Planning Association/Massachusetts Chapter Social Advocacy Award, and earned the American Institute of Architects Honor Award for Architecture as well as the Boston Society of Architects Honor Award for Design for their Ted Williams Tunnel design. Stull and Lee coordinated the design of nine of the city’s Orange Line subway stations, as well as a miles-long park running above them; this work earned them the Presidential Design Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. In particular, Stull and Lee designed the Orange Line’s Ruggles Station, which would emerge as a Boston landmark; the vaulted walkway at the Ruggles Station, connecting Columbus Avenue and the Northeastern University campus, was a particular point of pride for Stull.

Among other projects, Stull and Lee designed Boston’s Roxbury Community College and the Harriet Tubman House, and were lead architects and master planners for the $747 million Southwest Corridor project. In 2004, Stull discussed his design philosophy behind the Roxbury Community College project:

“He was a brilliant draftsman, a wonderful designer, and a thoughtful, philosophical practitioner,” Lee observes in the Boston Globe. “He enjoyed the respect of his peers.”

Alongside built work, Stull devoted his focus and energy to amplifying the contributions of Black architects and designers. Of note, he helped establish the New DesigNation conference; the inaugural session in Philadelphia in November 1996 gathered over 500 Black designers to examine and address the issues faced in the design professions.

Stull leaves two daughters, a son, a sister, and two grandchildren. He was predeceased by his mother Ruth Callahan Stull and his father Robert Stull of Mississippi, and longtime companion Janet Kendrick of Roxbury, Massachusetts.

Womxn in Design on shifts in design pedagogy: “The conditions in which we learn become the conditions we practice and reproduce.”

It’s been almost three years since the #MeToo movement started launching public awareness around the architecture industry’s many fault-lines. While dismantling a culture that has been troublingly hierarchical, sexist, racist, and sometimes predatory is slow, grinding work, the unprecedented events of 2020 seem to be inspiring a kind of sea change at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. “The main changes have been in the coursework, public programming, guest critics on reviews, and who is coming to teach,” says Shira Grosman of the GSD’s Womxn in Design (WiD). The student group has been highlighting the need for a revised pedagogy since first organizing Convergence, a two-day conference in late 2018 that explored the intersection between identity and design—and especially how, in the group’s words, “the conditions in which we learn become the conditions we practice and reproduce.” The conference’s workshops and panels inspired WiD to commission a separate annotated bibliography of identity theories it believes must play a greater role in design education. With sections on Feminist, Cyber-Feminist, Post-Humanist, Critical Indigenous, National Identity, Intersectionalist, Class, Critical Race, Postcolonial, Queer, Critical Disability, and Spirituality theories, the bibliography provides intentionally bite-sized excerpts rather than comprehensive texts. “It was an effort to make things accessible and digestible,” says 2019–20 cochair Fiona Kenney—“articles you could read on the bus in whatever spare time you have as a graduate student.” Currently in its second iteration, the “Bib,” as it’s colloquially called, now seems entirely prescient. Before this summer’s widespread protests and heightened awareness of systemic racism, attempts to integrate new perspectives into the curricula had been uneven across departments at the GSD. “For much of 2019 and 2020, we brainstormed with architecture professor Lisa Haber-Thomson about how to move the Bib into mainstream discourse,” says WiD’s Yashada Wagle, though COVID put a hold on any progress at the time. “The subject matter students are asking to be taught is outside what most faculty know,” adds Grosman. “We want to know about non-Western, non-Eurocentric ideas and projects, practitioners, and scholars.” The most recent Bib, coedited by Grosman and Wagle, substantially increased the content of previous editions and was available in both a color-coded print version for $35 and as a digital PDF for $5. Not only did students and faculty at the GSD buy the publication, but the Bib reached a number of other schools in the US, Canada and, interestingly, Kuwait. “We were also able to archive it at the Barnard Design Library,” notes Grosman. As with any attempt to encapsulate complex issues, the matter of what to include and exclude is a constantly moving target and things are sure to be missed—which is exactly why the bibliography is an ongoing project whose editorial leadership and research group changes every year. Although no new categories are slated for the Bib’s 2021 iteration, it will expand beyond strictly scholarly texts and include film, oral histories, podcasts, images, and articles. “I think in order to teach some subjects differently we need to consider new types of material,” explains Grosman. While the bibliography may have been an offshoot of WiD and a reflection, in part, of the GSD’s many identity-based groups, the hope has always been to benefit the school’s entire community, regardless of identity or affiliation. If introspection is key to changing the industry’s power imbalances, then this seems like a great start. “A number of public programs have responded to the moment,” says Grosman. “I think it’s too early to say that this will continue, but I hope it does.”

Coming soon: Harvard Design Magazine 48: America reflects on the United States of America as a country, an idea, and a history

Harvard Design Magazine 48: America (launching in March, 2021) strikes at the essence and the history of the United States of America, while interrogating its physical contents—its buildings, its cities, and the people who designed them—seeking linkages among them. Taking on “America” as a topic in the year 2021 may be contentious, but it’s one that the magazine’s editors consider vital, as well as one that design can uniquely inform. “I believe in the value of intellectual discomfort as a fuel to rethink, debate, and advance knowledge,” says Florencia Rodriguez, who joins the Graduate School of Design’s Mark Lee to guest edit Harvard Design Magazine 48: America. With the guiding hand of the GSD’s recently appointed editorial director, Julie Cirelli, Lee and Rodriguez have curated a reflection on America as a country, an idea, and a history. They’ve gathered design practitioners, historians, thought leaders, politicians, and others in order to approach the topic of nationhood from different angles. Lee and Rodriguez bring a commitment to linking practice with pedagogy to the magazine. Lee, an architect and educator, has contributed to and curated a variety of media, publications, and exhibitions, including as artistic director for the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial with his partner, Sharon Johnston. Rodriguez—an architect and writer—is the founder and editorial director of the publisher Lots of Architecture where she developed –NESS magazine, a periodical about architecture, life, and urban culture. This issue includes a conversation on the culture of American industrial design in relation to the larger global practice; historians reflecting on the late English architectural critic Reyner Banham; and dialogues around the culture of the American South and the scale of Miami. After all, “Politicians and public officials are critical in both the conception and implementation of design,” Lee observes. “Great cities and great architecture are reflections of the policies that govern their design. It is important for the makers of such policies and the designers who give form to such policies to be on the same page at the outset.” Harvard Design Magazine 48: America invites readers in with a series of “Call and Response” features, for which contributors were asked to send a 200-word email provocation to friends and colleagues, and await a reply—or perhaps a debate. “We asked the contributors to use the initial email as a reflection, a strong statement of any aspect of American architecture, culture, or history that they believe is in need of being examined,” Rodriguez says. “These pieces set the tone for the rest of the publication.” For the magazine’s editors, reading is critical for stoking productive conversations about design and beyond. Lee points to the intensifying pace of global society—especially of consumption—and the counterpace of the experience of reading. He believes that it can encourage a deeper reach into one’s conscience than a lecture or an exhibition might. “What architects and designers produce—buildings, cities, and landscapes—are often considered to have long-term impacts as opposed to immediate ones, and as a result are often overlooked in [political] cycles,” Lee says. “Rather than seeing such products as immediate remedies for urban or social issues, they should be seen as long-term investments, where the improvement of the built environment has a direct impact on social well-being.” As Rodriquez explains, “That Harvard Design Magazine can act as a vehicle for the ‘translation’ of political and decision-making discourses to academia and vice versa is relevant and symbolic.”

Harvard Design Magazine is an architecture and design magazine that probes at the reaches of design and its reciprocal influence on contemporary culture and life. Published twice a year and helmed by editorial director Julie Cirelli at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Harvard Design Magazine invites guest editors to consider design through an interdisciplinary lens, resulting in unique perspectives by an international group of architects, designers, students, academics, and artists. For current and back issues, as well as subscription information and stockists, visit the Harvard Design Magazine website.