The GSD Announces 2025–2026 Faculty Promotions

The Harvard Graduate School of Design announces four faculty promotions: Sean Canty to Associate Professor of Architecture, Jungyoon Kim to Associate Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture, Pablo Pérez-Ramos to Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, and Sara Zewde to Associate Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture.

Sean Canty (MArch ’14) is an architect and educator whose work explores the capacity of architectural form to reorganize spatial norms and forms of social life. He is the founder of Studio Sean Canty (SSC), a Cambridge-based, independent architecture practice that introduces novel geometries and materials to enrich the spaces of everyday life. Working across domestic, cultural, and civic programs, SSC’s design approach incorporates drawin­­­g, model-making, and immersive visualization to choreograph spatial adjacencies that balance solitude and collectivity. Canty is also a cofounder of Office III, a design collective with offices in New York, San Francisco, and Cambridge. The group was a finalist in the 2016 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program and designed the Governors Island Welcome Center. Their work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and other venues. Canty has taught or coordinated Architecture Core design studios since his first appointment at the GSD in 2017 and offers courses in design media and techniques. His pedagogy emphasizes abstraction, representation, and typological invention, drawing connections between architectural form, spatial organization, and visual communication. Prior to the GSD, Canty held teaching appointments at the Cooper Union, UC Berkeley, and California College of the Arts. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, The Cooper Union, and A83 Gallery, and his writing has appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Log, Domus, MAS Context, and several edited volumes. His accolades include the 2023 Arts and Letters Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2023 Architectural League Prize, and the 2020 Richard Rogers Fellowship from Harvard. He holds an MArch from the GSD and a BArch from California College of the Arts.

Jungyoon Kim (MLA ’00) is a practicing landscape architect, registered in the Netherlands and in Massachusetts. She founded PARKKIM with Yoonjin Park in Rotterdam in 2004 and relocated to Seoul in 2006. PARKKIM PLLC recently opened in Massachusetts with the goal of expanding its practice beyond Korea. PARKKIM has completed a wide variety of projects that range in scale and nature, including high-profile corporate landscapes and civic venues. Notable completed projects include the Seoul Museum of Craft Art (2021), Hyundai Motor Group Global Partnership Center and University Gyeongju Campus (2020), Plaza of Gyeonggi Provincial North Office (2018), CJ Blossom Park (2015), and Yanghwa Riverfront (2011). Their ongoing projects include Suseongmot Lake Floating Stage in Daegu, Korea, for which PARKKIM won the international invited competition in 2024 and is to be completed in 2026. She published the book Alternative Nature (2015), co-authored with Park, a compilation of articles written by the two principals since 2001. The term “alternative nature” was first presented in their essay “Gangnam Alternative Nature: the experience of nature without parks,” featured in the book Asian Alterity (2007), edited by William Lim, rethinking the concept of “natural” within the context of contemporary East Asian urbanism. Upon her GSD appointment, Kim has expanded PARKKIM’s design research into seminar courses and option studios, including “Lost and Alternative Nature: Vertical Mapping of Urban Subterrains for Climate Change Mitigation.” Kim was selected as “Design Leader of Next Generation” (2007) awarded by the Korean Ministry of Commerce and appointed to “Seoul Public Architect” (2011) by the Metropolitan Government Seoul. She received an MLA from the GSD and a BAgric in landscape architecture from Seoul National University with distinction.

Pablo Pérez-Ramos (MLA ’12, DDes ’18), is a licensed architect from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM); he coordinates the first-semester Landscape Architecture Core studio and teaches research seminars and lecture courses in landscape theory. Pérez-Ramos’s research explores the reciprocal relationship between design and the natural sciences, using landscape form as a medium to interpret both physical processes and abstract scientific concepts. With interests in material culture, the environmental humanities, and the philosophy of science, he has delved into the origins of ecological narratives in contemporary landscape architecture, and more recently expanded his focus to include thermodynamics, biological systematics, and evolutionary theory. His theoretical agenda underpins ongoing research on climate adaptation, traditional knowledge, and agroecological practices in conditions of extreme heat and aridity. His work is ultimately concerned with the formal tensions and interferences existing between human technology and the other physical forces and processes—tectonic, atmospheric, biological—that shape landscapes. Prior to his GSD appointment, Pérez-Ramos taught at the Northeastern University School of Architecture, Boston Architectural College, and Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid. Between 2012 and 2016, he served as regional planning coordinator for the 2025 master plan for the Metropolitan District of Quito and previously practiced as a licensed architect in Madrid. His writings have been published in the Journal of Landscape Architecture (JoLA), The International Journal of Islamic Architecture (IJIA), PLOT, MONU, Revista Arquitectura (COAM), Landscape Research Record (CELA), and in the edited volumes The Landscape as Union between Art and Science: The Legacy of Alexander von Humboldt and Ernst Haeckel (2023), and MedWays Open Atlas (2022), among others.

Sara Zewde (MLA ’15) is founding principal of Studio Zewde, a design firm practicing landscape architecture, urbanism, and public art. Recent and ongoing projects of the firm include the Dia Beacon Art Museum landscape in Beacon, New York; the Watts Towers Arts Center landscape in Watts, Los Angeles; Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio; and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Zewde’s practice and research start from her contention that the discipline of landscape architecture is tightly bound by precedents and typologies rooted in specific traditions that must be challenged. Without rigorous investigation, Zewde contends that these cultural assumptions will silently continue to constrict the practice of design and reinforce a quiet, cultural hegemony in the built form of cities and landscapes. Her projects exemplify how sensitivities to culture, ecology, and craft can serve as creative departures for expanding design traditions. Prior to joining the GSD in 2020, Zewde held faculty appointments at GSAPP, Columbia University, and the University of Texas School of Architecture. She holds an MLA from the GSD, an MCP from MIT, and a BA in sociology and statistics from Boston University. She regularly writes, lectures, and exhibits her work, and she is currently writing a manuscript based on her research of Frederick Law Olmsted’s travels through the Slave South and their impact on his practice. The book will be published in 2027 with Simon & Shuster.  Zewde was named the 2014 National Olmsted Scholar by the Landscape Architecture Foundation, a 2016 Artist-in-Residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and a United States Artists Fellow in 2020. More recently, she was named to the 2024 TIME 100 Next and *Wallpaper’s 300 People Shaping Creative America.

Prizes & Honors 2025

Each year at commencement, the Harvard Graduate School of Design confers awards on graduating students who demonstrate exceptional scholarly achievement, leadership, and service. Congratulations to the student award recipients, and to all 2025 graduates for your tremendous accomplishments.

Prize-Winning Thesis Projects

Form Follows Forest

Kei Takanami (MArch I ’25)

The Only Way Out is Through: Architecture, Building and Our Entangled Present in Gary, Indiana

Connor Daniel Gravelle (MArch II ’25)

Chemical Occupations: Anti-Colonial Reactions in the Desert

Issam Azzam (MLA I/MUP ’25)

After Snow: The Case for an Alpine Public

Cory Robinson Page (MLA I/MUP ’25)

Staging Riis

August Earnest Sklar (MLA I ’25)

VEILED VISIBILITY: SPATIAL MEMORY AND QUEER IDENTITY IN SHINJUKU NI-CHōME

Michael J. Kaneshiro Chou (MUP/MPH ’25)

Laptis

Kevin Hu (MDE ’25)

School Awards

Gerald M. McCue Medal

The Gerald M. McCue Medal is awarded each year to the student graduating from one of the school’s post-professional degree programs who has achieved the highest overall academic record.

• Connor Daniel Gravelle (MArch II ’25)

Digital Design Prize

The Digital Design Prize is presented by the Graduate School of Design to the students who have demonstrated the most imaginative and creative use of computer graphics in relation to the design professions.

• Paris Sebastian Bezanis (MArch I ’25)

Peter Rice Prize

The Peter Rice Prize honors students of exceptional promise in the school’s architecture and advanced degree programs who have proven their competence and innovation in advancing architecture and structural engineering.

• Juan Fernandez Gonzalez (MArch I ’25)

 Plimpton-Poorvu Design Prize

The Plimpton-Poorvu Design Prize recognizes the top team or individual for a viable real estate project completed as part of the GSD curriculum that best demonstrates feasibility in design, construction, economics, and in fulfillment of market and user needs.

• 1st Prize: R. Kofi Boakye Bempong   (MUP/MPA ’25)
• 1st Prize: Henry Black (MUP ’25)
• 1st Prize: Ka Weng Lai (MUD ’25)
• 1st Prize: Kiara Nahomy Wong Siu (MAUD ’25)

• 2nd Prize: Brittany Arceneaux (MRE ’25)
• 2nd Prize: Noemi Iten (MDes, Narratives ’25)
• 2nd Prize: Andres Lira Vigneaux (MArch II ’25)
• 2nd Prize: Dennis Sola (MArch II ’25)

• 3rd Prize: Ian Erickson (MArch I ’25)
• 3rd Prize: Vincent Jackow (MArch I [MIT] ’26)
• 3rd Prize: Nathan Lowrey (MRE ’25)
• 3rd Prize: Nicky Rhodes (MArch I ’26)

Clifford Wong Prize in Housing Design

The Clifford Wong Prize in Housing Design aims to help re-establish the essential role of architects in society to provide not only the fundamental needs of human shelter but to meet the challenge of designing creative solutions for improving living environments. The prize is awarded for the multi-family housing design that incorporates the most interesting ideas and/or innovations that may lead to socially oriented, improved living conditions.

• Chandler Jordan Caserta (MArch I ’25)

Best Paper on Housing

• Andres Lira Vigneaux (MArch II ’25)

Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship

Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowships are awarded to Harvard graduate students for one academic year of travel, study, and/or research outside the United States.

• Yihao Li (DDes ’24)

Architecture Awards

American Institute of Architects Medal

The American Institute of Architects Medal is awarded to a professional degree student in the Master in Architecture graduating class who has achieved the highest level of excellence in overall scholarship throughout the course of their studies.

• Stephanie L Tang (MArch I ’25)

Alpha Rho Chi Medal

The Alpha Rho Chi Medal is awarded to the graduating student who has achieved the best general record of leadership and service to the department and who gives promise of professional merit through their character.

• Catherine Shuying Chen (MArch I ’25)

James Templeton Kelley Prize

The James Templeton Kelley Prize recognizes the best final design project submitted by a graduating student in the architecture degree programs.

• MArch I: Kei Takanami  (MArch I ’25)
• MArch II: Conner Daniel Gravelle (MArch II ’25)

Julia Amory Appleton Traveling Fellowship in Architecture

The Julia Amory Appleton Traveling Fellowship is given to a student in the Department of Architecture on the basis of academic achievement as well as the worthiness of the project to be undertaken.

• Stephanie L Tang (MArch I ’25)

Kevin V. Kieran Prize

The Kevin V. Kieran Prize recognizes the highest level of academic achievement among students graduating from the post-professional Master in Architecture program.

• Duncan Angus Steele (MArch II ’25)

Dept. of Architecture Faculty Design Award

The Department of Architecture Faculty Design Award was established by the faculty of the Department of Architecture with the aim of recognizing significant achievement within a body of design work completed by a student at the GSD. This award is given to graduating students from each of the department’s two program.

• Fernando Garrido Carreras (MArch I ’25)
• Elias Bennett (MArch II ’25)

Dept. of Architecture Certificate of Academic Excellence

The Department of Architecture Certificate of Academic Excellence is awarded by the faculty of the Department of Architecture to a graduate of the professional degree program in architecture (MArch I) in recognition of their academic achievement throughout their course of study in the program.

• Jing Yao Liao (MArch I ’25)

Landscape Architecture Awards

Thesis Prize in Landscape Architecture

The Landscape Architecture Thesis Prize is given to the graduating student who has prepared the best independent thesis during the past academic year.

• Issam Azzam (MLA I/MUP ’25)
• Cory Robinson Page (MLA I/MUP ’25)
• August Earnest Sklar (MLA I ’25)

American Society of Landscape Architects Certificates

Nominated by the faculty in the GSD’s Department of Landscape Architecture, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) awards a certificate of Honor and a Certificate of Merit to students enrolled in the Master in Landscape Architecture program who have “demonstrated a high degree of academic scholarship and of accomplishment in skills related to the art and technology of landscape architecture.”

• Qijia Chen (MLA I ’25), Certificate of Merit
• Mauricio Cohen Kalb (MLA I AP/MAUD ’25), Certificate of Merit
• Anne Cecily Field (MLA I ’25), Certificate of Merit
• Issam Azzam (MLA I/MUP ’25), Certificate of Honor
• Hayden Issac Bernhardt (MLA I  ’25), Certificate of Honor
• Pedro Teixeira de Souza Brito (MLA I AP ’25), Certificate of Honor

Landscape Architecture Foundation Olmsted Scholar

Named for Frederick Law Olmsted, the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) Olmsted Scholars Program recognizes one outstanding student from each accredited landscape architecture program in the U.S. and Canada, along with the jury-selected graduate and undergraduate national award winners and finalists.

• Issam Azzam (MLA I/MUP ’25)

Norman T. Newton Prize

The Norman T. Newton Prize is given to a graduating landscape architecture student whose work best exemplifies achievement in design expression as realized in any medium.

• Justin Andrew Booz (MLA I/MDes ’25, Mediums Domain)

Peter Walker & Partners Fellowship for Landscape Architecture

The Peter Walker and Partners Fellowship for Landscape Architecture is awarded to support travel and study for a graduating GSD student to advance their understanding of the body of scholarship and practices related to landscape design.

• Cory Robinson Page (MLA I/MUP ’25)
• Dafne Saint-Hilaire (MArch I/MLA I AP ’25)

Jacob Weidenman Prize

The Jacob Weidenman Prize is awarded to the student of the most distinguished design achievement graduating from the Department of Landscape Architecture.

• Jorge González Yáñez (MLA I AP ’25)

Charles Eliot Traveling Fellowship in Landscape Architecture

The Charles Eliot Traveling Fellowship is awarded annually as the highest honor by the Department of Landscape Architecture to one of its graduates.

• Makio Yamamoto (MLA I AP/MUP  ’25)

Urban Planning and Design Awards

Academic Excellence in Urban Planning, Urban Design, and Real Estate

The Awards for Academic Excellence in Urban Planning, Urban Design, and  Real Estate honor graduating students from each of the programs who have achieved the highest academic record.

• Aanchal Chopra (MUP ’25)
• Harish Krishnamoorthy (MAUD ’25)
• Danny Kradjian (MRE ’24)

Awards for Outstanding Leadership in Urban Planning, Urban Design, and Real Estate

The Awards for Outstanding Leadership in Urban Planning, Urban Design, and Real Estate honor graduating students from each of the programs who have demonstrated outstanding leadership during their time at the Graduate School of Design.

• Hee Young Seung (MUP ’25)
• Kiara Nahomy Wong Siu (MAUD ’25)
• Leonard Oscar Allen-Smith (MRE ’24)

Thesis Prize in Urban Planning & Design

The Planning and Design Thesis Prize is given to the graduating students in each of the programs who have prepared the best independent theses during the past academic year.

• Michael J. Kaneshiro Chou (MUP/MPH ’25)

Award for Excellence in Project-Based Urban Planning

The Award for Excellence in Project-Based Urban Planning is given to students who have demonstrated exceptional ability in urban planning projects including research and design studios throughout their course of study.

• Aanchal Chopra (MUP ’25)

Award for Excellence in Urban Design

The Award for Excellence in Urban Design is given to students who have demonstrated exceptional design ability throughout their course of study in the Urban Design program.

• Natchanon Bhunto (MAUD ’25)

American Planning Association Outstanding Student Award

The American Planning Association Outstanding Student Award recognizes outstanding attainment in the study of planning by students graduating from accredited planning programs. The recipient of the award is chosen by a jury of planning faculty at each school.

• Aaron Zachary Smithson (MArch I/MUP ’25)

Ferdinand Colloredo-Mansfeld Prize for Superior Achievement in Real Estate Studies

The Ferdinand Colloredo-Mansfeld Prize for Superior Achievement in Real Estate Studies is awarded annually to a graduating student from any degree program, who has exhibited superior academic achievement and leadership in real estate studies.

• Danny Kradjian (MRE ’24)

Druker Traveling Fellowship

Established in 1986, the Druker Traveling Fellowship is open to all students at the GSD who demonstrate excellence in the design of urban environments. It offers students the opportunity to travel in the United States or abroad to pursue study that advances understanding of urban design.

• Naomi Nishit Mehta (MAUD ’25)

Design Studies Awards

Dimitris Pikionis Award

The Dimitris Pikionis Award recognizes a student for outstanding academic performance in the Master in Design Studies degree program.

• Tsz Man Nicholas Chung (MDes ’25, Narratives Domain)

Design Studies Domain Awards

• Angelina Yihan Zhang (MDes ’25, Ecologies Domain)
• Justin Andrew Booz (MDes ’25, Mediums Domain)
• Yifei Zhang (MDes ’25, Narratives Domain)
• Schola Chioma Eburuoh (MDes ’25, Publics Domain)

Design Engineering Awards

Overall Academic Performance Award

The Overall Academic Performance Award recognizes a graduating MDE student for outstanding academic performance in the Master in Design Engineering degree program.

• Malcolm Arthur Grba (MDE ’25)

Leadership and Community Prize

The Leadership and Community Prize recognizes one or more graduating students who have displayed outstanding leadership and community building within the Design Engineering cohort and who have represented MDE values to the larger world.

• Darren Kan-Fui Chin (MDE ’25)
• Fatima Alkali Mamu (MDE ’25)

Outstanding Design Engineering Project

• Kevin Hu (MDE ’25)

Malkit Shoshan on Design as an Agent of Change

Class Day at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) is a celebratory time for graduating students and their families, a day to honor achievements and reflect on the potential of a design education to impact the world beyond Harvard. In past years, invited speakers from outside the GSD community have joined the proceedings to share perspectives on design shaped through their own professional, academic, and philanthropic pursuits. The Class of 2025 will hear from someone who is already well-known at Gund Hall, and whose work is at the forefront of what design means for the world today—a world in conflict.

Malkit Shoshan, a design critic in Urban Planning and Design at the GSD, has built a practice and pedagogical methodology that foregrounds how designers can understand the sources of conflict and ultimately envision a more just and peaceful world. Much of her early work originated in the specific histories and geographies of Israel and Palestine. As founder and director of the architectural think tank Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (FAST) , Shoshan explores spaces of conflict in the region, foregrounds their histories, and envisions possible futures.

Over the past year, Shoshan has shared her perspective with the GSD in the role of Senior Loeb Scholar, another position that, in the past, has been filled by visiting scholars and practitioners. In this vital role Shoshan, presented her work and led a series of conversations that brought together interdisciplinary participants. She challenged the community to think deeply about how design can both address conflict in the present and define spaces of care and repair. Shoshan’s visually rich presentations featured layered images that evoke the complexity of her subject. Archival materials, detailed geographic studies, and personal stories came together to drive new narratives.

An ethos of design informed by a commitment to human rights underlies Shoshan’s courses at the GSD, including Forms of Assembly, an advanced research seminar for Master in Design Studies (MDes) students to prepare open projects. The course encourages approaches to design that inspire democratic processes and broad participatory discussions. It is in that spirit that Shoshan will address her students and the wider community. In advance of her address, Shoshan spoke with the GSD’s William Smith about her work and her message to the Class of 2025.

Given the many projects that you currently have underway as a teacher, scholar, and practitioner, why was it important to you to take on the additional role of Senior Loeb Scholar?

My work is situated at the intersection of spatial design and human rights. We at FAST use architecture, urban planning, and participatory design processes to make visible and address public concerns, co-developing alternative visions through design. We primarily collaborate with institutions such as UN agencies but also work directly with local communities in conflict-affected regions. Our initial projects, which started decades ago, were in Israel-Palestine, my homeland.

The Senior Loeb Scholarship, I believe, was a response to the events following October 7th. The brutal Hamas attack on Israeli civilians was devastating, as was the subsequent Israeli response. We are part of an international community, interconnected by shared humanity. Moreover, the technologies available us today project the news in eerie high resolution and in real-time, straight into our mobile devices. Even at a distance, we are close to each other.

This period was overwhelming and deeply personal. It was especially painful for me: most of my family is in Israel, and I have friends in Gaza. I have been working on a project since 2020 with a group of Gazan farmers, studying how the Israeli blockade and occupation protocols impact daily life on their small farm. This project was awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Sadly, the farm has now been destroyed; many farmers have been killed, and those who remain are living in tents, surviving each day, hour by hour, minute by minute.

All of this is part of my personal background, but I was not alone in feeling overwhelmed. At the GSD, I had students eager to talk about these issues. They wanted a safe space for conversations—personal and professional. Because we are all driven by hope, I used the Senior Loeb Scholarship as an umbrella to organize a series of lectures, events, conversations, and workshops with students and practitioners—including scholars, policymakers, civil servants, artists, architects, and human rights lawyers. The goal was to explore how injustice manifests at different scales and in various spaces and to learn how spatial design can contribute to addressing these complex issues.

One of the discussions you organized focused on the theme of “care.” How does care manifest in design?

An important aspect for me was emphasizing not only the humanization of each other but also care amidst the violence that surrounds us. We cannot ignore or suppress these narratives. In her book The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit writes:

“What’s your story? It’s all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and prisons out of them. To be without a story is to be lost in a vast world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.”

I often cite this quote, as well as the long and important essay of Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others. Sontag discusses the role of empathy and imagination, with a virtual meditative conversation with Virginia Woolf—highlighting the challenge we face in truly understanding and imagining others’ experiences and suffering.  These writings inspired the framework for my events: how can we, during the most difficult times, put ourselves in someone else’s story? How can design help foster empathy and expand our imagination?

Design represents a way to imagine what else is possible, to speculate on a future beyond violence and despair. It provides a space where we can rethink and reimagine our possibilities, offering hope in a very challenging world. Escaping this sense of helplessness is difficult, but I believe that engaging with design as a form of active hope can be part of the solution.

By sharing your work and leading discussions informed by decades of practice, you gave the GSD community and important perspective. What did you learn through the conversations you inspired as Senior Loeb Scholar?

The role was an opportunity to create a space for meaningful dialogue around complex, often contested issues. These conversations are inherently challenging because they touch on deeply held beliefs, systemic inequalities, and emotional investments. The nature of these discussions underscores the difficulty in addressing contentious topics; many individuals tend to be entrenched in their opinions or operate within echo chambers, facilitated by social media and technological platforms that often reinforce rather than challenge individual perspectives.

Through guiding these discussions, I learned that while the space for dialogue can be fraught with discomfort, it is also profoundly necessary. It’s a space where confusion and vulnerability are not only inevitable but also valuable. Encountering students and community members who are initially shy or unsure about forming opinions reminded me that many people need time, patience, and a safe environment to engage meaningfully with complex issues. It became clear that the process of questioning, openness, and active listening are essential components of growth—not just for individuals but for the collective community. It is not about having answers, but about listening, and that is something that I also had to work and need to keep working on myself; it is so much easier to speak than to listen and just realize that there are always so many narratives at place, and that’s OK.

My main goal with these events was to hold space—creating an environment where difficult conversations can take place ideally without judgment. This meant acknowledging the emotional labor involved and recognizing that meaningful engagement requires time and care. The Senior Loeb Scholars program provided a valuable umbrella for these efforts, demonstrating that institutional commitment to such dialogue can build trust and slowly encourage a deeper understanding of the situations and of ourselves.

Importantly, I feel that we need to find ways to embed these kinds of spaces in a more systemic way to allow sustaining these formal and informal critical conversations beyond isolated events. Designing intentional structures which is also not overly institutional and prescribed in advance within academic and professional communities can enable ongoing engagement with uncomfortable knowledge.

How do you, as a designer, work with archival materials and historical sources to understand today’s conflicts?

The archive emerges as an essential, yet complex, tool for understanding and intervening in contested spaces. It isn’t merely a collection of past documents; it functions as a living infrastructure for knowledge production, memory, and power. Navigating the archive requires care, criticality, and awareness of its inherent contours—since archives are often political spaces that both preserve contestation and serve as sites of potential intervention.

The landscape on which we design is fundamentally non-neutral. It is a terrain layered with histories, claims of ownership, power dynamics, and social conflicts. The lines we inscribe on this terrain—whether literal boundaries or symbolic demarcations—are rendered visible through archival materials such as maps, photographs, governmental records, or historical narratives. These lines both reflect and shape ongoing territorial disputes and social struggles, serving as contested evidence of ownership and control.

In this context, the act of working with archives becomes an act of engagement with these underlying conflicts. As Saidiya Hartman has extensively discussed, archives hold evidence not only of victory but also of subjugation, erasure, and exclusion. Recognizing this, I approach archives with an ethical awareness: they reflect histories of dominance and resistance, of displacement and resilience. To neglect this complexity is to risk reproducing or silencing parts of these histories.

My own engagement with archives has been shaped by historical materials from my country, Israel. For example, I have studied the archives of the architecture faculty at the Technion, where old national atlases from the post-World War II era (which were not exclusive to Israel), exemplified rapid processes of nation building. In my case, I wanted to understand the history of my country, so I studied these atlases and the associated material (such as regional masterplans) which documented not only physical rebuilding but also the reconstruction of national identity through master plans and territorial delineations. Maps, in this context, are more than representations—they are sites where the national project unfolds at an unprecedented pace, often implicating complex processes of displacement, exclusion, and territorial assertion.

In my teaching and practice, I emphasize that designing in such environments demands sensitivity to these histories. It requires recognizing that spaces carry stories of belonging, displacement, and resilience. Our interventions must be aware of their capacity to reinforce existing structures or open pathways toward repair and inclusion.

Beyond academia, I direct a foundation based in Amsterdam dedicated to engaging with archives as infrastructures for knowledge and intervention. Each project we undertake integrates archival research—collecting stories of often-invisible realities, histories, and cultural practices. For example, our research on the impact of UN peacekeeping missions is stored in the national architecture archive of the Netherlands, serving both as documentation and as a resource for future inquiry. Similarly, our studies of Gaza’s farming communities are preserved within a textile museum archive, reinforcing the importance of diverse, community-driven histories.

Archives can reveal stories that challenge existing narratives, highlight marginalized voices, and offer pathways toward understanding and reconciliation. They remind us that spaces are not merely physical entities but are constructed through histories, memories, and social struggles. As designers, our role is to navigate these complexities ethically, critically, and creatively—using historical sources not as definitive answers but as avenues for engaging deeply with the present and envisioning more just futures.

Many of the MDes open projects presented in your Spring 2025 course “Forms of Assembly: All Things Considered” grappled with difficult challenges related to environmental degradation or longstanding conflicts. But there was also an overarching belief in the power of public assembly and collective expression. How do you encourage students to maintain that sense of hope and purpose as designers amid seemingly overwhelming challenges?

I don’t need to encourage the students. They are extremely motivated and concerned, and they are eager to discover what tools they have and what they can do with design to contribute to society and their communities.

I started offering this course during the Covid-19 pandemic, when all of us were confined to our homes, often living in different countries, cultures, and time zones. The GSD’s international makeup is one of its strengths; we are exposed to so many cultures and languages. As we met via Zoom at the time, the question of assembly became very relevant. How do we assemble under these conditions? We explored spaces of dialogue, exchange of ideas, and solidarity; spaces which perhaps resemble the description of the world by Hannah Arendt—the invisible table that we humans gather around to exchange our ideas and make them public.

Students began sending postcards and items they cared about across the globe to connect more intimately with each other. They developed lasting friendships and eventually made parts of these stories public. A student shared a key to her art studio in Shanghai with a student from Brooklyn while exploring how to share both her process and her exhibition with the group. They exchanged recipes and hosted online dinner parties, which I liked because it allowed us to share more of our personal backgrounds than when we meet in person.

In that first class, two students—one from Bangalore, India, and another from Santa Fe, New Mexico—looked into the archives of the Peabody Museum and created a two-day international symposium online. Both students come from communities that have been oppressed under imperialism—India and the Navaho Nation—so each looked into different entries and provenance items shown at the museum. The symposium they initiated was beautiful, bringing together so many diverse voices.

How has the class evolved since the pandemic?

In a peculiar way, given recent news regarding the risks of academic freedom and the international make up of our school, this question has received a new sense of relevance. How to assemble? What are the forms of effective assemblies we can enact under stress?

We can only face the challenges of today as a collective, an assembly, as practitioners, as human beings, which are part of a bigger web of actors. The stresses we are under, whether the climate crisis, diminishing democracies, polarization, growing inequality, or the fact that even mentioning the word “justice” as a value and direction we should all aspire toward has become contested, we can, of course, address these issues—and need to address these issues—at a personal level. But these are collective, societal challenges, and to contribute to change, the assembly is important.

Yet this assembly should not be considered a homogeneous group. Forms of Assembly: All Things Considered, the course from Spring 2025, is about the power and beauty of diverse voices and opinions, of the different forms of life that inhabit this planet and the importance of situated knowledges –the depth of knowledge that exist in each site we engage with. In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour suggests that we should begin thinking about a new constitution that is more inclusive, representing not only humans but also nonhuman objects and things: all those who inhabit this planet.

Many of the projects in this class originated from a very personal place and turned it into something much bigger. Students are often much more passionate and can understand how to navigate such complexity better when working on issues they care about. They can learn how to engage design and apply it to their cause because of their familiarity with the context. After that, the methods they develop can be used in other cases and places.

This year, for instance, one student spoke about order and freedom in contested times. Building on her Jewish heritage and family ritual of the Passover Eve Seder and its tale of physical and spiritual transformation from slavery to freedom, she saw an opportunity to speak about what liberation means for everyone else. Another student investigated, for the first time, the impact of a dam on her community in India and the protracted environmental degradation it caused. She looked at it from multidisciplinary perspectives, from labor conditions to agricultural practices to gender and class disparities.

Another student worked with a women’s NGO from Mexico that is working continuously to address cartel violence, trace the hundreds of thousands of missing people (some of whom are their family members—sons, husbands, brothers, fathers), and campaign for policy change. The student from Mexico worked with them to create a nomadic exhibition that helps raise awareness, creating a space of gathering/assemblies in different spaces that function not only as a representation tool but also as a dynamic archive, a memorial, and a space that brings victims together. It was a beautiful project that also creates a direct bridge from the academia to the real world.

How you see the role of the designer in today’s world of multiple, overlapping crisis, from climate change to military conflict to the rise of authoritarianism?  

 In our increasingly complex, siloed, and fragmented world—what many now refer to as a “polycrisis”—the role of the designer is more vital than ever. Design can serve as a bridge—connecting ideas, sectors, communities, and ecological systems that are often seen as isolated or incompatible. In a world rife with fragmentation, design can demonstrate the relationality between elements, highlighting our blind spots while expanding our collective imagination of what is possible. It becomes a lens for understanding and intervening in the interconnected webs that shape societal and environmental outcomes.

Our world is composed of complex ecosystems—built environments, social networks, natural landscapes—that are shaped by socio-economic, cultural, historical, and financial factors. These factors influence the quality of our lives and are often invisible or overlooked in traditional approaches. When we use design to examine these interconnections, it opens entirely new possibilities for insight: understanding how policies influence environments, how technology shapes urban life, or how financial mechanisms impact ecological stability. Design is thus a tool for generating knowledge in the in-between spaces—those zones where disciplines, ideas, and stakeholders converge.

This approach transforms design from a static object into an active agent—one that can reveal past and present damages, stimulate dialogue, and propose alternative futures. For example, in the classroom we often addressing migration and environmental challenges. Students explore the complexities of migration—designing support systems, informational tools, and policy proposals that for instance facilitate safer journeys for migrants from Latin America to the United States. These projects involve engagement with NGOs, legal experts, and local communities, demonstrating how design can serve as a strategic instrument—amplifying voices and fostering tangible change

Design has the power to act as a catalyst for systemic change. I encounter this both through my practice and the ongoing collaborations, as the director of FAST with UN agencies—one of which influenced a UN resolution on peacekeeping missions in 2017, as well as important policy papers—and through my pedagogy, the work we do in class, where students are developing innovative proposals. The design of the built environment and design thinking are uniquely suited to help us navigate complexity because of their multi-scalar, multi-temporal, and interdisciplinary nature.

This semester, in another course I taught—Spatial Design Strategies for Climate and Conflict-Induced Migration—we worked closely with UNHCR and UN Habitat to gain a deeper understanding of the spatial challenges faced by a world in motion. With hundreds of millions of displaced persons, the question of how we design homes for people on the move has received new salience.

What would you say to those who might downplay the importance of design in the face of seemingly more urgent or pressing issues?

In a world of urgent crises, dismissing design as irrelevant or secondary is a mistake. Instead, we must recognize that design is a potent agent—one that can connect fragmented systems, empower communities, and foster innovative pathways toward a more resilient, equitable, and sustainable future.

What’s in a Grid?

Each year, the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) creates a visual identity for commencement exercises and related events and exhibitions. This year’s design, developed by art director Chad Kloepfer and graphic design consultant Willis Kingery, uses color to define grids of varying widths that frame text in GSD Gothic, the School’s custom typeface. The pattern appears on tickets for commencement events, exhibition title walls, banners throughout the school, and website graphics.

For the past several years, the commencement identity has utilized formal graphic treatments: repeating forms, eccentric shapes, and geometric patterns. In 2024, for example, the design featured off-cast forms found in the trays. Moving in a different direction for the Class of 2025, Kloepfer chose to emphasize color. 

 Seeking to “deploy color in a meaningful way,” Kloepfer and Kingery devised each grid pattern with a “core color” linked to the GSD’s identity system. The School’s signature green, pink, blue, and yellow anchor the rest of the color choices in a given iteration, with the designers working toward a harmonious palette. The visual identity leads to surprisingly complex results, especially in areas where bars of color overlap, creating a woven effect. Some of the title treatments for end-of-year exhibitions in the Druker Design Gallery, for example, feature a combination of translucent tape and paint to achieve the right intensity of color where the vertical and horizontal elements of the grid meet.The grid structure was inspired in part by tartans, distinctive woven patterns created by intersecting strips of varying width. The specific variations of color and weave in tartans have historically carried symbolic meanings. In architecture, the “tartan grid” refers to a grid system where the vertical and horizontal elements are not necessarily aligned or spaced evenly. The irregular features of these patterns create a sense of dynamism, whether in space or textiles.

Another inspiration comes from Karel Martens, the Amsterdam-based designer who developed the visual identity for the GSD’s public programs for the 2024–2025 school year. Marten’s monoprints in particular, on which two colors overlap to create a third, served as a point of reference for Kloepfer and Kingery. “The monoprints are all about time,” says Kloepfer. “The ink dries and then you can print again a day or two later. It’s a beautiful way to work in our era of high-speed.”  

Nina Chase on Building Connections through the Harvard GSD

Not so long ago, Nina Chase (MLA II ’12) stood beside her Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) classmates, enjoying commencement week activities. This year on Class Day, Chase—co-founder of Merritt Chase Landscape Architecture —will be a featured speaker at these activities, welcoming new graduates to the alumni community.

Co-chair of the GSD Alumni Council for the past three years and a council member since 2018, Chase has been engaged with the GSD in varying capacities since 2010, when she entered the master of landscape architecture II program. The years as a GSD student, she notes, “had an outsized impact on my career overall, especially my view of how landscape architecture fits into the design world. The people I met, and the expansion of what I knew landscape architecture could be . . . it was transformative.” Indeed, two principles imparted at the GSD—the significance of building connections and the value of communication—continue to guide Chase’s practice today.

Approaching the end of a four-year bachelor program in landscape architecture at West Virginia University (WVU), Chase decided to pursue a master’s degree. “The GSD,” she recalls, “was the only place I wanted to go. In an undergraduate professional practice class at WVU, we each researched a different national firm—Michael Van Valkenburg Associates, OLIN, EDSA. . . .” Chase researched the only woman-led firm on the list, Martha Schwartz Partners. “At the end of the project, a classmate presented a slide listing the firms’ principals and their education credentials, and every single principal had gone to this place called the GSD. I vividly remember thinking, ‘I have to go to there!’” Ultimately Chase did, and she soon experienced a “full-circle moment”: her first studio, which explored ecotourism in Greece, was taught by Schwartz.

Nearly 15 years later, Chase still finds herself drawing on concepts encountered in her GSD classes. The course “Leading the Design Firm,” which addressed the logistics of opening and running a practice, has served her well as a business owner; in 2017, after gaining experience at the Boston-based practice Sasaki, she established Merritt Chase Landscape Architecture with Chris Merritt (MLA ’17). As a principal and a designer in general, another GSD lesson has proved crucial for Chase. “The class ‘Communications for Designers’ was just incredible,” Chase recalls, in that it taught her a range of techniques to distill the complexity of her projects and convey their value to different audiences. “I learned how to communicate at the GSD, and how to build connections outside the world of landscape architecture,” says Chase.

What’s more, the MLA curriculum broadened Chase’s understanding of the discipline’s reach. “The GSD allowed me to expand the grounded, traditional landscape architecture education I received at WVU to an urban scale. At the GSD we were thinking about natural systems and cities,” she explains. Referencing a studio on sea level rise in New York City and another on the Chicago River, Chase continues, “I took many classes about urban American post-industrial landscapes; those projects really shaped much of my current work.”

Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, (where Chase resides) and Indianapolis, Indiana, (Merritt’s home turf), Merritt Chase holds a unique appreciation for the challenges faced by post-industrial urban areas, and the firm has garnered widespread acclaim for creating public spaces across Middle America. Recently Chase and Merritt were named fellows of the Emerson Collective , an organization that, among other initiatives, supports innovators dedicated to strengthening communities through site-specific interventions. As part of the Local Leaders cohort, Chase and Merritt will continue their work in downtown Indianapolis refashioning Monument Circle , the city’s civic center, from a traffic circle into a human-scaled environment for interaction and connection.

As the initial project in Indianapolis’s South Downtown Connectivity Vision Plan , part of the city’s resiliency strategy, Merritt Chase installed a temporary park in Monument Circle, which will soon return for its third summer as the firm works on the area’s long-range plan. Monument Circle Park consists of a series of verdant circles, trees, and plantings that providing garden-like and shaded places for play, activities, and community engagement within a space formerly dedicated to auto traffic. In addition to enlivening the social realm, this recurring pop-up park doubles as an advocacy tool; as Chase explains, “we are trying to show that by investing in public space on a traffic circle in the middle of downtown Indianapolis, by making the space a park and partially closing it to traffic, there can be a huge benefit.”

Chase’s earliest foray into short-term installations came in 2015, prior to cofounding Merritt Chase, with the award-winning Kit of Parks —a portable kit that, in five minutes, assembles into a flexible pop-up parklet and play area. Such tactical urbanism or temporary placemaking now features regularly in Merritt Chase’s projects, as part of larger planning work or projects that have longer timeframes. “When we are working with a community to fundraise for a project and we need to get funders and people excited about the project,” says Chase, “we’ll do a short-term installation or prototype of the permanent project to build momentum for the long-term vision. It’s very much part of how we think about planning and built work. The short-term work is about communication and advocacy.”

Vision plays a role not only in Chase’s design work, but also in her efforts as a disciplinary ambassador for landscape architecture. A primary avenue of Chase’s advocacy is volunteer service, in Pittsburgh and nationally, as well as for the GSD. For eight years she has served on the GSD Alumni Council, the main representative body of the school’s 15,000 alumni. Such work allows Chase “to continue to advocate for the profession and the value of landscape architecture. The process of urban design and city building has sometimes, but not always, included landscape architects,” she notes, “but it should always happen with landscape architects at the table. If we’re thinking about the future of a city, collectively we should be thinking about how to integrate natural systems and cultural systems, and to ensure that the identity of places is reflected in the public realm.”

In addition to providing a platform for advocacy, board service offers opportunities to make connections within and beyond the discipline—a critical component of a successful designer’s career. For Chase, being part of the GSD community has been “an incredibly life-changing experience—just being able to tap into this network of people who are leaders at firms and other schools across the country, and becoming part of that supportive community.” Chase initiated this process while she was a student at the GSD, and she advises current students to do the same. “Becoming part of that community starts with the design work you do in school, learning as much as you can from your incredible professors and classmates, and then there is the other side of it . . . getting outside the trays, off your computer, and participating in events like lectures, the Halloween Party, the Beaux Arts Ball. It may seem silly in the moment,” Chase concedes, “to spend time at Beer & Dogs at the end of the week. It’s just happy hour, right? But that’s where lifelong connections get made. For us as a firm, those connections became relationships that have continued to expand our interests and support our practice. So much of our work today was made possible because of connections from when we were at the GSD or because of the GSD,” asserts Chase.

Reflecting on her Alumni Council participation, Chase notes that “it’s been a wonderful way to stay connected with the GSD.” As co-chair, she has worked to increase the council’s visibility among alumni, students, and school’s leadership and faculty. “The alumni are such an incredible resource, and we’re everywhere. On the council, we continue to build out the GSD network. We’re a constellation of people who are leaders in our communities; we meet twice a year at Gund, and then we all go back to our home regions and continue to make connections locally. To me, that’s the power of the GSD,” says Chase. “My goal has been to help facilitate those connections.”

 

*All images courtesy of Merritt Chase.

Meet the GSD Class of 2025 Commencement Marshals

Each year, graduating students from the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) come together to nominate and elect classmates to serve as commencement marshals by program. Being selected as a commencement marshal is one of Harvard’s most beloved traditions and is a high honor for a graduating student. During commencement exercises, marshals help to organize the GSD procession to Harvard Yard. After commencement, the marshals become the alumni liaisons for their class cohorts.

Meet the graduates who will represent their programs at the GSD’s 2025 Commencement:

Architecture: Neha Harish

Neha is an architect from Bengaluru, India, who holds a bachelor of architecture from RV College of Architecture and a master of architecture II from Harvard GSD. After acquiring her licensure in India, Neha has worked with the offices of CollectiveProject in Bengaluru and Studio Gang in Chicago. With a primordial interest in typological histories, Neha’s work focuses on clarifying architecture’s position within material-energy-labor relationships that affect construction assemblies as a means to look at our contribution to the climate crisis. In this pursuit, her love for hand drawing-making has prompted her to travel extensively, striving to bring forth regional material and pedagogical histories, written and oral. In her spare time Neha enjoys playing basketball, nourishing her eternal love for the sport.

Landscape Architecture: Sophie Flinner

Born and raised in Orrville, Ohio, Sophie grew up in a family of farmers and gardeners. This early exposure inspired her pursuit of a bachelor of landscape architecture from the Knowlton School of Architecture at The Ohio State University, where her academic work received multiple accolades. While at the GSD, Sophie was a Hunnewell Intern at the Arnold Arboretum , worked as a technical assistant in the Zünd Room , and took pride in being a class representative. Her professional interests lie in small-scale gardens, intricate planting plans, and designing landscapes that are both aesthetic and sustainable. In her free time, Sophie enjoys producing music, going for long walks, writing, and spending time with friends.

Urban Design: Trinity Kao

Trinity Kao (Tsae Wei Kao) grew up in Taipei, Taiwan. She is a registered architect with a bachelor of architecture from Chung Yuan Christian University and is receiving a master of architecture in urban design from the Harvard GSD. She has a deep interest in how urban dwellers interact with public spaces, as well as in civic and cultural projects. With international experience at KHL Architects & Planners in Taiwan, Pelli Clarke & Partners in Tokyo, and KPF in New York, Trinity has worked on projects across diverse cultural and environmental contexts. She served as the president of Taiwan GSD and class representative for her MAUD class. Known for her love of art and music, Trinity taught a J-Term course at GSD called “Understanding Urban Landscape through Art and Musicals.” She likes to sketch and take photos in her free time; her photography and illustrations have earned awards and been featured in multiple publications. Trinity is honored to represent the 2025 cohort of MAUD and MLAUD!

Urban Planning: Giovanna Lia Toledo

Born and raised in Sorocaba, Brazil, Giovanna came to the GSD as a Jorge Paulo Lemann Fellow pursuing a master’s degree in urban planning. She focused on international and comparative planning, with a particular interest in the intersection of housing, climate, and social equity. At Harvard, Giovanna served as Social Impact Vice President for the Brazil Conference , student ambassador for the Center for International Development , and research assistant with the Department of Urban Planning and Design. She also mentored students and served as the GSD officer for the Harvard Brazilian Association, working to amplify the presence of Brazilian and international students on campus. Her research includes work for the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston on their 2025 Community Lending Plan and with MIT D-LAB , focused on innovation and participatory design in the Global South. Giovanna is honored to represent the Master in Urban Planning Class of 2025!

Real Estate: Daniel Park

Originally from Southern California, Daniel earned his bachelor of science in business administration from USC and is receiving a master in real estate from Harvard University. He has over five years of experience in acquisitions and asset management at family offices and institutional owner-operators such as Veritas Investments and Related , with a focus on value-add strategies across multifamily, retail, manufactured housing, student housing, and other asset classes. At Harvard, Daniel served as executive vice president of the Real Estate Club and was recognized as a Pension Real Estate Association (PREA) sponsored Real Estate Intensive Scholar and an Urban Land Institute Etkin Scholar .

Daniel takes an opportunistic approach to real estate private equity, targeting temporarily out-of-favor assets in dislocated markets ahead of institutional capital. He focuses on unlocking value through strategic repositioning, operational improvements, and disciplined execution. Outside of work, he enjoys driving along the Pacific Coast Highway, golfing, surfing, sailing, and deep-sea fishing.

Daniel is honored to represent the Harvard Master in Real Estate Class of 2025. He is committed to serving as a representative of the program, supporting his classmates, and fostering a stronger sense of connection, purpose, and pride within the class and the broader Harvard community.

Design Studies: Navya Raju

Navya was born and raised in Bangalore, India, where she earned her bachelor of architecture with distinction. Before pursuing her master in design studies at the GSD, she worked as a sustainable design specialist at Space Matrix Design Consultants , where she led global sustainability certifications including LEED, WELL, and IGBC. She integrated net-zero strategies into design solutions for Fortune 500 companies and global real estate portfolios, including Sequoia Capital and Brookfield Properties .

At Harvard and MIT, Navya explored how principles of ecology and sustainable building design can inform real estate and the future of the built environment. She was an active contributor to Harvard and MIT’s 2026 net-zero campus decarbonization efforts. Navya served as the MDes Ecologies class representative and won the 2025 Unsung Hero Book Prize for her kindness, leadership, and academic excellence. In her leisure time, Navya enjoys playing soccer, teaching Indian classical dance to undergraduate students at Harvard Dance Center, and exploring Boston with her friends. Navya is honored to represent the remarkable 2025 cohort of MDes students.

Design Engineering: Darren Chin

Born and raised in Edmonton, Canada, Darren is a proud first-generation college (and now master’s!) graduate, earning a bachelor of commerce at the University of Alberta. Initially working in management consulting, Darren pivoted into tech product management and product design, channeling his passion for creating impactful user experiences, most recently at Boston Consulting Group’s Digital Ventures team. During his time at Harvard, he’s tinkered on new venture ideas with classmates, worked at the Bloomberg Center for Cities , and visited small farms in Hawaii and New York for his thesis project on improving how small farms operate. These experiences allowed him to build his entrepreneurial muscle and learn to fully build zero-to-one. In his free time, you can find Darren at the Harvard Ceramics lab or training for his first sprint triathlon.

Doctor of Design: Gorata Kgafela

Gorata is a design-led innovation strategist from Gaborone, Botswana, whose work bridges architecture, policy, and business to address complex challenges with creativity and purpose. She brings a systems-thinking approach to design, using it as a strategic tool to foster equity, collaboration, and transformative change across disciplines. Her doctoral research at the Harvard GSD explores the use of game design to reimagine public policy, developing playful yet impactful frameworks for collective decision-making. She also holds a BA in Architecture (magna cum laude, Washington University), a Master of Architecture (Valedictorian, AIA Henry Adams Medal, University of Miami), and an MBA (University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science).

At the GSD, Gorata served as a teaching fellow, co-president of AfricaGSD, and finance co-chair of the inaugural Harvard Housing Infrastructure, Policy, and Design Symposium . As class marshal, she represents a journey shaped by leadership, service, and a vision for justice and inclusive innovation. She connects people through human-centered and deeply collaborative design.

Gorata is guided by the spirit of Botho, a Setswana philosophy rooted in dignity, mutual respect, and shared humanity. She finds joy in traveling the world with her husband and children, grounding herself through yoga, and serving God with gratitude and faith.

Whispered Stories: Le Corbusier in Chandigarh

In 1950, the Indian government commissioned Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier to design the city of Chandigarh. The project is often seen as marking a new era of modern architecture in South Asia. Records housed in the Frances Loeb Library at the GSD reveal the challenges of the monumental project as well as its influence and legacy. This semester, Graduate School of Design students Rishita Sen (MArch II 2025) and Neha Harish (MArch II 2025) organized a conversation on India’s rich history in modernist architecture, inspired by the Le Corbusier collection in the Frances Loeb Library Archives and Le Corbusier’s design of Chandigharh.

In collaboration with Rahul Mehrotra, John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization, and Ines Zalduendo , Special Collections Curator, the group met one evening to view historic objects and share stories that Mehrotra gathered as a result of his proximity to Le Corbusier’s community in India. The gathering is part of a series of “Archives Parties” that Zalduendo offers to the GSD community in collaboration with professors, student groups, and others interested in focusing on a particular theme or subject within the library’s collections.

“We represent a group of South Asian nations at the GSD,” said Sen, “and, because Neha and I are both so familiar with how modernism came to India, we wanted to pay homage to what we know, while setting the stage for future conversations focused on a range of South Asian nations and themes.”

The story of modernism in India starts with its independence from Britain in 1947, when the nation embraced the opportunity to define its identity through architecture and design. While “revivalists” attempted to reinvigorate older forms of Indian architecture to signify this new moment, Jawaharlal Nehru, the nation’s first prime minister, “embraced modernism as the appropriate vehicle for representing India’s future agenda,” writes Mehrotra in Architecture in India Since 1990. Modernism was free of associations with the British Empire and symbolized the pluralistic nation’s desire to be “progressive” and globally connected. Earlier in the century, Art Deco had become popular, introducing the use of reinforced concrete by the Maharajas, explained Mehrotra, and aligning Art Deco with opulence. At the same time, starting in about 1915, Gandhi constructed ashrams with a an aesthetic that grew out of frugality, creating an association between modernism and Gandhi’s ethics of  “minimalism,” and the ethos of today’s environmentalism and sustainability.

In 1950, Nehru commissioned Le Corbusier to design Chandigarh, setting in motion the country’s nascent development program and national identity under the era’s premise that, writes Mehrotra, “architects could shape the form not only of the physical environment but of social life.” A culture could be determined by its design.

At the Frances Loeb Library Archives, Harish, Sen, Mehrotra, and Zalduendo gathered with staff, faculty, and students to discuss a range of objects from the university archives as well as Mehrotra’s personal collection. Mehrotra noted how refreshing it was to be able to speak conversationally about these histories, within the context of the typically more formal archives at an institution.

“We were interested in engaging with oral histories,” said Harish, “which have been reiterated over the years.”

“Having grown up in Bombay,” said Mehrotra, “and having known architects who worked in that time, I heard many stories about who went to receive Corbusier at the airport when he travelled from Paris to make his connections to Delhi, or for his projects in Ahmedabad, etc.. Also how in his stays in Mumbai, Doshi and Correa walked with him on Juhu Beach, discussing architecture.” Some of the “whispered accounts” that circulated in the community between Le Corbusier and other architects and contractors in India from the 1950s to 1970s were evident in letters Mehrotra shared. In one, from Le Corbusier to the Indian government, the architect stridently requests an overdue payment. “Everyone believes that Le Corbu received incredible patronage in India,” said Mehrotra, “but, in fact, it was an uphill task, and, as was evident in the letter I shared, the man was going to go bankrupt.”

In other correspondence, notes Harish, “we saw the concept of jugaad,” a Hindi word meaning “make do with what you have,” as Le Corbusier had to “mend and mold the concrete every step of the way. Once he’d had this experience with the concrete looking so handcrafted in India, he could never replicate it anywhere else.” Le Corbusier used concrete for the construction of Harvard’s Carpenter Center , the only building he designed in North America , completed in 1963.

Mehrotra’s revised and updated Bombay Deco (Pictor Publishing), written with the late Sharada Dwivedi, was released in December 2024, and speaks to the history of Art Deco in India. In 2018, Mumbai’s collection of Art Deco buildings, the second largest in the world, was named a UNESCO World Heritage site. Le Corbusier’s use of concrete in Chandigarh rose out of that Art Deco tradition in Mumbai.

“Art Deco resulted in the creation of a whole industry that could produce reinforced concrete,” Mehrotra explained. “So, for Le Corbusier, the technology developed over 30 years. If Art Deco hadn’t happened [in Mumbai], and we weren’t using reinforced concrete, he couldn’t have built Chandigarh—because that’s the material he knew.”

The group also discussed Le Corbusier’s relationship with other key figures, including his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, who collaborated with him on building Chandigarh. Jeanneret and Le Corbusier had practiced together in France for over a decade, until 1937, and then, alongside the couple Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, reunited to design and construct Chandigarh.

Finally, the group celebrated the role that British urban planner Jacqueline Tyrwhitt played in developing architectural projects and discourse in South Asia in the 1940s and ’50s. Trywhitt worked with urban planner Patrick Geddes, editing Patrick Geddes in India, published in 1947, and was a United Nations technical assistance advisor to India and member of the 6^th Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in 1947. She served as a professor at the GSD from 1955 to 1969, and, as Dean Sarah Whiting explained, “helped establish and fortify the urban design program in its founding years.” An urban design lectureship named in her honor continues to support visiting scholars at the GSD today.

Dong-Ping Wong in Conversation with Emily Hsee, on the Chinese Merchants Building

Pairs is a student-run journal at the GSD, which centers conversations between GSD students and guests, about an archive at Harvard or beyond. In this excerpt from Pairs 05, editor Emily Hsee speaks with architect Dong-Ping Wong about the history of the Chinese Merchants Association Building in Boston, which was designed by Edwin Chin-Park and completed in 1949. The building was funded by local neighborhood associations and represented Chinatown’s economic and social progress since World War II. It was partially demolished in 1954 during construction of the Fitzgerald Expressway. Hsee and Wong address the history of the building, the culture of Chinatown in Boston and New York, and recent shifts in the perception of Chinese American culture in the United States.

Dong-Ping Wong is the founding director of Food New York , a design firm specializing in transforming environments, from structures to landscapes. Current and past projects have included a Cayman Islands garden and +POOL, the world’s first floating water-filtering pool . Previously, he co-founded Family New York, designing for Off-White, Kanye West, and contemporary art museums.

Emily Hsee is a 2024 graduate of the GSD Master of Architecture I program. She is originally from Chicago and has worked between New York City and Shanghai. Her research and interests focus on multi-family affordable housing design solutions.

Emily Hsee
Historically, Chinatowns across the United States were viewed as filthy slums filled with illicit activity. After World War II, however, there was a kind of rebranding effort. The US adopted the image of the new democratic leader, and China had been an important ally during World War II. As a result, there were efforts to financially invest in Chinatowns and to extend legal rights to Chinese immigrants. This was most clear in the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943. There were also social investments as the media began portraying Chinatowns more positively, highlighting them as great tourist destinations. That’s the backdrop for the construction of the Chinese Merchants Association in Boston in 1949, which housed the headquarters of the association and a community recreation center….

It’s the first building in Chinatown that was “self-funded,” which means it was funded through neighborhood associations….Tragically, five years after its construction, a third of the building was torn down to make way for the Fitzgerald Expressway, leaving behind this not-quite-whole building that’s rife with memory, symbolism, and more.

…I’m curious about your reaction to the building. In some ways it’s very Chinatown: a patchwork of aesthetics, an obvious grafting of oriental ornament onto an otherwise Western building.

Dong-Ping Wong
Right now I’m on Google Maps, staring at the facade that got chopped off and replaced and laughing. It’s a weird way to finish off a truncated building. The new facade is very blank, with just one modernist strip window. It’s more modernist than any other building facade in the immediate vicinity. Its blankness is especially surprising because it makes the facade feel like the back of the building, but it faces a lot of traffic and a significant intersection. It feels like it’s waiting for something else to be built next to it.

On the front facade, I didn’t notice that they closed off those balconies until you mentioned it. I originally thought that there was nothing about the architecture itself, except for the pagoda, that felt immediately Chinese or Asian to me. In fact, it actually felt quite German. But when I zoom in on the enclosed balconies, I can see that there are columns inside and also that at some point the balconies were open to the street, to the outside. You see that balcony condition often in Manhattan Chinatown, and it feels much more contextual and part of the neighborhood.

I’m guessing that openness reflected the Chinese Merchants Association’s goals to be a part of the community, so closing it off feels not just like an aesthetic abandonment but also like an abandonment of community connectivity. Otherwise, the decorative elements, like the “Welcome to Chinatown” sign in that chop suey font and the planted pagoda on top, are what stand out to me. It’s funny because it feels like all of the remaining decoration exists from the roofline up, and my read is that the point of the ornamentation is to announce itself to people further away. After the renovation, the building itself became backgrounded.

It must have been so brutal to finish a building and then five years later have it cut off like that.

EH
It’s so brutal.

DPW
I’m sure it was a huge deal in Chinatown at the time. There was probably a lot of pride in the building’s construction. Then five years later, the association lost half of it.

I appreciate how you used the word rebrand to open this conversation. I’ve never thought of the shift in the US view of Asian Americanness after World War II in those terms before. I’m aware of it, but I think rebrand is a perfect way to describe it. The word is so concise, yet it also captures the treatment of Asian Americanness as a kind of product or service. This building is a good example of that. The Asian American community had a little bit of agency to create something for itself, until it was in the way of something that the city wanted. Once the product of Asian Americanness was no longer useful, the city took a bunch of it away.

EH
Chinatowns everywhere have always been vulnerable, and to some extent, their existence always feels conditional. You mentioned agency, though, which is important to talk about. Despite Chinatowns’ precarity, Chinatown does have some agency, and I wonder where you think that is and how it can be leveraged.

DPW
If I had a good answer to this, I would solve the problems in Chinatown. I will say that one of the nice things I’ve learned about Manhattan Chinatown over the last years is how community members of all ages are drawn to activism. Of course, it’s not always effective. For example, there’s a big new jail coming into Chinatown that the neighborhood has been protesting nonstop for years, and still, there’s a point where it feels like a losing battle.^[1] But there are other city projects that the community has been more effective in blocking.

This was surprising to me, given my incorrect assumption that Asian Americans are not that vocal. I’ve come to realize that there’s a lot of internal vocalness, but it’s very rarely broadcast outside of the community. Within the neighborhood, it’s amazing to see so many organizations, associations, and nonprofits being loud. Chinatowns across the US have always been relatively low-income neighborhoods, so I don’t think there’s much of a financial lever to pull. But there is a political lever that I think stops bad things from happening. I wonder whether the community can use that same political leverage to push for changes that benefit Chinatown….

EH
…I want to talk about the role of memory and symbolism within Chinatown. As with the Chinese Merchants Association building, the built environment contains markers of both joy and pain. How central are those symbols to a community or a neighborhood?

DPW
We’re working with two young Asian American clients on a diner project and one of the first conversations we had was about the question “What does Asian American architecture look like?” We were going to different Asian American restaurants as reference points, and we found two examples. One type of architecture resembles the Chinese Merchants Association building: East Asian design elements are clearly translated and grafted onto Western structures. Many classic Chinese restaurants fall into this category: they have very cute, tongue-in-cheek, Asian-like neon signs or calendars and waving cats, but without the ornament, the space and architecture could be anything. There’s really nothing inherently Asian or Asian American.

The other is an architecture that leans heavily toward the exaggerated orientalized architecture that almost becomes a caricature. Both are using this Asian aesthetic for survival’s sake, appealing to what the city wants, but I wonder if the second kind might be more difficult to tear apart or demolish because it has more romanticized Chinese elements. Whether superficially or not, cultural identity is infused into it. I’m thinking about our restaurant design and whether it’s possible to weave Asian Americanness into the bones of the architecture itself, through material, structure, or aesthetics, without the “oriental” look that’s only catering to tourists.

When I was growing up, I hated Panda Express. Actually, I really liked it, but I was never proud of Panda Express. I was ashamed when I went to the mall, because I thought, This is not real Chinese food. Only recently, maybe in the last 10 years, I realized it isn’t supposed to be real Chinese food. It’s Chinese American food.

I’ve been seeing a generation of younger Asian American chefs in the past few years making Chinese American food their own. I imagine something similar happening architecturally: we take an aesthetic that was done for survival’s sake, for tourists, and own it. Can we make it a genuine Chinatown culture aesthetic, which in this case would be referencing not purely American or Chinese aesthetics but a sweet spot that’s somewhere between kitsch, authenticity, and progressivism? I’m particularly interested in kitsch because it’s been very helpful to the survival of Chinatowns. I don’t think an Asian American style necessarily needs to have that tired oriental look, but I think the kitsch aesthetic is a useful tool. It’s like, “Look, we know this is appealing to you, so we’re going to use it. You won’t want to fuck with this building, but we’re going to make it our own.”

EH
It’s almost like an inside joke. While the architecture doesn’t actually reference cliched images of China, we play to our advantage on the assumption that it does. I was at dinner with a friend who’s Chinese, from China, and he told me that he loves going to Chinatowns when he’s in other countries. It’s not because he misses China or because Chinatowns feel anything like China but because they’re their own worlds. That sentiment is useful when we talk about what it means to preserve Chinatown and what exactly makes Chinatown Chinatown.

DPW
Maybe there’s a way to frame these shifts in three phases. I can imagine that when Chinatowns first emerged Chinese Associations were established to protect the neighborhoods. At that point, there were huge vulnerable workforces from China that were being villainized. It makes sense that Chinese Associations had reputations for being involved in illicit business dealings, because Chinese immigrants had few legal rights or protections. After the “rebrand,” after World War II, it feels like Chinatowns became marketing opportunities and started catering to tourists. This shift involved creating a version of Chinatown that was palatable and acceptable to outsiders. I think Chinatowns now are still in this second phase.

One of the reasons we’re having this conversation is because that phase is ending and there’s a new phase that has to—and hopefully already is—happening. To the question about aesthetics, I think my generation felt embarrassed about the kitschy overexaggerated oriental aesthetic, but it is true to how we grew up. Orange chicken, as much as it might not be authentic Chinese food or relate to where our parents came from, belongs to the world we grew up in. It’s just now becoming a source of pride, still with a slight tongue-in-cheek quality, but it’s becoming a source of pride. I want to believe that this shift in psychology means that we’re beginning to own the aesthetic that was originally made for others, and even use that to set some new aesthetics.

This new phase parallels the emergence of Asian American creatives within Chinatown who are integrating that cultural identity we grew up with into fashion, architecture, design, and food. I don’t know what you’d label that third phase, but I hope it’s happening.

 

A Quilt Makes a Home

Rosie Lee Tompkins’s quilts gained worldwide acclaim when the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) mounted an exhibition of some of the more than 700 of her works that were donated by collector Eli Leon. Known for her bold use of color in an improvisational piecing style that breaks conventional bounds, Tompkins’s work was first shown in 1988 and has since been included in the Whitney Biennial, among many other museums and galleries. While William Arnett famously drew an alliance between quilts and architecture in his 2006 book, The Architecture of the Quilt, about the African American quilting collective Gee’s Bend, a spring studio at the GSD led by Sean Canty, assistant professor of architecture at the GSD, played with the inverse of this idea. 

In “Soft Slants, Mixed Gestures” students took inspiration from Tompkins’s work to create designs for housing and green space in the Portola neighborhood of San Francisco—an area known as the city’s Garden District for its history of nurseries and greenhouses that supplied the city with flowers.

In a region fraught with NIMBYism and gentrification, the site has become a flashpoint for conversations around development, the history of colonization, and racism—even appearing in the opening scene of the 2019 film The Last Black Man in San Franscisco, which the class viewed this semester. 

Like most of the western United States, Lipsky explains in her book, San Francisco was colonized and designed with “the Jeffersonian grid,” or Public Land Survey System, established in 1785 to divvy up vast acres into organized, heterogenous squares and rectangles.

In most cities and towns across the United States, the grid meshed relatively seamlessly with the landscape.

“The problem Lipsky defines,” explained Canty, assistant professor of architecture at the Graduate School of Design (GSD), “is that most cities in the United States aren’t as topographically diverse as San Francisco, so a survey system originating in river towns, coastal cities, and plains doesn’t work in the same way here.

In a series of what Lipsky calls “urban episodes,” she argues that the grid is forced to bend and change with San Francisco’s unique natural setting. As Canty summarized, the grid is “incommensurate with the topography.” Urban planners had to innovate to maintain through-lines along streets and neighborhoods, thereby disrupting or softening the grid. “In a grandiose landscape,” writes Lipsky, “where bridges and highways unite sea and land and where every hill forms a neighborhood, Nature and Architecture blend to compose a city that is alternately triumphant, modest, and familiar.” 

For example, Canty explained, a sidewalk accommodates a hill by transitioning into a stairway, a switchback is paired with a tunnel to move through the hill, a road dead-ends and “overlooks the street that runs perpendicular to it, underneath.” Such idiosyncrasies “produce something spatially exceptional,” Canty said—a surprising, sometimes even slightly dizzying, delight, not so unlike Tompkins’ quilts. 

“This became the concept of the slant for me—something that’s slightly off-kilter or new, as a subject-position in terms of queerness, and as a spatial practice within the city.”   

The “queer slant” is described by cultural theorist Sarah Ahmed in her book Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, an excerpt of which Canty and his students read at the outset of the semester, along with bell hooks’ “An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional.” Ahmed speaks to orientation and defines the “queer moment” as a time when things are “out of line” and “appear at a slant,” asking how the slant moment can inform our subject-positions, our relationships to objects and the world around us. 

bell hooks similarly considers the objects in her domestic space as they define her aesthetic. “Black domestic life,” she writes, “cultivates a rich, oppositional aesthetic rooted in everyday acts of homemaking.” Canty noted that hooks grew up with a grandmother who made quilts. hooks argues that her creation of the domestic space was its own art: “The way we lived was shaped by objects, the way we looked at them, the way they were placed around us,” and that, “we ourselves are shaped by space.”  

In class, Canty discussed work by Diller and Scofidio in which the designers fold and crease work shirts in unconventional ways, so that the functional objects transmute into sculptural forms—just as Tompkins’s quilts extend beyond their medium into the realm of abstract art. Both offer a way of thinking about fiber that Canty sees as a bridge to architectural forms. He explained that Diller and Scofidio’s work shirts, like Tompkins’s quilts, they “reveal how architectural thinking can be embedded within complex formal systems beyond the discipline itself.”

The creases and folds created with work shirts become “allegories for architecture—sites where social, formal, and political conditions are folded together and made visible.” This idea of translating quilted pieces and shirts to architecture became evident in the students’ initial exercises in the class as well as their final projects, where the buildings they designed opened and layered upon one another in mimicry of fabric. 

As Canty was designing the course, he was also at work on his book, Black Abstraction in Architecture , forthcoming from Park Books in November 2025, in which he analyzes “modes of abstraction that are outside the traditional canon,” which he explained the profession is still wrestling with in the years since George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement. In search of “an urban imaginary that comes from a Black aesthetic,” he studied the work of Theaster Gates, David Hammons, and Amanda Williams.  

In Color(ed) Theory , Williams, an artist and architect (and one of Canty’s professors as a graduate student) painted condemned houses in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood in a range of vivid colors that reflect Black experience and consumerism. Canty’s studio makes the argument that Tompkins’ work falls within the realm of Black Abstraction as well, and, with its asymmetrical blocks and color schemes, offers a creative space in the spirit of the “queer slant,” through which students can reimagine housing typologies in the Portola neighborhood—a site with a literal slant, rising 40 degrees from one side to the other.  

Armed with this theoretical background that connects African American art and theory, queer theory, and urban design, students headed into the field. The site, 770 Woolsey Street, sits in a diverse neighborhood that has been home to a wide range of immigrant communities ever since the indigenous tribes of the Ramaytush Ohlone were displaced by settlers in the eighteenth century.

The plot holds remnants of eighteen greenhouses, on more than 20,000 square feet, where roses and marigolds flourished. From the 1920s to 1990s, greenhouses around the neighborhood provided all the cut flowers for the city, giving the neighborhood its moniker, “The Garden District.” 

Now, the remaining twelve greenhouses sit dilapidated, portions of the roofs broken or sagging to the ground, untended weeds rising high. In a city that’s rapidly being gentrified and developed, with a desperate need for housing units, the site has become hotly contested. Community groups such as The Portola Green Plan and 770 Woolsey have advocated for accessible green space and affordable housing that retains the plot’s history, even as the developers who own the site have vacillated between selling and building for the last several years. 

Invited studio critics Lisa Iwamoto, chair and professor of architecture at California College of Art (CCA), and Craig Scott, professor of architecture at CCA, created a series of proposals for the site, and Mark Donahue, associate professor and chair of the BArch program at CCA, taught two studio courses on the site, sharing his survey with Canty’s students. Also invited to offer student critiques was Matthew Au, faculty member at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), whose studio Current Interests creates quilts together as part of their practice. 

The studio’s program required 40–80 residential units, integrating and repurposing the existing green space, establishing a public commons, and exploring the concept of a ceramic enclosure. Local ceramic manufacturer, Heath, opened its doors to the class so that they could explore using tile—a material that’s “mass-produced but carries the feeling of being bespoke,” said Canty—in the facade and enclosure of the buildings and site.   

The resulting designs included playfully oversized red siding, housing units situated as triangles rather than squares, using the concept of the fold to create multi-directional skins, and carefully curated interiors intended to foster community art-making and creativity.

Ashleigh Brady (MArch ’26), “Common Threads”

“This project explores domesticity through a formal language inspired by the geometric logic and improvisational ethos of Black American quilt making traditions, particularly through the work of Rosie Lee Tompkins, Chaney Ella Peace, and other Black women whose textile practices operate as radical acts of care, memory, and spatial invention.

Rooted in the programmatic design of ‘Common Threads’ is the legacy of Black San Franciscans whose resilience manifested through the transformations of the domestic sphere and public realm alike.

Porches, yards, and improvised additions became expressions of cultural identity and spatial autonomy. Citizens reclaimed land as communal infrastructure-spaces where food, kinship, and memory were cultivated side by side. These improvisational programmatic practices formed a spatial language of care and adaptability that this project adopts as both historical precedent and evolving methodology.”

“Garden in a Courtyard in a House in a City,” Sangki Nam (MArch ’25)

“This project engages the urban condition of San Francisco as a site of spatial and ideological tension, where the Cartesian imposition of the grid onto a dramatically sloped terrain has produced a landscape of unintended urban phenomena. Taking 770 Woolsey in Portola as a site of intervention, the work negotiates between competing imperatives: the preservation of local historical identity as a cultivated “Garden District” and the systemic pressures of the city’s housing crisis. Drawing on the conceptual framework of quilting, the proposal rethinks ground and form as interdependent, generating a domestic topography that dissolves binary distinctions between public/private, interior/exterior, and formal/informal, generating a spatial fabric that softens divisions between opposing realms and proposes a new model of domestic living.”

“House-fold: Playing with Household,” by Brandon Soto (March ’26) “This project reads the quilts of Rosie Lee Tompkins as a starting point for spatial exploration, seeking alternative but familiar form. Drawing from Tompkins’s quilts and Sara Ahmed’s Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology, the project challenges conventional domestic aesthetics through a queer, oppositional stance.

The pre-existing gabled bar is transformed by the stitches in Tompkins’s work, mirroring and folding figures in the interest of the off-center and non-uniform. The facade reacts similarly, reflecting topographical conditions as distortions to tile compositions, highlighting ‘seamlines’ between building and ground.”

These acts of folding and layering imagine a new queer domestic identity, answering to underlying visual traditions and cultures not fully realized in built domestic space.”

“Threaded Ground, Tending the Seam,” by Meagan Tan Jingchuu (March I ’26)  

“Structuring collective housing through two spatial datums, Threaded Ground refers to how architecture navigates San Francisco’s extreme topography—slipping between indoor and outdoor, residential, and shared space—through a plan-driven strategy of adjacency and maneuvering. Tending the Seam describes a sectional logic: a continuous roof seam that generates difference, connection, and circulation.

Together, they frame an architecture shaped by Sara Ahmed’s notion of orientation—attuned to how bodies move, align, and relate within space—and guided by a quilt logic of variation through aggregation, scale, and tactile differentiation. Across three scales of courtyard voids and long, shared seams, publicness drifts. By shaping spatial thresholds and shared seams, the architecture enables life to accumulate and unfold organically—through repeated gestures, material traces, and collective use over time.”

“Arrangements between Garden and Grid,” by Emanuel Cardenas (March II ’26)

“Along with the greenhouse history, vivid residential color palette, and sprawling gardens that make the Portola neighborhood known as San Francisco’s Garden District, the project draws from the act of quilting and San Francisco’s first master planning, in which Market Street acts as a converging line between two regular but misaligned organizational grids. The fragmented in-between spaces adjacent to Market Street are reminiscent of imperfect singular patches stitched together to form a quilted whole. Lone star quilts are traditionally constructed with Y-seams, where three separate fabrics fold onto one another and are stitched together to form a Y. The project adopts a similar strategy to quilt a figure ground from a standard perimeter block organization. These Y-seams become the central circulation within each cluster of homes and shared spaces, seaming together multiple fabrics of architectural orientation nestled in a cascading landscape of gardens.”

Loeb Fellowship Announces Class of 2026

The Loeb Fellowship  at the Harvard Graduate School of Design is proud to welcome the Class of 2026 Loeb Fellows. These visionary practitioners and activists are revitalizing urban and rural places, democratizing policymaking, engaging arts and culture to improve our health and environment, and strengthening civic engagement. They are inspired and inspiring mid-career professionals who come from diverse backgrounds around the world and share passion and purpose—to strengthen their abilities to advance equity and resilience and to harness the power of collective action.

During their ten-month residency at Harvard GSD, Loeb Fellows immerse themselves in a rich academic environment, auditing courses at Harvard and MIT, exchanging insights, and expanding professional networks. They engage actively with GSD students and faculty, participate as speakers and panelists at public events, and convene workshops and other activities that encourage knowledge sharing and creation. Throughout, Loeb Fellows consider how they might refocus their careers and broaden the impact of their work.

The ten Class of 2026 Loeb Fellows are:

Daniela Chacón Arias, cofounder and executive director of TANDEM, Quito, Ecuador / Cecilia Cuff, founder of the Nascent Group, Chicago, USA / Jeremiah Ellison, Ward 5 city council member, Minneapolis, USA / Pedro Évora Amaral, founder of Évora ArPE and RUA Arquitetos and professor at PUC-Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil / Jennifer Hughes, senior advisor for partnerships, expansion, and innovation at the National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, DC, USA / Natalia Rudiak, director of special projects at ReImagine Appalachia, Pittsburgh, USA / Jacek Smolicki, founder of Ekoton and cofounder of the Walking Festival of Sound, Stockholm, Sweden / Andy Summers, founder and codirector of Architecture Fringe, Glasgow, Scotland / Julia Thayne, founder of Twoº & Rising, Los Angeles, USA / Oliver Wainwright, architecture and design critic of the Guardian, London, Britain.

“In addition to being exceptional practitioners in their respective fields, Loeb Fellows are inspiring individuals. Each year, Fellows bring their unique experiences to the GSD community, sparking new conversations and challenging us all to consider how design can address global challenges,” says Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at Harvard GSD. “It is my pleasure to welcome the class of 2026 to campus next fall, and I look forward to what they accomplish during their time at Harvard.”

“In his autobiography, John Loeb reflected that among his many philanthropic endeavors, the Loeb Fellowship stood out as the most personally rewarding,” says Loeb Fellowship curator John Peterson. “Until their passing in 1996, John and his wife, Frances, hosted a luncheon for each year’s class of fellows at their home. It was not the program alone, but the people—their talents, aspirations, and potential—that inspired their deep appreciation for this unique investment. In difficult times, when the future can feel bleak, it is the vision and actions of individuals with a shared purpose that rekindle hope and remind us that better futures are possible.” Peterson is an architect, activist, and a Loeb Fellow in the class of 2006.

The Loeb Fellowship and the ArtLab—a laboratory for research in the arts—are pleased to welcome Jacek Smolicki as the 2026 Loeb/ArtLab Fellow. Now in its fifth year, the collaborative fellowship previously featured the artists Jordan Weber (’22), Dario Calmese (’23), Joseph Zeal Henry (’24), and Shana M. griffin (’25).

Bree Edwards, director of the ArtLab notes, “Sound is a vital layer of built and natural environments, shaping how we experience space, memory, and connection. We’re excited to collaborate with sound artist Jacek Smolicki, whose work deepens our understanding of place and perception.”

After their year in residence at Harvard GSD, Loeb Fellows join a powerful worldwide network of over 450 Loeb Fellowship alumni, including recognized leaders like Pilar Viladas (’96), Rick Lowe (’02), John Zeisel (’71), Mpho Matsipa (’22), Mary Means (’82), Eleni Myrivili (’20), Alejandro Echeverri (’16), Henry Grabar (’24), Mathew Mazzotta (’18), and Alessandro Petti (’17).

The Loeb Fellowship traces its roots to the late 1960s, when John L. Loeb directed a Harvard GSD campaign based on the theme of “Crisis.” Loeb saw the American city in disarray and believed Harvard could help. He imagined bringing promising innovators of the built and natural environment to Harvard GSD for a year, challenging them to do more and do better, convinced they would return to their work with new ideas and energy. John Peterson says, “The Class of 2026 continues this legacy, inviting us to imagine brighter tomorrows.”