Excerpt: In It Together, by Lesley Lokko

“Five years ago, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Just City Lab published The Just City Essays: 26 Visions of Inclusion, Equity and Opportunity. The questions it posed were deceptively simple: What would a just city look like? And what could be the strategies to get there? These questions were posed to mayors, architects, artists, philanthropists, educators and journalists in 22 cities, who told stories of global injustice and their dreams for reparative and restorative justice in the city. These essays were meant as a provocation, a call to action. Now, during these times of dissonance, unrest, and uncertainty, their contents have become ever more important. For the next 26 weeks [starting June 15, 2020], the GSD and the Just City Lab will republish one essay a week here and at designforthejustcity.org. We hope they may continue conversations of our shared responsibility for the just city. We believe design can repair injustice. We believe design must restore justice, especially that produced by its own hand. We believe in justice for Black Americans. We believe in justice for all marginalized people. We believe in a Just City.” —Toni L. Griffin, Professor in Practice of Urban Planning, founder of the Just City Lab, and editor of The Just City Essays

In It Together

Lesley Lokko

“[A city where] everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the trans-disciplinary, everyday life and unending history.” —Edward Soja No other city that I know of piques the imagination quite like The African City, wherever in Africa that is. I live in Johannesburg; I grew up in Accra: two African cities that have as little—or as much—in common as Chicago or Shanghai, but whose broad geography binds them together in ways that are both entirely fictitious and entirely real. By their very nature, cities are both generic and astoundingly, endlessly specific. The same broad categories of infrastructure, environment, equality and access to amenities apply to all urban centres, almost irrespective of scale. Yet there’s something in—or of/about—The African City that defies easy categorisation. African cities, to paraphrase Soja above, are places where “everything comes together,” in an almost dizzying panoply of contradictory binaries. Black/white; rich/poor; chaotic/controlled; hi-tech/lo-tech, as though there is no space or appetite for the nuance, the in-between, or the subtleties that make up any urban narrative in which most citizens somehow locate, negotiate and recognise themselves. When the invitation to contribute to the Just City essays project arrived in my Inbox, I was struck by its timing. It’s probably just over ten years ago that I met Max Bond in Accra, sadly for the last time, as it turned out. He was visiting the Ghanaian architect Joe Osae-Addo, and the three of us had dinner at the Golden Tulip Hotel on Independence Avenue whilst waiting for Accra’s terrible, gridlocked in a physical sense) of African cities. What could African American architects and urban designers bring to the table? What had Americans learned about race, class and culture that might prove useful to a new generation of African architects, planners, city-makers? Bond was better placed than most to answer the question: Ghana had been his home in the 1960s, in the first heady decade after independence. He’d seen more of the country than many Ghanaians, myself included, and his views were wide-ranging and broadly cosmopolitan, yet at the same time deeply personal and intuitive. We were joined a little later by another African American architect, Jack Travis, also a close friend of Bond’s. Four architects, two continents, one-and-a-half generations between us and many, many questions, though perhaps fewer answers. Continue reading on designforthejustcity.org… 

Redlining, Green Books, Gray Towns, High Yellow

Architect and artist Amanda Williams is best known for her bold public art project, Color(ed) Theory , produced for the 2015 architecture biennial in her native Chicago. Williams and a team of volunteers painted seven houses that were slated for demolition in the city’s predominantly Black Englewood neighborhood. Each building was coated in one color chosen from a palette Williams developed of culturally resonant hues for the surrounding community: Pink Oil Moisturizer, Ultrasheen, Harold’s Chicken Shack, Flamin’ Red Hots, Currency Exchange, Safe Passage, Crown Royal Bag. The vibrant paint conferred new life and meaning to each house, even as the dilapidated structure remained underneath.

A graduate of Cornell’s “extremely theoretical and conceptual” architecture program, Williams practiced for several years before yielding to a lifelong desire to pursue visual art full-time. After experimenting with abstract art, she eventually made her way to the intersection of art and architecture with projects like Color(ed) Theory that explore color and race and their relationship to space and value. Here, in lieu of her Open House Lecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design on April 2, 2020 that was cancelled due to the Covid-19 outbreak, Williams takes a moment to reflect on her work, purpose, and path, each of which has straddled multiple divides.

What drew you to architecture?

I grew up on the South Side of Chicago; the city is historically very segregated and continues to be. Before I had language for what was going on, I understood that there were inequities in space as we would move daily from Auburn Gresham—a predominantly Black and working/lower class neighborhood at the time—to Hyde Park, where I went to a private school. Seeing that shift piqued my interest about why and what was possible. I knew something wasn’t quite right.

At the same time, I loved art, drawing, color. There was a love of making things, of imagining people and how they would interact. I would draw houses or structures as a way to narrate stories. As I progressed, architecture seemed like the vehicle for exploring both. And when I told my parents I wanted to be an artist, my mother said, “Artists who can make a living are called architects.”

What prompted your move away from architecture in a strict sense of the discipline into visual art?

There was a long moment where my love of theory and the conceptual, and of thinking about architecture speculatively felt like a luxury I didn’t have because there was a need to actually change things. There was a bit of guilt that I could make these beautiful things and have these conversations with classmates and colleagues that I knew would be completely foreign to the environment that I had grown up in. So I practiced for about six and a half years in San Francisco during the height of the dot-com boom. We did interesting industrial projects, schools, and other civic buildings in addition to large-scale master plans for corporations. But I asked myself: Is this what you’re supposed to be doing? That transition into art full-time was that ideal moment when you could go from something you love to something you love more. Also, I really wanted to come back to Chicago and reinterrogate those early thoughts about my relationship to my creative self in the city that I love.

You’ve said that color, race, space, and value are the four things you’re constantly preoccupied with in your work. Are there patterns to how these four things interplay?

Yes. I would say that recently the idea that I can always lead with a color—and that it will have a spatial and racialized spatial corollary—is really strong. I didn’t see that early on. Color(ed) Theory led me to that: redlining, green books, gray towns, high yellow. Now I can see a whole kind of color palette that’s synchronous with color theory.

Is your exploration of color as a medium a way to get around gridlocked discussions about race? Or is it another way into those conversations?

My interest in the color gray is potentially a way to explode the kind of dead ends that we tend to fall into [around race], especially in Chicago. But the idea of race as just Black and white, for example, completely ignores the Asian community, Latinos.

When I was an artist-in-residence at Smith, I took much of the summer to think about this. What came to the fore is this idea that black and white can be combined into gray, but I also thought about other ways that you can get to gray. Another way is this tertiary—or what they call chroma—gray, where you make three colors turn into gray. That seems very powerful also as a metaphor for complicating the ways we tend to want to talk about race: if gray is not black and white but actually at least three things, then it not only expands how we have to position it, it also opens the door for trans and immigrant and others. You won’t end at the same place because now you’ve introduced a new element. People won’t be able to do what they usually do in discussions about race—ignore it and reduce the conversation. And it can help bring about potential strategies for getting out of this never-ending system that exists.

You bring art and architecture together to talk about larger social and economic and political issues. How do they serve one another?

In my mind, the art is leading. But I would say that in most people’s minds—both the everyday person and also those in the contemporary art and architectural worlds—the architecture is leading. There tends to be much more interest in the spatial implications of my work or the fact that this is a very different way of talking about space than people are accustomed to. And the artistic realm is not used to architecture being a medium as opposed to a functional thing. (I’m being very general and broad.)

Personally, I find agency in the art; there doesn’t always have to be a rationale. There’s room to think through it, to not have a conclusive answer, whatever the final product. Whereas there is an expectation that traditional architecture writ large actually needs to function: it has to stand up. People have to be able occupy it. There are rules about how it needs to operate.

There is a very distinct kind of discourse around contemporary architecture and art. They have their overlaps and there are people who have straddled those before me. But there’s not a synergy in the way one might imagine. So I’m always leading with the question, and the question is always spiraling around those four elements. I’m not thinking ahead of time what that matrix is, but it always seems to end up with those. And then if there were some kind of spectrum, you could think about whether one would initially label the final work art or architecture.

Amanda Williams was invited to lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design on April 2, 2020. Due to the Covid-19 outbreak, public programs at the GSD were cancelled, including Williams’s Open House Lecture. 

Four Native Designers Make GSD History

Excerpt: Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives, by Darnell L. Moore

“Five years ago, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Just City Lab published The Just City Essays: 26 Visions of Inclusion, Equity and Opportunity. The questions it posed were deceptively simple: What would a just city look like? And what could be the strategies to get there? These questions were posed to mayors, architects, artists, philanthropists, educators and journalists in 22 cities, who told stories of global injustice and their dreams for reparative and restorative justice in the city. These essays were meant as a provocation, a call to action. Now, during these times of dissonance, unrest, and uncertainty, their contents have become ever more important. For the next 26 weeks [starting June 15, 2020], the GSD and the Just City Lab will republish one essay a week here and at designforthejustcity.org. We hope they may continue conversations of our shared responsibility for the just city. We believe design can repair injustice. We believe design must restore justice, especially that produced by its own hand. We believe in justice for Black Americans. We believe in justice for all marginalized people. We believe in a Just City.” —Toni L. Griffin, Professor in Practice of Urban Planning, founder of the Just City Lab, and editor of The Just City Essays

Urban Spaces and the Mattering of Black Lives

By Darnell L. Moore

It was close to midnight. A youngish, jovial-looking white woman with russet colored hair ran by me with ostensive ease. She donned earphones and dark, body-fitting jogging attire. I was walking home from the A train stop and along Lewis Avenue, which is a moderately busy thoroughfare that runs through the BedfordStuyvesant neighborhood in central Brooklyn, where I live. Lewis runs parallel to Marcus Garvey. Black. Two avenues to the right is Malcolm X Boulevard. It’s Black. Fulton Street. Atlantic Avenue. The B15 bus. Bedford Avenue. Marcy Projects. Brownstoners. The C train. Working class renters. Peaches Restaurant. June Jordan. Livery taxis. Restoration Plaza. Jay-Z. Bed-Stuy is quite black. I am, too. Encountering the strange sight of a white woman running without care on a street in a section of our borough once considered an unredeemable “hood” terrified me. She ran past the new eateries and grocery shops that sell organic and specialty foods. Within a span of a few blocks, residents and visitors now have their choice of premium Mexican eats, brick oven pizza or freshly baked scones with artisanal coffee. Citi Bike racks and skateboard-riding hipsters adorn the now buzzing thoroughfare. To many, our part of Bed-Stuy may appear safer, cleaner, and whiter. And yet, I was still terrified. It was midnight. Black boys and men have been killed throughout the history of the U.S. for being less close to and observant of white women’s bodies as I was that late evening. Shortly after I passed by the white woman jogger, my close friend, Marcus, who lives within walking distance from me—closer to a densely populated public housing development—lamented lingering tremors of gentrification. Citing the presumed changes in racial demographics, renovated housing options and increased business development efforts, Marcus hinted at the frustration of black communities undergoing rapid and contested transformation. He came upon a flier that was fastened to a tree. According to Marcus, the New York Police Department precinct near his building created a “wanted” sign that was posted not too far from where he lived. The “wanted” were a few black men who allegedly robbed a neighbor. The neighbor was white. Never before, in the several years Marcus had lived in Bed-Stuy, had he seen anything similar. There were no signs made after black teens were shot or robbed. There were no cries for the “wanted” after black women and girls were sexually assaulted or followed home by a predator. There was no indication of concern for black people besides the ever-present anxiety black bodies seem to cause both to the state and to white people when they dwell en masse in the hood. A cursory review of NYPD’s data on the disproportionate and deleterious impact of stop, question and frisk procedures and broken windows policing on black communities is but one example. Marcus’s critique resonated because it illuminated the ways the state and its citizenry afford value to white lives. Hence, the reason for selecting the vignettes I’ve opened with here. In both scenes, white bodies signify worth and, therefore, are always centered in our collective imagination. They are esteemed commodities, especially in black spaces—that is, neighborhoods and other publics mostly inhabited and culturally shaped by a majority black populace. Thus, any dreamed and invented “just city” that is structured by a set of race ideologies that do not factor in the hyper-mattering of white lives and the perceived worthlessness of black and brown lives is not “just” at all. That is why catch phrases such as “community development” or “urban planning and design” can be counterproductive if, in fact, one’s praxis is not guided by a commitment to a type of transformative work grounded in the belief that black lives actually matter. Continue reading on designforthejustcity.org… 

Design as Protest: How can designers stand for, fight for, and build an anti-racist future?

“For nearly every injustice in the world, there is an architecture that has been planned and designed to perpetuate it,” writes the architect and activist Bryan Lee Jr. in his latest piece on CityLab. Lee spells out the ways that white America has militarized architecture and design reinforce its white supremacist ideologies and anti-Black violence in the built landscape of its cities, neighborhoods, and communities. How cities are laid out, the logics of zoning, the flow of transportation infrastructures, access to green space and the precise coordinates of urban renewal initiatives are all conceived to systemically exploit and perpetuate violence against communities of color, particularly Black Americans. Lee calls for the dismantling of the physical and political conditions that have allowed this structural and systemic racism to persist for as long as the United States is old. Now is the time, he says, to acknowledge the ways “in which our profession’s silence is assent,” so we can “stand for, fight for, and build a just future.” This call to action lays the groundwork for Design as Protest (DAP), a collaborative, Black-led organizing effort by Lee and five other interdisciplinary designers, architects, artists, organizers, and activists: De Nichols, Michael Ford, V. Mitch McEwen, Sunni Patterson, and Taylor Holloway. Mobilizing in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, they are calling upon design professionals to work collectively and creatively within their networks to dismantle the power structures and privilege that has allowed design and its contingent fields of architecture and urban planning to be utilized as a tool of oppression and violence against Black Americans for too long. Through a series of national calls held online, in which participants can share resources and brainstorm new and ongoing actions, projects, and strategies to mobilize the design industries, DAP organizes across the many platforms that such injustices are perpetuated. Together, the five co-organizers have put forth nine Design Justice Demands, copied in full below, which they are asking participating design professions to commit to, advocate for, and disseminate in their immediate networks. Some demands require immediate personal action, like refusing to design prisons and police stations, while others call for revisions in public policy such as defunding the police, handing power and resources to community-led public projects, and protecting the place-keeping of Black cultural spaces. DAP also calls for pedagogical and structural shifts in architecture and design, as well as a reworking of core terms like “public space” and “affordability”. The co-organizers emphasize that so many facets of the design disciplines–from how they are taught, evaluated, and implemented–need to be dismantled so that new structures and platforms can be built collaboratively from the ground up, ultimately enabling a more just future. There is much to be done, and DAP is the place to get to work. Design As Protest’s Nine Design Justice Demands:

1. That our cities and towns reallocate funds supporting police departments and reinvest in the critical needs of disinherited neighborhoods and communities.
2. A cease to all efforts to implement defensible space and (CPTED) crime prevention through environmental design tactics.
3. We cease support of the carceral state through the design of prisons, jails, and police stations.
4. We cease the use of area mean income to determine “affordability” in our communities and instead root the distribution of state and federal resources in a measure that reflects the extraction of generational wealth from black communities.
5. We advocate for policies and procedures that support a genuinely accessible public realm free from embedded oppression.
6. We ensure communities’ self-determination through an established procedure that incorporates community voice-in-progress and community benefits agreements in action for all publicly accountable projects.
7. We detangle our contractual relationships with power and capital to better serve neighborhoods and communities from a position of service and not from a place of extraction.
8. We invest and secure the place-keeping of black cultural spaces.
9. We proactively redesign our design training and licensing efforts to reflect the history of spatial injustice and build new measures to ground our work in service of liberating spaces.

“Think about how the things you’re already working on can connect creatively to what’s happening on the ground, how you can get your network advocating en masse for social justice and fighting against police brutality,” suggested co-organizer Nichols on the first meeting. So far, two DAP meetings have occurred on June 3 and 5. The second meeting launched a ‘day of action’, in which those involved with the movement are asked to 1. Commit to the Design Justice for Black Lives Demands and 2. Share the Design Justice Demands with prominent organizations, governments, practices, and academic institutions through a set of pre-filled emails. Participants are asked to add on contacts from their own networks. In the second meeting, Lee led an immediate feedback session wherein participants were asked to respond to the Design Justice Demands with outstanding questions and personal reflections on each demand. This data is being collated by the co-organizers and will be used to plan future DAP events and actions. “The more clarity we have from you, the more we’ll have for the world as we move forward,” explained Lee. The co-organizers are cognizant of the ways these conversations will scale upwards and outwards beyond the architecture and design industries; establishing a collaborative process together, here and now, is just the beginning of a durational fight for justice. “What is the just future, the just world we are envisioning?” asked Nichols. “It’s not just the vision of designers but the vision of the people.” New recruits are asked to fill in the following Direct Ideation Action form, through which DAP co-organizers can learn of their skills and coordinate further calls to action. There is also an open-source Resource Library available for those involved. Additional Action Campaign Calls will be happening weekly, with topics including Digital Histories + Futures, Buildable Memorials, and Tactical Protest Design happening the week through June 14, and more on the way. “Over the past weeks, we have witnessed various organizations and universities issuing statements of solidarity, but they are still abusing Black lives,” suggests Lee. For students and staff of architecture and design schools reading this and wanting to get involved, begin by using Design As Protest’s pre-filled email template to demand concrete action from your institution. The specific demands for institutions work across different planes of injustice, from reallocating police funding and ending CPTED tactics to restructuring all curriculum to acknowledge the history of spatial violence against Black communities and implementing anti-racist design strategies/knowledge. Dismantling design injustice begins in pedagogy and collaborative learning, so that students can leave their education equipped with the tools and language necessary to fight for spatial justice in their chosen professions. In the words of Nichols: “Seeking justice is a continuum. It’s not simply about removing barriers, but reconciling with the past, so we can move forward with strategies for success.” Design as Protest is co-organized by Bryan Lee Jr., Design Principal at Colloqate Design, an architect, writer, organizer, and activist of Design Justice; De Nichols, a current Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Principal of Design & Social Practice at Civic Creatives in St. Louis, an artist-organizer, social impact designer, and keynote speaker; Michael Ford, founding Director of Hip Hop Architecture Camp, a national collaborative education initiative aimed at introducing and empowering under represented youth in the architecture, design, and planning disciplines; V. Mitch McEwen, a practicing architect and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Princeton SOA and Founding Director of Black Box Research Group; Sunni Patterson, a poet, singer, activist, and spoken word artist; and Taylor Holloway, an architect and educator.

An Anti-Racist Reading List: Five Essential Titles for Designers

How can design contribute to the fight against racism? As a place to start, the African American Design Nexus—an initiative developed by the Frances Loeb Library in collaboration with the GSD African American Student Union—has curated five essential titles for anti-racism reading. The recommendations come from a list of over 45 books on race and design crowdsourced from the GSD community in honor of the 50th anniversary of the first Black History Month celebrations. The open-access bibliography is designed to “showcase and initiate conversation about the work of Black designers throughout the world and to critically re-examine the legacy of racial discourses in modern and contemporary design thinking and practice.” It is a living document fueled by submissions from the GSD community. Learn how to submit a book or other printed media.

For more recommended reading, visit A Call To Explore: Design, Race, and the Built Environment book suggestions from the GSD community.

The Fire Next Time

by James Baldwin

“At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two ‘letters,’ written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both Black and White, to attack the terrible legacy of racism.”

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America

by Richard Rothstein

“Richard Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create Whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in White neighborhoods.”

How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood

by Peter Moskowitz

Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors

by Carolyn Finney

Four recent graduates named 2020-2021 Irving Innovation Fellows

Four recent graduates have been selected as Irving Innovation Fellows for the 2020-2021 academic year. Established as part of a gift from the John E. Irving Family in 2013, the Fellowship offers recipients a platform for continued work with the Harvard Graduate School of Design beyond their time as students. This year’s cohort will be affiliated with the Innovation Task Force, which formed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic to research and develop new innovations in virtual design pedagogy.

With degrees in Urban Design, Landscape Architecture, Architecture, and the Master in Design Students program, this year’s recipients are:

Sarah Fayad (MLAUD ’20)
Isabella Frontado (MDes ADPD/ MLA I ’20)
Gia Jung (MArch I ’20)
Ian Miley (MArch I AP ’20)

“The applications were incredibly impressive,” said Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture. “It’s uplifting to see the what extraordinary talent is coursing through the school. Previous recipients have remarked on the Fellowship’s power to extend research and inquiry beyond the space of an academic term, to help bridge theory and practice, and to inspire new ways of researching and designing; I look forward to what this year’s talented cohort of Fellows will accomplish.”

GSD Radio: Broadcasting Black Voices Daily at 8:30 PM EDT

Daily at 8:30pm we will be broadcasting a Black voice: a speech, interview, lecture, or other form of audio on the GSD Radio

Announcing faculty appointments and promotions in urban design, architecture, and landscape architecture

The Harvard University Graduate School of Design is pleased to announce the following faculty appointments and promotions effective July 1, 2020:

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes appointed Assistant Professor of Urban Design. Malterre-Barthes was previously guest professor in the Architecture Department of TU Berlin, Malterre-Barthes has directed, managed, and taught the post-graduate Master of Advanced Studies in Urban Design at ETH Zurich over the last six years. She is also co-founder of OMNIBUS, an urban design laboratory focused on interdisciplinary exploration of community-building factors in various metropolitans contexts. Charlotte’s teaching and research interests are related to how struggling communities can gain greater access to resources, the mainstream economy, better governance, and ecological/social justice. She believes that educators and universities have an obligation to be responsive to the challenges of our urbanizing world, equipping young practitioners and researchers with both critical skills and design tools to address them. Her pedagogy is built on a research-based design approach for identifying urgent aspects of contemporary urbanization. Charlotte holds a PhD in Architecture from ETH Zurich, and master’s and bachelor’s degrees in architecture from the National School of Architecture of Marseille (ENSAM).

Yasmin Vobis appointed Assistant Professor of Architecture. Vobis currently serves as visiting professor of architecture at The Cooper Union, and has previously taught at Princeton University and the Rhode Island School of Design. She sees the academy as an experimental platform for testing and exchanging ideas about architecture; rather than retreat from the issues of today’s political, social, and environmental context, her teaching aims to foster curiosity in these complexities and foster dialogue through design. Yasmin is co-principal of Ultramoderne, an award-winning architecture and design firm located in Providence, Rhode Island; the office is committed to creating architecture and public spaces that are at once modern, playful, and generous. Their view that architecture is not a boutique luxury, but plays an important role in all aspects of urban life, has driven them to mine the rich possibilities for contact between the discipline and the everyday. Yasmin received her bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley and her master’s degree from Princeton University’s School of Architecture.

Sara Zewde appointed Assistant Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture. Zewde is a founding principal of Studio Zewde, a design firm practicing at the intersection of landscape architecture, urbanism, and public art. Sara’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. Sara most recently was Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s GSAPP, and prior to that, she held an appointment as Race and Gender in the Built Environment Fellow at the University of Texas School of Architecture. She offers curriculum that is expressly connected to current sociopolitical debates, giving students an opportunity to actively take part in forming the links between their design education and the movements shaping the world they live in. Sara is a GSD alumna, specifically of the Department of Landscape Architecture; she also holds a master’s degree in city planning from MIT, and a bachelor’s degree in sociology and statistics from Boston University.

Stephen Gray promoted to Associate Professor of Urban Design. Gray has served as Assistant Professor of Urban Design since July 1, 2015. In addition to his role as Assistant Professor, Gray serves as the Co-Chair of the GSD Diversity Council. Gray also serves on the GSD Review Board, and is a coordinating faculty member for the GSD’s Design Discovery program.

Gray’s interests center on understanding political and cultural contexts of urban design; socio-ecological urban design approaches to resilience; and the intersectionality of humanitarian aid and urban design. His research and practice interrogate design’s contribution to, and complicity with, structural and infrastructural racism, and develop research and design methodologies that address issues of equity, access, social justice, and precarity at the scales of infrastructure, communities, metropolitans, and the globe.

Gray focuses his teaching primarily on the American city, and often on Boston and the Boston region. Gray’s courses include Elements of Urban Design and Cities by Design II, both of which Gray has been instrumental in re-orienting more explicitly toward questions of social equity, affordability, access, and socio-ecological resilience, as well as the political and procedural realities of urban design implementation. In Urban Design and the Color-Line, Gray interrogates urban design’s role in the production and elimination of structural racism and racial segregation in American cities. In 2015, he founded Grayscale Collaborative to further expand thinking and work at the intersection of urban design research and practice.

Gray earned a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Cincinnati, and a Master of Architecture in Urban Design (MAUD) from the GSD, where he received the Thesis Prize for Urban Design and the Award for Outstanding Leadership in Urban Design. He has been tapped to serve on several Urban Land Institute (ULI) advisory panels, and has been nationally recognized by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) for his contributions to urban design thinking in the U.S. context with the National AIA Honor Award, the highest honor given to individual associate AIA members.

Holly Samuelson promoted to Associate Professor of Architecture. Samuelson has served as Assistant Professor of Architecture since July 30, 2013. In addition to her role as Assistant Professor, Samuelson serves as Co-Head of the Master in Design Studies in Energy and Environment. Samuelson also serves as one of the core faculty members for the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities, and is a faculty advisor for the GSD’s Executive Education programs.

Samuelson’s research focuses on energy conservation and occupant behavior and health, utilizing computerized simulation to help the building industry mitigate and adapt to climate change while providing healthier spaces for occupants. Her work is characterized by a broad interdisciplinary lens and deep technical capacity on building performance simulation and its application/implication for architectural design and real estate. Samuelson’s courses include Environmental Systems in Architecture; Energy Simulation; Daylighting; and Environment, Economics, & Enterprise.

Prior to joining Harvard, Samuelson practiced full-time as a licensed architect and sustainable design consultant. As an architect, her work ranged in scale from a small museum for interactive art to a 100 acre master plan for Boston’s Fort Point Channel area with a primary focus on large-scale commercial buildings. She has worked on dozens of LEED projects and taught LEED workshops nationally and abroad. Her collaborative design work has been featured in the Boston Globe and honored by the Boston Society of Architects.

Samuelson earned a Doctor of Design and Master in Design Studies with distinction from the GSD, where she was awarded the Gerald M. McCue medal. She earned a Bachelor of Architecture with honors from Carnegie Mellon where she was awarded the American Institute of Architects Henry Adams Gold Medal. She has contributed articles to Building and Environment, The Journal of Building Performance Simulation, and The Journal of Environmental Management.

Daniel Fernández Pascual Wins Harvard Graduate School of Design’s 2020 Wheelwright Prize

Harvard GSD is pleased to name Daniel Fernández Pascual the winner of the 2020 Wheelwright Prize , a grant to support investigative approaches to contemporary architecture, with an emphasis on globally minded research. With his winning proposal Being Shellfish: The Architecture of Intertidal Cohabitation, Fernández Pascual will examine the intertidal zone—coastal territory that is exposed to air at low tide, and covered with seawater at high tide—and its potential to advance architectural knowledge and material futures.

Observing that seaweed and shellfish have served as key sources of both nutrients and building materials for millennia, Fernández Pascual argues that their ongoing role in coastal circular economies opens new possibilities for contemporary architecture. He posits that shellfish waste shells and seaweeds may provide a basis for a new type of concrete, and could offer that and other clues to rethinking the construction sector and its impact in and on the built environment. While exploring such material futures, Fernández Pascual aims also to advance knowledge on sustaining more equitable social structures, while caring for coastal environments and cultures.

Amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Harvard GSD has prioritized the safety of all members of its community. Given the Wheelwright Prize’s fundamental connection between travel and research, Fernández Pascual has offered avenues for adapting his research to accommodate travel restrictions, envisioning a two-phase strategy whereby he would initiate or continue conversations with contacts at each site of interest, then travel to and visit sites during a second, later phase. He also connects the present pandemic to ongoing concerns relevant to his proposed topic, with regard to how his proposal may serve as a lens on how the human and natural worlds may cohabitate.

“We live immersed in ecologies that are eroding and changing at a rapid state, and the current global pandemic is just another sign of that environmental crisis,” Fernández Pascual observes. “As awareness about the environmental footprint of construction increases, there is an urgency to find materials that are responsive to dynamic ecosystems, to support eco-social innovation and architectural ingenuity along coastal zones, and to understand forms of cohabitation between humans and more-than-humans in order to support thriving ecosystems and societies. The Wheelwright Prize will allow me to investigate how the intertidal zone, in all of its complexity, may advance architectural knowledge in an era of climate emergency.”

“I am thrilled by the selection of Daniel Fernández Pascual as this year’s Wheelwright Prize recipient,” says Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at Harvard GSD, who served on the 2020 Wheelwright Prize jury. “By focusing on the potential of natural resources in the intertidal zone, Daniel’s proposal directly addresses one of the greatest threats our globe faces—climate change—by tackling one of architecture’s greatest contributors to that threat—concrete. Daniel has planned a dynamic research effort, reaching out to territories and societies that lie outside much of the architectural canon but that each offer variations on a theme: alternatives to using concrete as a building material. The potential for an investigation to play out so globally, and to draw in sites that offer such specific contexts, is rare, while the relevance of this topic and the care with which Daniel has organized his research agenda make me confident that this work will have a profound and widespread impact.”

Fernández Pascual was among three remarkable finalists selected from more than 170 applicants, hailing from 45 countries. The 2020 Wheelwright Prize jury commends finalists Bryony Roberts and Gustavo Utrabo for their promising research proposals and presentations.

Fernández Pascual holds a Master of Architecture from ETSA Madrid, a Master of Science in Urban Design from TU Berlin and Tongji University Shanghai, and a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2013, Fernández Pascual co-founded Cooking Sections with Alon Schwabe. Based in London, their work explores systems that organize the world through food. Using installation, performance, mapping and video, their research-based practice operates within the overlapping boundaries of architecture, visual culture, and ecology. Since 2015 Cooking Sections have worked on multiple iterations of the long-term, site-specific CLIMAVORE project, exploring how to eat as humans change climates.

Cooking Sections was part of the exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion in the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. Their work has also been exhibited widely; upcoming solo exhibitions will take place at Tate Britain and SALT Istanbul, as well as a new commission for P.5 New Orleans Triennial. In 2019, Cooking Sections won the Future Generation Special Art Prize and were shortlisted for the Visible Award for socially-engaged practices. Cooking Sections currently lead a studio unit investigating critical questions around refuse and the metabolization of the built environment at the School of Architecture, Royal College of Art, London.

With Being Shellfish, Fernández Pascual posits that, as awareness about the environmental footprint of construction increases, especially concerning the use of concrete, the intertidal zone can offer more-responsive ways to inhabit the planet and provide regenerative materials. Seaweeds and shellfish are key sources of nutrients and have been used in construction over millennia, he observes; by looking at waste shells and seaweed material cultures in Chile, Taiwan, China, Turkey, Japan, Zanzibar, Denmark, and New Zealand, Fernández Pascual plans to extend and expand an ongoing investigation on ecosocial coastal innovations in the intertidal zone, as initiated via Cooking Sections’ CLIMAVORE project. Within these proposed case studies, Fernández Pascual plans to look at historical and contemporary innovations, such as seaweed thermal insulation and waterproof roofing, as well as the use of waste shells used as cementless binding agents, cladding, and flooring systems in different parts of the world.

Ultimately, Fernández Pascual hopes to apply the knowledge gathered via his Wheelwright research to a built project that, in turn, will incorporate and illustrate the material innovations he discovers and serve as an educational facility on coastal ecologies.

As with past Wheelwright winners, the $100,000 prize is intended to fund two years of Fernández Pascual’s research travel.

Fernández Pascual follows 2019 Wheelwright Prize winner Aleksandra Jaeschke, whose Wheelwright project UNDER WRAPS: Architecture and Culture of Greenhouses is in its travel-research phase.

Now in its eighth year as an open international competition, the Wheelwright Prize supports travel-based research initiatives proposed by extraordinary early-career architects. Previous winners have circled the globe, pursuing inquiries into a broad range of social, cultural, environmental, and technological issues. The Wheelwright Prize originated at Harvard GSD in 1935 as the Arthur C. Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship, which was established to provide a Grand Tour experience to exceptional Harvard GSD graduates at a time when international travel was rare. In 2013 Harvard GSD opened the prize to early-career architects worldwide as a competition, with the goal of encouraging new forms of prolonged, hands-on research and cross-cultural engagement. The sole eligibility requirement is that applicants must have received a degree from a professionally accredited architecture program in the previous 15 years.

The 2020 Wheelwright Prize jury consisted of 2016 Wheelwright Prize Winner Anna Puigjaner; Harvard GSD’s Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture, Sarah M. Whiting; Harvard GSD’s Chair of the Department of Architecture, Mark Lee; Harvard GSD Assistant Professor of Architecture Megan Panzano; ETH Zurich Professor of Architecture Tom Emerson; and Belgian architect Wonne Ickx.

2020 Wheelwright Prize Finalists

The Wheelwright Prize jury commends the 2020 finalists for their outstanding applications:

Bryony Roberts
Wheelwright proposal: The Architecture of Childcare: A Global Study of Experimental Models

Bryony Roberts is an architectural designer and scholar. Her practice Bryony Roberts Studio, based in New York, integrates methods from architecture, art, and preservation to address complex social conditions and urban change. The practice has been awarded the Architectural League Prize and New Practices New York from AIA New York as well as support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Graham Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the American Academy in Rome, where Roberts was awarded the Rome Prize for 2015-2016. In tandem with her design practice, Roberts instigates research and publication projects about designing in response to social and cultural histories. She guest-edited the recent volume Log 48: Expanding Modes of Practice, edited the book Tabula Plena: Forms of Urban Preservation published by Lars Müller Publishers, and co-guest-edited Log 31: New Ancients. She has also published her research in Harvard Design Magazine, Praxis, Future Anterior, and Architectural Record.

Roberts earned her Bachelor of Arts at Yale University and her Master of Architecture at the Princeton School of Architecture, where she was awarded the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Thesis Prize and the Henry Adams AIA Medal. She teaches architecture and preservation at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in New York.

With The Architecture of Childcare, Roberts proposes an analysis of experimental models of care that hybridize programs to improve conditions for children, families, and care workers: childcare plus housing, childcare plus workplace, and childcare plus landscape. Comparing projects in Scandinavia, the UK, the US, Japan, and Southeast Asia through analytical drawings and contextual research, Roberts seeks to yield a global catalogue of new typologies.

Gustavo Utrabo
Wheelwright proposal: Rethinking Nature, Assembling Matter

Born in Curitiba, Brazil, Gustavo Utrabo received a degree in architecture and urbanism from the Federal University of Paraná in Curitiba, Brazil, in 2010. In 2014, he also completed a specialization course in National History and Literature from UTFPR. Through his studio, Estúdio Gustavo Utrabo, he intends to expand the architecture field, connect people, and imagine the future through sustainable and inclusive approaches. These approaches come together in an extensive portfolio that has earned significant awards as the RIBA International Prize (2018), RIBA International Emerging Architect (2018), finalist status in Harvard GSD’s 2018 Wheelwright Prize, and a “Highly Commended” award in the Architectural Review Emerging Architecture Awards (2019), among others. Utrabo has contributed to lectures and other actions in institutions including IIT Chicago, University of Hong Kong, Future Architecture Platform at MAO museum in Ljubljana, RIBA London, and FAU-USP in São Paulo, among others. Utrabo recently served as a visiting professor in the Master of Arts program at the University of Hong Kong.

Eyeing intersections between culture, nature, and economics, especially amid ongoing climate change, Utrabo proposes an investigation into merging nature and culture through matter. With “Rethinking Nature, Assembling Matter,” he seeks an understanding of how wood, from its natural, raw status to its final use in architecture, can be used as a primordial resource to compose a cultural manifestation.