GSD’s Fabrication Lab facilities being considered for possible production of medical supplies

Members of the Harvard GSD community are proactively exploring how we might best leverage our skills and resources to help with the COVID-19 outbreak and its impacts in any ways that we can. Most recently, the GSD’s Assistant Dean for Information Technology Stephen Ervin and 3-D Fabrication Specialist Chris Hansen have been in consultation with the newly formed Mass General Brigham (MGB) Center for COVID Innovation to explore whether and how the GSD’s Fabrication Lab facilities, including 3-D printers, might be put to work to address critical shortages in Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for front-line medical personnel—PPE such as face masks, and diagnostic aids such as nasopharyngeal test swabs. Together with the GSD’s Martin Bechthold, Kumagai Professor of Architectural Technology and Director of the Doctor of Design Studies and Master in Design Engineering programs, Ervin and Hansen are coordinating with other Harvard partners, including the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The MGB Center for COVID Innovation is organizing working groups to find rapid ways to pare down the hundreds of PPE designs currently available on the internet to the designs that are the most promising and feasible. The goal is to identify the best designs for printing and implementation strategies of 3-D printers, whether it be home printers, large-factory 3-D printers, or clusters of 3-D printers such as those in Gund Hall. These designs must then be prototyped, tested, and validated by medical professionals, since they are to be used in clinical settings. These GSD staff and faculty are working with Harvard’s Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S) group, GSD’s Director of Facilities Management Kevin Cahill, GSD Building Services staff, and custodial personnel to establish internal safety controls, so that a small number of GSD Fabrication Lab staff and others might enter Gund Hall in coming weeks to proceed with production. The urgency and gravity of the needs are evident, as is the requirement that these contributions meet strict public and personal health requirements. As soon as we can move forward, we will do so.

How to mitigate the impact of an epidemic and prevent the spread of the next viral disease: A guide for designers

One hundred and fifty years ago, using a map of London and data of the water supply system, physician John Snow identified the source of a cholera outbreak in London. His analysis proved that the neighborhoods supplied by a specific water pump were more affected by the disease than others. By closing the pump, they managed to control the epidemic. This incident is more than a historical anecdote; it was an inflection point in urban design for two reasons. First, it showed the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to city planning—how citizens would benefit from the collaboration of different domains of expertise. Second, it proved the connection between design and health and the importance of incorporating health considerations in city planning and urban design. Accordingly, in the decades that followed, public health experts joined urban planners and architects. Thanks to advances in science, new technologies, and flourishing economies, living conditions in cities improved, and standards and regulations to guarantee the health and safety of city inhabitants were defined and implemented. Success bred complacency, however, and the relationship between these disciplines frayed: urban design and public health parted ways again. This was the genesis of the challenging situation in which we found ourselves today—dealing with an as yet uncontrollable pandemic. Let’s review how a viral epidemic works: in general, the onset of many epidemics like COVID-19 happens when an animal reservoir infects a human with an unknown virus. Depending on the capacity for this virus to spread, its severity, and the context, the infection can evolve from a few cases into an epidemic and then into a pandemic in a matter of weeks—before the health authorities even agree on the definition of the scenario. With COVID-19, we had a high-density populated area, easy and fast transportation links to the rest of the world, and a highly contagious virus. And since this virus doesn’t kill its reservoir quickly—and it can be transmitted before any signs of infection are shown—it has time to spread to other people. So what do designers have to do with the spread of an epidemic? The disconnection between public health and urban design happened during an unprecedented level of urban growth in the mid-20th century. Growth is not a problem per se unless countries are unprepared to handle it. In many regions of the world, the rural-city displacement outpaced the capacity for governments and planners to provide an adequate response to people’s needs. This led to the proliferation of informal urban settlements. Today, more than one billion people live in unplanned and unregulated areas in cities, a staggering figure that is expected to double by 2030. These settlements, usually found in low- and middle-income countries, share a common trait; they lack the minimum levels of infrastructure to provide a safe environment in which to live and thrive. They also lack the necessary sanitation, so water contaminated with fecal matter and dirt runs between poorly built houses. Their markets are, in many cases, sheltered under semi-temporary structures, without any sanitary regulation in place, and it is not rare to see wild animals, dead and alive, sharing space with food. These environments are the perfect breeding ground for new infections and epidemics to develop. Over the last few decades, we’ve gone through numerous outbreaks of infectious diseases. And the more the world develops, the closer the outbreaks are to each other. Since the 1970s, there have been multiple lethal Ebola episodes in small villages in the middle of the African forest, where they wipe a percentage of the population and disappear. What has changed now? Our societies, hungry for land and resources, are getting too close to potential viral reservoirs by irrupting into wild animals’ habitats. And we do it without taking any precautions. On the contrary, we’re cramming people into unhealthy environments while improved transportation means that viruses can spread easily. We have created the perfect epidemic storm. There’s a lot designers can do not only to mitigate the impact of an epidemic but also to prevent the spread of the next viral disease. Here are some of the areas where we should invest money and resources: Prevention: We must invest in developing healthy marketplaces. By controlling the environments in which wild animals are sold, we can stop the disease at the onset. This is exceptionally complex due to the importance that food markets have in different cultures. So we must develop interventions that, without being disruptive, limit potential animal-to-animal, and animal-to-human transmission. Control: The COVID-19 epidemic began in a modern city in China, but the next one could start in a slum in Bangladesh or in a megacity like Nairobi, with very limited resources to tackle the spread of the disease. In 10 years, an estimated 20 percent of the world’s population will live in urban environments with a limited access to appropriate water, health, and sanitation infrastructures. Designers need to step up and find solutions to improve conditions in cities with low resources. It’s easy to build a fancy new green space in a modern city. The real challenge is to reduce the infant mortality rate due to inadequate living conditions in a sub-Saharan African slum. That same slum could also be the epicenter of the next pandemic. Response: During the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the Chinese government built health facilities at an incredibly fast pace (something repeated in Wuhan during the current epidemic). Doctors Without Borders can deploy an inflatable working hospital with ICU capacities in a matter of hours, as they did after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake. In fact, humanitarian organizations have responded to epidemics for decades. However, these solutions are adapted for specific contexts, mainly low-income countries with limited resources after catastrophic circumstances. Since epidemics can happen anywhere now, the next big challenge is to provide an adequate healthcare infrastructure once the hospitals are overloaded in a city like New York. To do so, designers need to work with health practitioners and authorities to prepare contingency plans that are ready in advance for every major city in the world. During outbreaks, there’s little time to think and no time to discuss. Instead, we need to act. Fast. These are just a few practical examples of how critical the contribution of urban planners, architects, and designers can be when dealing with epidemics. Nothing here is groundbreaking, but for one reason or another, investing in epidemics or underserved communities hasn’t been on the agendas of governments or urban developers. Unfortunately for all of us, epidemics are here to stay. In addition to viral epidemics, like the COVID-19, we must address the noncommunicable disease epidemics—such as cardiovascular disease, cancer or diabetes—that are responsible for more than 70 percent of deaths worldwide. Designers play an essential role in the prevention, control, and response of many of these diseases, so getting involved is not a matter of a choice anymore, but a duty. Dr. Elvis Garcia is an expert in epidemics and a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His 2020 course Public Health in an Era of Epidemics: From the Camp to the Building draws on ten years of experience in the field with Doctors Without Borders responding to epidemics like Ebola in Liberia and cholera in Haiti. 

What role do planning and design play in a pandemic? Ann Forsyth reflects on COVID-19’s impact on the future of urban life

Over the past few days, normal life at Harvard has been upended by government, university, community, and business responses to COVID-19. What role do planning and design have in this kind of pandemic? Recent reports from London’s Imperial College and Harvard Global Health Institute (HGHI) lay out the broad problem. The influential Imperial College report explains that since COVID-19 is a new disease, the general population does not have immunity. Until there is a vaccine—which is expected to be 6 to 18 months away—or a large number of people have been infected and develop immunity, infection rates will be high. The threat, outlined clearly by the HGHI, and illustrated by the Washington Post, is that hospital and intensive care beds and staff will be overwhelmed. The Imperial College report estimates that with no action, given that COVID-19 is already in the population, over 2 million deaths will occur in the US. That leaves non-pharmaceutical interventions; in the Imperial College report these are termed “mitigation” and “suppression.” Mitigation aims to slow the disease using measures such as isolating those who are sick, quarantining household members, and implementing social distancing for those over 70. This would spread out infections and has been used effectively in the past. However, using various assumptions, the report shows that even with a plausible mitigation approach, the US will still need eight times as many intensive care beds as it currently has, with the peak occurring in the summer of 2020. This leaves suppression—including closing schools and universities and social distancing of the entire population—as our new normal, for a period of months, not weeks. Of course, estimating the effects of various strategies involves many assumptions, but the situation is not a simple one. This is why universities, schools, governments, and businesses are changing how they operate; Harvard has gone to online instruction, for example. A key problem is that when suppression is used as an intervention, people do not build up immunity, so suppression needs to be in place until a vaccine is released, immunity built up, or until systems can be put in place to test, track, and trace at a massive scale. Countries such as Singapore and South Korea, that are now exemplars for managing the disease through testing and monitoring, experienced SARS or MERS in the past decades. They were prepared for COVID-19. In places without such preparation, suppression is buying time to make those preparations. A New York Times op ed by members of the University of Pennsylvania faculty explains the suppression strategy well. Additionally, the economic fallout from suppression may endanger the health of the vulnerable: older adults, children, those with preexisting conditions, anyone with a low income, and those otherwise marginalized in society. People may lose their housing, find it harder to access routine health care and prescription medications, and eat less well. Stress is caused by economic hurt as well as uncertainly over the pandemic itself. These are not good times for human health. What does this mean for urban places? There are very obvious disruptions at the global scale—with grounded flights, required isolation for travelers, and closed borders. More will need to be done internationally to try to stop diseases crossing from animals to humans—a task that is compounded by climate change altering habitats and people moving into previously unsettled areas. But here I want to examine three smaller scales and the built environment. Cities and regions: In the context of COVID-19, some have questioned the future of urban life. This is a bit premature. Metropolitan areas are quite varied in density and character; they range from leafy suburbs to apartment buildings in the core city. It is also important to distinguish between high population densities (counted as people per acre, for example) and crowding (often operationalized as people per room). Singapore has so far avoided the worst of the crisis with widespread testing, isolation, and clear communication. Italy, where suppression is in full force, shows the social solidarity possible in higher density areas—like people singing from their balconies. COVID-19 is emptying out public transportation in many places, but transportation is already in a transition period due to automation. The key health crisis from COVID-19 is likely to appear in more crowed settlements without adequate water supplies and sanitation—in both urban and rural settings—but these have been a focus of public health concern for a long time. While cities will not be eliminated, a long period of suppression may well change patterns of urban life. Neighborhoods: With more people working at home, and more deliveries, the neighborhood can provide support, challenge, and delight: support for healthy activities; challenges to stimulate oneself both physically and mentally; and delight in a time of stress. For all except the strictest suppression approaches, people can get out and about for exercise and errands, while still keeping social distance. With gyms closed, meetings going online, and grocery stores limiting numbers of visitors, the outdoors is all the more important. Of course, this assumes people retain their housing as economic conditions worsen—also a key planning and design concern. Home: People will be home—a lot—with more family members in the same place at the same time. This is not the case for everyone—health professionals, delivery workers, people caring for physical infrastructure, those cleaning and maintaining essential facilities—may be out quite a bit. But for most people, homes also need to provide support, challenge, and delight to maintain physical and mental health. Not all homes are healthy. For example, poor indoor air quality caused by mold or poor ventilation is a substantial health hazard. Physical activity can be carried out indoors but may involve changing behavioral patterns. This is surely a design issue, and again one more critical for those with fewer resources. More than ever, access to the internet, as well as to physical public spaces, are key planning, design, and health concerns. An infectious disease pandemic challenges recent research in the area of healthy places. In the 19th century, the emerging planning and design professions shared a core interest in infectious diseases. Building regulations and sanitation systems were common responses. Infectious diseases are certainly a top concern again today; they are also a continuing issue in places where low incomes lead to crowding, lack of sanitation, and the like. For the past decades, however, those looking at the intersections of planning, design, and public health have focused less on infectious diseases and more on three other areas: chronic disease, hazards and disasters, and the vulnerable. For chronic diseases—those lasting a year or more—the environment can provide options for healthy behaviors such as physical activity or mental restoration. For hazards—such as climate change—planners and designers need to address flooding, droughts, and climate-led migration. And for the vulnerable, the environment needs to focus on those who are old, young, have preexisting conditions, or have low incomes. The current pandemic brings the question of designing for infectious diseases back to the forefront, however, and raises important questions for future research and practice. Ann Forsyth is Ruth and Frank Stanton Professor of Urban Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is co-Director of the Healthy Places Design Lab.

Covid-19: Guidance for the Harvard Graduate School of Design Community

The health, safety, and well-being of our community, on and off campus, is our top priority. As of Friday, March 13, 2020, the Harvard Graduate School of Design has shifted to online coursework. The GSD will continue with remote teaching through the entire Fall 2020 semester. All university-related international travel and non-essential domestic travel are prohibited. All in-person school-wide events and public programs are cancelled. We thank our students, faculty, staff, and our circle of alumni and friends for their spirit of cooperation, patience, ingenuity, and kinship in response to this unprecedented situation. For more information, visit Covid-19 Information for Current and Incoming GSD Students, Covid-19 Information for GSD Faculty, and Covid-19 Information for GSD Staff.

Resources

Covid-19 Information for Current and Incoming GSD Students Covid-19 Information for GSD Faculty Covid-19 Information for GSD Staff Harvard Coronavirus Website Harvard Coronavirus Workplace Policies Travel Cancellation and Reimbursement FAQs Employee Assistance Program Prepare to Learn Remotely Prepare to Teach Remotely Prepare to Work Remotely Virtual Help Desk Do I Need to Self-Isolate for COVID-19?

Latest Updates

The feed below shows time-stamped updates made to the resources linked above, as they happen.

Updates from the Frances Loeb Library

August 3, 2020 at 14:23 You may now borrow print materials and request items from Scan and Deliver from Loeb Library, Lamont, Widener, Tozzer, Yenching, the Harvard Depository and other libraries using our Front Door Pickup service. Instructions can be found on the COVID-19 Information for Students and the COVID-19 Information for Faculty resource pages.

Teaching Assistant: How to Apply

Jul 20, 2020 at 11:40 A link to the Teaching Assistant: How to Apply resource page, which includes Fall 2020 updates, was added to the Table of Contents of the COVID-19 Information for Students resource page.

HUSHP Changes for Academic Year 2020-2021

Jun 10, 2020 at 14:35 Find a list of changes being implemented to the Harvard University Student Health Program (HUSHP) plan for the 2020-2021 Academic Year on the HUSHP website. Some changes are related to the pandemic and others are standard changes. This link has also been added to the FAQ section of the COVID-19 Information for Students resource page.

Harvard Update on Operational and Financial Planning

Jun 9, 2020 at 12:14 On June 9, 2020, Executive Vice President Katie Lapp sent a message to the Harvard community to share a few updates regarding University operations and finances, as well as updated workforce programs and policies. Read the full message.

Updates from the Frances Loeb Library

Jun 9, 2020 at 12:11 Updates as of June 8, 2020, regarding online research support, library services, and physical collections can be found on the Frances Loeb Library webpage. Corresponding text and links are also on the COVID-19 Information for Faculty and COVID-19 Information for Students resource pages.

Fall 2020 Announcement

June 3, 2020 at 09:55: A message from Dean Sarah M. Whiting regarding the fall 2020 semester: Dear GSD community, After intensive scenario planning, I am writing to you today to share our decision that the GSD will continue with remote teaching through the entire fall semester. Three factors influenced our thinking most. First, our concern for the health and safety of the entire GSD community remains our top priority, and based on current guidance from Harvard University Health Services, we have decided that the uncertainty of the coming months warrants our decision to continue with remote teaching. Second, our international students face very steep and unpredictable challenges obtaining necessary visas for entry into the United States, and international and even domestic travel will continue to pose logistical difficulties for everyone. And finally, we believe it is important to commit now to a full semester online, so that new students and returning students who will eventually need to move back to Cambridge and secure new housing accommodations can make their plans for the fall with certainty, and without any lingering possibility that circumstances may suddenly change in the middle of the semester. On Friday [June 5, 2020], you will receive a longer email with specific details about what students can expect in the summer months and fall semester. Kindly, Sarah

Leave of Absence Deadline Now June 15, 2020

May 22, 2020 at 10:33 As of May 22, 2020, the deadline to apply for a Leave of Absence for the fall has been extended to June 15, 2020. Find more information and FAQs around leaves of absence on the COVID-19 Information for Students resource page.

New FAQs

May 22, 2020 at 10:31 New FAQs on the re-opening Gund Hall, returning international students studying remotely, and leaves of absence have been added to the COVID-19 Information for Students resource page.

Harvard Guidance in response to Massachusetts Phased Re-Opening

May 19, 2020 at 12:39 On May 18, 2020, Provost Alan M. Garber (AB ’77, PhD ’82, MD) and Executive Vice President Katie Lapp sent a message to the Harvard community regarding Harvard guidance in response to Massachusetts phased re-opening. Read the full message.

2020 Summer Work and Grant Opportunities for Graduating and Returning Students

May 14, 2020 at 12:30 Information regarding 2020 summer work and grant opportunities for returning and graduating students can now be found on its own resource page, which includes frequently asked questions.

Update on International and Domestic Travel Guidance

May 11, 2020 at 16:20 On May 11, 2020, Provost Alan M. Garber (AB ’77, PhD ’82, MD), Executive Vice President Katie Lapp and Executive Director, Harvard University Health Services Giang T. Nguyen MD, MPH, MSCE, FAAFP sent a message to the Harvard community regarding updated international and domestic travel guidance. “University-related travel, both international and domestic, is prohibited until further notice and should not be planned or scheduled at this time,” states the message. “This applies to all community members—students, faculty, staff, postdoctoral fellows, and other academics. We encourage you to explore creative options for alternative study, research, work, and collaboration. We also strongly discourage personal travel, both international and domestic.” Read the full message.

Commonwealth of Massachusetts Order Requiring Use of Face Coverings

May 4, 2020 at 16:09 May 4, 2020, message from Katie Lapp, Executive Vice President, to the Harvard community: On Friday, May 1, 2020, Governor Baker issued an Order requiring people in Massachusetts to wear face masks or cloth face coverings in public places where social distancing is not possible. The Order takes effect Wednesday, May 6, 2020. This applies to both indoor and outdoor spaces. Exceptions include children under the age of 2 and those unable to wear a mask or face covering due to a medical condition. Full details can be found here: https://www.mass.gov/doc/may-1-2020-masks-and-face-coverings/download A violation of this order may result in a civil fine of up to $300 (per violation). As a reminder, a face covering is not a substitute for physical distancing and regular hand washing, which remain among the most effective ways to slow the spread of COVID-19.

Summer Support for Returning Students and New Graduates

Apr 30, 2020 at 17:56 New and emerging opportunities for grants and jobs that the GSD will be providing this summer for returning students and new graduates are posted to the FAQ section of the COVID-19 Information for Students resource page.

City of Cambridge Issues Emergency Order Requiring Use of Face Coverings

Apr 28, 2020 at 14:37 April 28, 2020, message from Katie Lapp, Executive Vice President, to the Harvard community: The City of Cambridge issued an emergency order requiring that face coverings be worn in all public places. The order takes effect at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday, April 29, and applies to everyone over the age of five years old. The order applies to everyone in public places, to anyone working in or visiting an essential business (including shoppers and consumers), and in common areas of residential buildings of two or more units. Full details of the order can be found here: https://www.cambridgema.gov/covid19/News/2020/04/emergencyorderonfacecoverings The Cambridge Police Department will be focused on educating violators and may issue warnings to those residents who do not cooperate. For those who willingly refuse to comply, they may be subject to a $300 fine. There will be a one-week grace period to allow time to comply. As a reminder, a face covering is not a substitute for physical distancing and regular hand washing, which remain among the most effective ways to slow the spread of COVID-19. Face coverings enhance the effectiveness of physical distancing. The single most effective way to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 is to stay home.

Planning for Fall 2020

Apr 28, 2020 at 14:35 On April 27, 2020, Provost Alan M. Garber (AB ’77, PhD ’82, MD) sent a message to the Harvard community stating that “Harvard will be open for fall 2020.” He continued, “Our goal is to bring our students, faculty, postdoctoral fellows and staff to campus as quickly as possible, but because most projections suggest that COVID-19 will remain a serious threat during the coming months, we cannot be certain that it will be safe to resume all usual activities on campus by then. Consequently, we will need to prepare for a scenario in which much or all learning will be conducted remotely. Even if conditions do not allow for a traditional fall experience on campus, we are committed to ensuring that the learning and research of our students will continue at the highest levels of excellence and that we will do our part to enable them to achieve their aspirations.” Read the full message.

Leave of Absence Requests

Apr 28, 2020 at 09:02 Information regarding Leave of Absence Requests has been added to the Covid-19 Information for Current and Incoming GSD Students resource page.

Scan & Deliver Services from Harvard Library Available Again

Apr 8, 2020 at 14:25 As of April 8, 2020, Scan & Deliver Services from Harvard Library are available again. Requests may be placed through HOLLIS. If the item you are interested in is eligible, the Scan & Deliver link will appear in the item record. You may also submit a Scan & Deliver request manually via your Scan & Deliver account. Find current updates for library services on our website.

Update on Travel Prohibitions, Summer Programs, and Visas

Apr 7, 2020 at 09:52 On April 6, 2020, Harvard issued an update on travel prohibitions, summer programs, and visas stating: Current prohibitions on University-related international travel and non-essential domestic air travel are extended through at least May 31. Harvard-organized and Harvard-funded international travel for all students that is scheduled to start and end between now and August 31 is prohibited. The worldwide suspension of routine visa processing at U.S. consular locations is being closely monitored and Harvard is working to advise international students and scholars accordingly. Read the full update. Additional information as of April 6, 2020, regarding summer international travel guidance for students from Harvard’s Vice Provost for International Affairs can be found on the Harvard COVID-19 website.

Academic Accommodations

Mar 25, 2020 at 14:32 An FAQ regarding academic accommodations, including classroom accommodations, exam accommodations, and registering for accommodations, has been added to the COVID-19 Information for Students page.

Massachusetts Governor Issues Stay at Home Advisory For Two Weeks

Mar 23, 2020 at 11:29 Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker has issued a stay-at-home advisory and is ordering non-essential businesses in the state to close beginning Tuesday, March 24 at noon through April 7 at noon. Grocery stores and pharmacies will remain open and you are permitted to go outdoors, as long as you practice strict social distancing measures. Staff: if you are not sure if you are an essential employee, please contact your manager.

Publishers and Vendors Offering Free Content

Mar 23, 2020 at 09:47 In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of publishers and vendors are making an assortment of content—ebooks, streaming services, image resources, and more—freely available. A Harvard Library colleague has put together a site compiling the offerings. This is an evolving list.

Do I need to self-isolate for COVID-19?

Mar 17, 2020 at 14:48 HUHS has put together a one-pager of potential scenarios based on the best scientific advice currently available.

Library Updates Regarding Checked Out and Getting Materials

Mar 17, 2020 at 14:40

If you have materials checked out:

Returns: Hold on to everything you have. This includes books, Borrow Direct and Interlibrary Loan materials, DVDs, periodicals, etc. There’s no way to return anything right now. Fines: All recall fines that accrue while the Library is closed will be waived. Reach out to us if you see fines on your account. Due dates: All due dates can be extended. Nothing should be due in the immediate future. Reach out to us if you need help extending a due date. Graduating seniors: We are working on solutions specifically for you, but hold on to loans for now.

If you need materials:

Electronic materials: You may submit Scan & Deliver requests for book chapters and journal articles, and we will try to fill as many requests electronically as possible.

• Scan & Deliver requests may be placed through HOLLIS. If the item you’re interested in is eligible, the Scan & Deliver link will appear in the item record.
• You may also submit a Scan & Deliver request manually via your Scan & Deliver account.

Physical materials: The borrowing of print materials has been suspended until further notice. Physical items are no longer requestable in HOLLIS.

Students: Vital Spring Break Travel Information Notice

Mar 16, 2020 at 10:28 Students: As we respond to the current, ever-shifting situation, it is very important that we are able to maintain contact with you. Please take a moment to update your contact information in my.harvard. Refer to your email for detailed instructions from Sean Conlon on how to use the site. If you are traveling domestically or internationally, be sure to register with Global Support Services. If you are traveling specifically for the spring break period and returning to Cambridge, select “Spring Break 2020,” as the purpose for your travel. Additional information on travel registration and support. If you are living in Harvard Housing or residential halls, you will need to complete the HUHS health form 48 hours before returning. Despite the fact that this form notes it is intended for those who travel to Level 3 areas, you will still need to fill this form out regardless of where you travel. Additional information is available at: Spring Break Travel Registration Instructions for Students and Residential Staff.

Closing Access to the GSD Campus

Mar 16, 2020 at 09:36 As of March 16, the GSD will close access entirely to our academic facilities, including the Fabrication Lab and Loeb Library, until further notice. Students: As of 6:00 pm on Sunday, March 15, students are expected to have moved out of GSD buildings what belongings they need to continue coursework remotely. All courses will continue online, and while students will not be able to enter any GSD buildings until further notice, the school’s administrative leadership has worked extremely hard to maintain remote accessibility of resources fundamental to the academic experience. Among the resources you will have ongoing access to are the digital collections offered by the Loeb Library. Another is a Virtual Help Desk, which starting Monday, March 16, will be open 8:00 am to 10:00 pm Mondays through Fridays to consult on and help resolve any IT-related issues. Faculty, Researchers, and Loeb Fellows: In the strongest terms, faculty are now required to work remotely, away from GSD campus buildings. Because this is a change to earlier communications, however, faculty who do need to enter our buildings to access and remove materials may do so until Wednesday, March 18, at 5:00 pm. Between 9:00 am and 5:00 pm Monday through Wednesday, faculty IDs will gain access to all spaces they already have had privileges to enter. To access Gund Hall, please use the Quincy Street entrance. Please do not let anyone else in any building using your ID card. If you encounter any difficulties, or if you are traveling through the deadline on Wednesday and will need to retrieve belongings from your office after you return, or if you need access to other GSD buildings, please contact Trevor O’Brien or Kevin Cahill. The Wednesday 5:00 pm deadline applies to researchers and Loeb Fellows as well. Some faculty have asked whether their courses may be taught online from their offices. For at least the next two and a half weeks, please teach your courses from home. Over this time (the first week of which involves no teaching, since it is spring break), we will be monitoring this situation as it unfolds, and faculty will be notified if the school’s or the university’s position changes. Because access to Gund Hall will not be allowed, faculty will continue to have access only to the Loeb Library’s digital collections online. As of Monday, March 16, the Virtual Help Desk also will be available 8:00 am to 10:00 pm Mondays through Fridays to consult on IT-related issues. GSD Staff: As of March 16, all Harvard staff who are able are being asked to work remotely. Managers will be in contact regarding specific responsibilities and means of accessing information, and please remember to check the page for staff on the GSD’s COVID-19 webpages for the most current updates.

Faculty Affairs and Library to Offer Weekly Zoom Online Pedagogy Discussion Session for Faculty

Mar 13, 2020 at 18:52 Faculty Affairs and the Library are planning to offer a weekly Zoom online pedagogy discussion session, optional and open to all faculty, to facilitate shared learning and provide a space for instructors to talk. The first discussion will be scheduled for next week, in spite of the break, in case faculty want to discuss planning for their first online class meetings, which will take place beginning Monday, March 23. Details to follow via email.

Signing up for Direct Deposit

Mar 13, 2020 at 18:39 Information on how students can sign up for direct deposit was added to the GSD Student Payroll section of the COVID-19 Information for Students page.

Tools for Learning, Teaching, and Working Remotely

Mar 13, 2020 at 16:00 Links to Harvard tools for learning, teaching, and working remotely were added to the Resources section of this website.

GSD Student Payroll

Mar 13, 2020 at 12:55 Information regarding payroll for GSD students holding a current job at the GSD who will continue to work remotely has been added to the Covid-19 Information for Students page. It includes links to download timesheets and instructions on how to submit timesheets. It also includes further instructions for students planning to start a new job that includes remote work. Should students have any questions regarding the process, please contact payroll coordinators directly.

Moving Assistance

Mar 13, 2020 at 11:06 Moving supplies and carts will be available in Piper Auditorium for GSD students Friday March 13 through Sunday March 15 at 6:00 pm. Moving Vans and Passenger Vans will be on-site 9:00 am – 6:00 pm Friday March 13 through Sunday March 15. Visit the Covid-19 Information for Students page for additional information about moving assistance and logistics. Please direct any questions around moving to [email protected].

Student Employment for the Spring Semester, Housing, and Emergency Assistance

Mar 13, 2020 at 10:02 Additional information regarding Student Employment for the Spring Semester, Housing, and Emergency Assistance has been added to the Covid-19 Information for Students page following the email from Laura Snowdon, Dean of Students & Asst. Dean for Enrollment Services, to students at 5:50 pm EDT on Thursday, March 12, 2020.

Financial Assistance for GSD Students

Mar 12, 2020 at 18:15 The GSD is organizing an emergency fund to assist students who depend on financial aid and others who find themselves with unforeseen and insurmountable financial hurdles. Details will follow by email. Meanwhile, students who have specific and immediate financial issues should email Keith Gnoza, Director of Financial Assistance at [email protected].

Zoom Online Training

Mar 12, 2020 at 18:11 Sign up for an online training for Teaching Remotely with Zoom with HUIT. Additional resources from CRG for anyone who would like to learn more about Zoom:

• Harvard University IT knowledgebase articles: Visit Harvard’s IT Service Portal and search for “zoom.”
• Zoom’s corporate web site also offers a robust online Help Center, including how-to videos, live webinars, and FAQ’s.
• Learn best practices, available tools, and how to get support for teaching your classes online.
• Information about CRG’s Virtual Help Desk.

Virtual Help Desk

Mar 12, 2020 at 15:52 Starting Monday, March 16, the HelpDesk will host an open meeting in Zoom 9:00 am to 5:00 pm daily to discuss any IT-related questions or issues.

Students Starting a University Job after March 13, 2020

Mar 12, 2020 at 15:24 If you are a student that is planning to start your first university job after March 13, 2020, you must see your payroll coordinator by close of business on Friday, March 13, 2020. This also applies to those who have not worked in over a year. See your email for a list of documents that must be presented. General payroll questions can be directed to Pilar Raynor Jordan. If you have, or had, a job during the Spring semester, this does not apply to you.

Fabrication Lab Update

Mar 12, 2020 at 15:17 The Fabrication Lab will be closing at 6:00 pm on Sunday, March 15, and will remain closed until further notice. Everything must be removed from the Project Room by this time. Anything left after that time will be discarded. The store will be open normal hours through Saturday, March 14, for returns through Crimson Cash only. It will accept items that are in good condition, not damaged or warped. Student Services is discussing procedures that will allow some limited access to Gund Hall for Fabrication Lab, 3D Printing, Helpdesk, and Digital Printing/Plotting, consistent with the School’s stated goal of limiting occupancy in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, for students whose work truly cannot be accomplished otherwise. This situation is evolving. Students should check their email and this website for updates.

Frances Loeb Library Loaned Material: No Fines

Mar 12, 2020 at 11:30 The Frances Loeb Library is taking steps to ensure that no loaned material will be due before the end of the term. This will involve pushing due dates forward, resetting renewal periods, and turning off recalls. If you have questions or problems with returning books, please respond to the Access Services email address on all Alma notices, and we will fix the issue for you.

Zoom Drop-in Clinics

Mar 12, 2020 at 11:28 Computer Resources Group and Library Staff will be offering a drop-in clinics for anyone who would like to receive hands-on assistance in learning how to use Zoom. Staff will be located in Frances Loeb Library/Collaboration Space 2 during the week of March 9–13 for drop-in sessions between 9:00 am and 5:00 pm. Helpdesk will provide an open online Zoom meeting for Helpdesk access.

Free Live-Streaming of Yoga Classes

Mar 12, 2020 at 11:25 YogaGSD and Student Services are coordinating live-streaming of yoga classes with Elizabeth Brown. More information will be forthcoming. Meanwhile, the yoga app Down Dog is free until April 1.

Alex Krieger remembers François Vigier (1931–2020)

François Claude Denis Vigier, the Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning Emeritus, died on February 7, 2020, shortly after his 89th birthday. Frank joined the Harvard Graduate School of Design faculty in 1962 and remained a distinguished member of the faculty until 2005. He was an early contributor to the emergence of urban design as a discipline—the program was founded just two years prior to his arrival—and was instrumental during the early 1990s in the return of urban planning to the GSD from its 14-year sojourn in the Kennedy School of Government. He served as the first chair of the then reorganized Department of Urban Planning and Design between 1992 and 1998. From 1987 until 2005 he also served as the director of the Center for Urban Development Studies at the GSD. Retirement for Frank in 2005 marked the start of a new phase: the research undertaken at the Center of Urban Development continued and broadened under a new nonprofit, the Institute for International Urban Development, dedicated to the same humanitarian values. Frank was its its founder and its president for the past 15 years. The Institute has helped communities, often poor or minority, pursue neighborhood or regional development frameworks, finance strategies, and provide upgrades to disinvested or slum areas. Most importantly, it has helped such communities in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe to establish methods to negotiate with local and regional partners in the government and the private sector to improve an area’s quality of life. The institute is a leader in the development of technical assistance and capacity building for urban populations. Another passion of Frank’s was the preservation of non-monumental cultural heritage sites, including the rehabilitation of the medina in Fez, an area of medieval Baku, and portions of old Damascus. His lifelong commitment to such work led the French government to honor him as Knight of the Order of Merit in 1995. The same dedication to improving the interaction between people and places marked Frank’s decades of teaching. When the American planning profession began to distance itself from physical planning in the 1970s, and the GSD’s planning program moved to the Kennedy School of Government, Frank was the one member of the planning faculty who chose to remain, convinced that the GSD must remain committed to and influential both in matters of design and planning. He understood that design ideas, and even aesthetic choices, were not independent of political, economic, and social values. His was a voice for engagement and collaboration, favoring more interaction among all of the disciplines at the GSD. His courses and studios always emphasized such interaction—planning perspectives influencing design ideas / design insights able to influence plans and policies. Upon the return of planning to the GSD, Frank strongly supported incorporating studio education into the planning curriculum, still one of the unique features of Harvard’s program. Frank also studied at the GSD. After earning a bachelor in architecture from MIT, he received a master of city planning degree from the GSD in 1960, and shortly after was asked to join the GSD faculty. He was awarded a PhD from Harvard in 1967. Frank was an accomplished author as well. His first major book, Change and Apathy: Liverpool and Manchester During the Industrial Revolution (MIT Press, 1970), continues to offer insight about the forces unleashed during the initial period of modern industrial-era urbanization. Those issues still require our attention: protecting natural resources; minimizing pollution; stemming sprawl in some contexts and reducing egregious density in others; and striving to reduce economic inequalities. Inculcating such values in decades of students was just one of Professor Vigier’s indispensable contributions.

February 2020 News Roundup

Toshiko Mori, Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture, is one of 13 new members inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an honor society of the country’s 250 leading architects, artists, composers, and writers. Each year the academy administers over 70 awards and prizes, exhibits art and manuscripts, funds performances of new works of musical theater, and purchases artwork for donation to museums across the United States. Francisco “Pancho” Brown (MDes CC ’20) and Angela Mayrina (MDes ADPD ’20) have been selected as New Museum/IdeasCity Singapore 2020 Fellows. They traveled to Singapore this month to attend the NTU CCA Ideas Fest 2019–20, which examined the impact of climate change on communities worldwide. The event also featured student work from the fall 2019 GSD course “Exhibit: Designing for Decentralization,” led by Malkit Shoshan, Area Head of the Art, Design, and the Public Domain MDes group. The advanced research- and project-based course was held in collaboration with IdeasCity, the New Museum’s platform to explore art and culture beyond the walls of the museum.   The Material Processes and Systems (MaP+S) Group presented “Ceramic Morphologies” at Cevisama 2020 in Valencia, Spain. The pavilion showcased the expressive potential of ceramic 3D printing, and tested the adaptation of principles of thermodynamic heat transfer to 3D printed geometry. The shape and design of the pavilion were products of current research related to the thermal performance of naturally ventilated spaces. While the exterior surface was smooth and uniform, the interior surface was heavily contoured and textured. MaP+S also displayed “Ceramic Prototype: Hypar Tower” at Cevisama. It explored the structural capabilities of slender ceramic extrusions—products commonly utilized for exterior claddings, rain screens, and sun-shading elements. An exhibition designed by Stanislas Chaillou (MArch ’19)—and featuring work from his GSD thesis—is displayed at Paris’s Pavillon de l’Arsenal. According to the exhibition website, “The ‘AI & Architecture’ exhibition takes us through the main stages of an evolution that started from the studies on Modularity, Computer-aided Design (CAD), Parametrics and, finally, Artificial Intelligence.” Bringing together research and practice, “it also explores the current scales of experimentation: plans, elevations, structures and perspectives in which AI could already make a contribution, real or speculative.” “AI & Architecture” will be on view through April 5, 2020. Honghao Deng’s (MDes ’18) thesis, “Diffusive Geometries,” advised by assistant professor of architectural technology Panagiotis Michalatos, won the Core77 Built Environment Award. “Diffusive Geometries” explores vapor as a medium to bring microclimates that exist outside into architectural space. The unique characteristics of vapor allow users to modulate visibility, create cooling gradients, and produce spatial patterns in a controlled manner. The Core77 Awards received more than 10,000 entries and selected just one student/professional winner in the built environment category. This is the second time a GSD student won, and the first win for the MDes program.      

Behind the Scenes at the GSD: Maricris Herrera on designing the public programs poster

Commissioned annually or seasonally, the Harvard Graduate School of Design Public Programs poster is an opportunity for an illustrious designer to bring a unique vision to the project of featuring and promoting a series of public talks, while also representing the ethos of the GSD community. One poster publicizes the full series, and additional posters give details on specific speakers and events, together using visual language to emphasize a cohesive series, and expressing the artist’s perspective on the entire program. While the designs have all served to present the program’s calendar, they have offered highly distinct perspectives. Often inspired by the themes and content of the featured talks, the concepts behind each poster are shaped by the vision and particular approach of each artist. But they all share a commitment to the power of paper. While digital ads and e-mail promotions inundate us every day, the paper poster brings us back to the material world. It takes into consideration time and space as physical fabric, and provides a break from the abstract glow of our screens. In turn, the community is encouraged to join in on the public events, interacting face-to-face with designers. This spring, the program is promoted through a design that offers minimalism with a wink. While clearly communicating key information about the series, the posters also offer layers, friendliness, and space for reflection. They are intended to preserve a “human moment,” says Maricris Herrera, founder and creative director of Estudio Herrera in Mexico City. We’ve invited Herrera to discuss her pieces and explain how they came to be. She tells us about how her background in architecture informs her graphic design, explains why she sees content as the driving force behind design, and defines the relationship between substance and form. How would you describe your vision for the poster designs? The first thing we did was to take a step back from the traditional idea of a poster saturated with images and information. Our initial question was: how can our posters draw the attention of the person standing before them? We decided that our starting point would be to focus on production and printing techniques, putting aside formal and aesthetic decisions until later. Our goal was to generate visually attractive solutions from a technical point of view. How did your varied background in design (architecture, books, fashion, and more) inspire or inform the posters? What kinds of tools do you use to experiment with your ideas and express them? I approach any concept through architecture. I was trained as an architect, so I never overlook conceptualizing under the three-dimensional premise. Regardless of the fact that graphic design is considered a single plane practice, any project takes up time—and time happens in space as a fourth dimension (x, y, z + time). My sources of inspiration are the contents themselves. That is why my work’s starting point is always classification, and takes on construction later. Positioning and understanding the contents as an essential part of an invisible framework supports a visual narrative. GSD commissioned a project for a time-based document—it needs to communicate a series of events that will happen over a determined period of time. Ultimately, it will also serve as the documentation and archive of something that happened, like a diary. To think of becoming a part of history is one more concept that I could add to the “background” of my graphic design practice. What role does erasure play in the design? I always mention the deliberate “lack of design” in my work; that phrase is my lifesaver when I have to explain myself. And I’m only now realizing—as I read your question again—that it is indeed a deliberate explanation. That “lack of design” means that the contents are of utmost importance to me. I take them into consideration before even considering showing my own work. My focus is on depicting them as clearly and in the most reader-friendly way possible. The information leads to the design and not the other way around. Once again architecture finds its way—it’s substance versus form. Here’s how I see the relationship between the two: substance is what we say, and form is how we say it. Form is a cover letter, a first impression of undeniable importance. The role of the design—the form—is subjective, and therefore risky. I once read something along the lines of, “If you don’t have anything to say, don’t say it at all, because no matter how witty you are, or how dark your metaphors can be, the reader will eventually close your book.” I’ve taken that advice to heart because the same thing happens with graphic design. The advice translates to: don’t design what doesn’t need to be designed. In my case this applies to information; my role as a graphic designer is simply to understand the information and know how to contain or display it. What does negative space reveal? In graphic design, negative space is present, meaning that the time when nothing occurs is just as important as when things actually happen. So, the “dead times” become spaces for reflection that allow us to process the information. That is why I found it so important to depict an actual timeline that is impossible to break, whether something happens or not. Why did you use transparent cellulose paper for the poster?  It allowed us to work in layers and to structure the contents according to their unmovable position in time. In this case, there is a grid that indicates what exists and cannot be modified: it shows time—in months, days, and hours. This will remain in its corresponding position in all the applications, and is printed in reverse on the back side of the paper. This first “layer” appears in orange on the program as well as on the individual events. In the front, as the other layer of time, the GSD seasonal program is printed according to—and overlapping—the fixed months, days, and hours. By taking advantage of all the spaces available on the paper (front and back), and thanks to the see-through option that we selected, we had the opportunity to create a visual effect on several dimensions. It’s hard to believe that the simple printing of a paper can have that effect . . . but it’s quite true. We also printed a bunch of tests, which allowed us to confirm that our original idea could actually be translated from the digital window to reality and become a space itself. Your style could be described as minimal and tidy but also playful. There is always some kind of a surprise. For example, the design has a sort of hidden grid, but it gets interrupted by a little hand-drawn clock at one point. You seem to like adding elements that are lighthearted and friendly. Why is that important to you? In this case, my response is actually implicit in your question. It’s more than just playful moments in our design . . . something that is always present at Estudio Herrera is a good mood and a good sense of humor (at least I like to think so). In a way, it’s a matter of personality and compatibility among team members. We are minimalists—orderly, friendly, and with a twist of fun—that’s how we dress and that’s how we behave. Whether we manage to reflect that in our work or not, it is not something we do consciously, it’s just the way we are. We like to call it el guiño de remate (the top-it-off-wink). It’s about seeking and maintaining the “human moment,” so that we can understand and flow—not only as a team, but as human beings. It gives us a certain freedom. When designing the poster, did you think about how to make it stand out against a sea of other posters, or in a visually cluttered space? What were some other challenges of designing this particular piece? Rather than trying to stand out, it became clear that the value of our proposal lay in the fact that it was respectful toward other posters and their information. The transparency allowed for whatever was underneath it to remain in sight, instead of obscuring it altogether. The underlying sign would probably be of a recent event or an upcoming one, so the fact that it is still visible means it’s still valid. The challenge was to design something without a preconceived concept. As my practice is focused on art and culture, I generally receive content loaded with concepts, and that is why I always insist at the studio that our goal is “only” to create structures that contain, support, and justify what comes next: design. We fret about content. We see our role not only as designers, but as art directors as well. To me, this project was more of a collaboration than a commission. It’s not about communicating the design, it’s about communicating a prestigious program with an objective—and graphic design is only a tool to achieve this. The full public program can be viewed on Harvard GSD’s events calendar. Please visit Harvard GSD’s home page to sign up to receive periodic emails about the School’s public programs, exhibitions, and other news.

ReDesign Miami: In a city defined by water, how does design turn threat into opportunity?

Each December, the art world descends on Miami Beach for Art Basel’s American installment, Design Miami. In late 2018, Cuban-American artist Xavier Cortada wanted to loop a social statement into the cresting euphoria. Cortada created blue and green yard signs; each listed a number, designating how many feet of sea level rise would submerge a given property in his Pinecrest Gardens neighborhood. He incorporated designs from “Ice Paintings,” an artwork he had completed in Antarctica that was composed of sediment from melting glaciers. Cortada and his neighbors staked these signs in their front yards, and with that, his Underwater HOA project punctuated Design Miami with a reminder of looming danger. “By mapping the crisis to come, I make the invisible visible,” Cortada says. “Block by block, house by house, neighbor by neighbor, I want to make the future impact of sea level rise something no longer possible to ignore.” Among American cities, Miami emerges as a particular case study in how and where we will house people as climate pressures mount. Its famous beaches and waterfront condominiums will struggle with sea level rise in the next 50 years—and inland regions will feel pressure, too, as coastal residents search for dry ground. Already, salt water routinely floods Miami’s streets and bubbles up in family yards, permeating the porous limestone bedrock deep underground. While basements and garages flood, developers proceed headfirst into seaside condo projects. As temperatures, oceans, and anxieties rise, might designers help anticipate—and adapt to—what is now considered the inevitable? In Miami and Miami Beach, what will happen to neighborhoods, like Cortada’s, expected to be underwater within their residents’ lifetimes? Can new buildings, and new strategies, emerge from competing dialogues? Stoked by this dilemma, Harvard Graduate School of Design professors Eric Höweler, an architect, and Corey Zehngebot, an urban designer and architect, organized a GSD investigation into issues of housing, resilience, and adaptability, using Miami as an urban laboratory. Their investigation, the Fall 2019 option studio “Adapting Miami: Housing on the Transect,” engaged a cohort of 12 GSD students in months of research, site visits, and critical review. Students generated housing-focused proposals that offer a portrait of Miami’s risks and opportunities. They collaborated with and drew research insights from a concurrent seminar led by Jesse M. Keenan, recognized as a leading researcher on questions of climate and real estate; he has worked to shape a global discourse on the relationship between climate change, social equity, and applied economics. The geographical and conceptual heart of their study is a periscopic transect of the city created by two of Miami’s most iconic streets—Flagler Street to the north, and 8th Street, also known as Calle Ocho and the Tamiami Trail, to the south—which bracket a swath of Miami’s fabric, cutting westward from the City of Miami’s high-density eastern coastline, through Little Havana, West Miami, and Tamiami, and into the Florida Everglades. This transect captures a range of natural ecosystems and urban conditions while representing the constraints of Miami’s built and natural environments: hard boundaries of high-density urban development at some edges (east, north, and south) and water everywhere else—the Everglades to the west, the Atlantic to the east. It is along and between these corridors where interesting opportunities for different housing typologies emerge, opportunities that are intertwined with mobility, streetscape design, density, infrastructure, ecology, resiliency, and adaptation, Zehngebot observes. “We are invoking the transect in order to provoke a concept rooted in the New Urbanist ideology of Andreas Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zybek, whose firm is appropriately based in Miami,” Zehngebot says. “We are appropriating the transect from the New Urbanists just as they appropriated it from ecology and environmental planning because it is a useful framework for understanding the transition from urban to rural and how might housing typologies manifest themselves at different moments or zones along a streetscape continuum. This is further complicated in Miami, a city that feels the effects of water from all sides, and whose areas further from the coast are counterintuitively more vulnerable where the water is coming not from the sea, but from the ground.” With the constraints of space and time, and the limits of human and financial resources, where might there be opportunities to rethink how we plan the buildings, cities, and regions of the future? An American City’s Formative Years: The Legacy of the Automobile As American cities go, Miami is young. The City of Miami was officially incorporated in 1896 and named for the Miami River—derived, in turn, from Mayaimi, the historic name of Lake Okeechobee and the Native Americans who had lived in the region for centuries. So-called lot-and-block development took hold of the city’s early planning, with civic infrastructure like transit and public space an afterthought. Despite its youth, Miami is a city with an organic relationship to change—natural, political, and otherwise. The city’s tradition is to live on or with water, and with nature. As the seas ebb and flow, so does Miami’s urban rhythm. But today, Miami’s freedom to change is increasingly constrained. It is arguably one of the few cities in the United States with a truly limited supply of land. Its 1920s-era “garden cities,” like Coral Gables, began percolating along the eastern shore and spread westward, growing more densely packed as they approached the Everglades. Now, out of necessity, the city is looking to move eastward back toward the sea, infilling its limited land with higher-density housing. With a renewed interest in fitting as many people as possible on limited land, many Miamians are realizing that the city’s traditional housing forms may no longer be sufficient. The single-family, low-rise house that dominates Miami’s urban fabric—a herald of the “American Dream”—may fail to sustain successive waves of younger, more transient citizens and new, expanded forms of family. Meanwhile, the high-rise towers that stand along the shoreline will be exposed to rising seas and stronger, more frequent storms. The modernist, Art Deco styles that flavor the city with clean, simple geometries don’t lend themselves to climate-resilient architecture, either. Compounding these pressures is the city’s lack of cohesive, holistic city planning. Miami offers a mix of vibrant, diverse communities, but they have competing municipal priorities and policies. Then there’s the legacy of the car. As Miami matured into the 1900s and the so-called era of the automobile, the car shaped the city’s spatial dimensions: long, straight avenues and single-family houses with driveways. One result is that rather than an urban center with spokes and connective tissues, Miami’s urban design resembles a large city composed of multiple, smaller cities—a sort of architectural accident. “Miami didn’t have the chance to develop without the impact of the automobile,” says Juan Mullerat, founder and director of urban design firm PlusUrbia. Among the projects that Mullerat and PlusUrbia have developed are Miami’s Little Havana Revitalization Master Plan and Transit Oriented Development (TOD) Guidelines for the City of Miami. The firm’s work on Miami’s Wynwood Neighborhood Revitalization District earned the American Planning Association’s 2015 America’s Great Places Award. Overlooking a lush Little Havana tree canopy from PlusUrbia’s offices, Mullerat explains to the GSD studio that, in his native Spain and throughout Europe, cars and parking are considered amenities, like a swimming pool, rather than standard elements. When you allot less space for cars, he continues, you get more space for people. “The neighborhood itself becomes the amenity,” he says. As Mullerat guides the studio through neighboring Little Havana, MArch candidate Aria Griffin pays attention to a series of hulking parking garages, standing like monuments to a car-centric history—unavoidable, but also largely unused. She’s wondering if residents might benefit from something other than parking. Griffin’s concurrent research on medical care had led her to the conclusion that, in essence, hospitals are the most expensive form of housing in the nation. She turned this equation into opportunity by proposing a mid-rise tower, containing both housing and a hospital, at the corner of 12th Avenue and Flagler Street in East Little Havana. Griffin proposes replacing the currently existing Walgreens with the tower, also modifying the current on-grade, covered parking lot surrounding the store in order to generate a friendlier streetscape. Griffin’s project would work to combat issues of loneliness and disenfranchisement in addition to promoting healthier living for those most at-risk ahead of the climate disasters expected to loom in Miami’s future: the elderly, the disabled, and the homeless. “I knew I wanted to propose a project that would provide housing, integrated health services, as well as public space to East Little Havana,” Griffin says. “I believe that such institutions must be integrated in the city’s fabric to better serve its communities.” Griffin observed other considerations at play. Building inland helps defray flood risk—a theme observed throughout the studio’s investigation—while the character of East Little Havana, marked by a lively streetscape and vibrant community life, makes it appealing for residents. She also addressed questions of mobility and accessibility issues. Rather than densifying the entire Calle Ocho corridor with a transit line, she instead prioritized nodal transit connections that would improve circulation. Westward down the transect, MArch candidate Don O’Keefe saw a similar opportunity locked within the Florida International University (FIU) campus. Three large parking decks greet visitors at FIU’s main entrance. By replacing these with low-rise but high-density housing, O’Keefe aims to transform FIU into a transit- and pedestrian-oriented community in which student housing, classrooms, and public space is intermingled. As Griffin seeks to integrate medical infrastructure with housing—literally and conceptually—O’Keefe sees a parallel opportunity with higher education, a staple of Miami’s economy. O’Keefe’s project also anticipates coming storms, with housing designed to be adaptable: classroom and public spaces allow for the expansion of FIU’s existing so-called “Living Learning Community” scheme. Meanwhile, common areas within the dorms could be flexibly rearranged and partitioned for use as overflow housing for nearby residents in the case of disaster, expanding FIU’s existing policy on neighborhood assistance during major storms. O’Keefe’s proposal also responds to two nearby transit stations proposed by the City of Miami. These will serve as “the new front door to FIU, with housing and mixed academic programs eventually replacing the massive parking structures at the north end of the campus,” O’Keefe says. “The plan reenvisions FIU in the post-automobile era.” Removing parking, though, reignites long-standing questions over mobility and accessibility, especially for aging populations. The East Little Havana intersection of Calle Ocho and Flagler Street offers a snapshot: it throbs with commercial activity, but to get there, pedestrians need to cross the wide, constantly trafficked Seventh Avenue, a vestige of Miami’s car-centric urban design. Instead, Höweler asks the studio, could Flagler emerge as a transit corridor, facilitating urban nodal connections and opening Little Havana to greater mobility and connectivity? This question speaks to how space and typology interact: why start at the scale of the house and scale upward from there instead of planning larger, more connective institutions or infrastructures first and embedding housing within? How does the urban fabric respond when cities and regions invert the scale at which they design? In Miami, questions like these intersect where so much of the city finds inspiration: at the water. Living with, and on, Water Miami’s tropical climate invites comparison to cities like Bangkok and Singapore, where high-density buildings sit beside broad, rainforest-like public spaces. Accordingly, throughout Miami’s urban growth, buildings have been spaced far enough apart to enable air circulation between plots. Extra space around buildings, though, means less collective space for public commons—and today Miami, like many American cities, is renewing its interest in public space. A trio of GSD students saw Miami’s city waterfront, where the Miami River meets Biscayne Bay, as an opportunity to add public space at the water. With their proposal, “Loop Within,” Adam Jichao Sun, Pengcheng Sun, and Shunfan Zheng pursued the chance to connect Miami more with nature, and to symbolically and literally unify water with people. They also wanted to experiment with the concept of a “vertical city,” extending the concept of high-rise towers into a more urbane and public, rather than cloistered, experience. “Loop Within” presents three high-rise towers on top of an undulating podium, with a single, publicly accessible walkway connecting the towers at varying heights, forming a continuous physical loop within the building. The walkway would be accessed by an oblique elevator facing the Miami River waterfront, as well as an elevated railway station at the project’s podium platform. The platform itself, with its physical ebbs and flows, navigates people from the river walk upward toward cultural and other public programming within the towers. The proposal’s connectivity works at the master-plan scale as well. Rather than an enclave-type development, “Loop Within” bridges what are currently segmented city blocks to generate a connected river-walk experience. Cultural programming is distributed at nodes along the waterfront in the interest of creating a destination out of the waterfront. “Articulated as a cultural loop, our proposal emphasizes physical accessibility and visual attraction to the urban context,” the team writes. “The juxtaposition of public and private development, as well as a broad spectrum of dwelling units, renders the super-block into a ‘city within one building’ concept.” The team also sensed the needs that building projects in Miami must resolve—namely, limited housing and rising seas. “Loop Within” fills the bulk of its towers’ interiors with housing, while the walkway’s physical infrastructure includes a seawall to mitigate flood risk. “Loop Within” stands as a bit of a metaphor for Miami today: incorporating both people and water, it synthesizes questions of economics, culture, and the risks of the future, pulling them together in new ways to make or suggest new forms of city-making. With a sense of temporality and adaptability baked into the design, the project both represents and responds to the city’s relationship with change. It also pivots away from the possessive, land-centric model of previous real estate development. “The project’s dynamic relationship with water is largely achieved by articulating its podium as one undulating typography with programmatic flexibility under different water height conditions,” the team observes. “The undulating surface presents a welcome gesture to the potential sea-level rise and unveils different modes of flow: flow of water, and flow of people. Both the existing multi-ground-level condition and the potential sea-level rise spontaneously render the feasibility of a ‘vertical city’ that dynamically interacts with the water.” Colleague Yuebin Dong, an MAUD candidate, offered a complementary project that would extend this symbolism further: a school on the water. Currently existing KLA Kindergarten and Elementary School, near Brickell City Center, has been threatened with demolition; in maintaining its physical presence, Dong advocated for civic democracy, prioritizing education among the various features of Miami’s iconic waterfront while also building in spaces that could double as public amenities, like a library or a gymnasium. Water presents opportunity in Miami, but also threat—and inland regions will feel the pressure, too. MArch candidate Grace Chee followed the transect to its Everglades terminus, arguing that development into the Everglades is inevitable in the near future, as suggested by the proposed expansion of the Urban Development Boundary in Miami-Dade’s 2020/30 Land Use Plan. Her proposal, “Sub-Urbia,” proposes an environmentally responsible model of housing development that minimizes disruption to the natural ecology and explores the implications of living in a state of both suspension and floatation. She drew design inspiration from traditional housing in the Mekong floating villages of Vietnam, seeking to replicate the complex and ephemeral relationships between different housing types within the village, with varying degrees of permanence and attachment to land. “With its daily and seasonal tidal fluctuations, the marshland provides an opportunity to create a prototype for amphibious living in Miami in response to rising sea levels, one that also offers an alternative suburbia to that which lies on the other side of the UBD,” Chee writes. Fellow MArch candidate Kofi Akakpo brought a similarly critical eye to the relatively inefficient land usage of cemeteries, especially those located in urban cores where land is at an increasingly high premium. Thus, Akakpo’s studio proposal, “Can the Living Live with the Dead?,” reinvents the horizontal cemetery as vertical, a phenomenon already happening in countries like Brazil and India. With this reinvention, Akakpo asks another vital, if macabre, question: with cemeteries and other burial grounds, what happens to all of those bodies as water creeps inland? “Aside from the inefficient use of land that is ground burial in traditional cemeteries, as flood waters come and ground waters rise with the sea-level, we run the risk of a lot dead bodies, particularly from old caskets, siting within the water table, contaminating ground water sources,” Akakpo writes. “A lot of these bodies will have to be moved to protect our fresh water sources.” It’s an observation that gets at some of the less-obvious but unquestionably threatening impacts of rising waters. Akakpo’s project would deliver a ring of housing, centered by publicly accessible green space and adjacent to a grid of vertical ossuaries into which bodies would be relocated from underground burial plots. A retaining pond at the middle of the ossuaries would provide both a slice of visual beauty, as well as a floodwater safety valve. Akakpo’s proposal highlights the reality that water may prove unstoppable, its march inland carries various layers of risk, and our waterfronts are hardly the only consideration at stake. Art as Instigator If Miami is shaped by water, it is fueled by art. Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood looks a lot more colorful, and welcomes many more visitors, than it did a decade ago. Abandoned lots and buildings have been transformed into a sort of ever-evolving outdoor museum, with masterfully designed graffiti art covering almost every available surface. Funky dining spots and retail shops have sprung up. Some would say Wynwood actually feels like a neighborhood. Its transformation started with little more than creativity and paint. “Art is energizing, it creates a sense of place, and it brings people together,” says Jessica Goldman Srebnick as she guides the GSD studio through Wynwood Walls. Srebnick is founder and CEO of Goldman Global Arts, which operates Wynwood Walls; her father, Tony Goldman, collaborated with art curator Jeffrey Deitch to spark Wynwood Walls in 2009. In recent years, Srebnick started inviting graffiti artists from around the world—many of them never before exhibited—to color Wynwood, literally and otherwise. As Srebnick worked to make Wynwood a new Miami destination, businesses started paying attention. She turned down Starbucks and 7-Eleven and, instead, kept looking for talent from around the world who might want to bring their slice of creativity to Miami. Today, Srebnick and Goldman Global Arts welcome millions of visitors to Wynwood Walls each year, free of charge. The result is a neighborhood where, Srebnick says, you can feel a sense of place, not unlike New York’s SoHo or Los Angeles’s Arts District. “You see a lot of people wandering around Wynwood now,” Srebnick observes. “Art has made the neighborhood itself an amenity.” She adds that not a single Miami resident has been displaced in the process. Historically, Miami has lacked a single, unified cultural district, though the city’s cultural and artistic production is globally renowned. Streams of intense creative production and spirit thread through the city, and individuals like Srebnick have established their own sorts of pocket districts, which in turn attract business and cultural attention. It’s a pattern that jibes with the city’s generally laissez-faire, homegrown attitude toward city development. A few blocks north of Wynwood Walls, the Bakehouse Art Complex hums with a quiet focus. Bakehouse was founded by and for artists in 1986 and, with support from the City of Miami and Miami Dade County, transformed an industrial, Art Deco–era bakery in a then-blighted neighborhood into a home for talented artists, helping address the difficulty of finding space for creating and developing a practice. Now, more than 30 years later, Bakehouse is trying to maximize use of its 2.3-acre campus in the heart of Miami’s urban core to address the city’s affordability crisis, says acting director Cathy Leff. As a result of the organization’s access to and engagement with its community of artists, city officials, and surrounding neighborhood—as well as with Harvard GSD’s ongoing “Future of the American City” initiative—the organization is on a path to rezone its site to be able to add residential uses, specifically affordable housing for artists, Leff says. “If successful, Bakehouse can become a true cultural anchor in a multigenerational and multicultural community, embedded in and embraced by the community to become a more robust and public commons for critical discourse, community dialogue, and exchange,” Leff observes. MArch candidate Brian Lee saw such opportunity with the famed Miami–Dade County Auditorium, at the corner of West Flagler Street and 27th Avenue. Opened in 1951, the auditorium’s architecture shouts Art Deco revival, while the surrounding neighborhood bears vestiges of an automobile era: a relentlessly square grid that serves cars but complicates connectivity among the area’s art and cultural destinations and transit options. Lee saw an opportunity for greater neighborhood connectivity as well as higher-density housing. Lee proposed a new theater to replace the auditorium after its lifespan, with a cap on parking spaces and a diagonal-cutting route that connects much of the area’s neighborhood development with local rapid-transit nodes. Housing would be integrated with Lee’s new auditorium, creating a courtyard that would double as an outdoor lobby. “More often than not, such multi-use developments are broken into their component parts, each of which is stacked or separated into large podium-tower configurations or segregated buildings,” Lee observes. “My project tries to challenge these types, by attempting to integrate the programs more closely so that residents can participate in this larger performance.” In today’s Miami, art can offer a foundation, a catalyst, and a sustaining force for housing and sense of place. But art has also played the role of activist: the Bakehouse rose from the need to offer sustainable living for artists and their practices, while cultural institutions like Miami’s Knight Foundation have worked for decades to convene dialogue and programming that stirs debate and tackles urgent social and political issues. (Knight was founded by newspapermen seeking new ways to communicate and thus to stoke public awareness; as Knight’s Victoria Rogers observed during a panel discussion at Bakehouse, “engaged communities have always been critical to democracy.”) In parallel, themes of climate change and rising seas have permeated the Miami art world—as the activism of Cortada’s Underwater HOA exemplifies. Artists and designers like Cortada have emerged as powerful communicators to herald the urgency and possible solutions around Miami’s issues. With so many of the city’s famed institutions perched on the water, art, climate, and dialogue work together in a circular feedback loop, each informing and driving the others. The Immigrant Experience and the “New American Dream” In considering Miami’s waterfront as a democratic space, studio members emphasized a stitching together of segmented blocks. Indeed, throughout much of Miami’s urban fabric, segmentation and separation appear as rules—perhaps another vestige of the tropical-climate planning that favored spacing and subsequent air circulation, or more broadly of the city’s lack of holistic urban planning. Regardless of cause, one effect of physical segmentation is social and community isolation. Single-family homes and high-rise towers alike are generally private experiences with private or individual entrances, and lack of public spaces compounds this effect. For waves of immigrants and other newcomers, this urban fabric is hardly welcoming. Hua Tian and Jungeun Goo, both candidates for the MArch in Urban Design, and Haey Ma, an MLA candidate, saw this as a stimulus for a typology refresh. Tian’s “A Piece of Life: Collective Housing for New Immigrants” takes up the intersection of 8th Street and 12th Avenue. Marked by lively street life, authentic human interaction, and nearby public transit, it is also comprised of segmented, incoherent housing. She took inspiration from the architectural language of Havana, Cuba, to design a housing project incorporating repeated, arched facades and centered around a communal courtyard. Not unlike the “Loop Within” waterfront project, Tian’s creates a sort of micro-city of a housing complex. In addition to a library and community center, she designed the project’s courtyard to provide a miniaturized street life within the housing complex, opening up the possibility for more human interaction. Westward down the 8th Street transect, Goo proposed “The New American Dream,” eyeing a low-density, suburban neighborhood near FIU for its opportunities. It’s close to Miami’s airport as well as planned transit, and is at a lower flood risk than much of the rest of the city. She considered it an appropriate spot to densify. Goo proposed making better use of front-yard and side-street space, using the former to accommodate more housing and the latter to create connectivity between main thoroughfares. She offered a housing solution that presents a more communal vision, and one that is better integrated into the neighborhood and city’s urban fabric than the set of single-family homes that currently sprawl. Goo also gestured toward solutions and typologies that could be repeated in other cities and regions. In reconfiguring typical housing-block elements—front and back yards, parking spaces, alleyways—Goo aims to suggest a new urban fabric, one that “gives livable neighborhood amenities, like walkable streets and urban-scale amenities, inside the residential block. “This project can be adapted to other suburban areas in Miami and become a ‘new American dream,’” she says. Now or Never? In 2008, the City of Miami approved Miami 21, a form-based zoning code that reacted to the city’s suddenly accelerating urbanization and ever-decreasing amount of available land. Following the implementation of Miami 21, developers and community groups alike created overlay plans, such the Wynwood Neighborhood Revitalization District and Special Area Plan and Mullerat’s Little Havana Revitalization Master Plan, to help facilitate neighborhood-appropriate zoning. “Miami 21’s revisions at the neighborhood scale demonstrate both its flexibility and imperfections,” wrote The Architect’s Newspaper in October 2016, “but it clearly creates a nuanced framework for the city that’s simultaneously logical citywide and hyperlocal to the human scale.” Today, though, as Miami 21 turns 10 years old, questions linger: Do we update Miami 21? Start over? While the plan addresses the impact of the private automobile, among other vestiges of the past, what about the question of how to design for the future—specifically, for rising seas? In responding to, if not resolving, pressing demands and limitations facing nearly every global city—a growing, changing population; limited land and other essential resources; rising climate-related threats—Miami will offer guidelines and insights that could become integral to urban planning, landscape architecture, and architecture well into the future. Communicating these ideas and policies—and these opportunities and threats—to the public will remain critical in stoking the dialogue and securing the political and financial support needed to actually enact change. Similarly, demonstrating the sorts of new typologies or formats that housing and homes might assume is the designer’s key to bringing opportunities and solutions forward. As Cortada accomplished in 2018, illustrating what a sea rise of two feet—or of 22 feet—would do to actual homes, actual neighborhoods, and actual people may prove the most potent contribution that designers can offer today. ## “Adapting Miami: Housing on the Transect” and its concurrent advanced research seminar form Part Two of a three-part investigation series, “Future of the American City: Miami,” generously supported by Miami’s John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Rahul Mehrotra appointed Chair of Department of Urban Planning and Design and John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization

Harvard Graduate School of Design announces the appointment of Rahul Mehrotra (MAUD ’87) as the Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design and the John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization, effective July 1, 2020. Mehrotra joined Harvard GSD’s faculty in 2010, serving as Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design from 2010 until 2015. He most recently served as the Director of the Master of Architecture in Urban Design Degree Program and Co-Director of the Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design Degree Program. He has also been a Professor of Urban Design and Planning at the School. “While our world continues to urbanize, while questions of housing intensify in their urgency and complexity, and as India’s population and role on the world stage both increase dramatically, the GSD’s ability to address these interconnected issues so successfully has been due to Rahul’s unique perspective, as well as his engagements on the ground,” says Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture. “As we look toward our collective ‘near future,’ Rahul brings an unmatched depth of insight to this contemporary moment. His extraordinary synthesis of pedagogy, practice, and a generous ethos will continue to guide us into challenging but essential debates and discoveries.” As Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design, Mehrotra will set the vision and agenda for Harvard GSD’s renowned urban planning and design programs, advancing the department’s ability to take on urgent, global questions and projects. It was at Harvard that the first North American programs in city planning (1923) and urban design (1960) were formally established; since then, the Department of Urban Planning and Design has graduated some of the world’s preeminent urban designers, policy-makers, and leaders. Its biannual Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design is considered the foremost award recognizing achievement in the field. In this role, Mehrotra succeeds Diane E. Davis, who led the department since 2015. “The pace and nature of urbanization are challenging how we define and teach planning and design,” Mehrotra says. “Today, the world is in a period of extreme transitions, triggered in large part by the inequities caused by globalization as well as climate change and its mark on people’s daily lives. This state of flux is obvious in the changing rhythms of nature and its impact on human settlements. Design and planning have crucial roles to play in using this condition of flux to create solutions to endemic inequalities, from conceiving innovative housing solutions to imagining entirely new urban formations.” As the John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization, Mehrotra will lead Harvard GSD’s efforts to study and advance discourse on housing, especially as pressures of widespread housing shortages and unaffordability continue to mount. In this role, Mehrotra succeeds Professor Emeritus Gerald McCue, who has held that title since 1996. “During his time as Dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and as U.S. Labor Secretary, John Dunlop trained and inspired generations of students to tackle complex questions of housing and urbanization,” says Chris Herbert, Managing Director of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, the research center that led the campaign to establish the Dunlop professorship. “With this appointment, Rahul will carry on John’s legacy and continue to elevate the importance of housing in the national conversation.” With a distinguished career as a practitioner and as an academic, Mehrotra’s practice, teaching, and prodigious writing focus primarily on housing and urbanization, particularly in Mumbai and India. Mehrotra taught at the University of Michigan from 2002 to 2006, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2006 until joining Harvard GSD in 2010. He founded his Mumbai- and Boston-based firm, RMA Architects, in 1990. RMA Architects has designed and executed projects around the world, including government and private institutions, corporate workplaces, private homes, and other projects, among them a Library for the School of Architecture at CEPT in Ahmedabad, a software campus for Hewlett Packard in Bengaluru, and a conservation master plan for the Taj Mahal with the Taj Mahal Conservation Collaborative. Mehrotra has also collaborated with NGOs to improve conditions for people living in informal settlements in Mumbai. Among other recent achievements, in 2015 RMA Architects completed the “Lab of the Future” on the Novartis Campus in Basel, Switzerland, and were finalists in an international design competition for the Museum of Modern Art in Sydney. In 2018, RMA Architects was awarded the Venice Architecture Biennale Jury’s Special Mention for “three projects that address issues of intimacy and empathy, gently diffusing social boundaries and hierarchies.” Mehrotra’s research on urbanism is focused on evolving a theoretical framework for designing in conditions of informal growth—what he refers to as the “Kinetic City.” From 2012 to 2015, Mehrotra led a Harvard University-wide research project with Professor Diana Eck called The Kumbh Mela: Mapping the Ephemeral Mega City. This work was published as a book in 2014, was extended in 2017 in the form of a book titled Does Permanence Matter?, and led to an invited exhibition at the 2016 Venice Architectural Biennale. His latest co-authored book is titled Taj Mahal: Multiple Narratives (December 2017). Mehrotra studied at the School of Architecture at CEPT in Ahmedabad, where he received the gold medal for his undergraduate thesis, and graduated with a master’s degree, with distinction, in urban design from Harvard GSD.

A Moveable Feast: Milliøns designs a living archive of modern ceramics for the Everson Museum

Collector Louise Rosenfield had a bold dream for her vast assemblage of modern ceramics. Two years ago, she envisioned almost all of it going “to a restaurant and that it would be used until it’s all broken, except for the last piece,” which, she imagined, “could go to some archive or some historical place with the story of the Rosenfield collection.” When Rosenfield donated more than 3,000 pieces to the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse this past year, that vision took one crucial step toward reality. Her one stipulation: The pieces must be used. This audacious gift coincided with an architectural competition to design a new café for I.M. Pei’s astounding Everson Museum building. Last month, the museum awarded the commission to Milliøns, an experimental architecture practice in Los Angeles founded by the Graduate School of Design’s John May and Zeina Koreitem. Their proposal introduces brilliant crystalline “curatorial towers” to house and display the collection in the café. So, in fractured light under Pei’s audacious concrete cantilevers, patrons will eat and drink from artworks by Mark Pharis, Molly Hatch, Betty Woodman, Sam Clarkson, or another of the more than 500 artists represented by the collection. May explains that Rosenfield’s extraordinary stipulation of use became the launching point for their design proposal. It immediately dictated an atypical understanding of art curation and display. Rosenfield has described unused ceramics as “sleeping” or “dead”; May and Koreitem’s first aim was to avoid this fate. “To place a piece of ceramics, especially a piece of functional ceramics… behind a glass wall,” May says, “is to completely dissociate that piece from everything that makes it meaningful to culture.” As they dove into research for the project, they learned that the glazes used on the vast majority of the modern pieces in the collection are stable under UV light, which means they can be safely stored, displayed, and used in the open, in daylight. The proposed café space in Pei’s remarkably sculptural 1968 museum building—“our favorite of Pei’s work,” May says—also drove their thinking. Construction photos May and Koreitem discovered early on revealed it to be a “pitch-dark” space beyond some of the building’s massive concrete piers, which are fronted by “really intense light wells.” In that strong contrast of light and dark, they saw the possibility of a powerful chiaroscuro using “some kind of glass insert that is simultaneously storage and, through prismatics, will bend the light… into the space of the café.” From this idea they developed the five curatorial towers that reach up to the sunlight between the heavy piers and cast it into the café. A similar “curatorial vestibule” will open under one of the building’s four immense cantilevers to connect the café with an exterior courtyard. These “prismatic machines” will consist primarily of open glass shelving, so that, May explains, “people will be able to reach in and touch” the works of ceramic art stored on them. Patrons of the museum will be able to hold and examine the pieces, as well as using them to drink coffee and eat pastries. As May sees it, this expands the use value of the ceramics beyond even what Rosenfield proposed. The furniture pieces Milliøns designed for the café also work to bring the ceramic pieces into the open, while becoming sculptural objects on their own. Consisting of inverted aluminum pyramids (which subtly pay respect to Pei’s indelible association with the form), they stand in balance with each other to create horizontal surfaces that May describes as “too deep.” In the space beyond arm’s reach, museum curators will place ceramic pieces on temporary display. Café patrons, meanwhile, will sit around the periphery, legs protected under the tables’ projecting angles. In addition to the powerful presentation of light and dark in the café and the bold geometries of its furniture, one particularly notable aspect of Milliøns’s competition entry for the project was a set of user scenarios. These consist of timelines paired with images of architectural dioramas that depict people using the café—a docent, the museum director, a curator, a donor, a visitor to the museum, a school group. Each scenario demonstrates an expanded definition of program in the project and depicts the fluid relationships between the ceramic pieces, the furniture, and the users who interact with them. These images boldly set Rosenfield’s dream in motion. Hopefully, once the café opens next year, that dream will move slowly, allowing a very long time before the last unbroken piece in the collection heads to the archives.