Freeing Creativity for Designers of the Future: Frederick Chan Makes Annual Fund Gift

Frederick Chan (MAUD ’74) believes that the most impactful design happens outside of the studio, and that the most important work of a graduate school is to carry out research that can shape the profession. That deep conviction in training designers of the future led to Chan’s generous gift to the GSD’s Annual Fund, which will support the School’s greatest needs.

“Harvard has been a wonderful place and experience for me,” Chan said. “I learned at the school that the tuition we pay is about one-third of the cost of educating a student. Therefore, I think it’s important that after we leave, we continue to support education to make it possible for the next generation, both in terms of financial aid and continuing participation in the school’s programs so we can learn from each other. Students are more creative when they’re not constrained.”

Chan, who describes himself as semi-retired and splits his time between Hong Kong and Bangkok, had a successful career in architecture and development. He was Managing Director at FMC Group, and president and chief executive officer at NuWest Group. In addition to his Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard, Chan also holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of California Berkeley.

His experience at Harvard, including a class with Mortimer B. Zuckerman LLM ’62, and his varied background, have cultivated Chan’s appreciation for the GSD’s multidisciplinary approach, especially the GSD’s collaboration with the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

“Design is no longer a profession by itself, and urban problems or problems in modern society can’t be tackled by one discipline,” Chan said. “Issues are so complicated and specialized, and you can’t design in a vacuum. Training in design should enable the student to learn how to work and collaborate with people from different fields.”

“I have always thought that design should be part of the core educational curriculum in our schools along with language skills and math,” he continued. “We can use design as a way both to learn and come up with solutions and communicate with others. In an increasingly visually-oriented world, design is taking on a more important role.”

Even a world away from Cambridge, Chan maintains his connections to the GSD in several ways: speaking to students, watching every commencement speech, and reading the Harvard Gazette every day. He has also participated in GSD seminars in Asia, such as a waterfront study in Hong Kong and a design review in Shanghai, and praised the GSD’s efforts to connect with alumni in the region.

“I love having the chance to talk to a lot of young students and get involved in the studio projects,” Chan said. “I find it very fascinating. It’s almost like I’m going back to school again.”

Helping Students Realize Their Visions Beyond The Walls of Gund Hall: Melissa Kaish and Jon Dorfman Donate to the GSD

As the child of artists and an artist herself, Melissa Kaish GSD ’85 grew up with painters, musicians, and writers gathering at her home for creative discussions. For her, art and design are not bound by walls; these disciplines can—and should—spill into the public sphere for the community’s benefit.

With that value in mind, Kaish and her husband, Jon Dorfman, made a generous gift to the GSD, which will support a built project on Harvard’s campus through the School’s Art, Design, and the Public Domain (ADPD) program. Kaish’s main goal: promote the GSD’s creative work beyond the walls of Gund Hall.

“It’s really about developing the life of the arts throughout the campus,” said Kaish, who attended the GSD before earning her MBA from Columbia University. “I love the idea of a merit-based award that would enable students with the absolute best ideas to have an opportunity to implement them on campus, and that the Harvard community and beyond will benefit.”

Kaish’s inspiration came from past philanthropy with the School and The Harvard Campaign, which she said allowed the GSD to broaden its impact on the community. Kaish had provided a gift for 9 Ash Street, supporting the vision of the space as a gathering place for designers. She and Dorfman became drawn to ADPD through “WE ALL,” a student design-build installation at the Grove in Boston’s North Allston neighborhood.

“What impresses us most about the School is the breadth of degree options and international studio options,” Dorfman said, pointing to the GSD’s increased global presence. “You can study design issues around the world, and I think that makes it very, very powerful.”

“The School is now much broader,” Kaish added. “It’s reached out to the university in different ways, such as technology, sustainability, and social equity. The new joint degree with the engineering school is a bold move. It is becoming increasingly important to integrate architecture with engineering and technology.”

As Kaish supports designers of the future, she is also exploring her own creative past through the Kaish Family Art Project and an upcoming book about her late mother. The project’s mission is to promote and exhibit the work of her parents, Luise and Morton Kaish. “I’m learning a lot about the art world I didn’t know, beyond my easel,” Kaish said with a laugh.

The far-reaching impact and evolution of her parents’ art mirrors what Kaish has observed and hopes to see continue at the GSD. “For me, I think, what opportunities are we giving to students to be able to realize their visions?” she said. “The idea is that the GSD will have an impact beyond itself.”

Further Reading: John May’s Signal. Image. Architecture

In his new book-length essay, Signal. Image. Architecture. (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2019), John May asserts that a technical succession—from the orthographic to the “postorthographic” (a term May substitutes for “the digital,” which in his view has mostly lost its meaning)—has occurred in recent decades, which has radically altered our consciousness and experience of the world. Yet the field of architecture has for the most part refused to acknowledge this change, too often regarding the technical gestures performed using computers—the “cut” or “Make2D” functions, for example—as simply extensions of those once performed by hand: plans, sections, elevations, etc. The consequences of such self-delusion, he argues, are not just academic or frivolous but rather “give rise to epistemic, political, moral, and ultimately existential concerns.”

A meticulous and objective description of the technical underpinnings of drawing, photography, and the image establishes the scope of this paradigm shift. In May’s account, the distinction between these three forms is absolute: drawing, at least in its architectural form, is constituted by “acts of geometric gesturing, always aided by mechanical tools, always in some way mechanized”; photography is a chemical process that is always “a form of heliography,” or “the writing of the sun”; images are “a form of photon detection…a process of detecting energy emitted by an environment and chopping it into discrete, measurable, electrical charges called signals, which are stored, calculated, managed, and manipulated through various statistical methods.”

Unlike drawings or photographs, both of which involve a fixed imprint on an equally stable surface, images are, according to May, “inherently dynamic.” Smartphones are not cameras but “energy detectors,” because “all imaging is, knowingly or not, an act of data processing.” In fact, the very idea of “digital photography” is an oxymoron. Conceiving of images and their production as akin to writing and drawing is either a form of denial, nostalgia, or an unconscious reluctance to comprehend a new form and system of thought.

That all thoughts have as their foundation the technical era in which they are born is one of the axioms that underpins May’s argument. The technical, he argues, must not be brushed aside as inconsequential or merely a mechanism for producing something more vital or substantial, because it is intimately entwined with and constitutive of thought itself.

Furthermore, this fusion between technical gestures and thought produces a notion of time unique to each technical era. Consider orthography, which for thousands of years was our dominant technical form. Orthography’s organized marks—inscribed by hand onto paper, parchment, stone, and other surfaces—contributed to forming an understanding of time as linear because the marks are “structured by rule-bound lines with beginnings and ends.” They also have embedded within them the “act of inheritance”: for any drawing to be legible, each gesture made by the hand is always a reproduction or reiteration of a past gesture. Were it created with a different technique each time, a letter or shape would be illegible. This inheritance in turn looks forward to a future in which that gesture will again be repeated. Put another way, the emergence of the orthographic was coterminous with that of history, culture, and tradition as they have long been understood.

By contrast, the electrical image, rather than being positioned in “historical time,” exists in “real time” which “continuously relates the present to all possible futures at once.” This is driven by computers’ capacity to simultaneously produce multiple permutations of possible outcomes of searches, models, or data sets. And all images are subsets of an infinite series of images; their differences are mere variations in electronic signals which can be changed ad infinitum. In this system, there is neither an inherited past nor the continuation of tradition into the future, but rather a focus on the joys of instantaneous production through invisible, automated gestures that occur at a speed incomprehensible to humans.

But the gain in efficiency is not without sacrifice. May argues that orthographic labor provided the space during which “architecture once ruminated on the possibilities and consequences of its forms of life,” and that this time was also where “concepts such as evidence, objectivity, precedent, and history made their home” and when “historical, ethical, political, ontological, epistemological, [and] metaphysical” questions could be pondered and problematized.

The advent of instantaneous and borderless images seems in many ways like a type of progress. But submitting wholly to this new form, without understanding its technical structure and the temporality it engenders, means we risk losing the opportunity to contemplate and assess what effects those instantaneous actions will have for architecture as a field and, by extension, society itself.

“The longer we refuse to see our work and our screens as belonging to a larger culture of imaging, the longer we continue to confuse images with drawings, the more apolitical we become,” May cautions. He is not without hope for the formation of a new consciousness in this era however, and with it a useful politics originating out of the “mental-deskilling” that has resulted from the ubiquity of automation. Through describing the world as it was and as it is now, May’s work acts as a clarion call to shed the futile delusion that the world has not changed.

Further Reading: Eve Blau’s Baku: Oil and Urbanism

Baku—like Dubai and other major cities flush from the oil industry—has seen an upsurge of foreign interest in recent decades, both in an influx of capital and in commissions of megastar architects. From the Flame Towers designed by HOK to Zaha Hadid’s monumental Heydar Aliyev Center, the high-profile new developments provide an international image for the city, which the Europe-focused Azerbaijani government is proud to claim.

But as Eve Blau details in her new study, Baku: Oil and Urbanism–which received the 2019 DAM Architectural Book Award from Deutsches Architekturmuseum at the Frankfurt Book Fair and which features a photo essay by Iwan Baan –this contemporary reality is far from the dynamic cosmopolitanism that defined the region’s urban and intellectual atmosphere during its first oil boom in the pre-Soviet era, when it was the world’s leading producer of oil. The new development also demonstrates less cohesive planning than what been implemented by the Soviets when the city became a test case for urban innovation and experimentation. Instead, Baku now exemplifies development based on oil profit rather than a focus on the processes of its industry, the latter of which previously dictated much of Baku’s urban planning.

The arrival of Swedish arms manufacturers Robert and Ludvig Nobel in Azerbaijan in the early 1870s revolutionized the oil industry that until then had been underdeveloped, in large part because of the government’s monopoly on wells and reserves. Their primary innovations were sharing research with local engineers that they had gleaned from John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, and the successful vertical integration of Baku’s oil industry. Beyond profit though, they introduced the notion of urban planning intimately linked to oil by providing housing and education to workers. They also constructed a public park in their Garden City development, Villa Petrolea, that contained an “extensive technical and cultural infrastructure for the managers and their families, including schools, a library, billiards, and meetings rooms, and the first telephone in Baku”—a style of comprehensive design for living on which the Soviets would expand.

This fusion of urbanism and oil influenced the construction of other developments, most notably the area known as Black Town that was established in the late 1800s. Both the first instance of zoning and the first “planned industrial zone” in Russia, Black Town became “one of the clearest instances of the knowledge spillover between urban and oil-production practices and the intersection of their distinctive spatial logics.” Here, the components of the oil industry, from pipelines and storage facilities to vats and railway tracks, became “subordinated to the urban.”

As Blau describes it, Black Town’s urban planning “attempted to rationalize the emerging oil industry in dense urban formation by compacting the apparatus of oil production into the traditional urban block, and organizing within the block the unwieldy infrastructure and noxious by-products of industry into the regular courtyard arrangement of the traditional urban workshop.” Though Black Town was unsanitary and generally poorly kept, the zone’s extreme density—which exacerbated these negative living conditions—was also central to fostering a diversity of thought. The resulting social and intellectual intensity spurred innovation and knowledge production—and, later, political unrest that undermined foreign interest in establishing oil industries in Baku and other densely populated areas.

In the 1880s, construction took off thanks to the rush-to-build psychology of the boom-and-bust oil industry, but also as a result of local oil barons’ goals for self-determination. The state now maintained a laissez-faire policy toward oil, and the barons owned the land on which it was found and therefore the oil they discovered under it. But because of their inability to participate in government due to bigoted Russian policies against Muslims, their influence was expressed by wielding “soft power.” They supported the local citizens and Azerbaijani culture more broadly by creating a host of institutions including major theaters, schools, parks, newspapers, hospitals, charitable organizations, museums, and more. These institutions contributed to Baku’s identity as the “Paris of the Caspian”—“a modern European city with broad tree-lined boulevards, a seaside esplanade, monumental public buildings, large new docks, electrical power, and modern communication networks.”

Oil would continue to function as a defining influence on Russian urban development in the Soviet Republic, in which the “City of Socialist Man” concept was developed in 1918. The desire for such a design template was derived from Engels and Marx’s antagonism toward the city for, among many reasons, the class antagonism it fostered. The first General Plan redefined the urban to include the regional—in Baku’s case, the Absheron Peninsula. This was a direct result not just of the Soviet desire to break city/country oppositions but because of the spread of the area’s oil fields. Its design was in turn only made possible because of the land surveys and other research performed throughout the area as a result of the Republic’s dependence on Baku’s oil.

One notable experiment from this General Plan was Armenikend, a zone situated “strategically between the sites of oil extraction and processing” and remarkable for its use of superblocks that consisted of “variously arranged apartment buildings…. grouped around garden spaces and communal facilities.” The latter included “technical and academic institutions, museums, and theatres, as well as markets, regional schools, community buildings, department stores, clubs, and sports facilities,” in addition to a sizable amount of “open space provided for collective use.”

Taken together, these new spaces served as an example of planning dictated in part by “communal logic”—a move that impressed Maxim Gorky, who in 1928 praised the integration of the workers into the cultural life of Baku. That logic would persist throughout the Soviet period as different leaders approved various urban experiments in the region, such as the world’s first offshore drilling facility, Neft Dashlari (Oily Rocks), which opened in 1949 and “housed thousands of oil works…in five- and nine-story apartment buildings that were linked with schools, libraries, shops, a bakery, clinic, cinema, sports facilities, and vegetable gardens.”

In the post-Soviet period, many of the once-thriving oil fields have become dilapidated, in part because Siberia became the center for the nation’s oil in the 1970s. Despite this, some legacy from the preceding century remains, from “the value put on research and the skills of scientists and engineers in the Soviet oil industry” to, arguably more critical, “the value placed on the welfare of the oil workers, which resulted in the vast urban and institutional infrastructure” throughout Baku. As Blau argues, “the most important legacy of the Soviet period there is the urban-industrial experiment begun in 1920—to plan oil and urbanism together—that shaped the lived experience of socialism in the city.”

The current ideology dictating Baku’s urbanism falls short of this legacy, according to Blau. Although foreigners are heavily investing in its oil industry, their actions are not accompanied by the exchange of ideas and knowledge that contribute to the development of a dynamic urban environment. Similarly, the prevalence of foreign architects does little to rejuvenate the cosmopolitan nature of the city whose population was once more foreign than Azerbaijani. Although there are green spaces and public areas, Blau implies that these are not created for the enrichment of Baku’s citizens as they would have been in the past. Instead, they are sites from which to view the high-rises and other shiny buildings that serve as a projection of an international spirit. It is imported internationalism rather than one enmeshed and embodied in Baku’s urban fabric.

The architectural vestiges of Baku’s development—“early capitalist, Soviet and post-Soviet”—persist, despite attempts to bulldoze that history. Oil’s infrastructure still permeates the city through the omnipresent pipelines that remain in use for the circulation of energy and water and which “wind through, over, and under city streets, into and around buildings, forming trellis-like archways over garage and driveway entrances, framing windows and doors.” They act as a visible reminder of the need for a logical, useful, and densely coordinated connective tissue that can support a diversity of people and ideas. After all, the inherent instability of the urban fabric has been the engine powering Baku’s ever-evolving innovation.

Learning from Susan Fainstein: Do planners have a responsibility to fight for social equity?

Susan Fainstein’s ideas for the “just city” crystallized in the 1960s and ’70s, during a time of great political unrest in the United States. She challenged the era’s prevailing top-down planning and urban renewal policies, which she understood to be a regressive, copy and paste approach to urban development that wrote off planners as powerless pawns in a universal growth pattern driven fundamentally by profit. Instead, Fainstein argued, the role of the planner was inherently political. Moreover, she believed that planners, as agents of the state, have the capacity to work inside the system in order to reform it.

“At a time when everyone was gunning toward high profit margins as the dominant form of public decision-making, The Just City placed other values—namely that of social equity—on the negotiating table,” reflects Sai Balakrishnan, an assistant professor of urban planning at the Graduate School of Design. Published in 2010 as the culmination of research that began in the ’70s, The Just City is Fainstein’s seminal text. In the first half of the book, she breaks down the categorical idea of justice into three tangible pillars: diversity, democracy, and equity. Surveying the ideas of key contemporary—often radical—theorists of justice including David Harvey, John Rawls, Iris Marion Young, Amartya Sen, and Martha Nussbaum, among many others, Fainstein works toward a pragmatic proposal for a more equitable form of urban planning that exists within capitalism.

In the second half of the text, Fainstein puts her ideas to the test with a comparative evaluation of hard data. She works across three case studies—Amsterdam, London, and New York—to examine the diverse strains of urban growth under capitalism. Moreover, Fainstein argues that intervention within a fragmented state by planners and communities leads to opportunities for a more equitable future.

Fainstein stresses the importance of reaching a compromise rather than holding out for an unfeasible utopian solution. She reminds planners of their political agency in striving for greater social equity and representing those voices typically left out of the conversation.

“Different capitalist cities have different levels of support for their citizens,” says Fainstein. In her research, she discovered the make-or-break point to be privatized land. When comparing US city governments with those of capitalist European cities in the 1990s, Fainstein—along with her partner, Norman Fainstein—understood the latter to possess greater power, which enabled them to exert a tighter control on urban planning. (Of course, a contemporary look at most capitalist European cities, particularly London, renders that conclusion increasingly void.)

When Fainstein first arrived in Amsterdam in the late ’70s, she saw a society that prioritized public ownership of land and a high degree of public housing that carried none of the social stigmas it did in New York. “Working in Amsterdam and later Singapore showed me that if the public sector owns land, housing prices are kept under control,” reflects Fainstein. “Once land is privately owned, it becomes a scarce commodity, and development creates a housing crisis.”

Grounded in the everyday practice of real-life planning, Fainstein can hold her own with both theorists and planners, calibrating her discussions of equity, diversity, and democracy to the right crowd. For theorists, she stresses the importance of concrete application of theory and of reaching a compromise rather than holding out for an unfeasible utopian solution. Perhaps more than anything, she takes up the task of reminding planners of their political agency in striving for greater social equity and representing those voices typically left out of the conversation.

Bestowing this authority and good will on planners and acknowledging the realities of a global capitalist regime has made Feinstein no stranger to criticism. It largely stems from more radical Marxist thinkers, including urban geographer David Harvey, who suggested Fainstein was “selling out” to capitalism by offering less than a full systemic overhaul. Fainstein countered this by challenging the hard-line Marxist belief that the state is merely an extension of the elite. She voiced skepticism about a proletariat revolution, arguing instead that the fractured nature of the state enables planners to act politically and redistribute public support to disenfranchised groups. She also critiques post-structuralism’s rejection of universal norms of justice, a position she believes could result in the silencing of women and minority voices.

Though environmental justice was notably left out of The Just City, Fainstein’s views on our contemporary environmental crisis and the Extinction Rebellion follows a similar thread of thought. “Protest is necessary in that it’s the only thing that will force the government to deal with these issues, but real change can only occur through the electoral system,” says Fainstein. “The triumph of a movement is when it gets represented by the government.”

Fainstein pushed beyond traditional notions of urban planning to incorporate the role of tourism and travel in global urban development. First espoused in the 1990s, these ideas have only become more relevant in the era of digital neoliberal capitalism and sharing economy platforms like Airbnb. “We’re all talking about tourism and gentrification now, but Susan was coming at it from a much earlier period,” notes Balakrishnan. “She understood tourism as a constituent agent in urban development, because while the tourists’ presence is temporary, their impact on a city’s growth is fundamental.”

In her research on tourism’s impact on cities in India, Fainstein discovered that low-budget tourism did much more for the economy because backpackers spent money at local resources. Fainstein feels the same can be said about Airbnb, where hosts often meet guests and suggest local attractions. “I believe a lot of publicity about how Airbnb is taking houses off the market is financed by the hotel industry,” says Fainstein. “Instead of profits going straight to Hyatt and distributed to corporate shareholders, Airbnb distributes revenue among middle-class investments.” (She acknowledges the inherent class divisions of the home-sharing model, however: “There is always a division between people who benefit from tourism, and advocates of NIMBYism , and it’s always about wealth.”)

From a contemporary standpoint, The City Builders (2001) is Fainstein’s pivotal work. Here, Fainstein hones in on a new phase of corporate-style global development, drawing an incisive comparison between urban development and the entertainment industry. She argues that both industries work through speculative, ad hoc developments that thrive on short-term hype but fall far short in terms of long-term sustainability, responsibility, and social equity. In Fainstein’s analysis, urban governments set no standards on private development in their desperation for investment capital. So planners take on the role of businesspeople brokering deals with private developers—deals that all too often leave the public high and dry.

It is a theory that has grown stronger with age. “From then to now, my research has intensified in the sense that property and development capital is more international,” says Fainstein. “Flows of capital entering the property market come from sovereign wealth funds, real estate trusts, and companies with no relationship to the cities they’re building.”

Revisiting Fainstein’s original case studies of New York and London today, we witness Manhattan’s megalithic Hudson Yards, the largest private development in the history of the United States. London’s numerous redevelopment schemes include Greenwich Peninsula (complete with its own take on New York’s High Line called The Tide: a mile-long “urban walkway,” also designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, that offers depressing views onto a sea of soulless high-rises) and the corporate luxury of the new Kings Cross, a former industrial site now occupied by Google’s HQ, a Heatherwick-designed private mall, and multimillion-pound penthouses.

These developments stand as cases in which private capital has outweighed public interest, with pseudo-public spaces, greenwashing , and artwashing campaigns that conjure a fictionalized community. Glossy, metal-clad towers reaching ever-higher into the sky and investors’ pockets have become a ubiquitous sight on most city skylines. These buildings demand ever-higher investments from abroad at the expense of local residents.

Were Fainstein to rewrite The Just City for the present, she would include Vienna and Singapore. Out of all European cities, Fainstein suggests, Vienna has most maintained an orientation to welfare and provision of housing. Fainstein relocated to Singapore in 2011 and has extensively studied the country’s government—which she refers to as a “benevolent despotism”—and its impact on urban planning. In this unique case, the model of government-led urban development has resulted in a highly structured, dense, and diverse society with great housing (over 90% live in public housing), while alienating its large foreign population, and preventing minorities from shaping the city.

Fainstein’s work remains relevant because it is predictive as well as analytical. When she reflects on the influence of Airbnb or the Extinction Rebellion today, as she did with privately led global property development two decades ago, Fainstein leaves the playing field open to new ideas. Her line of inquiry is porous—she embraces her critics, often integrating their voices into her text. Perhaps most significantly, she acknowledges that she doesn’t have all the answers; her work feels more like a discussion than a monologue. At a moment of crisis when everything feels on the line, her push for acting now, instead of waiting for a perfect future that’s unlikely to arrive, is a timely inspiration.

November 2019 News Roundup

Anita Nai Tzu Cheng (MLA I AP ’19) and Payao Shih (MArch II ’19) curated the first Harvard Taiwan Arts Festival in Boston . Titled “Reveal,” it provided a platform for artwork inspired by Taiwan. The works on display sought to uncover similarities and differences between cultural influences and creative expression through painting, photography, music, architecture, and archaeology. “Through this exhibition, we hope to bring viewers from all backgrounds to experience the diversity and complexity of Taiwanese culture,” explained the curators. “Reveal” was exhibited at Smith Campus Center from November 13 to November 22 .

Toni Griffin was invited to write an article for the Guggenheim, “The Guggenheim as Third Space: Accessing Community and Contemplation in a Place of Privilege.” The article posed the question of whether “a privately owned space [can] be a place for building community, especially when it can cost $25 to enter.” Griffin wrote about the “third space” in relation to her research at Just City Lab , observing Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda museum and the notion of the third space on the Guggenheim’s ramp.

Safeer Shersad (MUP ’20) is the first recipient of Nippon Paint’s Gennosuke Obata Fellowship Fund. Sherad aspires to make a difference through human-centered design, pursuing the goals of providing inclusive urban design solutions to solve global challenges at the local level.

Grace La moderated an event “Drawing Attention: Unplugged with CJ Lim and Helen Thomas” at the Roca London Gallery on November 7. The event explored new directions, experiments and meanings of contemporary architectural drawings, in conjunction with the exhibition “Drawing Attention: The Digital Culture of Contemporary Architecture Drawings” that La co-curated. The exhibition is recently reviewed by RIBA and is listed as top five things to do in November by London’s Evening Standard.

Baku – Oil and Urbanism by Eve Blau and Ivan Rupnik received the 2019 DAM Architectural Book Award by the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in collaboration with the Frankfurt Book Fair.

“Ting,” an app that detects stress levels and offers mediation, won iF Design Talent Award 2019. “Ting”was developed by Togo Kida and Berlynn Bai (MDE ’20), and Lou Zhang at George Washington University. The app combines a stress level detector that draws data from mobile keyboard input with integrated design interventions through 30-second micro-meditations.

GSD Green Team is celebrating 10 years dedicated to sustainability and environmental justice. Founded in 2009, the team is comprised of members of the GSD Community who are dedicated to finding innovative solutions, challenging norms, and encouraging behavior change. The GSD Green Team is open to all members of the GSD community. Through ongoing collaboration between student, staff, and faculty-driven green teams, the Harvard Graduate School of Design is working to create a sustainable campus for the future.

@humansofgsd is a new Instagram page featuring members of GSD Building Services talking about their favorite spots in Gund Hall, favorite salad dressing–and most importantly, what students, faculty and staff at the GSD can do to make their jobs easier and the environment at the GSD a better place for everyone.

Entrepreneurs @GSD had a kick-off meeting on November 6, featuring guest speaker, GSD pioneer entrepreneur Teran Evans.

Diastika Lokesworo (MArch II ’20) & Womxn in Design hosted a live acoustic jazz performance from Lokesworo’s newest single and an installation on November 8 at GSD Kirkland Gallery . 

 

Socks Studio: Part visual atlas, part psychological voyage into the unknown

What do textured Aurelian walls, a Franciscan friar’s dabblings in typography, and a telecommunicated exhibition from the 1990s have in common? They are all featured in Socks , a sidelong look at architecture and design as social phenomena capable of uniting discrete ideas across space and time. Like the trippy half-formed portraits of dogs rendered by Google’s hallucinogenic Deep Dream AI, Socks is an aesthetic exquisite corpse: part visual atlas, part historical cabinet of curiosities, and part psychological voyage into the unknown.

Mariabruna Fabrizi and Fosco Lucarelli—who presented their work at Harvard Graduate School of Design in November, 2019—founded Socks in 2006 while studying at the University of Roma Tre. At the time, the two were more interested in emergent technologies and their cultural impact than in architecture proper—or any other discipline in isolation. As its audience grew, Socks stretched beyond architecture and academia, attracting a diverse readership that included artists, video game designers, and technologists who helped shape the discussion through an increasingly interdisciplinary perspective. Over time it became a shared network, a place to prod beyond the already-known maxims of the built world and into new, softer territory. On this rapidly evolving informational ecosystem, the imaginary, speculative, and curious sides of architecture were freed from the progressive trajectory and precise terminology that often envelops the discipline.

“Now that there’s a critical mass of thousands of posts,” says Lucarelli, “we’ve been able to group our interests into 11 main categories, a process that we refer to as a sort of ‘reverse psychological analysis.’” The categories range from particular conceits arrived at over the years, including “photography as time” and “walls as rooms,” or veer into the paradoxical, such as “dysfunctional plans,” and finally embrace more quotidian architectural terms like “fields,” “housing,” and “axonometric projection”—but take them to very different ends. Distortion, a triumph of anachronism, ambiguity, interconnectivity, and the defiance of easy categorization are the connective tissues between the thousands of entries that comprise Socks’ online database. Reflecting on the categories, Lucarelli adds: “They chose us, we didn’t choose them.”

Socks adopts the language of the infinite scroll and grid that have become part and parcel of our internet experience, from mood boards delivered via Pinterest to your Instagram feed. But unlike similarly structured projects such as Archive of Affinities, Socks doesn’t revel in total ambiguity, nor does it claim to have all the answers. Instead, Fabrizi and Lucarelli provide a continually shifting editorial direction that ranges from a light curatorial prod to several paragraphs of detailed information per entry. The duo feel no pressure of consistency; there is neither fetish for novelty nor devotion to a traditional mode of presentation. They prefer to bring this information into daily life as practitioners and educators of architecture, both on-screen and off-line.

“It’s a two-way response to the way the internet shapes how we work,” says Fabrizi. “Socks replicates the exquisite corpse created as people contribute alternative ideas to the collective consciousness of the internet; it also steps beyond that increasingly insular bubble of algorithmically tailored information to provoke curiosity, which is the most crucial part of architectural education.”

While Fabrizi and Lucarelli continue to expand their digital atlas, they have anchored their practice in a physical space in Paris. In 2010, they founded Microcities, an architecture and design practice that runs independently of Socks but engages with many shared concerns. Ranging from Parisian apartment redesigns to Finnish libraries and entire neighborhood propositions in Sweden, their projects arrive at architecture through several other disciplines. Microcities incorporates principles of sociology, urban planning theory, and psychology, as well as pop culture and everyday life in their speculative designs. Hammarö Boogie-Woogie (2013) was an urban renovation plan for the Swedish city of Hammarö that draws on the partners’ ongoing interest in interstitial spaces, where the private meets the collective. Its title is in homage to Mondrian’s jazzy final painting, Broadway Boogie Woogie (1958)—wherein the sterile urban grid becomes a rhythmic romp through the picture plane. Similarly, their plan for Hammarö brings value to voids, transforming the spaces between housing clusters into vibrant sources of life.

But Fabrizi and Lucarelli believe the best translation of Socks’ ideology from url to irl is Inner Space, their contribution to the current Lisbon Architecture Triennale. The 36-foot-tall cabinet of curiosities they erected in the main exhibition hall offers a physical rendition of their research methodology of “inner space.” The project explores collective imagination through different media including models, photographs, objects, installations, drawings, and VR. In an effort to democratize and repopulate old imagery with new meaning, Fabrizi and Lucarelli only used images that have gone out of copyright and are readily downloadable from the internet.

As the plywood structure ascends, it travels through time and gradations of publicness to ask how the visual presentation of images throughout history has shaped the image of architecture within the public imagination. Beginning on the ground level with a series of maps—from otherworldly medieval speculations to existential topographical drawings by the contemporary artist Grayson Perry—architecture then ascends through media and categories to become a common representation. Reflecting on this project, the duo ask: “Is it possible to consider collective imagination as a sort of territory uniting disparate ideas? If so, how might you materialize it?”

“When we started Socks, we didn’t think it would last a long time—the title was a random placeholder for our website that just sort of stuck,” confess Fabrizi and Lucarelli. “But in the end, we are happy because it obliges us to not take anything too seriously.” Whether with their presentation in Lisbon, their research through Socks, or their role as educators in architecture and design schools worldwide, the duo care little for having all the answers. Rather, they want to provoke a second take on images and encourage the pursuit of new meanings. As the post-truth politics of the present evolves into a hybrid of fact and fiction, their unconventional approach to archiving—which values the speculative as much as the real—makes Socks a vital tool for unlearning and provoking curiosity in the realm of architecture and beyond.

The Thinking Machine: Paola Sturla calls on designers to renew their commitment to humanism

Smart cities, search engines, autonomous vehicles: The pairing of massive data sets and self-learning algorithms is transforming the world around us in ways that are not always easy to grasp. The strange ways computers “think” are hidden within opaque proprietary code. It has been called the “end of theory.” There is a danger, says Paola Sturla, Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, that human agency will be nudged out of the picture. Sturla, who is trained as an architect and landscape architect, has called on designers to renew the tradition of humanism. The logical step-by-step processing of our machines must be framed within the open-ended thinking of human-oriented design. In this respect, design has tricks to teach computer science: Working at the messy interface between human users and technological tools is what we do best. Sturla reminds us that humanist-designers were instrumental in the initial development of artificial intelligence (AI) decades ago—and she calls on us to renew this legacy.

What does it mean to be a humanist? Are AI tools and computer simulation compatible with humanism?

My research investigates the agency of AI in the design process in a theoretical way. I say that because, as I acquire more technical knowledge, I confirm for myself how sophisticated these skills are. I am not a data scientist; that would be a different career. Humanism, according to Umberto Eco and Linda Gasperoni, is the ability to tackle open-ended problems in a multidisciplinary way. I am not the technician—I am the questioner, the user, the person who interacts with the technology and therefore sets the requirements, which is part of the design process. That’s why my research looks so different from typical AI research, which is about testing and simulating. We need to question what we do in order to understand what AI can do for us. We don’t want to be blown away by the tool. We want to control the tool, make choices, and be accountable, while being surprised by its generative output.

How can we make sure the implementation of algorithms doesn’t make us lose that pre-modern or anti-modern or just human part of the discourse? My intuition is that it is the interface and the feedback loop between human and machine that is crucial.

Do we need technologies to be able to engage with infrastructures and landscapes, to be able to bring them to a human scale?

No. We have always experienced the world around us without technologies, or with other technologies. We can perceive with only our senses, but technology enhances them. That’s what technology has been doing forever. The reticula painters used to use to frame and subdivide their perspective views is a kind of technology for mediating perception. Technologies today are not totally new; they are an evolution.

AI could be just one additional layer. It can sense things we cannot sense and reveal things we cannot see with our eyes, because this data is not within the scope of our perception. It can therefore inform us with more information. Then there is the generative part of AI. We use many tools to have ideas—people do the most crazy things to be stimulated as designers, so why not use an algorithm? AI can provide forms. But we should not rely on that. We should realize that humans are still part of the process.

Is there currently a shift in the complexity of the problems approached by designers? Should the design disciplines change their ways of working to account for this?

I think there is a shift. I’m not sure if it’s related to technology or if it’s a consequence of technology. It’s obviously a complex phenomenon, rooted in economics, in the social aspects of globalization, and so on. The design process is now international. If I had to point out the most important thing enabled by technology, it would not be AI; it would be email making possible mega-teams around the world sharing BIM models. Communication is changing the landscape of what we do. Economic contingencies have resulted in increased complexity. And certainly technology can help. But this is my point: We need to make sure the technology doesn’t backfire on us. If it just adds a layer of complexity, then it’s a problem. If it helps us manage complex sites then it can be very useful.

We have been dealing with complexity forever. Imagine when Brunelleschi was building Santa Maria del Fiore—he came to an existing context, part of the building was already there, he had to invent a solution. This sort of complex context is not new; it is the bottom line of what we do. The aim should be for technology to help us manage this.

What do you see as the root of your approach? Which designers or thinkers are the heroes of working with complex systems?

What I did in my own work was to start at the beginning—to go back to the 1950s, to Alan Turing. From there I went historically, stepping forward about every 10 years, asking, Who are the key people? There was Herbert Simon, the economist who came up with the term “artificial intelligence.” (Interestingly, it was in a title for a grant application—it was branding to get the money.) Then there was the research at MIT: Marvin Minsky and Nicholas Negroponte at the Media Lab. It’s fascinating to learn that many of these people were architects—to find the humanist-designer at the root of all this disruptive innovation. The statistics came from mathematicians, sure, but the idea of applying it to technology for civil use came from architects, as Molly Wright Steenson has shown in her recent book, Architecture Intelligence.

It is a landscape of people who have been dealing with complexity in a variety of fields. All the people that founded the Santa Fe Institute, for example. Many of the heroes are from around the 1950s and 60s. The questions they were asking are still relevant, even if now we have advanced the technology. For example: How can we compute the ambiguous? How can we compute the “maybe,” as Marvin Minsky (and Stephen Ervin) would put it.

Finally, there are the designers—like landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and his creativity feedback loop, the RSVP Cycle, to name just one.

That’s a good question. How can we have an idea that is not necessarily rooted in a data set?

I don’t have an answer to Minsky’s question, but it’s probably a matter of a feedback loop between the human and the machine. Instead of imagining a machine that takes over, it’s more interesting to think about how to make the interface of that technology, to interact in a way that can be generative. This is what I talk about with computer scientists. There is a lot of research going on in that field, especially in the case of, say, emergency response. If there is an emergency, how can algorithms coordinate the rescue process? How can they interact with the human rescuers? The interface problem is key right now in computer science research.

The problem is a language problem. The machine thinks in linear terms, and the algorithm is a linear process: from A to B, from B to C, based on some parameters. Humans think in a nonlinear way, or we can think in both ways. (Or, really, we don’t know how we think; neuroscientists are clear about that.) An algorithm is a machine that can handle a very specific process. That is the opposite of what we do: tackle open-ended processes. I don’t want to open up the Pandora’s box of the critique of modernism, but if the algorithm is a super-linear way of expressing a problem, then it is the king of the modernist approach. And if we have never been modern (quoting Bruno Latour), then the tendency to try to act in a linear way was never really a coherent idea. My critique, then, is to ask how we can make sure the implementation of algorithms doesn’t make us lose that pre-modern or anti-modern or just human part of the discourse. My intuition, based on what I see happening in computer science, is that it is the interface and the feedback loop between human and machine that is crucial. So it’s not about getting rid of the human, but understanding how the two work together.

Harvard GSD Fall 2019 Option Studios

Please click the studio title for full descriptions of each studio.

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE

POST-SHAKER – Preston Scott Cohen

The studio’s hypothesis is that the Mount Lebanon Shaker Village in New York is to be converted into an art colony that reawakens the historic site as a living tradition in the present but one that extends and transforms many of the cultural and artistic practices of the Shakers.

HABITAT KASHGAR – Zhang Ke

Students in this studio undertake the challenge of designing a series of projects related to the subject of habitat, either as a single-family house, multifamily housing, or as community service programs (a school, a library, or an art center) in Kashgar, the ancient oasis city situated in between the great desert of Taklimakan and snow mountains of the Pamirs.

TYPE VS. DIFFERENCE: THE FUNCTION OF A 21^st CENTURY RESIDENTIAL BLOCK – Farshid Moussavi

Exploring the rooted politics of architecture and its agency in everyday life students in this studio address the subject of housing in relation to the individualized society of the 21st century. The project site is located in a dense historic area of Paris and each student will be asked to design a large-scale housing project that responds to the needs of our individualized and ever-changing society.

ADAPTING MIAMI – HOUSING ON THE TRANSECT – Eric Howeler, Corey Zehngebot

In this studio, students will explore housing types along an urban transect, cutting from the high-density coastline and following the primary commercial corridor of Calle Ocho (Eight Street) through Little Havana and out to the Florida everglades.

AN AMERICAN SECTION – Kersten Geers, David Van Severen

This is the second studio of American Architecture. In parallel to our previous endeavors, students will work on the university campus. The course will investigate the idea of American corporate education, perhaps best embodied in the image of the Mies van der Rohe’s Armour Institute. Students will look into Mittel Amerika, the Midwest, and the Great Lakes megalopolis, where the sheer economic expansion most apparently instigated this ambiguity between the idea and its mass production.

LABORATORY SCHOOL, STACKING, PRAGMATISM – Hilary Sample

On rethinking the scope and scale of the specific educational program, the laboratory school, students will reimagine a new type of primary public school for Columbia University’s Manhattanville campus, while drawing on historic precedents including pragmatist John and Alice Chipman Dewey’s Laboratory School (1896–1903) at the University of Chicago.

GROUNDLESS – Andrew Zago

The studio project is the new International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina. The museum has three physical components: the ground, which acts as a memorial garden; the interior exhibition; and the architecture.

CROSS RHYTHM (NEW HOUSE IN NEW ORLEANS) – Go Hasegawa

“Cross rhythm” is a term used to describe a composition made of different rhythms. This studio tries to deal with the building typology in positive way. How can we design a new house in New Orleans as a building of cross rhythm?

REFLECTIVE NOSTALGIA: ALTERNATIVE FUTURES FOR SHANGHAI’S SHIKUMEN HERITAGE – Lyndon Neri, Rossana Hu

This studio will explore how reflective nostalgia may offer a new model for adaptive reuse in the context of China, where the erosion of cultural identity and local heritage have come as a consequence of rapid urbanization.

A TYPOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGES – Eric Lapierre

Reconsidering the types and spaces of institutions that are dedicated to the classification and transmission of knowledge—schools of architecture, libraries, and museums—student will imagine how they can improve not only the society at large, but also their neighborhoods, at different scales and in different ways.

DOMESTIC ORBITS – Frida Escobedo, Xavier Nueno

How can architectural interventions help recognize, reduce, and redistribute the problems faced by domestic workers? This studio proposes to visualize and understand how space is articulated according to specific gendered, classist, and racist configurations of the social. The aim is to provide narratives of Mexico City that foreground the conflicts faced by the workforce onto which domestic labor is unloaded.

 

DEPARTMENT OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

ADRIFT AND INDETERMINATE: DESIGNING FOR PERPETUAL MIGRATION ON VIRGINIA’S EASTERN SHORE – Gary R. Hilderbrand

Virginia’s Eastern Shore is confronting sea level rise at a rate 40 percent faster than the global average. What can design offer in the face of this calamity? Students will examine a migratory phenomenon rooted in perpetual adaptation, one that has been in motion for far longer than the recent arc of concern for climate instability. The studio will pursue adaptive processes, land use strategies, and the design of landscapes and structures that extend the life of a challenged community.

GEOGRAPHIC REENCHANTMENT: SWISS LANDSCAPE INTERVENTIONS BETWEEN ATMOSPHERE, FUNCTION + EXPERIENCE – Robin Winogrond

In tiny Switzerland, landscape is regarded as a resource that serves lobbies from agriculture and speculation, to infrastructure, ecology, tourism, and recreation, each with a voice of its own except one–the landscape itself. This studio explores the potential of these spaces to develop a strong landscape voice and experience of their own, to imbue them with what Alistair Bonnet refers to as “geographical reenchantment”.

MANIFESTOS FOR BUILDING THE UTOPIA – Loreta Castro, Gabriela Carrillo

The continuous ground movements that happen in Mexico City, specifically those that have occurred during the last 40 years, demonstrate the territory’s frailty due to its radical landscape transformation. The focus will be ground-cracks, products of excessive water extraction, ground subsidence, and earthquakes. We are interested in their effects on the landscape and the urban fabric, and the possibilities they enable when considered as intrinsic elements that will shape the contemporary Mexico City. Participants will express their positions toward these extreme conditions through a space manifesto.

SOCIAL OPERATIVE INFRASTRUCTURE: SUSTAINABLE WATER MODELS IN CHILE – Eugenio Simonetti, Tomas Folch

As a way to start a discussion about networks beyond monofunctional operation, with the goal of bringing social, environmental, and functional upgrades to the city, students will explore the operative water infrastructure in Chile.

THE IMMEASURABLE ENCLOSURE – Segio Lopez-Pineiro

Single-space environments—outdoors, indoors, or in-between—are defined by enclosing and containing only a small part of the world. Precisely because of this condition, they have traditionally been perceived as the means for designing coherent singular identities. This studio aims to reframe the discrete space as the mechanism for containing and expressing the world. Through the design of a single-space environment, this studio proposes reframing the design technique of the enclosure and infusing landscape and architecture’s primordial roots with the ambition of holding the immeasurable.

FALLOWSCAPES, TERRITORIAL RECONFIGURATION STRATEGIES FOR ARLES, FRANCE – Anita Berrizbeitia, Marc Armengaud, Matthais Armengaud

On a promontory on the left bank of the lower Rhone River, the city of Arles presides over vast plains that, until fairly recently, were characterized as wastelands destined to remain permanently uncultivated. This studio will reconsider the interactions between systems and landscapes according to different scales, limits, time, and material, advocating for territorial reconfiguration strategies that investigate the existing and the potential, in order to face dramatic ecological threats and an enduring social crisis.

 

DEPARTMENT OF URBAN PLANNING AND DESIGN 

HOUSING & INFRASTRUCTURE IN YUCATAN: BEYOND THE MAYAN TRAIN – Jose Castillo

The Yucatán Peninsula in southeastern Mexico is a place where urbanization and environmental preservation have always been in delicate balance due to its particular geological conditions: a medium to low tropical rainforest on water-soluble limestone. This studio looks at the region in its historical and contemporary shifts and develop more productive, sustainable, and inclusive models for territorial transformation.

AFFORDABILITY NOW! – Dan D’Oca

The United States is in the midst of an affordable housing crisis. This interdisciplinary studio, offered in conjunction with Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, invites students from all departments to examine bold new affordable housing initiatives. The site is the Los Angeles region, where the affordability crisis is particularly dire. Students will work with tenants, community-based organizations, and city officials to imagine how we might creatively deploy cooperative developments, community land trusts, low-cost housing prototypes, and other weapons to help build a more equitable region.

NEWNESS AND SYNCHRONICITY: VISIONS FOR NOVI SAD 2050 – Alex Wall

The main objective in this studio is to critically explore Novi Sad, Serbia, the European Capital of Culture 2021. In this studio, students have researched future spatial scenarios for upgrading a series of defunct factory complexes into “civic social districts”. The challenge is to explore future civic design for these complexes via visionary urbanism, art, and design culture; finding a balance between government ownership and that of the private or informal sectors.

FEEDING BOSTON – Eulàlia Gómez Escoda

The development of postindustrial food supply systems parallels the explosion of the modern city. This studio deals with an ordinary matter whose future impacts every one of the world’s citizens. Focusing on Greater Boston, the studio will analyze temporal, spatial, and relational patterns of food production, transportation, storage, and sale.

 

The Collective Amnesia of Sugar Land: Unearthing a link between mass incarceration and slavery

In early 2018, the remains of 95 people were found in Sugar Land, Texas, as construction was underway on a new technical center in the Fort Bend Independent School District. The bodies—aged from 14 to 70, male except for one, and accompanied by chains and bricks—were buried in unmarked graves between 1878 and 1911. All of them were African American, and all of them were victims of the brutal practice of convict leasing.

This Jim Crow–era system of abuse arose not in spite of the 13th amendment but because of it. While the law seems to ban slavery, it explicitly allows it in one instance: “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Then as now, African Americans were disproportionately sent to prison for the smallest crimes or were falsely accused and then forced into brutal labor, ensuring that slavery was just restructured rather than abolished. As a result, the aptly named Imperial Sugar Company in the Houston suburb of Sugar Land profited from an unjust and inhumane practice that archaeological discoveries such as this are helping bring to the forefront of conversations about America’s violent history.

Hanna Kim (MDes ’19) recalled this story in late 2018 while working on her final research project for the Culture, Conservation, and Design course at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The assignment was to choose any place, look at its current identity, and analyze how it had changed from the past. Her paper delved into the collective amnesia surrounding the “Sugar Land 95” and the city’s legacy of abuse—from the massacre of the Karankawa peoples in 1823 upon Stephen F. Austin’s acquisition of the county from Mexico to the establishment of the sugar plantations—and proposed alternative methods of acknowledging the past in the present.

Kim’s research was the beginning of a much larger project. During the following winter break, she discovered the Soros Equality Fellowship program, which focuses on supporting midcareer individuals working in the field of racial justice. Kim reached out to Reginald Moore, the community activist at the center of her work on Sugar Land and convict leasing, because she believed he was an ideal candidate for the $100,000 grant. Speaking with Kim for the first time on January 1, Moore agreed but thought they should apply together. The two were selected as 2019 fellows and Kim has since moved to Houston.

Here, Kim discusses recent developments regarding the reinterment of the remains, the ways in which design can be both a positive and negative force for historical memory, and what she and Moore hope to accomplish with their Soros Equality Fellowship.

What are the most recent developments regarding the Sugar Land 95?

There’s a messy, long history between the school board and the county, which you could consider as the community voice. In July, the school board decided to give $1 million and the 10 acres on which the bodies were found to the county, and with it control of reinterment and memorialization. But last month, the board said they would take back that promise and reinter the bodies themselves. The atmosphere at the meeting was tense. People were imploring them to reconsider, but they decided otherwise.

Why do you consider it critical that the remains become part of a larger public dialogue?

Memorials and monuments are important parts of our civic life and show what we choose to remember. Take the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Families go there to find some form of closure, and I believe something similar can happen in Sugar Land. Considering the efforts around the country to memorialize victims of racial terror in general, this is an opportunity to bring to light the issue of convict leasing as the missing link between slavery and mass incarceration.

What is problematic with restricting the conversation to this single site where these bodies were found?

The whole city was essentially a huge convict farm, and one could argue that [the evidence of convict leasing is] not just where the bodies were found but also where the school was built and any lot around that huge area. How do you know where archaeology ends or where the last body is buried? It’s hard to delineate because profit and power were consequences of this brutal practice for a lot of people, so if you’re mapping, you can trace to the ends of the world what these bodies were used to do. Design, as limited as it is, should make these endless connections from this one place to the greater world—who convict leasing benefited, who the convicts’ descendants are, where they came from. It can uproot these questions and start conversations.

Can design also conceal histories?

When convict leasing was widely practiced, Sugar Land earned the name “the Hellhole on the Brazos.” After a federal investigation and public shaming, the court abolished the system in 1909 and gave the city five years to close it. The city hurried to terminate the leases by 1912. What happened then was the complete reshaping of the city into a company town. Imperial Sugar Company built 400 company houses with key services by 1917; in 1918, the first school opened here; in 1923, Sugar Land became one of the best planned cities in Texas. Designers and architects really tried to turn the story around and change the city’s identity in just 11 years.

Do you feel it’s necessary not to become too isolated and insulated, whether as a designer or as a community member generally?

Completely. I believe that before a designer can be considered an activist, the activists were activists. What I mean by that is, before I ever became interested in Sugar Land as an academic inquiry at Harvard, people lived through real pain, violence, and anguish for generations. These experiences should be honored first and foremost. And I realize the irony that I learned this at a top university. Regardless, it’s one’s choice to act and test out the critical lessons learned from school or just be comfortable where you are. It’s so easy to stay isolated and it can even be harmful when the stories of real people stay as mere “subjects of interest.” Breaking that seal and becoming proximate to the people and the site has completely shifted my relationship to what I know.

What are your and Reginald Moore’s goals for the Soros Equality Fellowship?

We will publish a book that will talk about the history of Sugar Land and convict leasing, the national narrative that slavery evolved into convict leasing and then mass incarceration, and also Moore’s advocacy and life story, because I think it’s really important to highlight how an individual can start a movement. Then I’ll move on to publishing a database of convict leasing camps around the country, inspired by the Lynching in America map by the Equal Justice Initiative. So many similar stories exist but are rarely talked about in relation to everything else. They become “the crazy Texas story” and one-offs that don’t show the magnitude of [the issue]. The map will show these connections.