Empty Monuments: Kaz Yoneda’s research on Olympic stadiums considers the future of cities

Just a year after the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, many of the stadiums built for the tournament had settled into disuse. Brasilia’s Estádio Nacional, for example, became a $550 million bus parking lot. This landscape of empty monuments, compounded by massive national debt, was not an aberration. Many blame the 2004 Athens Olympics for contributing heavily to Greece’s spiraling economic crisis, and other cities and nations that have hosted global, large-scale events have experienced similar challenges. But such outcomes are not foregone conclusions, according to Kaz Yoneda, design critic in architecture and the founding principal of Tokyo-based firm Bureau 0-1 and a 2018 Richard Rogers Fellow .

Yoneda used his three-month fellowship to analyze the London 2012 Olympics in order to improve preparations for Tokyo 2020, and to consider the futures of cities more broadly. His particular concern was legacy planning—the concept that buildings can solve present needs but should also be constructed with an awareness of, and hope for reappropriation by, future generations. “These types of events always expose the issues inherent to any host city,” he says. “A two-week event is not a city’s apotheosis. Cities don’t change in that time. What’s important is what happens 10, 20, and 30 years later. That architecture and urban spaces are able to adapt and take on changing cultural values is a beautiful thing.”

London serves as a prime counterexample to Brazil and Greece, as Yoneda learned when he visited the former venues and interviewed designers and architects involved in the games. “A huge legacy master plan existed years prior to the Olympics to develop the eastern track of the city that had been devastated by Nazi air raids and which subsequently became an industrial area with low-income housing,” Yoneda explains. “The goal wasn’t so much to build grandiose venues or develop luxury condos but to increase the average lifespan of East Londoners. And in order to do that, you need better hospitals, better living environments, better green spaces, and better education.”

A two-week event is not a city’s apotheosis. Cities don’t change in that time. What’s important is what happens 10, 20, and 30 years later. That architecture and urban spaces are able to adapt and take on changing cultural values is a beautiful thing.

Kaz Yoneda on planning Olympic facilities with long-term development goals in place

Tokyo does not have any such framework or vision in place—an absence that is a primary consideration of the international think tank xLab . Co-founded by Hitoshi Abe at UCLA and Kengo Kuma and Atsushi Deguchi at the University of Tokyo, the group focuses on imagining future environments with an emphasis on melding physical and digital spaces through interdisciplinary engagement.

During xLab’s recently concluded three-year summer program, Yoneda led courses concentrated on a set of core themes: community (2017), mobility (2018), and resilience (2019). This year, he and Miho Mazereeuw developed a syllabus around Harumi Flag, an athletes’ village under construction in the Bay of Tokyo. Of major concern is the site’s future stability. “Because it’s a landfill, it has a very weak foundation,” Yoneda explains. “It’s prone to soil liquefaction. The question is, When it’s eventually turned into a mixed-use high-end residential complex, how resilient will it be if an earthquake occurs and a tsunami hits the area?”

Yoneda believes that one way to mitigate the legacy of poor planning is to involve the local community. “We took a ground-up, incremental, small-scale approach to the idea of resilience because people are creative and strategic about how they can use their surroundings,” he says. “Citizens living in an area can become stakeholders who practice disaster prevention while living their everyday lives. It makes prevention second nature because you’ve trained subconsciously in your everyday learning.”

Future Olympic hosts may be better prepared. In 2018, the International Olympic Committee approved “Agenda 2020, the New Norm,” a manifesto featuring 118 reforms that could diminish the emphasis placed on iconic, individual buildings and shift attention to long-term development goals. “I wish that it had already been in place when Tokyo was chosen because that might have forced the organization and the city to push for a legacy plan,” Yoneda says.

He remains hopeful about the future, however, because he sees alternative solutions to governmental interventions. “Tokyo is very complex with a lot of players, and anything you do here requires collaboration and an interdisciplinary team,” he explains. “It will change at a grassroots and private-sector level, through coalitions of the willing—real-estate developers, architects, designers, producers, media outlets—who are interested in the long term.”

September 2019 News Roundup

“Drawing Attention: The Digital Culture of Contemporary Architectural Drawings, ” at the Roca London Gallery, explores contemporary architectural drawing and features an expansive collection of over seventy drawings from established and emerging practitioners around the globe including Jimenez Lai, CJ Lim, O’Donnell + Tuomey, and Neil Spiller. Co-curated by Grace La, the exhibition is part of the London Design Festival .

Anita Berrizbeitia gave a keynote lecture at the International Federation of Landscape Architects’ conference in Oslo. “Given the current challenges of species extinction and resource scarcity, I pose that the landscape will increasingly be the space where the conflicts between the interests of the few versus the need of the many are registered and negotiated,” wrote Berrizbeitia in an introduction to her lecture. The conference took direct aim at the climate crisis, asking how landscape architects can mitigate the destruction of nature and people.

Laier-Rayshon Smith (MUP ’20) was awarded an APA Foundation Scholarship . Smith’s vision for equitable communities includes working at the intersections of social interaction, policy, design and the decision-making processes that formulate the built environment. Experience working at non-profit organizations in Pittsburgh helped to shape this vision. The APA Foundation’s mission is to advance the art and science of planning through philanthropic activities that provide access to educational opportunities, enrich the public dialogue about planning, and advance social equity in the profession and in our communities.

Justin Stern (Ph.D ’19, MUP ’12) is the new Pollman Fellow in Real Estate and Urban Development 2019-2020. Stern’s research focuses on the interplay of economic development, technological disruption, and urban form in the rapidly urbanizing regions of East and Southeast Asia. As a Pollman Fellow, Stern will work on the research project “Offshoring, Automation, and the City: Mapping the Urban Futures of Global Outsourcing Hubs,” which builds on his dissertation. The research will address BPO automation in Bangalore, Johannesburg, Kraków, and Manila. Topics will include how local governments, real estate development corporations, and others prepare for the threat of BPO automation, and what lessons can be learned about functional building obsolescence caused by societal, economic, and technological changes.

Khoa Vu’s (MArch I ’19) thesis “Grayscale,” advised by Preston Scott Cohen, was recognized as one of the winners of 2019 Architecture MasterPrize in the Cultural Architecture category. “Grayscale” exploits the inbetween as central to providing a new design methodology and spatial type. The aim of this thesis is to discover spatial conditions that exist between nature and the man-made, the old and the new, the inner, imaginative mind and the external, perceived world. The project proposes a new Cultural and Laboratory Hub for a highland resort city in Vietnam called Dalat, “the city of fog and thousands of pine.” The thesis will be also exhibited at the GSD Dean’s Wall from 10/21 – 12/20, selected by the Chair of Architecture Department Mark Lee.

 

Weiss/Manfredi was recently selected as one of three finalists for Reimagining La Brea Tar Pits, an international competition for the historic museum and park in Los Angeles. DS+R and Dorte Mandrup (Copenhagen) are the other two finalists. In reimagining the 13 acres of Hancock Park, La Brea Tar Pits, and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the architects assembled teams that included not only architects and landscape architects, but scientists, engineers, designers, and artists. Recently, Weiss/Manfredi’s Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park won the Spaces, Places, and Cities category in the 2019 Fast Company Innovation by Design Awards . Both the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Overlook and Tulane University Commons are opening to the public this fall.

Robert Pietrusko’s sound installation Six Microphones, which was exhibited at Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2013 and at the Carpenter Center in 2015 is being released by LA-based record label, LINE: Sound Art Editions . It is now available for streaming, digital download, and on double vinyl.

Jesse Keenan published an article in Science entitled “A Climate Intelligence Arms Race in Financial Markets.” The articles focuses on black box technology and public science integrity issues in built environment systems associated with climate adaptation planning and investment. Science is one of the most prominent journals in the world among all disciplines. Currently, it is ranked #3 behind Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine.

Alex Krieger published an editorial in The Business Journals entitled “Viewpoint: The many lives of Boston’s Old Corner Bookstore”.

The House Is a Work of Art: Kazuyo Sejima on her fascination with “Shinohara’s way”

The diffuse spread of artistic thought and technique that we call “influence” impacts architecture in ways that are often difficult to discern. In his essential study, Influence in Art and Literature, Göran Hermerén explains that the notion of influence is broad and complicated: “Every work of art,” he writes, “is surrounded by what might be called its artistic field.” This includes not only the ideas of other artists, but traditions, contemporary philosophy and politics, the desires of sellers and buyers, the voices of critics, and so on. In architecture these expand to include legal restrictions, topography, context, and the practicalities of budgets.

All of these forces shape the work of designers, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, so that every work must be understood as, in some way, a product of its artistic field. Usually, though, the question of influence gravitates toward progenitors—“Which designer impacted your work, and in what ways?” Even simplified like this, the question presents a challenge because when designers are at their most susceptible to influence—as students or early in their careers—they are often least able to clearly discern the origins and directions of forces that are affecting their work.

This point came out forcefully in “Reflecting on Shinohara,” a conversation earlier this month between the Pritzker Prize–winning architect Kazuyo Sejima and Harvard architectural historian Seng Kuan. When describing Kazuo Shinohara’s impact on her work, Sejima paused in her recollections, noting with some amusement that young people sometimes don’t clearly realize their influences. While it was evident later that Shinohara had affected her thinking as an architect (which he pointed out to her in a conversation around 1990), how he did so wasn’t apparent at first.

Sejima remembered feeling “really shocked” on seeing Shinohara’s houses published in magazines while she was a young home economics student. She was particularly taken with his aphorism “the house is art,” a notion that was so different from what she and her classmates at Japan Women’s University were learning in the late 1970s. Their impulse, Sejima said, was toward the practical. “Circulation should be short,” “the dining room should be next to the kitchen,” and it was important to accommodate the simple lifestyle still prevalent in Japan since after the war.

Shinohara’s houses, however esoteric they might have seemed, appealed to these students because they were somehow realistic. Having been built in the postwar era, they appeared to respond to the scarcity of materials by making it “important to use thin, small members,” she explained, while still avoiding an impression of poverty. So, even as Sejima and her peers admired the monumental space frames of Kenzo Tange’s Osaka Exposition Hall, or the sweeping roofs of his Olympic venues, they were, she said, “fascinated with Shinohara’s way.” His simple, “and very difficult to understand” line drawings, accompanied in magazines by Koji Taki’s bold black-and-white photographs, offered a “very strong expression to us,” she explained.

These were youthful, and perhaps unsophisticated first impressions of Shinohara, whose influence on Japanese architecture in the late 20th century was immense, and whose work expressed subtle, challenging ideas about architecture in Japanese culture. He famously described the progression of his career in four distinct stages, each associated with an intense theoretical preoccupation.

In the first stage, he sought to condense what he called “a hot meaning cultivated in the long process of history.” His domestic spaces in this first phase expressed the “underlying abstract structure” of traditional Japanese building elements and their composition. In the second phase he shifted attention to the cube, a less semantically rich architectural figure, in an effort to create, he explained, “an anti-space” or “a cold space” that could express “an inorganic, neutral, or dry meaning.” In his third period—which coincided with Sejima’s time as an undergraduate—he experimented with assemblages of raw, functional objects without “any predetermined or prescribed intents.” Using posts, walls, and braces he sought to produce a “zero-degree machine” that could express the “chaos which generates the liveliness… of the contemporary metropolis.” His fourth phase, the subject of the “Shinohara Kazuo: ModernNext” exhibition on display in the Druker Design Gallery in the Graduate School of Design’s Gund Hall, elaborates on the idea of urban chaos, the near infinite complexity of modern machines, and the meaninglessness of their individual parts. This phase, which Kuan described in his opening remarks as a “counterpoint to postmodernism,” addressed not only the contemporary conditions of Japan, but also its position in a globalizing world.

While Shinohara expressed this thinking in 42 buildings, mostly houses, over the course of a long career, he also communicated his ideas to students at Tokyo Institute of Technology, where he served as professor of architecture from 1970 to 1985. In this context his influence was very direct. He gathered a group of students and collaborators—particularly Kazunari Sakamoto, Itsuko Hasegawa, and Toyo Ito—into what came to be known as the Shinohara School. The influence of these prominent architects rippled outward, as Kuan explained in conversation with Sejima, to “a very prominent group of young architects in the next generation.”

Although we can trace an architectural lineage (with offshoots and clusters) among these architects, it is perhaps more useful to envision a changing artistic field that surrounds the production of architecture in Japan. Shinohara was a prominent force within this field. So his investigations into the attenuation of tradition, the nonexistence of space, the rawness of architectural elements, the chaos of the metropolis, and the expressive power of the machine did not end in his buildings or even at the close of each phase in his career. Instead they continue to find new channels of expression in the hands of his students and devotees—and among architects who might have first encountered his work while flipping through pages of an architecture magazine, attending a lecture, or examining models and drawings in an exhibition of his work. “ModernNext” and the events surrounding it will no doubt contribute to amplifying the artistic field that surrounds Shinohara’s work.

“Reflecting on Shinohara” was organized in conjunction with the exhibition “Shinohara Kazuo: ModernNext,” on view through October 11, 2019 at Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Druker Design Gallery. 

Emmanuel Pratt awarded MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant

Harvard Graduate School of Design former Loeb Fellow Emmanuel Pratt (LF ’17) is one of 26 recipients of this year’s John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowships, colloquially called MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grants. The program aims to recognize a host of artists and scholars for their creativity and potential, and to empower them with the financial support to enable and elevate their endeavors.

Pratt was recognized for his visionary work through his Sweet Water Foundation, a nonprofit organization based on Chicago’s South Side that engages local residents in the cultivation and regeneration of social, environmental, and economic resources in the South Side. As the Foundation notes, the Sweet Water Foundation’s strategy is grounded in the transformation of abandoned buildings and vacant lots into sites of sustainable urban agriculture, which also serve as platforms for project-based educational and mentorship programs, intergenerational collaboration, and the creative reuse of salvaged materials through innovations in design.

Pratt joined the Harvard GSD community in 2016 as a Loeb Fellow , taking on a range of activities while in residence. He curated the Spring 2017 exhibition “We the Publics: A manifesto to restore democracy and truth in the Republic,” the result of a series of discussions Pratt had with Harvard GSD exhibitions director Dan Borelli reflecting upon a series of humanitarian and political crises. The resulting exhibition prompted visitors to reflect on what is considered “public” in today’s society, and to restore and reclaim eroded “Publics,” whether public good, public transportation, public discourse, or otherwise.

Pratt received a BArch (1999) from Cornell University and an MSAUD (Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design, 2003) from Columbia University. From 2011 to 2019, Pratt served as the director of aquaponics at Chicago State University, and he was the Charles Moore Visiting Professor at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan until 2019. Currently, Pratt is co-founder and executive director of Sweet Water Foundation and visiting lecturer in the Environmental and Urban Studies Program at the University of Chicago.

Learn more about Pratt’s MacArthur award, and his ongoing work, at the MacArthur Foundation’s announcement .

If it’s for us, but not with us, it’s against us: Hicham Khalidi on the challenges of curating in public spaces

Sprawling across entire cities, the biennial has become a prominent means for architects, designers, and artists to engage with pressing contemporary issues. But exhibitions on this scale pose particular curatorial problems. How can a curator translate idiosyncratic projects and the unique perspectives of the design disciplines into works that will resonate with the public?

For curator Hicham Khalidi, who delivered a lecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design this fall, part of the answer lies in understanding the public realm as a multilayered system. Just as urban spaces nest and overlap, the occupations of urban life—from homemaker to craftsperson to civil servant—form complex hierarchies. Khalidi believes that the task of a biennial’s curator is to translate projects vertically within this system. A single project can engage different people in very different ways, and large distributed exhibitions can bring projects to the people with whom they will resonate most strongly.

As the director of the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Khalidi fosters the work of designers, architects, and fine artists of all stripes. But he is equally committed to the issues that impact the world at large. He is curating a biennial in Chandigarh that will be about water; another in Marrakech featured site-specific works that were about the city itself. For Khalidi, it is not a contradiction to operate in the public realm while simultaneously being committed to the personal visions of artists and designers.

What are the challenges of curating large exhibitions in public spaces and spread across cities?

Design and public space do not always match. (Architecture is the exception in which they do match.) The thing I want to tap into is public space, and to do this, novelty is important—the idea of being a novice and approaching things with a certain naiveté. I have always used this to my benefit. I am constantly in new spaces and new cities. So what is my process? Choosing artists, for example, is always a work in progress in these large biennials. I start with a hunch or an intuition, and I talk with artists about it. Then at some point I let go and let the artists create their own spaces. They create spaces that can nourish communication and create knowledge and activities to bring people together. In other words, artists have their own processes, and what I do as a curator is to lay down the groundwork for them.

Approaching complex issues with openness is a way of putting yourself in the place of the audience.

And not only the audience. Public space is not only a sort of free space for citizens to inhabit; it also has to do with rules, laws, city development, and ideas and hunches and aspirations. When I’m curating a large exhibition, I talk to a plethora of people that are involved with a shared public space, from residents to the mayor to government ministers. It is a vertical system. Depending on the country this is more or less difficult. In Morocco or India, for example, it is much harder than in the Netherlands, because there are more layers, and there is less communication across them. In Morocco, you have the city run by the mayor, then neighborhoods that are controlled by certain people, then also streets that are controlled by other people. So it is a matter of going through all these people and explaining the project to them. This can require yet another set of people to help with these translations—they are sometimes called fixers—who can bridge these gaps. In order to get the exhibition I want, I have to understand how these systems work and engage constantly in translations up and down the chain.

Public space is not only a sort of free space for citizens to inhabit; it also has to do with rules, laws, city development, and ideas and hunches and aspirations.

Hicham Khalidi on understanding the complex systems that dictate how a public space is used and perceived

What is the relationship of your work to disciplinarity: How do you integrate artistic disciples, craft, and other specialized knowledge?

At the Jan van Eyck Academie, we are very multidisciplinary, but when we begin to work, we don’t care about disciplines, we care about subjects. We understand that there are different viewpoints, different ways of understanding the world. A fashion designer uses fashion to understand the world—that’s it. I have worked in a wide range of disciplines, from cooking to theater, and I incorporate those interests into exhibitions. In my approach to public spaces and cities, I am not thinking about disciplines at all. In India, I am thinking about water. They have a water problem. To approach this I need as many disciplines as possible. I need science, engineering. So for a biennial, I also invite artists that have a practice that I think would work well in this situation.

What draws you to the process of curating?

Curating, for me, is just a way of understanding the world—and every time I approach a project, I approach it anew. I see curatorship as a very singular inquiry into what interests me as a person. Of course, a curator needs to make it public, but making something public does not mean scraping away this personal interest. A lot of what we do is to find each other through personal interests. I do follow trajectories, just as an architect will revisit themes in a series of projects, but I also approach artistic work as a very singular, personal process—even when I curate very publicly, with many people.

Climate change, justice, and resilience at Harvard Graduate School of Design

At Harvard Graduate School of Design, climate crisis and resilience is a subject that permeates all aspects of the curriculum, from coursework and faculty research to student projects, exhibitions, and public programs. In recognition of Climate Week, which takes place September 23–29, we’ve assembled a few of the many ways the GSD has engaged with climate change this year.

Faculty Research

Which regions and cities in the United States will provide refuge for American climate migrants? As principal investigator for “Duluth Climigration,” lecturer in architecture Jesse M. Keenan collaborated with a team of GSD students to research the viability of the City of Duluth as a suitable destination for climate migrants. Recently featured in The New York Times , the project engages climate adaptation planning, demography, market analysis, design research, and infrastructure analysis to explore a range of scenarios for the physical adaptation of  Duluth. For more about Keenan’s research, read about “climate gentrification” in Miami and Detroit  or the brewing conflict of interest between financial institutions and the ever-expanding climate services technology industry in the journal Science .

In episode six of our podcast Talking Practice, host Grace La interviews Gary Hilderbrand, founding principal and partner at Reed Hilderbrand, and Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture. The pair discuss the trajectory of landscape urbanism, highlighting the ways in which new modes of representation have impacted the scope and capacity of landscape architecture to imagine larger systems, and to engage with climate change.

Curriculum

A threatened coastline presents particular challenges to the communities–and ecosystems–of coastal regions. Studios The Monochrome No-image, led by Rosetta Elkin, and Adrift and Indeterminate: Designing for Perpetual Migration on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, led by Gary Hilderbrand, examine regional interventions that might mitigate the effects of a rapidly deteriorating shoreline on the Barrier Islands of the eastern seaboard and Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

This fall, Urban Planning and Design’s Abby Spinak is leading a course on the topic of Climate Justice. Students will “ultimately ask what new kinds of practices, knowledges, and collaborations are necessary to build more just and responsible relationships between people and the nonhuman world, and with each other.”

Public Programs

On October 28, landscape architect Teresa Galí-Izard will give a lunchtime lecture about decentralizing the role of humans within the landscape. How can acknowledging the agency of plants and other non-human actors influence climate outcomes across the globe? Learn more at 12 pm in room 112 of Gund Hall.

On November 21, Michelle Delk of architecture firm Snøhetta will speak to the GSD about creating places that enhance the positive relationships between people and their environment. What are the direct outcomes of a stronger mediation between the built and natural world? Hear more at 6:30 pm in Piper Auditorium.

Alumni Activities

How does an individual’s creative capacity impact a changing climate? On September 28, Susan Israel (AB ’81, MArch ’86), President and Founder of Climate Creatives, will lead a workshop at the Arnold Arboretum around the topic of a creative climate commitment. Free for Harvard University students. Learn more in the Harvard Gazette story “Using art to inspire action .”

Installed on Harvard’s Science Center Plaza last fall, the public-art sculpture “Warming Warning” aimed to inspire dialogue about climate change and viewer engagement with a shape-shifting, participatory exhibition. The piece was conceived by Harvard Forest Fellow David Buckley Borden (MLA ’11) with Harvard Forest Senior Ecologist Aaron Ellison.

Student Projects

Prize-winning thesis “Lines in The Sand:
 Rethinking Private Property On Barrier Islands” by Maggie Tsang (MDes ’19) and Isaac Stein (MLA/MDes ’20) examined the role of private property in transforming the landscape of the barrier islands, using North Carolina’s Outer Banks region as their case study. Their research proposes an “alternative land trust” as a way of returning coastal territories to their natural function.

In the following work-in-progress video, Melissa Green (MLA ’19) describes her final project for the spring 2019 option studio “The Monochrome No-image” led by Rosetta S. Elkin.

Looking for more? Browse our climate change topic.

MUP candidate Laier-Rayshon Smith awarded APA Foundation Scholarship

Laier-Rayshon Smith, a degree candidate in Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Master in Urban Planning program, has been named one of five honorees of the American Planning Association’s (APA) Foundation scholarships program. According to the APA, the APA Foundation has awarded $90,000 in scholarships since 2015 to “deserving planning students who will be leaders and advocates in their communities.”

2019 marks the first year in which the APA Foundation has offered Foundation scholarships, in addition to the APA’s long-standing Charles Abrams Scholarship and Judith McManus Price Scholarship. APA Foundation scholarship recipients were selected by the APA Foundation’s seven-member grant-making committee.

Smith’s vision for equitable communities includes working at the intersections of social interaction, policy, design, and the decision-making processes that formulate the built environment. Living in Pittsburgh and working at non-profit organizations in the city helped to shape this vision.

Learn more about APA Foundation’s scholarships and Smith’s co-winners via the APA’s announcement .

On view through October 20, A Hole in the Wall exhibition presents an intimate reading of space

We usually don’t think much about what a thing is, because its self-evident qualities make it understandable: A chair, a desk, a brick all seem complete and coherent enough. But as soon as we look into things deeply and philosophically, as the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty has done, they become far less coherent. Objects “behave as though they had an internal principle of unity,” he says, but “they are only mild forces that develop their implications on condition that favorable circumstances be assembled.”

A chair presents itself as a chair from the right distance and angle, but get too close and it becomes other things—legs and joints, or wood. A wall is more ambiguous than a chair; it is sometimes discrete and freestanding, sometimes continuous with other walls, floors, and ceilings. It is always made of many parts: bricks and mortar, or studs, insulation, and sheathing. The space between walls is more ambiguous still, being only vaguely definable and with variable—sometimes inexplicable—qualities and intensities.

Art often finds value in the gaps. When the writer Italo Calvino advocated for precise language and description in literature, he gravitated toward “the beauty of the vague and indefinite,” and “all those objects… that by means of various materials and minimal circumstances come to our sight, hearing, etc., in a way that is uncertain, indistinct, imperfect, incomplete, or out of the ordinary.” To write poetically about such things requires, Calvino claims, “highly exact and meticulous attention to the composition of each image, to the minute definition of details. … The poet of vagueness can only be the poet of exactitude.”

This fall, visitors to Harvard’s Frances Loeb Library will have the opportunity to experience a concrete manifestation of architectural vagueness in an exhibition designed by Graduate School of Design assistant professor Michelle Chang. A Hole in the Wall presents holes, gaps, cavities, space—all decidedly vague concepts—within the context of five freestanding walls, which are themselves conceived as “broad, vague masses.”

In the library, this space of imagination will start with holes—not apertures like windows and doors—but holes considered, Chang notes, as “a conceptual principle.” The origin of Chang’s thinking lies in an art restoration technique called in-painting. Conservators use it to repair damaged artworks by replacing gaps with something simultaneously vague and exacting. The replacement might include an approximation of the missing original highlighted with clearly identifiable paint strokes, or a precisely brushed color field that matches the surrounding context. It never involves filling the gap with an indistinguishable facsimile of the original.

Chang points out that this makes in-painting fundamentally different from content-aware fill, another process that influences her thinking about holes. Content-aware fill is used to repair raster images by drawing colors and patterns from surrounding areas to conceal voids with new information. Unlike this digital process, the goal of in-painting, historian of science D. Graham Burnett explains, is to “reconstitute the aesthetic unity of the work… while scrupulously honoring the work’s material reality.” In other words, filling the holes with in-painting preserves the ineffable qualities that make the work art while also accounting for the object’s history.

A curious aspect of in-painting is that it makes gaps and holes elements of primary concern. Similarly, in A Hole in the Wall, voids become central to the exhibition. Careful detailing of the walls accentuates places where openings shape the composition: score lines that facilitate warping of flat drywall panels, raw cut edges where each wall stands free of the ceiling, a reveal between the wall and the floor. At a larger scale, the habitable spaces between and inside the walls are filled with new possibilities—intimate reading spaces or unscripted spaces of imagination. A Hole in the Wall presents a newly configured library in which walls become vague and visitors linger in the gaps.

The Grand Tour: GSD’s Wheelwright Prize reminds architects of the power of global research

“Two years ago, when I received the call about the Wheelwright Prize, Mohsen Mostafavi mentioned that it was going to be life-changing,” Anna Puigjaner told an audience at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in October 2018. “And he could not have been more right. These last two years have been probably the most intense time of my life.”

In April 2016, Puigjaner was named winner of that year’s Wheelwright Prize , an annual GSD fellowship offering one exceptional, early-career architect a $100,000 award to fuel two years of travel-based research (or research-focused travel). Puigjaner had risen to the top of the field of over 250 applicants with her research proposal, Kitchenless City: Architectural Systems for Social Welfare. After winning the prize, Puigjaner undertook an itinerary beginning in Senegal before she worked her way through Vietnam and Thailand, followed by China and Japan, then Scandinavia, and finally a leg in Latin America.

In Peru, Puigjaner visited Comedores Populares, a service that feeds half a million people per day; in China, she toured You+, which houses more than 10,000 people in micro-sized, kitchenless units. These experiences—along with many other valuable site visits—allowed Puigjaner to better understand kitchen and communal-cooking typologies and, ultimately, forward her hypothesis that people might not really need kitchens in their homes after all.

In undertaking her Wheelwright Prize fellowship, Puigjaner joined a distinguished coterie of architects—among them Paul Rudolph, Eliot Noyes, and I. M. Pei—who had been selected as fellows over the years. It was a belief in the value of intensive, hands-on travel and the discovery of new forms of design that inspired the Wheelwright Prize’s founding in 1935 as the Arthur C. Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship. The core idea was to provide a beaux arts, “grand tour”-type experience to exceptional GSD graduates at a time when international travel was rare, and to stimulate cross-cultural engagement in both practice and pedagogy.

In 2013, then-GSD dean Mohsen Mostafavi reshaped the Wheelwright Prize as a competition open to early-career architects from around the world, whether GSD graduates or not. “It is clear that today’s fluid movement of people and ideas necessitates new approaches towards the understanding of architecture and urbanization,” Mostafavi remarked in 2013. “I am excited that in the coming years the Wheelwright Prize fellowship will be able to have a significant impact on the intellectual projects of young architects and, in turn, on the future of architecture and the built environment.”

Mostafavi revamped the prize in collaboration with the GSD’s K. Michael Hays and Jorge Silvetti (Hays remains on the prize’s founding committee; Silvetti served on the 2013 jury), as well as then-GSD communications director Benjamin Prosky and consultant Cathy Lang Ho. The committee discussed what a grand tour for architects of the 21st century would entail, and how themes and issues could be tied to geography and cultures. Their goal was to enable deep research that could enhance an architect’s personal formation as well as architectural knowledge at large. They concluded that this kind of experience would be most beneficial for early-career architects with open-ended curiosity and great future potential.

Since this reinvention, the Wheelwright Prize fellowship has spread in reach and engagement, enabling its subsequent six winners the opportunity to expand their architectural agendas and enrich their perspectives. Even with the comparative ease of today’s digitally enabled research and image-gathering, the opportunity to personally visit a diverse range of sites around the world, and to do so in a focused, prolonged format, remains invaluable.

“The architectural project works in many ways as a series of hypotheses about life and reality, but this reality that we project can be verified only through experience,” observes Chilean architect Samuel Bravo, winner of the 2017 Wheelwright Prize. (Bravo returned to the GSD on September 12 to present his Wheelwright travel and findings.) “So I think it is important to explore architecture as ethnography in a sense of exploring the experience of people. The experience of the built environment can only be revealed by ‘being there.’”

Bravo’s research proposal, Projectless, examines the relationship of the architectural practice with non-project-driven traditional and informal environments. He focused on a dozen cases in seven different countries to unearth, as he puts it, “a portion of the human environment that has been shaped in the absence of project.” Informality, otherwise understood as a people’s shared ability to create a city or collective living arrangement, is harnessed by “community architects” as a tool for creating and improving the built environment, Bravo notes.

The Wheelwright Prize’s investment in those ideas and practices percolating at architecture’s margins may bring immense benefit for the field at large. “Only a prize that prioritizes travel and open-ended discovery could allow an architect to do what Samuel Bravo wants and needs to do—to experience situations likely to range from primitive to chaotic, to live with and learn from diverse communities, to document common building knowledge, with the goal of transforming this knowledge into practicing concepts,” says Gia Wolff, who served on the jury of the 2017 Wheelwright Prize cycle. She also won the prize herself in 2013, its inaugural cycle after Mostafavi’s reinvention.

Over his two years of research, Bravo was able to observe working methods and toolsets across continents, from the hills of Lima to the city of Jhennaidah in Bangladesh. His travels allowed him to engage with the indigenous Matsés tribe, living in the Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon. He learned about their construction of communal houses that, as Bravo observes, uniquely blend dwelling and being, revealing new clarity on the emergence of human environments in relation to language. He observed a series of other informal settlement areas, from the flooded slum of Belén Bajo in Iquitos (the capital city of Peru’s Maynas Province) to Korail in Dhaka, Bangladesh; he notes that Korail’s larger, more formal urban setup provokes questions about the nature and fundamental definition of informality.

“Through this process I met practitioners that, rather silently, have created a long-term engagement with communities,” Bravo says. “From city planners to community architects, these people are, in a way, expanding boundaries for our methods and strategies as architects.” He continues, “I feel the urgency of research on our rapidly changing realities. Architectural representation is a powerful tool to evidence the ignored. And architecture as a way of thinking about the human environment is also urgently needed.” As design fields are increasingly called upon in response to broad, complex, global problems, the sort of culturally engaged, boundary-questioning research that the Wheelwright fosters holds potential for architecture’s present and future agency.

Professors Toshiko Mori and Sharon Johnston receive 2019 Women in Architecture Awards

Two professors in the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Department of Architecture are among five winners of Architectural Record’s 2019 Women in Architecture Awards . Toshiko Mori, Robert P. Hubbard professor in the practice of architecture, received the Design Leader award, while Sharon Johnston, professor in practice of architecture, was named a New Generation Leader. Now in its sixth year, the annual awards recognize and promote women’s leadership in the field.

“The range of smart, passionate talent in these different fields related to architecture and design is inspiring and it’s also informative,” John King, a member of the award’s independent jury and the architecture critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, told the New York Times . “There is such talent that is working on very important and interesting design and social challenges.”

A former Chair of the Department of Architecture, Mori was the first woman to earn tenure at the GSD, which she received in 1995. She is also principal of Toshiko Mori Architect, the New York City-based firm she founded in 1981. “Her rich exploration of ideas, materials and details has been evident in architecture at every scale,” said Architectural Record in their announcement. Mori is recipient of numerous awards, including the 2019 AIA Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education, considered the highest honor given to educators in architecture.

A graduate of the GSD, Johnston joined the faculty as a Professor in Practice of Architecture in 2018. She is founder and principal of Johnston Marklee, which she established in 1998 with Mark Lee, chair of the Department of Architecture and professor in practice of architecture. “Since cofounding [Johnston Marklee], Sharon Johnston, FAIA, has consistently brought an original, expressive sensibility to such projects as the Menil Drawing Center in Houston and the just-opening UCLA Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios in Culver City, California,” said Architectural Record. Together with Lee, Johnston served as Artistic Director for the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial.

Mori and Johnston will be celebrated, along with the other honorees, at an event in New York City on October 30 .