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 .

The Humanitarian Activist’s Handbook: Understanding the role of architects and planners in humanitarian crises

According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, at the end of 2018, there were 70.8 million people living around the world who had been forcibly displaced. As this number reaches a record high each year, humanitarian organizations work to meet new demands and concerns. And yet, according to Marianne Potvin (PhD ’19, MDes ’13), they have become mired in an unwavering focus on camps and shelters and have turned away from a tradition of innovation.

Potvin’s research at the Graduate School of Design focused on what she calls “humanitarian urbanism.” The concept’s definition is multifaceted. It refers to the international actors and organizations that work with refugees and disaster victims—with a specific emphasis on their relationship with spatial disciplines. And it also includes a broad consideration of “urbanism” that encompasses both the practice of urban planning and theories regarding human settlements.

With firsthand experience leading field teams for the International Committee of the Red Cross and other humanitarian NGOs, Potvin knew that she would need to base her research primarily on field manuals and handbooks, instead of on traditional architectural materials. “For many reasons, there just aren’t enough common instruments of architecture [from the field], such as plans or drawings,” she says. “During humanitarian crises, you might not keep archives, the instruments you have could get destroyed, or they may never make it back to headquarters where the centralized archive would be.” But she discovered that the unconventional sources are often invaluable and can contain “a lot more data than a single drawing.”

In the following conversation, she discusses the problem with camps, the changing role of technology in humanitarianism, and the vital—but undervalued—role of architects and planners in humanitarian organizations.

Designing a camp is attractive to an architect because it’s abstract, gridded, and has sensual characteristics that architects like. It is in part because of this that we have paid too much attention to, and been limited by, this frame of reference.

Marianne Potvin on the fascination among architects with designing the “perfect camp”

How does the academic vision of camps and shelters bump up against the reality on the ground?

When I was working as a shelter-and-settlement program manager in suburban Kabul, whatever I could get my hands on regarding camps was completely inadequate to my work. And yet, in the literature and especially in design schools, a lot of interest is in designing the “perfect camp.” Architects are obsessed with camps because they are considered the origin of everything—the origin of the city, for example. And yet they are always used as an example of the “non-city” in conversations about what is and is not a city. I think that categorization doesn’t get us very far because it doesn’t describe the conditions of humanitarian spaces, most of which are in between camps and cities.

There’s a camp fetish. Designing a camp is attractive to an architect because it’s abstract, gridded, and has sensual characteristics that architects like. It is in part because of this that we have paid too much attention to, and been limited by, this frame of reference. I’m not saying that work on the urbanization of camps isn’t useful, but it’s limiting.

In the older field manuals from the 1970s and early ’80s, there was often a sense that you needed to be conscious of the surroundings and respectful of local customs, that you should use local materials and be aware of the ways in which refugees live in these spaces. This was not very integrated into practice though.

The split between a camp and the local population echoes the ways in which walls both keep people out and imprison those within them. In a practical sense, not separating these two populations—geographically or metaphorically—could generate solutions that benefit everyone in a region.

A prime instance of this occurred in 2015 at the height of the influx of Syrian refugees into Lebanon. There was a no-encampment policy, so the refugees (who became one-fourth of the population) were dispersed everywhere. A water engineer working at a humanitarian organization told me that they were working on large projects, such as big water-distribution stations. Even though, conventionally speaking, humanitarian money isn’t supposed to go into hard, large-scale infrastructure, they were putting all their resources into this because they would provide water for the refugees as well as improve the conditions of the larger population.

Technicians are considered value-free problem solvers, and they are often not seen as strategic in shaping a humanitarian organization. My archival and fieldwork research showed that the international humanitarian law specialist or the refugee lawyer has a hierarchical position above the architect or planner. In fact, often there aren’t even distinctions made between the architect and the planner, or even the agronomist and the water engineer.

I argue that architects and planners are the ones who need to take the legal framework and figure out how to implement it—how a camp is planned, where you put it, how you decide whether to have a camp or if you go for, say, rent subsidies. That has a huge impact. There should be more cross-dialogue between the technical and legal units than there currently is.

There was even a moment in history when the United Nations Refugee Agency decided to call what they were doing “planning.” This was so important because it was a moment when they acknowledged that they were not just doing “refugee protection,” they were influencing urbanization issues. They have since completely forgotten about this.

Do you see technology, such as crisis mapping (which enables the collection of real-time data during disasters), playing a helpful role in humanitarian urbanism?

For a very long time, the dominant approach was for “appropriate technology,” which kept everything low-tech because of the idea that you couldn’t bring complex technologies into the “Third World.” Then in the last five to ten years, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, with a belief that AI will save us all and the assumption that new technologies will make the lives of humanitarians easier. I’m not advocating for a return to appropriate technology, but we should remember what we once thought about technology so that we can balance our current excitement. We just need to be cautious.

That being said, even though I criticize crisis mapping, it is useful. Crisis networks comprised of volunteers are forming to help people map their areas. A tool like this is democratizing the humanitarian field because all of a sudden you have a software engineer in Silicon Valley who may not go to Kabul for nine months but, with his technical expertise, can perfect a system of geographical features recognition.

These communities are going to challenge the humanitarian field in good ways. They’re raising the question about who the new humanitarians are.

Proudly announcing this year’s faculty appointments and promotions

The Harvard Graduate School of Design is happy to announce those faculty who have been appointed or promoted to new positions at the School for the 2019-2020 academic year.

Jennifer Bonner promoted to Associate Professor of Architecture

Jennifer Bonner founded MALL, a creative practice for art and architecture, in 2009. MALL is interested in an intellectual project and is committed to projects that re-appropriate history, hack typologies, reference cultural events, and invent representation. By engaging “ordinary architecture” such as gable roofs and everyday materials, MALL playfully reimagines architecture in the field.

Sean Canty appointed Assistant Professor of Architecture

Sean Canty, the principal of Studio SC, focuses his research on architectural type and geometry. Referencing the conceptual approach of the picturesque, he explores the interrelationships between the interior, the building envelope and public space. His recent projects investigate abstract figures and transformed volumes that confound predictable readings of space. Sean is also one of the founding principals of Office III, an experimental architectural collective based in New York , San Francisco, and Cambridge.

Michelle Chang appointed Assistant Professor of Architecture

Michelle Chang directs JaJa Co and teaches architectural design. Her design work experiments with the overlaps between and among film, installation, music, teaching, and building. In her research, Chang studies the techniques and histories of architectural representation. Specifically, she investigates how optics, digital media, and modes of cultural production influence translations between design and building.

Elizabeth Christoforetti appointed Assistant Professor in Practice of Architecture

Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti is founding principal at Supernormal, an architecture, urban design, and research practice focused on the design of form and processes that balance contextual and cultural relevance with the contemporary imperative to scale beyond a single instance, and to reach more people and urban places. Her practice explores the deep cultural, typological, and process-based implications of scalable systems in late capitalism and was founded as a home for research in practice that bridges the analytic, critical design, and theoretical capacities required to create meaningful design outcomes in the 21st-century world.

Gareth Doherty promoted to Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture

Gareth Doherty’s research and teaching focus on the intersections between landscape architecture and anthropology. Doherty’s recent research projects have centered on landscape-related practices at various sites across the postcolonial and Islamic worlds, specifically in the Arabian peninsula, West Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean.

Craig Douglas appointed Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture

Craig Douglas is a landscape architect and scholar whose work focuses on innovative techniques and methodologies that explore the agency of representation in landscape architectural design. The approach supports informed and innovative responses to the challenges found at the nexus of the social, ecological and built environment that embrace the spatial, temporal and material complexity of the landscape.

Edward Eigen appointed Senior Lecturer in the History of Landscape and Architecture

A historian of the long nineteenth century, in the European and Anglo-American contexts, Ed Eigen‘s research and teaching focus on relationships in and between humanistic and scholarly traditions and the natural sciences and allied practices of knowledge production.

His writings have ranged from questions of botanical and zoological systematics, the creation and loss of great and not so great museums and libraries, the history of the weather, and acts of plagiarism in the founding documents of architecture theory. All of these studies engage in questions of historical narrative and the species of evidence upon which it depends and/or invents along the way.

Ann Forsyth named Ruth and Frank Stanton Professor of Urban Planning

Trained in planning and architecture, Ann Forsyth works mainly on the social aspects of physical planning and urban development. The big issue behind her research and practice is how to make more sustainable and healthy cities. Forsyth’s current research focuses on developing healthier places in a suburbanizing world, with overlapping emphases on aging and planned communities.

Jenny French appointed Assistant Professor in Practice of Architecture

Jenny French is founding partner of French 2D, an architecture studio based in Boston. The studio’s work balances formal exploration and participatory design in residential, commercial, and experimental projects. French 2D’s work on housing and mixed-use projects combines ideas of domesticity with more radical organizations and typologies.

French 2D also works on civic installations, interactive exhibitions, and objects that bring people together around familiar rituals with unfamiliar rules of engagement. These projects include dinner party happenings, curious tea sets, building-scale drawings, and super-graphic dresses.

Andrew Holder promoted to Associate Professor of Architecture

Andrew Holder is an educator, occasional author, and co-principal of the The LADG. His research interests include the construction of architecture as an inanimate subject as well as novel methods of engaging historical precedent and the production of complex form in a post-digital discipline.

Jungyoon Kim appointed Assistant Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture

Jungyoon Kim is principal at PARKKIM, which she founded in Rotterdam alongside Yoon-Jin Park upon their winning of Chichi Earthquake Memorial International Competition in Taiwan (2004). The firm relocated to Seoul in 2006.

Kim has an interest in exploring what she defines as “the relationship of ‘nature vs. artefacts,’” toward a new notion of “wilderness” as a counterpart to urbanism, which she is doing through a series of option studios at the GSD.

David Moreno Mateos appointed Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture

David Moreno Mateos is a restoration ecologist at the Basque Center for Climate change – BC3 (Basque Country, Spain) appointed by the Ikerbasque Foundation. He studies ecosystem recovery after anthropogenic disturbances with especial emphasis on wetlands and forests. He aims to understand patterns of recovery of complex ecosystem attributes (e.g. stability) emerging from organism interactions. In his research, he uses empirical field-collected data and meta-analyses to understand and accelerate the processes of ecosystem recovery in the context of restoration.

Jacob Reidel appointed Assistant Professor in Practice of Architecture

Jacob Reidel is an architect, editor, and writer whose work examines the history of architectural practice and seeks to redesign the way architecture is practiced today.

Jacob is currently a Senior Director at WeWork, a startup disrupting conventional architectural practice and the commercial real estate industry in more than 100 cities globally. At WeWork he is responsible for Design, Build, and Operate services tailored to the company’s growing number of Enterprise clients. Jacob is a licensed architect in New York and an alum of Ennead Architects and REX

Belinda Tato appointed Associate Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture

Alongside Jose Luis Vallejo, Belinda Tato is a founding member of ecosistema urbano, a Madrid based group of architects and urban designers operating within the fields of urbanism, architecture, engineering, and sociology. Vallejo and Tato define their approach as urban social design, by which they understand the design of environments, spaces and dynamics in order to improve the self-organization of citizens, social interaction within communities and their relationship with the environment. Ecosistema urbano has used this philosophy to design and implement projects in Norway, Denmark, Spain, Italy, France, and China.

Carole Voulgaris appointed Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Design

Carole Voulgaris‘s research focuses on explaining what influences individuals’ and households’ decisions on how to travel through cities, and how transportation planning institutions use information about those decisions to inform plans, policies, and infrastructure designs. She is particularly interested in the development and use of quantitative metrics to describe complex characteristics of the built environment, particularly those believed to influence travel behavior.

Andrew Witt appointed Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture

Andrew Witt is co-founder, with Tobias Nolte, of Certain Measures, a Boston- and Berlin-based design futures and technology studio that combines imagination and evidence for systemic and scalable approaches to spatial problems. The practice develops, licenses, and joint ventures around design futures, spatial analysis, machine vision, and geometric optimization. Their clients include Audi, BMW, Futurium (the German federal museum of the future), and the Dubai Futures Foundation.

The Death of the Genius: An alternative history of computation lays bare the problem of invisible labor in architecture

The development of the computer occasioned a radical paradigm shift in numerous fields. According to Matthew Allen (PhD ’19, MArch ’10), however, that was not the case for architecture. In his PhD dissertation, “Prehistory of the Digital: Architecture becomes Programming, 1935–1990,” Allen argues against the dominant narrative that the relationship between computers and architects began in earnest in the 1990s. He asserts instead that computational programming’s essence can be traced to the Bauhaus, and to modernism more broadly. And he claims that its effects—both structural and phenomenological—entered the field at a slow creep. It was subtle enough that some architects today believe they work the same way their predecessors did before the advent of technology, just with different tools.

Allen is a curious pluralist whose excavation of past traditions and, by extension, architectural processes, opens up the possibility of rethinking architecture at its most fundamental level. “We should not be defensive about what an architect is,” he says. “However you want to define ‘architecture,’ whether that’s the creation of environmental effects or the production of the spaces in which we all live, we should look broadly without predetermining it in an unhelpful way.”

In the following conversation about the occluded subculture of computational programming, Allen brings together Paul Klee, Le Corbusier, and the early structuralist dream of the computer in unexpected ways. He also provides a new lens through which to analyze the longstanding problem of invisible labor in the field of architecture.

Invisible labor and not valorizing collective labor enough are big problems in architecture right now. The pervasive, compelling myth still exists that someone called an architect designs a building; he might hire some people to draw it out for him or write up the details, but the idea belongs to this “genius” figure.

Matthew Allenon the dearth of “other figures” in architecture who students can look to as role models.

How does your research problematize the definition of “architecture”?

It’s hard to strike a balance between not taking the accepted definition for granted and giving your new definition immediately. Certainly, the architecture talked about by the computer-using architects was not what would normally be thought of as “architecture.” Design still occurred, but the methods were totally different from standard methods inherited from the Renaissance. The crux of the issue was these architects’ refusal to say that architecture is about how a building looks and that it is instead an activity and also the hidden structure with which designers work—whether that’s a linguistic structure that conveys meaning or a spatial structure that organizes how people use a building.

In what ways does this rethinking of architecture connect to the concept of programming?

“Program” is a 19th-century term for architecture, meaning the activities that happen inside a building. For example, a library has a certain program of having books, reading spaces, etc. While that use of the word is still around, in the mid-20th century the discipline of computer programming developed. But just a little before that, architects became interested in a way of creating architecture connected to this idea of the building’s program that was different from designing by way of drawing a facade and giving form to a building. With this new method, a programmer—who was more of a technician-type figure working in the firm’s back office—would be in charge of organization rather than a “genius” architect. This grew out of a modernist polemic of moving architecture away from fancy-looking buildings into a more technocratic profession of creating functional, cheaper spaces for all of humanity.

When does this movement converge with the advent of computer programming?

The change in modernism that you can easily see in abstract art also illustrates the changes occurring in architecture. A good figure to look at is Paul Klee, one of the Bauhaus’s two main artists. In the 1920s, Klee was creating what we would now call generative art, i.e. rather than painting in an expressionistic way, he would set up quasi-rules for himself such as making lines on paper out of which a figure emerged. This was very much the kind of thing you could dispassionately program with a computer. But what Klee and others at the Bauhaus were teaching was a holdover of expressionism that had strong spiritual components; they were by no means trying to fully rationalize this material.

Between the 1920s and the post-war period, many avant-garde figures emigrated from Europe to England. After two world wars, people no longer believed in the utopian ideals associated with modernism, but some still saw potential in modernism’s artistic practices of one kind or another. One group saw themselves as inheritors of the techniques used by Klee and took out what they considered their delusional politics, and wrote algorithms to produce the same kind of paintings. They had politics of their own, though—technocratic politics. They wanted a rational, technocratic designer instead of a delusional “genius” figure. It was this kind of artistic-formalist milieu from which the first computer architecture emerged.

This challenges the dominant narrative that architects “discovered” computers in the 1990s.

The digital architecture that is easily traced back to the 1990s is well within the old-fashioned “genius” mentality of architecture, and it’s convenient for certain architects who want to claim the computer as their own. But this other tradition happening in the immediate post-war period was spread very widely among architects, though generally not the principals of firms. Rather, it spread to architectural technicians—people using computers in the back offices of big corporate firms, or computer consultants who are architects—not people designing fancy buildings. It’s completely continuous from early 20th-century modernism to today, but the thread gets lost in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.

While some may think they’re designing in a 19th-century manner, the way architecture is being created is part of this long series of computational programming changes. It’s just hard to be aware of that.

The people in those back offices are not often recognized, and certainly not in conversations about architecture by those outside the field.

Invisible labor and not valorizing collective labor enough are big problems in architecture right now. The pervasive, compelling myth still exists that someone called an architect designs a building; he might hire some people to draw it out for him or write up the details, but the idea belongs to this “genius” figure. Yet anyone who has worked in architecture knows a lot happens below that top figure, and maybe most of the design decisions and meat of any project come from below. It’s the same in most professions. But even knowing this, students aren’t given enough awareness of other figures who they can see as role models or alternative methods they can see as valuable. A big part of my work involves building up a whole cast of characters, including back-office computer technicians, and a whole repertoire of techniques that architects can see as their own so that they don’t feel inferior.

There are levels to invisible labor, too. The computer-using architect, for example, still has computer programmers below them who become invisible. One reason this happens is because it’s convenient to package all this invisible labor so that it can be marketed and sold. If you’re a firm like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), you can’t show all the messiness of computation; you have to create an image of computation and sell that to clients.

Have you found anything that makes that labor visible?

There are loopholes and short circuits that subvert this structure, when something from a particular lower level asserts itself at a higher one. Look at the iconic Hajj Terminal in Saudi Arabia by SOM (1981). It looks exactly like the screenshot of a sort of output made by form-generating software that an engineer designed in the 1970s. For a historian or theorist, it’s a teachable moment when a charismatic, iconic building expresses something buried deep within the labor hierarchy. And it wasn’t even the sub-consulting engineer himself who revealed this hierarchy but the piece of software he wrote.

This pushes against the notion that the computer is just a tool.

It’s a comforting myth that the computer showed up and architects continued to work the same way they always worked; in fact, a lot of empirical evidence indicates that when computers show up, things change.

The question is, How do you talk about causation? Maybe the most helpful way is discussing what the computer is resonating with and enabling around it. When the computer first arrived on architects’ desks in the mid-20th century, the idea of the computer was much more specific than just a generic tool or drafting table. It was the structuralist device that could shuffle around symbols and create generative art in a tradition of abstraction. It was also very good at creating concrete poetry.

For me, the prototype of the computer for architects was László Moholy-Nagy’s Light-Space Modulator, which is a device that generates environmental effects. Some of the earliest computer-using architects wondered how this kind of effect generation could be systematized and organized. Marshall McLuhan, for example, dreamed of creating a room at the University of Toronto in which any environment from around the world could be recreated with screens, sounds, and smells with a computer.

That was the computer that these architects were dreaming about. It was a very particular device to be used to very particular ends. And it was no surprise that this resonated strongly with postmodernism, which was concerned with the codes buildings embodied and the idea that you could come up with the linguistic code of a building and parametrically recreate it in different forms.

Le Corbusier, you argue, in many ways exemplified this slow creep of architecture-becoming-programming. How so?

What connects the two is the particular, structuralist idea in Western philosophy since the 19th century that cultures are made up of codes—that there’s a linguistic underpinning to them. So to understand another culture you would work as an anthropologist to decode the meanings of different things in that culture. This is what Le Corbusier took up. Being a visually oriented person, he saw the vernacular objects in Eastern Europe as speaking the culture. In other words, the culture flows through the person who made it into the object and back out to the people who come into contact with it. The idea was compelling to him because he believed Europe was losing its culture to industrialization, that all these meaningful objects were being replaced by generic ones. Part of his project was to reimbue meaning into the object or make it more artistic. At the end of the day, this cast the architect as someone attuned to these codes. At a place like the Bauhaus, it became a collective computation project.

Just like the functionalist architect, the computer programmer works with a set of codes and creates appropriate outputs without ever creating something new. It’s more about channeling forces through codes into a set of objects that have their own effects. The radical anti-authorial/anti-genius architect stance comes in here, too.

I see Le Corbusier’s purist painting, in which there is a set of industrially created objects which sort of communicate with each other and with the viewer, as exactly what computer scientist Alan Kay argued regarding object-oriented programming and computation works. It’s all about setting up a bunch of objects in communication with each other. That’s all the programmer does, that’s all the architect does, and it’s all the artist does. There’s no creation. It’s juxtaposition. There are no longer authors or “geniuses,” there are only technicians.

Exhibition Preview: Shinohara Kazuo: ModernNext on view through October 11 in the Druker Design Gallery

Presenting the Fall 2019 public program

Harvard Graduate School of Design is pleased to reveal its Fall 2019 public program of lectures, conferences, and symposia, all free and open to the public.

On  September 3, the GSD’ s fall program opens with “Reflecting on Shinohara,” a conversation between Kazuyo Sejima and Seng Kuan that also introduces the exhibition Shinohara Kazuo: ModernNext (on view through October 11). Then, 2017 Wheelwright Prize winner and Chilean architect Samuel Bravo returns to the GSD on September 10, presenting his two years of global travel and research on informal settlements; and Dean Sarah Whiting engages in a fireside chat-style conversation with K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory and Co-Director of the Master in Design Studies program, on September 17.

Throughout, the GSD’s fall program draws from an array of design voices and perspectives. Frida Escobedo presents the annual Open House Lecture on October 31, while Michelle Delk offers the annual Daniel Urban Kiley Lecture on November 21. On October 22, the GSD welcomes curators Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen, and through its Rouse Visiting Artist Program, the School presents percussionist Susie Ibarra on November 19.

A series of conferences and symposia round out the fall program with provocations on cultural and political issues facing design and society. The GSD’s biennial Black in Design Conference returns this October 4 through 6, taking up the theme of “Black Futurism.” Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies presents the colloquium “Aging in [a] Place: Planning, Design, and Spatial Justice in Aging Societies” on October 18. The GSD’s landscape architecture department is also hosting the conference “Sacred Groves and Secret Parks: Orisha Landscapes in Brazil and West Africa” on October 3 and 4.

The full public program appears below and can be viewed on the GSD’ s events calendar. Past events can be viewed on the GSD’s YouTube channel .

Harvard GSD Fall 2019 public program

Reflecting on Shinohara: Kazuyo Sejima and Seng Kuan in conversation
September 3
Sejima, architect and co-founder of SANAA, joins architectural historian Kuan for a conversation about Sejima’s early career and Shinohara’s impact on the Japanese architectural community.

Wheelwright Prize Lecture: Samuel Bravo, “Projectless: On the Emergence of a Dwell”
September 10
Bravo was the 2017 Wheelwright Prize recipient.

Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture: Dave Hickey
September 12
Hickey is an art critic and analyst of Western culture who offers entirely original perspectives on contemporary art.

Philip Ursprung, “Bauhaus Bashing: Looking Back and Looking Ahead”
September 13
Ursprung is Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at ETH Zürich, previously ETH Zürich’s Dean of the Department of Architecture.

Sarah Whiting and K. Michael Hays: A Conversation
September 17
Whiting was recently named Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at the GSD. Hays is the GSD’s Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory.

Hicham Khalidi
September 19
Khalidi is the director of the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht.

“Sacred Groves and Secret Parks: Orisha Landscapes in Brazil and West Africa” 
October 3 & 4
This conference brings together insights on the materiality and spatiality of Afro-religious diasporic practices.

Black in Design 2019: “Black Futurism: Creating a More Equitable Future”
October 4, 5, & 6
The 2019 Black in Design conference explores pathways to liberation through a design lens. Please note that this event requires paid ticket registration. Tickets are available through the conference website. 

“Aging in [a] Place: Planning, Design, and Spatial Justice in Aging Societies”
October 18
The Aging in [a] Place symposium will apply a spatial justice lens to the challenges—financial, practical, political, and otherwise—facing our aging global population.

Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen
October 22
Fischli and Olsen are directors of exhibitions at the Institute of the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zürich.

Susan Fainstein with Sai Balakrishnan and Cuz Potter, “The Challenge of Applying Theory to Planning Practice”
October 22
Fainstein is a Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow at the GSD. Balakrishnan is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at the GSD. Potter is Associate Professor of International Development and Cooperation at Korea University’s Division of International Studies.

Teresa Galí-Izard, “Productive Resurgences: The Garden of the XXI Century”
October 28
Galí-Izard is a landscape architect interested in translating the hidden potential of places and exploring new languages that integrate living systems into design.

Yael Bartana
October 30
Bartana is an artist whose films, installations, and photographs explore the imagery of identity and the politics of memory. Bartana’s lecture marks the opening of the exhibition Love in a Mist (and the politics of fertility), on view in the Druker Design Gallery from October 28 – December 20, 209.

Open House Lecture: Frida Escobedo, “Split Subject”
October 31
Escobedo is principal and founder of her eponymous architecture and design studio based in Mexico City.

Mariabruna Fabrizi and Fosco Lucarelli (Microcities/Socks-studio), “Inner Space”
November 4
Fabrizi and Lucarelli are architects, educators, and curators, and are co-founders of the practice Microcities and the website Socks-studio.

Kiley Fellow Lecture: Paola Sturla
November 6
Sturla is a PhD candidate in urban planning, design, and policy at Politecnico di Milano, and the 2018-19 Daniel Urban Kiley teaching fellow at the GSD.

James Sloss Ackerman Memorial Lecture: Guido Beltramini
November 7
Beltramini is an Italian architectural historian, museum director, and curator.

Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture & Performance: Susie Ibarra, “Listening and Creating Spatially: How Do We Hear in Real Life?”
November 19
Ibarra is a Filipina-American composer, percussionist, and sound artist.

Daniel Urban Kiley Lecture: Michelle Delk
November 21
Delk is a Partner and Landscape Architect with Snøhetta.

POSTPONED: Reflecting on Shinohara: Rem Koolhaas and Sarah Whiting in conversation
Koolhaas, architect and co-founder of OMA, joins GSD Dean Sarah Whiting for a conversation about Shinohara and his impact on Koolhaas’ ideas and practice.