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.

Student work: Mining an emerging area of dementia studies, Alicia Valencia encourages memory-care facilities to embrace aesthetic play

Children may be celebrated for their non-rational thoughts, but society expects that adults will use reason. This belief is in part why dementia is often framed solely in terms of impairment, and why the dominant method of dementia care focuses on those reasoning faculties which are deteriorating or have already been lost.

According to Alicia Valencia (MDes ’19), however, an alternative approach is possible. Instead of concentrating so heavily on reasoning skills—by asking memory-impaired nursing home residents yes-or-no questions about the weather, or labeling everything in a way that insists on a set, singular identity for each item—why not focus on aesthetic engagement with the world? In her thesis, “Cultivating Aesthetic Play: A Case for Culture in Dementia Memory Care,” Valencia asserts that “the ability to perform aesthetic judgment still remains even as language skills and memory weaken.” She explains, “The capacity to decide whether something is lovely or not, to have certain feelings about the world, remains much longer in a person with dementia than knowing to put a book on a shelf.”

Valencia’s case study is personal: It’s based on her 81-year-old father, a resident at an in-patient memory-care facility in California. “The relationship I have with him might not fit the usual father/daughter label anymore, but it’s still an innate belief and knowledge that is beautiful to him in certain respects,” she describes. The way in which their relationship resists traditional classifications echoes her father’s connections with other elements of his environment, too. “The ways he and others at the facility make sense of where they are located and how they learn to call their new environment their own do not fall strictly into categories of reason, knowledge, short-term memory, or definitions of the world curated to a certain extent by the biomedical facility,” she says.

These observations resonate with an emerging area of dementia studies known as “critical dementia,” which reformulates the relationship between patient and practitioner by giving value to the patient’s potentially unorthodox behavior toward their surroundings. “It’s useful for a person who might be working well without the faculties of language, or when someone may or may not be emotional when they encounter something new,” Valencia explains. “It’s a way to broaden the scope of what can be understood as relatable to individuals with dementia.”

Critical dementia has its limits, though, she argues, as it still reinforces a framework of needing to render a patient’s activity intelligible to a practitioner. In other words, the practitioner’s way of making meaning in the world retains a level of superiority. Just as we foster positive interactions with children who have not yet internalized certain societal codes, Valencia proposes that we learn from individuals with dementia about different ways of functioning healthily in our respective environments.

To explore this hypothesis, Valencia designed an object for her father based on his biography, his observed behavior in the facility, and also the ways in which he and other residents use both fixed and transitory objects in their shared environment. She explains, “He likes to zoom around in his wheelchair and pick out details in objects like crown molding or metal fixtures. He also has a history of breaking down his hospital bed just to see the different parts.” All of this resonates with his background both as an electrical engineer and as a professional cyclist. Inspired by his specific interests, Valencia created an object that resembles a Duchamp readymade. Designed to reflect his passion for tinkering and cycling, it has hardwoods different from those around him so that they might stand out, an assortment of sensory materials, drawers filled with various items, and a bicycle wheel affixed to the tabletop.

But it was also designed with his neighbors in mind and was placed in the hallway outside his room. “There is an open-door policy at his facility, so anyone can be roaming in and out of rooms. Everything is fair game so that it doesn’t stir aggressive behavior to tell someone they can’t be somewhere or have something,” Valencia explains. “As a catalyst for engagement to be played with, observed, and analyzed, the object has pieces that can be taken away and moved elsewhere within the broader environment. That’s based on people’s behavior of taking something from someone else’s room, walking around with it, and then later questioning why they have it in their hands and where to put it. This table is an example of how to design a hub of different malleable materials that could be adopted by each patient within the nursing home environment.”

Valencia hopes that the ways in which her father and others engage with the table will generate a body of evidence that challenges not only standard preconceptions about individuals with dementia and occupational-therapy objects but also caregivers’ and practitioners’ understanding of human environments more broadly. “A lot of enrichment activities are performed just to occupy one’s time,” she says. “But I hope the ways in which residents interact with this object can reveal relationships that would instigate the creation of additional design objects—perhaps made by the residents themselves. Because there are so few personal aspects to these environments, I wonder how something very direct and built from them could change the engagement and experiences within the nursing home.”

At the Gardner Museum, Big Plans draws on landscape architecture’s progressive, reform-minded roots

By the time Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. founded the world’s first landscape architecture program at Harvard in 1900, he and other landscape architects, like his father, had devoted much of their careers to addressing some of the era’s greatest social challenges. For Frederick Law Olmsted, confronting the institution of slavery and the cotton economy was of profound importance. For Charles Eliot, advocating for progressive land trusts and conservancies was vital. Eliot shaped much of how the Boston region would develop in the coming century while conceptualizing a framework of conservation of natural resources that would be applied around the world.

As anti-immigrant and nativist anxieties germinated in turn-of-century America, the establishment of a landscape architecture program at Harvard, under the presidency of Eliot’s father, Charles William Eliot, presented a novel—and enduring—expression of design’s potential to ameliorate the growing pains of an evolving society.

Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers, and this ability is the secret of their power and their achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.

Frederick Douglass from a lecture Douglass presented in Boston’s Tremont Temple on December 3, 1861

“In its original formulation, the field of landscape architecture was seen to hold great promise to address societal and environmental conditions through design,” observes Charles Waldheim, the Graduate School of Design’s John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture and Director of the Office for Urbanization. “While neither Eliot would have used the term ‘social justice,’ they did see the development of landscape architecture, the building of reform parks, the conservation of natural resources, and the building of modern sciences to support these activities as directly addressing the lives of people.”

Waldheim offers perspective on these threads with the exhibition Big Plans: Picturing Social Reform , on view through September 15 at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Waldheim, the museum’s Ruettgers Curator of Landscape, collaborated with assistant curator Sara Zewde (MLA ’15) on the show, inviting viewers to see how landscape architects of the past, engaging with photographers and the media, advocated for social reform, and how the legacy of their work speaks to some of today’s urban and cultural challenges. “Social justice, equity, and reform are not new topics for landscape architecture—rather, they are at its origin,” Zewde notes. “This exhibit calls for a new look at the roots of the discipline.”

Waldheim and Zewde have curated a set of city plans, archival materials, historical maps, and photographs in order to demonstrate how, from its inception, landscape architecture as a field has invested itself in preservation, social justice, and economic equality. Zeroing in on the late 1800s and early 1900s, Big Plans features large-format urban plan drawings and small-format documentary street photographs, especially the work of photographer Lewis Wickes Hine. The exhibition considers central questions that intertwine visual media and landscape: How do pictures illustrate the conditions in our city now, and inspire us to improve them for the future? In other words: How do visual images support progressive social reform?

Olmsted’s career offers various entry points to these questions. As Zewde observes, Olmsted was first appointed superintendent of New York’s Central Park in 1857, as America was on the cusp of the Civil War. He advocated, through writing, for the end of chattel slavery and for a reconsideration of what society would need to do in order to overcome the “stain of slavery.”

“Olmsted and Eliot’s progressive and urban reform works of the late 19th century can be seen in the context of a country not far removed from that war, and engaging directly with those questions,” Zewde says. “Political and economic tensions remained high into the late 19th century as cities were witnessing intense rural-to-urban migration, industrialization, and immigration—forces that would prompt Olmsted and Eliot’s ‘Big Plans,’ and the formation of the discipline of landscape architecture.”

In Big Plans, Hine’s photography chronicles living conditions as experienced by immigrants in turn-of-century Boston. Like Hine’s broader body of work, which documents the working lives of children forced into industrial and agricultural labor and enduring soul-breaking conditions, these images demonstrate Hine’s commitment to advocacy and social reform. The large-format maps and urban plans in the exhibit encourage the viewer to envision the connection between Hine’s emotionally compelling images and the more orderly—but equally reform-minded—planning and design work led by Olmsted and Eliot.

Waldheim and Zewde complement the exhibition’s core displays with interactive video and multimedia. Long-format video offers contemporary voices discussing and analyzing some of the work and themes on display, and “Map This”—an ongoing community-engagement project—invites viewers to help generate alternative mappings of greater Boston.

One of the show’s most evocative features, though, is at its entry wall. There, Waldheim and Zewde highlight a quote from Frederick Douglass, taken from a lecture Douglass presented in Boston’s Tremont Temple on December 3, 1861:

“Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers—and this ability is the secret of their power and their achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.”

As Zewde observes, the power of what Douglass calls “picture-makers” is connected less to a specific medium and more to the process and thought behind envisioning or illustrating an idea or a moment.

“Rather, the power he describes is embodied in the process itself—the process of visioning the ‘is’ and the ‘ought,’ in so far as this is the first step toward bringing them in closer union,” Zewde says. “Digital techniques and contemporary media may open up new vantage points onto those visions, but ultimately these are tools to be employed in the greater pursuit of Douglass’ secret power.”

Celebrating Phil Freelon: Steven Lewis reflects on a career that transcended the ordinary limits of architecture

The passing of Phil Freelon has caused many of us who knew him to pause and reflect on the tremendous impact he had on our lives, our careers, and on the design profession as a whole. While we are saddened by the loss of our friend, there remains much to be thankful for, and much to remember with fondness. Phil possessed certain exceptional qualities that brought him great success as a husband and father, as a consummate professional, and as a friend who cared deeply about the well-being of others.

Phil rose to a level of career excellence and accomplishment that is rare among architects. From my personal observations, his successful legacy is attributable in large part to his wife, award-winning jazz vocalist Nnenna Freelon . Her talent served as a counterpoint to his; they were both focused on being at the top of their respective fields, while challenging each other to never be satisfied. As a master designer, Phil was humble, but he was also extremely proud of the many notable buildings he realized—in particular, buildings containing and displaying aspects of black history and the black experience. Of the many buildings Phil designed, one of my favorites is the Gantt Center, in Charlotte. The design of the façade takes its inspiration from West African textiles and Underground Railroad-era quilts. And the location of the stairs and escalators was influenced by an earlier local school nicknamed Jacob’s Ladder–which was a biblical reference to African-American educational advancement and achievement. The center’s design represents so much of what Phil was about—as a historian, an intellectual, and an intentional and insistent artist.

Phil transcended the ordinary limits of his profession. He was always anxious to share credit with his collaborators, even as he was proud of his own accomplishments as an architect and as a businessman. It was his commitment to selflessness and his willingness to put the needs of others ahead of his own that characterized his approach to work and life. The way that Phil would offer advice made his road to success knowable and possible (I’m sure that would be a big one on his list of how he might like to be remembered). Whether teaching at MIT, or entering work into the NOMA Design Competition, he always fulfilled requests to serve. But most of all, he had a zest for life. He enjoyed his family and friends with gusto, and his relationship with Nnenna was special. He never took his family or his marriage for granted.

Phil, you will be missed. But you’ll be remembered with such fondness that our sadness will soon dissolve into memories of all of the good work and good times that you shared with so many of us. Rest in peace, my friend.