Catherine Mosbach awarded medal by France’s National Order of the Legion of Honor

Landscape architect Catherine Mosbach has been awarded a medal by France’s National Order of the Legion of Honor, or Légion d’honneur, the highest French order of merit for civic and military accomplishment. Mosbach was formally honored by French Minister of Culture Franck Riester at a ceremony on April 23 at the Palais-Royal in Paris.

At the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Mosbach is the Aga Khan Design Critic in Landscape Architecture. She has led a variety of option studios at the GSD, most recently the Spring 2019 studio “Build with Life: Transformation + Formation: Landscape and Islamic Culture,” sited in Tunisia.

The French Legion of Honor awards recognize outstanding careers or service to the country of France. Honorees include entrepreneurs, high-level civil servants, champion athletes, artists, and business executives. Mosbach was awarded the Legion of Honor’s distinction of Chevalier, or Knight, from among the order’s five degrees of increasing distinction. To be considered for the Chevalier honor, a candidate must present a minimum of 20 years of public service or 25 years of professional activity with “eminent merits.”

Following eight years of service as a Chevalier, an honoree may then be promoted to Officier, or Officer. Subsequent honors include the Commandeur (Commander), Grand Officier (Grand Officer), and Grand Croix (Grand Cross) titles. The Order of the Legion has a maximum quota of 75 Grand Cross officers, 250 Grand Officers, 1,250 Commanders, 10,000 Officers, and 113,425 Knights. (As of 2010, the official memberships totaled 67 Grand Cross officers, 314 Grand Officers, 3,009 Commanders, 17,032 Officers, and 74,384 Knights.)

Prior to receiving the Chevalier medal, Mosbach was originally named to the Legion of Honor in July 2016 by France’s president Francois Hollande.

A world-renowned landscape architect, Mosbach is the founder of Paris-based design firm mosbach paysagiste, which she established in 1987, as well as the magazine Pages Paysages, which she co-founded with Marc Claramunt, Pascale Jacotot, and Vincent Tricaud. Among her many projects include the Solutre archaeological park in Saone-et-Loire, the “Walk Sluice” of Saint-Denis, the Botanical Garden of Bordeaux, “The Other Side” in Quebec City, “Shan Shui” at the International Horticultural Exposition in Xian, the “Place de la Republic” in Paris, and “Walking Mediterranean Fort Saint Jean” in Marseille. She received the Equerre D’Argent Award alongside Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa for the Louvre Lens Museum Park in 2013, while her “Phase Shift Park” (Gateway Park) in Taichung was honored in 2014 by with an Iconic Concept Award by the German Design Council.

Polish architect Aleksandra Jaeschke wins 2019 Wheelwright Prize

Harvard University Graduate School of Design is pleased to name Polish-born and U.S.-based architect Aleksandra Jaeschke the winner of the 2019 Wheelwright Prize , a $100,000 grant to support investigative approaches to contemporary architecture, with an emphasis on travel-based research. Jaeschke’s winning proposal, UNDER WRAPS: Architecture and Culture of Greenhouses, aims to explore the culture and architecture of greenhouses around the world, focusing on the spatiality of horticultural operations, as well as the interactions between plants and humans across a spectrum of contexts and cultures.

Jaeschke was among three remarkable finalists selected from more than 145 applicants, hailing from 46 countries. The 2019 Wheelwright Prize jury commends finalists Maria Shéhérazade Giudici and Garrett Ricciardi for their promising research proposals and presentations.

“With her pioneering work on greenhouses, Aleksandra Jaeschke reasserts that the field of architecture can and should continue to engage deeply with nature, with horticulture, and with ruralism and the countryside,” says Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean and Alexander and Wiley Professor of Design, Harvard GSD. “As we applaud Aleksandra and look forward to her project, I also want to take this opportunity to congratulate the other two finalists, Maria Shéhérazade Giudici and Garrett Ricciardi, for their outstanding proposals, which made the decision about this year’s award exceedingly challenging for the jury.”

A graduate of Harvard GSD (Doctor of Design, 2018) and the Architectural Association in London (AA Diploma, 2005), Jaeschke is an architect licensed in Italy and an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Sustainable Design at the University of Texas at Austin. She was one of the 2014 Kosciuszko Foundation Fellows and will be the Meadows Foundation Centennial Fellow, at the Center for American Architecture and Design at the University of Texas at Austin, from September 2019 to August 2021. She previously taught at the Woodbury School of Architecture in Los Angeles.

Jaeschke’s interests range from mainstream discourses on sustainability and broader notions of ecology to cross-scalar integrative design strategies and the role of architects in transdisciplinary projects. Her Harvard GSD doctoral dissertation, Green Apparatus: Ecology of the American House According to Building Codes, investigated how building regulations coupled with green building technologies and incentives shape environmentally-driven design and environmental awareness. While at Harvard GSD, she coordinated the project “Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians Housing Research and Prototype Design,” exploring sustainability as a building-scale issue, and one of embodied energy, transportation, and sourcing of materials. She co-organized the 2016 Doctor of Design Conference “#decoding,” which investigated the impact of codes in mapping of environments, demarcation of legal territories, and operational protocols of logistics and control of the built environment, highlighting the interconnections between design techniques, economic processes, and regulatory mechanisms.

Jaeschke’s Wheelwright proposal, UNDER WRAPS, stems from her fascination with the multifaceted nature of greenhouses and the very act of sharing a roof with plant life. Her goal is to investigate the impact of spatial arrangements and speculate about strategies for a more equitable “greenhouse ruralism” and an engaged “urban (horti)culture”—the former to empower farmers, and the latter to engage urban dwellers in the act of caring for plants, which she calls “our living substrate and the ultimate Other.”

Jaeschke’s intention is to spend extended periods of time in a number of regions with a high concentration of greenhouse agriculture and visit remarkable urban and rural greenhouses that are unique for their singular architecture, adaptive approach to technology, or extraordinary function. She will travel to the Netherlands, Spain, Israel, Morocco, Mexico, and South Korea, and will also visit significant sites in Canada, Singapore, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Poland. Her goal is to catalog and compare various greenhouse types, from farm-hoop houses to botanical conservatories; operations, from farming to hospitality; and locations, along a rural-urban transect. Jaeschke also hopes to use her travels to launch collaborative projects.

As with past Wheelwright winners, the $100,000 prize is intended to fund two years of Jaeschke’s research travel.

Jaeschke previously practiced at AION, an architectural firm she co-founded and co-directed with Andrea Di Stefano. As part of AION, she managed numerous design workshops and contributed to various publications. She participated in the 27/37 Exhibition of Young Italian Architecture at the Italian Pavilion, Shanghai Expo 2010, and was part of the ARCHITEKTUR! conference series held at the MAXXI Museum in Rome in 2012. In 2013, AION held a solo exhibition, Eco-Machines, in the Wroclaw Museum of Architecture in Poland. In 2011, Jaeschke received the Europe 40 Under 40 Award conferred by the European Centre for Architecture, Art, Design & Urban Studies and Chicago Athenaeum.

Jaeschke follows 2018 Wheelwright Prize winner Aude-Line Dulière, whose Wheelwright project Crafted Images: Material Flows, Techniques, and Uses in Set Design Construction is in its travel-research phase.

Now in its seventh year as an open international competition, the Wheelwright Prize supports travel-based research initiatives proposed by extraordinary early-career architects. Previous winners have circled the globe, pursuing inquiries into a broad range of social, cultural, environmental, and technological issues. The Wheelwright Prize originated at Harvard GSD in 1935 as the Arthur C. Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship, which was established to provide a Grand Tour experience to exceptional Harvard GSD graduates at a time when international travel was rare. In 2013 Harvard GSD opened the prize to early-career architects worldwide as a competition, with the goal of encouraging new forms of prolonged, hands-on research and cross-cultural engagement. The sole eligibility requirement is that applicants must have received a degree from a professionally accredited architecture program in the previous 15 years.

The 2019 Wheelwright Prize jury consisted of Tatiana Bilbao, Loreta Castro Reguera, K. Michael Hays, Eric Höweler, Erik L’Heureux (2015 Wheelwright Prize winner), Mohsen Mostafavi, and Megan Panzano. For extended juror biographies, visit wheelwrightprize.org.

2019 Wheelwright Prize Finalists

The Wheelwright Prize jury commends the 2019 finalists for their outstanding applications:

Maria Shéhérazade Giudici

Wheelwright proposal: The Spring of our Discontent: Urban Space and Conflict in the Mediterranean City

Giudici is the editor of AA Files and founder of Black Square, a collective engaged in research-by-design since 2014. Black Square makes projects, installations, and books, and serves as an educational platform with a yearly summer workshop. Giudici is the coordinator of the History and Theory course at the School of Architecture of the Royal College of Art and a Diploma Unit Master at the Architectural Association, both in London. She earned her PhD from Delft University in 2014; her theoretical research focuses on the construction of modern subjectivity, a topic she has explored in her writings and editorial projects—most recently, by co-editing with Pier Vittorio Aureli Rituals and Walls: The Architecture of Sacred Space (2016). With Black Square, Giudici pursues questions about the link between form, image, and use. The first installment of this research, Black Blocs (2017), was commissioned by the FRAC Centre-Orléans, and will be followed this year by How to Live in a Jungle, an experiment on the park as civic space exhibited at the Versailles Landscape Biennial.

In her Wheelwright proposal, Giudici writes: The contemporary city is often considered as a low-intensity landscape shaped by speculation; however, in the last decade this context has become again the scene of conflict, and nowhere more so than in those Mediterranean countries where a legacy of colonialism has come to its endgame in recent demonstrations. Tahrir, Place des Martyrs, and Gezi Park are not only controversial symbols of social discontent but also places where the limits of modern city-making—formless, generic, scaleless—are revealed. The research will find new forms of design agency by rereading these radical moments of political debate and their effect on urban space.

Garrett Ricciardi

Wheelwright proposal: Ground Tour: Material Commons and Architecture as a Limited Natural Resource

Ricciardi co-founded Formlessfinder in 2011 as an interdisciplinary practice combining research, writing, and design. Drawing from the disciplines of architecture, art, and engineering, the practice is focused on how the built environment can rethink its relationship to raw materials and natural resources. Ricciardi has been recognized internationally and received numerous design awards, including the AIA-NY New Practices award and a National Endowment for the Arts project grant, and he has been a finalist for the MOMA/PS1 Young Architects Program. Ranging from residential and commercial projects to public pavilions and installations, Formlessfinder’s work has been exhibited at institutions including the MAXXI in Rome, the Art Institute of Chicago, Design Miami, the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and has published the book Formless Manifesto with Lars Muller and Storefront for Art and Architecture. Currently, Ricciardi is a Lecturer at UCLA UAD Ideas, and has taught numerous studios at Columbia University GSAPP (focused on the National Park System, land art, land use, remote architecture, infrastructure, and the American southwest) and at Parsons School for the Constructed Environment. He holds a Master of Architecture from the Princeton University School of Architecture, where he was awarded the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Prize for Design, and is a graduate of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (BFA) and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. Previously he has worked for the offices of Steven Holl Architects and has collaborated with James Carpenter Design Associates on many large-scale projects, including the recently completed St. Louis Arch Museum of Westward Expansion for the Gateway Arch National Park.

In his Wheelwright proposal, Ricciardi writes: Our MATERIAL COMMONS are in crisis. By traveling to their remote reserves, this proposal seeks to unpack the aggregation of economies, politics, spaces, and forms embedded in the relationship between architecture and natural resources. This re-envisioned grand tour begins from the ground downward by visiting the resource deposits themselves—lithium in Chile, sand in Malaysia, bauxite in Australia—and studying the embedded, often fragile, native geographies to understand the complex relationship between each, as well as three distinctly different architectural outputs: the architecture designed FOR extraction, the architecture made OF extraction, and the architecture enabled BY extraction.

The full winner’s brochure, which includes jury comments and the winner’s portfolio, will soon be available at wheelwrightprize.org. Applications for the 2020 Wheelwright Prize will be accepted in Fall 2019.

Students of Jeanne Gang’s architecture studio seek redemption for the concrete behemoths of Brutalism

Cold, alienating, unfriendly; an architectural abomination, one of the world’s ugliest buildings. Although these are the epithets tossed casually at Boston City Hall, the same terms land on many outwardly similar concrete buildings wherever they are. Add abrasive, forbidding, Stalinist, bunkerlike, and hideous, and a sense of intense public dislike for these buildings becomes clear. Countless major institutional structures like Boston City Hall emerged from behind plywood formwork in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s—gray assemblies of reinforced concrete. Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, Kenzō Tange’s Kagawa Prefectural Office in Japan, Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 in Montreal, Paul Rudolph’s Yale University Art and Architecture building in New Haven, as well as multitudes of hospital, campus, and government buildings like them, have struck critics as callous, aggressive, frigid. That these buildings fall conveniently under the stylistic term “Brutalism” seems to confirm their inhumanity: The word “brutal” so well encompasses all of the unsettling adjectives that swirl around these concrete behemoths.

As these buildings age, as their surfaces accumulate grime and stains, as their roofs begin to leak, intense public dislike makes them vulnerable, and the quick impulse so often is to get rid of them. Most of the time this is a bad idea, not only because it is wasteful, but also because the buildings are not as horrible as they seem. This is the contention behind Jeanne Gang (MArch ’93) and Claire Cahan’s Spring 2019 architecture studio at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, “Recasting the Outcasts.” Gang and Cahan argue that “at a time when it is more essential than ever to conserve resources and prevent carbon pollution, we find that buildings are frequently discarded rather than being reinvented to serve contemporary life. . . One group of architectural outcasts that are particularly vulnerable to being erased and replaced—and their embodied carbon thereby released—are the Brutalist structures of the 1960s and ’70s.” An important reason for their vulnerability is the language that surrounds them, starting with their now almost unavoidable designation as “Brutalist.”

At a time when it is more essential than ever to conserve resources and prevent carbon pollution, we find that buildings are frequently discarded rather than being reinvented to serve contemporary life.

Jeanne Gang on Brutalist buildings, a group of architectural outcasts that are particularly vulnerable to being erased and replaced

As with most stylistic labels, serious misunderstandings have crept in. The first and most important in this case is that the real root of Brutalism is the French term “brut” (raw) rather than the English word “brutal” (savagely violent). Béton brut, variously translated as “rough concrete” or “raw concrete,” became the material of choice for progressive architects of the 1950s. Concrete gave them opportunities to repudiate a reductivist version of steel and glass modernism that was developing after World War II. As a modern material, however, concrete also fortified their disavowal of reactionary trends in architecture that reached toward nostalgic regional sensibilities. These architects of concrete quickly appeared to represent a movement. The British architectural critic, Reyner Banham, who announced this movement as “The New Brutalism” in 1955, stressed later that the label came about somewhat facetiously, as a nod toward a favorite material (béton brut), and as a verbal parody of current anti-modernist movements: “The New Humanism,” a revival of arts and crafts construction and ornament in England, and a similarly sentimental revival in Sweden sometimes called “The New Empiricism.” Whatever its origins, the name captured some important shared ideologies. The early proponents of The New Brutalism sought to reassert the goals of modern architecture: reduction of cost, honesty with regard to material, simplicity of form, clarity of expression. Its most important practitioners in England, Alison and Peter Smithson, insisted that in essence, the movement was “ethical” rather than stylistic. Even so, Brutalist buildings tended to express themselves visually: in the exposure of modern building services and building structure, and most prominently in the unapologetically bare surfaces of raw concrete.

While the Smithsons focused on straightforward articulation of architectural assemblies, other “New Brutalist” architects became intensely interested in the potentials of concrete as a medium of expression. Matthew Nowicki, an influential young architect in the 1950s, claimed that a “sense of medium” reflected the maturation of modern architecture. He explained that the careful detailing of concrete manifested a shift from the formalism of early modernism to a more subtle kind of architectural expression. Similarly, Louis Kahn considered material—especially mundane materials like raw brick and concrete—to establish the basis of architectural expression. “But how right it is to think about material!” he exclaimed to a roomful of Boston architects in 1966. He explained to the group that, for concrete in particular, the construction must accommodate the expressive behavior of the material, so that the formwork “gives the opportunity for the concrete to be relaxed in… forming itself.” In another talk, he suggested in more specific terms that by carefully anticipating the behavior of concrete at the Yale Art Gallery and assuring that “in every way, how it was made is apparent,” he was striving toward the “beginning of ornament.”

This is all to say that to appreciate Brutalist architecture, it is important to look at it closely, which is what so many of its critics fail to do. Postmodernist critic Kent Bloomer complained that Brutalist architecture was “monofigural,” that it conveyed only one message, and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown contended that it “twisted the whole building into one big ornament.” By focusing only on the whole building, however, these normally perceptive critics betrayed a curious lack of attention toward the subtle, expressive qualities of the buildings’ materials and surfaces. Certainly, Brutalist buildings are formally arresting, perhaps too aggressively so, but their most intriguing attributes are in their surfaces and details, in their textures, in the way the catch and play with light.

Notwithstanding all of their subtlety—most evident in carefully organized formwork lines and tie holes, or in taut fine-grained precast elements—Brutalist buildings contain a lot of concrete. This makes them impractical to demolish but also challenging to renovate. Boston City Hall, for example, contains roughly 2.5 million pounds of concrete. So, much as some critics and politicians would have liked to get rid of this “architectural abomination” long ago, the impracticality of doing so has been one important factor in saving it. Designer Chris Grimley, who has been active in supporting the preservation of Boston City Hall, quips that “as they’re wont to say, it would take a controlled nuclear device to bring it down, so we have that on our side.” There is also a rising consciousness of the environmental benefits of re-using, rather than destroying, existing buildings, which has no doubt helped rescue other Brutalist buildings from oblivion, at least temporarily.

This is the opportunity Gang and Cahan are exploiting in this semester’s studio. Recognizing that people are beginning to understand that simply destroying and replacing Brutalist buildings is wasteful and environmentally harmful, they wanted, Gang says, “to wake our collective brain to the situation,” and “to become creative with something that is already there.” So, they had their twelve students begin by carefully studying examples of Brutalist architecture—some from the Boston area, others from South America, Asia, and Europe. The students’ task was to “zoom into qualities: light and shadow… how scale operates in these buildings,” to study how the buildings reveal program and structural behavior. Making analytical models of these buildings focused their attention even more closely. The studio group also toured Boston City Hall, with the guidance of Professor Mark Pasnik, co-author of the 2015 book Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston . Then, they visited the site for the studio: Swope Center, the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. The students and studio faculty spent a night in its dormitories taking in views of the campus through concrete framed windows. They ate breakfast in its dining room under an expansive concrete waffle-slab ceiling, and looked out over Eel Pond through immense strip windows.

Designed by Pierce, Pierce & Kramer and completed in 1974, Swope Center is a more modest concrete building than some of the more heroic examples the students studied earlier in the semester. Nevertheless, it offers some of the same challenges that many other Brutalist buildings present. It aggressively occupies its site. It stands in strong contrast to the older buildings around it. It is not ADA compliant. Its air handling systems are inadequate. It contains a huge amount of concrete. And, Gang points out that the building presents an additional challenge—that in contrast to other Brutalist buildings “it doesn’t have a strong enough identity; it is not heroic enough” to demand strict preservation, nor even to suggest a specific approach for renovation. So, Gang and Cahan are challenging the students to “strip back to essentials, then invade with a new idea,” to “make a building about today.” Cahan emphasizes that “Woods Hole is helping us see climate change,” and because “Brutalist architecture can be very expressive of environmental systems,” the Swope Center building provides a strong platform from which to explore the goals of the studio. So, rising to the “challenge of recasting this specific architecture toward a viable, extended future” the students in “Recasting the Outcasts” are taking on a concrete behemoth and urging it to better ends.

Announcing establishment of the GSD’s Plimpton Professorship of Planning and Urban Economics

The Harvard Graduate School of Design is pleased to announce the establishment of the Plimpton Professorship of Planning and Urban Economics, made possible by a gift from Samuel Plimpton (MBA ’77, MArch ’80) and his wife, Wendy Shattuck. The position will be able to explore a wide range of urban issues and data, including: development, evolving land use patterns and property values, affordability, market and regulatory interactions, open space, consumer behaviors and outcomes, and climate change, and will help inform the decisions of future architects and planners. The position will reside within the GSD’s Department of Urban Planning and Design.

“Investments in cities and the built environment drive growth in local, regional, national, and global economies. Our students are committed to using design to create opportunities in these urban environments,” said Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design. “With this new faculty expertise and support, the GSD presents an ideal environment for planners and designers of the future to investigate best practices in new urban development, overcoming the hurdles that come with building in cities. The GSD is grateful to Sam and Wendy, two of the school’s most loyal advocates and generous donors, for their gift to create this position and keep the school on the leading edge of design education.”

“Using the tools of urban economics research to evaluate and measure the societal impacts of development should inform design and planning decisions,” said Plimpton. “As the world’s top design school, Harvard and the GSD are the best places for exploring these issues and advancing both urban economics and excellence in design. I appreciate all the work that Dean Mostafavi and Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design, Diane Davis, have done to set the foundation for this professorship, and I look forward to seeing what scholars in this position will achieve at Harvard.”

For Plimpton, Partner Emeritus and Senior Advisor at the Baupost Group, L.L.C, this gift is the latest chapter in a long partnership with the GSD. In December 2015, Plimpton and Professor William Poorvu MBA’58 established the Plimpton-Poorvu Design Prize, which honors and recognizes students whose work produced at the GSD exemplifies both feasibility and excellence in design. Plimpton received his bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and worked as an independent advisor, developer, and investor in real estate ventures. He held a research appointment in real estate at Harvard Business School from 1978 to 1980, and was an early supporter and a founding member of the Harvard Real Estate Academic Initiative, a cross-faculty initiative, from 2002 to 2015.

“Sam Plimpton is a visionary leader helping make the study of urban economics central to contemporary urbanism, and vice versa. We are thrilled that he has shared his aspirations in this regard with GSD,” said Diane E. Davis, Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design. “With a dynamic real estate program already embedded in the school, and with its strong links to urban planning and design, the GSD will be able to move this vision forward in the years to come. I have great expectations about the exciting new research directions and practical applications that we will see as a result of this new faculty position.”

Matthew Macchietto and MIT collaborators win 2019 Urban Land Institute Student Competition

Harvard Graduate School of Design degree candidate Matthew Macchietto (MLA ’19) and a team of collaborators from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have been named winners of the 2019 Urban Land Institute (ULI) Student Competition, an ideas competition that provides graduate students the opportunity to devise a comprehensive design and development scheme for a large-scale site in an urban area.

The selection was announced on April 4 in Cincinnati, where the competition’s four finalist teams presented to the competition jury. The winning team is awarded a prize of $50,000, while each finalist team receives $10,000. The four finalist teams were chosen from 90 teams representing more than 40 universities in the United States and Canada.

This year’s competition involved the redevelopment of a site in Cincinnati comprising portions of a highway, the central business district, and the downtown riverfront along the Ohio River, as the ULI notes on the competition website. Teams were asked to evaluate the potential to deck the highway and combine it with adjacent parcels, with the goal being to connect the parcels and create a vibrant, pedestrian-oriented, sustainable, mixed-use neighborhood.

The winning scheme from the MIT-Harvard team, “The Cincy.Stitch ,” repositions a pivotal stretch of waterfront not as the city’s edge, but as the center of a connected region. Through four threads—culture and history, public realm, transportation, and new economies—the proposal strategically expands the site and creates connections to break down barriers across geography and time. Together, these four threads weave an urban tapestry rich in history but geared to the future, creating a 24-hour neighborhood bustling with city dwellers and a center for new commerce that connects citizens across the region socially and physically.

Macchietto joined four students from MIT to form the winning team: Joshua Brooks, Shiqi Peng, Alan Sage, and Zhicheng Xu. Dennis Pieprz, design critic in urban planning and design, served as an academic adviser along with MIT’s Eran Ben-Joseph.

“The MIT-Harvard team stood out because it demonstrated the greatest cohesiveness by an interdisciplinary team to solve an urban challenge requiring multiple disciplines,” said Alex J. Rose, ULI Hines Student Competition jury chairman and longtime ULI Foundation governor. senior vice president of Continental Development Corporation in El Segundo, California. “The team had a very clear strategy, an achievable plan, a clear and creative financial model, and a presentation that strongly supported and illustrated their plan.”

Read more about Macchietto and his collaborators’ winning project via the ULI competition announcement .

Work in Progress: Lina Karain’s day-care center for Rohingya children in Bangladesh

Lina Karain (MArch ’20) describes her final project for the option studio “Architecture as a Tool to Improve Lives: Development of a Day Care Centre for Rohingya Children” led by Anna Heringer, fall 2018.

Pioneering conceptual artist Agnes Denes addresses the students of the Harvard Graduate School of Design

For more than 50 years, artist Agnes Denes has dedicated herself to unifying disparate trajectories of knowledge across the arts and sciences into radically new forms of seeing and engaging with the world. Her work spans a range of media and scales, and engages a variety of academic disciplines, including philosophy, mathematics, and the natural and social sciences. Denes’s large-scale ecological interventions are among her most well-known projects, in particular Wheatfield–A Confrontation  (1982), the now-iconic work in which she planted a two-acre wheat field in what was then a derelict lot in Lower Manhattan. No less impressive and important are her conceptual prints, which have explored among other things variations on earth’s mathematical form and visual experiments with Pascal’s Triangle. In Spring 2019, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design invited Denes to give a lecture as part of its Rouse Visiting Artist Program. When schedules did not align, she offered instead to address students through a piece of writing.

Below is her address to students, written in April 2019. To accompany the piece, Denes created an original object, a six-foot-long scroll of the manifesto she composed in 1970 and which has guided her practice ever since. An artist edition of 1,000 copies of the manifesto was designed by Zak Group and is offered as a gift to students from Denes.

“Hello you brilliant young people ready to change the world and make it a better place because you are in it, saving it from its self-inflicted wounds and self-propelled doom.

Ask yourselves: Where are you, at your age of wanting to change things?

A few words as you go on your journey:

Every word uttered today is political. There is no escaping it. The atmosphere has become contaminated.

People are fighting to be heard, using big words, tugging at heartstrings, fighting for some truth, while language itself is losing its precision.

Saying something meaningful is difficult when everybody says some of it to a degree, when all has been touched on or becomes meaningful by who says it—someone with power or a famous person. You listen to a friend, a relative, someone you trust and admire.

I am not sure how well you know me, because I am not a self-promoter, abhor politics and because we are separated by disciplines, even though we shouldn’t be. Art, science and philosophy should be together and part of all else in spite of specialization, which is the subject of one of my books.

I’ll try to offer you one true language of communication that cannot be corrupted. My art and philosophy.

When I set out on my journey I wanted to change the world, re-evaluate all knowledge and put it into visual form for better understanding. This process of evaluation and visualization would probably have taken 1,000 humans and at least as many libraries to even begin. An impossibility, so I began. This was the onset of my Early Philosophical Drawings and became my art of Visual Philosophy.

As I worked, I came to realize that my task was a little more complex than what could be accomplished by a single mind without help or funds. This did not faze me a bit and I kept going, setting and reaching milestones as I went.

I was inexperienced and fearless, willing to give up all else but my goal.

Many people do that. Scientists wanting to discover, writers educating in special terms, inventors, leaders whose motives are still pure, a few artists.

It was only when I got much older that I realized I had changed very little, that some of what I wanted to change had changed by itself. Not to say that I was useless or unneeded, just that this is the way of things. You don’t move a behemoth, it moves by its sheer volume.

Change is the only thing you can count on. You learn how to walk without crutches, and with very little to depend on.

Even the truth, that great challenger, because it is beyond the long end of your telescope even in the land of ultimates, changes meaning, leaving many truths, and nothing to depend on.

Wanting to change the world morphed into a unique artistic output of a lifetime of creation, and the visualization of invisible processes, such as math, logic, thinking processes, and so on.

This process of re-evaluation and visualization became a process of offering humanity benign solutions to some of its problems and involved a multitude of disciplines.

So now ask yourselves, where are you at your age of wanting to change things? What mountain is left to climb, move over or eliminate?

I will not pretend to tell you ultimate truths or aims, only that you should seek them. It is this seeking that is the journey, and it is as precious as the destination.

Even if the words we seek to describe our condition have already been worked over. Even if your hope is already waning, and your innocence has already been lost, many of you still might believe you can change the world. And some of you might. A little.

Question everything. Not just because you should, but so that you might hone your ability to do so. The best creativity comes from questioning the status quo.

While you’ll never be fully free of the influences of your environment and your upbringing, deep thinking and evaluation are a necessary part of the development of your own mode of thought, be that good or bad.

Your mind will be your salvation in a troubled world, and there will never be a time when our world is not troubled.

But don’t just live within the walls of your own mind, but also DO, because overthinking can also bring downfall. Abused, unused or overused organs offer little benefit.

Read my Manifesto that accompanies this writing. I live by it and hope you will too.

Good luck, dear future and fellow travelers on our journey of life.

Have you guessed yet what that ultimate language of communication is?

Go find your goal and create.”

Agnes Denes
April 19, 2019

 

The first ever retrospective of Agnes Denes’s work to be organized in New York City—Agnes Denes: Absolutes and Intermediates —will open at The Shed on October 9, 2019.

Top photograph: John McGrail. All artworks © Agnes Denes & Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York. Introduction by Ken Stewart. Photographs of “Manifesto” by Maggie Janik. Special thanks to Penelope Phylactopoulos.

Sarah Whiting named next dean of Harvard Graduate School of Design

Sarah Whiting, dean of architecture at Rice University, will return to Harvard, where she taught early in her career, as the next dean of the Graduate School of Design.

Sarah Whiting, a leading scholar, educator, and architect widely respected for her commitment to integrating design theory and practice, has been named dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), University President Larry Bacow announced today.

A Harvard GSD faculty member early in her career, Whiting has served since 2010 as dean of the Rice University School of Architecture, where she is the William Ward Watkin Professor of Architecture. She is also co-founder and partner of WW Architecture, a firm she launched with her partner, Ron Witte, in 1999.

Whiting will assume the GSD deanship on July 1, succeeding Mohsen Mostafavi, who is stepping down after more than 11 years of distinguished service.

“Sarah Whiting is an outstanding leader with broad interests that range across the design disciplines and beyond,” said Bacow in announcing the appointment. “She has a keen understanding of the intellectual dimensions of design and its distinctive power to shape the world of ideas. And she has an equally keen understanding of design as a force for shaping the communities we inhabit and for engaging with some of contemporary society’s hardest challenges. I have been deeply impressed by her during the course of the search, and I greatly look forward to welcoming her back to Harvard.”

“The GSD has long been a center of gravity for my thinking and actions, and I’m thrilled to be returning,” Whiting said. “It is altogether tantalizing to look across the School’s three departments, with their individual and collective capacities to shape new horizons within Gund Hall. And it’s even more enticing to envision working with the GSD’s remarkable faculty, students, staff, and alumni to help imagine and create new futures for the world, not just at Harvard but beyond.”

As dean at Rice, Whiting said she has been guided by an overarching commitment to “dissolving the divide between architecture as an intellectual endeavor and architecture as a form of engaged practice.” She has led efforts to reform the curriculum, introduce innovative studio options, recruit faculty, boost funding for research and course development, enhance facilities, and raise new resources.

Her interests are broadly interdisciplinary, with the built environment at their core. An expert in architectural theory and urbanism, she has particular interest in architecture’s relationship with politics, economics, and society and how the built environment shapes the nature of public life. Her work has been published in leading journals and collections, and she is the founding editor of Point, a book series aimed at shaping contemporary discussions in architecture and urbanism.

In recent years, Whiting has been recognized as an educator of the year by the publication DesignIntelligence (2014, 2018), by Architectural Record magazine’s Women in Architecture program (2017), and by the Houston chapter of the American Institute of Architects (2016).

“Sarah Whiting has earned an extraordinary reputation as dean of the School of Architecture at Rice, where she has pursued educational innovations while building connections across the university,” said Harvard Provost Alan Garber. “She is similarly committed to strengthening connections across the departments of the GSD and between the GSD and the rest of Harvard. At a time when the role of design is increasingly important, and when design education and practice face an array of challenges, her creativity, wisdom, and leadership experience will help the GSD navigate the changing demands of the design professions and the evolving interests of our faculty and students. She is the right person to lead the School forward.”

Whiting has held many other leadership roles at Rice, chairing search committees for the dean of graduate studies, the dean of humanities, and the director of Rice’s Moody Center for the Arts. She sits on the Rice board of trustees’ buildings and grounds design subcommittee and has been active in the university’s efforts to engage with its home city of Houston.

Before becoming dean at Rice, Whiting served on the Princeton architecture faculty as assistant professor from 2005 to 2009. From 1999 to 2005, she was a design critic, assistant professor, and associate professor in the Harvard GSD’s Department of Architecture. She also has taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Florida.

A graduate of Yale College, Whiting earned her MArch degree from Princeton and her PhD in architectural history, theory, and criticism from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Early in her career, she practiced with the architects Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, and Michael Graves.

In announcing her appointment, Bacow expressed thanks to the “many members of the GSD community — faculty, students, staff, alumni — who offered thoughtful advice during the search. Provost Alan Garber and I are grateful to all of you — and especially to our faculty advisory committee, whose members provided valuable counsel throughout. Special thanks go again to Mohsen Mostafavi, whose devoted service as dean these past 11-plus years has guided the GSD’s continuing leadership and progress.”

“Sarah Whiting is an exemplary academic leader and colleague. Her intellectual commitment to design education has enhanced the future of practice,” Mostafavi said of his successor. “I am delighted that she will be returning to the GSD to help shape the next phase of this incredible School’s journey.”

Grace La co-chairs annual Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture conference

This March, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Grace La co-chaired the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s (ACSA) 107th annual conference, leading the three-day symposium at Carnegie Mellon University and a culminating exhibition, installed at the Carnegie Museum of Art. La was joined by co-chairs Jeremy Ficca, Associate Professor of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University and director of its Design Fabrication Laboratory, and Amy Kulper, Associate Professor of Architecture and Department Head at the Rhode Island School of Design. At the GSD, La is Professor of Architecture and chair of the GSD’s Practice Platform. She also hosts the GSD podcast “Talking Practice.”

Titled “Black Box: Articulating Architecture’s Core in the Post-Digital Era,” the 2019 ACSA conference took its inspiration from architectural critic Reyner Banham’s final essay, in which he described the discipline as a black box, a device known only through its inputs and outputs, but never through its content. In the nearly 30 years since that essay’s publication, the ACSA’s 2019 conference theme responds to field’s current post-digital moment, La observes, in which design has continued to broaden its arsenal of techniques and operate across an increasingly expanded field. Amid such expansion and diversification, the conference aimed to ask what constitutes the central tasks of an architect today, and sought paper and exhibition proposals around architecture’s core assertions, approaches, and techniques.

The response to this call generated 454 paper submissions and 226 drawing submissions, totaling nearly 700 entries—the ACSA’s highest response rate in the last decade.

The conference’s subsequent exhibition, “Drawing for the Design Imaginary,” was on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art for the week following the conference. Presenting works collected from around the world, the exhibition inquired upon the role of drawing for the design imaginary, and how such drawings might scaffold contemporary design thinking and pedagogy amid ongoing advancement in technology, simulation, and modeling.

Alongside La, the conference also featured GSD faculty Antoine Picon and Toshiko Mori, honored as Plenary Keynote and Topaz Medallion awardees respectively, as well as Michelle Chang, Iman Fayyad, Andrew Holder, Max Kuo, Megan Panzano, Tom De Paor, and Sergio Lopez Pineiro. Over 30 additional GSD alums and affiliates from all degree programs participated via delivery of papers, exhibition of projects, and moderation of sessions.

In addition to her GSD work, La is founding principal of LA DALLMAN Architects, internationally recognized for the integration of architecture, engineering, and landscape. Co-founded with James Dallman, LA DALLMAN is engaged in catalytic projects of diverse scale and type. Noted for works that expand the architect’s agency in the civic recalibration of infrastructure, public space and challenging sites, LA DALLMAN was named as an Emerging Voice by the Architectural League of New York in 2010 and received the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence Silver Medal in 2007. In 2011, LA DALLMAN was the first practice in the United States to receive the Rice Design Alliance Prize, an international award recognizing exceptionally gifted architects in the early phase of their career. LA DALLMAN has also been awarded numerous professional honors, including architecture and engineering awards, as well as prizes in international design competitions.

Climate change, “climigration,” and the Rust Belt: The New York Times joins Jesse Keenan for a look at the future of Duluth

Faced with a rapidly changing climate, where might millions of Americans relocate to escape newly inhospitable environments? Already, rising seas in New Jersey and wildfires in California are forcing locals to rethink whether to rebuild or move elsewhere. “We are already seeing northern range migration of flora and fauna in the Northern Hemisphere,” says Jesse M. Keenan, lecturer in architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. “What is to say that we humans won’t be next to move?”

Last September, The Guardian tapped Keenan for a series of reportage about so-called “climate migrants,” or people forced to relocate due to the effects of climate change, including rising seas and persistent wildfires. As a concept, climate migration (or “climigration,” a term coined by the attorney and advocate Robin Bronen) hits at an intersection of Keenan’s wide-ranging work on climate adaptation, urban development, and public policy—but it may soon be less of a concept and more of a reality for many Americans.

“The climigration discourse is often framed around forced displacement, but there is another category of elective mobility that is critically important to understanding future climate scenarios,” Keenan says. “This broader range of migration considerations could have a significant influence on the future of American cities, particularly in the rust belt, which is proximate to the fresh water resources of the Great lakes.”

“Come to Duluth, the Air-Conditioned City,” heralds a vintage postcard that Keenan keeps in his Harvard office. It’s one of the many Duluth-flavored artifacts he has gathered over the past few months, as he and a team of GSD students have researched the city’s cultural and physical infrastructure with an eye for understanding the Duluth’s capacity to adapt to future climigrants.

Keenan says Duluth might set a valuable example for sustainable urbanization by advancing climate mitigation and adaptation policies, and by branding itself as a climate reprieve. Its cooler climate and fresh-water access are draws, certainly, but the region also boasts reliable sources of energy production and access to high quality healthcare and education. Duluth also has an infrastructural capacity that would allow the city and its region to diversify economically in the future. Land prices and the cost of living are cheap—for now—and the region boasts a well-educated and skilled labor force. Beyond affordability and accessibility, Keenan argues, Duluth is home to a diverse and vibrant range of cultures that speak to a certain authenticity of place that is compelling to populations on the move.

Climigration involves broad, overlapping sets of considerations. Current discourse tends to focus on forced displacement from specific events, but Keenan and his colleagues are also considering changing consumer preferences and economic mobility—in other words, if people are forced to move, what options are within their preferences and financial reach? And how can a city like Duluth prepare itself for such a shift while maintaining community-driven values?

The New York Times followed Keenan and his team around Duluth during a portion of their research. Their “Duluth Climigration” 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. Thereafter, climate imaginaries and physical planning are synthesized, and then complemented by a marketing effort that could target mobility market segments—across the income spectrum—with the intent of projecting Duluth as a “climigrant friendly city.”

New York Times reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis observes the key assets that Keenan and other researchers have identified in Duluth, as well as other climigrant-appropriate cities like Buffalo: relatively cool temperatures year-round, lower wildfire risk than the West or the Southeast, inland location (as in, isolated from rising seas), and ample fresh water, via the Great Lakes.

Keenan’s concern is that inflows of climigrants may undermine affordability and further challenge existing income inequality in the Rust Belt. To this end, his team strives to “[u]nderstand not just how one markets to economically-mobile populations, but how we accommodate existing marginalized and aging communities in the advancement of affordable housing, as well as access to transportation, healthcare and other services and amenities.”

As principal investigator for “Duluth Climigration,” Keenan convened and collaborated with a team of GSD students to execute research and develop an economic development and marketing framework for the City of Duluth. Keenan and the team presented this work at a March conference focused on Duluth and the future of climate change. Their next phase of study will begin to address not just the receiving zones for climigrants, but also the high-risk geographies where people may be otherwise trapped.

“This idea that we have this national researcher who has identified Duluth as a place that has kind of a secret sauce when it comes to being a place for refuge and sustainability and resiliency, that is something you want to be a part of,” said Duluth’s mayor, Emily Larson.

“Because climate migration transcends disciplinary boundaries, the role of the designer becomes the facilitator of interdisciplinary collaboration,” observed project manager Alexandra DiStefano (MLA ’20). “This project has motivated me to further cultivate this role within academic research and professional practice.”

The full “Duluth Climigration” project team is: Jesse M. Keenan, Principal Investigator; Alexandra DiStefano, Project Manager; Don O’Keefe, Andreea Vasile Hoxha, Sam Adkisson, Jennifer Kaplan, Maura Barry-Garland, Sydney Pedigo and Runjia Tian

Read more about Jesse Keenan’s climigration research via The New York Times,  or view his March conference presentation via the University of Minnesota . 

Photography by Tim Gruber for The New York Times.