Janette Sadik-Khan on creating bike- and pedestrian-friendly cities

In 2016, Janette Sadik-Khan published Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution, drawing lessons from her time as commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation under mayor Michael Bloomberg. Three years later, she presented an optimistic view of the battle for a more human-scale, walkable city at a lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. “Before we got started, there wasn’t a public vocabulary for the kinds of changes New York—and many other cities—needed,” she says. “Today city residents worldwide are becoming fluent in the language of place-making and parking-protected bike lanes.”

Sadik-Khan’s modus operandi has always been to show, not tell. The interventions she presided over between 2007 and 2013 as transportation commissioner demonstrated the potential hidden in plain sight. “When your street stays the same for so long, it’s hard for people to look at it differently,” she explains. “Just because they’re built in concrete, asphalt, and steel doesn’t mean they are trapped in amber, forever unchanged.” Among her most notable achievements were closing Broadway to cars in Times Square, building nearly 400 miles of bike lanes, introducing seven rapid bus lines, launching the largest bike share program in North America, and creating more than 60 plazas around the city.

In the past, developers didn’t want to have protected bike lanes, bike stations, and plazas next to their developments, but now they advertise them and have seen property values soar as a result.

Janette Sadik-Khan whose data showed that retail sales improved by 49% on 9th Avenue in New York City when bikes lanes were introduced

And the impact has gone beyond New York. “Since we transformed Times Square ten years ago, we’ve seen the same concept put into action in dozens of cities: Atlanta, Athens, Addis Ababa, Mexico City, Milan, Mumbai. Cities you wouldn’t expect, like Detroit—Motor City—recently rolled out 25 miles of protected bike lanes. Nobody has a patent on pavements. Don’t be shy about stealing solutions.”

In New York, Sadik-Khan says, she witnessed a mindset change among policymakers and private developers, as well as citizens. “In the past, developers didn’t want to have protected bike lanes, bike stations, and plazas next to their developments, but now they advertise them and have seen property values soar as a result.” This was partly because her team made their argument using hard data that had not been gathered before. “Previously we’ve only really used metrics like how fast traffic was moving and how many cars could get through an intersection.” A wider evidence base—that retail sales improved by 49% on Ninth Avenue when bikes lanes were introduced, for example—is crucial in countering anecdotal disinformation, she says.

The projects Sadik-Khan champions are targeted and relatively small-scale. “We still need to plan big, but we’d forgotten about the spaces trapped between the lines. It’s about reimagining one block at a time and that doesn’t have to cost billions of dollars—it’s something any city can do with materials they have on hand—paint, brushes, cones.” The other essential ingredient is people. “You need to reimagine the community involvement process as well. We asked communities to submit their own proposals, for example on where to put bike share stations, which was important for building trust.”

This community engagement appears to be missing as we enter the next era of cities: While investment is being made in driverless car technology, Sadik-Khan says, little is being done to prepare cities for its impact. “We’re just starting to undo mistakes made 100 years ago, razing neighborhoods and expanding highways to overhaul outer cities and make way for cars—we can’t afford to hand over the keys to our cities again.”

How to prevent this? Sadik-Khan says, “It starts with a question: What do we want the streets of the future to look like? It’s about making technology fit into our cities rather than designing them to accommodate new technologies.” It’s a battle that’s just begun but one we must all prepare for. After all, “Our streets are worth fighting for.”

Virgil Abloh’s “Insert Complicated Title Here” among AIGA/Design Observer’s top 50 book covers of 2018

“Insert Complicated Title Here,” the sixth title in the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s The Incidents book series, has been named a top 50 cover design of 2018 by AIGA and Design Observer. Co-published by the GSD and Sternberg Press, the book is an adaptation of an October 2017 Core Studio Public Lecture delivered by Virgil Abloh with an introduction from Design Critic in Architecture Oana Stanescu. The book was edited by Jennifer Sigler and Leah Whitman Salkin, who conceived and developed the series in collaboration with the London-based designers Åbäke .

Now in its 95th year, the 50 Books | 50 Covers competition received over 700 entries representing 29 countries for the 2018 cycle. “In an age where reading increasingly happens on screens, it is clear from the winning entries that designers and publishers are not just resigned to the new world but are actively challenging it,” noted Design Observer in the competition announcement .

The book was launched at Grafiche Veneziane during the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018, where Abloh live printed a limited edition of unique“Insert Complicated Title Here” covers.

Watch the public lecture that inspired the publication on the event page.

Mixed metaphors and manifestos: Five prizes are awarded for exemplary student thesis work in 2019

Melody Stein (MLA ’19) and Emily Hicks (MLA ’19) are the recipients of the 2019 Landscape Architecture Thesis Prize for Wild Rice Waters: Recovering Practice in the St. Louis River Estuary, a proposition for recovering the St. Louis River Estuary through the practice of harvesting wild rice. The homeland of the Fond du Lac band of Ojibwe people in the St. Louis River Estuary was once blanketed with wild rice (Zizania palustris). “Wild rice is a culturally and spiritually important wild grain that has been hand-harvested from the lakes and rivers of the Great Lakes Region for thousands of years. Today, wild rice harvest remains a treaty-protected right for all Ojibwe people in Minnesota. As the estuary lost its wild rice to land dispossession, resource extraction, and industrialization, the people of Duluth have also lost their estuary.” Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Rosetta S. Elkin served as the pair’s Faculty Advisor. Rosetta S. Elkin

Kathryn Gourley (MUP ’19) is the recipient of the 2019 Urban Planning and Design Thesis Prize in Urban Planning for It Starts with a Seed: Exploring Place-Based Socio-Ecological Care and Alternative Economies in Community Seed Saving Initiatives, a project that addresses biotechnology, intellectual property rights, and corporate consolidation in the food industry by encouraging urban community seed-saving initiatives. “Applying the lens of feminist political ecology, which centers the study of care, everyday life, and practices which establish ‘diverse economies,’ this project examines particular trends in the seed sovereignty movement as they play out in North American seed libraries. Specifically, through a multi-site case study in the Bay Area, it reads the act of seed-saving as a practice of place-based socioecological care, and public seed libraries as alternative economies that facilitate the translation of that care to the public sphere by a process of re-commoning.” Lily Song, lecturer in urban planning and design and research associate, served as Gourley’s Faculty Advisor.

Aimilios Davlantis Lo (MArch II ’19) is the recipient of the 2019 James Templeton Kelley Prize, Masters in Architecture II for Rain Bridge, a stress ribbon footbridge on Washington DC’s Potomac River. Rain Bridge spans from the Little Island (south of Roosevelt Island) to the Arlington Memorial bridge, where a new path passes through and under the center bascule of the existing bridge. The new pedestrian bridge terminates with a fan-shaped floating deck, creating a public space at the center of the river. Inspired by Christo and Jean Claude’s floating piers in Italy, and Jurg Conzett’s punt da Suransuns in Switzerland, the project brings pedestrians into close proximity with the surrounding water and landscape. “The bridge is a mechanical instrument that amplifies the forces of the river’s current to pull itself taut. It utilizes the double luff tackle mechanism and is strung with cables to create a lift that is in constant oscillation. As the daily tides shift and the water discharge fluctuates between seasons, the floating concrete deck, which extends beyond the Arlington Memorial Bridge, offers various functions–from a canoe storage framework to a concert stage structure. The bridge animates the river within the heart of DC’s picturesque landscape, serving as a dynamic contrast to the static monuments of the city, revitalizing the old Memorial Bridge with a tactile counterpoint.” The project was completed for the Spring 2019 option studio “The Anamorphic Double: A Bridge for DC,” led by Professor of Architecture Grace La and Design Critic in Architecture James Dallman.

Morgan Starkey (MArch I ’19) is the recipient of the 2019 James Templeton Kelley Prize, Masters in Architecture I, for Mixed Metaphors: The Poetics of Gravity, Machines, and Empathy, a project that seeks to “complete” New York City Hall, a grand neoclassical courthouse originally commissioned by Boss Tweed. Then the head of the New York City’s foremost political machine, Tweed used the building project to embezzle hundreds of millions of (2019) dollars and was later convicted in the unfinished courthouse and sent to prison. The central feature of the building, its Beaux Arts dome, was never completed and the building today is capped by a simple glass atrium. Starkey suggests an inverted dome held precariously in compression by the weight of a hung prisoner detention mass below. The intervention cantilevers over City Hall Park, propped on one corner and tied back with a tension member in another. “At every scale, the building attempts to turn the tectonic into the scenographic, choreographing ostensibly inefficient structural solutions with the complex circulation and programmatic concerns required by the modern courthouse. The building is precariously held in balance through this combination of simple machines and props, where an intentional conflation of sociological and physical weight orients the courthouse’s various users through its constituent parts, each dependent on each other to stand.” Starkey worked with Faculty Advisor Andrew Holder, assistant professor of architecture.

Evan Shieh (MAUD ’19) is the recipient of the 2019 Urban Planning and Design Thesis Prize in Urban Design for Autonomous Urbanism: Towards a New Transitopia!, a manifesto that envisions a near future (the year 2047) in which the Autonomous Vehicle causes a mobility paradigm shift towards autonomous public transit in Los Angeles. As a model of regional urban growth, Shieh’s project seeks to combat urban sprawl, traffic congestion, environmental unsustainability, and mobility inequality. “The manifesto instrumentalizes automation as a revolutionizing force in the NextGen bus transit network of LA, introducing a new range of automated vehicle sizes that plug mobility gaps while simultaneously critiquing current LA transit agencies’ obsession with the expansion of its light rail network.” The manifesto proposes an alternative, top-down, AV-incorporated transit planning model that is populated by a bottom-up narrative framework, a graphic novel that envisions this future world through the eyes of four distinct Angeleno archetypes as they experience this mobility paradigm shift first-hand. ” [It tells] a radical story that might convince the everyday Angeleno that alternatives to car culture can exist, a set of concrete policies that would enable this potential LA of 2047 to emerge, and finally a set of urban implications and lessons-learned for the design and planning of the city of the future.” Assistant Professor of Urban Planning Andres Sevtsuk served as Shieh’s Faculty Advisor.

GSD launches the African American Design Nexus

The Harvard University Graduate School of Design is proud to launch the African American Design Nexus (AADN), a virtual collection that illuminates African American architects and designers from various generations, practices, and backgrounds. AADN employs a variety of interactive media to chronicle the history and ongoing promise of African American design practice across three categories—people, projects, and places—and to reveal previously undiscovered or under-acknowledged practitioners, theorists, and spaces.

AADN aims to not only introduce and highlight these various designers and contributions, but tell the stories behind each. In foregrounding these narratives, AADN seeks to attract and inspire the next generation of underrepresented designers, while exemplifying a value at the heart of Harvard GSD’s pedagogy: Designing the built environment must call upon insights and voices that represent a diversity of backgrounds and experiences.

AADN content includes video interviews, visual portfolios, and engaging written biographies and narratives, all curated by a team of Harvard GSD researchers. AADN launched last Friday with an initial collection that includes designers Alison Grace Williams, Mabel O. Wilson, and Walter Hood, and projects including the National Museum of African American History and the August Wilson Center.

AADN’s debut represents four years of research and development, a collaboration among Harvard GSD’s African American Student Union (AASU), Harvard GSD dean Mohsen Mostafavi, architect Phil Freelon (Loeb Fellow ’90), and Harvard GSD’s Frances Loeb Library, where AADN is housed. As such, the AADN both represents and advances Frances Loeb Library’s ambition of innovative information access and knowledge creation.

“By establishing a virtual collection for African American design resources, Harvard GSD’s Frances Loeb Library will ensure the legacy of African American architects by collecting, cataloguing, and sharing their work and stories,” says Ann Whiteside, Librarian and Assistant Dean for Information Services, Frances Loeb Library. “As a place of knowledge, the library’s role is to ensure the collection and dissemination of knowledge that promotes our goals for diversity and inclusion for Harvard GSD, and for the design fields. Creating an online platform for this allows us to share this information broadly.”

Following its launch, AADN will be expanded and maintained by a research team, charged with identifying people and institutions of interest, assessing gaps in knowledge, and advancing collaborative relationships. This research team includes Whiteside as well as Alix Reiskind, Research and Teaching Team Librarian and Team Lead, Frances Loeb Library; Gabriel Ramos (MUP ’19); and other Harvard GSD students and Frances Loeb Library researchers.

AADN took root following Harvard GSD’s inaugural Black in Design Conference in October 2015, as student organizers and AASU members considered how to proceed with building coalitions of African American designers and enhancing their visibility. Freelon and Mostafavi were engaged in parallel conversations; in dialogue with then-AASU president Dana McKinney (MArch/MUP ’17), Mostafavi envisioned an authoritative compendium of individuals and institutions that pursue a pattern-break in design education and practice.

“The African American Design Nexus is a powerful platform for disseminating knowledge about the remarkable achievements of a diverse group of designers, as well as projects,” Mostafavi says. “It also illustrates, more broadly, the legacy and power of the canon they have generated. I am incredibly proud of and grateful for the work that has been done to bring this incredible collaboration to fruition, and hope that it continues to evolve and provide inspiration for future generations.”

AADN represents the most recent and most public undertaking of the Dean’s Diversity Initiative (DDI), a portfolio of projects aimed at inspiring students from critically underrepresented populations to pursue design, and maintaining an inclusive environment that promotes an active and effective exchange of ideas. Establishing DDI was one of Mostafavi’s first actions as dean of Harvard GSD.

Visionary philanthropy has the power to preserve this important narrative and inspire future generations. A gift to the GSD in support of the African American Design Nexus will provide seed funding to begin this important work over the next two years. Please contact us at [email protected] to discuss how you can contribute to this project.

Is there an architect, designer, or theorist whom you believe should be included in this collection? Please let us know what you would like to see featured on the African American Design Nexus website. Send your ideas and suggestions to [email protected].

 

Thing Tank exhibition imagines a parallel history of 20th-century Italian industrial design

“Often research in design involves going to Google Images and looking at a page of out-of-context thumbnails,” says Jeffrey Schnapp, faculty director at Harvard Graduate School of Design’s MetaLAB , which explores the ties between design, engineering, society and culture. “I believe a deep and sustained engagement with different moments in the history of design is a force for unleashing the imagination and a valuable and humbling experience that gives a more nuanced understanding of the different factors that come together in a successful design.”

The first course Schnapp taught at Harvard GSD in 2009 was designed to put this philosophy into action, encouraging students to take an in-depth look at various objects in the canon of 20th-century Italian industrial design. For an associated exhibition, students created fictional, but plausible, objects of their own, each with a history and story spun around it.

A decade later, another exhibition–Thing Tank: 18 Design Fictions, opening May 28, 2019–takes a similar approach, this time displaying 18 student projects that engage in a dialogue with some of the defining works of 20th-century Italian design, from Carlo Bugatti’s 1902 Cobra Chair to the Olivetti calculators of the 1980s. “The idea is to get students to think about how design practice is deeply intertwined with storytelling and social narratives.”

Among the exhibited works is a pair of shoes for the early 1980s, inspired by the work of Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis movement, and a fan made out of aircraft aluminum designed for the 1930s, a time when there was much excitement about electric table fans. Each artifact in the exhibition was analyzed with respect to its materials, properties, the broader family of objects to which it belongs, and the socio-historical context in which it was produced. The resultant gallery of fictional facsimiles includes period advertising campaigns, patent drawings, and other forms of “historical” documentation.

One of the central lessons for the students was the fact that many of the objects we think of as iconic were actually failures. “It was often a surprise that designs that eventually entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art or the Victoria & Albert Museum were not necessarily commercially successful.” He points the famed Bialetti Moka Express coffee maker, which was made by a metallurgist with limited design skills, as an example. “For the first 15 to 20 years it sold an extremely small number. Then his son came along and turned it into the coffee maker we know today.”

This sense of history has informed Schnapp’s own design work with the Piaggio automotive group : Gita, which goes into production this year, is a robotic vehicle conceived to support pedestrianism by carrying heavy objects that would normally lead people–particularly older individuals and those with mobility constraints–to use a car. “We’re trying to create what we see as a missing link in the mobility models that have characterized the world we live in, where something like 75% of the trips that people take in automobiles are at pedestrian distances.”

The project seems entirely driven by contemporary concerns, but it builds on research in Piaggio’s archives into vehicles like the Vespa. “We spent a lot of time thinking about how the Gita fits into the history of light mobility vehicles and the close intertwining of design and engineering.” Over the next few years, a whole family of related vehicles will emerge around this design, creating a new typology–and, in doing so, forming a design history of its own.

Visit the Thing Tank exhibition page for more information and a full list of student projects, or keep reading about the innovations underway at Piaggio Fast Forward . 

GSD honorees among 2019 Boston Society of Landscape Architects award recipients

The Boston Society of Landscape Architects (BSLA) honored 26 projects this year with its annual Design Awards , including a range of Harvard University Graduate School of Design students, faculty, and alumni. The program recognizes outstanding landscape architects, students, and projects based in Massachusetts or Maine.

“From a restored wetland in a residential yard to managed retreat of a seaside town; to rethinking neighborhood playgrounds, urban streets, or a war-torn city, the jury recognized projects that expanded the definition of design excellence,” noted Ricardo Austrich, BSLA President and member of the 2019 Design Awards jury. “Landscape architecture is one means to address the complex issues of our time, and create beautiful environments in the process.”

All six of the Merit Awards in the Student Work category were given to GSD projects. They include:

• Qiaoqi Dai (MLA ’19) and Chengzhang Zhang (MLA ’19) for “Across Racial and Infrastructural Boundaries”
• Jonathan Kuhr (MLA ’20), Koby Moreno (MArch/MLA ’20), Haoyu Zhao (MLA ’20), and Sijia Zhong (MLA ’20) for “Airport Archipelago”
• Alexandra DiStefano (MLA ’20), Sophie Elias (MLA ’20), and Jonathon Koewler (MLA ’20) for “Aggregated Inundation”
• Xiwei Shen (MLA ’19), Jiawen Chen (MLA ’18), and Chengzhe Zhang (MLA ’19) for “Bloom! A Dynamic Landscape Biological System”
• Chengzhe Zhang (MLA ’19) for “Oasis + Productive Settlement”
• Xiwei Shen (MLA ’19) for “The Forehead of Arlington National Cemetery”

GSD faculty and alumni were well represented in the professional categories. Among the GSD affiliated winners were Sasaki Associates , led by James N. Miner (MUP ’01) and other GSD affiliates, which received five awards; Stoss Landscape Urbanism , the firm of Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture Chris Reed (AB ’91); and Ground, Inc. , the firm founded and led by Shauna Gillies Smith (MAUD ’95).

Browse the full list of 2019 BSLA Award recipients .

Harvard Graduate School of Design redefines the post-Brexit landscape of the Irish Northwest

Ireland’s northwestern borderland is a place that has changed a lot over the last two decades. For those living there, recent memory includes a time when the border was “hard,” meaning that it was marked-out with customs posts and military checkpoints. Until twenty years ago, two authorities–those from Northern Ireland on one side, and the Republic of Ireland on the other–could stop, question and search border-crossers, including locals whose daily commutes involved twice-daily crossings. Hassle and delay were facets of everyday life for residents, many of whom lived on one side and commuted to a job or school on the other. There was a degree of emotional discomfort to crossing the border, and it was an experience that could provoke a question that had no easy answers: Where do you think you belong? A distinction between the two sides of the landscape was reinforced by border infrastructure, which for many created an artificially-divided common ground.

Nowadays it is possible to cross the border without even realizing you have done so. Often the only indications are road markings that change from yellow to white, and most of the border’s 200+ roads are too small to have such markings. Two important international agreements are responsible for rendering Ireland’s border invisible: In 1993, the United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland) and the Republic of Ireland joined the European Union’s Single Market, which meant goods or services could be sold to member states within the EU without fuss. Customs posts closed, and the economies of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland began to grow together. The question of whether Ireland should have a border at all remained a key issue in Ireland’s politics even after 1993, especially in Northern Ireland, where the debate had spurred violence. That violent phase was known as the Troubles, and it drew to a close in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement. This peace accord finally took guns and bombs out of Northern Ireland’s politics. The military checkpoints disappeared almost as quickly as the customs posts had, and the border became invisible. As a symbol on the map, the border remains contested but is no longer a confrontational element in the landscape.

As complex and fraught as cross-border communication and identity is, today the fate of the border region in Ireland is further complicated by the potential outcome of Brexit, the attempt to untangle the United Kingdom from the European Union. Leaving the EU is something the UK decided to do in a referendum three years ago, and after many setbacks it is now slated for October, 2019. It will make Ireland’s border the only land frontier between the UK and the EU. It is possible that the UK will leave the single market that day too, undoing the work of 1993. This could mean the return of custom checks at the border. Brexit could also damage the work of 1998, as the Good Friday Agreement allows for both Irish and British citizenship for the people of Northern Ireland, an arrangement that was more easily workable within the shared context of the European Union.

Harvard design and anthropology students arrived in Ireland’s northwestern borderland in March 2019 as part of a research trip to where the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland meet, to understand the landscape and its potential within the framework of impending political and social transformations. They visited the northwestern borderland, including the city of Derry/Londonderry, north Donegal and Lough Foyle. I met Gareth Doherty, assistant professor of landscape architecture and principal investigator of the research project Atlas for a City Region: Imagining the Post-Brexit Landscapes of the Irish Northwest, in a café near Derry/Londonderry. As part of the research project, Doherty is leading a seminar at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Design Anthropology: Objects, Landscapes, Cities, as well as a studio with Professor Niall Kirkwood, Field Work: Brexit, Borders, and Imagining a New City-Region for the Irish Northwest, which imagines how the region will develop over the next 50 years or more.

An underpinning idea was that researchers can gain a lot by living in communities and trying to understanding them from the inside, from the ground up. “This can be a useful complement to the planning processes,” he explained. Traditionally, ethnographers and anthropologists work alone, and often spend extensive amounts of time in the places they are studying. The field research did not have much time–just a few weeks–but they had plenty of people–a dozen landscape architecture students and seventeen design anthropology students.

The students traveled to the borderland to explore, talk to locals and then pool what they had gathered. The team was embedded in urban zones like Derry/Londonderry, in villages and on farms. They were looking at practical issues–food systems, transportation, border technology and the fishing industry–but also at more abstract factors, such as sexuality, music and concepts of home. Anthropologists, said Gareth, are good at asking why, but this project was also about getting them to think into the future and consider where a society’s dynamics may lead. Architects, planners, and landscape architects, on the other hand, are well-practiced in imagining futures, so during this project they were encouraged to consider the rationale for their creations.

The students arrived with some set tasks and issues to investigate. Firstly, they were asked to identify if the area they were exploring could be accurately described as a region, a region with an international border running up the middle, but nonetheless a coherent place. “What do you think the limits of this region might be?” I asked. Gareth unfolded a map of the area, ran his finger around it, indicating an area spread equally across both sides of the border about 70 miles wide and 70 miles high. It encompassed Derry/Londonderry, Strabane and Letterkenny, but the outer edges of this proposed region were deliberately vague. “We didn’t want to simply draw another border,” says Gareth.

It seems fair to call this area a region: The economic pull of Derry/Londonderry is felt across the border in rural Donegal, and cross-border roads are busy (Derry/Londonderry was where we often went to shop when I was a child, despite the checkpoints. Once we had got beyond the dislocating experience of the border there was not much that was alien about what we discovered on the other side).

The students were asked to consider how this region could be affected by climate change. Broadly speaking, as it runs from east to west, Ireland’s border goes from high and hilly to flatter and more open. To the northwest, horizons get lower; the sky gets bigger and the border joins its one major river, the Foyle, which widens on its way to the sea. Because of its low elevation and the fact that it’s hemmed by water on three sides, this land and economy will be hugely affected by a rising sea level. The landscape’s delicacy is suggested in old maps of the area. In the 1600s, a large headland called Inishowen, now firmly attached to the rest of Ireland by a neck six miles wide, was considered a separate landmass. This shift is reflected in the area’s original name: Inish means island. The landscape was likely boggy and prone to flooding before the advent of drainage systems. Now, several miles from the sea, round pebbles as if from a beach are still to be found beneath a shallow layer of soil, an indication that once upon a time the tides came much further in.

On their daily explorations, the students were encouraged to rely on chance, as Gareth reasoned that chance encounters can be very rich. At first this might seem a haphazard way of going about things, but if there are two dozen people out there relying on chance every day for a couple of weeks, then you can be confident of returns. Planning too much, Gareth suggested, can lead to bias. How can one plan without relying on the preconceived? Chance means freshness and immediacy. Chance also means being unprepared, so students had to rely on their humanity and instincts to simply get along with the people they met and learn things from them. The students did not hand out questionnaires; they talked and listened. One student reported that walking their host’s dog was a great way to get into conversations with locals. Sohun Kang, from South Korea, went to places open for visitors, such as community groups, public libraries, and a boxing club. He found that one encounter could lead to another. Kiran Wattamwar, who is from India, called into a community center on a lucky day and within an hour she was “engaged in a discussion with eight people, friends of friends who had all been called over by someone else they knew.”

Another of the students’ tasks was to examine how people live on a cross-border basis. Kiran wanted to find out how people’s use of telecommunications was shaped by the border. Despite the fact that there are no additional roaming or cellular charges across the border region, Kiran discovered that some people preferred having two phones, compartmentalizing their lives on either side of the line. Having two phones is indeed the mark of many borderland citizens, as is having two separate currency pockets for British Pounds and Irish Euros.

Ashutosh Singhal, originally from Mumbai, examined the aquatic border and the rules around national fishing rights, visiting fishing villages like Greencastle and Buncrana. For generations, fishing has been an important part of the region’s economy. Fishing fleets are permitted anywhere around the UK and Ireland. Singhal mapped opportunities for socio-economic development in the fishing communities of Inishowen; “opportunities that could be used to by-pass the implications of Brexit”.

The students’ final task was to consider how Brexit might affect their research area and people’s lives in the region generally. It is certainly a concern for the fishing fleets. Ashutosh warned that, “the consequences of a Hard Aquatic Border on these fishing communities will be dire.” Meesh Zucker, a City Planning graduate student at MIT, focused on the visibility of marginalized identities in the region, particularly LGBTQ+ people, and spoke to many who would rather see Brexit cancelled. Some fear identity profiling at the border, while transgender individuals were concerned that they may be stopped from receiving healthcare on one side of the border or the other. Some told Meesh that they feared Brexit “might lead to events similar to those that took place during the Troubles.”

This is far from a minority concern. In the region these students visited, and all along the borderland, there is real anxiety that the frontier’s invisibility will turn out to have just been a 20-year phase—a short, productive hiatus from the border’s overarching story: confrontation. This would be a real shame because, as this group of students and researchers discovered, so much is just getting started.

Work in Progress: Sunmee Lee and Yuebin Dong’s public transit system in Los Angeles

Sunmee Lee (MLA ’19) and Yuebin Dong (MAUD ’20) describe their final project for the option studio “Future of Streets in Los Angeles” led by Andres Sevtsuk, spring 2019.

Vanishing Soundscapes is a stark but beautiful reminder of the fragility of the urban soundscape

According to a recent report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the world’s ecosystem are at an “unprecedented” level of decline. “We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health, and quality of life worldwide,” commented Sir Robert Watson, the IPBES Chair.

The report’s findings are alarming: One million animals and plants are threatened with extinction, among them nearly half of all amphibian species, 10% of insects, and 33% of reef-forming corals; pollution of the oceans has caused the formation of 400 “dead zones” totaling over 245,000 square kilometers; raw timber production has increased by 45% since 1970; and numerous other unsettling statistics.

Prominent among those voices suggesting ways to avert this human-caused destruction is George Monbiot, a weekly columnist for The Guardian and author of books including Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. Monbiot is an ardent supporter of rewilding, the process of ecological restoration through reintroducing species to environments which were once their homes as a means of re-cultivating our natural world, the consequences of which include lowering carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. In a 2013 TED Talk, he discusses, as an example, the catalogue of positive changes that arose when wolves were brought back to Yellowstone National Park. The transition may not even be a shock to the existing ecologies, he details, because in many cases, various instances of support for these long-absent megafaunas may already exists. Consider Europe, where hippopotamuses, lions, and rhinoceroses once roamed. “You can still see the shadows of these great beasts in our current ecosystems,” he observes and details flora whose current forms can be traced back to a time of cohabitation with megafauna, such as the still-thriving deciduous tree species that can survive great bark loss because of a possible adaption caused by European elephants. Yet these visible inscriptions of extinction have not motivated enough people to act.

This failure makes the work of Elitza Koeva (DDes ’21) and Spyridon Ampanavos (DDes ’20) that much more valuable, as it creates an iteration of the shadows to which Monbiot refers—not through visual stimuli but through sound. For the three-day ARTS FIRST Festival held earlier this month, Koeva and Ampanavos designed a four-channel audio installation entitled Vanishing Soundscapes that was affixed to a tree in Harvard Yard. Each speaker played birdsong soundscapes taken from collections of recordings at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology which Koeva combined, manipulated, and subtly distorted into 154-second compositions. Each of the 48 birds represented, from the Eastern Meadowlark to the Ovenbird , are species local to the area. In addition, Ampanavos designed an app with which visitors to the tree could scan playing cards bearing the images of the birds and generate their respective soundscape compositions in random combinations, and in unison with anyone else’s devices if they were not using headphones. The app creates a personal aspect to the performance, Koeva says, because through your devices “you become these birds—the sounds we are going to lose.”

By using only species that still exist, the work acts as a cautionary, but not pessimistic, injunction to participants about the precariousness of the these soundscapes.

On the birdsong experienced in Vanishing Soundscapes

Sound and the emotional reactions it can generate might wrest people from the stupor created by the bombardment of negative news, and predominantly visual stimuli, regarding the health of the planet. “There is a lot of information about the consequences of global warming and the rate that our habitats are disappearing, but we are not acknowledging it because we’ve become resilient and numb,” Koeva comments. “I want to address this [issue] in a different way so that it’s more surprising and subtle, that you feel it more deeply. Sound is ephemeral. It’s also a sculpture, with time as a medium.”

A major inspiration throughout Koeva’s oeuvre is composer John Cage . In this piece, she drew on his use of chance operations which allowed her to remove herself from the piece to a great extent and gave her an opportunity to speak with anyone engaging with it. “Some people said that while approaching the site, they could hear sounds and knew something was going on but not what exactly. Then when they approached the tree, they felt they needed to close their eyes,” she recounts. “Some came to meditate. Some returned many times. Many children climbed the tree. On the grass, we put several banana-fiber stools, and people just came to sit on them. With those small interventions, the space become activated.” And humans were not the only animals attracted to the work. “Birds were quite interested and coming to the tree, too.”

While each birdsong that played on Harvard Yard comes from species that are still alive, the actual birds’ absence turned the soundtrack into a haunting soundscape, a ghostly series of calls that both entice us towards a variation of a world that exists while also reminding us of that world’s fragility and impermanence. Another of Koeva’s inspirations, the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, speaks to a phenomenon in cinema that also applies to Vanishing Soundscapes: “As soon as the sounds of the visible world are removed from [film], or that world is filled, for the sake of the image, with extraneous sounds that don’t exist literally, or if the real sounds are distorted so that they no longer correspond with the image—then the film acquires a resonance.”

Koeva’s recordings draw on birdsong captured during multiple times of day, in separate seasons, and from different birds of the same species, all joined together by her in a way that collapses time and space. In this way, the performance is not only evocative but utopic in that it creates, by virtue of sound, a kind of three-dimensional no-place in which these birds seem to thrive. In the future, Koeva says that she might experiment with sounds of birds that have become extinct, which would add another layer of impermanence to the piece. But by using only species that still exist, the work acts as a cautionary, but not pessimistic, injunction to participants about the precariousness of the these soundscapes, and it is up to each person to determine which outcome we will hear in our collective future.

Listen to birdsong field recordings used in Vanishing Soundscapes:

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.