A Pattern Language: A user’s guide to the seminal architectural handbook

“A complex of buildings with no center is like a man without a head.” This sentence conveys the ethos of A Pattern Language (1977), the instructional tome written by architect, design theorist and Harvard Graduate School of Design alumnus Christopher Alexander (PhD ’63) along with five of his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure at the University of California, Berkeley. The bestselling architectural handbook is itself in many ways a man without a head: a sprawling guide to building and planning that has seen renewed relevance lately as a model for marrying physical spaces with ideological frameworks.

A Pattern Language lays out over 1,100 pages how our buildings—and by proxy our cities—are not entities at a remove from human beings, but rather their manufactured extensions. And as with any body (headless or otherwise), the whole structure is only as healthy as its individual parts. No facet of our cities and towns should be unwelcoming to their citizens, and no room in a house should feel neglected. A space should “feel right,” the authors argue, and that feeling is tied to the congruence between physical and social spaces.

Separated into three sections, Towns, Buildings, and Construction, the book contains 253 patterns defined as “problem[s] which occur over and over again in our environment.” Problems like how to orient the rooms in a home around naturally-occurring light and dark, so that the flow of movement “guides people toward the light whenever they are going important places: seats, entrances, stairs, passages, [and] places of special beauty.” Or the problem of the lack of intimacy between couples when children are present. “Their role as parents rather than as a couple permeates all aspects of their private relations.” The solution: the creation of a private “couple’s realm… a world in which the intimacy of the man and woman, their joys and sorrows, can be shared and lived through.”

For each of the archetypal facets of our homes and communities, the authors offer a solution for living well in the form of gentle-yet-pointed advice that can be adapted to individual circumstances. This in turn creates a diagnosis-and-solution rhythm that continues throughout the dense—if charming, and frequently idiosyncratic—book. Not every pattern will be useful or applicable to every individual home or community, the authors point out, but a good portion could potentially be—every home has a main door; every city has a system of roads—and how they build off of and influence each other will determine the unit’s health.

Every society which is alive and whole will have its own unique and distinct pattern language. Every individual in such a society will have a unique language, shared in part, but which as a totality is unique to the mind of the person who has it. In this sense, in a healthy society there will be as many pattern languages as there are people—even though these languages are shared and similar.

A Pattern Language

The authors are primarily concerned with the alienating effects of poor architecture and design, which leads them to recommend means by which life at work—as well as in the city and at home—involves contact with others. With entries such as 140. Private Terrace on the Street, the authors aim to facilitate happiness and tranquility by virtue of a delicate fusion of public and private areas. When combining this goal with an equally emphasized desire to put humans in constant proximity to nature, they demonstrate their focus on physical and mental wellbeing in the form of a balance between social interaction and Zen-like serenity. For this reason, Modernism and Classicism alike have no place in these pages, as their aesthetic and philosophical foundations, the authors imply, have little concern for their inhabitants’ health.

A Pattern Language, in large part due to its encyclopedic nature, stimulates introspection and healthy debate about what environments, both personal and professional, we currently inhabit and how they might be improved. One can cast aside the given prescriptions at will, but Alexander and his coauthors encourage readers to contemplate their reactions to nearly every aspect of the built environment.

A Pattern Language has been used as a reference in research and coursework at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Continue reading about Toni L. Griffin’s 2019 course Patterned Justice: Design Languages for a Just Pittsburgh and the Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture by Fritz Haeg, Nils Norman, and Julieta González.

 

The Inaugural Eduard Sekler Scholarship Recipient: Francisco Colom

As the first Eduard Sekler Fellow, Francisco Colom (MDes ’19) is embracing the legacy of the beloved Professor Sekler through his work in conservation and the tensions between progress and tradition. Colom is an architect, urban designer, and Master in Design Studies (MDes) candidate at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD). Eduard Franz Sekler served on the Harvard University faculty for more than 50 years at both the GSD and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Among his numerous achievements was co-founding the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies and advocating for the preservation of cultural and architectural sites around the world.

The Eduard Sekler Fellowship Fund was created to honor Professor Sekler’s legacy at the GSD. Mick Doyle (MArch ’77), who first met Professor Sekler as a GSD student, then teaching assistant, and who maintained a life-long friendship and association with Professor Sekler through projects including the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust, led the effort. A broad range of alumni and friends supported the fellowship, and a significant contribution from Dr. Ellen Phoebe “Epi” Wiese (PhD ’53, PhD ’59) ensured the Eduard Sekler Fellowship Fund at the GSD in perpetuity.

Sekler’s passion for preservation lives on in the work of Colom and his MDes concentration of Critical Conservation, which provides designers, real estate professionals, planners, and others with a foundation to understand the cultural systems that frame conflicts inherent in making progressive places. Colom’s research focuses on embedded and temporal cultural systems, the tensions between progress and tradition, and the way clashes of meaning and identity are registered by the built environment. His thesis considers the Maison Tropicale, a prefabricated housing system originally designed by architect Jean Prouvé to address the shortage of housing in French colonies in West Africa during the 1950s and how Western media and institutions use modernist architecture as a tool for cultural domination today. Colom serves as Teaching Assistant for the course “Conservation, Destruction, and Curating Impermanence” and is the editor of More Than Green, a project directed by a platform of professionals and academicians that promotes a holistic understanding of sustainability in the urban environment.

“By awarding me the Sekler Fellowship, you have lightened my financial burden which allows me to focus more on the most important aspect of school, learning,” wrote Colom to Pat Sekler (AM ’58, PhD ’73, BF ’76). He continues: “I will work very hard to make the most of this opportunity. Thank you again for your generosity and support.”

Colom received his Master of Architecture degree with honors from the University of Alicante in Spain and was appointed Honorary Professor of the Department of Architectural Design. Professional highlights include a diverse range of architectural and urban projects in the Netherlands, Spain, Azerbaijan, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States. His work has been exhibited at the 15th and 16th Venice Architecture Biennale and his academic research grants include the Fundacion La Caixa Fellowship, the European Union Tempo Project Scholarship, and the Harvard GSD Community Service Fellowship. For his GSD Community Service Fellowship, he joined MASS Design Group, co-founded by Alan Ricks (MArch ’10) and Michael Murphy (MArch ’11), as a Community Service Program Fellow working in support of their mission of researching, building, and advocating for architecture that promotes justice and human dignity. His projects included collaborating on a project for the holistic improvement of a vulnerable neighborhood in Asuncion, Paraguay, in which community participation strategies were central to the design process and designing an education center to complement the program of a hospital in Monrovia, Liberia.

After graduation, Colom plans to work with fellow student Maclean Sarbah (MDes ’19), with the aim of finding and applying design strategies where they can potentially be most beneficial. They began the partnership with a trip to Sarbah’s native Ghana during which they reflected on the ways design can make a positive impact in the lives of people when introduced collaboratively and sensitively.

The GSD joins with Francisco Colom and the future Sekler Fellows in thanking the many alumni and friends whose generous contributions helped to establish this enduring financial aid award in memory of the incomparable Professor Eduard Sekler.

GSD names Teju Cole the 2019 Class Day speaker

Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design has named Teju Cole as its 2019 Class Day speaker. Cole will address the GSD’s Class of 2019 and their families during the School’s 2019 Class Day exercises on Wednesday, May 29.

Cole is currently photography critic for the New York Times Magazine and the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard. He is the author of four books, including debut novel Open City, and has won an array of awards for his writing, including the PEN/Hemingway Award in 2011, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2015, and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship. As a photographer, he has had solo exhibitions throughout the U.S. and Europe. His photography column at the New York Times Magazine, “On Photography,” was a finalist for a 2016 National Magazine Award.

Speaking with the Harvard Gazette last December, Cole ruminated on some of the ethos and insight he hopes to share with his creative writing students at Harvard.

“For most students who end up here, Harvard can feel like the big prize. It’s dazzling,” he said. “But here’s the thing: You have not arrived at a destination, you have arrived at a beginning. There’s so much to do that’s not about the grades. We live in a society in which there’s not only so much to do but also so much to undo. Students have a task ahead—not just of achievement, which can be mechanical, but also of deconstruction, which is often a more delicate matter.”

To see a full schedule of 2019 Class Day and Commencement exercises, and for other Commencement information, please visit the GSD’s Commencement webpage.

The Detroit model: Kimberly Dowdell discusses strategies for revitalization

Cities like Detroit have become increasingly central to public dialogue about the nature and politics of urban revitalization in the United States. In Detroit—and other urban centers that are home to large populations of non-white residents across the class spectrum—divestment, depopulation, and post-industrialization leave residents vulnerable to the whims of wealthy private investors and government initiatives that benefit the few at the expense of the many.

The term “revitalization” itself is often used euphemistically to obscure insidious, harmful design policies and development practices. For architect and developer Kimberly Dowdell, who was born and raised in Detroit, combating these policies means using real estate development and sustainable design as tools to foster equitable and inclusive cities. She will discuss these strategies in her upcoming lecture, “Diverse City: How Equitable Design and Development Will Shape Urban Futures” at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

“Part of my origin story is spending time in downtown Detroit as a little kid and noticing that while it had really good bones and really beautiful old buildings, most of them were either boarded up or largely underutilized,” says Dowdell. “I noticed that the people walking around often looked sad, and I thought to myself—using ‘kid logic’—that the problem was the buildings. I thought that since architects fix buildings, if I fixed the buildings then that would make things better. Of course, I later realized that that’s not entirely how this works.”

Still, the architect’s role in equitable planning and development is crucial, says Dowdell, and the need for more architects of color to contribute to the care of America’s cities is an urgent one. It is this charge that Dowdell takes up in her role as president of the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) . There, she has championed a three-pronged plan, “ALL in for NOMA ,” to increase representation. (ALL stands for Access, Leadership, and Legacy.) Through the initiative, NOMA provides architecture education to students as young as five through to post-graduate education; leadership training to practitioners in the field; and estate and retirement planning to architects of color who are nearing retirement, with the aim of helping facilitate mentorship for future generations.

Though NOMA’s initiatives place much emphasis on the work of architects and related practitioners, Dowdell makes clear that architects do not work in isolation, and that large-scale change takes a great deal of cross-disciplinary engagement. “I think architects play a major role in improving the way that buildings look and the way that they operate, but obviously a lot of decisions are also made by the developers who take on these projects and by city government, which often has a hand in facilitating that process.”

Her own career trajectory is illustrative of this relationship: Dowdell is a licensed architect, as well as a partner at Century Partners, a Detroit-based development firm whose mission is to facilitate holistic revitalization through sustainable residential housing development. A central strategy in Century Partners’ efforts is harnessing the power of grassroots community outreach and creative placemaking.

A mission as ambitious as Century Partners’ would not be possible without strong municipal support. Dowdell cites smart leadership choices as an essential element in her strategy to foster inclusive development, and she points to Detroit’s director of planning, Maurice Cox, as an example of productive engagement. “I had an opportunity to work with Maurice when I worked in city government, and what was great about that was that I actually got to see him say to developers, ‘You can’t design this here.’ He would directly challenge the architects during meetings, and he would sometimes sketch over existing plans and say, ‘This is a better way to engage the streets,’ or, ‘This is a better way to activate this corner.’ I think that’s really powerful.”

Perhaps most crucially though, in any locale, is real buy-in from city residents. Much of the mainstream narrative surrounding Detroit’s recent “comeback” has emphasized the arrival of young, white transplants and changes to the downtown corridor. It is a narrative that skews the perception of the city’s other neighborhoods and contributes to a real suspicion on the part of black residents who have been affected by displacement under the guise of redevelopment.

The Fitzgerald Revitalization Project is a model to which Dowdell turns when discussing fresh approaches to urban planning that do not neglect residents’ voices. Located within the Fitzgerald neighborhood in northwest Detroit, the project comprises a quarter-square-mile area that was chosen for its location between two anchor institutions, University of Detroit Mercy and Marygrove College, and because it is adjacent to some of Detroit’s more economically resilient neighborhoods. The basis of the project is the implementation of a transformation plan that includes the City of Detroit’s Planning and Development Department, the immediate community, and private philanthropic support, the latter of which Dowdell says is necessary in order to close capital gaps.

“Tri-sector collaboration is really important to success, particularly in a city like Detroit. The economics of certain deals don’t make sense without philanthropic input.” The Fitzgerald Revitalization Project has a three-pronged strategy that addresses public space, housing rehabilitation, and an innovative landscape plan that includes a central park and a greenway. The project began with a neighborhood framework plan created by the city-hired landscape architecture firm Spackman Mossop Michaels, which was later modified based on extensive, ongoing conversations with Fitzgerald residents.

Through their nonprofit arm, Century Forward, Dowdell and her team at Century Partners anticipate the future needs of neighborhood residents, and offer resources beyond the scope of real estate. These efforts might include, for example, providing neighborhood-wide internet access or financial literacy classes. “What I’d like to share with people is the notion that neighborhood revitalization is a very important thing to do, but you have to do it in a way that’s comprehensive because otherwise you are putting a band-aid on a problem that runs much deeper.”

Keep reading about Kimberly Dowdell’s upcoming lecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, presented by the Joint Center for Housing Studies .

What can the utopian communities of the 1960s teach today’s designers about co-living?

Wind blows hard over the bluff as huge waves roll in from the horizon, crashing finally, thunderously on the sea stacks and rocks below. An unending acoustic flow and rhythm, deep and ever-present, plays over the fields and hedgerows. Lines of 100-year-old cypress trees reach back from the cliffs. Graying redwood-sided houses poise unobtrusively behind the hedgerows out of the wind. Their roof slopes, like the branches protecting them, seem to give the airflow material form.

All of this hardly conjures the image of suburbia. But, bound by Highway 101 to the great conurbation around San Francisco Bay, carved with cul-de-sacs, and sprinkled with single-family houses, the Sea Ranch is very much a bedroom community. It originated in the early 1960s as a developer-driven project, a large real-estate venture aiming to settle nearly 2,000 families on 5,000 acres of land. But from the beginning, its designers envisioned it as something different. Lawrence Halprin, the Harvard Graduate School of Design-trained landscape architect who drew up its first master plan, called it “a new kind of Utopia.” He envisioned the Sea Ranch as an “experiment in ecological planning” with “place as a generator of community design.” The architectural team (Charles Moore, William Turnbull, Donlyn Lyndon, Richard Whitaker, and Joseph Esherick) that planned the 10-mile stretch of Pacific coast and designed its first buildings formed a community of their own. “The experience of the Sea Ranch began to infiltrate our lives,” Halprin recalls. They camped on the site with their families. They brought their students to study it. They ran workshops with designers, dancers, and actors on the beach, building driftwood “villages” and weaving myths around the idea of community. Most of them built houses for themselves at the Sea Ranch.

The special care that these first settlers (as they thought of themselves) took with the land led them to establish deeply felt principles for the development. They wanted, first of all, to avoid building another copy of “suburbia” along the Pacific coast, but they also wanted to keep the houses affordable and maintain much of the place as commons, freely accessible to everyone. They proposed arranging the houses in “farm-like clusters” and using compatible materials, fencing, and vegetation to bind them into neighborly groups. This required careful subdivision of the land and minutely scripted rules for engaging it—no mansions, no grass lawns, no visible antennas, no visible clotheslines, no reflective cladding, all exterior surfaces in shades of gray or brown, and so on. The development’s Declaration of Restrictions, Covenants and Conditions, first published in 1965, specified these and other minutiae, but it was most emphatic about preserving the natural character of the site. “The purpose of this declaration,” it says, “is to perpetuate… the rich variety of this rugged costal, pastoral, and forested environment for the benefit of all who acquire property within the Sea Ranch.” A Design Committee would oversee many of the rules to assure that the original spirit of place would persist.

Although these rules have remained virtually unchanged, the Sea Ranch has not fulfilled its originators’ grandest expectations with regard to community. Much of the landscape has been preserved intact, but, as Halprin lamented in the early 2000s, “succeeding waves of people flawed the experience.” Some of the houses have gotten too big and isolated. Some of the later developments gravitated into standard suburban patterns that claim views for individual families and exclusive access to common land that should have been shared. (And prices have gone up: Original houses and condo units sell for well over $1,000,000, and a typical lot goes for $500,000). Above all, an authentic community failed to develop. Halprin acknowledged that the Sea Ranch did not have “a functional base” upon which a community could form. Although there was a common love for the place and shared aspirations for it, recreation, not work, was its foundation and has remained so. And strong feelings for the place have sometimes led to disagreements. Halprin acknowledges that “self-governance at the Sea Ranch has sometimes been difficult… rancorous, shrill.” Despite its unquestionable beauty, the Sea Ranch, he says, never formed a viable center to hold it together.

As one of the twentieth century’s most vital experiments in communal, ecological living, the Sea Ranch stands as an open question: “How can we live together?” This semester, in a studio run by Iñaki Ábalos, thirteen Harvard architecture students are reconsidering this question. The challenge, Abalos explains, is “one of the deepest paradoxes of our time.” The students’ task is to design a cluster of modest houses “where co-living and co-working are the basis of a new social structure.” They are questioning an all-too-typical style of development, Ábalos says, in which “the family has to be in limbo, protected from the city, with the car as their connection.” It is sometimes “a beautiful limbo,” he admits, but hardly conducive to the construction of vital community. Instead, Abalos asks the students “to construct a new ecology of humans and non-humans… an alternative commune, a co-living form that revises and updates the idea of a collective Palace.” To start, they critically examined American suburban development, considering its “disgraces” (particularly given the recent environmental tragedies of fire and flood that have destroyed so many lives in the suburbs, Ábalos points out) but also investigating some of its most innovative manifestations. They analyzed case studies and visited experimental suburbs near Boston—Frederick Law Olmsted’s failed development of World’s End in Hingham, and the old company town of North Easton, with its civic buildings by H. H. Richardson and well-built workers’ housing. The studio group also traveled to the West Coast to visit the Sea Ranch and an exhibition about it at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Sea Ranch. Architecture, Environment and Idealism .

Guiding the studio is an idea of “idiorrhythmy,” taken from Roland Barthes’ 1977 book How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces. The term conveys an understanding of harmonious conviviality in which individuals live according to their own patterns while accepting the living patterns of others. Barthes suggests that these interrelated rhythms develop communal bonds while assuring individual equanimity. The studio case studies and site visits seek architectural prototypes for this. At the Sea Ranch, students visited one such example: Condominium One, designed by Moore, Lyndon, Whitaker and Turnbull (MLTW) in 1965. One of the first constructions in the development, and certainly its best known, it exemplifies the experimental, ideological vision of the Sea Ranch design team. Condominium One resonates beautifully with the vast windblown landscape, its sloping roof-forms and weathered wood cladding offering an almost iconic rendition of environmental sympathy. It also binds people together. Built with “the footprint of a monastery,” as Ábalos describes it, its ten conjoined dwelling units cluster around a sheltered court. Inside, each unit contains two small aedicules that hold or frame particular activities—sleeping, cooking, conversing—so that even within family settings individual rhythms play out in their own domains.

Charles Moore owned Unit 9 of Condominium One for nearly thirty years, frequently re-painting walls, adjusting furniture, and adding decorative objects. The result was a highly idiosyncratic home, a manifestation of his own patterns of living within the collective. Not far from Condominium One, another idiorrhythmic prototype merges with the vegetation above the sea cliffs. Joseph Esherick & Associates built clusters of “Hedgerow Houses” protected by the wind-sculpted cypresses that ranchers had planted fifty years before. Their roofs mimic the sweep of the branches; dark wood cladding blends with the shadowed understory of the trees. Each house in the cluster defers to the others, sharing views and common space. The designers of the Sea Ranch hoped that in these clusters of homes, patterns of individual actions would bind with the complimentary life patterns of others and with the natural vitality of the site to shape a communal, ecological symphony.

While they may have fallen short of their highest aspirations, the legacy of the Sea Ranch designers continues in the research of Harvard’s graduate students. Perhaps, like Lawrence Halprin and his team nearly sixty years ago, braced against the wind, looking over the crashing waves toward the western horizon, these new designers will discover “an alternative to the suburbs capable of satisfying contemporary needs and aspirations.” Although this may have been merely the initial call of Professor Iñaki Abalos’s studio brief, after weeks of research the students have made it their own goal. Returning from California they will develop new models for co-living shaped by the past but also, Abalos explains, “connected with a broader sense of time.”

Images courtesy of the Lawrence Halprin Collection; The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania; University of California, Berkeley; and San Francisco Modern Museum of Art © Lawrence Halprin  

Continue reading about the course How to Live Together, the Department of Architecture’s 2019 course offerings or Iñaki Ábalos’ research. Student projects related to this course will be available after May 1, 2019. 

 

TUMI names Diane E. Davis one of 50 “remarkable women in transport”

The Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative (TUMI) has revealed its first-ever “Remarkable Women in Transport” report , and has included the Harvard University Graduate School of Design’s Diane E. Davis as one of its inaugural honorees. Davis joins 49 other visionary transit and transportation leaders, including Zipcar CEO Robin Chase and European Commissioner for Transport Violeta Bulc.

“To make the daily work of women who transform urban mobility more visible, we are proud to present the first TUMI Remarkable Women in Transport Publication,” TUMI notes on its website. TUMI continues in the publication’s introduction: “Furthermore, transport systems can only become truly inclusive and gender-responsive if the voices, perspectives, and experiences of women are reflected at all levels in the transport sector. Thus, as it is still a largely male-dominated field, it is imperative to focus on increasing the number of women working on transport.”

The full publication is available for free download via TUMI’s website .

At the GSD, Davis serves as Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism and Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design, a position she has held since 2015. She joined the GSD faculty in 2012, before which she served as the head of the International Development Group in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, where she also had a term as Associate Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. He research interests include the relations between urbanization and national development, comparative urban governance, socio-spatial practice in conflict cities, urban violence, and new territorial manifestations of sovereignty. Over the years she has written several books that examine the politics of urban policy and their impact on city form, the contributions of urban growth to national economic prosperity, the strategies and tactics used to transform urban transport, and the inter-relationships between cities and sovereignty.

Davis has recently completed two separate initiatives on which she was principal investigator: a three-year project funded by the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations (VREF) focused on the role of political leadership in transforming urban transport, and a three-year project funded by Mexico’s national workers’ housing agency (INFONAVIT) geared toward developing more sustainable social-housing policies for Mexican cities. She also serves as faculty director of the GSD’s Mexican Cities Initiative .

 

Miriam Alexandroff awarded the 2019 Kohn Pedersen Fox Paul Katz Fellowship

Harvard University Graduate School of Design degree candidate Miriam Alexandroff (MArch ’19) has been awarded the 2019 Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) Paul Katz Fellowship, an internationally competitive award established and administered by the KPF Foundation in honor of the life and work of former KPF Principal Paul Katz. Alexandroff is one of the two recipients this year, while the GSD’s Shining Sun (MArch ’19) was one of three Honorable Mentions.

The KPF Paul Katz Fellowship is given each year to assist international students in their pursuit of studying issues of global urbanism upon graduation from a masters of architecture program from one of the five East Coast schools at which Paul Katz studied or participated as a teacher. Scholars are selected by a jury of leading architects and urbanists appointed by the KPF Foundation on a rotating basis.

Alexandroff’s honor follows similar GSD participation in 2018, when Eduardo Martínez-Mediero Rubio (MArch ’19) was awarded one of three KPF Traveling Fellowships and Sonny Xu (MArch ’18, MLA ’18) received one of two KPF Paul Katz Fellowships.

Alexandroff was recently profiled by the GSD’s Work in Progress series, sharing her final project for the Fall 2018 option studio “UTOPIA/DYSTOPIA: Living Post-Work” led by Annabelle Selldorf.

Work in Progress: Siyu Liu’s Penn Station

Siyu Liu (MLA ’19) describes her final project for the option studio “Now Arriving: A Manhattan Transit Landscape” led by Gary R. Hilderbrand, fall 2018.

Assemblage, San Rocco, and the shifting value of architecture discourse

“Books and Looks” is a series of discussions at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design about the importance of architectural discourse. Its inaugural event was a conversation between K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, and Pier Paolo Tamburelli, Design Critic in Architecture, and was presented by Mark Lee, Chair of the Department of Architecture. Hays and Tamburelli’s publications, Assemblage and San Rocco , were launched nearly 25 years apart, but each had a hand in shaping the landscape of architecture criticism.

When Assemblage first published in 1986, the journal offered an alternative to the rigid typology that dominated critical thinking about architecture. It presented, sometimes for the first time, new works by Herzog & de Meuron, Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam, and Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, accompanied by grainy black-and-white images and dense theoretical text. “It was not trying too hard to show you what it was, which had a certain allure,” says Mark Lee. “The historians at that time would talk about typology, and typology is about rules. ‘If you make this kind of building, you have to follow these rules.’ Assemblage provided a way to circumvent the pure authority of history.”

The name Assemblage made reference to the collage-like assortment of architecture projects and essays the journal published. K. Michael Hays, who founded Assemblage with editor Alisha Kennedy (Catherine Ingraham would later join as co-editor in 1991), redefined architecture as “built discourse,” one medium among the many that comprised critical theoretical discourse. “The idea was to put together different modes of thought, and different kinds of presentations, and thereby endorse a way of producing—a way of thinking—rather than endorsing any individual project.”

The launch of Assemblage in 1986 followed closely on the heels of the shuttering of Oppositions , an architecture journal that published between 1973 and 1984 and that would later be credited with setting the stage for more widely recognized—and radicalized—journals like Assemblage and October . However, if the ambition of Oppositions was to liberate architecture discourse from the grips of late-modernist functionalism and systems theory, Assemblage sought to look further, beyond built works to the exploration of architecture as a subject of thought and mode of cultural production. “We were a generation fueled by post-structuralism, including psychoanalytical work as well as critical theory,” says Hays. “We were fueled by feminism, by queer theory, by everything that came out of post-structuralism but could be applied.”

By 2010, when Pier Paolo Tamburelli and his cohort launched Issue 0 of San Rocco—a collaborative publishing project produced by and for architecture practitioners—architecture discourse was engaging with an entirely different set of conditions. Printed matter, having languished in the shallows of a growing tide of digital information, was finding new prominence as a medium uniquely suited to fashionably unfashionable ideas. San Rocco offered a rejection of the digital, as well as an open-circuit communication channel between architects. Its focus was practice, not theory.

Ironically, it was the internet that accounted for San Rocco’s wide dissemination and subsequent success. Its contributors, cofounders, and readership were all drawn from the same well of emergent European architects. Each issue closed with a call for submissions. “Like the comic books of the 1970s that told the last three-quarters of the story and the first quarter of the next, San Rocco had a line of continuity that ran through its issues,” says Tamburelli. With themes like objective beauty, islands, common sense, and intellectual resistance, “it established an ongoing dialogue [between readers and contributors] that was confrontational and animated.”

Assemblage stopped publishing in 2000 after 41 issues, and San Rocco will publish its final issue later this year. Both journals exist as physical archives of the modes of thought that defined their eras. Both created an important means of communication between far-flung practitioners and thinkers; both suffered from a dearth of resources but made good use of the freedom that came with few financial ties. Both, as Mark Lee says, “reflect the times they were published in, but also shaped those times.”

New logo a “gesture toward visibility” for New York’s hundreds of privately owned public spaces

Whether unavoidable or hidden, so-called privately owned public spaces (or POPS) dot the nation’s cities and downtowns. They are plazas, arcades, atriums, rooftop terraces, and mini-parks, some located within and some outside private buildings or property, but all are required to be open to the public under a city’s zoning ordinance or land-use laws.

The Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Jerold S. Kayden popularized the term “POPS” with his 2000 book, Privately Owned Public Space: The New York City Experience . Now, Kayden wants to promote the spaces themselves, many of which lack any signage or suggestion of public availability.

To that end, Kayden’s New York-based Advocates for Privately Owned Public Space is collaborating with the New York City Department of City Planning (DCP) and the Municipal Art Society of New York to find a fitting logo for use on legally mandated signage that informs the public that a POPS site is open for use. Kayden and collaborators have launched a design competition in pursuit of such a logo, inviting applicants to apply by March 15.

“As POPS have grown in number and diversity of design and use, the time has come to explore a new logo design that graphically represents the evolving nature of POPS and that creates a unified visual identity for the City’s POPS program,” reads the competition website.

Submissions will be posted online on Wednesday, March 20, reads the official website, and displayed at a public exhibit in March. Members of the public will be invited to vote online for their favorite logo through Tuesday, April 2. The competition will name up to three awardees, and the Director of New York’s DCP may choose from among them for a new official New York POPS logo to grace signs at the city’s 550-plus POPS sites.

This gesture toward visibility follows last September’s New York DCP release of an interactive map cataloging the city’s hundreds of POPS. Such POPS have been an integral part of New York’s zoning process since their introduction in the city’s 1961 zoning code, in which POPS were incorporated as incentive zoning to developers: The city would offer private developers a zoning bonus of 10 rentable office or residential square feet in return for one square foot of plaza, and, while the developers would legally own and maintain the plaza, such spaces would need to be open to the public 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Now, New York’s POPS tally nearly 4 million square feet of space, or about 80 acres—but, a 2017 audit by New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer of 333 POPS found that 182 of them were not fully compliant with the law, obstructing or restricting entry by the public in some way. The city has been engaged in a tussle with the Trump Organization since the 1980s over the removal of a bench in New York’s Trump Tower—on which Kayden had some ruminations.

Like New York, other cities have undertaken efforts to chronicle and publicize their POPS sites, among them San Francisco, Seattle, and Toronto. Boston might need to catch up a bit: In 2015, Kayden observed in Architecture Boston magazine that the City of Boston could further publicize those POPS to the public who could use and engage them. He also joined Radio Boston host Meghna Chakrabarti for a walking tour of some of Boston’s little-known (and better-known) POPS, like Post Office Square Park, the 14th-floor observation deck at Independence Wharf and Foster’s Rotunda on the 9th floor of 30 Rowes Wharf.

POPS are among Kayden’s many research and public-service interests. Kayden is the Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design at the GSD, and his teaching and scholarship address issues of land use and environmental law, public and private real estate development, public space, and urban disasters and climate change. As urban planner and lawyer, Professor Kayden has advised governments, non-governmental organizations, and real estate developers in the United States and around the world. He has consulted for the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, the United States Agency for International Development, and the United Nations Development Programme, among others, working principally in Armenia, China, Nepal, Russia, and Ukraine.

Kayden has previously served as co-chair of the GSD’s Department of Urban Planning and Design, he was recognized schoolwide as “Teacher of the Year.” He earned his undergraduate, law, and city and regional planning degrees from Harvard, and subsequently was law clerk to Judge James L. Oakes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court.