Jeffry Burchard co-chairs year-long BSA series on challenges, changes within contemporary practice

What is the contemporary state of architecture practice? How must practitioners respond to changes in technology, production, and collaboration? Hosted by the Boston Society of Architects, and co-chaired by Assistant Professor in Practice Jeffry Burchard (MArch ’08), Now Practice Now is taking up these foundational questions through a yearlong series of workshops and events that is now underway.

There have been three workshops offered so far this year: STUFF, which looked at what designers are making and why they are making it; TURF, which considered where and how designers are working; and CASH, a deep-dive into how today’s design work is supported. Listen to podcast recordings of the workshops.  

“We believe that in these canonical question lie many of the problems and solutions that are center stage in practice today: equity, inclusion, design’s ambiguity, focus on technology, environmental responsibility to name a few,” Burchard says.

On Friday, October 19, Now Practice Now will hold a summit at the BSA Space to consider and map out links between core aspects of practice and the issues facing designers today. Outcomes from the event will be collected for a publication on the current state of architecture practice.

The summit touches on questions of contemporary architecture practice that captivate many observers within and outside the field. The GSD is producing a parallel symposium on the topic, entitled “PRACTICE: Outside In | Inside Out,” scheduled for Friday, October 12. That event will consider discourse around today’s design practice in two parts: the external pressures, taken up in “Building Practice: Ethics, Agency, and Labor,” and internal forces considered during “The Architect’s Arsenal: Tools and Strategies.” The symposium is sponsored by the Carl M. Sapers Ethics in Practice Fund, and co-hosted by the GSD Practice Platform and the Department of Architecture.

Other GSD faculty on the Now Practice Now committee include Jenny French (MArch ’11) and David Gamble (MAUD ’97). Anda French is co-charing the series with Burchard, in close collaboration with BSA president Jay Wickersham (MArch ’83, JD ’94).

Mark Lee Appointed Chair of Department of Architecture

Harvard University Graduate School of Design (Harvard GSD) announces the appointment of Mark Lee (MArch ’95) as Chair of the Department of Architecture, effective July 1, 2018. Lee has taught at Harvard GSD since 2013 and was recently named Professor in Practice of Architecture, an appointment that also will take effect July 1, 2018. Lee is a principal and founding partner of Johnston Marklee, established in 1998.

Lee succeeds K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, who has taught at Harvard GSD since 1988 and served as Interim Chair of the Department of Architecture since 2016.

“I am delighted that Mark Lee has agreed to serve as the next Chair of the Department of Architecture,” says Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design at Harvard GSD. “Johnston Marklee is one of the most talented practices currently working in the United States and beyond, and Mark deeply understands the contemporary world of architecture. His vision and leadership will enormously benefit our students and our School in the years to come. As we welcome Mark to this role, I am also incredibly grateful to Michael Hays for his unwavering and ongoing dedication to the Department of Architecture and the GSD.”

“I am honored to be entrusted with the chairmanship of the Department of Architecture at the GSD,” Lee says. “In advancing both the discipline and the profession of architecture, the Department has been without parallel; I look forward to building upon the formidable achievements of my predecessors and this deeply-rooted tradition of excellence. We stand on the threshold of a very challenging, but exciting, future. I feel confident that architecture’s best days lie ahead.”

Lee is a principal and founding partner of Johnston Marklee, which since its establishment in 1998 has been recognized nationally and internationally with over 30 major awards. Projects undertaken by Johnston Marklee span seven countries throughout North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Current projects include the renovation of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which opened in September 2017; the new UCLA Graduate Art Studios campus in Culver City, California; and the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, to be completed in 2018. Along with partner Sharon Johnston (MArch ’95), Lee served as Co-Artistic Director of the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial, and participated in the GSD’s symposium at the Biennial last September.

Prior to his appointment as Professor in Practice at Harvard GSD, Lee held the position of Frank Gehry Chair at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, and Cullinan Guest Professor at Rice University School of Architecture, in addition to appointments at ETH (Zurich) and UCLA. Lee has taught as a design critic at the GSD since 2013, and has served as a visiting critic at institutions around the world. He was also a member of Harvard GSD’s 2018 Wheelwright Prize jury. Lee earned a Master in Architecture from the GSD in 1995.

GSD introduces The Future of the American City initiative, with support from Miami’s Knight Foundation

The Harvard University Graduate School of Design announces a multi-year, multi-city endeavor entitled The Future of the American City, an urban study initiative aimed at helping cities tackle urgent challenges. Building on the GSD’s unique, multi-disciplinary model, the effort will use architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning and design to come up with actionable, efficient solutions that take into account community needs.

Research on Miami will form the first phase of the project; cities of future investigation include Los Angeles, Detroit, and Boston.

To engage Miami residents in creating new approaches to address pressing urban issues—including affordable housing, transportation and sea level rise—the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is providing $1 million in support to the GSD and its Future of the American City initiative. With the funding, the school will embed urban researchers in Miami and Miami Beach to better understand the cities’ opportunities and challenges, and launch a multi-year study toward building solutions shaped by residents.

“The Harvard Graduate School of Design is eager to partner with Miami and Miami Beach and to bring the school’s design expertise to bear on a set of complex issues affecting nearly everyone living in those communities on a daily basis,” said Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean and Alexander and Victoria Wiley professor of design at the GSD. “In employing the model of the School’s design studios, our goal is to work across multiple fields of knowledge and research and develop a set of actionable, design-based recommendations to share with city and community leaders.”

The Miami-focused research will be led by Mostafavi as well as Harvard Graduate School of Design professors Charles Waldheim, John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture, and Jesse M. Keenan, Lecturer in Architecture. The study will include a three-part series of courses being led at the school. This fall, a course will focus on mobility and transit in Miami, particularly Brickell, with a site visit in October 2018. A second course in Fall 2019 will examine the roles of higher education and medical institutions in Miami’s economy, and a third in Fall 2020 will focus on the roles of Miami’s various ethnic neighborhoods in shaping the city’s cultural identity.

Jon Lott, Andrew Holder, and Eric Höweler among winners of Architect magazine’s 65th annual Progressive Architecture Awards

Among the 10 projects Architect magazine has honored with its 65th annual Progressive Architecture Awards are three by Harvard Graduate School of Design faculty. The three GSD honorees are assistant professor of architecture/MArch I Program Director Jon Lott (MArch ’05) for “Pioneertown House”; associate professor of architecture Eric Höweler for “Float Lab”; and assistant professor of architecture Andrew Holder for “Restaurant in Los Angeles.”

“There is a thrilling moment in every creative endeavor, when an idea has been wholly fleshed out and developed, but not yet realized in physical form. That particular moment of anticipation, of innovation on the cusp, is what the Progressive Architecture Awards celebrate,” Architect magazine says. “For 65 years and counting, the P/A Awards has served as a crystal ball for the built environment, revealing the influences, typologies, forms, and techniques of tomorrow.”

Lott designed the winning “Pioneertown House ” through his firm PARA Project, intended for a site in the “seemingly alien landscape” of the Mohave Desert, in California’s Pioneertown. The particular site is a 5-acre boulder parcel owned by a Los Angeles couple seeking a weekend getaway and artist studio.

Lott took the existing cabin, built in the 1950s, and designed “a house around this house.” As the firm’s project description reads, “[Pioneertown House’s] organization takes cues from the natural landscape. But rather than piles of boulders (objects) it experiments with piles of rooms (voids). It plays with a ‘pilgrimage’ for these domestic types: rooms, courts, closets, counters, bookcases, pantries… All are actors. All pile and gather around the homestead.

“The separation and movement between them makes common ground between interior and landscape,” the firm continues. “Each of the rooms relates to the natural in very particular ways.”

Awards juror Florian Idenburg, associate professor in practice of architecture, noted the project “is formally very interesting: a collage of almost found spaces assembled into a whole. There is also something really elegant about how the interior and exterior blend together.”

Höweler takes a pier along Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River as the site for Höweler + Yoon Architecture’s “Float Lab ,” which garnered an honorable mention in this year’s awards. Höweler designed the project alongside Höweler + Yoon’s J. Meejin Yoon (MAUD ’97).

“Float Lab” comprises a downward-sloping path from the pier’s furthest end, eventually semi-submerging pedestrians under the water level; the river water is held back by a steel wall lining the walkway, and floatation is achieved by a ballast that maintains the structure at the water’s surface.

As visitors proceed, they hear sounds of the river’s current and splashes via speakers inside the promenade.

“Using the site of a polluted urban river system which continues to undergo clean-up efforts from coal mining and other industrial manufacturing by-products, ‘Float Lab’ proposes to create an environmental installation, to re-experience the river in a completely new way,” reads the firm’s project description. “The resulting design allows the public to experience a significant urban American waterway and its ecology in a manner that ties environmental science to environmental art, and allows us to learn about how perception can influence stewardship.”

“I think it’s very topical, and I think it’s interesting how it addresses the issue of rising tides,” noted juror Reto Geiser. “I imagine being there with your head just above the water is a powerful experience.”

Also receiving an honorable mention, Holder’s “Restaurant in Los Angeles ” presents a freestanding, two-story, indoor/outdoor restaurant in Venice Beach, California. The project arose from an unusual commission: design on spec, for a developer seeking to fill the space with a concept restaurant.

“Restaurant in Los Angeles” aims to create a sense of space and interior without a permanent envelope. To do so, Holder and LADG employed a sequence of intersecting barrel vaults to create a spatial experience of “niches and episodes,” heightened by construction technique and materiality.

With an eye to sustainability, the building is designed to take advantage of its own thermal mass: concrete and masonry systems hold down the maximum daytime temperature while re-radiating heat as the air temperature cools at night. This and other passive systems are augmented by a hydronic heating and cooling system embedded in the concrete that will raise or lower the temperature of the mass a few degrees during the day.

Read more about each of these projects, as well as the seven other awardees, in Architect magazine’s full feature .

The GSD honors the life, legacy, and inspiration of John Portman (1924–2017)

Last October the GSD’s Dean Mohsen Mostafavi sat down with Metropolis Magazine and Mr. Portman’s son, Jack Portman (MArch ’73), to discuss the architect’s impact and the 2017 book Portman’s America & Other Speculations (Harvard University GSD and Lars Müller Publishers), edited by Mostafavi. Read the interview here.

Read about the legacy of John Portman (1924–2017) in Architect Magazine in his obituary “Atlanta Architect John Portman Dies at 93 .”

Has “climate resiliency” lost its meaning? Jesse M. Keenan and Chris Reed discuss in Metropolis and elsewhere

As Mimi Zeiger observes in Metropolis , natural disasters occupy our cultural consciousness with mounting regularity and intensity. These scenarios appear to be increasing in frequency, and advances in media technology mean they are documented, shared, and discussed with greater speed and spread.

With an eye toward the intersection of natural-disaster risk and the built environment, Zeiger and the designers she interviews note that the concept of climate resiliency may prove less constructive than one of climate adaptation.

Harvard Graduate School of Design faculty across departments have woven questions and discussions of climate adaptation, risk, and resiliency into studio work at the School. Among them are Jesse M. Keenan and Chris Reed, both of whom spoke with Zeiger for her Metropolis piece and have edited recent books on climate-adaptation projects and proposals.

Keenan teaches courses and conducts research in the fields of urban development and climate adaptation, and has spoken widely on the risks posed by climate change. He’s currently the editor for the Built Environment category of the 4th U.S. National Climate Assessment. Following previous federal public service appointments, Keenan currently leads adaptation efforts for a state governor and was recently nominated by the U.N. to serve as Chair of Adaptation Finance for IPCC Cities.

In Metropolis, Zeiger draws from Keenan’s recent book Blue Dunes: Climate Change by Design  (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2017; co-edited by Keenan and Claire Weisz), which looks at the development of WXY Architecture and West 8’s post–Hurricane Sandy proposal, also entitled Blue Dunes. The proposal calls for a chain of artificial barrier islands centered around the New York/New Jersey Harbor in the Atlantic Ocean, intended as a multi-purpose line of defense against coastal storms.

“People need to change the way that they produce and consume in response or in preparation to climate change,” Keenan writes in Blue Dunes.

Speaking with Metropolis earlier this year about the book, Keenan discussed the synergies, and conflicts, between climate resilience and climate adaptation as concepts.

“There are different categorical variants for resilience. …. They all mean slightly different things, but they primarily reflect this idea of a single equilibrium, which is that there’s something inherent in the processes of resilience where one reverts to the relative status quo,” he said.

Regarding adaptation, Keenan continued, “Adaptation, though, is more fundamentally about the incremental, transitional, and transformational definitions of system processes that transform us and bring us to a wholly different domain of operation. In the built environment, this means that we have to build in different places, with different densities, different infrastructure, and different communities. We have to transform our way of life. Perpetuating ways of life only through certain types of resilience will never address our underlying vulnerabilities.”

These and other topics are bound to lie at the core of Keenan’s Spring 2018 course, “Climate Change Resilience and Adaptation.” Read about Keenan’s thoughts on “climate gentrification” and the case of Miami.

Reed is professor in practice of landscape architecture as well as co-director of the Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design degree program at the GSD. Reed’s current teaching and research examine the role of landscape in imagining and structuring the contemporary city, within the context of climate change, social and economic inequities, and increasing cultural diversity. Reed and his firm Stoss Lansdscape Urbanism have been recognized for, among other accomplishments, their innovation in using landscape as a mitigating force.

Among other work, Reed’s Trinity Waterfront project in Dallas addressed a vacant flood zone of land that had divided downtown Dallas from Trinity River. The original RFP asked designers to connect the downtown area to the waterfront, but Reed and his firm Stoss instead expanded the landscape by drawing the river and wetlands into the city, while extending the city out into the flood zone.

Earlier in 2017, the City of Boston released a public RFP around the city’s Imagine Boston 2030 plan, which concerns itself with a good deal of riverfront development. Of the six neighborhoods named in Imagine Boston 2030 for waterfront renewal, two—East Boston and Charlestown—were awarded to Stoss. Read about Reed’s 2016 proposal to reimagine a mile-long stretch of Los Angeles freeway as a vibrant, eco-sensitive public space.

“Resiliency has gone the way of sustainability—it has lost its meaning,” Reed tells Zeiger. “I subscribe to an ecologist’s definition of resiliency: the ability to adapt to new conditions. A wetland, for instance, changes and evolves over time.”

Reed’s Fall 2016 GSD option studio “Retooling Metropolis: Working Landscapes, Emergent Urbanism” examined pre-Hurricane Harvey Houston with an eye toward using landscape to address modern-day challenges, including climate. The studio produced a number of proposals that reimagined industrial sites along Houston’s Buffalo Bayou as socially connective, and ecologically constructive, powerhouses.

The studio’s output and discourse was catalogued in an eponymous GSD Studio Report publication. The book has been recognized as one of “25 Architecture and Design Books to Read This Fall” by Metropolis and one of the year’s “notable developments in landscape architecture” by the Huffington Post .

While climate change and resultant risks remain complex, approaches and solutions seem to hinge on interdisciplinary synthesis and collaboration.

Ronald M. Druker Makes Historic $15M Gift to the Harvard Graduate School of Design

The Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) announced today that it has received a $15 million gift from Ronald M. Druker (LF ’76) and the Bertram A. and Ronald M. Druker Charitable Foundation. The gift provides the necessary seed funding for the GSD to launch an ambitious renewal and new building expansion of its main facility, Gund Hall, to support focused work in design innovation. In recognition of the gift—the largest made to date to the GSD’s current Grounded Visionaries campaign as well as the largest single gift from an individual in the school’s history—the GSD will name its primary exhibition gallery the Druker Design Gallery.

Druker’s gift provides the foundation for the school’s effort to reimagine the role and ambitions of design education in the twenty-first century and in the context of a leading research university, beginning with the school’s physical plant. The success of the Grounded Visionaries campaign—the GSD’s portion of the university-wide Harvard Campaign—has put the school in a position to think openly and fundamentally about future practices of design pedagogy, their integration into research in the sciences and the arts, and their capacity to have an impact on practitioners working at all scales of the built environment.

Toward that end, for the past several years, Druker has worked closely alongside Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design at the GSD, to help define and develop a strategy for the future spatial and facility needs of the school, taking into account the school’s increasing focus on design innovation. Druker’s gift will carry forward planning for a new building expansion of Gund Hall.

The Druker Design Gallery features the work of faculty, students, and researchers and scholars from across the design fields. Located at Gund Hall, the gallery serves as a site for experimentation and explication of ideas and plays a fundamental role in the pedagogical life of the school. The gallery is open to the public, and has a long and rich history of exhibitions that engage the historical and contemporary conditions of design discourse across physical, digital, and spatial media.

Together with the Harvard Art Museums and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, the Druker Design Gallery stands as part of Harvard University’s arts corridor along Quincy Street in Cambridge. Highlights from the gallery’s past exhibitions include: “Utopia Across Scales,” featuring a selection of drawings by Kenzo Tange (2009); “The Divine Comedy,” a three-part exhibition featuring works by Olafur Eliasson, Tomas Saraceno, and Ai Weiwei (2011); “Motion Matters: UNStudio” (2011); “Transformative Mobilities: Porto & Medellín,” featuring two projects awarded the 2013 Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design (2013); “Architectural Ethnography,” featuring the work of Atelier Bow-Wow (2017); “Soft Thresholds: the Works of RMA” (2016); and “Landscape: Fabric of Details: the Works of Toru Mitani and Studio On Site” (2017), among many others.

“I am delighted that this generous gift from Ron, one of the GSD’s most prominent, committed, and long-standing advocates and supporters, will provide resources crucial to helping us move forward our plans to build new, innovative spaces of research and learning,” said Mostafavi. “It is equally meaningful and fitting for the school to be able to name its primary exhibition space in his honor.”

“For more than four decades, the GSD has played an integral role in both my professional and personal life. I’m pleased to have this opportunity to serve as a catalyst in creating the environment that fosters innovative design education,” said Druker. “This gift reflects my admiration and respect for the school, Dean Mostafavi, and his vision for the future.”

“It is only through the dedication of bold thinkers like Ron Druker that allows the GSD to think audaciously about shaping the future of its campus,” said GSD Grounded Visionaries campaign co-chair John K. F. Irving (AB ’83, MBA ’89). “It is an honor to recognize Ron’s remarkable generosity through the naming of the Druker Design Gallery, which will have an extraordinary impact on the arts and design at the GSD, at Harvard, and for the wider community.”

Though best known across the Boston area for transformational developments like The Heritage on the Garden and Atelier|505, Druker has an unyielding passion for architecture and design that is best manifested in his more than 42-year relationship with the GSD. His relationship with the school began in 1975, when Druker became one of the early inductees into the school’s prestigious Loeb Fellowship program, a time during which he first articulated many of the principles that define not only his projects, but also his perspective on urban planning and design across the region.

Continuing from 1975 to 1983, Druker taught as a member of the school’s faculty in urban design. Cherishing his growing connection to the GSD, Druker established an endowment creating the Druker Traveling Fellowship in 1986. The program reflects Druker’s firm belief that travel and exposure to different points of view are critical components to the development of one’s professional practice. Since then, the fellowship has supported a corps of rising designers who, following the example set by Druker and his father (Bertram Druker), are dedicated to advancing the study and practice of urban design in the United States and around the world. Druker has formed and maintained lasting friendships with many past fellows.

More recently, Druker has served on the school’s Visiting Committee, on the Dean’s Advisory Council, and as Chair of the school’s Strategic Planning Committee. Druker’s gift to the GSD represents not only his deep involvement in and connection to the school over a period of more than four decades, but also his continued commitment to supporting education in the arts and cultural production across several of the Boston area’s leading institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Public Library.

Read more about this story in the Boston Globe and the Harvard Gazette .

 

Ideas (and sneakers) in the air for Virgil Abloh

As the Harvard Gazette notes, “It was probably the first time a Harvard lecture ended with audience members tossing their sneakers toward the podium.”

Such was how Virgil Abloh’s October 26 talk at the Harvard Graduate School of Design reached its conclusion. Entitled “Insert Complicated Title Here,” Abloh’s talk encouraged the packed Piper Auditorium crowd (some attendees traveled from as far away as Syracuse, New York, to attend the talk) to find their creative voices and directions. Founder of the Milan-based fashion label Off-White, and collaborator with the likes of Ikea, Nike, and Kanye West, Abloh also passed around different prototypes of sneakers he has in the works, and shared photographs of concepts for a forthcoming furniture collection.

Abloh, who holds a Master in Architecture from Illinois Institute of Technology, noted he’s been inspired by the work of Rem Koolhaas, Donald Judd, and Jim Joe, among others. View Abloh’s full GSD lecture via the GSD’s YouTube channel .

“He’s a contemporary young voice who can disrupt. Architecture needs some disruption,” Eric Höweler, associate professor of architecture, told the Gazette. “Design has never been as well-regarded as it is today. He’s connecting to people, to clients, to fashion. It’s great for people to think big about design, not just architecture.”

Toward the lecture’s end, Abloh asked for the return for a sneaker prototype that he had shared with the audience. In return, he offered to autograph the first few sneakers that made their way to the podium. Ultimately, he autographed more than a few.

Read the Gazette’s full review via its website .

The Forest for the Trees: exploring the interplay of art, history, and science at Harvard Forest

Taking a walk through Harvard Forest  is like traveling back in time. Eighteenth century stone walls spotted with moss and lichen reveal the land’s agricultural past. They tell the story of many failed attempts to tame the soil and impose boundaries, and of the forest’s dogged will to persist. Every now and then, sunlight strikes through the dense canopy, creating a sense of primordial otherworldliness. But there are more recent signs of human intervention here.

Since 1907, the 4,000-acre parcel in Petersham, MA has been the site of interdisciplinary research and education programs investigating the ways in which physical, biological, and human systems interact to change our earth. One of North America’s oldest managed forests, it is at once a living laboratory and a museum.

According to Sonja Dümpelmann, associate professor of landscape architecture and head of the MDes concentration in History and Philosophy of Design, “Studying trees in time and place offers the opportunity to address questions and topics that straddle landscape, forest, environmental, and cultural history.”

Coinciding with a recent lecture by Dümpelmann on the use of trees in art, students received a tour of Hemlock Hospice, a two-mile interpretive trail by artist David Buckley Borden. Hemlock Hospice blends art, science, and design to chronicle the demise of eastern hemlock and to address larger issues of climate change, human impact, and the future of New England forests.

2017 Black in Design Conference examines where and how design and activism intersect

Empowering; uplifting; sobering; timely; necessary. An event that evades simple distillation, the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s 2017 Black in Design Conference evoked a range of immediate reactions, as well as a charge for sustained dialogue over the many issues it positioned within its programming.

Organized by the GSD’s African American Student Union (AASU), the 2017 Black in Design Conference was inspired by its inaugural predecessor, held in 2015, but was charged with urgency given the shifts in the nation’s cultural and political climate over the past two years. With a theme of “Designing Resistance, Building Coalitions,” Black in Design 2017 sought to recognize the contributions of the African diaspora to the design fields, as well as to “explore design as resistance and show how designers are advocates and activists”—a mandate relevant to the country’s current political tenor. (View the entire 2017 Black in Design Conference via the GSD’s YouTube channel, where the full conference is available and organized by session, and see a photo gallery of select moments below.)

GSD student leaders from AASU began conceptualizing Black in Design 2017 in fall 2016, spending much of the following months in dialogue over which speakers to invite, which themes to prioritize, and how to scaffold the wealth of ideas and thematic touch points within the context of a three-day conference. Organizers began their planning work in earnest in March 2017.

Around that point, conference organizers coalesced as a planning committee, including Natasha Hicks (MUP/MDes ’19), Marcus Mello (MArch/MUP ’18), Amanda Miller (MDes ’17), Armando Sullivan (MUP ’18), and Chanel Williams (MUP ’18). The committee were advised by collaborators including urban planner Justin Garrett Moore, who spoke at the 2015 Black in Design Conference, and 2015 conference co-chair Courtney Sharpe (MUP ’16).

While the 2015 conference proposed scalar themes—starting with discussion of buildings, then moving upward in scale to neighborhoods, cities, and regions—this year’s organizers chose value-driven topics to structuring the conference’s various sessions: Exploring and Visualizing Identities; Communicating Values; Mobilizing and Organizing; and Design Futuring.

These themes were structured to form conversations around topics and skills integral to so-called “design activism,” according to conference organizers. (Design activism refers to the activation of designers’ creative agency toward catalyzing and generating alternatives to normalized ways of living, working, and thinking—or, applying design creativity and strategy toward proposing new ways of living and thinking.)

Powerful keynotes framed the entire conference; LAXArt executive director Hamza Walker opened the conference on Friday evening, October 6, and activist DeRay Mckesson provided closing thoughts at the end of Saturday, October 7. As in 2015, sessions were interwoven with interludes that enriched discourse as much as they entertained audiences; some of this year’s diversions included yoga, dance, and spoken-word performances.

Throughout the conference, the core thematic sessions enabled conversations that delved into given subject matter. Panelists included designers and leaders from across the country—as did the audience. (A number of schools and organizations, including Washington University in St. Louis’s Sam Fox School and Bowie State University, arranged group travel for their respective attendees.)

In addition to two noteworthy keynote addresses, a Saturday morning presentation from speaker Courtney D. Cogburn, during the “Exploring and Visualizing Identities” session, struck many conference attendees and organizers as a highlight. Cogburn, whose research focuses broadly on the role of racism in producing racial inequities in health, offered a virtual-reality presentation illustrating day-to-day experiences of an African-American male, and discussed connections among social inequity, the built environment, and health and the body.

Another moment that resonated post-conference: GSD professor Toni L. Griffin’s Sunday morning Just City Lab workshop. Among other activities, Griffin runs the GSD’s Just City Lab , one of the School’s nine such “Design Labs” that synthesize theoretical and applied research and knowledge. Griffin’s Just City Lab addresses some of the themes and questions that Griffin has worked with over the course of her career: how design and planning contribute to the conditions of justice and injustice in cities, neighborhoods, and the public realm. Griffin and the Lab ask: would we design differently if equality, inclusion, and equity were the primary drivers behind design?

During her Sunday presentation, Griffin asked categories of individuals to stand up in the audience.

“I need the black brothers to stand up,” she began.

“I need the women in this room to stand up,” she continued.

“If you are a proud member of the LGBTQ community, I need you to stand up.

“If you are a person who practices a religion that is not Christianity, please stand up.

“If you are a person in this room who lives in this country but was not born in this country, please stand up.”

With nearly the entirety of Piper Auditorium’s audience on their feet, Griffin asked the room to raise their fists, and declared: “You are the people who live in fear in this country every day. You are who the ‘just city’ is for.”

“It is hard to define the emotion in the room while this happened,” Hicks reflects. “I think it was a moment for us all to collectively embrace our fear and also reclaim our agency to do something about it. Toni could not have closed out the program in a more beautiful way.”

In navigating the conference’s ripple effects and forecasting its future, organizers are currently focused on working with the 2017 conference’s immediate momentum and building broad coalitions. As an ongoing feature, the exhibition “Real Talk” was unveiled on Gund Hall’s Experiments Wall, inviting participants to capture and share reflections from the conference and beyond. (An evening event on October 26 with current Loeb Fellow Eric Williams will expand upon the exhibition with a session of “connected storytelling,” inviting participants to each offer a five-minute personal story.)

One hope for organizers is that the conference serves as a jumping-off point for creating coalitions, especially in the communities where conference participants live and work. BlackSpace NYC, which presented during Sunday’s sessions, offers one such example of cross-organizational coalition building; following the conference, a sister organization in Chicago took root.

To look ahead, though, involves a measure of looking back.

“One thing that is so special about Black in Design 2017 is that it did not really begin when we started planning, or even with the 2015 conference,” says Mello. “It started from the generations of black designers who have broken barriers to inspire us to enter these design professions.”

Learn more about the 2017 Black in Design Conference via its website , and learn more about the African American Student Union via the group’s website .

View the entire 2017 Black in Design Conference via the GSD’s YouTube channel, where the full conference  is available and organized by session.