Department of Landscape Architecture announces 2019 Penny White Project Fund recipients

The Harvard University Graduate School of Design’s Department of Landscape Architecture has announced this year’s recipients of the Penny White Project Fund. This grant program was established by White’s family in 1976 to “help carry forward Penny’s ideal of a culture which emphasizes a close relationship between people and nature in a cohesive living environment.” (Winifred G. “Penny” White had just completed her second year in the GSD’s landscape architecture program when she died suddenly of leukemia in 1976.)

Eighteen projects have been announced in honor of the fund’s 42nd anniversary. The winning proposals were selected through an adjudication process based on originality and innovation of projects, with an eye to their contribution to pressing challenges related to the fields of urbanism, landscape, ecology. The regions of research for the selected student projects span the planet and address a range of critical conditions, technologies, and processes relevant to the advancement of the discipline of landscape architecture and contemporary urbanization today.

“From the fracking landscapes of oil extraction in the Argentinian Patagonia to the peatland ecosystems of carbon sequestration, from the submarine landscapes of digital networks in the Mediterranean to the melting glaciers of the Rocky Mountains, from post Cold War era military landscapes in Asia to small agricultural communities in Mexico, from queer ecologies to rivers with legal person status, this 42nd edition of the Penny White Project Fund has awarded an extraordinary set of proposals,” remarks the Fund’s 2019 selection committee. “Working with a wide variety of geographic conditions and research methods, these 2019 projects constitute a great reflection on the many different ways that design contributes to a more just distribution of the world’s resources, and will help to expand the Penny White Project’s legacy towards a better understanding of the complexities of our contemporary environment.”

The following GSD degree candidates will receive project funding for 2019:

Colin Chadderton (MLA ’20) for “Sensors in the Landscape: A Literature Review of Current Sensor Deployment in Landscapes, and Three Case Studies of their Application in Peatlands”

Kira Clingen (MLA ’20) and Edyth Jostol (MLA ’20) for “Falling Stands: The Role of Climate Change, Cultivation and Culture surrounding Cryptomeria Japonica in the 21st century”

Armida Fernández (MDes RR ’20) and Luis Enrique Flores (MLA ’19) for “Designing with Communities of the Agricultural Industry in Mexico”

Dana Hills (MLA ’20) for “Newborn Lakes in Glacier National Park: Investigating the Succession of Lakes Created by the Acceleration of Glacial Melting”

Zoe Holland (MLA ’20) and McKenna Mitchell (MLA ’20) for “Earth, Wind, and Fiber: Imaging Marseille’s Digital Landscape”

Cecilia Huber (MLA ’20) for “Patchwork Horizon: Patterns of Resource Conservation and Farm Subsidies in the American Prairie Landscape”

Kimberley Huggins (MLA ’20) for “River as a Person”

Malika Leiper (MUP ’19) and Connie Trinh (MLA ’20) for “Urban Fabrics: Garments, Textiles and Urbanization in Cambodia”

Ting Liang (MLA and MAUD ’19) for “The Socialist Utopia: Reconciliation Between City and Countryside Field Investigation of Preexisting People’s Communes in Rural China”

Jeffrey S. Nesbit (DDes ’20) for “Soil for Space: A Critical History of Earthmoving at Cape Canaveral”

Adam Kai Chi Ng (MLA ’19) and Qiaoqi Dai (MLA ’19) and Xiwei Shen (MLA ’19) for “Eco-Immigrant”

Stefano Romagnoli (MLA ’19) and Soledad Patiño (MAUD ’20) for “Fracking Landscapes: The Vaca Muerta Case during the World’s Energy Transition”

Kari Roynesdal (MLA ’20) for “Queer Ecologies: Controversial Human + Plant Communities”

Zishen Wen (MLA ’19) for “Brownfield on Extraterritoriality: Waste Disposed of in Global, Recycled in Rural China”

Chohao Victor Wu (MLA ’19) for “Camouflage Island: Re-Imagining the Contested Landscape of Kinmen”

Ziwei Zhang (MDes ULE ’20) for “Whose Maps are These? Mapping versus Indigenous Forest Spatiality in West Kalimantan, Indonesia”

This year, the Penny White Fund has also awarded two projects as part of the Penny White GSD-Courances Design Residency program:

Michael Cafiero (MLA ’20) for “Regenerative Connections”

Yoni Angelo Carnice (MLA ’20) for “The World Was My Garden”

Rosi Braidotti on collective positivity in the face of human extinction 

We do not have time for entrenched antagonisms or building communities that bask in apocalyptic melancholia, says philosopher Rosi Braidotti, ahead of her lecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. If we are to survive the convergence of the fourth Industrial Revolution and the human-instigated sixth mass extinction, she argues, then both the people currently living on the margins as well as those in power must work together, locally and globally, to formulate creative solutions.

As an Italian-born, Australian-raised, Sorbonne-educated theorist who is a Distinguished Professor at Utrecht University—where she has taught since 1988—Rosi Braidotti is herself a living manifestation of the “nomadic thought” that is at the foundation of much of her work. In numerous books, such as Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (1994), The Posthuman (2013), and the forthcoming Posthuman Knowledge (2019), Braidotti’s nomadism objects to fixed identities and dialectical oppositions, whether man/woman, human/animal, human/technology, science/humanities, rural/urban, or secular/religious. Instead, she favors modes of thought and practice that take the form of interdisciplinarity, intersectionality, creolization, and various forms of hybridity. She argues that the latter methods—a living with rather than living against—create relationships that effect positive change rather than nurture feelings of resentment, nihilism, and collective vulnerability.

This position does not negate feminist, postcolonial, and antiracist theorists, whose valuable work Braidotti admires for illuminating the “human”—and by extension the “humanities”—as non-neutral concepts which for centuries were, and in too many ways continue to be, solely the domain of white, heterosexual, secular European men. But the urgency of the current crises—principally the twelve-year countdown towards the irreversibility of climate change and the risk that automation could make 1/3 of American workers jobless by 2013—demands unity.

“Individualism is very destructive at a time like this,” she says. “There is also a lot of resentment from women, the LGBTQ+ community, colonized people, and the descendants of slaves who say, ‘We were never considered fully human, so why should we care about this crisis?’ The focus is on [shared] pain and the affirmation of counter-identities, which is a very understandable condition that I respect and politically support. But the bulk of my work has been trying to go in a transformative direction of bridge-building. We are in this convergence together.”

In the same breath, she acknowledges that this “we” is never singular or static, and everyone could benefit from feminist and anti-racist inclusivity. Collective positivity in the face of human extinction and the destruction of the planet—neither of which are reversible through the work of a single individual—is one of Braidotti’s central concerns.

Such a project begins with what Braidotti says may be the most non-American facet of this entire discussion: the need to accept that “the self is a collective entity and not a liberal individual.” “The self is relational,” she explains. “We are never just one thing. One differs within oneself, which prevents any strong identity claims. You’re not American on Monday, black on Tuesday, straight on Wednesday, and a lesbian on Thursday. You’re all of those things. And the self is also related to the environment, society, others both human and nonhuman, and, today, to the technological apparatus and data grid that we are never really off of anymore and with which we need to interact.”

Conceiving of the self as relational as opposed to individualistic (the latter loved by capitalism for its preference for consumerism) serves as a foundation for forming new ethical structures. In this and in many other aspects of her work, Braidotti is indebted to Spinoza. “The ethical life is the pursuit of relations, situations, contexts, and values that enhance our power to act in the world. It’s about our power to take in the world’s pain and process it,” she says. In this way, she further articulates her empathy with marginalized communities but also her refusal to dwell in pain and vulnerability, because she believes these sentiments act as deterrents to transformative action and create an interminable sense of inertia.

Instead, Braidotti advocates for a neo-Spinozist praxis that turns suffering in its many forms into productive relational forces. “This ethics is a detoxing exercise in processing pain,” she says. “It’s also joyful—not in the sense of facile psychological cheerfulness but in the ability to mobilize stamina and endurance. For us, the people of the Anthropocene, that includes the strength to stare at multiple scales of challenges and say, ‘What can we do about this? Are “we” enough of a community to take this on?’ It’s a practical, hands-on approach that combines an adequate understanding of the problems [facing us] with the collectively shared energy to take them on. And why do we do it? Because we owe it to the future in a sense that we owe it to the perseverance of our own existence and that of future generations.”

Integral to this conception of ethics as a mode of living as custodians of the future is an acceptance of death that many may consider radical or even totally unfathomable. She articulates her position on death throughout The Posthuman, such as in the following passage:

“Death is not the teleological destination of life, a sort of ontological magnet that propels us forward…death is behind us. Death is the event that has always already taken place at the level of consciousness. As an individual occurrence it will come in the form of the physical extinction of the body, but as event, in the sense of the awareness of finitude, of the interrupted flow of my being-there, death has already taken place. We are all synchronized with death—death is the same thing as the time of our living, in so far as we all live on borrowed time.”

Life—which Braidotti calls “cosmic energy” and through her relation-based ontology is not confined to the physical bodies we occupy but extends in constellatory fashion to the earth, other humans and species, and technology—persists long after each of us has died. Death is not merely a point at which one’s life ends, but a condition that must be accepted before any serious and productive living can begin. “This death that pertains to a past that is forever present is not individual but impersonal,” Braidotti says. “Making friends with the impersonal necessity of death is an ethical way of installing oneself in life as a transient, slightly wounded visitor. We build our house on the crack, so to speak.”

Making friends with the impersonal necessity of death is an ethical way of installing oneself in life as a transient, slightly wounded visitor. We build our house on the crack, so to speak. In other words, only by both living as already dead and acknowledging that life will persist after we become corpses can we begin an ethical practice that is directed not at self-fulfillment but towards caring for others (both human and nonhuman), as well as those who will come after us. It is no surprise then that Braidotti also denigrates euphoric fantasies of immortality, such as those connected to Silicon Valley’s preferred notion of posthumanism as a perfect union between man and machine (consider how many science fiction films feature this conceit), as well as a booming wellness industry whose underlying ethos is an aggressive avoidance of death.

As a solution to these various psychic and social predicaments, some might demand the wholesale eradication of capitalism and technology. Braidotti, however, dismisses such clarion calls as “20th-century romanticism.” “We’re all part of the system that we call capitalism because in Spinozist philosophy, unlike in Hegel and Marx, you’re not outside the problem just because you’re against it,” she explains. “You’re against and you’re within. [Because this is the case, we must ask:] What margins can we negotiate given that none of us is going to give up our computers, mobile phones, and other things polluting the earth that are causing enormous issues as well as enormous benefits? Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s argument is that capitalism is not going to break—it’s going to bend. If it does, then let’s bring in a Spinozist ontology of immanence in which we are part of the very issue we’re trying to solve. It’s a balancing act.”

Despite the challenges facing all humans today, this position gives Braidotti hope and a conviction that creative solutions are possible. “We’re in a fantastic moment of reinvention as well as a moment of pain and mourning,” she says. “As a teacher and researcher paid by taxpayers’ money—as we are in Europe—I feel an ethical obligation to work for hope and on the construction of a ‘we’ that can take on this task and activate people to get together and [work] in the direction of joyful, gratuitous experimentations [regarding] what ‘we’ are capable of becoming.”

 
Photography by Sally Tsoutas

Rosi Braidotti’s lecture Posthuman Knowledge will be available in its entirety after March 12, 2019. 

Toshiko Mori’s Fass School opens in Senegal, offering “architecture as a big vision”

The Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Toshiko Mori has designed a new elementary school in the Senegalese village of Fass, activating materials and form in ways similar to her award-winning Thread project and pioneering an educational facility that binds local villages and redefines learning for children.

Revealed on February 2, the Fass School and Teachers’ Residence is the first in the region to teach children how to read and write in their native language, Pulaar, as well as in French. It will serve up to 300 students, ages 5 through ten. The school’s opening capstones seven years of negotiations with local Muslim leaders as well as Nicholas Fox Weber, the executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and founder and president of Le Korsa, a nonprofit dedicated to developing medical centers and schools in Senegal.

“One of the things that’s made Toshiko so great for this project is that she sees architecture as a big vision—its impact on humanity—not just building buildings,” Fox Weber says in recent Architectural Record coverage of the project.

As Architectural Record observes, Mori designed the Fass School as an oval building, with an inner courtyard for the school that references an ancient compound in a nearby village. The project engages workers with the traditional skills and materials to build it; walls are of mud-brick, supported by small steel members and bamboo, and painted white to deflect the sun’s heat. The school’s roof is composed of bamboo and grass, with the outer ring draping the exterior walls and the inner dipping to partially shade the courtyard. Inside, six interior walls create three classrooms and three indoor-outdoor spaces.

Mori notes that the Fass School design was inspired by Josef and Anni Albers, given Josef Albers’ time as a teacher. She imagines the school as a place for members of various local tribes to come together in a comfortable, inviting space, where learning and education might take on new meaning for students and the community.

“We wanted to de-institutionalize school and not make it imposing, scary, or foreign,” Mori tells Architectural Record. She adds that Quranic studies typically take place in concrete-block buildings with corrugated metal roofs—so when it’s hot, the buildings are stifling, and when it rains, the sound drowns out instruction. The materials and form of her Fass School aim to transcend these and other barriers to learning.

At the GSD, Mori is the Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture and was Chair of the Department of Architecture from 2002 to 2008. She is principal of Toshiko Mori Architect, which she established in 1981 in New York City. Mori taught at the Cooper Union School of Architecture from 1983 until 1995, when she joined the GSD faculty with tenure. She has been a visiting faculty member at Columbia University and Yale University, where she was the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor in 1992. Mori has taught courses on the tectonics of textiles, materials, and fabrication methods in architecture; structural innovations; and the role of architects as agents of change in a global context. Her recent studio classes have partnered with international non-profits to develop prototypes for community centers and performing arts centers.

Read more about Mori’s Fass School project via Architectural Record.

Photography by Le Korsa and Iwan Baan, courtesy the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.

Department of Architecture launches two event series, “Books and Looks” and “Five on Five”

The Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Department of Architecture, and department chair Mark Lee, are pleased to announce two new lunch talk series, entitled “Books and Looks” and “Five on Five.” Centering around the importance of written architectural discourse, “Books and Looks” will convene GSD faculty, including historians, curators, and other professionals, through a series of paired discussions in which each guest will present a book or publication related to the field of architecture. Meanwhile, taking the “accumulation of knowledge” as a reference point, each installment in the series “Five on Five” will present two architects of contrasting backgrounds or experiences to each present five projects that haver been relevant during their career.

The series commenced on February 21, with a “Books and Looks” presentation featuring Design Critic in Architecture Pier Paolo Tamburelli, who took up the publication San Rocco, and K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, who discussed the journal Assemblage that he founded in 1986 and that ran until 2000.

Upcoming talks in these new series include:

Wednesday, March 27

6:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., Frances Loeb Library, Gund Hall

“Five on Five” with Andrew Holder and Preston Scott Cohen

Friday, March 29

12:30 p.m. to 2:00 p.m., Frances Loeb Library, Gund Hall

“Five on Five” with Iñaki Abalos and Michael Meredith

Thursday, April 11

12:30 p.m. to 2:00 p.m., Frances Loeb Library, Gund Hall

“Five on Five” with Jennifer Bonner and Jeanne Gang

Monday, April 22

12:30 p.m. to 2:00 p.m., Frances Loeb Library, Gund Hall

“Books and Looks” with Reto Geiser (Giedion and America) and Edward Eigen

Tuesday, April 23

6:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., Frances Loeb Library, Gund Hall

“Books and Looks” with Jonathan Massey and Barry Bergdoll (Marcel Breuer: Building Global Institutions) and Erika Naginski

Work in Progress: Miriam Alexandroff’s climate collective for a future Framingham, MA

Miriam Alexandroff (MArch ’19) describes her final project for the option studio “UTOPIA/DYSTOPIA: Living Post-Work” led by Annabelle Selldorf, fall 2018.

2018 Rouse Visiting Artist Hannah Beachler on her history-making Oscar nomination

Of the seven Oscar nominations that Marvel Studios’ blockbuster Black Panther received this year, two are historic firsts: It is the first superhero movie to contend for best picture, and Hannah Beachler , its production designer, is the first African-American ever nominated in that category. Beachler, who was a Rouse Visiting Artist at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design last fall, conceived and oversaw creation of every element of the complex environments in which the Afrofuturist feature plays out, from individual rooms to urban and natural landscapes and the now-famous fictitious African nation of Wakanda.

Since Black Panther’s release in February 2018, an estimated 170+ million people have journeyed from their theater seats to the lush and high-tech world Beachler created with her team. Black Panther was by far the greatest triumph–and test–of her career, she says. The film’s director, Ryan Coogler, with whom Beachler had worked on Fruitvale Station (2013) and Creed (2015), trusted she could deliver. But to secure the job, she had to give a live presentation of her concept to Marvel Studios. “I needed to prove to the executives and producers that I could design and manage a department of that magnitude on a tent-pole blockbuster, with the biggest film I had done at that point being Creed at approximately $35 million,” she remembers. (Black Panther had a $200 million budget.)

Her presentation was the result of two intense weeks of research, which, as she described in conversation with Jacqueline Stewart and Toni L. Griffin in 2018, forms the basis for all of her projects in “pre-pre-production.” She started with the scenes that moved her most as she read the script, storing them as “screen shots” in her mind. Those images became richer in subsequent days as she poured over literature and images, and as songs, passing scenes, or flashes of color inspired her and added texture to those mental snapshots.

For Black Panther, she started with the history of the comic, going back to the superhero’s creation in 1966 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby all the way through to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2016 comic book series illustrated by Brian Stelfreeze. Knowing that the set had to reflect both African-American and African cultures, she went looking for the right African influences to incorporate—“the countries, tribes, languages, geography, economics, trade, militaries, conflicts, on and on, specifically before colonization, but also through time,” she says.

Next came Wakanda, its landscape, architecture and defining details, such as how Wakandans would use technology and interact with nature. It was a values-driven and iterative process: “I just kept creating a place where there was a sense of agency, where the people did not carry the weight of their skin color on them, where the future was their past and is their present.”

For her final presentation to Marvel, Beachler worked with illustrator Vicki Pui to develop a one-minute animatic and preliminary drawings of Golden City, capital of Wakanda. With Coogler in the room offering moral support, she won over the executives and seized the opportunity to spend a career-defining 13 months working on Black Panther. Beachler is not new to important projects or to accolades. In addition to Coogler, she has worked notably on Barry Jenkin’s Moonlight (2016), which won the Best Picture Oscar, and with director Melina Matsoukas on Beyoncé’s powerful 2016 visual concept album, Lemonade, which earned Beachler two major design awards.

I hope that diversity doesn’t just fade out as another buzzword, but that we enact the things we’ve been committed to talking about so that, soon, there will no longer be firsts. ~Hannah Beachler on her Oscar-winning production design for Black Panther

It was her final year in film school at Wright State University when Beachler decided to become a production designer. Since then, she has found her way into the work using what she calls “story design,” an approach that places the characters at the heart of creative decision making. “I always enter into the design through the people that inhabit or inhabited the spaces. For instance, on Creed it was understanding the people of Philly, the history of the city, its current state, people’s stories, accents and colloquialisms.” From there, Beachler makes the links to the design: What social, cultural, emotional and economic environment could yield these characters? And what does that environment look like in a living space? Each answer, honed in collaboration with the director, costume designers and cinematographer, brings her closer to the final set design.

Regardless of the outcome of Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony, Beachler’s Oscar nomination is a huge endorsement of her work and another important win for diversity in the film industry courtesy of Black Panther. “The nomination means everything–it’s the highest honor you can get in the American film industry, so it’s quite humbling and breathtaking. I hope it means more opportunities are given to people of color in below-the-line positions. That diversity doesn’t just fade out as another buzzword, but that we enact the things we’ve been committed to talking about so that, soon, there will no longer be firsts.”

Photography by Chris Britt. Sketch art for Black Panther courtesy of Marvel Studios. 

Design course opens students’ eyes to “plant blindness”

Just beyond the old iron gates of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, a creative experiment in pedagogy has been bringing the concept of plant sciences to growing, changing life.

For three years now, master’s degree candidates in Field Methods and Living Collections, led by Rosetta S. Elkin and the Arboretum’s William “Ned” Friedman, have used social theory and a methodology that examines plant evolution, morphology, built neighborhoods, and landscape design to address “plant blindness”—the human tendency to take plants for granted, reducing them to a green fuzz in the background.

“There is quite a history of human exceptionalism, and that we are the absolute species. On Maslow’s ladder [the hierarchy of needs] … plants were so low they barely made the rung. The whole class hinges on this diagnosis of plant blindness, that people assume that plants are just there, and they will always be there,” said Elkin, an associate professor of landscape architecture and faculty fellow at the Arboretum.

Yet, “We’re an entirely plant-dependent species. Plants were here way before we were; they will be here way after. They move, grow, communicate, behave, and adapt in magnificent ways and have a very different relationship with time. Once you start to appreciate that, the world around you does become a little more articulated,” she said.

Plants can be bellwethers of environmental risk, which often is overlooked by urbanists or architects focused on parcels of land whose confines are determined by economics or politics. High risk from and to the environment, such as drought, transcends manmade boundaries, however. This means that studying the effects of climate change requires acknowledging that where ecology is at risk, so is all of the area that the local environment defines, Elkin said. Continue reading at the Harvard Gazette…

Words by Deborah Blackwell & photography by Maggie Janik. 

Dean Mohsen Mostafavi talks John Portman, Atlanta architecture, and “Portman’s America” with Georgia Public Radio

On Tuesday, February 19, Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) Dean Mohsen Mostafavi joined Georgia Public Radio’s (GPR) “On Second Thought” for a 25-minute conversation with host Virginia Prescott about John C. Portman, Jr., the legendary architect and developer who passed away in December 2017 at the age of 93, his imprint indelible on cityscapes around the world. Mostafavi and Prescott discussed some of Portman’s signature achievements in Atlanta, such as his Peachtree Center, Marriott Marquis, Hyatt Regency—the first fully integrated hotel in Atlanta—and other mega-structures. They also examined Portman’s legacy writ large, in terms of both specific projects and their impacts as well as his masterful hybridization of the developer-architect who synthesizes design, real estate, economics, technology, and artistic and social sensitivity.

“Without Atlanta legend John Portman, you might never walk into a hotel lobby with a cavernous atrium, an office tower with stacked balconies or a shopping center with transparent elevators whizzing up and down,” observes GPR in its online feature. “Portman revolutionized architecture, turning buildings inward to jaw-dropping effect. To quote his close friend, Ambassador Andrew Young, ‘Everybody became a country bumpkin when they walked into the Hyatt. You had to say, Oh my god, what is this?'”

The full 25-minute interview, which was broadcast live at 9:20 a.m. on February 19, is available for listening online .

Over the years, Portman shared a special relationship with Mostafavi and with the GSD. Portman lectured at the GSD in March 2013 , reminding the audience that “It’s all about people.” Mostafavi recently edited the book Portman’s America: & Other Speculations (May 2017), offering Portman’s own voice and ideas alongside dialogue and analysis from a series of GSD students and faculty, as well as Iwan Baan’s photographic look at a number of Portman projects.

Mostafavi also recently discussed John Portman with Metropolis magazine , alongside Portman’s son Jack, and with City Lab .

Work in Progress: Amirah Ndam Njoya’s vision for a new neighborhood in Allston

Amirah Ndam Njoya (MUP ’19) describes her final project for the option studio “A Campus in a City – A City in A Campus: Harvard and Allston” led by Shaun Donovan and David Gamble, fall 2018.

Johnston Marklee, MALL, and PARA ProjectS among winners of Architect magazine’s 2019 Progressive Architecture Awards

Architect magazine has named Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee‘s Johnston Marklee, Jennifer Bonner’s MALL, and Jon Lott‘s PARA Project among the ten winners of its 2019 Progressive Architecture Awards . The annual awards program honors projects that “demonstrate how architects taking thoughtful design risks can yield progressive and unexpected environments,” according to the award’s website. Johnston, Lee, Bonner, and Lott’s projects rose to the top of this year’s nearly 200 unbuilt submissions, reviewed by jurors Paul Andersen, J. Frano Violich, and Claire Weisz.

Among the 10 winning projects is Johnston Marklee’s UCLA Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios, granted one of two awards this cycle. Sited in Culver City, California, the project calls for the renovation of the UCLA Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios’ current home in a 21,200-square-foot one-time wallpaper warehouse, adding to it a 26,800-square-foot, L-shaped addition.

“This project opens up new possibilities for a typical warehouse,” Andersen observes. “It shows how a thoughtful approach can make something that is banal and extraordinary. It doesn’t stray too far from the type, but subtle changes—like opening alternating roofs and facades—really redefine its organization and sensibility.”

At the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Johnston is Professor in Practice of Architecture, and Lee is Chair of the Department of Architecture Professor in Practice of Architecture. Learn more about Johnston Marklee’s winning project.

Bonner’s MALL and Lott’s PARA Project each received Honorable Mention for their respective projects. Bonner and MALL’s “Office Stack” proposes a 329,000-square-foot building in Huntsville, Alabama. Its elevation incorporates five different façades, each with its own roofline and communicated through various materials. Each of the project’s four-story verticals will house its own tenant, and the interior gestures toward innovation and rethinking in office design and flow.

“This project optimistically makes a very American office tower: It’s a promiscuous collection of parts irreverently arranged, and the mismatch of different pieces seems deliberately organized so that each can have its own identity,” Andersen notes. “Within a non-hierarchical composition, the chunks are all exceptional.”

Bonner is Assistant Professor of Architecture and Director of the Master in Architecture II Program at the GSD. Learn more about Bonner’s winning project .

Meanwhile, Lott’s Stump House stacks one structure atop another to conceptualize a live-work space under one roof, with a lower level designated as an art space and lodged into a neighboring slope. The design team has thus contended with local building ordinances (the project’s site is within California’s Santa Cruz Mountains) that limit construction to a single 1,200-square-foot home, with a maximum height of 40 feet.

“I like the tension that this seemingly simple encampment brings toward architecture’s contested place in nature,” Violich remarks. “There’s a special conversation between the two that is both lyrical and pragmatic.”

At the GSD, Lott is Assistant Professor of Architecture and Director of the Master in Architecture I Program. Learn more about Lott’s winning project .