An Interview with Richard Sennett: Democracy and Urban Form

In fall 1981, the eminent sociologist and urban theorist Richard Sennett delivered six public lectures at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), focused on ways in which the city’s spatial characteristics can foster—or forestall—democracy. This month, more than 40 years after the lectures’ original debut, Harvard Design Press and Sternberg Press published them as Democracy and Urban Form . In the book’s preface, Diane Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism at the GSD, notes that despite the lectures’ age, they maintain relevance, inspiring designers “to think ethically, critically, and responsibly about which kinds of cities and societies they could be producing if they understood how individuals and groups relate to the spaces that they as professionals are designing.”

Harvard GSD’s Krista Sykes talked with Sennett about the evolution of his thoughts on urbanism, the need to take architecture seriously, and the fundamental importance of encountering others unlike oneself. Their interview followed a series of talks and panel discussions held at the GSD in October to celebrate the publication of Democracy and Urban Form.

Krista Sykes: Many concepts from your 1981 lectures hold true today; at the same time, your thoughts appear to have shifted in some ways. For example, during the panel you stated that, in recent decades, you have become more interested in “the mobilizing power of architecture,” which I understand as architecture’s potential to shape human interactions, rather than in its representative or symbolic abilities. What motivated this shift?

Richard Sennett: A couple of things. After I left the United States in the late 1990s, I went to the London School of Economics [LSE] and set up an architecture and urban studies program with Richard Burdett. This program was orientated to practical solutions to problems in Britain. It was a new country for me, and the notion of actually problem-solving—that’s the DNA of the LSE—got me thinking about what architecture could solve in a practical way for problems about economic inequality and so on. Yet, I also was very resistant to that because I think that architecture should be visionary rather than pragmatic. And I began to experience this as a very useful contradiction. My impulse was to say, “let’s think about what might be.” My colleagues at the LSE were thinking, “well, what do we do next? The government has asked us to solve this problem next year.” That stimulated me to think more about mobilizing our architecture.

A second aspect that made me believe in this: I was very struck in Britain that younger architects had lost faith in architecture. They thought it was only a representation of social and economic conditions. That seemed to me very sad—a very sad take on a profession which you think is merely the puppet of the social order. And although I’m trained as a sociologist, I don’t think sociology has that kind of power over the imagination, particularly of people who know how to practice an art.

Yet another thing that really got me going about the mobilizing power of architecture was that I worked for the United Nations for 10 years. In poor countries like Mali or Ghana, it was hard to maintain that the way things are built has nothing to do with the way in which people live. When you’re in a country in which there aren’t enough schools to go around, thinking about what a school should look like is part and parcel of being with a scarcity of resources; it’s not something separable from it. Certainly, the people that I worked with in Sub-Saharan Africa and also in the Far East didn’t see a divide between the expressive qualities of architecture and its practical qualities. That’s a distinction that happens in more privileged societies.

I was reminded of this a few months ago. We have a housing shortage in Britain, and a top housing official declared she didn’t want to build something that was beautiful. She wanted to build something that served a practical need. Only in a very spoiled, rich country could you draw the distinction between quality and quantity. That’s how I came to be much more interested in the qualities of how things look, the qualities of architecture that are of social value.

Likewise, in your 1981 lectures, you emphasize how cities foster democracy by facilitating discourse. Today, your focus is more on bodily presence—what you have referred to as the “democracy of the body.” What prompted this turn?

Well, I think part of the reason that a lot of young architects that I was teaching in London had lost faith in architecture was because they looked at architecture as a discursive practice. It isn’t. Certainly, the political aspects of democracy are as much physical and nonverbal as they are verbal. We always think about democratic form in terms of discourse, and that seems very limited to me. So, I gave a course one year, a research seminar called “What is a Democratic Door?” Originally, people thought this was a joke. But after three months, I had woken them to the notion that, yes, you can embody democracy in the form of a door. It was part of the same shift of taking architecture more seriously.

Perhaps architecture embodies greater power when the focus is on bodily presence instead of discourse, taking a person’s willingness to verbally interact out of the equation. People are exposed to difference simply by occupying a given space with others.

Oftentimes, people will embody a practice that they can’t or wouldn’t explain. It’s true about all aspects of life, that people do things which they are not consciously masterminding. That’s certainly true about the relations between people in social space, in physical space. An assembly line can be racially mixed, yet the people working on it aren’t thinking about what racial integration is. They’re just working together. That’s another aspect of this same shift; it’s too great a burden on people to explain what they’re doing as though the actions that they’re taking are consequences of conscious decisions. There’s a whole issue about democratic theory: often we act on knowledge which is not fully articulated to our self.

How does this translate to environments that lack the density and diversity for such exposure to difference? I’m thinking about the current political divide and our pending presidential election. How might we promote democracy outside of urban situations?

I’m quite worried about this. I mean, there’s no reason why people can do things unconsciously that are bad for them. When you look at Trump’s audiences, they’re all old, or mostly old, and they’re mostly white. I’m not sure those rallies could have actually worked if there were significant numbers of Black people or significant numbers of kids.

I had one of my students examine one of these rallies to take a reading on how old people were and how racially mixed they were. As you can imagine, up in the front near Trump’s rostrum, about five or six rows deep, it’s all mixed. When you get behind that, it’s a sea of whiteness, and it’s a sea of people who are, like me, going bald. My sense of it is that, if these are people who don’t have much daily physical experience being with people unlike themselves, that lack of physical interacting with people unlike oneself can easily lead to fantasies about the other, about who they are. That’s part of what we are facing. There are lots of studies showing that the more racial mixing you have in workplaces, the less racial prejudice is felt on both sides of the divide.

This dovetails with my final question. The 1981 lectures underscore the need to expose people to difference as a democratic undertaking because it allows them to understand themselves as one among many. You describe this experience as one of solitude. “In modern cities,” you stated, “we’regoing to have to come to terms with this new order of solitude.” How might you reposition this experience for the present day?

Well, the ultimate form of solitude that people are experiencing now is online. There’s an editing out of anything that people don’t want to hear. Online you’re in an echo chamber, essentially. That takes us back to the physical city where you have experiences in which you can’t just push a button and withdraw from other people. This has an old history. One of the reasons that politically conservative people don’t like to use public transport is because, involuntarily, there are people on buses or subways who are not like them. It’s a well-known sociological phenomenon. That’s why a lot of Americans like cars, because they’re like an isolation booth. And online has become an evolution of the that. You’re a button away from withdrawing, from being exposed to people unlike yourself.

That’s why physical space is so important. I think for architects, we’ve got to find ways in designing schools or hospitals to mix people up more. When I worked in Mali on a hospital where we mixed up urban lower- and middle-class people using the hospital with people who were agricultural workers, shepherds, and such, it was resisted at first by both groups. And we mixed up men and women as well, which was resisted. But in the end, it made the hospital more of a communal experience.

We have to think out of the box about this. That’s why I’m a great believer in bussing, and not a believer so much in homogenous local communities. That’s why a lot of the planning work I’ve done has looked at the edges, at how do you bring the edges between communities or different sections of the city alive—which I think of as democratic, with the edges being more democratic than the center. But that’s a whole other story.

Ask Me How

If you want to reach Germane Barnes, ask a young person for help. “All my friends know this,” he laughed, repeating their advice: “You’re an adult asking for something, he’s going to say no. You want him to do this lecture? Get a college freshman or a high school student to ask, he’ll do it immediately.”

And, in fact, within four minutes of arriving in Boston for his Wheelwright Prize lecture, he got a text from a member of the GSD African American Student Union and agreed to meet with the group that night at the Shake Shack. In addition to his work as an associate professor at the University of Miami, director of the Community, Housing & Identity Lab (CHIL), and principal of Studio Barnes, most of his time is spent mentoring others. “I didn’t have that representation,” he said, “and so I understand the importance of it.”

Barnes wanted to be an architect all his life, making a model of the Guggenheim Museum in seventh grade. Today, you can view his solo exhibit, “Columnar Disorder ,” at the Art Institute of Chicago. “A lot of this [work] started with the fact that, in architecture, you don’t see a lot of representation of people who look like me.” He earned both undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture, but, he explains, “I never had a Black TA, Black professor, Black critic, Black juror.” In his survey classes, he was repeatedly shown the Colosseum—but never a building in Africa. “I know that the Mediterranean is vast,” he said, “and with its proximity to North Africa, there had to be some cross-pollination between the two. Why is that missing from what I’m learning?”

The Wheelwright Prize, awarded to Barnes in 2021 , afforded him the long-awaited opportunity to pursue the answer to that question, and to develop his own columnar order that reflects Black identity and experience, now on display at the Art Institute of Chicago.

On October 9, he spoke at the GSD about his project, “Where This Flower Blooms: Anatomical Transformations in Classical Architecture,” in a talk that wove together his historic research and creative process (including references to Megatron and Solange), emphasizing the importance of tactility and how joy drives his work.

It all began years earlier: “At one point in my life,” Barnes said, “I was known as the ‘porch guy.’” Supported by an award from the Graham Foundation, he studied the porch “across the diaspora from Africa to Chicago,” and spent several years creating pieces that focus on that “interstitial space” between outside and inside that’s been so critical to African American identity and community. “The porch is an important space for observation of collective identity and entry point to the home, as well as issues of race, segregation, and spatial politics,” writes Barnes. In describing his 2018 Pop-Up Porch , a portable eight-by-twenty-foot wooden container that opens to provide couch space and soft lighting for socializing, he writes, “The front porch has served as a refuge from Jim Crow restrictions; a stage straddling the home and the street; and the structural backdrop for meaningful life moments.”

Barnes’s Wheelwright research in Italian archives first took shape when a colleague told him that the Italian portico predated the African porch. He decided to research this “contested history.” While he knew that African history was inevitably interwoven with Italian—for example, Septimius, ruler of Rome, was of North African descent—there was no information about Africa in the architectural materials he sought in the library at the American Academy in Rome. Instead, he had to turn to archeology and anthropology.

Drawing from research he found in the archives and Paul Lachlan MacKendrick’s book North African Stones Speak, Barnes studied images of opus africanum, a North African system of stacking stones or bricks in a design both functional and beautiful, with examples in both Tunisia and Pompeii. He was also struck by opus sectile, a technique for creating collaged images made from any available materials. The pieces are not cut identically, as in a mosaic, but of all different sizes. The latter, he says, reflects so much of the African Diaspora and African American creativity; people have made beautiful and ingenious works with “whatever pieces they had.” Barnes began creating his own work in the opus sectile tradition. He pieced together butcher-block paper from a local Sicilian restaurant to create a world map that represents the actual size of each continent—rather than their typically distorted sizes centering western continents—to illustrate Africa’s significance in the global context and the influence of the Diaspora.

Through his research, Barnes found that Africa had columns before Greece; the Egyptians created the Papyrus order, which the Greeks took to create the Ionic, Corinthian, and Doric orders, Barnes explained. “We love to quote Vitruvius and talk about how the [Greek] columns are inspired by the female figure,” he said. Instead, he asked, “What if I make a column inspired by a Black figure, and then reimagine architecture through that lens?” He began to create a “truly Black columnar order,” returning to the question he proposed in his application for the prize. He developed a system of his own, which involved breaking every rule of the classical columnar orders. Barnes developed the three themes for his columns: identity, labor, and migration, and sought out materials that evoked the tactile qualities he appreciates. The result is a series of columns, masks, and drawings that reinsert the African tradition in Western architectural history.

The identity column, made of Spanish Marquina marble, was inspired by hair, with striations that look like undulating waves of braided, dreadlocked, and natural hair, and, from some perspectives, “a body emerging.” Barnes displayed the monumental work at the 2023 Venice Biennale alongside drawings that depict the identity column within the Pantheon. Small human figures at the column’s base symbolize the theorists who erased the existence of the Egyptian columns and African architecture and claimed it as their own invention with the Ionic, Doric, and Corinthian orders.

Barnes says he wants his family to see themselves in his work, to recognize their memories and experiences, which are interwoven through all of his projects (this infusion of the personal is partly why he feels that his columns are not reproducible in the same way the Greek columnar orders are intended to be). He created another iteration of the identity column, this time with synthetic hair woven and braided by Chicago artist SHENEQUA , who trained with Nick Cave. She included “every hairstyle [Barnes] knew” from childhood, watching his four sisters get their hair done, from “Bantu knots to overhand and extensions.” The final product is a nine-by-four-foot tapestry that was then wrapped around a column.

When he designed the migration pillar with waves to symbolize the millions of people lost to the Middle Passage, and selected poplar for its construction—a nod to Nina Simone’s “Strange Fruit”—Barnes knew his sisters would recognize the allusion. And when they saw the red clay labor column, he says, “they’d think about working twice as hard for half the credit.” Acutely aware of the ways that African and African American people’s labor has been erased, he always makes sure to credit the craftspeople who fabricate his works.

His devotion to help break down barriers long upheld by systemic racism extends to how he thinks about gallery spaces for his installations, as well. Barnes took on the role of exhibition designer for his show at the Art Institute of Chicago. “I convinced them to let me do a stripe across the outside of the room,” he says. “It’s a way of identifying what’s going on in the space, and of saying that, at many white institutions, you have to reduce your Blackness. So, if you’re inside of [this space I designed], you get be unbridled—exactly who you are. When you’re in these public spheres, how much of yourself gets reduced, until you’re down to just a single strip of your identity?” The installation he created celebrates the unity of fragmented columns that split apart in the middle to allow viewers to see the perfectly aligned drawings on the wall in the background. Other columns rest at seat height. As someone for whom tactility and welcoming spaces are so important, Barnes invited participants to sit on and touch his work, as he’s done at other galleries in the past (each time, he was quickly corrected by curators).

A series of chairs he designed years earlier, “Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears a Crown,” were intended to be functional seats, as well. Those chairs—which turned out to be one of his biggest successes—evolved out of a series of mishaps in the early Covid days. When the project he’d planned to deliver for an event had to be reimagined for social distancing, Barnes created the chairs, thinking they’d be used for seating. Instead, the client displayed them as artworks. The chairs are made from materials typically found in a South Florida shotgun house—sheet metal, wood, and rope on the seats—in forms meant to mirror Black hair and hats, with chair backs that look like hair combs or the profile of a bejeweled crown. This became one of the projects he’d submit to the Wheelwright Prize jury, the members of which gathered at the GSD for a conversation with Barnes on October 10. Megan Panzano, GSD senior director of early design education and assistant professor of architecture, said she could see the germs of his columnar project in this series. The chairs—born out of what he thought was a failure—propelled him in a new direction in his work and helped him win the Wheelwright Prize.

He noted that the title of his Wheelwright research, “Where This Flower Blooms” comes from a poem by “our prophet, Tupac Shakur, who rivals Vitruvius.” Barnes often layers into his work all of his experiences and references—from pop culture to family stories to archival research. During his lecture, Barnes discussed Tupac’s poem about the beauty and resilience of a rose that rises up from a crack in the sidewalk, arguing that when we see a rose with broken petals rising up in the sidewalk, we don’t need to ask why it’s there but how it grew in a seemingly impossible place. “I’m aware of the weight that I carry on my shoulders because I’m a descendant of slavery and freedom fighters and Civil Rights activists who have done so much to get me to this point,” Barnes said. “That’s what’s allowed me to be so successful. It’s not just me doing the work. It’s my family doing the work. It’s me using all the ancestral knowledge I’ve gathered from my mom and my grandmother and turning that into spatial praxis. If you see me, you’re going to see a Black man. I’m going to wear that as a badge of honor.”

Barnes’ authenticity also allows him to reach the young people he’s devoted to mentoring. His impact on students at the GSD events was clear; they eagerly engaged him with questions about his career, design history, and process. Barnes gestured to the Black design colleagues with whom he shared the space, illustrating how much has changed since he was in school twenty years ago.

He offered advice to students on establishing their own authority and sense of community, and, when one student asked how he manages working from traumatic histories, Barnes replied, “When I work, it’s from a place of joy…. This isn’t about trauma. It’s about perseverance. This is about resilience. It’s about making something out of nothing, and sure, you might have scars and scratches. Your shirt might be a little bit tattered, or you might speak a little bit differently…. But, it’s still the rose. I hope you’re able to work from a position of joy, because I guarantee that the work will be so much better.”

Carrying that forward, his next projects include a collaboration in Dallas to “transform a space filled with hate into a space of hope, as restorative and design justice, with former GSD professor, Christian Stayner of Stayner Architects, and Jennifer Bonner of MALL, as well as the local Fort Worth office ch_studio,” and a solo project in Memphis, Tennessee. Both will allow him to extend the work he undertook for the Wheelwright Prize, bringing his work out of the gallery and into functional spaces that will invite users to experience—and, finally, touch—his designs.

Housing Takes Center Stage in the Presidential Election

Every presidential election cycle, those who work on housing issues (“housers”) watch the policy debate hoping that the nation’s housing challenges get some attention from those in the race. For decades those hopes have been dashed as housing has barely received a mention. But this year housing has not only made an appearance on the political stage, it has taken a leading role. In this election, housing affordability has emerged as a critical issue not just for the country’s poorest households or those on the expensive coasts but for those solidly in the middle class and in the heartland. Renters across a broad spectrum are struggling to find apartments that don’t require an excessive share of their monthly income, while would-be homebuyers are increasingly priced out, if they can even find an available home in today’s historically tight market.

So what are the candidates proposing to address these issues? Vice President Kamala Harris has formulated a fairly detailed housing plan that both seeks to stimulate greater production of affordable homes and help households afford to buy one. On the supply side, she has proposed expanding the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program (LIHTC), which has been the principal source of new affordable rentals since 1986. Harris has also proposed tax incentives for homebuilders to produce more entry-level homes, as well as a tax credit to support the construction and rehabilitation of homes for sale in distressed communities where these investments don’t pencil out. The plan also includes financial incentives for state and local governments to streamline restrictive regulations that currently limit housing production and support innovative means of developing homes.

The campaign asserts that these initiatives would enable the construction of three million new homes over four years. That goal is certainly ambitious; it would represent a roughly 50 percent increase in housing production over the current rate. But while the target may be difficult to achieve, the emphasis on efforts to expand the housing supply—particularly of affordable rentals and entry-level homes—represents a sea change in the federal approach to housing assistance that has largely focused on demand-side help in recent decades.

In fact, the Harris plan includes a substantial new program that would provide $25,000 in downpayment assistance to four million first-time homebuyers over the next four years. This proposal has raised concerns that it would spur inflation in a tight housing market. However, this concern would be mitigated if the supply-side initiatives are quickly implemented and successful. And given the stark racial differences in wealth in the US, failing to address this critical demand-side constraint would unfairly leave millions on the sidelines. Given the massive cost of supporting so many homebuyers, a smaller scale and more targeted program would be more likely to get passed by congress, less likely to be inflationary, and give more time for supply-side efforts to bear fruit.

Finally, the Harris plan calls for efforts to rein in investors in single-family rentals who may compete with first-time buyers. Her proposal would limit tax breaks available to investors and would curtail coordinated efforts by large property owners to share data to set rents. It is difficult to gauge how effective these approaches would be. Single-family rentals play an important role in expanding choice for renters and the national share of single-family homes for rent is not particularly elevated relative to historic standards, although the shares are high in selected markets in the South and West. Cracking down on firms that aggregate rental data to help owners set rents is also unlikely to turn back the clock on what is now a far more sophisticated industry with respect to mining data to assess market conditions.

The Trump campaign has also consistently highlighted housing affordability, although it has not released any detailed policy proposals, so the specifics of their approach are not known. The Republican platform simply calls for the limited use of federal land for housing construction, tax incentives for first-time homebuyers, and efforts to cut unnecessary regulations that raise housing costs. Former President Donald Trump’s principal talking point on the campaign trail has been that immigrants are a chief cause of housing inflation and that efforts to curb immigration and deport millions of immigrants will bring housing costs under control. Notwithstanding the substantial personal suffering and economic toll that massive deportation would entail, the argument that immigrants are behind the recent housing cost rise has been rebutted by numerous economists who note that there is only a small correlation between house prices, rents, and levels of immigration. Immigrants are also an important source of labor to help expand the supply of homes.

Having made it to the political stage, the question is whether housing will see greater action by the federal government once the dust settles on the election. Given the specifics of the Harris plan in my view there would be more hope of progress in a Harris administration. But most of her agenda will require congressional action and bipartisan legislation, which has been rare in these hyper-partisan times. Still, many of these proposals have strong support from both parties, building as they often do on existing proposed legislation. And the groundswell of public opinion that has brought housing to center stage is not going away, as home prices and rents continue to stay near record levels. Housers will be eager to see how this drama unfolds, keeping hope alive that there will be meaningful action to address our country’s significant need for decent, affordable homes.

Chris Herbert is the managing director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. 

Joseph F. Hudnut, the GSD’s First Dean, 1936–1953

In 1935, American architect and educator Joseph F. Hudnut returned to Harvard University. Born in Big Rapids, Michigan, in 1886, he had studied architecture at Harvard before continuing his training at the University of Michigan and Columbia University.

As a practicing architect, Hudnut taught architectural design and history at Alabama Polytechnic Institute and the University of Virginia before turning his attention to academia fulltime in 1926 with a position at Columbia’s School of Architecture. Assuming the school’s deanship in the early 1930s, he dismantled its Beaux-Arts pedagogy in favor of an educational system based on philosopher John Dewey’s ideas of pragmatism and experience. While students under the Beaux-Arts mantle had competed on grand and often idealized schemes, under Hudnut’s new system they worked—at times collectively—on projects such as low-income housing, taking elements like budget and community needs into consideration.

Hudnut’s brand of modern pedagogy soon drew the attention of Harvard president John Conant, who in 1935 recruited him to modernize the university’s architectural education. Upon his arrival, Hudnut proposed uniting Harvard’s three professional design programs—Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning—into one entity called the Graduate School of Design (GSD), to be housed in neoclassical Robinson Hall (by McKim, Mead & White, 1900). He served from 1936 through 1953 as the GSD’s first dean.

During his time at Harvard, Hudnut emerged as a leading advocate of modern architecture in the United States. In 1937 he augmented the GSD faculty with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, key figures of the German Bauhaus who had fled fascist Europe. The following year Hudnut was instrumental in bringing to Harvard the Swiss historian and secretary of CIAM Siegfried Giedion, who delivered the Charles Elliot Norton Lectures that comprised Space, Time and Architecture (1941), a history of modern architecture that dominated the narrative for decades to come. Hudnut thus shepherded these European modernists into American architectural consciousness.

In addition, Hudnut championed modernism in other ways, including his revamping of architectural education to emphasize a combination of theoretical and practical work. He furthermore supported modernism in his own writings, including Architecture and the Spirit of Man (1949), which positioned architecture as the unification of art and science, with the former never to be sacrificed to the latter—a criticism he would later ascribe to Gropius’s work.

Hudnut retired from the GSD in 1953 while finishing his term on the US Commission of Fine Arts, a five-year post he began 1950. Into the early 1960s he continued to teach a course in civic design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and publish essays in a variety of journals. Hudnut died of pneumonia in Norwood, MA, in 1968.

 

SUGGESTED RESOURCES

Jill Pearlman, Inventing American Modernism: Joseph Hudnut, Walter Gropius, and the Bauhaus Legacy (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2007).

“Joseph Hudnut, Architect, Dead,” Obituary, New York Times, Jan. 17, 1968, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/01/17/88922263.html?pageNumber=47 .

Hanif Kara Receives the 2024 Soane Medal

Hanif Kara, Professor in Practice of Architectural Technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), is the recipient of the 2024 Soane Medal. Awarded by Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, the medal recognizes a distinguished practitioner who has advanced the public’s understanding of architecture.

On November 26, Kara will give the seventh Soane Medal Lecture at the museum. His talk will consider how the field of architecture can address the climate crisis. “As a scientist, I like to think that hope can turn into possibilities,” says Kara. Drawing on experiences over his distinguished career as an engineer and educator, Kara emphasizes the role of structural engineers at the forefront of sustainable practices.

“In the complex world that we live in today, it is impossible to solve the problems we face without interdisciplinary collaboration and thinking,” Kara says. “Only through curiosity and continual enquiry, questioning practices and norms, will we find the solutions that are so urgently required.”

In addition to his role at the GSD, Kara is creative director and co-founder of AKT II, a practice that has won over 350 design awards, including RIBA Stirling Prizes for four projects: the Peckham Library, London (2000); the Sainsbury Laboratory, Cambridge (2012); the Bloomberg European headquarters, London (2018); and Kingston University London–Town House (2021). The practice also received the RIBA Lubetkin Prize for the UK Pavilion at Shanghai Expo in 2010.

“Hanif Kara is the engineer to whom Sir John Soane would have turned to realize his most ambitious, exciting designs,” says Will Gompertz, Deborah Loeb Brice Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum. “They might be divided by two centuries, but they are united in the belief that innovative, sympathetic, beautiful architecture can make a lasting and positive impact on the world.”

Landscapes of the Overflow

A forthcoming book from Harvard Design Press, Thinking Through Soil: Wastewater Agriculture in the Mezquital Valley , by Montserrat Bonhevi Rosich and Seth Denizen, investigates a struggle that, the authors write, “will come to define an increasing number of environmental conflicts in the 21st century.” In 2018, farmers in Hidalgo protested because the Mexican government had implemented, at great expense, a new sewage processing system. The problem? The farmers say the new system stole from their crops the nutrients that enriched their soil when the sewage system overflowed into the Mezquital Valley. Rosich and Denizen say that their work arises “out of a deep sympathy for the position the farmers have taken,” and that, in exploring the history of soil use in the context of colonization, we can understand better the complexities that arise in what might otherwise seem like straightforward systems of sanitation and food production. “A central claim of this book,” they write, “is that over the next few decades, wastewater reuse will become a necessary and unavoidable part of addressing water scarcity in a warming world.” In addition to exploring irrigation and sanitation systems and the history of colonization, the book defines what they call the “arid abundance” of the Mezquital Valley and how traditional foods that were always grown together enrich the soil, as well as how to mitigate diseases that can arise from wastewater agriculture—lessons that can be applied in communities across the world.

Ahead of the book’s official release on June 10, support your local bookstore by pre-ordering a copy. Pre-orders can also be made through Harvard University Press or Amazon . Limited copies will be available at a book release event at the GSD on April 24, 2025. The following is an excerpt from part one of the book, titled “Part 1: The Profile.”

 

No other city in the world has tried to do as much to reuse the combined sewer as Mexico City. Consider, for example, some of the basic geographic assumptions that a combined sewer system typically makes. The idea of a combined sewer is to use fresh water to flush concentrated waste into a large water body. This assumes that there is a water body, like an ocean, that is large enough to dilute the waste indefinitely. It also assumes that if the sewer system is far away from this water body there is a river to convey the waste. The river should not be seasonal and should always maintain the minimum flow-rate necessary to convey the waste. Its flood stages should also never exceed the topographic level of the combined sewer pipes themselves, which implies a certain spatial relationship between river and city. In short, there is a vast imaginary landscape contained in the concept of a combined sewer system, and this landscape bears almost no resemblance to Mexico City.

From the perspective of a combined sewer system, Mexico City has no rivers. Topographically, it sits in the bottom of a bowl, or what geomorphologists call an “endorheic basin.” For the last seven hundred thousand years, this bowl has been accumulating water in a large lake system that has no outflow. In the 16th century, the city’s lakes stretched continuously over 2,000 square kilometers in the rainy season.[1] During the dry season the waters would partially recede, creating shallow marshes along its borders, revealing the blurry outlines of five separate lakes (from north to south: Zumpango, Xaltocan, Texcoco, Xochimilco, and Chalco). The towering volcanic mountain ranges to the south put the city in their rain shadow, capturing fresh water from storms that blow in from the Gulf. When the lakes existed, this rainfall differential created a salinity gradient in the lake water. The three northern lakes were brackish from the accumulation of soluble salts produced by the weathering of volcanic rocks for more than seven hundred thousand years. The southern lakes (Chalco and Xochimilco) were fresh, as the rainwater from these southern slopes pushed the saline waters north toward the bottom of the basin.

In the mid-15th century, the Mexica (Aztec) ruler Nezahualcoyotl built a dike through the middle of the lake system. Its primary function was flood control but, like all good infrastructure, it was multifunctional and also worked to preserve this salinity gradient, ensuring that the southern lakes could be used as a freshwater reservoir for crop production. The famous “chinampas” of Xochimilco took advantage of this and were, at one time, able to produce food for two hundred thousand people in Mexico City.[2] For centuries, these southern lakes were the most productive agricultural area in the basin, whose fish, corn, chili, beans, and squash were easily floated on boats to its bustling urban markets. The saline waters of Texcoco were also productive, and provided a nutritious algae (spirulina), salt harvesting (tequesquite), the “caviar” of the waterfly (axacayácatl), and abundant waterfowl.[3] As an important resting place on the Central Americas Flyway, the brackish wetlands of Texcoco were full of migratory birds.

These dynamic hydrologic cycles were precisely what colonial engineers struggled to disrupt in the 16th-century aftermath of colonization. The seasonal flooding that produced a perpetually blurry boundary between the city and its muddy wetland periphery was particularly appalling to the arid Iberian imagination.[4] Early European hydrologic efforts focused on draining Lake Zumpango, which is topographically the highest in the cascade of lakes that end in the bottom of the basin near the center of Lake Texcoco. By controlling water levels in Zumpango, the idea was to deprive Lake Texcoco of floodwater. To do this, colonial administrators decided to build a 20-kilometer-long, 60-meter-deep trench—El Tajo de Nochistongo (the Nochistongo Cut)—through the topographic walls of the basin. The project, which began in 1607 and continued, off and on, for two centuries, was notorious for its cruelty and completed mostly through forced Indigenous labor. The historian Vera Candiani notes that workers were lowered into the trench on ropes to dig out the walls in something called “the Indian-dangling” method, earning it the name El Tajo de las Desgracias (The Trench of Misfortunes).[5] The Mezquital Valley is what lies on the other side of this trench.

By the 19th century, it became apparent that El Tajo de las Desgracias would never be able to solve Mexico City’s flooding problem, and a new plan was formed. Instead of cutting a steep trench through the soft and erodible soils of the Basin, a tunnel would be constructed. This new tunnel would connect Mexico City’s San Lazaro neighborhood to the Mezquital Valley through the Gran Canal del Desagüe.[6] Inaugurated by Mexican president Porfirio Díaz in 1901, the drainage canal was a symbol of progress and modernity for Mexico City at the dawn of the new century.[7] After hundreds of years of failure, it was a marvel of engineering that finally broke through the basin walls whose topography had determined everything about life in the lacustrine city. However, what had started in the 17th century as a project to mitigate flooding had ended in 1901 as something very different. The Gran Canal would not only carry floodwater during the rainy season but it would also harness the power of Mexico City’s remaining freshwater lakes in the south (Chalco and Xochimilco) to flush Mexico City’s sewage north to the Mezquital Valley.[8] In this way, the Gran Canal was the origin of Mexico City’s combined sewer system, and it transformed the Mezquital Valley into a Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO).

The architect of this plan was a drainage engineer named Roberto Gayol, and his expertise was critical to the project. Without sufficient rainfall to move the sewage, Gayol needed to figure out how to use the lakes to create base-flow. For this reason, Gayol argued passionately in favor of a combined sewer system rather than a divided one. Without some kind of force pushing the waste out of the city, the system would stagnate, and a combined sewer maximized that force. According to Gayol’s calculations in 1892, Lakes Chalco and Xochimilco could provide 2,500 liters per second through the Canal de la Viga.[9] This effectively turned the lakes into a massive flush tank that sat above every urban toilet in Mexico City. The volume of wastewater Mexico City sent to the Mezquital was significant enough, and dilute enough, that in these early days the first idea for how to use Gayol’s 2,500 liters per second wasn’t even agriculture. The first wastewater canals to be built in the Mezquital were designed to find the Valley’s steepest topographic gradients for powering hydroelectric generators, and this historical anachronism explains much of the unusual complexity of the wastewater irrigation canal network today.

In hindsight, it is remarkable that nowhere in Gayol’s 156-page proposal does he consider the possibility that this water source might disappear. Those 2,500 liters per second were supposed to last forever in the plan he outlined. Today, what remains of Lake Xochimilco is less than 1 percent of what it was in 1892, and its waters have been fully converted into sewage infrastructure (also a World Heritage Site). Lake Chalco disappeared entirely, but has started to return: a battery of groundwater extraction wells caused enough subsidence for parts of the city to sink below the water table again, creating a ghostly and garbage-filled memorial to the former lake.[10] In other places, the water table has been lowered as much as 100 meters below levels recorded in the early 20th century, and it continues to fall to the profound disappointment of the twenty-two million people in the capital city who depend on the Basin’s subsurface aquifers for 70 percent of their drinking water, and who must live in the perpetual aftermath of the urban land subsidence caused by the groundwater extraction.

Over the next 150 years, Mexico City is expected to fall between 60 and 90 feet.[11] This rate of collapse is locked in from the desiccation of its upper aquitard; it cannot be reversed even if the city were to stop pumping, or pump water back into the ground. As different parts of the city fall at slightly different speeds, subsurface infrastructure will continue to break, making the city’s plumbing problems endless and unfixable. Lake Texcoco, which was once a biodiverse saltwater marsh, is now a barren plain capable of supporting only the most salt-tolerant plant species, such as Distichlis spicata (saltgrass) and Tamarix ramosissima (salt cedar).[12] Instead of threatening the city with floods during the rainy season between June and November, it threatens the city with dust storms in the dry winter months between January and May.[13]

The Mezquital Valley, by contrast, has become a verdant agricultural landscape that supports three crops a year.[14] Mexico City’s sewer system sends it more water than many of Mexico’s major rivers would provide—an average of about 60 cubic meters per second over the course of a year. This is more than the Río Baluarte (which forms the border between Durango and Sinaloa), and about a third as much as the Río Bravo (the Rio Grande), on the border with Texas.[15] New springs, lakes, and streams still regularly appear in the Mezquital Valley, and in this sense, we can see its 20th-century history as a long process of hydrologic transfer. The southern lake system that supported Mexico City’s agricultural production for thousands of years disappeared, only to reemerge as lakes, springs, and aquifers 100 kilometers away in the Mezquital Valley—the world’s largest wastewater agriculture system.

From this perspective, Mexico City’s combined sewer is unique. Where many cities produce only a small pause in the hydrologic journey of a raindrop from cloud to ocean, Mexico City is both journey and destination. Every drop of rain that falls in the Basin of Mexico stays there, unless it is managed by built infrastructure that moves that water some-where more convenient. For cities like Paris and London, whose physical geography closely resembles the imaginary landscape implied by a combined sewer system, this process is powered by the force of gravity. For Mexico City, the entire imaginary landscape assumed by a combined sewer system did not actually exist and had to be built according to its implicit geographical imperatives at great cost.

The infrastructure for containing water and moving it around the city during rainfall events is massive, but it’s only part of the system. Today, 30 percent of Mexico City’s water comes from pipelines beginning in the upper Lerma and Cutzamala Basins, which are topographically a kilometer below the city. Water flows from these basins through a 127-kilometer aqueduct before being pumped upward, 1.2 kilometers in altitude, to enter the Basin of Mexico. This involves a vast network of canals, 3 pipelines, 11 dams, 6 pumping plants, 10 reservoirs, and 6 storage tanks.[16] It then provides municipal water to residents before entering the combined sewer system and traveling another 80 kilometers to the Mezquital Valley in the drenaje profundo, or “deep drainage” system, 100 meters below ground. The other 70 percent of Mexico City’s water comes from groundwater pumps within the Basin of Mexico, which extract water from as deep as 2 kilometers below the city.[17] On an average day, the combined sewer system needs to move 60 cubic meters of water per second, and while some of this water is rain that just recently fell on the city or its adjacent basins, 70 percent of it is rain that fell hundreds of thousands of years ago.

To call the result a combined sewer system is therefore to risk underselling the immensity of what was actually built over the last five hundred years. The Mexican architect Iñaki Echeverria refers to the system as “a leviathan.” The city’s famous sewer line diver, Julio César Cu, describes it as something like “outer space.”[18] For the Mexican television drama Drenaje Profundo (Deep Drainage), it’s a vast underground laboratory where the government researches immortality drugs to test on students who disappeared in the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. None of these descriptions should be read as hyperbole. In each case, they capture some-thing precise and accurate about the combined sewer, if we understand it as an inherently speculative project that spatially and temporally inverted the city’s physical geography in order to bury the evidence of an old colonial crime beneath cleaner and more sanitary streets. It would be science fiction if it hadn’t been built.

 

1 Sanders, William T., Jeffrey R. Parsons, and Robert S. Santley. The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization. Studies in Archaeology. New York: Academic Press, 1979.

2 Chinampas are a network of agricultural plots of land formed by a process of placing dredged sediments from shallow canals on the land surface to cycle nutrients and maintain soil moisture. Parsons, Jeffrey R., Mary Parsons, Virginia Popper, and Mary Taft. “Chinampa Agriculture and Aztec Urbanization in the Valley of Mexico.” Prehistoric Intensive Agriculture in the Tropics 232 (1985): 49–96.

3 Parsons, Jeffrey R. “The Pastoral Niche in Pre- Hispanic Mesoamerica.”
In Pre-Columbian Foodways: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Food, Culture, and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica, edited by John Staller and Michael Carrasco, 109–36. New York: Springer New York, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419 -0471-3_4; Ruiz de Velasco, Tomas. “Los Tequesquites Del Lago Texcoco.” Revista Mexicana de Ingeniería y Arquitectura 4, no. 5 (May 15, 1926).

4 On the European distaste for wetlands, see McLean, Stuart. “BLACK GOO: Forceful Encounters with Matter in Europe’s Muddy Margins.” Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4 (2011): 589–619. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360 .2011.01113.x.

5 Candiani, Vera S. Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014.

6 Graham, Johns Webb. “Environmental, Social, and Political Change in the Otomí Heartland: A Hydraulic History of the Ixmiquilpan Valley (Hidalgo State, Mexico).” PhD thesis, Yale University, 2018.

7 Agostoni, Claudia. Monuments of Progress: Modernization and Public Health in Mexico City, 1876–1910. Latin American and Caribbean Series, 4. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2003.

8 Graham, Johns Webb. “Environmental, Social, and Political Change in the Otomí Heartland: A Hydraulic History of the Ixmiquilpan Valley (Hidalgo State, Mexico).” PhD thesis, Yale University, 2018; Tortolero Villaseñor, Alejandro. Tierra, agua y bosques: historia y medio ambiente en el México central. 1. ed. Colección Ecología (Mexico City, Mexico). Ciudad de México: Centre Français d’Études mexicaines et centraméricaines and Instituto de Investigaciones Dr José María Luis Mora,1996.

9 Gayol, Roberto. Proyecto de desagüe y saneamiento para la Ciudad de México. México: Oficina Tip. de la Secretaría de Fomento, 1892. http://archive.org/details/63140180R.nlm. Nih.gov.

10 Alves, Maria Thereza. El Regreso de Un Lago / The Return of a Lake. Cologne, Germany: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2012; Ortiz Zamora and Ortega Guerrero, “Origen y Evolución de Un Nuevo Lago En La Planicie de Chalco: Implicaciones de Peligro Por Subsidencia e Inundación de Áreas Urbanas En Valle de Chalco (Estado de México) y Tláhuac (Distrito Federal).” Investigaciones Geográficas 64 (2007): 26–42.

11 Chaussard, E., E. Havazli, H. Fattahi, E. Cabral-Cano, and D. Solano-Rojas.
“Over a Century of Sinking in Mexico City: No Hope for Significant Elevation and Storage Capacity Recovery.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth 126, no. 4 (April 1, 2021): e2020JB020648. https://doi.org/10.1029 /2020JB020648.

12 Llerena V, FA. “Massive Propagation of Halophytes (Distichlis Spicata and Tamarix Spp.) on the Highly Saline-Alkaline Soils in the Ex-Lake Texcoco, Mexico.” Halophytes as a Resource for Livestock and for Rehabilitation of Degraded Lands, 1994, 289–92.

13 For an alternative and inspiring vision of how Lake Texcoco’s ecological future could be different, see the work of local activist group Manos a la Cuenca (Twitter: @manos_alacuenca).

14 British Geological Survey, and Comisión Nacional del Agua. “Impact of Wastewater Re-use on Groundwater in the Mezquital Valley, Hidalgo State, Mexico.” Technical Report. London: London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 1998.

15 Comisión Nacional del Agua, and Subdirección General de Planeación. “Dimensión y Volumen de Descarga En La Desembocadura de Ríos Principales 2016,” 2018. Contreras, Jesse D., Rafael Meza, Christina Siebe, Sandra Rodríguez- Dozal, Yolanda A. López-Vidal, Gonzalo Castillo-Rojas, Rosa I. Amieva, et al. “Health Risks from Exposure to Untreated Wastewater Used for Irrigation in the Mezquital Valley, Mexico: A 25-Year Update.” Water Research 123 (October 15, 2017): 834–50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j .watres.2017.06.058.

16 Comisión Nacional del Agua (CONAGUA). “Systema Cutzamala: Agua Para Milliones de Mexicanos.” México 2006 IV Foro Mundial del Agua. Mexico: CONAGUA, 2005. http://www.conagua .gob.mx/conagua07 /publicaciones /publicaciones/sistema -cutzamala.pdf.

17 González-Morán, T., R. Rodrı́guez, and S. A. Cortes. “The Basin of Mexico and Its Metropolitan Area: Water Abstraction and Related Environmental Problems.” Journal of South American Earth Sciences 12, no. 6 (November 1999): 607–13. https://doi.org /http://dx.doi.org/10.1016 /S0895-9811(99)00043-7.

18 Arrangoiz, Esteban. El buzo (The Diver). Documentary. Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos (CUEC), 2015. www .estebanarrangoiz.com.

The Grandest Form

The Fall 2024 Public Programs series at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) launched this month with the opening of Farshid Moussavi’s exhibition, “Architecture as an Instruction-Based Art.” The show features construction coordination drawings: visual instructions architects use throughout the building process. More than 75 studios and practitioners submitted examples of these drawings, and Moussavi invited several of the participants to speak about their contributions for the opening event at the GSD.

Moussavi contextualized the exhibition with the history of art, drawing connections between the practice of architecture and the work of Conceptual artists like Sol Lewitt. Early in his career, Lewitt worked as a graphic designer in architect I.M. Pei’s office. As Moussavi noted, “it is there that [Lewitt] drew inspiration from the architectural process and started to explore the notion that art could be a concept for creation.”

Because architects create instructions for the often hundreds of laborers, engineers, and other construction experts who will make the building, their authorship—like Lewitt’s in the conceptual drawings—rests “in their instructions and their drawings, and not in the actual physical building itself.” While Lewitt was interested in leaving space for interpretation, Moussavi notes that architects have a “moral and legal responsibility” to ensure that instructions are meticulously followed: “Every line in a drawing carries consequence.”  Because of this level of precision and the complexity of the design and construction process, she argues that architecture is “perhaps the grandest form of instruction-based art.”

Moussavi defines her methodology in her most recent book, Architecture & Micropolitics (2022) , which engages with Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of assemblages and rhizomatic systems. With no beginning and no end, and the ability to grow from any section rather than a central root, the rhizomatic design process creates many examples of micropolitics at work. As in experimental literature, Moussavi argues in the book, assemblages, rather than hierarchical architecture, open opportunities for the design to change as the piece is created, and for users to alter the space to suit their needs. The complexity of construction coordination drawings, with each layer communicating a different aspect of a building, attests to the many specialists who contribute to a work of architecture. As Moussavi writes in the exhibition text, “the architecture of a building is a product of assemblage, or the way physical elements—forms, materials, textures, colors—are combined to create enclosed and open spaces that have a distinctive presence.”

Conversations throughout the event reflected back on the ways in which users were part of the design process, the level of control an architect maintains, and how mechanical systems could be rendered visible or hidden. Grace La, GSD Professor of Architecture and Chair of the Department of Architecture, noted that the exhibition offers the opportunity to cluster different sets of images together to “theorize a way in which the ‘instruction-based-ness’ of the architect’s project is part and parcel with a kind of design thinking.”

One of the most resonant notes of the evening was a rallying call from Moussavi to “claim our work as art. I cannot imagine any other practice that is more complex than the work of the architect. You have to be artful in the way you see, think, negotiate, and manage all the unpredictability thrown at you. How can anything be more exciting than architecture?”

In this spirit of instruction-based art and Moussavi’s assemblages, what follows is a nonlinear glimpse of the evening’s conversation, in images and excerpts from the speakers’ presentations, which have been edited for clarity and length.

Toyo Ito

The structure looks like thick columns consisting of slabs extending upwards from below, while the area where light that falls from above are tubes extending upwards from the slabs. As you see, the structure of this architecture is a combination of these two types of tubes and is very complex. Initially, this structure was created by interlacing two gridded panels with stretching fabric, forming three dimensional curved structures. This drawing was created to explain this structure more clearly for the contractor. Although floor plans for each floor were prepared, they were not sufficient on their own, so this colored drawing was added to distinguish between tubes growing upward and those extending downward. This is intended to clearly illustrate the directions of the interwoven tubes.

 

Angela Pang 

This drawing looks absolutely oversaturated with information. In fact, it is—it’s an explosion of layers of coordinates and information that, along with the hundreds of people involved—structural engineers, building services engineers, landscape architects—enable us to decipher how the building comes together and should be built. In a city like Hong Kong that is all about verticality, it’s very unusual to push for flatness. But that’s what we’ve done here. The project is 150 meters long, or about 500 feet. Every inch of space was used. The drawing reveals the intensity that is required to create a very simple space.

Our concept for this drawing is to frame it like a human body. There’s a spine, out of which various components emerge. Headroom is very limited. We had to scrutinize every cross-section and every pipe and duct. A drawing like this speaks to the complexity and intensity that lie behind the scenes.

Pang is an assistant professor in practice of architecture at the GSD.

 

Sean Canty

The process of the project is developed through three layers: the landscape and plinth plan, the reflected ceiling plan, and the roof plan. The idea of the house and the yard, and the park’s reflection of that, was determined in workshops with community stakeholders. It was important to come up with a design that could withstand all the rounds of value engineering. It went through many different structural systems, but the formal conceit stayed the same. In some ways, the choice of project for the exhibition is interesting. I decided to choose two large-scale pavilions because the three layers that are turned on will be co-present in reality, after they’re constructed. That kind of coherence in the structural systems, the limited mechanical systems, are all present in the drawings—and they’re not hidden away in reality. So, when [Farshid Moussavi] gave the prompt, I went to find the least complex building, to show something with instructions that said: “Nothing is hidden.”

Canty is an assistant professor of architecture at the GSD.

Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam

The building is conceived as six levels of distinctive cascading forms. If you look on the right-hand side of the drawing, there’s a long list of dates in the upper right-hand corner, indicating the number of times this drawing was issued—first in September of 2002, and last in April of 2005. That’s 30 months of construction. The drawing was reissued to the contractor on average once a month. I can’t emphasize enough the intensity this client exhibited throughout the project in terms of their dedication to the education of these young women, and the idea that they were going to build something called a center for the campus—that was a huge change in something that they believe in fully, the idea that these young women should never think of themselves as centered, but always de-centered and always challenged by the things that they hold dear in their life. It was the most amazing three years of talking about their expectations for this project and what architecture can do.

Scogin is Kajima Professor in Practice of Architecture, Emeritus, at the GSD.

Philip Schmerbeck

The drawing that we selected for this presentation is, in a way, a limiting of information. We’ve extracted everything but the mechanical systems—the hidden, technical layers in our projects. By focusing only on these systems, we find clues to the instructions and the technical requirements that were handed to us by a whole constellation of technical know-how that had to be integrated into the core program, to generate a 2,100-seat concert hall at the center of this extruded trapezoid. Let’s call it the ghost of the concert hall, because we’re only seeing the large ductwork wrapping around the concert hall itself. By seeing the mechanical system, you also get a sense of what is invisible to the public from the outside. There was a choice not to make a building that was the formal embodiment of a concert hall. The mechanical system is the lens through which to understand all the complexities of that goal. The ductwork had to be acoustically isolated from the adjacent program, so the mechanical plant is positioned at the top of the hall where it can lend vertical presence volumetrically as seen from the harbor. The hall is a shell within a shell, serviced in-between by this octopus of low-velocity, high-volume air, all emanating from that very large plant at the top of the building.

Christian Kerez

The landscape and the topography lines are crucial for the understanding of the constant height changes within the slabs. The plans highlight the position of the connections between slabs given that, in reality, one should not be able to differentiate where they start and end. The project required 20 different scales of scaffolding towers in order to redraw the changing levels as close as possible; larger scaffolding towers were used for less inclined areas, while the smaller towers were assembled around the biggest changes in levels. While the floor plan is the key plan for understanding the overview and relationship between all elements within the slab, the sections were crucial for retracing the project on site. The sections were cut and drawn every 50 centimeters totaling more than 40,000 sections. They indicated the height of the towers and, more importantly, the small formwork beams which were customized on-site to achieve the different curvatures. All the drawings were developed on-site by Brazilian architect Caio Barboza, who studied at Harvard, and was the project manager with the local construction company.

Farshid Moussavi

These visualizations were made for the Ismaili Center Houston. One of the foundational layers of the drawing is a grid, which we have used to develop two key concepts for the building: simplicity and openness. Simplicity through repetition is inspired by Islamic and minimalist art. It’s about creating harmony and unity. This grid spans across the whole site. One of the main functions of the grid is to bring together the sacred and the profane, or the everyday aspects of the project. The sacred is to do with qibla, the orientation towards the Kaaba, which is significant for the Ismaili community. The other everyday aspects of the site have to do with the north-south orientation, the topography, and the floodplain.

As you see, the grid helps integrate the building with its garden and creates a sense of openness, which is vital for the Ismaili Center because it is meant to be not just for the Ismaili community, but for other communities in Houston and beyond. We’ve used the grid to create a form that opens out in all four cardinal directions—north, south, east, and west—so it is highly accessible from all its sides and integrated with its surroundings. This has also allowed us to introduce three verandas to the building, reinforcing our concept of openness. Inside, we used the triangular grid, together with the long span structure to create three atriums inside the building, which abut the verandas. This coupling of the atriums and the verandas connect the interior with the exterior, enhancing the sense of openness. To keep the prayer hall as a quiet, contemplative space, we’ve added a two-layer perforated aluminum suspended ceiling, which is shown in pink on the drawing, with a layer of diffused light underneath. This assembly of elements not only hides the M&E elements, but also creates a soft, infinite ceiling effect that will contribute to the serenity of the space. Without these carefully designed ceilings, we would see all of the ducts, pipes, and cables. By concealing them, we maintain a sense of lightness and serenity, which supports the building’s spiritual and contemplative atmosphere.

Moussavi is a professor in practice of architecture at the GSD.

The History of Gund Hall

The Graduate School of Design (GSD) was established in 1936 to foster interdisciplinarity among the previously separate Schools of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning. Within a few decades, though, the GSD had outgrown its home in Robinson and Hunt Halls, and the desired collaboration among the design departments proved difficult with offerings scattered throughout Harvard’s campus. Leadership recognized the need to unite the GSD’s programs under one roof to encourage cooperation among the school’s disciplines. In 1964, the GSD launched a capital campaign to fund the construction of the new building, to be named in honor of key benefactor George Gund II (1888–1966), a Harvard Business School graduate, banker, and real estate investor from Cleveland, Ohio.

THE ARCHITECT

Prior to earning his master of architecture at the GSD in 1958, Australian-born John Andrews had graduated with an architecture degree from the University of Sydney. By the early 1960s, Andrews had settled in Canada, where he developed a reputation as a strong architect and a thoughtful educator at the University of Toronto, for which he designed the well-feted Scarborough College, completed in 1966. The following year, likely on the urging of GSD dean Josep Lluís Sert (Andrews’s former professor), Harvard commissioned Andrews to design Gund Hall.

PROGRAM AND CONSTRUCTION

Issued in October 1967, the building’s brief called for studio space, an auditorium, an exhibition area, audiovisual and library facilities, workshops, and classrooms, to be located on a site at the intersection of Cambridge and Quincy Streets, just a block from Robinson and Hunt Halls. Andrews structured the parti around the design studio, which he viewed as the heart of architectural education, grouping the remaining programmatic elements alongside and below this dominant zone. Construction began in November 1969, and in fall 1972, the GSD moved into its new home.

THE DESIGN

Comprising exposed reinforced concrete and extensive glass, Gund Hall features at its core a shared multilevel studio block. A 125-foot clear-span steel-truss system soars above the four terraced studio “trays” that occupy this glass-enclosed expanse, traversed by open stairways and infused with light. Supporting spaces, including faculty offices and classrooms, wrap the studio block to the west and north.

Outside, Gund Hall’s main facade faces west, rising five stories with a deep overhang supported by a tall concrete colonnade that shelters the building’s primary entrance. The building’s recessed lower levels defer to the neighboring Memorial Hall while widening the brick-paved sidewalk along Quincy Street, thereby emphasizing the thoroughfare that Gund Hall shares with Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center and the Fogg Art Museum to the south. Plentiful glass offers passersby a glimpse into Gund Hall’s exhibition and library spaces. From Quincy Street the building slopes down toward the east, echoing the tiered studio space within. At night, the illuminated trays outline Gund Hall’s dramatic stepped profile against the dark sky.

Upon Gund Hall’s opening, New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable characterized Andrews’s creation as “a very powerful building,” citing “the remarkable architectural statement of the studio.” And despite the architect’s use of concrete and glass—a notable deviation from Harvard’s dominant use of brick—Huxtable described Gund Hall as a “handsome structure” that “sits well in the street and its surroundings.”¹

RENOVATIONS

Since its completion more than 50 years ago, Gund Hall has undergone incremental renovations to address growing student numbers, evolving pedagogical needs, and facility maintenance. The most recent renovation, undertaken during summer 2024, rendered Gund Hall more sustainable through the installation in the studio trays of high efficiency glazing and shading systems to optimize interior climatic conditions and minimize energy use. Additional enhancements, such as updated lighting and widened exits, increased accessibility and well-being in studio spaces. David Fixler, lecturer in architecture at the GSD, characterized the renovated Gund Hall as a best-practices showcase for the rehabilitation and conservation of mid-twentieth-century buildings, emphasizing that the newest enhancements deliver “a significant upgrade in energy performance and occupant comfort.”²

 

 

1. Ada Louise Huxtable, “New Harvard Hall: Drama and Questions,” NYT, Nov. 8, 1972. ↩︎
2. David Fixler in Joshua Machat, “The Plan for a More Sustainable and Accessible Gund Hall,” GSD News, Dec. 18, 2023, https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/2023/12/the-plan-for-a-more-sustainable-and-accessible-gund-hall/. ↩︎

 

SUGGESTED RESOURCES

Anthony Alofsin, The Struggle for Modernism: Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning at Harvard (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2002)

Bainbridge Bunting, Harvard: An Architectural History (Cambridge, MA: Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985)

Morton and Phyllis Keller, Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America’s University (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)

Joshua Machat, “The Plan for a More Sustainable and Accessible Gund Hall,” News, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Dec. 18, 2023

Paul Walker, John Andrews: Architect of Uncommon Sense (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Design Press, 2023)

Contemporary Memorials: Spaces of Engagement, Calls to Action

As Christopher Columbus plunged into Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, and General Robert E. Lee dismounted his pedestal in Richmond, a distinctive kind of memorial has been gaining traction.¹ While past debates centered on a memorial’s formal qualities—figurative or abstract?—attention has pivoted from aesthetic attributes to the ways in which a visitor interacts with a memorial. Rather than an object to be contemplated, today’s memorial is a space to be experienced. And with this shift from contemplation to experience, a focus driven in part by faculty and alumni of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), comes an emphasis on active engagement, now and in the future.

Take, for example, the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers (MEL), which swells from the lawn just east of the Rotunda on the University of Virginia’s (UVA’s) campus. Designed by Höweler + Yoon, a firm founded by GSD professor of architecture Eric Höweler and dean of Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning J. Meejin Yoon, who graduated from the GSD in 1997, this installation honors the 4,000 enslaved individuals who built and worked at the university from its inception in 1817 through the Civil War’s conclusion nearly 50 years later. Composed of concentric granite rings, the outermost cresting to 8 feet in height, the memorial beckons to passersby traversing campus and across the street in Charlottesville. On the larger ring’s smooth inner wall they find inscribed 578 names and 311 phrases of kinship or occupation, such as “daughter” or “mason,” along with more than 3000 “memory marks”—placeholders for the yet-unidentified enslaved individuals. Visitors also encounter a timeline, awash with water, that denotes the racial violence underlying Jefferson’s “Academical Village.” These features partially enclose a circle of grass, a public space for meeting and interaction, recalling clearings in the woods where enslaved people would secretly gather. Meanwhile, in certain light conditions an ethereal portrait of Isabella Gibbons—a former enslaved domestic worker at UVA who became a Charlottesville school teacher—materializes on the MEL’s outer wall, suggesting that the history of which the memorial speaks is ever present, even when unseen.

Dedicated in 2021, the MEL is a contemporary memorial in date and sensibility: it engages visitors in an active manner, through multiple and flexible means; it contains room for emergent information (new names can be inscribed); and it incorporates input from a range of stakeholders, including UVA students and descendants of the honored individuals, who took part in its conceptualization. The MEL aspires to more than the commemoration of a person, group, or event; it sheds light on a previously suppressed history—not as a closed episode, but rather as an ongoing collective conversation in the present and future. “Righting past wrongs is what we were asked to do,” noted Höweler, who with Brenda Tindal was recently appointed co-chair of Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery Memorial Project . “How do you begin repair in the present by starting with the past and being more truthful about it?”²

A reflection of changing attitudes toward memorialization, in 2016 the National Park Service, National Capital Planning Commission, and Van Alen Institute co-sponsored Memorials for the Future , “an ideas competition to reimagine how we think about, feel, and experience memorials.”³ After analyzing the 89 submissions drawn from around the world, the organizers issued Not Set in Stone , a document underscoring potential key aspects of memorial design moving forward. The overarching message highlights the heterogeneous audiences that today’s memorials address as well as the inherent complexity and multi-dimensionality memorials now embody. The report offers broad guidelines for thinking about new memorials, recommending that they engage with the present and future as much as the past; accommodate shifting narratives; harness public involvement for conceptualization; and explore mobile or temporary forms of expression.⁴ The winning submission for Memorials for the Future, Climate Chronograph by landscape architects Rebecca Sunter and Erik Jensen, exemplifies these ideas, repurposing a portion of East Potomac Park in Washington, DC, as a place for visitors to kayak among the dead cherry trees, left behind as persistent sea level rise subsumes the land.⁵

Throughout the past decade, elements espoused by Not Set in Stone have appeared with increasing frequency in new memorials, as evidenced through a brief survey of projects by Harvard GSD affiliates—including those responsible for the MEL. Höweler + Yoon also designed the Collier Memorial (2015), sited on Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s campus where Officer Sean Collier was shot and killed following the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013. Comprising 32 blocks of granite that create a five-way stone vault, the memorial serves as an iconic destination, mid-campus passageway, and dynamic sculptural presence, its form suggesting that strength derives from unity.

The notion that contemporary memorials are “more visitor-centric”—less about observation and more about interaction—aligns with the recent competition-winning design for the Fallen Journalists Memorial (FJM) by Chicago-based architect John Ronan, who graduated from the GSD in 1995.⁶ Located on the National Mall in Washington, DC, and slated for completion in 2028, the FJM serves a twofold purpose: to honor journalists who have died in the pursuit of truth, and to educate visitors about the First Amendment’s role in a democratic society. With the FJM still working its way through the federal approval process, images of the design have not been released. Yet it has been revealed that Ronan’s design employs an array of glass elements through which visitors navigate to reach a “place of remembrance,” echoing the investigative journalist’s “journey of discovery” as a story comes together.⁷ The FJM thus distinguishes itself within its monument-saturated landscape by demanding the visitor’s active engagement.

A prerequisite of active engagement likewise informs Penjing , the shortlisted project for the Memorial to the Victims of the Los Angeles Chinese Massacre of 1871 by GSD alumni J. Roc Jih, James Leng, and Jennifer Ly (who graduated in 2012, 2013, and 2014, respectively). Nearly 150 years ago, a racist mob terrorized and lynched 18 Chinese men. The incident, which precipitated anti-Asian laws that restricted Chinese immigration, remained largely unacknowledged until 2021, when Los Angeles and California allocated funds for the commemoration of the massacre. In response to a call for submissions, Jih (of Studio J. Jih in Boston) and Leng and Ly (of San Francisco-based Figure) crafted a design that unites the Chinese concepts of Pen (frame) and Jing (scene) in a series of multitextured limestone vessels that house miniature gardens and mark locations in downtown Los Angeles significant to the massacre. The designers envisioned the installations as living sculptures to be cultivated by residents, who encounter the gardens as they move through the neighborhood; inscriptions on the ground educate visitors, ensuring that the massacre remains part of the public discourse. As Jih noted, “We see remembrance as a constant and ongoing act rather than as something sacred and unchanging.” Through the incorporation of living elements, “the act of remembering also becomes one of care and maintenance, inviting tactile engagement.”⁸

Likewise, visitor engagement figured prominently in the conceptualization of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice (2018), created by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). Following years in-depth research on lynching and the lasting impacts of racial violence, EJI collaborated with an array of designers and artists to construct, across a six-acre site adjacent to the State Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, a memorial that honors the more than 4,400 victims of racial terror lynchings that took place in the United States between 1877 and 1950. MASS Design Group, founded by Michael Murphy and Alan Ricks (GSD graduates from 2011 and 2010, respectively), worked with EJI on one of the memorial’s elements of the memorial: a pavilion that contains 800 suspended steel columns —one for each of the counties in which a lynching took place—engraved with victims’ names.

A passageway descends through the columns, with visitors journeying to a position below, gazing up as if part of the crowd at a public lynching. Surrounding the pavilion, matching columns wait for their respective counties to claim and transport them home. In this way, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice engages more than its immediate visitors, extending its reach to hundreds of counties that must choose to create local memorials, thereby acknowledging their past atrocities, or leave the columns in Montgomery, signaling their lack of remorse. The National Lynching Memorial thus acts as a tool for engagement, education, and public accountability.

In 2019, the Gun Violence Memorial Project , designed by MASS Design Group and Songha & Company, where artist Hank Willis Thomas is creative director, debuted at the Chicago Architecture Biennal before opening, in spring 2021, for a two-year run at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. As explained by Jha D. Amazi, principal at MASS Design Group, the memorial aims “to communicate the enormity of the [gun violence] epidemic while also honoring the individuals whose lives have been taken.”⁹ The design features four houses composed of 700 transparent glass bricks, with each house signifying the weekly human cost—700 lives on average—of gun violence in this country.¹⁰ Families who have lost someone to gun violence have donated remembrance objects from drivers’ licenses to Double Dutch jump ropes, which are displayed within a glass brick along with the victim’s name, date of birth, and date of death. For visitors, these objects humanize the victim, transforming them from a statistic to a person. Additional engaging elements include audio and film clips about the effects of gun violence, which visitors experience as they enter the houses to view their contents.

For the families of victims, the remembrance objects act as visible tributes to their loved ones. Simultaneously, the objects encourage interaction between the families as well as society at large. This begins with the objects’ process of collection, which draws families to given places at designated times; indeed, since opening five years ago, representatives from the Gun Violence Memorial Project have traveled to 14 cities around the country, holding collection events to fill formerly empty glass bricks. At these events, families encounter, and ideally connect with, others in their area who suffer with gun-violence-related tragedies. Then, once the objects populate the glass bricks, the families by default join the memorial’s contributory community—not a formal designation, yet nonetheless meaningful. Finally, the objects connect families with people they may never meet yet who, by experiencing the memorial, will be touched by these individual stories. The Gun Violence Memorial Project, fortified by the assembled remembrance objects, underscores the vast reach of gun violence, a nationwide epidemic the United States has yet to sufficiently accept or address.

In late August 2024, the Gun Violence Memorial Project opened in Boston. As opposed to its tenures in Chicago and Washington, DC, the memorial’s current manifestation involves a citywide collaboration, with displays at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston City Hall, and the MASS Design Group’s gallery. With this shift from a single venue to multiple sites throughout a city, the memorial appears to have leapt in scale, taking a great stride toward its ambition to “foster a national healing process that begins with a recognition of the collective loss and its impact on society.”¹¹ Unlike static monuments that were conceived to be seen, this contemporary memorial elicits interaction and active engagement. As the Gun Violence Memorial Project illustrates, such a memorial can even be transitory; what persists is the human experience it provides.

*This piece was updated to describe the Equal Justice Initiative as the originator of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. 

1. Rachel Treisman, “Baltimore Protesters Topple Columbus Statue,” NPR, July 5, 2020; and Whittney Evans and David Streever, “Virginia’s Massive Robert E. Lee Statue Has Been Removed,” NPR,  Sept. 8, 2021. ↩︎
2. Eric Höweler, interview with author, June 27, 2024. ↩︎
3. Not Set in Stone (National Park Service, National Capital Planning Commission, and Van Alen Institute, 2016), 2. ↩︎
4. “Key Findings,” Memorials for the Future, Van Alen Institute. ↩︎
5. “Competition Winner,” Memorials for the Future, Van Alen Institute. ↩︎
6. John Ronan, interview with author, Mar. 25, 2024. ↩︎
7. Ibid. ↩︎
8. “Penjing,” Work, Studio J. Jih.. ↩︎
9. Jha D. Amazi, “The Gun Violence Memorial Project,” Exhibitions, Institute of Contemporary Art. ↩︎
10. This average number of 700 gun deaths per week in the United States is based on a statistic from 2018. As of May 2024, the average number of gun deaths per week for the year is 840. ↩︎
11. “About,” The Gun Violence Memorial Project. ↩︎

Plug-In Pastoral

A vertical garden in the backyard of 40 Kirkland Street on the campus of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) promises sanctuary to insects, relief from the late-summer heat, and new insights for how cities around the world can mitigate the effects of climate change. More than 1400 local plants hang in grow bags from a cylindrical scaffolding tower that rises nearly as high as the surrounding buildings. Titled Polinature , the project is spearheaded by Belinda Tato, associate professor in practice of landscape architecture at the GSD. “Polinature has been designed as a low-cost, low-tech temporary solution to bring climatic comfort to urban areas that currently lack it,” Tato explains in a text about the work.

Funded by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard, Polinature is, on the one hand, harmonious with its immediate surroundings. Grown from seed in Massachusetts nurseries, the plants are similar to those found in yards and fields all over Cambridge, and the name refers to Tato’s aim of bolstering the local population of pollinating insects. On the other hand, Polinature has a singular aesthetic and self-sufficient function that sets it apart from its context. The steel tubes of the scaffolding and the counterweight system that keeps it stable attest to Polinature’s temporary status—the structure will be disassembled within a few weeks with minimal waste—while highlighting the project’s overall character, which is as much technological as pastoral.

Polinature is a machine for producing climate relief. Solar panels that cap the tower are capable of providing the project with its own source of off-the-grid electricity. In addition to powering digital displays with information about the project aims and data about Polinature’s climatic performance, the solar panels are adequate to support a set of twelve inflatable pods that ring the tower. Six of these pods are permanently inflated and embedded with LEDs to provide illumination. Another six are what Tato calls “climatic bubbles.” Apart from providing shade, these pods inflate and deflate in response to environmental conditions. Nozzles in the undersides of the climatic bubbles produce a cooling breeze for anyone below to enjoy.

For the past two decades, Tato has investigated how designers can address the deadly effects of heat in urban areas. Climate scientists have warned that cities are becoming hotter more quickly than rural areas, a divergence that is even more pronounced in megacities with populations over 10 million. “Urban greening” can play a role in mitigating these effects, though tree canopies dense enough to have a significant cooling function are often distributed unevenly, making excessive city heat a tangible index of social inequality.

Tato stresses that no single architectural intervention can compensate for the structural factors driving climate change. Still, Polinature has the potential to address acute dangers immediately while permanent solutions come to fruition. As a prototype, Polinature offers an opportunity to study “how the structure is creating a better climatic comfort in the space compared to the outside,” Tato says. Sensors placed inside and outside the structure provide comparative data, allowing Tato and her team to assess the project’s performance quantitatively and optimize it in future iterations. Polinature is the result of years of careful study, not only of the nature of the plants that are most suited to such a growing arrangement, but also of mechanisms that can modulate the airflow from the climatic bubbles, producing the perfect breeze.

Tato stresses that the Cambridge location, which was already verdant, is far from the end point for the project. “In an ideal world, this should have been placed on a parking lot,” she says. Polinature has the potential to provide instant urban greening and convert disused, asphalt-heavy areas into climatically comfortable public spaces. The designs for the project are open-source, shareable with urban planners, architects, and builders as well as policymakers and communities around the world. To Tato, the iteration of Polinature at the GSD represents a “kit of parts” that could be quickly and inexpensively mass produced.

Polinature extends Tato’s longstanding work investigating how landscape architecture can support efforts toward climate justice. With Jose Luis Vallejo, Tato is a founding member of Ecosistema Urbano , a group of architects and urban designers with offices in Madrid, Florida, and Massachusetts. Polinature refines and develops concepts at the heart of their Eco-Boulevard project for Madrid (2004–2008), described as an “urban recycling operation.” Tiers of trees arranged on a cylindrical tower provide both cooling through evapotranspiration and an inviting social space.  While Eco-Boulevard became a permanent fixture in Madrid, Polinature is about providing immediate impact with zero waste. Tato designed it as what she calls a “plug-in” structure, easy to erect and dismantle in any context. That terminology evokes the work of avant-garde collective Archigram, whose members envisioned cities comprising flexible, mobile, high-tech structures that could respond to inhabitants’ changing needs.

While Archigram’s work channels the consumerist tendencies of postwar mass culture, Polinature is wholly sustainable and community oriented. When the tower comes down in mid-September, Tato and her team will give away all the plants that ring the structure to people in Cambridge. In that way, this temporary garden could have a long-term effect on the city’s urban ecology. Polinature will live on in other ways as well, especially as a learning and teaching opportunity about how we must contend with a changing climate. “The goal is that we pollinate Cambridge with the idea of the project,” says Tato.