How a Collaboration Between Design and Real Estate Advances Equity in Mumbai

Students in Rahul Mehrotra’s “Extreme Urbanism Mumbai” Graduate School of Design (GSD) Spring 2025 option studio faced a challenge that was intended to take them “completely outside their comfort level,” said Mehrotra. “We set a wicked problem that exposes them to an unfolding of interconnected issues.”  

Mumbai, set on a peninsula on the northwest coast of India, is one of the largest and densest cities in the world, with a population of about 21.3 million residents and more than 36,200 people per square kilometer—most of whom face a stark housing crisis. Approximately 57 percent of Mumbai’s population lives in informal homes, many of whom work in nearby housing complexes where they’re employed by the upper-class residents. Most of the students in the studio had never been exposed to what Mehrotra describes as “extreme conditions, in terms of density, poverty, and the juxtaposition of different worlds in the same space.”

“Mumbai is like nothing I’d ever seen before,” said Enrique Lozano (MAUD ’26), who had previously traveled to other parts of India. “There’s no designed urban form; skyscrapers are scattered throughout the city. It’s on a former wetland, so there are issues with water, one of my research areas.”

He and his classmates were introduced to Mumbai’s coastal Elphinstone Estate neighborhood and a site owned by the Port Authoritiy of Mumbai  that includes 40 acres of warehouses as well as iron and steel shipping offices, bounded on one side by a rail line and on the other by the harbor and P D’Mello Road, a major city street. “The Eastern Waterfront will be one of the city’s most contested land parcels to be opened for urban development in the next few years,” writes Mehrotra. “It plays a catalytic role in connecting the city back to the metropolitan hinterland….” The 900 or so people who work in this area and live in sidewalk tenements stand to be displaced once development progresses.

Students were tasked with working at three scales: regional, district (the “superblock”), and site (urban development policy). Rather than displacing workers whose lives are strongly rooted in the neighborhood, students were asked to invent schemes that would newly house those 900 families in tenements by “cross-subsidizing from market-value housing.” The studio offered a counterpoint to the government’s designation of the site as a commercial district. Students’ proposals served what Mehrotra terms in reference to his research, “instruments of advocacy,” creating a way to keep the city’s most vulnerable residents where they have always lived, while also offering needed market-value homes.

This studio differs from many others at the GSD, in that it involves collaboration between the studio and a Master in Real Estate course titled “The Development Project.” Jerold Kayden, Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design and founding director of the Master in Real Estate Program, and Mehrotra brainstormed about the idea of such a collaboration and launched the idea in spring 2024. David Hamilton, a real estate faculty member at the GSD, co-instructed this year’s version in the spring 2025 semester.

“I think of real estate as the physical vessel in which people live, work, and play,” Kayden explained. “And if we can apply our multidisciplinary skills and knowledge to shape real estate in ways that create a more productive, sustainable, equitable, and pleasing world, then I can’t think of a more noble cause than that.”

The magic of the combined studio and real estate class, as Kayden, Mehrotra, and Hamilton saw it, was that students from the two programs would be interdependent and could only solve the on-site housing challenges by working together. “The real estate students couldn’t own the problem because the designers didn’t design it in a way that would work in terms of real estate sense,” said Mehrotra. “And the designers couldn’t think of the design unless the real estate folks came up with a model of financing for that cross-subsidy.”

              
Hamilton concurred that the studio set up a collaborative tension that replicated real-world challenges: “We can imagine a path that gets us from having bright ideas and a beautiful piece of land, to a proposed future that’s both appealing and realistic enough to attract investment capital to be built. Then, we get to what we call stabilization, where the new neighborhood is working physically and financially in a sustainable way. Getting there involves a million different variables, from government action and public subsidies, to the needs of the market and investors and other financial considerations.”

Lozano saw the benefits of designing in Mumbai, where “the street is an even playing ground. Everybody takes the metro, walks the Plaza, buys street food in the markets.” At the same time, like most collaborators, his group had their share of challenges as they moved through the design process. “The entire studio was a negotiation between the students—of judging our values and understanding that the real estate students want to make a return on investment, but the subversion is the social mission, and the designers had to convince them that social space is an asset.”

He described a beautiful 19th-century clock tower on the Elphinstone site, which one of his real estate group members wanted to demolish, and how they negotiated the “iterative design process” and “pushed against the blank slate idea.” They kept the clock tower, which they saw as a cultural asset, and “turned it into an incredible public amenity with restrooms, civic spaces, and movie screenings. It’s an anchor and memory of the site itself, with the maritime history and labor organizing that occurred there.” Through the collaborative process, building trust by drawing and talking through their design plans, the design students developed a final project of which they’re proud.

“As we become surrounded by the madness and complexities of the world we inhabit,” said Mehrotra, “it’s important to have multiple perspectives on the same problem, and to synthesize those multiple perspectives into a proposition.”

The final review mirrored the lively discourse the students experienced all semester, as critics discussed the merits of each proposal and the possibilities for the Elphinstone Estate. Sujata Saunik, Chief Secretary of the Government of Maharashtra, participated throughout the final review and helped bring to the conversation a sense of Mumbai’s realities. As the student groups together advocated for shared public access to the site and investing in dignified housing for people living in tenements, they presented to the government a more equitable approach to developing a site that’s unique as well as profitable.

“It’s not the solution,” said Mehrotra, “but it’s a conversation changer.”

Student Propositions

Life on Earth: Zhang Ke’s Studio Melds Contemporary Architecture with an Ancient Landscape

The terraced rice fields of Yuanyang, in Yunnan Province, China, have been maintained and rebuilt continuously for more than 1,300 years. Designed to capture water flowing from mountaintops for natural irrigation, the terraces transform the steep walls of the Hong river valley into a gentle slope. This resilient geoengineering project has sustained rice production season after season for centuries. The traditional home to the Hani and Ifugao people, the area was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2013 in recognition of its significant “cultural landscape.” Today, stunning vistas of the fields, which are enclosed by earthen barriers that follow the topography of the mountains, attract visitors from around the world.

For Zhang Ke, Aga Khan Design Critic in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the ancient traditions of shaping the landscape at Yuanyang offer a point of departure for contemporary architecture. The terraces demonstrate “how agricultural landscape and natural landscape merge together,” he says. The earthworks were “created using local materials and then embedded in the landscape without intruding.” Zhang Ke sees the fields as a time-tested way of living in sync with the environment, embodying a concept he calls Earth-Dwelling.  

Zhang Ke, who received his MArch from the GSD in 1998, recently led an option studio that travelled to Yuanyang with the brief to develop not just architecture that responded to the spectacular landscape, but a program inspired by Earth-Dwelling that might enhance the area for residents and tourists alike. The founder of ZAO, Zhang Ke has explored related notions with GSD students previously in a 2017 option studio focused on Tibet. More recently, he has been drawn to Yuanyang for a collaboration with the Avant-Garde Library, an institution known in China for occupying daring architectural spaces, including a building in nearby Mengzi that Zhang Ke completed in 2021. 

Zhang Ke’s design for a branch of the library in Yuanyang is a low-slung structure, the shape of which evokes the organic lines of the terraced fields. When completed, it will look and feel integrated with the earthen rice terraces, in part because Zhang Ke has chosen to work with rammed earth. “There’s a material continuation, but it’s clearly contemporary,” he said. “The standpoint is not to imitate but to invent.” More than proscribing the use of any material, Earth-Dwelling, as Zhang Ke defines it, specifies attentiveness to environmental conditions at different scales, an interlocking approach to fostering global sustainability, community development, and, with a nod to Heidegger, creative modes of life grounded in the physical experience of a place. 

This perspective guided the fall 2024 research trip as part of a Department of Architecture option studio, which afforded a unique opportunity for GSD students to work in a rural setting with a delicate ecosystem and deep cultural roots.

“It just seemed so natural to terrace a mountain face and use the water from up on the hillside,” recalled Lucas Almassy (MArch ’26) of his impressions of the area. “It made sense for me immediately. I would live there or anywhere similar.” Inspired by the landscape, Almassy found himself sketching “constantly” on the trip. “I didn’t know what I was really drawing, but I knew it was assemblages of stones and bricks. And as I was drawing, I realized I was drawing tables and chairs and benches growing out of the earth.” These preliminary drawings, and a later series of large-scale paintings, informed a proposal for a library, which Almassy describes as “social infrastructure” designed as a common space for members of existing communities in the area and visitors. 

Guided by Zhang Ke, the studio met with local leaders and residents of the villages in the area, offering a chance to “see the land through the eyes of the people that live there,” says Abby Kuohn (MArch ’25). This consultation was especially critical because Zhang Ke tasked students with developing a program that could both benefit residents and offer a model for sustainable tourism. The ancient landscape of Yuanyang has, in recent years, been subject to contemporary social forces. While the UNESCO designation protected Yuanyang, it also guaranteed the arrival of mass tourism. A new airport under construction nearby promises to accelerate the growth of the tourist economy by allowing travelers to bypass the provincial capital of Kunming, a four-hour drive away.  

For Zhang Ke, architects must be proactive in addressing both the built environment and such changing social realities. His engagement with Yuanyang aims to help “increase the income of local communities . . . without losing a detached view of the potential consequences of tourism.” 

In his project, Peihao Jin (MArch II ’26) grappled the contradictory tendencies for tourism to increase awareness of local cultures while also threatening to degrade them. Noting a strong tradition of bamboo weaving in the area, especially among elder members of the community—“grandma and grandpa”, as he put it— Jin envisioned a pavilion to enclose a central square in a main village. Jin’s design for a dramatic thatch roof spanning the entire square would afford some protection from the elements while focusing views of the rice terraces. Offering an inviting space for both weavers and tourists, the structure would also employ local materials—rice straw thatching—that would effectively sustain the traditional technique by virtue of needing to be replaced on a three to five-year cycle.  

The agricultural economy of the area also informed the work of Aakash Dave (MAUD ’25), whose design for a rice noodle production facility employs rammed earth structures. “Earth was the biggest influence for my intervention,” he says, pointing both to the demonstration of rammed earth techniques that the studio witnessed at the site of Zhang Ke’s library as well as modes of building from his home country of India. Dave’s project also drew upon a careful study of how villagers used spaces between buildings for various stages of processing rice and byproducts, as well as the flow of water through both agricultural fields and dwellings. The spaces he created are meant to facilitate the traditional production of high-quality noodles using the red rice varietals for which Yuanyang is famous.  

In addition to tourists, Zhang Ke says that rural areas like Yuanyang are also experiencing a more localized renewal. Following decades of intense urbanization in China, ambitious young people who might have once left villages for cities are returning home. Many are interested in preserving customs, like rice noodle manufacturing, while adding value.  Traditional buildings are also being reconsidered. “Because of decades of demolition,” says Zhang Ke, such structures “are suddenly rare resources”. Indeed, a rural analogue to Zhang Ke’s work reimagining traditional hutongs in Beijing, for which he is well known, and ongoing projects to rehabilitate languishing villages. 

While villages in Yuanyang appear to follow traditional construction techniques, with prominent thatched roofs, most are, in fact, recent reconstructions. Through a government initiative, many village buildings that had previously employed rammed earth were reconstructed from concrete, but made to resemble older structures. Still, ruins of previous villages exist in the area, and the studio hiked to one cluster of buildings with a commanding view of the valley.

Kuohn selected this site for her project, which engages with traditional water systems. “One of the things that I found captivating about this area was how powerful and intricately engineered the water system was,” she says, observing how residents “constructed their dwellings in the villages all the way through the rice terraces themselves, and then down to the river. Without the water system, the entire ecosystem of the area wouldn’t work.” Kuohn devised a bathhouse that makes use of a peak-spanning bridge structure. Celebrating the central place of water in the community and offering a counter to its association with agricultural work, her proposal invites residents and tourists to find a source of rejuvenation.

“Earth, for our ancestors, contemporaries, and future generations alike, means also one of the most basic and sustainable materials for building,” Zhang Ke wrote in a description of the course prior to final reviews of the projects. Though many found inspiration in a broader conception of Earth-Dwelling and made use of a variety of materials, students strove to articulate connection to lifeways that predate us and possibly extend beyond our own time.  

Housing, By and For the Public

Bounded by the Blackstone River, a vital artery for industry since the late eighteenth century, Central Falls, RI, has a long history as a manufacturing center. The arc of that history—spanning from the city’s role as a catalyst for regional growth to its resident’s pivotal actions in the labor movement to the region’s slow decline as an industrial hub—is reflected in a now-vacant property off Broad Street, near Central Falls’ northern edge. Corning Glass started production on the site in the 1920s. Eventually, Osram Sylvania took over and manufactured lighting equipment until shuttering the facility in 2014. Today, the property is an expanse of blacktop awaiting a new future.

What that future will look like is a pressing question for Mayor Maria Rivera, who took office in 2021. Her administration wants to fill the gaps in the city’s urban fabric left by twentieth-century industries to address a pressing twenty-first-century need: affordable housing. To further this goal, the city aims to purchase a 1.8-acre portion of the Osram Sylvania site, pending approval of a federal grant. This spring, city officials gathered in City Hall with Rhode Island state administrators and housing activists to hear rapid-fire proposals for the property from students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). The presentations summarized the research students conducted in an option studio led by Susanne Schindler, design critic in urban planning and design at the GSD. “One impetus to do this studio was that there’s urgency now to build and to build affordably,” she said. “Rather than just focus on quantity, which is what policy makers tend to do, I wanted students to develop ways to also focus on the quality and longevity of this public investment.”

I believe the public should benefit directly and in the longer term because the costs for affordable housing are ultimately paid by the public, the taxpayer,

Susanne Schindler

A city of about 23,000 residents, many packed into the kind of triple-decker residential building found throughout urban New England, Central Falls is experiencing a similar housing crunch as municipalities around the country. Jim Vandermillen, director of planning and economic development in Central Falls, noted that many residents are underhoused; that is, they are members of households too large for the dwellings they inhabit. With the new Pawtucket/Central Falls commuter rail station providing direct access to Boston and Providence, the mismatch between current housing stock, which is still relatively affordable, and potential growth, which would make overall prices rise, could become increasingly severe.

In a wood-paneled meeting room adorned with large-scale portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, GSD students from across the school’s departments detailed plans for building dense, affordable housing on the Osram Sylvania site and elsewhere in Central Falls. The cross-disciplinary makeup of the studio reflected the complex challenges inherent in creating such housing. In addition to envisioning beautiful apartment buildings in a lushly planted, walkable area, the proposals grappled with how such structures could actually be built and maintained. Students advocated tweaks to zoning regulations and building codes while detailing viable financing models that take advantage of state tax incentives and federal grants.

“You’ve got planners who are thinking about design, you’ve got designers who are thinking like planners,” observed Vandermillen. “It’s not hypothetical,” he said of the proposals. “There’s a huge push under the leadership of the current [Rhode Island] house speaker to make changes in legislation that will drive more housing production. We’re very much in a mode where changes are being made.”

The Return of the Public Developer

This promise of change is what attracted Schindler to Rhode Island. The spring 2024 studio was an extension of her ongoing engagement with Central Falls, where she had previously led a similar course focused on city-wide strategies rather than a single site, although several students focused on Conant Thread, a sprawling 50-acre complex of former mill buildings, some dating to the nineteenth century. In 2020, a fire tore through many of these historic structures. Despite its prime location a short walk from the regional rail station, the property remains a forest of ruins as the owner, a private development firm, weighs its options. The dilemma raised a question at the core of Schindler’s research: if commercial developers are not providing high-quality housing at affordable rates, what options might a municipal government have to address the needs of residents?

Despite its small size, Central Falls has been unusually proactive in the housing field. Through its nuisance laws, it has pressed private landlords to maintain their properties, and has also developed new homes for affordable homeownership. It has successfully pursued various state and federal funding streams to acquire land and buildings for redevelopment or rehabilitation, generally then turning a property over to a nonprofit to develop and manage the property. In turning over properties, however, the city also cedes significant control over what gets built. “To make a public-private partnership work,” says Schindler, “you really need people on the public side who know how to negotiate, who know what to ask for. And you need similar capacity on the private side, and a range of development partners to work with.”

Schindler sees another option becoming viable in this environment. “At least since the mid-1970s, it’s been politically impossible to talk about public housing,” she said, acknowledging an often-repeated narrative of mismanaged, under-funded public developments. “Over the past five years, in a very short time, the conversation has completely changed. The fact that the affordability question is so much on everyone’s mind, it may now be a political moment where there’s a window of opportunity to try direct public action again.” Schindler, who has studied nonprofit housing cooperatives in Switzerland as well as the history of housing in the United States, sees the potential to develop new models for public entities in the US to directly finance, build, and own housing units. “I believe the public should benefit directly and in the longer term because the costs for affordable housing are ultimately paid by the public, the taxpayer,” she said. The Central Falls Housing Authority is, in fact, about to develop its first new building with more than 60 apartments.

On a research trip, the studio studied examples of public development that challenged outdated, skewed notions of housing agencies as moribund bureaucracies. The group travelled to Atlanta to understand one of the nation’s oldest public developers, the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA). The AHA has worked with private developers  over the past thirty years, and it has also partnered with  its new nonprofit subsidiary, the Atlanta Urban Development Corporation, set up in 2023. The latter implements  innovative strategies for investing in mixed-income development on city-owned land,  thereby maintaining long-term control over the housing. As Noah Kahan (MUP ’24) observed, this strategy “allows the city to be more creative in the production of affordable housing.”

Whereas private developers typically seek returns within five years, public developers can manage a site for generations, extended timelines that allow for more flexibility not just in building but in addressing specific needs. Back in Central Falls, one of these specific needs is for housing units of a certain size: especially scarce are studios as well as large, four- and five-bedroom apartments for extended families. “It’s not all about just more, more,” said Vandermillen. “Let’s make sure we’re developing the right types of housing, and we get the mix of bedroom sizes and get the opportunities for home ownership as well as for rental.”

The possibilities opened by public development extend beyond the housing units themselves, allowing for investments in substantial amenities that provide long-term benefits. Students developed nine proposals, working individually or in pairs. Approaches ranged from redesigning the process to redesigning the product.

Landscape architecture student Dora Mugerwa (MLA ’24) proposed standards that prioritized tree planting and landscape in lieu of standards focused on the building interior only in an effort to make the Osram-Sylvania site a healthier living space overall.

Noah Kahan (MUP ’24) and Naomi Mehta (MAUD ’25), who collaborated on a project, envisioned a network of bike paths helping to weave together adjacent riverfront sites as well as the connecting residents with existing services in the city, including medical centers, community businesses, and recreation facilities.

Designing the Conditions

Students in the studio created proposals for affordable housing, but the assignment required that they also take a broader view, grappling with city, state, and federal programs that could impact their designs. They also assessed how a new development would fit within Central Falls’ existing infrastructure, planning initiatives, and community priorities.  “I call this studio ‘designing the conditions,’ because design is not just about designing a physical object, in this case a building or a floor plan or facade,” Schindler explained. “There are rules that govern what we can produce as architects or planners. There are formulas, metrics, codes, and conventions that decide what gets funded, in what way, and on what timeline. Those are the conditions that shape what gets built, and architects, planners, and landscape architects should be at the table in designing those conditions.”

As a group, the studio met with Mayor Rivera, city solicitor Matt Jerzyk, deputy director of planning Diane Jacques, and Frank Spinella, the city’s housing consultant. Individually, students conducted interviews with developers and organizations as needed for their research. Taking these conversations into consideration, students proposed designs informed by real building codes, legal structures, and data about the urban context. “We were able to work across scales,” said Mehta “looking at a larger, comprehensive plan without compromising on the design.”

For students coming from a planning or urban design background like Mehta and Kahan, some of the details about financing, mortgages, and tax codes may have been relatively familiar territory. For architecture student David Shim (MArch I ’25) digging into state laws was a new and challenging experience. “As an architect, you’re usually given the prompt and you go from there,” said Shim. In the studio, he was given Rhode Island’s Qualified Allocation Plan, a document outlining the state’s criteria according to which affordable housing proposals are evaluated to receive public funding. “To parse this document and find your pain points is quite a daunting task.”

On his first visit to Central Falls, Shim was struck by the contrast between the city’s brand-new rail station and the nearby Conant Thread site. “The sheer scale of it, and the state of disarray that it was in—I just couldn’t keep my mind off it,” he said. Turning his attention away from the Osram Sylvania parcel, Shim decided that Central Falls could most effectively meet its housing goals by focusing on development at the expansive Conant Thread site.

Since a private developer owned the property without taking steps to build on it, Shim began looking into state eminent domain laws. He found a startling detail: Rhode Island requires that the state pay property owners 150 percent of fair market value in eminent domain cases, a poison pill seemingly designed to dissuade the government from taking over private property. Yet with the state in a mode to make changes, as Vandermillen said, perhaps this eminent domain policy, an outlier among nearby states, could be adjusted as well.

Mill buildings similar to those on the Conant Thread site had been renovated elsewhere in the state, most often for luxury housing. Shim’s plan for Conant Thread emphasized affordable housing, pedestrian walkways, and new community recreational facilities. “If a public developer in the state of Rhode Island were to step in and reimagine these mill buildings as something other than high-end residential, I think it’s certainly an exciting route,” said Shim, “a building typology that speaks to the city’s history, adaptively reused to create a redefined way of living.”

In the final review for the studio, Vandermillen observed that Central Falls had a reputation as a city where people establish themselves before moving elsewhere. The proposals put forward by GSD students, however, were meant to establish a lasting community. For now, the plans for building and financing at the Osram Sylvania and Conant Thread sites will serve as valuable inputs as the city continues its planning and community engagement process.

A New Future for a Colonial Fort in Ghana

The village of Ada Foah sits on the coast of Ghana where the Volta River flows into the Atlantic. Its name—a centuries-old vernacular adaptation of “fort”—acknowledges an erstwhile landmark: Fort Kongenstein. Constructed by Danes in the eighteenth century, Fort Kongenstein facilitated trade in goods and, for a period of about a decade, enslaved people. It is one of many such forts erected on the West African coast by European traders and settlers. These foreign structures, often built from materials imported from Europe along proto-globalized trade routes, stand as remnants of the complex and brutal colonial history that has shaped the region.

Though other forts in Ghana, such as Cape Coast Castle, have been preserved and rehabilitated, Fort Kongenstein today is at risk of being forgotten. Its historical significance is belied by its current physical condition. Most of the original stone fort has washed into the ocean, destroyed by the severe coastal erosion that has accelerated in a changing climate. What remains of the site includes a trading post, built in concrete and timber sometime after the British took power in the area, as well as a brick residential structure for the fort’s captain. In recent years, members of the Ada Foah community have taken steps to reclaim the site, adorning its walls with murals and occasionally hosting cultural events in the ruins.

While the fort has fallen into disrepair, tourist facilities and villas have sprung up in the area, catering to those drawn to the area’s natural beauty and seeking respite from the bustling capital Accra, a three-hour drive away. Caught between tourist development and relentless coastal erosion that has only accelerated with climate change, Ada Foah’s namesake has an uncertain future.

Yet this uncertainty also presents opportunities to transform the site into a facility with contemporary meaning. “Forgotten Fort Kongenstein,” an option studio led by Olayinka Dosekun-Adjei, John Portman Design Critic in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, challenged students to grapple with the compound’s past while envisioning a new future for it at the heart of the Ada Foah community. Dosekun-Adjei, a Lagos-based architect and Creative Director of Studio Contra , aimed to embrace the fort as a “symbolic site of contact between European settlers and traders and the local population,” rather than “rejecting the ruins as part of a painful past and contentious or problematic history.”

With support from the Open Society Foundations, Dosekun-Adjei led a group of students on a trip to Ghana to study the site. In addition to proposing an adaptive reuse of the fort structures that would address unforgiving erosion, students were tasked with developing a cultural program for the adapted site that would be historically sensitive, relevant to Ada Foah residents, and connected to the burgeoning ecosystem of regional arts institutions. Instead of preserving a monument or recovering a ruin, the goal was to transform the existing conditions into what Dosekun-Adjei calls a “generator” that will enrich the cultural life and economy of its surrounding community.

We used a European building constructed in Africa as a site for hybridizing what could be a rediscovered Indigenous approach to architecture and material culture.

Olayinka Dosekun-Adjei

“When we first arrived at the site after a long drive, the sun was blaring, but it was beautiful,” recalled Mariama M. M. Kah (MArch II ’24). “Everyone was taken aback by the sensory and auditory experience: wind gusts were coming off the Atlantic, the air was full of sea salt.” This stunning setting also posed challenges for envisioning resilient material conditions for the studio project. Fort Kongenstein has been worn down over time, defined today as much by absence as by monumentality.

Kah, who had worked in Ghana prior to studying at the GSD, described the fort as a palimpsest characterized by a “layering of history.” The structures that remain embody historical discontinuities: the captain’s house, the oldest extant structure, is built of brick imported from Denmark. The concrete trading post, meanwhile, was constructed sometime after 1850, likely when the British dominated the area. Timber used in each structure has mostly rotted away or been repurposed elsewhere. Recent paintings on the structures’ walls are evidence of community-driven attempts to discover meaningful uses for the building.

Dosekun-Adjei views these challenging conditions as an impetus to critically evaluate the contemporary West African architecture. “We used a European building constructed in Africa as a site for hybridizing what could be a rediscovered Indigenous approach to architecture and material culture.” Looking at the historical fort through the lens of globalization also offered a genealogy of contemporary practices in West Africa, “where so many materials are produced elsewhere, imported very much like this building.” Tracing the histories of these practices back to colonial periods can help architects today rediscover materials and techniques that retain deep local meaning precisely because of their hybridity.

In guiding students through their studio projects, Dosekun-Adjei encouraged them to take imaginative approaches to this hybridity while also foregrounding the need for resiliency. “The idea of a museum or an archive became complicated because we were situated right in front of the sea and coastal erosion was happening at such a rapid rate,” Kah said. “The inevitable reality was looming: the site would succumb to the Atlantic.” Some projects accepted this reality by envisioning temporary structures that would last only as long as the terra firma. Kah addressed this challenge by proposing a robust sea wall structure that would be the centerpiece of similar measures developed in the area.

Courtney Sohn (MArch I ’24) also envisioned a permanent cultural center on the site. “I was thinking about materials in relation to temporality,” she said. “We projected a future for the site in which the materials were going to fall into the ocean. I wanted to build in materials that had resilience even if the rest of the site was lost.” That meant employing techniques from marine architecture to create a structure over the site. As the sea approached, the historical fort would be washed away, representing “a part of the history that we could let go of,” while the new structure, with its new community-centered purpose remained.

The historical legacy of the fort, as Dosekun-Adjei sees it, could help create needed public spaces and institutions in Ada Foah, a village dominated by private tourist development. A re-imagined fort complex could transform Ada Foah into a new kind of public space: a cultural center in the community and a node in the emerging network of small cultural institutions in Ghana. To generate ideas for the building’s program, studio participants visited a number of arts organizations in Accra. With little government support for the arts available, institutions like the Dikan Center and the Nubuke Foundation Art Gallery depend on the ambition and vision of future cultural leaders. This ethos is reflected in the physical structures that house many new arts organizations, many of which employ strategies of adaptive reuse. The Dikan Center, for example, is a photography gallery and library in a refurbished housing complex.

Many of the arts organizations that inspired student projects had hybrid identities, offering their communities more than spaces to contemplate visual arts. The Nubuke Foundation complex is a mix of exhibition galleries and studios, co-working spaces, and other facilities intended to provide broad support for the creative economy.

Partly in acknowledgment of this local need and partly as an exercise in working with different architectural scales, Dosekun-Adjei prompted students to envision both exhibition spaces and other facilities for the community such as classrooms and workshops. Inspired by the role of film production in decolonizing struggles, Kah proposed a program for the fort that included an art house cinema. “I looked at photography and cinema as both a decolonizing method as well as a method for people [in West Africa] to construct their own narratives and archive their history and memories. Photography and cinema are a means of creating beautiful dialectic stories that span generations but still hold true.” Sohn drew upon course discussions about cultural restitution—the repatriation of artifacts removed during the colonial period—as well as her conversations with Ada Foah community members to propose a space for archaeological finds that could stimulate historical and cultural research. Other projects included spaces for a community radio station and production facility, as well as art galleries, classrooms, and workshop spaces.

The GSD student projects, compiled by Dosekun-Adjei and her studio, will become part of a discussion with local leaders and potential funders about the future of the site. The work undertaken as part of the GSD studio suggests that the future of Fort Kongenstein will exemplify an expanded notion of adaptive reuse. Any project that modifies the ruins of the fort will have to address questions of sustainability while engaging with contested historical narratives. As Dosekun-Adjei says, the project will “uncover histories, both architectural and material,” providing new foundations for building in the region and beyond.

Designing Food Security in Rural Mississippi

For nearly a decade, Mississippi has ranked as America’s hungriest state. Nearly 19 percent of its citizens—about 600,000 people—face food insecurity, including one in four children. This catastrophe is not the fault of geography. Agriculture serves as the state’s main industry, with about 34,700 farms operating across 10.4 million acres of fertile soil. The fault principally lies in a long history of exploitation, from the arrival of settler colonialists who identified its promise and built some of the South’s largest plantations to the continued privileging of crops grown for profit, like soy and hay, which perpetuates the legacy of slavery.

In his fall 2022 studio, “The Paradox of Hunger—Rural Mississippi,” Design Critic in Architecture Cory Henry asked students to examine this crisis and investigate what mitigating role architecture and design could play. “In Mississippi, you have some of the most arable land in the country,” says Henry. “Over 30 percent of the state is farmland—a percentage which is growing—but the state consistently ranks as one of the most food insecure in the country.”

In Mississippi, you have some of the most arable land in the country,” says Henry. “Over 30 percent of the state is farmland—a percentage which is growing—but the state consistently ranks as one of the most food insecure in the country.

Cory Henry

That land has attracted numerous out-of-state investment funds as well as wealthy Americans. It was only for sale, however, after being stolen from Black and Indigenous people, sometimes with the help of abusive policies. In these instances, profit motivates more than feeding local people: only 45,000 of those 10.4 million acres are devoted to fruits and vegetables. “A farmer told me that Mississippi farms value the green dollar more than the green for sustenance,” says Henry. As a result, the state imports most of its produce, which in turn is difficult for many to access due to a dearth of grocery stores. Dollar Generals, which do not sell fresh produce, are often the nearest source of food, particularly in rural areas.

This condition contradicts the dream Laurence C. Jones had in 1909 when he founded the Piney Woods School, the nation’s second oldest continuously operating Black boarding school, located about 21 miles southeast of Jackson. Jones’s mission was to teach formerly enslaved people not just how to read but also about food sovereignty. “We educate for the head, the heart, and the hands” remains a foundational motto. Occupying approximately 2,000 acres, about 10 percent of which is farmland, the school became an ideal case study for Henry’s students to translate their research on the multipronged roots of food insecurity into a concrete intervention at a specific site.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed many of the country’s structural inequalities that already existed. These include how Black, non-Hispanic households are twice as likely to be food insecure,” says Henry. “I wanted students to understand the agency of our design disciplines—that we must understand the socioeconomic conditions of a place in order to have meaningful change—and to explore ways in which design thinking can create opportunities for food sovereignty.

Younger Americans do not gravitate toward farming careers. According to the 2017 census, the average age of a Mississippi farmer is 60. At Piney Woods specifically, the farm today carries punitive associations, with students sent there as a form of discipline. Altering these impressions requires creating a new relationship between the youth and the natural environment—one that emphasizes joy and excitement rather than obligation.

Avi Robinson (MArch ’23) and Supriya Ambwani (MLA ’23) understood that inculcating a positive connection to farming will not arise from harsh prescriptions, particularly for high schoolers and especially those in communities with an acute awareness of the history of slavery. Freedom—of choice, movement, and program—resonates throughout their design. “Spaces often tell you what you can or cannot do,” says Robinson. “The more nondescript spaces are, the more flexibility you have.”

Utilizing inexpensive materials such as plywood and employing ancient techniques like rammed earth, the pair emphasized minimalist simplicity. At the site of the existing barn, for instance, they retained the original structure but added a variation of terraced farming inspired by farms in South Africa, with plots arrayed throughout a series of long, arched passages that are enclosed in chain-link fences. This expansion created room for a kitchen, where food from the farm can be taken directly and either stored or served, making an alternative to the cafeteria. Guided by the impulse not to demarcate aspects of the plan as being strictly focused on sustainability, waste, design, or any other narrow concept, the complex becomes multiuse in a way that makes the food cycle more legible.

Hybridity is emphasized further in the new makerspace, which includes a woodshop, classroom, computer lab, library, and drawing studio. It acts as a center for hands-on learning, such as the construction of goat sheds which house the herd that provides fertilizer. The frame of the makerspace partially echoes the sloping arches of the new barn complex. And as with the chain-link roofs in the barn, the porousness of the building’s multistory, floor-to-ceiling windows establish an attachment to the land, even for those uninterested in this work.

But the flexibility of Robinson and Ambwani’s design encourages students to use these spaces in ways both related and unrelated to farming—whether doing homework or just hanging out. It also positions Piney Woods as a site of inspiration for schools and institutions in Mississippi and beyond, with plans that are more widely adaptable than rigidly defined spaces. “I wanted to find ingredients that people could use,” explains Robinson. “What you see are the current needs of Piney Woods. But this is an entry point, a recipe book, about how to mix things together to address, in any specific situation, both food and education.”

Christian Behling (MArch II ’24) and Gabriel Schmid (MArch II ’24) saw the campus as bifurcated, with the “hands,” represented by the farm, lacking both a material and positive emotional connection to the “head,” represented by the academic buildings. In order to join the two, they designed a boardwalk that functions as a kind of spine across campus. Made of light-frame pine to respect the school’s history of building with on-site materials, it begins at the original schoolhouse and the grave of Laurence Jones, passes by Jones’s house, and then integrates with the farmland and historic barn. “We want this to be a physical path, a formal procession,” says Behling, who is sensitive to the importance of not imposing an entirely new history on the site but rather being in dialogue with its celebrated past.

Consideration for the past also concerns cross-generational respect. Behling and Schmid’s plan facilitates formal and informal mentorships between farmers and students to support new generations of farmers. Programmatically, this takes the form of a farmer living on campus in the newly designed dormitories. Accessed from the boardwalk, these buildings utilize Southern vernacular forms, such as the shotgun house and the wraparound porch. “There’s an important lack of social and spatial hierarchy between the different spaces in the dormitories, with private bedrooms and shared spaces all connected through a procession of doors. There are no hallways,” explains Behling.

Near the dormitories, each student is provided a small plot to manage. Behling and Schmid believe these should be given without assignments or expectations. “We had an idealistic idea that if each student has a little piece of the school of which they are in charge, it will make them more invested in the mission that the school is trying to promote,” says Behling. Whether they grow food, put in a trampoline, or let it grow wild, the plot remains their own. “It fully embraces the entrepreneurial aspirations the school already promotes.”

These plots are not the only means by which students can learn about a circular system of resources, in contrast to the current model in Mississippi in which crops like soy are largely exported for processing. The new woodshop and makerspace will educate them about the process of growing wood, milling, and making furniture or other resources. The same is true for a new test and production kitchen, where students can learn about culinary practices and make food products, like preserves, that can be supplied to the surrounding community. In the short term, Behling and Schmid believe this exchange could take place at Piney Woods farm stands constructed in the parking lots of the closest Dollar General stores, with similar architecture to that found on campus so as to pull the campus beyond its property.

Mariama Kah (MArch II ’24) and Shant Charoian (MArch II ’23) also saw the agricultural sciences as being disconnected from the rest of the school, with physical relics dotting the campus serving as a reminder of its original ethos. They were reluctant to make any changes to the site, however small. As a result, their respect for the past became a focus on repair. “We were very cognizant that this is a historic campus which is very proud of its history,” says Kah. “We wanted to touch the ground very lightly, so we decided to take an adaptive reuse stance rather than do anything invasive which takes over the campus.”

In an effort to subvert the notion of agriculture as an extractive force, Kah and Charoian looked at a speciality crop that leaves a small footprint and requires minimal space and labor: mushrooms. The opportunity for financial returns from mushroom farming is high, with a projected annual revenue of $62,000 per year for the school. Evoking another of the school’s mottos—“Land as laboratory”—this initiative could then be used to make Piney Woods a magnet for agricultural research and study. “It would become an opportunity for fellowships and engagement with local farmers and universities. It would give it power through economics as well as education,” says Kah.

To further this goal, and in keeping with their anti-interventionist philosophy, Kah and Charoian propose to turn the back end of Iowa Hall, a building that had fallen into disuse but which is slated to become a chemistry lab, into an agronomy studies and mushroom laboratory. Like their peers, they understood the importance of multiuse spaces, especially for a centrally located space like this. Surrounding the laboratory are revived basketball courts, porches and other extensions overlooking the campus, a sunken student plaza, and additional spaces that create moments for gathering.

We did not want to be an imposition on the legacies that exist but rather create space and ground them, to allow them to continue into the future.

Mariama Kah

These sites address the students’ desire to have more time to enjoy nature, which Kah and Charoian learned through a game in which the teens were asked how they connected with the green spaces in their lives. The pair responded to these concerns elsewhere, too. At the barn, they followed the gables of the original roof to create shading moments as well as classrooms, established two laboratories for animal research, and introduced spots for levity and community at the top of the silos, with panoramic views of the farm. The community garden was commandeered to include a food-nutrition lab and student kitchen, while a cabin near the water, a favorite leisure space for students, also features a water- and soil-testing lab. What was once forgotten or given less attention now has a new sense of prominence.

“The intention of the project is for Piney Woods to become the center for agricultural research and ecological study in Mississippi. The space would be used for research through fellowships and partnership, as well as for the teaching of students, who could then see themselves doing agricultural work in the future,” says Kah. But, for her, that must not come at the expense of the architecture already present: just as crops have multigenerational lives and their successful harvesting requires the passing down of knowledge, design at this site cannot ignore the past in an effort to change the future. We did not want to be an imposition on the legacies that exist but rather create space and ground them, to allow them to continue into the future,” Kah continues. “We thought of our additions of these agricultural laboratories as another link in the chain of the school’s history rather than a top-down approach of saying how things should be.

How an urban design studio is proposing a more equitable approach to Boston’s building boom

Over the past decade, the Boston/Cambridge area has attracted tremendous attention and investment as a global center for technology innovation. Major hospitals and research institutions (so-called “meds and eds”) have been the driving forces behind innovation and enterprise districts arising across the city, including Kendall Square, the Seaport, and the planned Harvard Allston Enterprise Research campus. Across the United States and globally, these districts represent a relatively recent product of the market, an urban typology that’s not yet well established. To Andrea Leers, design critic in the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Urban Planning and Design department, this kind of development is a double-edged sword. She explains, “It’s powerful, and it’s bringing jobs and economic benefit of all kinds, but it is also a kind of community killer because it’s frequently a mono-use and fairly exclusive development type.”

This spring, Leers’s Urban Design studio, “Leveraging Boston’s Building Boom to Advance Equity” (taught with Associate Instructor Anthony Averbeck), took on a real site as a case study in proposing a more vibrant, inclusive, and welcoming type of innovation district in Boston. “The task that we set for ourselves was how to build on the energy and initiative of this burst of economic investment to build more than a cluster of lab buildings and associated facilities, but something that could really benefit and connect with the adjacent neighborhoods to bring a sense of equity—not an island of privilege—to this site,” she says.

Harvard has an obligation to lend its creativity and research to making its home city as wonderful as it can be, to take part in its community, and to contribute,” Leers points out. “I think that there was real value in having a serious look at Boston itself.

Andrea Leers

With its proximity to Moakley Park and Carson Beach to the north, Dorchester Bay to the east, a housing development and the institutional campuses of UMass Boston and the JFK Library to the south, and the diverse neighborhood of Dorchester to the west, the site is ideally located, but plagued by accessibility challenges. “The site is well served by transit and by car, but made an island effectively by the elevated highways, train lines, and massive traffic circles,” Leers says. “It’s a great site that’s impossible to get to.”

This underdeveloped land, currently a 1,300-space parking lot for UMass students that was formerly a convention center and shopping mall, is a blank slate for a porous new district that can leverage public transit to link nearby communities with economic opportunity through jobs, services, stores, the waterfront, and the city beyond. “[The students] really enjoyed tackling a real site that they could go to visit,” Leers says. “They could walk through the adjacent neighborhoods and get a feel for the place, and then begin to imagine things on it.”

Students undertook an initial hands-on research and analysis phase before diving into the development of their studio projects. Physical engagement with the site, research, and guest lectures from the Dorchester community, UMass leadership, and GSD faculty enriched the students’ understanding of the area’s topography, history, and demography, and helped them identify the unique possibilities and challenges that informed their design strategy. Students also looked at global approaches to innovation districts and other waterfront development precedents to analyze programmatic needs and opportunities specific to the Dorchester site.

Building upon this shared research and analysis, students split into teams to develop and test their design concepts. Through drawings, physical models, and building studies, the students engaged issues of urban form, circulation, and open space, exploring the specific qualities that make a place vibrant but also useful and inclusive to a diverse range of constituents.

Dorchester Innovation Commons,” designed by Pinyang Chen (MAUD ’22) and Zhuoer Mu (MAUD ’22), features a chevron-shaped development, with a network of streets and buildings widening to either side of a central green. The intent was to draw people from the transit hub down through the district to the waterfront park, via this porous central promenade.

In “Pathways to Prosperity,” a model designed by Danny Kolosta (MUP ’22) and Adriana Lasso-Harrier (MUP ’22), research and interviews with Boston educational and vocational experts inspired the inclusion of three on-site spaces—the Nonprofit Exchange, the Adult Success Navigator, and the Youth Excelerator—that create job training and educational opportunities to help residents gain access to the innovation economy.

“Greenway to the Bay: A Stroll Through the Neighborhood,” a model developed by Dianne Lê (MLA ’22 and Danny Kolosta (MUP ’22), organizes the site through the landscape, anchored by a new diagonal greenway that connects the site and adjacent neighborhoods to the harbor.

The “Well-Tempered Grid” by Saad Boujane (MAUD ’23) and Naksha Satish (MAUD ’22) proposes an urban fabric that reconciles the different street networks and land uses surrounding the site. Disrupting the new grid are strategically placed and distinct blocks of buildings that respond to the adjacent conditions: a gateway node housing biotech and pharmaceutical labs, a learning commons interfacing with the residential neighborhood, and an eco-innovation hub on the waterfront.

The students’ concepts for the Dorchester Bay site present varied approaches to density, building scale, programming, and urban frameworks; but the exercise yielded critical learnings that were shared across the board. Innovation districts are a recent phenomenon, and a typology that’s not yet well defined—there’s no standard that can serve all sites. They discovered that a coherent blend of street networks, open spaces, access to the water, and inviting places to go matter more than the density and composition of buildings.

“Going in, we were really concerned with what was it going to be like to have so much building in this place where there wasn’t any and nothing like it nearby,” recalls Leers. “And in fact, that turned out not to be the key question. It was really interesting to learn the importance of just making it a normal piece of city.” Critically, integration of programmatic anchors that engage the community—whether training or education facilities, spaces for family recreation, childcare centers, and neighborhood retail—are crucial to making innovation districts more inclusive to and integrated with their neighbors.

An Island in Flux: Envisioning a more resilient Nantucket

Nantucket offers a vivid illustration of the principle of flux, the idea that everything is in a constant state of becoming. There is a powerfully optimistic sense to this ancient Greek concept: on one hand, steady change begets stability—think of a river or an organism, which is never quite the same from one moment to the next, yet it resolutely maintains its identity—and on the other, “becoming” suggests possibility, improvement, and innovation. Lately, we have become accustomed to viewing change with trepidation: climate change, especially, offers fearsome potential for catastrophe. Warmer temperatures and rising oceans will alter Nantucket, possibly inundating its beaches, its historic town center, and other low-lying areas across the island.

A recent survey of Nantucketers revealed that over 70 percent are “very worried” about climate change. However, the Envision Resilience Nantucket Challenge organized by ReMain Nantucket calls for a sense of confidence in the face of change. It “seeks to inspire the community to imagine a future that is adaptive in the face of sea level rise.” Over the last year, ReMain Nantucket has brought together island residents, scientists, business leaders, artists, and preservationists to advise graduate students and faculty from five different US design programs, including a group from the Harvard GSD led by Professor Chris Reed, as they considered the possibilities for long-term change on Nantucket.

Nantucket took shape through the unhurried dynamism of earth’s geological transformations. Twenty-five thousand years ago, the slowly advancing Laurentide ice sheet pushed huge piles of soil and gravel southward, forming irregular glacial moraines south of Cape Cod. The ice retreated, sea levels rose, and erosion beat down the low hills to form Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and the Elizabeth Islands. The earliest settlers on Nantucket walked there from the mainland before the Atlantic gradually surged up around it. Some 10,000 years before Greek philosopher Heracleitus first wrote about the concept of flux, the Wampanoag people benefited from change on the island, taking advantage of its seasonal abundance of food. They fished on the windswept shore during the summer and retreated to more protected inland areas to hunt and harvest cranberries in the winter.

European settlers on Nantucket from the 1640s on carried with them a very different understanding of change and land tenure, fixing property boundaries and building more permanent settlements. Although their fortified harbors, sturdy wooden buildings, and well-established infrastructure offered a degree of stability over the last four centuries, natural flows of water, wind, and time have continually enforced the inevitability of change. The island’s first harbor silted up in the late 18th century, requiring the main town to move two miles to a new harbor. A hundred years of whaling enriched the island, but a devastating whale oil fire, another silted harbor, and the distant civil war sent Nantucket into decline. The whalers and other settlers drifted away, although a diminishing fishing industry persisted. Beginning in the 1950s, tourism shifted the island’s economy again, bringing wealthy property owners and visitors and as well as a diverse population of seasonal and full-time service workers.

Global climate change will affect this current version of Nantucket, but the crucial question is whether sea level rise, altered ocean currents, and unfamiliar weather patterns will bring catastrophe or a new becoming for the island. Reed’s spring semester Landscape Architecture studio, “Away. . . Offshore. . . Adrift. . . Shifting Landscapes, Unstable Futures,” delved deeply into this question. Although it carefully addressed the Envision Resilience Nantucket Challenge, the studio considered the consequences and possibilities of change even more broadly, both in the context of the island, and with a view toward other maritime localities that must also respond to climate change. Reed and his 10 students examined the natural and human drivers of change, in order to understand their entanglements and their mutually reinforcing influences on the island.

In the initial research portion of the studio, “Migrations,” Reed proposed that “climate change and human practices are already having significant impacts on the island, eroding bluffs and collapsing houses, flooding critical infrastructures and streets around downtown and the port, impacting the quality of the natural environment and its ability to sustain habitat and ecological life.” To understand these circumstances more fully, students undertook research in five different areas—earth, water flows, ecologies, people, and land tenure—“within a broader frame of glacial, hydrologic, ecological, and social change over longer periods of time.”

Part of the goal of this first phase, Reed explains, was to avoid merely responding to the crisis at hand—to “the set of now conditions”—so they could account for “the bigger forces that are in play.” Using software to model the flows of water, for example, the students were able to understand present-day mechanisms of erosion and sedimentation within the much longer processes of constant change that have shaped the island from the beginning. They could then speculate on how these flows might continue to alter Nantucket’s shorelines. In particular, Reed points out, students could envision how human efforts, such as the creation of groins, jetties, and artificial islands, or the dredging of harbors, have contributed to natural geological alterations of the island. Modeling provided crucial insights into the problems these devices have caused, but also showed how they might be used creatively to help mitigate or even capitalize on long-term effects of climate change.

Research into social changes on the island yielded other insights, recalling, for example, the “light touch” of Indigenous modes of seasonal land use, in contrast to European settlers’ more fixed approaches to settlement on the island. The students investigating people and land tenure on Nantucket also uncovered the diverse stories of an island disconnected in crucial ways from mainland culture—of the Wampanoag settlers—“People of the First Light,” of enslaved people who had escaped their oppressors and found refuge on the island, of generations of prominent Black landowners and whalers who prospered there, and more recently of a large number of people from all over the world who provide seasonal labor.

In phase two of the studio, “Shifting Grounds,” students continued their research with what Reed calls “performative speculations.” These exercises “introduce a physical design component,” Reed explains, and get the students “to deal with materials, physical things and physical forms within a constantly changing and dynamic environment.” Digital simulations in this phase of the studio helped students look at “the physical and the temporal, and the mutual effects between them, so that they are designing with these forces in mind.” They investigated ways, for example, that installation of fences or piles on a vulnerable shoreline might help control beach erosion and encourage dune deposition, or how chains, nets, and other small structures anchored in shallow tidal areas would channel flows of water and sediment to make shore areas more productive for sea life, or how houses might be anchored against the attrition of coastal bluffs.

During the final phase of the studio, “Provisional (Re-)occupations,” the students carried this research into designs for specific sites on the island. In focusing on the vulnerable areas identified by Envision Nantucket—Brant Point, downtown, and Washington street—students developed extensive long-term proposals that could take advantage of sea level rise and shifts in tidal currents to improve habitats and accommodate evolving public interests. But Reed explains that he wanted these proposals “to go beyond the brief that Envision had given us, which was very much focused on the inner harbor and the downtown,” in order to address more comprehensive climatic and social issues that affect the whole island. So students also proposed long-term protections for and reconfiguration of other important places on the island—the collapsing bluffs on the North Shore and the barrier beach of Coatue peninsula.

The benefit of going beyond the brief in their proposals, Reed argues, was that “because we stepped so far back to look at some of the formational processes in a bigger geography [the students] were able to say ‘we can actually address a whole bunch of potentially bigger problems by acting out here, than by acting locally.’” The resulting designs proposed sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic adjustments to the island’s shorelines that would allow Nantucket to evolve productively while sustaining the fundamental identities of the island and its communities.

Although climate change is a developing crisis—a widespread disaster of our own making—this studio extended from a sense of optimism about change. From the outset, “Away. . . Offshore. . . Adrift. . . Shifting Landscapes, Unstable Futures” accepted that Nantucket is in flux—as it always has been. Climate change became the inspiration for long-term designs to build more plentiful habitats and fisheries, more protective shorelines, and more resilient and flexible communities. In the face of malevolent change, of potential catastrophe, the studio instead envisioned powerful new ways of becoming for Nantucket.

Silvia Benedito’s new book Atmosphere Anatomies explores weather, climate, and atmosphere as mediums of design

Much of modern civilization has been shaped by a fundamental need for shelter, and much of design by a fundamental need to provide it. Designers throughout history have taken climate and weather as obstacles—a domain from which to shield inhabitants, or an infinite void that mystifies scientists and evades control. Conversely, though, designers have also imagined or created spaces in which weather and atmosphere are components or even foundations of a project, integral to the individual and collective experience. GSD professor Silvia Benedito maps out such a shift in her new book, Atmosphere Anatomies: On Design, Weather, and Sensation, exploring how weather, climate, and atmosphere are considered principal mediums of design. It’s a project that Benedito summarizes as “curating the meteorological parameters of wind, heat, sunlight, humidity, and rain through built form and materiality.” Collaborating with photographer Iwan Baan, Benedito immerses readers in 10 projects, sourced from different eras, designers, and climatic zones around the world. She “dissects” each project in order to demonstrate how often-invisible atmospheres can be reconsidered as measurable, shapeable forms, with the human body as design arbiter. “A paradigm shift must be considered,” Benedito says, “one that realigns design’s disciplinary inquiry toward the recognition of air and atmosphere as spatial media and the body as an anatomico-physiological sensor in the all-enveloping environment.” “By feeling, breathing, and touching architecture and its landscape, by opening our buildings more to the wind and sounds, a new topology of architecture could be born into something never before conceived of, in which landscape could regain a central role,” writes Christophe Girot in the book’s introduction. “The world of sound, space, smell, and touch is part of a spatial continuum that has only recently been interrupted by contemporary planning, engineering, and architectural practices. This realization should be an open invitation to rethink architecture as something no longer divorced from our bodily experience.” Le Corbusier’s “model city” at Chandigarh in India, designed alongside Pierre Jeanneret between 1951 and 1966, emerges as a case study in design-as-anatomy. Corbusier had long conceptualized cities as bodies or biologies, Benedito notes. Tasked in 1951 with designing a new capital for the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana, Corbusier took particular interest in how a city or space “breathes.” Such a reconceptualization led to tangible design decisions, as well as an expansion of the architect’s fundamental scope. As Corbusier became increasingly tuned in to the intersections between architecture and landscape, he developed new approaches toward tempering the environment in order to promote physical and emotional well-being. (Benedito summarizes the Chandigarh project as “a disciplinary synthesis where architecture, landscape, and climate converge into a unified idea of space for human nurturing.”) Courtyards, patios, porticos, arcades, terraces, passageways, arbors, pergolas, and open pavilions allow residents to negotiate climate differences in comfort, while expanding the sheer volume as well as the varieties of shared, public-private space. Buildings are studded with detached roofs, parasols, sleeping terraces, projecting shades, and super-sized scuppers; the surrounding landscape comprises rills, ponds, reflecting pools, canals, groves, follies, green belts, artificial hills, and water basins. In effect, Corbusier resisted boundaries between inside and outside, architecture and landscape and city. “At Chandigarh, [Corbusier] turned the architectural membrane, previously sealed and ‘neutralizing,’ into a deep space that includes landscape,” Benedito explains, “broadening his understanding of the scope of the discipline.” Likewise, in William Kent’s Rousham Garden—a mid-1700s project in Oxfordshire, England—landscape is treated as “weather theater,” Benedito writes, in which the amplification (or the softening) of temperature, humidity, and other meteorological elements are foundational, dramatic design factors. Throughout the garden, the visitor comes across cooling retreats, warming shelters, shaded rooms, humid and ventilated passages—what Benedito calls “a meteorological journey.” Benedito and Baan’s tour through Geometric Hot Springs, deep within Chile’s Villarica National Park, is grounded by Benedito’s conversation with the architect, Germán del Sol. Since ancient times, del Sol tells Benedito, the region’s Indigenous Mapuche people had talked about the waters and hot springs near the Villarica Volcano; they spoke of the waters as gold, buried like treasure. “The Mapuche are people of the land; their tradition is one of being in touch with the whole territory, not with a small house or town,” del Sol says. “They live outside rather than inside. Not because they weren’t able to build houses—open spaces are just more important than enclosures. So, direct contact with surrounding nature became very important for the Geometric Hot Springs.” As del Sol explains, excavation for the springs was performed with simple shovels and brooms to avoid damaging rock. He and his colleagues also innovated gentle ways for reading ground temperature and discovering where hot springs might lie within the site. Del Sol details the geothermal research and precision-maneuvering that helped create the hot springs, and Benedito annotates the discussion with thermal imagery and mappings of select project sections. Visitors to the springs travel between pools via elevated walkways, which are warmed by radiant heat to prevent thermal shock—in other words, to keep people comfortable. The book illustrates how atmospheric elements perform and interact with each other and with their human visitors. And Baan’s photographs layer another vital narrative atop this analysis: snapshots of dense mists shrouding lush greenery, as well as of informal, human reactions of visitors, evoke both the project’s atmospheric characteristics and its influence on human emotion. The technical and the emotional, the natural and the human, are distilled into different frames, their synthesis reflected in Baan’s candid documentation. An architect trained also in landscape architecture and urban design, Benedito positions a climate-minded paradigm shift as essential for designers across all scales and specific disciplines. She sees particular implications for landscape and urban designers, however, given their focus on mediation of atmospheric forces as well as on resource conservation and public health. Despite such a disciplinary orientation, Benedito senses potential for a tighter braiding of landscape and urbanism’s tangible, physical outcomes with the less-familiar, hazier context of atmosphere. “An obliviousness to air, although justified by its ubiquity, is nonetheless paradoxical, as inherent to being outdoors is the de facto condition of living with and within the meteorological elements and their constant variability,” Benedito writes. “How, then, can one design with meteorological elements that escape ‘appearing,’ when design is, conversely, about making apparent—about building and constructing? How does one design for the collective milieu while accounting for sensation, so personal and particular?” As climate-related concerns rise in intensity and frequency, Benedito reminds designers of their agency in shaping the uncontrollable. In the book’s introduction, she discusses the case study of postwar Stuttgart, Germany, which needed to ventilate its valley-basin setting. She explains that Stuttgart’s solution—which achieved natural climate control at the urban scale, while also sustaining well-being and economic growth—is one reason the city emerged as a model of urban development. “A hazy comprehension of weather may reside in its ubiquitous but nonetheless paradoxical nature; weather is not only subjectively sensed and invisibly felt but also analytically registered and scientifically categorized in a complex manner,” Benedito writes. “This apparent antagonism makes the task of designing with weather a puzzling enterprise. Despite such challenges, the act of building for humankind is indisputably a project of acclimatization for the sustenance of life.”

Making Next to Forest: Toshiko Mori’s studio demonstrates how design decisions relate to natural-resource use and protection

The argument that forests should remain untouched by human beings poses counterintuitive but considerable risks. At best, it suggests the lingering influence of nineteenth-century romantic views about nature, made that much more relevant by the continued abuse of natural resources by capitalism and industry. The global warming crisis also prompts an understandable knee-jerk response in defense of the flora and fauna that depend on healthy ecosystems. At worst, however, this position reveals an implicit colonial mindset that suggests colonizers arrived at “unspoiled” environments, while much evidence suggests that indigenous peoples worldwide extensively managed forests, both out of respect for their environment and for their mutual benefit.

Consider forest fires. For centuries, Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, and other groups performed controlled burning as a preventative measure to curb larger fires. European colonizers often banned these practices though, whether out of fear of or distaste for fire or as a means to stop indigenous people from living as they were prior to the occupation of their lands. Despite the persistence of this resistance over centuries, many governments today have acknowledged the benefits of these older practices, if not the hubristic undercurrents of this attempted environmental altruism. With longer wet seasons in many regions, the understory becomes overgrown and turns into kindling during the increasingly hotter dry seasons. This buildup can be stopped if burned early and with care. The positive effects of these practices exceed mitigation, too: greenhouse-gas emissions, paradoxically, can be reduced by controlled burning, because wildfires themselves release considerable levels of carbon dioxide; smoke caused by prescribed fires can cool river temperatures by blocking sunlight and promote larger fish populations; bush and other grasses less vital to particular animals in an ecosystem can be cleared so that other plants can thrive; fire can trigger serotiny, a process in which certain trees benefit from specific, extreme environmental conditions like heat that trigger seed dissemination, which is in turn helped by ash-fertilized soil.

Rather than restrict thought to a strict binary comprised of unbridled human intervention in nature or our total separation from it, Toshiko Mori advocates seeing humans as one of many actors in complex, polyphonic systems. In her Spring 2020 studio “Making Next to Forest,” she sought to increase students’ awareness of the level of connectivity between different participants in these networks and across scales, from the micro to the macro, the detail to the envelope. “The goal was to demonstrate to students, by one concrete example, how the design decisions they make can relate in incremental ways to the impact they have on natural-resource use and protection,” Mori says. “The imbalance between consumer practices and natural cycles is resulting in the destruction of our environment, and architecture and design occupies a middle ground between those scales.”

The case study she chose, on the surface, might seem niche: a museum in Hokkaido, Japan, for the internationally renowned chair collection of the Oda family, whose patriarch, Noritsugu Oda, is a retired design and professor emeritus at Tokai University’s School of Arts and Engineering . Its location and subject matter, however, provide an ideal pedagogical tool to demonstrate the effects design can have on issues concerning cyclical economies, sustainability, and other critical but broad topics that, for many, may be discussed only in abstract terms.

The northernmost island of the Japanese archipelago, Hokkaido contains about a quarter of the country’s total forested landmass, with about seventy-one percent of its own land covered in forests. It is also the nation’s center for the design and production of wood furniture, some of the material for which is sourced from the surrounding area.

Students visited the island on a trip sponsored by the small township Higashikawa . A center for furniture making located on the edge of the industrial city Asahikawa, the township was suggested to Mori as the site for the chair museum by a local furniture company. Aside from Oda’s desire for the collection to remain in Hokkaido, the choice is apt in relation to the local lumber industry. Whereas in the United States lumber harvesting, production, and whatever fabrication that follows are usually performed hundreds of miles apart, in Asahikawa and its environs the distance between sites is reduced to a short drive. With the city’s location next to the forest, the relationship between raw material and manufactured product—a cycle that includes the living trees, the lumber yards, factories that make dimensional lumber as well as cross-laminated timber (CLT), and individual furniture makers and designers—becomes unmissable. That little is wasted in Asahikawa’s factories, where even wood shavings are used as furnace fuel, also provides a view of the possibilities of functional cyclical economies. By having students observe firsthand the journeys of multiple types of trees through this process, Mori hoped to instill an awareness of the differences between tree specimens, the designs and specific building components for which they may be suitable, and how all trees can be used sustainably.

The emphasis on sustainability throughout Hokkaido can be traced in part to the beliefs and practices of Japan’s indigenous people, the Ainu , who have resided on the island for over 15,000 years. Heavily persecuted and marginalized by the Japanese government for decades in ways similar to the experiences of other native peoples, the Ainu no longer know their exact population because so many were forced into interracial marriages, their language was not allowed, and they endured other violent policies. Today, the approximately 200,000 Ainu and their descendants still largely residing in Hokkaido live predominantly in urban areas. As a result, they no longer manage the surrounding forests which their animist religion considers a place filled with gods that cannot be entered by humans solely for their own use.

“The Ainu believe that the trees, animals, and humans are all gods and are equivalent,” Mori explains. “Man has to give back something to the forest. It is not like in Finland, where the forest industry considers the forests as a pure economic resource. Similar to the Ezo brown bear the Ainu worship, who eats cones and later spreads its seeds through defecation, the Ainu manage the forest by making clearings to prevent fires from spreading, using leftover salmon they don’t eat as fertilizer, and replanting limited areas so they can keep an eye on faster growth. Hokkaido’s forests are unique in that they’re multi-diverse—close to what Richard Power writes about in his novel Overstory —and the Ainu’s actions keep that complex ecosystem together. But because they largely have been taken out of the forest, it is no longer managed so well.” This may change, she notes, as the government and forestry industry have begun to incorporate indigenous management practices.

Mori complimented this traditional perspective with an examination of modern wood technology. As an example of cutting-edge advances in the industry, she focused on CLT, which is an increasingly popular material similar to plywood and composed of wood glued together in perpendicular layers. “It’s made of types and parts of trees which may not traditionally be used for building,” she says. “It’s material often used for pulp in the paper industry, but with paper factories closing all over the world, some of these factories have been converted to make it.”

In addition to its sustainability benefits, CLT can help reduce carbon levels. “Because it’s incredibly strong, it can be used more and more instead of concrete to make buildings as high as six or seven stories,” Mori notes. “In this way, you’re cutting trees for buildings and, by implementing forest management, encouraging the growth of younger trees. This supports carbon sequestration in the forest but also in the products made in cities—the wood buildings—which also help sequester carbon. It has a double benefit.”

For the Oda Chair Museum , the location for which is a steep hill on the edge of a dense forest, Mori let her students freely synthesize their observations and concerns about wood types, traditional and digital materials, and sustainability and cyclical economies. “I wanted them to connect dots related to larger issues: elements of program, the sequence of building and how many trees would need to be removed, and a strategy for using products,” she says.

Shaina Yang took inspiration from Fumihiko Maki and the Metabolist movement in her plan which emphasizes individuality as well as collective codependence and connection. “The Metabolists looked to how nature designs its spaces and structures to try to inform how we might design on a more systemic level,” she describes. “Maki postulated that an important part of group systems is that there is a certain type of object aggregation which involves the development of a basic building block. As you develop that block in sequence over time, it is still recognizable but you allow for complexities within the module as well. For example, you have one mushroom, then another, and another, and then you have a cluster.”

The mushroom, while not a strict figural or metaphoric inspiration for Yang’s project, became a useful means to conceptualize the stem-and-cap form of her individual units and the cluster-like system that resulted from their union. The units arose from the class’s visit to the Oda residence, where she saw some of the family’s 1350 chairs in domestic spaces as opposed to a more traditional museum setting. “It made me think there were two different ways of assessing chair design,” she recalls. “I was looking to create a human-scale space with a domestic setting that we’re aware of, one that explores the boundary between furniture and architecture.” What resulted were a series of sunken rooms—the “stems”—that act as re-creations of domesticity, potentially designed by guest curators, that draw on the chair’s relationship to the human body. (The English words ascribed to chair components are themselves anatomical: arms, legs, back.) Above these meditations on personal taste and domestic life are galleries—the “caps”—that run along the room’s periphery and provide a traditional educational “museum” program.

When combined into a cohesive whole, these modules create a meditation on repetition and difference, homogeneity and individuality. As a semi-organic shape rooted in a rigorous geometric system, the structure also spurs a discussion regarding the natural and man-made. “Human beings are not antithetical to the existence of nature. We are as much a component of any healthy ecosystem as we are stewards of it, and there are plenty of ways in which we can engage in design and consumption that can actually help an ecosystem,” Yang argues. Case in point, the dowel-laminated timber (DLT) she uses for her modules that can be pre-fabricated off-site and which do not involve the chemical processes necessary for the production of CLT. “We’ve entered an absurd epoch in human history in which we are doing harm—with climate change, deforestation, animal extinction—and drawing heavy boundaries between humans and nature. The Japanese concept of satoyama points out how paternalistic and harmful that view is. Translated literally to ‘peasant forest,’ satoyama describes the ecosystems that derive when people work the land next to forests in agrarian ways. In Japan, it gave rise to extensive biodiversity, which declined when they moved into a more segregated rural/urban society. It moves us beyond ideas of preservation and conversation to those that help us manage and participate in systems to make them better and healthier.”

Yaxuan Liu’s plan also conveys a sense of repeatability and suggests the potential for continuous growth, akin to how flora often populates in nature. Ecological connections are more implicit here though, with the direct inspiration for his project arising from Oda’s views on design as not born from a singular moment but being part of a lineage within historical, cultural, and economic contexts.

The local architectural typologies throughout Hokkaido attracted Liu. “The main domestic house there, with a gable design, is often accompanied by large greenhouses,” he says. “These greenhouses have a skeletal language and can be covered with a translucent material or become very opaque. Seeing these repetitive structures emerge from the fields, especially when driving from Asahikawa to the museum site, is almost like hearing a long note in music.” The result was a three-story building with a series of parallel bays that combine local domestic, agricultural, and industrial architecture. “In an aerial view, it looks like an aggregation of small houses on the hill of the village and also the rice fields, the greenhouses.”

While Liu installed a small main gallery on the ground floor, the archive as a whole takes up the majority of display space. “It’s a forest of chairs,” Liu says about the many rows of glass cases through which visitors can meander. The metaphor is made even more apparent by the glass walls that enclose much of the building and make the forest ever present. Some of these walls can be opened to eliminate a hard border between natural and built environments. In the auditorium, for example, the surrounding trees (which, when last reforested, were planted in straight lines) are echoed in the acoustic panels made of narrow wood planks. The repeated pattern of wood of which these panels are composed also make apparent how much material is necessary for their construction.

This transparency, combined with the exposure to the panoply of chair types in the Oda collection, conveys to the visitor an awareness of origin and production, the domestic and the industrial, and the individual elements of design, all of which are necessary in well-crafted objects. “Every part works towards a larger purpose,” Liu says, which resonates, too, with the argument that all actors play a role in ecosystems and removing any one organism can affect the others in myriad, often unpredictable, ways.

Alkiviadis Pyliotis also utilizes transparent design to inculcate an awareness that systems, whether museums or forests, require multiple actors in order to function. With a single-story circular plan, he puts art and administration on a level plane that ensures visitors encounter facets of the institution, from the cafeteria to the photography lab, that are often considered disanalogous. “The project tries to investigate the museum as an indivisible whole,” he says.

The entire archive is showcased in its totality, too, and forms the museum’s exterior boundary. A single passageway from which the archive is visible serves as the inner border. This loop draws on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum . “At the Guggenheim, you can see the entirety of the exhibition as you gradually move upwards, which creates an amazing view of the whole. It allows you to know exactly where you are, and have a relationship with the museum’s center,” says Pyliotis.

Unlike the Guggenheim, whose spiral wraps around an enclosed atrium, the center in Pyliotis’s design is the forest. Visible through glass walls, it both dwarfs the chairs and humans within the structure’s walls while also entering into a direct dialogue with them. “The museum is as present as it is absent,” he says. In this way, though the circular design may seem monumental in scale, it expresses a kind of humility towards its surroundings. This is particularly apparent, too, in its construction needs: as a modular system made of slender wooden elements, it creates a minimal footprint, to the extent that Pyliotis can even calculate the number of trees whose removal it requires.

The circle also suggests the infinite, though in a more symbolic manner than Yang and Liu’s designs. “The shape refers to totality and to constant movement,” Pyliotis describes. “The path will not be the same path to a visitor who moves through the museum again because they have changed after seeing the archive, the in-between spaces, and all the functions that happen there.” This notion of perpetual renewal speaks to the environment as well, as ecosystems from deserts to forests can appear the same day after day to the naked eye when in actuality they experience constant change and regeneration. In neither nature nor Pyliotis’s museum is an end point or telos reached.

Each of these projects perform an injunction to reframe the conversation about how humans engage with their environments and the other agents which populate them. “This awareness can build a broader understanding of how one thing relates to another, which is a great set of tools for students going into the profession,” Toshiko Mori says. “It is not just about preaching in moral tones about sustainability. It ends up with concrete results.”

Such results may even emerge in Hokkaido because of these students’ work. The designs will be presented by the Asahikawa Creative City Promotion Council to the prefecture’s governor as a means to make less abstract a proposal for the chair museum, just as the mayor of Asahikawa has said he will use the studio’s midterm projects concerning Tokai University’s new campus as the basis for the actual masterplan. “Sometimes,” Mori says, “students can have a real impact on future work.”

Zoom! The Archigram Collection Arrives at the Harvard Graduate School of Design

Imagine yourself a couple of months out of architecture school recalling the moments and projects that helped change your view of the world—a powerful exhibition, a design project that got your imagination going, the astounding work of your peers in studio, the big ideas you discussed, the small details you noticed. Put some of that together as an image-word collage on a sheet of letter paper; print 400 copies in somebody’s office; cut a potato to give each one a red stamp for color; staple it to another sheet presenting images of your group’s best projects. Then see if you can get everyone you know to buy a copy for about 75 cents. This is the unlikely beginning of Archigram, one of the most influential architectural publications of the 20th century.

The projects in the first issue, “Paper One,” are wild and sprawling, a “breakaway from graphpaper.” The words wind around and through the drawings; more poetry than essay, they lament:

the love is gone
The love is gone
The poetry in bricks is lost.
We want to drag into building some of the poetry of countdown,
orbital helmets, discord of mechanical body transportation methods
and leg walking

Initially the work of British architects David Greene, Peter Cook, and Michael Webb, Archigram announced an energetic, youthful architecture connected to the present and hopeful about the future, and much more fun than modernism. The roughly annual publication evolved over nine editions from 1961 to 1970; it became more refined but remained unpredictable, bold, and entertaining. Issue 3 on the theme of “Throw-Away Architecture” offered seven single-sided pages on hand-stapled bright yellow paper. Unfolding Amazing Archigram 4: Zoom Issue presented an array of colorful hand-cut pop-up “Entertainments Towers” by Cook, Warren Chalk, and Ron Herron. Inside the brilliant green Issue 9—the “fruitiest yet”—Archigram readers received a free packet of flower seeds stapled to page 11. Its sinuously printed pages in red, purple, green, brown, and orange ink on colored paper discuss the blending of machines and nature, global networks, instant cities, robot appliances, and “architecture in a state of flux.”

Soon, students and faculty at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design will be able to page through these astounding artifacts. GSD Special Collections has just acquired all nine full editions of Archigram and a large assembly of related ephemera—handwritten notes, cards, flyers, posters, newspaper clippings, magazines, and books.

Special Collection Archivist Ines Zalduendo notes that the acquisition is timely for the GSD because of students’ current fascinations: “This generation is really attracted to the 1960s visionaries. I see a comeback and an interest in visionary architecture. Just as important, the acquisition gives context to collections of other architectural icons already in the archives, especially Alison and Peter Smithson and Kenzō Tange.”

The early issues of Archigram, in particular, are rare and difficult to find, but M+ museum in Hong Kong also recently purchased the full archives. Handling the original issues, it becomes immediately clear how valuable they are as a physical collection. Archigram’s raw quality and variety can be fully appreciated: The red potato stamp, the hand-stapled pages, the manually cut pop-up, and the seed packet convey powerful impressions unavailable in online versions.

Although there are no plans yet for an Archigram exhibition, Zalduendo and Michelle Baildon, Collections Strategy Team Lead, hint that discussions are underway. Cataloging and preservation work will take a little time, but Baildon suggests that the collection will be accessible sometime in spring 2020. Then, GSD students will be able to page through the work of young visionaries from the 1960s and perhaps see themselves and the work of their generation in a similarly audacious, hopeful frame of mind.