Jorge Silvetti
Jorge S. Silvetti is the Nelson Robinson, Jr. Professor of Architecture, Emeritus at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where he has taught since 1975. He was chairman of the Architecture Department from 1995-2002. He has taught design studios (that have included The National Archives of Argentina, A Project Along the River Bilbao La Ria de Bilbao, La Reserva Ecologia of Buenos Aires, and Cordoba) and lectures on history, contemporary theory, and criticism (Architectural History I: Buildings, Texts, and Contexts from Antiquity through the 17th Century).
Since 1986, Silvetti has directed a number of research programs, including one on the urbanism and architecture of Sicily, which won a Progressive Architecture award and made him the first designer to win in all P/A award categories. Other research programs include “Buenos Aires 2000,” on the future of public spaces in the changing Latin American metropolis, and “The ria de Bilbao,” on the future development of this formerly industrial city in northern Spain. Silvetti has written on architectural theory, and his design work has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. In 1986, he was awarded the Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome. Since 1996, he has served as a juror for the Pritzker Architectural Prize, and in 2000 he became a juror for the Mies van der Rohe Prize for Latin American Architecture. Silvetti received the Dipl Arch from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the MArch from the University of California at Berkeley.
His architecture firm, Machado and Silvetti , was founded in 1974 and has received numerous honors for design projects, including three awards from the American Institute of Architects, nine Progressive Architecture awards and citations, seven Boston Society of Architects awards, and eight design awards from the New England AIA chapter. In 1991, the firm was given the First Award in Architecture by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The firm’s notable projects include work at Princeton University, Harvard University, Rice University, Arizona State University, the University of Arkansas, the University of Utah, the American University of Beirut, as well as a public library branch in Boston, a private development in Boston, and a new center of comparative archaeology at the Getty Villa in Malibu, California.
Mack Scogin
Mack Scogin, Kajima Professor in Practice of Architecture, Emeritus at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, is a principal in the firm of Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects, in Atlanta, Georgia. At GSD, he was the chairman of the Department of Architecture from 1990 to 1995. He offered instruction in the core studio sequence and in advanced studio options. Recent studios have included: Everybody loves Frank, Field Trip, “My Way”—A Trip to Gee’s Bend, Symmetrical Performance, “Empathy”, 13141516171819, Beige Neon, and Doing and Dancing.
With Merrill Elam, he received the 1995 Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 1996 Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, the 2006 Boston Society of Architects Harleston Parker Medal and a 2008 Honorary Fellowship in the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). Projects by Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects have received over fifty design awards including six national American Institute of Architects Awards of Excellence. Their work has been widely featured in popular and academic publications on architecture including the 1992 Rizzoli publication, Scogin Elam and Bray: Critical Architecture / Architectural Criticism, the 1999 University of Michigan publication Mack & Merrill and the 2005 Princeton Architectural Press publication Mack Scogin Merrill Elam: Knowlton Hall. Their work has been exhibited at many museums and galleries including: Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center; Wexner Center for the Arts; Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, Spain; Deutches Architektur Museum in Frankfurt, Germany; and the Global Architecture Gallery in Tokyo, Japan.
Notable projects include the new United States Federal Courthouse in Austin, Texas; New Student Housing at Syracuse University; the Yale University Health Services Center; the Gates Center for Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University; the Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center and Davis Garage for Wellesley College; the Knowlton School of Architecture for The Ohio State University; the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library for the University of California at Berkeley; the Herman Miller Cherokee Operations Facility in Canton, Georgia; the Zhongkai Sheshan Villas in Shanghai, China and a variety of projects for Tishman Speyer Properties in New York City; Washington DC; Atlanta, Georgia and Hyderabad, India.
Allen Sayegh
Allen Sayegh is Design Critic and Senior Interaction Technologies Fellow at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the director of REAL, the Responsive Environment and Artifacts Lab at Harvard. Sayegh is an architect, designer, and educator and the principal of the award-winning design firm INVIVIA.
Sayegh began his dual engagement of teaching research alongside his practice more than two decades ago at Harvard and most recently as an Associate Professor. His courses and practice focus on technologically driven transformative design, exploring the potentials of media and technology integrated built environment, Interaction design, and the study of architectural and urban space thought through the impact of changing technology.
The research at his lab REAL investigates topics that are at the intersection of the built environment, digital technologies, and human experience. And his work is characterized as the cross between these disciplined in producing innovative solutions to new and complex problems.
In addition to his design work, he has a deep interest in the visual arts and has been a recurring visiting professor at the Harvard Carpenter Center of Visual and Environmental Studies offering courses in the areas of media and the built environment such as; Sculpting Motion, Interactive Spaces, Augmented Architecture, Cinematic Architecture, and Responsive Environments.
Sayegh, has served as a founding faculty in many interdisciplinary initiatives at Harvard among them the Alive group with Wyss Institute at Harvard and The LDT the laboratory of Design Technologies.
INVIVIA his design firm has a diverse set of clients that include, municipalities, corporations and NGOs such as The city of Copenhagen, The city of Bergamo, The city of NY, City of Calgary, MIT/DARPA, NY Museum of Natural History, The IOC, Microsoft, Boeing, LG, Hewlett Packard, SAMSUNG, to name a few.
Sayegh has published and exhibited extensively and in many prestigious venues including the Guggenheim NY, The Duomo in Florence, The Storefront of Art and Architecture in NY he has been part of many architecture and art biennales including Moscow, Kwangju, and Venice Biennales.
Spiro Pollalis
Professor Pollalis is Professor of Design Technology and Management, Emeritus at the Harvard Design School. Starting in 2008, he served as the Director of the Zofnass Program for the Sustainability of Infrastructure that led to the Envision Rating System. He is also the Principal Investigator of the project “Gulf Sustainable Urbanism” for 10 cities in the Arab Gulf. He has taught as a visiting professor at the ETH-Zurich, Switzerland; TU-Delft, Holland; Uni-Stuttgart, Germany; U-Patras, Greece; and has offered joint courses with the Harvard Business School on planning and development. He serves as the co-chair of the Advisory Committee on Future Cities for the Singapore-ETH Center.
Professor Pollalis is the chief planner for the new DHA City Karachi for 600,000 people, currently under construction, and the concept designer of the information infrastructure in the new administrative city in Korea. He served as the Chairman and CEO of the public company for the redevelopment of Hellinikon, the former Athens airport, and he developed the base master plan and business plan. He currently serves as a member of the Athens Planning Committee. He has designed two signature bridges: the Main Street Bridge in Columbus Ohio and the Kifisias pedestrian bridge in Athens, Greece, and played a central role in the iconic cable-stayed Zakim Bridge, the new symbol of Boston. Since 1999, Prof. Pollalis has been a contractor to the General Services Administration (GSA) for the “Learning from Our Legacy” program.
Professor Pollalis received his first degree from the University in Athens (EMP) and his Master’s and PhD from MIT. His MBA in high technology is from Northeastern University. He has an honorary Master’s degree in Architecture from Harvard.
Papers, Conference Lectures, Interviews
Antoine Picon
Antoine Picon is the G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology at the GSD where he is also Chair of the PhD in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning. He teaches courses in the history and theory of architecture and technology. Trained as an engineer, architect, and historian, Picon works on the relationships between architectural and urban space, technology, and society, from the eighteenth century to the present.
His French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (1988; English translation, 1992) is a synthetic study of the disciplinary deep structures of architecture, garden design, and engineering in the eighteenth century, and their transformations as new issues of territorial management and infrastructure-systems planning were confronted. Whereas Claude Perrault (1613-1688) ou la Curiosité d’un classique (1988) traces the origin of these changes at the end of the seventeenth century, L’Invention de l’Ingénieur Moderne, L’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées 1747-1851 (1992) envisages their full development from the mid-eighteenth century to the 1850s by focusing on the changes experienced by the engineering profession.
Picon has also worked on the relations between space, technology and utopia. This is in particular the theme of Les Saint-Simoniens: Raison, Imaginaire, et Utopie (2002), a detailed study of the Saint-Simonian movement that played a seminal role in the emergence of industrial modernity. His interest in utopian thought is actually traceable from his early work to his more recent publications such as his book on cities and nature.
A series of Picon’s books offer a comprehensive overview of the changes brought by the computer and digital culture to the theory and practice of architecture as well as to the planning and experience of the city. He has published in particular Digital Culture in Architecture: An Introduction for the Design Profession (2010), Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity (2013), Smart Cities: Théorie et Critique d’un Idéal Autoréalisateur (2013), and Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence (2015).
At the intersection of an enduring interest for the history of construction and his research on digital culture in architecture, Picon has developed a theoretical and historical approach to the question of materiality that has led to his book The Materiality of Architecture (2021). How is the digital, the recent rise of artificial intelligence in particular, transforming the materiality of architecture is among his current topics of investigation.
It is almost impossible to work on the history of technology without encountering the question of nature or rather of the relationship between the natural and the artificial. This question is at the core of Picon’s latest book, a history of urban natures from the seventeenth century to the present. Natures Urbaines: Une Histoire Technique et Sociale (2024) follows two main threads: the technological component of the presence of nature in cities as well as its social and political dimension.
Picon has received a number of awards for his writings, including the Médaille de la Ville de Paris, and twice the Prix du Livre d’Architecture de la Ville de Briey, a well as the Georges Sarton Medal of the University of Gand. In 2010, he was elected a member of the French Académie des Technologies. In 2015, he became a member of the French Académie d’Architecture. He is Chevalier des Arts et Lettres since 2014. He was Chairman of the Fondation Le Corbusier from 2013 to 2024.
Picon received science and engineering degrees from the Ecole Polytechnique and from the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, an architecture degree from the Ecole d’Architecture de Paris-Villemin, a PhD in history and a Habilitation à Diriger les Recherches from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.
Hanspeter Pfister
Hanspeter Pfister’s research lies at the intersection of visualization, computer graphics, and computer vision. It spans a wide range of topics, including visualization, computational photography, point-based graphics, appearance modeling, 3D television, and face recognition.
He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1996 from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland, in 1991.
Prior to his appointment at Harvard, Pfister worked for 11 years at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) where he was most recently Associate Director and Senior Research Scientist. He was the chief architect of VolumePro, Mitsubishi Electric’s award-winning real-time volume rendering hardware for PCs.
Megan Panzano
Megan Panzano is Program Director of the Harvard Undergraduate Architecture Studies Track and Lecturer in Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) where she coordinates and teaches design studios and representation courses in the graduate and undergraduate programs.
The design research and built work of her independent practice, studioPM, addresses architectures across a range of scales that are progressive through their interplay of images, objects, and space in the production of more inclusive, open-ended forms of subjectivity.
Panzano has taught architecture studio, concurrent with practice, for the past ten years. She is the recipient of a variety of awards for her architectural and pedagogical work including a ‘Best Parks’ honor for her design of a perceptual playground for unscripted play built on the roof of a preschool, a solo exhibition of her project ‘Architectural Artifacts’ at Boston’s pinkcomma gallery, a HILT Spark grant supporting new forms of learning through making, a pair of Harvard GSD Dean’s Junior Faculty Grants for original design research projects, and four sequential Harvard Excellence in Teaching awards. Her design work has been published in Mark Magazine, Wallpaper, Bauwelt, Architect, PLAT, Arch Daily, Domus, the Boston Globe, the Harvard Gazette, and Harvard Design Magazine and has been exhibited in numerous domestic and international academies and galleries.
As GSD faculty, Panzano has authored original core studio briefs and design courses within both the graduate and undergraduate programs. In 2018, she advised MArch II GSD Thesis Prize winner, Scarlet Ziwei Song, for her project, “Not so skin deep: vernacularism in XL.” In the spring of 2020, Megan’s original Core IV housing studio brief, “Collected Company,” supported the winning project of the Harvard 2020 Clifford Wong Prize in Housing Design, “A House is Not a Home,” by Qin Ye Chen (MArch I 2022) and Yiwen Wang (MArch I AP 2022). She has also served as an invited design critic at UCLA, USC, Columbia, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Wesleyan, Temple University, RISD, Northeastern University, Wellesley, Boston Architectural College, and MIT.
Prior to joining the GSD, Panzano taught studio at Northeastern University. She has practiced in Boston as a Senior Designer and Project Manager at Utile, Inc. and in Philadelphia at Venturi, Scott Brown + Associates, where she worked closely with both Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi. She holds a B.A. in Architecture with honors from Yale University and a Master of Architecture with distinction from the GSD, where she was the recipient of the John E. Thayer Award for outstanding academic achievement and the 2010 winner of the GSD’s James Templeton Kelley Thesis Prize for her thesis design of a new architectural type that explored the home as an inhabitable archive – an integral site of object collection and collective living.
Panzano is the mother of two boisterous boys, whose energies she and her husband, Vince, direct as often as possible to involved, collaborative renovation projects of their 1929 home in Arlington, MA, just west of Cambridge.
Erika Naginski
Erika Naginski is the Robert P. Hubbard Professor of Architectural History. Her research interests include Baroque and Enlightenment architecture, early modern aesthetic philosophy, theories of public space, and the critical traditions of architectural history. In addition to teaching modules in the Building Texts Contexts sequence, she offers seminars and lecture courses in architectural history and theory including The Shapes of Utopia, The Piranesi Effect, Versailles to the Visionaries and The Ruin Aesthetic: Episodes in the History of Architectural Idea.
Naginski’s books and edited volumes include Sculpture and Enlightenment (2009), which traces the transformation of public art and architecture in an age of secular rationalism and revolutionary politics; Polemical Objects (2004), a special issue of Res co-edited with Stephen Melville, which explores the philosophy of medium in Hegel, Heidegger and others; and Writing on Drawing (2000) for the journal Representations, with essays addressing the collision of semiotics and mimesis in drawing practices as they emerge in art, architecture and science. In 2007, Naginski was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for her current book project on the intersections of architecture, archaeology and the conception of history in the eighteenth century.
Before joining the GSD faculty, Naginski taught in the architecture department at MIT and in the art history department at the University of Michigan. She has been a junior fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard University as well as a research fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and the Deutsches Forum fr Kunstgeschichte. She serves on the editorial board of Res.
Farshid Moussavi
Farshid Moussavi is Professor in Practice in the Department of Architecture, Harvard University Graduate School of Design and principal of Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA). Moussavi’s approach is characterised by an openness to change and a commitment to the intellectual and cultural life of architecture. Alongside leading an award-winning architectural practice, she lectures regularly at arts institutions and schools of architecture worldwide and is a published author. Moussavi was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to architecture. She was elected a Royal Academician in 2015 and Professor of Architecture at the RA Schools in 2017.
Moussavi trained at Harvard GSD, the Bartlett School of Architecture University College London and Dundee University. Recognized as an outstanding and committed teacher, she has been a visiting professor at UCLA, Columbia, Princeton, and at several architecture schools in Europe; she was also the Kenzo Tange Visiting Design Critic at the GSD in Spring 2005. She taught for eight years at the Architectural Association in London and was the head of the Institute of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where she taught from 2002 until 2005.
At FMA, Moussavi’s completed projects include the acclaimed Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, USA; La Folie Divine, a residential complex in Montpellier; a multi-tenure residential complex in the La Défense district of Paris, flagship stores for Victoria Beckham in London and Hong Kong, and the Toys Department for Harrods in London. Her current projects include the Ismaili Center Houston and a primary school in Paris. Previously Moussavi was co-founder of the internationally renowned London-based Foreign Office Architects (FOA) where she co-authored many award-winning international projects including the Yokohama International Cruise Terminal and the Spanish Pavilion at the Aichi International Expo, London’s Ravensbourne College of Media and Communication and the Leicester John Lewis Department Store and Cineplex. Prior to setting up FOA, Moussavi worked with the Renzo Piano Building Workshop in Genoa and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam.
A prolific writer and public speaker, Moussavi is a leading figure in contemporary architectural dialogue. Author of four books, her most recent Architecture and Micropolitics, Four Buildings 2011-2022, Farshid Moussavi Architecture (Park Books, 2022) sets out her vision for architecture as a form practice that is responsive rather than deterministic. Moussavi has pursued teaching in parallel to practice for more than 30 years, seeing it as the opportunity for developing new thinking on subjects including the design of social housing and approaches to adaptive reuse.
Moussavi has served on key design and architectural advisory panels and international design juries including for the British Council, the Mayor of London’s “Design for London” advisory group, the London Development Agency, the RIBA Gold and Presidential Medals and the Stirling Prize for Architecture.
Moussavi is deeply committed to art and culture. She has previously served as a trustee of the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the London Architecture Foundation, and a member of the Steering Committee of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. Currently, she is a trustee of the Norman Foster Foundation London and New Architecture Writers (NAW) which focuses on black and minority ethnic emerging writers who are under-represented across design journalism and curation.
In Moussavi’s latest book, Architecture & Micropolitics , she seeks to dispel two widely held misconceptions: first, that architects are no longer central to the making of buildings and, second, that design is a linear process which begins with a fully formed architectural vision. Moussavi argues that the temporality of architecture provides day-to-day practice with the potential to generate change. She proposes that we abandon determinism and embrace chance events and the subjective factors that influence practice in order to ground buildings in the micropolitics of everyday life.
Mohsen Mostafavi
Mohsen Mostafavi, architect and educator, is the Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, and served as Dean of the GSD from 2008-2019. His work focuses on modes and processes of urbanization and on the interface between technology and aesthetics.
He was formerly the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University where he was also the Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Professor in Architecture. Previously, he was the Chairman of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. He studied architecture at the AA, and undertook research on counter-reformation urban history at the Universities of Essex and Cambridge. He has been the Director of the Master of Architecture I Program at the GSD and has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Cambridge, and the Frankfurt Academy of Fine Arts (Städelschule).
Mostafavi is a Trustee of Smith College, an Honorary Trustee of the Norman Foster Foundation, and served on the Board of the Van Alen Institute as well as the Steering Committee and the Jury of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. At Harvard, he co-chaired the Harvard University Committee for the Arts, served on the Smith Campus Center Executive Committee, the Harvard Allston Steering Committee, and co-chaired the Steering Committee on Common Spaces. He is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Mahindra Humanities Center, the Harvard Innovation Lab Advisory Board, the Executive Board of The Laboratory at Harvard, and the Committee on Middle Eastern Studies.
Mostafavi has chaired the jury of the Mies van der Rohe Prize for Architecture and the European, Global, and North American juries of the LafargeHolcim Awards for Sustainable Construction. He served on the design committee of the London Development Agency (LDA), the juries for the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Gold Medal and Annie Spink Award, and the advisory committee on campus planning of the Asian University for Women.
He is a consultant on a number of international architectural and urban projects. His research and design projects have been published in many journals, including The Architectural Review, AAFiles, Arquitectura, Bauwelt, Casabella, Centre, Daidalos, and El Croquis. His books include On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time (co-authored 1993), which received the American Institute of Architects prize for writing on architectural theory; Delayed Space (co-authored 1994); Approximations (2002); Surface Architecture (2002); Logique Visuelle (2003); Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape (2004); Structure as Space (2006); Ecological Urbanism (co-edited 2010 and recently translated into Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish); Implicate & Explicate (2011); Louis Vuitton: Architecture and Interiors (2011); In the Life of Cities (2012); Instigations: Engaging Architecture, Landscape and the City (co-edited 2012); Architecture is Life (2013); Nicholas Hawksmoor: The London Churches (2015); Architecture and Plurality (2016); Portman’s America & Other Speculations (2017); and Ethics of the Urban: The City and the Spaces of the Political (2017).