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About This Event

Infrastructure in a Time of Flux: Methods, Conditions, and Situations, is an exhibition that examines how architecture, engineering, urban design, and planning respond to a world increasingly defined by environmental disruption, political instability, technological transformation, migration, and rapidly changing patterns of habitation. 

This symposium brings together designers, architects, humanitarian workers, and historians to reflect on the exhibition’s three themes and a case study:

• Methods: This panel explores historic and contemporary approaches to lightweight construction: suspended, pneumatic, tensile, tensegrity, deployable, gridshell, folded, scaffolding, and spaceframe systems. Developed across different periods and disciplines, these methods use tension, air pressure, geometry, movement, modularity, and coordinated assemblies to create expansive spaces with relatively little material.
• Conditions: This panel brings together urbanists, economists, and political scientists to discuss the forces that continually reshape human settlements. These forces operate beyond the scale of individual buildings, transforming landscapes, redistributing resources, influencing migration, and determining where and how communities can live. 
• Situations: Designers and researchers present contemporary examples and speculative proposals for structures that meet immediate human needs. These  situations emerge through necessity, ritual, labor, exchange, displacement, conflict, celebration, and collective action.
• Case Study, Kumbh Mela: Religious pilgrimages create temporary sacred cities. Drawing work by several schools at Harvard, this interdisciplinary conversation reflects on the Kumbh Mela, one of the largest gatherings in the world, and the roads, tents, sanitation systems, ceremonial routes, and public services that support it. This panel is organized by the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University.

The full lineup of speakers will be announced shortly.

This symposium is supported by the Koji Yanai Innovative Infrastructure Initiative Fund and a partnership with the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University.

Harvard University welcomes individuals with disabilities to participate in its programs and activities. If you would like to request accommodations or have questions about the physical access provided, please contact the Public Programs Office at (617) 496-2414 or [email protected] in advance of your participation or visit. Requests for American Sign Language interpreters and/or CART providers should be made at least two weeks in advance. Please note that the University will make every effort to secure services, but that services are subject to availability.

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