Mabel O. Wilson “The Measure of Freedom and Unfreedom”

About this Event

This talk explores the establishment of the capital city built at the fall line of the Potomac River in 1791, with the intention of it becoming not only the seat of federal government, but, with infrastructural improvements, a major trading point and port between the Chesapeake Bay, Atlantic Ocean, and Northwest Territory. Land served not only as the ground upon which the new federal territory was mapped, but “land” acquisition, enabled by property rights, also served as the legal substrate for both the establishment of “unalienable rights” and the conditions of unfreedom experienced by all enslaved and free Black peoples in the US. During this period, racial difference fundamental to national belonging was calibrated in relation to disappearing indigenous nations and their rich knowledge and cultural practices about their respective homelands, and through a growing dependence on enslaved Black labor—all of which became essential to the construction of the capital, Washington City in the District of Columbia.

Speaker

Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George E. Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and Chair of  African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University, where she recently served as director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies and co-director of the Global Africa Lab. Wilson has authored Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016) and Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012), and co-edited the volume Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020). With her practice Studio&, she is a member of the architectural design team that recently completed the award-winning Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia.  She is a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?), an advocacy project educating the architectural profession about the problems of globalization and labor. For the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, she co-curated the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021). She is currently developing the manuscript for her next book, Building Race and Nation: Slavery, Dispossession, and US Civic Architecture.

Deanna Van Buren, “Designing for Abolition”

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Event Description

Architects and designers play a critical role in addressing whole-systems change, including ending the systemic oppression and punishment of our criminal justice system.  Designing Justice + Designing Spaces is an architecture and real estate nonprofit that aims to ignite radical imagination to build an ecosystem of care that addresses the root causes of mass incarceration. This talk by co-founder and executive director Deanna Van Buren will show completed, current, and future projects by Designing Justice + Designing Spaces that illustrate how and what we need to build instead of prisons, jails, or courthouses. “Designing for Abolition” presents real world examples of how architects can practice differently to develop new prototypes that are driven by the communities we serve. Following the lecture, Andrea James, Executive Director of The National Council of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls , will join Deanna on stage for a conversation and Q&A.

Speakers

Deanna Van Buren is the co-founder and executive director of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces . An architecture and real estate nonprofit working to end mass incarceration through place-based solutions, DJDS builds infrastructure that addresses its root causes: poverty, racism, unequal access to resources, and the criminal justice system itself. She is also a socially engaged artist working across media platforms, including public art, film, and video games.

Van Buren has been profiled by The New York Times. She has written op-eds on the intersection of design, architecture, mass incarceration, and video games in outlets such as Politico, Architectural Record, and Gamasutra. Her TEDWomen talk on what a world without prisons could look like has been viewed more than one million times.

Her other honors include UC Berkeley’s Berkeley-Rupp Architecture Prize and Professorship , awarded to a design practitioner who has made a significant contribution to advancing gender equity in architecture and whose work emphasizes a commitment to sustainability and community. Globally, she’s been awarded the 2018 Bicentenary Medal of the Royal Society of Arts , for her efforts in transforming justice through design, and Architectural Record’s Women in Architecture Award .

Van Buren received her BS in architecture from the University of Virginia and her MArch from Columbia University. She is an alumnus of the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

 

Andrea C. James, JD. is the founder and executive director of The National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls; founder of Families for Justice as Healing; author of Upper Bunkies Unite: And Other Thoughts on the Politics of Mass Incarceration; a 2015 Soros Justice Fellow and recipient of the 2016 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award.

As a former criminal defense attorney and a formerly incarcerated woman, Andrea shares her personal and professional experiences to raise awareness of the effects of incarcerating women on themselves, their children, and their communities. Her work is focused on ending the incarceration of women and girls and contributing to the shift from a criminal legal system focused on police and prisons to a system led by directly affected people from within their neighborhoods and based on individual and community accountability.

Manuel Salgado, “City-Making”

Event Description

“City-making” can be approached from different points of view and disciplines, whether starting from global theoretical reflections or from a particular and pragmatic approach to solving concrete problems.

One can contribute to ‘city-making’ as a thinker, sociologist, economist, legislator, planner, developer, policymaker, or even an agitator.

Throughout my life, I have contributed to said process in three different ways:

1. As a planner
Starting from the 1974 Revolution, in a climate of great political and social unrest, I designed several Urban Plans in different cities to solve concrete problems.

2. As an architect
I then designed the Cultural Center that remodeled the Belém monumental area in Lisbon; the Expo’98 Urban Project; several urban regeneration projects; a major port infrastructure in the Azores and a new urban center in Rome.

3. As a policymaker
For 12 years, I made decisions about and implemented urban policies in the Municipality of Lisbon. In a changing economic, social, and political context, the rehabilitation of the historic city, the redesign of public space, and the conquest of the Tagus River banks changed the city.

Staying grounded in reality and being concerned with possible, if imperfect, solutions was a constant in these three ways of “making city.”

Speaker

Manuel Salgado earned a degree in Architecture in Lisbon, in 1968. He worked in a construction company and an international engineering office before dedicating himself to urban planning – which he did right after the Portuguese Revolution of 1974.

In 1988 Vittorio Gregotti invited him to join him in an international competition to design the Centro Cultural de Belém, which became his first large-scale project. This was followed by the Expo-98 Plan and the Antas Urban Project, which included FC Porto’s soccer stadium.

Drawing from those experiences, he was invited to develop several large-scale interventions, including both urban plans and architectural projects, in Portugal and abroad. He also served as an Urban Planning Professor at IST, one of Portugal’s leading Universities.

In mid-2007, he ran for the City Council of Lisbon, where he became Head of Urban Planning for the subsequent 12 years, renouncing his professional and academic activities.

Throughout his career, he received numerous awards and accolades, including appointment as an honorary academician of the Academy of Urbanism in England; membership on the Scientific Council of the French think-tank “La Fabrique de la Cité”; he was a member of the Jury at the French National Prize for Urbanism; and was part of the Scientific Advisory Board of the magazine “Urbanística INU”.

Adèle Naudé Santos, “Narrative Maps: A Design Process”

A recording of this event is available with audio description .
Event Description
Adèle Naudé Santos will deliver the annual Jaqueline Tyrwhitt Urban Design Lecture.
It is an honor to be invited to give the Jaqueline Tyrwhitt Urban Design Lecture at the GSD. In addition to sharing my design process tonight, I can also share my memories of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, who taught me while I was a student in the urban design program here. As fellow South Africans we both experienced influential years of study at the AA in London, though at different times. My interest in housing and urbanism was sparked by experiences with Team 10 members, who taught at the AA in London, and Shadrach Woods, whom I worked for in Paris. Being accepted into the Urban Design program at the GSD, where Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and Team 10 members taught, I was exposed to many philosophical discussions about the importance of urbanistic thinking and how best to teach it. 
Through these early teachers and discussions, I learned how to think analytically about key issues influencing design and how to draw diagrams to explain essential attributes. I believe this is an essential bridge between abstract thinking and a design process with physical results. Many decades later in practice, with increasingly complex design problems, a belief that many concepts are needed to resolve most designs, this process became an essential methodology in my office. I call this process Narrative Mapping. Two solo exhibitions show this process and its outcomes, one in Bloemfontein, South Africa, and a second in Kitakyushu, Japan. 
I will show work from different stages in my practice which followed my academic career. These will include design narratives and work at different scales including affordable housing, projects for the arts, public facilities and places, and urban design proposals. 
Speaker
Adèle Naudé Santos, FAIA, MAUD ’63, currently Professor Post Tenure of Architecture and Urban Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and previously dean of the School of Architecture and Planning from 2004 to 2014. During her tenure as dean she founded the Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism –an important think tank on urban futures—and after her tenure as dean she became its co-director for two years. 
She is principal architect in the San Francisco/Somerville-based firm, Santos Prescott and Associates . Her projects include affordable and luxury housing and institutional buildings. She recently completed projects in California, Massachusetts, Guatemala and China. 
Professor Santos has received many awards and honors including the 2009 Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education and the Friendship Award by the Chinese government.   
She received an AA Diploma from the Architectural Association in London, Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard, and Master of Architecture and Master of City Planning from the University of Pennsylvania. 

Anne Lacaton

Event Information

The guest speaker for this event will be joining us virtually. All are invited to watch and participate online in this program by tuning into this page at the noted start time. No pre-registration is required.  Online audience members will be able to submit questions throughout the event using Vimeo’s Q&A function. If you would like to submit questions for the speaker in advance of the event, please click here. Harvard ID holders are also welcome to attend programs in person, except where an event is listed as online only. Live captioning will be provided during this event livestream. Learn more about accessibility services at public programs.

This event recording is also available to watch with audio description.

Event Description

French architect Anne Lacaton will deliver the inaugural Jaqueline Tyrwhitt Urban Design Lecture. Lacaton and partner Jean-Philippe Vassal received the 2021 Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor.

Audience members who attend this event in its entirety may be eligible for continuing education credits from AIA. Please reach out to [email protected] for more information.

Speaker

Anne Lacaton (1955, Saint-Pardoux, France) and Jean-Philippe Vassal met in the late 1970s during their formal architecture training at École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et de Paysage de Bordeaux. They established Lacaton & Vassal in Paris (1987), and have since demonstrated boldness through their design of new buildings and transformative projects. For over three decades, they have designed private and social housing, cultural and academic institutions, public space, and urban strategies. The duo’s architecture reflects their advocacy of social justice and sustainability, by prioritizing a generosity of space and freedom of use through economical and ecological materials.

Lacaton is an associate professor of Architecture and Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich (Zurich, Switzerland, since 2017), and a visiting professor at Polytechnic University of Madrid, Master in Housing (Madrid, Spain, since 2007). She has been a visiting professor at Delft University of Technology (Delft, Netherlands, 2016–2017) and Technische Hochschule Nürnberg Georg Simon Ohm (Nürnberg, Germany, 2014); was the Design Critic in Architecture (2015) and the Kenzo Tange Visiting Chair in Architecture and Urban Planning (2011) at Harvard Graduate School of Design (Cambridge, MA); and the Clarkson Chair at the University of Buffalo (Buffalo, NY, 2013). She served on the LafargeHolcim Awards jury for Europe (2017) and will be a member of the 2021 jury later this year.