Malkit Shoshan, Andrew Herscher, and Daniel Serwer, “Reconstruction and Redestruction: Post-War Antinomies”
Malkit Shoshan, Andrew Herscher, and Daniel Serwer, “Reconstruction and Redestruction: Post-War Antinomies”
Event Description
In times of war, the destruction of the built environment stands out as a profoundly traumatic act of violence against a collective, a nation, a people. “We expect people to die,” writes Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulic. “A dead woman is one of us – but the bridge is all of us, forever.” However, the destruction of the built environment is not confined to times of war. Dominant powers and neoliberal forces exploit disasters, crises, and shocks to impose new values, narratives, and forms that similarly disrupt the cities and spaces we live in. Especially in post-war environments, reconstruction and “redestruction” are often difficult to disentangle when discussing rebuilding environments that were ruined in war.
In this conversation, Senior Loeb Scholar Malkit Shoshan will discuss the complexities of postwar reconstruction with Andrew Herscher, a professor of architecture at University of Michigan whose work explores the architecture of political violence, migration, and displacement, and Daniel Serwer, a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins SAIS Center for Transatlantic Relations and professorial lecturer in the Conflict Management Program.
Speakers
Malkit Shoshan is the 2024-2025 Senior Loeb Scholar at Harvard GSD and a 2024 Resident at The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. She is a designer, researcher, and writer, and founding director of the architecture think tank FAST (Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory). FAST employs research, advocacy, design, and public art to explore the complex relationships between architecture, urban planning, and human rights.
In 2021, Shoshan was awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale for her collaborative project Border Ecologies and the Gaza Strip: Watermelon, Sardines, Crabs, Sand, and Sediment, which is also the subject of her forthcoming book with Amir Qudaih (Mack Books, 2024). Her award-winning books on spatial equity, peace, and conflict include BLUE: The Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions (Actar, 2023), Atlas of Conflict: Israel-Palestine (Uitgeverij 010, 2010), Village: One Land, Two Systems and Platform Paradise (Damiani Editore, 2014), Zoo, or the Letter Z, Just After Zionism (NAiM, 2012). Shoshan’s research and design work has been exhibited internationally and featured in prominent newspapers, magazines, and academic journals, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Haaretz, and Harvard Design Magazine.
Andrew Herscher’s work endeavors to bring the study of architecture and cities to bear on struggles for justice, democracy, and self-determination across a range of global sites. He is the co-founder of a series of militant research collectives, including Detroit Resists, Settler Colonial City Project, and the We the People of Detroit Community Research Collective. His scholarly work includes Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict (Stanford University Press, 2010); The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2012); Displacements: Architecture and Refugee (Sternberg Press, 2017); The Global Shelter Imaginary: IKEA Humanitarianism and Rightless Relief (co-authored with Daniel Bertrand Monk, University of Minnesota Press, 2022); and Under the Campus, the Land: Anishinaabe Futuring, Colonial Non-Memory, and the Origin of the University of Michigan (University of Michigan Press, 2025). He works at the University of Michigan.
Daniel Serwer is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where he previously directed the Conflict Management and American Foreign Policy programs. He is also a scholar affiliated with the Middle East Institute. He was Vice President for Centers of Peacebuilding Innovation as well as for Peace and Stability Operations at the United States Institute of Peace and served as Executive Director of the Hamilton/Baker Iraq Study Group. As a Minister-Counselor at the U.S. Department of State, Serwer was a wartime Special Envoy for the Bosnian Federation. He also served as Charge’ d’affaires and Deputy Chief of Mission at U.S. Embassy Rome.
Serwer is the author of From War to Peace in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Ukraine (Palgrave MacMillan 2019), which he is revising for a new edition in 2027. He also wrote Righting the Balance: How You Can Help Protect America (Potomac Books, 2013). His most recent book is Strengthening International Norms: The Case of Radiation Protection (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024).
Serwer holds a Ph.D. and M.A. from Princeton University; M.S. from the University of Chicago; and a B.A. from Haverford College.
Malkit Shoshan, Tatiana Bilbao, and Elke Krasny, “Building with Care: Feminist Perspectives on Design in Conflict”
Malkit Shoshan, Tatiana Bilbao, and Elke Krasny, “Building with Care: Feminist Perspectives on Design in Conflict”
Event Description
Our words have the power to cultivate our imagination and actions. By extension, they shape our world. Too often, our relationships with each other and the world are framed through the lens of war. Beyond the over 120 militarized conflicts globally, the word “war” is also used to capture our collective resources to mobilize radical changes – “war on poverty,” “war on crime,” “war on obesity,” “war on climate change,” and some still wage what is called a “war on women.” What if we remove the word “war” and look at our world with care? How can we center care not merely as an abstract idea but as a pragmatic process and ethos of collective well-being? Can we change our world through care and nurture?
This event will feature three short lectures by Malkit Shoshan, Elke Krasny, and Tatiana Bilbao, showcasing work that addresses systemic violence related to gender, race, and class disparity and exploring ways to integrate care into architecture and urbanism from a feminist perspective. The event is part of an ongoing conversation among the three, driven by questions about how to envision building a world aligned with anti-colonial and anti-capitalist viewpoints that remain marginalized in design.
Speakers
Malkit Shoshan is the 2024-2025 Senior Loeb Scholar at Harvard GSD and a 2024 Resident at The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. She is a designer, researcher, and writer, and founding director of the architecture think tank FAST (Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory). FAST employs research, advocacy, design, and public art to explore the complex relationships between architecture, urban planning, and human rights.
In 2021, Shoshan was awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale for her collaborative project Border Ecologies and the Gaza Strip: Watermelon, Sardines, Crabs, Sand, and Sediment, which is also the subject of her forthcoming book with Amir Qudaih (Mack Books, 2024). Her award-winning books on spatial equity, peace, and conflict include BLUE: The Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions (Actar, 2023), Atlas of Conflict: Israel-Palestine (Uitgeverij 010, 2010), Village: One Land, Two Systems and Platform Paradise (Damiani Editore, 2014), Zoo, or the Letter Z, Just After Zionism (NAiM, 2012). Shoshan’s research and design work has been exhibited internationally and featured in prominent newspapers, magazines, and academic journals, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Haaretz, and Harvard Design Magazine.
Tatiana Bilbao, architect, born in 1972, began her eponymous studio in 2004. Prior to this, she was an Advisor in the Ministry of Development and Housing for the Federal District of Mexico City. Bilbao holds a recurrent visiting teaching position at Yale University School of Architecture and has taught at Harvard University GSD, Columbia University GSAPP, Rice University, and Peter Behrens School of Arts at Dusseldorf in Germany, among others. Bilbao’s studio work intersects field research with the construction of an intellectual approach to focus on spaces that aim to become platforms for the possibility and enhancement of life across typologies and in different parts of the world. She has been recognized with several distinctions, including the Kunstpreis Berlin in 2012, the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture Prize by the LOCUS Foundation in 2014, the Marcus Prize Award in 2019, Tau Sigma Delta Gold Medal of the ACSA 2020, Honorary Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) 2021, and the Richard Neutra Award in 2022, the architecture recognition of the FIL (International Book Fair) for the professional career of the year 2023, and a Doctorate Honoris Causa for Design from the Boston Architectural College in 2024.
Elke Krasny, Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, is a cultural theorist, curator, and author. Her work focuses on practices of care, transnational feminisms, and ecological and social justice in architecture, urbanism, and contemporary art. With Angelika Fitz, Krasny co-edited Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet (MIT Press, 2019). In 2021, Krasny, together with Urska Jurman, initiated Ecologies of Care. Krasny, together with Sophie Lingg and Claudia Lomoschitz, edited Feminist Infrastructural Critique. Life-Affirming Practices against Capital.
Malkit Shoshan, “Designing Within Conflict”
Malkit Shoshan, “Designing Within Conflict”
Speaker
Malkit Shoshan is a designer, author, and educator. She is the founding director of the Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (FAST), which initiates and develops projects at the intersection of architecture, urban planning and human rights. In her work, she uses spatial design tools to make visible systemic violence, engage with various publics to co-design alternatives that center social and environmental justice, and advocate for systemic change.
Shoshan is a design critic in Urban Planning at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and a visiting scholar at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge. She is the author and mapmaker of the award-winning book “Atlas of the Conflict, Israel-Palestine” (010 Publishers, 2011), the co-author of “Village. One Land Two Systems and Platform Paradise” (Damiani Editore, 2014), and the author and illustrator of “BLUE: The Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions” (Actar, 2023). Her additional publications include “Zoo, or the letter Z, just after Zionism” (NAiM, 2012), “Drone” (DPR-Barcelona, 2016), “Spaces of Conflict” (JapSam books, 2016), “Greening Peacekeeping: The Environmental Impact of UN Peace Operations” (IPI, 2018), and “Retreat” (DPR-Barcelona, 2020). Her work has been published and exhibited internationally. In 2021, she was awarded, together with FAST, the Silver Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale for their collaborative presentation “Border Ecologies and the Gaza Strip.”
Lesley Lokko
Lesley Lokko
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This event recording is also available to watch with audio description .
Event Description
The Senior Loeb Scholars program invites prominent individuals whose expertise is outside the typical disciplines of the GSD or whose practice displays a unique focus. Scholars are welcomed for a short-term residency at the School, during which they present a public lecture and engage directly with GSD students, faculty, staff, researchers, Loeb Fellows, and others. Since its inception, the program has offered the GSD community opportunities to learn from and be in discourse with visionary designers, scholars, and thought leaders in a uniquely focused context.
Lesley Lokko is the Spring 2022 Senior Loeb Scholar. Lokko joins a cohort of previous Senior Loeb Scholars who include Walter Hood (2021); Bruno Latour (2018-2019); Kenneth Frampton and Silvia Kolbowski (2017-2018); Richard and Ruth Rogers (2016-2017); and David Harvey (2015-2016).
Lokko will be in residence at the GSD on Monday, February 28 and Tuesday, March 1, 2022. She will deliver the annual Senior Loeb Scholar public lecture on Tuesday, March 1 at 6:30 pm ET.
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
Lesley Lokko is the founder and director of the African Futures Institute (AFI) in Accra, Ghana, an independent postgraduate school of architecture and public events platform. She was the founder and director of the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg (2014—2019) and the Dean of Architecture at The Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture (2019—2020), CCNY. She is the editor of White Papers, Black Marks: Race, Culture, Architecture (University of Minnesota Press, 2000) and the editor-in-chief of FOLIO: Journal of Contemporary African Architecture , published by the AFI.
In 2004, she made the successful transition from academic to novelist with the publication of her first novel, Sundowners , (Orion, 2004) and has since followed with twelve further bestsellers, which have been translated into fifteen languages. She is currently a founding member of the Council on Urban Initiatives, co-founded by LSE Cities, UN Habitat and UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose; and a Visiting Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. She is a trustee of London-based The Architecture Foundation and has held visiting professorships at the University of Westminster, University of Cape Town, The Cooper Union and the University of Virginia.
In December 2021, she was appointed Curator of Biennale Architettura 2023 of La Biennale di Venezia.
Follow Lesley Lokko on Twitter and Instagram .
Walter Hood, “When Memory Is Not Enough”
Walter Hood, “When Memory Is Not Enough”
The GSD’s Spring 2021 Public Programs are all virtual and require registration.
Click here to register for Walter Hood’s Senior Loeb Scholar Lecture .
Scroll down to find complete registration instructions and additional information about accessing the GSD’s programs.
Event Description
The Senior Loeb Scholars program invites prominent individuals whose expertise is outside the typical disciplines of the GSD or whose practice displays a unique focus. Scholars are welcomed for a short term residency at the School, during which they present a public lecture, workshops, and other engagements. Since its inception, the program has offered the GSD community opportunities to learn from and engage with visionary designers, scholars, and thought leaders.
Walter Hood is the Spring 2021 Senior Loeb Scholar. Hood joins a cohort of previous Senior Loeb Scholars, which include Bruno Latour (2018-2019); Kenneth Frampton and Silvia Kolbowski (2017-2018); Richard and Ruth Rogers (2016-2017); and David Harvey (2015-2016).
Speaker
Walter Hood is the Creative Director and Founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California. Hood Design Studio is a cultural practice, working across art, fabrication, design, landscape, research and urbanism. He is also the David K. Woo Chair and the Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. He lectures on and exhibits professional and theoretical projects nationally and internationally. He was recently the Spring 2020 Diana Balmori Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Architecture.
Walter creates urban spaces that resonate with and enrich the lives of current residents while also honoring communal histories. Hood melds architectural and fine arts expertise with a commitment to designing ecologically sustainable public spaces that empower marginalized communities. Over his career, he has transformed traffic islands, vacant lots, and freeway underpasses into spaces that challenge the legacy of neglect of urban neighborhoods. Through engagement with community members, he teases out the natural and social histories as well as current residents’ shared patterns and practices of use and aspirations for a place.
The Studio’s award-winning work has been featured in publications including Dwell, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fast Company, Architectural Digest, Places Journal, and Landscape Architecture Magazine. Walter Hood is also a recipient of the 2017 Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award, 2019 Knight Foundation Public Spaces Fellowship, 2019 MacArthur Fellowship and 2019 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize.
How to Join
Register to attend the lecture here . Once you have registered, you will be provided with a link to join the lecture via Zoom. This link will also be emailed to you.
The event will also be live streamed to the GSD’s YouTube page . Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speakers in advance of the event, please click here .
Live captioning will be provided during this event. A transcript will be available roughly two weeks after the event, upon request.
CANCELLED – “Words Build Worlds” with Nicolai Ouroussoff, Florencia Rodriguez, and Thomas Weaver
CANCELLED – “Words Build Worlds” with Nicolai Ouroussoff, Florencia Rodriguez, and Thomas Weaver
This event has been cancelled. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
With Words Build Worlds, Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture, invites three distinct voices from the world of contemporary publishing to the GSD for a conversation around the power and importance of the written word within the design fields now. Nicolai Ouroussoff, Florencia Rodriguez, and Thomas Weaver come together from different corners of the criticism, journalism, print and digital media, and editorial fields to discuss what a commitment to the curation and publication of design discourse through writing means in this moment in time.
As Senior Loeb Scholars within the Loeb Fellowship program, Ouroussoff, Rodriguez, and Weaver will spend a week at the GSD interacting with students, faculty, and Loeb Fellows and offering new and different perspectives on the range of issues we are facing within the design disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning and design. Words Build Worlds is the keynote public event for the 2019-2020 Senior Loeb Scholars.
PARTICIPANTS
Nicolai Ouroussoff is a writer and critic living in New York. He is currently completing a book on architecture, culture and politics from the First World War to today, which will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Since 2011 he has taught on modern and contemporary architecture at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, the Strelka Institute in Moscow and the Columbia University graduate school of architecture. From 2004 to 2011 he was the architecture critic of The New York Times, were he wrote widely on architecture and urbanism in the United States, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and where he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in both 2006 and 2011. Previously, he was the architecture critic of The Los Angeles Times, where he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for a series on the cultural decline of Baghdad. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1962.
Florencia Rodriguez , LF ’14, is an architect, and has dedicated her career to writing and editing. In 2014 she received the Loeb Fellowship from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 2010, Florencia founded PLOT magazine, which continued to direct until 2017. Under her stewardship, PLOT quickly became one of the leading publications in the region. In early 2017 Florencia embarked on a new project with Pablo Gerson, the editorial platform Lots of architecture -publishers, which main product is the periodical publication –NESS. On Architecture, Life and Urban Culture. Rodriguez was curated several exhibitions and organized international symposia. She was a Professor of Landscape Theory and Technology Theory in the Torcuato Di Tella University graduate programs and has taught theory courses at other universities such as Universidad del Litoral and The Boston Architectural College. She has received awards for her editorial work and published a number of articles in books and specialized media like Domus, Oris, summa +, Arquine, a+u, or Uncube, among others.
Thomas Weaver is an architectural writer, teacher and editor, and senior commissioning editor for art and architecture at MIT Press. Educated at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, and at Princeton University, he subsequently combined editorial positions – at ANY magazine in New York, and later, and for more than a decade, editing AA Files at the Architectural Association in London – with academic appointments at the Cooper Union and currently as a visiting fellow at the Berlage Centre for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design, TU Delft. He has lectured extensively, and is the author (with Alessandra Ponte and Laurent Stalder) of GOD & CO: François Dallegret Beyond the Bubble (2011), AA Files Conversations (2013), Against Research/Model-maker Grimm (2018), From Soane to The Strip (2018, with Denise Scott Brown) and Writing not Typing (2019), in addition to numerous essays and published conversations.
Sarah M. Whiting is Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Co-founder of WW Architecture, she served as Dean of Architecture at Rice University for nine years. She received her BA from Yale, MA from Princeton, and PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture from MIT.
Whiting’s research is interdisciplinary, with the built environment at its core. An expert in architectural theory and urbanism, she has particular interests in architecture’s relationship with politics, economics, and society and how the built environment shapes public life.
Whiting has taught at various universities and lectures globally. She serves as a critic of architecture and urban design and is an Associate member of the American Institute of Architects. Whiting is also a prolific published writer and editor in her field, and is the founding editor of Point, a book series aimed at shaping contemporary discussions in architecture and urbanism.
This program is supported by the Loeb Fellowship at the GSD.
Bruno Latour, “A Tale of Seven Planets – An Exercise in Gaiapolitics”
Bruno Latour, “A Tale of Seven Planets – An Exercise in Gaiapolitics”
Until recently the expression ‘we don’t live in the same planet’ was a metaphorical way of expressing no more than a disagreement. Today it has taken a literal meaning that the lecture will pursue in trying to map contrasted definitions of what used to be called “the natural world”.
Bruno Latour is now emeritus professor associated with the médialab and the program in political arts (SPEAP) of Sciences Po Paris. Since January 2018 he is for two years fellow at the Zentrum fur Media Kunst (ZKM) and professor at the HfG both in Karlsruhe. Member of several academies and recipient of six honorary doctorate, he is the recipient in 2013 of the Holberg Prize. He has written and edited more than twenty books and published more than one hundred and fifty articles. You can find more informations on his website (http://www.bruno-latour.fr/).
Click here to read an article co-authored by Latour on the subject of Gaiapolitics.
Silvia Kolbowski, “This Monument Which is Not One”
Silvia Kolbowski, “This Monument Which is Not One”
Kenneth Frampton, “Megaform as Urban Landscape”
Kenneth Frampton, “Megaform as Urban Landscape”
Kenneth Frampton was born in 1930 and trained as an architect at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London. He has worked as an architect and as an architectural historian and critic, and is now Ware Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, New York. He has taught at a number of leading institutions in the field, including the Royal College of Art in London, the ETH in Zurich, the Berlage Institute in Amsterdam, EPFL in Lausanne and the Accademia di Architettura in Medrisio. Frampton is the author of numerous essays on modern and contemporary architecture, and has served on many international juries for architectural awards and building commissions. In addition to Modern Architecture: A Critical History, his publications include Studies in Tectonic Culture, Labour, Work and Architecture, and A Genealogy of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form.
HCGBC Annual Lecture by Richard Rogers
HCGBC Annual Lecture by Richard Rogers
Lloyd’s of London, escalators. Photo: Paul Raftery.
Richard Rogers is a founding partner of Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners (formerly called the Richard Rogers Partnership), established in 1977. In a career spanning more than fifty years, he and his various partners have designed many buildings including Centre Pompidou, Lloyd’s of London, the Bordeaux Law Courts, the Welsh Assembly, the Millennium Dome, the Leadenhall Building, and new terminals at Madrid Barajas and London Heathrow airports. Rogers has advised national and city leaders across Europe, including France’s President Mitterrand, the Mayor of London, and the Mayor of Barcelona. In 1997, he was asked by the UK deputy prime minister to chair an urban task force on the revival of English cities. The task force’s report, Towards an Urban Renaissance, was highly influential in the UK and beyond, and set the agenda for Rogers’s work for Mayor Ken Livingstone as head of London’s Architecture and Urbanism Unit.
Rogers received the RIBA Gold Medal in 1985. He was awarded the Legion d’Honneur in 1986, knighted in 1991, and made a member of the House of Lords (the upper house of the UK Parliament) in 1996. He received the Praemium Imperiale Prize for Architecture in 2000 and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement (La Biennale di Venezia) in 2006. He was the 2007 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate; he was made a Member of the Order of Companions of Honour in 2008.
Richard Rogers and his wife, the chef and restaurateur Ruth Rogers, are the 2016–17 Senior Loeb Scholars at Harvard GSD. Richard Rogers’s lecture is the 2016 Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities Annual Lecture, which aims to expose a large audience of students, faculty and members of the public to the importance of green design and planning by highlighting the work of key leaders within this movement. The CGBC Annual Lecture was inaugurated by Norman Foster in fall 2015.