Black in Design 2025 Black Roots: Grounded and Growing Toward Collective Futures

This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Reserve tickets or join the waitlist for this event. Tickets for meals have now closed.

About this Event

Black Roots: Grounded and Growing Toward Collective Futures is a conference at the Harvard Graduate School of Design presented by the Black Student Union (formerly African American Student Union) and Africa GSD. This event investigates the Black praxes of making space, taking space, and creating “tools for living” through three interconnected themes: Black theologies, Black ecologies, and Black geographies. It explores the complex relationships between belief systems, environments, and lands that shape Black communities across the diaspora. Design serves as both terrain and a tool to explore lineage, land, and lore as intertwined forces shaping our communities. Through keynote panels, workshops, performances, and creative exchanges, the conference critically examines histories of migration, displacement, and resilience in the context of ongoing political and environmental crises. Through dialogue and creative expression, Black Roots foregrounds how Black spatial practices shape, and are shaped by, resistance, resilience, and regeneration.

Schedule of Livestream

A comprehensive conference schedule and details about our speakers are now available at blackindesign.org . The list below includes conference events that will be viewable on the livestream above.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 07, 2025

“From Ecologies to Geographies”
4:00 PM-4:30 PM | Opening Ceremony / Address
4:30 PM-6:00 PM | Ancestral Fabrications: Crafting Collective Memory (Panel)
6:30 PM-8:00 PM | Keynote: The Spider, The Rabbit and The Preacher Man

Saturday, November 08, 2025

“From Geographies to Theologies”
8:45 AM-9:00 AM | Morning Address: BiD Co-Chairs
9:00 AM-10:30 AM | Blueprints for Liberation: Black Infrastructures of Creation and Care (Panel)
3:00 PM-4:30 PM | Grounds of Inheritance: Land, Law, and Sovereignties (Panel)
5:00 PM-6:30 PM | Evening Keynote: Princess Adedoyin Talabi Faniyi, in conversation with Dr. Tracey E. Hucks
7:00 PM-7:30 PM | Closing Remarks: BiD Co-Chairs

Sponsors

The GSD gratefully acknowledges the support of the Graham Foundation and the Tawan Davis Impact Foundation in making this conference possible.

DDes Conference 2025 ‘HOME’CAST: Shaping the Built Environment through Data-Driven Innovation

About This Event

In a constantly evolving urban landscape, the future of housing is increasingly intertwined with the complexities of a rapidly advancing technological sphere. The ‘HOME’CAST conference explores how AI, predictive analytics, and adaptive climate modeling are converging to shape housing systems that are both resilient and responsive to change. How do intermittent renewable energy sources like wind and solar complicate energy supply and building design? Can emerging technologies unravel these complexities when we can’t reliably forecast how much sun we’ll get or when the wind will blow? On the demand side, how do smart buildings, zero-energy homes, and community-scale energy systems adapt in real time to precarious energy inputs? 

‘HOME’CAST brings together a curated group of experts—industry leaders, scholars, and practitioners—for a series of analytical panel discussions. These will highlight innovations in fault detection, AI-driven energy modeling, and climate-adaptive infrastructure, alongside broader conversations about urban planning, equity, design, and predictive governance. 

From sustainability and climate resilience to data-driven, technology-enabled approaches and intelligent infrastructure, the conference offers multidisciplinary perspectives from design, data science, policy, and urban development—envisioning new forms of shelter in a climate-constrained world. 

For any questions and concerns, please contact organizers Lyna and Gulai Shen.

Speakers

Keynote Address

10:00–10:45 a.m.

Panel 1
Urban Intelligence: Rethinking Cities Through Data, Design, and Real Estate Innovation  

11:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m.

Panel 2
Building Intelligence: Control and Optimize Human-Centered Built Environment 

1:15–2:30 p.m.

Panel 3
Innovating Urban Planning: AI Applications for Climate Resilience and Public Health  

3:00–4:15 p.m.

DDes Student Presentations 

4:15–5:15 p.m.

Sponsors

Thank you to our sponsor, the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

African Landscape Architectures: Alternative Futures for the Field

Registration is required for this event. Please RSVP here .

Event Description

The African Landscape Architectures conference brings together a wide range of landscape practices from across the continent. This two-day hybrid event highlights the transformative potential of decolonizing design to address social injustices and prepare African cities for the impacts of climate change. Speakers will explore innovative strategies through frameworks such as ecology, adaptation, and materiality that offer alternative futures for African landscapes.

Conference Schedule

Thursday, March 6
Harvard GSD, Piper Auditorium
48 Quincy St., Cambridge, MA 02138

Doors open at 12:15 p.m.

Welcome
12:30 — 1:00 p.m.

Sarah Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture

Jacob K. Olupona, Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies, Professor of African Religious Traditions, Professor of African and African American Studies

Gary Hilderbrand (MLA ’85), Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture

Gareth Doherty (DDes ’10), Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Affiliate of the Department of African and African American Studies

Panel 1: Currencies
1:00 p.m. — 2:30 p.m.

Current state of the field, including the environmental, social, and aesthetic issues impacting African landscapes.

Moderated by Thaïsa Way, Director of Garden & Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, and Lecturer in Landscape Architecture

• Johan van Papendorp (MLA ’75), OvP, Cape Town, South Africa
• Chelina Odbert (MUP ’07), Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI), Nairobi, Kenya
• Arthur Adeya (MLA ’06), Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology

Panel 2: Materialities
3:00 p.m. — 4:30 pm

The botanical, mineral, and other material compositions and extractions of contemporary landscapes in Africa.

Moderated by Amber M. Henry,Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies

• Mounia Bennani, MB Paysage, Rabat, Morocco and President, Moroccan Landscape Architects Association
• Ann Gollifer, Earth artist, Gaborone, Botswana
• Joe Christa Giraso, MASS Design Group, Boston, USA, and Kigali, Rwanda

 

International Womxn’s Day Keynote Address
6:30 p.m. — 8:00 p.m.

Co-sponsored by the Center for African Studies and organized in coordination with Womxn in Design and Africa GSD.

Moderated by Zoe Marks , Oppenheimer Faculty Director of the Harvard Center for African Studies and Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

• Princess Adedoyin Talabi Faniyi, High Priestess, Osun Sacred Grove, Osogbo, Nigeria
• Tarna Klitzner, TKLA, Cape Town, South Africa

Reception
8:00 p.m. — 9:30 p.m.

 

Friday, March 7
Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Campus Center, Harvard University
Conference Suite, 10th Floor
1350 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02138

***Please note that registration is required for Day 2 of the conference, as there is a space capacity of up to 100 people. Register here .

Panel 3: Adaptabilities
9:00 a.m. — 10:30 a.m.

Case studies illustrating successful adaptation strategies across scales: the processes by which landscapes and cities adjust to changing conditions over time to maintain their viability.

Moderated by Daniel E. Agbiboa, Associate Professor of African and African American Studies

• Thabo Lenneiye, University of Pennsylvania
• Safouan Azouzi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Olatunji Adejumo, University of Lagos

Panel 4: Pedagogies
11:00 a.m. — 12:30 pm

How landscape architecture is currently taught across the African continent, and what future directions might it take.

Moderated by Gareth Doherty (DDes ’10), Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Affiliate of the Department of African and African American Studies

• Finzi Saidi, University of Johannesburg
• Sechaba Maape, University of the Witwatersrand
• Carey Duncan, Past President IFLA Africa, Rabat, Morocco

Lunchtime Painting Workshop with Ann Gollifer and Africa GSD
1:00–2:00 PM | Gund Hall. Limited space available.

Panel 5: Futurities
2:30 p.m. — 4:30 p.m.

The future of landscape architecture in the Global South.

Moderated by Bruno Carvalho (PhD ’09), Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and African and African American Studies and co-Director of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative

• Jala Makhzoumi, Acting President, IFLA, Beirut, Lebanon
• Graham Young, President IFLA Africa, Pretoria, South Africa
• Tosin Oshinowo, Loeb Fellow 2025 and Oshinowo Studio, Lagos, Nigeria
• Jungyoon Kim (MLA ‘00), Harvard GSD and PARKKIM
• Adewale O. Owoseni, 2024-25 Postdoctoral Fellow, Mahindra Humanities Center

Wrap-up Session
4:30 p.m. — 5:00 p.m.

A reflection on the conference’s proceedings.

Research Guide

Please find a research guide for this conference through this link . A central aim of the African Landscape Architectures conference and its accompanying bibliography is to highlight the plurality of ways people shape landscapes across the African continent and demonstrate how landscape architecture can contribute to mitigating the impacts of climate change and social injustices. Africa is abundant in landscape projects and practices, yet most landscape architecture programs on the continent do not include African landscapes in their curriculums. Similarly, African landscapes are mainly absent from formal landscape architectural education in other parts of the world. This bibliography seeks to help bridge this educational gap by compiling existing literature on African landscapes and making it accessible for use in research and teaching.

Sponsors and Collaborators

The conference is co-hosted by the Department of Landscape Architecture and the Department of African and African American Studies with generous support from:

• The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
• The Provost’s Fund for Interfaculty Collaboration
• Center for African Studies
• Center for Middle Eastern Studies
• Alwaleed Islamic Studies Program
• Hutchins Center for African and African American Research
• The Critical Landscapes Design Lab at the Graduate School of Design
• The International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA), Africa Region.

 

Speakers

Olatunji “Tunji” Adejumo, Lagos, Nigeria, is a landscape architect, urban theorist, environmentalist, and professor at the University of Lagos. He has shared his forty years of practice across the globe, honoring projects that include nature conservation, ecotourism, and climate adaptation.

 

 

Arthur Adeya (MLA ’06), Nairobi, Kenya, is a landscape architect based in Nairobi, where he teaches landscape engineering at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology. He graduated from the Harvard GSD in 2006, where he co-founded the Kounkuey Design Initiative.

 

 

Safouan Azouzi, Cambridge, MA, is a postdoctoral fellow at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. From 2023-24, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He earned his PhD in Design from Sapienza University of Rome.

 

 

Mounia Bennani, Rabat, Morocco, is a landscape architect who graduated from the ENSP (National Graduate School of Landscape) in Versailles and holds a PhD in Geography. She founded MB Paysage, a multidisciplinary firm that works on landscape projects at all scales, and currently serves as president of the Moroccan Landscape Architects Association.

 

 

Carey Duncan, Rabat, Morocco, is a South African landscape architect living in Morocco. She owns Carey Duncan Design and has lectured at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University. Duncan is the immediate past president of IFLA Africa, where she was instrumental in creating the African Landscape Network (ALN) and launching the African Journal of Landscape Architecture (AJLA).

 

 

Princess Adedoyin Talabi Faniyi, Osogbo, Nigeria, is an Orisha high priestess and the daughter of Chief Susanne Wenger. She is a key volunteer of The Adunni Olorisha Trust working to protect the Sacred Groves of Osogbo, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

 

 

Joe Christa Giraso, Boston, MA and Kigali, Rwanda, is a landscape designer at MASS Design Group dedicated to creating thriving ecosystems that inspire and nourish communities. Her work on the Ellen Degeneres Campus of The Dian Fossey Fund and the Rwanda Institute of Conservation Agriculture inspired her to be proactive in the preservation of native green spaces and the design of functional and resilient spaces that serve current and future generations.

 

 

Ann Gollifer, Gaborone, Botswana, is a visual artist who was born in the Barima-Waini region of Guyana
and has lived and worked in Gaborone, Botswana, since 1985. Gollifer’s work is a process-based, material practice. She is represented by the Guns and Rain Gallery in Johannesburg.

 

 

Jungyoon Kim (MLA ’00), Cambridge, MA and Seoul, South Korea, Assistant Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at the GSD, is the founding principal of PARKKIM, a Seoul- and Boston-based landscape architectural firm practicing beyond the conventional boundary of the profession.

 

 

Tarna Klitzner, Cape Town, South Africa, established Tarna Klitzner Landscape Architects (TKLA) in 1995 and is a lecturer at the University of Cape Town. TKLA’s work includes public and private projects conceptualized with an understanding of their given natural, urban, and social environments.

 

 

Thabo Lenneiye, Philadelphia, PA, is the inaugural managing director of the Carl H. Goldsmith Sustainable Agriculture Fund at the University of Pennsylvania, where she leads research at the intersection of sustainable agriculture, climate, and energy policy. Her work focuses on building a comprehensive research agenda that explores how agriculture can address the challenges posed by climate change and the global energy transition. Lenneiye is also a senior fellow with the Center for Leadership and Change Management at the Wharton School.

 

Sechaba Maape, Johannesburg, South Africa, is an architect and lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is the director of the design practice Afreetekture. Dr. Maape was born in Kuruman in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa. He works on research projects; teaches architecture design, history, and theory; supervises master’s thesis projects; and spends a considerable amount of time visiting ritual sites all over the country.

 

Jala Makhzoumi, Beirut, Lebanon, is the acting president for IFLA Middle East. She is an adjunct professor at the American University of Beirut and a co-founder of UNIT44, a consultancy in ecological planning and landscape architecture. Jala is the 2021 laureate of the IFLA Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award for her outstanding contribution to education and practice in landscape architecture.

 

Chelina Odbert (MUP ’07), Los Angeles, CA, believes in the power of community-engaged design to advance racial, environmental, and economic equity in neighborhoods and cities. As founding principal of Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI), she has built an award-winning practice that brings good design to places where it is not often found, and that connects localized design interventions to large-scale policy change.

 

Tosin Oshinowo (Loeb Fellow ’25), Cambridge, MA and Lagos, Nigeria, is a 2025 Loeb Fellow at the GSD and a Lagos-based Nigerian architect and designer renowned for her expansive residential and commercial spaces and insights into socially responsive approaches to urbanism. Her current practice prioritizes issues concerning African urbanism and climate change, which she will showcase at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2025.

 

 

Adewale O. Owoseni, Cambridge, MA and Ibadan, Nigeria, a scholar in the fields of African philosophy and environmental humanities, is a 2024-25 Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center. Adewale is a faculty member of the University of Ibadan, where he also teaches courses in philosophy.

 

 

Johan van Papendorp (MLA ‘75), Cape Town, South Africa, graduated from Cape Town University and Harvard University. He is a registered architect and landscape architect with fifty years of interdisciplinary consulting experience. He co-authored studies on greening the metropole and pedestrianizing Cape Town’s city center. As co-founder of OvP Associates, he directed the design and implementation of numerous projects countrywide, receiving several industry awards of merit. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Service to the Profession in 2013.

 

Finzi Saidi, Johannesburg, South Africa, is a Zambian landscape architect who is currently the head of the department and senior lecturer in the Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture at the University of Johannesburg. He taught at the Copperbelt University in Zambia and the University of Pretoria before he served as convener of the Master of Landscape Architecture program at the University of Cape Town from 2006–08.

 

Graham Young, Pretoria, South Africa, has forty years of experience consulting and teaching landscape architecture in South Africa and across the continent. He has received many industry awards, including the Institute of Landscape Architects of South Africa (ILASA) Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022. Graham is currently the president of the International Federation of Landscape Architects, Africa Region (IFLA Africa) and is a past vice president of IFLA World.

 

 

Moderators

Daniel E. Agbiboa is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, where he also serves as Faculty Associate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Affiliate Faculty of the Bloomberg Center for Cities, and Co-Chair of the Urban Conversation Series in the Mahindra Humanities Center. He is also an Executive Committee Member of the Harvard Center for African Studies (CAS) and an Advisory Board Member of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative.

 

Bruno Carvalho (PhD ’09) is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and African and African American Studies, and co-directs the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative. His most recent book, The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World, is forthcoming with Princeton University press.

 

 

Gareth Doherty (DDes ’10) is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard GSD and an affiliate faculty of the Department of African and African American Studies. Doherty takes a human-centered approach to design that aspires to shape environmentally and socially just landscapes.

 

 

Amber M. Henry is an Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard and an Afro-Latin American Research Institute faculty affiliate. She is an anthropologist of Latin America and the Caribbean whose work explores political mobilization and embodied practices in relation to sovereign forms of Black placemaking.

 

 

Zoe Marks is the Oppenheimer Faculty Director of the Harvard Center for African Studies and a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research and teaching interests focus on the intersections of conflict and political violence; race, gender, and inequality; peacebuilding; and African politics.

 

 

 

Thaïsa Way is a Visiting Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard GSD. She is the Director of Garden & Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, a Harvard University research institution located in Washington, DC. She is a scholar of landscape history, theory, and design.

 

 

Princess Adedoyin Talabi Faniyi and Tarna Klitzner

Please RSVP for attendance tracking and to receive reminders about the event.

Event Description

International Womxn’s Week includes a weeklong series of events organized by Womxn in Design that gather members of the GSD community to learn about and challenge notions of gender and power from within the framework of design.

Join us for a dialogue between Princess Adedoyin Talabi Faniyi of the Osun Sacred Grove in Osogbo, Nigeria, and landscape architect Tarna Klitzner, founder of TKLA in Cape Town, South Africa. The conversation will be moderated by Zoe Marks, Director of the Harvard Center for African Studies.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for African Studies and organized in coordination with Womxn in Design and Africa GSD. It serves as the keynote event for the conference African Landscape Architectures: Alternative Futures for the Field, which brings together a wide range of landscape practices from across the continent. The two-day hybrid conference highlights the transformative potential of decolonizing design to address social injustices and prepare African cities for the impacts of climate change. Speakers will explore innovative strategies through frameworks such as ecology, adaptation, and materiality that offer alternative futures for African landscapes.

Speakers

Princess Adedoyin Talabi Faniyi (Osogbo, Nigeria) is an Orisha high priestess and the daughter of Chief Susanne Wenger. Princess Adedoyin is a key volunteer of The Adunni Olorisha Trust working to protect the Sacred Groves of Osogbo, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

 

Tarna Klitzner established Tarna Klitzner Landscape Architects (TKLA) in 1995 and serves as a full-time lecturer at the University of Cape Town in the Landscape Architecture, Architecture and Planning Department. TKLA’s scope of works includes both public and private projects. The office ethos is rooted in providing environments that are conceptualized within an understanding of the given natural/urban and social environments and endeavor to provide spaces for human interaction that encourage positive engagement within communities and with the broader context of our cities, towns, and natural landscapes. TKLA has received several awards from the ILASA for their projects and were part of the Eliot Ngxola Architects team placed in the top 10 of the Commonwealth War Graves Memorial 2022 competition in Cape Town.

Moderator

Zoe Marks is the Oppenheimer Faculty Director of the Harvard Center for African Studies and a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research and teaching interests focus on the intersections of conflict and political violence; race, gender and inequality; peacebuilding; and African politics.

DDes Conference 2024: RealTimeNature

Event Description

The earliest duck decoys, found in Ancient Egypt, were often live herons bound to ships, their presence tempting wild waterfowl to killing distance. Birds today are suspicious of their lifeless decoy counterparts, so modern versions have begun to use sensors to mimic natural movement, blurring the artificial and real. If sensors in a decoy help it mimic kin, in turn luring an animal to its death, what might it mean for an environment to use sensors in an attempt to mimic its “natural” state?

RealTimeNature brings together a diverse group of thinkers to discuss the promises and perils of environmental simulation, remote sensing, and real-time synchronizations. In the context of the current “ontological turn,” which responds to the ecological crisis resulting from modernity, RealTimeNature takes into account the philosopher Yuk Hui’s observation that the focus on nature and the non-human in this movement often overlooks questions related to technology.

Through a set of public dialogs and keynote lectures, RealTimeNature poses these questions: What happens when we consider technology as a universal fix, and how does this impact our understanding of space and time? Can we reimagine technology not as a universal concept, but as a diverse multitude?

Schedule

Friday, September 27, 2024 in Piper Auditorium, Gund Hall

Opening Remarks, Peter Galison
Introduced by Ali Malkawi
9:30 AM

Uncanny Valley (Panel), Karen M’Closkey, Joe Paradiso
Andrew Witt, moderator
10:15 AM

Scales of RealTime (Workshop), Farzin Lofti-Jam
1:00 PM

Natures of Sensing (Panel), Nicholas de Monchaux, Dana Cupkova
John May, moderator
2:00 PM

Exposure (Panel), Garnette Cadogan, James Enos
Mohsen Mostafavi and Annie Simpson, moderators
3:30 PM

Keynote, Daniel Barber
Introduced by Charles Waldheim
5:00 PM

Speakers

Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University. He currently directs the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard, a leading center for interdisciplinary research on black holes. His books include How Experiments End; Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics; Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps; and, with Lorraine Daston, Objectivity. Peter Galison’s work in writing and film explores the complex interaction between the three principal subcultures of physics–experimentation, instrumentation, and theory—and the embedding of physics in the wider world.

Ali Malkawi is Director of the Doctor of Design Studies Program and Professor of Architectural Technology at the GSD. Malkawi is an international scholar and expert in building simulation, energy conservation, and sustainability in buildings. He teaches architectural technology and computation and conducts research in the areas of computational simulation, building performance evaluation, and design decision support. He is also the founding director of the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities (CGBC).

Karen M’Closkey is associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design and co-founder, with Keith VanDerSys, of PEG office of landscape + architecture. Their work focuses on the opportunities and limitations enabled by recent advancements in digital mapping and modeling and how they shape our understanding of landscapes and environments. Karen was the recipient of the 2012-2013 American Academy in Rome Prize in landscape architecture. She leads the the EMLab working group with Sean Burkholder and Keith VanDerSys and the Biodiversity working group with Richard Weller.

Joseph Paradiso is the Alexander W. Dreyfoos (1954) Professor at MIT’s Program in Media Arts and Sciences. He directs the MIT Media Lab’s Responsive Environments Group, which explores how sensor networks augment and mediate human experience, interaction and perception. His current research interests include wireless sensing systems, wearable and body sensor networks, sensor systems for built and natural environments, energy harvesting and power management for embedded sensors, ubiquitous/pervasive computing and the Internet of Things, human-computer interfaces, space-based systems, and interactive music/media.

Andrew Witt is an Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, teaching and researching on the relationship of geometry and machines to perception, design, assembly, and culture. He is also co-founder, with Tobias Nolte, of Certain Measures, a design and technology studio that prototypes the future. Trained in both architecture and mathematics, Witt has a particular interest in a technically synthetic and logically rigorous approach to form.

Farzin Lotfi-Jam is an architect whose work explores the politics of technology and cities. He is an assistant professor in architecture at Cornell University where he directs the Realtime Urbanism Lab. The lab uses and invents new spatial media and technologies to visualize and simulate how algorithms, models, and notions of ”real time” govern urban life.  He is also director of Farzin Farzin, an interdisciplinary design studio working across architecture, urbanism, computation, and media. From modeling the control matrices of smart cities to spatializing the cultural logics of social media, his individual and collaborative projects are research based and multimediatic.

Nicholas de Monchaux is Professor and Head of Architecture at MIT. Until 2020 he was Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, and Craigslist Distinguished Chair in New Media at UC Berkeley, where he also served as Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media. De Monchaux is the author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (MIT Press, 2011), an architectural and urban history of the Apollo Spacesuit, winner of the Eugene Emme award from the American Astronautical Society and shortlisted for the Art Book Prize, as well as Local Code: 3,659 Proposals about Data, Design, and the Nature of Cities (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016). His work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony, the Santa Fe Institute, the Smithsonian Institution, the Hellman Fund, and the Bakar Fellows Program. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.

Dana Čupková is a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Architecture and the graduate Track Chair for the Master of Science in Sustainable Design (MSSD) program. She directs EPIPHYTE Lab, a design and research collaborative that was recognized as the Next Progressives design practice by Architect Magazine in 2018. She is a recipient of the 2019 ACADIA Teaching Award of Excellence, the 2022 ACSA Creative Achievement, and a 2022-23 Fulbright US Scholar. Additionally, she is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Architectural Computing (IJAC).

John May is founding partner, with Zeina Koreitem, of MILLIØNS, a Los Angeles-based design practice. Their recent work includes completed and ongoing projects in California, New York, Boston, Germany and Beirut. Recently selected as the winner of an international competition to reimagine the west wing of I.M. Pei’s Everson Musum, in Syracuse, NY, MILLIØNS’ experimental work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at Friedman Benda Gallery, the Storefront for Art and Architecture, The Architecture + Design Museum of Los Angeles, and Jai & Jai Los Angeles, among others. Their essays have appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, e-flux, Flaunt magazine, I.D., a+t, and in a catalog of their work on experimental collective living, New Massings for New Masses: Collectivity After Orthography (MIT, 2015).

Garnette Cadogan is the Tunney Lee Distinguished Lecturer in Urbanism at the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT. His research explores the promise and perils of urban life, the vitality and inequality of cities, and the challenges of pluralism.

James A. Enos is an Assistant Professor of Art and Chair of Studio Core at the University of Georgia. His research engages issues of process, architecture, and social artist practice in an effort to understand how public culture responds to change. He received a BS from Purdue University, a M. Arch from The NewSchool of Architecture, and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Enos is a recipient of the 2013 San Diego Art Prize, and has served as artist, director, and founder for several public projects including The Periscope Project, Drone Readymade, Exploring Engagement, Port Journeys, HyperCultural Passengers, WeTrees and Social Logistics.

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.

Annie Simpson works via sight-/site-based investigation to make videos, photographs, and essays. For the 2024-2025 academic year, she is a Doctoral Fellow with the Harvard-Mellon Urban Initiative.

Daniel Barber is Professor and Chair of Architecture Theory and History at TU Eindhoven. He is an architectural historian researching the relationship between the design fields and the emergence of global environmental culture across the 20th century. Daniel received a PhD in Architecture History and Theory from Columbia University, and a Master of Environmental Design from Yale University. He currently holds a Fellowship for Advanced Researchers from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which he is spending in residence at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, Germany, and at the Max Planck Institute for the study of the Human Sciences in Berlin, over the summer until 2022. In March 2017 he was be a Visiting Fellow at the Sydney Environmental Institute, University of Sydney, Australia; in 2015-2016 he was the Thomas A. and Currie C. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and Humanities at the Princeton Environmental Institute, hosted by the Princeton School of Architecture. He has also held a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Harvard University Center for the Environment and Graduate School of Design, and has been a visiting professor at Oberlin College, Barnard College, and the University of Auckland, New Zealand. In February 2015 he was the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

Charles Waldheim is the John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture, Director of the Office for Urbanization, and Co-Director of the Master in Design Studies program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is an American-Canadian architect and urbanist. Waldheim’s research examines the relations between landscape, ecology, and contemporary urbanism. He is author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books on these subjects, and his writing has been published and translated internationally. Waldheim is recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome; the Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship at the Study Centre of the Canadian Centre for Architecture; the Cullinan Chair at Rice University; and the Sanders Fellowship at the University of Michigan.

ASLA Washington, DC: GSD Alumni Reception 2024

GSD alumni and faculty gathered for an informal reception to kick off the American Society of Landscape Architects Conference on Landscape Architecture in Washington, DC.

Questions? Contact [email protected].

Forest Futures: Will the Forest Save Us All?

Event Description

The Harvard University Graduate School of Design will host a two-day academic conference alongside its new exhibition, Forest Futures.

Planetary survival in the Anthropocene crucially depends on the stewardship of resilient forest ecosystems worldwide—at the scales of wilderness, planted forests, metropolitan tracts, and the urban forest canopy of cities and towns everywhere. The Fifth National Climate Assessment (US, 2023) repeats now familiar claims that healthy forests provide essential ecological, economic, and social benefits and services.
 
But our forests today face extreme risk. Disturbance agents are driving massive change—including unprecedented temperature increases, altered precipitation patterns, increasingly catastrophic weather events, uncontrollable mega-fires, and destructive land use practices. This symposium addresses risks and threats, initiatives and improved practices, and speculations on a more secure and more just future for metropolitan and urban forests and the species that inhabit them.  
 
The symposium accompanies a concurrent gallery exhibition in the Druker Design Gallery, Gund Hall, entitled Forest Futures, curated by GSD Professor of Landscape Architecture Anita Berrizbeitia and the graduate students in her seminar, DES-3510 Forests: Histories and Future Narratives. 

Conference Overview

Thursday, February 15
Harvard GSD, Piper Auditorium
48 Quincy St., Cambridge, MA 02138

Doors open at 6:00 p.m.

Welcome
6:30 — 6:45 p.m.Gary Hilderbrand, Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture

Opening Keynote
6:45 — 7:15 p.m.
William (Ned) Friedman

Keynote Response
7:15 — 7:45 p.m.
Honorable Mayor Michelle Wu
Gary Hilderbrand, William (Ned) Friedman & Edward Eigen

Gallery Preview
7:45 — 8:00 p.m.
Anita Berrizbeitia

Reception
8:00 p.m. — 9:00 p.m.

Friday, February 16
Harvard GSD, Gund Hall
48 Quincy St., Cambridge, MA 02138

Welcome
9:30 — 9:45 a.m.Sarah Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture

Opening Remarks
9:45 a.m. — 10:00 a.m.
Gary Hilderbrand, Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture

Panel 1: Scaling Threats
10:00 a.m. — 11:25 a.m.
Moderated by Edward Eigen

• Lisa Haber-Thomson & Edward Eigen, Epping Forest’s Highwayman, Dick Turpin
• David Nowak, Urban Forest Change: The Need for Planning and Action
• Jonathan Thompson, The Role of Forests in Massachusetts’ Decarbonization Roadmap
• Discussion

Panel 2: Decoding the Urban Forest
11:45 a.m. — 1:10 pm
Moderated by Pablo Perez-Ramos

• Michael Jakob, The Heterotopic Other
• Nicholas Pevzner and Max Piana, Beyond the Axe: Reimagining Silviculture and Design
• Acheampong Atta-Boateng, Concrete to Canopy: Nature-based Urban Adaptation

Lunch Break
1:15 p.m. — 2:15 p.m.

Panel 3: Speculating and Acting
2:15 p.m. — 3:40 p.m.
Moderated by Pamela Conrad

• Silvia Benedito, “Cold-Fire” Landscape Management for Warmer Climates
• Amy Whitesides, An Equitable Urban Forest Plan for the City of Boston
• Eric Kramer, Shared Responsibility, Empowering Action in Cambridge, MA

Panel 4: A Just Survival?
4:00 p.m. — 6:00 p.m.
Moderated by Gary Hilderbrand

• Maria-Mercedes Jaramillo, Growing Forests in Bogotá: Resistance, Reconciliation, Resilience
• Abby Spinak, What You Do to the Land, You Do to the People
• Sonja Dümpelmann, From Breathing Space to Palliative: Urban Forests and Public  Health in the Plantationocene
• Discussion & Closing Remarks

Speakers

Acheampong Atta-Boateng is a plant ecologist affiliated with the ecosystems group at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford. Additionally, he serves as a research associate at the Oxford Museum of Natural History. Formerly, he held the research director position at Yale University’s Urban Ecology and Design Lab, contributing significantly to the development of Green Cooling Tower technology for infrastructure cooling and carbon sequestration. Acheampong’s research centers on understanding how plants strategically employ life history traits for optimal adaptation and productivity in diverse environmental conditions. His work spans temperate and tropical vegetation systems, from the Metacomet Ridges of New England to African savannas. He holds a Master’s degree in Forest Science and pursued further education in mechanical engineering and material science at Yale University. His doctoral research at the University of Oxford explored the intricate connections between tree physiology, pollination ecology, and landscape in relation to cacao productivity.

Silvia Benedito is a registered architect, landscape architect and urban designer in both Portugal and Germany. She teaches and coordinates design studios and research centered on the role of climate-oriented design strategies in ameliorating thermal loads of urban territories. Her most recent research examines the wildfire causes in rural communities of the Mediterranean-type climate regions (MCRs) and West Africa. Benedito has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and has served as a Guest Professor at the Technische Universität München (2018) and at the Technische Universität Graz (2019). More recently, she was the Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Benedito’s most recent book, Atmosphere Anatomies: On Design, Weather, and Sensation (Lars Müller Publishers, Zürich, 2021), was awarded the Sustainability and Innovation Book Award (2022).

Anita Berrizbeitia is a Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She served as Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture between 2015-2022 and as Program Director of the Master in Landscape Architecture Degree Programs between 2012-2015. Her research explores nineteenth and twentieth-century public realm landscapes, with interests in material culture, urban political ecology, and the productive functions of landscapes in processes of urbanization and climate adaptation. Her research on Latin American cities and landscapes focuses, in addition, on the role of large-scale infrastructural projects on territorial organization, climate adaptation, and on the interface between landscape and emerging urbanization.

Sonja Dümpelmann is Professor and Chair of Environmental Humanities at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich where she also co-directs the Rachel Carson Center. She was previously a Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. Dümpelmann is a historian of urban landscapes and environments. Her most recent award-winning books are Landscapes for Sport: Histories of Physical Exercise, Sport, and Health (ed., Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2022), and Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York City and Berlin (Yale University Press, 2019). Among other things, she has served as Senior Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington D.C. and as President of the Landscape History Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians.

Edward Eigen is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Landscape and Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. His scholarly work focuses on the intersections of the human and natural sciences with the built environment in the long nineteenth century. His book, On Accident: Episodes in Architecture and Landscape, was published by the MIT Press in 2018. Currently, he is examining landscapes associated with the modern American presidency, including the “grassy knoll.” His recent essays on Olmsted examine questions of race, ornithology, piracy, drafting tools, and friction.

Lisa Haber-Thomson is a Lecturer in the Department of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and an architectural historian and designer interested in interdisciplinary and inter-media translations. Her research explores the historical entanglements between architecture and law. She is currently at work on two major projects. The first is about prisons—a book manuscript on early modern carceral architecture across England and its expanding empire as well as the many spatial forms of detention and claims of sovereignty and subjecthood it produced. In parallel, she is interested in how architecture becomes implicated in contemporary legal practice, especially with regard to prisoner’s rights discourses.

Gary Hilderbrand, FASLA, FAAR, is the Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is also principal and founder of Reed Hilderbrand Landscape Architects. Hilderbrand is a fellow and resident of the American Academy in Rome. He received the Design Medal from ASLA in 2017. His widely acclaimed publications include The Miller Garden: Icon of Modernism (Spacemaker Press, 1999) and Visible | Invisible: Landscape Works of Reed Hilderbrand (Metropolis Books, 2013).

Michael Jakob teaches Comparative Literature at UGA Grenoble, History and Theory of Landscape at HEPIA, Geneva, and aesthetics of design at HEAD, Geneva. He is a visiting professor at the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio and at Parma University. His teaching and research focus on landscape theory, aesthetics, the history of vertigo, contemporary theories of perception and the poetics of architecture. Among his publications in English: the swiss touch in landscape architecture, Ifengspace, Tianjing 2015; The Bench in the Garden, Oro Editions, Novato CA 2022; Faux Mountains, Oro Editions, Novato CA 2019, Seeds of Knowledge, Silvana Editoriale, Milan 2022. He is the curator of international exhibitions and the author of documentary films on landscape.

Maria-Mercedes Jaramillo is a transcultural architect and urban planner. After more than ten years of experience in urban design, master planning and strategic land-use planning in France, she has been orienting structural transformations for Bogota through her roles as Urban Development Director at ProBogotá Región -an independent non-profit organization sponsored by the top 50 Colombian companies- (2015-2020), CEO of Bogota’s public Urban Regeneration and Development Company (2020-2021) and Secretary of Planning for Bogotá (2021-2023). During Covid 19 pandemic, she was appointed by Mayor Claudia López to tackle poverty, feminization of poverty and hunger, engaging in new scales of territorial planning, from the very local to metropolitan dimensions. As a result, Bogota has a new Land Use and Master Plan -Bogotá Reverdece, 2022-2035- to shape the future of needed innovations: providing 1 million housing units, enabling 1 million additional jobs, and deploying a feminist ease-of-access care system while preserving strategic ecosystems, fostering adaptation to climate risks and promoting local, innovative and participatory planning. She is currently a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

William (Ned) Friedman is the Arnold Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and the eighth Director of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University in its 152-year history. During his thirteen years at the helm of the Arboretum, Friedman has worked to expand the Arboretum’s global impacts through diverse environmental justice initiatives, a keen focus on ex situ conservation, and the promotion of a vast array of scientific scholarship within the living collections. As an evolutionary biologist, Friedman’s scholarly studies have fundamentally altered century-old views of the earliest phases of the evolution of flowering plants, Darwin’s so-called “abominable mystery.” He is also deeply interested in the history of early (pre-Darwinian) evolutionary thought, particularly the largely overlooked contributions of horticulturists and botanists.

Eric Kramer A principal of Reed Hilderbrand, Eric brings equal attention to rigorous research, responsive engagement of people and communities, and the expressive potential of design. He has led projects associated with the renewal and enrichment of campuses, cities, and institutions, including the Cambridge Urban Forest Master Plan, the Alamo Comprehensive Interpretive Master Plan in San Antonio, Texas, Pier 4 Waterfront Park and Central Wharf Plaza in Boston, and the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He edited Visible|Invisible, the firm’s award-winning monograph. Eric received a Master of Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Arts from Amherst College. He has served as an adjunct professor in the Rhode Island School of Design’s landscape architecture program and serves on the board of The Cultural Landscape Foundation.

David J. Nowak is an Emeritus Senior Scientist with the USDA Forest Service, Northern Research Station. His research investigates urban forest structure, health, and change, and its effect on human health and environmental quality. He has authored 400 publications and given over 600 presentations across the world. He also led teams developing the i-Tree software suite that quantifies the benefits and values from vegetation globally. In a 2020 ranking of >24,000 forest researchers worldwide, Dr. Nowak ranked number 2.

Nicholas Pevzner is an assistant professor in landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design. His research spans across the topics of ecological systems, energy landscapes, and climate policy. His work focuses on ecological systems and their integration into design, the design of renewable energy landscapes and energy infrastructure’s integration into culturally contested landscapes, and speculative designs for decarbonization. His teaching and research investigate the impacts of climate policy on the physical built environment, on cultural attitudes, and on implications for spatial justice. He holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Architecture from The Cooper Union. Prior to his appointment at Penn, he worked at the landscape architecture firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.

Max Piana is a postdoc researching ecologies with the U.S. Forest Service and an urban ecologist who works at the interface of science and practice. As a research ecologist, teacher, and land manager, he engages with urban practitioners and integrates research into the planning, design, and management of cities. His current research focuses on plant community dynamics and management strategies in urban greenspaces. From remnant forest fragments to green infrastructure, he is interested in how the ecological mechanisms and successional trajectories of these systems may be altered to better facilitate and sustain their ecological health and function.

Abby Spinak is a Lecturer in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she studies energy history, with a particular interest in the politics of utility ownership and the role of infrastructure in disseminating economic ideas. Her current research ties the history of electrification in the rural United States to the evolution of twentieth-century American capitalism and alternative economic visions. She is currently completing a book, Democracy Electric: Energy and Economic Citizenship in an Urbanizing America.

Jonathan Thompson is a Senior Ecologist at the Harvard Forest, a department of Harvard University. His research focuses on long-term and broad-scale changes in forest ecosystems, with an emphasis on quantifying how land use – including harvest, conversion, and land protection – affects forest ecosystem processes and services. He is the Principal Investigator for the Harvard Forest Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and involving more than 100 scientists and students investigating the dynamics of the New England landscape. He also leads the New England Landscape Futures project, which collaborates with diverse stakeholders from throughout the region to build and evaluate scenarios that show how land-use choices and climate change could shape the landscape over the next 50 years.

Amy Whitesides is a registered landscape architect, practitioner, and educator. She is a Design Critic in Landscape Architecture at Harvard GSD, where she teaches Climate by Design and second and third-semester CORE studios. Before coming to the GSD full-time, she spent 10 years in the Boston office of Stoss Landscape Urbanism, where she was most recently the Director of Resilience. At Stoss, Amy ran many of the firm’s waterfront design and planning efforts for resilient public open space and Boston’s Urban Forest Plan. Her projects have been recognized with numerous awards, including an ASLA Honor Award, World Landscape Architecture Award of Excellence, APA Sustainability & Resiliency Award, and multiple BSLA awards of Merit. Amy is currently working on watershed-level urban forest planning in the greater Boston area and research, funded by Harvard University’s Salata Institute, on the potential for developing agroforestry at a national scale.

Sarah Whiting has been Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design since 2019. She is also a design principal and co-founder of WW Architecture, based in Cambridge, and served as the Dean of Rice University’s School of Architecture from 2010 to 2019. Whiting obtained an interdisciplinary, self-directed Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale, a Master of Architecture from Princeton in 1990, and a Doctor of Philosophy in the History and Theory of Architecture from MIT in 2001. Whiting’s research and writing is broadly interdisciplinary, with the built environment at its core. An expert in architectural theory and urbanism, she is particularly interested in modern and contemporary architecture’s imbricated relationship with politics, economics, and society, and how the built environment shapes the nature of public life.

DDes Conference ’23: Embodied Climates

Event Description

This event is both for in-person attendance and online viewing. No registration is required. You can access the live-streamed via Zoom.

Titled “Embodied Climates,” the conference invites designers of an inclusive world to view climate in its power to affect human health, mental well-being, socio-political conditions, and cultures of ecology through subjective, embodied ways of knowing. The symposium will situate architecture at the core of influencing necessary change by acknowledging the built environment’s agency in the way that humans embody, respond, and react to changing climatic conditions. The conference will look at climate change not in terms of abstract data tables and figures but rather through more immediate and embodied ways of knowing. Whether that be addressing the reconstruction of local ecologies due to resource-exhausting labor practices of the past, or looking at the ways architecture acts as a prosthetic for human comfort in supposedly hostile climates, questions that the symposium hopes to answer are:

• How does embodiment affect our understanding of the climate crisis and the way this crisis is narrativized? How might we understand the imperatives of climate stewardship and sustainability through means other than scientific analyses, data speculation, and financial loss?
• How might differing definitions of “embodiment” and “climate” press upon, compliment, or denaturalize one another?
• What are the factors and externalities that make the very notion of climate subjective through embodiment? How might ongoing discourses around resilience and climate change shape understandings of racial, sexual, gender, class, and other socio-political norms?

The conference entangles three thematics — Tectonics, Politics, and Health — and will culminate in a keynote speaker session.

This event will be live-streamed via Zoom. No registration is required.

Schedule

Panel 1 . CLIMATE TECTONICS

10:00 am to 11:30 am
Piper Auditorium

Moderated by Pablo Perez-Ramos

Climate Tectonics will discuss views on energy, embodied or operational, within contemporary design contexts and climatic conditions. Connections between the global, the building, and the personal scale will be made to discuss relationships between technology, human needs, and environmental sustainability.

Panelists:

Mohamed Ismail (Assistant Professor, University of Virginia School of Architecture)

Aaron Tobey (Doctoral Candidate, Yale University)

Austin Wade Smith (Artist | Executive Director of Regen Foundation)

 

Panel 2. CLIMATE POLITICS

11:45 am to 1:15 pm
Piper Auditorium

Moderated by Dana McKinney White

Climate Politics will discuss how gender, race, class, and other socio-political contexts can inspire emerging practices of climate activism and equity. The politicization of gender and race will be brought forth as a historical and contemporary force shaping urban renewal processes.

Panelists:

Davy Knittle (Assistant Professor of English, University of Delaware)

Kevin Moultrie Daye (Architectural Designer and Educator)

Malkit Shoshan (Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design, Harvard GSD | Founder, Foundation for Archieving Seamless Territory)

 

Panel 3. CLIMATE HEALTH

2:15 pm to 3:45 pm
Piper Auditorium

Moderated by Martin Bechthold

Climate Health will discuss new calls for Design in the context of issues such as heat vulnerability, building-related occupant disease, and feedback loops representing the relationship between human health and environmental sustainability.

Panelists:

Arianna Deane (Co-Founder, A+A+A)

Alison Mears (Associate Professor of Architecture, Parsons School of Design | Co-Founder & Co-Director, Healthy Materials Lab, Parsons School of Design)

Jonsara Ruth (Associate Professor of Interior Design, Parsons School of Design | Co-Founder & Design Director, Healthy Materials Lab, Parsons School of Design)

Charu Srivastava (Post-Doctoral Researcher, Harvard Graduate School of Design)

 

KEYNOTE TALKS (incl. Q&A)

4:00 pm to 6:00 pm
Piper Auditorium

Moderated by Ana María Leon Crespo

Opening remarks by Dean Sarah Whiting

Lydia Kallipoliti (Associate Professor of Architecture, The Cooper Union, New York |

Principal, ANAcycle thinktank), in person

Dr. Jami Weinstein (Associate Professor, Linköping University), virtually

 

RECEPTION

6:00 pm – 7:00 pm

Gund – Room 124

Open to all DDes faculty, Staff & Students.

Conference Chairs

Maroula Zacharias (Doctoral Candidate, Harvard GSD)

Katarina Richter-Lunn (Doctoral Candidate, Harvard GSD)

Malcolm Rio (Doctoral Candidate, Columbia GSAPP)

Black in Design 2023: The Black Home

Event Description

The Black in Design conference, organized by the Harvard Graduate School of Design African American Student Union (GSD AASU), recognizes the contributions of the African diaspora to the design fields and promotes discourse around the agency of the design professions to address and dismantle the institutional barriers faced by Black communities. The fifth biannual conference, The Black Home, will take place in person September 22 – 24, 2023 at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gund Hall, 48 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA 02138.

Yaad, ile, lakay. All languages have a word for home, shelter, a claim to a place, to a delineated territory of heritage. However, the experience of Black people across the world has created a unique yet divergent practice of creating and claiming home. This year’s Black in Design conference explores the Black home’s multidimensionality — as a literal structure that shelters, as a reflection of culture and traditions, and as spaces that are not entirely physical. The conference brings together keynote panels, workshops, and conversations that discuss and expand these themes with different thought leaders involved in designing and creating various interpretations of Black homes. The goal is to establish a broader understanding and alternate ways of experiencing the Black home in an effort to reinforce the ideals of Black communities living across the country and larger diaspora and to help plan for the future.

To purchase tickets and/or learn more about Black in Design 2023, visit the Black in Design website . To stay up to date on speakers, programming, accommodations, and more, subscribe to the Black in Design listserv !

LATITUDES: Latin American Architecture NOW

NYC GSD alumni were invited to LATITUDES: Latin American Architecture NOW. This program featured a live keynote by Enrique Norten and  Zoom presentations by participants from across Latin America, including alumni Adriana Chavez (MArch ’14, MDes ’14), Elisa Silva (MArch ’02), and Lucas Correa (Sevilla MAUD ’12). The event was free and open to the public. Learn more .

Questions? Contact [email protected].