Christopher Hawthorne
Christopher Hawthorne is the Chief Design Officer for the city of Los Angeles, a position appointed by Mayor Eric Garcetti. Prior to joining City Hall, Hawthorne was architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2004 to early 2018. He is Professor of the Practice at Occidental College, where since 2015 he has directed the Third Los Angeles Project, a series of public conversations about architecture, urban planning, mobility, and demographic change in Southern California. He has also taught at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. A frequent collaborator with KCET-TV, the PBS affiliate in Los Angeles, Hawthorne wrote and directed the hour-long documentary “That Far Corner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles,” which had its broadcast debut earlier this year, and received an L.A.-area Emmy Award as Executive Producer for the 2016 KCET program “Third L.A. with Architecture Critic Christopher Hawthorne.” He has been a Mid-Career Fellow at Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program and a Resident in Criticism at the American Academy in Rome. Hawthorne grew up in Berkeley and holds a bachelor’s from Yale College, where he studied political science and architectural history.
The Veronica Rudge Green Prize In Urban Design: The High Line
The Veronica Rudge Green Prize In Urban Design: The High Line
Please join us for two days of events in conjunction with the 2017 Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design, awarded to the High Line.
The events begin Wednesday, November 14 at 6:30 PM with remarks in the GSD’s Piper Auditorium from Diane Davis (Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design, GSD), Stephen Gray (Assistant Professor of Urban Design, GSD), Elizabeth Diller and Ric Scofidio (Diller Scofidio + Renfro), James Corner and Lisa Tziona Switkin (Field Operations), and Robert Hammond and Joshua David (Friends of the High Line).
These remarks will be followed by a reception in the Druker Design Gallery to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
The following afternoon, the GSD will host a panel discussion entitled The High Line: A Debate exploring the enduring impact of The High Line.
2017 Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design
The 13th Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design has been awarded to The High Line in New York, designed collaboratively by James Corner Field Operations, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Piet Oudolf. The prize committee has elected to allot the monetary prize of $50,000 associated with the award to Friends of the High Line, in recognition of the organization’s originating efforts and continued stewardship behind the project.
The High Line, a linear public park built on elevated freight rail on Manhattan’s West Side, has been hailed as a model of urban regeneration and of collaboration across fields and perspectives. In summarizing the deliberation process, the Green Prize jury noted that a great urban-design project is one where multiple actors spanning public and private domains are involved in and committed to lasting urban change.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Please join us for an evening lecture by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director at the Serpentine Galleries in London.
Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries, London. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show “World Soup” (The Kitchen Show) in 1991 he has curated more than 300 shows.
So far in 2018, Obrist has co-curated at the Serpentine Galleries solo shows for Rose Wylie, Wade Guyton, Ian Cheng, Sondra Perry, Tom Abts and Christo. In 2014 he curated the Swiss Pavilion at the 14th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, where he presented Lucius Burckhardt and Cedric Price—A stroll through a fun palace; the building was designed by architects Herzog & de Meuron, and the program was developed with artists Liam Gillick, Philippe Parreno, Tino Sehgal and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. Obrist’s Art of Handwriting project is taking place on Instagram and is a protest against the disappearance of handwriting in the digital age.
In 2013, Obrist co-founded with Simon Castets the 89plus, a long-term, international, multi-platform research project, conceived as a mapping of the digitally native generation born in or after 1989. In 2011 Obrist received the CCS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence, in 2009 he was made Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), and in 2015 he received the International Folkwang Prize for his commitment to the arts. Obrist has lectured internationally at academic and art institutions, and is contributing editor to several magazines and journals.
Obrist’s recent publications include Mondialité, Somewhere Totally Else, Conversations in Colombia, Ways of Curating, The Age of Earthquakes with Douglas Coupland and Shumon Basar, and Lives of The Artists, Lives of The Architects.
Please note that Obrists’ evening lecture takes the place of the interview marathon previously announced.
Shirin Neshat
Shirin Neshat‘s lecture will offer an overview of the development of her art and her ongoing multi-media practice involving still-photography, video installations, performance, and feature length films. She will primarily focus on her most recent projects, including her direction of an opera “Aida,” which was presented at the Salzburg Music Festival in 2017, in collaboration with world renowned Riccardo Muti and Soprano singer, Anna Netrebko; as well as speaking, and showing clips of her latest movie “Looking for Oum Kulthum” (2017,) based on the life and music of Egyptian singer. Neshat will also share glimpses into her new and upcoming projects, including her next film titled “Dreamland,” to be shot in 2019.
Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. Neshat’s early photographic works include the Women of Allah series (1993–1997), which explored the question of gender in relation to Islamic fundamentalism and militancy. Her subsequent video works departed from overtly political content or critique in favor of more poetic imagery and complex human narratives. Neshat continues to explore and experiment with the mediums of photography, video and film. Her most recent bodies of work include the photographic series The Book of Kings (2012), The Home of My Eyes (2015) and the trilogy Dreamers comprised of three video installations: Illusions and Mirrors (2013), Roja (2016), and Sarah (2016).
Neshat has held numerous solo exhibitions at galleries and museums worldwide, including the Museo Correr in Venice, Italy, to coincide with the 2017 Venice Biennale; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Doha; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Detroit Institute of the Arts, Detroit, Michigan; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Serpentine Gallery, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, among others.
Neshat has participated in major international group exhibitions, including the 48th Venice Biennale of Art (1999), the Whitney Biennial (2000), Documenta XI (2002) and LACMA (2015). Neshat was the recipient of the Golden Lion Award – the First International Prize at the 48th Venice Biennial (1999), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005), The Crystal Award (2014), and the Praemium Imperiale (2017). Her work is included in the collections of museums and public institutions around the world.
In 2009, Neshat directed her first feature-length film, Women Without Men, which received the Silver Lion Award for Best Director at the 66th Venice International Film Festival. She has recently completed her second feature-length film, based on the life and art of the legendary Egyptian singer Oum Kulthum. Neshat is represented by Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.
This event is made possible with funding from the Graham Gund Exhibition Fund and is co-organized by the GSD and the Harvard Art Museums.
Yara Sharif, “The Not So Ordinary: Capturing Possibilities Through The Gaps”
Aga Khan Program Lecture
Yara Sharif, “The Not So Ordinary: Capturing Possibilities Through The Gaps”
“I became no longer able to live with the subtle acceptance of the ‘norm’ that existed. I needed to zoom out in search of a breathing space beyond the constraints of the Israeli occupation. I needed to search for a broader narrative where everyday life would be bigger than the city of Ramallah, where adventures might involve more than journeys across checkpoints, and where dreams could go beyond merely those of sneaking into Jerusalem (which, after all, is only 15 minutes away from my family home).”
Dr. Sharif will be sharing a collection of the various thoughts and ideas provoked by her own journeys and narratives when she lived and worked in Palestine, and which were later transformed into projects.
The work will unpack alternative means to re-read and redraw the Palestinian landscape – from a Palestinian perspective – by stripping it off the dominant power of lines. Dr. Sharif will be using speculation – and at times irony – as a mean to stretch the mental space beyond the constraints of the occupation. The work argues that there is a degree of power on the Palestinian side and weakness on the Israeli one that transforms contested spaces into spaces of creativity of which she will share.
Yara Sharif is a practicing architect and an academic with an interest in design as a mean to facilitate and empower ‘forgotten’ communities, while also interrogating the relationship between politics and architecture.
Combining research with design her work runs parallel between the architecture practice Golzari NG Architects, London and the design studio at the school of architecture, University of Westminster. Sharif has co-founded Palestine Regeneration Team (PART). PART is a design-led research group that aims through speculative and live projects to search for creative and responsive spatial possibilities in Palestine to heal the fractures caused by the occupation.
Yara’s work on Palestine has won a number of awards including the 2014 Holcim Award for Sustainable Construction for the Middle East Region, RIBA President’s Award for Research 2013, 2016.
This event is supported by the Aga Khan Program at the GSD.
Stanislaus Fung, “Recent Projects in Rural China”
Stanislaus Fung, “Recent Projects in Rural China”
Stanislaus Fung is a researcher in landscape architecture and architecture who has written extensively on Chinese landscape architecture and architecture in both traditional and contemporary contexts. He is best known for his close readings of Yuan ye, the 17th-century Chinese treatise on gardens, and for new analyses Suzhou gardens that re-aligned the experience of spatial depth and scale to the sensibilities of Chinese painting. Stan Fung is Associate Professor and Director of the MPhil-PhD programme in the School of Architecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has previously held teaching positions in Australia (in the University of Adelaide and the University of New South Wales) and in America (in the University of Pennsylvania).
Apart from research papers addressed to specialists, Stan Fung has also brought his work to the attention of design practitioners with contributions to two edited volumes: Recovering Landscape (edited by James Corner) and Thinking the Contemporary Landscape (edited by Christophe Girot and Dora Imhof).
Anna Heringer, “Architecture is a Tool to Improve Lives”
Aga Khan Program Lecture
Anna Heringer, “Architecture is a Tool to Improve Lives”
“The vision behind, and motivation for my work is to explore and use architecture as a medium to strengthen cultural and individual confidence, to support local economies and to foster the ecological balance. Joyful living is a creative and active process and I am deeply interested in the sustainable development of our society and our built environment. For me, sustainability is a synonym for beauty: a building that is harmonious in its design, structure, technique and use of materials, as well as with the location, the environment, the user, the socio-cultural context. This, for me, is what defines its sustainable and aesthetic value.”
For Anna Heringer, architecture is a tool to improve lives. As an architect and honorary professor of the UNESCO Chair of Earthen Architecture, Building Cultures, and Sustainable Development she is focusing on the use of natural building materials. Her diploma work, the METI School in Rudrapur got realized in 2005 and won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2007. Over the years, Anna has realized further projects in Asia, Africa, and Europe. Together with Martin Rauch she has developed the method of Clay Storming that she teaches at various universities, including ETH Zurich, UP Madrid, TU Munich. She received numerous honors: the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture, the AR Emerging Architecture Awards in 2006 and 2008, the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard’s GSD and a RIBA International Fellowship. Her work was widely published and exhibited in the MoMA New York, the V&A Museum in London and at the Venice Biennale among other places. In 2013 with Andres Lepik and Hubert Klumpner she initiated the Laufenmanifesto where practitioners and academics from around the world contributed to define guidelines for a humane design culture. She is currently appointed as Aga Khan Design Critic in Architecture at the GSD.
This event is supported by the Aga Khan Program at the GSD.
Thomas Woltz, “Threatened Landscapes: Designed Countermeasures of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects”
Thomas Woltz, “Threatened Landscapes: Designed Countermeasures of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects”
Public parks are a source of civic identity for the communities they serve – inclusivity and authenticity are crucial. Similarly, memorials are bastions of democratic exchange and act as repositories of our cultural past and evolution. Thomas Woltz will present projects from the portfolio of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects (NBW) that demonstrate the power of the firm’s research-based design to reframe our relationship with civic, ecological, and cultural systems within the public realm. Lastly, Thomas will present NBW projects that prioritize the ecological health and resilience in agriculturally productive landscapes and reveal surprising connections between these typologies.
Over the past two decades of practice, landscape architect Thomas Woltz has forged a body of work that integrates the beauty and function of built forms with an understanding of complex biological systems and restoration ecology. As principal of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects (NBW), a 45-person firm based in Charlottesville, Virginia and New York City, Woltz has infused narratives of the land into the places where people live, work and play, deepening the public’s enjoyment of the natural world and inspiring environmental stewardship. NBW projects create models of biodiversity and sustainable agriculture within areas of damaged ecological infrastructure and working farmland, yielding hundreds of acres of reconstructed wetlands, reforested land, and flourishing wildlife habitat.
Presently, Thomas and NBW are entrusted with the design of major public parks across the United States, Canada and New Zealand, they include Memorial Park in Houston, Hudson Yards in New York City, NoMA Green in Washington DC, Cornwall Park in Auckland, the Aga Khan Garden in Alberta, Canada, and three parks in Nashville, including Centennial Park.
In 2013 was named Design Innovator of the Year by the Wall Street Journal magazine and in 2017 Fast Company named Woltz one of the most creative people in business.
Jan Boelen, “Design as Learning”
Margaret McCurry Lectureship in the Design Arts
Jan Boelen, “Design as Learning”
Why do design? What is it for? These are forward-looking questions for a creative discipline that seems more slippery to define than ever. In a world of dwindling natural resources, exhausted social and political systems, and an overload of information there are many urgent reasons to reimagine the design discipline, and there is a growing need to look at design education. Learning and unlearning should become part of an on-going educational practice. We need new proposals for how to organize society, how to structure our governments, how to live with, not against, the planet, how to sift fact from fiction, how to relate to each other, and frankly, how to simply survive.
This lecture Design as Learning asks: can design and design education provide these critical ideas and strategies?
Jan Boelen (b. 1967, Genk, Belgium) is artistic director of Z33 House for Contemporary Art in Hasselt, Belgium, artistic director of Atelier LUMA, an experimental laboratory for design in Arles, France, and curator of the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial (22 Sep–4 Nov 2018) in Istanbul, Turkey. He also holds the position of the head of the Master department Social Design at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands.
Since the opening, Z33 House for Contemporary Art has been fashioning projects and exhibitions that encourage the visitor to look at everyday objects in a novel manner. It is a unique laboratory for experiment and innovation and a meeting place with cutting-edge exhibitions of contemporary art and design. With Z33 Research, design and art research studios established in 2013, Boelen is transforming Z33 from exhibition-based to a research-based institution. At the initiative of Z33 and the Province of Limburg, Manifesta 9 took place in Belgium in 2012. As part of his role at Z33, Boelen curated the 24th Biennial of Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 2014.
Boelen holds a degree in product design from the Media and Design Academy (now the LUCA School of Arts) in Genk, Belgium.
Irma Boom
Open House Lecture
Irma Boom
Please join us for a lecture by internationally renowned graphic designer, Irma Boom, where she will show recent design projects and discuss the continued urgency of physical books in the age of the digital. Boom will focus specifically on more than 20 years of collaborations with Rem Koolhaas, including their most recent project, Elements of Architecture, which is based on two GSD studios, conducted in Rotterdam and Cambridge in 2012 and 2013. The students’ research formed the basis for both the book and an exhibition of the same title that was part of the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennial for which Boom acted as Art Director. Other recent projects include Victor & Rolf: Cover to Cover (Phaidon, 2018), Olafur Eliasson: Contact (Flammarion, 2015), and Project Japan (Taschen, 2011—with Koolhaas), among others.
Irma Boom is an Amsterdam-based graphic designer who specializes in making books. After earning her B.F.A. in graphic design from the AKI Art Academy in Enschedé, she worked for five years at the Dutch government publishing and printing office in The Hague. In 1991 she founded Irma Boom Office, which works nationally and internationally in both the cultural and commercial sectors. Clients include the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Aga Khan Foundation for Architects, the Museum of Modern Art, Prince Claus Fund, Koninklijke Tichelaar Makkum, Camper, Mallorca, Ferrari, Vitra International, the United Nations, and OMA/Rem Koolhaas. For five years she worked (editing and concept/design) on the 2,136-page SHV Think Book 1996–1896, commissioned by SHV Holdings in Utrecht and published in English and Chinese. Ms. Boom has been the recipient of many awards for her book designs and was the youngest ever laureate to receive the prestigious Gutenberg prize for her complete oeuvre. The University of Amsterdam manages the Irma Boom Archive, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York has acquired her work for the permanent collection in the Design and Architecture Department. She was appointed to the Yale faculty in 1992 and is currently senior critic in graphic design.
Elements of Architecture by Rem Koolhaas, designed by Irma Boom
Interior spread from Elements of Architecture, designed by Irma Boom
Interior page spread from Elements of Architecture, designed by Irma Boom
