Maurice Cox with Lori Lightfoot, “The Design of Power Sharing: Chicago’s South and West Sides”

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Event Description

In this lecture, Maurice Cox will present what happens when designers share the power of design with marginalized and disenfranchised communities and begin to reverse decades of disinvestment to reactivate neighborhood cores on the south and west sides of Chicago. Cox, Emma Bloomberg Professor in Residence of Urban Planning and Design at the GSD, will discuss the goals, engagement processes, and still-evolving outcomes of former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s signature economic development initiative, INVEST South/West , which he designed as Chicago’s Commissioner of Planning and Development. Lightfoot will join Cox onstage for an in-depth conversation following his lecture.

Speakers

Maurice D. Cox is the Emma Bloomberg Professor in Residence of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Prior to joining the GSD faculty, Cox was the director of planning and development for the City of Detroit (2015-2019) and Commissioner of Planning and Development for the City of Chicago (2019-2023), where he focused on the challenges facing contemporary urban revitalization.

Cox is an urban designer acclaimed for his ability to merge architecture, design, and politics in pursuit of design excellence and the equitable development of cities. His professional biography offers a new model for what a designer in society can be, demonstrating that planning, architecture, and design operate within a sociopolitical sphere.

To that end, his career spans public service, private practice, and higher education, including his tenure as mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia; as Design Director for the National Endowment for the Arts under two presidents; and as a tenured faculty member at the University of Virginia and Tulane University. Cox received a Bachelor of Architecture from the Cooper Union and a 2005 Loeb Fellowship from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Lori E. Lightfoot served as the 56th mayor of Chicago, making history as the city’s first African American female mayor and first member of the LGBTQ+ community to ever serve as mayor of the city. During her term as mayor, which ended May 15, 2023, Lightfoot led a coordinated, citywide response across government, business, and community organizations to safeguard public health and minimize the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lightfoot also championed generating inclusive economic growth across the city’s neighborhoods specifically those that had historically suffered from decades of disinvestment. Through her signature economic development plan, Invest South/West, the Lightfoot Administration partnered with the private sector and philanthropy to invest approximately $3 billion dollars into Black and brown neighborhoods on the city’s south and west sides. Lightfoot’s administration also led many wealth-building initiatives for Chicago residents, which freed them from tens of millions of dollars in city debt. In August of 2021, Lightfoot secured a $15 minimum wage for most workers in Chicago, including domestic workers, years ahead of the state’s planned phase-in of a living wage.

Lightfoot is a founder of Chicago Vibrant Communities Collective, a not-for-profit focused on strengthening Chicago neighborhoods through investing in community-based, social impact organizations in historically disinvested communities. Lightfoot has recently joined the global consulting firm Charles River Associates as a Senior Consultant in the Forensic Practices group. Lightfoot is based in the Chicago office.

Minsuk Cho, “Notes on Time”

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Event Description

Minsuk Cho presents over two decades of architectural works by his Seoul-based firm Mass Studies, which offers “a critical investigation of architecture in the context of mass production.” Cho will explore the uneven spatial and temporal conditions that define architecture in contemporary South Korea, with its ever-shifting social and cultural dynamics. The term “compressed history” is used to describe the political and economic transformations that have unfolded in the country since the second half of the 20th century. In contrast to the universalizing bird’s-eye view, Cho responds to the heterogeneous conditions of contemporary South Korea by adopting a “crow’s-eye view.” This fragmented vision is based on the Korean poet Yi Sang’s 1934 work Crow’s Eye View, a work that inspired Cho’s 2014 Venice Biennale Korean Pavilion exhibition.

This event is supported by the Melissa Kaish and Jonathan Dorfman Makers Fund.

Speaker

Minsuk Cho founded the Seoul-based firm Mass Studies in 2003. The practice is dedicated to advancing architectural discourse through socio-cultural and urban research, focusing primarily on built works that have achieved global recognition. Notable projects include the Pixel House, Missing Matrix, Bundle Matrix, Shanghai Expo 2010: Korea Pavilion, Daum Space.1, Tea Stone/Innisfree, Southcape Spa & Suite: Clubhouse, Wonnam Temple, the extension and renovation of the French Embassy in Korea, the Osulloc Tea Museum and Osulloc Tea Factory, and the 2024 Serpentine Pavilion: Archipelagic Void.

Current projects, all competition-selected, include the new Seoul Film Center (Montage 4:5), the Danginri Cultural Power Plant (Danginri Podium and Promenade), the Yang-dong District Main Street (Sowol Forest), and the Yeonhui Public Housing Complex. Cho co-curated the 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale and served as commissioner and co-curator of the Korean Pavilion at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia– where the pavilion won the Gold Lion for Best National Participation. In 2014, PLATEAU Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, presented a survey of the first 12 years of Cho and Mass Studies’ work, titled Before/After: Mass Studies Does Architecture.

 

Dorte Mandrup, “Conditions of Place & Form”

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Event Description

Throughout the last 25 years, Copenhagen-based architect Dorte Mandrup has specialized in projects that require a high degree of consideration and care, balancing pragmatics and creative exploration. For Mandrup, a building’s context is much more than the physical elements that you can see, touch, and feel. It includes the invisible layers of memory, emotion, and identity that give a place meaning. Her architecture is characterized by its attention to context in both spectacular and fragile landscapes, and places grappling with uncomfortable historical events.

In this lecture, Mandrup will discuss the importance of context in the studio’s work, including projects that engage with the yellow-brown marshes of the Wadden Sea, the vast scale of the Arctic, the mythical landscape beneath the surface of the Norwegian Sea, and the difficult memories imprinted on the ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin.

Speaker

Danish architect Dorte Mandrup is the principal and creative director of the Copenhagen-based architecture studio Dorte Mandrup, which she established in 1999. The studio is internationally recognized for their ability to create architecture that actively engages with the complexities of each place and contributes with new relevance. Using the entire context as a conceptual starting point, Mandrup employs an artistic, humanistic, and scientific approach to create designs that enhance the awareness and experience of each place. In recent years, Mandrup has distinguished herself in the architectural field with extraordinary projects like The Whale in Norway, the Exile Museum in Berlin, Nunavut Inuit Heritage Centre in Canada, and Ilulissat Icefjord Centre in Greenland.

Dorte Mandrup has received numerous national and international awards for her work. She headlined the international exhibition at La Biennale de Venezia in 2018, chaired the Mies van der Rohe Award in 2019, serves as Vice Chairman of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and is a member of Akademi der Künste in Berlin. Mandrup is also Honorary Professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Architecture, Design and Conservation, Adjunct Professor at Accademia de Architettura de Mendrisio in Switzerland, and the spring 2025 Kenzō Tange Design Critic in Architecture at the Harvard GSD.

 

Souleymane Bachir Diagne, “African Art and Universal Museums”

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Speaker

Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a professor of philosophy and francophone studies at Columbia University and the director of the Institute of African Studies. An alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he did both his BA and his PhD at the Sorbonne. His fields of research and teaching include the history of philosophy, the history of logic and mathematics, Islamic philosophy, and African literature and philosophy.

He is the author of numerous books: Boole, l’oiseau de nuit en plein jour (Belin, 1989); Islam and Open Society: Fidelity and Movement in the Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal (Codesria, 2011); African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude (Seagull, 2012, with a new edition published by The Other Press, 2023); The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa (Codesria, 2016); Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with the Western Tradition (Columbia UP, 2018); Postcolonial Bergson (Fordham UP, 2019); and In Search of Africa(s): Universalism and Decolonial Thought(Polity, 2020). The original French version of Postcolonial Bergson won the Dagnan-Bouveret Prize given by the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 2011, and in the same year, Diagne was awarded the Edouard Glissant Prize. In 2019, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His latest book, From Language to Language: The Hospitality of Translation, will be published by The Other Press in spring 2024.

 

Peter Barber, “Reimagining Social Housing”

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Event Description

Peter Barber is the founder of Peter Barber Architects , an award-winning practice based in London known for its radical approach to social housing and urban planning. In this lecture, Barber will highlight some of his firm’s award-winning social housing projects, such as Donnybrook Quarter , a 40-unit, low-rise, high-density, mixed-use project near Victoria Park in London, and Edgewood Mews , a 97-unit urban block arranged around a pedestrianized street near  North Circular Road in London’s Barnet borough. He will review the political and ideological contexts in which these and other projects were conceived and describe his firm’s analog design process, which makes extensive use of hand sketches and hand-made models.

Speaker

Peter Barber is the founder of Peter Barber Architects , an award-winning practice based in London known for its innovative approaches to social housing and urban planning. Driven by a consistent commitment to radical solutions and excellence in design, Barber and his colleagues have created groundbreaking mixed-use and residential schemes as well as many award-winning buildings, projects, and planning studies. In 2022, Barber received the Soane Medal, which recognizes architects, educators, and critics who have enriched the public understanding of architecture. He and his firm also have won the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Neave Brown Award for Housing and the Royal Academy’s Grand Prize for Housing. Barber was also awarded an OBE (Officer of the British Empire) for his services to architecture and a lifetime achievement award from The Architect’s Journal and serves as an elected member of the Royal Academy of Arts.

Barber worked with Richard Rogers, Will Alsop, and Jestico+Whiles prior to establishing his own practice and is currently a lecturer and reader in architecture at the University of Westminster.

 

Deanna Van Buren, “Designing for Abolition”

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Event Description

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

Speakers

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Sounds of Medieval Cluny with Christine Smith, Thomas Forrest Kelly, and Blue Heron

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Piper Auditorium, Gund Hall
January 30th, 2025
6:30PM

Event Description

The Druker Design Gallery hosts an evening of music to mark the opening of Envisioning Cluny: Kenneth Conant and Representations of Medieval Architecture, 1872–2025, an exhibition that celebrates the study of medieval architecture at Harvard University. Following remarks by curator Christine Smith, the Blue Heron vocal ensemble will perform a selection of music that would have been heard in the medieval monastery of Cluny, with commentary by the musicologist Thomas Forrest Kelly. A reception will follow in the Druker Design Gallery.

This event is free and open to the public. As space is limited, please RSVP to help track attendance. The event will be livestreamed on this page (see the window above), but will not be recorded.

This event is supported by the Melissa Kaish and Jonathan Dorfman Makers Fund.

Speaker

Christine Smith is the Robert C. and Marion K. Weinberg Professor of Architectural History. She teaches courses in Late Antique, Medieval and Italian Renaissance and Baroque architecture.

Christine Smith has published on Early Christian, Italian Romanesque, Italian Renaissance and 20th century art and architecture; most of her publications are in the field of Tuscan Romanesque or on Leon Battista Alberti and Early Renaissance architectural theory.

Her most recent book is Eyewitness to Old St. Peter’s: Maffeo Vegio’s ‘Remembering the Ancient History of St.Peter’s Basilica in Rome,’  with Joseph O’Connor (Cambridge University Press, 2019), making available for the first time an English translation of Vegio’s text, accompanied by full-color digital reconstructions of the basilica as it appeared in Vegio’s day.

Her current project is a book-length study of the experience of wonder as it relates to architecture. Drawn entirely from the evidence of primary sources from the 5th century B.C. to the 18th century A.D, the work explores changing ideas about what the experience of wonder consists of, what the qualities of a “wonderful” building might be, and what role wonder in architecture played in human society at different times and places.

 

Thomas Forrest Kelly is Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music emeritus at Harvard University and serves on the faculty of the Historical Performance Program at The Juilliard School. He is the author of Capturing Music (Norton, 2015), First Nights: Five Performance Premieres (Yale, translated into Korean and Chinese), Early Music: A Very Short Introduction(Oxford, translated into German and Hungarian), and The Beneventan Chant (Cambridge, translated into Italian), which was awarded the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological. He is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres of the French Republic and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy in Rome, and the Medieval Academy of America.

 

The vocal ensemble Blue Heron, directed by Scott Metcalfe, has been acclaimed by The Boston Globe as “one of the Boston music community’s indispensables” and hailed by Alex Ross in The New Yorker for its “expressive intensity.” The ensemble ranges over a wide repertoire from plainchant to new music, with specialties in 15th century Franco-Flemish polyphony and early 16th century English sacred music. Blue Heron is committed to vivid live performance informed by the study of original source materials and historical performance practices. Founded in 1999, Blue Heron presents a concert series in Cambridge and has performed across North America and in Europe. Among the ensemble’s many recordings is the 5-CD series Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, Vol. 5 which was awarded the prestigious Gramophone Classical Music Award for Early Music. The series features the complete songs of Johannes Ockeghem, madrigals by Cipriano de Rore, music by Guillaume Du Fay, Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, and more, including numerous world premiere recordings. The ensemble also recorded a companion CD for Thomas Forrest Kelly’s book Capturing Music: The Story of Notation.

 

2024 Druker Traveling Fellowship Presentation

The 2024 Druker Traveling Fellowship Presentation featured the 2020-2021 Druker Fellow, Sam Naylor (MAUD ’21), who presented his research, “Living Without Land: A Field Report on Cooperative Housing.”

The presentation was followed by a Q&A with Joan Busquets, Martin Bucksbaum Professor in Practice of Urban Planning and Design, and a reception in the Druker Design Gallery.

Housing tenure and architecture are limited by our status quo, whereby design and development are driven by speculation and limit resident security by pitting affordability against ownership. In contrast, cooperative housing schemes, both in formation (co-housing, centraal wonen, Baugruppen), and in land ownership (cooperatives, community land trusts) offer alternative approaches in development, funding, materiality, unit arrangement, circulation, and common space. Perhaps more importantly, these models reframe housing as not only a product or shell, but rather as a neighborhood and home to live in forever.

In this lecture, Sam Naylor (MAUD ’21) discussed the impact for housing design based on the analysis of over 100 cooperative projects in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Denmark, England, Germany, the Netherlands, Scotland, Switzerland, the United States, and Uruguay. The result of three years of travel, dozens of interviews, and a few shared meals, the field report shared lessons learned from residents, developers, and designers of formative projects constructed between the 1970s and the present day. Insights centered around space, function, and form as defined over time and by consensus; they are often left open ended. This favoring of provisional architecture is enhanced by designs that incentivize spontaneity, sharing, and negotiated modifications. Furthermore, longevity in tenure is secured through resident customizations and resident movement—flexibilities that are only possible in co-managed developments, designs, and maintenance regimes.

Sam Naylor, AIA, is an architect, educator, and researcher of multifamily housing in the US. Currently, he is an associate at Utile; the lead designer for Equitable by Design, a zoning research project at Northeastern University; and a Harvard Druker Fellow investigating cooperative housing around the world. He is putting theory into practice by decarbonizing and renovating a cooperatively owned triple-decker with friends in Jamaica Plain. He is an author of the recently released report: Legalizing Mid-Rise Single-Stair Housing in Massachusetts, as well as a co-editor of The State of Housing Design 2023, a book about national design trends, both of which are published by The Harvard Joint Center for Housing. He believes everyone has a right to a dignified, affordable, and delightful dwelling, and is in pursuit of more expansive and imaginative designs for housing—from the block to the bedroom.

Established in 1986 by Ronald M. Druker (LF ’76) and by the Trustees of the Bertram A. Druker Charitable Foundation, the Druker Traveling Fellowship is open to all GSD master’s degree candidates who demonstrate excellence in the design of urban environments. The fellowship offers students the opportunity to travel domestically or abroad to pursue study that advances their understanding of urban design.

This event was organized by the Development and Alumni Relations Department and the Department of Urban Planning and Design.

Questions? Contact [email protected].

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.

 

Anne Whiston Spirn, “Restoring Nature, Rebuilding Community”

Event Description

What would it mean for a city to be ecologically robust and socially just? What would such a place be like? Through what means might such a vision be accomplished? And how might change be created and sustained? These are not questions to be explored in the abstract. They call for action research, for testing ideas in practice, and engaging with real people in actual places to make discoveries from which principles can be drawn.

For the past four decades, Anne Whiston Spirn’s research and teaching have demonstrated how to combine concerns for environment, poverty, race, social equity, and educational reform, and how university resources can be leveraged to address environmental and social challenges that confound society. These initiatives have resulted in projects and programs in partnership with community residents, and contributed to a revolution in water-quality management, represented by Philadelphia’s landmark, billion-dollar “green” infrastructure project.

Speaker

Anne Whiston Spirn is the Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning at MIT. The American Planning Association named her first book, The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (1984), as one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century and credited it with launching the ecological urbanism movement. Since 1987, Spirn has directed the West Philadelphia Landscape Project (WPLP), an action research project whose mission is to restore nature and rebuild community through strategic design, planning, and education programs . Spirn’s second book, The Language of Landscape(1998), argues that landscape is a form of language. She continued to develop the subject of visual literacy and visual thinking in her award-winning book, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field (2008), and The Eye Is a Door: Landscape, Photography, and the Art of Discovery (2014). Prior to MIT, Spirn taught at Harvard University and at the University of Pennsylvania. Spirn’s work has been recognized by many awards, including Japan’s International Cosmos Prize for “contributions to the harmonious coexistence of nature and mankind,” and the National Design Award for Design Mind, for “a visionary who has had a profound impact on design theory, practice, or public awareness.” Spirn’s homepage is a gateway to her work and activities.