Jeanne Gang, “Expeditions in the Contemporary City”
Today’s cities must cope with lapsed industrial spaces and inherited infrastructure. Through the lens of some of her firm’s most recent and noteworthy projects, Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang Architects (Chicago) will consider how architectural practice might be refocused to help reimagine these territories and initiate transformation, and profess her longstanding interest in the new ways that cultural and science-based aspects of natural systems can be of use in defining the city.
For accessibility accommodations, please contat the events office two weeks in advance at (617) 496-2414 or [email protected].
Principal Speaker: 5980UPD Lecture: Geeta Pradhan, “The Privileged City: Cambridge and the pursuit of equity”
The Privileged City: Cambridge and the pursuit of equity
Cambridge is at an interesting crossroads.
With its long and celebrated history, Cambridge today is the epicenter of the region’s innovation economy, a center of educational excellence, and an engine for economic vitality with global significance. Prized as well for its quality of life, Cambridge constantly draws new residents from around the world – over 104 languages are spoken here — from Albanian to Vietnamese. A key player in the region’s prosperity — Cambridge generously contributes to economic growth but is isolated when it comes to dealing with the consequences of that growth. The high cost of housing is resulting in a rapid erosion of Cambridge’s middle class and fully 17 percent of Cambridge children live in poverty. Growing income inequality threatens to hollow out the city itself.
Cambridge is fast becoming a tale of two cities. One provides opportunity, the other puts up barriers. What must one do in a privileged city such as this? How might we learn from cities such as San Francisco that have lost the diversity, the quirkiness, the grittiness that made it a hotbed for innovation? What must be done to foster shared prosperity in Cambridge?
Geeta Pradhan is the President of the Cambridge Community Foundation
UPD Lecture. Harvard University Graduate School of Design Department of Urban Planning and Design
Eva Castro and Jose Alfredo Ramirez, “The Grounds of a Radical Nature”
In the context of today’s generic urban developments and the eradication of public space by market forces and power structures, does landscape as a discipline have any capacity to challenge those mechanisms that produce contemporary urbanization as opposed to its conventional role in producing their aesthetic component? Eva Castro and Jose Alfredo Ramirez explore this question in their understanding of the landscape discipline and their radical utilization of infrastructure. These ideas represent a paradigm in the construction of our own political position not only in respect to questions of identity and public space but in the construction of our approach towards nature. Nature and ecology begin to serve as a mechanism of de-politicizing discourses linked to territorial planning and design as an effect of the mainstream ecological urbanism related practices. This professional shift towards pretended neutrality, in terms of both its social and political context, further reaches the domain of spatial design. As a counterargument, beyond the romanticist, a-politic, altruist, protectionist or mimetic conceptions of nature of the so-called ecologic or sustainable urbanism, Castro and Ramirez understand nature as an artifice, along the lines of an artificial construct, reinforcing rather than minimizing its political power. Castro and Ramirez argue that a spatial definition of the concept of ground can turn “nature” into a radical component of a morphologically driven urban discourse, signaling ways in which the discourse around the concept of ground and nature can be re-centered as a source of a radical approach to engineered landscapes.
Eva Castro is the co-founder and Director of Groundlab and Plasma studio. She has been teaching at the Architectural Association (AA) in London since 2003 and at the School of Landscape Architecture at Tsinghua University as a guest professor since 2011, where she directs a Landscape Urbanism Unit. She studied architecture and urbanism at the Universidad Central de Venezuela and the AA Graduate Design program with Jeff Kipnis. She has won a number of awards, including the Next Generation Architects Award and the Young Architect of the Year Award, and has published and exhibited worldwide.
Jose Alfredo Ramírez is an architect co-founder and director of Groundlab and currently co-director of the Landscape urbanism MA at the Architectural Association. He studied Architecture in Mexico City and graduate from the AA Landscape Urbanism graduate program in London 2005. Alfredo has worked and developed projects at the junction of architecture, landscape and urbanism in a variety of contexts such as China, Mexico, Spain, among others. He concentrates mainly in large scale developments like the Olympic Master Plan for London 2012 or the International Horticultural Exhibition in Xian China 2011. He has lectured on the topic of Landscape Urbanism and the work of Groundlab worldwide.
For accessibility accommodations, please contact the events office two weeks in advance at (617) 496-2414 or [email protected].
Lola Sheppard and Mason White, “Undisciplined”
Every act of architecture is simultaneously a declaration and realignment of its disciplinarity. Architecture’s recent history seems best characterized by a dizzying swing from the project of autonomy to various forms of transgression. A centrifugal pull toward the discipline’s exterior, in the last decade, may have shifted the balance in favor of transgression and realigned the discipline’s center; but this extrinsic architecture remains ill defined. This talk by Lola Sheppard and Mason White will present methodology, or what they call “detective work,” and recent projects that attempt to locate and assert the undisciplined as a spatial practice. Sheppard is an associate professor at University of Waterloo. White is an associate professor at University of Toronto. Together, they are Lateral Office.
The work of Lateral Office has been exhibited in numerous venues across the United States and Canada, as well as Germany, Iceland, England, and the Faroe Islands, with clients and collaborators including the City of Memphis, City of Reykjavik, City of Toronto, Metis Garden, Harbourfront Centre, Culture and Heritage Nunavut, and Holcim Foundation among others. Lateral Office are co-authors of “Pamphlet Architecture: Coupling / Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism” published by Princeton Architectural Press; and authors of the forthcoming book “Many Norths” published by Actar.
Lateral Office have been recognized with several awards and merits including: the 2012 Arctic Inspiration Prize; the 2011 Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction Gold Award; and the 2011 Emerging Voices award from the Architectural League of New York. The firm was selected to represent Canada with a project called “Arctic Adaptations” at the 2014 Venice Biennale in Architecture, where they received Special Mention – a first for Canada at the Architecture Biennale.
For accessibility accommodations, please contact the events office two weeks in advance at (617) 496-2414 or [email protected].
Additional Speakers: 3712Lola Sheppard
UPD Lecture: The Resilience Dividend: Judith Rodin in conversation with Jerold S. Kayden
Judith Rodin is president of The Rockefeller Foundation, one of the world’s leading philanthropic organizations, and author of the recently published book The Resilience Dividend, PublicAffairs (November 11, 2014). She was previously president of the University of Pennsylvania, and provost of Yale University. Since joining the Foundation in 2005, Dr. Rodin has recalibrated its focus to meet the challenges of the 21st century and today the Foundation supports and shapes innovations to expand opportunity worldwide and build greater resilience by helping people, communities and institutions prepare for, withstand and emerge stronger from acute shocks and chronic stresses. The Foundation accomplishes these goals through work that advances health, revalues ecosystems, secures livelihoods and transforms cities.
Dr. Rodin will speak about The Resilience Dividend in conversation with Jerold S. Kayden, Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design.
For accessibility accommodations, please contact the events office two weeks in advance at (617) 496-2414 or [email protected].
Additional Speakers: 2128Judith Rodin
GSD Talks. Innovate: Jennifer Bonner MArch ’09, “Close Reading of the Good Ol Ordinary”
A standard gable, with a camel-backed hip, combined with a rotated gable, connected by a shed, all populated with multiple dormers, and lastly, a mini-gable bump in the back is what I see. What do you see?
These are a few of the terms for making a close reading of ordinary rooflines in domesticity. The close reading, otherwise known as formal analysis, is a way of looking at art and architecture’s most prestigious. The talk will present a case for the ordinary and its role in architectural production. At the close of the talk, the presenter requests that the audience make another close reading of the forms presented just moments beforehand. Close readings on close reading.
Born in Alabama, Jennifer Bonner, MArch ’09, is the owner of MALL and Assistant Professor at Harvard GSD. She is founder of a Guide to the Dirty South with forthcoming titles in Atlanta and New Orleans. Her research and design work has been published in various journals, including Architectural Review, Architectural Record, Wallpaper, a+t, DAMn, ART PAPERS, PLAT, and MAS Context. Bonner has exhibited at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, National Building Museum in Washington DC, Association of Architects of Catalonia in Barcelona, WUHO Gallery in Los Angeles, HistoryMIAMI, and most recently at the Istanbul Design Biennial.
Innovation is not only a scientific issue, it demands the architect’s opportunistic gaze and design skills; it happens at multiple scales, frequently crisscrossing disciplinary boundaries and occasionally changing our cities, cultures, and lives. “Innovate” is a mid-day talk series curated by Iñaki Ábalos, chair of the Department of Architecture, featuring a brief presentation followed by a discussion facilitated by faculty and by thesis, PhD, and DDes students.
UPD Lecture: Felipe Hernández, “Articulatory Urbanism”
The concept of “articulation,” which has a long trajectory in geography, philosophy, social studies, and cultural theory, has had a much lesser impact on urban studies and architecture. In the work of Cities South of Cancer, the research group created and chaired by Felipe Hernández at the University of Cambridge, articulation has inherent potential for the study of the impact of subaltern agencies in the continuous development of cities. This talk explores the notion of articulatory urbanism, both theoretically and through the work of the CSC in various developing-world cities: Cali and Pereira (Colombia), Jakarta (Indonesia), Queretaro (Mexico) and Nanjing (China). The CSC proposes an approach to urbanism geared towards articulation rather then absorption and/or eradication. It seeks to strategically articulate diverse and often antagonistic elements in order to reconfigure the notion of city, helping to improve conditions of life for people in conflict-ridden communities.
At the invitation of Rahul Mehrotra, chair of the Urban Planning and Design Department.
Felipe Hernández, a lecturer in urban planning and design at Harvard GSD, is an architect and professor of architectural design, history, and theory. He is director of the M.Phil. in Architecture and Urban Studies, fellow architect, and director of studies at King’s College Cambridge.
Dr. Hernández, who has worked and published extensively on Latin America and other areas in the developing world, is author of Bhabha for Architects (Routledge 2010) and Beyond Modernist Masters: Contemporary Architecture in Latin America (Birkhauser 2009). He is co-editor of Rethinking the Informal City: Critical Perspectives from Latin America (Berghahn 2009) and Transculturation: Cities, Spaces and Architectures in Latin America (Rodopi 2005). He is currently co-editing a second volume on Latin American informal settlements for Cambridge Scholar Publishing and writing a monograph on modern architecture in Africa and South America.
In addition to his academic activities, Dr. Hernández is chair of Cities South of Cancer, an interdisciplinary Research Group that offers consultancy to governmental, non-governmental, and private institutions involved in urban development projects in cities around the world.
This event is co-sponsored by Harvard Kennedy School Indonesia Program at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
For accessibility accommodations, please contact the events office two weeks in advance at (617) 496-2414 or [email protected].
Principal Speaker: 5468 Additional Speakers: 2337“Material Provocations” with Ken Smith MLA ’86, Andrea Cochran MLA ’79, and James Lord MLA ’96. Moderated by Anita Berrizbeitia MLA ’87
In an era of singular focus on environmental issues, how do we characterize other aspects of design, such as the role materials play in questions of expression, aesthetic sensibility, form, and perception? Three leading landscape architects will discuss how they communicate affective qualities in the landscape through specific material manipulations. Rather than being either merely decorative or sustainable, materials have the capacity to engage cognition, engage cultural discourse, and construct difference in otherwise homogeneous environments, offering a critique to the idea of landscape as a neutral surface for events. Moderated by Anita Berrizbeitia, professor of landscape architecture and chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture.
Andrea Cochran, FASLA, winner of the 2014 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Landscape Architecture, believes that landscape architecture has the power to alter perceptions and ultimately initiate a deeper respect for the environment. Central to this belief is a conviction that materials possess inherent psychological content. Cochran begins her designs by envisioning how one will feel in the place. Through carefully selecting materials for their visual and sensorial qualities, and paying special attention to craft, her work elicits strong emotional responses in the landscapes. Though the overall spatial configuration of a project drives the design, ultimately materials support the integrity of the space and maximize the experience of the user. Cochran’s seventeen-person studio, Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture (ACLA), is set apart by an emphasis on the experiential and material quality of built work, and effectively pursuing design excellence from a project’s inception to diligent oversight of its construction. A cross-pollination of ideas amongst project types is critical to the practice; experimentation pursued in smaller projects, where there is a greater ability to take risks, informs innovations at a civic scale.
James A. Lord founded Surfacedesign in 2001, his 27 years of experience and design vision lead the firm’s diverse portfolio of award-winning landscapes. Through leadership and innovative design, James has established Surfacedesign’s international reputation in urban design and sustainable landscape architecture in such notable projects as the AIA-award winning Smithsonian Masterplan, Auckland International Airport, Golden Gate Bridge 75th Anniversary Plaza and ASLA award-winning IBM Plaza Honolulu. James’ ideals-balancing culture, ecology and design vision with fiscal realities to ultimately create poetic spaces and experiences resonate through the office, no matter how big or small the project.
Surfacedesign is a landscape architecture and urban design firm based in San Francisco, California. This internationally award-winning practice focuses on creating dynamic parks, campuses, plazas, waterfronts, civic landscapes and private gardens. Under the leadership of James A. Lord, Roderick Wyllie and Geoff di Girolamo, a multidisciplinary staff of landscape architects, urban designers and architects provide clients with a wide range of services. The firm’s approach emphasizes and celebrates the unique context of each project, and in the case of a public client, the project’s constituency. Working to cultivate a common understanding about project objectives through community engagement, Surfacedesign employs innovative design strategies to balance social, environmental and cultural goals for each project.
Ken Smith is one of the best-known of a generation of landscape architects equally at home in the worlds of art, architecture, and urbanism. Trained in both design and the fine arts, he explores the relationship between art, contemporary culture, and landscape. Ken Smith Workshop, established in 1992 and based in New York City, is an award winning design firm with experience in a wide variety and scale of projects, practicing landscape design primarily in the realm of public space. Typical design problems involve making landscape space within the context of existing, reworked or complex urban fabric. This requires a strategic approach in making the strongest conceptual landscapes within the limits and possibilities of the site’s infrastructure, context and program. This has led to pushing beyond traditional landscape typologies of plaza, street, and garden to conceptualize landscapes that are hybridized from diverse traditions and influences of the contemporary culture.
Principal Speaker: 1672
Additional Speakers:
with Ken Smith MLA ’86, Andrea Cochran MLA ’79, and James Lord MLA ’96
Druker Presentation: Form and Pedagogy: The Design of the University City in Latin America
Druker Presentation: Form and Pedagogy: The Design of the University City in Latin America
Carlos Garciavelez, 2012 Druker Fellow, will present his research in a talk entitled, Form and Pedagogy: The Design of the University City in Latin America. His work explores the architectural and urban legacy of the University Campus Model in the region, which became an epicenter of twentieth-century architectural and urban experimentation, and a unique form of urban development within major Latin American cities. Garciavelez’ research examines the historical evolution of these campuses across Latin America and the diverse design synergies that tie them together. Form and Pedagogy: The Design of the University City in Latin America consolidates each of the singular projects into a de facto Pan-American project, establishing a clear link between design and mid-century national higher education aspirations in the region.
Please RSVP by Thursday, March 26th, to [email protected]. As a sit-down meal will be served, seating is limited.
Additional Speakers:
Carlos Garciavelez
Ross Lovegrove
Ross Lovegrove is a designer and visionary whose work is widely considered to be the very apex of his field, stimulating a profound change in the physicality of our three-dimensional world. Inspired by the logic and beauty of nature, his designs embrace technology, materials science, and intelligent organic form, creating what many industry leaders regard as the aesthetic expression of the 21st Century. Lovegrove’s designs reflect his deeply human and resourceful approach; he strives to imbue everything he designs—from cameras to cars to trains, aviation, and architecture—with optimism, innovation, and vitality. His work has been published widely in design journals and he is author of Supernatural: The work of Ross Lovegrove (Phaidon, 2004) with essays by Greg Lynn, Tokujin Yoshioka, and Cecil Balmond. Lovegrove has won numerous international awards and his work has been exhibited internationally for over twenty years, including shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum NY, Axis Centre Japan, Pompidou Centre, Paris and the Design Museum, London.
Supported by the Margaret McCurry Lectureship fund, and part of the Rouse Visiting Artist Program