Symposium on Architecture: Organization or Design? Organized by Mariana Ibañez, with Pierre Bélanger, Ciro Najle, Andrew Witt, and others
From cybernetics to systems theory to present-day parametricism, organization has haunted the architectural imagination. Today, many debates about design practice center on data. Given the pervasiveness of information in the material, spatial, formal, and programmatic forms of organization that today’s designer must confront—in objects, networks, and genealogies—the obsession with data is hardly surprising. But data has no intrinsic bearing on the architectural process or its products. It is; how data is organized—acquired, quantified, represented, processed, and manipulated—is what differentiates design outcomes.
Design techniques connect theory and practice; organization exposes operative frameworks and figures an inner rift between the scientific and cultural aspects of architectural practice. What is design, if it relies on systematic processes and scientific methods, to those who value subjectivity and creativity? This symposium investigates how theories and systems of organization are conceived and enacted and considers their outcomes and disciplinary implications. Moderated by Mariana Ibañez, with Pierre Bélanger, Chuck Hoberman, Lluis Ortega, Ciro Najle, Andrew Witt, and others.
Supported by the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities.
For accessibility accommodations, please contact the events office in advance at [email protected] or (617) 496-2414.
Calvin Klein
Calvin Klein is an award-winning fashion icon. He is recognized globally as a master of minimalism and has spent his career distilling things to their very essence. His name ranks among the best-known brands in the world, with Calvin Klein, Inc. reaching over seven billion dollars in global retail sales. Klein studied at the School of Art & Design and Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. After a short time working as a designer, in 1968, he launched Calvin Klein, Inc. with childhood friend, Barry Schwartz.
Whether in fashion, fragrance, beauty or his collections for the home, his work has been subtle, sophisticated and possesses a clarity that redefined modern living, and an American point of view. For him, the challenge is to create new things that fit a modern way of life. “It’s about making people look and feel good about themselves and their homes,” he says.
The scope of Calvin Klein’s influence makes him unique among the world’s top designers. On the cutting edge of fashion with his Calvin Klein Collections for women, men, and the home, he reinvented many basic icons of modern dress. He pioneered designer jeans and redefined the idea of underwear and fragrance, making designer quality apparel affordable for virtually anyone; as well as revolutionizing the designer denim and underwear businesses with his overtly sexy advertising campaigns.
His advertising campaigns redefined the way products were marketed to consumers with Klein purchasing multiple ad pages in magazines. One of the most famous was his 1991 Calvin Klein Jeans supplement for Vanity Fair magazine, which totaled over 100 pages.
Time Magazine, in 1996, named Calvin Klein as one of the most influential Americans.
In 1973, Klein won the prestigious Coty American Fashion Critic’s Award, the fashion industry’s Oscar, and was the first designer to consecutively win again in 1974 and 1975. He was the youngest designer ever be elected into the Coty Hall of Fame in 1975.
Klein also received seven awards for outstanding design from the Council of Fashion Designers of America, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.
Strikingly tall panes of glass rise from the sidewalk to the third floor at John Pawson’s celebrated Calvin Klein flagship store (1993–1995), fitted into a former bank in uptown Manhattan; interiors for CK stores were designed by Deborah Berke; and in two decades Calvin Klein Home has been a source of inspiration for interior and textile design.
Calvin Klein, Inc. was sold to Philips Van Heusen Corporation in 2003, and Klein remained a creative consultant with the company until 2006.
Klein has one daughter, Marci Klein, a television producer. He resides in New York City.
Supported by the Rouse Visiting Artist Fund.
For accessibility accommodations, please contact the events office in advance at [email protected] or (617) 496-2414.
Organization or Design? George Legendre and Hanif Kara; Moderated by Mariana Ibañez
Following the event “Symposium on Architecture: Organization or Design?” which took place in fall 2015, this event investigates how theories and systems of organization are conceived and enacted and ponders their outcomes and disciplinary implications. Moderated by Mariana Ibañez, associate professor of architecture, with George Legendre, associate professor in practice of architecture, and Hanif Kara, professor in practice of architectural technology.
Carla Juaçaba, “Perceiving and Working”
Carla Juaçaba founded her independent studio in 2000, in Rio de Janeiro, following a period of work in the office of Niemeyer-era architect Gisela Magalhães. With several projects on her own and in collaborations—including the Rio Bonito house (2005), Varanda House (2007), Minimum House (2008), and Santa Teresa House (2012)—Juaçaba is now involved in public and private projects for housing and cultural programs, such as Humanidade2012, an ephemeral pavilion for the international congress Rio+20 (with scenographer/director Bia Lessa). Juaçaba’s academic research, teaching, and exhibition design is ongoing; she was recently a juror at the Bienal Ibero Americana in Madrid (2012) and she won the international ArcVision Women and Architecture prize in its first edition, in 2013.
For accessibility accommodations, please contact the events office two weeks in advance at (617) 496-2414 or [email protected].
Loeb Fellowship 45th Anniversary Lectures | Designing for Change: Towards Equity and Resiliance
List of events include:
Scoring Equitable Design & Development: Steve Lewis LF ’07 Moderator; Jamie Blosser LF ’15, Interim Executive Director Santa Fe Art Institute; Jair Lynch LF ’06, Jair Lynch Development Partners; Deanna Van Buren LF ’12, FOURM Design; Antwi Akom Co-Founder, Executive Director, ISEEED; George “Mac” McCarthy, President & CEO, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
Loeb University #2: Pecha Kucha-style Presentations by Loeb Fellows
The Closing: Michael Kimmelman, Architecture critic, The New York Times.
Michael Kimmelman is an American author, critic, columnist and pianist. He is the architecture critic for The New York Times and has written on issues of public housing, public space, infrastructure, community development and social responsibility. In March, 2014, he was awarded the Brendan Gill Prize for his “insightful candor and continuous scrutiny of New York’s architectural environment” that is “journalism at its finest.”
Loeb University #3: Pecha Kucha-style Presentations by Loeb Fellows
Full schedule of events and more information available at: http://loebreunion.gsd.harvard.edu
For accessibility accommodations, please contact the events office in advance at [email protected] or (617) 496-2414.
GSD Talks | Innovate: Andrew Holder, “Bricks like You”
As a decade or so of digitally-fueled formal investigation draws to a close it is an excellent time to ask again, what can form do? The seeming exhaustion of this question – the sense that everything has been done and the concomitant suspicion that the question itself is irrelevant in the face of more obviously pressing concerns – might in fact have a clarifying effect on our collective ability to discern and make use of any powers that form might retain. Of all the territory that has been exhausted by the introduction of computation to the discipline of architecture, perhaps none has been more worked-over and abused than the brick, which is now so spent after its recent exertions that it has lost its status as a brick altogether and emerged re-naturalized as the digital “unit.” So what could possibly be left to say? Bricks: I think they’re like you. And I think they like you.
For accessibility accommodations, please contact the events office in advance at [email protected] or (617) 496-2414.
Diane Davis, Joan Busquets, et al: “Knowledge Transfer in the Design Professions: Learning from Barcelona”
The larger question guiding this panel concerns the transferability of models, ideas, or practices in the urban design professions. Can practices deemed successful in one city be effectively transferred to another? Likewise, can compelling ideas developed in one of the design disciplines (urban design, planning, architecture, landscape architecture) transform practices in the other? Barcelona is world-renowned for both its architecture and its regulatory successes in preserving and expanding public and green spaces, advancing the goals of urban compactness, generating a vibrant urban and cultural economy, and building infrastructure with metropolitan aims in mind. This panel, offering an opportunity for reflection and dialogue among GSD faculty, will take a closer look at the case of Barcelona. Panelists from each of the departments will speak about the city, its influences in their fields, and the larger pedagogy of knowledge transfer in the design professions. Moderated by Diane Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism and chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design; with Joan Busquets, Martin Bucksbaum Professor in Practice of Urban Planning and Design; Carles Muro, associate professor of architecture; and Chris Reed, AB ’91, associate professor in practice of landscape architecture.
Meet the 2017 Loeb Fellows
Meet the 2017 Loeb Fellows
Greta Byrum, David Molander, and Mark Lamster
Monday, September 12 12:00–1:30pm
Stubbins (Room 112)
Karen Abrams, Pallavi Mande, and Emmanuel Pratt
Tuesday, September 13 12:00–1:30pm
Stubbins (Room 112)
“Meet the Loebs” Reception
Wednesday, September 14 7–9pm
Piper Auditorium
Alessandro Petti, Emi Kiyota, and Rahel Shawl Zelleke
Thursday, September 15 12:00–1:30pm
Room 124
More Information:
+1 617 495 9345
[email protected]
gsd.harvard.edu/loebfellowship
blogs.gsd.harvard.edu/loebfellows
facebook.com/loebfellows
David Netto: “Designing Interiors (The Part They Forgot to Tell You About)”
David Netto: “Designing Interiors (The Part They Forgot to Tell You About)”
Architecture, landscape, urbanism . . . we are at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, which takes an enlightened and comprehensive view of “designed” environments and how they interrelate. But—David Netto GSD ’97 asks—how many of you have ever been taught how to make a furniture plan? How to light a room? The secrets of proportion and texture, and the breaking of rules in animating an interior? These are questions Netto has never found a satisfactory answer to in school—any school; one only learns about them from experience in the workplace. The practical truth is that how a project is perceived is key to how it is received—and essential to whether or not it gets published, written about, and given a fair trial after its transition from an abstract hypothetical to real life.
Netto has worked as an interior designer for decades and has written about architecture and design history for just as long. He professes to have learned as much from writing about the work of others as from formal education in design. His latest book is about the French designer François Catroux, who since 1968 has innovated and excelled in a career of nearly fifty years with no formal design education whatsoever (he credits Philip Johnson as a formative influence and is presently working with Diller Scofidio & Renfro on an apartment in New York). In the course of his talk, Netto will address the importance of interiors in the success of architecture and his observations on how this gets accomplished, based on what he has learned in his work as a design journalist.
Rouse Visiting Artist Program: Reiko Sudo
Rouse Visiting Artist Program: Reiko Sudo
A renowned “weaver of new ideas,” Reiko Sudo is co-founder, current CEO, and design director of Nuno Corporation of Tokyo. Nuno is widely recognized as one of the world’s most innovative textile companies, known for its use of cutting-edge technology to reinterpret the techniques, materials, and aesthetics of traditional textiles. Sudo and her design team, together with the company’s skilled weavers and dyers, have greatly broadened the parameters of contemporary design in the industry, experimenting with an eclectic array of materials, ranging from silk, cotton, and polyester to hand-made paper and aluminum, and with finishing methods that include salt-shrinking, rust-dyeing, and caustic burning. Sudo has taught at Musashino Art University and Tokyo Zokei University, where she was appointed professor in 2007. Six volumes of the Nuno Nuno Books series have been published, and Sudo’s work is in the permanent collections of several prestigious museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, in New York; the Victoria & Albert Museum, in London; and the National Museum of Modern Art Craft Gallery, in Tokyo.