FOREST FUTURES

FOREST FUTURES explores the intertwined history of forests and humanity, critically examining the past and the present to emphasize our profound connection with these vital habitats. A glance at the ungraspable timeline of forest evolution, 350 million years, reveals an alarming fact: a millennium of human activity—a blink of an eye in geological time—has threatened the equilibrium of these life-sustaining ecosystems.

Through the collective efforts of scholars, scientists, designers, artists, policymakers, and communities to restore and conserve the biodiversity that remains, today’s forests have become designed environments. Yet, it is essential to recognize that silvicultural practices and other forms of forest management entail the construction of symbiotic relationships with living beings while enabling nature’s own processes to unfold freely. Trees—indeed, all flora—are wildlife.

FOREST FUTURES celebrates nature’s ineffable essence. By urging a sensorial connection beyond observation, the exhibition underscores the limits of logic alone to fathom the natural world’s complexity. Instinct over reason offers a further lens to envision potential narratives within the still-unknown realm of forests. The paradox lies in merging design—fundamentally a reasoned and measured endeavor—with raw nature. This juxtaposition produces the challenge—at times the overwhelming sensation—of learning the vast science of forests while at the same time staying deeply attuned to the powerful experiential dimension they offer.

FOREST FUTURES’ curatorial approach reflects the diverse storylines explored in the seminar FORESTS: History and Future Narratives at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. As forests capture the attention of multiple disciplines, each exhibition section incorporates historical, technical, artistic, and scientific perspectives. In addition, forests require many forms of labor. Beyond the actual planting—now undertaken by both human hands and robots—advocates, activists, citizen foresters, and volunteers contribute enormous efforts to making healthy forests a reality. Urban forests, in particular, become tangible expressions of the dialogue between design and the natural world, offering opportunities for climate change adaptation and environmental justice. Together, these various perspectives converge on the larger ambition of more equitable societies, each thriving under the vast canopies of the earth’s munificent forests.

CONTRIBUTORS  Ajuntament de Barcelona, Barcelona City Council, Arquitectura Agronomía, Francesca Benedetto, Silvia Benedito, Anita Berrizbeitia, Bureau Bas Smets, Buro Happold, Luis Callejas/LCLA Office, Danielle Choi, Cities4Forests Program, Kira Clingen, DPA Picture Alliance, John Dialesandro/LA Times, Gareth Doherty, Gerber Architekten, Ed Eigen, Lisa Haber-Thompson, Mark Heller, Henning Larsen, Howard Center for Investigate Journalism and Capital News Service, Mariona Gil, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Stanley Greenberg, Junya Ishigami + Associates, Àlex Losada, Magnolia Tree Earth Center, Mosbach Paysagistes, NASA Earth Observatory, Omrania, Curro Palacios, Pablo Pérez Ramos, Reed Hilderbrand, RI India, STOSS Landscape Urbanism, SETEC Engineering, Studio in Site, SWA Group, Inc., Taller Capital Loreta Castro Reguera, Daniel Vargas, WRI India, WRI Mexico, and Zion Breen Richardson Associates The exhibition also includes 28 black and white photographs by New York artist Stanley Greenberg. Most of these (25) are from his book Olmsted Trees (2022), which documents trees planted in the 19th century for Olmsted’s original park designs around the country, including many in Boston. Additional photographs, entitled Coronavirus Shelters, are of rustic structures built by local residents in Prospect Park at the beginning of the pandemic, created to provide play space when public playgrounds had been closed. CREDITS

Exhibition Curation and Design Anita Berrizbeitia, Professor of Landscape Architecture

Students: Natalie Boverman MArch I/ MUP ‘25, Hiteshree Das MDes ‘24, Emilie Dunnenberger MLA I ‘24, Rinka Gao MLA I ‘24, Laura-India Garinois MIT SMArchS AD ’24, Andres Harvey MDes ‘24, Miguel Lantigua Inoa MArch II / MLA I AP ‘24, Yuhan Ji MLA II ‘24, Amelia Jones MDes ‘25, Alexandra Kupi MArch II ‘25, Florencia Lima MLA I ‘24, Patrick Margain MLA II ‘25, Gracie Meek MLA I AP ‘24, Emily Menard MLA II ‘24, Rosita Palladino MDes ‘24, Ya Qin MDes ‘25, Katie Wu MLA II ‘24, Elaine Zmuda MLA I AP ‘24.

Research Assistants Aura Phongsirivech MDes ’23, Manuel Bouzas MDes ‘24

Curatorial and Design Assistant Manuel Bouzas MDes ‘24

Dan Borelli, Director of Exhibitions David Zimmerman-Stuart, Exhibitions Coordinator

Installation Team Ray Coffey, Jeff Czekaj, Anita Kan, Sarah Lubin, Jesus Matheus, Joanna Vouriotis, Miguel Lantigua Inoa MArch II / MLA I AP ‘24, Emile Dunnenberger MLA I ‘24, Ya Qin MDes ‘25, and Katie Wu MLA II ‘24

Fabrication Lab Rachel Vroman, Iris Ayala, Burton LeGeyt, Marco Martins, Steve Spodaryck, Harris Rosenblum

GSD Communications and Public Programs William Smith, Editorial Director Joshua Machat, Assistant Director Communications and Public Affairs Kyra Davies, Assistant Director of Digital Media Chad Kloepfer, Art Director Paige Johnston, Associate Director of Public Programs Raquel Rivera, Public Programs Coordinator Matt Smith, Assistant Director, Multimedia Production

Graphic Design Chad Kloepfer and Willis Kingery

 

Our Artificial Nature: Design Research for an Era of Environmental Change

Our Artificial Nature daylights the cultural, social, and technological processes emerging within design discourse in response to the environmental imperatives of our time. The in-progress research of the Center of Green Buildings and Cities (CGBC) core and affiliated research faculty at the GSD provides a window onto the often-invisible mechanics of the built environment that allow us to see, analyze, and design our future world in new and yet-unimagined ways. The collective body of work explores the challenging space between empirical and cultural information, scalable systems and local relevance, and data and design. The exhibition calls attention to design practice as the creation of the artificial and the imagination of our constructed environment in a moment when our designed and natural worlds are fused. In this context the built environment accounts for 39% of global carbon emissions  and our concept of our environmental change is shifting from a bucolic organic system to be dominated or restored toward an entangled system of biological, cultural, and technological processes. This quiet, hopeful thread of design research, emerging from the multiplicity of 21st century design narratives, strives for positive environmental impact. It addresses the present ecological paradigm by embracing degrowth as much as growth, and process as much as artifact in the deployment of design for the meaningful transformation of our shared world. On the tenth anniversary of the Center for Green Buildings and Cities, the exhibition aims to situate the emerging research within a history of design for environmental change and solidify a dialogue around a new paradigm for environmental design. Positioned outside the framework of technological optimism and pessimism, Our Artificial Nature showcases our role as creators of the artificial, and designers of synthetic processes that engage continuously-becoming artifacts and environments informed by networked structures – from grounded, situated, and analog systems of knowledge to artificial intelligence and data-rich systems of information. Exhibition Credits Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture Ken Stewart, Assistant Dean and Director of Communications and Public Programs Exhibition Curation and Design Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti, Assistant Professor in Practice of Architecture Curatorial and Design Assistant Pablo Castillo Luna (M.Arch II ‘23) Contributors Clara He (MArch I ‘24) Ana Merla (MDE ‘23) Dhruv Mehta (M.Arch II ‘23) Luke Reeve (MDE ‘23) Kat Wyatt (MLA ‘23) Exhibition Materials, Construction, and Gratitude Our Artificial Nature owes special thanks to the previous exhibition, Multihyphenate, for lending us its waste. The design and material construction of this exhibition involves the re-use of 12 sheets of plywood, and 54 metal studs. We are grateful for the talents and care provided by the exhibitions team for this collaborative exploration into the future potentials and layered meanings of re-use in the design of our built environment. CGBC Ali Malkawi, Founding Director of the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities Professor of Architectural Technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Design Staff Peter Howard Robert Marino Samantha Sarafin GSD Exhibitions Team Dan Borelli, Director of Exhibitions David Zimmerman-Stuart, Exhibitions Coordinator Installation Team Ray Coffey, Jef Czekaj, Anita Kan, Sarah Lubin, Jesus Matheus, and Joanna Vouriotis GSD Communications and Public Programs William Smith, Editorial Director Joshua Machat, Assistant Director, Communications and Public Affairs Kyra Davies, Assistant Director of Digital Media Chad Kloepfer, Art Director Paige Johnston, Associate Director of Public Programs Raquel Rivera, Public Programs Coordinator Matt Smith, Assistant Director, Multimedia Production Graphic Design Chris Grimley, SIGNALS Vendor Partners Sharon Gioioso, ICL Imaging Peter McAuliffe, DPM Construction Dan Weissman, Lam Partners

Multihyphenation

Multihyphenation is a compound term referring to alternate modes of creative production: “Collab” culture; “brand X brand” projects; and multiple, or even opaque styles of attribution and ownership among the individuals, studios, and practices that engage in such work. For them, the “body of work” they produce matters more than maintaining a singular creative identity as an individual designer, architect, artist, and so on. As Virgil Abloh—the consummate multihyphenate—once remarked in an interview, “it’s explicitly the fact that I split my time among many things that gives me the point of view to know that what I’m doing is relevant.”

This exhibition features a selection of work by a variety of designers and artists that represents a shift toward multihyphenation as a mode of practice. And it is a shift that has emerged amid a seemingly paradoxical feature of our neoliberal world—namely, “vertical disintegration,” a corporate strategy characterized by high degrees of subcontracting and outsourcing of labor and expertise, maximum operational efficiency, and temporary commitments to tangible resources like land, equipment, and buildings. Throughout the neoliberal period, a global shift toward vertical disintegration across corporate structures has resulted in forms of market domination that now exceed even the vertically integrated dynasties of the Gilded Age. At the turn of the 20th century, for example, Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest people in the world at that time, had grown Carnegie Steel into a monopoly force by gaining control of coal and iron suppliers and their mines and operations, railroad lines, and other resources essential to the production and distribution of steel. Today, a century later, when the world’s largest taxi firm can claim that it owns no cars and employs no drivers, and the world’s largest vacation rental firm owns nearly no real estate, we can say we are truly in a new reality. Multihyphenation has emerged as one kind of response. Which is to say that one way of navigating a world dominated by multinational corporate firms and global brands is simply to become a multiplicity: architect-hyphen-curator-hyphen-art director-hyphen-furniture designer-hyphen-theorist-hyphen-fashion designer, etc., etc., ad infinitum.

This exhibition has been organized together with its counterpart, issue 51 of Harvard Design Magazine. In keeping with the media-sensitivity and format-specificity of multihyphenation, the magazine presents itself as a printed object that captures for posterity a fundamental shift in contemporary practice, whereas this exhibition offers an experience of multihyphenate works that is dynamic, experiential, and temporary.

Multihypenation features works by: AD-WO, A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE, Arielle Assouline-Lichten, groupsports, Höweler+Yoon, Inside Outside | Petra Blaisse, Metahaven, Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample & MOS, OMA, Samuel Ross, SO – IL, Oana Stănescu and WOJR.

 

Exhibition Credits
Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture

Curation and Design
Sean Canty, Assistant Professor of Architecture, Harvard GSD; Director, Studio Sean Canty
Zeina Koreitem, Design Faculty, SCI-Arc; Partner, MILLIØNS
John May, Associate Professor of Architecture, Harvard GSD; Partner, MILLIØNS
Alex Yueyan Li, Designer, MILLIØNS (MArch I AP ’21)

Student Contributors
Celeste Martore (MArch I ’24), Kirsten Sexton (MArch I ’25), and Rachel Skof (MArch I ’25)

GSD Exhibitions Team
Dan Borelli, Director of Exhibitions
David Zimmerman-Stuart, Exhibitions Coordinator

Installation Team
Ray Coffey, Jef Czekaj, Anita Kan, Sarah Lubin, Jesus Matheus, and Joanna Vouriotis

Harvard Design Magazine
Ken Stewart, Editor in Chief
Meg Sandberg, Managing Editor
Alexis Mark, Graphic Design & Art Direction

Student Researchers
Elitza Koeva (DDes ’24) and Vivienne Shi (MArch I ’25)

Student Marketing & Social Media
Audrey Watkins (MArch I ’24) and Alison Zhou (MArch I ’26)

GSD Communications
William Smith, Editorial Director
Joshua Machat, Assistant Director, Communications and Public Affairs
Kyra Davies, Assistant Director of Digital Media
Chad Kloepfer, Art Director
Paige Johnston, Associate Director of Public Programs
Kat Chavez, Public Programs Coordinator
Matt Smith, Assistant Director, Multimedia Production

Vendor Partners
Peter McAuliffe & DPM Construction
Sharon Gioioso & ICL Imaging
Andy Kaufman Painting

Special Thank You
Toshiko Mori, Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture; Grace La, Professor of Architecture and Chair of the Department of Architecture; Mark Lee, Professor in Practice of Architecture; and Julie Cirelli.

We dedicate this exhibition to the late multihyphenates Virgil Abloh, Etel Adnan, Bruno Latour, and Issey Miyake, whose brilliance inspired the issue of Harvard Design Magazine the exhibition is based on, and that continues to inspire our own practices as well as generations of designers who, because of them, see the world differently.

 

 

Commencement Exhibition 2023

Each year, the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) presents an exhibition of work by students in the graduating class. On view in the Druker Design Gallery and the Frances Loeb Library, this selection of work includes theses and independent final projects. Exceptional student projects that have been awarded prizes by the GSD faculty are also featured. The Commencement Exhibition showcases individual achievements in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning and Design, and offers an overall picture of the School’s interdisciplinary approach to design education. Sarah M. Whiting Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture  

John Andrews: Architect of Uncommon Sense

John Andrews (MArch ’58) was the architect of a remarkable series of buildings, from Scarborough College in Toronto’s outer suburbs in 1965 to the Intelsat Headquarters in Washington, DC, in 1988. In between came a bright and prolific career, with buildings completed across Canada, the United States, and Andrews’s native home of Australia, including George Gund Hall at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD). This year, the GSD is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Gund Hall, which was completed in 1972 at the height of Andrews’s international career.

Reflecting changes in global architectural culture, Andrews’s fame waned as quickly as it had developed. In the face of postmodernism’s rise, Andrews remained committed to an essentially modernist approach: design should redeem the built world, making it better for everyone. His approach was late modernist in that it maintained a more circumspect view of building technology than first-generation modern architects, and it had a more contextual appreciation of the urban scale.

More than anything, Andrews was proud of what he built. He saw himself as a pragmatic architect rather than a theorist or a designer of speculative schemes—he often argued that his designs were based on “common sense,” solving design problems on the drawing board and construction sites. But there are other achievements as well. At the height of his career, he was widely celebrated: in 1971, he became the only non-American architect inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 1980, he received the Gold Medal of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects; and in 1983, he was one of two international speakers at China’s first national convention of architects. In 1972, he was named by Philip Drew as a leader of the “third generation” of modern architects, along with James Stirling, Kiyonori Kikutake, Robert Venturi, and others. For ten years from 1978, Andrews worked with the Australia Council, Australia’s preeminent arts organization, to promote the country’s architecture nationally and internationally. He served on the juries for two major international design competitions: for the Australian Parliament (1979), won by Romaldo Giurgola, and The Peak Leisure Club in Hong Kong (1983), won by Zaha Hadid.

These accomplishments speak to Andrews’s engagement with design culture and its publics that went beyond common sense: the sensibilities embodied in his work had—and arguably still have—broader application than in just his own buildings. They also suggest that this sensibility was not common at all, but remarkable. Uncommon sense

Project Credits:

IMAGE CREDITS

Fig 1: Len Gittleman, 1972, Frances Loeb Library.

Fig 2: Steve Rosenthal, 1972 © Historic New England, from the Steve Rosenthal Collection of Commissioned Work at Historic New England.

Fig. 3: Frances Loeb Library. Fig. 4: Photo: PANDA Associates. Courtesy of the Canadian Architectural Archives, Calgary.

Figs. 5-8, 11-12: Noritaka Minami, 2022. Figs. 9-10: Courtesy of the State Library of NSW.

EXHIBITED PROJECTS

Scarborough College, 1963–66, Canada
Guelph University South Residences, 1965–68, Canada
Miami Seaport Terminal, 1967–70, United States
Metro Centre, 1967–70, Canada
D.B. Weldon Library, 1967–72, Canada
George Gund Hall, 1967–72, United States
Cameron Offices, 1968–77, Australia
King George Tower, 1970–76, Australia
Canberra College of Advanced Education, 1973–74, Australia
Callam Offices, 1973–77, Australia
Eugowra House, 1978–80, Australia
Intelsat Headquarters, 1980–88, United States
The Octagon, 1985–90, Australia

COLOPHON

John Andrews: Architect of Uncommon Sense
Curated by Paul Walker and Kevin Liu
Featuring photographic works by Noritaka Minami

 

HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN:

Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture
Ken Stewart, Assistant Dean and Director of Communications and Public Programs
Marielle Suba, Editor, Harvard Design Press

 

EXHIBITIONS:

Dan Borelli, Director of Exhibitions
Ray Coffey, Exhibition Installer
Jef Czekaj, Exhibition Installer
Anita Kan, Exhibition Installer
Sarah Lubin, Exhibition Installer
Jesus Matheus, Exhibition Installer
Joanna Vouriotis, Exhibition Installer
David Zimmerman-Stuart, Exhibitions Coordinator
Chad Kloepfer, Art Director
Willis Kingery, Graphic Design

 

COMMUNICATIONS AND PUBLIC PROGRAMS:

Paige K. Johnston, Associate Director, Public Programs
Kat Chavez, Public Programs Assistant
Joshua Machat, Assistant Director, Communications and Public Affairs

 

FRANCES LOEB LIBRARY:

Ann Whiteside, Librarian, Assistant Dean for Information Services
Alix Reiskind, Research and Teaching Support Team Lead Librarian
Ines Zalduendo, Special Collections Archivist
Irina Gorstein, Conservator

 

BUILDING SERVICES:

Kevin Cahill, Assistant Dean for Facilities
Joe Amato, Maintenance Technician
Trevor O’Brien, Manager of Building Services

 

BUILDING ACCESS:

George Gund Hall: Kevin Cahill, Trevor O’Brien, Linda Kuczynski, Sabrina Joaquim, Peter Underhill, and Francis Barry for access to George Gund Hall. Steve Rosenthal and Lorna Condon from Historic New England. The late Len Gittleman for a copy of Building Gund Hall; Cameron Offices: University of Canberra; Callam Offices: ACT Property Group; Scarborough College: Don Campbell, University of Toronto, Scarborough; Guelph University South Residences: Leanne Caron, University of Guelph; Miami Seaport Terminal: Marc Treib for access to photographs; D. B. Weldon Library: Western University; University of Canberra Residences: University of Canberra; Toad Hall (not pictured): Dr Ian Walker, The Australian National University; Eugowra House: Dowling Pastoral; Garden Island Parking Structure: Australian Defence Force; Intelsat Headquarters: David Sarpal, The Whittle School.

 

COLLECTIONS:

The State Library of New South Wales and the John Andrews Architectural archive, 1951-2004
The Canadian Architectural Archives and the John Andrews fonds
The Canadian Centre for Architecture
The Frances Loeb Library Special Collections and the Harvard University Archives
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia
The Andrews family

 

Special thanks from the curators to the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Sarah M. Whiting for supporting the first international exhibition of John Andrews’s work and career.

Book typeset in Monument Grotesk, drawn by Kasper-Florio, 2018; and Archital, drawn by Willis Kingery in consultation with Craig and John Andrews, 2021.

 

Unprecedented Realism: Selections from the Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti Collection

On the occasion of Jorge Silvetti’s retirement from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the Frances Loeb Library’s acquisition of the Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti Collection, Unprecedented Realism presents a series of narratives that reflect the evolution of the Machado and Silvetti architectural practice over the last five decades. Over 120 pieces of two-dimensional work, 30 models, and 250 pieces of discursive material have been assembled for the exhibition. Taken together, these items stand in for the primary subject in Machado and Silvetti’s life-long accumulation of architectural production—buildings. Whether built or unbuilt, whether a vehicle for theoretical ideas or an autonomous artifact onto itself, the work of Machado and Silvetti is and has always been about buildings. The primacy of buildings permeates the architects’ Collection, which also serves as a repository of secondary material they compiled for their own explorations into the history of construction. From the earliest documents on Gothic cathedrals traced back to the Middle Ages, to the architectural models dated back to the Renaissance, materials that were initially collected as evidence of construction evolved into primary source material that Machado and Silvetti used in their theoretical training of other architects. The materials selected from the Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti Collection encompass the foundational mediums of the paradigmatic historical architectural archive. From representative architectural drawings for exhibitions; speculative drawings for design explorations; working documents for specifying a building project; to models, construction sets, material samples, and mock-ups, the selection of objects and texts on view in this exhibition reflect the entire scope of the design and building processes and complicate our understanding of an individual building and the minds of the architects who designed it. “Unprecedented realism,” a phrase coined by Rodolfo Machado in 1986 and the title of a book edited by K. Michael Hays in 1997, refers to Machado Silvetti’s mode of operation and the aspirations of their practice. Based on the notion that heterogeneous systems, knowledge, and sensibilities are brought together as an antidote to totalizing systems, the concept of “unprecedented realism” aims to retain a degree of autonomy for architecture while intensifying the sociocultural possibilities within that very autonomy. While Machado and Silvetti seek to be “unprecedented” and unbound by convention in their work, their practice has been, at the same time, grounded in a “realism” that engages habitation and participation—a lasting conviction reflected throughout the Collection.

2022 Commencement Exhibition

On view in the Druker Design Gallery and the Frances Loeb Library is a selection of thesis and independent final projects completed by this year’s graduates, as well as exceptional work by graduating students who have earned awards given out annually by the school. I encourage you to take your time to absorb the breadth of this impressive body of work. Each project offers a glimpse into an individual’s design voice; taken together, the show is an ensemble that envelops us within this graduating class’s optimistic future. Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture

Interrogative Design: Selected Works of Krzysztof Wodiczko

Materials for this exhibit provided by the artist, with unique edits specially produced for this project by GSD Exhibitions.

Spanning five decades, the artistic practice of Krzysztof Wodiczko has interrogated a variety of social conditions across cultures, through artistic interventions that deploy creative technologies to disrupt the public and civic spaces of our everyday urban environments. Wodiczko is well known for his public projections, in which his subject matters range broadly—from homelessness to war veterans—as he consistently engages marginalized peoples and gains their trust to use his artistic platforms for their own public speech-acts. He researches public squares, institutional buildings, and wartime monuments, delving into the various histories embedded in the design, ornamentation, and inscriptions of these pieces of civic architecture. His siting of the surfaces of these spaces and structures recasts them as a stage setting for his ephemeral events, in which unseen, unheard, and forgotten people inscribe their lived experiences back onto the materiality of the architecture. Using projected light, Wodiczko transforms the scale of the individual to the scale of the urban, as these architectural facades—literally the faces of buildings—come alive by taking on the faces and voices of those who have been dispossessed by the host society. This artistic technique of defamiliarizing our everyday built environment empowers the alienated, and this temporary, projected light of their identities shines a spotlight on the power structures of their systemic oppressors.

While Wodiczko is known for his large-scale slide and video projections onto architectural facades and monuments, this exhibition also features a set of his process drawings and objects, expanding and deepening the discourse around his artistic methods. These objects from his practice may be less visible and public than his large-scale installations, but they are equally important as provocations. In exploring Wodiczko’s practice comprehensively as a whole—projections, objects, drawings, videos, texts—we begin to have a deeper understanding of how he approaches a subject, in particular his engagement with communities whose very identities are intertwined with local sites, public spaces, monuments, and architecture. Questions that animate this exploration include: how does Wodiczko approach communities of people who are often marginalized, underrepresented, or unheard, and how does he begin to build a trusting connection with them so they contribute to and collaborate in his interventions? The exhibition title, Interrogative Design, aims to evoke the entirety of this creative process, locating a subject, researching an urban area, selecting an architectural element, navigating power structures, and cultivating trust throughout.

Interrogative Design will introduce, or reintroduce, visitors to the diverse and wide-ranging aspects of one of the most vital artistic practices of the 21st century. The exhibition will reemphasize Wodiczko’s practice as one bridging art with design, weaving social engagement with innovative technologies, mapping marginalized identities onto architecture, and reinscribing new memories onto existing monuments. By focusing on the origin of each project on view, this exhibition will become pedagogical for our audience, allowing the viewer to refocus on the precision within Wodiczko’s processes while being moved by the human stories that his disruptive gestures make public.

In addition to objects and works shown in the Druker Design Gallery, Harvard GSD’s Frances Loeb Library will feature a timeline of publications on Wodiczko’s practice, with accompanying photography of corresponding projects, including earlier slide projections in public space. The library will also feature an in-depth look into the process of the Voices of Bunker Hill Monument project, delving into the processes behind one of his local interventions.

Spring 2022 update: Druker Design Gallery will be accessible to visitors who are in compliance with the GSD’s current health and safety requirements. Please check the school’s reopening page for details on visitor guidelines and requirements. Visitor hours are from 8am – 6pm Monday through Friday.

 

Interrogative Design: Selected Works of Krzysztof Wodiczko
October 21, 2021 – April 8, 2022

In conjunction with the Harvard Art Museums exhibition :

Krzysztof Wodiczko: Portrait 
October 14, 2021–April 17, 2022

These exhibitions, organized jointly by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the Harvard Art Museums, are made possible by the Graham Gund Exhibition Fund, Galerie Lelong & Co., and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

GSD: A–Z 2020 & 2021

Harvard GSD has installed GSD: A–Z 2020 & 2021, the first exhibition on view inside of Gund Hall since campus buildings closed in March 2020. The exhibition welcomes back the Harvard GSD community by celebrating the pedagogical output of the Class of 2020 and Class of 2021. Student work—images, illustrations, abstracts, and other material—is organized into a grid-like visual structure in Gund Hall’s Druker Design Gallery. Multimedia projections disrupt the grid and shift the scale of each image across three channels, generating a scroll-through effect. Prize-winning design projects from the Class of 2020 and Class of 2021 are on view in a complementary installation inside Harvard GSD’s Frances Loeb Library.

GSD: A–Z 2020 & 2021 previews forthcoming publications A–Z: Harvard University Graduate School of Design 2020 and A–Z: Harvard University Graduate School of Design 2021, which convey student work and dialogue from the Class of 2020 and Class of 2021 in book form.

Please note that Gund Hall, the Druker Design Gallery, and other Harvard GSD campus buildings and spaces are open only to Harvard University ID holders at this time.

 

First the Forests

This exhibition explores the complex and intertwined layers of knowledge—sciences, history, aesthetics, and material culture—that are embedded in the seemingly simple undertaking of planting, whether a large forest, an urban park, or a garden. It does so through documenting the creative process of the work of Günther Vogt Landscape Architects, for whom plants have been a central subject and loci of experimentation.  In the manner of a Wunderkammer, the exhibition documents six projects by bringing together a collection of artifacts of varied origins, materiality, function, and geographical provenance. In Vogt’s practice, the Wunderkammer is part record and part design method, as the artifacts are utilized at the beginning of each project to instigate broad discussion and form the intellectual direction of the work ahead. Located in the premises of the office and Case Studio, it contains an encyclopedic collection of objects from around the world, not counting his extensive library.   The artifacts in this exhibition are displayed in four classes of frames: shallow boxes contain drawings, photographs, and reference images of each project; deep boxes display a selection of objects from Vogt’s collection, including plaster casts, surveying instruments, seeds, study models, wood samples, plant specimens, geological core samples, books, drawings, and models; free-standing magical machines are dioramas for the simulation and testing of wind, fire, water, and earth in the design process; and a mirrored hut, in the shape and size of Thoreau’s cabin, references the indivisibility between direct observation of the natural world, introspective reflection, and the imagination in the mediation of nature. Together, they showcase the methodologies, exercises, and precedents through which the firm explores and analyzes plants as a central protagonist of the practice.  Plant specimens for this exhibit are located downstairs in the reading room of the Frances Loeb Library.