Letter from the Dean The mission and the work of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design oscillates between knowledge construction and societal relevance. As it unfolds, this negotiation produces its own themes and variations in emphasis between the two areas. Understanding and then responding…
If recent theory has highlighted architecture’s turn to evident resemblance and signification, we argue this tendency has also produced its other: The landscape of contemporary practice is filled with work whose motivating interests are anterior to meaning and averse to thematization; they are, in a…
This exhibition of a selection of projects by Toru Mitani and his practice, Studio on Site, is about how small things have a significant, perceptual impact on diffuse landscapes. The title itself is an incitement to connect ideas that operate at vastly different scales. Fabric,…
An elephant and its family at the Hathigaon Elephant Village near Jaipur, Rajasthan. Photo: Rahul Mehrotra As a point of entry and exit, a threshold has a dual coding in society as both a physical and symbolic marker of separation and connection. Thresholds are often…
The ninth edition of Platform, produced by a faculty-student team, documents student work produced at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) over the prior year. This edition invokes the still life as a device to organize works from across the School, which are in…
Atelier Bow-Wow investigates the living condition of people through various fieldwork and design practices. They observe architecture and its environments from a behaviorological point of view and always invent unique visual representations specific to the subject and scope at hand, like the book Graphic Anatomy (Toto, 2007). Their interests…
Barcelona, Metropolis of Cities The Department of Urban Planning and Design is promoting a wide-ranging debate to highlight the extent to which twenty-first-century ecological, economic, and social issues are giving shape to new urban forms. Concerns for the environment, energy, sustainable mobility, and social equity…
From the last decades of the twentieth century leading up to today, much attention has been paid to the expedient strategies that have driven construction activities in China. Distinct from the shortsighted operations, an experimental phase in Chinese architecture emerged in the early 1990s. Independent…
Each year we celebrate the achievements of the GSD's graduating class by gathering an exhibition of their work. Although it only provides a glimpse of what these amazing groups of students have created during their studies at Harvard, this exhibition nonetheless presents numerous exemplary…
Both Croatia and Slovenia have had a complex cultural, economic, and political history, and now as members of a New Europe are sites of intense, inspiring, and productive architectural and urban debates. The exhibition focused on innovative practices in architecture and urbanism in Croatia and…