CoDesign at the GSD

“CoDesign at the GSD” showcases engaged-design pedagogy and methodologies to improve Boston public realms in partnership with local organizations. Foregrounding collaborative design research by interdisciplinary student teams at the GSD and the Place Leadership Network, 8 Boston area organizations including cultural districts, main streets, parks conservancies, business improvement districts, and CDCs, the exhibit explores challenges and strategies to promote inclusive, democratic, and vibrant public spaces within an urban and regional context of racialized, classed, and gendered im/mobility and access. In addition to mapping socioeconomic and other demographic disparities, cultural assets, and art and creative strategies at the regional scale, it makes a case for networked strategies for place leadership among local communities, organizations, and anchor institutions that leverage the transformative power of design. The exhibition’s interactive nature invites viewers to annotate its living map with suggestions for creative, interconnected strategies.

Style Worry or #FOMO

Reyner Banham once described the proliferation of styles after a waning epoch as “style worry,” an anxiety where the architect must decide how to go about choosing one style out of many. Today this anxiety has shifted to a worry better characterized as fear of missing out. Digital and social networks of production and distribution incentivize a culture of inclusion, where the boundaries between producer and audience begin to dissolve. Whether it be Trump’s retweets of fringe conspiracies, audience direction of live stream action, or crowd-sourced research, cultural production has become participatory. As a result, Banham’s exclusivity has given over to a stylistic promiscuity and today’s architectural forms and experiments show it. Against this contemporary backdrop, DES 3377: Style Worry or #FOMO seminar (Fall 2018) encouraged students to adopt, engage and hybridize the polemics of architectural theory, mostly from the past twenty-five years, as an essential process of design. Upon synthesizing these theoretical quarrels and camps into their own treatises on form, the students designed individual signature chairs. This exhibition presents both chairs designed by Harvard Graduate School of Design students and, with the seminar’s ethic of inclusion, those designed by influential creatives outside the GSD community. Each chair is explicit in their portrayal of polemical form making. Both groups’ work presents a variety of conversations and influences indicative of today’s accelerated sharing of ideas, where divergent camps quickly hybridize and mutate into new streams. The exhibition underscores the disciplinary necessity of cultivating and honing theoretical positions as a crucial stage that contextualizes these new inclusionary formal practices. In underscoring the importance of both discursive and representational modes of design, the exhibition of each chair borrows from Joseph Kosuth’s template, One and Three Chairs, whereby each designer presents their chair in three divergent forms: a 1:6 physical model, a drawing/image, and a conceptual statement. Student Participants: Andrew Bako, Aimilios Davlantis Lo, Eduardo Mediero, Matthew Gehm, Jin Guo, Joshua Kuhr, Benjamin Pennell, Adam Sherman, Sevki Topcu, Kiran Wattamwar, Sol Yoon, and Zi Meng Outside Exhibitors: ALLTHATISSOLID, MOS Architects, Megan Paulson, Norman Kelley, Soft Baroque, Synthesis-DNA, Zago Architecture, Zaha Hadid Architects

From Fallow

Vacant lots have long vexed cities—especially the architects, landscape architects, urban designers, and planners working in them. In the past few decades hundreds of design ideas for abandoned property have emerged. Some remain purely speculative, while others have been tested and implemented. Meanwhile, neither the preoccupation with nor the accruement of abandoned property has abated. This curated collection of 100 ideas for abandoned property is intended to serve both as documentation and speculation. All of the ideas are possible—they either have been or could be proposed for a piece of formerly occupied land. It is hard, naïve, even dangerous to forget the years of exploitation or to pause the dream of rebuilding on these vacant lands. It is human nature to want to replace building with building. It is distressing to see the built environment dissolving, pulling economic resources and social support systems down in its wake. It is tragic to live in its midst. At the same time, it is rejuvenating to see the expansive sky allowed by open fields, to watch volunteer plants take root and grow tall, to allow water to infiltrate soils, to generate energy through climatic conditions, and to see animals and people at play, at work, and at rest in the landscape. The people, the wildlife, and the land are embodied resources. These fallow landscapes are everywhere and everywhere they are distinct. The goal is to convey their idiosyncratic potentials without disclosing their hidden identities. It is an attempt to look intently at the present lived condition, as a reflection of a complex past, in order to imagine equally rich and varied futures. In so many of these examples, it is a matter not so much of making drastic change to the sites themselves, as drastically reimagining how we approach them. Curated by Jill Desimini, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture

Thing Tank: 18 Design Fictions

The world of things is more than the body of everyday equipment that accompanies our lives: It is a laboratory where the intentions of makers and marketers collide with unstable scenarios of past, present, and future use. The Thing Tank explores this terrain of contact and collision in the form of 18 student projects that engage in a dialogue with some of the defining works of 20th-century Italian design, from Carlo Bugatti’s 1902 Cobra Chair to the Olivetti calculators of the 1980s. The projects were developed in the setting of a Spring 2019 seminar taught by Professor Jeffrey Schnapp that was structured around a sequence of case studies of exemplary 20th-century artifacts devised to suit fundamental needs of modern life: sitting, drinking, lighting, walking, moving about, cooling, cooking, writing, calculating, and entertaining. Though the seminar was broadly concerned with intersections between design, engineering, society, and culture, each artifact was meticulously analyzed with respect to its materials, properties, and affordances, the broader family of objects to which it belongs, and the socio-historical context in which it was produced and circulated. Student projects plumb this depth dimension of artifacts in the form of plausible (but imaginary) works belonging to a specific historical moment, complete with period advertising campaigns, patent drawings, and other forms of “historical” documentation. The gallery of fictional facsimiles includes a pair of special event Martini & Rossi cocktail glasses, a 1934 timepiece worn to the opening of La Scala in Milan, a scooter-stroller, and two Memphis-style lamps. Elio Gaarthuis Sampath Pediredla Lane Raffaldini Rubin Kate Spies Jacob Stinson Jakob Šešok Vivian Ho In Kuong Jiho Sejung Song Omar Valentin, Frankie Perone Saad Rajan Meric Arslanoglu Alex Yueyan Li, Alex Fernandez Grande Isabel Chun Xiaotang Tang, Jing Chang Berto Ceballos Gina Ciancone Kenneth Hasegawa; Veronica Smith Wal Khumalo Professor: Jeffery Schnapp Teaching Assistants: Chiara Fauda Pichet, Mindy Seu Exhibitions Team: Dan Borelli, David Stuart-Zimmerman  

Representation First (!!!), Then Architecture

Current tendencies in the discipline suggest a split between two opposing architectural projects: the easy project versus the difficult project. Primarily related to architecture’s form, this oversimplification of the divide might also be used to identify developments in representation: cheap and fast one-point perspectives with minimal material changes as opposed to laborious photo-realistic renderings oozing tactile interiors. The hourly “swipe”—up/down/left/right—and the way architectural images are posted, pinned, shared, and liked moments after they are created places a further immediacy on the making of representation and the naming of an agenda. Rather than question the easy over the difficult, might we readjust our focus towards the conceptualization of representation first, as a way of conceiving of architecture? This exhibition presents the work developed in the seminar VIS-2348: Representation First (!!!), Then Architecture, offered at the Harvard Graduate School of Design during the Fall 2018 semester by Jennifer Bonner (MArch ’09), Assistant Professor of Architecture, Program Director of the Master in Architecture II program, and founder and director of MALL. The aim of the seminar was to develop techniques and methodologies through a series of representational experiments. Exercises referenced cake decorating, color-gel photography, food styling, still-life painting, 3D model archives, and YouTube. Not a historical overview, the class was framed by contemporary issues in representation including studies of materiality, color, digital tooling, animations, scale figures, and media. Students were asked to curate references into a conceptual position on architectural representation, to closely read work found in contemporary art practice, pop culture aesthetics, and the visual environment of the “everyday,” and to experiment with a range of visual methods in order to develop novel representational techniques. Results include: pixelated Herman Miller furniture, Honeysuckle-toned kitchen appliances, jelly urbanism, fake towels, fake fruit, real bread, a deconstructed Medusa, Oppenheim’s banana, bananas knolled, bananas made of Starburst, bad meshes, the Earth in a glass, Corbusier x Supreme, many helpings of cakes pleated, piped, or squished. This exhibition was designed by Malinda Seu (MDes/ADPD ‘17) with assistance from Ed Wang (MArch ’21). Teaching Assistant, VIS-2348: Alexandru Vilcu Research Assistant, VIS-2348: Wan Wan Fei

enGENDERing Urban Equity: Inclusive Design Strategies in Argentina

Curated by Chelina Odbert How can participatory planning and design morph cities into places that genuinely work for all genders? The product of Chelina Odbert’s Fall 2018 option studio “Gendering Urban Development,” this exhibition showcases the output of a collaborative and participatory planning and design process where partner outcomes are just as important as learning outcomes, where process is just as important as product.

Outside the Lines: Across Disciplines with Harvard’s Design Engineers

Harvard’s recently launched Master in Design Engineering program is a first-of-its-kind synthesis of future-oriented strategic design, cross-scalar imagination, and rigorous engineering. In this exhibit, we reveal some methods and products of this unique experiment in systemic solutions that cross fields and address issues ranging from food networks to  human aging and mobility. Curated by Andrew Witt, Assistant Professor in Practice of Architecture