What is it that gives places their individual qualities and defines the life of a city? Architects and urbanists are accustomed to describing and creating the organizational structures, the layouts and physical attributes of our cities. But what are the relations between the design of…
Traditionally, decisions about design and planning have incorporated limited public input. This top-down process has been questioned at various times in the twentieth century through alternative participatory strategies. But the promise of participation has not been realized at a large scale. Now, at the beginning…
“Every time I photograph a space there is a history, and often this history is connected to the city.” While busy photographing architecture over the past twenty-eight years, Hélène Binet (b. Sorengo, 1959) has unwittingly been encountering the cities in which the architecture is situated.
For designers, mathematics presents both the promise of control and the challenge of constraint. The working models presented here are products of an ongoing seminar at the GSD that confronts this productive tension between the freedom of design and the logic of geometry. In particular,…
March 19, 2012–May 17, 2012 Eric Howeler, Curator On March 11, 2011, an 8.9 magnitude earthquake off the eastern coast of Japan sent 40 foot high waves crashing into the coastal city of Miyako, overwhelming the tsunami barriers and damaging the Fukushima Nuclear…
March 26, 2012–April 16, 2012 Ricardo Solar Lezama, exhibition design Melissa Hurcomb, exhibition design Anne Lacaton, instructor The goal of the studio was to enable the city to provide an exceptional quality of life for its inhabitants. This includes a wide range…
The visualization of complex surface geometry common in contemporary architectural practice and pedagogy has a history prior to its appearance as a product of contemporary digital tools. The methods of geometric analysis developed in the nineteenth century by mathematicians such as Gaspard Monge (1746–1818) in…
Lightfall is not only an exhibition design and a presentation of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s new Amir Building. It is an architectural intervention in the Harvard Graduate School of Design that embodies the deeply interiorized concept of the Amir Building’s “Lightfall,” an 87-foot-tall…
August 22, 2011–December 22, 2011 Peter Christiansen, curator Anniversaries offer the opportunity to consider the past as an active interlocutor with the present and the future. For the GSD, this means foregrounding an array of agents—people, events, objects, and ideas—in a rich institutional history…
Artists have the capacity to move conversations out of the realm of the theoretical and into the domain of the hyper-real. A space where gestural moments are both poetic and pragmatic. The projects that I am working on in Chicago, St. Louis and in other…