Team Better Block recently received a $155,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to pursue an innovative project in Akron, Ohio. They’ll be converting excess housing stock in a Bhutanese neighborhood into boutique hostels and cultural hubs utilizing the Airbnb platform. Loeb Andrew Howard, co-founder of Team Better Block, describes the project in the LOEBlog.
While GSD students in Cambridge were enduring record snowfall, Josep Lluís Sert Council members were in sunny California touring the work of Eric Owen Moss MArch '72. On February 24th, a group of nearly twenty alumni and friends gathered at the studio of Eric Owen Moss Architects (EOMA) in Culver City for a first-hand look at Moss’s work and vision.
For over a year, Harvard University President Drew Faust has traveled the globe to share her vision for the University’s future through the Your Harvard event series. With previous stops in London, Los Angeles, New York, Mexico City, Dallas, and Seattle, this past month the University hosted Your Harvard: China in Beijing. As part of this celebration, the Graduate School of Design held a number of satellite events geared toward the School’s alumni and friends. Notable among these were an unveiling ceremony for the hub of a collaborative research project, and an alumni reception where guests learned more about the GSD's studios, research, and other work in China.
Riki Nishimura MAUD '03 realized that he had a curiousity about cities at a very young age. He travelled extensively as a child as a result of his family's work, and from the windows of airplanes he looked out over landscapes to imagined cities of his own design.
As part of the lecture "Expeditions in the Contemporary City," Gang focused on the post-industrial city, tall buildings, and a new definition of technology.
The surprise guest at the TED2015 conference in Vancouver this month was Theaster Gates (LF '11), whose talk will inspire both skeptics and believers in the power of design and culture to transform communities. Watch it now, or explore the entire conference schedule.
The Urban Theory Lab recently opened their exhibition "Operational Landscapes" at the Melbourne School of Design (MSD).
The work of two Harvard University Graduate School of Design students designing and implementing urban interventions in Cochabamba, Bolivia, were featured in the local newspaper, Los Tiempos. Michael Lee and Jessica Sevilla (both MDes '15), students in the Art, Design and the Public Domain program, are working on their theses and collaborating with the cultural institution mARTadero and the city's University of San Simon.
From a pool of 120 participating teams, two Harvard University Graduate School of Design teams made to the final four in the Urban Land Institute (ULI) Hines Competition of 2015.
In discussing "POPS" (privately owned public spaces) in the latest edition of ArchitectureBoston, Jerold S. Kayden, Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design, outlines the learning curve of acknowledging, mapping, utilizing, critiquing, and potentially celebrating these often overlooked spaces.