Design is the breath of opportunity. People often assume that the role of design is to beautify and that it has no importance beyond that. They think of design as the icing on the proverbial cake. Nothing could be further from the truth. As the late architect and activist Beverly Willis once said, “There’s design in everything—even a good program, like a roundtable discussion, takes a lot of what I consider design … the most successful people are good designers, even though they may not be in art or architecture.”
Coming to the GSD means committing to our collective design project: continuously developing shared threads of urgent research questions within an environment of civility, curiosity, striving, empathy, and tolerance. Genuine learning happens only when you can allow yourself to be challenged by different approaches, different voices, different perspectives, different questions, and different precedents. We foster an environment where we challenge each other respectfully, whether in the classroom, at events, or simply over lunch in the school’s backyard. Such openness is necessary because everything can be designed in multiple ways: from the pen or stylus in your hand; to the streets, subways, buildings, and parks of the city you are in right now; to the International Space Station orbiting above. Every one of the GSD’s academic programs is deliberately designed, as is each course that we offer. Design is nothing other than the careful construction of a system, an object, a plan, an argument—in short, it is the creation of a possibility.
Here at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, we translate new and diverse ways of living and working together into spatial forms, building uses, and public policies that mitigate our climate catastrophe, mend fractured communities, and realize a healthier contemporary world. The GSD’s breadth of programs enables radical cross-disciplinarity while also ensuring the specificity and precision of core expertise. We synthesize knowledge from across the academy and the public and private sectors to distill the most relevant and effective ideas into an innovative design, an effective public process, or generative history—always responding to the complex circumstances of a place, its community, and its future.
We work across a rich diversity of offerings at the GSD—nine different degrees comprising 16 different programs. Added to these degree programs are the Loeb Fellowship, the Wheelwright Prize, Executive Education, the Undergraduate Architecture Studies concentration, Early Design Education programs, and a remarkable array of student organizations, not to mention public lectures, exhibitions, conferences, and publications that are produced each semester at the GSD and across Harvard’s entire campus.
For collaboration to soar in this bountiful environment, each party has to come to the table with expertise. Every one of our degree programs is anchored in a constantly evolving core or a proseminar or a required series of courses that lay out the fundamental skills, methods, and bodies of knowledge that drive the disciplines forward. In reckoning with the cores of our disciplines, and in mastering their fundamentals—as students, teachers, and practitioners—we all learn to sharpen our vision, deepen our empathy, and commit to an idea, an argument, a design, and its consequences.
A hallmark of the GSD is the convergence of our various core programs in our advanced electives, most of which are cross-disciplinary and bring together students from across the school. Such cross-disciplinary collaboration is precisely what equips our students to address our contemporary global challenges. As you explore the extraordinary range of programs the GSD has to offer, consider these two complementary ends of our spectrum—the intimate rigor of each program’s discipline-specific offerings, and the expansive breadth and depth of our cross-disciplinary options and electives.
I am excited about what the future holds for our GSD. When the semester is in full swing, the energy in Gund Hall is unlike any school or workplace I’ve encountered. Our entire GSD campus teems with remarkable research, captivating conversations, exciting events, and surprising syntheses. I sincerely hope you will consider joining us in Cambridge, and that we might soon cross paths in the Trays, in the Loeb Library, at a crit, or during an event in Piper Auditorium.
Sarah M. Whiting
Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture