Ana María León and Torsten Lange, “Bodies of Work: Activism, Gender, Architecture”
Ana María León and Torsten Lange, “Bodies of Work: Activism, Gender, Architecture”
The GSD’s Spring 2021 Public Programs are all virtual and require registration.
Scroll down to find complete registration instructions and additional information about accessing the GSD’s programs.
Event Description
“Bodies of Work: Activism, Gender, Architecture,” Ana María León and Torsten Lange with Katarina Burin; moderated by Sophie Hochhäusl, Demetra Vogiatzaki, and Emmanuel Olunkwa.
In this conversation, architectural historians Ana María León and Torsten Lange consider the labor of organizing around issues of gender in architecture. Based on three precedents, they will reflect on their work and practice and highlight how the present has allowed scholars and practitioners to revise architectural historiography. Building on intersectional feminist theory, the discussion considers architecture and urban space as well as architectural discourse as forums where white heteronormative systems of planning can become subverted by empowered labor and living practices.
Speakers
Torsten Lange studied architecture and architectural history and theory at the Bauhaus-University Weimar and the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL in London, where he also received his Ph.D. in 2015. Currently, he is visiting professor at Technical University of Munich. His research focuses on economies and networks of architectural production in the (late-)socialist world, and, more recently, on gender, sexuality and the body in relation to architecture and the built environment. In 2019, he was a research fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, QC with the project “Queer Ecologies of Care”. He has published in journals and edited volumes and is the co-editor of “archithese reader: Critical Positions in Search of Postmodernity, 1971–1976” (Zürich: Triest, 2021 fortcoming); “Architectural Historiography and Fourth Wave Feminism” (special collection of Architectural Histories, fall 2020); “Re-Framing Identities: Architecture’s Turn to History, 1970–1990” (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2017).
Ana María León, MDes ’01, is an architect and a historian of objects, buildings, and landscapes. Her research and teaching examines the modernity of the Americas and its transcontinental flows, with particular focus on how different publics relate to each other through spatial practices and discourses of power and resistance. She is an active member of several collaborations laboring to broaden the reach of architectural history including the Settler Colonial City Project (SCCP ), the Decolonizing Pedagogies Workshop (DPW ), Nuestro Norte es el Sur, and Detroit Resists .
The focus of her research is the intersection of modernity, politics, architecture and art, with emphasis in hemispheric connections across the Americas, as well as transnational networks across the Atlantic. She is currently working on two book projects that tackle the transnational networks that converged in Latin America after World War II. Modernity for the Masses: Antonio Bonet’s Dreams for Buenos Aires examines the relationship between modern architecture housing projects, the populations they claim to serve, and the totalitarian states that seek to control them. Counter-institutions: Producing Pedagogies of Freedom turns to the potential of the museum, the prison, and the school, institutions traditionally associated with power, to produce counter-narratives to oppressive regimes. Additional work examines the intersection of public housing with public space as a site of dissensus, the spatial politics of resistance, and the complicities between capital, nationalism, and dispossession.
Katarina Burin is an artist and a lecturer on visual and environmental studies at Harvard University. Her work takes variable forms and is profoundly informed by the history of architecture, with a particular emphasis on Modernism, female architects, and historical documentation. Burin executes drawings, models, collages, and installations. She recently published Contribution and Collaboration: The Work of Petra Andrejova-Molnár and Her Contemporaries (Koenig Books, 2016).
At Radcliffe, Burin is conducting research on the life and work of Fran Hosken (1920–2006), a furniture designer, educator, and activist who was among the first women to graduate from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The project is an artist’s engagement with her works and legacy, culminating in a creative, comprehensive exhibition and a catalog, the first publication on Hosken.
Burin has had solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Langenhagen (Germany); the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society (Chicago); P! (New York); and Ratio 3 (San Francisco). She has also been included in group exhibitions at such international venues as the Aspen Art Museum, FormContent (London), Galerie Max Hetzler (Berlin); Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston; Participant Inc (New York); Wattis Institute (San Francisco); and White Columns (New York). She was a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, received a grant from the Graham Foundation, and won the 2013 James and Audrey Foster Prize. Burin earned an MFA at Yale University.
Moderators
Sophie Hochhäusl is an Assistant Professor for Architectural History and Theory at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design and a member of the Executive Board for the program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. In the 2020-2021 academic year, Sophie will be a Visiting Assistant Professor at Princeton University and a Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities. She will also be the Pearl Resnick Fellow at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum in Washington DC in the academic year 2021-2022 and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow from 2021 to 2024. Before joining the Faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, she was the Frieda L. Miller Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Sophie is interested in discourse on collectivity, difference, and dissent in architecture. Her scholarly work centers on modern architecture and urban culture with a focus on spatial histories of dissidence and resistance, intersectional feminism, queer theory, and gender studies, as well as environmental history and labor theory. Currently, she is working on two book projects: an interdisciplinary history and translation project titled Memories of the Resistance: Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and the Architecture of Collective Dissidence, 1918–1989 as well as the monograph, Housing Cooperative: Politics, Architecture, and Urban Imagination in Vienna, 1904–1934. Sophie is the co-editor of the forthcoming Architecture, Environment, Territory, Essential Writings Since 1850 with Daniel Barber and Irene Cheng. Sophie has published articles and essays in academic journals including Architectural Histories, Architecture Beyond Europe, Ediciones ARQ, and Platform. Currently, she has forthcoming texts in Aggregate and The Journal for the Society of Architectural Historians. In 2020 she was chosen to deliver the Detlef Mertins Memorial Lecture on the History of Modernity at Columbia University, which honors promising research in architectural history. She is the recipient of a Carter Manny Award by the Graham Foundation
Emmanuel Olunkwa is an artist, writer, editor, and filmmaker based in New York. His work brings deep study and surprising connection across culture, fashion, urban landscape, and social ecology. He is a masters candidate in the Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture. His work has been published in Artforum, Garage, Cultured Magazine, Museum of Modern Art, and he is an editor for Pioneer Works The Broadcast and is a co-founder and editor of November Magazine.
Demetra Vogiatzaki is a historian of 18th- century architecture, currently pursuing a PhD in history and theory of architecture at the GSD. Her work focuses on the interplay of architectural theory and praxis with evolving religious, philosophical, and aesthetic theories of dreaming in the Enlightenment. As a doctoral candidate, Demetra has received multiple fellowships and grants (UCLA Ahmanson Research Fellowship, Jens Aubrey Westengard Fund, and A.G.Leventis Foundation grant among others) to conduct research in archives, special collections, libraries and sites across France, Germany, and the US. She is currently a Chateaubriand Fellow in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) at Sorbonne University.
An active member of the Harvard-wide Mental Health Task Force, Demetra worked closely over the past year with Deans Dench and McCavana to formulate concrete proposals for the enhancement of advising structures at the GSAS. She further served for two years as an Arts Fellow for the GSAS Graduate Student Center, solidifying her investment in bottom-up institutional practices that developed during 2009-10, when she represented Greece as a National Contact for the European Architecture Students Assembly. Last summer Demetra worked in a research group led by Professor Erika Naginski on putting together a new pedagogy plan for history and theory classes that could address the challenges of the shift to a virtual environment, while also promoting social and racial justice and equity.
How to Join
Register to attend the event here . Once you have registered, you will be provided with a link to join the lecture via Zoom. This link will also be emailed to you.
The event will also be live streamed to the GSD’s YouTube page . Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speakers in advance of the event, please click here .
Live captioning will be provided during this event. A transcript will be available roughly two weeks after the event, upon request.
This program is co-sponsored by the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and serves as a lead-up event to the Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar entitled “Bodies of Evidence, Bodies of Work, Bodies of Water: Visual and Spatial Narratives for Feminist Historiographies.”
Harvard Design Magazine reveals “Harvard Design Magazine #48: America”
Harvard Design Magazine reveals “Harvard Design Magazine #48: America”
The GSD’s Spring 2021 Public Programs are all virtual and require registration.
Click here to register for Harvard Design Magazine reveals “Harvard Design Magazine #48: America”.
Scroll down to find complete registration instructions and additional information about accessing the GSD’s programs.
Event Description
“A terrible mechanism [is] on the march, its gears multiplying.” So begins the first essay of the 48th issue of Harvard Design Magazine, guest edited by Mark Lee, chair of the department of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and Florencia Rodriguez, editorial director of -Ness Magazine. The issue takes as its theme the slippery and ambiguous figure of “America,” seen through the lens of the built and unbuilt environment. Americanization—once the “terrible mechanism” bent on pressing capitalist values on emerging economies everywhere—is now in retreat, eclipsed by the more urgent domestic concerns of pandemic and climate change, racial injustice and domestic radicalization. The very notion of what constitutes America is ripe for redefinition.
Speakers
Paul Andersen is founder of Independent Architecture, a Denver-based office with projects around the United States. He was appointed a Fulbright Specialist in Architecture, teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and has previously been on the architecture faculties of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and Cornell University. He has been a guest curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and the Biennial of the Americas.
Neeraj Bhatia is a licensed architect and urban designer whose work resides at the intersection of politics, infrastructure, and urbanism. He is an Associate Professor at the California College of the Arts where he also Directs the urbanism research lab, the Urban Works Agency . Bhatia has also held teaching positions at UC Berkeley (as the visiting Esherick Professor), UT Arlington (as the visiting Ralph Hawkins Professor), Cornell University, Rice University, and the University of Toronto. Neeraj is founder of The Open Workshop , a transcalar design-research office examining the negotiation between architecture and its territorial environment. Select distinctions include the Architectural League Young Architects Prize, Emerging Leaders Award from Design Intelligence, and the Canadian Prix de Rome. He is co-editor of books Bracket [Takes Action], The Petropolis of Tomorrow, Bracket [Goes Soft], Arium: Weather + Architecture, and co-author of Pamphlet Architecture 30: Coupling — Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism and New Investigations in Collective Form. Neeraj has a Master degree in Architecture and Urbanism from MIT and a Bachelor of Environmental Studies and Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Waterloo.
Maite Borjabad Lòpez-Pastor is an architect and curator whose work revolves around diverse forms of critical spatial practices, operating across architecture, art and performance. As Associate Curator of Architecture & Design at the Art Institute of Chicago she takes care of the contemporary collection leading research initiatives and acquisitions and has curated a number of significant installations and exhibitions including PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society (2019), My Building, Your Design: Seven Portraits by David Hartt (2018), Past Forward (2017-ongoing) and Designs for Different Futures (2019-2021) co-curated with the PMA and the Walker Art Center. Other projects as independent curator include the exhibition and book Scenographies of Power: From the State of Exception to the Spaces of Exception (2017) at La Casa Encendida, Madrid or Wet Protocols (2018) at MAO, Slovenia. She is currently Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and has previously taught at Columbia University, and UIC. Maite holds a Bachelor and Master of Architecture by the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and a MS. in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture by Columbia University, New York. Her upcoming exhibition with artist duo Basel&Ruanne will be opening at The Art Institute of Chicago in July 2021.
Mark Lee is the Chair of the Department of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a principal and founding partner of the Los Angeles-based architecture firm Johnston Marklee. Since its establishment in 1998, Johnston Marklee has been recognized internationally with over 50 major honors and awards. A book on the work of the firm entitled House Is a House Is a House Is a House Is a House was published by Birkhauser in 2016, and monographs include 2G N. 67 (2014) and El Croquis N. 198 (2019). Mark has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Princeton University, the University of California, Los Angeles, the Technical University of Berlin, and ETH Zurich. He has held the Cullinan Chair at Rice University and the Frank Gehry International Chair at the University of Toronto. The firm’s work spans thirteen countries and resides in the permanent collections of several museums. Recent projects include the Menil Drawing Institute, in Houston, Texas; a renovation of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and the new UCLA Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios in Culver City, California. Together with partner Sharon Johnston, Mark served as Co-Artistic Director for the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial.
Marc Norman, LF ’15, is the founder of consulting firm Ideas and Action and associate professor of practice at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Teaching courses in real estate finance and economic development, he also advises municipal, private, and nonprofit clients on housing and development.
Florencia Rodriguez is an architect, and has dedicated her career to writing and editing. In 2014 she received the Loeb Fellowship from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 2010, she founded PLOT magazine, which continued to direct until 2017. Under her stewardship, PLOT quickly became one of the leading publications in the region. In early 2017 Florencia embarked on a new project with Pablo Gerson, the editorial platform Lots of architecture -publishers, which main product is the periodical publication –NESS. On Architecture, Life and Urban Culture.
Rodriguez was curated several exhibitions and organized international symposia. She was a Professor of Landscape Theory and Technology Theory in the Torcuato Di Tella University graduate programs and has taught theory courses at other universities such as Universidad del Litoral and The Boston Architectural College.
She has received awards for her editorial work and published a number of articles in books and specialized media like Domus, Oris, summa +, Arquine, a+u, or Uncube, among others. She has been invited to guest edit the next issue of the Harvard Design Magazine, together with Mark Lee.
How to Join
Register to attend the event here . Once you have registered, you will be provided with a link to join the lecture via Zoom. This link will also be emailed to you.
The event will also be live streamed to the GSD’s YouTube page . Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speakers in advance of the event, please click here .
Live captioning will be provided during this event. A transcript will be available roughly two weeks after the event, upon request.
Rebecca Choi, “White Man’s Got a God Complex”
Rebecca Choi, “White Man’s Got a God Complex”
The GSD’s Spring 2021 Public Programs are all virtual and require registration.
Click here to register for Rebecca Choi, “White Man’s Got a God Complex.”
Scroll down to find complete registration instructions and additional information about accessing the GSD’s programs.
Event Description
In 1976, Chicago developer Charles Shaw bought nearly one million cubic feet of air above the Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art for 17 million dollars, relieving the Museum of their debt problems. Bought under New York City’s Transfer of Development Rights, Shaw used his rights to air space in the construction of a 56-floor apartment tower on 53rd Street. Mayor Beame hailed the “self-help project” a success, claiming that the transaction showed “how government and the private sector can cooperate in achieving the common goal of improving lives in the city.” Transfer of air rights was not new, however the relationship between architects, Harlem, and MoMA in presenting experimental, bureaucratized architectural visions to the public is specific to the late 1960s. This talk discusses these visions and the context of Harlem, where a range of surreptitious and highly choreographed mechanisms of abstraction were tested out and exhibited at MoMA in a demonstration plan for the neighborhood in 1967.
Audience members are eligible for 1.5 AICP Certification Maintenance credits and/or 1.5 AIA Continuing Education Learning Units after attending this event. Please visit the AICP website or AIA website for more information.
Speaker
Dr. Rebecca Choi is a postdoctoral fellow and visiting lecturer at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta Institute) at the ETH Zürich. Her research considers how movements for racial justice have had a pivotal role in the making of urban America. Choi is currently working on a book project which expands and deepens her doctoral work, Black Architectures: Race, Pedagogy and Practice, 1957–68. Developed through oral histories and alter-institutional archives, Black Architectures is an atlas of resistance that pushes for greater intersectionality between architecture, critical race theory and environmental studies. She has contributed writing to Harvard Design Magazine, The Avery Review, ARDETH Journal, and Places Journal.
How to Join
Register to attend the lecture here . Once you have registered, you will be provided with a link to join the lecture via Zoom. This link will also be emailed to you.
The event will also be live streamed to the GSD’s YouTube page . Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speakers in advance of the event, please click here .
Live captioning will be provided during this event. A transcript will be available roughly two weeks after the event, upon request.
CANCELLED: Achille Mbembe in conversation with Joshua Comaroff and John May
CANCELLED: Achille Mbembe in conversation with Joshua Comaroff and John May
The GSD’s Spring 2021 Public Programs are all virtual and require registration.
The Harvard GSD public lecture with Achille Mbembe has been postponed due to unforeseen circumstances. We hope to reschedule this lecture to Fall 2021. Please stay tuned for information about our upcoming events.
Scroll down to find complete registration instructions and additional information about accessing the GSD’s programs.
Speakers
ProfessorAchille Mbembe, born in Cameroon, obtained his Ph.D in History at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1989 and a D.E.A. in Political Science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Paris). He was Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, New York (1988-1991), a Senior Research Fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C. (1991-1992), Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania (1992-1996), Executive Secretary of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in Dakar, Senegal (1996-2000). He was also a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley (2001), at Yale University (2003), at the University of California at Irvine (2004-2005), at Duke University (2006-2011) and at Harvard University (2012).
He is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Paris VIII (France) and Universite Catholique de Louvain (Belgium). He has also held the Albert the Great Chair at the University of Koln (2019) and was an Honorary Professor at the Jakob Fugger-Zentrum, University of Augsburg (Germany). He has been awarded numerous awards including the 2015 Geswichter Scholl-Preis, the 2018 Gerda Henkel Award and the 2018 Ernst Bloch Award.
A co-founder of Les Ateliers de la pensee de Dakar and a major figure in the emergence of a new wave of French critical theory, he has written extensively on contemporary politics and philosophy, including On the Postcolony (University of California Press, 2001), Critique of Black Reason (Duke University Press, 2016), Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019) and Out of the Dark Night. Essays on Decolonization (Columbia University Press, 2020). Originally written in French, his books and numerous articles are translated in thirteen languages (English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Slovenian, Danish, Swedish, Romanian, Arabic, Chinese). He has an A1 rating from the South African National Research Foundation and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Joshua Comaroff, MArch ’01, MLA ’01, is Assistant Professor in Social Sciences at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Comaroff studied literature and creative writing at Amherst College before joining the Master of Architecture and Master of Landscape Architecture programs at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he worked as part of Rem Koolhaas’ Harvard Project on the City. In 2009, Comaroff completed a PhD in cultural geography at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), writing on the subject of haunted landscapes and urban memory in Singapore. He has published writing about architecture, urbanism, and politics, with an Asian focus. His articles have been published in Public Culture, Cultural Geographies, Journal of Architectural Education, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, CITY, and elsewhere. He is also a regular contributor to the Harvard Design Magazine.
Together with his partner, Ms Ong Ker-Shing, Comaroff oversees Lekker Architects, a multidisciplinary design practice in Singapore. Comaroff works across a broad creative spectrum, with a special emphasis on design for the arts, for children, and for seniors. He is the recipient of Singapore’s President’s Design Award, and Harvard’s Wheelwright Travelling Fellowship. Together with Ms Ong, he is the author of Horror in Architecture.
John May, MARch ’02, RAE ’10, is founding partner, with Zeina Koreitem, in MILLIØNS, an award-winning, Los Angeles-based design practice, and assistant professor of architecture at the Harvard Graduate school of design, where he served as director of the Master in Design Studies program from 2015-2020. Recently selected as the winner of an international competition to reimagine the east wing of I.M. Pei’s Everson Musum, in Syracuse, NY, MILLIØNS’ work includes completed and ongoing projects in California, New York, Germany, and in the 2020 Taipei Biennial. May is the author of Signal. Image. Architecture. (Columbia, 2019) and co-editor, with Zeynep Çelik Alexander, of Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice (Minnesota, 2020). May previously taught at MIT, UCLA, SCI-Arc, the University of Toronto, and served as D. Kenneth Sargent Visiting Professor at Syracuse University, and National Endowment for the Humanities Visiting Professor in Architecture at Rice University.
International Womxn’s Week Keynote Address: Ananya Roy, “Undoing Property: Feminist Struggle in the Time of Abolition”
International Womxn’s Week Keynote Address: Ananya Roy, “Undoing Property: Feminist Struggle in the Time of Abolition”
The GSD’s Spring 2021 Public Programs are all virtual and require registration.
Click here to register for the International Womxn’s Week Keynote Address: Ananya Roy .
For the full list of International Womxn’s Week activities, please visit the Womxn in Design website .
Scroll down to find complete registration instructions for this program and additional information about accessing the GSD’s programs.
Event Description
Renewed uprising against the death-making apparatus of police and prison demands that we attend to the relationship between property and personhood, specifically to how the theft of land is facilitated by the theft of life. This talk, given on the occasion of International Womxn’s Day and during the week that marks the first anniversary of Breonna Taylor’s killing, focuses on the propertization of the gendered subject in the making of whiteness. The time of abolition, Roy argues, requires the undoing of gender-property logics. What does this entail within the university? Speaking as “unbearable presence,” that which cannot be accommodated within the university’s diversity regimes, Roy foregrounds modes of refusal and rebellion inspired by Black and postcolonial feminism. In particular, she shares, and calls for, forms of abolitionist struggle that challenge the university as propertied/policed order and stage the disinheritance of whiteness. To wage feminist struggle in the time of abolition is to refuse to “fit under the lease.”
Womxn in Design ‘s fifth annual International Womxn’s Week convenes a weeklong series of events that gathers members of the Harvard GSD community and beyond to celebrate and cultivate new ways of thinking about gender and power. In March 2021, the International Womxn’s Week Keynote Address and subsequent events will explore the theme of GRASSROOTS.
Speaker
Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography and The Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is founding Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy , which advances scholarship concerned with displacement and dispossession in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the world. Ananya’s work has focused on urban transformations and land grabs as well as on global capital and predatory financialization. With enduring theoretical commitments to postcolonial critique, feminist thought, and the Black Radical Tradition, she refuses the whiteness of canons of knowledge, forging theory and pedagogy attentive to historical difference. Ananya’s current research is concerned with “racial banishment,” the expulsion of working-class communities of color from cities through racialized policing and other forms of state-organized violence. She leads a National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network on Housing Justice in Unequal Cities and a Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on Sanctuary Spaces: Reworlding Humanism. Ananya was named a Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation in 2020.
Follow Ananya Roy on Twitter at @ananyaucla , and follow the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy at @challengeineq .
How to Join
Register to attend the lecture here . Once you have registered, you will be provided with a link to join the lecture via Zoom. This link will also be emailed to you.
The event will also be live streamed to the GSD’s YouTube page . Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speakers in advance of the event, please click here .
Live captioning will be provided during this event. A transcript will be available roughly two weeks after the event, upon request.
Small Town Urbanism in the 21st Century: Andrew Freear, Faranak Miraftab, and Todd Okolichany
Small Town Urbanism in the 21st Century: Andrew Freear, Faranak Miraftab, and Todd Okolichany
The GSD’s Spring 2021 Public Programs are all virtual and require registration.
Click here to register for “Small Town Urbanism in the 21st Century” .
Scroll down to find complete registration instructions and additional information about accessing the GSD’s programs.
Event Description
This program brings together three unique perspectives on the idea of “Small Town Urbanism”: Andrew Freear, Director of Rural Studio at Auburn University; Faranak Miraftab, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and Todd Okolichany, Director of Planning and Urban Design for the City of Asheville, North Carolina. The panel will be moderated by GSD faculty members Eve Blau and Diane Davis.
Climate change, the pandemic, telecommuting, and accelerating land costs in large cities have fueled a slow but noticeable relocation of people and services to ex-urban locales. The retreat from large cities offers opportunities to design and plan for rural and regional locations that have routinely been overlooked by investors and design & planning professionals alike. In order to do so, we need a better understanding of the major social transformations, spatial conditions, employment challenges, governing capacities, land market logics, and ecological circumstances in those smaller cities and towns that form the territorial landscape outside the large metropolises that have garnered so much attention in the contemporary `urban age.’ Recent debates in geography, sociology, and urbanism have sought to question the conceptual significance of the rural-urban divide, a move that may make sense in refocusing attention on the ways that resource extraction and other activities in the urban “hinterlands” are central to processes of urbanization. Yet the embrace of such a posture can have the unintended effect of erasing small towns from the collective imagination of urban planners, architects, and urban designers. Even among those who purposefully turn their attention to the countryside, as with Rem Koolhaas’s newest experimental foray, the tendency is to define this rather abstract territorial domain as everything that is “non-urban,” and for some, to see it as an open territory for “rationalization….with fantasies of automation and largescale visionary transformations” (Bathla, 2020: 946). But small towns need examination in their own terms, not as sites to be eclipsed in the search for new territorial logics.
This event is supported by the 50th Anniversary of Urban Design Lectureship Fund.
Audience members are eligible for 1.5 AICP Certification Maintenance credits after attending this event. Please visit the AICP website for more information.
Speakers
Andrew Freear, LF ’18, from Yorkshire, England, is the Director of Rural Studio, Auburn University.
For over two decades Freear has lived in rural Newbern, Alabama, a town with a population of 187, where he runs a program that questions the conventional education and role of architects. His students have designed and built more than 200 community buildings, homes, and parks in their under-resourced community. He is a teacher, builder, advocate and liaison between local authorities, community partners, and students.
Freear’s work has been published extensively, and he regularly lectures around the world. He has designed and built exhibits at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, the Whitney Biennial, the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, as well as the Milan Triennale and the Venice Biennale.
His honors include the Ralph Erskine Award, the Global Awards for Sustainable Architecture and the Architecture Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Freear was a 2018 Loeb Fellow at Harvard University and most recently received the Presidents Medal from the Architectural League of New York, the League’s highest honor.
Faranak Miraftab is Professor of Urban and Regional Planning with joint appointments in Women and Gender Studies and Geography at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her established transnational feminist urban scholarship focuses on urbanization, citizenship, and insurgent practices of marginalized people based on class, race, and gender in many areas of the world—United States, Middle East, Southern Africa, and Latin America. Her most recent book, Global Heartland: Displaced Labor, Transnational Lives, and Local Placemaking , received the American Sociological Association’s Global & Transnational Sociology Award and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning’s Davidoff book award, and it was a Society for the Study of Social Problems C. Wright Mills book award finalist. Miraftab is currently working on three collaborative projects on intersectional conceptualization of gendered urbanization in global South, co-production of knowledge by academics and urban movements, and trans-local and transnational emergent movements that experiment with and offer alternatives to neoliberal urban policies.
Todd Okolichany serves as the Director of Planning and Urban Design for the City of Asheville, North Carolina where he is responsible for leading sustainable growth, promoting equitable development and shaping the built environment. While at the City Todd has led the implementation of projects that have addressed long-standing inequities in the community, such as the award winning Living Asheville Comprehensive Plan , and has advocated for inclusive prosperity for the city’s diverse community. Prior to moving to Asheville he oversaw the City of Fort Lauderdale’s long-range planning program. Todd also previously worked for an internationally renowned urban planning and architecture firm in New York City, where he received a Master of Science degree in planning from Pratt Institute.
How to Join
Register to attend the lecture here . Once you have registered, you will be provided with a link to join the lecture via Zoom. This link will also be emailed to you.
The event will also be live streamed to the GSD’s YouTube page . Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speakers in advance of the event, please click here .
Live captioning will be provided during this event. A transcript will be available roughly two weeks after the event, upon request.
Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, “The Miasmist: George E. Waring, Jr. and Landscapes of Public Health”
Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, “The Miasmist: George E. Waring, Jr. and Landscapes of Public Health”
The GSD’s Spring 2021 Public Programs are all virtual and require registration.
Scroll down to find complete registration instructions and additional information about accessing the GSD’s programs.
Event Description
In 1867, nineteenth-century sanitary engineer George E. Waring, Jr. (1833–1898) published an influential manual entitled “Draining for Profit, Draining for Health,” reflecting the obsessions of his gilded age—wealth, health, and miasma. Even as the germ theory emerged, Waring supported the anti-contagionist miasma theory, positing that disease spread through the air as a poisonous vapor, emerging from damp soil. He applied his knowledge of farm drainage to an urban theory of public health, with a drainage plan for Central Park; a sewerage system for Memphis; a transformation of New York City’s Department of Street Cleaning; and a sanitation plan for Havana, Cuba. Waring’s battle against miasma was an endeavor to transform both the physical landscape and its inhabitants’ morality; his brilliant failure (in scientific terms) is worth reassessing in light of the public health and equity issues arising from today’s pandemic and climate crises.
Speaker
Catherine Seavitt Nordenson , AIA ASLA, is a professor and director of the graduate landscape architecture program at the Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York. A registered architect and landscape architect, she is a graduate of the Cooper Union and Princeton University, a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, and a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship for research in Brazil. Her work explores adaptation to climate change in urban environments and the novel transformation of landscape restoration practices. She also examines the intersection of political power, environmental activism, and public health, particularly as seen through the design of equitable public space and policy. Her books include Depositions: Roberto Burle Marx and Public Landscapes under Dictatorship (University of Texas Press, 2018); Structures of Coastal Resilience (Island Press, 2018); Waterproofing New York (Urban Research Press, 2016); and On the Water: Palisade Bay (Hatje Cantz, 2010). Her essays have been published widely, including the journals Architectural Review, Artforum, Avery Review, Harvard Design Magazine, JoLA, LA+, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and Topos.
How to Join
Register to attend the lecture here . Once you have registered, you will be provided with a link to join the lecture via Zoom. This link will also be emailed to you.
The event will also be live streamed to the GSD’s YouTube page . Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speakers in advance of the event, please click here .
Live captioning will be provided during this event. A transcript will be available roughly two weeks after the event, upon request.
Black Radical Space: The Black School and Bryan C. Lee Jr in conversation
Black Radical Space: The Black School and Bryan C. Lee Jr in conversation
The GSD’s Spring 2021 Public Programs are all virtual and require registration.
Click here to register for Black Radical Space: The Black School and Bryan C. Lee Jr in conversation .
Scroll down to find complete registration instructions and additional information about accessing the GSD’s programs.
Event Description
Designer and activist Bryan C. Lee, Jr will convene with the founders of The Black School for a conversation about Black radical pedagogical experiments, past, present, and future. GSD community members Toshiko Mori and Tara Oluwafemi will join for the second half of the program.
Audience members are eligible for 1.5 AIA Continuing Education Learning Units after attending this event. Please visit the AIA website for more information.
Speakers
Based on our commitment to community building and our core principles of Black love, wellness, and self-determination, The Black School ’s mission is to promote and extend the legacy of art in Black radical histories by providing innovative education alternatives centered in Black love. Through youth art workshops, community-wide events/programing, and our student-staffed art and design studio, we use art to transform social realities while celebrating Black people’s history and the beauty and ingenuity of our ever-evolving culture.
The Black School (TBS) is an experimental art school teaching Black/POC students and allies to become agents of change through art workshops on radical Black politics and public interventions that address local community needs. TBS was founded by Joseph Cuillier III and Shani Peters in 2016. We are socially engaged artists, designers, and educators with a combined 20 years of relevant experience working at the intersections of K-12/university teaching, art, design, and activism. In five years we have served over 400 students, facilitated over 100 workshops and classes, produced three Black Love Fests , collaborated with more than 40 professional artists, trained and employed 16 design apprentices, and partnered with over 50 organizations.With this foundation of programmatic success, we are now working towards our ultimate goal to build a Black Art School in Joseph’s hometown of New Orleans, LA.
Bryan C. Lee Jr. is the Design Principal of Colloqate and a national Design Justice Advocate. Lee has twelve years of experience in the field of architecture Lee is the founding organizer of the Design Justice Platform and organized the Design As Protest National Day of Action. Bryan has led two award-winning architecture and design programs for high school students through the Arts Council of New Orleans and the National Organization of Minority Architects.
How to Join
Register to attend the lecture here . Once you have registered, you will be provided with a link to join the lecture via Zoom. This link will also be emailed to you.
The event will also be live-streamed to the GSD’s YouTube page . Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speakers in advance of the event, please click here .
Live captioning will be provided during this event. A transcript will be available roughly two weeks after the event, upon request.
Cecilia Puga and Paula Velasco, “(Some) Characters in Search of an Author”
Cecilia Puga and Paula Velasco, “(Some) Characters in Search of an Author”
The GSD’s Spring 2021 Public Programs are all virtual and require registration.
Scroll down to find complete registration instructions and additional information about accessing the GSD’s programs.
Audience members are eligible for 1.5 AIA Continuing Education Learning Units after attending this event. Please visit the AIA website for more information.
Speaker
CECILIA PUGA – PAULA VELASCO ARQUITECTURA connects independent professionals from various disciplines and specialties. Its structure and expertise are adapted to the specific areas in which it operates, in order to provide innovative and high-standard professional services at different scales and fields. Through different international competitions, the studio has been in charge of the new headquarters of Chile’s Ministry of Cultures and Heritage, the infrastructure design project for Queulat National Park, and the masterplan and preliminary project for Punta Arenas’ International Passenger Terminal. Recently, together with architect Smiljan Radic, they obtained the first place for the design of the Chilean Pavilion for Expo Dubai 2020.
CECILIA PUGA
Director and founding partner of CECILIA PUGA – PAULA VELASCO ARQUITECTURA.
Architect, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile 1990. Since 1995 she has developed her professional practice independently in Santiago, where she has carried out design projects at different scales and programs, from single-family homes (most notably the House in Bahia Azul), to collective housing, educational and industrial equipment, and urban design such as the renovation of public spaces in Cerro Toro. She has developed her academic activity at Universidad Católica de Santiago, at Austin’s University of Texas (2007 and 2015), GSD Harvard (2009) and at BIAarch in Barcelona (2011) and ETH Zurich’s School of Architecture (2017-2019),
PAULA VELASCO
Director and founding partner of CECILIA PUGA – PAULA VELASCO ARQUITECTURA.
Architect, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile 2005. Master on Science Emergent Technologies and Design, Architectural Association UK, 2010. Undergraduate and Master’s Professor at Universidad Católica de Chile’s School of Architecture.
How to Join
Register to attend the lecture here . Once you have registered, you will be provided with a link to join the lecture via Zoom. This link will also be emailed to you.
The event will also be live streamed to the GSD’s YouTube page . Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speakers in advance of the event, please click here .
Live captioning will be provided during this event. A transcript will be available roughly two weeks after the event, upon request.
Think like a Historian, Imagine like a Designer: A Conversation on Landscape History and Design Education
Think like a Historian, Imagine like a Designer: A Conversation on Landscape History and Design Education
The GSD’s Spring 2021 Public Programs are all virtual and require registration.
Scroll down to find complete registration instructions and additional information about accessing the GSD’s programs.
Event Description
History is a manner of thinking about the world, grounded in the places we design, construct, and inhabit. Design offers the opportunity to re-imagine the world around us, today and for the future. We might draw from history, or draw upon it; certainly, it is to be hoped that we are drawn to it, as designers and historians. The purpose of landscape history—not reducible to memory nor timelines nor styles—is to produce and share knowledge of how we have come to be who and where we are. We will gather across studios we collectively inhabit to draw attention to and lessons from the design of history. We will investigate the relationship of history as a craft and design as a mode of inquiry. As landscape historians who have chosen to teach and do their scholarship within the GSD and Harvard design community, we investigate the role of history and its methods and narratives in the understanding of place and cultural relationships to site and landscape. By thinking like a historian, designers might re-imagine both their future and our collective future.
Speakers
Thaisa Way is the Program Director for Garden & Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, a Harvard University research institution located in Washington DC. She teaches and researches history, theory, and design in the College of Built Environments, University of Washington. She was awarded the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture at the American Academy in Rome in 2016. Dr. Way’s publications focus on questions of history, gender, and shaping the landscape. Her book, Unbounded Practices: Women, Landscape Architecture, and Early Twentieth Century Design (2009, University of Virginia Press) was awarded the J.B. Jackson Book Award. Her book From Modern Space to Urban Ecological Design: the Landscape Architecture of Richard Haag (UW Press 2015) explores post-industrial cities and the practice of landscape architecture. She co-edited a book with Ken Yocom, Ben Spencer, and Jeff Hou, Now Urbanism: The Future City is Here (Routledge 2014). River Cities/ City Rivers (Harvard Press 2018) is a collection of essays contributing to urban environmental history. Her latest book is GGN 1999-2018 (Timber Press, 2018). Dr. Way is focused on a broad effort to challenge the canon of landscape architecture to engage with the inscriptions of race, gender, and class on the profession, practice, and pedagogy of the field.
Edward A. Eigen is Senior Lecturer in the History of Landscape and Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. A historian of the long nineteenth century, in the European and Anglo-American contexts, his research and teaching focus on relationships in and between humanistic and scholarly traditions and the natural sciences and allied practices of knowledge production. With a background in art history, a professional training in design, and a doctorate in the history and theory of architecture from MIT, he is at home with and seeks to productively defamiliarize images, texts, and topographies of intricate description. A proponent of the Montaignian essay tradition, his writings, while ultimately grounded in the uncertain terrain of “landscape,” have ranged from questions of botanical and zoological systematics, the creation and loss of great and not so great museums and libraries, the history of the weather, and acts of plagiarism in the founding documents of architecture theory. All of these studies engage in questions of historical narrative and the species of evidence upon which it depends and/or invents along the way.
Eigen was an assistant professor at the Princeton University School of Architecture, where he was an Old Dominion Faculty Fellow, and the recipient of a university-wide graduate mentoring award, and the David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Grant for his research on architectural machines. His article on the prestidigitator Robert-Houdin’s invention of the doorbell will appear as “Controlling: Comfort in the Modern Home,” in Architecture and Technics: A Theoretical Field Guide to Practice. At the GSD, Eigen co-organized the colloquium “Claiming Landscape as Architecture,” which appeared as a special issue of Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, of which he is an Associate Editor. His recent book, On Accident: Episodes in Architecture and Landscape (MIT Press), seeks to reclaim and provide forms of interpretability for unfamiliar incidents and artifacts that fall outside the canon. His current monograph project, Beyond the Rose Garden, examines real and emblematic landscapes and architectures associated with the administrations of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, including the “grassy knoll,” the Highway Beautification Act, Watergate, and the Bicentennial Time Capsule.
Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto is a garden historian and critic. She is the editor of The Culture of Cultivation: Recovering the Roots of Landscape Architecture (2020) and of Foreign Trends in American Gardens: A History of Exchange, Adaptation, and Reception (2017). In 2010 Fabiani Giannetto received the Society of Architectural Historians’ Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Book of the Year Award for her first monograph, Medici Gardens: From Making to Design (2008). In the book she questions the origin of a design process that is often taken for granted and casts doubt on the existence of the Italian garden as a timeless and consistent type, an issue which she continues to explore in her most recent manuscript, Georgic Grounds and Gardens from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic World, which examines the transmission, translation and adaptation of agricultural, horticultural and design knowledge from early modern Veneto to colonial America.
Fabiani Giannetto’s research has been supported by two fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks, the American Philosophical Society, the Mellon Foundation and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library. She has served as member of the editorial board of the journal Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes and has lectured in Switzerland, Germany, Italy, England, and the United States.
How to Join
Register to attend the panel discussion here . Once you have registered, you will be provided with a link to join the lecture via Zoom. This link will also be emailed to you.
The event will also be live streamed to the GSD’s YouTube page . Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speakers in advance of the event, please click here .
Live captioning will be provided during this event. A transcript will be available roughly two weeks after the event, upon request.