Conservation in a Shifting Landscape: The Future of Modern Architecture in South Asia

Event Information

All are invited to watch and participate online in this program by tuning into this page at the noted start time. No pre-registration is required. Online audience members will be able to submit questions throughout the event using Vimeo’s Q&A function. Harvard ID holders are also welcome to attend programs in person, except where an event is listed as online only. Live captioning will be provided during this event livestream. Learn more about accessibility services at public programs.

Event Description

The period of 1950 to 1980 saw exemplary examples of architecture in the South Asian region, some of which are being celebrated this year in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York’s first transnational show focused on the region, titled “The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985 .” While these projects were an integral part of the nation-building agenda and the construction of national identity at the time, more recently, these buildings have begun to come under threat with political and social shifts in the region.

With the passage of time, the importance of these buildings is becoming more evident, albeit among a small group of academics and practitioners in the South Asian region. Recently, The Hall of Nations—Raj Rewal and Mahendra Raj’s critically acclaimed, postcolonial project known for being the world’s first and largest space-frame structure built in concrete—was demolished overnight. This act invited much outrage and triggered an entire debate on what the architectural and cultural significance of such projects, which many might call “works of art of national importance,” is in contemporary times. Ever since, Louis Kahn’s IIM Ahmedabad dormitories and Charles Correa’s Kala Academy, among several other buildings, have similarly come under threat.

At this critical juncture, an urgent question has emerged: How might we redefine what constitutes architectural history and “heritage,” given that the current categorization of “heritage” sets a minimum time horizon of 100 years? Why does an act like demolition or proposed destruction of ‘modern’ buildings not spark more of a public outcry? How can modern buildings be rethought not only as historical remnants but active backdrops for contemporary life? What might qualify as “works of art of national importance” today?

More importantly, what narratives might we develop to anchor the importance of such buildings in the public awareness once again, so that transitionary political agendas and bureaucratic constraints are not left to determine their fate? What strategies and interpretations must the practice of conservation devise to include to help cope with an increasingly contested and transitionary landscape that characterizes the region now?

“Conservation in a Time of Transition/ Shifting Landscape” is an event that aims to convene leading scholars working on architecture in South Asia to discuss this very question. This event hopes to begin the process of reconceptualizing conservation practice in the face of such threats and current attitudes. It also aims to celebrate and build upon MoMA’s current exhibition focused on the architectural history of the region between 1947 and 1985, which throws light on these endangered projects, illustrating their importance not just in the region’s history, but also their contributions to the fields of architecture and the culture of building in South Asia and beyond.

Schedule

Due to unforeseen circumstances, Hitesh Hathi and Sunil Khilnani are unable to participate in this event.

Introduction
Rahul Mehrotra
John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization, Harvard GSD

Presentations                                                                                                            
Martino Stierli
The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art

Kathleen James-Chakraborty
Art History and Cultural Policy, University College Dublin

Panel Discussion 
Moderated by Eve Blau
Adjunct Professor of the History and Theory of Urban Form and Design, Director of Research, Harvard GSD

Closing
Rahul Mehrotra

Speakers

Eve Blau teaches the History and Theory of Urban Form and Design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where she is Director of Research and Co-Director of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative. She has published widely on modern architecture, urbanism, and the productive intersection of urbanism and media. Her books include Baku: Oil and Urbanism (2018); The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934 / Rotes Wien: Architektur 1919-1934. Stadt-Raum-Politik (2014/1999); Project Zagreb: Transition as Condition, Strategy, Practice (2007); Shaping the Great City: Modern Architecture in Central Europe (2000); Architecture and Cubism (2001/1997); Architecture and Its Image: Four Centuries of Architectural Representation (1989).Her books have received numerous awards including the 2019 DAM Architectural Book Award, 2015 Victor Adler Prize, 2001 Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award, 2000 Spiro Kostof Book Award, 2000 Austrian Cultural Institute Book Prize. In 2015 Blau was awarded the Victor Adler State Prize by the Republic of Austria for her contributions to the history of social movements; in 2018 she was named a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians. 

Kathleen James-Chakraborty is professor of art history at University College Dublin. She is currently also an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. Her books include Architecture since 1400 (Minnesota, 2014) and Modernism as Memory: Building Identity in the Federal Republic of Germany (Minnesota, 2016) as well as the edited collections Bauhaus Culture from Weimar to the Cold War (Minnesota, 2006) and India in Art in Ireland (Routledge, 2016).  In 2021 she was been awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant for a project entitled Expanding Agency: Women, Race, and the Global Dissemination of Modern Architecture.

Rahul Mehrotra is Professor of Urban Design and Planning and the John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He is the  founder principal of RMA Architects which has studios in Mumbai and Boston. In 2018 RMA Architects were awarded the Venice Biennale juror’s ‘Special Mention’ for ‘three projects that address issues of Intimacy and empathy, gently diffusing social boundaries and hierarchies’. In 2012-2015, he led a Harvard University-wide research project with Professor Diana Eck, called The Kumbh Mela: Mapping the Ephemeral Mega City. This work was published as a book in 2014 and the research extended in 2017 in the form of a book titled Does Permanence Matter? Mehrotra’s also co – authored a book is  titled Taj Mahal : Multiple Narratives which was published in Dec 2017. Mehrotra’s most recent books are titled Working in Mumbai (2020) and The Kinetic City and other essays ( 2021). The former a reflection on his practice evolved through its association with the city of Bombay/Mumbai. The second book presents Mehrotra’s writings over the last thirty years and illustrates his long-term engagement with and analysis of urbanism in India. This work has given rise to a new conceptualization of the city which Mehrotra calls the Kinetic City. 

Martino Stierli is The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, a role he assumed in March 2015. Stierli oversees the wide-ranging program of special exhibitions, installations, and acquisitions of the Department of Architecture and Design. He is the author of Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity and the Representation of Space (Yale University Press, 2018) and Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film (Getty Research Institute, 2013). He has organized and co-curated exhibitions on a variety of topics, including the international traveling exhibition Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and The Architecture of Hedonism: Three Villas in the Island of Capri, which was included in the 14th Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2014. At MoMA, he has curated the exhibitions Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980 (with Vladimir Kulić), Renew, Reuse, Recycle: Recent Architecture from China (with Evangelos Kotsioris), and The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947-1985 (with Anoma Pieris and Sean Anderson). Stierli also oversaw the installation of the new Architecture and Design collection galleries in the expanded MoMA, which opened in October 2019, and curated numerous collection installations.

Anne Lacaton

Event Information

The guest speaker for this event will be joining us virtually. All are invited to watch and participate online in this program by tuning into this page at the noted start time. No pre-registration is required.  Online audience members will be able to submit questions throughout the event using Vimeo’s Q&A function. If you would like to submit questions for the speaker in advance of the event, please click here. Harvard ID holders are also welcome to attend programs in person, except where an event is listed as online only. Live captioning will be provided during this event livestream. Learn more about accessibility services at public programs.

This event recording is also available to watch with audio description.

Event Description

French architect Anne Lacaton will deliver the inaugural Jaqueline Tyrwhitt Urban Design Lecture. Lacaton and partner Jean-Philippe Vassal received the 2021 Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor.

Audience members who attend this event in its entirety may be eligible for continuing education credits from AIA. Please reach out to [email protected] for more information.

Speaker

Anne Lacaton (1955, Saint-Pardoux, France) and Jean-Philippe Vassal met in the late 1970s during their formal architecture training at École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et de Paysage de Bordeaux. They established Lacaton & Vassal in Paris (1987), and have since demonstrated boldness through their design of new buildings and transformative projects. For over three decades, they have designed private and social housing, cultural and academic institutions, public space, and urban strategies. The duo’s architecture reflects their advocacy of social justice and sustainability, by prioritizing a generosity of space and freedom of use through economical and ecological materials.

Lacaton is an associate professor of Architecture and Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich (Zurich, Switzerland, since 2017), and a visiting professor at Polytechnic University of Madrid, Master in Housing (Madrid, Spain, since 2007). She has been a visiting professor at Delft University of Technology (Delft, Netherlands, 2016–2017) and Technische Hochschule Nürnberg Georg Simon Ohm (Nürnberg, Germany, 2014); was the Design Critic in Architecture (2015) and the Kenzo Tange Visiting Chair in Architecture and Urban Planning (2011) at Harvard Graduate School of Design (Cambridge, MA); and the Clarkson Chair at the University of Buffalo (Buffalo, NY, 2013). She served on the LafargeHolcim Awards jury for Europe (2017) and will be a member of the 2021 jury later this year.

Small Infrastructures

Event Information
Please visit the UC Berkeley CED website for information on how to attend this event.

To submit questions during the event, navigate to Slido.com and enter event code: #ARCHevent

Event Description

In March 2021, the Biden Administration released the American Jobs Plan, earmarking $213B for “quality” and “affordable” housing, yet the bill lacks specificity on how houses are to be built. Here housing’s problem is split into two: a social one of accessibility and equity, and a material one of wood, metal, and rocks. Architects can play a unique role in bridging abstract policy ambitions to real construction as these connections are made every day in practice.   

Although accessible housing has been cast in many forms, accessory dwelling units (ADUs) have been a catalyst for including architects in direct policy development. For the first time, cities are directly contracting with architects to provide designs for private property through pre-approved ADU programs. These programs reflect a plurality of ideas, though without rigorous consideration for how the costs of site work, labor, materials, and energy make quality housing sustainable.  

Small Infrastructures is an exhibition of ADU designs that uses the economics of building assembly as the groundwork for experimentation. Ten architects teaching at Harvard GSD and Berkeley CED consider the overlaps between academia, where cost is often external to conceptual work, and practice, where budgeting is an integral task. 

Curated by Michelle Chang and Rudabeh Pakravan 

Participants

• Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu are Founding Partners of Neri&Hu Design and Research Office and John C. Portman Design Critics in Architecture at Harvard GSD.
• Sean Canty, MArch ‚Äô14, is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Harvard GSD and the founder of Studio Sean Canty (SSC).
• Yasmin Vobis is co-founder of Ultramoderne and an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Harvard GSD.
• Andrew Atwood, MArch ‚Äô07, is an Associate Professor of Architecture at UC Berkeley and a partner in the architecture firm, First Office.
• Lisa Iwamoto MArch ‚Äô93 and Craig Scott MArch ‚Äô94 are partners at IwamotoScott Architecture. Lisa is Professor and Chair of Architecture at UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design (CED) and Craig is Professor at CCA.
• Mark Anderson, MArch ‚Äô86, is a Professor of Architecture and a partner in the firm Anderson¬†Anderson¬†Architecture.¬†
• Neyran Turan, DDes ‚Äô09, is an Associate Professor of Architecture at UC Berkeley CED and a founding partner at NEMESTUDIO.¬†
• Michelle Chang, MArch ‚Äô09, is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Harvard GSD and the director of JaJa Co.¬†
• Rudabeh Pakravan is a Continuing Lecturer at UC Berkeley CED and a principal at Sidell Pakravan Architects.¬†

 

Mariam Kamara, “atelier masōmī: pedagogy, practice and (shifting) possibilities”

Event Information

The guest speaker for this event will be joining us virtually.  All are invited to watch and participate online in this program by tuning into this page at the noted start time. No pre-registration is required.  Online audience members will be able to submit questions throughout the event using Vimeo’s Q&A function. If you would like to submit questions for the speaker in advance of the event, please click here. Harvard ID holders are also welcome to attend programs in person, except where an event is listed as online only. Live captioning will be provided during this event livestream. Learn more about accessibility services at public programs.

This event recording is also available to watch with audio description .

Event Description

The Architecture canon, the way it is researched, taught and practiced, has a singular point of view. Accepting that point of view as universally valid has been one of the biggest missed opportunities in architecture. What we are taught as universal masterworks are, in reality, only a representation of a small homogenous group. This talk will cover the way I have merged practice and research to fill the gaps left by the absence of authentic scholarship outside of the canon. I will also discuss the ways in which this approach continues to shift my conception of what is possible given the contexts, narratives, and challenges of the places in which we work.

Audience members who attend this event in its entirety may be eligible for continuing education credits from AIA. Please reach out to [email protected] for more information.

Speaker

Mariam Issoufou Kamara is an architect from Niger who studied architecture at the University of Washington. In 2014, she founded atelier masōmī , an architecture and research practice with offices in Niger’s capital, Niamey. The firm tackles public, cultural, residential, commercial, and urban design projects. Kamara believes that architects have an important role to play in creating spaces that have the power to elevate, dignify, and provide people with a better quality of life.  

The Hikma Community Complex, designed by Kamara and Yasaman Esmaili, won the 2017 Gold LafargeHolcim Award for Africa and the Middle East, and the 2018 Silver Global LafargeHolcim Award for Sustainable Architecture. Other projects include the Dandaji Regional Market, which was shortlisted for the Dezeen Awards in 2019. Upcoming projects include an office building in Niamey as well as the Niamey Cultural Centre, which Kamara designed under the mentorship of Sir David Adjaye as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Initiative.

In 2019, Kamara was named as a Laureate of the Price Claus Award. She was a 2019 Royal Academy of Arts Dorfman Awards finalist. The New York Times named her as one of 15 Creative Women of Our Time. The Royal Institute of Canada named her as one of their 2020 Honorary Fellows. The firm has appeared twice on the AD100 list.

Follow Mariam Kamara on Twitter and Instagram .

This event is part of International Womxn’s Week 2022, presented by Womxn in Design .

Anthony Titus, “Rupture and Reconciliations” 

Event Information

All are invited to watch and participate online in this program by tuning into this page at the noted start time. No pre-registration is required.  Online audience members will be able to submit questions throughout the event using Vimeo’s Q&A function. If you would like to submit questions for the speaker in advance of the event, please click here. Harvard ID holders are also welcome to attend programs in person, except where an event is listed as online only. Live captioning will be provided during this event livestream. Learn more about accessibility services at public programs.

This event recording is also available to watch with audio description .

Event Description

The lecture will focus on the structure of Anthony Titus’s transdisciplinary practice of art and architecture. Titus will speak about a selection of several exhibitions, installations, and projects that span the past decade. Emphasis will be placed upon the processes and procedures as well as the final product of the works. Looking to explore and discover new possibilities between the spaces of architecture, sculpture, and painting Titus will share drawings, diagrams, models, and photographs of the projects. The conversation and exchange between these disciplines serves as a rich space of opportunity to enhance and expand our current understanding of space, form, color, and structure as participants in a larger cultural landscape.  

Reference will be made to Titus’s architectural education at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, under the deanship of John Hejduk as well as his graduate education in painting at the University of Chicago. In addition to his independent studio work, Titus has served as an architectural educator for the past two decades and he will include a small selection of teaching work in dialogue with his studio practice.  

Audience members who attend this event in its entirety may be eligible to receive continuing education credits from AIA. Please email [email protected] for more details.

Speaker

Anthony Titus Studio is an interdisciplinary practice that focuses on the relationships between contemporary art and architecture. Since its inception in 2005, the studio has produced numerous installations, objects as well as solo and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad. The practice has consistently explored the uniquely constructed spaces between architecture, painting and sculpture. Parallel to his independent practice, Titus has taught architecture and art since 2002. He is currently a tenured professor of architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and he is the recipient of a 2013 research grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. The research project is titled Twisted Siblings: Relationships Between Contemporary Painting and Digital Architecture. His work has been exhibited and published widely and includes a current solo exhibition titled Ruptures and Reconciliations at ‘T’ Space in Rhinebeck, NY. He received his undergraduate degree in architecture from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and a graduate degree in fine art from the University of Chicago.  

Follow Anthony Titus Studio on Instagram .

TERREMOTO // David Godshall and Jenny Jones, “Radical Gardens of Love and Interconnectedness”

Event Information

Starting Monday, April 4, members of the general public will once again be invited to attend GSD public programs in person. All attendees must be fully vaccinated, including a booster shot, and must present proof of vaccination at the security desk in the lobby of Gund Hall before entering an event. To expedite your check-in process, please email your proof of vaccination to [email protected]. All are also invited to watch and participate online in this program by tuning into this page at the noted start time. No pre-registration is required.  Online audience members will be able to submit questions throughout the event using Vimeo’s Q&A function. If you would like to submit questions for the speaker in advance of the event, please click here. Live captioning will be provided during this event live stream and CART captioning will be provided for our in-person audience. Learn more about accessibility services at public programs.

This event recording is also available to watch with audio description .

Event Description

TERREMOTO is presently navigating a transitional period within its practice towards making omni-positive gardens and landscapes that are fair, just and generous in their relationships to labor, materials and ecology. We believe that we are at a cultural, environmental + civilizational fork in the road, and through deep internal self-interrogation of landscape history and practice (including our own), we are creating a constantly evolving set of metrics that will allow us (and you!) to create gardens that can lock horns with the BIGNESS of this moment. What a time to be alive! And what a time to be making gardens!

Audience members who attend this event in its entirety may be eligible for continuing education credits from LACES. Please reach out to [email protected] for more information.

Speakers

TERREMOTO is a formally and conceptually adventurous office for landscape architecture. TERREMOTO creates well-built, site-specific landscapes that respond to clients’ needs while simultaneously challenging historical and contemporary landscape construction methods, materials, and formal conventions.  Our design approach is post-Internet, critically regionalist, and respectfully inflammatory.

TERREMOTO mines the omnipotence of intentional inexactitude and flirts openly with illegibility.  We strive, in many cases, to do as little as possible. It is our goal to build gardens and landscapes not for this civilization, but rather, the next one.

Follow TERREMOTO on Instagram .

International Womxn’s Week Keynote Address: Nitasha Dhillon

Event Information

All are invited to watch and participate online in this program by tuning into this page at the noted start time. No pre-registration is required.  Online audience members will be able to submit questions throughout the event using Vimeo’s Q&A function. If you would like to submit questions for the speaker in advance of the event, please click here. Harvard ID holders are also welcome to attend programs in person, except where an event is listed as online only. Live captioning will be provided during this event livestream. Learn more about accessibility services at public programs.

This event recording is also available to watch with audio description .

Event Description

Womxn in Design ‘s sixth 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.

Speaker

Nitasha Dhillon has a B.A. in Mathematics from St Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York and School of International Center of Photography. She holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Media Study – University of Buffalo in New York. She along with Amin Husain is MTL Collective, a collaboration that joins research, aesthetics, and action in its practice. 

MTL is a founding member of Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy and Anemones, two in-print movement-generated theory magazines; Strike Debt and Rolling Jubilee, Direct Action Front for Palestine; Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.); and most recently MTL+, the collective facilitating Decolonize This Place. At present, in addition to being involved in Strike MoMA working group of the International Imagination of Anti-national and Anti-imperialist Feelings (IIAAF), MTL is in post-production on a feature-length experimental documentary about land, life, and liberation in occupied Palestine.

POSTPONED: Iñaki Echeverria, “Parque Ecológico Lago de Texcoco, an Ongoing Ecological Recovery in the Mexico City Valley”

Event Information
This event has been postponed. Please stay tuned for further details.

Event Description

After the fall of Tenochtitlán, 500 years ago, the Spanish conquistadors established a regime that opposed water in the Mexico City Valley. In contrast to the culture of the original inhabitants, water became an “enemy” to be confronted and defeated. Engineering over five centuries perpetuated this approach, which has been called “hydrophobic” by members of the traditional peoples that inhabit the Valley.

This culture extends all the way into the present day, but recently a parallel conversation has arisen, and there are technicians, planners, designers, and politicians that demand a different approach–one that may help preserve and recover as much as possible the original ecology of the Valley, one that may help heal what has been destroyed, one that may transform the future of the entire Valley region.

The first large project that is based on this premise and that has been able to reach the execution phase is the “Parque Ecológico Lago de Texcoco”, an initiative to reclaim 14,000 hectares (almost 35,000 Acre) for ecological purposes with enclaves of cultural and sports infrastructure, that will open this space to the public.

Speaker

Iñaki Echeverria is an architect, landscape urbanist, and entrepreneur based in Mexico City. He has specialized in the integration of techniques conventionally associated with architecture, science, technology, and ecology to reconsider this intersection as an opportunity to transform buildings, landscape, and infrastructure. He has been studying the region around Lago de Texcoco for more than 18 years. Today he is the Director of the Parque Ecológico Lago de Texcoco in Mexico National Water Commission (Conagua).

Echeverria is an academic at UPenn and has taught Design at Harvard GSD, UNAM, and Iberoamericana and founded an annual workshop at Aedes Network Campus Berlin. He is a member of the board of advisors to Harvard’s Office for Urbanization, Mexico City’s Conduse and the Journal of Contemporary Urban Affairs.

His work has been published and exhibited in America, Africa, Asia and Europe; some emblematic commissions are the ecological parks CDT Tijuana, PEMEX Coatzacoalcos and Atlacomulco; the Papalote Children’s Museum in Monterrey; PEMEX boarding houses for indigenous children; Infirmary school and diabetes clinic for ProCdMx; Ternium’s workers’ club; exteriors for luxury retailer Liverpool and a vast array of housing, mix-use and office projects.

Follow Iñaki Echeverria on Twitter and Instagram .

Harvard Design Magazine #50 Issue Preview and Conversation

Event Information

This event is Online Only. All are invited to watch and participate online in this program by tuning into this page at the noted start time. No pre-registration is required.  Online audience members will be able to submit questions throughout the event using Vimeo’s Q&A function. If you would like to submit questions for the speaker in advance of the event, please click here. Live captioning will be provided during this event livestream. Learn more about accessibility services at public programs.

This event is also available to watch with audio description .

Event Description

“Today is global” is a rather banal truism, but what really is today’s globalism? In a conversation with contributors from across the globe, Harvard Design Magazine introduces Issue #50: Today’s Global, guest-edited by Sarah M. Whiting and Rahul Mehrotra.

Today’s world has entered a phase of critical backlash against globalization, which is for some a critique of international integration, for others a critique of global and local inequalities produced by neoliberal extremism, and for many, a shared global concern over climate change. Increasingly, the inevitability of globalization has been called into question. This issue of Harvard Design Magazine eschews a simple and ineffective binary swing back to a mere celebration of the local or the regional. Instead, it presents a nuanced understanding of where design “sits” vis-à-vis our planet and advances a more productive discourse on globalization. In doing so, we celebrate the emergence of new resources that have made broader global design talent more visible and reject the stultifying categories—such as “first world” and “third world”—defined by contemporary boundaries.

The event will be introduced by Harvard Design Magazine’s Editorial Director, Julie Cirelli, and it will feature a conversation between Sarah Whiting, Rahul Mehrotra, and a group of contributors to the issue: DAAR (Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti), Christopher Lee, Nicolai Ouroussoff, and Anel Du Plessis.

Speakers

Anél du Plessis is the National Research Foundation of South Africa (NRF) Research Chair in Cities, Law and Environmental Sustainability and Professor of Law at the North-West University, Faculty of Law, South Africa. Her research focuses on urban law reform and development, sustainability, climate change and transitional local governance in the South African and African regional contexts.

Christopher C. M. Lee is the principal of Serie Architects, and the Arthur Rotch Design Critic in Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

The artistic research practice of Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti is situated between politics, architecture, art and pedagogy. They are co-director of DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency) an architectural studio and an art residency in Palestine and Stockholm.  Alessandro is professor of Architecture and Social Justice at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and Sandi is visiting professor at Lund University. Their recent publications are Refugee Heritage (Art and Theory 2021) and Permanent Temporariness (Art and Theory 2019).

Nicolai Ouroussoff is a writer and critic living in New York. Currently adjunct associate professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, he is formerly the architecture critic of The Los Angeles Times, where he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2004.

Bringing Digitalization Home: How Can Technology Address Housing Challenges?

Event Description

Digitalization—the use of automated digital technologies to collect, process, analyze, distribute, use, and sell information—is spurring fundamental change in the way housing is produced, marketed, sold, financed, managed, and lived in. This symposium, organized by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies , will feature leading scholars and experts from academia, industry, government, and advocacy groups. Participants will examine the nature and extent of technologically-driven changes and assess whether these changes are likely to further (or hamper) efforts to address economic, social, and environmental challenges, such as housing affordability, discrimination, and climate change. Speakers will also suggest strategies that the public, private, and non-profit sectors can use to produce more equitable and environmentally sustainable housing.

For more information, visit: https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/digitalization-symposium

Keynote Address

Designing AI Ethics, in Practice and in Public 

Molly Wright Steenson , Vice Provost for Faculty, K&L Gates Associate Professor of Ethics & Computational Technology, and Associate Professor, School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University. Author, Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape  (MIT Press, 2017) and co-editor Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press, 2019).

When a company makes an AI-related misstep, a familiar script unfolds. Someone inside the company brings the problem to public attention, the company produces and promotes a statement of ethics, makes internal changes (or not), and the news cycle typically blows over. But how does this practice hold companies accountable? To what extent does it impact the public’s understanding of technology and ethics? Just as the design of user experience for AI and its related technologies are vital concerns for architects and designers, so too are these questions of ethics and AI. In her keynote, Steenson will examine the role design has to play in the relationship of AI and ethics. Ultimately, is AI ethics, in practice and public about ethics — or something else?