Film Screening: Sitting Still with Laurie Olin

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Event Description

SITTING STILL offers an intimate look into the mind of Laurie Olin, a brilliant and irreverent landscape architect dedicated to designing public spaces fostering democracy and equality. At a time when profit often outweighs people, Olin’s work stands as a testament to the power of landscape in addressing environmental crises and social divides.

From his frontier childhood in Alaska to his global experiences challenging conventional design, Olin’s journey fuels SITTING STILL—a compelling blend of artist portrait and social commentary. Through his insights and those of fellow visionaries, the film exposes flawed economic models and misguided policies, revealing how thoughtful design shapes the world—and why it matters.

Following the screening, Olin and director Gina Angelone will appear on stage for a conversation and Q&A. A reception will follow.

Speakers

Laurie Olin is a distinguished teacher, author, and one of the most renowned landscape architects practicing today. From vision to realization, he has guided many of OLIN’s signature projects, which span the history of the studio, from the Washington Monument Grounds in Washington, DC, to Bryant Park in New York City. His recent projects include the AIA-award-winning Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and the Simon and Helen Director Park in Portland, Oregon.

Olin studied civil engineering at the University of Alaska and pursued architecture at the University of Washington, where Richard Haag encouraged him to focus on landscape. He is currently a practice professor of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught for 40 years, and is the former chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, and a recipient of the 1998 Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the recipient of the 2012 National Medal of Arts, the highest lifetime achievement award for artists and designers bestowed by the National Endowment for the Arts and the President of the United States. He also holds the 2011 American Society of Landscape Architects Medal, the society’s highest award for a landscape architect.

Gina M. Angelone Born and raised in Philadelphia, Gina became a global citizen at age seventeen and has lived, worked, and traveled the world as a film director, producer, and writer. Gina’s TV work is the recipient of two Emmy awards and multiple nominations. Her documentaries have garnered top festival prizes and notable grants from the NEA, Philadelphia Foundation, William Penn Foundation, Graham Foundation, New York Women in Film, and The American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others. Credits include founding Producer of Bravoʼs “Inside the Actors Studio,” Writer/Director of the original series, “Defining Beauty” (Disney), and Writer/Producer/Director of feature documentaries “Connections” (PBS), “René & I,” (NBC), “Itʼs Better to Jump,” (Al Jazeera).

Brian D. Goldstein, “‘These Contradictory Things’: Max Bond’s Harvard”

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Event Description

Join us for “‘These Contradictory Things’: Max Bond’s Harvard,” a lecture that Brian D. Goldstein will give on the occasion of the naming of the J. Max Bond Jr. Room in Gund Hall. Following the lecture, Dean Whiting will moderate a conversation with Goldstein and a panel that includes Bond’s peers and colleagues and generations of designers influenced by his work.

Bond—a graduate of Harvard College and the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD)—was characterized in his 2009 New York Times obituary as a “voice of conscience within his profession on issues of racial and economic justice.” He understood cities as instruments of justice and equality for their inhabitants. “Architecture,” he asserted, “inevitably involves all the larger issues of society.” This conviction that architecture has the capacity to produce a just society was foundational to Bond’s own extensive practice as an architect: as executive director of the Architects’ Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH); as a professor of architecture; as chair of the Division of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University; and as dean of the School of Architecture and Environmental Studies at the City College of New York.

Bond graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1955 and as an undergraduate was also inducted into the academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa. He graduated from the Department of Architecture at the GSD in 1958. Over the course of his career, Bond became an extraordinarily influential figure in architecture and urbanism. His success came both because of and despite his experience at Harvard. At the GSD, Bond absorbed the idealism of modernist architecture and its promise to effect social change, but his time at Harvard was also marked with racist episodes that included a cross burning outside his undergraduate dormitory in Harvard Yard. On another occasion, a GSD faculty member discouraged Bond from pursuing architecture as a course of study because that faculty member believed it to be a profession suited mainly for white men. That Bond was able to draw on his education at the GSD—its wisdom and its failures—as well as his lived experience of the University community to articulate a new vision for the field of architecture as an agent of social change is as much a testament to his perseverance as it is to his insight and talent.

Naming the largest classroom in Gund Hall the “J. Max Bond Jr. Room” celebrates the enormous influence and breadth of Bond’s career and acknowledges how unwelcoming Harvard was for him and other Black students who were subjected to similar experiences at the GSD. With this dedication, the GSD inscribes Bond’s name on the largest classroom in Gund Hall to give him a permanent home on Harvard’s campus, even if posthumously, and to keep the memory of his experience and the legacy of his achievements alive in this School.

Read more about Bond’s biography and career in architecture at the GSD’s African American Design Nexus .

Speaker

Brian D. Goldstein

Brian D. Goldstein (AB ’04, AM ’09, PhD ’13) is an architectural and urban historian and an associate professor and chair of the Art History program at Swarthmore College. His research focuses on the intersection of the built environment, race and class, and social movements, especially in the United States. His writing includes the book The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle Over Harlem (expanded edition, Princeton University Press, 2023), which received the 2020 John Friedmann Book Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and the 2019 Lewis Mumford Prize for the Best Book in Planning History.

Goldstein’s articles have appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Journal of American History, Buildings & Landscapes, Journal of Urban History, and the edited volumes Radical Pedagogies; Affordable Housing in New York; Reassessing Rudolph; and Summer in the City: John Lindsay, New York, and the American Dream. He has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and Society of Architectural Historians. He is currently writing If Architecture Were for People: The Life and Work of J. Max Bond, Jr., under contract with Princeton University Press.

Panelists

Steven Davis, FAIA, is Managing Director of the New York City office at Page, and until 2023, was a partner at Davis Brody Bond. A lifelong New Yorker, Steven has developed a focus on spaces that express the relationship between the user, the physical environment, and the surrounding community. His designs have been honored with numerous awards, including the AIA Institute Honor Award, three Business Week/Architectural Record Awards, and the Presidential Award for Design Excellence. Outside of his practice, he serves as a juror in architectural competitions and has been an invited critic at many universities.

Moe N. Finegold (AB ’54, MArch ’58) Licensed to practice Architecture in 1961, Moe established his office in 1964, expanded to a partnership, then a corporation, retiring in 2021 having worked with 7 of his GSD classmates during those 57 years. His firm has been recognized with more than 250 awards for design excellence in a wide range of challenging projects, including restoration and reuse of historic buildings, new structures and urban planning across the United Staes. He has focused on the creation of spaces and places for people with an eye for details that speak to time and place.

His recognition includes an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters for his 13 years of leadership at the Boston Architectural College and was just the 6^th person to receive the Edwin S Frey award for outstanding achievement in religious architecture from AIA/IFRAA. A graduate of Harvard College in 1954cl and the GSD in 1958, he is extremely pleased that 2 of his classmates, John Andrews and Max Bond are now forever an integral part of the Gund Hall legacy.

David Lee (MAUD ’71) is the president of Stull and Lee, Incorporated (S+L), an architecture, urban design, and planning firm. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois and Harvard Graduate School of Design. He has taught at the GSD, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and a past president of the Boston Society of Architects.

He has been awarded the BSA’s 2000 Award of Honor and the Norman B. Leventhal City Excellence Land Use Award. With his late business partner Donald Stull, Mr. Lee received the National Organization of Minority Architects Lifetime Achievement Award and the Harvard GSD Distinguished Alumni Award. S+L projects have won multiple awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts’ Presidential Design Award.

Shawn L. Rickenbacker is an architect, urbanist, and urban data researcher. He is currently the Director of the CCNY J. Max Bond Center for Urban Futures, where he directs the Center’s sponsored research and is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the CCNY Spitzer School of Architecture. His research and work confront the intersection of spatial equity and the socioeconomic impact of place-based policies, programs, and design. His projects have been supported by JP Morgan Chase, the Graham Foundation, Moxie Foundation and published by MIT Press, Actar, and University College London. Shawn holds a Master of Architecture with a Certificate in American Urbanism from the University of Virginia, where he was the Dupont Scholar, a LoC in Climate Change Leadership from Cornell University, and a BArch from Syracuse University.

Isabel Strauss (AB ’13, MArch ’21) is an architectural designer from Chicago. She holds an M.Arch I from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and an AB from Harvard College. For the past three years, she has worked in the curatorial department at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, assisting on projects related to Architecture & Design. Before NMAAHC she worked with Frances Loeb Library staff and members of the GSD’s African American Student Union to establish the African American Design Nexus. Strauss will be joining the faculty at Smith College this summer.

 

Moderator

Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture, joined the GSD as Dean in July 2019. She is a design principal and co-founder of WW Architecture and served as the Dean of Rice University’s School of Architecture from 2010 to 2019. Whiting has taught at Princeton University, the University of Kentucky, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the University of Florida. She frequently lectures throughout the US and abroad and regularly serves as a critic of architecture and urban design. Prior to founding WW, Whiting worked with the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Peter Eisenman in New York; and Michael Graves in Princeton, New Jersey. She is an Associate member of the American Institute of Architects. Dean Whiting received her Bachelor of Arts from Yale, her Master of Architecture from Princeton University, and her Doctor of Philosophy in the History and Theory of Architecture from MIT.

 

African Landscape Architectures: Alternative Futures for the Field

Registration is required for this event. Please RSVP here .

Event Description

The African Landscape Architectures conference brings together a wide range of landscape practices from across the continent. This two-day hybrid event highlights the transformative potential of decolonizing design to address social injustices and prepare African cities for the impacts of climate change. Speakers will explore innovative strategies through frameworks such as ecology, adaptation, and materiality that offer alternative futures for African landscapes.

Conference Schedule

Thursday, March 6
Harvard GSD, Piper Auditorium
48 Quincy St., Cambridge, MA 02138

Doors open at 12:15 p.m.

Welcome
12:30 — 1:00 p.m.

Sarah Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture

Jacob K. Olupona, Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies, Professor of African Religious Traditions, Professor of African and African American Studies

Gary Hilderbrand (MLA ’85), Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture

Gareth Doherty (DDes ’10), Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Affiliate of the Department of African and African American Studies

Panel 1: Currencies
1:00 p.m. — 2:30 p.m.

Current state of the field, including the environmental, social, and aesthetic issues impacting African landscapes.

Moderated by Thaïsa Way, Director of Garden & Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, and Lecturer in Landscape Architecture

• Johan van Papendorp (MLA ’75), OvP, Cape Town, South Africa
• Chelina Odbert (MUP ’07), Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI), Nairobi, Kenya
• Arthur Adeya (MLA ’06), Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology

Panel 2: Materialities
3:00 p.m. — 4:30 pm

The botanical, mineral, and other material compositions and extractions of contemporary landscapes in Africa.

Moderated by Amber M. Henry,Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies

• Mounia Bennani, MB Paysage, Rabat, Morocco and President, Moroccan Landscape Architects Association
• Ann Gollifer, Earth artist, Gaborone, Botswana
• Joe Christa Giraso, MASS Design Group, Boston, USA, and Kigali, Rwanda

 

International Womxn’s Day Keynote Address
6:30 p.m. — 8:00 p.m.

Co-sponsored by the Center for African Studies and organized in coordination with Womxn in Design and Africa GSD.

Moderated by Zoe Marks , Oppenheimer Faculty Director of the Harvard Center for African Studies and Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

• Princess Adedoyin Talabi Faniyi, High Priestess, Osun Sacred Grove, Osogbo, Nigeria
• Tarna Klitzner, TKLA, Cape Town, South Africa

Reception
8:00 p.m. — 9:30 p.m.

 

Friday, March 7
Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Campus Center, Harvard University
Conference Suite, 10th Floor
1350 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02138

***Please note that registration is required for Day 2 of the conference, as there is a space capacity of up to 100 people. Register here .

Panel 3: Adaptabilities
9:00 a.m. — 10:30 a.m.

Case studies illustrating successful adaptation strategies across scales: the processes by which landscapes and cities adjust to changing conditions over time to maintain their viability.

Moderated by Daniel E. Agbiboa, Associate Professor of African and African American Studies

• Thabo Lenneiye, University of Pennsylvania
• Safouan Azouzi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Olatunji Adejumo, University of Lagos

Panel 4: Pedagogies
11:00 a.m. — 12:30 pm

How landscape architecture is currently taught across the African continent, and what future directions might it take.

Moderated by Gareth Doherty (DDes ’10), Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Affiliate of the Department of African and African American Studies

• Finzi Saidi, University of Johannesburg
• Sechaba Maape, University of the Witwatersrand
• Carey Duncan, Past President IFLA Africa, Rabat, Morocco

Lunchtime Painting Workshop with Ann Gollifer and Africa GSD
1:00–2:00 PM | Gund Hall. Limited space available.

Panel 5: Futurities
2:30 p.m. — 4:30 p.m.

The future of landscape architecture in the Global South.

Moderated by Bruno Carvalho (PhD ’09), Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and African and African American Studies and co-Director of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative

• Jala Makhzoumi, Acting President, IFLA, Beirut, Lebanon
• Graham Young, President IFLA Africa, Pretoria, South Africa
• Tosin Oshinowo, Loeb Fellow 2025 and Oshinowo Studio, Lagos, Nigeria
• Jungyoon Kim (MLA ‘00), Harvard GSD and PARKKIM
• Adewale O. Owoseni, 2024-25 Postdoctoral Fellow, Mahindra Humanities Center

Wrap-up Session
4:30 p.m. — 5:00 p.m.

A reflection on the conference’s proceedings.

Research Guide

Please find a research guide for this conference through this link . A central aim of the African Landscape Architectures conference and its accompanying bibliography is to highlight the plurality of ways people shape landscapes across the African continent and demonstrate how landscape architecture can contribute to mitigating the impacts of climate change and social injustices. Africa is abundant in landscape projects and practices, yet most landscape architecture programs on the continent do not include African landscapes in their curriculums. Similarly, African landscapes are mainly absent from formal landscape architectural education in other parts of the world. This bibliography seeks to help bridge this educational gap by compiling existing literature on African landscapes and making it accessible for use in research and teaching.

Sponsors and Collaborators

The conference is co-hosted by the Department of Landscape Architecture and the Department of African and African American Studies with generous support from:

• The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
• The Provost’s Fund for Interfaculty Collaboration
• Center for African Studies
• Center for Middle Eastern Studies
• Alwaleed Islamic Studies Program
• Hutchins Center for African and African American Research
• The Critical Landscapes Design Lab at the Graduate School of Design
• The International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA), Africa Region.

 

Speakers

Olatunji “Tunji” Adejumo, Lagos, Nigeria, is a landscape architect, urban theorist, environmentalist, and professor at the University of Lagos. He has shared his forty years of practice across the globe, honoring projects that include nature conservation, ecotourism, and climate adaptation.

 

 

Arthur Adeya (MLA ’06), Nairobi, Kenya, is a landscape architect based in Nairobi, where he teaches landscape engineering at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology. He graduated from the Harvard GSD in 2006, where he co-founded the Kounkuey Design Initiative.

 

 

Safouan Azouzi, Cambridge, MA, is a postdoctoral fellow at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. From 2023-24, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He earned his PhD in Design from Sapienza University of Rome.

 

 

Mounia Bennani, Rabat, Morocco, is a landscape architect who graduated from the ENSP (National Graduate School of Landscape) in Versailles and holds a PhD in Geography. She founded MB Paysage, a multidisciplinary firm that works on landscape projects at all scales, and currently serves as president of the Moroccan Landscape Architects Association.

 

 

Carey Duncan, Rabat, Morocco, is a South African landscape architect living in Morocco. She owns Carey Duncan Design and has lectured at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University. Duncan is the immediate past president of IFLA Africa, where she was instrumental in creating the African Landscape Network (ALN) and launching the African Journal of Landscape Architecture (AJLA).

 

 

Princess Adedoyin Talabi Faniyi, Osogbo, Nigeria, is an Orisha high priestess and the daughter of Chief Susanne Wenger. She is a key volunteer of The Adunni Olorisha Trust working to protect the Sacred Groves of Osogbo, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

 

 

Joe Christa Giraso, Boston, MA and Kigali, Rwanda, is a landscape designer at MASS Design Group dedicated to creating thriving ecosystems that inspire and nourish communities. Her work on the Ellen Degeneres Campus of The Dian Fossey Fund and the Rwanda Institute of Conservation Agriculture inspired her to be proactive in the preservation of native green spaces and the design of functional and resilient spaces that serve current and future generations.

 

 

Ann Gollifer, Gaborone, Botswana, is a visual artist who was born in the Barima-Waini region of Guyana
and has lived and worked in Gaborone, Botswana, since 1985. Gollifer’s work is a process-based, material practice. She is represented by the Guns and Rain Gallery in Johannesburg.

 

 

Jungyoon Kim (MLA ’00), Cambridge, MA and Seoul, South Korea, Assistant Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at the GSD, is the founding principal of PARKKIM, a Seoul- and Boston-based landscape architectural firm practicing beyond the conventional boundary of the profession.

 

 

Tarna Klitzner, Cape Town, South Africa, established Tarna Klitzner Landscape Architects (TKLA) in 1995 and is a lecturer at the University of Cape Town. TKLA’s work includes public and private projects conceptualized with an understanding of their given natural, urban, and social environments.

 

 

Thabo Lenneiye, Philadelphia, PA, is the inaugural managing director of the Carl H. Goldsmith Sustainable Agriculture Fund at the University of Pennsylvania, where she leads research at the intersection of sustainable agriculture, climate, and energy policy. Her work focuses on building a comprehensive research agenda that explores how agriculture can address the challenges posed by climate change and the global energy transition. Lenneiye is also a senior fellow with the Center for Leadership and Change Management at the Wharton School.

 

Sechaba Maape, Johannesburg, South Africa, is an architect and lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is the director of the design practice Afreetekture. Dr. Maape was born in Kuruman in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa. He works on research projects; teaches architecture design, history, and theory; supervises master’s thesis projects; and spends a considerable amount of time visiting ritual sites all over the country.

 

Jala Makhzoumi, Beirut, Lebanon, is the acting president for IFLA Middle East. She is an adjunct professor at the American University of Beirut and a co-founder of UNIT44, a consultancy in ecological planning and landscape architecture. Jala is the 2021 laureate of the IFLA Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award for her outstanding contribution to education and practice in landscape architecture.

 

Chelina Odbert (MUP ’07), Los Angeles, CA, believes in the power of community-engaged design to advance racial, environmental, and economic equity in neighborhoods and cities. As founding principal of Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI), she has built an award-winning practice that brings good design to places where it is not often found, and that connects localized design interventions to large-scale policy change.

 

Tosin Oshinowo (Loeb Fellow ’25), Cambridge, MA and Lagos, Nigeria, is a 2025 Loeb Fellow at the GSD and a Lagos-based Nigerian architect and designer renowned for her expansive residential and commercial spaces and insights into socially responsive approaches to urbanism. Her current practice prioritizes issues concerning African urbanism and climate change, which she will showcase at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2025.

 

 

Adewale O. Owoseni, Cambridge, MA and Ibadan, Nigeria, a scholar in the fields of African philosophy and environmental humanities, is a 2024-25 Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center. Adewale is a faculty member of the University of Ibadan, where he also teaches courses in philosophy.

 

 

Johan van Papendorp (MLA ‘75), Cape Town, South Africa, graduated from Cape Town University and Harvard University. He is a registered architect and landscape architect with fifty years of interdisciplinary consulting experience. He co-authored studies on greening the metropole and pedestrianizing Cape Town’s city center. As co-founder of OvP Associates, he directed the design and implementation of numerous projects countrywide, receiving several industry awards of merit. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Service to the Profession in 2013.

 

Finzi Saidi, Johannesburg, South Africa, is a Zambian landscape architect who is currently the head of the department and senior lecturer in the Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture at the University of Johannesburg. He taught at the Copperbelt University in Zambia and the University of Pretoria before he served as convener of the Master of Landscape Architecture program at the University of Cape Town from 2006–08.

 

Graham Young, Pretoria, South Africa, has forty years of experience consulting and teaching landscape architecture in South Africa and across the continent. He has received many industry awards, including the Institute of Landscape Architects of South Africa (ILASA) Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022. Graham is currently the president of the International Federation of Landscape Architects, Africa Region (IFLA Africa) and is a past vice president of IFLA World.

 

 

Moderators

Daniel E. Agbiboa is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, where he also serves as Faculty Associate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Affiliate Faculty of the Bloomberg Center for Cities, and Co-Chair of the Urban Conversation Series in the Mahindra Humanities Center. He is also an Executive Committee Member of the Harvard Center for African Studies (CAS) and an Advisory Board Member of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative.

 

Bruno Carvalho (PhD ’09) is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and African and African American Studies, and co-directs the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative. His most recent book, The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World, is forthcoming with Princeton University press.

 

 

Gareth Doherty (DDes ’10) is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard GSD and an affiliate faculty of the Department of African and African American Studies. Doherty takes a human-centered approach to design that aspires to shape environmentally and socially just landscapes.

 

 

Amber M. Henry is an Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard and an Afro-Latin American Research Institute faculty affiliate. She is an anthropologist of Latin America and the Caribbean whose work explores political mobilization and embodied practices in relation to sovereign forms of Black placemaking.

 

 

Zoe Marks is the Oppenheimer Faculty Director of the Harvard Center for African Studies and a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research and teaching interests focus on the intersections of conflict and political violence; race, gender, and inequality; peacebuilding; and African politics.

 

 

 

Thaïsa Way is a Visiting Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard GSD. She is the Director of Garden & Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, a Harvard University research institution located in Washington, DC. She is a scholar of landscape history, theory, and design.

 

 

Princess Adedoyin Talabi Faniyi and Tarna Klitzner

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Event Description

International Womxn’s Week includes a weeklong series of events organized by Womxn in Design that gather members of the GSD community to learn about and challenge notions of gender and power from within the framework of design.

Join us for a dialogue between Princess Adedoyin Talabi Faniyi of the Osun Sacred Grove in Osogbo, Nigeria, and landscape architect Tarna Klitzner, founder of TKLA in Cape Town, South Africa. The conversation will be moderated by Zoe Marks, Director of the Harvard Center for African Studies.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for African Studies and organized in coordination with Womxn in Design and Africa GSD. It serves as the keynote event for the conference African Landscape Architectures: Alternative Futures for the Field, which brings together a wide range of landscape practices from across the continent. The two-day hybrid conference highlights the transformative potential of decolonizing design to address social injustices and prepare African cities for the impacts of climate change. Speakers will explore innovative strategies through frameworks such as ecology, adaptation, and materiality that offer alternative futures for African landscapes.

Speakers

Princess Adedoyin Talabi Faniyi (Osogbo, Nigeria) is an Orisha high priestess and the daughter of Chief Susanne Wenger. Princess Adedoyin is a key volunteer of The Adunni Olorisha Trust working to protect the Sacred Groves of Osogbo, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

 

Tarna Klitzner established Tarna Klitzner Landscape Architects (TKLA) in 1995 and serves as a full-time lecturer at the University of Cape Town in the Landscape Architecture, Architecture and Planning Department. TKLA’s scope of works includes both public and private projects. The office ethos is rooted in providing environments that are conceptualized within an understanding of the given natural/urban and social environments and endeavor to provide spaces for human interaction that encourage positive engagement within communities and with the broader context of our cities, towns, and natural landscapes. TKLA has received several awards from the ILASA for their projects and were part of the Eliot Ngxola Architects team placed in the top 10 of the Commonwealth War Graves Memorial 2022 competition in Cape Town.

Moderator

Zoe Marks is the Oppenheimer Faculty Director of the Harvard Center for African Studies and a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research and teaching interests focus on the intersections of conflict and political violence; race, gender and inequality; peacebuilding; and African politics.

An-My Lê, Maps and Legends: Photography Between Histories and Beyond Borders

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Event Description

Internationally renowned photographer An-My Lê seeks “to photograph the landscape in such a way that it suggests a universal history, a personal history, a history of culture.” In this lecture, Lê presents two new series of recent photographs, Dark Star and Grey Wolf, continuing her exploration of the contradictory nature of the manifest and the sublime within the contemporary American landscape, and the latter as a present-day locus of technology, power and ambition. In Lê’s work, scale is both temporal and historical, encompassing themes of displacement, war, memory, and resilience. These are present in her earliest black and white pictures of Vietnam (1994-1998) in which she returned to a scarred homeland as a political refugee, to her pictures of war re-enactors in the southern U.S. (Small Wars, 1999-2002),  to staged military training exercises in the American desert (29 Palms, 2003-04), to her more recent lens on polarization in the United States through a series of historical fragments (Silent General, 2015 to today). With extraordinary consideration of history and culture, Lê’s view of her subjects often incorporates an elevated perspective to achieve its signature precision and ethical neutrality. In zooming out to look closer, her stepped-back “proscenium framing” brings into crystal clear vision her observations and stories, not unlike layers of a history painting.

Speaker

An-My Lê is an internationally renowned photographer based in New York. Her work often addresses the impact of war on culture and the environment. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art, the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. Lê’s work has been exhibited widely, including in the Whitney Biennial, Taipei Biennial, Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Tate Modern. In 2020, Lê’s major exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art traveled to the Amon Carter Museum and the Milwaukee Art Museum, with a comprehensive catalog published by Aperture. Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières, a 30-year survey of her career, including her forays into film, textiles, and installation was recently shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Lê is currently the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College, New York.

 

Mayors Imagining the Just City: Volume 5

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Event Description

Kicking off the fifth annual Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD) Just City Mayoral Fellowship—a collaboration between MICD and Harvard GSD’s Just City Lab—speakers will discuss strategies for using planning and design interventions to address racial, social, and environmental injustice in our cities.

Speakers

Jake Day Secretary Jacob R. (Jake) Day leads the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development and serves as a member of Governor Wes Moore’s Cabinet. As a member of the Governor’s Executive Council, Secretary Day is the Governor’s senior advisor on housing and place-based economic development. He is also the chief executive officer of the State’s housing finance agency, managing $2.5 Billion in annual spending, $9 Billion in assets, and more than 500 staff members. Prior to his nomination to lead the Department, Secretary Day served as the 28th Mayor of Salisbury, Maryland. Born and raised in Salisbury, he previously served as City Council President.

Tiffany Chu Tiffany Chu is the Chief of Staff to Mayor Michelle Wu. Tiffany comes from a background in design, urban planning, and entrepreneurship. Prior to joining the City of Boston, she was the CEO & Co-founder of Remix, a collaborative software platform for transportation planning used by 500+cities around the world. Previously, Tiffany was at Code for America, Y Combinator, Zipcar, and Continuum. She’s been named in Forbes’ 30 Under 30, LinkedIn’s Next Wave of Leaders Under 35, and featured at SXSW, Helsinki Design Week, the New York Times Cities for Tomorrow Conference, and more.

“D.C” Reeves D.C. Reeves has been mayor of Pensacola since November 2022. His focus is on public safety, economic development and maintenance of city assets. Previously, Reeves was a sports journalist, author, community builder and entrepreneur. He also served as the CEO at The Spring Entrepreneur Hub advocating for small businesses in Pensacola. In 2017, Reeves founded Perfect Plain Brewing Co., which quickly became a staple of downtown Pensacola and one of Florida’s busiest craft beer taprooms. The business expanded to four locations and had over 40 employees before. sold to New Orleans-based Urban South Brewery. D.C.’s community focus led him to serve as board chairman of Visit Pensacola, Pensacola’s tourism marketing organization, in 2021. He was named 2021 Emerging Leader of the Year by the Greater Pensacola Chamber of Commerce.

Moderator

Katie Swenson A nationally recognized design leader, researcher, writer, and educator, Katie Swenson has served as a Senior Principal of MASS Design Group since 2020. Katie has over 20 years of experience in the theoretical and practical application of design thinking and is a talented global public speaker and thought leader. A prolific writer, she authored Design with Love: At Home in America, and In Bohemia: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Kindness, and co-authored Growing Urban Habitats: Seeking a Housing Development Model. Katie was awarded the AIA Award for Excellence in Public Architecture in 2021. Prior to joining MASS, Katie was the vice president of Design & Sustainability at Enterprise Community Partners, where, as a member of the second class, she led the Enterprise Rose Fellowship. Katie lives in New York City, where she serves on the board of the Van Alen Institute and teaches at Columbia University and Parsons School of Design.

Partners

At the Just City Lab, we ask: Would we design better places if we put the values of equality, inclusion, or equity first? If a community articulated what it stood for, what it believed in, what it aspired to be — as a city, as a neighborhood — would it have a better chance of creating and sustaining a more healthy, vibrant place with positive economic, health, civic, cultural, and environmental conditions? Imagine that the issues of race, income, education, and unemployment inequality, and the resulting segregation, isolation, and fear, could be addressed by planning and designing for greater access, agency, ownership, beauty, diversity, or empowerment. Now, imagine the Just City: the cities, neighborhoods, and public spaces that thrive using a value-based approach to urban stabilization, revitalization, and transformation. Imagine a set of values that would define a community’s aspiration for the Just City. Imagine we can assign metrics to measure design’s impact on justice. Imagine we can use these findings to deploy interventions that minimize conditions of injustice.

With a belief in the power of city design to transform communities, the Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD) educates mayors to be the chief urban designers of their cities. Since 1986, we’ve offered collaborative learning programs and resources to mayors in order to make a purposeful, positive impact on America.

Book Release: “Thinking Through Soil”

Please RSVP to receive reminders about the event. Ahead of the book’s official release on June 10, support your local bookstore by pre-ordering a copy. Pre-orders can also be made through Harvard University Press or Amazon . Limited copies will be available for sale at the event.

Event Description

To think through soil is to engage with some of the most critical issues of our time. In addition to its agricultural role in feeding eight billion people, soil has become the primary agent of carbon storage in global climate models, and it is crucial for biodiversity, flood control, and freshwater resources. Perhaps no other material is asked to do so much for the human environment, and yet our basic conceptual model of what soil is and how it works remains surprisingly vague.

In cities, soil occupies a blurry category whose boundaries are both empirically uncertain and politically contested. Soil functions as a nexus for environmental processes through which the planet’s most fundamental material transformations occur, but conjuring what it actually is serves as a useful exercise in reframing environmental thought, design thinking, and city and regional planning toward a healthier, more ethical, and more sustainable future.

Through a sustained analysis of the world’s largest wastewater agricultural system, located in the Mexico City–Mezquital hydrological region, Thinking Through Soil, the latest release from Harvard Design Press, imagines what a better environmental future might look like in central Mexico. More broadly, this case study offers a new image of soil that captures its shifting identity, explains its profound importance to rural and urban life, and argues for its capacity to save our planet.

Following brief remarks, Rosich and Denizen will be joined on stage by Gary Hilderbrand for a conversation.

Speakers

Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich is a licensed Spanish architect and urban designer. She was the 2017-2018 Daniel Urban Kiley Fellowship at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and has taught landscape architecture at the University of Virginia and the Urban Design Department at ETSAB-UPC Barcelona.

Seth Denizen, a recipient of the 2019 SOM Foundation Research Prize and a Princeton-Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities, is a researcher and design practitioner trained in landscape architecture, evolutionary biology, and human geography.

The Evolving Landscape of Social Housing in New England

Please RSVP to receive reminders about the event. RSVP does not guarantee entry, which is filled on a first-come-first-served basis. Doors open 15 minutes before the event begins, so be sure to arrive early.

Event Description

In response to persistent and worsening housing affordability challenges, the idea of “social housing” has been gaining momentum across the US. While the details differ, social housing proposals all call for creating permanently affordable housing while also expanding the public sector’s direct role in financing, developing, and/or managing projects; emphasizing broad inclusion by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status; and giving residents more control over their homes. In this half-day event, practitioners, policymakers, advocates, and researchers will discuss both existing models of social housing in New England and new efforts to create affordable, high-quality homes.

Agenda

1:00 p.m.  Welcome and Overview

• Chris Herbert , Managing Director, Joint Center for Housing Studies
• Susanne Schindler , Research Fellow, Joint Center for Housing Studies

1:15 p.m.  Keynote: Why Social Housing?

• The Hon. Mike Connolly , Massachusetts State Representative, 26th Middlesex District

1:30 p.m.  Panel 1: Enabling Public Development  

• Kenzie Bok , Administrator, Boston Housing Authority
• Margaret Donnelly Moran , Deputy Director of Development, Cambridge Housing Authority
• Deborah Goddard , Secretary, Rhode Island Department of Housing
• Susanne Schindler , Research Fellow, Joint Center for Housing Studies (moderator)

2:30 p.m.  Break 

2:45 p.m.  Panel 2: Empowering Residents  

• Peter Fousek , Secretary-Treasurer, Connecticut Tenants Union
• Michael Monte , Chief Executive Officer, Champlain Housing Trust
• Mary O’Hara , Executive Vice President, ROC Movement
• Dana McKinney White, Assistant Professor of Urban Design, Harvard Graduate School of Design (moderator)

3:45 p.m.  Panel 3: Expanding Financial Supports

• Tanya Hahnel , Project Manager, East Boston CDC
• Chrystal Kornegay , Chief Executive Officer, MassHousing
• Craig Saddlemire , Cooperative Development Organizer, Raise-Op Housing Cooperative
• Rachel Weber, Professor of Urban Planning, Harvard Graduate School of Design (moderator)

4:45 p.m.  Wrap-Up: Responses and Reflections  

• Rachel Bratt , Professor Emerita, Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, Tufts University
• The Hon. Mike Connolly , Massachusetts State Representative, 26th Middlesex District
• Chris Herbert , Managing Director, Joint Center for Housing Studies (moderator)

5:15 p.m.  Reception 

View the Full Agenda

Ximena Caminos, “The ReefLine”

Event Description

The ReefLine’s Founder and Artistic Director, Ximena Caminos, invites you to explore “marine acupuncture,” an innovative practice combining high art and deep science to target critical pressure points within our oceans.

The ReefLine will be a 7-mile underwater public sculpture park, snorkel trail, and hybrid reef off Miami Beach’s shoreline, fostering environmental awareness through art and action-driven conservation. Conceived by cultural place-maker Ximena Caminos and developed by the BlueLab Preservation Society, the ReefLine nonprofit team collaborates with architecture firm OMA as well as marine biologists, researchers, architects, and coastal engineers to design the master plan. Caminos’ lecture, followed by a conversation with Pedro Alonzo and Charles Waldheim, highlights how this pioneering approach uses human ingenuity to ignite ecological processes that help the reef regenerate. The ReefLine’s cross-disciplinary methodology offers a compelling example of how collaboration can help solve some of the most pressing environmental challenges of our time.

This event is supported by the Melissa Kaish and Jonathan Dorfman Makers Fund.

Speaker

Ximena Caminos is a cultural entrepreneur and place-maker, celebrated for her unwavering commitment to public art. She is the President of BlueLab Preservation Society, CCO of HoneyLab Creative, and Founder of The ReefLine. Caminos has pioneered new ways to engage with contemporary art, emphasizing its role in community-building, urban development, climate change, and ocean conservation. She has played a pivotal role in creating large-scale cultural districts across North and South America.

Caminos served as Artistic Visionary Planner for The Underline, the largest public art project in the US, and former Chair of Faena Art. She also served as Executive Creative Director and partner in Faena Group, Chief Curator at the Faena Arts Center in Buenos Aires, and founded the Faena Prize for the Arts.

Caminos is a member of the New Museum Leadership Council, founding member of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Latin American Circle, and Advisor to Art Basel Cities. She is an XPrize Ambassador and a recipient of the Knight Foundation’s Arts Challenge Award and the Arts Champion Award.

Pedro Alonzo is an independent curator who has served as adjunct curator at Dallas Contemporary, the ICA Boston, and the Institute of Visual Arts at the University of Wisconsin. He is currently a Lecturer in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he teaches a course on curating in public spaces. Alonzo specializes in exhibitions that transcend the museum walls. In 2017, he collaborated with JR on an installation at the U.S.-Mexico border and, in 2022, on Amnesia Atómica with Pedro Reyes in Times Square. He has also developed singular public art projects with Alicja Kwade, Claudia Comte, Doug Aitken, Sam Durant, Shepard Fairey, Oscar Tuazon, and Jean-Marie Appriou. In 2024, Alonzo was part of the curatorial team for the Noor Riyadh Festival in Saudi Arabia. He is currently the artistic director for the inaugural Boston Public Art Triennial, scheduled for 2025. In November 2024, he produced and curated Midnight Zone, a large-scale video installation and sculptural lighthouse lens by Julian Charrière in Los Cabos, Mexico, addressing the dangers of deep-sea mining.

David Sheldon-Hicks, “Future Mapping”

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Event Description

David Sheldon-Hicks is the founder of Territory Studio, which specializes in world-building and storytelling for film and next-generation digital brand platforms. The studio has created visualizations for films such as Guardians of the Galaxy, The Martian, Ex Machina, Bladerunner 2049, and Dune. In this talk, Sheldon-Hicks explores the depiction of technology and AI in films and how these technologies can be used to inspire innovative design projects.

Speaker

With a background in graphic design, David Sheldon-Hicks’ career began in digital media before moving into to the fast-paced world of music videos, where his passion for the craft and creativity of motion graphics led him to film, games, and commercial campaigns. As founder of Territory Studio, Sheldon-Hicks’ love of storytelling and technology has established his reputation for beautifully crafted graphic narratives across genres and media.

Today, Sheldon-Hicks’ multidisciplinary team attracts diverse briefs across entertainment, brands, installations, and emerging technologies. In recognition of the studio’s creative approach and achievements, Sheldon-Hicks was named one of Creative Review’s 2018 Creative Leaders 50. The studio has won The Motion Awards and D&AD Creative Advertising and Design Awards. In 2018, the studio’s work for Blade Runner 2049 was nominated for the annual Beazley Designs of the Year.