Platform 12: How About Now?

Edited by Carrie Bly (MDes History and Philosophy of Design and Media ’19), Isabella Caterina Frontado (MLA I, MDes Art, Design, and the Public Domain ’20), and Natasha Hicks (MUP, MDes Risk and Resilience ’19)

Faculty Advisors: Gareth Doherty, Jenny French, and Abby Spinak

Platform represents a year in the life of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Produced annually, this compendium highlights a selection of work from the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and design, and design engineering, and exposes a rich and varied pedagogical culture committed to shaping the future of design. Documenting projects, research, events, exhibitions, and more, Platform offers a curated view into the emerging topics, techniques, and dispositions within and beyond the Harvard GSD.

In 1941, Bruno Zevi led a group of his fellow students to publish a letter to Dean Joseph Hudnut. The letter, eventually known as “An Opinion on Architecture,” called for structural change in architectural education and practice—and a space in which to talk about the possibilities of that change. From this statement emerged the first student publication of the Harvard GSD, TASK: A Magazine for the Younger Generation in Architecture. Many more would follow in the nearly 80 years after, and while diverse in tone, objective, context, medium, frequency, and editorial model, they are united by a shared value of giving platform to student voices that questioned, challenged, and provoked the disciplines of design.

This installment of the Platform series celebrates—and places itself within—the rich tradition of student publications at the Harvard GSD. How About Now? offers questions of the past to ground projects of the present, and serves as a reminder of the enduring concerns and preoccupations that designers constantly revisit, reconsider, and redefine in response to a changing world.

Copublished by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Actar, Fall 2019.

Designed by Neil Donnelly Studio
Softcover, 293 pages, 7.5 x 10.5 inches / 19.05 x 26.67 cm, $34.95
ISBN 978-1-948765-36-7