Hannah Teicher
Hannah M. Teicher is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Her research is broadly concerned with how adaptation to climate change is shaping urban transformations across scales. Her current research agenda centers on long-term planning for climate migration and collaborations that reach beyond the usual environmental suspects. She has published her research in journals including the Journal of the American Planning Association, Climate Policy, the Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, Urban Climate, and the Journal of Planning Education and Research.
In the climate migration domain, she is interested in how and why cities are identified as potential receiving communities and the implications for policy and planning. Further illuminating the emerging concept of receiving communities, she is analyzing corporate climate migration and how it is shaping geographies of opportunity for individuals and households in places perceived to be safer from climate impacts. In addition, she is seeking to deepen analysis of labor migration as a potential climate migration pathway, examining the relationship between climate impacts and temporary foreign workers in the agricultural sector in British Columbia, Canada.
Hannah served in the leadership of the Climigration Network for five years and worked with a team there to guide development of Lead with Listening: a guidebook for community conversations on climate migration which is widely referenced by practitioners. Through project-based courses, she continues working with the Climigration Network. In a recent seminar, she worked with a team of students to analyze the intersection of the Indigenous land back movement and climate migration.
Prior to joining the GSD, Hannah was the Researcher in Residence for the Built Environment at the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, a multi-university institute in British Columbia, Canada. Her previous experience includes practicing architecture with a focus on green residential and community projects at Shape Architecture in Vancouver, BC, applied research on EV charging infrastructure with the Transportation Infrastructure and Public Space Lab at the University of British Columbia, and teaching at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. She holds a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from MIT, a Master of Architecture from UBC, and a BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Swarthmore College.
Daniel Tish
Daniel Tish is a designer and researcher whose work lies at the intersection of digital fabrication, material science, sustainability, and computation, investigating new design opportunities through the lens of bespoke materiality. Daniel’s research develops a new generation of carbon-negative biocomposites derived from microorganisms and methods for their robotic fabrication. He configures circular economies and technological solutions to address the high carbon footprint of architecture and the built environment. The research establishes multi-disciplinary collaborations with domain experts in material science and biology and operates between design and science to deliver this critical new material technology. Meanwhile, the work also challenges the ubiquity of industrialized materials in digital fabrication spaces. It creates fabrication methods to cater to the unpredictable nature of many biomaterials, dovetailing with the current research focus on cyber-physical systems in the computational design and fabrication community.
Daniel is a Lecturer in Architecture at the GSD and a Postdoctoral Fellow jointly appointed between the Materials Processes and Systems (MaP+S) group in the GSD and the Lewis Lab in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The Salata Institute, the Center for Green Buildings and Cities, and the Joint Center for Housing Studies have generously supported his research at Harvard. His work can be found in the publications of recent ACADIA, Fabricate, Rob|Arch, and IASS conferences, as well as in the book Towards a Robotic Architecture and the journals Construction Robotics and TAD. Daniel was a 2021 Fellow at the Design Akademie Saaleck (dieDAS), and his work has been exhibited at Design Miami/ Basel and other international venues.
Daniel was previously a Lecturer at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, where he taught digital fabrication. Additionally, he led an intensive summer masterclass at the University of Technology Sydney. Daniel was recently a Research Associate at Autodesk, where he developed computer-vision technologies for construction robotics. Daniel holds a Doctor of Design from the GSD, a Master of Architecture with Distinction from the University of Michigan, and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from Washington University in St. Louis with a self-guided special major in Sustainable Design.
Paola Sturla
Paola Sturla is a lecturer in Landscape Architecture and the 2018/2019 Daniel Urban Kiley Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Urban Planning, Design, and Policy at Politecnico di Milano in the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies. Born and raised in Italy, Paola is a registered “architetto” and “paesaggista.” She is currently a full-time researcher working on the designer’s creative agency to address open-ended problems through the hermeneutic design process, and the potentials and limits of Artificial Intelligence-based tools in such a practice. Before entering academia, she had been practicing internationally in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry in the framework of large scale infrastructure projects. Paola holds a bachelor’s degree in Architecture (Politecnico di Milano, 2004), a Master in Architecture (Politecnico di Milano, 2007), and a Master in Landscape Architecture (Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2011).
Craig Douglas
Craig Douglas is a Landscape Architect whose work focuses on innovative techniques and methodologies that explore the agency of representation in landscape architectural design. He is an Assistant Professor in the Landscape Architecture Department at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. His work explores the landscape as a dynamic material process in a constant state of flux through analytical and conceptual approaches integrating drawing, modelling, simulation, and sensing to make visible and reconstitute the landscape as a complex temporal and material manifold of differential space.
His work on ‘Digital Air’ claims air as matter by reconceptualising it as a material that is both corporeal and technological. In resisting conventional forms of definition and representation, air as matter invites the potential of emergence and production to augment our static realities. This material dialectic changes how we perceive and understand the scope of landscape architecture and how we might compose the architecture of our cities and landscapes in which air is identified as a principal agent for design.
The research explores the measuring and mapping of the air as matter oscillating between physical, corporeal, and cultural definitions by redefining it as a landscape of living and living space through atmospheric encounters. This is an investigation and reconceptualization of air as a dynamic, emergent process displaying flows, forces, and forms of change in a constant and unstable state of flux across a range of spatial scales, physical states, and temporal modes. Shifting the perception of air from an immaterial and wholly natural element to a material matter co-created by humans requalifies its significance, highlights the precarious relationship we have with it, and provides ways through which we might reconceptualise air and our relationship with it. ‘Digital Air’ considers the potential to inform new modes of understanding and practice that are relevant to the changes the climate crisis brings by making it possible to respond to projected states of being and to simultaneously consider how we might act through dynamic states of change.
His approach supports informed and innovative responses to the challenges found at the nexus of the social, ecological, and built environment that embrace the spatial, temporal, and material complexity of the landscape. It explores design as an activity of making and as an agent for understanding and responding to the challenges of urbanisation in a rapidly changing world that contributes to the complexity of the contemporary city in the age of climate crisis.
Douglas’ teaching includes the coordination of the Landscape Architecture Core II Design Studio and Representation II courses alongside Option Studios, Seminars, Independent Studies, Core III, and Thesis supervision. He has practised in offices in Australia, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom on complex urban projects and continues to collaborate on projects with practices around the world.
Student Supervision Awards
Housing, politics, climate change, ecology: range of student projects honored with 2018 ASLA Awards
Susannah Drake
Susannah C. Drake is the founding principal of DLANDstudio Architecture + Landscape Architecture pllc. The firm, winner of the 2014 AIA New Practices New York Award, has received city, state, and national AIA and ASLA awards. In 2013, Susannah was awarded the AIA Young Architects Award and Fellowship in the ASLA, and was recognized as an Architectural League Emerging Voice. She has received numerous grants and awards for adapting infrastructure corridors for storm water capture, climate resilience and park creation. Susannah is the former President and Trustee of the NYASLA and former Trustee of the Van Alen Institute. She lectures globally about resilient urban infrastructure, and has taught courses at The Cooper Union, Harvard University, Syracuse University, Washington University in St. Louis, Florida International University, The City College of New York, and Illinois Institute of Technology. Susannah delivered the keynote addresses at the 18th Congress of the International Union of Women Architects in Blacksburg, VA in 2015, and at the XXV International Union of Architects World Congress in Durban, South Africa in 2014. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. DLANDstudio’s recent projects include QueensWay, MoMA Rising Currents, BQGreen, and Gowanus Canal Sponge Park™.
Susannah received a BA from Dartmouth College and MArch and MLA from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She is a registered architect and a registered landscape architect.
Steven Apfelbaum
Steve Apfelbaum has been a full-time research and consulting ecologist with AES since 1978 when he founded the company. Steve has conducted ecological research projects in most biomes of North America, and since the early 1980s he has been one of the leading consultants in the U.S. in ecological restoration programs. Apfelbaum is trained as an animal and plant ecologist with graduate studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where he earned his MS Degree in Ecological and Biological Sciences in 1978. He has been a scientist in hundreds of field ecological projects and data analysis projects. During his career, Mr. Apfelbaum has authored or co-authored hundreds of technical studies, reports, ecological program plans, restoration plans, and monitoring and compliance reports for research projects and for regulatory program reporting. In recent years he has worked closely with hydrologists to understand landscape-scale hydrologic changes associated with land settlement in the Midwestern U.S. This work has direct application to many hundred millions of acres in North America and elsewhere. Mr. Apfelbaum has also presented results of his study of ecological restoration at hundreds of seminars and courses around the world and is a much sought-after speaker at educational events focusing on ecological restoration, alternative storm water management and conservation development. Apfelbaum’s latest book, “Restoring Ecological Health to Your Land” (Island Press) and his personal account of thirty years of restoring their Wisconsin farm, in “Natures Second Chance” (Beacon press) have received a range of awards, including rave reviews in the New York Times and elsewhere. The later book has been recognized as one of the top ten environmental books of 2009 and also best books for people to personally learn about what they can do to address climate change. Apfelbaum teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Design a course on the future of coastal systems on earth, and holds adjunct professorships and lectureships at several other universities.
Katharine Parsons
Katharine C. Parsons is a Lecturer in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the GSD. She holds a Ph.D. in Ecology from Rutgers University and has 30 years of experience in coastal waterbird research, management and policy in the U.S. northeast. Since 2011, Kathy has directed Mass Audubon’s Coastal Waterbird Program which works with coastal communities throughout Massachusetts to protect rare birds and their habitats through research, management, and advocacy. Her research interests include the reproductive and foraging ecology of long-legged wading birds, near-shore seabirds, and temperate zone shorebirds. She has studied extensively the ecotoxicology of aquatic birds utilizing estuarine wetlands publishing research articles in Waterbirds, other ornithological publications, Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, Estuaries, and Journal of Coastal Research. Parsons edited and contributed to special publications of Waterbirds: “Managing Wetlands for Waterbirds: Integrated Approaches” and “Rice and Waterbirds: Science, Management, and Conservation.” She is a member and past-chair of the Executive Council of Waterbird Conservation for the Americas. She is a 30-year member, current Executive Council member, and past-president of the Waterbird Society which publishes the international journal Waterbirds. She has served on numerous graduate student committees and teaches a seminar on coastal ecology at GSD: Changing Natural and Built Coastal Environments.
Andrew Witt
Andrew Witt is an Associate Professor in Practice in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, teaching and researching on the relationship of geometry and machines to perception, design, construction, and culture. Trained as both an architect and mathematician, he has a particular interest in a technically synthetic and logically rigorous approach to form.
Witt is also co-founder, with Tobias Nolte, of Certain Measures , a Boston/Berlin-based design and technology studio that combines imagination and evidence for systemic and scalable approaches to spatial problems. Their clients include large manufacturers, material fabricators, government agencies, infrastructure companies, investment funds, medical startups, and cultural institutions. The work of Certain Measures is in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou, and has been exhibited at the Pompidou (twice), the Barbican Centre, Futurium, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, among others. Witt’s personal work has been featured at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. In 2017 Certain Measures were finalists for the Zumtobel Award in both the Young Professionals and Applied Innovation Categories.
Witt has a longstanding research interest in the disciplinary exchanges between design and science, particularly through the media and visualizations of mathematics. He is the author of Formulations: Architecture, Mathematics, Culture (MIT Press, 2021), an expansive examination of the visual, methodological, and epistemic connections between design, mathematics, and the broader sciences. He is also author of Light Harmonies: The Rhythmic Photographs of Heinrich Heidersberger (Hatje Cantz, 2014), the first English treatment of German proto-computational photographic hacker Heinrich Heidersberger’s light-drawing machines. For the Canadian Centre for Architecture he has authored Studies in the Design Laboratory , a trilogy of case studies that examine how and why architects who developed laboratories in the 1960s and 1970s and what these laboratories reveal about the cultural research practices of design.
He is a fellow of the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Macdowell, a Graham Foundation and Harvard Data Science Initiative grantee, a World Frontiers Forum Pioneer (2018) and Young Pioneer (2017), and a 2015 nominee for the Chernikov Prize. Witt has lectured widely, including at the Venice Biennale, Library of Congress, Yale, Princeton, MIT, The Bartlett, The Berlage, Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, ETH, and EPFL, and his research has been published in venues such as AD, Log, Project, Detail, Harvard Design Magazine, e-Flux, Surface, Space, Linear Algebra and its Applications, and Linear and Multilinear Algebra, and Issues in Science and Technology. He has been awarded a number of patents, including for geometric rationalizations of complex geometry and large-scale collaborative software systems .
Witt was previously Director of Research at Gehry Technologies and a director at GT’s Paris, France office, where he solved complex geometric challenges for clients including Gehry Partners, Ateliers Jean Nouvel, UN Studio, and Coop Himmelb(l)au, and projects such as Fondation Louis Vuitton and Louvre Abu Dhabi. He also developed prototypes for new software design tools such as GTeam (now Trimble Connect, acquired by Trimble in 2014).
Witt received a Master in Architecture (with distinction, AIA medal, John E. Thayer Scholarship) and a Master in Design Studies (History and Theory, with distinction) from Harvard GSD. He has an Erdős number of 3.
Michael Van Valkenburgh
Michael R. Van Valkenburgh, Charles Eliot Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture, Emeritus, has taught at the GSD since 1982. He served as program director from 1987-89 and for a term as chairman of the department from 1991-96.
As founding principal of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc. (MVVA), with offices in New York City and Cambridge, Van Valkenburgh has designed a wide range of project types ranging from intimate gardens to full-scale urban design undertakings. Some of his recent projects include Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York City, the Lower Don Lands in Toronto, and the Monk’s Garden at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Most recently, the firm has been commissioned to design the landscape for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago and master plan the 308-acre Dorothea Dix Park in Raleigh. MVVA has received numerous design awards, including ASLA Firm of the Year in 2016 and the Brendan Gill Prize from the Municipal Art Society of New York in 2010 for Brooklyn Bridge Park, which is presented annually to the work of art that best captures the spirit and energy of New York City.
Van Valkenburgh was the 2003 recipient of the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Environmental Design, and in 2010 became the second landscape architect in history to receive the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for contributions to architecture as an art. In 2011 he was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he is one of only three landscape architects on its roster of members. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the ASLA.
Van Valkenburgh earned a BS in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University and an MLA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2008, Yale University Press published Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates: Reconstructing Urban Landscapes, a book on his firm’s work. Van Valkenburgh’s approach to creating landscapes and public spaces has also been featured in a wide range of publications, most notably Art in America and Harvard Magazine .
Jose Luis Vallejo
Jose Luis Vallejo is founding member of ecosistema urbano, a Madrid based group of architects and urban designers operating within the fields of urbanism, architecture, engineering and sociology. Ecosistema urbano’s approach is defined as urban social design, by which they understand the design of environments, spaces and dynamics in order to improve the self-organization of citizens, social interaction within communities and their relationship with the environment. Ecosistema urbano has used this philosophy to design and implement projects in Norway, Denmark, Spain, Italy, France and China.
Jose Luis Vallejo has lectured and has been a visiting professor in many of the most important institutions and universities worldwide like: Harvard, Yale, UCLA, Cornell, Iberoamericana, RIBA, Copenhagen, Bergen, Munich, Paris, Milan, Shanghai, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Santiago… From 2003 he is Professor at the Architecture Department, Madrid School of Architecture.
In 2005 ecosistema urbano received the European Acknowledgement Award from the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction (Geneva, 2005). In 2006, they were awarded the prize of the Architectural Association and the Environments, Ecology and Sustainability Research Cluster (London, 2006). In 2007 they have been nominated for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture Mies van der Rohe Award “Emerging European Architect” and received the AR AWARD for emerging architecture in London, selected between more than 400 teams from all around the world. In 2008 ecosistema urbano received the first prize NEXT GENERATION AWARD from the Arquia Próxima Foundation and in 2009 the Silver Award Europe from the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction selected between more than 500 teams, later being nominated as a worldwide finalist.
During the last four years their work has been covered by more than 100 media (national and international press, television programs, and specialized publications) from 30 countries, and their projects have been exhibited at multiple galleries, museums and institutions (The Venice Biennale of Architecture, “Le Sommer Environnement“ in Paris, Milan Spazio FMG, Seoul Design Olympics, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, Boston Society of Architects, Matadero Madrid, Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Society of Architects of Madrid and Barcelona, Design Museum in London, Deutsches Architektur Zentrum in Berlin, Oslo National Museum, Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris…)
Since 2007 the team is involved in research projects on the future paths of urban design called “eco-technological cities”, financed by the Spanish Ministry of Industry. In parallel, they have created a digital platform that develops social networks and manage online channels around the subject of creative urban sustainability (ecosistemaurbano.org).
At the moment, they are working on several urban proposals for different cities and their most recent projects include the new experimental education building for the Reggio Children Foundation in Reggio Emilia (Italy), the design of an interactive public space for the Shanghai World Expo, an experimental urban playground in Dordrecht (Netherland), the “Ecopolis Plaza” a waste to resources building and public space on the outskirts of Madrid and the “Dreamhamar” project to design the urban centre of Hamar in Norway through an innovative open source process to empower public participation and collective creativity.