Kaja Tally-Schumacher

Kaja Tally-Schumacher is an Assistant Professor of Environmental History at the Graduate School of Design. Her primary area of expertise is the archaeology and analysis of designed landscapes and ancient environments in the ancient Roman world from ca. 2^nd c. BCE to 4^th c. CE across Western Eurasia and Northern Africa, ranging from urban plantings to suburban and rural gardens. More broadly, her research interests include ancient Mediterranean gardens and landscapes, digital reconstructions and visualization, comparative environmental history, and issues pertaining to sustainability, resiliency, and climate mitigation in cultural heritage sites.

She currently serves as the Assistant Director of the joint Università di Bologna, Graduate School of Design, and Cornell University Casa della Regina Carolina (CRC) Project at Pompeii, where she and her team are excavating one of the largest urban gardens in the ancient city. Pompeii is central to any account of Roman households and daily life in ancient times. This study focuses on the so-called Casa della Regina Carolina (VIII 3.14 and VIII 3.15), a house and garden that was cleared of volcanic ash in the early 19th century but never excavated with modern scientific methods. While Pompeii is famous for revealing details of daily life, frozen in time by the eruption, those of this house have been largely forgotten, with few records remaining of what the archaeologists first found.

The CRC team is the first to conduct stratigraphic excavation of the garden and house since its discovery in the nineteenth century. In 2018–2023, the team used ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to locate buried remains; documented standing architecture and topography via LiDAR and Total Station; excavated over 130 m2 of the garden and have been able to reconstruct aspects of the ancient environment via various sampling methods. Excavated and documented garden features include multiple planting pots, root cavities, pathways, built architecture (including two shrines and a probable triclinium), and wall paintings. As a result, the team has now recorded and is reconstructing much of the first-century CE garden in CAD, Rhino, and Unity, and has spatially recorded the findspots of all artifacts for GIS analysis.

Her long-term research goals are rooted in investigating human-landscape interactions and in challenging the boundaries of the canon. In “Wet Feet” (2023) she explores changing corporeal perceptions of climate as depicted and described in visual and literary ecological calendars created during the period of the Roman Climate Optimum (roughly 200 BCE to 150 CE), when the climate was unusually stable, moist, and warm, and as well as those constructed in the subsequent climatologically unstable centuries. This analysis articulates the rich archival potential of late Roman and Antique visual and textual material culture as a source of climatological data.

Tally-Schumacher’s research has also focused on the development and conceptualization of ornamental plantings and gardens in the Roman period. She first examined this theme in “Through the Picture Plane” (2016 and 2017), focusing on the creation of a new densely-planted ornamental garden type that arose in the second half of the first century BCE, as exemplified in the Garden Room wall paintings from Livia’s villa at Prima Porta. Utilizing a greenscreen, generating a planting plan based on the painted garden, and populating the painting and room with strollers, viewers, and diners, illustrates the close connection between real and painted gardens, suggesting a close relationship between designers and painters in antiquity. A Cultural History of Plants in Antiquity (2022), which features her subsequent work on the conceptualization of these new ornamental green spaces as widowed, unmarried, and useless, won the Daniel F. Austin Award from The Society for Economic Botany and was a Finalist of the Prose Award in the Humanities Reference Category.

Tally-Schumacher’s current book project, Gardeners, Plants, and Soils of the Roman World, investigates an overlooked group of practitioners: landscape designers and gardeners of various social classes in the period of the “Roman Climate Optimum,” a period characterized by an unusually stable, moist, and warm climate. This period was marked by a rapid blossoming of a new cross-Mediterranean plant trade, burgeoning horticultural innovation, and, as a result, the rise of a new designer and gardener class. The project is interdisciplinary, drawing on traditional archives, such as representations of gardens, textual descriptions of gardeners and gardens, and archaeological evidence from excavated gardens. She also integrates innovative work on plant bio-intelligence, human-object entanglements, diachronic case studies (such as US Antebellum records of similar gardeners in neoclassical plantation gardens), and field interviews with present-day practitioners to reconstruct historical gardener lives. This project thus not only contributes to our understanding of the entanglement between forced labor, cultivation, and climate change in the Roman world, but also engages with comparative discourse on forced labor and landscape studies in the US.

She holds an MA with Distinction in Ancient Art History and completed her doctoral work with leading landscape historians, Claudia Lazzaro and Kathryn L. Gleason, at Cornell University. Dr. Tally-Schumacher’s research has been supported by predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks, at the University of Pennsylvania, and at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. Dr. Tally-Schumacher’s commitment to scholastic excellence in the classroom is exemplified by her two Distinguished Teaching awards, from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (2012), and Cornell University (2017).

Li Hou

Li Hou is Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She teaches Comparative Planning Regulations in the spring semester, and assists the chair, program director, and coordinator with the UPD administration support responsibilities.

Hou is a planning scholar, educator, and practitioner with rich experiences. Her research interest lies at the intersection of history and theory of urban and regional planning, planning regulations, and spatial politics. She has authored over 50 book chapters and articles in scholarly journals and regularly contributes to urban and planning issues in public media. Her first English book, Building for Oil: Daqing and the Formation of the Chinese Socialist State (Harvard Asia Center, 2018, reprinted in 2021) received the 2020 First Book Prize for the Most Innovative Book in Planning History, awarded by the International Planning History Society. The SDX Joint Publishing Company 三联书店 will publish the Chinese version in 2024. Other noteworthy books published in Chinese include Richard Paulick in Shanghai, 1933-1949: The Postwar Planning and Reconstruction of a Modern Chinese Metropolis (Tongji University Press, 2016), An Academic History in China’s Urban and Rural Planning Discipline (book chapters, China Science and Technology Press, 2018).

Before joining Harvard, Dr. Li Hou held the position of Professor of Urban Planning at Tongji University and served as the Ph.D. program director at the Department of Urban and Rural Planning. She has been a research affiliate at the MIT Sustainable Urbanization lab since 2023 and was a Harvard-Yenching Coordinate Research Scholar from 2014 to 2015. In practice, Hou has been a registered planner at the Tongji Urban Planning and Design Institute since 2000, an expert member of the Shanghai City Planning Commission since 2012, and the vice secretary-general for the Academic Committee of Regulatory Planning, Urban Planning Society of China, since 2018. In academic services, she is a council member of the International Planning History Society, and a Global Urban History Project board member who chairs the prize committee for emerging scholars. She has served on numerous editorial boards, including China City Planning Review, and is a guest editor for Time + Architecture.

Growing up on an oil field in North China, Hou entered Tongji University to receive her training in architecture and urban planning. She was later awarded the Frank Tsao Chinese Teachers’ Fund to study at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. At Harvard GSD, she received a Master of Design Studies and a Doctor of Design with a concentration in urbanization and housing.

Ana María León Crespo

Ana María León’s work traces how spatial practices and transnational networks of power and resistance shape the modernity and coloniality of the Americas. Her research and teaching foregrounds the agency of populations under struggle and the multiple forms of bias embedded in the built environment and its histories. León is invested in collaborative approaches to learning, teaching, and writing. Attention to multiple critical positions, particularly those of historically underrepresented groups, she argues, grounds our understanding of history in the politics of coliberation.

León is author of Modernity for the Masses: Antonio Bonet’s Dreams for Buenos Aires  (University of Texas Press, 2021) and A Ruin in Reverse / Bones of the Nation  (ARQ, 2021). She has edited issues of Thresholds (41: Revolution! ), The Architectural Theory Review (21:3 Designing Commodity Cultures , with Niko Vicario), and e-flux Architecture (The Settler Colonial Present , with Andrew Herscher); her writing has been published in multiple journals and edited anthologies. Working as part of research collectives, León has organized actions at the Venice Biennale (with Detroit Resists , 2016) and the Chicago Architecture Biennial (with the Settler Colonial City Project, 2019). She has co-organized teaching workshops on feminist pedagogy, the south, settler colonialism, and antiracism in architectural history, and is convener and co-editor of the SPACE/RACE , SPACE/GENDER , SPACE/BODY and SPACE/LABOR collaborative reading lists.

Prior to joining the GSD, León was Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan. She holds a Ph.D. in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture from MIT, a Master in Design Studies with distinction from the GSD, a Master in Architecture from Georgia Tech, and a diploma in architecture from UCSG Ecuador. She serves on the editorial board of the journals Thresholds  and post(s) , and has served on the boards of GAHTC  (2019–2021), The Architecture Lobby  (2019–2021), and SAH  (2021–2024). León is co-founder of several collectives laboring to broaden the reach of architectural history, including the Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative  (where she was active 2013–2020), Detroit Resists , Nuestro Norte es el Sur and the Settler Colonial City Project . Additional information and links available at anamarialeon.net .

John May

On leave for Fall 2025

John May is founding partner, with Zeina Koreitem, of MILLIØNS , a Los Angeles-based design practice. Their recent work includes completed and ongoing projects in California, New York, Boston, Germany and Beirut. Recently selected as the winner of an international competition to reimagine the west wing of I.M. Pei’s Everson Musum, in Syracuse, NY, MILLIØNS’ experimental work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at Friedman Benda Gallery, the Storefront for Art and Architecture, The Architecture + Design Museum of Los Angeles, and Jai & Jai Los Angeles, among others. Their essays have appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, e-flux, Flaunt magazine, I.D., a+t, and in a catalog of their work on experimental collective living, New Massings for New Masses: Collectivity After Orthography  (PDF) (MIT, 2015).

Situated at the intersection of philosophy, technology, and the politics of environmentalism, May’s writings aim at a continual articulation of the conditions surrounding the contemporary design fields. His most recent book, Signal. Image. Architecture  (Columbia, 2019) contemplates the psychosocial effects of transmissible electronic images, and their consequences for architecture and urbanism. Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice  (Minnesota, 2019; co-edited with Zeynep Çelik Alexander) explores the philosophical, historical, and political dimensions of contemporary design technologies. May’s essays and interviews have appeared in Log, Perspecta, Praxis, MIT Thresholds, Project, Quaderns, New Geographies, and Actar’s Verb: Crisis, among many others.

May previously taught at MIT, UCLA, SCI-Arc, and the University of Toronto. In 2012 he was named National Endowment for the Humanities Visiting Professor in Architecture at Rice University. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Visual Art from the College of William and Mary, a Master of Architecture (AP) with Distinction from Harvard GSD, and a doctorate in Geography and Environmental Studies from UCLA.

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.

Charles Waldheim

Charles Waldheim is the John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture, Director of the Office for Urbanization, and Co-Director of the Master in Design Studies program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is an American-Canadian architect and urbanist. Waldheim’s research examines the relations between landscape, ecology, and contemporary urbanism. He is author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books on these subjects, and his writing has been published and translated internationally. Waldheim is recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome; the Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship at the Study Centre of the Canadian Centre for Architecture; the Cullinan Chair at Rice University; and the Sanders Fellowship at the University of Michigan.

George Thomas

Area Head, Critical Conservation MDes area group

George E. Thomas, Ph.D. is a cultural and architectural historian practicing with Susan Nigra Snyder, a registered architect in CivicVisions, based in Philadelphia. CivicVisions merges knowledge of a place’s history with the ability to see how this may be used to create a future that responds to contemporary lifestyle forces. Mr. Thomas has been a national pioneer in documentation for National Register Historic Districts and individual listings to secure historic tax credits for rehabilitation projects. For more than thirty years he has taught at the University of Pennsylvania where his courses seek to understand the interconnection between history and patterns of modern life. In 1978 he was one of the founders of Penn’s Program in Historic Preservation where he taught until 2002. In 1995 he was awarded the University’s Provost’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. Dr. Thomas has written and lectured widely on nineteenth and early twentieth century American architecture with a focus on the relationship between cultural innovation and architectural design. His research has broadened our understanding of the origins of modern design in the work of Pennsylvania architects serving industrial clients. His books include Cape May: Queen of the Seaside Resort; Drawing Toward Building: American Architectural Graphics 1732-1986; Frank Furness: The Complete Works; Building America’s First University: An Architectural and Historical Guide to the University of Pennsylvania; William L. Price: From Arts and Crafts to Modern Design; Buildings of the United States: Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania and forthcoming, The Poetry of the Present: Architecture in the age of the great machines.

Adam Tanaka

Adam Tanaka is an urban planner and educator. His research, teaching and professional practice focus on the challenges and opportunities of public-private real estate development, with a particular emphasis on affordable housing in U.S. cities.

Adam is a Senior Analyst at HR&A Advisors, an industry leader in economic development, real estate and urban policy consulting. Adam’s work at HR&A has included negotiation support, financial analysis, economic and fiscal impact analysis, organizational design and economic development strategy on behalf of public and private clients, including the Battery Park City Authority, the New York City Economic Development Corporation, the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh and Sidewalk Labs.

Prior to joining HR&A, Adam received his Ph.D. in urban planning from Harvard University, where his research focused on the history of large-scale, middle-income housing in New York City. Adam’s doctoral work was supported by the Joint Center for Housing Studies, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Harvard Horizons scholarship program. While at Harvard, Adam served as a teaching fellow for courses ranging from planning theory to real estate finance and helped launch an urban innovation summer program in partnership with the City of Paris. In 2014, he received a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching for his work on the undergraduate course “Designing the American City.”

Over the course of his doctoral studies, Adam also worked for the New York City Department of City Planning and the New York City Housing Development Corporation, analyzing the City’s Transferable Development Rights programs and contributing to the underwriting of affordable housing preservation deals. He also served as a student organizer of the Boston Affordable Housing Development Competition, an annual program pairing graduate students with non-profit housing developers in the Boston area.

Adam’s writing, filmmaking, and civic art projects have been published by the Boston Globe, CityLab, Crain’s New York, the Journal of Urban History, Slate and the Van Alen Institute, among others. Originally from London, England, Adam is a Fellow of the Urban Design Forum and currently serves on the Program Committee for Open House New York, a non-profit organization that promotes public access to off-limits urban spaces.

 

Lectures

Private Projects, Public Ambitions: Large-Scale, Middle-Income Housing in New York City

Harvard Horizons, May 2018

 

Essays

Historians for Housing: Excavating the Past to Advocate for the Future

Journal of Urban History, July 2019

Co-op City: How New York Made Large-Scale Affordable Housing Work

CityLab, January 2019

Yes, There Is Room to Build More Housing in New York City (with Mathias Altwicker and Nicholas Bloom)

Crain’s New York, September 2017

Reviving the Large-Scale Approach: A Manifesto for New York City (with a response by Carl Weisbrod)

Harvard Real Estate Review, May 2017

Fiduciary Landlords: Life Insurers and Large-Scale Housing in Postwar New York City

Working Paper, Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, April 2017

Neighborhood Change and the Right to the City

Metropolitics, March 2016

John R. Stilgoe

John Stilgoe, Robert and Lois Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape Development, Emeritus, held a joint appointment in the Harvard Faculties of Arts and Science and Design. He offered courses on the history and future of the North American built landscape.

Author of What Is Landscape? (2015), Old Fields:  Photography, Glamour, and Fantasy Landscape (2014), Train Time:  Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape (2007), Landscape and Images (2005), Lifeboat (2003), Outside Lies Magic (1998), Alongshore (1994) and other books,  Stilgoe is a Fellow of the Society of American Historians and winner of the Parkman Medal (1983, for his Common Landscape of America), the ASLA Williams Medal, the AIA Medal for collaborative research, the Cabot Fellowship Prize, and other awards. Among his research projects are a book on elites and another on the enduring meanings of Spanish, French, African-American, Portuguese, Canary Island, and related Creole landscape terms north of Haiti and Cuba. He restores and sails antique boats.

Christine Smith

Christine Smith is the Robert C. and Marion K. Weinberg Professor of Architectural History. She teaches courses in Late Antique, Medieval, and Italian Renaissance and Baroque architecture.

Christine Smith has published on Early Christian, Italian Romanesque, Italian Renaissance, and Twentieth-Century American art and architecture; most of her publications are in the field of Tuscan Romanesque or on Leon Battista Alberti and Early Renaissance architectural theory.

Her most recent book is Eyewitness to Old St. Peter’s. Maffeo Vegio’s “Remembering the Ancient History of St.Peter’s Basilica in Rome” with Joseph O’Connor (Cambridge University Press, 2019) which makes available for the first time an English translation of Vegio’s text, accompanied by full-color digital reconstructions of the basilica as it appeared in Vegio’s day.

Her current project is a book-length study of the experience of wonder as it relates to architecture. Drawn entirely from the evidence of primary sources from the fifth century B.C. to the eighteenth-century A.D, the work explores changing ideas about what the experience of wonder consists of, what the qualities of a “wonderful” building might be, and what role wonder in architecture played in human society at different times and places.