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.
Jorge Silvetti
Jorge S. Silvetti is the Nelson Robinson, Jr. Professor of Architecture, Emeritus at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where he has taught since 1975. He was chairman of the Architecture Department from 1995-2002. He has taught design studios (that have included The National Archives of Argentina, A Project Along the River Bilbao La Ria de Bilbao, La Reserva Ecologia of Buenos Aires, and Cordoba) and lectures on history, contemporary theory, and criticism (Architectural History I: Buildings, Texts, and Contexts from Antiquity through the 17th Century).
Since 1986, Silvetti has directed a number of research programs, including one on the urbanism and architecture of Sicily, which won a Progressive Architecture award and made him the first designer to win in all P/A award categories. Other research programs include “Buenos Aires 2000,” on the future of public spaces in the changing Latin American metropolis, and “The ria de Bilbao,” on the future development of this formerly industrial city in northern Spain. Silvetti has written on architectural theory, and his design work has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. In 1986, he was awarded the Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome. Since 1996, he has served as a juror for the Pritzker Architectural Prize, and in 2000 he became a juror for the Mies van der Rohe Prize for Latin American Architecture. Silvetti received the Dipl Arch from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the MArch from the University of California at Berkeley.
His architecture firm, Machado and Silvetti , was founded in 1974 and has received numerous honors for design projects, including three awards from the American Institute of Architects, nine Progressive Architecture awards and citations, seven Boston Society of Architects awards, and eight design awards from the New England AIA chapter. In 1991, the firm was given the First Award in Architecture by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The firm’s notable projects include work at Princeton University, Harvard University, Rice University, Arizona State University, the University of Arkansas, the University of Utah, the American University of Beirut, as well as a public library branch in Boston, a private development in Boston, and a new center of comparative archaeology at the Getty Villa in Malibu, California.
Robert Pietrusko
Robert Gerard Pietrusko is an Associate Professor in the department of Landscape Architecture, where his teaching and research focus on geographic representation, simulation, narrative cartography, and the history of spatial data sets.
His design work is part of the permanent collection of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris and has been exhibited in over ten countries at venues such the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), ZKM Center for Art & Media, and the Venice Architecture Biennale, among others.
Prior to joining the junior faculty of the GSD, Pietrusko worked as a designer with Diller Scofidio + Renfro in New York, and held research positions at Parsons Institute for Information Mapping at the New School and at Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab.
Pietrusko holds a Bachelor of Music in Music Synthesis (with honors) from the Berklee College of Music; a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Villanova University; and a Master of Architecture (with distinction) from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.
Antoine Picon
Antoine Picon is the G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology at the GSD where he is also Chair of the PhD in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning. He teaches courses in the history and theory of architecture and technology. Trained as an engineer, architect, and historian, Picon works on the relationships between architectural and urban space, technology, and society, from the eighteenth century to the present.
His French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (1988; English translation, 1992) is a synthetic study of the disciplinary deep structures of architecture, garden design, and engineering in the eighteenth century, and their transformations as new issues of territorial management and infrastructure-systems planning were confronted. Whereas Claude Perrault (1613-1688) ou la Curiosité d’un classique (1988) traces the origin of these changes at the end of the seventeenth century, L’Invention de l’Ingénieur Moderne, L’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées 1747-1851 (1992) envisages their full development from the mid-eighteenth century to the 1850s by focusing on the changes experienced by the engineering profession.
Picon has also worked on the relations between space, technology and utopia. This is in particular the theme of Les Saint-Simoniens: Raison, Imaginaire, et Utopie (2002), a detailed study of the Saint-Simonian movement that played a seminal role in the emergence of industrial modernity. His interest in utopian thought is actually traceable from his early work to his more recent publications such as his book on cities and nature.
A series of Picon’s books offer a comprehensive overview of the changes brought by the computer and digital culture to the theory and practice of architecture as well as to the planning and experience of the city. He has published in particular Digital Culture in Architecture: An Introduction for the Design Profession (2010), Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity (2013), Smart Cities: Théorie et Critique d’un Idéal Autoréalisateur (2013), and Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence (2015).
At the intersection of an enduring interest for the history of construction and his research on digital culture in architecture, Picon has developed a theoretical and historical approach to the question of materiality that has led to his book The Materiality of Architecture (2021). How is the digital, the recent rise of artificial intelligence in particular, transforming the materiality of architecture is among his current topics of investigation.
It is almost impossible to work on the history of technology without encountering the question of nature or rather of the relationship between the natural and the artificial. This question is at the core of Picon’s latest book, a history of urban natures from the seventeenth century to the present. Natures Urbaines: Une Histoire Technique et Sociale (2024) follows two main threads: the technological component of the presence of nature in cities as well as its social and political dimension.
Picon has received a number of awards for his writings, including the Médaille de la Ville de Paris, and twice the Prix du Livre d’Architecture de la Ville de Briey, a well as the Georges Sarton Medal of the University of Gand. In 2010, he was elected a member of the French Académie des Technologies. In 2015, he became a member of the French Académie d’Architecture. He is Chevalier des Arts et Lettres since 2014. He was Chairman of the Fondation Le Corbusier from 2013 to 2024.
Picon received science and engineering degrees from the Ecole Polytechnique and from the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, an architecture degree from the Ecole d’Architecture de Paris-Villemin, a PhD in history and a Habilitation à Diriger les Recherches from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.
Pablo Pérez-Ramos
Pablo Pérez-Ramos is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he coordinates the first-semester Landscape Architecture Core Studio and teaches research seminars and lecture courses in landscape theory. He holds Doctor of Design and Master in Landscape Architecture degrees from the GSD and is a licensed architect from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM).
Pérez-Ramos’s research focuses on the aesthetic and formal associations between design and the natural sciences, and is informed by interests in material culture, the environmental humanities, and the philosophy of science. He has delved into the origins of ecological narratives in contemporary landscape architecture by examining the central debates in ecological theory throughout the twentieth century. His interest in the intersection of science and design has broadened more recently to encompass the fields of thermodynamics, biological systematics, and evolutionary theory. This theoretical agenda underpins ongoing research on climate adaptation strategies, traditional knowledge, and agroecological practices in productive landscapes in conditions of extreme heat and aridity, including the Maghreb region, Northwest India, Peru, and the Central Valleys in Oaxaca, Mexico. His work is ultimately concerned with the formal tensions and interferences existing between human technology and the other physical forces and processes—tectonic, atmospheric, biological—that shape landscapes.
Prior to his appointment at the GSD, Pérez-Ramos coordinated the Urban Landscape Program at the Northeastern University School of Architecture and taught at the Boston Architectural College (BAC) and the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid. Between 2012 and 2016, he served as regional planning coordinator for the 2025 Masterplan for the Metropolitan District of Quito, and before that, he practiced as a licensed architect in Madrid.
He was a member of the editorial board of the New Geographies journal between 2013 and 2018 and editor-in-chief (with Daniel Daou) of New Geographies 08: Island (Harvard GSD, 2016). His writings have also been published in the Journal of Landscape Architecture (JoLA), The International Journal of Islamic Architecture (IJIA), PLOT, MONU, Revista Arquitectura (COAM), Landscape Research Record (CELA), and in the edited volumes The Landscape as Union between Art and Science: The Legacy of Alexander von Humboldt and Ernst Haeckel (Quodlibet, 2023), MedWays Open Atlas (LetteraVentidue, 2022), Architecture is All Over (Columbia University Press, 2017), and Urban Landscape: Critical Concepts in Built Environment (Routledge, 2015), among others.
Pérez-Ramos’ research and academic work at Harvard has been funded by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the William F. Milton Fund, the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities, the Alwaleed Islamic Studies Program, La Caixa Foundation, and Caja Madrid Foundation among others, and his design work has received numerous awards in competitions of architecture and urbanism.
Erika Naginski
Erika Naginski is the Robert P. Hubbard Professor of Architectural History. Her research interests include Baroque and Enlightenment architecture, early modern aesthetic philosophy, theories of public space, and the critical traditions of architectural history. In addition to teaching modules in the Building Texts Contexts sequence, she offers seminars and lecture courses in architectural history and theory including The Shapes of Utopia, The Piranesi Effect, Versailles to the Visionaries and The Ruin Aesthetic: Episodes in the History of Architectural Idea.
Naginski’s books and edited volumes include Sculpture and Enlightenment (2009), which traces the transformation of public art and architecture in an age of secular rationalism and revolutionary politics; Polemical Objects (2004), a special issue of Res co-edited with Stephen Melville, which explores the philosophy of medium in Hegel, Heidegger and others; and Writing on Drawing (2000) for the journal Representations, with essays addressing the collision of semiotics and mimesis in drawing practices as they emerge in art, architecture and science. In 2007, Naginski was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for her current book project on the intersections of architecture, archaeology and the conception of history in the eighteenth century.
Before joining the GSD faculty, Naginski taught in the architecture department at MIT and in the art history department at the University of Michigan. She has been a junior fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard University as well as a research fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and the Deutsches Forum fr Kunstgeschichte. She serves on the editorial board of Res.
Mohsen Mostafavi
Mohsen Mostafavi, architect and educator, is the Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, and served as Dean of the GSD from 2008-2019. His work focuses on modes and processes of urbanization and on the interface between technology and aesthetics.
He was formerly the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University where he was also the Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Professor in Architecture. Previously, he was the Chairman of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. He studied architecture at the AA, and undertook research on counter-reformation urban history at the Universities of Essex and Cambridge. He has been the Director of the Master of Architecture I Program at the GSD and has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Cambridge, and the Frankfurt Academy of Fine Arts (Städelschule).
Mostafavi is a Trustee of Smith College, an Honorary Trustee of the Norman Foster Foundation, and served on the Board of the Van Alen Institute as well as the Steering Committee and the Jury of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. At Harvard, he co-chaired the Harvard University Committee for the Arts, served on the Smith Campus Center Executive Committee, the Harvard Allston Steering Committee, and co-chaired the Steering Committee on Common Spaces. He is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Mahindra Humanities Center, the Harvard Innovation Lab Advisory Board, the Executive Board of The Laboratory at Harvard, and the Committee on Middle Eastern Studies.
Mostafavi has chaired the jury of the Mies van der Rohe Prize for Architecture and the European, Global, and North American juries of the LafargeHolcim Awards for Sustainable Construction. He served on the design committee of the London Development Agency (LDA), the juries for the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Gold Medal and Annie Spink Award, and the advisory committee on campus planning of the Asian University for Women.
He is a consultant on a number of international architectural and urban projects. His research and design projects have been published in many journals, including The Architectural Review, AAFiles, Arquitectura, Bauwelt, Casabella, Centre, Daidalos, and El Croquis. His books include On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time (co-authored 1993), which received the American Institute of Architects prize for writing on architectural theory; Delayed Space (co-authored 1994); Approximations (2002); Surface Architecture (2002); Logique Visuelle (2003); Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape (2004); Structure as Space (2006); Ecological Urbanism (co-edited 2010 and recently translated into Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish); Implicate & Explicate (2011); Louis Vuitton: Architecture and Interiors (2011); In the Life of Cities (2012); Instigations: Engaging Architecture, Landscape and the City (co-edited 2012); Architecture is Life (2013); Nicholas Hawksmoor: The London Churches (2015); Architecture and Plurality (2016); Portman’s America & Other Speculations (2017); and Ethics of the Urban: The City and the Spaces of the Political (2017).
Rafael Moneo
José Rafael Moneo is the first Josep Lluis Sert Professor of Architecture, Emeritus. He was chair of the Department of Architecture from 1985 until 1990 and teaches the lecture courses On Contemporary Architecture and Design Theories in Architecture.
Before joining the Graduate School of Design, Moneo was a fellow at the Spanish Academy in Rome and taught in Barcelona and Madrid. His scholarly work includes numerous articles and lectures published throughout the world. His projects include the Bankinter Building in Madrid, the Museum of Roman Art in Mérida, the L’Illa building in Barcelona, the Pilar and Joan Miró Museum in Palma de Mallorca, the “Kursaal” Auditorium and Congess Center in San Sebastián, the extension of the Prado Museum in Madrid, as well as the Davis Art Museum at Wellesley College, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. Moneo has been awarded the Gold Medal by the Spanish government, the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Prince of Viana Prize (Spain), the Swedish Schock Price for the Visual Arts and the Royal Institute of British Architects Gold Medal. In 1996, he received the UIA Gold Medal and the Pritzker Prize.
Rahul Mehrotra
Rahul Mehrotra is the founder principal of RMA Architects . He divides his time between working in Mumbai and Boston and teaching at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University where he is Professor of Urban Design and Planning and the John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization.
His Mumbai-based firm, RMA Architects, was founded in 1990 and has designed and executed projects including government and private institutions, corporate workplaces, private homes, and unsolicited projects driven by the firm’s commitment to advocacy in the city of Mumbai. The firm has designed a software campus for Hewlett Packard in Bangalore, a campus for Magic Bus (an NGO that works with poor children), led the restoration of the Chowmahalla Palace in Hyderabad, and formulated a conservation master plan for the Taj Mahal with the Taj Mahal Conservation Collaborative. The firm also recently designed and built a social housing project for 100 elephants and their caretakers in Jaipur as well as a corporate office in Hyderabad. The firm has designed several single-family houses in different parts of India and one in Karachi, Pakistan. In 2015 RMA Architects completed the Lab of the Future on the Novartis Campus in Basel, Switzerland and were finalist in an international design competition for the Museum of Modern Art in Sydney. The recent projects of the firm include a Library for the School of Architecture at CEPT , the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University and a School of Public Policy at the IIM Ahmedabad. In 2018 RMA Architects were awarded the Venice Biennale juror’s ‘Special Mention ’ for ‘three projects that address issues of Intimacy and empathy, gently diffusing social boundaries and hierarchies’.
Mehrotra has written and lectured extensively on issues to do with architecture, conservation, and urban planning and design in Mumbai and India. His writings include coauthoring Bombay: The Cities Within, which covers the city’s urban history from the 1600s to 1990; Banganga: Sacred Tank; Public Places Bombay; Anchoring a City Line, A history of the city’s commuter railway; and Bombay to Mumbai: Changing Perspectives. He has also coauthored Conserving an Image Center: The Fort Precinct in Bombay. Based on this study and its recommendations, the historic Fort District in Mumbai was declared a conservation precinct in 1995 – a first such designation in India. In 2000, he edited a book for the Union of International Architects, which earmarks the end of the last century and is titled The Architecture of the 20th Century in the South Asian Region. In 2011, Mehrotra wrote Architecture in India – Since 1990, which is a reading of contemporary architecture in India which was extended through an exhibition he co-curated titled The State of Architecture: Practices and Processes in India, at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai in Jan 2016. This was followed in 2018 by a second co curated exhibition titled: The State of Housing: Realities, Aspirations and imaginaries in India which showed between Jan and March 2018 and is currently travelling in India. Since 2014 Mehrotra has been a member of the CICA – the International Committee of Architecture Critics.
Mehrotra is a member of the steering committee of the Laxmi Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard. In 2012-2015, he led a Harvard University-wide research project with Professor Diana Eck, called The Kumbh Mela: Mapping the Ephemeral Mega City. This work was published as a book in 2014. This research was extended in 2017 in the form of a book titled Does Permanence Matter? This research was also extended into an invited exhibition at the 2016 Venice Biennale. Mehrotra co – authored a book titled Taj Mahal: Multiple Narratives which was published in Dec 2017. Mehrotra’s most recent books are titled Working in Mumbai (2020) and The Kinetic City and other essays (2021). The former a reflection on his practice evolved through its association with the city of Bombay/Mumbai. The second book presents Mehrotra’s writings over the last thirty years and illustrates his long-term engagement with and analysis of urbanism in India. This work has given rise to a new conceptualization of the city which Mehrotra calls the Kinetic City.
Sergio Lopez-Pineiro
Sergio Lopez-Pineiro is an interdisciplinary architect, whose work explores voids as socio-spatial phenomena of freedom, diversity, and spontaneity.
Lopez-Pineiro is the director of Holes of Matter, a design studio operating at the intersection of architecture and landscape. It aims to look at the mutual influence between sociocultural forces and spatial organizations, and imagine existing and potential gaps to redefine relations between individual and collective forms of life. Lopez-Pineiro is a lecturer in landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he teaches design studios and theory seminars on architecture and landscape with a focus on the public nature of the built environment. He has previously held the 2006-07 Reyner Banham Fellowship at the University at Buffalo and the 2014-15 Daniel Urban Kiley Fellowship at Harvard University.
Lopez-Pineiro is the author of the volume A Glossary of Urban Voids (Berlin: Jovis, 2020). His projects and texts have been published internationally by a+t, MAS Context, Bracket, arq: Architecture Research Quarterly, Places, 2G, and others, and his work has received support from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and MacDowell. Lopez-Pineiro is a licensed architect in Spain. He trained at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM) and received his Master of Architecture degree from Princeton University, where he was awarded the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Prize. He previously worked at No.mad in Madrid and Foreign Office Architects in London.