Student Journals Recount the GSD’s Intellectual History

When Cam My Nguyen, a first-year architecture student, was applying to the Graduate School of Design (GSD), she learned about one of the School’s student journals, Open Letters , which invites students, staff, and faculty to engage in public discourse about design in the epistolary form. This fall, Nguyen helped organize an exhibition of archival issues of Open Letters in the student-run Quotes Gallery . The history of the publication was also the subject of a separate event in the Frances Loeb Library Special Collections that celebrated the long history of student journals at the GSD.  

Nguyen’s interest in the journal rose out of her passion for the letter as a narrative device. She grew up reading Edgar Allen Poe’s collected letters, Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and was part of the last class of students at her elementary school who were taught to write cursive; she’s always hand-written letters to friends. So, in her first year at the GSD this fall, she immediately sought out Open Letters, joining its staff and working with two other students, Simona Evtimova (MArch ’29) and Hazel Flaherty (MArch ’29), to design the exhibition. The show included copies of all 100 issues the journal has published since its founding in 2013. Issues were hung side by side in the Quotes Gallery so that visitors could peruse and read each letter, flipping up the pages one by one.    

Since its inception, the topics in the journal’s letters have range d from “love letters, anonymous letters, curriculum proposal letters, letters of admiration and letters of discontent,” writes special collections curator Inés Zalduendo in the Special Collections’ guide to their collection of student journals. Open Letters’ founder, Chelsea Spencer, was inspired to launch the journal after reading a letter from Mack Scogin, Kajima Professor in Practice of Architecture, Emeritus, to architect Benedetta Tagliabue, about her Barcelona home, in Harvard Design Magazine No. 35. In the inaugural Open Letters, Spencer wrote to Mack Scogin , explaining the premise for the journal and speaking to her history with him and his partner and wife, Merrill Elam.  

“I’d tell you,” writes Spencer, “we wanted to pry open the gap between the stilted obfuscation of Academic English and the sloppy narcissism of Internetspeak, with the ambition of creating a space for slow, sincere correspondence.” She  adds at the end, “P.S. I’m blaming you if this whole thing turns out to be a waste of paper.” In fact, it would go on to be the School’s longest-running student journal.  

Over the years, the journal’s letter writers have grappled with many topics, “from the history of architecture,” noted Nguyen, “to a secret admirer writing to a crush.” Some are more experimental than others, she said. One person wrote to their unborn son, another to beds. One of her favorites is an exchange between Cameron Wu and Milos Mladenovic in 2017 and 2018. Mladenovic (MArch ’20) first wrote to Wu in 2017, when Wu served as assistant professor of architecture at the GSD. Mladenovic was grappling with his sources of inspiration and commitment to his projects as a student, and his reliance on “the essential dialectics of architecture” that Wu had taught in that semester’s studio course. Wu responded when Mladenovic was wrapping up his last semester at the School, offering advice to his student about his projects.

“What I found productive,” Nguyen noted, “is the very critical (almost combative) position that the letter format allows one to take. I’m advocating for generative conversations, especially in the face of opposing ideologies.”   

Nguyen explained that, when she was an undergraduate at Princeton, Wu was her mentor. While she’d known how influential Wu was in the core studios at the GSD, as a new student at the School reading Open Letters, she found it “really exciting to see a thread through the very different pedagogies of Princeton and Harvard.”

This year, the biweekly Open Letters will include a letter from Mae Dessauvage (MArch ’21), a trans woman addressing her pre-transition self, “M,” when she was a student at the GSD.  

The journal was also recognized as an important part of the history of student publications at the GSD. This fall, during an “archives party ,” an event during which attendees examined various archival documents and publications in the Special Collections Reading Room at the GSD’s Frances Loeb Library, special collections curator Inés Zalduendo and archival collections website editor Ashleigh Brady (MArch ’26) featured the wide range of student publications that are part of the GSD’s history, starting with TASK: A Magazine for the Younger Generation in Architecture , first published in 1941. In addition, Loeb Fellow Andy Summers delivered a presentation on his work to document student journals in Scotland. In partnership with Priscilla Mariani, access services specialist, Zalduendo and Brady have made the GSD student publications available to read online , with the guide written by Zalduendo.  

“Since its founding in 1936,” writes Zalduendo, “students at the GSD have produced at least 17 different student publications.”  

The journals mark not only the School’s culture and students’ “landscape of inquiry,” Zalduendo writes, but also offer a window into our national and global history. For example, TASK includes writing by Dean Joseph Hudnut and professor Walter Gropius; Synthesis (1957–1958) reflects Dean Josep Lluís Sert’s years and Jacqueline Tyrwhitt’s work to found a program in urban design at the GSD; Connection (1963–1969) documents visual arts at the GSD and other Harvard schools, and includes a photographic series of the 1969 beating of Harvard students by local police during a Vietnam War protest; and, the first issue of APPENDX: Culture/Theory/Praxis , published in 1993, includes an argument by editors Darrell Fields, then a Harvard PhD student (he’d go on to earn his MArch at the GSD), and Kevin L. Fuller (MArch ’92) calling attention to the dearth of diverse representation in the field.

“We, the editors, are not shouting to be included in the academy—indeed, we are already here,” they write. “We are more interested in conveying, from our various positions, our insights and experiences from within the discipline in order that these essential positions not continue to be overlooked….” The journal was intended to include space for their voices and others in the field who were overlooked or unheard.  

Zalduendo’s summaries of the School’s student journals highlight almost a century of thinkers and designers at the GSD who helped advance public discourse around design, consider the School’s pedagogy and curricula, expose systemic gaps and inequities, and highlight the ideas and works swirling through the trays each semester. 

The history of student journals has also been documented in the School’s publication, Platform, which “represents a year in the life of the GSD.” Issue 12, “How About Now?” covers 2018–2019, and includes a curated overview of several student journals, including Open Letters. Editors Carrie Bly (MDes ’19), Isabella Caterina Frontado (MLA, MDes ’20), and Natasha Hicks (MUP, MDes ’19) write that “GSD students have consistently sought to process their intellectual inheritance in order to evaluate their position as designers within and beyond the School.”  

A New Life Offered

In 1970, Peter Smithson made the lofty promise that, at Robin Hood Gardens , the social housing complex he and his wife, Alison, designed, “you’ll be able to smell, feel, and experience the new life that’s being offered .” Two years later, the complex was complete, spanning two city blocks, with so-called “streets in the sky” that gave residents access to community, expansive views, and sunlit apartments—at least, that was the hope. 

The detailed documentation the pair made of the site, with early sketches and photographs, as well as drawings and plans made throughout the design and construction process, can be viewed in the Frances Loeb Library’s Smithson Collection , the only publicly-accessible repository of the couples’ life work. Selections from the collection have been utilized for a wide range of scholarship activities, from books to exhibitions, including, last fall at the GSD, “Towards a Newer Brutalism: Solar Pavilions, Appliance Houses, and Other Topologies of Contemporary Life,” curated by Emmett Zeifman, a former GSD faculty member. Zeifman writes that the Smithsons understood new brutalism as “an ethic, not a style,” and hoped to “meet the changing needs and desires of postwar society through an architecture that directly expressed the material conditions of its time.”  

In addition to offering a historical framework for understanding architecture today, the Smithson collection holds never-before-published drawings, photographs, sketches, and ephemera that bear testimony to more than fifty years of their vocation, including their philosophy of seamlessly integrating family life with work. There’s a landscape design by their twelve year old daughter, Soltana, for example, and childrens’ book manuscripts the couple co-wrote, along with pedagogical materials about the historical significance of Christmas imagery. “Innocent imagination, children’s books, and the responsibility of the architect,” writes M. Christine Boyer in Not Quite Architecture: Writing Around Alison and Peter Smithson , which draws from the library’s collection, “are continuously intermeshed in the Smithson’s writings…” 

The Smithsons’ utopian design of Robin Hood Gardens, with its central hill created for children’s play, protected by a building made to support families in community, ended in controversy. While some residents advocated for the rich sense of connection facilitated by the “streets in the sky,” others argued that they became ideal tucked-away passages for crime. After decades of neglect, the dilapidated building was demolished starting in 2017, with the final portion completed in March of this year, though the V&A Museum preserved a small portion  for its collection.

The Smithsons’ legacy, however, and their dreams of the benefits of social housing, helped propel forward the conversation around how to best ensure safe, affordable housing for all. The GSD, in partnership with the Joint Center for Housing Studies , has long addressed issues around social housing, expanding affordable housing access in the face of the climate crisis, and centering care in housing—some of the same threads of thought that led the Smithsons to build the iconic, if ultimately flawed, Robin Hood Gardens.  

A New Way to Explore Archigram, a Rarity in the Frances Loeb Library 

The iconic experimental magazine, Archigram , is about to make its return to contemporary culture with a forthcoming facsimile boxed edition of all 9½ original issues, nine of which can be found in the Frances Loeb Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD).

The facsimile edition, edited and featuring essays by Peter Cook, one of the original founders and 2015 Kenzō Tange Visiting Professor at the GSD, along with essays by David Grahame Shane and Reyner Banham, promises to “faithfully reproduce” the elements that made the magazine such a joy to read: “flyers, pockets, a pop-up centerfold, posters, gatefolds, and an electronic resistor.” Publisher artbook also notes that ths edition  includes some new material: a glossary index, a “scrapbook of previously unseen archival images,” and bibliographies.

Archigram was first published in 1961 after Peter Cook, David Greene, Warren Chalk, Dennis Crompton, Ron Herron, and Mike Webb gathered to form a collective that challenged mainstream design trends towards modernism. Together, for nearly a decade, they created speculative designs, exhibits, and writing, along with Archigram. The final half issue (a single page) was published in 1974.

Drawing from early twentieth century groups such as the Dadaists who distributed handmade packets that would one day be known as “zines,” the Archigram collective used collage, woodcut prints, and stapled pages, photocopying early issues for distribution and creating more complex design elements that mirrored the era’s new technologies, consumerism, and Pop Art. Together, the group developed a new vision for architecture that centered avant-garde aesthetics, with its futuristic designs and sense of play.

One of their most famous magazine issues featured Ron Herron’s “Walking City”—building units set on moveable legs that, like scurrying beetles, allow dwellers to move to necessary resources and communities. The “Zoom” issue helped the group find a broader audience, writes GSD archivist Ines Zalduendo , when Reyner Banham brought six copies from England to the US, where it landed a spot in Architectural Record. “It is easy to see how this issue,” Zalduendo notes in the archive’s collection record, “which took inspiration from Roy Lichtenstein and sci-fi comics, successfully conveyed the group’s characteristic rallying against high modernist culture.”

Zalduendo acquired the extremely rare Archigram collection—one of only three in the world—in 2019 for the GSD archives, where visitors can experience the zine firsthand. Also included in the collection are ephemera from the group, such as greeting cards, a hand-colored print of “Block City,” flyers, and posters.

In December 2024, Cook published a tenth issue of the magazine, available online, with contributors including Marjan Colletti and Klein Dytham, among others. For those who want to build their own Archigram archive, the forthcoming facsimile edition offers consumers the same tactile delights as the originals—along with the nostalgia of the group’s 1960s and ’70s radical design sensibilities that changed the course of architecture.

When the Client is a Nation

Inside the Peabody Museum on a windy October day, leaders of the Sac and Fox Nation peered into the eyes of their ancestor, William Jones , the second Indigenous person to graduate from Harvard, in 1901. Posed in a cap and gown, Jones’s black-and-white photographs sit under a glass case beside a pair of beaded moccasins.

“He’s almost as good-looking as I am,” Principal Chief Randle Carter joked with Robert Williamson. Carter and Williamson had traveled to Harvard from Oklahoma, where Jones was born in 1871 and the tribe is based today.

The Sac and Fox are one of 574 Native tribes who operate as nations within a nation; they have the right to self-governance and maintain their own political systems . Williamson and Carter were invited to Harvard by Eric Henson, a lecturer in Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a longstanding member of the Harvard Project on Indigenous Governance and Development , which helps Indigenous nations worldwide strengthen their governance systems. Henson’s Fall 2024 GSD course, “Native Nations and Contemporary Land Use”, brought together GSD students with representatives of the Sac and Fox—along with the tribe’s collaborator, a professional hockey team—to help the tribes meet their goals to regain sovereignty over their ancestral lands in Illinois.

“With a focus on land use, landback initiatives, and economic development opportunities,” writes Henson, “the course provides in-depth, hands-on exposure to how Native people are addressing these issues today.” Landback initiatives have been underway since the colonial era but only became widely known as such in the last few years. Part of Native nations’ work towards claiming their sovereignty, landback focuses on a number of initiatives, including acquiring land that was stolen from them throughout the process of colonization.

“If you’re building something new, or designing a park,” said Henson, explaining the importance of learning Indigenous history at a design school, “you have these steps you are supposed to check off: Did we do this review? Did we look for artifacts or archaeological dig sites? I’d like to see a degree of understanding beyond that. It’s not just a box to check off. You’re talking about real people who are victims of genocide and war and outright theft of their traditional territory. Taking a few minutes talking to a tribal leader before starting a design might open your eyes to the place in which you’re doing that work.”

For example, he says, in Bendigo, a town north of Melbourne, Australia, town leaders collaborated with the Dja Dja Wurrung , the Indigenous community, to incorporate Native design elements, revitalizing the town and attracting more investors. Henson noted that there are Native design elements in many buildings in Bendigo, which offers a model for others to follow.

This semester, students are working with two Indigenous Nations. Henson, a Chickasaw citizen, draws from his deep contacts with tribes around the US who have requested to work with him and his classes. The course Henson teaches at the Kennedy School , Nation Building II/Native Americans in the Twenty-First Century, offers collaborations with Indigenous Nations and now serves as a companion to the course at the GSD, with projects carrying over from one to the other. The course at the Kennedy School is cross-listed with the GSD, the Faculty of Arts and Science, the Graduate School of Education, and the Chan School of Public Health.

“With more education around Indigenous history, culture, and design, there could be tremendous collaboration between designers and Indigenous nations,” Henson argued, “with Indigenous design elements incorporated. In addition, non-Native communities that neighbor tribal lands have great opportunities, if they want to embrace them and work with tribes.” Not least of which, Henson explained, is the tribes’ access to federal funding and their role as major employers, particularly in rural areas.

This mutually beneficial relationship is what Rahul Mehrotra hoped for when he suggested a Native-focused GSD course to Henson in 2020, when Mehrotra was chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design. Henson collaborated with Philip DeLoria and Daniel D’Oca to design an interdisciplinary GSD class they called “Land Loss, Reclamation, and Stewardship.”

“In the context of discussions at the GSD on diverse ways of understanding history, and in the context of climate change,” said Mehrotra, “learning from traditional practices is very important. The relationship that Native Americans have to the land, and to nature more broadly, is sensitive, beautiful, poetic, and empathetic—and incredibly intelligent.”

GSD students’ work impacts the lived environment around the world, Mehrotra explained, and with more education about Indigenous people and their history, design students’ sensibilities would invariably shift.

“I wanted the Indigenous studies course to have history, design, and practice components,” said Mehrotra, “so that students would have a sense of what they can learn from history and traditional practices as they intersect with design.”

This past fall in Henson’s course, GSD students Cayden Abu-Arja (MArch I / MUP ’27) and Neady Oduor (MDes ’26) opted to work with Carter and Williamson to design a program to help them regain their ancestral lands, which the tribe determined was one of their primary goals.

“Our traditional lands,” Williamson explained, “are not in Oklahoma.”

For 12,000 years, the two tribes, then known as Sauk (now Sac), the Yellow Earth People, and Meswaki (Fox), the Red Earth People inhabited the area around Quebec, Montreal, and eastern New York state, but were forced southwest by the Iroquois, and then further west by the French. The two tribes banded together and moved to Illinois, establishing their summer village in Saukenuk, today known as Rock Island, along the Mississippi River. There, they planted 800 acres of corn, vegetables, and fruit to feed the almost 5,000 people in the well-organized community.

Abu-Arja and Oduor quoted tribal leader Black Hawk’s autobiography, in which he describes his memories of that place: “It was our garden (like the white people have near their big villages) which supplied us with strawberries, gooseberries, plums, apples, and nuts of different kinds, and its waters supplied us with fine fish, being situated in the rapids of the river.” Black Hawk recalled spending his childhood summers on the island, surounded by family.

In 1804, colonists tricked the Sac and Fox chief into signing a treaty that gave the land to Illinois, forcing the tribe off their summer grounds to the west of the Mississippi. By 1832, with the Sac and Fox people starving, Black Hawk led the community back to Saukenuk to plant their traditional summer crops.

“After years of encroachments from the US government,” said Williamson, “this was Black Hawk saying, ‘I want to go home.’” Instead, said Williamson, the Illinois militia “slaughtered women, children, and older men” over the course of more than three months, in what colonists called the Black Hawk War. The Sac and Fox were subsequently pushed further west again, this time to Oklahoma, where they live today and continue to fight for access to their ancestral lands.

Landback Initiatives & Innovative Collaborations

At the beginning of January, another tribe, the Prairie Band Potawatomi , were approved by the Illinois State House to receive a land transfer of 1,400 acres, which makes up Shabbona Lake State Park, named for Chief Shab-eh-nay. The government sold the land illegally in 1849, violating a treaty the Prairie Band had signed 20 years earlier. The Potawatomi have agreed to continue allowing public access to the park, which will be maintained by the state.

Tribes across the US have undertaken landback initiatives in different ways, from acquiring the land through private purchase to lobbying for it from state lands or through estate planning. For the Sac and Fox, a Nation with about 4,000 members, the goal is to follow the lead of the Potawatomi to reestablish their footing back in Illinois around the site of Saukenuk village. Today, Illinois maintains Black Hawk Historic Site on the tribe’s ancestral lands, with a statue of the warrior, a small museum that describes Saukenuk, and a 100-acre nature preserve. Williamson noted that, like many other Indigenous US tribes, their leaders’ names have been used for streets, towns, professional sports teams, and even army helicopters. They deserve to have access to their ancestral lands.

Joining Carter and Williamson on their trip to Illinois were representatives from the Blackhawks Hockey team, whose CEO, Danny Wirtz, has invited the nation to collaborate in ways the Sac and Fox choose. While many Indigenous advocates have argued for professional sports teams to change their name, Wirtz suggests that the collaborative work he and his team are doing with the Sac and Fox requires more authentically engaging with one another. The tribe voted to work with the hockey team and is prioritizing economic development, strategic planning (including landback initiatives), and language preservation projects.

“Our partnership with Black Hawks’ tribe, the Sac and Fox Nation of Oklahoma,” says Sara Guderyahn, the Chicago Blackhawk’s Executive Director, “is centered around education and cultural preservation with the goal of supporting the Nation’s priorities for sovereignty. To that end, we are excited and optimistic that this project is an important step to explore opportunities for the Nation to reconnect with their original homelands in Illinois.”

GSD students Abu-Arja and Oduor began their work with the Sac and Fox by learning about the tribe’s history, including their forced migration through the US, Black Hawk’s leadership, and the Nation’s ancestral lands. The group’s visit to the Peabody Museum with Carter and Williamson highlighted the Sac and Fox’s most famous members: anthropologist William Jones, whose photos and writings they viewed alongside the leaders at the museum and in the archives, and football player Jim Thorpe, who won two Olympic gold medals in 1912.

“When you look at the record books,” said Chief Carter, “Thorpe was not a citizen of the US. Before 1924, Indian people were not citizens of the United States. The record should say he was a citizen of the Sac and Fox Nation.”

Henson led the group to visit a site on Harvard’s campus that brings Thorpe’s legacy back to contemporary material culture. At what’s now Clover Food Lab , the ceiling tiles that depict the early twentieth-century Harvard football league pennant flags include the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.  When Jim Thorpe led Carlisle to defeat Harvard in 1911, the Indian School was cut from the league; Harvard never played them again. The Indian Industrial school was part of the US government’s attempt to erase Indigenous culture through the forced removal of thousands of children from their homes and families, under the motto “kill the Indian, save the Man.” When the tiles were uncovered on Massachusetts Avenue, right across from Harvard’s gates, in a 2016 renovation , they restored to the record in Cambridge the story of Jim Thorpe at Carlisle, before he went on to win Olympic gold medals.

The group’s visit to the site was part of a tour Henson led, which was originally designed by Jordan Clark, Executive Director of the Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP) and a member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah. The tour makes visible the Indigenous histories that are often missed all around us.

For example, Henson pointed out a plaque on the side of Matthews Hall, commemorating the history of Harvard’s Indian College— founded by missionaries in the 1640s—whose bricks were eventually dismantled to build other Harvard structures. Henson pointed to a spot on the lawn beside Matthews Hall, where a 1990s archeological dig revealed pieces of the press used to print the Eliot Bible, written in Algonquin (a language of Indigenous tribes), the first Bible printed in the US, now held at the Houghton Library . Henson noted the plaque on the president’s house that names the enslaved people who labored there, and the rusty pump in the center of the yard, which marks the water source from which Massachusett and other Indigenous people were cut off when settlers claimed the site.

Making Indigenous histories visible, highlighting how their stories predate colonization by thousands of years, as well as how they are irrevocably intertwined with Harvard’s history, helps to make tangible the ethos of the land acknowledgment that the GSD wrote in collaboration with HUNAP and reads at the beginning of every public event.

Strategies to Educate the Public and Regain Access to Saukenuk

After learning the histories of Indigenous nations in the east and midwest, Abu-Arja and Oduor focused on designing a program centered on “co-management” of the Black Hawk State Historic Site, which they say the Sac and Fox Nation “sees…as a way to connect with their ancestral homeland…and pass on traditions (some of which were lost when they were removed from their land).” The team outlined three goals: 1) creating storytelling opportunities so that people understand the “social and cultural significance of the Black Hawk State Historic Site” to the Sac and Fox Nation, 2) developing revenue streams, and 3) increasing collaboration with Illinois state.

They defined 15 different activities, from collaborating with the Sac and Fox to develop new exhibits at the existing historic site museum, to building clan houses for cultural activities, hosting riverside storytelling sessions and ceremonies, creating a gift shop, and “tailoring [the tribe’s existing language programs] to young students who visit the site.” They note that the Nation can turn to existing protections, for example, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which would support co-managing the cemetery where Black Hawk’s children are buried but remain unnamed on signage that commemorates settlers. As precedent for managing burial grounds, they cite Minnesota’s Indian Mounds Regional Park, which was developed around the gravesites of several tribal nations to protect the mounds and share their people’s histories. By increasing the public’s knowledge of and engagement with the Sac and Fox Nation, as well as collaborating with the state government, the Sac and Fox’s case for landback will become more visible—and therefore, more viable.

At the end of the semester, Abu-Arja and Oduor presented their proposals to the Sac and Fox Nation, who are moving ahead with their plans to develop the programs in Illinois, which they hope will bring them one step closer in their two-hundred-year battle, starting with their ancestor Black Hawk, to regain their lands.

Shana M. griffin on Resisting Reproductive Violence in the Built Environment

For the last three years, Shana M. griffin has been collecting soil, nineteenth-century nails, acorns, and fragments of bricks from sugar plantations along the Mississippi River in southeastern Louisiana. Now, in her Harvard ArtLab studio, the rusty, hand-hewn nails sit in a jumble inside a large glass jar, bearing silent testimony to the labor that went into making and using them, by people whose lives were shaped by racial violence. Beside the table stand two figures in coarsely woven cotton dresses, a crown of upside-down nails atop one of their heads. Beside the door, she has posted a list of women’s names and nineteenth-century dates—the year they ran away and were listed in New Orleans newspaper runaway slave ads and jail notices.

griffin says she is “excavating people out of the archive. How do I create a narrative that’s historically based on their lives?”

An activist, artist, sociologist, and geographer, griffin is the Graduate School of Design’s 2024–2025 Loeb/ArtLab Fellow . She works from a foundation of Black feminist theory to question and reimagine spatial politics. This winter at the GSD, griffin offered a J-Term course, “The Political Economy of Reproductive Violence in the Built Environment: Critical Conversations Towards Intersectional Feminist Spatial Practices.” In a pair of two-hour sessions, she asked GSD students, who attended both in person and via Zoom, to consider how reproductive violence is interwoven with the built environment, from historical and contemporary perspectives. She defines reproductive violence as “the methods used to sustain reproductive oppression and reproductive subjectivity—institutional and systemic control of the sexuality and reproductive lives of women and marginalized communities.”

In order to understand that history and context, griffin turned back to the colonial era in the United States, explaining that mercantilism—generating products to export so the nation could develop a profitable economy—pushed white settlers to attempt to erase Indigenous people through genocide. Colonists used “sexual violence, disease, and the systemic killing of Indigenous women and children during massacres,” griffin explained. By controlling Indigenous women’s bodies, white settlers controlled their land.

Similarly, European’s enslavement of Africans and African Americans included the “control of reproduction for the production of profit,” as well as forced labor to “clear forests and swamps, build roads, houses,” and everything else required to develop the nation. Tracing US policies across hundreds of years to the present day, griffin illustrated how white colonists have long attempted to control Black women’s bodies and “discourage the reproduction of Indigenous, Black, and women of color”—for example with mandated birth control, the “criminalization of women of color and queer communities’ sexuality and motherhood,” the exclusion of immigrants and Latinx women, presenting “Arab and Muslim women’s reproduction as a terrorist threat,” and “coercive incentives,” among many others.

While most people are aware of how racism is made manifest in the built environment, griffin explains, “racialized gender policies” are “often rendered invisible” in our landscape, infrastructure, buildings, and cities.

“Whenever you talk about housing,” she explained, “whether you say it or not, you’re talking about gender.”

Homeowners have access to security and equity; affordable housing is stigmatized, especially for Black mothers, and the materials that create those structures are substandard. In addition, she added, Americans are supposed to be safe inside our own homes, but, as in the case of Breonna Taylor, police entered her home and killed her. griffin described housing policies built on the nation’s racist systems, starting with enslaved people’s confinement in plantation houses, to issues such as racial zoning, systemic divestment from neighborhoods, “urban renewal” that displaces communities of color, redlining, subprime mortgages, and foreclosures. She shared images of 1930s posters by the US Housing Authority with the headlines, “Slums Breed Crime” and “Cross Out Slums.”

Her interdisciplinary work as an artist and activist rises out of her resistance to systemic racism and sexism. In DISPLACED , a book art, atlas, community center, and New Orleans walking tour project, griffin explains how slums, blight, and increased incarceration rates for Black people result in, as one page of the DISPLACING Blackness chapbook reads, “Black Disposability and Displacement.” griffin writes, “In neighborhoods that are majority Black, one in four renters experienced a court-ordered eviction,” while in white neighborhoods, only “one in twenty-four renters” are evicted. Aiming to mitigate these disparities, griffin has planned a “multiuse art space for communal infrastructure building and civic engagement,” with a research lab, gallery, and activist studios.

During the walking tours, “Geographies of Black Displacement,” griffin invited listeners to recognize other racist ideologies and histories that have formed New Orleans: “land-use planning, housing policy, and development, starting with the violent formation of New Orleans as a carceral landscape and colonial enterprise of extraction, enslavement, genocide, and conquest.” And, her interdisciplinary project, PUNCUATE, responds to the “violent subjugation and objectification of Black women’s bodies, reproduction, and sexuality,” with research, art, publications, activism, and pop-up stores.

Like SOIL, the project for which she gathers nails, soil, and bricks from plantations, her book Theirs Was A Movement Without Marches: Black Women in Public Housing creates a “counter-archival narrative,” using photographs and essays to reintroduce to public record women whose work was forgotten. The book celebrates Black women organizers who helped improve conditions in New Orleans public housing, where griffin herself grew up. While she always knew of her mother’s work as an activist, she was pleasantly surprised to come across an archival photo of her—Mrs. Irene B. Griffin—delivering a meal to elderly residents as part of her work as president of the Iberville Residents’ Council. Mrs. Irene and her co-organizers are listed in the book, in recognition of how they improved living conditions in the apartments and grounds, organized programs for children and the elderly, and advocated for the rights of people living in public housing.

SOIL is part of the 2023-2024 group show Finding Grounding at Barnes Ogden Art and Design Complex Gallery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and in the 2023 solo exhibition “ERASED / Geographies of Black Displacement ,” at Fordham University’s Ildiko Butler Gallery. “ERASED” also includes paintings from her “Cartographies of Violence” series—maps caked in black paint and swirled into waves—as well as rooms she designed to bring to life the late nineteenth-century parlor entrance of the White Rose Mission, founded in 1897 Manhattan by Victoria Earle Matthews, a writer and activist who was born into enslavement and then emancipated, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, a Harlem Renaissance poet. The White Rose Mission was in the San Juan Hill neighborhood of New York, an African American community displaced in the 1950s for “urban renewal,” and replaced with Lincoln Center and Fordham University’s Manhattan campus. griffin reimagines the Mission space, down to replicated business cards and Victorian era furnishings, once again excavating women’s stories from the archive to recognize their contributions.

And, for the 2022-2023 exhibition “First Frame: The Preludial exhibition of SEEING BLACK: Black Photography in New Orleans 1840 & Beyond,” at the New Orleans African American Museum, griffin designed and furnished Florestine Perrault Collins’ studio as she imagined it might have looked when Collins worked there. Collins was the first documented Black woman photographer in New Orleans.

griffin is currently at work on a series of sculptural waves reminiscent of bodies emerging from the water, referencing the Middle Passage and the waterways around Louisiana’s sugar plantations. And, in addition to creating her own work, she’s curated shows on photography and the intersection of race and water in contemporary art.

In concluding her course this winter, griffin asked the class to consider what a feminist city might look like, and, if control and regulation of the built environment starts with control and regulation of our bodies, how we can form our own sites of resistance. If we don’t want to reproduce violence, what are we aiming for? She left students to consider the questions: “How is the legacy of slavery spatialized in the built environment? How is colonial violence implicit in the production of space?” Following her lead, the answers might be found by sinking deeply into our geographies to come to know the histories that surround us, starting with the dirt at our feet.

“In thinking about slavery through soil,” said griffin, “soil becomes the witness.” It allows her to engage with the history of enslavement without reproducing its violence in images.

She left students to consider how they might develop their own feminist spatial practices, and how they could apply care to reimagine the built environment and right some of these wrongs—questions especially relevant in an era that has many looking to history for a path forward.

 

Humphry Repton’s Pop-up ‘Red Book’ at the Frances Loeb Library

At 36, Humphry Repton (1752-1818) retreated to the country after failing in yet another career. He spent his time doing what he truly loved—painting and writing—while learning from a neighbor about the flora and fauna around him and designing landscape projects for friends: “I am impatient to shew you the alterations in my house and lands,” he wrote. “The wet hazy meadows, which were deemed incorrigible, have been drained, and transformed to flowery meads.” When the renowned landscape architect Capability Brown died, Repton named himself Brown’s successor, coining the title “landscape gardener,” because, he explained, “the art can only be advanced and perfected by the united powers of the landscape painter and the practical gardener.”

Repton propelled himself into his new career with savvy advertising and a singular design aesthetic that relied on his lifelong practices of painting and writing poetry.  He became known for the bound “red books” featuring his watercolor landscapes from various vantage points, and ingenious overlays that could be lifted and lowered to show clients the “before” and “after.” The liftable flaps were likely inspired by the widely read pop-up and interactive books made for both adults and children in his era.

The Frances Loeb Library holds one of the approximately fifty remaining red books, “Moseley Hall,” in its Rare Books Collection. Scholar A. Reece argues that the books were an extremely effective marketing technique, especially because Repton’s designs were intended to make the landscape look like an improved but still natural setting. “Although more than one hundred years lie between Repton’s Red Books and Eisenstein’s Piranesi essay, a similar concept of montage can be discovered in both cases,” writes Reese. “This montage ensures that the viewer’s attention is drawn from the images themselves to the difference that opens up between the two motifs … [M]ontage as a means of representation has inestimable value for a landscape designer who, in many of his projects, dispensed with spectacular interventions and instead relied on subtle measures…”  Repton wrote many essays in defense of his craft and aesthetic, arguing “that true taste, in every art, consists more in adapting tried expedients to peculiar circumstances, than in an inordinate thirst after novelty, &c … this inordinate thirst after novelty, is a characteristic of uncultivated minds.”

Repton explained that the complexity of his role required “a competent knowledge of surveying, mechanics, hydraulics, agriculture, botany, and architecture, as well as other essential tools and skills:…his effects must be studied by the eye of the painter, and reduced to proper scale with the measurement of the land surveyor.”

While Repton never achieved the same levels of wealth and fame as Capability Brown, editors J.C.L. write in their 1840 biography that, “[Repton] enumerates it amongst his many sources of gratitude to Heaven [that] he was blessed ‘with a poet’s feelings and a painter’s eye,…not only for success in my profession, but for more than half the enjoyments of my life.’”

Repton’s work and legacy have been critiqued both in his own era and by contemporary scholars. Jane Austen refers to him in Mansfield Park as “the archetypal ‘improver,’” writes J. Finch, “who destroys ancient avenues in pursuit of the improved modern landscape.” Edward Eigen, senior lecturer in the history of landscape and architecture at the GSD and MDes Narratives domain head, in his essay on the roots of racist incidents in New York’s Olmsted-designed Central Park, writes, ”While descriptions of ‘Pig Town’ or ‘Stink Town’ were rife with anti-Irish sentiment, the unimproved grounds of this neighbourhood presented precisely the sort of ‘natural defect’ that Olmsted has learned from Humphry Repton must be ‘removed or concealed,’” The Irish immigrants and African-Americans whose farming and livestock spaces were unacceptable to Olmsted were removed by the police, who, Eigen writes, were also to oversee the completed park and arrest anyone they perceived to be misusing it.

—

Daniels, Stephen. Humphry Repton, Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England. New Haven: Yale university Press, 1999

Eigen, E. (2022). Birds, dogs, and humankind in Olmsted’s ‘Bramble’: a story of Central Park. Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, 42(1), 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/14601176.2022.2035164.

FINCH, J. (2019). Humphry Repton: Domesticity and Design. Garden History, 47, 24–38. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26589636 .

Repton, H. (1792). Mosely [sic] Hall near Birmingham, a seat of John Taylor, Esqr. Frances Loeb Library Special Collections, Rare Books. https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:46526300$1i .

Reese, A. (2022). Montaged Gardens – On Paper: The Red Books by Landscape Designer Humphry Repton. Dimensions. Journal of Architectural Knowledge, 2(4), 67–84. https://doi.org/10.14361/dak-2022-0406

Repton, H., Loudon, J. C. (John Claudius). (1840). The landscape gardening and landscape architecture of the late Humphrey Repton, esq.: being his entire works on these subjects. A new ed. London: Printed for the editor, [etc., etc.].

Zoom! The Archigram Collection Arrives at the Harvard Graduate School of Design

Imagine yourself a couple of months out of architecture school recalling the moments and projects that helped change your view of the world—a powerful exhibition, a design project that got your imagination going, the astounding work of your peers in studio, the big ideas you discussed, the small details you noticed. Put some of that together as an image-word collage on a sheet of letter paper; print 400 copies in somebody’s office; cut a potato to give each one a red stamp for color; staple it to another sheet presenting images of your group’s best projects. Then see if you can get everyone you know to buy a copy for about 75 cents. This is the unlikely beginning of Archigram, one of the most influential architectural publications of the 20th century.

The projects in the first issue, “Paper One,” are wild and sprawling, a “breakaway from graphpaper.” The words wind around and through the drawings; more poetry than essay, they lament:

the love is gone
The love is gone
The poetry in bricks is lost.
We want to drag into building some of the poetry of countdown,
orbital helmets, discord of mechanical body transportation methods
and leg walking

Initially the work of British architects David Greene, Peter Cook, and Michael Webb, Archigram announced an energetic, youthful architecture connected to the present and hopeful about the future, and much more fun than modernism. The roughly annual publication evolved over nine editions from 1961 to 1970; it became more refined but remained unpredictable, bold, and entertaining. Issue 3 on the theme of “Throw-Away Architecture” offered seven single-sided pages on hand-stapled bright yellow paper. Unfolding Amazing Archigram 4: Zoom Issue presented an array of colorful hand-cut pop-up “Entertainments Towers” by Cook, Warren Chalk, and Ron Herron. Inside the brilliant green Issue 9—the “fruitiest yet”—Archigram readers received a free packet of flower seeds stapled to page 11. Its sinuously printed pages in red, purple, green, brown, and orange ink on colored paper discuss the blending of machines and nature, global networks, instant cities, robot appliances, and “architecture in a state of flux.”

Soon, students and faculty at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design will be able to page through these astounding artifacts. GSD Special Collections has just acquired all nine full editions of Archigram and a large assembly of related ephemera—handwritten notes, cards, flyers, posters, newspaper clippings, magazines, and books.

Special Collection Archivist Ines Zalduendo notes that the acquisition is timely for the GSD because of students’ current fascinations: “This generation is really attracted to the 1960s visionaries. I see a comeback and an interest in visionary architecture. Just as important, the acquisition gives context to collections of other architectural icons already in the archives, especially Alison and Peter Smithson and Kenzō Tange.”

The early issues of Archigram, in particular, are rare and difficult to find, but M+ museum in Hong Kong also recently purchased the full archives. Handling the original issues, it becomes immediately clear how valuable they are as a physical collection. Archigram’s raw quality and variety can be fully appreciated: The red potato stamp, the hand-stapled pages, the manually cut pop-up, and the seed packet convey powerful impressions unavailable in online versions.

Although there are no plans yet for an Archigram exhibition, Zalduendo and Michelle Baildon, Collections Strategy Team Lead, hint that discussions are underway. Cataloging and preservation work will take a little time, but Baildon suggests that the collection will be accessible sometime in spring 2020. Then, GSD students will be able to page through the work of young visionaries from the 1960s and perhaps see themselves and the work of their generation in a similarly audacious, hopeful frame of mind.