Sameh Wahba: Expanding the Canvas of Sustainable Development

Sameh Wahba (MUP ’97, PhD ’02) navigates one of the most complex landscapes in global development. As the World Bank’s Regional Director for Sustainable Development in Europe and Central Asia, Wahba heads efforts to eradicate poverty and promote inclusive development in an area stretching nearly 5.5 million square miles, from Kazakhstan’s desert and steppes to the Mediterranean coasts. Within this vast territory, his mandate covers a diverse population and an extraordinary range of issues—helping countries strengthen agriculture and food systems, manage water and natural resources, adapt to climate change, build resilient cities, and foster social inclusion. With a $10 billion portfolio and a team of 200 experts over 23 regional offices, Wahba is tasked with creating a vision of sustainable growth that can withstand both the pressures of today and the uncertainties of tomorrow.

“For me, the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) was a good entry for this work; it gave me a place to build on my background in architecture while pushing me toward new ways of thinking,” Wahba reflects. Indeed, over the course of his studies in the GSD’s master of urban planning and doctoral programs, he came to embrace design as inseparable from economic, sociological, and environmental concerns. Whether in his efforts with the World Bank or his sustained engagement with the GSD, this expansive framework continues to guide Wahba’s work today.

The GSD as Springboard: From Architecture to Global Development

Wahba’s professional path began in Cairo, Egypt, where he completed a master’s degree in architecture with a focus on engineering. Interested in housing, he was inspired by the work of Hassan Fathy, whose pioneering low-cost housing projects demonstrated that affordability, culture, and beauty could align. But Wahba also recognized the limitations of such community development initiatives; for example, Fathy’s vernacular-inspired work didn’t always resonate aesthetically or functionally with the needs of those for whom he designed.

Arriving at the GSD, Wahba began to further explore the complexities of housing and community development. “My first couple of years, I complemented my existing design and spatial perspective with more quantitative tools, understanding the economics, the real estate finance dynamics, and the urban politics,” he recalls. The academic freedom allowed him to experiment broadly as he deepened his knowledge, drawing from design studios, planning courses, and policy seminars at the GSD, other Harvard schools, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This latitude proved transformative. “The GSD was a place where I could take Alan Altshuler’s ‘Urban Politics and Planning’ at the same time as Rem Koolhaas’s ‘Harvard Project on the City,’ and then take Rafael Moneo’s ‘Design Theories in Architecture,’” Wahba notes. For his PhD committee, Wahba assembled diverse thinkers, working with Jerold Kayden on public-private development, Bill Doebele  on international development, and Tony Gómez-Ibáñez on economics and public policy. Drawing from all three areas of expertise, he ultimately devised his own formula for work on land and housing policy. “The breadth of choice, within the GSD as well as across Harvard and MIT,” Wahba reflects, “gave me the intellectual flexibility that continues to shape my work.”

Overall, at the GSD, Wahba reframed his approach to urban and development challenges. “The school became a springboard for me; it let me experiment and connect design with the real forces shaping cities,” he explains. Wahba began to see design as a framework that could connect with economics, policy, and governance to create holistic solutions. As Wahba notes, the GSD’s multidisciplinarity “allowed me to expand the canvas. Whether it’s working on land policy, housing, or resilience, I’m always drawing from that foundation of ‘design-plus’.”

Integrating Insights to Create Solutions

Through his work with the World Bank, Wahba applies this “design-plus” concept within an amazingly broad context. While he currently directs efforts in Europe and Central Asia, throughout his 22 years with the institution he has been part of sustainable growth initiatives in regions around the world facing the pressures of rapid urbanization, environmental degradation, social inequality, and the intensifying impacts of climate change. Reflecting this complexity, Wahba’s portfolio encompasses projects across sectors, from improving land administration to supporting agricultural resilience to advancing energy and water sustainability. His work also includes helping governments strengthen disaster preparedness and recovery, a responsibility that has grown in urgency as extreme weather events increase in severity.

Crucially, Wahba emphasizes cooperation across domains, balancing technical expertise, policy advice, financing, and diplomacy—aspects that draw directly on the intellectual foundation he built at the GSD. “You cannot solve the housing crisis only with architecture,” he observes. “You have to think about finance, about land markets, about politics, about resilience, and you must integrate them all.” It is this perspective that Wahba brings to the World Bank. “Mainly we’re financiers,” he explains, “so we support governments in doing things. Yet with our research and the analytics, we’ve expanded the boundaries of the practice. And I’ve managed to introduce a stronger design lens to our work.” Since Wahba has joined the World Bank, he has helped countries grow significantly into issues of climate action, decarbonization, and adaptation. “We have moved into urban design, public spaces, nature-based solutions such as wetlands and mangroves—which serve decarbonization and flood mitigation purposes, but also in terms of creating green spaces, accessible spaces, thinking about mobility in the city.”

For Wahba, “expand the canvas” is more than a metaphor—it is a method of integrating insights across disciplines to generate practical, impactful solutions. It also means rethinking systems rather than simply delivering projects. For instance, in disaster prevention efforts, Wahba’s team helps rebuild infrastructure with embedded resilience measures that allow communities to emerge stronger. An example of such work is Beddagana Wetlands Park , part of the larger Metro Colombo Urban Redevelopment Project in Sri Lanka, which Wahba headed during an earlier role as Global Director for Urban, Resilience, and Land at the World Bank. His team transformed an 18-hectacre garbage strewn area into a thriving urban wetland that provides a recreational zone, regulates flooding, moderates atmospheric temperatures, and hosts an array of flora and fauna. At the same time, this regenerated wetland offers educational opportunities for local children and, through the development of concessions, generates revenue. Envisioned as a nature-based solution for flash floods, Beddagana Wetland has become a major amenity in the city, increasing biodiversity, residents’ property values, and their quality of life.

Another remarkable project occurred in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, following a massive mudslide that killed hundreds of people and displaced thousands more. In addition to rehousing the affected population, the Sierra Leone Urban Resilience Program  involved planting more than a million trees in the city for soil stabilization. This tree planting and care campaign  simultaneously doubles as an income transfer program to alleviate poverty, with poor households engaged as environmental stewards. In exchange for pay, they plant the trees, grow them, and document their growth. Such creative programs support urban improvements while bolstering opportunity. 

In many cases, Wahba’s team introduces new practices—such as the recently established Türkiye Water Circularity and Efficiency Improvement Project , which expands wastewater treatment and addresses water scarcity through the reuse of that water for agriculture and irrigation. And even seemingly small interventions can have a huge impact. Wahba cites an informal settlement upgrading program in Kenya where the installation of high mast lighting has changed communities: shops stay open later, kids without electricity at home bring books and study under the light, and crime rates drop. “It’s a complete transformation just because you put in a single light pole,” Wahba says. 

These initiatives reflect the interconnectedness of sustainable development and the imperative to bridge realms that, at times, have been treated as distinct. They also echo the GSD ethos of design as a framework that unites physical form with social, economic, and political realities.

A Continuing Conversation with the GSD

Even as he leads an expansive portfolio at the World Bank, Wahba remains closely connected to the GSD. Since July 2024 he has served as co-chair of the GSD Alumni Council, first with Nina Chase (MLA ’12)  and now with Alpa Nawre (MLAUD ’11). Through the Alumni Council Wahba co-created Design Impact —a global speaker series in which practitioners share their visionary work on critical yet often overlooked topics, including upgrading slums and accessible design. Wahba is also a member of the Dean’s Council, through which he takes part in high-level discussions that help further the GSD’s reach within the university and beyond. He also recently began as an appointed director of the Harvard Alumni Association, representing the GSD. Indeed, Wahba sees the GSD as a vital incubator for the next generation of urban and development leaders—individuals who will tackle the increasingly complex challenges of climate adaptation, migration, housing crises, and social equity. 

Looking back, Wahba positions his GSD experience as a reframing of design and the opportunities it brings. His wide-ranging explorations prepared him for a career where architecture merges with policy, spatial design intertwines with economic systems, and resilience demands creativity across disciplines. As Wahba affirms, “that multidisciplinary approach formed at the GSD comes to life in everything I do now.”

Harvard GSD Faculty and Alumni Feature Prominently in Chicago Architecture Biennial

As a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) more than a decade ago, Florencia Rodriguez (LF ’13) researched modes of architectural criticism. This theme remains uniquely relevant to Rodriguez in her current role as artistic director of the sixth Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB), on view September 19 through February 28, 2026. An editor, writer, and assistant professor and director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois Chicago, Rodriguez has fashioned the biennial—titled SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change—as an exploration of our uncertain era’s generative and transformational possibilities.

“Architecture is fundamentally about engaging with change—understanding it, responding to it, and proposing ways to improve the conditions we inhabit,” Rodriguez explains . “We always have choices, and the decisions we make define what becomes possible tomorrow. As Artistic Director of the Chicago Architecture Biennial on its 10th anniversary,” she continues, “I hope to foster a critical platform where bold, imaginative ideas can surface and be shared with the public.” 

For the next five months, SHIFT will present installations, capsule exhibitions, programming, and events throughout Chicago, collecting the work of over 100 creative designers, practitioners, and artists who hail from 30 countries. This international assemblage features contributions by more than two dozen GSD affiliates that investigate new, alternative models for our built environment, housing, future resiliency, and more.  

FACULTY (in alphabetical order)

Stan Allen, design critic in architecture, presents Building with Writing, an installation of Allen’s work examining the relationship between drawing and the written word. Specifically, 48 drawings from 12 buildings and 12 pieces of writing are (re)presented as pamphlets and displayed in an installation designed by Michael Meredith (MArch ’00) and Hilary Sample, conceived as a reading room. Writing and design are distinct yet parallel practices, usually kept separate. This exhibition presents writing and buildings together, juxtaposed on folded metal bookstands. Visitors are encouraged to engage with the work—rearrange the drawings, take down the pamphlets, sit and read, and spend time in the space, together. Originally shown at the Princeton School of Architecture Gallery, for this iteration at the CAB, the reading room is installed on the second floor of the Graham Foundation. 

Associate professor of architecture Sean Canty (MArch ’14) presents Regal Reverb, a semi-circular public forum designed for the CAB’s Speaker Corners. The project draws from the Regal Theater (by Edward Eichenbaum, 1928), once a celebrated center of Black performance and cultural life in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. Adorned with velvet drapes, gilded ornament, and a monumental proscenium, the Regal regularly featured musical performers such as Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong, securing the theater’s place on the Chitlin’ Circuit and in the cultural memory of Chicago’s South Side. Demolished in 1973, the theater remains an enduring figure of collective experience and architectural presence. 

Canty’s installation translates this history into a contemporary spatial register. A sweeping arc, drawn from the theater’s façade and proscenium, organizes the plan. In elevation, three brass-edged, color-blocked arches open onto the central space, evoking the ornamental profiles and window figures of the demolished theater. The composition is structured by a consistent datum that links each module, establishing order while leaving room for open occupation. Regal Reverb is not a reconstruction but a reverb: an architectural echo of a vanished landmark. 

Grace La (MArch ’95), professor and chair of the GSD’s Department of Architecture, and James Dallman (MArch ’92), co-principal of LA DALLMAN Architects, present SHIFTING REUSE AND REPAIR: the Door County Granary. The installation contemplates emerging strategies to reuse and repair derelict buildings—not only to prolong their useful life but to transform and extend their historical and civic meaning. Using the reclamation of an abandoned granary in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, as a case study, LA DALLMAN demonstrates how strategic excisions and insertions within existing structures produce new modes of habitation. A comprehensive architectural model suspended within an occupiable fragment of a grain storage bin comprises the installation. LA DALLMAN’s exhibition team includes Elias Bennett (MArch ’25), Oonagh Davis (MArch ’23), Belle Verwaay Delatour (MArch ’18), Sigmund Seongyun Jeong, Min Ho Kim (MArch ’26), Brian Lee (MArch ’22), and Go Nakao (MArch ’28). 

Iman Fayyad (MArch ’16), assistant professor of architecture, presents In The Round, part of a larger line of work that deals with the effects of standardization in building materials on architectural typology, addressing formal exploration as a function of material waste. This installation invites visitors to contemplate the spatial potentials of material transformations from thin, planar sheets to volumetric form. The space is composed exclusively of uncut 4-ft x 8-ft rectangular sheets of plywood bent into composite cylindrical forms. The radial assembly allows the membrane to operate as a compressive structure in both plan and section (similar to a dome), while the oculus opens the interior to its surroundings above. Seating elements around the interior and exterior serve as structural anchor points for people to rest and gather. The structure offers an intimate, collective inward-facing space as well as outward-facing individualized spaces that are simultaneously contemplative and exposed. 

The capsule exhibition Inhabit Outhabit brings together over 30 housing projects from around the world that explore new solutions and challenge traditional models in response to contemporary needs. French 2D, led by assistant professor in practice of architecture Jenny French (MArch ’11) and Anda French, contributed material on Bay State Cohousing, a 30-unit community developed by its residents in Malden, Massachusetts. Each individual unit provides the amenities of a private home, while shared spaces and resources promote the creation of a vibrant, multigenerational community. 

To mark the 10th anniversary of the CAB, Harvard Design Magazine  and biennial leadership invited GSD design critics in architecture Lap Chi Kwong (MArch ’13) and Alison Von Glinow (MArch ’13) to imagine a new future for the Chicago Horizon, a temporary pavilion—by the architecture firm Ultramodern and structural engineer Brett Schneider—commissioned for the inaugural CAB that, despite original intentions, still exists. Kwong Von Glinow’s proposal, Forget-Me-Not, preserves the pavilion’s essential structural character while responding thoughtfully to its site, materiality, and context. Kwong Von Glinow consulted closely with the original team, modeling a collaborative approach to architectural practice that considers a building’s evolution from conception through execution and beyond. 

With Living Histories: Space for Reckoning, Mónica Ponce de León (MAUD ’91) of MPdL Studio, Mark Lamster (LF ’17 ), and STOSS Landscape Urbanism—founded by Chris Reed, GSD professor in practice of landscape architecture and co-director of the Master in Landscape Architecture in Urban Design program—propose a new way of approaching commemorative space. Their installation addresses questions of how public space might tell the complex and interconnected histories that shape culture and inform who we are vis-à-vis a proposal for memorializing political and racial violence at Dealey Plaza and Martyr’s Park in Dallas, Texas. 

ALUMNI (in alphabetical order)

RADDAR, led by Sol Camacho (MAUD ’08), presents the glass pavilion Our Second Skin. More than 2,200 glass pieces comprise the pavilion, forming a translucent skin that simultaneously evokes the omnipresence of glass facades in contemporary cities and the invisible materiality of the industrial process that produces them. Inside the pavilion, an audiovisual essay presents excerpts from several interviews Camacho conducted with 23 leading international architects, engineers, and artists whose expertise spans design, research, construction, and technology. These individuals reflect on our contemporary indiscriminate use of glass, highlight its unparalleled and enigmatic qualities in architecture, and propose ideas for the material’s future. 

Abigail Chang (M Arch ’16) presents Liquid Glass for the CAB exhibition Melting Solids, located at the Stony Island Arts Bank. Liquid Glass examines a larger question about the boundary between our interior and exterior worlds. The work reflects on water as a resource whose invisible presence in air and vapor has the potential to materialize as condensation on windows. The installation, composed of hanging resin objects with various lenses, asks visitors to reflect on the fragility in our ever-changing surroundings as they move between and peer into opaque windows that seemingly stream, drip, and puddle.

Ignacio G. Galán (MArch ’10) with David Gissen and Architensions (Nick Roseboro, Alessandro Orsini) offer Fragments of Disability Fictions. Presented as a discontinuous description of a fictional disability world mixing different scales and times, Fragments of Disability Fictions highlights how disability and impairment offer alternatives to conventional representations of the past and future. The installation’s fragmentary character also disrupts the connection between the crafting of physical models and the pursuit of totalizing forms of control that produce “model” (i.e., “ideal”), streamlined worlds. The latter are often ableist (if not eugenic) representations of life. Unlike many visions of urban health and well-being, the architectural and urban histories we explore include messier, more complex, and more inclusive embodiments, materialities, cultures, socialities, technologies, and ecologies. Developed with the guidance of a group of disabled scholars, activists, and policymakers, such histories conceptualize physical and emotional well-being in complementary, contrasting, and even contradictory ways. 

Fragments of Disability Fictions includes contributions by Neta Alexander, Victor Calise, David Serlin, and Eman Rimawi. The exhibition team includes Sharona Cramer and Yotam Oron, Thomas Gomez Ospina, Lauren Jian, Norman Keyes, Yuna Li, Lajja Mehta, Natalia Molina Delgado, Nur Nuri, Aistyara Charmita Shaning, Sherry Aine Chuang Te. Voice is provided by Sophie Schulman; ASL interpreting is provided by All Hands in Motion / Diana Abayeva (DI on screen) and Maria Cardoza (HI).

SHIFT’s curatorial team includes co-curators Chana Haouzi (MArch ’14) and Igo Kommers Wender and artistic director Florencia Rodriguez (LF ’13).

Johnston Marklee, led by Sharon Johnston (MArch ’95) and Mark Lee (MArch ’95), presents Speaker Corners. Located on the second floor of 840 N. Michigan Avenue, this project takes the form of a grandstand with seating for more than 50 people. This small arena will host talks, panels, and other public events during the full run of the CAB. Speaker Corners was conceived as part of a series of spaces that promote discussions, presentations, and exchange, which began with Speakers’ Corner—an installation by Christopher Hawthorne, Florencia Rodriguez, and Johnston Marklee—one of the featured curator’s special projects at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2025.

Two Foundations, presented by Alex Yueyan Li (MArch ’21) and Mahsa Malek of 11X17, examines the dichotomy of stability/instability through two everyday construction practices—house lifting and underpinning—that accept instability as a perpetual architectural condition. The installation reconstructs these techniques through a series of technical objects; cribbing stacks, shoring posts, plumb bobs, and formwork are arranged as a structural diagram, enacting the physical operations they are designed to perform. Taken together, they reveal the mechanisms that allow an existing structure to pause, frame, and accommodate acts of repair. In doing so, the installation foregrounds instability as a fundamental aspect of architecture’s life, despite the persistent quest to create stable, unchanging buildings. Aging is a material fact that requires continuous care, and architecture will only endure through ongoing acts of adjustment and maintenance that sustain it over time.

Michael Maltzan (MArch ’88) of Michael Maltzan Architects has contributed materials on 26 Point 2 Apartments to the Inhabit Outhabit exhibition. Completed in 2023 in Long Beach, California, 26 Point 2 Apartments is a five-story permanent supportive housing apartment building that bridges a busy commercial zone and a residential neighborhood, providing 77 units plus amenities, staff, and supportive services that address the needs of chronically unhoused people.

To Inhabit Outhabit MASS Design Group has contributed materials on their Maternity Waiting Village in Kasungu, Malawi. Completed in 2015, this complex offers a housing model for expectant mothers. Alan Ricks (MArch ‘10), Michael Murphy (MArch ’11), and Matt Swaidon (MArch ’12) took part in the design of this project.

Susannah Sayler (LF ’09) and Edward Morris (LF ’09) of Sayler/Morris present The Crystal Forest, a body of linked works (photography, collage, a short film, animation) that meditates on the Amazon as a mosaic of symbolic meanings and a place where humans and other beings dwell. The work circles around the remains of a building the artists encountered on the edge of the jungle that inspired the title. The Escuela Superior Politécnica Ecológica Amazónica in Tena, Ecuador, was part of an ambitious 1997 endeavor to create a network of universities across the Amazon that would educate indigenous people and other citizens in subjects like business management and computer science. The “modernization” enterprise failed almost immediately, the jungle quickly overgrowing and re-absorbing its remnants, authoring its own architecture of entropy. The title The Crystal Forest also references the Crystal Palace built in London (1851) to house the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, which has been cited as an epochal moment in the development of integrated world capitalism. In this sense, The Crystal Forest is the inverse or shadow of the Crystal Palace.  

As part of the Inhabit Outhabit exhibition, Tosin Oshinowo (LF ’25) of Oshinowo Studio presents the film Nagarannam: Home Coming, which shares the story of a community displaced by the insurgency group Boko Haram operating in Nigeria, Chad, Niger, Cameroon, and Mali. In addition, to the capsule exhibition Ecologies, opening November 6, Oshinowo has contributed Alternative Urbanism, a continuation of her research exhibit from the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale that explores specialized markets in Nigeria. These markets operate as factories processing “waste” or “end-of-life” items from industrialized economies and showcase the principle of circularity prevalent in African cities through the ingeniousness of iterative self-organizing initiatives. Often foreign to their host environments and not structured by the state, these markets coexist with and may re-appropriate the urban fabric, speaking to the realities that enable the African city to function in modernity. 

The Embellished, the Transient, and the Critical, presented by Alejandro Saldarriaga Rubio (MArch ’23) of alsar-atelier, explores an architecture of post-pandemic magical realism within the context of temporary exhibits. The installation uses quotidian plastic pallets as a primary compositional element and speculates on the spatial possibilities behind a single vertical partition built from this ordinary object, critically addressing the economic and environmental implications of experimental ephemeral design. By embracing “off-the-shelfness” and “dryness” as structural principles, the installation embellishes the ordinary, accepts its own impermanence, and challenges norms through critical material choices. 

Oscar Zamora (MArch ’23) in collaboration with Michael Koliner worked on AIR VAPOR BARRIER, a piece that juxtaposes vernacular archetypes with Western envelope technologies by reinterpreting the tropical roof through mass-produced air-and-vapor-barrier (AVB) shingles. This material transposition critiques the persistent framing of the tropical as primitive while exposing the entanglement of indigenous practices and imported standards. The project demonstrates how industrial materials gain new significance when recontextualized through local construction logics. Positioned beyond nostalgia or technical determinism, it proposes a “third space” of contradiction, improvisation, and critique, reclaiming the tropical roof as a site of cultural negotiation and architectural imagination. 

Grafting the Aquarium

Overlooking the Boston Harbor on Central Wharf stands the New England Aquarium, a local landmark and an icon of Brutalist architecture. It is also the subject of “Grafting the Aquarium,” a studio course held during the spring 2025 semester at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) that addressed complex issues of climate change, aging building stock, and institutional transformation—themes critical to this aquarium and numerous others throughout the world.

The studio’s name, “Grafting the Aquarium,” references the horticultural practice of grafting that has been embraced by Jeanne Gang (MArch ’93), founding partner of Studio Gang  and professor in practice of architecture at the GSD, as a model for sustainable design and adaptive reuse. As described in her recent book The Art of Architectural Grafting  (Park Books, 2024), “grafting is a design philosophy aimed at upcycling existing building stock by attaching new additions (scions) to old structures (rootstock) in a way that is advantageous to both. The practice of architectural grafting connects the two to create an expanded, flourishing, and distinctive work of architecture.” Rather than engage in the carbon-intensive cycle of demolishing existing buildings and rebuilding from scratch, grafting extends a structure’s life for greater capacity and utility. Taught by Gang and Eric Zuckerman (MArch ’18), project leader in Studio Gang’s New York City office, “Grafting the Aquarium” channeled this design approach to investigate possibilities for the New England Aquarium, a distinguished Boston organization with a celebrated past and an uncertain future.

The New England Aquarium, Then and Now

A cornerstone of the city’s waterfront revitalization plan, the New England Aquarium opened in 1969 to much fanfare. The robust concrete edifice, designed by Peter Chermayeff (MArch ’62) with Cambridge Seven Associates, sits a mere half mile from another Brutalist paragon, Boston City Hall (1963).¹ 

The aquarium’s central feature, around which African and southern rockhopper penguins caper, is the cylindrical Giant Ocean Tank, 40-feet wide and four-stories tall, home to Caribbean marine life ranging in size from tiny reef fish to a 550-lb green sea turtle.² Nearly five hundred thousand locals and tourists visited the aquarium the year after it opened; now, more than 1.3 million people annually frequent this regional attraction. 

To accommodate more visitors and create space for new exhibits, the aquarium has grown in the past half-century, with the original building remaining largely untouched. The Marine Mammal Pavilion appended to the water-facing (east) facade accommodates sea lions; a metal-paneled addition to the west (by Schwartz/Silver Architects, completed in 1996) provides a harbor seal habitat, external ticketing windows, lobby, gift shop, café, and additional exhibit spaces; and the Simons IMAX Theater (2001), constructed on the southwestern portion of the wharf, boasts a six-story 3-D film screen and 378 seats. 

Alongside these physical changes to its Central Wharf site, the New England Aquarium’s mission has evolved over the years, moving beyond the expectation for aquariums to serve, first and foremost, as venues for human entertainment. Aquariums previously offered a glimpse into elusive underwater realms; today, images and videos of these foreign ecosystems are accessible through the internet, with the click of a mouse. Furthermore, in recent decades, ethical concerns around keeping animals in captivity, especially incredibly sentient and intelligent species like dolphins and octopuses, have prompted shifts in aquarium programming, as has growing awareness of the deleterious impact of climate change on the ocean and its inhabitants. For these and other reasons, many aquariums—including the New England Aquarium—have become increasingly focused on research and conservation operations.

With this expanded scope come financial and spatial demands that exceed the limited facilities currently available at Central Wharf. Thus, the aquarium’s rescue and rehabilitation site in Quincy, 10 miles south of Boston, houses ethical breeding programs and acute care for injured animals (whether they be ailing residents or cold-stunned wild turtles). Another struture on the coast of Maine serves as homebase for a multi-decade North Atlantic Right Whale research project, one of the aquarium’s many marine science efforts. Mindful of the need for more revenue and additional space, aquarium leadership is keen to explore potentially advantageous programming and partnership opportunities beyond those that currently exist. 

Underscoring the mandate for increased funding is the stark reality that the New England Aquarium’s Central Wharf properties require interventions to address the near- and long-term impacts of climate change—in particular, rising sea levels and storm surges. These days the aquarium experiences regular basement flooding, which threatens the animals’ mechanical and filtration life-support systems, and erosion around the Simons Theater’s foundational pilings requires mitigation. Recent resiliency planning  calls for flood protection systems to withstand the inevitable tidal and storm flooding that will accompany the rising seas, predicted by 2050 to exceed four feet over current day levels. This knowledge goes hand in hand with climate-driven questions around how and when to protect against, accommodate, or retreat from the water. Consequently, in tandem with refining the institution’s mission and increasing revenue, aquarium officials must contend with aging buildings that need attention to remain operational and survive into the future.

Grafting the 21st-Century Aquarium

Under the guidance of Gang and Zuckerman, twelve GSD students from the master of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design programs undertook an in-depth analysis of the New England Aquarium. Visits to its facilities, discussions with its leadership, targeted design exercises, and expert-led workshops informed the students about the aquarium and its site as they grappled with the complex themes surrounding the project, ranging from considerations of embodied carbon and vulnerability to sea level rise to designing for biodiversity and non-human species.

The main aquarium building posed an additional challenge. Consultations with Chermayeff provided rare insight into the design intent that shaped the concrete building, the first of the many aquariums in the architect’s portfolio. With its carefully choreographed interior circulation (winding around the Giant Ocean Tank) and its distinct, otherworldly interior (sans daylight, with strategic accent lighting), the New England Aquarium set the standard for Chermayeff’s aquariums that followed, including the National Aquarium (1981) in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Oceanarium (1998) in Lisbon, Portugal. Thus, as they devised their grafting operations to address the New England Aquarium’s future needs, students had to parse Chermayeff’s original vision for the building alongside its historic significance, material nature, environmental impact, and future needs. 

As a design philosophy, architectural grafting is especially well suited to urban contexts, which are often marked by decades—if not centuries—of accretion. In her book, Gang notes that, in terms of environmental impact, “all renovations are better than building new. However, certain approaches prove more effective in reducing carbon pollution than others. In order to end greenhouse emissions in the critical period leading up to 2050, delaying the demolition of buildings saves the most carbon over any other single strategy, followed closely by increasing existing buildings’ intensity of use.”³ This holds true for the Brutalist New England Aquarium, making it and its Central Wharf campus perfect candidates for grafting. Following a strategic assessment of the existing site, the benefits it brings, and the challenges it faces, the designer then crafts sustainable solutions that honor the past, minimize carbon expenditure and waste, and build toward a resilient future. This compelling approach merges preservation and innovation to create a new whole greater than its parts.    

Building on the concept of grafting, the students’ projects address climatic, economic, and spatial concerns, designs differ in terms of resiliency strategies, envisioned revenue streams, and physical interventions within the Central Wharf site.⁴ Yet, despite the diversity of approaches, the projects all position architecture as a key force in responding to these pressing issues and in shaping the New England Aquarium’s future. Whether establishing a greater connection with the city or the islands offshore, or highlighting education and animal care, the resulting designs foreground the aquarium as a steward of the marine environment and its resident species, the health of which impacts us all.

When the High Tech Abounds, the Low Tech Shines: A Review of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale

Across from the main entrance to the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale  stands a courtyard lined with bamboo scaffolding. An ancient Chinese structure fashioned with lashed bamboo poles, such scaffolding dates back thousands of years and remains ubiquitous throughout Hong Kong, wherever construction is underway.

This particular bamboo scaffolding, erected in a Venetian courtyard, serves a different purpose: it is both set piece and enticement, part of a collateral event called Projecting Future Heritage: A Hong Kong Archive , curated by GSD alumni Fai Au (MDes ’11) and Ying Zhou (MArch ’07) with Sunnie Sy Lau. The scaffolding draws in visitors, showcasing its artful existence while leading to an adjacent warehouse-turned-gallery that catalogs examples of Hong Kong’s post-war building typologies and infrastructures.¹ Employing natural materials and collective practices, the bamboo scaffolding evokes a sense of ingenuity and timelessness.

This year’s architecture biennale, also known as the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, carries the theme “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. ” Explaining this title, curator Carlo Ratti aligned the Latin intelligens with multiple forms of knowledge available to humankind. (Gens, after all, is Latin for people). Nevertheless, since the biennale opened last month, reviews—including “A Tech Bro Fever Dream”  and “Can Robots Make the Perfect Aperol Spritz?” — have largely focused on the omnipresence of technology. True, the high tech abounds in a range of guises, from algae-infused building materials to sensor-ladened space skins. Yet, even as the dangling automatons and LiDAR maps underscore the “Artificial,” an expansive understanding of intelligence, one that embraces the “Natural” and the “Collective,” remains palpable, especially among contributions by members of the GSD community. This undercurrent surfaces through visitors’ “low tech” experiences with sensorial input, animal encounters, and communal engagement.

A Multisensory Biennale

The 2025 Architecture Biennale encompasses 300 installations, 66 National Pavilions, and 11 collateral events (as well as more than 100 GSD-affiliated contributors). Given this concentration of projects, one would anticipate an array of sights, sounds, scents, and atmospheric conditions. What appears striking, however, is the number of projects that rely on visitors’ immersive and multisensory involvement for full effect.

While most installations discourage hands-on interaction (“non toccare!”), tactile sensation nonetheless reigns supreme. This begins with Ratti’s main exhibition, staged primarily in the Arsenale’s Cordiere (a former rope factory/warehouse), which opens with the project Terms and Conditions . Here visitors move from the bright Venetian sunlight to a dim, muggy vestibule containing the waste heat from the air conditioning system that maintains the vast hall beyond at a comfortable 23 degrees Celsius (73.4 degrees Fahrenheit). The oppressive heat envelops visitors, offering them a glimpse of Venice’s projected future climatic conditions as they move beneath suspended air conditioning units, finally emerging into the Cordiere’s cool, light-filled, low-humidity interior where hundreds of exhibits await.

The immersive experiences continue with installations that cloak visitors in sound—dripping water; awe-inspiring music reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey; humming frequencies, and more. One such exhibit—Oxyville  by Jean-Michel Jarre, Maria Grazia Mattei, and GSD professor Antoine Picone—uses electronic music to explore the relationship between 3D audio and architecture. Within a space illuminated by glowing blue lights, visitors experience soundtracks that conjure different “sonic architectures,” such as that of a cathedral or, perhaps, a nightclub.

Other exhibits involve perceptible odors. Their inclusion isn’t necessarily intentional, although it is for some installations, such as Sound Greenfall   and Grounded , the Türkiye Pavilion. Still, in many circumstances, discernable aromas become integral experiential components of a given project. For example, with its dense concentration of indoor microclimate-producing plants, Building Biospheres —the Belgium Pavilion, curated by GSD professor Bas Smets and Stefano Mancuso—proves incredibly fragrant. Meanwhile, the rectangular blocks of earth (chinampas) that populate Chinampa Veneta , the Mexico Pavilion, evoke the shallow-water environments in which these life-supporting landscape elements traditionally float.

The exhibits are diverse visually, with intriguing dynamic elements and textured surfaces—smoke, water, lava, wood, vegetation—to catch one’s eye. Film features prominently, at times animating wrap-around enclosures to immerse visitors in the imagery. Stresstest , the German Pavilion (which includes a projects by GSD alumni Frank Barkow [MArch ’90], Regine Leibinger [MArch ’91], and design critic in landscape architecture Silvia Benedito [MAUD ’04]), employs this strategy, filling three walls of the pavilion’s soaring main space with infrared heat maps and alarming news footage of warming city centers. (A tolling bell—our planet’s death knell?—sounds in the background). Former GSD Loeb Fellow Tosin Oshinowo (LF ’25) harnesses a similar approach on a smaller scale for Alternative Urbanism: The Self-Organized Markets of Lagos . This installation’s screens surround visitors with the bustling activity of three Nigerian markets that recirculate so-called waste items from industrialized societies (clothing, auto parts, and more)—repairing, altering, and reusing them to create a sustainable system that transcends conventional patterns of consumption.

While planning the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, Ratti and his curatorial team no doubt recognized that all this sensory input could prove overwhelming. Perhaps this is one reason behind the minimalist AI descriptions that appear, in English and Italian, alongside the designers’ longer project explanations. Some may be disturbed by these pared-down depictions, at times a mere two sentences versus the designers’ original multi-paragraph text; have critical nuances been lost? Is this a commentary on the human attention span? Does architectural discourse really require such CliffsNotes? All these may well be the case. Yet, after experiencing a few dozen installations and realizing hundreds more await, it becomes clear that, whatever else they may be, the AI descriptions are a kindness, a “low-power mode” for visitors’ mental stamina as they undertake this endurance event. An added bonus: the AI text ruthlessly eliminates the discipline’s notorious archi-speak, in theory making the biennale more accessible to the public, including the mass of tourists who roam the Venetian cobblestone streets.

Animal Encounters

Aside from thieving seagulls and Piazza San Marco’s iconic winged lion, animals aren’t often associated with Venice, by said tourists or locals. A number of biennale installations seek to change this, including The Living Orders of Venice  by Studio Gang, led by GSD professor Jeanne Gang. This project uses iNaturalist , a citizen science app, to enact a Biennale Bioblitz : a crowd-sourced field study to document local animal activity during the show’s 6-month run. In addition, the firm’s exhibit in the Cordiere showcases prototypical habitats to accommodate Venice’s non-human residents—the birds, bats, and bees displaced throughout centuries of construction, which destroyed their natural architectures. Instrumental for the planet’s health, these creatures require appropriate homes in increasing crowded urban centers, and Studio Gang proposes species-specific abodes to complement Venice’s existing classical architecture.

Architecture for animals likewise plays a role in Song of the Cricket , which models a rehabilitation effort for endangered species—in this case, the Adriatic Marbled Bush-Cricket, believed extinct for fifty years before its 1990s rediscovery in the wetlands of northeastern Italy. Alongside integrated research and monitoring programs, Song of the Cricket offers modular, floating islands as portable breeding stations that reintroduce healthy cricket populations to the Venetian Lagoon. Emblazoned with “BUSH-CRICKETS ON BOARD,” these temporary habitats support multiple cricket lifecycles, reducing threats of predation and disease. Other components of the project include a sound garden featuring the crickets’ song, described “as a bioindicator of ecosystem health,” unheard in Venice for over a century.

Similarly, animals emerge as crucial contributors in the Korea Pavilion, titled Little Toad, Little Toad: Unbuilding A Pavilion . With the project Overwriting, Overriding , exhibitor/GSD alumna Dammy Lee (MArch ’13) turns to the structure’s non-human occupants—a large honey locust tree and Mucca, “the [cow-spotted] cat who roams the space as if it were its own home”—to interrogate the pavilion’s history, highlighting the “hidden entities that have silently coexisted with the pavilion.” The installation 30 Million Years Under the Pavilion , by artist Yena Young, complements this narrative with a camera mounted beneath the structure to document unexpected visitors. The footage reveals that Giardini critters regularly frequent this and presumable all pavilions, which typically remain closed to the public when a biennale is not in session. (One is reminded of Remy the Cat, the unofficial GSD mascot who trapses through Gund Hall at will.) Thus the Korea Pavilion, built in 1995 yet reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s designs of the 1920s, serves as a home for not just the architects, artists, curators, and works they produce, but also cats (Mucca and two others), mice, birds, spiders, flies, and even a hedgehog—all cataloged by hand in pencil below wall-mounted Ipads that depict their visits. Amid the hi-tech fanfare that characterizes much of the 2025 Architecture Biennale, the ease, simplicity, and whimsy of Lee’s and Young’s projects, in conception and execution, feels particularly powerful.

The Power of Community

The Polish Pavilion, Lares and Penates: On Building a Sense of Security in Architecture , offers another commanding and clever presentation that shines among the National Pavilions. Infused with its own dose of whimsy, this exhibition zeros in on the ways in which architecture creates a sense of security, relying on two concepts from two very different communities: solutions derived from conventional building and health regulations, such as roofs, electrical codes, and evacuation signs; and others rooted in traditional Slavic cultural practices like brandishing dowsing (divining) rods to determine fortuitous home placement, installing horseshoes in doorways for luck, and burning smudge sticks to banish negative energy from a space. Lares and Penates, defensive household deities of Ancient Rome, lend their name to the exhibition while its designers present these security-bestowing practices as equally valid, complementary elements that, as a brochure accompanying the pavilion states, “help people feel more secure in a swiftly changing reality.” This non-judgmental approach is exemplified by the placement of a bright red fire extinguisher at the heart of a stone-and-shell encrusted niche. Fire codes, after all, are sacred in their own way.

While highlighting the human desire for security, the Polish Pavilion also alludes to our innate tendency to find strength in community, to connect with others to share ideas, resources, and support. Since its inception in 1980, Venice’s International Architecture Exhibition has embodied this urge for the cultivation of community on a global scale. That people today continue to congregate for the biennale, even though digitalization makes it possible to distribute knowledge without transcontinental trudging, indicates that many still yearn for actual (versus virtual) contact. Two installations openly address this impulse, as they provide platforms for present-day gathering and discussion. At the same time, they offer clear connections to the biennale’s communal past.

The Speakers’ Corner , by Christopher Hawthorne, former Loeb Fellow Florencia Rodriguez(LF ’14), and GSD design critics Sharon Johnston (MArch ’95) and Mark Lee (MArch ’95), who comprise the firm Johnston Marklee, offers a forum for workshops, lectures, and panels within the Cordiere. The inspiration for this sixty-person grandstand, made of unfinished white pine, stems from the 1980 Architecture Biennale—specifically, I Mostri d’Critici, curated by architectural historians/critics Charles Jencks, Christian Norberg-Shulz, and Vincent Scully, underscoring the disciplinary role of criticism and discourse. Throughout the 2025 biennale’s run, the Speakers’ Corner is hosting a series of events focused on future possibilities for architecture criticism—including those posed by the emerging role of artificial intelligence, as signaled by the biennale’s AI project descriptions.

The other installation that highlights collective gathering and this biennale’s connection with the past is Aquapraça by CRA – Carlo Ratti Associati and Höweler + Yoon (founded by GSD professor Eric Höweler and alumna J. Meejin Yoon [MAUD ‘02]). Envisioned as a floating plaza to prompt discussions around climate change, this 400-square-meter entity will debut in the Venice Lagoon on September 4 before migrating across the Atlantic Ocean to join COP30 in Belém, Brazil, in November of this year. (A large model of the floating platform is currently on display in the Cordiere.) Aquapraça’s pure geometries recall those of Aldo Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo  of 1979, a floating wooden theater that became an icon of the First Architecture Biennale before traveling via tugboat to Dubrovnik.

It is no accident that both the Speakers’ Corner and Aquapraça echo the aesthetic simplicity and communal intent of Rossi’s aquatic building. These projects illustrate the human desire to gather, to experience sights, sounds, and environments in real life. The sustained existence of the biennale attests to the continued significance of collective intelligence as well as creating places and events that bring people together.

1. In addition to Fai Au (MDes ’11) and Ying Zhou (MArch ’07), Projecting Future Heritage includes many GSD affiliates. Jonathan Yeung (MArch ’20) and Wing Yuen (MArch ’22) are part of the curatorial team. Exhibitors include Max Hirsh (PhD ’12) and Dorothy Tang (MLA ’12) with Airport Urbanism: Remaking Hong Kong, 1975–2025; Su Chang (MArch ’17) and Frankie Au (MArch ’16) of Su Chang Design Research Office with Made in Kwun Tong: Between Type and Territory; and Betty Ng (MArch ’09), Chi Yan Chan (MArch ’08) and Juan Minguez (MArch ’08) of Collective with Pixelated Landscapes. ↩︎

Summer Reading 2025: Design Books by GSD Faculty and Alumni

Whether you plan to read in the summer sunshine or an air-conditioned lounge, these recent books by Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) faculty and alumni conjure environments from the semi-arid Mezquital Valley to the frozen Arctic tundra.

Arctic Practices: Design for a Changing World  (Actar, 2025), edited by GSD lecturer in landscape architecture Bert De Jonghe (MDes ’21, DDes ’25) and Elise Misao Hunchuck, confronts two issues critical for Arctic lands: the climate crisis and the need for anticolonial reconciliation. Gathering texts by authors in the fields of design, education, and the arts, the collection offers diverse perspectives on current and future design interventions, all grounded within the Arctic’s distinct environmental and historical context.

Design for Construction: Tectonic Imagination in Contemporary Architecture  (Routledge, 2025), by Eric Höweler, professor of architecture and director of the Master of Architecture I program, bridges conceptual thinking and practical building techniques. The book delves into topics such as materials research and construction sequencing, dissecting projects by leading practitioners (including GSD-affiliates Barkow Leibinger, Johnston Marklee, MASS Design, NADAA, and others) as illustrative examples. As the discipline contends with its ecological and social impacts, re-engaging with design and building offers an opportunity for architects to assert agency while working toward a better future.

Drifting Symmetries: Projects, Provocations, and Other Enduring Models  (Park Books, 2025), by Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, design critic in urban planning and design, features projects by the New York City–based architecture practice Weiss/Manfredi. Alongside the firm’s work—which is characterized by a multidisciplinary approach that melds architecture, landscape, and infrastructure—the book presents commentary from leading architects such as Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture Sarah Whiting, John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization Rahul Mehrota, Hashim Sarkis (MArch ’89, PhD ’95), Nader Tehrani (MAUD ’91), and Meejin Yoon (MAUD ’97), among others.

With the recent publication Hideo Sasaki: A Legacy of Collaborative Design, author Richard Galehouse (MCP ’61)—first Sasaki’s student at the GSD and later his business partner—traces the early development of Sasaki’s professional practice in the 1960s and 1970s. Through selected case studies Galehouse illustrates the legacy of design collaboration that Sasaki endowed to his professional practice—Sasaki —as it lives on today. In a distinguishing feature of the book, Sasaki speaks directly to the reader through excerpts from an interview conducted five years after his retirement. 

All book proceeds support the Hideo Sasaki Foundation’s mission of equity in design.

Inside Architecture: A Design Journal (Balcony Press, 2025) by Scott Johnson (MArch ’75), FAIA, is structured as a personal and professional retrospective, offering a glimpse into the creative process of one of Los Angeles’s most accomplished architects. Combining candid narrative (including thoughts on his student years at the GSD), project case studies, and design commentary, Johnson reflects on the buildings, cities, and ideas that have shaped his decades-long career as the design partner and cofounder of the firm Johnson Fain.

Gareth Doherty (DDes ’10), associate professor of landscape architecture and affiliate of the Department of African and African American Studies, recently published Landscape Fieldwork: How Engaging the World Can Change Design  (University of Virginia Press, 2025). This book challenges the discipline’s long-standing focus on the Global North and its current reliance on digital and technological solutions, offering tools for practitioners to engage more deeply with multidimensional, diverse landscapes and the communities that create, live in, and use them.

Landscape Is . . . !: Essays on the Meaning of Landscape (Routledge, 2025) explores various meanings of landscape as a discipline, profession, and medium. Edited by Gareth Doherty (DDes ’10), associate professor of landscape architecture and affiliate of the Department of African and African American Studies; and Charles Waldheim, John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture and co-director of the Master in Design Studies program, this collection is a companion volume to Is Landscape…?: Essays on the Identity of Landscape , released in 2016.

Thinking Through Soil: Wastewater Agriculture in the Mezquital Valley (Harvard Design Press, 2025), by former Dan Urban Kiley fellows Monserrat Bonvehi Rosich (2017–2018) and Seth Denizen (2019–2021), offers an analysis of the world’s largest wastewater agricultural system, located in the Mexico City–Mezquital hydrological region, to envision an improved future environment in central Mexico. This case study presents soil as an everchanging entity that is critical for the health of the planet and all its inhabitants.

Vembanad Lake and Its Untold Stories: Ecological Fragility, Food Sovereignty, and Sustenance Habitability (Notion Press, 2025), by Hasna Sal (MDes ’25), interrogates the historical evolution, ecological challenges, and socio-economic transformations of Vembanad Lake—the longest lake in India, and the largest in the state of Kerala—over the past century. Integrating cartographic and diagrammatic analysis with oral histories by fisherman, oceanographers, and more, the book advocates for a transdisciplinary framework that values localized, experiential knowledge as essential for designing inclusive conservation strategies that support environmental stewardship and social justice.

Harvard Graduate School of Design Community Makes a Strong Showing at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale

As spring emerges in Venice, Italy, so too does the 2025 Architecture Biennale, also known as the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, opening to the public on May 10. Curated by Italian architect/engineer Carlo Ratti and titled Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. , this prestigious event showcases design solutions to climatic adaptation, transcending disciplinary boundaries to address this urgent global issue. The exhibition includes installations, National Pavilions, workshops, and related programs staged throughout the Giardini, Arsenale, and other Venetian locations. The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) is well represented, with more than 90 affiliates—faculty, alumni, and students—taking part in the grand exhibition.

The 2025 Biennale begins with a clear premise: adaptation. As the climate shifts, so must the spaces we inhabit. Architecture is no longer a question of appearance—it is a matter of resilience. Meeting this reality means reimagining not just our cities, but also our methods, tools, and modes of collaboration.

Academic institutions are central to this transformation. Their capacity to nurture diverse forms of intelligence—natural, artificial, and collective—is essential, especially in an era marked by new forms of obscurantism.

We are proud of the GSD’s strong presence in this year’s exhibition, not just as participants either. The GSD’s Anna Lyman is directing our public program, and Master of Design (MDes) student Dana Barale is public program assistant for our curatorial team. I hope the exhibition inspires students—present and future—to see design as both a responsibility and an opportunity. Architecture still matters, but only if we allow it to evolve.

                                     ­–Carlo Ratti, curator of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition

 

FACULTY AND CURRENT STUDENTS

Martin Bechthold—Kumagai Professor of Architectural Technology and academic dean—with Marina Sartori, Maroula Zacharias, and Juan Pablo Ugarte Urzúa present Material Perceptions: Ceramics in the European Cultural Centre’s Time Space Existence exhibition. The project draws on research conducted by the Material Processes and Systems (MaP+S) group at the GSD, which Bechthold leads. Material Perceptions creates unexpected encounters with ceramic tiles, including prototypes of dry-pressed flat tiles designed as hyper-realistic imitations of other materials. Floor mounted installations use the tiles as “cairns,” demonstrating that these products, once removed from walls or floors, can attain unique structural and spatial design qualities.

Silvia Benedito (MAUD ’04), design critic in landscape architecture, has contributed to Stresstest, the German Pavilion, which also includes a project by GSD alumni Frank Barkow (MArch ’90) and Regine Leibinger (MArch ’91).

Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti, assistant professor in practice of architecture, has contributed Continuously Becoming Home: Design at the Intersection of Climate Crisis and AI to Time Space Existence. The title Continuously Becoming Home refers to the emerging reality that the nature of our mundane domestic activities, and the simple solidity of the home as a shelter that holds them, is changing due to continuous streams of invisible information that flow through our environments. The installation imagines the emerging 21st-century domestic landscape through the lens of eight small vignettes that explore the disposition of the home as a living, systems-linked architecture defined by a choreography of friction and cooperation. HouseZero® —the living laboratory and headquarters for the Harvard Center for Green Building and Cities—is featured in Christoforetti’s installation, showcasing its data-driven infrastructure and innovations in adaptive design. Christoforetti, who is principal investigator for the Laboratory for Values in the Built Environment (ViBE Lab) at the GSD and founding principal of Supernormal, is also speaking and hosting a workshop as part of the GENS Public Programme .

Gareth Doherty, associate professor of landscape architecture and affiliate of the Department of African and African American Studies, and Washington Fajardo (LF ’19), former secretary of urban planning and president of the Pereira Passos Institute for Urbanism in Rio de Janeiro, are part of a team presenting Data Clouds. Developed in collaboration with the MIT Senseable City Lab, Data Clouds uses LiDAR scanning and digital twin technologies to map informal settlements. Centered on Vidigal, a favela in Rio de Janeiro, the installation fuses physical and digital representations to immerse visitors in the complexity of this urban landscape. Through high-resolution 3D visualizations and an immersive LiDAR experience, the project explores how emerging technologies can document, analyze, and inform interventions in informal settlements, advocating for bottom-up, data-driven strategies to advance more inclusive and climate-resilient urban development.

Craig Douglas, assistant professor of landscape architecture; Max Piana, visiting lecturer in landscape architecture; and Kate Orff (MLA ’97) of SCAPE Landscape Architecture worked with Marco Scano to create Cool Forest, a project exploring themes of urban heat, adaptation, and biodiversity. As a window into Venice’s future climate, Cool Forest is an interactive journey through a lush, planted microenvironment. The plants are future visitors, foreshadowing the species that will eventually join the current ecosystem as the climate of Venice shifts. As visitors walk along the promenade, they learn about the biodiversity of the forest, engage with urban cooling methods, and consider our climate-changed future. Embedded sensors track the growth and change of tree species within the installation, while other sensors monitor microclimate conditions within and around the installation. Collectively, the installation presents a digital repository of heat data, harnessing the power of technology to understand our changing climate.

Nicolas Fayad (MArch ’10), of EAST Architecture Studio, has contributed an exhibition and book that highlight how traditional design principles can shape future practices in Islamic architecture. The exhibition, titled Rooted Transience, showcases the inaugural AlMusalla Prize’s winning design—On Weaving—for a space of prayer and reflection, which was built for the second edition of the Islamic Arts Biennale 2025 at the Hajj Terminal in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. On Weaving was designed by EAST Architecture Studio in collaboration with artist Rayyane Tabet and engineer Hanif Kara, GSD professor in practice of architectural technology for a competition organized by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation. The jury, chaired by Prince Nawaf Bin Ayyaf (MDes ’22), included GSD professor of architectural technology Ali Malkawi, Lina Ghotmeh, Azra Aksamija, and Farrokh Derakhshani. The exhibition in Venice is curated by Faysal Tabbarah and hosted by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation. An accompanying publication, co-edited by Bin Ayyaf and Tabbara and published by KAPH, that focuses on the transient nature of musalla spaces. 

Studio Gang, founded by professor in practice of architecture Jeanne Gang (MArch ’93), presents The Living Orders of Venice, a site-specific installation that explores how architecture can foster urban biodiversity by supporting wildlife and people. The installation features three animal nesting structures created for important species in Venice. Designed in conversation with biologists and fabricated in collaboration with a ceramic artist, the structures are designed to be integrated into human architecture, while supporting the specific conditions that each species needs to thrive. In addition, the project launches the Biennale Bioblitz , a crowd-sourced field study of the biennale grounds. Studio Gang’s work also appears in the national pavilions of the United States, France, and Albania.

Chuck Hoberman, Pierce Anderson Lecturer in Design Engineering, and Hanif Kara, professor in practice of architectural technology, collaborated with CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati on Teatro Verde.

 Eric Höweler, professor of architecture and director of the Master of Architecture I Program, and J. Meejin Yoon (MAUD ’02) have developed AquaPraça, a traveling floating platform that serves as a meeting place for conversations about the climate crisis’s challenges. The designers’ Boston-based firm Höweler + Yoon worked with CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati to develop to the 400-square-meter floating plaza for the biennale. The structure levels with the tidal buoyancy system that operates by siphoning water into basins. As its adaptive design responds to tides in real time, the platform rises and falls in sync with the water system’s ebb and flow. Conceived as a global public space to reflect on climate, AquaPraça will travel to COP30 in Belém, Brazil, following the biennale.

Daniel Ibáñez, design critic in architecture, worked with Carla Ferrer (MDes ’17) and photographer María Azkarate on a section within the Spanish Pavilion, which has been curated by Manuel Bouzas (MDes ’24) and Roi Salgueiro (MDes ’14) [see below]. Ibáñez and his collaborators focused on the role of materials in the decarbonization of architecture. Their research analyzes the value chains of natural and regenerative materials in the Cantabrian coast, from forestry practices to the wood industry.

Christopher Hawthorne, Florencia Rodriguez (LF ’14), and GSD design critics Sharon Johnston (MArch ’95) and Mark Lee (MArch ’95), who comprise the firm Johnston Marklee, devised the Speakers’ Corner, one of the biennale’s featured Curator’s Special Projects. The project takes the form of a grandstand with seating for more than 50 and hosts talks, panels, and other public events during the exhibition, most prominently “Restaging Criticism,” a discussion series organized by Hawthorne and Rodriguez on the future of architecture criticism. The structure’s base contains a small, soundproofed room that can act, variously, as the setting for more intimate talks and interviews, an archive of earlier Speakers’ Corner events, a curated library, and a space of respite. In ways more implicit than explicit, the Speakers’ Corner positions itself in dialogue with the inaugural Architecture Biennale in 1980. For that exhibition Paolo Portoghesi invited Charles Jencks, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Vincent Scully to participate in a Mostra dei critici, or Critics’ Exhibition.

Alberto Kritzler (LF ’23), lecturer in landscape architecture and founder of Polistudio, presents Laguna, in collaboration with Productora. The project transforms a former textile and lace factory built in the 1920s in central Mexico City into a vibrant hub of activity, production, and social encounter. Its model informs the future of urban manufacturing revitalization by creating a “factory of factories” where people work, design, and fabricate. While the exterior facade remains unchanged, the previously cluttered interior patios have been opened to create community spaces and green areas. Specific architectural interventions improve horizontal and vertical circulation, generating a promenade that encourages visitors to explore the complex. The site seamlessly blends new and historic elements into a cohesive composition.

The reconversion strategy was designed to be implemented gradually over several years, with a flexible group of tenants actively using the complex—a process that remains ongoing. This phased approach allows for continuous recalibration and adaptation. The adaptability built into the design—through educational and trade skill workshops, engagement with former factory workers, and an artist-in-residence program—has made Laguna a coveted cultural hub that more than 30 creative and productive firms now call home.

Tosin Oshinowo (LF ’25) presents Alternative Urbanism: The Self-Organized Markets of Lagos, an immersive experience of three specialist markets from Lagos, Nigeria, as part of a broader research project on what we can learn from the city. These markets operate as factories processing “waste” or “end-of-life” items from industrialized economies and showcase the principle of circularity prevalent in African cities through the ingeniousness of iterative self-organizing initiatives. The markets tend to be foreign to their host environments and not structured by the state. Yet, they coexist with and, in some cases, re-appropriate these urban fabrics, speaking to the realities that enable the African city to function in modernity. These markets resonate with the theme of communal intelligence, highlighting an alternative urbanism that contributes sparingly to our global carbon challenge while offering an optimist conversation on circularity. The International Jury awarded Alternative Urbanism with a special mention .

Marina Otero, lecturer in architecture and 2022 Wheelwright Prize winner, has multiple projects on view in Venice this year. The video installation Building for Quantum, created with Manuel Correa, Emil Nygard Olsen, and Manu Sancho Sánchez, documents the construction of a building designed to house one of the world’s only quantum computers. Wetland Enmeshments. Water Cables and Data in Quilicura, Chile, with Serena Dambrosio and Nicolas Diaz, focuses on the community impacts of data center construction. Otero is also the curator of the Holy See Pavilion. The presentation, titled Opera Aperta, features the work of Tatiana Bilbao Studio and MAIO Architects, including Anna Puigjaner, 2016 Wheelwright Prize winner. The International Jury awarded the Holy See Pavilion with a special mention for National Participation. In addition, Otero served on the scientific advisory committee for Chile’s national pavilion.

Antoine Picon—G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology, director of Doctoral Programs, and director of the PhD Program—contributed an essay titled “Learning Differently from Nature” to the catalogue for the 19th International Architecture Exhibition and serves as an advisor to composer Jean-Michel Jarre who created the Oxyville 360 sonic structure.

 Shweta Ranpura (DDes ’26) presents Tracing the Voids: Adapting the Ordinary. Produced under the auspices of Ranpura’s Mumbai-based firm replace architecture urbanism, the project traces the absences and gaps between a century-old house and trees, their canopies and roots. By allowing the voids to shape the architectural forms of the vaults and arches, the design accommodates uncertainty, negotiates absences, and transforms the ordinary through deeply connections to its environments. As historical traces, the vaults and arches reminiscent of past construction techniques reveal to the present spaces that address the current climate crisis. In so doing, they trace the voids of knowing, doing, and being in a time marked by realities that redefine architecture as adaptation. Ranpura collaborated with technical advisor Raaj Ranpura, client Harshal Parekh, and master masons Azad Singh and Mohan Pateliya.

Emma Sheffer (MArch ’27) and team including alumni Charles Kim (MArch ’21), Stephanie Rae Lloyd (MArch ’22), Sam Sheffer (MArch ’22), Emily Ezquerro, and Jero Ezquerro, have developed SpaceSuits.US: A Case for Ultra Thin Adjustments. The project, which features a 1:4 scale fragment of a typical American timber framed house and a tailored “Space Suit,” rethinks how we can improve building and insulation techniques for existing housing stock. Drawing parallels between astronauts in extreme environments and urban dwellers facing extreme environmental shifts, the project explores how heat reflection, thermal insulation, and ultra-thin adjustments to existing buildings can provide an architectural solution for impending climatic emergencies.

On May 12, Sheffer and collaborators will deliver a GENS Public Programme workshop titled “Soft Tactics: Tailored Assemblies.” The session addresses how soft knowledges can be leveraged against architectural technologies to produce tailored assemblies for social and environmental pressures.

Bas Smets, professor in practice of landscape architecture, and biologist Stefano Mancuso have transformed the Belgian Pavilion with the installation of Building Biospheres. Initiated by the Flemish government and the Flanders Architecture Institute, this thought-provoking exhibit explores architecture through the lens of plant intelligence. Building Biospheres imagines a future where buildings are redefined as dynamic microclimates, with plants taking on a central role in purifying air and regulating temperatures. This vision of architecture positions nature not as a passive element but as an active and intelligent partner in urban spaces. Drawing from the latest research into plant behavior and intelligence, the project proposes a world where nature and built environments seamlessly integrate to create healthier, more sustainable, and more habitable cities.

 Andrew Witt (MDes ’02, MArch ’07), associate professor in practice of architecture and co-director of the Master in Design Engineering program, and Tobias Nolte of Certain Measures have developed the installation Machine View of the City.

 

ALUMNI

Celina Chinyere Abba (MLA ’23) and Enrique Cavelier (MLA ’23) have created Plantation Futures, an experimental video installation that envisions the future of Louisiana’s “Plantation Country.” The intertwined legacies of chattel slavery and ecological degradation in the lower Mississippi region have long marginalized the voices of the enslaved, their descendants, and the land itself. This video, which draws on their thesis research at the GSD, challenges colonial narratives and proposes an alternative future for the region that recognises suppressed histories and non-human entities as essential forms of natural intelligence. A new version of Abba and Cavelier’s thesis project is included in the Time Space Existence exhibition staged at the Palazzo Mora, organized by the European Centre of Culture.

 Anthony Acciavatti (MArch ’09) of Somatic Collaborative, presents Grounded Growth: Groundwater’s Blueprint for Intelligent Urban Form, an exhibition focused on one of the world’s largest distributed freshwater reserves: aquifers. Today, hydrologists estimate that nearly half of the global population drinks groundwater daily and more than half of the world’s irrigated crops rely on it. As population increases and demand for food grows, aquifers are declining, cities are sinking, and the agricultural workforce is shrinking. Using two of the most over-pumped landscapes in the world, the Indo-Gangetic Plains and Sonoran Desert, Acciavatti designed new agrarian communities in each region. Drawing on lessons learned from Venice’s system of cisterns and South Asia’s stepwells, the models and drawings foreground aquifers as a shared commons that can collectively shape farms and cities.

Fai Au (MDes ’11), Ying Zhou (MArch ’07), and Sunnie Sy Lau are the curators for Projecting Future Heritage: An Archive of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Pavilion, which showcases Hong Kong’s post-war public architectures through the media of an archive, together with the construction of bamboo scaffolding in an adjacent outdoor courtyard. Jonathan Yeung (MArch ’20) and Wing Yuen (MArch ’22) are part of the curatorial team. Exhibitors include Max Hirsh (PhD ’12) and Dorothy Tang (MLA ’12) with Airport Urbanism: Remaking Hong Kong, 1975–2025; Su Chang (MArch ’17) and Frankie Au (MArch ’16) of Su Chang Design Research Office with Made in Kwun Tong: Between Type and Territory; and Betty Ng (MArch ’09), Chi Yan Chan (MArch ’08) and Juan Minguez (MArch ’08) of Collective with Pixelated Landscapes.

Frank Barkow (MArch ’90) and Regine Leibinger (March ’91) of Barkow Leibinger have created Map of Glass, which rescales the urban island fragments that comprise Venice as an abstracted topographical model of incremental densities, shapes, and sizes. This three-dimensional map, composed of cement blocks containing waste glass fragments from Murano-based artisans and located in the sunken garden adjacent to the Austrian Pavilion in the Giardini, acts as a self-referential installation and a reference to the city beyond the site. The reproduction offers a gestalt view of the city as a complex and yet comprehensible entity, while offering a landscaped space for play, leisure, and rest. At the end of the biennale, the map can be disassembled and the individual pieces can be recycled or sold singularly or in groups.

Alexis Boivin (MArch ’22) served as project lead for Boucaneries, by Atelier Pierre Thibault. In the Saint Lawrence River, on an island called Île Verte, twelve boucaneries (smokehouses) testify to local ingenuity and collective resilience amidst the harsh climate of Quebec, Canada. Using a participatory design process, Boucaneries explores how adaptive reuse of those smokehouse-inspired structures can promote the island’s food self-sufficiency, cultural development, and traditions.

Manuel Bouzas (MDes ’24) and Roi Salgueiro (MDes ’14) have co-curated the 2025 Spanish Pavilion, Internalities: Architectures for Territorial Equilibrium. The project explores how architecture can (and should) respond to the environmental externalities associated with production processes to advance the decarbonization of the built environment. Internalities highlights the work of a new generation of Spanish architects—including contributor Carla Ferrer (MDes ’17)—that rigorously and radically examine how the practice of construction can balance ecologies with economies.

Xiaojun Bu (MArch ’05) and Yingfan Zhang (MAUD ’06) of Atelier Alter Architects have contributed two projects to the Biennale and collateral events. The first, Dunhuang Con-stella-tion, is one of twelve works featured in Co-Exist, the China Pavillion, curated by Yansong Ma. Dunhuang Con-stella-tion reimagines Cave 285 from Dunhuang’s Mogao Grottoes as a celestial archive of civilizational fusion. The second project, Dali Transformer Park Theater, is part of an exhibition titled No Doubt About It: Projects from Armenia, China, Georgia, Germany, Latvia, and Poland, curated by Vladimir Belogolovsky and on view in Dorsoduro, tracing the intentions and design strategies of six projects by six architects from six countries.

Armando Carbonell (LF ’93) will moderate “The Relevance of Land in an Era of Adaptation: A conversation with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy,” a GENS Public Programme workshop, on May 11.

The 2025 United States Pavilion, organized by co-commissioners Susan Chin (LF ’99), Peter MacKeith, and Rod Bigelow, is called Porch: An Architecture of Generosity . As the project’s website notes, “The porch is an unheralded American icon of architectural character, an American architectural place-construct persisting across scales, geographies, communities, construction methods, and histories.” This iteration of the US Pavilion “spotlight[s] the American porch’s multi-layered character, value, and contemporary purpose through the exhibition of contemporary projects from across the nation, accomplished by practices of distinction, inventiveness, and diversity.” GSD-affiliated participants include Julie Bargmann (MLA ’87), Stephen Burks (LF ’19), James Carpenter (LF ’90), Andrew Freear (LF ’18), Walter Hood (2021 Senior Loeb Fellow), Susan Jones (MArch ’88), James Leng (MArch ’13) and Jennifer Ly (MArch ’14) of Figure, Matthew Mazzotta (LF ’18), Christopher Meyer (MArch ’16) of Atelier Mey, David Perkes (LF ’04), Dan Pitera (LF ’05), James Shen (LF ’18, also participating in the China Pavilion), and Jennifer Yoos (LF ’03).

Tatjana Crossley (MArch ’15) and George Guida (MArch ’22) in collaboration with Daniel Escobar and Giovanna Elizabeth Pillaca present Designing Zero-Carbon Future: AI and the Power of Collective Imagination, an AI-powered design platform that reimagines urban spaces through dynamic data visualizations. Users transform digitized 3D neighborhoods with generative AI, while AI agents assess environmental and carbon metrics. Challenging traditional bottom-up construction methods, the platform fosters a participatory, AI-augmented approach to sustainable and resilient urban design.

Natalia Dopazo (LF ’23) presents a conversation about “My Grandfather’s House,” part of the GENS Public Programme on Monday, May 12th.

Alex Felson (MLA ’01) and a cross-disciplinary team from biosciences, landscape architecture, engineering, and fine arts at the University of Melbourne have developed Song of the Cricket, a performative research exhibition that introduces the public to an endangered species of cricket while instituting a long-term cricket translocation and habitat rehabilitation program for the Venice Lagoon. The biennale exhibition includes a breeding population of crickets, a cricket sound garden, mobile breeding population life rafts to support future cricket generations, and landscape elements that foster public education. The project uses art and science to promote wetland conservation and recognition of the cricket song as an indicator for wetland health.

The Perimeter of Architecture: Amid the Elements, a project curated by Sylvia Lavin in the James Stirling Pavilion, hosts an array of GSD alumni participants including Rania Ghosn (DDes ’10) and El Hadi Jazairy (DDes ’10) of DESIGN EARTH, Andrew Atwood (MArch ’07) and Anna Neimark of First Office, Michael Meredith (MArch ’00) and Hilary Sample of MOS, and DK Osseo-Asare (MArch ’09).

ChengHe Guan (DDes ’16) and Ying Li have developed AI for Climate Resilient Urban Planning: Making of Meta Park and Community. This project explores an emerging climate narrative centered on physical and virtual human perception, envisioning China’s concept of “urban climate park and community” not simply as green infrastructure, but as a spatial and strategic response to climate challenges. By integrating AI-powered urban sensing, the project reimagines parks and communities as adaptive environments responsive to contextualized socioecological systems, foregrounding six case studies that demonstrate unique approaches to localism, inclusiveness, ecological endowments, and social structures.

Julia Hedges (MLA ’24) has created the project Keep on Truckin’.

Olivia Heung (MArch ’97) and Scott March Smith (MArch ’97) present Extant Leaves. Digital imaging and archiving produce massive databases of ecological data, open-access yet inaccessible without specialized technical training. Extant Leaves excavates archives of fossilized leaves, buried under complicated search queries and cryptic cataloging. Through the archives’ re-animation, ancient intelligence and resilience inscribed in the geology of the Earth becomes tangible for everyone.

Max Hirsh (PhD ’12) and Dorothy Tang (MLA ’12) present Airport Urbanism: Remaking Hong Kong, 1975-2025. This installation is part of the Hong Kong Pavilion, Projecting Future Heritage: An Archive of Hong Kong, which features projects that demonstrate Hong Kong’s multifaceted public infrastructure.

Jeffrey Huang (DDes ’97), Frederick Chando Kim (MArch ’16), Mikhael Johanes, and Muriel Waldvogel (GSD ’88) have developed Planet Brain, an urgent call to action against the escalating climate crisis. The installation confronts the paradox of a world inundated with data yet paralyzed by inaction, increasingly reliant on artificial intelligence to interpret signs of planetary distress. Sixteen rotating orbs evoke the “overview effect,” a cognitive shift akin to that felt by astronauts when beholding Earth’s vulnerability from space. Despite decades of accumulating satellite imagery, sensor data, and global surveys, synthesizing this vast information into actionable insights remains a challenge. By leveraging big data and Urban GPTs to analyze complex geospatial datasets, Planet Brain traces the patterns of resource extraction and environmental collapse, bringing attention to vulnerable cities poised on the brink of ecological crises.

Mitchell Joachim (MAUD ’02) of Terreform ONE, Wendy W. Fok (DDes ’17), Peder Anker (PhD ’99) with Melanie Fessel and Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) present Coding Plants: An Artificial Reef and Living Kelp Archive. This project proposes a living archive embedded within a synthetic kelp reef: an architectural ecosystem that stores design intelligence—blueprints for homes, civic structures, and ecological infrastructure—within the DNA of engineered vegetation, enabling future generations of plants to grow pre-configured structures attuned to environmental conditions. Within translucent vitrines, visitors encounter suspended fragments of this reef, hybrid organisms in which botanical life merges with coded information. These active archives, capable of regeneration, mutation, and adaptation, offer a glimpse into an architecture that eats, breathes, and remembers. Rather than resisting nature, Coding Plants proposes a system where urbanism is symbiotic—an evolution of the built environment toward a coauthored future with the living world.

On May 14, Joachim will participate in a GENS Public Programme titled “Manifesto for the Rights of the Venice Lagoon,” which explores how spatial disciplines can respond to “more-than-human” realities.

Eliyahu Keller (MDes ’16), Mark Jarzombek, and Eytan Mann as the Augmented Historiography Collaborative have created Venice in Conversation, an AI-driven “seminar” that orchestrates a conversation between avatars of historical and contemporary figures about real and generated Venices. Employing archival and manipulated images, the project aims to soften the boundary between fact and fiction to enrich and confuse the historiography of a place like Venice. With each changing image, Venice appears as both fantastical and realistic, and forever elusive.

Areti Kotsoni (MDes ’23) presents Born of the Land: The Typology of the Cretan House. The Cretan house typology emerged in direct response to the land and available raw materials. Shaped by local techniques, its form and articulation are defined by simplicity, adaptability, and modular growth. Inherently sustainable, it offers insights into how architecture once harmonized with the environment, serving as a lesson for contemporary design.

Dammy Dami Lee (MArch ’13) presents Overwriting, Overriding, a project that reimagines its site—the Korean Pavilion—from beyond the nation-state framework, exploring an architecture that crosses boundaries, connects, and disperses into a landscape. The installation appropriates elements traditionally considered outside the realm of “pure” architecture—awnings, curtains, bedding, and kitchen scenes, once dismissed as women’s home styling—foreground their soft and capricious presence. Diaries, letters, and photo albums overlay the official archive, seeking out the periphery and attempting to weave together yesterday and tomorrow anew. Here, in a place that represents the nation, Overwriting, Overriding draws out the personal spaces often obscured by the modern publicness of architecture.

Thandi Loewenson, 2024 Wheelwright Prize winner, has contributed to the Great Britain Pavilion, GBR: Geology of Britannic Repair. The International Jury awarded this pavilion a special mention  for National Participation.

Mpho Matsipa (LF ’22), South African architect, teacher, curator, and associate professor at the Barlett School of Architecture, with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Paola Antonelli comprise the International Jury of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia .

Tomohisa Miyauchi (MArch ’04) is part of the multidisciplinary team behind T-an, the Art of Utushi, an installation that highlights the art of Utsushi, or reverent reconstruction of medieval teahouses, maintaining their integral character while reconfiguring them to suit present circumstances. Emphasizing the teahouse’s material and spiritual qualities, the project offers insights into long-established building methods that can inform current discourse, demonstrating how traditional intelligence can be reinterpreted and redesigned to suit contemporary contexts in an open, inclusive process. The resulting environment welcomes everyone, promoting a collective heritage as a solid basis for adaptability and resilience in an ever-evolving world. T-an, the Art of Utushi aims to demonstrate the timeless qualities of an ancient teahouse’s aesthetic balance, reinterpreting the use of materials, contemplative interaction within small spaces, and spiritual profundity as timeless wisdom shared across generations.

Eric Owen Moss (MArch ’72) has contributed an installation called 708/02.

Andreas Nikolovgenis (MArch ’15), who with Costis Paniyiris (MArch ’92) co-curated the Greek Pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 2023, this year presents Cultivating in Shallow Waters: The Messolonghi Saltworks Production Landscape. This project explores how production landscapes like the Messolonghi saltworks in Greece shape the countryside. Since 1500 AD, locals have managed a shallow lagoon with intricate water circulation to produce salt. This collective process relies on simple yet sophisticated systems, passed down through generations, reflecting urban patterns in a rural context.

Mary Anne Ocampo (MAUD ’10), Laura Fregolent, Rebecca Ocampo, Sabrina Meneghello, and Cale Wagner have created BeLieving in the Mountains, a project examining the intersection of climate change, depopulation, and heritage within the Dolomite municipality of Cibiana di Cadore.  Developed as an interdisciplinary research collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Università Iuav di Venezia, Comune di Cibiana di Cadore, and Studio RO, the urban design and planning project draws from community interviews, field observations, and workshops. Through film, drone mapping, and data analytics the exhibition translates larger themes of socioecological systems, abandonment, and adaptation into Alpine alternatives for collective living.

Georgios A. Panetsos (MArch ’86) and Le Città di Villard present AMARE (Atlas of Migrations, Crossings, and Rootings in Europe), an installation that explores the spatial dimension of these phenomena in Europe. Through traces recorded across the European territory and maps that depict routes and settlements, AMARE uses analytical and projective tools to address the transformative effect of migration flows and settlements, and the new territorial, cultural, and social balances they create.

Robert Gerard Pietrusko (MArch ’12), Space Caviar, and Ersilia Vaudo present A Satellite Symphony. A reflection on space-based technologies, the installation operates as an experimental, immersive documentary in which data science and remote sensing play equal roles. Inspired by Charles and Ray Eames’s 1977 film Powers of Ten, the project takes the Veneto region—in particular Venice and its lagoon—as the starting point for an exploration that traverses multiple scales, from the Earth’s core to its orbit. Along the way, Veneto and the Venice Lagoon serve as compelling case studies for the capabilities of space-based Earth observation. Built from storm-felled wood, the installation supports local reuse efforts while linking physical materiality to data visualizations of the effects of extreme weather events, highlighting the intersection of digital analysis and sustainable design in addressing climate crises. More broadly, the project exposes visitors to the wealth of data provided by the numerous orbital observation stations that have been developed and deployed since the 1970s.

Alan Ricks (MArch ’10) and Nadia Perlepe (MArch ’16) of MASS Design Group are part of the team behind the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture (RICA), a climate-positive campus in Bugesera, Rwanda, built with local materials and craftsmanship. On view at the biennale, RICA leverages a unique agricultural model, sustainably sourced materials, and off-grid power sources to restore native biodiversity and train future generations of leaders in conservation agriculture. Partnering with the RICA to envision, design, and build their new campus, MASS led the master planning, architecture, landscape, engineering, and construction for the new campus. The project was conceived and funded by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and supported by the Government of Rwanda.

Sonia Sobrino Ralston (MLA ’23) presents Uncommon Knowledge: Plants as Sensors, a series of drawings that explore the informational capacity of plants as a counter to extractive computing infrastructure that harm water-stressed communities. Responding to Google’s water-hungry data center on the Columbia River, data is expanded into a speculative landscape where digital hardware and plant wetware intertwine. In these new drawings that build on her MLA thesis research, plants are represented as naturally intelligent, low tech components of a collectively managed informational system. Ralston will be expanding on this work of representing bioindicator plant life and death as the incoming 2025–2026 Daniel Urban Kiley Teaching Fellow in Landscape Architecture.

Kotchakorn Voraakhom (MLA ’06) and Watcharapon Nimwattanagul of LANDPROCESS are responsible for Thammasat Urban Rooftop Farm.

 

Are you a GSD affiliate with a project in Venice that’s not included here? Please email [email protected].

The ReefLine: An Unprecedented Underwater Sculpture Park Brings Art, Marine Habitats, and Public Education to Miami Beach

A 7-mile underwater sculpture park and hybrid reef will soon trace the shore of Miami Beach. Known as the ReefLine , this first-of-its-kind project fuses public art, science, and conservation to address threats posed by the climate crisis, in particular sea level rise and warming ocean temperatures. At the same time, the ReefLine offers an innovative model for cooperation, situating art as a catalytic force that transcends disciplines and fosters wide-spread environmental stewardship. As the project’s founder and artistic director Ximena Caminos recently asserted in a lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), the ReefLine “forces alliances between artists, scientists, engineers, architects, and communities. . . . Through storytelling, cultural practice, and knowledge, we translate complex science into shared emotional understanding and collective responsibility.”

Charles Waldeim, John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture at the GSD and co-head of the MDes program, introduced Caminos to the GSD audience. “Beyond the importance of Ximena Caminos’s work, what’s so powerful about the ReefLine is that it is a new paradigm,” Waldheim declared, “a new category of work that hadn’t existed before at the intersection of arts, design, and environmental stewardship.”

Throughout her career as a curator, artistic director, and cultural placemaker, Caminos has used art to foster community development and raise awareness about topics she holds dear. For example, in her homeland of Argentina, Caminos worked with conceptual artist Jenny Holzer to highlight the abuses of the country’s former military government. Two decades later, she orchestrated a commentary on the climate crisis with Leandro Erlich’s Order of Importance (2019), a traffic jam of 66 full-size automobiles, sculpted from sand, in Miami Beach. More recently, she curated the art master plan for the UnderLine , a 10-mile linear park on formerly fallow land beneath Miami’s Metrorail.

“To me, everything starts and ends in the ocean,” says Caminos. It seems natural, then, that with the ReefLine, Caminos has focused her attention on the marine world. Following preliminary funding from the Knight Foundation’s Knight Arts Challenge in 2019, Miami Beach residents voted in 2021 to issue a $5 million bond for the project. This sparked years of collaboration between disciplinary experts (art, architecture, technology, science), governmental authorities (city, state, federal), and local communities—all stakeholders in the ReefLine, which Waldheim aptly described as an “audacious adventure.”

Located 600 feet offshore at a depth of 20 feet, the ReefLine begins off South Beach and runs north, featuring large-scale installations that simultaneously comprise a public sculpture park and a hybrid reef, intended to enhance biodiversity in an area ravaged by decades of sand replenishment and dredging operations. Experts estimate that, since the 1970s, 90 percent of the Florida coral reef tract has been destroyed , harming the underwater ecosystem and leaving the land even more vulnerable to rising sea levels and storm swell. Caminos and her team envision the ReefLine as providing much-needed coastline protection and, of equal importance, encouraging public interaction with—and education about—the marine environment.

The first sculpture/hybrid reef will be installed in early September. Designed by Erlich and called ConcreteCoral, the work reprises the artist’s earlier land-based installation with 22 automobiles, which have been cast in environmentally friendly concrete using 3D-printed molds. Innovative insets (Coral Loks ) will attach living coral to vehicles, fostering a vibrant submerged garden for marine life to explore alongside willing snorkelers, who can simply venture out from the beach, no boat or fee required.

In the next two years, more sculptures will follow Concrete Coral, adding to the ReefLine’s “snorkel trail.” British artist Petroc Sesti modeled Heart of Okeanos on the heart of a blue whale and fashioned the sculpture from CarbonXinc , an experimental eco-concrete that acts as a carbon sink. Coral scientists will seed living corals in the 17-by-9-foot module, while sea creatures colonize its plentiful openings. With the Miami Reef Star, fifty-six 3D-printed concrete starfish congregate in the shape of a giant star. Designed by artist Carlos Betancourt and architect Alberto Latorre, the 90-foot-wide sculpture will be public artwork, marine habitat, and visual icon, visible via air upon approach to Miami International Airport. And a series of interlocking concrete elements—designed by OMA/Shohei Shigematsu, also responsible for the ReefLine’s master plan—will form a protective barrier against sand migration and serve as another surface on which coral may grow. Additional eco-conscious sculptures by artists from around the world, selected through a new Blue Arts Award competition, will join this collection in the future.

The ReefLine encompasses more than underwater sites, with educational components that connect the submerged installations with events on land. For example, in December 2024, the annual Art Week in Miami Beach featured a version of the Miami Reef Star arranged on the sand, as well as physical signage and digitally accessible images of the corals that will soon flourish offshore. Temporarily installed on the beach, the Miami Reef Star received more than one hundred thousand visitors throughout the festival’s seven-day run. It also drew the attention of officials organizing the 2025 United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice, France, which will now feature a twin reef star on its Mediterranean beach.

In Miami Beach, Caminos’s team has plans for the ReefLine Pavilion & Biocultural Center, situated along Ocean Drive in the popular waterfront Lummus Park. The structure, to be 3D-printed like the Miami Reef Star, will house a learning space, coral demonstrations, gift shop, and multipurpose event space. Caminos also envisions the ReefLine Salon, a regular meet-up modeled on the social salons of early modern France where individuals across disciplines will gather to informally share ideas.

Following her presentation, Caminos spoke with Pedro Alonzo, a curator, art advisor, and GSD lecturer who recently taught a course for MDes students on curation in the public realm. The discussion focused on the power of art, with Caminos commenting that “art has the power to open doors where doors don’t exist. I think that’s a hack,” she explained, and the ReefLine offers a perfect example. An incredibly complex project, the ReefLine doesn’t fall into any neat category; funding comes from a cultural grant, while a hybrid reef permit allows for its creation. Yet, Caminos emphasized that, while the ReefLine straddles art and science, art—not science—“actually unlocked the funds and the imagination of the people,” the citizens of Miami Beach who overwhelmingly support the project. “Neuroscience now confirms what artists have always known,” Caminos declared earlier in her talk; “empathy and narrative move people much faster than numbers do.”

Caminos also highlighted how the ReefLine sculptures are “doing the work and not representing it; [the art] is the environment and is serving the environment.” Alonzo echoed this sentiment. “Art tends to be symbolic, representational, and the ReefLine transcends that. Some of this work functions as a carbon sink,” he commented. “This is all very important.”

 Waldheim agrees. “A mix of habitat creation, biodiversity, addressing the climate crisis directly, the ReefLine is absolutely as innovative and progressive a model for the arts and design as I’ve seen anywhere else in the world. And we are so very thrilled that Ximena came to share it here with us.”

 

Landscape Architecture Students Explore Pioneering Climate Visualization Techniques to Inform Design

Droughts, floods, food shortages, species extinction—the impacts of climate change are physically tangible. Yet, the terms and data used to describe these predicted impacts often seem abstract. Richer visualization techniques offer great promise to communicate the consequences of climate change and thereby promote the adoption of strategies to preempt these effects. This semester at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), master of landscape architecture (MLA) students are exploring two such innovative modeling approaches: a framework for understanding spatial impacts of climate strategies over time, and a modern sand table that supports real-time simulations.

Since the 1960s, Carl Steinitz—Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning Emeritus—has been contemplating land-use change as a designed process. As part of the Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis, Steinitz began using geographical information system (GIS) maps to evaluate the impacts on a given area of variables such as population growth and migration, financial influx, and environmental conservation. In the ensuing years, Steinitz developed a framework for “geodesign,” a term coined to describe design in a space linked to a geographic coordinate system with its accompanying specificities. Today the International Geodesign Collaboration (IGC), which Steinitz helped found, defines geodesign as “a collaborative approach [that] uses GIS-based analytic and design tools to explore alternative future scenarios in response to global problems.” When first exploring this problem five decades ago, Steinitz initiated his geodesign work with a two-square-mile geographical region; recently, he expanded this scope to the global scale.

In 2022, in conjunction with the company Esri —a global leader in GIS software, location intelligence, and digital mapping, cofounded by Jack Dangermond (MLA ’69)—Steinitz and additional collaborators began work on the ICG Global to Local to Global (GLG) Climate Mitigation Project, building the technology to facilitate geodesign for the purpose of climate change mitigation.¹ Steinitz introduced the project to MLA Core IV students (those engaged in their final studio of the core sequence), characterizing mitigation as “a multi-jurisdiction, multi-scalar geodesign problem. Climate change,” he explained, “is a global existential phenomenon, and all nations must act in collaboration if climate mitigation is to succeed. Guided by climate science, this requires looking and thinking ahead in time, globally to locally to globally, and planning now to act now for the future of everyone.”

While multinational agreement and a global oversight of planning, negotiation, and implementation does not yet exist, Steinitz and colleagues view the GLG Climate Mitigation Project, a protocol to facilitate this process, as necessary infrastructure for future climate action. Building from a geodesign framework published in 2012, Steinitz has created tools to identify mitigation strategies to optimize impact by considering the date of initiation (for example, 2025, 2050, or 2080), execution and maintenance costs, alterations in climate (temperature and aridity), and additional variables across a span of decades. Focusing on changes in land use, the goal is to lower carbon emissions below zero, ideally (if perhaps improbably) returning atmospheric measurements to pre-Industrial Revolution levels. In short, the GLG Climate Mitigation Project offers a preview of, and guidance on how, mitigation-related decisions can affect our future.

Following his explanation of the project, Steinitz walked the MLA Core IV students through a tutorial on how to use it. This exercise served a double purpose, providing a test run for the tools themselves while preparing students for their upcoming semester-long studio “The Near Future City,” focused on Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood. Lorena Bello Gómez, GSD design critic in landscape architecture and lead instructor of the studio, sees the GLG Climate Mitigation Project as a climate action framework students can use to determine suitable mitigation strategies for the studio’s site. These include strategies such as enhanced wetland restoration, neighborhood energy retrofits, infrastructural recalibration, urban canopy growth, and sustainable wastewater management.

Charlestown sits within a warming climatic region that, in years to come, will face increasing challenges around already-problematic issues of inland flooding, salt-water inundation, and heat island effect. Highlighting why climatic shifts matter, Steinitz asked students about appropriate trees to plant at this location today. “Where are you going to look [for precedents]—Charlestown or South Carolina?” Considering that the latter approximates Charlestown’s expected climatic region in 2050, “I’d look to South Carolina if I were you,” Steinitz declared, “especially if the trees take thirty years to grow,” as many species do. This point, while seemingly simple, underscores an important reality: today’s designs must take future conditions and long-term repercussions into account.

For the students, then, the GLG Climate Mitigation Project offers mitigation strategies for Boston’s climatic region that can be adapted for maximum impact in Charlestown. Once students have a particular strategy in mind, they can explore a different visualization technique—the Simtable . Invented by Stephen Guerin, affiliated with Harvard’s Visualization Research and Teaching Laboratory , the Simtable is a high-tech sand table that uses GIS data and computational modeling to explore complex phenomena, such as wildfires or chemical plumes, that involve people, places, and things interacting over time.

To demonstrate the Simtable’s interactive and projective capabilities, Guerin projected a topographic map of a fire-threatened Los Angeles region onto the sand. He asked the students to shape the sand by hand, following the map’s contours, building mountains and excavating valleys. Onto this modeled surface Guerin then projected satellite imagery of the area. Setting parameters such as time and weather conditions, he began testing scenarios for the fire’s progression and containment, using a laser pointer to select and implement different tactics. For example, how does bulldozing a trench from point A to point B impact the fire’s spread? What about sending resources to points C and D simultaneously? Or staggering them, while designating certain routes for human evacuation? The interactive simulations offer immediate feedback with minimal effort, facilitating a rapid iterative process for exploring, adjusting, and assessing interventions. Guerin’s ingenious tool has been employed numerous times during real-life emergencies, including the Los Angeles fires in January 2025.

For GSD landscape architecture faculty, the Simtable offers phenomenal possibilities to inform design. Bello envisions the table as a tool that could allow architects to “move back and forth between design and performance, exploring parameters in a more fluid iterative process” than afforded by conventional physical modeling techniques, which are notoriously labor and time intensive. Furthermore, Simtable’s interactive nature could enhance community participation in climate adaptation and mitigation planning, the success of which often relies on robust social engagement. As Bello notes, instead of showing data on a stationary screen, “you are projecting data onto [a tangible representation of] the territory, empowering people to construct that territory, which empathetically puts them in mind to act.”

Yet, before the Simtable can be employed by architects, experimentation is required. “We need to translate this tool into our field,” Bello says. “How might we use the Simtable, and how can it be used in landscape design? That is what we want to test.” And this is where the MLA Core IV students enter the picture. Just as the students tested Steinitz and team’s tools, Core IV faculty will continue to work with Guerin this semester to introduce the Simtable in early stages of architectural investigations, from site selection through design performance.

Of course, visualizing data is only part of the work undertaken by designers. Each site comes with its own history and current residents, who have with their own aspirations. Thus, in preparation for the Core IV studio, the students met with several people with strong ties to Charlestown. In addition to Steinitz’s and Guerin’s workshops, MLA students heard from experts such as Alex Krieger (GSD professor in practice of urban design, emeritus), who shared insights about Charlestown’s physical evolution; officials from the Boston Water and Sewer Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other institutions, who discussed current plans for the neighborhood; and nonprofit leaders from organizations such as Boston Harbor Now, who work to address community needs. Students must consider all thisinformation and more as they assess and design for their urban site. The innovative methodologies embodied by the GLG Climate Mitigate Project and the Simtable will further support the students’ design efforts, now and in a future marked by inevitable change and environmental crisis.

1. GLG Climate Mitigation Project collaborators include Stephen Ervin (Harvard GSD), Pedro Aresino (University of Lisbon), Tijana Dabović (University of Belgrade), Michele Campagna (University of Calgary), and Alex Killing (Yale Center for Biodiversity) among others. ↩︎

Five Lessons from the Gund Hall Renovation

In late May 2024, following commencement at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), the initial stage of Gund Hall’s multiphase renovation began. Designed by GSD alumnus John Andrews (MArch ’58), Gund Hall first opened in 1972, uniting the school’s three departments under one roof. Andrews’s scheme foregrounded the school’s pedagogical philosophy, apparent in the building’s shared studio block, which featured extensive glazing and 125-foot clear-span steel trusses. Described by reviewers as “visually dramatic ” and “a handsome structure ,” Gund Hall was received within the architectural community as a bold achievement.

The recent renovation, intended to make the building more climate friendly and comfortable for occupants, is equally bold, balancing the twin goals of conservation and innovation. Aside from serving as a paradigm for the preservation and revitalization of mid-twentieth-century modern architecture, the Gund Hall renovation offers valuable takeaways for clients and project teams. These five lessons suggest that, when introduced at the project’s earliest stages, collaborative decision-making sets a strong foundation for success.

1. Designate clear priorities 

Many aspects of Gund Hall, designed and constructed more than a half-century ago, required attention. The question was, where to begin within this nearly 165,000 square-foot building? To help determine the priorities for the multiphase renovation, the GSD turned to Bruner/Cott Architects, who performed a comprehensive feasibility study. It revealed that the studio block (known as “the trays”) consumed energy at a rate double that of the rest of the building, due largely to heat loss and solar heat gain through the single-pane-glass curtain walls and clerestory windows. And not only were the trays energy inefficient, they were also notoriously uncomfortable in terms of temperature extremes and poor lighting conditions. (As one alumnus noted, “I spent a very cold winter in 1996 at my desk drawing with mittens on, and I don’t think I’m the only one who has done this.”) In addition, the trays’ terraces were not wheelchair accessible. Thus, for the initial phase of the renovation, the GSD identified the trays as the area that would deliver the highest impact on operational carbon and the students’ daily experience.

While it is too soon to quantify reduced energy usage following the renovation’s first phase, anecdotal reports suggest that, since the project’s completion, studio temperatures have been far more comfortable during both hot and cold weather. Students and faculty also applaud the improved quality of daylight and the lack of glare. Sarah Whiting, dean and Jose Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture, noted that the renovation has transformed not only the temperature in the trays but also the light. “The feel of the trays is completely different,” she said, “and it’s extraordinary.”

Another example of prioritization involved ensuring efficiency, specifically in preparing for and executing construction. To confine intensive construction to 12 weeks, the GSD opted to move summer classes online, which provided Shawmut Design and Construction’s workers unfettered access to the trays. And throughout construction, a tower crane located in front of Gund Hall—while inconvenient for visitors to the building—allowed work to proceed smoothly and on schedule. According to Shawmut senior project manager Glenn Patrick Ryan, the crane proved indispensable in safely transporting unwieldly materials to and from the roof. “I don’t think we could have achieved the needed efficiency had we not planned to have the crane in place to support the workers,” noted Ryan. Determined early on, “this piece of our logistics plan was critical.”

2. Consider Design Assist project delivery

As opposed to the standard project delivery method used throughout the twentieth century—where design professionals create the design and then pass it to the construction team to build—with Design Assist (DA), the designers, construction team, and subcontractors work together throughout the design phase. This process increases collaboration and innovation while minimizing risk, leading to DA’s growing popularity in recent years. In the estimation of Ben Szalewicz, chief of GSD Facilities and Campus Operations, the early partnership with Bruner/Cott, Shawmut, and other consultants allowed the team to address—if not entirely circumvent—critical issues that arose during construction. This was no small feat, considering the project’s complexity, which included uniting a new, high-tech glazing system with a 50-year-old steel structure. “The benefit of Design Assist,” said Szalewicz, “was that we were able to accomplish this project with relatively few hiccups in a really short time frame. I don’t think we could have done this had we not partnered early on with this whole team.”

For the Gund renovation, DA’s value went beyond simply adhering to the project’s strict timing. Rather, as GSD lecturer in architecture and chair of the Building Committee David Fixler explained, the process allowed the team to “maximize efficiency, performance, aesthetics, and peace of mind.” During the design process, the team collaborated with A&A Window Products, who leveraged their manufacturing relationships to devise a high-performing glazing system that, despite the use of triple-pane units, maintained the original single-pane-glass system’s low profile and narrow sightline. Preserving the original appearance and relative dimensions of the facade as designed by Andrews was a critical aspect of the project’s conservation aims. And as Ryan noted, early partnering for the project facilitated “tangibles [such as] the plan, the logistics, the schedule, the nuts and bolts. Yet the intangible benefit of the Design Assist process was the development of a team,” an immeasurable asset that played a huge role in bringing the renovation to fruition.

3. Learn from an in-situ mock-up

In the months before construction began, the project team built a three-bay mock-up in the southeast corner of the Pit, on the ground level of the studio block. The decision to build this mock-up in situ instead of freestanding, either in Gund Hall’s backyard or in a testing facility, proved essential to the renovation’s execution. Integrating the new glazing system with the existing steel proved challenging, and the mock-up provided troubleshooting experience alongside the opportunity to refine installation tolerances and techniques.

The trays’ 112 clerestory windows, one of which was included in the mock-up, offer a perfect example. “Each clerestory window is its own mini project,” Ryan explained, “requiring work by six different trades that had to come back at several different junctures. The first time we attempted this, we weren’t as efficient as we needed to be to do 111 more.” Through the mock-up, however, “we learned a lot about the building, the existing conditions, and how the new systems connect. We also learned a lot about ourselves and how to execute the project, especially given the tight time frame.” Multiplied by 111, those efficiencies were incredibly valuable for avoiding the unexpected and saving time during construction.

4. Think about the future

Aside from increasing energy performance and occupant comfort, another issue the renovation sought to address was future repairability. Consider the trays’ curtain walls. Andrews’s design used neoprene gaskets to secure the glass panes, which relied on the panes below them for support—an arrangement that made repairing broken elements extremely difficult. As project architect and Bruner/Cott associate George Gard (MAUD ’14) noted, for the renovation they designed a curtain-wall system in which each pane is individually supported “so, if a pane breaks, it’s a relatively straightforward process to take that glass out and put new glass in. Similarly, if there’s damage to the curtain wall itself, those pieces can be removed and replaced in a local manner.”

In addition to considering Gund Hall’s maintenance and longevity, the project team paid attention to the life cycles of the new elements they introduced. They reduced the project’s waste wherever possible, for instance by retaining most of the trays’ existing glazing support steel despite the complicated merger of old and new. They also adopted materials that were manufactured with recycled products, including roughly 90 percent of the aluminum used for the new curtain-wall system. In terms of embodied carbon, such strategies help minimize greenhouse gas emissions now and moving forward.

5. Remember that the payoff may not be visible or immediate 

“In some ways, the project’s best parts are virtually invisible. And the more invisible they are, the better it is,” declared Fixler. As a delicate balance of innovation and conservation, much of the Gund Hall renovation is intentionally invisible to the eye—improving energy performance while retaining the originality of Andrews’s design. The building looks how Andrews intended, and this is precisely the point; in this sense, the project’s invisibility indicates success. This holds true for issues of sustainability in general, where the absence of waste and greenhouse gas emissions signifies achievement and is often measured over time.

Another facet of the Gund renovation involves concrete conservation, which Fixler described as “an art and a science [that depends on] the right aggregate, the right mix, the right conditions, and really skilled people to execute the work.” Far from invisible, the newly treated areas at first stand out, though care is taken with an extended curing process to give the sample mixes a cycle through the seasons prior to selecting the right match. Once applied, they will continue to age over years to approach the original concrete’s hue. Here too, then, the payoff is not immediate, yet it is eventually visible (ironically, by becoming invisible). The final concrete repairs will be performed later this year.

Of course, enhanced light quality, comfortable interior temperatures, and accessibility improvements were apparent to building occupants right away. Coupled with the renovation’s less immediate and invisible payoffs, these aspects will benefit the GSD community for years to come.

Bas Smets Teaches How to Hack Urban Landscapes for a Changing Climate

In the Attica region of Greece this August, says Bas Smets, wildfires ripped through forests left parched by record-hot temperatures, with heat waves starting June 12, earlier than ever before.

“They had to close the Acropolis,” he said, “which is the most visited tourist attraction in Athens.”

By the end of the summer, the fires had claimed one person’s life and left more than 150 acres scorched. The ongoing drought, following Greece’s hottest summer on record, forced residents to surrender tourism income when they couldn’t supply water for their guests. And, this fall, chestnut and olive farmers yielded diminished harvests. Experts warn that Greece’s water crisis will be ongoing.

Smets, professor in practice of landscape architecture at the GSD, is at work alongside his students in Athens this semester, developing an intervention as part of his multi-course series on biospheric urbanism, which involves carefully measuring each city’s climate and infrastructure, mapping the climate for the next hundred years, and then “hacking” into the system to create what he calls microclimates, which aid in human and nonhuman survival and, ultimately, mitigate climate change. “Biospheric Urbanism is the study of the built environment as the interface between meteorology and geology,” Smets writes in an introduction to the studio. “It seeks to transform the critical zone between the above and the below, to better adapt to uncertain changes in climate while optimizing the use of underground capacities.” So far, Smets’s courses at the GSD have focused on New York and Paris, operating in tandem with his firm’s projects at Notre-Dame in Paris, Luma Park in Arles, and the Scheldt River park in Antwerp.

As climate change wreaks havoc around the world, says Smets, he believes the solution requires systemic thinking and wide-scale collaboration. Noting common factors in the recent floods in Valencia, Spain, as well as other similar catastrophes in Europe over the past few years, he pointed to how, “the construction of the city restricts the river. So, when we make a design proposals, of course we make it for a specific site and context. But, we are also thinking of it as a systemic concern. How can it be designed in different variations that then could be taken up by other designers, in other cities?”

Building on the work he undertakes at Bureau Bas Smets, he is creating with his students a catalogue of at least 60 scalable hacks that could be adapted worldwide, creating an endless series of urban microclimates that both improve habitability and help fight global warming. “The problem is so big today that the only way out is a collaborative effort,” Smets said. “It’s not about who has the best idea. It’s about, How can we have as many good ideas as possible together? I really believe in that. That’s why I started teaching at Harvard, to share ideas.”

This fall, Smets presented his work in “Changing Climates,” an exhibition and related talk at the GSD that illuminated how deeply he involves his students in his urban biospheres projects. The sense of collaboration that he cultivates in his studio over the course of the semester was evident in the students’ final presentations, as they described how their Athens designs might work in tandem, and how those ideas could be adapted in any city.

A New Kind of Cartography

Smets’s studios depart from the traditional studio format by beginning not with a designated site, but with exploring a city. He wants his students to think critically, finding their own hacks within the urban landscape. The first phase in every project is to create a map, examining, “all the elements of the microclimate, from heat islands to wind speed, humidity, soil, trees, and canopy cover. We try to make a new map of the city by taking into account all the microclimatic elements.” In addition to taking meteorological measurements from across the city, students gather GIS data, study topological and historic maps, look at underground systems like subways and old plumbing infrastructure, as well as parks, building height, and even construction sites.

“I care about cartography, like Alexander von Humboldt and explorers who made their own maps of reality. I want students to make a new map of reality,” Smets said of his approach. “I don’t give them a site, but I ask them to find the site that has a problem. I’m trying to create critical minds that don’t respond to a question, but that ask the question themselves.”

For example, when studying Manhattan in Spring 2023, student Jiyoung Baek (MLA I ’23) found that scaffolding on building facades covers an area equivalent to one third of  Central Park. Baek discovered that building owners relied on a loophole to save money: It was cheaper to keep up unsightly scaffolding and pay the city’s fine for failing to remove it, than to pay the cost of removing it and reinstalling it every ten years for required maintenance. Baek proposed transforming each of the scaffolds into green spaces—improving both the aesthetic and environmental quality of the city.

Another student, Parama Suteja (MArch I ’24), looked at the original topography of Mannahatta, as it’s called by the Lenape nation, before it was leveled and developed. Suteja proposed reintegrating the island’s original hills by planting gardens on rooftops and other abandoned spaces. In Paris in the Fall of 2023, Crane Sarris (MLA I ’24) proposed using old underground car parking lots as refuges in the +5 degree future, creating a multilayered underground park, “Musée du Parc,” inspired by the 1867 Paris Exposition. And, Leila Breen (MLA I ’24) hacked one of the abandoned underground quarries in Paris, Bergerye Soutterrain, to create “climate-proof underground spaces along lines 2 and 6 of the Paris Metro,” including space for dancing, reading, swimming, and mushroom agriculture.

Smets argues that, by looking at the city and finding their own interventions, students develop themes that can be applied in other urban landscapes. “They make a project not only for their site, as we traditionally would do, but for the theme that is applied to their site. That way, it becomes systemic.”

Using Succession to Create Microclimates

Once students have found their intervention, Smets asks them to do a close analysis of the site, considering how it will look far into the future as climate change takes hold. “We work with four scenarios: 2 degrees more, in 2025; 3 degrees more, in 2050; 4 degrees more, in 2075; and 5 degrees more, in 2100. That also allows to have a range of proposals that get more and more drastic. It works well to see the gravity of the problem in stages, as well as the necessity of solutions that become more adapted.”

Rather than planning merely for survival in each time period, Smets’ landscapes are made to predict and help advance succession, the natural progression that forests undergo as they develop from open spaces to mature canopies. “How can we accelerate that process?” Smets asked. “How can we use the force of nature to have it come back to the city?”

He applies natural conditions found in the “wild” to atmospheres created in urban landscapes, implementing, for example, water retention systems and forests that would take hundreds of years to grow, to create cooling systems that allow people to enjoy the city while promoting climate resilience. In considering the wind, Smets studies how it would bring sediments, trees, shrubs, and ground cover to the site. As the force of succession proceeds, the slope of the earth and therefore wind patterns would change, and the vegetation would change. For each subsequent succession, the design is pushed further into the future. Three hundred years later, there’s a new ecology. This speculative design process is done in collaboration with pedologists, hydrologists, and ecologists, as well as with climate engineers from Transsolar, which continues to track conditions at the site after the design process, above and below ground.

At Luma Parc des Ateliers in Arles, Smets was presented with a flat, industrial wasteland, and planned a landscape that included 80,000 trees and shrubs, which they planted one by one. In the years after, one hundred of those trees are continuously monitored, as the team returns to the site for visits, helping the site to develop. One species might be found to thrive where another falters, and the team can swap them out. At the team’s Arles site this summer, the perceived temperature was lowered by 20 degrees, in large part due to evapotranspiration—the water trees emit from their leaves during photosynthesis—and the evaporation from the lake the team created. This, says Smets, is proof positive that microclimates can be created in urban landscapes.

Striking Water in Athens

 In Athens this summer, temperatures soared 1.6 degrees above normal. “Two degrees,” said Johnny Zhong (MLA I AP ’25), “is the warning before the dominoes begin to fall.”

The immediate solution, he suggested, begins with a sustainable tree canopy, which provides shade as well as the cooling effects of evapotranspiration. Citing a checkerboard of abandoned lots across the city with neoclassical facades that he’d maintain, Zhong illustrated how he could increase the city’s public tree canopy by 138,673 square meters, with underground water aquifers to collect rainfall for the trees.

Thinking at the level of the neighborhood, Carlo Raimondo (MLA I ’25) turned to Greece’s “stoa typology” to transform urban pathways into vine-covered shaded walkways, bougainvillea blooming over formerly scorching sidewalks. Because certain crawling plants, such as Roman hops and wine grapes, flourish in drought conditions that would kill a tree, Raimondo imagined using bollards, installed to protect pedestrians on the sidewalk, to create stoas. This makes Athenian’s existing pathways more useable, and creates new, shaded paths around the city.

Moving further into the climate crisis, to +3 degrees, Muyao Zhou (MLA II ’25) proposed a toolkit—adaptable to any urban context—for collecting rainwater from city roofs and growing rooftop forests, because, as one of the critics noted, “water is the new gold.” Meanwhile, Sitong Wang (MLA I AP ’25) created a citywide shaded walking loop, and Hayden Bernhardt (MLA I ’25) looked below ground, finding limestone pockets underneath abandoned lots. Capitalizing on limestone’s permeability rate of 25-30 percent, he transformed the deposits into wells whose ground-level pools are equipped with misters to cool the area and help vegetation flourish. He noted that the wells could be filled with rainwater collected by Zhou’s rooftops.

The possibilities for inter-reliance among the projects seemed endless, and, Smets emphasized that these projects represent not 11 distinct ideas but a collective intelligence. “Students help each other. We create a community,” he said.

Ultimately, Smets’ concept of urban biospheres, “transforming the critical zone between the above and below to better adapt to uncertain changes in climate,” is grounded in hope. He explained that, working in Athens, a city that’s full of reminders of thousands of years of human history, “it’s interesting to think of the past and the future.”

Smets has an optimistic view of what’s possible, noting that as we move through the effects of climate change, the interventions we make now could be altered later: “The unexplored archeology sites in Athens are amazing opportunities to make carbon sinks. What if we put an anti-root layer to protect those sites, add soil, plant a mini forest for the coming 200 years.” Then, once we’ve survived this phase of warming, people might harvest those trees and excavate the sites to learn about how we lived two thousand years ago. “Maybe the urgency now is to make the planet livable. It’s a whole different way of looking at both the past and the future.”