Practicing Growth in a Finite World: An Ethics Of Patience and Pragmatism

Two themes—pragmatism and time—dominated last week’s Practicing Growth in a Finite World, a Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) panel presented as this year’s Carl E. Sapers Ethics in Practice Lecture and hosted by the GSD Practice Forum. Four experts—one philosopher and three built‑environment practitioners—approached the question of growth and sustainability in a resource‑constrained world from distinct vantage points. Their conversation, urgent yet mindful of the incremental pace of change, surfaced ethical frameworks for 21st‑century practice and examined how designers can work within today’s constraints to make room for future transformation.

Architects, planners, and designers face a constellation of ethical quandaries. Moderator Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti, assistant professor in practice of architecture and chair of the GSD Practice Forum, set the stage with a sobering fact: buildings produce more than 40 percent of global carbon emissions. In an age of relentless urban growth, that number captures a central paradox. Political and professional pressures demand speed—the rapid delivery of affordable housing and public infrastructure—even as every new square foot adds to the planet’s carbon and waste loads. Technology can scale these efforts , magnifying both progress and harm—harm potentially so devastating that some commentators argue for a moratorium on new construction. Beneath it all runs a familiar tension: the push to maximize returns for clients versus the desire to create culturally meaningful work. As Christoforetti observed, “the context for 21st-century design is thus a pressure cooker of external complexities.” 

The urgency of the moment was brought into focus by philosopher Mathias Risse —Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights, Global Affairs, and Philosophy and director of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights  at the Harvard Kennedy School. “Architecture and design are at an ethical crossroads,” he argued. The only ethically responsible path forward, Risse suggested, is to become a “pragmatic moral agent”—someone who “works within existing systems to minimize environmental impact, promote sustainable practices, and gradually shift attitudes toward building and consumption.” The practical and temporal dimensions he outlined echoed through the reflections of the remaining three panelists. 

Jane Amidon  (MLA ’95), professor of landscape architecture and director of the Urban Landscape Program at Northeastern University, examined how practitioners navigate questions of public space, nature, and human experience.  She pointed to large-scale, dynamic projects, such as those involving ecological rehabilitation and landscape maturation, that rely on “small tools of incremental change” and sustained advocacy—efforts that unfold over decades. Working closely with communities, she noted, designers can help shift expectations and foster acceptance of new approaches, such as coastal landscape projects in recent years that make room for rising water rather than trying, futilely, to hold it back. 

“I’m interested in how design can work within the systems of today and catalyze or allow for the possibility of a different tomorrow,” said Neeraj Bhatia, advocating a similar forward-looking approach. A professor at the California College of the Arts and founder of THE OPEN WORKSHOP , a design-research practice, Bhatia discussed  Lots Will Tear Us Apart, a recent collaboration with Spiegel Aihara Workshop that proposes a new housing typology for San Francisco. The project reimagines community living by rejecting conventional property division and private ownership, instead using prefabricated cores and flexible configurations to promote alternative living arrangements that allow for higher density and communal land. “The project asks how the architect can preconfigure the conditions for more collectivity, sharing, and social resilience,” Bhatia explained. “It offers the possibility of other ways of life that can slowly reconfigure the system over time.”

Dr. Dana Cuff , a professor at UCLA, concluded the discussion by focusing on spatial justice and the work she leads through cityLAB , a UCLA-based non-profit research and design center. “In every form of practice,” Cuff observed, “there are ways of doing work that step outside a capitalist model, whether it’s pro bono efforts in a traditional practice or … an organization dedicated to something like affordable housing.” One of cityLAB’s first breakthroughs was its research into the feasibility of accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in California, which helped shape 2016 legislation that opened the door for an estimated 8.1 million ADUs statewide. Building on that momentum, Cuff and her team turned their attention to small vacant lots throughout Los Angeles, launching Small Lots, Big Impact in spring 2025—a design competition aimed at prototyping and promoting housing on underused parcels. As she remarked in response to an audience question, “Capitalism is the air we breathe. Once you accept that, you have to ask yourself: what can you do to shift the trajectory, even slightly, and open up new possibilities?” 

Cuff’s reflection echoed a point made earlier in the evening by Sarah Whiting, dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at the GSD, who opened the event by emphasizing design schools’ ethical responsibilities—to their students, the profession, and humanity. “If we want our students to advance the world, making it more beautiful, more just, more ecological, and more durable, we need to work with them to envision what practices can enable that,” Whiting said. “As we push the envelope of building envelopes, facades, structures, materials, forms, and programs, we need to push the envelope of practice itself.” 

In the end, Practicing Growth in a Finite World revealed less a crisis than a recalibration. The panelists’ insights traced an ethics of patience and pragmatism—an acknowledgment that meaningful change in the built environment unfolds not only through grand gestures, but through persistant, systemic work. In confronting the limits of growth, they offered a hopeful reminder: that design’s true power lies not only in what it creates, but in how it reimagines the conditions for collective progress.

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 Graduate School of Design Students Win 24-hour Hack-a-thon with Creative Solution to Address America’s Housing Crisis

A team of Harvard Graduate School of Design students has won the Ivory Innovations  2025 Hack-A-House  competition in the Construction & Design category. Hack-A-House, an annual virtual competition, gives students a chance to win $5,000 while creating novel solutions to tackle America’s housing crisis. The One Block Away team—composed of Justin Joel Tan (MRE ’26), Marko Velazquez (MRE ’26), Noah Garcia (MRE ’26), Tejas S (MRE ’26), and Pranav Subramanian (MDes ’27)—won for their project “NeighborCore ,” which consists of a new housing typology that makes housing more affordable through shared spaces, modular construction, and flexible layouts.

“Hack-A-House uniquely empowers students from colleges and universities nationwide to create real-world solutions to address today’s housing crisis in a 24-hour period,” said Ian Cahoon, director of Innovations at Ivory Innovations. “It is truly amazing to see the innovative ideas and solutions teams like One Block Away can produce in such a short time. In addition to One Block Away’s winning entry, this year’s competitors presented solutions ranging from improving lending to first time buyers to increasing access to affordable housing.”

Combining off- and onsite construction techniques, One Block Away’s “NeighborCore” proposes an alternative to traditional single-family homes, which are often too big and too expensive for today’s changing population demographics. “Together, we explored a new housing typology aimed at bridging the gap between apartment living and home ownership by leveraging innovative design, efficient construction methods, existing distribution, and financial feasibility,” said One Block Away team member Tan. “We believe our solution, ‘NeighborCore,’ delivers a vision that can be scaled, producing densification while still blending into the character of existing neighborhoods.”

The Ivory Innovations 2025 Hack-A-House  recognizes winners in three areas—Finance, Policy & Regulatory Reform, Construction & Design. Participants were tasked with addressing specific challenges impacting housing affordability. After selecting a topic, contestants spent the next 24 hours strategizing with their teams, meeting with industry experts, and preparing a short live presentation for judges and other competitors. A panel of judges that included real estate industry experts, startup founders, academics, and leaders of major companies selected winning teams in the three categories.

The Hack-A-House winners will attend the upcoming 2025 Ivory Prize Summit  on October 29, at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and present their ideas in person. After the teams present, the audience, which includes a live stream , will vote to select the grand prize winner.

​Both an operating foundation and an academic center based at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, Ivory Innovations catalyzes high-impact innovations in housing affordability. They bridge research and industry to support cross-sector solutions, provide recognition and funding for groundbreaking ideas, engage a global student population, and contribute directly to the development of affordable housing.

A New Life Offered

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

How a Collaboration Between Design and Real Estate Advances Equity in Mumbai

Students in Rahul Mehrotra’s “Extreme Urbanism Mumbai” Graduate School of Design (GSD) Spring 2025 option studio faced a challenge that was intended to take them “completely outside their comfort level,” said Mehrotra. “We set a wicked problem that exposes them to an unfolding of interconnected issues.”  

Mumbai, set on a peninsula on the northwest coast of India, is one of the largest and densest cities in the world, with a population of about 21.3 million residents and more than 36,200 people per square kilometer—most of whom face a stark housing crisis. Approximately 57 percent of Mumbai’s population lives in informal homes, many of whom work in nearby housing complexes where they’re employed by the upper-class residents. Most of the students in the studio had never been exposed to what Mehrotra describes as “extreme conditions, in terms of density, poverty, and the juxtaposition of different worlds in the same space.”

“Mumbai is like nothing I’d ever seen before,” said Enrique Lozano (MAUD ’26), who had previously traveled to other parts of India. “There’s no designed urban form; skyscrapers are scattered throughout the city. It’s on a former wetland, so there are issues with water, one of my research areas.”

He and his classmates were introduced to Mumbai’s coastal Elphinstone Estate neighborhood and a site owned by the Port Authoritiy of Mumbai  that includes 40 acres of warehouses as well as iron and steel shipping offices, bounded on one side by a rail line and on the other by the harbor and P D’Mello Road, a major city street. “The Eastern Waterfront will be one of the city’s most contested land parcels to be opened for urban development in the next few years,” writes Mehrotra. “It plays a catalytic role in connecting the city back to the metropolitan hinterland….” The 900 or so people who work in this area and live in sidewalk tenements stand to be displaced once development progresses.

Students were tasked with working at three scales: regional, district (the “superblock”), and site (urban development policy). Rather than displacing workers whose lives are strongly rooted in the neighborhood, students were asked to invent schemes that would newly house those 900 families in tenements by “cross-subsidizing from market-value housing.” The studio offered a counterpoint to the government’s designation of the site as a commercial district. Students’ proposals served what Mehrotra terms in reference to his research, “instruments of advocacy,” creating a way to keep the city’s most vulnerable residents where they have always lived, while also offering needed market-value homes.

This studio differs from many others at the GSD, in that it involves collaboration between the studio and a Master in Real Estate course titled “The Development Project.” Jerold Kayden, Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design and founding director of the Master in Real Estate Program, and Mehrotra brainstormed about the idea of such a collaboration and launched the idea in spring 2024. David Hamilton, a real estate faculty member at the GSD, co-instructed this year’s version in the spring 2025 semester.

“I think of real estate as the physical vessel in which people live, work, and play,” Kayden explained. “And if we can apply our multidisciplinary skills and knowledge to shape real estate in ways that create a more productive, sustainable, equitable, and pleasing world, then I can’t think of a more noble cause than that.”

The magic of the combined studio and real estate class, as Kayden, Mehrotra, and Hamilton saw it, was that students from the two programs would be interdependent and could only solve the on-site housing challenges by working together. “The real estate students couldn’t own the problem because the designers didn’t design it in a way that would work in terms of real estate sense,” said Mehrotra. “And the designers couldn’t think of the design unless the real estate folks came up with a model of financing for that cross-subsidy.”

              
Hamilton concurred that the studio set up a collaborative tension that replicated real-world challenges: “We can imagine a path that gets us from having bright ideas and a beautiful piece of land, to a proposed future that’s both appealing and realistic enough to attract investment capital to be built. Then, we get to what we call stabilization, where the new neighborhood is working physically and financially in a sustainable way. Getting there involves a million different variables, from government action and public subsidies, to the needs of the market and investors and other financial considerations.”

Lozano saw the benefits of designing in Mumbai, where “the street is an even playing ground. Everybody takes the metro, walks the Plaza, buys street food in the markets.” At the same time, like most collaborators, his group had their share of challenges as they moved through the design process. “The entire studio was a negotiation between the students—of judging our values and understanding that the real estate students want to make a return on investment, but the subversion is the social mission, and the designers had to convince them that social space is an asset.”

He described a beautiful 19th-century clock tower on the Elphinstone site, which one of his real estate group members wanted to demolish, and how they negotiated the “iterative design process” and “pushed against the blank slate idea.” They kept the clock tower, which they saw as a cultural asset, and “turned it into an incredible public amenity with restrooms, civic spaces, and movie screenings. It’s an anchor and memory of the site itself, with the maritime history and labor organizing that occurred there.” Through the collaborative process, building trust by drawing and talking through their design plans, the design students developed a final project of which they’re proud.

“As we become surrounded by the madness and complexities of the world we inhabit,” said Mehrotra, “it’s important to have multiple perspectives on the same problem, and to synthesize those multiple perspectives into a proposition.”

The final review mirrored the lively discourse the students experienced all semester, as critics discussed the merits of each proposal and the possibilities for the Elphinstone Estate. Sujata Saunik, Chief Secretary of the Government of Maharashtra, participated throughout the final review and helped bring to the conversation a sense of Mumbai’s realities. As the student groups together advocated for shared public access to the site and investing in dignified housing for people living in tenements, they presented to the government a more equitable approach to developing a site that’s unique as well as profitable.

“It’s not the solution,” said Mehrotra, “but it’s a conversation changer.”

Student Propositions

A Quilt Makes a Home

Rosie Lee Tompkins’s quilts gained worldwide acclaim when the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) mounted an exhibition of some of the more than 700 of her works that were donated by collector Eli Leon. Known for her bold use of color in an improvisational piecing style that breaks conventional bounds, Tompkins’s work was first shown in 1988 and has since been included in the Whitney Biennial, among many other museums and galleries. While William Arnett famously drew an alliance between quilts and architecture in his 2006 book, The Architecture of the Quilt, about the African American quilting collective Gee’s Bend, a spring studio at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) led by Sean Canty, assistant professor of architecture, played with the inverse of this idea. 

In “Soft Slants, Mixed Gestures” students took inspiration from Tompkins’s work to create designs for housing and green space in the Portola neighborhood of San Francisco—an area known as the city’s Garden District for its history of nurseries and greenhouses that supplied the city with flowers.

In a region fraught with NIMBYism and gentrification, the site has become a flashpoint for conversations around development, the history of colonization, and racism—even appearing in the opening scene of the 2019 film The Last Black Man in San Franscisco, which the class viewed this semester. 

Like most of the western United States, Lipsky explains in her book, San Francisco was colonized and designed with “the Jeffersonian grid,” or Public Land Survey System, established in 1785 to divvy up vast acres into organized, heterogenous squares and rectangles.

In most cities and towns across the United States, the grid meshed relatively seamlessly with the landscape.

“The problem Lipsky defines,” explained Canty, “is that most cities in the United States aren’t as topographically diverse as San Francisco, so a survey system originating in river towns, coastal cities, and plains doesn’t work in the same way here.

In a series of what Lipsky calls “urban episodes,” she argues that the grid is forced to bend and change with San Francisco’s unique natural setting. As Canty summarized, the grid is “incommensurate with the topography.” Urban planners had to innovate to maintain through-lines along streets and neighborhoods, thereby disrupting or softening the grid. “In a grandiose landscape,” writes Lipsky, “where bridges and highways unite sea and land and where every hill forms a neighborhood, Nature and Architecture blend to compose a city that is alternately triumphant, modest, and familiar.” 

For example, Canty explained, a sidewalk accommodates a hill by transitioning into a stairway, a switchback is paired with a tunnel to move through the hill, a road dead-ends and “overlooks the street that runs perpendicular to it, underneath.” Such idiosyncrasies “produce something spatially exceptional,” Canty said—a surprising, sometimes even slightly dizzying, delight, not so unlike Tompkins’ quilts. 

“This became the concept of the slant for me—something that’s slightly off-kilter or new, as a subject-position in terms of queerness, and as a spatial practice within the city.”   

The “queer slant” is described by cultural theorist Sarah Ahmed in her book Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, an excerpt of which Canty and his students read at the outset of the semester, along with bell hooks’ “An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional.” Ahmed speaks to orientation and defines the “queer moment” as a time when things are “out of line” and “appear at a slant,” asking how the slant moment can inform our subject-positions, our relationships to objects and the world around us. 

bell hooks similarly considers the objects in her domestic space as they define her aesthetic. “Black domestic life,” she writes, “cultivates a rich, oppositional aesthetic rooted in everyday acts of homemaking.” Canty noted that hooks grew up with a grandmother who made quilts. hooks argues that her creation of the domestic space was its own art: “The way we lived was shaped by objects, the way we looked at them, the way they were placed around us,” and that, “we ourselves are shaped by space.”  

In class, Canty discussed work by Diller and Scofidio in which the designers fold and crease work shirts in unconventional ways, so that the functional objects transmute into sculptural forms—just as Tompkins’s quilts extend beyond their medium into the realm of abstract art. Both offer a way of thinking about fiber that Canty sees as a bridge to architectural forms. He explained that Diller and Scofidio’s work shirts, like Tompkins’s quilts, they “reveal how architectural thinking can be embedded within complex formal systems beyond the discipline itself.”

The creases and folds created with work shirts become “allegories for architecture—sites where social, formal, and political conditions are folded together and made visible.” This idea of translating quilted pieces and shirts to architecture became evident in the students’ initial exercises in the class as well as their final projects, where the buildings they designed opened and layered upon one another in mimicry of fabric. 

As Canty was designing the course, he was also at work on his book, Black Abstraction in Architecture , forthcoming from Park Books in November 2025, in which he analyzes “modes of abstraction that are outside the traditional canon,” which he explained the profession is still wrestling with in the years since George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement. In search of “an urban imaginary that comes from a Black aesthetic,” he studied the work of Theaster Gates, David Hammons, and Amanda Williams.  

In Color(ed) Theory , Williams, an artist and architect (and one of Canty’s professors as a graduate student) painted condemned houses in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood in a range of vivid colors that reflect Black experience and consumerism. Canty’s studio makes the argument that Tompkins’ work falls within the realm of Black Abstraction as well, and, with its asymmetrical blocks and color schemes, offers a creative space in the spirit of the “queer slant,” through which students can reimagine housing typologies in the Portola neighborhood—a site with a literal slant, rising 40 degrees from one side to the other.  

Armed with this theoretical background that connects African American art and theory, queer theory, and urban design, students headed into the field. The site, 770 Woolsey Street, sits in a diverse neighborhood that has been home to a wide range of immigrant communities ever since the indigenous tribes of the Ramaytush Ohlone were displaced by settlers in the eighteenth century.

The plot holds remnants of eighteen greenhouses, on more than 20,000 square feet, where roses and marigolds flourished. From the 1920s to 1990s, greenhouses around the neighborhood provided all the cut flowers for the city, giving the neighborhood its moniker, “The Garden District.” 

Now, the remaining twelve greenhouses sit dilapidated, portions of the roofs broken or sagging to the ground, untended weeds rising high. In a city that’s rapidly being gentrified and developed, with a desperate need for housing units, the site has become hotly contested. Community groups such as The Portola Green Plan and 770 Woolsey have advocated for accessible green space and affordable housing that retains the plot’s history, even as the developers who own the site have vacillated between selling and building for the last several years. 

Invited studio critics Lisa Iwamoto, chair and professor of architecture at California College of Art (CCA), and Craig Scott, professor of architecture at CCA, created a series of proposals for the site, and Mark Donahue, associate professor and chair of the BArch program at CCA, taught two studio courses on the site, sharing his survey with Canty’s students. Also invited to offer student critiques was Matthew Au, faculty member at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), whose studio Current Interests creates quilts together as part of their practice. 

The studio’s program required 40–80 residential units, integrating and repurposing the existing green space, establishing a public commons, and exploring the concept of a ceramic enclosure. Local ceramic manufacturer, Heath, opened its doors to the class so that they could explore using tile—a material that’s “mass-produced but carries the feeling of being bespoke,” said Canty—in the facade and enclosure of the buildings and site.   

The resulting designs included playfully oversized red siding, housing units situated as triangles rather than squares, using the concept of the fold to create multi-directional skins, and carefully curated interiors intended to foster community art-making and creativity.

Ashleigh Brady (MArch ’26), “Common Threads”

“This project explores domesticity through a formal language inspired by the geometric logic and improvisational ethos of Black American quilt making traditions, particularly through the work of Rosie Lee Tompkins, Chaney Ella Peace, and other Black women whose textile practices operate as radical acts of care, memory, and spatial invention.

Rooted in the programmatic design of ‘Common Threads’ is the legacy of Black San Franciscans whose resilience manifested through the transformations of the domestic sphere and public realm alike.

Porches, yards, and improvised additions became expressions of cultural identity and spatial autonomy. Citizens reclaimed land as communal infrastructure-spaces where food, kinship, and memory were cultivated side by side. These improvisational programmatic practices formed a spatial language of care and adaptability that this project adopts as both historical precedent and evolving methodology.”

“Garden in a Courtyard in a House in a City,” Sangki Nam (MArch ’25)

“This project engages the urban condition of San Francisco as a site of spatial and ideological tension, where the Cartesian imposition of the grid onto a dramatically sloped terrain has produced a landscape of unintended urban phenomena. Taking 770 Woolsey in Portola as a site of intervention, the work negotiates between competing imperatives: the preservation of local historical identity as a cultivated “Garden District” and the systemic pressures of the city’s housing crisis. Drawing on the conceptual framework of quilting, the proposal rethinks ground and form as interdependent, generating a domestic topography that dissolves binary distinctions between public/private, interior/exterior, and formal/informal, generating a spatial fabric that softens divisions between opposing realms and proposes a new model of domestic living.”

“House-fold: Playing with Household,” by Brandon Soto (March ’26) “This project reads the quilts of Rosie Lee Tompkins as a starting point for spatial exploration, seeking alternative but familiar form. Drawing from Tompkins’s quilts and Sara Ahmed’s Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology, the project challenges conventional domestic aesthetics through a queer, oppositional stance.

The pre-existing gabled bar is transformed by the stitches in Tompkins’s work, mirroring and folding figures in the interest of the off-center and non-uniform. The facade reacts similarly, reflecting topographical conditions as distortions to tile compositions, highlighting ‘seamlines’ between building and ground.”

These acts of folding and layering imagine a new queer domestic identity, answering to underlying visual traditions and cultures not fully realized in built domestic space.”

“Threaded Ground, Tending the Seam,” by Meagan Tan Jingchuu (March I ’26)  

“Structuring collective housing through two spatial datums, Threaded Ground refers to how architecture navigates San Francisco’s extreme topography—slipping between indoor and outdoor, residential, and shared space—through a plan-driven strategy of adjacency and maneuvering. Tending the Seam describes a sectional logic: a continuous roof seam that generates difference, connection, and circulation.

Together, they frame an architecture shaped by Sara Ahmed’s notion of orientation—attuned to how bodies move, align, and relate within space—and guided by a quilt logic of variation through aggregation, scale, and tactile differentiation. Across three scales of courtyard voids and long, shared seams, publicness drifts. By shaping spatial thresholds and shared seams, the architecture enables life to accumulate and unfold organically—through repeated gestures, material traces, and collective use over time.”

“Arrangements between Garden and Grid,” by Emanuel Cardenas (March II ’26)

“Along with the greenhouse history, vivid residential color palette, and sprawling gardens that make the Portola neighborhood known as San Francisco’s Garden District, the project draws from the act of quilting and San Francisco’s first master planning, in which Market Street acts as a converging line between two regular but misaligned organizational grids. The fragmented in-between spaces adjacent to Market Street are reminiscent of imperfect singular patches stitched together to form a quilted whole. Lone star quilts are traditionally constructed with Y-seams, where three separate fabrics fold onto one another and are stitched together to form a Y. The project adopts a similar strategy to quilt a figure ground from a standard perimeter block organization. These Y-seams become the central circulation within each cluster of homes and shared spaces, seaming together multiple fabrics of architectural orientation nestled in a cascading landscape of gardens.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Unifying Research and Practice: Sam Naylor

As a Harvard Graduate School of Design Druker Fellow, Sam Naylor (MAUD ’21) traveled the globe to investigate cooperative housing, exploring more than 100 projects over three years. Simultaneously, Naylor worked as an architect full time, co-authored three major housing-related reports, and sustainably renovated a cooperatively owned triple-decker in the Jamaica Plains neighborhood of Boston. Uniting these endeavors and driving this improbably large aggregation of work is Naylor’s abiding interest in housing—what it is, and what it can be—alongside his conviction that research and practice enrich one another.

Naylor’s architectural studies began in 2011 at Tulane University’s School of Architecture, in New Orleans. This was less than a decade after Hurricane Katrina, and the school immersed students in the city’s reconstruction. “Because it was so hands-on, and we were building real things that would happen in different neighborhoods, the design-build program was a big part of what inspired my architectural thinking,” Naylor says. In addition to individual architectural interventions, “there was also a focus on the city itself, working with community members and rebuilding at multiple scales, in a really considered way that was engaged and ecologically specific.”

Following Tulane, from which he graduated with bachelor and master of architecture degrees, Naylor’s experience of thinking about design at multiple scales accompanied him to Los Angeles where he worked for a few firms “on a wide range of architectural projects, from the city scale down to furniture. Slowly,” Naylor recalls, “I became more political and wanted to understand the dynamics behind our cities and what makes it possible for things to happen. What hidden forces set up the game for us as architects? I was curious to see how I in my career, and architects and designers in general, could have more agency in establishing the rules of the game that we then play.” This thinking led Naylor to the GSD, where he began his post-professional MAUD studies in 2019.

Looking back, Naylor describes his two years as a GSD student as “a critical part of my career, a great time to slow down, read and research more heavily, and take classes in different disciplines.” By the second semester, Naylor found himself drawn to housing. “As a design area,” he explains, “housing embodies a lot of the elements in which I’m interested. Housing transitions scale; you have to think about the city, and also about the room and furniture scales, even door handles. It’s also extremely political; you have to be engaged in the world, thinking about the processes through which design and construction will actually occur.” Finally, “housing is intimately connected to our own lives,” Naylor says. “And with the current housing crisis, it is satisfying to work on an issue that matters. Designing housing for communities where I live or work or that I care about is extremely fulfilling.”

Fortunately, the GSD proved an excellent place for Naylor to explore housing as a student and beyond. Graduating from the MAUD program in 2021, Naylor was awarded the Druker Traveling Fellowship, which sponsored his three-year study of cooperative housing design , exploring models in nearly a dozen countries from Argentina to the Netherlands to Australia. Toward the end of the 2021, Naylor was also appointed a research fellow at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) where, with associate professor in practice of urban planning Daniel D’Oca and professor in practice of landscape architecture Chris Reed, he co-edited The State of Housing Design 2023 , the first book in a new series that addresses issues related to residential design.

Meanwhile, Naylor joined Utile, a Boston-based firm founded by Mimi Love and Tim Love (MArch ’89, also a lecturer in real estate at the GSD). At Utile, Naylor is currently an associate with a focus on multifamily housing, as well as a member of the internal housing research team, which investigates housing and policy-related best practices. In October 2024, Naylor with Utile, JCHS, and the research center Boston Indicators released “Legalizing Mid-Rise Single-Stair Housing in Massachusetts,” a report examining the space-saving benefits of eliminating multiple-stair mandates in this building type. The single-stair report is the first step in “the harder work of making that regulatory change possible,” with Naylor now “meeting every week with people in co-development, housing advocacy, municipal policy, or the state legislature to talk about how we can make that happen.” In addition, Naylor is concurrently working with Tim Love, Amy Dain, and Camille Wimpe on Equitable Zoning by Design , a research project at Northeastern University that explores rezoning for multifamily development following MBTA guidelines, with findings to be released this month.

Concerning the potent mix of research and practice that comprises his career, Naylor feels fortunate to be a part of a firm that supports research and exploration. “It would be advantageous if more places we work supported these tangents because they enrich everything—your work, your connections, your design thinking. Research and practice improve each other,” Naylor affirms. “Research informs theory and then comes back into practice. It’s a form of testing ideas iteratively.”

This philosophy appears to hold sway in Naylor’s personal realm, notably in his very intentional living arrangements. Naylor, his wife Elaine Stokes (MLA ’16, DDes ’25), and a few friends cooperatively own a triple-decker house in Jamaica Plain. They purchased the property and have since embarked on a collective journey to decarbonize, renovate, and reside together, in their individual units, sharing building maintenance, some meals, and dog care responsibilities. Not coincidentally, during the years that Naylor traveled the globe to investigate cooperative housing projects, back at home he initiated his own—a true unification of research and practice.

 

Flood Control as a Social Movement: Coastal Communities Adapt to a Wetter Reality

As oceans expand and storms intensify, coastal regions face a rising threat: water. Whether due to deluging downpours or surging seas, flooding has increased in frequency for shore communities. Throughout the past two decades, landscape architects and urbanists associated with the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) have explored ways in which oceanfront regions can adjust to this new, wetter reality as coastal adaptation approaches have evolved, shifting from a reliance on hard infrastructure designed to keep water out, to what architects and engineers call nature-based solutions, which often intentionally let water in. Today, GSD-affiliated designers have expanded this trajectory by prioritizing communication and education as essential first steps for adaptation efforts in the struggle with climate change.

The Looming Threat of Sea Level Rise and Storm Intensification

The inaugural report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), issued in 1990, underscored the dangers confronting coastal communities, with sea level rise positioned as a main culprit. Sea level rise stems from global warming, the IPCC explained, which results in higher ocean temperatures that cause water to thermally expand, ice sheets and glaciers to melt, and storms to intensify. A 3-foot rise in sea levels, the report warned, would severely impact coastal regions, “threaten populations in low-lying areas and island countries,” displace millions, expose even more to coastal storm flooding, destroy the built and natural environment, and force the redesign of infrastructure to withstand “flooding, erosion, storm surge, wave attack, and sea-water intrusion.”¹ (In recent years, the menace of a 3-foot bump in sea levels has grown to a worst-case scenario of a 6-foot rise by 2100—a fate that will affect thousands of coastal miles and upwards of 800 million people globally.)

Despite the IPCC’s initial warning, the need for coastal adaptation was slow to infiltrate public discussion. Then, in late August 2005, Hurricane Katina roared ashore in southeast Louisiana, bringing storm surge that contributed to the failure of New Orleans’s levee system, inundating 80 percent of the city. Nearly 1400 people died, and flooding took two and a half weeks to recede. Seven years later, Superstorm Sandy’s convergence of weather and tidal patterns overran New York City’s protective infrastructure. High waves and storm surge swamped subway tunnels, knocked out power grids, engulfed at least 50 square miles of the city, decimated area shore communities, and claimed more than 100 lives. No longer nebulous phenomena, sea level rise and storm intensification were rendered strikingly real, exacting a terrible economic, social, and human toll.

For both Katrina and Sandy, infrastructural failures disproportionately affected low-income and working-class communities—a fact that suggested issues of social inequality were built into the infrastructural system itself. This continues to hold true not only in urban settings, but in locations in all stages of development around the world. Likewise, natural ecosystems have been devastated by infrastructure such as levees, sea walls, and pumping stations, which have historically inflicted negative impacts on the environment as well as plant and animal life. With such inequities in mind, architects and engineers have started to seriously rethink dominant approaches to storm water management.

From Gray to Green

For centuries, dikes, pipes, and other human-made elements have served as industrialized societies’ go-to tactics for controlling water, either preventing its entry or facilitating its rapid removal. The Netherlands , with a third of its land below sea level, had long been a global leader in such endeavors. By the late twentieth century, Dutch experts began exploring a different approach to water management: they looked to nature, drawing lessons from processes such as permeable ground absorbing water or wetlands buffering against storm surge. Building on these ecological systems, in 2007 the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management launched the Room for the River program to strategically restore rivers’ natural flood plains. The broadened flood plains, achieved through owner-compensated land reclamation and dike relocation, allow rivers to safely accommodate larger volumes of water, which would have previously flooded developed areas. Moving forward, these renewed flood plains will help offset the rising water levels resulting from climate change.

In 2008, the year following Room for the River’s initiation, the GSD embarked on a two-and-a-half-year partnership with Dutch agencies to create the Harvard–Netherlands Project : Climate Change, Water, Land Development, and Adaptation. Characterized by the motto “Water is Our Enemy, Water is Our Friend” and spearheaded by GSD professor Jerold Kayden (MCR-JD ’79), the project involved seminars and option studios in which students and faculty worked with Dutch experts to rethink long-accepted ideas around water management. Instead of focusing on “engineering know-how to build up dikes and improve pumping technology,” they explored “open[ing] cities to the sea in such a way that natural systems can co-exist with human habitation.”²

Elsewhere, coastal adaptation measures that mimicked natural processes were gaining traction. Many submissions to the 2007 design competition for the Governors Island Park and Public Space Master Plan in New York Harbor addressed future rising tides and storm surge, for example incorporating recreational green spaces that could act as buffer zones during flood events.³ A few years later, the Museum of Modern Art staged an exhibition at the PS1 Contemporary Art Center called Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront, featuring interdisciplinary design teams’ proposals to “re-envision the coastlines of New York and New Jersey around New York Harbor and to imagine new ways to occupy the harbor itself with adaptive ‘soft’ infrastructures.”⁴ On the opposite coast, San Francisco launched an ambitious plan to transform Treasure Island, a former US naval base on a low-lying artificial island adjacent to the Golden Gate Bridge, into a neighborhood with thousands of homes alongside parks, plazas, open spaces, an urban farm, and a commercial town center. This sustainable development, among the first major projects of its kind, established guidance for sea level rise adaptation policy moving forward.⁵

Likewise, in 2010, the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE)—the organization responsible for constructing and maintaining water management infrastructure throughout the country—announced the Engineering with Nature (EWN) initiative. Described as “the intentional alignment of natural and engineering processes to efficiently and sustainably deliver economic, environmental, and social benefits through collaboration,” the EWN framework underscored the USACE’s willingness to supplement their engineering tool kit, which classically consisted of hard/“gray” infrastructure, with soft/“green” approaches—what the US Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) now calls “nature-based solutions .” The creation of the EWN indicated that, alongside designers, engineers recognized the value in reconsidering traditional approaches to flood control.

Sandy’s arrival in 2012 accelerated the search for water management solutions that combined gray and green approaches. This hybrid paradigm features in winning projects from the Rebuild by Design competition, initiated in 2013 by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. Intended to foster resilience in Sandy-impacted areas through “regionally scalable” yet “locally contextual solutions,” Rebuild by Design operated as a funding mechanism for the initial phase of seven innovative projects.⁶

This includes the BIG U , designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and ONE Architecture & Urbanism, comprising a series of open green spaces that work with berms, deployable walls, and other hard components to serve as flood protection around lower Manhattan. Another project, Living Breakwaters , designed by SCAPE—a landscape architecture and urban design practice run by GSD alumni Kate Orff (MLA ’97 and firm founder), Gena Wirth (MLA/MUP ’09), Pippa Brashear (MLA/MUP ’07), Alexis C. Landes (MLA ’10, also a lecturer at the GSD)—with Parsons Brinckerhoff, involves artificial breakwaters that shield Staten Island’s southeastern coast from storm surge and wave action. Constructed of stone and concrete, the partially submerged breakwaters reduce beach erosion while providing habitats for oysters and other marine life. Currently both the BIG U and Living Breakwaters are advancing through multi-phased construction, demonstrating a distinct progression from water management through hard engineering (such as New Orleans’s levee and pump system pre-Katrina) to approaches that incorporate green processes.

Coastal Adaptation as a Social Movement

Since the Harvard–Netherlands Project concluded in 2010 and Sandy wreaked havoc in 2012, discussions around coastal adaptation and storm water management at the GSD have followed a similar path from gray to green, hard to soft, with programs, studios, and initiatives stretching from Canada to the Philippines, Denmark to China. Recently, the GSD has advanced the conversation by foregrounding community engagement as a necessary precursor to developing water management strategies. In other words, GSD-affiliated practitioners are considering coastal adaptation as a social movement as much as an infrastructural program. This fall, amidst offerings that address coastal adaptation and resilience around the globe, the emphasis on sharing knowledge with and learning from residents of coastal communities is clearly visible in two courses that focus closer to home: Rockaway Peninsula, New York; and Portland, Maine.

Residents of the Rockaway Peninsula, which juts from the southwest corner of New York’s Long Island, have yet to fully recover from Sandy. And with increasing land values, problematic rebuilding practices, and near full salt-water inundation predicted by 2100, life on the barrier island is not getting easier. This convergence of forces prompted Ed Wall—professor of cities and landscapes at the University of Greenwich, visiting professor in landscape architecture at the GSD, and a practitioner whose work focuses on spatial equity—to organize the project-based seminar “Rockaway’s Housing Superstorm: Between Rising Waters and Climate Gentrification.” In this course, Wall and his students collaborated with Rockaway residents to design a new public realm throughout the peninsula that connects local housing to the waterfront and provides shared space for recreation, social interaction, and transportation-hub access. With ample community input, the students then developed strategies of adaptation to respond to the rising seas in the coming months, years, and decades.

Wall believes that collaboration between experts and the communities they serve is a prerequisite for successful adaptation interventions. Yet, as Wall notes, “architects, landscape architects, engineers, and the agencies that employ them too often undertake work in a location without spending enough time there.” This results in designs that may inadvertently ignore true community needs and fail to foster the local interest that sustains a project long term. Thus, Wall’s seminar repeatedly engaged with Rockaway residents and community activists, on site and via video conferences; these interactions guided the students as they designed and refined interventions. “This back-and-forth is partly about building trust with the community,” Wall explains, “and partly about supporting the students as they learn to navigate these relationships and recognize the complexity of this type of work. It’s complicated, layered, and messy, and I genuinely believe it must start with these conversations.”

In addition to frequent engagement, Wall advocates community education through regular and honest discussion about future environmental predictions. “There needs to be some way of communicating that our landscapes are changing,” he asserts. “When we have heavy rainfalls or a drought, what does that mean? Where does our water come from, and how are seasonal tides different from daily tides?” For Wall, public awareness about climate science is an imperative, as is clarity about the temporal nature of buildings, cities, and landscapes.

Similar sentiments about communication and education feature in the work of Pamela Conrad, a landscape architect and design critic at the GSD. This fall Conrad (Loeb Fellow ’23) and Michael Blier (MLA ’94) led an option studio titled “Envision Resilience: Imagining a Future Waterfront for Portland, Maine,” part of a larger multi-university design studio and community engagement initiative called Envision Resilience Challenge , sponsored by Remain . Through Conrad and Blier’s studio, the students worked with local stakeholders to develop short-, mid-, and long-term interventions for the city’s downtown Old Port, which experienced two extreme flooding events in January 2024 alone. The studio prioritized community engagement, aligning with Conrad’s belief that “it is absolutely critical to bring the community into the conversation early, and in a safe space.” This begins by establishing a shared common ground regarding climate-related risks.

During the initial meeting with area residents and stakeholders, Conrad’s students introduced neighborhood sea level rise maps and then posed questions: what concerns you the most about these predictions? What’s important to you in this area? Where do you think we should prioritize resources? This knowledge informed the studio’s next step, which involved additional community discussion around adaptation approaches. “We act as facilitators for the conversation and listen deeply so we can hear community members’ ideas,” Conrad explains. “Then we move to the drawing board to transform their ideas into adaptation concepts, after which we return to the community with those strategies. This process leads to more long-term stewardship because community members see their ideas in the visions presented, and they’re the ones who will advocate for these projects over time.”

Among landscape architects, it is generally understood that nature-based adaptations, such as a living marsh instead of a concrete seawall, can address the risks of sea level rise and storm intensification as (if not more) effectively than hard infrastructure—and with accompanying benefits such as reduced carbon emissions and increased cost savings, human health, and biodiversity. Yet, hard infrastructure often remains the norm in coastal adaptation work, in part because there is no way to systematically assess the efficacy of nature-based adaptations. Fortunately, this will soon change. This fall, Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability funded an ambitious project by Conrad and Charles Waldheim, John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture and director of the GSD Office for Urbanization, to develop and distribute an evaluation methodology for nature-based shoreline adaptation solutions. This study aims to educate design and engineering practitioners, highlighting sources of embodied carbon and demonstrating that “low-carbon, nature-based infrastructure can address, rather than exacerbate, the climate crisis,” thereby laying the groundwork for the broader adoption of nature-based adaptation solutions.⁷

Conrad’s educational efforts likewise extend to international practitioners and leaders. As one of two delegates representing the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), she recently attended the UN Climate Change Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan (COP29). Here Conrad and Thai landscape architect Kotchakorn Voraakhom spearheaded a workshop for global policymakers and launched their recently completed WORKS with Nature: Low Carbon Adaptation Techniques for a Changing World , a guide presenting 100 nature-based strategies for various contexts—developing and developed countries, urban and rural locations, coastal and inland.⁸ Conceived as “a low-carbon, nature-based resource for all countries, at all scales, and for all budgets,” WORKS with Nature prioritizes communication and education as a critical next step for climate adaptation, not to mention climate mitigation and ecosystem regeneration, all efforts essential for sustained future life on our planet. As Conrad notes, “We must share our collective stories, lessons learned, and work on nature-based solutions with the global community.” In the end, “we are all in this together.”⁹

1. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change: The IPCC 1990 and 1992 Assessments (June 1992), 106-107,  https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/05/ipcc_90_92_assessments_far_full_report.pdf.  Note that sea levels rise and recede at different rates around the globe, depending on an area’s ground-water subsidence, distance from the equator, and other factors. ↩︎
2. See Pierre Bélanger and Nina-Marie Lister, “Landscape Disurbanism” option studio course description, https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/course/landscape-disurbanism-depolderization-decentralization-in-the-dutch-delta-region-spring-2010/. ↩︎
3. Ed Wall, interview with author, Nov. 6, 2024. All further quotes from Wall come from this interview. Wall was part of the team that established the 2007 Governors Island competition. ↩︎
4. “Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront,” Mar. 24–Oct. 11, 2010, Exhibitions and Events, MoMA, https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1028. ↩︎
5. Pamela Conrad, interview with author, Nov. 8, 2024. All further quotes from Conrad, unless otherwise noted, come from this interview. Conrad worked on the Treasure Island development during her time with CMG Landscape Architects. ↩︎
6. “Origin and Impact,” Hurricane Sandy Design Competition, Rebuild by Design, https://rebuildbydesign.org/hurricane-sandy-design-competition/. ↩︎
7. “Salata Institute Funds Five New Climate Research Projects,” Sept. 18, 2024, Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University, https://salatainstitute.harvard.edu/salata-institute-funds-five-new-climate-research-projects/. ↩︎
8. Jared Green, “At COP29, Landscape Architects Will Workshop Landscape Solutions to Climate Change with World Leaders,” Dirt, Nov. 6, 2024, https://dirt.asla.org/2024/11/06/at-cop29-landscape-architects-will-workshop-landscape-solutions-to-climate-change-with-world-leaders/. ↩︎
9. Pamela Conrad, “Introduction: When it Comes to Climate and Biodiversity, How Do We Choose?” in Pamela Conrad and Kotchakorn Voraakhom, WORKS with Nature: Low Carbon Adaptation Techniques for a Changing World (United Nations Climate Change, Nov. 18, 2024), 13, https://unfccc.int/documents/644016. ↩︎