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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Final Experience is Beyond Our Control

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, a time An-My Lê remembers vividly. As she recalled during her Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture at the Graduate School of Design (GSD) this month, Lê and her family were among the hundreds evacuated from Vietnam by US soldiers. When she left, she was just fifteen years old, and, because of the war, had never had access to the Mekong Delta. Her only memories of the place were images she’d seen of GI’s being airlifted out. Nearly twenty years later, working under a grant after graduate school, she went back to photograph it.

“Exploring the landscape was a complete adventure,” said Lê, describing her return in 1994, when the United States re-established relations with Vietnam. “Living in exile,” she explained, “means not having access to your culture. For many years, we did not think we could return to Vietnam, and once I got there, I realized that all these memories were not very reliable.”

Speaking at the GSD on April 1,  Lê described how she made repeated visits to make landscape photographs with a view camera. The cumbersome but essential tool allows her to capture vast landscapes and poignant portraits, with long exposures that often create “happy accidents.” Back in Vietnam, she quickly found resonances of not only her childhood and the war, but also centuries past emerging in her images. The blurry palm trees above a flock of ducks, depicted in “Untitled, Mekong Delta, 1994,” could have been preserved from another lifetime, long before the war made travel in the Mekong Delta unsafe and damaged the landscape.

Lê pointed out the similarity between her work as a photographer and that of landscape architects in terms of time and history. Landscape architects design spaces we experience in the moment that also make reference to history and suggest potential change. According to Lê,  photographers layer their images with “notions of the past” and future. She said she looks at the landscape like a designer when she thinks about the separation between earth and sky, or questions of scale.

“I love the freedom,” she said of her medium. “You can start anywhere. And yet, we do our best to provide specific elements—whether a landscape architect designs a particular hill or curve, or how I choose to frame an image—but, the final experience is something we can’t control.”

In 1999, at the invitation of a group of Vietnam War reenactors who stage battles in Virginia and North Carolina, she began to photograph images of war—or at least, a mimicry of it. She often participated in the events herself so that she could remain close to the action, posing as a spy or soldier. The resulting images—a cluster of soldiers converging in a small opening in the woods blurred by a stand of bamboo they’d planted, the sparks of a bomb splashing into the air like a fountain—reveal the moments she found most interesting, which, she reminded the audience, is not the same as the photojournalistic impulse to record what’s “most pressing.”

Since then, she has observed military trainings in the Southern California desert that prepared soldiers for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, traveled on US navy ships across the Pacific, visited army training sessions in Ghana, and observed earthquake relief efforts in Haiti. Images from these travels became part of her series “29 Palms” (2003) and “Events Ashore” (2005–2012). She has also continued to attend war reenactments and was invited to shoot at the Louisiana filming of Free State of Jones, about the Civil War. While she often pursues “hot button topics,” she approaches those issues not from a documentary perspective but with poetic language, explaining that the building blocks of language and the photographic worlds she creates are very similar in terms of establishing tension, perspective, and the marriage of form and content.

In 2022, Lê began to experiment with the cyclorama, a form popular before the moving image that surrounded viewers with monumental paintings on the walls of a circular room. She reimagined the genre by hanging a series of large-scale photographs side by side around a circular room, allowing people to read them in linear and nonlinear fashions.

She used the cyclorama to present narrative photographs in the 2024 series “Dark Star” and “Grey Wolf.” Shot at a national park in Colorado near a nuclear missile test site, the images in “Dark Star”  depict the vast night sky, capturing with a long exposure the thousands of stars invisible to the naked eye, and urging the viewer to consider “civilization and the infinite world beyond us”—perhaps even offering comfort, Lê explained. “Grey Wolf,” a series of photographs shot from a helicopter over the missile installations set amid farmland in Montana and Nebraska, was inspired in part by the history of Land Art. The sites and their context evoke the monumental earthworks and concrete structures that comprise artist Michael Heizer’s Nevada project City, which stretches across over a mile of the desert. “The size of the stones on the path, the color of the stones, the height of the sidewalk, the borders, the plants—it’s very specific.” Lê cites Heizer as a contemporary influence.

She also engages deeply with the history of her primary medium and acknowledges nineteenth-century war photographers Timothy O’Sullivan and Roger Fenton as influences as well. Because war and its aftermath has been her subject for much of her career, Lê has had to wrestle with the question of whether she’s rendering violence “beautiful.” Her landscape photographs have been compared to the work of Robert Adams, and challenge our perception of the narrative a war image can tell. She argued that she’s in search of something beyond beauty—the sublime, or ineffable.

Her use of the view camera helps advance that goal. While she tried a smaller camera that allowed her to move with more agility, she was dissatisfied with the images; cumbersome though the view camera was, it allowed her to capture the landscape as she perceived it, with its many layers of space, time, and the valances of memory. And as she experimented with portrait photography—for example in her portraits of women on the carrier ships in “Events Ashore”—she also found that the view camera created different experiences with her subjects. When she went under the dark curtain to snap the shot, people posed for the camera, looking into its lens but unable to see her looking back.

Lê concluded her talk at the GSD with discussion of recent work in a new medium, embroidery, in which she considers the “ecstatic sublimity and quasi-religiosity of the frenzied performance.” She creates embroideries based on stills from a pornographic movie ostensibly set during the Vietnam War, in which performers stage an encounter between American soldiers and Vietnamese sex workers. She explained that she’s drawn to needlework because it completely absorbs her attention. “I find comfort when I lose myself in the work.”

She previously made weavings for her “đô-mi-nô” series, and was drawn to embroidery after finding a cross-stitched landscape in the basement of her apartment building. In Lê’s printing process, she edits her photographs at the level of the pixel, and began to think, “maybe that’s the way for me to control the image.” She was also influenced by medieval tapestries that “hang as decorative pieces while also suggesting a narrative. They’re about storytelling.”

Inspired by the long tradition of embroidery in Vietnam, Lê and her studio assistants create painterly palettes for the images that Lê expanded and cropped, abstracting them beyond the pornographic realm. “It’s not easily decipherable at first,” she explained. “I chose moments when the action is more obscure, which was important to get people to stop and think about the origin of the piece.” For her, the series is about how women “hustled during the war,” as well as the “spoils of war,” sex workers, and how the makers of the Vietnam War–themed porn film took a historic and painful time and turned it into entertainment.

Like all of her work, however, she leaves the embroidered images up to the audience to interpret. “Ultimately, you provide an experience that only the audience or the viewer or participant can experience themselves, and you just have to let go.”

Spring 2025 Update from Gary R. Hilderbrand MLA ’85, Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture

Dear Alumni and Friends of Landscape Architecture,

Greetings from Cambridge, where we have embarked upon the 125th year of the Landscape Architecture department and the third week of the spring semester. I recently traveled to Bangkok, Thailand, where Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture Sarah M. Whiting, Professor Anita Berrizbeitia MLA ’87, Charles Eliot Professor Niall Kirkwood, and I presented a public symposium on the past three years of option studios focused on the redevelopment of the old port along the Chao Phraya River. We had a remarkable week of visits and events; the research and design work was shared with the governor of Bangkok, several national ministers, and leaders of the community of Khlong Toei, the site of the three studios. The winter temperatures hovered in the lovely low 90s. It’s far colder back here.

Faculty Highlights

I am proud to say that our three new faculty hires this year are off to a prosperous start. Assistant Professor Karen Lee Bar-Sinai PhD LF ’13 is teaching in core studios and assisting in the curation of our Material Orders collection in the Frances Loeb Library toward the inclusion of living matter and related landscape resources beyond the walls of Gund. Assistant Professor Kaja Tally-Schumacher PhD is an environmental historian specializing in matters of climate in the Roman period through archaeology in Pompeii, utilizing LIDAR technologies and ground-penetrating radar alongside traditional excavation methods. She’s teaching in the history/theory sequence and plans to take some of our students on the dig this summer. Finally, Lecturer in Plant Science and Forest Ecology Max Piana PhD has also joined the faculty full-time. Max brings an important kind of field research in forest ecology and ecological restoration to the department. He’s also guest workshopping in at least a half-dozen classes, which is a great use of his valuable presence here in the department.

I’m so pleased to have welcomed these three to our ranks. And special thanks go to Senior Lecturer Ed Eigen and Charles Eliot Professor Niall Kirkwood for managing the searches that led us to this place.

On the curriculum front, given that we now have two environmental historians on the faculty (including Kaja and Lecturer Abby Spinak), I’ve convened all eight faculty members who teach in this area to review our required four-course sequence and make recommendations on how we integrate the incipient environmental humanities into the ways we teach history and theory. I look forward to updating you on our progress as we refine an already strong sequence. One more note regarding history/theory culture in the department: we’ve received a generous gift that provides for a new annual prize at Commencement, the Ronald Lee Fleming MCRP ’67 Award for Landscape History/Theory, recognizing the best paper in any of the department’s history/theory courses. The faculty committee will be reading lots of papers!

I would like to recognize Associate Professor Gareth Doherty DDes ’10 for his extraordinary efforts to expand our knowledge base to landscape architecture on the African continent. Gareth has played a pivotal role in shaping our efforts to get students out in the field and has developed an amazing course on landscape architecture education and practice in Africa, following his year-long sabbatical fieldwork in nearly every nation in Africa. On March 6 and 7, we will host the symposium “African Landscape Architectures: Alternative Futures for the Field.” Featuring speakers from around the world, including the African continent, the event will be live streamed. The symposium is jointly supported by GSD Public Programs, the Department of African and African American Studies, IFLA, the Center for Middle East Studies, and other Harvard entities. This will be a one-of-a-kind event.

This past fall semester, we presented the exhibition Changing Climates in the Druker Design Gallery, which included works from Professor in Practice Bas Smets’ practice, Bureau Bas Smets, along with student work from two of his recent option studios. The parallels are striking—the firm’s work in Paris, Antwerp, and Arles (for the LUMA Foundation) is all focused on altering urban microclimates, and the same is true for the studio work in Manhattan and Central Paris. This fall Smets had his students on the same urgent climate path in Athens, Greece.

Collaborations and Partnerships

There is much to report on this topic. First, we had an outstanding turnout at our alumni event last fall in Washington, DC, held in concert with the ASLA Conference. I, several faculty, and our loyal development partner, Lindsey Grant LaGrasse, were joined by nearly two hundred alumni and friends to share news, recognitions, and merriment. We sponsored ten of our current students to attend the conference, and they joined as well.

One big push we have made this year: we are ensuring that fieldwork and site visits are a vital part of our classes. I’ve raised a fund that provides shared transportation for field trips, and faculty are taking advantage of it. Course budgets often cannot provide for this, but we believe it’s of utmost importance to get our students out into the landscape. We’ve deepened our relationships with the Arnold Arboretum and the Harvard Forest. At the Arboretum, we’ve had tours and workshops with our first-year MLAs, as well as soils workshops with Max Piana and Ecology, Techniques, and Technology III. Next year, we hope to begin some experimental planting that will be monitored over time by successive classes, utilizing protocols developed by Max in collaboration with the National Forest Service. Program Director Karen Janosky MLA ’91 visited the Harvard Forest with her soils class to review the long-duration soils warming work being done there, and six faculty joined the class. These experiences reflect our renewed commitment to making fieldwork a normative practice for learning and researching on sites.

My other concerted effort is to enhance the visibility of our climate adaptation initiatives both within the university and beyond. We have several faculty collaborations going with Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. Design Critic Amy Whitesides MLA ’12 has joined the Climate Blog at Salata. We’ve initiated another collaboration with the Visualization Lab at Harvard, where real-time climate modeling has advanced to remarkable new heights. Our exhibition in the Druker Design Gallery last spring, FOREST FUTURES, brought a vast audience from across the university and the greater public. Its accompanying conference, “Forest Futures: Will the Forest Save Us All?” was well attended, featuring a special keynote evening with William (Ned) Friedman, Arnold Professor and Director of the Arboretum, who lectured on trees as living archives, followed by responses from Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and Ed Eigen. It was a packed house in Piper Auditorium that night. A book on both the exhibition and the conference is forthcoming.

We are supporting student internships with several of our Harvard partners. This year, we will have a second intern at Villa I Tatti in Florence. Last summer, Caroline Brodeur MLA ’26, MUP ’26 built a new detailed site plan and conducted a climate risk assessment for I Tatti’s extensive properties, which suffer from extreme long-term drought and ensuing challenges to the historic gardens. They are now adapting Caroline’s site plan as their official garden and facilities map. This summer, Gemrisha Anantham MLA ’26 will begin building a digital twin model of the site and its structures, which will enable I Tatti to tell the story of its historical development and to project its future growth patterns. We are grateful to Alina Payne, Alexander P. Misheff Professor of History of Art and Architecture and Paul E. Geier Director of Villa I Tatti, for supporting this effort and for deepening our relationship with this magical place.

This summer at Dumbarton Oaks, with the assistance of Visiting Professor and Director of Garden and Landscape Studies Thaïsa Way, we’ll have several interns working three days a week in the gardens alongside Director of Gardens and Grounds Jonathan Kavalier and in the archives with Thaïsa for the balance of the week. Lucky students! We’re grateful to Benjamin Prosky, President of the Richard Hampton Jenrette Foundation and former GSD Director of Communications, for assisting with funding for the DO internships. And special thanks also go to Dumbarton Oaks Professor of the History of Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art Tom Cummins for his fervent support of the many threads of our relationship with DO.

Furthermore, we’ll have two interns at the amazing Château de Courances in France, working half-time in the historic gardens and half-time in the organic farm. Lucky, again.

Alumni Notes

I would like to acknowledge the recent passing of Joe Brown MLAUD ’72. Joe was extremely loyal to the department; some years ago, he and his spouse, Jacinta McCann, established a fund to support faculty research, and we miss his leadership and passion for the field. You can find my remembrance of Joe here.

Just two weeks ago, we learned of the untimely passing of Eric “T” Fleisher LF ’08. During his Loeb year, T spent a great deal of time with us in the department, while he was preparing the university to move to organic management of Harvard Yard. And I know that many alums have worked with F2 Environmental Design, T’s firm with his wife and partner Andrea Filippone MArch ’87. T was the guru of soils design, installation, and management for many of us. We will really miss him, and we send our heartfelt sympathies to Andrea.

There was a lovely piece in the November/December issue of Harvard Magazine  about the inspired painting and collage work of Darren Sears MLA ’04. Congratulations, Darren, on works of great interest to designers and artists.

Paying Tribute

Finally, I must share tributes to two senior colleagues who will retire this year—sadly for us. Niall Kirkwood, who joined the faculty in 1991 after eight years managing notable projects at Hanna Olin (now Olin), has made contributions of great consequence to the field in the areas of technologies of urban infrastructures, detailing and weathering of material assemblies, phytoremediation applications in restoration ecology, and climate adaptation in Asia, among others. Niall has also served as our primary departmental ambassador to Asia, consistently teaching studios in India, Korea, and Thailand. He has also examined and advised on landscape architecture education and practice in Seoul and Bangkok. Associate Professor in Practice Jungyoon Kim MLA ’00, founder of PARKKIM landscape architects in Seoul and Boston, will graciously assume a primary role in this continuing endeavor. But we are ever grateful for Niall’s dedicated and productive work as a researcher and technologist, design teacher, mentor, department chair, and academic dean of the GSD for the past three years. He’s been a standout colleague and collaborator for three decades, and we wish him the very best in his continued pursuits in Asia and beyond.

Robert and Lois Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape Development John Stilgoe PhD has taught jointly in the department and at the college since 1977. A legend in higher education for five decades, he is the author of nearly two dozen books on as many topics and a renowned teacher of countless Harvard students about the provenance and meanings of landscapes, photography, literature, film, public policy, politics, and more. John has a colossal following of alumni who keep him apprised of much going on in the world. He’s been counsel to nine department chairs. I will keep in touch with John—his wisdom never fails to clarify and reveal historical patterns and emerging trends for me, no matter the topic or crisis. After this final semester, his fieldwork trips in the Chevrolet Suburban will be longer and less constrained. Good wishes to John for his “retirement.”

Looking Ahead

As I write this, our students in Option Studios are preparing to travel for their fieldwork to amazing destinations. With Design Critic Rosalea Monacella, students will travel to Australia. Visiting Design Critic Tom Balsley of SWA/Balsley is taking 12 design students and eight Master in Real Estate students to Rotterdam. Visiting Professor Luis Callejas will have students exploring the “Norwegian Scenic Routes” project. Anita Berrizbeitia MLA ’87 and Visiting Design Critic Ignacio Bunster-Ossa LF ’93 will be looking at adaptations to the coastal ecology and infrastructure of the Panama Canal—which is in the news every day lately! Our students are extremely fortunate to be able to spend a full week with their instructors, local experts, and stakeholders in these very real and sometimes exotic places.

There is more to say, but this letter is already long. I send you all my sincere hopes that 2025, a year of significant change, will bring rewards and good health to you all. Additionally, I’d like to thank my full departmental staff for their amazing support: Program Director and Lecturer Karen Janosky MLA ’91; Associate Director of Academic Administration Ryan Jacob; Program Coordinator Briana King; and Executive Coordinator Rebecca Hallowell. They are working on all cylinders to keep the department alive and well and thriving.

Please let us hear from you!

Sincerely,

Gary R. Hilderbrand FASLA, FAAR, MLA ’85
Principal
Reed Hilderbrand LLC

Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture | Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice
Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Winter Reading 2025: Design Books by GSD Faculty and Alumni

In need of new reading for the new year? These recent books by Harvard Graduate School of Design faculty and alumni—published within the past six months and organized alphabetically by title—feature topics from Victorian architecture to geospatial mapping. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remembering Joseph Edward Brown (1947–2024)

Joseph Edward Brown (MLAUD ’72), whose unrelenting promotion of landscape architecture influenced several generations of practitioners, died on Thursday, October 31st, in San Francisco after an extended illness. I was fortunate to have witnessed the loving care his spouse, Jacinta McCann, gave him over the long years of his physical impairment—one of the truest measures of human devotion I have ever encountered.

In my lifetime, there was no stronger champion for the striving achievement of landscape architecture practices than Joe, a tireless man whose energy could not be dampened. The story of his advocacy for the field necessarily starts with the formation of EDAW in 1973, when Garrett Eckbo, Francis Dean, Don Austin, and Ed Williams reincorporated the small but powerfully innovative firm that Eckbo and Williams had originated two decades earlier. EDAW expanded steadily on a wave of emerging environmentalism, delivering new scales of environmental planning including the expansive California Urban Metropolitan Space Study of 1965 and a similar plan for the state of Hawaii in 1970. Joe joined EDAW in 1974 in California and, seeing the East Coast as an opportunity, soon opened the firm’s studio in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1976.

It was in the District of Columbia that Joe developed his full-throated voice for visibility, credibility, and influence for the discipline. Through sustained and strategic promotion, the Alexandria office became a powerhouse in Washington. EDAW’s Alexandria principals assiduously studied how design intersects with governance and public process—the only key to success for anyone working in the capital city. They conquered the art of persuading and winning with agencies including the National Capital Planning Commission, the US Commission of Fine Arts, and the National Park Service. The DC projects were significant, from the Monumental Core Master Plan, Constitution Gardens, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial, and the National Museum of the American Indian, to perhaps the ultimate prize in planning the capital city: Joe’s leadership role in a mega-team for the all-important plan for the District and beyond, called Extending the Legacy, in 1997.

Meanwhile EDAW was expanding globally. In 1992, Joe took the reins of the firm as president; satellite offices thrived in Atlanta, Sydney, and London. By 1994, it was a 400-person entity banking on new global markets including Europe, China, and the Global South. By 2000, EDAW stood at 1,000 people. In 2005, EDAW joined the AECOM companies, one of the world’s largest infrastructure consulting firms. With this merger, EDAW’s landscape practice would gain hold on an unlimited market worldwide.

EDAW kept its identity within AECOM for nearly a decade, but in 2009, after its own legacy of 50 years of transformational practice, the firm was consolidated into AECOM. Many viewed this as a diminishment—it was sad to see the Eckbo Dean Austin & Williams legacy retired. But Joe saw his team of landscape architects working on the largest and most complex projects throughout the world. He led AECOM’s Planning, Design, and Development team, and became the Chief Innovation Officer, prior to his retirement in 2016. Joe had moved beyond visibility and credibility for the field; he was satisfied that landscape architects were leading and collaborating everywhere, and he continued to motivate everyone he knew. He was more than once heard saying, “Make big plans now . . . or be prepared to make little plans for a small future.”

An anecdote: In the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, Joe did some teaching at the GSD, mostly workshops in core studios and guest appearances in classes, and we spent a bit of time together, sharing studio reviews and occasional dinners. At the time, I taught the MLA II Proseminar, which aided first-semester students in the shaping of an academic platform for their two years in the program. I’d invited Joe to speak with the class about his career path and his views on practice. Joe headed to the blackboard after a short introduction. There he wrote “EDAW” and “Reed Hilderbrand” across the top. He said he wanted to talk about where this class of students wanted to work once they’d finished their MLA degrees. He explained that if you wanted to have impact, EDAW would take you places you’ve never imagined, where you can design anything. If you want to work in an atelier, then you should work for Gary’s firm; you will really learn how to design, but the impact will be smaller. A friendly hour-long debate ensued. His voice, forever a bit on the raspy side, was always intense, directive, and encouraging. Joe and I remained good friends. We both liked our respective corners of the world.

Whether he saw you as a boutique artist or a large firm collaborator, Joe always seemed to be as keen on your firm’s success as he was on his own, as a range of practitioners attest. Gerdo Aquino FASLA (MLA ’96) of SWA has noted that “Joe was an important mentor to me in my early professional years at EDAW and SWA. He was the one who talked me into attending graduate school—said I wouldn’t regret it. He was a north star for so many of us.” Cindy Sanders FASLA of OLIN said, “Joe was my most significant mentor in the business of the business. He taught me nearly everything I now know about the business of landscape architecture. I was a good student of his academy.” And James Burnett FASLA of OJB observed, “He wanted us all to make it and prosper because he understood how important it was for our firms and our profession to be strong.”

Joe received many accolades in his career, including the 2009 American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) Medal, the association’s top honor. That same year—the year of the full merger into AECOM—EDAW received the ASLA Firm of the Year award as well. The most significant recognition in my view, and I like to imagine possibly for him, was Joe being presented with the Landscape Architecture Foundation Medal in 2019. The ceremony in Washington, DC, was deeply affecting, a moment those in attendance will never forget. While Joe was by then barely able to speak, he was fully aware, with Jacinta at his side, that all in the room felt a great sweep of emotion and gratitude for his determined and tireless contributions to the advancement of landscape architecture.

Joe’s dedication to furthering the discipline of landscape architecture persists. Established in 2017 with Jacinta, the Joe Brown and Jacinta McCann Fund for Faculty Research provides support for both new and ongoing research projects conducted by junior faculty in the GSD’s Department of Landscape Architecture or Department of Urban Design, with a particular interest in interdisciplinary projects.

 

The Body in Intimate Spaces

The bathroom is inevitably a space where we find ourselves spending time each day, and yet, say Laila Seewang and Chris Reed, its impact on urban space is often overlooked in terms of design. The studio Seewang and Reed are leading this semester, “FLUSH: Waste and Intimacy in Berlin’s Civic Realm,” explores issues around water supply and sewage systems and how intimate spaces—such as bathrooms, public pools, or showers—are connected with these larger urban systems. Seewang, visiting assistant professor of urban planning and design, and Reed, co-director of the Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design degree program and professor in practice of landscape architecture, collaborated on the interdisciplinary course that brought students to Berlin to learn more about the history of resource landscapes, such as the “sewage farms” that filtered urban waste, and how they might respond to these leftover spaces today.

Rachel May: How did you create the FLUSH studio?

Laila Seewang: The city of Berlin had the first municipal water system that flushed out a whole city’s wastewater onto sewage farms, primarily because it’s not near the sea. It was a city-scaled experiment in water circularity. The work stems from my doctoral research that examined the history of that system.

The studio is about the legacies of public sanitation—for example, what it means when, as a public responsibility, a city decides to provide water to its citizens and take away sewage. It’s one of those things that we take for granted as a sign of modernity: in developed cities today, we expect clean, free, running water and someone taking away the waste. But, how we came to those decisions is not always clear.

We gave this history to the students as a prompt. It’s a way of asking them to think about issues such as: Who has rights to resources—and are they evenly distributed? How are they channeled? What do we give up in exchange? How do our bodies use that water? How does the community need to use it? What spaces does that create in an urban landscape?

Chris Reed: I was looking at some of the drawings developed at the time that the sewage and water systems were being designed, and the movement toward public toilets was underway. There’s very clear thinking about relationships between, say, the point of origin—whether that’s the point of waste removal or access to water, and the system across the city that’s required to put that in place—and how that then relates to groundwater, soil, slope, the earth, topography, landscape, environment. All those things are connected.

You may have a small expression for a pump house or a single toilet within a public square. The design of that structure has been considered very carefully in terms of the language of the design, the setting, the image. But it’s just the tip of the iceberg, as you begin to trace the implications of that system.

Those issues of being able to jump scale, to address circularity in a contemporary condition with the climate challenges that we’re now facing, and overlaying that with the sensorial, intimate process and rituals around cleansing the body, waste removal, urination—those simple things that we do every day and take for granted. How do we think of those moments within the architectural or landscape or urban design project?

A piece that the students are reading right now, “In Praise of Shadows” (1933) by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, points toward the care and craft that goes into Japanese toilets, so as not to over-illuminate or over-expose. It allows for nuance. A shadow is something that, perhaps, we want to capture. It’s part of the human experience. It also hints at a sensibility about something other than purity or purification—something much richer.

This semester, you both introduced the GSD’s screening Perfect Days, the film by Wim Wenders about a Tokyo toilet cleaner. Japanese toilets sound much more sophisticated than ours.

Chris Reed: There are two especially good versions. One is the historic version, which is covered in Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s essay. Some toilets of this type are meant to be places of respite and quiet, of thinking, often with a view toward a beautiful landscape. But there’s also the contemporary Tokyo Toilet project, for which a number of A-list architects were asked to design a public toilet in the city of Tokyo and to consider not just the design of the toilet—what is inside, what is outside, what is private, what is public—but also how that toilet sits within its urban context. What is its position within that environment? They are 20 of these toilets, and they’re all quite different and extraordinary in their own ways.

What do you want students to think about in terms of sustainability and design? What should we consider for a future shaped by climate change?

Laila Seewang: There are a number of values that were built into systems like the one in Berlin—values that we have inherited. People had to be taught to shower when it wasn’t common to bathe daily. They didn’t want to be taxed for clean, fresh water. They had plenty of water. There was no taboo about being dirty, necessarily. But the system that Berlin inherited to support these practices requires practically endless amounts of running water every day. That’s potable water that has been filtered, that is flushed down the toilet, or used for industrial purposes.

Part of the hope is that students will start to link bodily practices and values with enormous technical systems that magnify and support those acts, because I think a lot of those systems seem neutral and predetermined by very practical things. When you look back, historically, it’s easier to unpack because the systems were simpler than they are today. They were doing it for the first time. You could see that they had to go on a campaign to get people to shower, or that there were 40 years of debates as to where a woman’s toilet would be. You can see the thinking processes. It makes it very clear that all of these things have been designed. In other words, choices and values were translated into form.

Moving forward, I think there are some very practical options out there that many people—researchers, scientists—have looked at. For example, do we use dry toilets and stop using water, or do we use less industry, or do we recirculate the water? Does circularity have to be scaled down? All these things will come up for the students.

Groundwater pollution was already happening 100 years ago in Berlin, at a certain scale. In Berlin we met people who’ve worked on projects to capture human waste from toilets to recycle it, both as manure and the nitrogen content from urine. There are rather technical outcomes that we would expect. But, Chris and I are both interested in putting the body back into the scale of urban design, where it often gets lost. Many urban design projects are supposed to be for people, but we think of people as identities. Physical needs are still sensitive.

Chris Reed: We often reduce a typical situation and talk about it in a very technological, abstract way, which is why we have the bathrooms today that are so uniform, bright, sparkling white. How is it that recognizing the body? How does that assist with the physical and mental aspects of being able to take a moment to oneself to do something we need to do, and often within a public environment, where some level of shielding is very important?

What are those values today? How do we think about the impacts of today’s current systems, resources, points of origin. What’s the connection between the particular place you’re inhabiting and the bigger landscape or infrastructural system? Where does the water come from, and the waste go to? What does it take to get them there? Are there ways in which these systems might be rethought relative to the environment?

We’re also thinking about the middle scale of the river. Oftentimes, Berlin has combined sewer outlets, which will overflow raw sewage into rivers. So, the simple idea of bathing in the river—how does that conflict with reality? We saw that in Paris during the Olympics , as they tried to launch the swimming competition. How might we alter riverine environments, infrastructure, and even the ways we assess and communicate levels of toxicity, to truly innovate and allow for different relationships to water and waste?

How do we rethink some of the ways that those systems could work for the benefit of the environment, as well as people?

Laila Seewang: The course includes students from urban design, landscape, and architecture, so in Berlin, they can operate on three different sites, at three different scales. We designed the course so that they could work on the scale of public toilets and showers at commuter intersections in Berlin—a historical project they can revisit today—or on the river itself and the stormwater overflows that dump raw sewage into the river and thwart attempts to use it as a bathing space. Then there are these ex-sewage farms on the periphery of Berlin, where, because no one could build on them for some time, there’s now quite an enormous green resource. We could imagine everything from infrastructural solutions for keeping wastewater out of the river, to new public toilets, to something to do with other rituals involving water and human bodies.

Could you explain the legacy of the sewage farms, sites where waste had been channeled from the city to the surrounding landscape? Has that pollution been mitigated? Can these sites be used for recreation or food production or development?

Laila Seewang: Berlin is built on sand, and the original system relied upon this sand to filter pollutants. But, eventually, it became much more problematic for sand to filter out an increasing amount of sewage with antibiotics or heavy industrial toxins, for example, and return it to groundwater. Some of the sewage farms shut down by 1920, then a number of them shut down or were destroyed in the Second World War. Once the wall went up in Berlin, in 1961, they were basically an island inside of East Germany. Some of the sewage farms operated up until 1970.

In general, the students are confronting issues that muddy the binary between “clean” and “polluted”– the soil in these spaces are to some degree tainted, but not unusable. Mostly these lands are not used for housing, where soil may need to be replaced, but for recreational spaces like gardens, or low-grade, small-scale ecological farms. Since this is municipal land beyond the urban boundary of Berlin,  the city can also work on alternative energy projects: there are now also wind farms and solar farms on these ex-sewage farms. 

Chris Reed: You might not be able to do normative urban development per se, but thinking about these things as a resource, not just a waste space, might, given some good design thinking, create a different kind of proposition. We’re building on a couple decades now of many people, landscape architects included, looking at sites of waste and disposal—a Staten Island landfill , for instance—being remade as public spaces and ecological sites that are very much embraced as part of the city, not cordoned off and thought of as a waste of land. How can we bring new or different kinds of values to a site like that? 

Are there comparable cities or systems to this history of Berlin’s sewage treatment? Are there other cities dealing with similar challenges now?

Laila Seewang: The Berlin sewer engineer traveled to England and Scotland to look at sewage farms, and went on to design systems in Cairo, Moscow, and other places, so Berlin wasn’t unique. Paris was also experimenting quite a lot. They didn’t build sewage farms for the whole city, but put some farms in place, and were experimenting with urine recycling. The nitrogen was an early fertilizer, as well.

However, the scale of the Berlin system was not matched anywhere in the world. And, uniquely, the Berlin farms were all purchased from old feudal estates—some had been in one family for 600 years—so it represented a complete change of rural way of life. The farms tripled the area of Berlin. That’s how much land they needed to recycle the sewage.

As industrialization scaled up, cities grew and needed to rethink how agriculture was produced. So, the management of sewage was a big question in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as they looked for ways to magnify output. As long as a city was near the ocean, the common practice at the time was to just flush raw sewage out to the sea. Sewage systems had an even greater impact on landscapes around inland cities in that period.

Chris Reed: Thinking about the river as part of that disposal system in a de facto way, we’ll also be asking students to look at the river itself not being able to deal with the large quantities of waste that are often dumped into it—in part because many urban rivers have been quite constrained. Their floodplains have been taken away. They’ve been channelized. So, the slow-moving areas that often have shallower water, where vegetation can absorb pollutants and nutrients, have been all taken away as well.

What we’ve seen again in the last couple decades is a movement to re-naturalize rivers. It’s not a restoration process, because oftentimes the space is not available to bring the river back. But this idea that we might take back some of the floodplain for the river, install plant communities, wetland systems that themselves are highly engineered and designed, but that can help deal with some of the pollutants, elevate the river water quality—this is something we’ve seen in a number of different places and that we’ll be looking at with case studies, for example in Zarazoga, Spain.

I’m interested to know a little bit more about how you invite students to reconsider the human body and think about the designing the space around the body. How does that happen within a class?

Laila Seewang: We divided the course into three episodes. The first one is about asking them to draw an intimate urban space including the scale of the body in relation to the scale of the system. We’ve asked them to identify a space of bodily intimacy that they are familiar with, where the body comes into contact with water, to analyze that and understand what it is contingent upon. Where is the body located and what does it need physically in a space? We’re developing a vocabulary. There’s a spatial to sensory relationship that students are starting to articulate. Once you identify what is an intimate space, you then have to say, well, these are the things that define it as intimate and make it work, and these are the things that would make it not work, specifically in an urban condition.

Chris Reed: The range of spaces students chose to explore was quite remarkable. One person was looking at the washing station for the human body before a Muslim goes into prayer, and the ritual associated with that, the spatial conditions. Somebody else was looking at a place underneath a building in a wildlife park where there was a footwash station for people who had ventured off the path into muddy terrain. One student had spent the summer in Berlin, interestingly enough, and went to a recreational lake that’s known as a queer retreat, and was describing various moments and spaces for intimacy and enclosure—one that occurs on a floating raft in the middle of the lake, where the enclosure is actually defined by the mass of human bodies that are in close proximity to one another—a completely temporal and fleeting thing defined by bodies.

Someone else was in southern China, and was part of a community that would swim off of a heavily industrialized dock during gaps between cargo ships coming in and out of the port. So, the appropriation of a place not intended for swimming, that’s quite industrial, quite rough, has a big tidal flux—the qualities and conditions of the space change.

When you raise questions of intimacy within a design studio, the question is always: What will come of that? We’re being quite deliberate about the conversations that we’re having, and we’re seeing a wonderful effort on behalf of the students to find those moments and dig in and to explore it in the ways that are meaningful to them.

Daniel Urban Kiley Teaching Fellowship in Landscape Architecture

The Daniel Urban Kiley Teaching Fellowship is awarded to an emerging designer who demonstrates a promising trajectory towards consequential work in the design of the urban public realm. The Kiley Fellow will be appointed Lecturer in Landscape Architecture for the academic year. While the ​fellowship is awarded competitively on an annual ​or semi-annual basis, successful ​fellows are eligible to have their academic appointments renewed for a second year at the rank of Lecturer, dependent upon review of their teaching, research, and creative practice. The AY ’23-’24 Kiley Fellow is Kira Clingen. The Daniel Urban Kiley Fellowship builds upon the history of pedagogic innovation at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design as well as ​more than a century of leadership in landscape architecture education. A jury comprised of Harvard GSD faculty will identify a short-list of two to three finalists who will be invited to ​remote interviews. The recipient of the fellowship will be announced publicly in ​February. The Landscape Architecture Department will be conducting an application process for the Kiley Fellowship this year for AY 24-25.  For information on application processes, see the information below. Eligibility Landscape architects and designers from a range of allied design professions who can demonstrate a significant engagement with landscape architecture practice, pedagogy, or scholarship are invited to apply. The Selection Process A jury composed of members from the Harvard GSD faculty will typically select the Fellow. The two-stage competition process will identify a short-list of three finalists who will be invited to interviews with the competition jury. The jury will recommend a winner to be notified in December and announced publicly in February. How to Apply The Kiley Fellowship application deadline is November 15, 2024 at 5pm (EST). Please submit the following application materials in the form of a single PDF (not larger than 25 MB):

• Current curriculum vitae
• One-page proposal describing the design/research project to be undertaken during the Fellowship
• Digital portfolio of design work
• Please name the PDF Lastname_Firstname.pdf
• Submit the PDF by email attachment to [email protected]
• Finalists should be prepared to provide names and contact information for 3 references

Return of Materials and Usage All documents submitted through the application process will become the property of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and may be used, with proper attribution, at a future date by the School for noncommercial purposes in any media or format. For more information, email [email protected].  

Joseph F. Hudnut, the GSD’s First Dean, 1936–1953

In 1935, American architect and educator Joseph F. Hudnut returned to Harvard University. Born in Big Rapids, Michigan, in 1886, he had studied architecture at Harvard before continuing his training at the University of Michigan and Columbia University.

As a practicing architect, Hudnut taught architectural design and history at Alabama Polytechnic Institute and the University of Virginia before turning his attention to academia fulltime in 1926 with a position at Columbia’s School of Architecture. Assuming the school’s deanship in the early 1930s, he dismantled its Beaux-Arts pedagogy in favor of an educational system based on philosopher John Dewey’s ideas of pragmatism and experience. While students under the Beaux-Arts mantle had competed on grand and often idealized schemes, under Hudnut’s new system they worked—at times collectively—on projects such as low-income housing, taking elements like budget and community needs into consideration.

Hudnut’s brand of modern pedagogy soon drew the attention of Harvard president John Conant, who in 1935 recruited him to modernize the university’s architectural education. Upon his arrival, Hudnut proposed uniting Harvard’s three professional design programs—Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning—into one entity called the Graduate School of Design (GSD), to be housed in neoclassical Robinson Hall (by McKim, Mead & White, 1900). He served from 1936 through 1953 as the GSD’s first dean.

During his time at Harvard, Hudnut emerged as a leading advocate of modern architecture in the United States. In 1937 he augmented the GSD faculty with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, key figures of the German Bauhaus who had fled fascist Europe. The following year Hudnut was instrumental in bringing to Harvard the Swiss historian and secretary of CIAM Siegfried Giedion, who delivered the Charles Elliot Norton Lectures that comprised Space, Time and Architecture (1941), a history of modern architecture that dominated the narrative for decades to come. Hudnut thus shepherded these European modernists into American architectural consciousness.

In addition, Hudnut championed modernism in other ways, including his revamping of architectural education to emphasize a combination of theoretical and practical work. He furthermore supported modernism in his own writings, including Architecture and the Spirit of Man (1949), which positioned architecture as the unification of art and science, with the former never to be sacrificed to the latter—a criticism he would later ascribe to Gropius’s work.

Hudnut retired from the GSD in 1953 while finishing his term on the US Commission of Fine Arts, a five-year post he began 1950. Into the early 1960s he continued to teach a course in civic design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and publish essays in a variety of journals. Hudnut died of pneumonia in Norwood, MA, in 1968.

 

SUGGESTED RESOURCES

Jill Pearlman, Inventing American Modernism: Joseph Hudnut, Walter Gropius, and the Bauhaus Legacy (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2007).

“Joseph Hudnut, Architect, Dead,” Obituary, New York Times, Jan. 17, 1968, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/01/17/88922263.html?pageNumber=47 .

Contemporary Memorials: Spaces of Engagement, Calls to Action

As Christopher Columbus plunged into Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, and General Robert E. Lee dismounted his pedestal in Richmond, a distinctive kind of memorial has been gaining traction.¹ While past debates centered on a memorial’s formal qualities—figurative or abstract?—attention has pivoted from aesthetic attributes to the ways in which a visitor interacts with a memorial. Rather than an object to be contemplated, today’s memorial is a space to be experienced. And with this shift from contemplation to experience, a focus driven in part by faculty and alumni of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), comes an emphasis on active engagement, now and in the future.

Take, for example, the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers (MEL), which swells from the lawn just east of the Rotunda on the University of Virginia’s (UVA’s) campus. Designed by Höweler + Yoon, a firm founded by GSD professor of architecture Eric Höweler and dean of Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning J. Meejin Yoon, who graduated from the GSD in 1997, this installation honors the 4,000 enslaved individuals who built and worked at the university from its inception in 1817 through the Civil War’s conclusion nearly 50 years later. Composed of concentric granite rings, the outermost cresting to 8 feet in height, the memorial beckons to passersby traversing campus and across the street in Charlottesville. On the larger ring’s smooth inner wall they find inscribed 578 names and 311 phrases of kinship or occupation, such as “daughter” or “mason,” along with more than 3000 “memory marks”—placeholders for the yet-unidentified enslaved individuals. Visitors also encounter a timeline, awash with water, that denotes the racial violence underlying Jefferson’s “Academical Village.” These features partially enclose a circle of grass, a public space for meeting and interaction, recalling clearings in the woods where enslaved people would secretly gather. Meanwhile, in certain light conditions an ethereal portrait of Isabella Gibbons—a former enslaved domestic worker at UVA who became a Charlottesville school teacher—materializes on the MEL’s outer wall, suggesting that the history of which the memorial speaks is ever present, even when unseen.

Dedicated in 2021, the MEL is a contemporary memorial in date and sensibility: it engages visitors in an active manner, through multiple and flexible means; it contains room for emergent information (new names can be inscribed); and it incorporates input from a range of stakeholders, including UVA students and descendants of the honored individuals, who took part in its conceptualization. The MEL aspires to more than the commemoration of a person, group, or event; it sheds light on a previously suppressed history—not as a closed episode, but rather as an ongoing collective conversation in the present and future. “Righting past wrongs is what we were asked to do,” noted Höweler, who with Brenda Tindal was recently appointed co-chair of Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery Memorial Project . “How do you begin repair in the present by starting with the past and being more truthful about it?”²

A reflection of changing attitudes toward memorialization, in 2016 the National Park Service, National Capital Planning Commission, and Van Alen Institute co-sponsored Memorials for the Future , “an ideas competition to reimagine how we think about, feel, and experience memorials.”³ After analyzing the 89 submissions drawn from around the world, the organizers issued Not Set in Stone , a document underscoring potential key aspects of memorial design moving forward. The overarching message highlights the heterogeneous audiences that today’s memorials address as well as the inherent complexity and multi-dimensionality memorials now embody. The report offers broad guidelines for thinking about new memorials, recommending that they engage with the present and future as much as the past; accommodate shifting narratives; harness public involvement for conceptualization; and explore mobile or temporary forms of expression.⁴ The winning submission for Memorials for the Future, Climate Chronograph by landscape architects Rebecca Sunter and Erik Jensen, exemplifies these ideas, repurposing a portion of East Potomac Park in Washington, DC, as a place for visitors to kayak among the dead cherry trees, left behind as persistent sea level rise subsumes the land.⁵

Throughout the past decade, elements espoused by Not Set in Stone have appeared with increasing frequency in new memorials, as evidenced through a brief survey of projects by Harvard GSD affiliates—including those responsible for the MEL. Höweler + Yoon also designed the Collier Memorial (2015), sited on Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s campus where Officer Sean Collier was shot and killed following the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013. Comprising 32 blocks of granite that create a five-way stone vault, the memorial serves as an iconic destination, mid-campus passageway, and dynamic sculptural presence, its form suggesting that strength derives from unity.

The notion that contemporary memorials are “more visitor-centric”—less about observation and more about interaction—aligns with the recent competition-winning design for the Fallen Journalists Memorial (FJM) by Chicago-based architect John Ronan, who graduated from the GSD in 1995.⁶ Located on the National Mall in Washington, DC, and slated for completion in 2028, the FJM serves a twofold purpose: to honor journalists who have died in the pursuit of truth, and to educate visitors about the First Amendment’s role in a democratic society. With the FJM still working its way through the federal approval process, images of the design have not been released. Yet it has been revealed that Ronan’s design employs an array of glass elements through which visitors navigate to reach a “place of remembrance,” echoing the investigative journalist’s “journey of discovery” as a story comes together.⁷ The FJM thus distinguishes itself within its monument-saturated landscape by demanding the visitor’s active engagement.

A prerequisite of active engagement likewise informs Penjing , the shortlisted project for the Memorial to the Victims of the Los Angeles Chinese Massacre of 1871 by GSD alumni J. Roc Jih, James Leng, and Jennifer Ly (who graduated in 2012, 2013, and 2014, respectively). Nearly 150 years ago, a racist mob terrorized and lynched 18 Chinese men. The incident, which precipitated anti-Asian laws that restricted Chinese immigration, remained largely unacknowledged until 2021, when Los Angeles and California allocated funds for the commemoration of the massacre. In response to a call for submissions, Jih (of Studio J. Jih in Boston) and Leng and Ly (of San Francisco-based Figure) crafted a design that unites the Chinese concepts of Pen (frame) and Jing (scene) in a series of multitextured limestone vessels that house miniature gardens and mark locations in downtown Los Angeles significant to the massacre. The designers envisioned the installations as living sculptures to be cultivated by residents, who encounter the gardens as they move through the neighborhood; inscriptions on the ground educate visitors, ensuring that the massacre remains part of the public discourse. As Jih noted, “We see remembrance as a constant and ongoing act rather than as something sacred and unchanging.” Through the incorporation of living elements, “the act of remembering also becomes one of care and maintenance, inviting tactile engagement.”⁸

Likewise, visitor engagement figured prominently in the conceptualization of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice (2018), created by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). Following years in-depth research on lynching and the lasting impacts of racial violence, EJI collaborated with an array of designers and artists to construct, across a six-acre site adjacent to the State Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, a memorial that honors the more than 4,400 victims of racial terror lynchings that took place in the United States between 1877 and 1950. MASS Design Group, founded by Michael Murphy and Alan Ricks (GSD graduates from 2011 and 2010, respectively), worked with EJI on one of the memorial’s elements of the memorial: a pavilion that contains 800 suspended steel columns —one for each of the counties in which a lynching took place—engraved with victims’ names.

A passageway descends through the columns, with visitors journeying to a position below, gazing up as if part of the crowd at a public lynching. Surrounding the pavilion, matching columns wait for their respective counties to claim and transport them home. In this way, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice engages more than its immediate visitors, extending its reach to hundreds of counties that must choose to create local memorials, thereby acknowledging their past atrocities, or leave the columns in Montgomery, signaling their lack of remorse. The National Lynching Memorial thus acts as a tool for engagement, education, and public accountability.

In 2019, the Gun Violence Memorial Project , designed by MASS Design Group and Songha & Company, where artist Hank Willis Thomas is creative director, debuted at the Chicago Architecture Biennal before opening, in spring 2021, for a two-year run at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. As explained by Jha D. Amazi, principal at MASS Design Group, the memorial aims “to communicate the enormity of the [gun violence] epidemic while also honoring the individuals whose lives have been taken.”⁹ The design features four houses composed of 700 transparent glass bricks, with each house signifying the weekly human cost—700 lives on average—of gun violence in this country.¹⁰ Families who have lost someone to gun violence have donated remembrance objects from drivers’ licenses to Double Dutch jump ropes, which are displayed within a glass brick along with the victim’s name, date of birth, and date of death. For visitors, these objects humanize the victim, transforming them from a statistic to a person. Additional engaging elements include audio and film clips about the effects of gun violence, which visitors experience as they enter the houses to view their contents.

For the families of victims, the remembrance objects act as visible tributes to their loved ones. Simultaneously, the objects encourage interaction between the families as well as society at large. This begins with the objects’ process of collection, which draws families to given places at designated times; indeed, since opening five years ago, representatives from the Gun Violence Memorial Project have traveled to 14 cities around the country, holding collection events to fill formerly empty glass bricks. At these events, families encounter, and ideally connect with, others in their area who suffer with gun-violence-related tragedies. Then, once the objects populate the glass bricks, the families by default join the memorial’s contributory community—not a formal designation, yet nonetheless meaningful. Finally, the objects connect families with people they may never meet yet who, by experiencing the memorial, will be touched by these individual stories. The Gun Violence Memorial Project, fortified by the assembled remembrance objects, underscores the vast reach of gun violence, a nationwide epidemic the United States has yet to sufficiently accept or address.

In late August 2024, the Gun Violence Memorial Project opened in Boston. As opposed to its tenures in Chicago and Washington, DC, the memorial’s current manifestation involves a citywide collaboration, with displays at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston City Hall, and the MASS Design Group’s gallery. With this shift from a single venue to multiple sites throughout a city, the memorial appears to have leapt in scale, taking a great stride toward its ambition to “foster a national healing process that begins with a recognition of the collective loss and its impact on society.”¹¹ Unlike static monuments that were conceived to be seen, this contemporary memorial elicits interaction and active engagement. As the Gun Violence Memorial Project illustrates, such a memorial can even be transitory; what persists is the human experience it provides.

*This piece was updated to describe the Equal Justice Initiative as the originator of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. 

1. Rachel Treisman, “Baltimore Protesters Topple Columbus Statue,” NPR, July 5, 2020; and Whittney Evans and David Streever, “Virginia’s Massive Robert E. Lee Statue Has Been Removed,” NPR,  Sept. 8, 2021. ↩︎
2. Eric Höweler, interview with author, June 27, 2024. ↩︎
3. Not Set in Stone (National Park Service, National Capital Planning Commission, and Van Alen Institute, 2016), 2. ↩︎
4. “Key Findings,” Memorials for the Future, Van Alen Institute. ↩︎
5. “Competition Winner,” Memorials for the Future, Van Alen Institute. ↩︎
6. John Ronan, interview with author, Mar. 25, 2024. ↩︎
7. Ibid. ↩︎
8. “Penjing,” Work, Studio J. Jih.. ↩︎
9. Jha D. Amazi, “The Gun Violence Memorial Project,” Exhibitions, Institute of Contemporary Art. ↩︎
10. This average number of 700 gun deaths per week in the United States is based on a statistic from 2018. As of May 2024, the average number of gun deaths per week for the year is 840. ↩︎
11. “About,” The Gun Violence Memorial Project. ↩︎