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. ↩︎

Pete Walker & the GSD: Nearly 70 Years of Connections

For almost 70 years, the landscape architect Pete Walker (MLA ’57) has maintained strong ties with the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), a relationship that has evolved alongside his career, from student to world-renowned designer and GSD benefactor. Since 2004, the Peter Walker & Partners Fellowship, conferred on Class Day, has supported travel for promising Landscape Architecture graduates.

Walker’s introduction to the GSD dates to the mid-1950s when he was a graduate student at the University of Illinois, studying with the landscape architect Stanley White. After his first term, Walker asked his professor what courses to take the next semester. White’s response? “Well, you’re not going to be here,” Walker recalled. “You’re going to be at Harvard.” Indeed, White had arranged with his former student Hideo Sasaki, then a GSD faculty member in the Department of Landscape Architecture, for Walker’s transfer.

Encouraging Walker’s move east, White had characterized Sasaki as a mastermind—an assessment Walker would soon share. “Sasaki saw the future in a way that I had never even imagined,” Walker says. “He gave this view of the world—an incredibly dynamic postwar view, talking about transportation, expansion of education, corporate expansion, urban expansion, world trade, airplanes. . . . I had never thought of landscape in those terms, likely because no one had really described it like that. And Sasaki was just beginning to.” Walker was thus exposed, though his time at the GSD and in Sasaki’s office, to a perspective that broadened landscape architecture’s reach to an urban scale.

Walker graduated from the GSD with an MLA in 1957 and, funded by the school’s Jacob Weidenman Prize, undertook his first trip to Europe to visit the continent’s historic gardens. After returning home, he continued to work with Sasaki, cofounding Sasaki, Walker, and Associates (eventually the SWA Group), which soon added to its initial location in Watertown, Massachusetts, an office in San Francisco, with Walker at the helm. He left SWA in 1983, establishing a small practice with his then-wife and partner Martha Schwartz (currently Research Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at the GSD). Since then, the firm has undergone a series of iterations culminating in Peter Walker and Partners, which now operates as PWP Landscape Architecture .

In the midst of celebrated design activity—including projects such as Harvard University’s Tanner Fountain (1984) and New York’s National September 11 Memorial (2011), with architect Michael Arad, and awards like the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) Medal in 2004—Walker maintained a robust presence in the educational realm. While firmly ensconced at SWA in the mid-1970s, Walker returned to the GSD, initially as visiting critic and adjunct professor before serving as the acting director of the Urban Design program in 1976. (“My job was to replace myself,” Walker recalls. He succeeded, convincing his friend Moshe Safdie to become the new program head.) Walker then served as chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture from 1978 through 1981. He remained on the GSD’s faculty through 1991, after which time he moved on to UC Berkeley, his undergraduate alma mater, where he would lead the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning in the late 1990s.

Despite Walker’s move to the West Coast and the subsequent passage of time, his presence continues to resonate at the GSD, especially through his former students, three of whom have chaired the Department of Landscape Architecture: Gary Hilderbrand (MLA ’85 and current chair), Anita Berrizbeitia (MLA ’87), and George Hargreaves (MLA ’79). Contributing another layer of connection, sons David E. Walker (MLA ’92) and Jacob S. Walker (MDes ’24) have cemented Walker’s position as alumni parent.

Finally, Walker has expanded his relationship with the GSD by becoming a benefactor. In 2004, his firm established the PWP Fellowship for Landscape Architecture to provide “young landscape architecture designers [with] an opportunity to spend a concentrated period of time studying landscape design in various parts of the world.” The roots of this annual award rest in Walker’s own post-graduate experience—namely his Weidenman Prize–sponsored European travels, which exposed him firsthand to a historical component of landscape design that complemented the modern perspective introduced by Sasaki. Walker sees the PWP Fellowship as an opportunity for emerging designers to further broaden their global outlook. “For me, in a sense,” Walker says, these graduates “represent what design could mean in a changing world.” This year Walker will attend the GSD’s Class Day for the conferral of the PWP Fellowship.

In various capacities, Walker has witnessed—and played a discernable role in—the Harvard GSD’s evolution. And from his unique vantage point, Walker recognizes the diverse, mind-expanding views amassed at the GSD as an enduring gift for students and alumni alike, even long after they have departed campus. As Walker notes, “through family and close friends”—many former students turned colleagues—“Harvard has kept me in touch with these things.”

Niall Kirkwood Elected Member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences recently announced that Niall Kirkwood, Charles Elliot Professor of Landscape Architecture, has been elected a member of the honorary society in 2024.

Kirkwood is one of 250 new members—including Apple CEO Tim Cook, author Jhumpa Lahiri, and actor/producer/activist George Clooney—across 31 areas of expertise being recognized for their excellence and dedication to societal issues. “We honor these artists, scholars, scientist, and leaders in the public, non-profit, and private sectors for their accomplishments and for the curiosity, creativity, and courage required to reach new heights,” said President of the Academy David Oxtoby in the organization’s press release. “We invite these exceptional individuals to join in the Academy’s work to address serious challenges and advance the common good.”

According to its mission, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences was founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock, and 60 other scholar-patriots to convene “leaders from every field of human endeavor to examine new ideas, address

issues of importance to the nation and the world, and work together ‘to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.’” Previously elected members include Benjamin Franklin (1781), Charles Darwin (1874), Albert Einstein (1924), Margaret Mead (1948), Marin Luther King, Jr. (1966), Madeline K. Albright (2001), and Salman Rushdie (2022).

Induction ceremonies for new members will be held at the Academy’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in September 2024. 

Kongjian Yu Featured in the New York Times for his “Sponge City” Approach to Urban Floodwater Management 

Among the challenges posed by climate change, floodwater looms large. Today, cities grapple with regular inundations brought by intensifying downpours and extreme weather events, and conventional approaches to stormwater management—drainage pipes, concrete channels, and the like—are proving insufficient. Landscape architect Kongjian Yu (DDes ’95) offers an alternative solution, one that welcomes the water rather than fights to expel it. Yu calls this concept the “sponge city,” an idea that has been applied in 250 Chinese municipalities since 2015.

A recent New York Times article by Richard Schiffman, titled “He’s Got a Plan for Cities That Flood: Stop Fighting the Water,” details Yu’s sponge city approach and includes commentary by Niall Kirkwood, Charles Eliot Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Graduate School of Design.

In place of concrete drainage infrastructures, sponge cities embrace native vegetation, land formations, and constructed wetlands to slow and absorb excess water locally before it floods streets and subways. Such living landscapes offer additional benefits, as they simultaneously filter pollutants from surface water, provide habitats for wildlife, and offer recreational spaces for urban dwellers.

In September 2023, Yu delivered the Sylvester Baxter Lecture at the Graduate School of Design, “Adaptation: Political, Cultural, and Ecological Design—My Journey to Heal the Planet.” He discussed how his agricultural upbringing, experiences with the art of Chinese landscaping, and studies at the GSD inform his ideas about urban water management. The following month, the Cultural Landscape Foundation awarded Yu the 2023 Cornelia Han Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize (also known as the Oberlander Prize). Yu is founder of the Beijing-based firm Turenscape and professor at Peking University in Beijing.  

Jungyoon Kim’s firm PARKKIM Wins an International Competition for a Floating Stage Development in South Korea

 

 

PARKKIM , the Seoul-based landscape architectural firm co-founded by Jungyoon Kim (MLA ’00), assistant professor in practice of landscape architecture at the GSD, with Yoonjin Park (MLA ’00), has won the international competition to design a floating stage for Suseongmot Lake in Daegu, South Korea. Proposals by the four firms invited to the competition, including PARKKIM’s “Suseongmot Floating Hills,” will be showcased in the first annual Suseong International Biennial  this fall. The unique floating performance space, part of a multipurpose waterfront park, “aims to awaken the potential of Suseongmot and create a space for new programs, contributing to the revitalization of high-quality outdoor performance culture through the expansion of cultural infrastructure,” according to the competition guidelines released by the Suseong District. A panel of judges chaired by Kim Jun-seong of Hand Plus Architects Office evaluated the proposals by focusing on connectivity with waterside space, usability of space, and originality of design.

The proposed design by PARKKIM features eight sloped oval sections or “hills,” all interconnected by pedestrian walkways. Lushly landscaped with trees and vegetation, the open auditorium concept incorporates both fixed and lawn-type seating and accommodates an audience of 1,500. The platform and stage rest on a hybrid pile-slab structure, a combination of concrete and fiber reinforced polymers. Junya Ishimagi, a Japanese architect, won the concurrent pedestrian bridge competition that will land on the northern edge of the Suseongmot lake, about 100m apart from the Floating Hill stage. 

Home to Korea’s largest music festival, the Daegu International Music Festival (DIMP), Daegu is designated as a City of Music by UNESCO. In a statement, Daegu Suseong-gu District Mayor Kim Dae-kwon said, “An excellent work was selected as the winner through an international design contest . . . We will build it as a cultural landmark that goes beyond the region and is world-class.”

In addition to Kim Jun-seong, the judges included Jin-wook Kwon, Yeungnam University; A-yeon Kim, University of Seoul; Jong-guk Lee, Keimyung University; Pil-jun Jeon, Daegwu Catholic University; Daniel Valle, Baye Architects; and John Hong, Seoul National University.

The Suseongmot Performance Hall and Bridge are scheduled to begin construction in 2025 and be completed in 2026.

Kongjian Yu Wins 2023 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize

The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) has named Beijing-based landscape architect Kongjian Yu (DDes ’95) the winner of the 2023 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize , a biennial honor that includes a $100,000 award and two years of public engagement activities focused on the laureate’s work and landscape architecture more broadly.

Yu recently delivered the Sylvester Baxter Lecture at the Graduate School of Design (GSD), “Adaption: Political, Cultural, and Ecological Design—My Journey to Heal the Planet.” His guiding design principles are the appreciation of the ordinary and a deep embrace of nature—even of its potentially destructive aspects, such as flooding. Yu’s thinking about “ecological security patterns” helped shape environmental protection efforts throughout China. And his promotion of the “sponge city” concept, which uses landscape to capture, filter, and store rainfall for future use and reduce flood risks, helped to spur the Chinese government to launch an ambitious sponge city campaign across the country and has gained global attention.

Named in honor of the late landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander (BLA ’47), the Prize awarded by the TCLF is bestowed on a recipient who is “exceptionally talented, creative, courageous, and visionary” and has “a significant body of built work that exemplifies the art of landscape architecture.”

The international, seven-person Oberlander Prize Jury selected Yu from among more than 300 nominations from across the world. In naming the 2023 winner, the Oberlander Prize Jury Citation noted of Yu, he is a “brilliant and prolific designer … [who] is also a force for progressive change in landscape architecture around the world.”

“He lives and breathes his conviction that landscape architecture is the discipline to lead effective responses to the climate crisis,” said TCLF President & CEO Charles A. Birnbaum.

Gary R. Hilderbrand, Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the GSD, adds that Yu is the “all-time greatest spokesperson for landscape architecture in China—a nation that needs environmental rescue on a colossal scale.”

Yu is Professor and founding dean of Peking University College of Architecture and Landscape, and founder and design principal of Turenscape . His projects have won numerous international design awards, including 14 ASLA Excellence and Honor Awards and seven WAF Best Landscape Architecture of the Year Award. Yu is also the author of over 20 books and more than 300 papers and is the founder and chief editor of the internationally awarded magazine Landscape Architecture Frontiers. Yu was elected International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016 and received the IFLA’s highest honor, the Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award, in 2020, which celebrates a living landscape architect whose “achievements and contributions have had a unique and lasting impact on the welfare of society.”

The Cultural Landscape Foundation, founded in 1998, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit founded in 1998 to connect people to places. TCLF educates and engages the public to make our shared landscape heritage more visible, identify its value, and empower its stewards. Through its website, publishing, lectures, and other events, TCLF broadens support and understanding for cultural landscapes.

Remembering Claude Cormier (1960–2023)

I first met Claude Cormier (MDes ’94) when he approached me about being a teaching assistant position in my core studio course, in 1993. What impressed me most in our first meeting: his excitable voice, with an upward-sounding pitch, along with his genial and upbeat manner, which made me feel like I already knew this man. A quick wit, a quizzical intensity. I liked this about him. This was the convivial and always curious guy with whom I enjoyed a warm friendship over the past 30 years.

Claude passed away on September 15 this year, at age 63, after a four-year fight with a rare and uncurable form of cancer. His was a life too short, though it was filled with great drive and remarkable success. Claude was a rare landscape architect whose take on common design problems was nothing if not uncommon.

I will admit that fun has perhaps only rarely been a design motivation for me, but it was almost always this way for Claude. Once he established his firm in Montreal, he immediately made his mark with projects that came to him in the form of the typical kinds of urban problems we face everywhere—but his design solutions always defied expectations, and he was persuasive with concepts that were at times far-reaching though always precise in execution. Painted or wrapped trees, blue sticks, balls and cones, pink lights, umbrellas, fake stones—often ordinary things made dramatically unordinary. His admiration for and friendship with Martha Schwartz surely influenced this way of working, but Claude made it his own. He rather famously used to say he imagined himself as the love child of Martha Schwartz and Frederick Law Olmsted—another of his great influences, and a very different one at that.

Because of the sustained popular appeal of Claude’s work, he accumulated attention, enthusiasm, and recognition from far beyond the design community—including being appointed a knight of the Ordre National du Québec. But while he enjoyed peer recognition much like the rest of us, these things had little effect on Claude’s persona or his ego. What animated him the most was talking about the work, along with the jubilant embrace of his work by those who use the public realm spaces he and his partners and staff designed. Those of us who knew him will remember his love of fashion and design, his uncanny passion for art—high, low, fake, or real—and his unbending joyfulness in life. Amen. Yet his far larger legacy will remain those life experiences by the citizens who inhabit his comic, playful, and highly intelligent parks and squares every day.

A comprehensive account of Cormier’s life and career was written by Beth Kapusta and can be found at The Cultural Landscape Foundation’s website .

Alumni Spotlight: Kotchakorn Voraakhom

“Nature is changing, the climate is changing, and so we, too, need to change. We must understand that fixed definitions of nature from the past no longer apply in this era of uncertainty we are confronting. Climate change is causing cities to sink, and our current infrastructure is making us even more vulnerable to severe flooding. What if we could design cities to work with nature instead of against it?”

— Kotchakorn Voraakhom

Over the next couple of months, we are continuing to share conversations with several of our alumni, each of whom pursued different areas of study at the GSD and are now leading impactful careers in design.

We recently spoke with Kotchakorn (Kotch) Voraakhom (MLA ’06). Kotch is the founder and lead designer of the award-winning landscape architecture and urban design firm LANDPROCESS , where she’s working to improve Thailand’s public spaces and solve urban ecological problems through landscape architectural design. During the spring 2023 semester, Kotch is also a design critic in Landscape Architecture at the GSD and is co-teaching the Option Studio BANGKOK REMADE with Niall Kirkwood, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Technology and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.

Kotch’s recent work spans a major urban ecological park at the heart of Bangkok and numerous innovative public landscape designs. She’s a Chairwoman of the Climate Change Working Group of the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA World) and a 2018 TED Fellow. The United Nations honored Kotch as a winner of the 2020 UN Global Climate Action Awards: Women for Results.

How did you hear about the GSD and what drew you to apply?

In Thailand, I studied landscape architecture at Chulalongkorn University. After graduating, I got a chance to work in the U.S. for a couple of years—which is quite hard to do as an international student, so I was very lucky. My landscape architecture profession started in the U.S. at Sasaki. My boss at the time, Alistair McIntosh, is on faculty at the GSD, and my professor Pornpun Futrakul MLA ’77 had graduated from the GSD, so I heard great stories about their experiences. The GSD seemed like a commonality among many people I looked up to, which made me think, “If I really want to be a great landscape architect, maybe the GSD is the answer.”

Was there a certain experience that you look back on as being helpful in finding the right practice?

A huge turning point was meeting my peers at the GSD. We were all questioning our place within the profession, and six of us founded an organization called the Kounkuey Design Initiative . It felt like my dream job to work for those in need of our services, rather than those who hired us for services they wanted. So, we wrote a proposal for a grant through the Penny White Project Fund —and we got it.

This was around 15 years ago—it’s remarkable, looking back. It wouldn’t have been possible without the platform the GSD provided; it wouldn’t have been possible without meeting the right people, [who became] my colleagues and friends.

Why is it so important to learn about the various cultures you’re serving when trying to come up with new design solutions?

We’re designing for humans, right? If we want to understand the needs of the people we’re designing for, we have to go and listen to them. We have to experience their culture, their food, their language—even if it’s just for a short period of time. Each unique site is so specific, and every project can vary dramatically depending on the location.

That’s why the option studios were such a great learning opportunity [at the GSD]. They gave us the chance to learn about another culture through real hands-on experience. Culture, climate, and people can vary drastically, and something that works in one country might not work in another. I feel that is what’s lacking in much of our practice. We talk to our clients, or whoever is paying us, but we don’t talk to the real stakeholders, who are the people being impacted by our work.

What goals and objectives did you have in mind when starting your current practice, LANDPROCESS?

There’s no “land process” without “people process.” I am very excited about the possible solutions for climate-vulnerable communities. I’m excited for the challenges that my team and I will face, even though they are very serious. For example, I’m from Bangkok; Thailand is [one of the 10 most] flood-affected countries in the world. Every year, our land sinks and goes missing because of rising sea levels. New buildings mean nothing if entire cities flood and sink in the near future.

The point that we are at now is “adapt or die.” The work that we are doing is helping to shift cities to a carbon-neutral future by prioritizing livelihood and utilizing neglected spaces.

Utilizing neglected spaces—can you expand on that?

Forgotten and unused spaces, like rooftops, can present opportunities to make a city more useful for everyone. My team at Thammasat University, working alongside the surrounding communities, has achieved this. We created the largest urban rooftop farm in Asia. The idea for this project was derived from the wisdom of landscapes of the past, when people used rice terraces to harvest the rain from the mountainous area.

Our goals for the project were to relieve flash floods and turn the urban heat island effect into clean energy. One solution [for flooding] was implementing a flood roof, equipped with rainwater tanks that are designed to flood, allowing water to flow up and down. Solar panels on the roof create clean energy, pumping out water from the retention pond, and gravity slows down the runoff to prevent flooding.

What would you say is the biggest worry or concern you have in your field right now?

The biggest global concern is climate change, by far. Thailand has tried to tackle its flooding problems by building higher and higher dams, but this is not the right solution because dams will eventually cause more problems.

There are 7,000 fishermen in villages along the coast of Thailand. These Thai people are not allowed to stay in their country, because their homes have been built into what’s now the ocean. These villages are in the most dangerous part of Thailand, next to Cambodia, so the people who live there have nowhere to go. The government has forced everyone in the villages to be displaced.

My work now is addressing these problems by helping villages design viable solutions and negotiate with the government. We were able to get the government to commit to a housing credit with UN-Habitat [United Nations Human Settlements Programme ]. Eventually, we helped the first village secure a permit to let us enter and address the [housing crisis]. This all happened right before COVID, and unfortunately, they only granted a permit for one local community. This problem is ongoing and is some of our most important work.

With these climate concerns, what do you see as the biggest opportunity for global designers today?

There should be more concern around how we manage resources. I feel that only thinking about structure in the traditional way of “fixing things” won’t get us very far in regard to sustainable design.

Nowadays, the world needs a nature-based solution, or an ecosystem-based adaptation, which is an open opportunity for landscape architects. I think we need to push for climate-focused design in all departments. If urban designers, planners, engineers, architects, and landscape architects all work more collaboratively, we will strengthen our cities in very significant ways.

Why is it important for designers to give back to the younger generations—whether it’s through teaching or being involved in the broader design community?

Education is best transmitted by human-to-human interaction. We need humans to teach and pass on their knowledge to other humans, to the next generation, whether it’s through experience, practice, or academia. The transmission of knowledge between generations is crucial. The next generation is full of energy and potential.

And for us as alumni, we are part of the GSD culture. Even if it was a brief two years, it was such an intense period that shaped who we are as designers. It’s important to be involved in the community as alumni because it’s such a gift that we’ve already received, and we get to share it with a new generation of designers.

How are designers leaders, and why is it important that designers continue to be leaders across industries?

When I graduated, I asked my professor, Niall Kirkwood, “Why did [the GSD] choose me as a student?” And he said, “Because of your potential to be a leader.” I had no clue what he was talking about because I didn’t want to lead anyone; I didn’t want to be the head of any defined organization.

Through my practice and experiences after the GSD, I started to understand the word “leadership” more and more. It’s not about a title or position, it’s about action and impact. It’s about what you care for. I’m a designer who cares for the future of humanity, my homeland, my people, and my community. That’s what “leadership’’ means to me.

You can learn more about Kotch’s work and leadership below:

How to Adapt to Climate Change | Harvard Magazine

How to transform sinking cities into landscapes that fight floods | TED Talk

Landscape Processes Discussion Series | Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Meet the Woman Behind Asia’s Largest Urban Rooftop Farm | Bloomberg Quicktake

Architect Fights to Keep Bangkok from Flooding | Bloomberg Quicktake

Fall Update—Department of Landscape Architecture

Dear Landscape Architecture Alumni,

I bring you greetings from Cambridge, where the autumn weather has been beautiful, and we are already past the midpoint of our fall semester. It’s my great pleasure to report that from where I sit, the mood in the school is positive and upbeat. Our “Back to School” gathering in early September hit the right notes with Dean Sarah Whiting and the program chairs sharing thoughts on the year ahead, followed by a Beer ‘n Dogs barbecue in the back garden for students, faculty, and staff. The relief among all parties upon a full and largely unmasked return was palpable. We also had a fantastic set of events around the GSD Comeback in mid-September, when returning alumni engaged in faculty-led “mini-courses,” witnessed our Dean Whiting honoring alums for achievements and service, and celebrated with friends at a raucous front porch party. This all occurred alongside our Alumni Council’s first in-person meeting in several years. And this momentum remains strong just after mid-semester reviews.

Many of you are aware of the Olmsted 200 events throughout the nation in honor of Frederick Law Olmsted’s bicentennial birth year. The department held a well-attended two-day event in September entitled Olmsted: Bicentennial Perspectives. Many notable speakers brought forward newly critical readings of Olmsted Sr.’s work and that of his successors. Professor Ethan Carr MLA ’91, of the University of Massachusetts Department of Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning, gave the Annual Frederick Law Olmsted lecture as keynote for the symposium. I am immensely grateful to Professor Anita Berrizbeitia MLA ’87 and most especially senior lecturer Ed Eigen for organizing this superb event.

We are all feeling the urgency of the climate crisis like never before. The extreme heat and drought this past summer here in Massachusetts was the worst I can remember in 40 years of practicing here. The deadly flooding in Pakistan left more than 1,700 dead and 33 million people impacted by the worst rains in decades. One-third of the country was submerged, and the damage is devastating. The Pearl River in Mississippi crested at 36 feet twice this year. That has happened only once before. Flooding and failed infrastructure intersected in Jackson, Mississippi, leaving the city without potable water for weeks. Forests burned in France and Spain this summer. And 18-foot surges from Hurricane Ian caused at least 119 deaths in Florida and adjoining states. Florida, in particular, will take years to recover.

Our faculty and students are directly addressing the urgent hazards of climate risk, the need to decarbonize our energy use and our material and construction practices, and the need to pursue the cause of environmental justice through design everywhere we can. To give you a palpable feel for this revolution in curriculum, I need only describe our current semester’s option studios, many of which have included international travel. In Guinea-Bissau, for instance, in West Africa, a studio with design critic Silvia Benedito MAUD ’04 is facing matters of food sovereignty in the face of extreme drought and fire risk. In the Mexican Altiplano with visiting design critic Lorena Bello-Gomez MAUD ’11 is leading a pursuit of the return to liquidity in the face of severe lack of water resources. In the Texcoco region of Mexico with Lecturer in Landscape Architecture, Montserrat Bonvehi-Rosich, students are tackling matters of polluted waste, drought, and land subsidence on a massive scale.

In Portland, Oregon, with visiting design critics Gina Ford MLA ’03 and Anyeley Hallova MLA ’03, students are working with an organization that treats children suffering from the traumatic effects of child welfare injustices and incarceration. In Iceland, with Surfacedesign design critics James Lord MLA ’96 and Roderick Wyllie MLA ’98, students are examining intelligent energy landscapes, individual responsibility, and bodily sensory experience—baths included. In Luxemburg, students are examining decarbonization of the entire territory with visitors Aglaee Degros and Stefan Bendix. With Sergio Lopez-Pinero, students are electing climate, ecological, or justice issues on sites of their own choosing in communities facing conflict. And a studio with design critic Danilo Martic is designing massive temporary settlements caused by forced migration, incarceration, natural or human disasters like those just mentioned, or religious affiliation. How very timely.

When I look at the option studios across all three departments, in fact, and at the coursework and final projects in the advanced design study programs and in design engineering, I see a correlation of issues and inquiries that is remarkable in its overlap of environmental, political, and justice drivers. We are using varying tools and modes of inquiry, asking differently framed questions, of course. But I would venture this: The time we are living in is marked by greater urgency in these questions, and I see that all students in all the programs in the school are facing them accordingly—to a degree, I would assert, that is unprecedented. I for one am glad for this alignment, and I trust we’ll find useful differences and productive overlaps. That excites me about the GSD at this time.

Because of former chair Anita Berrizbietia’s MLA ’87 excellent stewardship for the past seven years, I am working with outstanding faculty and amazing staff in the department. But we have had several retirements and a few departures in the past two years. My number one priority for this academic year is to secure additional design faculty for the department. We have four searches running concurrently, and I am deeply grateful for the leadership of Professors Niall Kirkwood and Ed Eigen, and to the many other faculty who are working on our behalf in these searches. In case it is of interest, you can see these positions described on the GSD website, on the Open Faculty Positions page. And, if you have recommendations for us, please don’t hesitate to be in touch.

We are gearing up for our first alumni gathering at the ASLA Conference in a few years, this time in San Francisco, on Saturday, November 12th. I look forward to seeing many of you there and at other events over the weekend. Please introduce yourselves to our nine student members who are traveling to the conference with financial support from the department!

I welcome hearing from you whenever you are moved to reach out. Thanks for paying attention to the department!

With my warmest wishes.

Sincerely,

Gary R Hilderbrand FASLA FAAR he | him

Principal
Reed Hilderbrand LLC | 130 Bishop Allen Drive Cambridge MA 02139 | 617 923 2422

Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture | Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice
Harvard University Graduate School of Design | 48 Quincy Street G312 Cambridge MA 02138 | 617 495 2367