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.

A New Way of Seeing: The Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis

In 1965, as students protested the escalating war in Vietnam, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, and the federal government sought to revive faltering cities through urban renewal programs, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design launched a groundbreaking initiative: the Laboratory for Computer Graphics. Over the next quarter century, this multidisciplinary research group developed programs for automated mapping and spatial analysis that changed the ways we understand and create the world around us, from forecasting the weather to designing buildings. The lab served as an incubator for computer-based technologies that pervade all aspects of contemporary life—including the ability to avoid traffic back-ups, courtesy of the now-standard mapping software in today’s vehicles.

Origins: Howard Fisher and SYMAP

Howard T. Fisher was no stranger to Harvard. He had earned his undergraduate degree there in the mid-1920s and then studied architecture at the school, prior to the advent of the Graduate School of Design (GSD). Fisher, who for a time specialized in prefabricated housing and commercial architecture, was a versatile designer; a colleague would later describe him as “a complete architect, planner, master builder, inventor, environmental scientist, teacher, and scholar . . . truly a Renaissance man of the 20^th century.”¹ Yet, those who knew Fisher best characterized him, above all, as a problem solver—a trait that prompted his return to Harvard in 1965.

In the decade following World War II, the flipside of American prosperity was urban turmoil. People with means abandoned the city, opting instead for suburban life. Businesses soon followed, leaving in their wake empty downtown commercial districts, deteriorating neighborhoods, and substandard living conditions. Cities were in crisis, and the search was on for potential solutions, many of which drew on the era’s developing technologies—including the computer. It was in this cultural milieu that Fisher, practicing and teaching in Chicago in the early 1960s, devised a software program to create legible maps from complex data.

Fisher’s creation, named SYMAP (short for Synagraphic Mapping System), was conceived as “a new way of seeing things together as a whole.”² In other words, SYMAP could analyze information from many sources and present it so that relationships were readily visible to planners, designers, or anyone. Furthermore, while earlier software programs required users to physically assemble the layers of a thematic map (essentially a map that tells a story about a place), SYMAP used a computer to create an entire thematic map, representing data by using contour lines, shading, patterns, and eventually color. To create such a map, the programmer manually keypunched data on cards, brought them to a computing center for processing, and returned for the printout hours or days later.³ In the mid-1960s, Harvard had a single computer for such purposes; registered users were permitted one visit per day, and due to processing time, it could take up to a month to produce a single map.⁴ Nevertheless, SYMAP’s ability to synthesize material and generate information-laden maps was an improvement, both in the sophistication of analysis and the time required to create such maps sans computer.

Given the precarious state of American cities at the time, SYMAP’s potential applications in the realm of planning and design offered great promise.⁵ This appealed to the philanthropic Ford Foundation, which sought to further the public welfare by “identify[ing] and contribut[ing] to the solution of problems of national and international importance.”⁶ Foundation officials signaled that they would be open to funding Fisher’s continued research, however he first needed a university to house this research. Fisher thus turned to his alma mater, where he found a champion in Harvard GSD dean Josep Lluís Sert.

Fisher and SYMAP relocated to Harvard in February 1965 where, within the GSD, he established the Laboratory for Computer Graphics (LCG).⁷ That fall, through the GSD’s Department of City and Regional Planning, he submitted a proposal to the Ford Foundation, which promised $294,000 (equivalent to nearly $3 million today) “for research and training in the use of computers to make maps of social and economic features of cities.” This grant to the GSD, to run through 1969, formed part of a larger effort to address the ongoing crisis in American cities by, as the foundation characterized it, “harness[ing] computer-based analysis to the study of urban problems.”⁸ Subsequent funding for the LCG would come from a variety of sources, including the sale of proprietary software; correspondence courses, professional development seminars, and conferences; local and federal government contracts; and grants from institutions such as the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation.

Early Years

Major funding in hand, Fisher wasted little time in attracting attention—and talented researchers—to the LCG, launching an ambitious lecture series in April 1966. Held weekly throughout the spring and fall semesters that year, these meetings attracted participants from throughout Harvard and beyond. Regular attendees, dubbed “Computer Graphics Aficionados,” engaged with distinguished speakers from many disciplines, including geography, cartography, engineering, economics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, classics, transportation and city planning, urban design, and landscape architecture.⁹

Mathematical geographer William Warntz, known for population analyses of social and economic patterns, spoke at an Aficionados session on the topic of statistical surfaces. Warntz soon became a key figure in the LCG, leaving his position with the American Geographical Society to join the GSD in 1966 as professor of theoretical geography and regional planning, and the LCG’s associate director. When Fisher retired two years later, Warntz moved into the role of director and added “Spatial Analysis” to the group’s name, signaling the lab’s expanding focus. Thus, from 1968 on, the organization was officially known as the Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis.

In fall 1966, geographer and urban planner Allan Schmidt was featured at an Aficionados meeting, where he discussed the role of computer mapping in the planning process. Shortly thereafter Fisher persuaded Schmidt to leave his position at Michigan State University and assume a new post at the LCG, starting in spring 1967. For the next 15 years, Schmidt remained at the lab in various capacities, including director (1971–1975) and executive director (1975–1982).

Another key figure who took part in the LCG’s formative years is Carl Steinitz, now Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning Emeritus at the GSD. Steinitz traced his involvement to a fortuitous 1965 encounter with Fisher, where Steinitz—then a graduate student in city and regional planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—learned of SYMAP. With Fisher’s tutelage, Steinitz used SYMAP to analyze and map data for his doctoral thesis, which explored Central Boston’s urban features in relation to his advisor Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960).¹⁰ In 1966, Steinitz accepted a joint post at the GSD: assistant professor in the Departments of Landscape Architecture and City and Regional Planning, and research associate at the LCG.¹¹ He would stay with the lab through 1972.

By the end of the 1966–67 academic year, the lab employed 29 people, including GSD graduate students, Harvard undergrads, and experts from many fields. Staff numbers would fluctuate in the coming years, depending on specific research projects and funding. Despite being an organization within the GSD, the LCG was housed for its first seven years not in Robinson or Hunt Halls, but in the basement of adjacent Memorial Hall. In 1972, the lab joined the rest of the GSD across the street in the newly completed Gund Hall, occupying space on the 5^th floor.

Research and Outreach

Fifty years after its founding, Steinitz described the LCG’s early research as falling into two basic categories. The first stemmed from SYMAP, involving “investigations into computer graphic representation of spatially and temporally distributed data.”¹² This research included time-series maps of a storm’s progression, three-dimensional data displays, and maps that conveyed large data sets, such as early census maps for New Haven, Connecticut.

The lab’s second area of inquiry, according to Steinitz, “related to city and regional planning, landscape architecture and architecture, focused on the role of computers in programming, design, evaluation and simulation.”¹³ These efforts included research that drew on SYMAP and other programs to analyze data—such as a region’s possible uses, resources, and vulnerabilities—and generate models to assess future land-use impacts, which could in turn guide design and development decisions. This methodology, envisioned by Steinitz in 1967 to apply computer analysis and mapping to environmental planning, is today widely known as geodesign.

In tandem with its research and development activities, the LCG circulated its work through a variety of means. The lab sold SYMAP and later programs commercially, with nearly 1000 practitioners throughout the world participating in the lab’s correspondence training course, initiated in 1966. Beginning the following year, the LCG staged conferences, some for researchers and others for a broad audience that encompassed corporate and government employees—including from General Motors, Bell Laboratories, Anaheim Police Department, and the US House of Representatives. Branded as Harvard Computer Graphics Week, this renowned five-day conference occurred annually between 1978 and 1983, drawing up to 500 participants its final year.¹⁴

Highlighting Harvard Computer Graphics Week’s disciplinary breadth, a program for the 1981 session noted that participants would learn “how computer graphics is being used to solve problems in corporate planning and management, marketing, energy exploration and distribution, physical design, natural resource management, city and regional planning, education, research, financial management, and many other areas.”¹⁵ And for those unable to attend this or other meetings, the LCG issued and sold the conference papers for all six years in the 19-volume publication Harvard Library of Computer Graphics.

Legacy

The LCG continued operation throughout the 1980s, albeit at a greatly reduced capacity due to shifting priorities and changes in GSD

leadership. The lab ultimately disbanded in 1991, leaving an impact that well exceeds its relatively brief existence.¹⁶ Through the development of cutting-edge software packages and a robust outreach program, the LCG introduced computer graphics and spatial analysis to a host of disciplines—including architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. In addition, the lab acted as an incubator for innovation, providing “many of today’s essential ideas and early versions of tools now embedded in GIS [geographic information systems], remote sensing, geospatial science, geodesign, and online culture.¹⁷ Finally, the LCG served as a training ground for researchers who, following their time at the lab, went on to develop life-altering computer-based technologies. For example, the architectural software used throughout design professions today is grounded in the LCG’s work, as are four-dimensional holograms and digital mapping.

Among the LCG’s renowned former members are Jack and Laura Dangermond, then a GSD landscape architecture student and a social scientist, respectively. The Dangermonds spent a year in the late 1960s working in the LCG, which Jack recently described as “a place that shaped the rest of my life.”¹⁸ After Jack’s graduation from the GSD (MLA ’69), the Dangermonds returned to his hometown of Redlands, California, and cofounded the Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri), building on their experience at the LCG. Today Esri is a global leader in GIS software, location intelligence, and digital mapping.

In 2015, Dangermond and other participants from the LCG’s heyday joined with contemporary researchers for a two-day conference entitled The Lab for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis and Its Legacy, organized to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the LCG’s founding.¹⁹ Mohsen Mostafavi, then GSD dean and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design, offered introductory remarks that situated the lab and its contributions as “part and parcel of our history.”²⁰ This holds true not only for the GSD, where spatial mapping software is the cornerstone of many research studios, but for daily life in general. As we navigate city streets with the digital maps on our phones or learn about election results in precinct-by-precinct detail, we rely on LCG-derived technologies. As Mostafavi suggested, far from a bygone entity, the LCG endures as “a vision for the future.”²¹

 *Unless otherwise noted, all images are courtesy of the Special Collections, Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design.

 

1. Leonard J. Currie, “Digest of the Career and Achievements of Howard T. Fisher,” sponsorship letter for Fisher AIA Fellowship application, c. 1974, https://web.archive.org/web/20150105113516/http://public.aia.org/sites/hdoaa/wiki/AIA%20scans/F-H/Fisher_Howard.pdf. ↩︎
2. Nick Chrisman, Charting the Unknown: How Computer Mapping at Harvard Became GIS (Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2006), 20. For a detailed discussion of SYMAP, see chapter 2. ↩︎
3. Evangelos Kotsioris, “The Computer Misfits: The Rise and Fall of the Pioneering Laboratory for Computer Graphics,” in Radical Pedagogies, eds. Beatriz Colomina et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022). An excerpt of this article appears in The MIT Press Reader, https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-computer-misfits-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-pioneering-laboratory-for-computer-graphics/. ↩︎
4. Carl Steinitz, “The Beginnings of Geographical Information Systems: A Personal Historical Perspective,” Planning Perspectives 29, no. 2 (2014): 239–254, doi:10.1080/02665433.2013.860762. ↩︎
5. A recent MoMA show, Emerging Ecologies, included a four-dimensional model derived from SYMAP’s output as an example of a pioneering approach to visualizing complex data about the environment. See Carson Chan and Matthew Wagstaffe, Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism (New York: MoMA, 2023), 70–71. ↩︎
6. Ford Foundation, The Ford Foundation Annual Report 1966 (New York, NY: Ford Foundation, 1966), mission statement, https://www.fordfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/1966-annual-report.pdf. ↩︎
7. Matthew W. Wilson, “Celebrating the Advent of Digital Mapping,” ArcNews, Esri, Winter 2015, https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/arcnews/celebrating-the-advent-of-digital-mapping/. Chrisman’s summarization of the LCG’s founding provides a slightly different ordering of events. See Chrisman, Charting the Unknown, 3. ↩︎
8. Ford Foundation, Annual Report 1966, 7. ↩︎
9. Chrisman, Charting the Unknown, 10–11. ↩︎
10. Carl Steinitz, “Meaning and the Congruence of Urban Form and Activity,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 34, no. 4 (July 1968): 223–247. ↩︎
11. Steinitz, “Beginnings of Geographical Information Systems.” ↩︎
12. Ibid. ↩︎
13. Ibid. ↩︎
14. Chrisman, Charting the Unknown, 158. ↩︎
15. Harvard GSD Lab for Computer Graphics, brochure for Harvard Computer Graphics Week ’81, July 26-31, 1981, https://www.vasulka.org/archive/ExhTWO/Harvard/general.pdf. ↩︎
16. The author thanks Martin Bechthold, Bruce Boucek, Stephen Erwin, Carl Steinitz, and Charles Waldheim for their willingness to be interviewed about the lab and its legacy. For more on the lab’s last decade and dissolution, see Chrisman, Charting the Unknown, chapter 11. ↩︎
17. Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis, The Lab for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis and its Legacy, conference program, April 30 through May 1, 2015, https://cga-download.hmdc.harvard.edu/publish_web/CGA_Conferences/2015_Lab_Legacy/2015_CGA_Conference_Program.pdf. ↩︎
18. In a recent article, Jack Dangermond wrote about his formative time in the lab. See Jack Dangermond, “How the Geographic Information System May Help Make the World Better,” Forbes, Oct. 8, 2024, https://www.forbes.com/sites/esri/2024/10/08/how-the-geographic-information-system-may-help-make-the-world-better/. ↩︎
19. The conference was hosted by the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA), established in 2006 to support the use of GIS in research and teaching across the university. As such, the CGA acts as a successor of sorts to the LCG. ↩︎
20. Mohsen Mostafavi, “Welcome & Introduction,” talk at The Lab for Computer Graphic and Spatial Analysis and Its Legacy, April 30, 2015, https://vimeo.com/128158780?autoplay=1&muted=1&stream_id=Y2xpcHN8MTMxODA5NTR8aWQ6ZGVzY3xbXQ%3D%3D. ↩︎
21. Ibid. ↩︎

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. ↩︎

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.