The Health and Places Initiative—a joint project between the GSD and the Harvard School of Public Health—and a wide ranging project on housing policies in Mexico are 2 major research efforts moving forward under the leadership of UPD faculty with important contributions from MUP students.
Mayor de Blasio has selected an innovative leader in urban planning and design, Mitch Silver (lecturer in housing and urbanization), to be Commissioner of the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation.
Machado and Silvetti Associates (Jorge Silvetti’s firm) has been named general design planner for the new model campus of Vietnamese-German University in the Bình Duong province of Vietnam. MSA will be both master planner for the campus and design architect for 3.5 million square feet of laboratories, classrooms, food-courts, sports halls, administrative spaces and dormitories for 12 thousand students. The appointment is the result of an international competition held in 2013.
Lindsay Woodson (MDesS ‘15) will be working in the LA Mayor's Office Department of Homeland Security this summer, courtesy of a fellowship from the HKS Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. Her internship will pair her with Dr. Lucy Jones, a US Geological Services seismologist, to create resiliency policies and plans for the city. Learn more about the Ash Center summer 2014 fellowship project proposals.
A vision created by Chris Reed’s firm Stoss Landscape Urbanism in collaboration with SHoP Architects has been selected as the jury’s choice in the Dallas Connected City Design Challenge, initiated to reunite downtown Dallas and the Trinity River. GSD alums Amy Whitesides (MLA '12), Mariusz Klemens (MAUD '12) and Ellen Garrett (MLA '13) were on the Stoss team.
Xiaoxuan Lu (MLA ’12) has become a bit of a celebrity as a result of her YIXI talk (similar to TED Talks), combining her Penny White Fund research and her ASLA award-winning thesis.
Two GSD student teams recently won first-place awards in the 2013-14 NESEA (Northeast Sustainable Energy Association) Net-Zero Energy Design Competition. The competition called for low-energy, high aesthetic architectural designs supported by energy simulation analysis for a variety of building types in Holyoke, Mass.
Five GSD students spent J-Term preparing their entry for the Urban Land Institute’s 2014 Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition and were rewarded with the news that they made it to the final round. The GSD team–Mikhail Thomas Grinwald (MArch), team leader Wajeha Qureshi (MDesS), PG-Human Smit (MUD), Aliza Sovani (MLA) and Sonja Vangjeli (MLA), advised by faculty adviser Richard Peiser– is 1 of four out of 163 in North America invited to compete for the grand prize.
Zofnass Program for Sustainable Infrastructure at Harvard GSD awarded Surdna Foundation research grant.
A GSD urban planning team’s hopeful vision of a sustainable and resilient future for the Tohoku region of Japan - devastated by earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in 2011 - has earned first prize in Toyo University’s Tohoku Recovery invitational academic competition. Maria Ignacia Arrasate (MDes), Elise Baudon (MUP), Natalia Gaerlan (MUP), Karina Gilbert (MAUD) and Trevor Johnson (MUP) collaborated on a team led by Kristen Hunter (DDes) and advised by Jerold Kayden (professor of urban planning and design). They will be traveling to Japan in February to receive the $10,000 award for their project “Here Today, Here Tomorrow.”