After two years in Berlin, the World Architecture Festival will move their 2018 edition to Amsterdam for three days of talks, design presentations, and award ceremonies featuring cutting-edge contemporary works and some of the most prominent figures in architecture today.
Following extensive renovations led by Philip Gumuchdjian and landscape architect Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, 'Wimbledon House'—formerly known as the Rogers House or '22 Parkside'—has reopened as the Harvard GSD's primary residence and London venue for the Richard Rogers Fellowship.
Chilean architect Samuel Bravo has been selected as the winner of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design 2017 Wheelwright Prize, a $100,000 travel grant established to support “investigative approaches to contemporary design.”
Bravo’s research proposal, Projectless: Architecture of Informal Settlements, seeks to study the architecture of traditional and informal settlements, offering a contemporary revisiting of Bernard Rudofsky’s “architecture without architects” exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 1964.
In October, the Harvard Graduate School of Design (Harvard GSD) hosted “Zaha Hadid: A Celebration,” an evening of presentations and discussion around the extraordinary work and life of the late Zaha Hadid. Six months on from Hadid’s sudden passing in March, the Dean of Harvard GSD, Mohsen Mostafavi, introduced the event as the appropriate time to focus on creative recognition and “an evening of incredible celebration and enjoyment.”
While climate change, sustainable architecture and green technologies have become increasingly topical issues, concerns regarding the sustainability of the city are rarely addressed. The premise of Ecological Urbanism is that an ecological approach is urgently needed both as a remedial device for the contemporary city and an organizing principle for new cities.
The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) have announced Mohsen Mostafavi, Eva Franch i Gilabert, K. Michael Hays, Jeannie Kim, Benjamin Prosky, Rafael Moneo, and Kiel Moe as the jurors of the 2016 Wheelwright Prize. The award, "an open, international competition for early-career architects that supports travel-based research with a $100,000 grant," was relaunched as an international competition in 2012 and is now open to all graduates of professionally accredited programs within the last fifteen years. Last year's winner was Erik l'Heureaux for his proposal to study the extreme climatic conditions of equatorial zones.
Richard Rogers has announced that the home he built for his parents in Wimbledon, London, will be gifted to Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) for the training of doctorates in the field of architecture. The home, which will be donated by his charity, the Richard Rogers Charitable Settlement, was completed between 1967 and 1968 by Richard and his then wife Su Rogers. Originally designed for his parents, Dr. William Nino and Dada Rogers, the Grade II* listed pre-fabrictated single storey dwelling was later adapted for Rogers' son Ab and his family, before being put on the market in 2013 for £3.2million ($4.8million).
Dalibor Vesely, a celebrated architectural historian, philosopher and teacher, died this week in London aged 79. Over the course of his teaching career, which spanned five decades, he tutored a number of the world’s leading architects and thinkers from Daniel Libeskind, Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Robin Evans, to Mohsen Mostafavi and David Leatherbarrow.
Vesely was born in Prague in 1934, five years before the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Following World War II, he studied engineering, architecture, art history and philosophy in Prague, Munich, Paris and Heidelberg. He was awarded his doctorate from Charles University (Prague) having been taught and supervised by Josef Havlicek, Karel Honzik, and Jaroslav Fragner. Although later he would be tutored by James Stirling, it was the philosopher of phenomenology Jan Patočka who, in his own words, “contributed more than anyone else to [his] overall intellectual orientation and to the articulation of some of the critical topics” explored in his seminal book, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation, published in 2004.
During his recent trip to Chile, organized by the Harvard David Rockefeller Center For Latin American Studies, we caught up with the Dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), Mohsen Mostafavi, to see what challenges he thinks are facing the future of architecture education and to learn more about his work on ecological urbanism.
“[Architecture is] both a singular discipline, but at the same time it needs to be a collaborative discipline. It’s at once focusing on disciplinary knowledge but at the same time trans-disciplinary practicing; therefore it means that architectural education has to find new venues for collaboration,” he said.
"I think the GSD is very well-positioned to address key societal issues today because first, we’re a very multidisciplinary school in the sense that we believe strongly both in the focus of individual disciplines like architecture, but also on the inter-relationship between architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and urban design. "
Watch the full interview above to see what else Mostafavi had to say about architecture school, the role of architecture in society and ecological urbanism.
The creative imagination is not solely based on the intuitive capacities of individuals. One of the tasks of design education is to help provide the tools, techniques, and methods that enhance constructed imagination. At the same time, the modes and practices of design need to confront the challenges of our contemporary societies. The commitment to societal engagement through design excellence is at the core of the pedagogy at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
