Harvard Graduate School of Design: The Latest Architecture and News

Over the years, the nocturnal landscape of cities has witnessed a significant transformation, marked by the emergence of more than 80-night mayors globally, a trend that has been on the rise since the early 2000s. Andreina Seijas, currently working as an Associate at Gehl, has analyzed these shifting dynamics of night-time governance in her research and during her doctoral studies at Harvard GSD. Seijas speaks in the interview about this development, challenges, and opportunities with night mayors, global differences, and the role of climate change. Seijas' upbringing in Caracas, Venezuela, where safety concerns dictated strict curfews, ignited her passion for creating safer, more inclusive urban environments, particularly for the youth. Her quest for a better future for the urban night explores the potential for cities to become safer, more inclusive, and more productive by creating spaces for work and leisure after dark.

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QS, Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings, has announced the annual list of the top universities to study Architecture and the Built Environment in the year 2024. The ranking evaluates over 1,500 institutions from over 100 locations. The evaluation system has been updated this year to include new metrics such as sustainability, employment outcomes, and international research networks.

The top three contenders, the Bartlett School of Architecture, MIT, and Delft UT, have maintained their ranking from 2023, with ETH Zurich showing a slight decrease from an equal third position to the fourth. In the sixth position, Harvard University stands out as the top university for employer reputation in this subject. Among the top 10 universities, Politecnico di Milano had the greatest advancement in rankings, moving from the 10th position last year to the 7th.

The Harvard Graduate School of Design (Harvard GSD) has announced the Class of 2025 Loeb Fellows. Ten practitioners and activists from around the world have been selected to join the Loeb Fellowship program to expand their careers and advance their programs and initiatives focused on equity, resilience, and collective action.

The ten selected practitioners are mid-career professionals coming from diverse backgrounds. Each one has been recognized for initiating practices that are transforming public spaces and urban infrastructures, addressing public health concerns and environmental injustices, as well as housing needs and efforts to preserve the cultural, natural, and architectural heritage of diverse regions from all continents.

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Farshid Moussavi and Mona Hatoum have been named this year's recipients of the Jane Drew and Ada Louise Huxtable Prizes, two awards celebrating women's contribution to the architecture profession and the broader architectural culture. The 2022 Jane Drew Prize commends Farshid Moussavi for her achievements as architect, educator and writer, while artist Mona Hatoum, whose works take on an architectural scale, was awarded the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize in recognition of her significant contribution to architecture.

Videos

The Second Studio (formerly The Midnight Charette) is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by Architects David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features different creative professionals in unscripted conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and personal discussions.

A variety of subjects are covered with honesty and humor: some episodes are interviews, while others are tips for fellow designers, reviews of buildings and other projects, or casual explorations of everyday life and design. The Second Studio is also available on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube.

This week David and Marina are joined by Mark Lee, Principal and Founding Partner of Johnston Marklee and Chair of the Architecture Department at Harvard Graduate School of Design to discuss cities, architecture's responsibility to context, the cultural value of iconic architecture and everyday buildings, architectural education, designing for other cultures, working with clients, designing buildings, 'appropriateness' in architecture, and much more.

Germane Barnes has won the 2021 Wheelwright Prize from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. The $100,000 prize will fund two years of travel and research for Barnes’s proposal Anatomical Transformations in Classical Architecture, an examination of classical Roman and Italian architecture through the lens of non-white constructors. Barnes will study how spaces have been transformed through the material contributions of the African Diaspora while creating new possibilities within investigations of Blackness.

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Students and alumni from the Harvard Graduate School of Design are launching an online Design Yard Sale to raise funds in support of the movement against systemic anti-Black racism. The team will sell and auction creative works donated by the design community, and all net proceeds will go towards the Bail Project and Colloqate Design. Among Design Yard Sale’s offerings will be works donated by renowned designers, artists, and scholars such as Toshiko Mori, Oana Stanescu, Rachel Israela, Jeanne Gang, Billie Tsien, Snarkitecture, Jerome Byron and VERV LONDON.

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Harvard Graduate School of Design (Harvard GSD) has announced Daniel Fernández Pascual as the winner of the 2020 Wheelwright Prize. Now in its eighth cycle, the Wheelwright Prize supports innovative design research, crossing both cultural and architectural boundaries, with a $100,000 grant intended to support two years of study. The 2020 Wheelwright Prize drew over 170 applicants from over 45 countries.

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The Harvard Graduate School of Design has initiated a call for submissions for the 2020 Wheelwright Prize, an open international competition that awards $100,000 to a “talented early-career architect to support expansive, intensive design research.” This annual prize is dedicated to advancing original architectural research that is informed by cross-cultural engagement and that shows potential to make a significant impact on architectural discourse.

Designer and Fulbright fellow Stanislas Chaillou has created a project at Harvard utilizing machine learning to explore the future of generative design, bias and architectural style. While studying AI and its potential integration into architectural practice, Chaillou built an entire generation methodology using Generative Adversarial Neural Networks (GANs). Chaillou's project investigates the future of AI through architectural style learning, and his work illustrates the profound impact of style on the composition of floor plans.

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Architect Aleksandra Jaeschke has been named the winner of the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s 2019 Wheelwright Prize. Jaeschke receives a $100,000 traveling fellowship to fund her research proposal UNDER WRAPS: Architecture and Culture of Greenhouses. The fellowship and grant are designed to support investigative approaches to contemporary architecture, with an emphasis on travel-based research.

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The Harvard Graduate School of Design has announced that Sarah Whiting, dean of the Rice University School of Architecture since 2010, will serve as the next dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, beginning on July 1st. Described by the university as “an outstanding scholar, educator, and architect with broad interests that range across the design principles and beyond,” Whiting served on the GSD faculty for six years before moving to Princeton and later becoming the dean at Rice, where she also served as the William Ward Watkin Professor of Architecture.

The Harvard Graduate School of Design has relaunched its free online course entitled “The Architectural Imagination.” Directed by the school’s Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory, K. Michael Hays, the course seeks to teach students “how to understand architecture as both cultural expression and technical achievement.”

The free 10-week program runs until July 2019 and is carried out through the online edX platform, a Harvard/MIT system that specializes in high-quality massive open online courses. During the course, students will engage with the social and historical contexts behind major works of architecture, basic principles to produce drawings and models, and the pertinent content for academic study or a professional career as an architect.