Architecture school is a place of experiment and a testing ground for innovative ideas. The academic work and student projects can bring to light the focus of an entire career, shape the backbone for an architectural theory, and crystalize values. How do their studies and formative years reflect on the later work of different architects? Taking a journey along decades, we explore the transition from architecture school to practice, the reverberance of academic explorations and early projects in the work of several architects and practices, highlighting the different pivotal steps that have shaped the beginning of their architectural journey.
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police, the United States erupted in protests and demonstrations. The fervor generated by that event reached the world of architecture education a couple of weeks later, when two groups at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD)—the African American Student Union (AASU) and AfricaGSD—posted a public statement, Notes on Credibility, calling for reforms at the school. Four days later, Dean Sarah M. Whiting posted a response, Towards a New GSD. Shortly after, I reached out to the groups, and they put me in touch with two of their members: Caleb Negash, a second-year student in the MArch program, and Andrew Mbuthia Ngure, a third-year student in the same program.
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.
Drawing by Clara He. Field Hospital. Wuhan, China.
The work presented in this article is the outcome of drawings done by the students of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in their second-semester studio, conducted by Alfredo Thiermann (ThiermannCruz). The work was produced during a 6-week long period of distance-learning after the school was shut down at the beginning of March.
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.
Harvard GSD is presenting during the month of April 2020, an online series of talks and webinars via Zoom, where attendees can interact and submit questions. Accessible for everyone who registers, the events are also streamed live to the GSD's YouTube page.
Harvard Graduate School of Design (Harvard GSD) has announced three shortlisted architects for 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 168 applicants from over 45 countries.
Harvard Graduate School of Design (Harvard GSD) has announced the six winners of the 2020 Richard Rogers Fellowship, a residency program at the Wimbledon House in London, the landmarked residence designed by Lord Richard Rogers for his parents in the late 1960s. Now entering its fourth cycle, the Fellowship is inspired by Lord Rogers’s commitment to cross-disciplinary investigation and engagement.
The Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design is now accepting applications for the Loeb Fellowship Class of 2021. The Fellowship program offers a year of study in residence at Harvard GSD and a worldwide network of over 450 colleagues. The Loeb Fellowship encourages applications from a wide range of exceptional practitioners whose work is advancing positive social outcomes through the shaping of the built and natural environment in the US and around the world.
Harvard University Graduate School of Design has announced the 2020 Richard Rogers Fellowship cycle. Open to accomplished practitioners and scholars working in fields related to the built environment, the research-focused residency program is based in London at the Wimbledon House, designed by Lord Richard Rogers in the late 1960s. Fellows have researched a diverse series of topics, including examinations of public and affordable housing; how food and cooking transform cities; and citizen-driven urban regeneration initiatives, among others.
Griffin founded the consultancy Urban Planning for the American City, which she complements with her pedagogical work at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.
Since its emergence with the cultural turn in the 1970s and ’80s, spatial justice has become a rallying cry among activists, planners, and plugged-in architects. But as with many concepts with academic origins, its precepts often remain elusive and uninterrogated. Though some of this has changed with the advent of city- and place-making discourse, few are doing as much to lend articulation, nuance, and malleability to spatial justice as Toni Griffin. A Chicago native, Griffin practiced architecture at SOM for nearly a decade before leaving the city to work as a planner in Newark and Washington, D.C., among other municipalities. In 2009, she founded the consultancy Urban Planning for the American City, which she complements with her pedagogical work at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. There, she runs the Just City Lab, which, through research and a host of programs, aims to develop, disseminate, and evaluate tools for enhancing justice—and remediating chronic, systematized injustice—in America’s cities. But what form could justice take in the U.S. context, and how can architects and designers help? Metropolis spoke with Griffin about how focusing on inclusivity and embracing interdependence and complexity are parts of the answer.
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.
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.
https://www.archdaily.com/915408/harvard-graduate-school-of-design-announces-sarah-whiting-as-next-deanNiall Patrick Walsh
After the dissolution of the Bauhaus due to Nazi political pressure in April 1933, the ideas, teachings, and philosophies of the school were flung across the world as former students and faculty dispersed in the face of impending war. Of the numerous creative talents associated with the Bauhaus, many went on to notable careers elsewhere. Some made a living as artists or practitioners, others either continued or began careers as teachers themselves - and many did both throughout the course of their lives.
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.
https://www.archdaily.com/910644/harvard-gsd-relaunches-free-online-architecture-courseNiall Patrick Walsh
The Harvard Graduate School of Design has initiated a call for submissions for the 2019 Wheelwright Prize, an open international competition that awards $100,000 to a “talented early-career architect to support travel-based research.”
Harvard University Graduate School of Design has announced the 2019 Richard Rogers Fellowship cycle. Open to accomplished practitioners and scholars working in fields related to the built environment, the research-focused residency program is based in London at the Wimbledon House, designed by Lord Richard Rogers in the late 1960s. Fellows have researched a diverse series of topics, including examinations of public and affordable housing; how food and cooking transform cities; and citizen-driven urban regeneration initiatives, among others.