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GSD exhibitions turn “Inside Out”

This spring, Harvard Graduate School of Design has turned its Druker Design Gallery, Experiments Wall, and other exhibition spaces “Inside Out,” with installations shown through a series of exterior projections on the building’s facade. The series, entitled “Inside Out,” will be screened nightly (4:00 pm to 11:00 pm, EST) through March 18, rotating through a weekly roster of shows that exhibit some recent preoccupations among Harvard GSD faculty and students, selected and curated from among an open call last November.
From March 1 through March 7, “Inside Out” presents four films highlighting student work from Farshid Moussavi‘s Fall 2020 GSD option studio, “Dual-Use: The function of a 21st century urban residential block.” The studio concerned itself with the politics latent within architecture, carried out through making aesthetic decisions regarding everyday spaces, and the resultant, and profound, consequences on people’s lives. In particular, the studio explored the subject of housing combined with working from home.
Collage of four images, each a different project for a dual-use residential building.
Projects currently on view in “Inside Out,” drawn from Farshid Moussavi’s Fall 2020 option studio “Dual-use: The function of a 21st century urban residential block.” Clockwise from top left: “Mutating Threshold” by Dan Lu, “Dual-Use Vertical Village” by Qin Ye Chen, “Dual-Use” by Erik Fichter, “Thrive – An Ethos of Collaboration and Support” by Devashree Shah

“Inside Out” premiered in early February with a pair of three-minute projections, or “filmic studies,” produced by GSD professor Helen Han, and concludes on March 19 with a look at student work from the Department of Landscape Architecture. Han’s “Scalar Shifts: Two recent filmic studies of Jewel Changi Airport and The Clark Art Institute” proceeded through the layers and sequencing of vegetation, light, and other natural phenomena at Williamstown’s Clark Art Institute grounds; its companion video, “Garden of Wonder,” offered a tour of Singapore’s Jewel Changi Airport and the public space within, filmed over four days in November 2019 in collaboration with Safdie Architects. “Inside Out” proceeded with student-directed projection “Floating Between Borders” (February 15-21), presenting a futuristic, imagined look at what the world could look like without formal national boundaries—an inherent “critique of the bureaucracy of geopolitical borders,” the students write, imagining what the world could look like if people could move freely among nations.

Following the exhibition of Moussavi’s “Dual-use” studio, “Inside Out” will feature a video celebration of Womxn in Design (March 8-14); a view of select thesis projects (March 15-21) and core-studio and option-studio work (March 25-31) from the Department of Architecture; and a look at the Department of Landscape Architecture’s recent pedagogical tools (April 1-7), including 3D-printed maps, toolkits, and other physical ephemera that students have received at home this academic year.

“Inside Out” follows last fall’s “2020 Election Day at Gund Hall” presentation. Gund Hall is a perennial voting location, and this show called all residents of Cambridge’s Ward-Precinct 7-3 to vote in the November 3, 2020 election, and doubled as a wayfinding device that instructed voters where they should enter and exit the building.

To learn more about the GSD’s past and present exhibitions, visit the Exhibitions webpage.