Charles Waldheim, the John E. Irving Professor and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture contributed a chapter “Detroit, Disabitato, and the Origins of Landscape” to an anthology of essays on urban abandonment.
The architect is no longer an organizer of matter and space, but a designer of systems with multi-layered components and complex relationships. Sanford Kwinter (co-director MDesS and professor of architectural theory and criticism), Panagiotis Michalatos (assistant professor of architectural technology) and Ingeborg Rocker (associate professor of architecture) were at Carnegie Mellon University February 8 and 9 to speak about the the profession's new identity and call to arms at [En]Coding Architecture 2013.
What does it mean to be "at home" in a context where land and space are both limited and contentious? Some answers may lie in a new publication released by Melany Sun-Min Park (MDesS ’14): HOME + BOUND: Narratives of Domesticity in Singapore and Beyond, co-edited with Lilian Chee.
The gigantic pop-up city established for the Hindu festival Kumbh Mela is the perfect crucible for interdisciplinary research. This January 8 faculty and 20 students from the GSD and other Harvard schools are traveling to northern India for fieldwork for the project “Mapping Kumbh Mela.” The initiative is co-led by Rahul Mehrotra (chair of the department of urban design and planning) and Diana Eck (affiliated professor to UPD) with the South Asia Initiative, FAS, HBS and SPH. Read "Mapping the Kumbh Mela" in the Times of India.
GSD students will display the wide range of the school's research when Penn State holds its 1st "Nature of Spatial Practices" conference this Friday. The conference will examine how spatial practice, education and political discourse are responding to recent changes in technology, mobility and socio-cultural patterns.
Natalia Escobar (MDesS candidate ’13) heads to New Delhi, India, at the end of February supported by a grant from Sharda University. She is looking forward to studying informal settlements as conveyors of intangible cultural heritage of Indian society.
“Sinking Gardens,” by Nikola Bojic (MDesS 13) and Alan Waxman (MLA 14), was installed in XiXi National Wetland Park in Hangzhou for the 2012 West Lake International Sculpture Exhibition. The work connects the history of families who lived for generations in XiXi with the contemporary building boom, and lays claim to public space for the future of China.
A team of Harvard students has won the Massachusetts Chapter of the American Planning Association 2012 Student Project Award. James Cody Birkey (MDesS ’13) and Jaemin Ha (MAUD ’12) collaborated with Mukul Bafana (HBS) and Laura Bishop (HLS) on the Mumbai Port Redevelopment project.
Krzysztof Wodiczko (professor in residence of art, design and the public domain) has animated the statue of Abraham Lincoln in NYC with the stories of contemporary veterans for “Abraham Lincoln: War Veteran Projection.” The Wall Street Journal has the story.
Twin GSD alums Teman and Teran Evans (MArch ’04 and lecturers in architecture) aren’t worried when the New York Times proclaims the architect is obsolete. They have parlayed their celebrated design skills into a firm that offers brand consulting, architectural design and jewelry design, and they are currently jolting the thinking of GSD students through their Paper or Plastic seminar. As Teman puts it, “We’re three-dimensional problem-solvers, and we can solve problems at the big scale of buildings and also small problems that fit in your hand.” Read more in “Architects in supermarkets” in the Harvard Gazette.