A team of GSD students, led by Kristen Hunter (DDes) and advised by Jerold Kayden (professor of urban planning and design), traveled to Japan this month to collect an award, meet with officials and tour the Tohoku region devastated by compound disasters in 2011.
Floating overhead like a giant pair of wings at the 2014 Cevisama exhibition is a ceramic structure created by the GSD Design Robotics Group. It’s a mock-up of a structural ceramic and concrete shell system being developed in collaboration with the Institute for Structural Design at TU Graz, Austria.
Daniel Ibañez (MDesS ’12, DDes candidate) and Tomas Folch (MLA I ’12), in association with Rodrigo Rubio (Margen-Lab) and Sofia Armanet, have recently received second prize in the international competition to build a telecommunication tower in Santiago de Chile.
Nathan King (Fall 2013 Instructor of Architecture and DDes ’14) presented the results of the course relating to Innovation in Ceramics and The Future of Architectural Applications, during the Form|Rule|RuleForm symposium on Self-organizing forms and processes at the University of Innsbruck Institute for Structure and Deign, Innsbruck Austria.
The current explosive growth of South Asian cities was the impetus for the Contemporary South Asian City Conference this month in Karachi, Pakistan, where Rahul Mehrotra (chair and professor of urban planning and design) gave the first guest lecture, titled “Kinetic City.” He was attending as part of a Harvard team that included Spiro Pollalis (Professor of Design, Technology and Management) and Justin D. Stern (PhD student in urban planning and design), as well as representatives from the School of Public Health, South Asia Institute (a co-sponsor of the conference) and Harvard Medical School.
A GSD urban planning team’s hopeful vision of a sustainable and resilient future for the Tohoku region of Japan - devastated by earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in 2011 - has earned first prize in Toyo University’s Tohoku Recovery invitational academic competition. Maria Ignacia Arrasate (MDes), Elise Baudon (MUP), Natalia Gaerlan (MUP), Karina Gilbert (MAUD) and Trevor Johnson (MUP) collaborated on a team led by Kristen Hunter (DDes) and advised by Jerold Kayden (professor of urban planning and design). They will be traveling to Japan in February to receive the $10,000 award for their project “Here Today, Here Tomorrow.”
Professors Rahul Mehrotra, Spiro Pollalis and PhD candidate Justin D. Stern will travel to Karachi, Pakistan alongside a team of Harvard scholars, students and doctors to participate in the Contemporary South Asian City Conference (Pakistan Urban Forum) from January 9-12.
When humanitarian relief organizations substitute for civic structures in states weakened by crisis and conflict, a new type of urbanism prevails, contends Marianne Potvin (MDesS ‘13 and PhD). Too often the resulting agendas ignore or sacrifice the needs of the devastated populations they purport to serve. Potvin examines this phenomenon through the lens of “humanitarian urbanism” in an article for Open Democracy entitled "Kabul: the humanitarian city."
Peter Christensen (PhD '14) publishes Architecturalized Asia: Mapping a Continent Through History which is co-edited with Vimalin Rujivacharakul, Hazel Hahn and Ken Oshima.
The Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning has announced its 2013 awards, and Sai Balakrishan (PhD ’13) is being honored with the Gill-Chin Lim Award for the Best Dissertation on International Planning. Her paper “Land Conflicts and Cooperatives along Pune’s Highways: Managing India’s Agrarian to Urban Transition” focuses on the challenges as India makes its conversion from an agrarian to an urban economy.