Rahul Mehrotra (professor of urban design and planning and chair of urban planning and design) views architecture as the expression of the aspirations of society. In his teaching he advocates for design that connects all strata of society and chips away at inequities, and he practices what he preaches. Watch a video interview by ArchDaily.
A new book, Homeownership Built to Last: Affordability, Access, and Risk after the Housing Crisis, features essays by Eric Belsky, Chris Herbert and Jen Molinsky of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies and the Department of Urban Planning and Design. They offer solutions and strategies to create an affordable, fair, and sustainable future for all Americans.
The Lincoln Institute’s quarterly July 2014 issue of Land Lines is rich with insights from Loeb Fellows Lynn Richards (LF ’13), Helen Lochhead (Lincoln/Loeb Fellow ’14) and Anthony Flint (LF ’01). Read more in the LOEBlog.
MDes students Jared Friedman, Olga Mesa and Hea Min Kim (all MDes in Technology ’15) have married age-old ceramic materials with modern processes to create beautiful, innovative building surfaces. Their work caught the attention of Wired.
Bradley Cantrell (MLA ‘03), associate professor of landscape architecture, has been named a TEDGlobal 2014 Fellow.
Janet Echelman (LF '08) will soon join Ross Miller (LF '93) as a featured artist along the Boston Greenway. Echelman’s floating sculpture will hover over the Greenway next year, suspended from neighboring buildings. Miller welcomes the company for his sculpture Harbor Fog, installed in 2009. Created from granite blocks of a seawall uncovered during construction, the boat-shaped form has lighting, fog and sound that respond to activity in the environment. Read more in the LOEBlog.
It should come as no surprise that Jennifer Siegal (LF ’03), whose Office of Mobile Design is known for sustainable design and innovative mobile structures, led a prize-winning team in the “Designing for Free Speech” challenge. OMD’s entry is Industrial Up-Cycling: the Pop-Up SoapBox, a movable flexible performance space made of recycled parts discarded by the aerospace industry. Read more in the LOEBlog
Ana Gelabert-Sanchez (LF ’11, MLA) was selected to be part of a team of international advisors working with Zhuhai, China, to assist the city in becoming “one of the most habitable environmentally friendly waterside cities in Asia.” Read more in the LOEBlog.
Martin Bechthold (professor of architectural technology, co-director of the DDes Program and director of the GSD Technology Platform) and a group of GSD students joined hundreds of artists, designers, fabricators and industry leaders at Rob|Arch 2014, a biannual conference created by the Association for Robots in Architecture.
Theaster Gates (LF '11) now has an extra $3.5 million to put toward using the arts and culture to strengthen communities, courtesy of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Read about it in the LOEBlog.