In the News

Vanessa Harden named 2023 Penny White Project Fund Recipient

DDes candidate Vanessa Harden was named a 2023 Penny White Project Fund recipient by the Department of Landscape Architecture for her project, “Designing the Fungal City: A framework for connecting mycorrhizal networks in the built environment.”

The winning proposals were selected through an adjudication process based on originality and innovation of projects, with an eye to their contribution to pressing challenges related to the fields of design, landscape, urbanism, and ecology. The Penny White Project Fund annually awards up to $50,000 in project funding for student-submitted research proposals. The call is open to all graduate, postgraduate, and doctoral students at the GSD, including collaborations across programs and disciplines.

DDes Alumni and Faculty article wins Best Paper Award by the Energy and Buildings Journal.

Yujiao Chen (DDes ’19), Les Norford, Holly Samuelson (DDes ’13), and Ali Malkawi’s article entitled “Optimal control of HVAC and window systems for natural ventilation through reinforcement learning”, was recently selected as one of the ten “Best Papers Awards” published between 2018 and 2022 by the Energy and Buildings journal.

Energy and Buildings is an international journal publishing articles with explicit links to energy use in buildings. The aim is to present new research results, and new proven practice aimed at reducing the energy needs of a building and improving indoor environment quality.

Aisha Densmore-Bey gives talk at Boston Architectural College

DDes Candidate Aisha Densmore-Bey recently gave a talk at Boston Architectural College as part of their 2023 Spring Lecture Series. She discussed the creative practice as an exercise of love and activism. She posed the question: How can one generate a body of work that interrogates and influences the built environment using various mediums, including film, authorship, and graphic design? In addition, Aisha reviewed her research on how artists have proactively used real estate and urban planning to build culturally rich and celebratory neighborhoods.

Nusrat Jahan Mim named 2022-2023 Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative Fellow

Trained as an Architect, Nusrat Jahan Mim from Bangladesh, is a Doctor of Design candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her research work is focused on studying the socio-economic politics embedded in resource-constrained contexts of the Global South and designing novel and creative urban spaces to facilitate an inclusive and democratic participation of the marginalized communities there. Her work draws upon cutting-edge critical literature in Urban Design Politics around Faith and Informalities and addresses the contemporary struggles of marginalized communities within the globalized projects of modernization, urbanization, and digitization.

The Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative is a multi-year project funded by Harvard University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to expand understanding about urban life, social and political structures, design, and history across diverse sites and scales. The Initiative aims in particular to link humanistic approaches to cities with spatial investigations of the built and natural environments.