GSD Talks: Innovate: Megan Panzano


The edge is framed as a potent site of command over contingencies.It is the seat from which the architect may best be able to invite in different logics, with new temporal variation, to mingle with and recode patterns of use, experience, and tectonic definition already familiar.  The work presented will include various experiments with spaces capable of operating at the edge of control – enabling and registering specific contingent conditions through architectural delineation.  The title also refers to the periphery, where the presented projects hail from or marginal actions that are centralized in the work and investigated as a motivating force.  The talk prompts: the edge can be a favorable margin.

Megan Panzano,
 MArch ’10, is a design critic in architecture at Harvard GSD, where she is currently coordinating and teaching in the first semester studios of both the graduate and undergraduate programs. Through her practice, studioPM, she is working on an assembly of projects addressing conditions of contingency across a range of architectural scales. Panzano has taught architecture studio for six years, concurrent to practice, and previously worked at Utile Inc. and Venturi, Scott Brown + Associates. Her design work has been exhibited in the Cite de l’architecture show in Paris in addition to several Boston venues, and featured in Mark Magazine, Wallpaper, BauweltDomusArch Daily, and the Boston Globe, among other publications. Panzano was the designer and co-curator of Living Anatomy, an exhibition on housing, in Fall 2015; her recent essay “Control Points,” published in Harvard Design Magazine No. 41, extends her analysis of housing design to the choreography of contemporary family structures.

Megan Panzano earned a Master of Architecture with distinction from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (2010) where she was the James Templeton Kelley Thesis Prize winner and the John E. Thayer Award Scholar.  She also received her B.A. in Architecture with honors from Yale.

Innovation is not only a scientific issue, it demands the architect’s opportunistic gaze and design skills; it happens at multiple scales, frequently crisscrossing disciplinary boundaries and occasionally changing our cities, cultures, and lives. “Innovate” is a mid-day talk series curated by Iñaki Ábalos, chair of the Department of Architecture, featuring a brief presentation followed by a discussion facilitated by faculty and by thesis, PhD, and DDes students.

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