Dispatches from the GSD: 075 Years of Design

August 22, 2011–December 22, 2011
Peter Christiansen, curator

Anniversaries offer the opportunity to consider the past as an active interlocutor with the present and the future. For the GSD, this means foregrounding an array of agents—people, events, objects, and ideas—in a rich institutional history to bring the collective memory of seventy-five years into sharper focus for design practice today and tomorrow. Conjuring a comprehensive account of the institution since 1936—its thousands of alumni, hundreds of faculty and staff, and two homes—would run the risk of homogenizing a history characterized so consistently by heterogeneity and multiplicity. As such, the exhibition employs an approach that is episodic, reveling in moments of the GSD’s history that are as singular as they are important. In the spirit of framing these moments as stories unto themselves, they have been conceived of as journalistic dispatches from the past, each with its own narrative and artifacts. Writing history in the present tense, as this exhibition does, is an attempt to make the GSD’s vitality clear and to claim a future that is at once inherited and projective.

The 120 dispatches in this exhibition begin in 1936 and arrive at the present day to include a handful of contemporary thought pieces from a cross section of the School’s faculty, each expressing in a single authorial voice a reflection on the state of design today and the challenges of its future. The historical dispatches are organized into six thematic categories: Design as Research, Design as Critique, City as Process, City as Form, The Continuous Institution, and The Shifting Institution. Each section contains dispatches that speak to a greater set of themes spanning all of the School’s programs and departments, various media, and all seventy-five of the School’s years. In momentarily stopping the clock, this exhibition hopes to enliven the GSD, and Harvard University at large, with the engagement and propulsion that the past can offer us today and tomorrow.