Concluding the second annual Mayors Institute on City Design (MICD) Just City Mayoral Fellowship–a collaboration between the MICD and Harvard GSD’s Just City Lab–the Fellows discuss strategies for using planning and design interventions to address racial injustice in each of their cities.
Inclusions, an art installation created by Kiana Rawji '23, Cecilia Zhou '23, and Luke Reeve MDE '23, affirms that just as Harvard has shaped its students, so too have the students shaped Harvard; the student bricks will serve as records of formative contact between entities, expressions of individual identity, presence, and power in public space. During the month of April 2022, the bricks will be used to create a cohesive installation in Harvard Yard near Thayer Hall.
Join Kiana and Cecilia, with special guest commentator Professor Tracy K. Smith and moderator...
“Today is global” is a rather banal truism, but what really is today’s globalism? In a conversation with contributors from across the globe, Harvard Design Magazine introduces issue #50: Today’s Global, guest-edited by Sarah M. Whiting and Rahul Mehrotra.
Today’s world has entered a phase of critical backlash against globalization, which is for some a critique of...
Join us for a discussion featuring leading activists and scholars working toward menstrual justice. The program will open the exhibition Out for Blood: Feminine Hygiene to Menstrual Equity.
Join us for the second of two one-hour webinars exploring the legacy of Eileen Southern, author of “The Music of Black Americans: A History” and founder and editor of “The Black Perspective in Music.” In 1976, Eileen Southern (1920–2002) became the first African American woman tenured in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). She was central in developing the Department of Afro-American Studies (now African and African American Studies), serving as an early chair, and was on the faculty of the Department of Music, where she taught courses on Black music and Renaissance musical...
“Conservation in a Time of Transition/ Shifting Landscape” is an event that aims to convene leading scholars working on architecture in South Asia to discuss what strategies and interpretations must conservation include to help cope with an increasingly contested and transitionary landscape that now characterizes the region. This event hopes to begin the process of reconceptualizing conservation practice in the face of such threats and current attitudes. It also aims to celebrate and build upon MoMA’s current exhibition focused on the architectural history of the region between 1947 and...
Mind Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative at Harvard—Online
When aliens touchdown on Earth, linguistics professor Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and her team are tasked with determining why they are here and what they want. Our experts will discuss and debate the challenges that may arise in communicating with alien lifeforms and where the film succeeded and/or failed in this regard.
HBS's iconic Baker Library is the largest business library in the world—and its collection expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic. For the first time in its 95-year history, Baker brought in non-business books, over 170 titles (to date) organized by Cathy Chukwulebe (MBA 2021) as part of her new non-profit, Little Black Library (LBL).
In response to the racial and social unrest of 2020, Cathy launched Little Black Library to promote Black authors and conversations about the Black experience through books and events at libraries and other partners around the U.S.
Although accessible housing has been cast in many forms, accessory dwelling units (ADUs) have been a catalyst for including architects in direct policy development. For the first time, cities are directly contracting with architects to provide designs for private property through pre-approved ADU programs. These programs reflect a plurality of ideas, though without rigorous consideration for how the costs of site work, labor, materials, and energy make quality housing sustainable.
Small Infrastructures is an exhibition of ADU designs that uses the economics of...
From the world-renowned Wideman Davis Dance Company and award-winning filmmakers Ethan Payne and Brian Foster, We Dance is a love story, deconstructed and distilled into its most elemental ingredients. Dreams. Memories. Family. Environments. In this 12-minute film, Tanya Wideman-Davis and Thaddeus Davis take us from Chicago, Montgomery, and New York to the point where their lives meet and become one. Along the way, they honor and signify on Black American art, poetry, and literature.
Media and video art practice of the last twenty years coincided with the harrowing expansion of climate degradation. While the effects of climate change had been anticipated before 2000, they took shape ubiquitously and lethally post-2000, bringing new challenges about whether and how to imagine a future for shared life on the planet. These effects coincided also with a deeper historical understanding of how we got here, tracking the history of extractive economies and their imbrication with the forces of gender, race, colonialism, and a human-centered anthropocentricism.
Please join us for a free virtual film screening of the documentary film, "This Ain't Normal." Register for a link to see the documentary at your convenience between February 15 and 16. Then join us for a discussion on...
In Benin Bronzes in Context, Sarah Clunis will look at objects currently in the care of Harvard and discuss the way that these objects represent an iconographic and contextual story of trade, contact, and crossroads between cultures. Diana Loren will moderate a discussion after the presentation.
The bronze, ivory, and wooden artworks broadly known as the “Benin Bronzes” were taken from Benin City as part of the British Punitive Expedition of 1897 and dispersed to private collections and museums around the world. The Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology...
How did Chicago, a city known for commerce, come to have such a splendid public waterfront—its most treasured asset? The book’s authors study the lakefront’s evolution from the middle of the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Their findings have significance for understanding not only Chicago’s history but also the law’s part in determining the future of significant urban resources such as waterfronts.
Join us for a discussion on Lakefront: Public Trust and Private Rights in Chicago with authors Joseph Kearney and Thomas Merrill and panelists Henry Smith, Richard...
Join us for two consecutive panels and a conversation with internationally renowned artist Krzysztof Wodiczko.
In this joint panel, we will first explore how creative practices and institutions navigate audience participation and how they enter into spaces of co-production. Artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer will discuss how his practice, use of technology, and processes of community participation are in dialogue with Krzysztof Wodiczko’s own practice. In her presentation, Jill Medvedow, Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston, will discuss the role of...
Join us for a one-hour webinar exploring the legacy of Eileen Southern, author of The Music of Black Americans: A History and founder and editor of The Black Perspective in Music. In 1976, Eileen Southern became the first African American woman tenured in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). Southern played an important institutional role at Harvard. She was central in developing the Department of Afro-American Studies (now African and African American Studies), serving as an early chair, and was on the faculty of the Department of Music, where she taught...
Heralding the exhibition "Interrogative Design: Selected Works of Krzysztof Wodiczko," the artist joins architectural historian and GSD professor Erika Naginski for an exploration of architecture's role in the construction and performance of memory (12pm) and art historian Rosalyn Deutsche to discuss the role of trauma, healing, and survival in his work over the last five decades (2:30pm).
In a world of increasing polarization and boundary-drawing manifest at multiple scales, what has happened to the notion of “the public”? Is there evidence that collective understanding of who belongs in our neighborhoods, cities, regions, and nations is changing? And to what extent have the urban planning and design professions enabled or constrained these transformations? The 49th issue ofHarvard Design Magazine, guest-edited by Anita Berrizbeitia and Diane Davis, addresses “the status of the...
This event will be held in Portuguese with simultaneous English translation.
One of the most exciting developments in Brazilian art and art history today is the emergence of Indigenous self-representation. The growing presence of Indigenous artists and art curators in exhibitions and museums in the country challenges traditional narratives and modes of display as it generates new spaces for the silenced voices of the over three-hundred Indigenous ethnic groups that inhabit the territories of Brazil. In 2017, the Rio de Janeiro Museum (MAR) organized the exhibition...
Join the Harvard Graduate School of Design for an interview by Jeannette Kuo (Assistant Professor in Practice at Harvard GSD and founding partner of KARAMUK KUO) with Swiss architects Emanuel Christ and Christoph Gantenbein, and OFFICE founders Kersten Geers and David Van Severen.