2020 Oct 08
Loeb Lecture: Edgar Pieterse
12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
African cities are confronted by large youthful labour markets with limited prospects of formal industrial employment, on the one hand, and rapid physical expansion without the resources to address the massive infrastructural requirements to support people and economies, on the other. These daunting challenges are compounded by the impacts of the climate crisis and other forms of acute environmental risk. This confluence calls for situated innovations to reimagine and redesign investments in sustainable infrastructures that are simultaneously low-carbon, labour-intensive and geared...
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2020 Oct 07
From the Hands of the Makers
6:00pm to 7:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Museum of Natural History—Online
From 1886 to 1936, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka applied their artistic talents and knowledge of natural history to create an exquisite collection of glass models of plants to support the botanical education of Harvard students and the public. This program will explore the history, conservation, and relevance of the Glass Flowers in the twenty-first century and introduce the publication Glass Flowers: Marvels of Art and Science at Harvard, a compendium of new photographs that captures the beauty and magnificent detail of the models.
...
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2020 Oct 07
Animals: A Mission Brief
12:00pm to 1:00pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
Using the military's "five-paragraph order" format, Mackin will provide the listener with the essential information needed to carry out and understand the mission of writing a war story. "Animals," is a collection of short stories based on his experiences as a special operations soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Learn more about and RSVP for Animals: A Mission Brief....
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2020 Oct 06
Lecture: Cannon Fodder: Debating the Racial Politics of Canonicity in Modern Architectural History
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
This talk introduces audiences to the antiracist framework for architectural history that guided the formulation of the recent monograph Building Character: The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style (2020). This revisionist intellectual history recovers the ways that architectural organicism provided a rationalist model of design to consciously relate the perceived racial and architectural “characters” of a nation to the people they served.
From the ethnographic histories of style penned by Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Gottfried Semper, to Louis Sullivan...
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2020 Oct 05
Lecture: Metahaven, “Inhabitant”
12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
How can we respond to the imperative of being in the now, of inhabiting the present? Can a work absorb the moment in time of its making without becoming like the news?
Inhabitant is about this question and how it has informed our work in filmmaking, art, and design. Referring to processes of sensing and inhabiting as practiced by non-human-species such as mushrooms and lichens, we will reference the work of Anna Tsing and Jennifer Gabrys, among others. In doing so, Inhabitant will explore affinities between sensing and cinematic capture.
...
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2020 Oct 03
Amazing Virtual Archaeology Fair at Harvard
1:00pm to 3:00pm
Location: 
Online—Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East
Celebrate the glamour, labor, humor, and discoveries of archaeology at Harvard. Join student archaeologists as they share their experience with an Irish castle, a shaft tomb in western Mexico, monuments on the Giza plateau in Egypt and drones used to study El-Kurru in ancient Nubia, among other locations. Place a friendly wager on an atlatl (spear throwing) demonstration, observe chew marks on bones from the Zooarchaeology Lab and experience a virtual-reality view of the Great Sphinx.
...
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2020 Oct 03
Student Guide Tour: Art in Exile, with Vlad Batagui
11:00am to 11:30am
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
Join us live on Zoom for a Student Guide Tour! Vlad Batagui ’21 explores the relationship between art and the origins of creation, looking at different ways in which art objects and artists get removed from their original cultural contexts. This free tour will take place online via Zoom.
To join, click the following link: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/94341342869 (no pre-registration required).
...
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2020 Oct 03
Creature Feature: Merpeople!
10:00am to 10:30am
Location: 
Harvard Art Museums—Online
Creature Feature, a new online series from the Harvard Art Museums, offers a chance for families with children ages 6 and up to explore magical creatures across the collections through close-looking and curious exploration with museum staff. In this talk, take a (virtual) trip to the sea! Join curatorial assistants Casey Monahan and Heather Linton on Zoom to discover sirens and merpeople in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s "A Sea-Spell" and Edward Farrell’s "Pair of Rutland Tazzas."
This online talk is free and open to all, but registration is required. To register, please complete...
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2020 Oct 01
On Account of Sex (1920)
4:00pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
The passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 did not "give" women the vote. Rather, it established a negative: that the right to vote could not be abridged on account of sex alone. This session brings together diverse participants who will each illuminate one facet of women’s political history at this key transitional moment. Together, participants will emphasize the radical achievement of the amendment, exploring the full implications of what it meant to remove sex as a barrier to voting, which resulted in the largest-ever one-time expansion of the electorate and mobilized a...
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2020 Oct 01
Lecture: [Re]Constructing Real Estate: The Question of Value
12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
For this event with the Harvard Graduate School of Design, speaker Emmanuel Pratt will contextualize the historical degeneration vs. regeneration of The Commonwealth to present date, lead viewers on a virtual site visit, and share some upcoming developments emerging across a network of value-based partners.
Speaker:
Emmanuel Pratt, LF ‘17, received a BArch (1999) from Cornell University and an MSAUD (Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design, 2003) from Columbia University. From 2011 to 2019, Pratt served as the director of aquaponics at Chicago...
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2020 Sep 28
Our Common Purpose: Voting by Design
12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Online—Harvard Graduate School of Design
Join the Harvard Graduate School of design for a virtual lecture with Michael Murphy, Danielle Allen, and Sarah Whiting.
Michael Murphy is the Founding Principal and Executive Director of MASS Design Group, an architecture and design collective with offices in Boston, Kigali, Poughkeepsie, Santa Fe, Cape Town, and London. As a designer, writer, and teacher, his work investigates the social and political consequences of the built world. Michael’s research and writing advocates for a new empowerment that calls on architects to consider the power relationships of...
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2020 Sep 26
Learning to See: Art, Medical Imaging, and Project Success
4:00pm to 5:00pm
Location: 
Online—Harvard Art Museums
How can looking at art help high school students envision a future for themselves in medicine? Join us live on Zoom to learn more about a recent collaboration with Project Success for High School Students, a summer school program at Harvard Medical School that offers 11th and 12th graders from Boston and Cambridge an opportunity to explore professional pathways in the biomedical field. This collaboration builds on a program that helps doctors-in-training better understand their patients by engaging with art at the Harvard Art Museums.
Following presentations by this year’s...
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2020 Sep 25
In Pursuit of Equitable Development: Lessons from Washington, Detroit, and Boston
12:30pm to 4:30pm
Location: 
Online—Harvard Graduate School of Design
In this half-day virtual symposium, leading practitioners and scholars from three cities, Washington, DC, Detroit, and Boston, will explore efforts to bring equitable development to their communities and outline how they are responding to current challenges. The presentations and discussions will help students, scholars, community leaders, public officials, and others identify innovative strategies and successful approaches to advancing social justice in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.
Co-sponsored by the Joint Center for Housing...
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2020 Sep 25
Art Study Center Seminar at Home: Plastics in the Collections
11:00am to 12:00pm
Location: 
Online—Harvard Art Museums
Since the early 20th century, plastic has been a popular material for many artists due to its ability to be transformed—bent, shaped, molded, stretched. However, when works made with plastic enter a museum collection, they bring numerous challenges. Join conservation scientist Georgina Rayner and conservator Susan Costello to learn more about the materials, condition and treatment issues, and the demands this material poses for storage and display.
Led by:
Susan Costello, Associate Conservator of Objects and Sculpture, Straus Center for Conservation and...
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2020 Sep 23
Leaving New Orleans: A Personal Urban History
12:00pm
Location: 
Online—Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard
As the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow, Leslie M. Harris is completing “Leaving New Orleans: A Personal Urban History.” She uses memoir and family, urban, and environmental histories to explore the multiple meanings of New Orleans in the nation, from its founding through its uncertain future amid climate change.
...
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2020 Sep 22
50th Anniversary of Urban Design Lecture: Alex Krieger, “The American City Prior and (Possibly) Following the Pandemic”
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Online Event, Graduate School of Design
 
American instincts oscillate between the allure of the city and that of life free of city stress; between the temptations of the metropolis, and bucolic retreat from those very centers of civic life. Such oscillation, occurring across American history, have on the one hand enabled the building of Manhattan, the ‘Capital of Capitalism’ (and culture, too) and the invention of the ‘garden suburb’ where family grace was to dwell, prior to metastasizing into sprawl.
...
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2020 Sep 21
Exhibition Opening and Artist Talk: Accompanied
4:00pm
Location: 
Online—Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard
The artists Marilyn Pappas and Jill Slosburg-Ackerman met at Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute in the 1980s. Decades later, their sustained friendship has led them to work in adjoining studios and teach generations of artists.
In this exhibition-opening discussion, Pappas and Slosburg-Ackerman will reflect on how their artistic practices have been shaped by friendship and the ways in which women’s art is shaped by the conditions of its making. Pappas and Slosburg-Ackerman will be joined in conversation by author Maggie Doherty.
...
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2020 Sep 21
Kiley Fellow Lecture: Seth Denizen, "Thinking Through Soil: Case Study from the Mezquital Valley"
12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Online—Harvard Graduate School of Design
Almost 200,000 acres of land in the fertile Mezquital Valley are irrigated with the untreated sewage of Mexico City. Every drop of rain, urban runoff, industrial effluent, and sewage in Mexico City is sent to the Mezquital Valley through a 60 kilometer pipe. Soils in this valley have been continuously irrigated with urban wastewater since 1901, longer than any other soil in the world. The capacity of these soils to produce conditions in which agriculture can be practiced safely and produce healthy crops depends on a complex negotiation between soil...
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2020 Sep 17
Observatory Night: What Stars Are Made Of
7:00pm
Location: 
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian—Online
Join the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian for a virtual Public Observatory Night with guest lecturer Donavan Moore, author of "What Stars Are Made Of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin."
It was not easy being a woman of ambition in early twentieth-century England, much less one who wished to be a scientist. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin overcame prodigious obstacles to become a woman of many firsts: the first to receive a PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe College, the first promoted to full professor at Harvard, the first to head a department there. And, in what...
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2020 Sep 16
Lecture: Apprenticeship in Ancient Egypt
6:00pm to 7:00pm
Location: 
Online—Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East
Presenter: Willeke Wendrich, Joan Silsbee Chair of African Cultural Archaeology; Professor of Egyptian Archaeology and Digital Humanities, University of California, Los Angeles
Archaeologists study stylistic and technological changes in excavated materials—especially pottery—to better understand developments in ancient Egyptian society. However, little attention has focused on using the archaeological record to understand the transfer of cultural knowledge. How did people learn the arts and crafts of potters, basket makers, metalworkers, and scribes?...
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