Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium 105, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Public parks are a source of civic identity for the communities they serve – inclusivity and authenticity are crucial. Similarly, memorials are bastions of democratic exchange and act as repositories of our cultural past and evolution. Thomas Woltz will present projects from the portfolio of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects (NBW) that demonstrate the power of the firm’s research-based design to reframe our relationship with civic, ecological, and cultural systems within the public realm. Lastly, Thomas will present NBW projects that...
Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
David Reich, Professor, Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Senior Associate Member, Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT
Sweeping technological innovations in the field of genomics are enabling scientists to extract and analyze ancient...
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Knafel Center, 10 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Anna Von Mertens is an exhibited artist who uses the structures of quilting and drawing to explore the frontiers of human understanding. Her new exhibition "Measure" explores the life and work of Henrietta Leavitt, one of the women “computers” hired to study glass-plate astronomical photographs at the Harvard College Observatory a century ago. Leavitt’s findings provided a unit of measurement for galactic distances. Reimagined in meticulous stitches and intricate graphite marks, Von Mertens examines our current understanding of the size and shape of...
Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium 105, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Why do design? What is it for? These are forward-looking questions for a creative discipline that seems more slippery to define than ever. In a world of dwindling natural resources, exhausted social and political systems, and an overload of information there are many urgent reasons to reimagine the design discipline, and there is a growing need to look at design education. Learning and unlearning should become part of an on-going educational practice. We need new proposals for how to organize society, how to structure our governments, how to...
Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Christina Riggs, Professor of the History of Art and Archaeology, University of East Anglia, United Kingdom
When Howard Carter found the sealed entrance to Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, he secured the services of archaeological photographer Harry Burton to document the site. Over the course of ten years, Burton produced more than 3,000 glass negatives of the tomb, its contents, and the many people—including Egyptian men, women, and children—who participated in the excavation. Christina Riggs will discuss how Burton’s photography helped create “King Tut” at a...
Menschel Hall, Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA
Corinne Wasmuht (b. 1964) is considered one of the most important German painters of her generation. In this lecture, the artist will discuss her work, from her early naturalistic structures of the late 1980s to more recent large-scale oil paintings, which reflect her interest in digital imagery and the anonymity of public space.
Join us for the next Voices in Leadership event of the fall semester, featuring Dr. John Silvanus Wilson, Jr., Senior Advisor and Strategist to the President of Harvard University. He assumed that role after spending much of 2017 as “President in Residence” at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he conducted research for a book about the future of American higher education, with an emphasis on the nation’s historically black colleges and universities. Wilson served as the 11th...
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Knafel Center, 10 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
The Next in Science series provides an opportunity for early-career scientists whose creative, cross-disciplinary research is thematically linked to introduce their work to one another, to fellow scientists, and to nonspecialists from Harvard and the greater Boston area. The focus of this year’s program is in the study of evolution. In this program, two leading researchers will explore the genetic impact of Neanderthal interbreeding with modern humans and consider how people migrated, adapted, and mixed over the course of human history. Two...
Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Irma Boom is an Amsterdam-based graphic designer who specializes in making books. After earning her B.F.A. in graphic design from the AKI Art Academy in Enschedé, she worked for five years at the Dutch government publishing and printing office in The Hague. In 1991 she founded ...
Gund Hall, Stubbins Room 112, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Elisa Silva is director and founder of Enlace Arquitectura established in Caracas Venezuela 2007. Projects focus on raising awareness of spatial inequality and the urban environment through public space, the integration of informal settlements and community engagement in rural landscapes. Public space interventions in informal settlements through participatory methodologies are also...
Dana Greenhouse, Arnold Arboretum, 125 Arborway, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
Learn about seed biology, embryo dormancy, and factors present in woody plant seeds. The class will focus on seed storage and various treatment techniques, including over-wintering and aftercare. Appropriate for those who have succeeded at growing some plants from seed and are ready for greater challenges. Post-class nurturing will be required. Fee $55 members; $68 non-members.
Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium 105, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
One hundred years after his birth, the prolific work of Roman architect Bruno Zevi continues to engage current problems in theory and criticism, and deserves to be revisited. From the publication of Towards an Organic Architecture, in 1945, to his monograph on Erik Gunnar Asplund published the very year of his death in 2000, many of his books have had an electrifying effect on architects and historians. Active as educator and as political activist, he was an engaged, charismatic...
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Knafel Center, 10 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA
To paraphrase Louis Pasteur, sometimes luck favors the prepared mind, as when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin by noticing that mold growing accidentally in his lab seemed to kill bacteria. This 2018 Radcliffe Institute science symposium will focus on how scientists explore realities they cannot anticipate. Speakers from across the disciplines of modern science will present personal experiences and discuss how to train scientists, educators, and funders to foster the expertise and open-mindedness needed to reveal undiscovered aspects of the world around us.
Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA
Approximately 4,000 years ago, the peoples of China and Eurasia gradually began to develop networks of interaction and exchange that radically transformed the cultures of both regions. These networks eventually gave rise to the Silk Road trade routes connecting the East and West. Rowan Flad will examine the archaeological evidence—from the Qijia Culture of Northwest China—that documents the agricultural, metallurgical, and technological innovations that resulted from the earliest trans-Eurasian exchanges, and how studies of the Silk Road origins are being reinvigorated by China’s One...
Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium, Room 105, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA
Please join us for a conversation between visual artists Fritz Haeg and Nils Norman and Julieta González, Artistic Director of Museo Jumex. They will discuss their recent project Proposals for a Plaza at Museo Jumex. Proposals for a Plaza was commissioned as part of the series Agora: Blueprints for a Utopia, and the temporary sculptural installation invites the public to imagine and...
Hunnewell Building, Arnold Arboretum, 125 Arborway, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
Sharon Hessney, Writer and Moderator of New York Times Learning Network "What's Going On in This Graph?"
Graphs can go a long way in conveying information that might otherwise take several paragraphs to explain. But it is easy to misread or not fully understand the content and context. In this participatory program, we will decipher several graphs based on data from Arnold Arboretum curators and scientists. We will also look at the data...
Gund Hall, Stubbins, Room 112, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
For 40 years, Marty Poirier has combined insatiable curiosity with love of community life to practice landscape architecture fused with urbanity, social purpose, and aesthetics. His designs strive to shape expressive places that people connect with.
Marty’s career is filled with assignments informed by the downtown centers in which he has lived and worked – Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Cambridge, New York, and San Diego. His work has focused on places of dense...
Hunnewell Building and Landscape, Arnold Arboretum, 125 Arborway, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
Urban and suburban planting spaces are often constrained, often not ideal for accommodating a large oak, linden, or maple tree. But there are many smaller tree species that will thrive in a smaller space and won’t overwhelm the area. Some trees are cultivars that have been selected for their smaller size or narrow characteristics, while others are naturally genetically petite. Guided by the “right plant, right place” philosophy, Laura Mele...
Gund Hall, Stubbins, Room 112, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge
José Esparza Chong Cuy is the Pamela Alper Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where he recently co-organized a major collection exhibition to celebrate the museum’s 50thanniversary and curated solo shows of Tania Pérez Córdova and Mika Horibuchi. Upcoming projects include a major commission with Federico Herrero, a solo exhibition with Jonathas de Andrade, and a large-scale retrospective on the life and work of Lina Bo Bardi, co-organized with the Museu de arte de São Paulo and the Museo Jumex in Mexico City. Prior to the MCA Chicago, Esparza Chong Cuy was...