Archinect - Features

GSD Grad Yang Fei Creates Conceptual Renovation and Extension of 18th-Century Townhome

2020-06-29T12:45:00-04:00

Yang Fei is a recent graduate from the Harvard GSD. Archinect connected with Yang to learn more about his final thesis project, which was nominated for the 2020 James Templeton Kelley Prize at GSD. It is a renovation and extension project for an 18th-century townhouse located in the heart of old Montreal.

Archinect's Spotlight on 2020 Thesis Projects: 2020 has been an extraordinarily challenging year for architecture graduates. Students were displaced as schools shut down, academic communities had to adapt to a new virtual format, end-of-year celebrations were canceled or changed dramatically, and now these students are graduating into an extremely challenging employment market. To support the 2020 class we're launching a summer series of features highlighting the work of thesis students during this unique time of remote learning amid COVID-19. Be sure to follow our 2020 thesis tag to stay up to date as we release new project highlights.

Deans List: Sarah Whiting on Taking The Helm of Harvard's Graduate School of Design

2019-12-10T13:23:00-05:00

Deans List is an interview series with the leaders of architecture schools, worldwide. The series profiles the school’s programs, pedagogical approaches, and academic goals, as defined by the dean–giving an invaluable perspective into the institution’s unique curriculum, faculty, and academic environment.

For this installment, Archinect spoke with Sarah M. Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Design (GSD) at Harvard University. The school is home to over 900 students and offers an expansive set of programs and degrees at the undergraduate, masters, and doctoral levels in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and design studies. Whiting, who is a design principal and co-founder of WW Architecture arrived at GSD in July 2019. The last time we spoke to Dean Whiting, she was the Dean at Rice University.

We caught up with Whiting once again as she arrives at Harvard to discuss the school's reputation for years-long curric...

A Conversation With Jennifer Bonner: Architecture's Playful Provocateur of Practice and Pedagogy

2019-06-21T12:14:00-04:00

Understanding architectural practice and pedagogy is one thing; learning how to merge them together and challenge its idiosyncrasies is another. A name often associated with playful obscurity, Jennifer Bonner is a powerful force in the academic and practicing world of architecture. The Huntsville, Alabama native often thanks the city of Las Vegas for her interest in pursuing architecture, but owes much of her highly specific design aesthetic to her experience challenging design systems. Pulling influence and application from ordinary things outside of architecture, Bonner learned to embrace the every day in order to understand any object or task can be represented in architecture.

Pushing herself, her students, and the profession, Bonner continually finds ways to take risks and find new opportunities for discourse and disruption through playfulness and architectural representation. This week Archinect chats with Jennifer Bonner for an in-depth interview discussing the power of alter...

Generating Bias in Architectural Design with Stanislas Chaillou

2019-06-07T13:45:00-04:00

Thesis Review is a collection of conversations, statements and inquiries into the current state of thesis in academia. Thesis projects give a glimpse into the current state of the academic arena while painting a picture for the future of practice.

Each feature will present a contemporary thesis project through the voice of those that constructed it. This week, we talk to Stanislas Chaillou about his thesis, Bias & Architectural Style: A New Frontier for AI In Architecture, recently presented at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, in the Master of Architecture program.

Discovering Techniques of Descriptive and Analytical Geometry with Iman Fayyad

2019-04-04T13:30:00-04:00

This week, we talk to Iman Fayyad. Iman holds a Master in Architecture with Distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she was the recipient of the American Institute of Architects Certificate of Merit, Faculty Design Award, and the Araldo A. Cossutta Prize for Design Excellence.

Latent Rationality & Incompatible Worlds; A Conversation with Zahra Safaverdi

2019-03-05T09:00:00-05:00

Each feature will present a contemporary thesis project through the voice of those that constructed it. This week, we talk to Zahra Safaverdi, Recipient of Harvard Graduate School of Design's James Templeton Kelley Prize.

A Thesis Hidden in the Shadows; A Conversation with Zack Matthews

2019-01-03T09:00:00-05:00

Each feature will present a contemporary thesis project through the voice of those that constructed it. This week, we talk to Zack Matthews about his thesis titled, Untitled 01 170219.

Drawing a Blank: Harvard GSD's Recent Exhibition, Inscriptions, Asks Visitors to Imagine Architecture Before Speech

2018-09-26T09:30:00-04:00

Inscriptions: Architecture before Speech, the inaugural exhibition of the Drucker Design Gallery at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, prompted visitors to “read” the works on display as blank pages might be read.

In an essay on artworks that take the form of blank pages, the media theorist Craig Dworkin catalogs many different ways artists have done something significant while ostensibly doing almost nothing. For example, in the movie Orpheus, a Parisian poet published a book of poetry consisting of nothing but blank pages, titled Nudisme. What this book did in the context of the movie’s fictional poetry scene was very different from a similar blank book, also titled Nudisme and styled in a similar way, that was recently on sale in fashionable Brooklyn shops. Another of Dworkin’s examples, a poet bought 1,500 reams of blank paper and stamped his name on the cover, aiming to sell them as poetry. The patron who funded the project threw “the wretched little thing” into the garbage (...

Fellow Fellows : Zahra Safaverdi

2018-03-02T09:00:00-05:00

Fellow Fellows is a series that focuses on the current eruption of fellowships in academia today. Within this realm, these positions produce a fantastic blend of practice, research, and design influence, traditionally done within a tight time-frame. Fellow Fellows sits down with these fellows and attempts to understand what these positions offer to both the participants and the discipline at large. It is about bringing attention and inquiry to the otherwise maddening pace of revolving academics while giving a broad view of the breakthrough work being done by those who exist in-between the newly minted graduate and the licensed associate.

This week we speak to Zahra Safaverdi who served as the Harvard GSD's Irving innovation fellow in architecture in 2017.

Soapbox: Diversity

2018-01-25T09:00:00-05:00

Soapbox is a weekly series delivering a curated set of lectures, talks and symposia concerning contemporary themes but explored through the archives of lectures past and present. With the plethora of lectures, talks, symposia and panels occurring world wide on a daily basis, how can we begin to keep up and if not, find them once they are gone? Soapbox looks to assemble a selection of recent, archived and outlier lectures surrounding a given theme. Soapbox looks to curate this never-ending library of ideas into an engaging and diverse list of thoughts and provocations. Soapbox is just that, a collection aimed at discovering the occasional needle in a haystack.

SoapBox: Discourse?

2017-11-20T13:02:00-05:00

Recent Wheelwright recipient Samuel Bravo discusses unearthing the architectural vernaculars of the Amazonian region and beyond

2017-07-14T11:45:00-04:00

The Harvard University Graduate School of Design awarded its coveted 2017 Wheelwright Prize to Chilean architect Samuel Bravo for his proposal Projectless: Architecture of Informal Settlements. His work focuses on the traditional architectures and informal settlements of communities in Chile, Peru, and the Amazonian region. Past projects include organizing community-led rebuilding efforts in earthquake-damaged Chile and designing/constructing a lodge, shamanic center and school for the Shipibo people in the Peruvian Amazon.

Discussing the role of jargon and difficulty with Harvard GSD's K. Michael Hays + Lisa Haber-Thomson

2017-06-09T10:30:00-04:00

Why are introductory architecture courses often packed with dense, off-putting jargon? It’s a question I didn't anticipate asking an esteemed architectural historian and current Harvard GSD professor, yet after I unintentionally offended K. Michael Hays by publicly airing my annoyances with jargon and difficulty as part of a recap of a review of his new online course, I realized that I needed to ask it. In fact, I owed it to the Professor; it’s unfair to criticize someone’s teaching style if one hasn’t thoroughly experienced it, although I've taken courses taught by others that used a similar approach.

Screen/Print #51: Moving from the Ordinary to the Extraordinary with "The Generic Sublime"

2017-02-28T17:52:00-05:00

Luxury condominiums, airport hubs, resort complexes, gated communities, satellite cities — these are among the “extra-large” architectural typologies that have proliferated globally in recent years. In The Generic Sublime: Organizational Models for Global Architecture, a new book edited by Ciro Najle and co-published by Actar and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, a series of essays explores these dominating edifices, investigating how the generic “holds the potential to become its very opposite: the singular, the irreducible, and the extraordinary”.

Frank Gehry, Steven Holl, Liz Diller, Rem Koolhaas and Others Share Crucial Moments in Their Education

2016-09-30T12:19:00-04:00

What is the role of education in shaping a visionary architect? Several contemporary architects reflect on how the environment, curriculum, and tangential opportunities of their formal learning influenced and shaped their design sensibility.

Come rain or shine: reviving collective urban form with the GSD's Office for Urbanization

2016-09-16T12:17:00-04:00

In architecture, city-wide design concepts have a checkered history: public housing projects and century-old zoning ordinances seem to have created almost as many problems as they were intended to solve. And yet, the dream of the collective urban form may be restored with the work of the Harvard Graduate Design School’s new Office for Urbanization. Headed by landscape architecture professor Charles Waldheim, the Office for Urbanization is currently tackling the problems of sea level rise in Miami Beach, but the scope of its research is unearthing a promising new realm of possibilities.

Screen/Print #41: "Family Planning" from Harvard Design Magazine

2016-04-22T09:45:00-04:00

It’s among the worst clichés of architectural writing: towers are phallic; stadiums (or just any project by a certain recently-deceased icon) are vulval. But what about when the architects themselves describe their project in genital terms? And, in particular, when they take inspiration not from some heroic idea of rigidity, but rather acceptance of a more prosaic state of flaccidity?