For over 40 years, Bill McKibben has been raising the alarm about the climate crisis, starting with his groundbreaking book, The End of Nature. Now McKibben says, for once in his life, he is spreading good news. In his latest book, Here Comes the Sun , he explains why the recent boom in solar and wind power has given him hope for the planet’s future, and he implores everyone to buy in. We hope you can join the Harvard Graduate School of Design on March 26 either online or in the Piper Auditorium for this inspiring and important conversation with Mr. McKibben and Gary Hilderbrand.
This event is supported by the Melissa Kaish and Jonathan Dorfman Makers Fund. Free. Register and receive instructions for livestreaming at www.gsd.harvard.edu
This November 1 Massachusetts Horticultural Society class is for those new to botanical art as well as more experienced artists who desire a short refresher in plant morphology.
Bring your sketchbook and spend the day learning about the form, structure, and function of plants and their components through close observation and immersive drawing exercises intended to enhance your ability to draw plants accurately. The focus of this class is fall fruits, seeds and pods.
A selection of plant materials and specimens will be provided to draw during class. If you have a garden or indoor plant or a botanical specimen (such as a seed pod) you would like to draw, please feel free to bring it to class. Lauren Meier is a botanical artist and landscape architect. She received a BA in Botany from Pomona College and a Masters in Landscape Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design. She worked as a field botanist and plant ecologist before specializing in historic landscapes and has published many articles, contributed to several books, and frequently lectures on topics related to landscape preservation and restoration, treatment of plant material, and the work of the Olmsted Firm. Her publications and projects have received many national and local awards. Meier is currently completing a Certificate in Botanical Art and Illustration from Massachusetts Horticultural Society, formerly the Friends of Wellesley College Botanic Gardens, where she combines her specific interest in the interrelationships between science and art.
The class takes place at The Garden at Elm Bank, 900 Washington Street in Wellesley, from 10 – 4, and is $125 for Mass Hort members, $150 for nonmembers. Register at www.masshort.org
The Harvard Graduate School of Design hosts the Sylvester Baxter Lecture on September 23 at 6:30 pm in the Piper Auditorium, and livestreamed, with Lauren Stimson and Stephen Stimson. Free and open to the public. Register HERE. STIMSON is a collective of 40 designers led by partners Lauren and Stephen Stimson. With a shared love of design, crafts, plants, and landscape, the studio’s work is varied, including public parks, museums, college and school campuses, farms, and gardens. Stephen Stimson founded STIMSON in 1992 and has been practicing landscape architecture for 35 years, after growing up on a dairy farm and studying landscape architecture at UMass Amherst and Harvard. Lauren Stimson’s interest in art, landscape, geology, and history was nurtured at Bates College in Maine, and she earned a dual degree in landscape and planning from UMass Amherst. She joined the studio in 2006, and the pair have been working alongside each other ever since. Raised just two towns apart in New England, they returned to central Massachusetts fifteen years ago to homestead and begin a more remote branch of their practice. Charbrook, a lifelong project that connects designers to the land, serves as their home, studio, working farm, plant nursery, and site of experimentation and open-minded inquiry. STIMSON earned the ASLA’s Firm Award in 2021. Both Stephen and Lauren are ASLA Fellows. Lauren was awarded the 2023-24 Rome Prize, and they spent a year at the American Academy in Rome with their children.
The Harvard Graduate School of Design welcomes the start of the academic year with the Rachel Dorothy Tanur Memorial lectore on September 2 – Urban Natures: Climate Change Adaptation, Design Agency, and Politics, beginning at 5 pm Eastern in the Piper Auditorium in Cambridge, Free and open to the public, A live stream for this event will be available by clicking HERE at the scheduled start time. The exhibition in the Druker Design Gallery measures how far we have come since the first public gardens were created, and it challenges us to envision the future of our cities in new ways. Following remarks by Dean Sarah Whiting and curator Antoine Picon, Erika Naginski will moderate a panel discussion between Gary R. Hilderbrand, Ali Malkawi, and Mohsen Mostafavi, about three themes in the exhibition: climate change adaptation, the agency of designers, and the role of urban natures in promoting new collective values.
This event is generously supported by The Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities and the Villa Albertine, the French Institute of Culture & Education. A reception will follow, made possible by the generous support of Ron Druker. Register for the live event at www.gsd.harvard.edu
Internationally renowned photographer An-My Lê seeks “to photograph the landscape in such a way that it suggests a universal history, a personal history, a history of culture.” In this lecture, Lê presents two new series of recent photographs, Dark Star and Grey Wolf, continuing her exploration of the contradictory nature of the manifest and the sublime within the contemporary American landscape, and the latter as a present-day locus of technology, power and ambition. In Lê’s work, scale is both temporal and historical, encompassing themes of displacement, war, memory, and resilience. These are present in her earliest black and white pictures of Vietnam (1994-1998) in which she returned to a scarred homeland as a political refugee, to her pictures of war re-enactors in the southern U.S. (Small Wars, 1999-2002), to staged military training exercises in the American desert (29 Palms, 2003-04), to her more recent lens on polarization in the United States through a series of historical fragments (Silent General, 2015 to today). With extraordinary consideration of history and culture, Lê’s view of her subjects often incorporates an elevated perspective to achieve its signature precision and ethical neutrality. In zooming out to look closer, her stepped-back “proscenium framing” brings into crystal clear vision her observations and stories, not unlike layers of a history painting.
The Harvard Graduate School of Design presents the 2025 Aga Khan Program Lecture with Jala Makhzoumi entitled Landscape, Garden, and a Colonial Legacy, on March 11 at 6:30 in the Piper Auditorium in Gund Hall, and also streaming online (the link will be available at https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/event/jala-makhzoumi-landscape-garden-and-a-colonial-legacy/ when the event begins.) Free. Registration not required.
The speaker says: “My search for a grounded language on landscape architecture relies in great part on the search for Arabic terms that capture the complexity of the layered English meaning of “landscape.” Until then, we must contend with inadequate translations—and sometimes transliterations—that reduce “landscape” to scenery and narrow the professional scope of the landscape architect to urban beautification. Moving away from the “borrowed” landscapes in cities, we encounter “rooted” conceptions in rural cultures. These ideas have endured over time and are in tune with the regional ecology and cultural values. Here, we find many iterations of “landscape,” even if they can’t be captured in a single word. For example, the traditional house garden typology, the hakura, which originated in the eastern Mediterranean, combines production and pleasure and is grounded in a love of nature and caring for the land. Can these examples inform and inspire a contextualized landscape architecture in the Middle East and beyond?”
Jala Makhzoumi is an adjunct professor of landscape architecture at the American University of Beirut, and Acting President of the International Federation of Landscape Architects, the Middle East Region. Teaching and practicing in a region where landscape architecture is still an emerging profession has brought many challenges but freed Jala to engender a definition of landscape architecture that is responsive to the ecological, socio-cultural, and political context of the region. She applies this contextual landscape approach to the conservation of natural and cultural heritage, to framing human rights and citizenship and in her approach to postwar recovery.
Her publications include Ecological Landscape Design and Planning: The Mediterranean Context, co-author Pungetti, The Right to Landscape: Contesting Landscape and Human Rights, co-editors Egoz and Pungetti, and Horizon 101, a collection of paintings and prose, reflections on landscape and identity. Jala is the recipient of the Tamayouz Women in Architecture and Construction Award (2013), was profiled by the Aga Khan Women Architects (2014), received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools (2019) and is the 2021 laureate of the IFLA Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award for her outstanding contribution to education and practice in landscape architecture.
The African Landscape Architectures conference at the Harvard Graduate School of Design on March 6 & 7 brings together a wide range of landscape practices from across the continent. This two-day hybrid event highlights the transformative potential of decolonizing design to address social injustices and prepare African cities for the impacts of climate change. Speakers will explore innovative strategies through frameworks such as ecology, adaptation, and materiality that offer alternative futures for African landscapes.
The conference is co-hosted by the Department of Landscape Architecture and the Department of African and African American Studies with generous support from:
The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
The Provost’s Fund for Interfaculty Collaboration
Center for African Studies
Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Alwaleed Islamic Studies Program
Hutchins Center for African and African American Research
The Critical Landscapes Design Lab at the Graduate School of Design
The International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA), Africa Region.
The Opening Keynote speaker is Princess Adedoyin Talabi Faniyi, High Priestess, Osun Sacred Grove, Osogbo, Nigeria, with Tarna Klitzner, TKLA, Cape Town, South Africa.
Historic New England is delighted to announce Earle G. Shettleworth Jr. as the recipient of our second Preservation Leadership Award for his lifelong dedication to promoting and protecting Maine’s history and architecture.
A native of Portland, Maine, Shettleworth attended Deering High School, Colby College, and Boston University. He has received honorary degrees from Bowdoin College, Colby College, and the Maine College of Art. His storied career includes a forty-year tenure as director of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, from which he retired in 2015, and six terms (and counting) as Maine’s State Historian. Shettleworth’s visionary leadership stands as an inspiration not only to Mainers, but to all New Englanders who share his passion for and commitment to preserving the built environment, cultural landscapes, and our region’s history.
Earle G. Shettleworth Jr. will accept the Preservation Leadership Award at the 2024 Historic New England Summit in Portland, Maine. The Summit will take place November 14 and 15 at The Westin Portland Harborview in Portland, Maine, and will be livestreamed. There is a stellar list of presenters over two days, from Maurice Cox of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, to Jim Schachter, President and CEO of New Hampshire Public Radio, to composer Tod Machover of MIT Media Lab – there are too many to list here. For the complete schedule visit www.summit.historicnewengland.org
The Harvard Graduate School of Design exhibition Changing Climates explores how built environments can be transformed into urban ecologies. Producing an enhanced micro-climate, each of these ecologies has the capacity to augment the resilience of the urban condition under the challenges of the climate crisis.
A city can be understood as the juxtaposition of many artificial micro-climates. Buildings change wind patterns and sunlight exposure, while streetscapes modify runoff and soil permeability. For each man-made micro-climate, a comparable natural condition can be found. The study of its living organisms informs the introduction of vegetation as an agent of change into the artificial environment.
The city thus becomes a second nature and an active laboratory. Similar to plants that have gradually transformed their environment, and life in general that has been shaping the form of the earth, these urban ecologies have the force to transform the very nature of the city into a living organism. The built environment becomes an intelligent interface between an uncertain meteorology and an underused geology. Positioned between the above and the below, cities develop into a true zone of life.
In this October 31 lecture in the Piper Auditorium of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Bas Smets will explore how these new urban ecologies can be conceived and constructed through a selection of projects featured in the exhibition. Varying in both scale and program, these projects show how to develop solution-based design through science-based research.
A reception will follow in the Druker Design Gallery. Free and open to the public. Complete information may be found at www.gsd.harvard.edu.
The Harvard Graduate School of Design presents the Kenzo Tange Lecture with Sean Godsell on October 17 at 6:30 pm in Gund Hall in Cambridge. The event is free and open to the public. Complete information is available at www.gsd.harvard.edu
Australia is hot and dry. Over 70% of the country is arid or semi-arid and sparsely populated. We are basically a giant desert about the same geographical size as the mainland US but with approximately the same population as greater Los Angeles. Despite our vast mineral wealth, water remains our most precious commodity, and fire and floods are our constant concern. For us, “the bush” is a mystical, mythical place. Australians know of the Outback, the Never Never, the Dreamtime, and the Songlines of our Indigenous communities. Here, “the bush” mediates between our colonial coastalism and the endless emptiness of the rest. These are dreamy, half-real skies.
Sean Godsell was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1960. He graduated with First Class Honours from The University of Melbourne in 1984. He spent much of 1985 traveling in Japan and Europe and worked in London from 1986 to 1988 for Sir Denys Lasdun. In 1994, he formed Sean Godsell Architects. His work has been published in the world’s leading Architectural journals, and he has lectured and exhibited in the USA, UK, China, Japan, India, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, and New Zealand as well as across Australia.
In July 2002, the influential English design magazine Wallpaper* listed him as one of ten people destined to “change the way we live.” His Future Shack housing prototype was exhibited at the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in New York in 2005 and the facade prototype of the RMIT Design Hub is on permanent display at the V+A Museum in London.
He has received numerous local and international awards, including the 2022 Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal. His work has been published in the monographsSean Godsell(Electa, 2005), Sean Godsell: Tough Subtlety(El Croquis, 2013), and Sean Godsell: Houses(Thames and Hudson, 2018). In 2013 and 2014, he was visiting professor at the IUAV in Venice. He is adjunct professor of architecture at Deakin University. Photo below by Earl Carter.
