Since the mid-20th century, US parks have evolved from highly programmed recreation spaces to ones that harken back to the 19th century, when strolling in nature and enjoying cultural offerings resonated with urban dwellers. Our monuments – those silent artifacts of history – have evolved along a similar course. As our nation becomes more culturally aware, many monuments are scrutinized for the values, meaning, and individuals they celebrate. Signe Nielsen, landscape architect and former President of the Public Design Commission, which owns all the public art in New York City, will discuss strategies to address controversial monuments in search of a deeper understanding of history. Nielson will highlight one park, Little Island, which embodies recent trends in park design and the intersection of art, nature, and culture. This Harvard Graduate School of Design lecture will take place September 26 at 12:30 pm at Gund Hall, 112 Stubbins in Cambridge, and is free and open to the public.
Signe Nielsen has been practicing as a landscape architect and urban designer in New York since 1978. Her body of work has renewed the environmental integrity and transformed the quality of spaces for those who live, work and play in the urban realm. She believes in using design as a vehicle for advocacy, to promote discourse on social equity and community resilience. She has served on multiple panels to effect positive change. A Fellow of the ASLA, she is the recipient of over 100 national and local design awards for public open space projects and is published extensively in national and international publications. Ms. Nielsen is a Professor of Urban Design and Landscape Architecture at Pratt Institute in both the Graduate and Undergraduate Schools of Architecture and is the former President for the Public Design Commission of the City of New York. Born in Paris, Ms. Nielsen holds degrees in Urban Planning from Smith College, in Landscape Architecture from City College of New York, and in Construction Management from Pratt Institute.
Sand and stone are Earth’s fragmented memory. Each of us is also a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. Lauret Savoy’s Trace interweaves journeys and historical inquiry across a continent and time to explore how this country’s still unfolding history has marked the land, this society, and her. From twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds to names on the land, from “Indian Territory” and the U.S.-Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often-unvoiced presence of the past. Lauret will offer elements from this book and introduce her current project on the Chesapeake region. The new work braids histories of the land and of “race” using as a lens her search for ancestors, lives entwined by converging diasporas from Africa, Indigenous America, and the Indian Ocean basin with immigrants from Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their stories are entangled with the rise and fall of tobacco agriculture and the origin and growth of the capital city along the Potomac River. Lauret delves through fragmented histories—geological, personal, cultural—to find shadowy outlines of other stories of place in America. She asks, what is your relationship with history, told and untold, on this land? Lauret will speak at the Harvard Graduate School of Design on March 26 at 6:30 in the Gund Hall Piper Auditorium in Cambridge. Free and open to the public.
Lauret Savoy‘s research and writing consider how the nation’s ever-unfolding history has marked the land and people. Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape won the 2016 American Book Award; it was a finalist for PEN American and additional honors. Her other books include The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural Worldand Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology, named one of the “Five Best” science books in the Wall Street Journal. Lauret writes of the complex intertwinings of natural and cultural histories to understand the American land’s origins—and the stories we tell of ourselves in this land. A woman of African American, Euro-American, and Indigenous heritages, Lauret is the David B. Truman Professor of Environmental Studies & Geology at Mount Holyoke College. Winner of Mount Holyoke’s Distinguished Teaching Award and an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, Lauret has also held fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution and Yale University. She is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and a pilot.
You are invited to the Margaret McCurry Lectureship in the Design Arts on March 19 at 6:30 with Petra Blaisse, in conversation with Grace La, Niels Olsen, and Fredi Fischli, at the Harvard Graduate School of Design Gund Hall Piper Auditorium in Cambridge. Free. Designer Petra Blaisse discusses her forthcoming publication Art Applied, Inside Outside(2024), a kaleidoscopic view of her work across interior, exhibition, and landscape design over three decades. This comprehensive survey encompasses renowned projects, including the recently completed Taipei Performing Arts Center; the Kunsthal Rotterdam; Biblioteca degli Alberi in Milan, a park spanning almost ten hectares; and LocHal Library in Tilburg, a vast factory repurposed using an architecture of semitranslucent curtains. Joining the conversation are the GSD’s Grace La, Chair of the Department of Architecture; Niels Olsen, John Portman Design Critic in Architecture; and Fredi Fischli, John Portman Design Critic in Architecture.
Petra Blaisse, Inside Outside’s lead designer, works in a multitude of creative areas including interior design, landscape architecture, exhibition and textile design. After an education in the visual arts and work for commercial photographers and filmers she became assistant curator at the Applied Arts department of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 1986 she became free-lance exhibition designer.
While realizing a series of experimental installations and exhibitions with the Rotterdamse Kunststichting (1988) and OMA (1987-1992), Blaisse’s assignments extended to the architectural field, where her focus on interior interventions (material, colour, light) and large-scale curtains developed, parallel to her life-long passion for gardening. After a two-year period of practical schooling in the early 90’s to gain botanical knowledge, Blaisse decided to add garden design to her practice.
Since 2016 Inside Outside is led by Blaisse and partners Aura Luz Melis (architect) and Jana Crepon (landscape architect) in collaboration with long-time colleague Peter Niessen (fashion designer). The studio specializes in the creation of dynamic, ever-changing environments of various levels of complexity, both inside and outside.
Catherine Mosbach is a landscape architect and the Founder of Paris-based design firm mosbach paysagistes and the magazine Pages Paysages. In her Harvard Graduate School of Design Aga Khan Program Lecture, she will address drawing in relation to landscape. Meditating on the practice of drawing, she asks: “What would this imprint-trace-landscape-desire be if we gave up drawing, an instrument of open dialogue, revealing the living ongoing, which teaches us and helps us evolve in our relationship with the host land and the beings who inhabit it?”
Catherine’s key projects include the Solutre Archaeological Park in Saone-et-Loire, Walk Sluice of Saint-Denis, the Botanical Garden of Bordeaux, the other side in Quebec City, Shan Shui in Xian & Lost in Transition in Ulsan. She was the recipient of the Equerre D’argent award with Kazuyo Sejima & Ryue Nishizawa for the Louvre Lens Museum Park & was honored in the Iconic Concept Award category by the German Design Council and Platine Award by INT.design 15th Montreal for Phase Shifts Park in Taichung. The team was honored Firm of the Year 2021 in Landscape and Urban Design by Architecture Master Prize Los Angeles. Catherine was named a knight of the Legion of Honour proposed by the President of the Republic Francois Hollande in 2016. “In the net of desires” with ovvo studio explores the infinitesimal of the living by XXI Triennale de Milano 2017. Some of her latest essays are ‘emersion’, dialog Jerome Boutterin with Catherine Mosbach, Jerome Boutterin Reboot 1999-2022, (eds.) snoeck MMBOOKS BELGIQUE and ‘de passage’ la couleur en questions, directe by Michel Menu, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Romain Thomas; Collection la Nature de l’oeuvre, ed Hermann, 2023.
Free and open to the public. The November 14 lecture will take place at 6:30 in the Piper Auditorium of Gund Hall, Oxford Street, Cambridge. For more information visit HERE.
Latin America contains 31% of the world’s water sources. Adding in the Caribbean, drinking water coverage in the area reaches 94% compared to developing countries. However, 37 million people still do not have access to water, and 100 million lack access to sanitation (World Bank). Chile, for its part, has 99% drinking water coverage. However, a large amount of its territory is in a continental zone that will be strongly affected by the future consequences of climate change, both because of droughts and floods, a product of the receding of the Andean glaciers and of the evolution of projected precipitation patterns. Thus, climate change will force the Andean regions to rethink how they manage their water resources and the infrastructure that supports their management. Better collection, storage, and distribution systems will be essential when promoting ecological and socially sustainable development. It is necessary to have an integrated view of resources and the infrastructure that manages them, thinking about the multiple dimensions to which these could cohesively respond.
On November 3, the Harvard Graduate School of Design will feature Tomás Folch, in Gund Hall 112, for a free public lecture. He is currently a professor and Co-Director of the Center for Ecology, Landscape and Urbanism –CEPU- of the Design Lab of the Adolfo Ibañez University in Santiago and a Founding Partner at PAUR. Folch earned his undergraduate Architecture and Master of Architecture degrees from the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, and his Masters in Landscape Architecture from the GSD.
Trained as an architect, his professional work has expanded the scales of architecture, urban design, and landscape through professional experience with production on heritage and urban recovery projects, housing and social equipment, landscape architecture, and territorial planning. He is co-founder with Sofia Armanet of Paisaje Urbano -PAUR- where their work has been oriented to public space and includes built projects such as urban parks in informal areas, restoration designs for urban wetlands in Santiago, and consultancy for international agencies for the informal city in Latin.
His work has been featured in international exhibitions, such as the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture and the 2006 Architecture Biennial of Chile in the category of emerging generation. He has received numerous awards, such as the National Exhibition Award in the Architecture Biennial of Santiago 2008, the South-South Professional Award of the XX Architecture Biennial of Chile 2017 for being the proposal more effective in establishing a horizontal dialogue with the geographies of the global south, and the PAU 2017 Urban Contribution Award in the categories of Best Height Building Project and Best Urban Project for Subsidized Housing.
Anita Berrizbeitia is a Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She served as Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture between 2015-2022 and as Program Director of the Master in Landscape Architecture Degree Programs between 2012-2015. Her research explores nineteenth and twentieth-century public realm landscapes, with interests in material culture, urban political ecology, and the productive functions of landscapes in processes of urbanization and climate adaptation. Her research on Latin American cities and landscapes focuses, in addition, on the role of large-scale infrastructural projects on territorial organization, climate adaptation, and on the interface between landscape and emerging urbanization.
A licensed landscape architect, she has worked on a broad range of projects and competitions, including urban design, campus planning, public parks, and residential gardens. She is a consultant for national and international landscape architectural firms and has served on juries of multiple design competitions in the US and abroad, including Chair of the Jury of the Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, and design competitions in Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, Spain, and the Middle East. At Harvard, she serves on the university’s Design Review Board, the Harvard University Committee on the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute Public Art Competition. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Landscape Architecture (JoLA). Before joining the GSD in 2009 she was a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania.
At the GSD she has taught core Landscape Architecture studios and core Urban Design studios. Her option studios have focused on urban and territorial scale infrastructures, on emergent urbanization, and climate adaptation. She has also taught design theory in both the core and elective curricula.
Berrizbeitia is editor of Urban Landscape—Critical Concepts in Built Environment Series; editor of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates: Reconstructing Urban Landscapes(Yale University Press), which received an ASLA Honor Award; author of Roberto Burle Marx in Caracas: Parque del Este, 1956–1961 (Penn Press), awarded the inaugural J.B. Jackson Book Prize in 2007 from the Foundation for Landscape Studies; and co-author with Linda Pollak of Inside/Outside: Between Architecture and Landscape, which won an ASLA Merit Award. Her essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies, including the Journal of Landscape Architecture (JoLA); Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes; Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts(National Gallery of Art); Cultural History of Gardens (Berg Publishers); Sao Paolo: A Graphic Biography(University of Texas Press), Cerros Islas Santiago (Fundación Cerros Islas); Recovering Landscape(Princeton Architectural Press);CASE: Downsview Park Toronto(Prestel); Large Parks(Princeton Architectural Press); and Retorno al Paisaje (Evren) among others. With Diane Davis, she co-edited Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics (2021).
Berrizbeitia received a BA from Wellesley College in Studio Art and an MLA from the GSD. She was awarded the Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 2006.
This lecture explores how developments in the earth sciences—specifically geology, evolutionism, and biogeography—ushered in advances in design methodologies for large public–realm landscapes in late nineteenth-century Boston.
In her earlier work on Charles Eliot’s Metropolitan Park System of 1892, she argued that geology had provided a framework for re-envisioning what had become a fragmented territory as a unified whole. Eliot proposed the region’s formative processes and the thick and unseen strata underlying the visible and varied topography in and around Boston as the foundation for a new political geography for a rapidly expanding city. For the Blue Hills, the largest of the reservations of the park system, Eliot turns his attention to the surface, proposed as a mantle of vegetation that drapes over the hills’ granitic foundation. Eliot introduces methods of biogeography to fieldwork, of forestry and conservation, and of what today we call restoration ecology. However, Eliot also prompts us to reconsider the role of the wild and wilderness, and of aesthetics in relationship to a growing public. Rather than being the product of a singular or unified framework, his proposal shows us the intertwining of multiple design methods and ways of knowing that join notions of the “wild” and of the “urban.”
Harvard Graduate School of Design is proud to host this October 10 Frederick Law Olmsted free lecture at Gund Hall’s Piper Auditorium beginning at 6:30 pm. For complete details visit www.gsd.harvard.edu
Join Uli Lorimer, director of Horticulture at Native Plant Trust and author of The Northeast Native Plant Primer- 235 Plants for an Earth-Friendly Garden (Timber Press) and Rebecca McMackin, Loeb Fellow, Harvard Graduate School of Design, and former director of Horticulture, Brooklyn Bridge Park, for an evening of no-holds-barred discussion about native plants in horticulture from two of the leading experts in the field today. The event will be moderated by Barbara Moran, a correspondent on WBUR’s environmental team. For 25 years, she has worked as a science journalist covering public health, environmental justice, and the intersection of science and society. She has written for many publications, including the New York Times and the Boston Globe Magazine, and produced television documentaries for PBS and others. She was twice awarded the National Association of Science Writers’ highest honor, the Science in Society Award.
This is a hybrid event: Live virtual and in person at Garden in the Woods, Framingham, MA. The talk is scheduled for March 31 from 6 – 8 Eastern.
Attend in person: Tickets $30 (members)/$36 (non-members)
Please note: We at the Native Plant Trust do not make video or audio recordings of classes or programs available after the fact, because we believe education is interactive, with instructors and students building a community and culture of learning. Some programs may be recorded strictly for instructor-training purposes.
The climate crisis poses the urgent challenge to make our urban environment more resilient in the face of unprecedented atmospheric changes such as rising temperatures, intensified rainfall, and longer droughts.
A city can be understood as a sequence of artificial microclimates. Buildings change wind patterns and sunlight exposure, while streetscapes modify soil permeability, runoff, and solar radiation. For each man-made microclimate, a comparable natural condition can be studied. Research on habitats and on the survival strategies of the organisms living within them permits the introduction of plants into artificial urban environments that have similar climatic conditions.
Using the logic of nature, cities can be transformed into complex urban ecologies, blurring the boundaries between the artificial and the natural. Science-based research allows the conception of solution-based projects, revealing our built environment as a network of microclimates in which plants combine the absorption of carbon dioxide with the production of evaporative cooling, simultaneously reducing the source of the problem and mitigating its effects.
The built environment thus becomes a hybrid living organism, lying at the interface between a changing meteorology and an underused geology. Biospheric Urbanism conceives the urban environment as the intersection connecting what lies above and what lies below, using the intelligence of plants.
Bas Smets (b. 1975) has a background in landscape architecture, civil engineering and architecture. He founded his firm in Brussels in 2007 and has since completed more than 50 projects in more than 12 countries with his team of 25 architects and landscape architects.
His projects include the Parc des Ateliers in Arles, the park of Thurn & Taxis in Brussels, the Mandrake Hotel in London, and the Himara Waterfront in Albania. In 2022 he won the international competition for public space around the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, France.
Each of these projects is part of an interrelated research into the possible role and ambition of landscape projects. The aim is to invent ‘Augmented Landscapes’ by using the logics of nature. These augmented landscapes produce a new microclimate while providing new atmospheres. The collaboration with artists and scientists takes a central role in this research.
A first monographic exhibition was presented in 2013 by deSingel International Arts Center in Antwerp and Arc-en-Reve centre for architecture in Bordeaux. Bas Smets has received numerous honours and awards, among which the Award for Urbanism and Public Space from the French Royal Academy of Architecture and the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.
This Harvard Graduate School of Design lecture, the Daniel Urban Kiley lecture, is free and open to the public on Thursday March 23 at 6:30 pm in Gund Hall of the Piper Auditorium in Cambridge. For more information and accessibility information, visit https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/event/bas-smets-biospheric-urbanism/
Blending traditional Yankee building techniques with high design, Maine native Matthew Cunningham is well-known for his plantcentric residential landscapes throughout the Northeast. His gardens feature ecologically minded planting schemes and regionally sourced reclaimed materials that evoke an authentic sense of place, while showcasing his unique ability to grasp the dynamic rhythms of everyday life. With offices in Massachusetts and Maine, Matthew Cunningham’s firm, MCLD, has garnered awards from ASL A, the Boston Society of Landscape Architects, and APLD to name a few. His gardens have been published in magazines such as Architectural Digest, Garden Design, and New England Home. Cunningham is currently a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Prior to founding MCLD, he worked for Reed Hilderbrand.
The Design of Disability convenes conversation on the design and planning of the public realm in relation to human capacities, civic aspirations, and bodily experience beyond access. This March 9 lecture in the Calderwood Hall at the Museum features Victor Calise, advocate for people with disabilities, author and professor Elizabeth Guffey, and artist and professor Sara Hendren.
The Larger Landscape Conversation is a recurring series at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum that brings together visionaries across disciplines to discuss the intersection of creativity, lived experience, and social justice.
This program is moderated by Charles Waldheim, Ruettgers Curator of Landscape at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Advance tickets are required and include Museum admission. Adults $20, seniors $18, students $13, free for members and children 17 and under. Seating in Calderwood Hall is first come, first served. Seating begins 45 minutes before the event. Late seating is not guaranteed.
Call the Box Office at 617 278 5156, Wednesday-Monday, 10 am-4 pm*
Museum members free, Adults $20, Seniors $18, Students $13, children 7 – 17 free.
COVID-19 POLICY
Face masks, worn over the mouth and nose, are required for free and ticketed events in Calderwood Hall. In line with state and local guidance, we advise anyone who is unvaccinated, and encourage anyone who feels more comfortable, to wear a mask as they explore other areas of the museum.
ACCESSIBILITY
To request accessible or companion seating, or to inquire about other accommodations, please call the Box Office at 617 278 5156 in advance of the program.
