The Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Margaret McCurry Lectureship in the Design Arts will present James Wines on Tuesday, November 1 from 6:30 – 8 at the Gund Hall Piper Auditorium in Cambridge. Free and open to the public. Speaker James Wines – born in Chicago, IL 1932 – is the founder and president of SITE, an environmental art and architecture organization, chartered in New York City in 1970. He is the former Chairman of Environmental Design at Parsons School of Design and a retired Professor of Architecture at Penn State University. His architecture, landscape, and public space projects are based on a site-specific response to surrounding contexts. Prof. Wines’ educational philosophy advocates ‘integrative thinking,’ as a means of including multi-disciplinary ideas from outside the design professions. He has written seven books on art and design, including ON SITE-ON ENERGY – Scribners & Sons 1974, DE-ARCHITECTURE – Rizzoli International 1987, and GREEN ARCHITECTURE – Taschen Verlag 2000. He has designed more than one hundred and fifty buildings, public spaces, exhibitions, landscapes, and environmental art works for private and municipal clients in eleven countries. He was awarded the Smithsonian Institution’s 2013 National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement, the ANCE Annual Award for an International Architect (Italy 2011), and the Chrysler Award for Design Innovation (USA 1995). He is also the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kress Foundation, American Academy in Rome, Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Graham Foundation, and Ford Foundation. In 2021 there was a retrospective of his drawings for SITE at the Tchoban Museum in Berlin. Prof. Wines continues to work on international art and design projects, write, lecture, and engage in educational programs based on environmental initiatives.
Anyone requiring accessibility accommodations should contact the events office at (617) 496-2414 or events@gsd.harvard.edu.
In this Harvard Graduate School of Design talk on October 18 at 6:30 in the Piper Auditorium of Gund Hall in Cambridge, Ana María Durán Calisto will discuss the design principles of ancient Amazonian agroecological urban constellations; the ways in which colonialism disrupted (and continues to disrupt) Amazonian patterns of inhabitation and habitat construction; and the visions Amazonian urban history offers to inform our ability to reimagine future urban ecologies. Free and open to the public.
Ana María Durán Calisto is an architect, urban planner, environmental designer and scholar from Quito, Ecuador. In 2002, she founded the award-winning design group Estudio A0 with her husband, British-Punjabi architect Jaskran Kalirai. Estudio A0 has designed a diverse array of projects, at all scales, in close collaboration with its clients and community partners. Its building QPH obtained the first Leed Gold of continental Ecuador and was ranked 8th among the 500 best socio-environmental projects in Latin America at the 2015 Latin American Green Awards. In collaboration with Del Hierro AU and L + A Arquitectos, it won the competition for the Ikiam University campus, which eventually was awarded First Prize in the SDSN Amazonia Infrastructure Award, COP 21, in Paris. Its incremental housing scheme received Second Prize in a Social Housing Competition sponsored by UN Habitat. Estudio A0’s projects have been extensively published. Recent features include 30 arquitectos más relevantes de América Latina (Línea Editorial y Lexus Editores, 2020), Office Design (Booq Publishing, 2019), Company Gardens: Green Spaces for Retreat and Inspiration (Braun Publishing, 2019), and International Houses (Taschen, 2018).
Durán Calisto is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the urban planning department at UCLA. Under the advice of Susanna Hecht, she is writing a dissertation on the urban history of Amazonia, with a focus on indigenous systems of territorial planning and colonial disruptions. She is a member of the Science Panel for the Amazon, convened by SDSN & the UN. She co-authored its report ́s chapter on urbanization. In2022, she received the Mark Cousins Theory Award. Durán Calisto is a lecturer at the Yale School of Architecture and has taught research seminars and design studios at FADA-PUCE, the Harvard GSD, Columbia University, the University of Michigan, IAAC, Universidad Católica de Temuco, and UCLA ́s Institute for the Environment and Sustainability. She curated the XV Quito Architecture Biennial: Visible Cities (2006) and was National Curator for the IX BIAU. She co-edited the books Ecological Urbanism in Latin America (2019), Beyond Petropolis: Designing a Practical Utopia in Nueva Loja (2015), IV Taller Internacional de Vivienda Popular (2007).
Anyone requiring accessibility accommodations should contact the events office at (617) 496-2414 or events@gsd.harvard.edu.
This year’s Harvard Graduate School of Design Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture, delivered by Ethan Carr, is also the keynote lecture for the conference Olmsted: Bicentennial Perspectives, October 14-15, 2022. On Friday, the conference will run from 10:00 AM – 7:00 PM; the Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture will take place from 5:30 – 7:00 PM that evening. The talk will take place in Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium, and is free and open to the public, but registration required HERE
Olmsted designed his most complete and innovative park system in Boston, including a “large park” that contained his most ambitious pastoral landscape. Often grouped with Central Park (1858) and Prospect Park (1865) as one of his three greatest urban parks, Boston’s Franklin Park (1885) cost less than a third as much to develop. But the desire to “let it alone” was more than a pecuniary impulse. Achieving more by doing less culminated an evolution in his design practice. The landscape of upland pastures and hanging woods persisted as an amplified version of what it had been: a characteristic passage of “rural” New England scenery. For Olmsted, letting it alone both preserved and transformed the landscape into an ideal setting for “receptive” recreations that improved individual wellbeing and built a sense of community in the modern city.
When the problem of low visitation to Franklin Park was identified at the end of the nineteenth century, Boston responded with the construction of the Franklin Park Zoo (1912) and successfully activated the park. But in the mid-twentieth century, a decline in the condition of the park drew an opposite response—another and very different way of letting it alone. Buildings and structures were left to deteriorate and landscape maintenance all but disappeared. Institutional racism influenced official policy: once Franklin Park was perceived as a place for Black people, city government no longer considered it worth maintaining. This fact has been obscured by histories that emphasize a perceived obsolescence of the design or the conflict of “active” and “passive” recreation as causes of the park’s supposed demise. These interpretations suggest that the park should be considered an abandoned ruin awaiting redevelopment. But Franklin Park was never abandoned. For over fifty years people in the communities around it have enjoyed the park, organized programming, and performed maintenance. The official neglect of Franklin Park is nevertheless one of great inequities in the city’s history, and new investment and design must address it—perhaps by finding a right way, again, to let it alone.
To attend this keynote address, please register for Olmsted: Bicentennial Perspectives. Ethan Carr, PhD, FASLA, is a Professor of Landscape Architecture and the Director of the Master of Landscape Architecture program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is a landscape historian and preservationist specializing in public landscapes. Three of his award-winning books, Wilderness by Design (University of Nebraska Press, 1998), Mission 66: Modernism and the National Park Dilemma(University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), and The Greatest Beach: A History of Cape Cod National Seashore (University of Georgia Press, 2019), describe the twentieth-century history of planning and design in the US national park system as a context for considering its future. Carr was the lead editor for The Early Boston Years, 1882-1890, Volume 8 of the Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted (2013). Carr co-wrote Olmsted and Yosemite: Civil War, Abolition, and the National Park Idea(Library Of American Landscape History, 2022) with Rolf Diamant, tracing the origins of the American park movement. His latest book, Boston’s Franklin Park: Olmsted, Recreation, and the Modern City (2023) reconsiders the history of this landmark urban park. Carr consults with landscape architecture firms that are developing plans and designs for historic landscapes.
Three innovative and much-honored landscape architects discuss their signature projects, unique working methods, and design philosophies-while sharing transformative stories of people and places. For these designers, a respect for history informs and inspires the creative process. This online New York Botanical Garden Series on October 3, October 17, & November 7, will be presented at 6:30 Eastern time on Zoom. $95 for the series. Register here at www.nybg.org
The first talk will be by Elizabeth Kennedy entitled At the Crossroads: Socially Just Landscapes. From her office in New York’s Brooklyn Naval Yard, Elizabeth Kennedy leads EKLA PLLC, a collaborative, interdisciplinary social justice practice noted for excellence in innovative landscape preservation, development, and management. For Kennedy, design inspiration can come from anywhere-even the quality of light and shade. Kennedy’s talk will illustrate how her projects-including the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn, the African Burial Ground National Monument in Lower Manhattan, the Inwood Sacred Site, the Peninsula Live-Work Campus in the Bronx, and Buffalo’s Michigan Street African American Heritage Corridor-exemplify landscape architecture’s potential to afford a broader understanding of place and identity.
The daughter of an architect, Elizabeth Kennedy, FASLA, knew at 14 that she wanted to be a landscape architect. She studied landscape architecture at Cornell University and founded her own firm in 1994, with the goal of collaborating with mission-driven non-profit organizations to serve communities. Much honored for her distinguished work in sustainability, Kennedy is an ASLA Fellow and the recipient of 2022’s prestigious Annual Landscape Architecture Foundation Medal.
On October 17, you will hear Julie Bargmann speak on Troubled Beauty: A Manifesto for Ugly Duckling Landscapes. Known for her innovative approaches to design and regeneration of toxic industrial sites and degraded urban landscapes, Julie Bargmann turns “ugly duckling” sites into swans. Her process begins with site forensics-finding the stories of place and then surmounting innumerable obstacles with her unique blend of fearlessness, experimentation, common sense and restraint in order to produce award-winning work. She will discuss a community-based reclamation project of an abandoned coal works; a corporate campus refashioned within an abandoned Navy yard; an obsolete water supply station reinterpreted for a small private garden; and a privately funded public park offered as a sign of optimism in a disinvested Detroit neighborhood.
Julie Bargmann is the Founder and Principal of D.I.R.T. Studio and a Professor Emerita at the University of Virginia Department of Landscape Architecture. She is the Inaugural Laureate of the 2021 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize and a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. Bargmann received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Carnegie Mellon and a MLA from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
The final talk on November 7 will be by Roderick Wyllie and James A. Lord on Supergreen: Gardens, Placemaking, and Infrastructure. Roderick Wyllie and James A. Lord, founding partners of Surfacedesign, a San Francisco-based landscape architecture studio, challenge conventional approaches to design by asking novel questions and listening to a site and its users. By doing so, Wyllie and Lord focus on cultivating a sense of connection between the built and the natural world, inviting people to engage with the landscape in new ways. Together, the two landscape architects will present work that ranges in location and scale, from civic projects to intimate residential gardens, including Auckland International Airport in New Zealand; the 40-acre Expedia headquarters site on Seattle’s waterfront; Uber’s headquarters in San Francisco that includes a public park; and Uliveto, a private residence in Northern California.
Roderick Wyllie, FASLA, and James A. Lord, FASLA, along with partner Geoff di Girolamo, have established Surfacedesign as an international leader in landscape architecture, urban design, and sustainability. Alumni of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, both are ASLA Fellows. For the consistent excellence of their built designs, they were honored with the 2017 Cooper Hewitt Design Award.
The Harvard University Graduate School of Design, in partnership with the Arnold Arboretum, will host a two-day academic conference as part of the national Olmsted 200 celebration. While Olmsted was central to the conceptual formation of the degree program in landscape architecture at Harvard University and the design of the Arnold Arboretum, the interpretive ambitions of the conference are anything but parochial.
More details to come. Friday’s program will take place at the GSD, Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium, and Saturday’s program will take place at the Arnold Arboretum, 125 Arborway. Free and open to the public. Anyone requiring accessibility accommodations should contact the events office at (617) 496-2414 or events@gsd.harvard.edu.
TERREMOTO is a formally and conceptually adventurous office for landscape architecture. TERREMOTO creates well-built, site-specific landscapes that respond to clients’ needs while simultaneously challenging historical and contemporary landscape construction methods, materials, and formal conventions. Their design approach is post-Internet, critically regionalist, and respectfully inflammatory.
TERREMOTO mines the omnipotence of intentional inexactitude and flirts openly with illegibility. Principals David Godshall and Jenny Jones strive, in many cases, to do as little as possible. It is their stated goal to build gardens and landscapes not for this civilization. All are invited to watch and participate online in this Harvard Graduate School of Design program by Clicking Here at the noted start time of April 5 at 6:30 Eastern. No pre-registration is required. Online audience members will be able to submit questions throughout the event using Vimeo’s Q&A function. If you would like to submit questions for the speaker in advance of the event, please click here.
The third and final installment of the New York Botanical Garden’s 23rd Annual Landscape Design Portfolio online lectures takes place November 1 at 6:30 pm with David Rubin speaking on Empathy and Inclusivity in the Public Realm. Known for his design talent and advocacy for social justice within urban spaces, David Rubin will share his concern that the connective tissue of our cities—the “third spaces” between work and home—are not truly public or reflective of the general population. His work reflects his belief that “accessibility begins with the invitation to participate.” In this presentation, Rubin will illustrate how his designs explore issues of identity and accessibility with a focus on Franklin Park and the National World War I Memorial in Washington, D.C., as well as Eskenazi Health Hospital and the Cummins Distribution Headquarters in Indianapolis. The founding principal of DAVID RUBIN Land Collective in Philadelphia, David Rubin, PLA, FASLA, FAAR, has garnered awards for his empathy-driven designs from the American Society of Landscape Architects and the American Institute of Architects, in addition to the prestigious Garden Club of America Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture from the American Academy in Rome in 2011. A graduate of Connecticut College and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, he is a Design Critic at Harvard. $15/$18. Register at http://nybg.org
The replacement of the unique and specific with the generic is a sign of our times. Cities make no exception. In the name of the modern, new and improved, the luring richness, unexpected and uncontrolled are being standardized out of our urban landscapes. The result is often a sterile built environment with scary resemblance to architectural renderings that has little to do with the unfolding of human experience.
Robin Winogrond will show a series of her recent projects in Switzerland and Germany, most often on the urban periphery, which increasingly focus on sussing out the poetic potential of the banality of our contemporary urban landscape. What in a place engages our imagination or leaves us cold? Using a narrative approach, the projects become testing grounds to re-enchant each specific site with the power of its own inherent qualities, expressing the underestimated oddity of place that our contemporary urban landscapes contain.
Robin Winogrond, landscape architect and urban designer, is co-founder of Studio Vulkan Landscape Architecture, in Zurich, Switzerland. She was partner from 2014-2020, a period in which numerous international competitions and prizes were won, most notably the recently completed Zurich Airport Park. While continuing the collaboration with Studio Vulkan, she is working independently and internationally on projects, juries, lecturing, teaching, and publishing. She is currently teaching at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Robin Winogrond works on a wide variety of scales and themes, with a focus on built works as well as large-scale open space and urban design schemes, and site-specific installations. Her work, at once atmospheric and pragmatic in nature, seeks to design but also build powerful experiences of slippery matters such as atmosphere, imagination, the psychology of social space, multifaceted identity of place, and embodied experience. Combining these with the pragmatic nature of building, the projects search to understand and interpret the diverse demands, contradictions and countervailing expectations of the contemporary landscape, especially on the increasingly banal urban periphery, using this productive tension as a driver for developing innovative and experimental design strategies that interpret the conditions of the site and its users.
The Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Fall 2021 Public Programs are all virtual and require registration.
The chain of green spaces and waterways that comprise the Emerald Necklace park system is an invaluable urban oasis. Described as “the lungs of the city” this parkland and its rivers and ponds clean the city air, provide habitats for birds and other wildlife, and greatly improve quality of life for Boston residents. Our panel, Karen Mauney-Brodek, Emerald Necklace Conservancy; Representative Nika Elugardo; Chris Reed, Harvard Graduate School of Design, and moderator Sarah Glazer will explore the past, present, and future of this urban wild, beginning with Olmsted’s vision, through the lens of social equity and environmental justice.
Please note, this free April 22 program is an online event hosted by the Green Committee of the Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay and the Massachusetts Historical Society and held on the video conference platform, Zoom. Registrants will receive an email with links to join the program. Registration is required at https://www.masshist.org/calendar/event?event=3461
The Harvard Graduate School of Design will stream the Rouse Visiting Artist online lecture on April 1 at noon. New York-based artist Zoe Leonard balances rigorous conceptualism with a distinctly personal vision in her work, which merges photography, sculpture, and installation. By employing strategies of repetition, shifting perspectives, and a multitude of printing processes, Leonard’s practice probes the politics of representation and display. Leonard explores themes such as gender and sexuality, loss and mourning, migration, displacement, and the urban landscape. Her photography specifically invites us to contemplate the role that the medium plays in constructing history, and to consider the roots of contemporary photographic culture. More than its focus on any particular subject, however, Leonard’s work encourages the viewer to reconsider the act of looking itself, drawing attention to observation as a complex, ongoing process.
Leonard has exhibited extensively since the late 1980s, including solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2018), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2015), Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas (2013-14); Camden Arts Centre, London (2012); Museum Moderner Kunst Stifting Ludwig, Vienna (2009), Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2009); Reina Sofia, Madrid (2008), Dia: Beacon (2008); The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2007); Fotomuseum Wintherthur (2007); Philadelphia Museum of Art (1998); Kunsthalle Basel (1997); Secession, Vienna (1997), and The Renaissance Society, Chicago (1993). Group exhibitions include Documenta IX (1992), Documenta XII (2007), and Whitney Biennials in 1993, 1997 and 2014. Publications include Analogue (2007), Zoe Leonard: Photographs (2008), You see I am here after all (2010), Available Light (2014), and Survey (2018).
How to Join
Register to attend the lecture here. Once you have registered, you will be provided with a link to join the lecture via Zoom. This link will also be emailed to you.
