Boston Flora

Tag: Harvard University Graduate School of Design

  • Thursday, September 14, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm – Kongjian Yu

    Kongjian Yu is Professor and founding dean of Peking University College of Architecture and Landscape, and founder and design principal of Turenscape. Yu’s guiding design principles are the appreciation of the ordinary and a deep embrace of nature—even of its potentially destructive aspects, such as flooding. His projects have won numerous international design awards, including 14 ASLA Excellence and Honor Awards and 7 WAF Best Landscape Architecture of the Year Award. Yu is also the author of over 20 books and more than 300 papers and is the founder and chief editor of the internationally awarded magazine Landscape Architecture Frontiers. His thinking about “ecological security patterns” helped shape environmental protection efforts throughout China. And his promotion of the “sponge city” concept, which uses landscape to capture, filter, and store rainfall for future use and reduce flood risks, helped to spur the Chinese government to launch an ambitious sponge city campaign across the country and has gained global attention. Yu was elected International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016 and received the IFLA’s highest honor, the Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award, in 2020, which celebrates a living landscape architect whose “achievements and contributions have had a unique and lasting impact on the welfare of society.” The Harvard Graduate School of Design hosts Professor Kongjian Yu on September 14 at 6:30 at Gund Hall Piper Auditorium. Free and open to the public. For additional information on parking and accessibility, visit www.gsd.harvard.edu

  • Thursday, September 14, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm – Seeding Change: The Politics of Plants

    Plants provide a medium for the creative expression of individual identities, shared narratives, and collective memories, yet they are also inherently political, and never more so than in the midst of our rapidly warming climate. As changes to the climate become more volatile, how are designers, gardeners, and others who work directly with plants developing adaptive strategies to changes both environmental and social?

    This September 14 conversation at 7 pm in Calderwood Hall at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum will convene landscape architect Rosetta S. Elkin of Pratt Institute, Stephanie Morningstar of the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust, and Erika Rumbley, and the Gardner’s Stanley P. Kozak, Director of Horticulture, in dialogue with Charles Waldheim, the Gardner’s Ruettgers Curator of Landscape and Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Together they will consider the cultural, social, and political meanings of plants, and share approaches to adaptive strategies, particularly as these relate to seed-keeping and sharing. This program is organized in connection with the current exhibition Presence of Plants in Contemporary Art. Tickets may be purchased at https://www.gardnermuseum.org/calendar/seeding-change-politics-plants

  • Monday, January 23 – Friday, March 31 – Grand Paris Express: Reconfiguring the City through Radical Infrastructure

    The Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) is pleased to announce that the 14th Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design has been awarded to the Grand Paris Express, a large-scale transit project currently being built in and around the Paris metropolitan area. Through carefully articulated design interventions, the Grand Paris Express illustrates the potential for the planning and execution of mobility infrastructure to transform a city and its region. Société du Grand Paris, a national agency responsible for designing, creating, and implementing the Grand Paris Express, will receive the $50,000 USD prize and recognition for the continued stewardship behind the project.

    With 68 new stations and 200 kilometers of additional tracks, as well as extensions of existing metro lines, the Grand Paris Express is currently the largest urban design project in Europe. Its four new lines will circle around the capital and provide connections with Paris’s three airports, developing neighborhoods, business districts, and research clusters. It will service more than 100 municipalities, 165,000 companies, and the daily transport of 2,000,000 commuters. Construction work began mid-June 2016 and is due to last until 2030.

    Grand Paris Express: Reconfiguring the City through Radical Infrastructure, an exhibition coinciding with the prize, will be on display at the Druker Design Gallery from January 23 – March 31. Curated by Joan Busquets, Martin Bucksbaum Professor in Practice of Urban Planning and Design, the exhibition showcases models, renderings, documentary photographs, and video footage of this vast and ambitious urban design project. A public lecture and reception for the exhibition is scheduled for Thursday, March 2 at 6:30 pm at Piper Auditorium. For more information, visit https://urbandesignprize.gsd.harvard.edu/grand-paris-express/

  • Tuesday, April 24, 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm – Stig L. Andersson

    Stig L. Andersson founded SLA Architects in 1994. Having studied nuclear physics, Japanese culture and chemistry before becoming an architect, Andersson graduated from The Royal Danish School of Architecture in 1986. From 1986-1989 Andersson moved to Japan with Japanese ministerial research funds. Andersson was particularly interested in Japanese culture’s relationship with substance, space and changeability – fields he has integrated and developed in his own practice since 1994.

    Stig L. Andersson is SLA’s founding partner. Beginning as a (purely) landscape architectural practice, SLA has developed into an international interdisciplinary organization working with city nature, urban design and nature-based solutions. Renowned for his sensuous and poetic work, Andersson combines unique amenity values based on the aesthetics of nature with cutting-edge sustainable city solutions and ecosystem services.

    He is a professor in aesthetic design at the University of Copenhagen and is a much sought-after lecturer and teacher at universities and architecture schools in Europe, Asia and the United States, and has received numerous national and international awards for his work, including The European Landscape Award, The RIBA Award, The World Landscape Architecture Award, and in 2014 the C.F. Hansen Medal – the highest national honor given to a Danish architect awarded by Queen Margrethe II of Denmark.

    Mr. Andersson will speak at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design on Tuesday, April 24 beginning at 6:30 pm. Free and open to the public. Anyone requiring accessibility accommodations should contact the events office at (617) 496-2414 or events@gsd.harvard.edu.

  • Thursday, March 1, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm – A Common Treasury for All: Toward a Deeper History of Environmental Justice

    Thursday, March 1, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm – A Common Treasury for All: Toward a Deeper History of Environmental Justice

    In recent years, environmental justice scholarship has exploded. But virtually every relevant piece of work has understood the history of environmental justice as dating only to the late 20th century. The Harvard University Graduate School of Design Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture on Thursday, March 1 at 6:30 pm in the Gund Hall Piper Auditorium goes back to the 17th century, seeking to trace and analyze the evolution of a positive environmental rights discourse in European and American history. Having established our opposition to environmental injustice, we might want to ask: what exactly are we aiming for, in positive terms? What are the components of environmental justice? Is there any common ground left to stand on? And how might a deeper historical perspective help us answer these questions?

    Speaker Aaron Sachs is Professor of History and American Studies at Cornell University, where he has taught since 2004. In 2006, he published The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (Viking), which won Honorable Mention for the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, given to the best first book in the field of U.S. history by the Organization of American Historians (OAH). In 2013, he published Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition (Yale U. Press), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. Sachs has also published articles in such journals as Environmental History, Rethinking History, American Quarterly, and History and Theory. In his graduate teaching, he works with students not only in History but also in English, Science and Technology Studies, History of Architecture, City and Regional Planning, Anthropology, and Natural Resources. At Cornell, Sachs is the faculty sponsor of a radical underground organization called Historians Are Writers, which brings together graduate students who believe that academic writing can be moving on a deeply human level. He is also the founder and coordinator of the Cornell Roundtable on Environmental Studies Topics (CREST). Sachs is currently at work on book projects focusing on environmental modernity; environmental justice; and environmental humor. Free and open to the public.

    Anyone requiring accessibility accommodations should contact the events office at (617) 496-2414 or events@gsd.harvard.edu.

  • Thursday, June 2 – Carol R. Johnson: Great American Gardeners Award Ceremony

    The American Horticultural Society’s 2016 Landscape Design Award will be presented to Carol R. Johnson, founder and chairman emeritus of Carol R. Johnson Associates of Boston, Massachusetts.  The award is given to an individual whose work has demonstrated and promoted the values of sound horticultural practices in the field of landscape architecture.  Carol has been a landscape architect for more than 50 years.  Among her notable projects are the redesign of the Mystic River Reservation and the creation of urban parks such as John Marshall Park in Washington, DC.  She taught landscape architecture at her alma mater, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and has lectured at other universities in the US and abroad.  She is a trustee for the Hubbard Educational Trust, founded to further education in landscape architecture throughout the United States.

    The award will be given on Thursday, June 2 during the Banquet at River Farm, the AHS headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia.  To attend, visit www.ahs.org/awards, or call 703-768-5700.

  • Tuesday, October 28, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm – Olmsted Lecture: On the Theoretical and Practical Development of Landscape Architecture

    The Harvard University Graduate School of Design will present its Olmsted Lecture on Tuesday, October 28, from 6:30 – 8 in the Piper Auditorium of Gund Hall, 48 Quincy Street in Cambridge.  The speaker will be Joseph Disponzio, and his topic is On the Theoretical and Practical Development of Landscape Architecture.

    Exploring the transformation of the modeling of land from garden-making to landscape architecture, this lecture by Joseph Disponzio will establish the intellectual origins of landscape architecture in relation to the new garden practices that emerged during the 18th century, and the texts that codified these practices, amid Enlightenment-era changes in the understanding of nature. Disponzio is Preservation Landscape Architect for the City of New York Department of Parks and Recreation, and Director of the Landscape Design program at Columbia University. He has taught at several institutions, published widely on garden history from the 18th century to the present, and is currently writing introductions for an edition of N. Vergnaud’s L’Art de créer les jardins (1835) and a translation of Jean-Marie Morel’s Théorie des jardins (1776).

    For accessibility issues, please contact the events office two weeks in advance at (617)-496-2414 or events@gsd.harvard.edu. Free and open to the public.

  • Tuesday, November 3, 6:30 – 7:30 pm – The Vertical Garden, From Nature to the City

    The Harvard University Graduate School of Design will sponsor a Margaret McCurry Lecture in the Design Arts on Tuesday, November 3, from 6:30 – 7:30 pm in the Piper Auditorium of the Graduate School of Design in Cambridge.  Patrick Blanc will speak on “The Vertical Garden, from Nature to the City, or how to bring biodiversity close to everybody’s life.”  For more information, email Brooke King at bking@gsd.harvard.edu, or log on to www.gsd.harvard.edu.

    The Vertical Garden, known as Le Mur Vegetal in French, was conceived after many observations in natural environments.  The Vertical Garden relies on a new way to grow plants without any soil.  Since its weight is very light, it is possible to set up the Vertical Garden on any wall, whatever its size.  The Vertical Garden can be implemented outdoors or indoors, in any climatic environment.  The plant species selection is mainly set according to the prevailing climatic conditions.  For an indoor location, an artificial lighting system is usually required.  Watering and fertilization are automated.  The Vertical Garden acts as a phonic and thermic isolation system.  It is also an air purification device.

    http://www.thedailygreen.com/cm/thedailygreen/images/tO/blanc-quai-lg.jpg