What is there to see at the Arboretum after all of the leaves have fallen and before spring flowers start to bloom? Bark! Shaggy bark, mottled bark, striped bark: the Arboretum has it all. Join Horticulturist Rachel Lawlor at 11 am on January 7 to see some beautiful bark highlights, learn how to identify some trees by their bark, and learn why that bark looks the way it does. Accessibility: Participants will walk over paved roads, woodchip paths, and mowed grass. Parking: There is limited parking outside of Centre Street Gate, and additional parking on Arborway near Forest Hills Gate (a 10 minute walk from the meeting point).
Join a balmy Caribbean winter escape aboard the brand-new superyacht Emerald Azzurra. Sail to seven island paradises, once vital stops on transatlantic trade routes, and rediscover often-forgotten links between the Caribbean and the birth of the United States. From Barbados, sail to the little-visited yet spectacular island of Dominica and tour an 18th-century military fortress surrounded by virgin forest, shimmering rivers, and dormant volcanoes. Call at Nevis, the birthplace of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, and visit his childhood home. Spend a day among the white-sand beaches of St. Barthélemy (“St. Barts”), with opportunities to swim in the warm Caribbean waters. On magical Antigua, visit the famous Nelson’s Dockyard and a restored 17th-century sugar plantation before calling at Montserrat, described as “a modern-day Pompeii” and home to a stunning botanical garden. Step ashore for a day in the archipelago known as Îles des Saintes, site of the most significant naval battle ever fought in the Caribbean between the British and the French. Before disembarking upon return to Barbados, meander through a magnificent garden in Soufrière, a town on the island of St. Lucia. This Harvard Alumni trip (open to all) is co-sponsored with the National Trust for Historic Preservation the University of Chicago Alumni Association, and Johns Hopkins Alumni Association. Activity Level 3. Dates February 24 – March 2. Study leader Kay Kaufman Shelemay is the G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music, Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard. She plans to lecture on Caribbean music at home and abroad, and about Caribbean musicians and their global impact. For pricing and information on registration, 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.
It’s not too late to join The Friends of the Public Garden, supporting the Boston Common, the Boston Public Garden, and the Commonwealth Avenue Mall. For information visit https://friendsofthepublicgarden.org/ The annual Members Reception will be held Thursday, November 2 at the Park Plaza Hotel from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Featured – a presentation by Peter James, ScD, Associate Professor of Environmental Health, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Cocktails to follow. The reception is a members only event, so sign up now.
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
During tulip season in the Low Countries, follow meandering rivers and canals through storybook villages, idyllic green countryside, and multicolored fields of spring flowers. Witness the spellbinding art of Dutch and Flemish masters, explore stunning medieval architecture, and savor the local cuisine, all while cruising aboard the delightful, intimate riverboat Magnifique III. Begin in Amsterdam with a walking tour and see timeless works by Dutch masters such as Rembrandt at the Rijksmuseum. Then embark Magnifique III, stopping in towns like Kinderdijk, Holland, with its perfectly aligned, UNESCO-recognized windmills. Call at Antwerp, Belgium, to see Rubens’s Descent From the Cross and visit the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp. Explore Ghent, including the magnificent Saint Bavo’s Cathedral housing the 15th-century Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (Ghent Altarpiece) by the Van Eyck brothers. Conclude in Bruges, the “Venice of the North,” where a highlight will be a behind-the-scenes look at an authentic ancestral medieval estate. Full details on this exclusive Harvard Alumni travel experience (open to all, Harvard connection not required) at https://alumni.harvard.edu/travel/trips/holland-belgium-2024
Join The Harvard Museum of Natural History, 26 Oxford Street in Cambridge, on June 3 from 10 – noon for an exploration of plant diversity and an introduction to methods of plant preservation. Using plant cuttings brought from home and some collected near the museum, participants will employ the powerful art of observation to identify and compare morphological characteristics of plants and discuss why they may have been favored over evolutionary time. They will learn how herbarium specimens are prepared, and prepare their own pressed specimens using these techniques. Instructor: Andrea Appleton, Harvard PhD candidate in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. $54 for Museum members, $60 for nonmembers. Registration required at https://hmnh.harvard.edu/event/preserving-plant-diversity
Insect populations around the world are declining rapidly. But why? While habitat loss, pesticide use, and climate change all have something to do with it, Dr. Avalon C.S. Owens of The Rowland Institute at Harvard will show in this talk that light pollution is another important — but too often overlooked — bringer of the insect apocalypse. Light pollution interferes with the development, movement, foraging, and reproduction of diverse insect species, including many that we know and love such as fireflies. Fortunately, there are many simple things that we can all do to help reverse this driver of insect declines. Light pollution can be cheaply, easily, and instantly eliminated, and doing so can help ensure that we live in harmony with our insect friends and neighbors for generations to come. Dr. Avalon C.S. Owens (owenslab.org) received her Ph.D. in Biology from Tufts University in spring 2022, where she studied the impact of artificial light on bioluminescent fireflies. She also holds a B.A. in Integrative Biology from Harvard University and an M.S. in Entomology from National Taiwan University.
This Xerces Society webinar will be recorded and available on our YouTube channel. Closed Captioning will be available during this webinar.
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/
