Boston Flora

Tag: Yale School of Architecture

  • Tuesday, February 23, 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm – Senior Loeb Scholar Online Lecture: Walter Hood

    Walter Hood is the Creative Director and Founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California. Hood Design Studio is a cultural practice, working across art, fabrication, design, landscape, research and urbanism. He is also the David K. Woo Chair and the Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. He lectures on and exhibits professional and theoretical projects nationally and internationally. He was recently the Spring 2020 Diana Balmori Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Architecture. He will speak online with the Harvard Graduate School of Design on February 23 at 7:30 Eastern time as the Senior Loeb Scholar Lecturer.

    Walter creates urban spaces that resonate with and enrich the lives of current residents while also honoring communal histories. Hood melds architectural and fine arts expertise with a commitment to designing ecologically sustainable public spaces that empower marginalized communities. Over his career, he has transformed traffic islands, vacant lots, and freeway underpasses into spaces that challenge the legacy of neglect of urban neighborhoods. Through engagement with community members, he teases out the natural and social histories as well as current residents’ shared patterns and practices of use and aspirations for a place.

    The Studio’s award-winning work has been featured in publications including Dwell, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fast Company, Architectural Digest, Places Journal, and Landscape Architecture Magazine. Walter Hood is also a recipient of the 2017 Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award, 2019 Knight Foundation Public Spaces Fellowship, 2019 MacArthur Fellowship and 2019 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize.

    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.

    The event will also be live streamed to the GSD’s YouTube page. Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speakers in advance of the event, please click here. Live captioning will be provided during this event. A transcript will be available roughly two weeks after the event, upon request.

  • Friday, November 1, 7:30 pm – Space for Well-being: Japanese Spatial Concepts in Gardens and Architecture

    Why do we feel contemplative in Japanese gardens and architecture? Can our physical environment foster our mindfulness and well-being? Yoko Kawai, lecturer at Yale School of Architecture and co-founder of Mirai Work Space, discusses the mind-body-space relationship found in Japanese gardens and architecture that is instrumental to mindfulness. Japanese spatial concepts like ma (in-between-ness), utsuroi (transience) and yugen (the unknown) are examined as key concepts. Tea gardens and teahouses are introduced as traditional examples from which we can learn for the contemporary mindful environment. The event is the opening lecture of the Chrysanthemum Show in the Lyman Plant House and Conservatory at Smith College, and begins at 7 pm on November 1. The show will run from Sunday, November 2 – Sunday, November 17. Free and open to the public. For more information visit https://garden.smith.edu/events

    Yoko Kawai, PhD, is a lecturer at Yale School of Architecture. Her mission is to create “space for well-being” by utilizing the Japanese spatial concepts. She co-founded Mirai Work Space Alliance in New York to bring this idea to contemporary workplaces. She is also the cofounder and principal of Penguin Environmental Design in Hamden, CT, which focuses on incorporating landscape into architecture. Its works include a residential project that received CTC&G Award in 2015 and a Japanese garden at Frost Valley YMCA in 2014. Yoko has published articles in various scholarly journals, including Journal of Green Building and Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering.