IF THE 20TH CENTURY PERFECTED MONOLITHIC, TOP-DOWN SOLUTIONS (STORMING THE NORMANDY BEACHES WITH A SINGLE FRONTAL ATTACK, REPORTING THE STORY ON TV’S NIGHTLY NEWS, AND SALVAGING THE WRECKAGE WITH A $13 BILLION MARSHALL PLAN), THEN THE 21ST CENTURY IS SHAPING UP TO BE A LEANER, FASTER, NIMBLER ERA (TAKING ON GUERRILLA INSURGENCIES, PARSING THE NEWS THROUGH TWITTER FEEDS, AND ADDRESSING COMMUNITY NEEDS WITH MICROFINANCE).

RE-MAPPING PRACTICE

THE MASTER IN DESIGN STUDIES AT HARVARD’S GSD SETS DESIGN—AND THE PROGRAM’S STUDENTS—IN A NEW TRAJECTORYBY JOHN GENDALL

WITH HARVARD’S MASTER IN DESIGN STUDIES,INTER-DISCIPLINARITY GETS REALIZED IN TANGIBLE WAYS, as it did with Sanford Kwinter’s 2010 exhibition, The Divine Comedy, which temporarily re-mapped Harvard’s campus into a public art venue, linking different parts of the campus: Olafur Eliasson at the GSD’s Gund Hall (above and below, left), Ai Weiwei at the university’s Science Center, and Tomás Saraceno at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (below, right). Students have the opportunity to engage with artists as they did with Marina Abramovic for a separate event (below, center, with Kwinter).With Harvard’s president, Drew Faust, and the GSD’s dean, Mohsen Mostafavi, art has taken on renewed vibrancy at the university, and Design Studies concentration Art, Design and the Public Domain captures that spirit.

Design, accordingly, is re-equipping itself for this century’s challenges, becoming better able to quickly respond to changing conditions in localized environments. Within the Graduate School of Design (GSD), at Harvard University, the Master in Design Studies is providing a critical venue for this reorientation of practice. The three-semester post-professional program acts as a laboratory where students launch and test new ideas, ultimately reframing the professional backgrounds with which they entered. Composed of eight concentrations—Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology (ULE); Technology; Art, Design and the Public Domain; Sustainable Design; Anticipatory Spatial Practice (ASP);

Critical and Strategic Conservation; History and Philosophy of Design; and Real Estate—the program is definitionally inter-disciplinary and fundamentally speculative. Students construct curricula with courses and resources throughout not only the GSD, but also across Harvard University and MIT. Freeing students to devise their own trajectory in the context of an indeterminate intellectual zone, this pedagogical model is itself an act of contemporary design.

In the midst of last century’s Marshall Plan and a nascent Cold War, the world of idea-making birthed an unintended consequence: think-tanks, organizations that slowly produced, over the course

of decades, singular world views. Architecture groups adopted the model, codifying schools of thought that became increasingly entrenched over the last part of the 20th century.

Design Studies is no think-tank. There is plenty of thinking, to be sure, but it is a di!erent brand of thought, more akin to thinking as a design practice itself (and vice versa). In this formulation, the program is pluralistic and staggeringly productive, with students traveling to Haiti and Mumbai to carry out urban designs, working with artists like Olafur Eliasson to build installations within the school itself, winning international design competitions, and patenting technology breakthroughs.

The program’s nimbleness comes from its own structure. Post-professional, it skirts the obligations of accreditation. In that way, students are free to initiate and carry out speculations into areas of personal interest without the typical encumbrance of studio demands and in an institutional space freed from the constraints of accrediting boards.

“It’s really like an R&D lab, the probehead of the GSD, meant to respond to emerging problems,” explains Sanford Kwinter, who, with professor of architectural technology Martin Bechthold, co-directs the program.

THE TECHNOLOGY CONCENTRATION LAUNCHED A SERIES OF LABORATORIES UNDER THE SCHOOL’S RESEARCH ADVANCEMENT INITIATIVE. Su Qui, Matias Imbern and Doctor of Design candidate Felix Raspall (above) created a construction process for a structural ceramic shell that minimizes waste (next page, top, left). “It’s part of an interest I have in ceramics,” says Raspall. “The project explores applications of digital design and fabrication in the context of a low-tech site.” The project demands different areas of expertise, but, as Raspall puts it, “there’s a tremendous amount of collective knowledge in the program, so we never have to start from scratch. You can always find another student or faculty person with expertise in a part of any project.”

In the Technology concentration’s Design Robotics Group, students carry out mass customization of architectural ceramics using robotic technologies and CNC-fabricated components. One team (Stefano Andreani, Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo, Aurgho Jyoti, Doctor of Design candidate Nathan King, and Professor Martin Bechthold) was selected to present at the prestigious SmartGeometry workshop. “The program enabled us to design everything—the workflow and the material itself,” explains Garcia del Castillo. “The program really allows you to craft your own agenda.” Kinematic Bloom (2nd row, left) creates a lighting condition responsive to environmental input—human proximity, sound and light. Conceived by students Daekwon Park, Elizabeth MacWillie, Benjamin Tew and Corey Wowk, it was carried out as part of Technology’s Lab for Responsive Environments. Bob Pavlik’s temporary, three-dimensional installation, Zero-K (2nd row, right), acquires its shape by zipping together Italian poplar plywood. It can be unzipped and stored as flat panels. Kwinter’s book (below), Far From Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture (Actar, 2008), establishes relationships between technology and design, history, the humanities, art and culture.

Within the Technology concentration, overseen by Allen Sayegh, “laboratory” is no mere analogy having launched a series of research labs where speculations get built and empirically tested. The Design Robotics Group (DRG), for example, a research unit led by Bechthold, develops robotic and computer-numerically controlled (CNC) fabrication processes that result in fully conceived prototypes, and, at times, in industry integration. Whereas labs are often characterized as the insular environment of a sole genius, the Design Studies model is di!erent, disabusing this hermetic approach in favor of something assertively collaborative. The CeramicsLAB course, for instance, works with

(and in) Harvard’s Ceramics Studio, a facility across the Charles River, in Allston, where it develops CNC-fabricated architectural ceramics. The Lab for Responsive Environments considers the cultural and urban dimensions of space in conceiving digitally-mediated environments and artifacts. DRG and Responsive Environments are now forging a collaboration with Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and students in technology and sustainability are becoming closely engaged.

The program’s name—Design Studies—is itself revealing, undoing some of the privilege that architecture has customarily enjoyed, and instead emphasizing the emerging significance of

design. As Kwinter argues in his 2008 book Far From Equilibrium, “Architecture has begun to vanish as a discipline, and some of us are not mourning. More and more, we like to think of practice in far more generic and elastic terms, we think of what we do as design, and like the generations before us, we feel the need for an escape velocity that might carry us beyond the sclerosis of inherited boundaries.”

Design Studies serves as that escape hatch, operating as a venue for students to question their own disciplines, and, in the case of some, to stage an unabashed critical attack on some of the fundamentals of their own professional backgrounds.

“THE URBANISM, LANDSCAPE, ECOLOGY CONCENTRATION PROVIDES A LANDSCAPE BASE, BUT IT OFFERS ACCESS TO OTHER AREAS,” says professor and concentration coordinator Pierre Bélanger. “We encourage students to develop the type of practice that allows them to achieve the reorientation they’re coming for.” Third Coast Atlas, a forthcoming book edited by Charles Waldheim, Professor and Chair of the GSD’s Department of Landscape Architecture, and co-editors Clare Lyster and Mason White, examines urbanization in the Great Lakes region. Daniel Ibañez, Travis Bost, Kees Lokman, students in the ULE concentration, carried out much of the research and visualization. “Each semester, I engage in research and jump into content in ways that are difficult to do in a studio program,” says Ibañez, a Spanish architect transitioning into work at the urban and regional scale. “The Design Studies program has a real mobility across the campus,” he adds. “Even within the program itself, there’s a great diversity of disciplines, experience, and age.” Ibañez, with GSD content manager Ronee Saroff, is exercising some of this intellectual freedom by producing a tablet App for the GSD’s recent tome, Ecological Urbanism (Lars Müller, 2010).

ASP STUDENTS DAN WEISSMAN AND ERDEM ERGIN TRAVELED TO HAITI TO DESIGN REPLICABLE REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT COMMUNITIES. Below, professor Christian Werthmann presents designs to Bill Clinton, whose foundation co-sponsored the initiative with Deutsche Bank. “Anticipatory Spatial Practice is meant for students with a design background who are interested in developing a focus in pre-disaster planning and post-disaster recovery,” explains ASP coordinator Joyce Klein Rosenthal. “In this urbanizing world, with a greater frequency of environmental disasters, particularly along coastal areas, this approach to design—long-range planning—is vitally important.” Like other concentrations, ASP benefits from collaborations across Cambridge, including the GSD’s Department of Urban Planning and Design, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and School of Public Health, and MIT. Ergin, who worked for ten years as an engineer before enrolling in Design Studies, plans to work in urbanizing conditions in the developing world. “Infrastructure,” says Ergin, “is often exposed above ground in these sites, so extreme events have particularly catastrophic results. We need to plan from the beginning.”

Take ULE for example, whose director, Pierre Bélanger, explains, “the program is for professionals looking for a radical reorientation of their practice.” Attracting students with professional backgrounds in urban design and planning, and, more recently, civil engineering, the program treats its subject as embedded in a dynamic ecology of landscape and urbanism—not as a city or park with defined borders. “There’s a large body of urban planners who have gone through training centered on legislation and jurisprudence, and of urban designers who have not been exposed to the ecological approach to urbanism, and this program allows them to develop ways of taking on ecological urbanism.” The school experience mimics trends happening in

practice. “Design is always collaborative,” he says. “We don’t work alone, and the program fosters that mixing across disciplines, since students customize their own experience.”

Owing, in part, to its research-intensive setting, Design Studies mints new ways of carrying out established practices. Whereas preservation is often treated as a discipline for specialists with certain technical expertise, students in Critical and Strategic Conservation are more inclined to examine cultural histories of entire urban and ecological landscapes, as student Chris Cosper is doing with his work on recovering Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. Sustainability, too, is treated as no rote system of energy e!iciency metrics. Coordinator Kiel Moe explains,

SUSTAINABILITY STUDENT TIMUR DOGAN USES THERMODYNAMICS TO GENERATE ARCHITECTURAL FORM —AND MITIGATE ENVIRONMENTAL COSTS (top). Dan Borelli, an Art, Design and the Public Domain student, maps the complex—and dangerously invisible—ecologies of toxicity in Ashland, Mass., a Superfund site because of run-off from the local paint industry (2nd row, middle). His project is emblematic of Design Studies, since it could have fallen into any of the concentrations. Helena Slosar uses art to explore acoustics (2nd row, left) and builds an interactive light landscape with peers Melissa Chow and Yuichiro Takeuchi.

“we are interested in energy, but not just for e!iciency. We explore it for its formal or conceptual essence. The program is still quantitatively rigorous,” he adds, “but it’s really focused on the imaginative possibilities of sustainability.” Like each of the concentrations, Sustainability benefits from the expansive opportunities to collaborate with other concentrations. “I am constantly referring to the art installations from The Divine Comedy exhibition in my courses,” says Moe.

Urban Planning has also undergone a re-tooling within Design Studies. While the GSD has a long-celebrated Department of Urban Planning and Design, Anticipatory Spatial Practice provides a non-studio opportunity to develop methods of

planning that are, like this century’s models of practice, leaner, faster and rooted in local community e!ort. Often susceptible to rapid change and/or catastrophe, the sites that ASP takes on are often di!erent from what students might encounter in a traditional planning course. “The concentration certainly has a lot in common with Urban Planning, but it attracts design professionals who come from architecture or engineering backgrounds, and who are now wishing to focus on enhancing urban resiliency in contexts subject to disaster,” says ASP coordinator Joyce Klein Rosenthal. “The students are global thinkers who really want to work with local communities in a culture of humanitarian response.”

ART, DESIGN AND THE PUBLIC DOMAIN COORDINATOR KRZYSZTOF WODICZKO has designed what he calls an “unsolicited proposal” for the “World Institute for the Abolition of War” to be grafted onto the Arc de Triomphe, in Paris (above).

JG: How did you choose the site for your proposed institute?KW: The Arc de Triomphe is a cultural war machine. It’s the first modern triumphal arch and the first eternal flame. It celebrates a culture of war, and artists and architects have been important in building this. If we want to abolish war, which we certainly can do, we need to dismantle the culture of war that these monuments perpetuate. Peace institutes are always sited far from war monuments, so I want to confront war directly. JG: In order to negate its meaning?KW: Negate? No. I want to bring people so close to its meaning that they can no longer be captured by its brutality.JG: You’ve made it a point to engage architecture throughout your practice.KW: Yes, art helps people live in a discursive way in the built environment. It uncovers meaning and change.JG: How do you see your role as an artist in a professional school of design?KW: There’s so much possibility. Considering temporary designs can really help understand the possibilities of permanent design. Except maquettes and details, architects don’t really work at this scale, so it broadens the program. There is a complex discourse within the school’s building. Art and architecture, these are very complementary practices.

When it was built to house the GSD in 1972, as the age of think-tanks was reaching its zenith, Gund Hall enveloped an entire discipline. Now, Design Studies is undoing that border and, in the process, redefining the very way design is understood. Krzysztof Wodiczko, who oversees Art, Design and the Public Domain, has long represented—in a literal sort of way—the kind of boundary-erosion that the program has committed to undertake. His early work cast projections on architectural monuments as a way to temporarily replace meaning. This critique of the architectural edifice is what is now happening with Gund Hall itself as Design

Studies renders its precinct more porous. When Wodiczko characterizes the public domain, he captures the essence of Design Studies as a program: “when there is an environment that allows for a lot of encounters between different people, and when meanings are confronted and contested, it creates a good, conflictual space—creative friction.”

Images courtesy Harvard GSD, except page 2 (bottom, right): courtesy Tomás Saraceno, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Andersen’s Contemporary Gallery, Pinksummer.