Zaneta Hong (MLA '07), lecturer in landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and faculty editor of Platform 8: An Index of Design & Research, will launch Platform 8 on Friday evening, May 6, at the Van Alen Institute in New York. 

In the GSD’s press release, the Platform 8 is featured as the GSD's annual publication, and the corresponding exhibition, present a curated selection of work generated in the previous academic year at the school. Hong structured Platform 8 as an encyclopedic survey in which term entries, each connected to a particular activity or item at the school (including events, courses, publications, and research centers), are presented alphabetically rather than hierarchically. 

Thus, Hong writes in the Letter from the Editor, the book documents both scholarly discourse and material production as concomitant artifacts of practice, education, and research.

Zaneta Hong. Image courtesy of beta-field.org

“For me, this publication is an effort to simultaneously present an archaeological documentation into the working concepts of design and research—a reveal, exposing a particular moment of design culture at the Harvard GSD—and to provide a projective platform for defining new possibilities,” Hong writes.

Zaneta Hong is a Lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the recipient of the 2013-2014 Daniel Urban Kiley Teaching Fellowship in Landscape Architecture. Prior to her appointment, Zaneta was a Lecturer in Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia and the Materials Lab Curator at the University of Texas in Austin.

Her research into landscape material systems and technologies has emerged in numerous material collections and has been cited in publications including Living Systems: Innovative Materials and Technologies for Landscape Architecture, Material Design: Information Architecture by Materiality, and Landscape Architecture Magazine. Currently, Zaneta is design principal at Beta-field, a Boston-based research and design office, and GA Collaborative, a design-oriented non-profit organization. Zaneta attended Cornell University before completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Industrial Design from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Friday, May 6
6:30pm—8:30pm
Van Alen Institute
30 W 22nd Street
New York, NY

Top Image courtesy of Havard GSD

> via gsd.harvard.edu