Updated: All spring public programs have been cancelled due to Covid-19. To follow up-to-date information on campus, visit Harvard GSD's homepage. 

Harvard University Graduate School Of Design (GSD) has announced its Spring 2020 public programs and events, including Rem Koolhaas, Hanif Kara, Hashim Sarkis, Jeanne Gang, Alex Krieger with Thomas J. Campanella, Lizabeth Cohen, Paul Goldberger, Alissa Quart, and Sarah Whiting and more...

See program details below and add favourite lectures and events to your architecture calendar:

February

February 4, 2020

"Harvard in Allston: Perspective and Next Steps": Marika E. Reuling and Thomas Glynn

Reuling is the Managing Director for Allston Initiatives at Harvard University, where she oversees the team focused on planning, development and placemaking strategy in Allston. Glynn is the Chief Executive Officer of the Harvard Allston Land Company, overseeing Harvard University’s non-institutional development of its Enterprise Research Campus in Allston. 

February 5, 2020

C. David Tseng, "Uncharted Exclaves: Modernism and Other -Isms in the Practices of Taiwanese Architecture” 

Tseng joins Harvard GSD’s Michelle Chang to examine Taiwan as a laboratory for architectural experiments, or more precisely, the exclaves of all architectural movements and architecture’s “-isms.” 

February 6, 2020

Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture: Günther Vogt, "The Imprint of the Landscape"

Celebrating, in part, the opening of the exhibition First the Forests, curator Vogt asks: What is the relevant scale, whether the miniature or the panoramic, for operating with the landscape of the city? 

February 25, 2020

"Plants in the Design Imagination": Ron Henderson, Julian Raxworthy, and Douglas Reed with Danielle Choi

A conversation among landscape architects Henderson, Raxworthy, and Reed, moderated by Harvard GSD’s Choi. 

February 27, 2020

"Saving America’s Cities: The Past, Present, and Future of Urban Revitalization"

A Conversation with Lizabeth Cohen, Shaun Donovan, and Sarah Whiting. Cohen, Donovan, and Whiting reflect on the career of urban planner Ed Logue and what it suggests about how policy, planning, and design can address current urban challenges. 

March

March 2, 2020

Elizabeth Hoover, "Seed Sovereignty and ‘Our Living Relatives’ in Native American Community Farming and Gardening"

Hoover explores how Native American community-based farming and gardening projects are defining heirloom or heritage seeds; why maintaining and growing out these seeds is seen as so important; and how terms like “seed sovereignty” should be defined and enacted. 

March 3, 2020

International Womxn’s Day Lecture: Dr. Vandana Shiva

Shiva is a scholar, author, environmental activist, and food sovereignty advocate.

March 10, 2020

"Words Build Worlds": Nicolai Ouroussoff, Florencia Rodriguez, and Tom Weaver

As Senior Loeb Scholars within Harvard GSD’s Loeb Fellowship program, Ouroussoff, Rodriguez, and Weaver plan to offer new and different perspectives on the range of issues being faced within the design disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning and design. 

March 12, 2020

50th Anniversary of Urban Design Lecture: Former Mayor Anthony A. Williams

Williams, former Mayor of Washington, D.C. (1999 to 2007), discusses the physical, programmatic, and philosophical dimensions of the public realm and a political leader’s role in shaping it. 

March 13, 2020

Conference: "On the Cene: New Approaches to Building the American Museum of Natural History," with keynote by Jeanne Gang, Gary Hilderbrand, and Douglas Reed

This conference proposes a new multi-prepositional approach to issues of contemporary practice. Focusing on a single project currently under construction, the American Museum of Natural History’s Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation (Studio Gang and Reed Hilderbrand), architects, historians, and critics will address what potentialities, past and future, are bound up in and/or are released by the (natural) history of an institutional building project. 

March 23, 2020

Thomas Daniell, "An Anatomy of Influence"

Daniell, Professor of Architectural Theory and Criticism at Kyoto University, introduces his recent book An Anatomy of Influence (AA Publications, 2018), which comprises a wealth of texts and images that together elucidate the theory and practice of a series of postwar Japanese architects. 

March 24, 2020

John T. Dunlop Lecture: "Addressing Homelessness: What Can (and Can’t) Architecture Do?" with Michael Maltzan

Maltzan discusses his work with the Skid Row Housing Trust and what it suggests about the ways in which architecture and other design professions can help address problems of housing affordability and homelessness. 

March 27, 2020

Conference: "Thresholds: Design and Science," at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study

This conference gathers thought leaders from both design and science who interrogate the space in between through their work. The sessions, thematically aligned with the human senses, present a multitude of approaches, methods, and techniques that transcend the disciplinary focus. 

March 30, 2020

Rouse Visiting Artist Lecture: "Prospecting Ocean: Artistic Research in the Oceanic Anthropocene": Stefanie Hessler and Armin Linke

Curator and writer Hessler and photographer and filmmaker Linke discuss their project Prospecting Ocean, which investigates the entanglement of industry, politics, culture, and economics at the frontier of ocean excavations through an innovative union of art and science. 

April

April 2, 2020

Open House Lecture: Amanda Williams: "PRACTICE or Holding Space for ___________."

How do we make space for an expanded definition of what it means to practice? Williams’s lecture highlights recent projects that navigate or dwell in between the disciplinary lines of art and architecture. 

April 7, 2020

Kenzo Tange Lecture: OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen

Belgium-based OFFICE is renowned for its idiosyncratic architecture, in which realizations and theoretical projects stand side by side. Its projects are direct, spatial, and firmly rooted in architectural theory. 

April 9, 2020

Sol Camacho/RADDAR

Camacho is an architect and urban designer leading RADDAR, an innovative practice focused in research and design acting in Sao Paulo and Mexico City. 

April 10, 2020

Conference: "Mass Timber: Beyond Instrumentality and Technology," moderated by Jennifer Bonner and Hanif Kara

This conference acknowledges the recent acceleration of mass timber technology within the industry, coupled with the unprecedented challenges faced by human kind at the global scale, yet, demands new pedagogical approaches to learning and teaching design. 

April 13, 2020

Aga Khan Program Lecture: Laleh Khalili, "Tankers, Tycoons, and the Making of Modern Regimes of Law, Labour, and Finance"

Focusing on the tanker terminals of the Arabian Peninsula from the 1930s to present, and the subsequent burgeoning of tanker-ships plying the trade between the Peninsula and the rest of the world, Khalili illuminates the radical changes in political economy, labor, law, and production that the specificities of tanker trade have wrought. 

April 14, 2020

"Writing Our Cities": Alex Krieger with Thomas J. Campanella, Lizabeth Cohen, Paul Goldberger, Alissa Quart, and Sarah Whiting

To honor Krieger’s decades-long service as a professor at Harvard GSD, and his dedication to the crafts of urban planning and urban design, Harvard GSD brings together a distinguished panel of guests for a conversation about cities; each participant has recently penned a book on U.S. cities, as examined through lenses as broad as baseball parks, affordability, history, development, crisis, and beyond. 

April 16, 2020

Jan De Vylder, "THAT IT DOES NOT LOOK GOOD MAKES THAT IT LOOKS GOOD."

The firm architecten jan de vylder inge vinck (A JDVIV), founded by De Vylder and Inge Vinck, explores ideas launched at ETH Zurich in the studio series titled “Universum Carrousel Journey (UCJ): Universum as a world to be created.” 

April 17, 2020

Conference: "In Pursuit of Equitable Development: Lessons from Washington, Detroit, and Boston"

Presentations and discussions aim to help students, scholars, community leaders, public officials and others identify innovative strategies and successful approaches to advancing social justice goals in low-income and largely minority neighborhoods. 

April 21, 2020

Hashim Sarkis

Sarkis is an architect, educator, and scholar. He is principal of Hashim Sarkis Studios (HSS) and dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). 

April 23, 2020

"Project for a New Decade: From City to Countryside": Samir Bantal, Rem Koolhaas, Troy Conrad Therrien, and Sarah Whiting 

Bantal, Koolhaas, Therrien, and Whiting explore radical changes in the rural, remote, and wild territories collectively identified here as “countryside,” tying in themes and investigations from the concurrent Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum exhibition Countryside, The Future. 

April 24, 2020

"Project for a New Decade: From City to Countryside": panel discussion at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

A panel discussion complementing the Guggenheim’s full rotunda exhibition of Countryside, The Future. 

Top image: Koppert Cress, Netherlands. Photo: Luca Locatelli, 2017. Harvard GSD co-organizes a pair of events with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum this spring, tied to the Guggenheim exhibition Countryside, The Future. 

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