Harvard Design Magazine

The intimate Monk's Garden at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston embodies the design principles that inform the work of noted landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh. In Designing a Garden, Van Valkenburgh presents the design of the Monk's Garden at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, an intimate, walled garden that Laurie Olin has described as "a masterpiece, and not a minor one." The book documents the evolution of the garden's design, which is based on the concept of meandering paths through a dreamlike woodland to create a contemplative space. Sketches and models show how the idea was worked out, and lush photographs reveal the completed garden through the seasons. Van Valkenburgh's text explores the origins of his love of landscape and plants in his family farm in Upstate New York and how this has influenced his intuitions as a designer. He shares the full background story of the Monk's Garden, focusing on the experimental nature of design work as well as the challenges and satisfactions of the small scale and the historic and cultural context. Designing a Garden provides a unique first-person account of the design process from the most prominent landscape architects in the country.

Offering questions of the past to ground questions of the present, How About Now? summons the enduring concerns and preoccupations that designers constantly revisit, reconsider, and redefine in response to a changing world. This installment of the GSD Platform series celebrates--and places itself within--the rich tradition of student publications at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Produced annually, this compendium highlights a selection of work from the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and design, and design engineering, and exposes a rich and varied pedagogical culture committed to shaping the future of design. Documenting projects, research, events, exhibitions, and more, Platform offers a curated view into the emerging topics, techniques, and dispositions within and beyond the Harvard GSD.

This collection of an important architectural theorist's essays considers and compares designs by Palladio and Le Corbusier, discusses mannerism and modern architecture, architectural vocabulary in the 19th century, the architecture of Chicago, neoclassicism and modern architecture, and the architecture of utopia.

SHOPPING is arguably the last remaining form of public activity. Through a battery of increasingly predatory forms, shopping has infiltrated, colonized, and even replaced, almost every aspect of urban life. Town centers, suburbs, streets, and now airports, train stations, museums, hospitals, schools, the Internet, and the military are shaped by the mechanisms and spaces of shopping. The voracity by which shopping pursues the public has, in effect, made it one of the principal-if only-modes by which we experience the city. The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping explores the spaces, people, techniques, ideologies, and inventions by which shopping has so dramatically refashioned the city. Perhaps the beginning of the twenty-first century will be remembered as the point where the urban could no longer be understood without shopping. The PROJECT ON THE CITY, formerly known as "The Project for What Used to be the City," is an ongoing research effort that examines the effects of modernization on the urban condition. Each year the Project on the City investigates a specific urban region or a general urban condition undergoing virulent change. It tries to capture and decipher ongoing mutations in order to develop a new conceptual framework and vocabulary for phenomena that can no longer be described within the traditional categories of architecture, landscape, and urban planning. The first project, Great Leap Forward, focuses on the new forms and speeds of urbanization in the Pearl River Delta, China. The second project investigates the impact of shopping on the city. The third project explores the urban condition of Lagos, Nigeria. The fourth project treats the invention and expansion of the "systematic" Roman city as an early version of modernization and a prototype for the current process of globalization.

Sustainability is now one of the key debates shaping cities. It has been suggested that 'sustainable architecture isn't a prescription. It's an approach, an attitude. It shouldn't really even have a label. It should just be architecture!' But what does it mean to describe a building as 'green'? How can we make sense of the bewildering array of contrasting styles of sustainable architecture? Based on original research by a sociologist and architect, the book draws upon a range of perspectives and theories that illuminate both the contested nature of green design and the socially constructive nature of sustainable architectural practice. Written in a straightforward style and illustrated throughout with well-known international examples of green building, this book will appeal to students, practitioners and academics alike.

In the wake of architecture's digital turn, contemporary practices have taken up archaic, even "prehistoric," models for the practice of architecture and how it might develop trenchant relationships to contemporary audiences. Underneath a wildly diverse and variable set of appearances, Inscriptions: Architecture Before Speech reveals architectures that evince a stable and shared set of commitments to design as an act before speech--that is, they exceed the structural and semiotic propositions of the twentieth century which have long served as a point of beginning for the imagination of architectural thought itself. Featuring essays from Catherine Ingraham, Lucia Allais, Stan Allen, Phillip Denny, Edward Eigen, Sylvia Lavin, Antoine Picon, and Marrikka Trotter, Inscriptions rethinks architecture at the moment just before it is presupposed as the material of an indeterminably meaningful mark, the moment just before text becomes speech and before architecture becomes building--the site of inscription.