The Harvard Graduate School of Design has announced that Sarah Whiting, dean of the Rice University School of Architecture since 2010, will serve as the next dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, beginning on July 1st. Described by the university as “an outstanding scholar, educator, and architect with broad interests that range across the design principles and beyond,” Whiting served on the GSD faculty for six years before moving to Princeton and later becoming the dean at Rice, where she also served as the William Ward Watkin Professor of Architecture.

The Harvard Graduate School of Design has relaunched its free online course entitled “The Architectural Imagination.” Directed by the school’s Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory, K. Michael Hays, the course seeks to teach students “how to understand architecture as both cultural expression and technical achievement.”

The free 10-week program runs until July 2019 and is carried out through the online edX platform, a Harvard/MIT system that specializes in high-quality massive open online courses. During the course, students will engage with the social and historical contexts behind major works of architecture, basic principles to produce drawings and models, and the pertinent content for academic study or a professional career as an architect.

Harvard University Graduate School of Design has announced the 2019 Richard Rogers Fellowship cycle. Open to accomplished practitioners and scholars working in fields related to the built environment, the research-focused residency program is based in London at the Wimbledon House, designed by Lord Richard Rogers in the late 1960s. Fellows have researched a diverse series of topics, including examinations of public and affordable housing; how food and cooking transform cities; and citizen-driven urban regeneration initiatives, among others.

Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) has announced three architects shortlisted for this year's prestigious Wheelwright Prize. The $100,000 grant, which is awarded annually to a single architect to support travel-based architectural research, is “intended to spur innovative research during the early stage of an architect’s professional career” and “foster new forms of research informed by cross-cultural engagement.”

Similarly to previous years, the shortlisted applicants were chosen from nearly 200 submitters spanning 51 countries. Each finalist will be invited to speak at Harvard GSD on April 16 (starting at noon) to present their work and research proposals. The event will be free and open to the public. A winner will be announced at the end of April.

“The strength and diversity of the applications are growing each year, making the jury’s job increasingly difficult,” said K. Michael Hays, Wheelwright Prize organizing committee member and 2015 jury chair. “It’s gratifying to see so many young architects approach their work as part of larger intellectual projects.”

The shortlisted architects are...

National libraries, often monumental in scale and "dominated by nationalistic ambitions and overwhelming architectural details," will be the subject of a new exhibition opening later this month at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). Icons of Knowledge: Architecture and Symbolism in National Libraries seeks to examine why national libraries are amongst the most symbolic icons of modern day countries. In the global milieu of the "rapid digitisation of print," this exhibition aims to shed light on why nations are "vehemently investing resources in the construction of buildings that will project their cultural legacy and house the most precious treasures of their written history."

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In a profession all-too-often associated with and dominated by men, women have begun to carve a space for themselves in the architecture world - but still few are recognized as they deserve. 

So Alice Shure and Janice Stanton, the founders of Amici Productions LLC, began work on a new documentary, Making Space: a visual register for future generations of architects that will document what is changing in architecture today and how these changes are affecting women. 

After interviewing over 30 architects, Shure and Stanton selected five women, five "rising stars" to hi-light. The documentary will show their day-to-day lives as well as tell the stories of how they achieved success. 

Thanks to a recent Kickstarter campaign, this project will soon be a reality. But to get your sneak peek into these five female pioneers, read on after the break.