Part of the beauty of an architectural education is that it provides you with design skills that can be applied to a wide variety to jobs. So when it came time for Kharkov University Architecture School graduate Dinara Kasko to select a career path, she chose to pursue something a little bit sweeter: architectural pastry chef.
QS- Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings just announced the 2023 top universities to study Architecture and the Built Environment. The index rates over 1,400 schools and covers a total of 54 disciplines, grouped into five broad subject areas, based on five indicators "to effectively reflect their performance, taking into account academic reputation, employer reputation, and faculty research".
In this edition of the 2023 Architecture/ Built Environment category, UCL dethrones MIT, which stayed in the first position for three consecutive years. MIT came second, while both the Delft University of Technology and ETH Zurich took third place. The Manchester School of Architecture makes its first debut in the top 5, followed by Harvard, the National University of Singapore, and Tsinghua University in China. Berkeley moved to ninth position and Politecnico remains a non-mover at 10, for the third year.
Rahul Mehrotra is a practicing architect based in Boston and Mumbai and he has been teaching at Harvard’s GSD where he is currently Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design and Director of the Master in Architecture in Urban Design Degree Program. Born in 1959, Mehrotra grew up in Lucknow, a city in Northern India and an important cultural and artistic hub. His father was a manager at a large machine tool company. The family moved a lot following Mehrotra senior’s frequent promotions, which led to changing residences owned by his company. Besides a few years in Lucknow and Delhi, they lived in different neighborhoods within Mumbai.
In the complex trade of architecture and construction, you are never alone. And behind every great building there is a strong team of professionals combining their expertise.
Hanif Kara OBE is a structural engineer and one of the founders of AKT II, one of the top engineering firms in the world. Based in London, he has been closely collaborating with some of the world’s most innovative architects, including Grafton Architects, David Chipperfield, Norman Foster, BIG, Zaha Hadid, Thomas Heatherwick, and many more.
Notable projects include the Kingston University Town House by Grafton Architects, the Bloomberg HQ by Foster + Partners and the Peckham Library by Will Alsop, all recognized with the RIBA Stirling Prize, and the recently completed Twist Museum by BIG, LSE Marshall Building by Grafton Architects, and 404 One Park Drive by Herzog & de Meuron.
Harvard University Graduate School of Design (Harvard GSD) has announced Marina Otero as the winner of the 2022 Wheelwright Prize. The 100,000 USD grant funds two years of research and travel to support contemporary architecture's investigative approaches, with an emphasis on globally minded research. The winning proposal, “Future Storage: Architectures to Host the Metaverse”, examines a new architecture paradigm for storing digital data. The project looks at how reimagining digital infrastructures could provide answers to the unprecedented demands facing the world today. The field research, data collection, and prototype development will result in an open-source manual for data center architecture design containing examples of ecological, circular, and egalitarian data storage models.
Architect Mariam Kamara—founder of Niamey, Niger-based firm Atelier Masōmī—is a contrarian of design pedagogy as it is largely practiced today. To Kamara, modern is not synonymous with European forms, architecture is not only for Westerners to define, and the so-called canon of great buildings actually ignores most of the built world. The Niger-based architect's rapidly growing practice informs a series of lectures she has delivered recently at MIT, Columbia University GSAPP, the African Futures Institute in Ghana, and Harvard GSD.
The Second Studio (formerly The Midnight Charette) is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by Architects David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features different creative professionals in unscripted conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and personal discussions.
A variety of subjects are covered with honesty and humor: some episodes are interviews, while others are tips for fellow designers, reviews of buildings and other projects, or casual explorations of everyday life and design. The Second Studio is also available on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube.
This week, David and Marina are joined by Sarah Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design; Co-Founder of WW Architecture to discuss her early interests in architecture, communicating the value of architecture to the public, the GSD, social and environmental issues in architecture, the future of architecture practice, movements in architecture, and more.
Germane Barnes has won the 2021 Wheelwright Prize from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. The $100,000 prize will fund two years of travel and research for Barnes’s proposal Anatomical Transformations in Classical Architecture, an examination of classical Roman and Italian architecture through the lens of non-white constructors. Barnes will study how spaces have been transformed through the material contributions of the African Diaspora while creating new possibilities within investigations of Blackness.
As the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, Harvard has emerged as one of the world's most well-known universities. Organized into ten academic faculties and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, it is spread across 200 acres and centers on Harvard Yard in Cambridge. Developed along the Charles River adjacent to the Allston neighborhood of Boston, Harvard has the largest financial endowment of any academic institution. This has supported a number of different campus building projects across the university’s history.
The Harvard Graduate School of Design (Harvard GSD) will no longer refer to a private residence at 9 Ash Street in Cambridge as the “Philip Johnson Thesis House.” Moving forward, the home, designed by and inhabited by Johnson while enrolled at the Harvard GSD in the 1940s, will now be known solely by its physical street address.
Architecture school is a place of experiment and a testing ground for innovative ideas. The academic work and student projects can bring to light the focus of an entire career, shape the backbone for an architectural theory, and crystalize values. How do their studies and formative years reflect on the later work of different architects? Taking a journey along decades, we explore the transition from architecture school to practice, the reverberance of academic explorations and early projects in the work of several architects and practices, highlighting the different pivotal steps that have shaped the beginning of their architectural journey.
This article was originally published on Common Edge.
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police, the United States erupted in protests and demonstrations. The fervor generated by that event reached the world of architecture education a couple of weeks later, when two groups at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD)—the African American Student Union (AASU) and AfricaGSD—posted a public statement, Notes on Credibility, calling for reforms at the school. Four days later, Dean Sarah M. Whiting posted a response, Towards a New GSD. Shortly after, I reached out to the groups, and they put me in touch with two of their members: Caleb Negash, a second-year student in the MArch program, and Andrew Mbuthia Ngure, a third-year student in the same program.
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The Best Architecture Masters (BAM) platform presented the third edition of its ranking of the best postgraduate architecture programs in the world.
Based on a list of different postgraduate study programs from the best architecture schools selected in the QS Ranking by Subjects – Architecture / Built Environment, these were evaluated by 11 educational-performance indicators and 41 sub-indicators in relation to the teaching approach, the opportunities they offer, and the programs themselves.
Students and alumni from the Harvard Graduate School of Design are launching an online Design Yard Sale to raise funds in support of the movement against systemic anti-Black racism. The team will sell and auction creative works donated by the design community, and all net proceeds will go towards the Bail Project and Colloqate Design. Among Design Yard Sale’s offerings will be works donated by renowned designers, artists, and scholars such as Toshiko Mori, Oana Stanescu, Rachel Israela, Jeanne Gang, Billie Tsien, Snarkitecture, Jerome Byron and VERV LONDON.
The work presented in this article is the outcome of drawings done by the students of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in their second-semester studio, conducted by Alfredo Thiermann (ThiermannCruz). The work was produced during a 6-week long period of distance-learning after the school was shut down at the beginning of March.
Harvard Graduate School of Design (Harvard GSD) has announced Daniel Fernández Pascual as the winner of the 2020 Wheelwright Prize. Now in its eighth cycle, the Wheelwright Prize supports innovative design research, crossing both cultural and architectural boundaries, with a $100,000 grant intended to support two years of study. The 2020 Wheelwright Prize drew over 170 applicants from over 45 countries.
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Harvard GSD is presenting during the month of April 2020, an online series of talks and webinars via Zoom, where attendees can interact and submit questions. Accessible for everyone who registers, the events are also streamed live to the GSD's YouTube page.
Harvard Graduate School of Design (Harvard GSD) has announced three shortlisted architects for the 2020 Wheelwright Prize. Now in its eighth cycle, the Wheelwright Prize supports innovative design research, crossing both cultural and architectural boundaries, with a $100,000 grant intended to support two years of study. The 2020 Wheelwright Prize drew 168 applicants from over 45 countries.
