The Thing Tank

The Thing Tank

THE THING TANK The world of things is more than the accumulation of everyday flotsam and jetsam that accompanies our lives: it is a laboratory where the intentions of makers and marketers come into contact and collision with unstable scenarios of past, present, and future use. The Thing Tank explores this terrain of contact and [...]

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MOSS

MOSS

JongHyun Baek (MLA 1 AP) Professor Niall Kirkwood YongKyu Kim (Visiting Scholar) Project Name: Moss Paving Panels Installation Date : October 12, 2009 Installation By: JongHyun Baek (MLA 1 AP), Andrew Zientek (MLA II) Location : GSD rooftop Area : 72 sq ft Landscape Architecture Department This moss fabrics installation is a part of the [...]

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Beer N Dogs:  A Retrospective

Beer N Dogs: A Retrospective

As landscape students of the GSD, our voices are rarely heard in the drowning sea of architects. We are but a fraction compared to their numbers and hubris. To add salt to the wound, we are constantly reminded of our lagging representational skills, lack of historical theory, and philistinian vocabulary. So it comes as no [...]

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INSERT!

INSERT!

Chinatown Storefront Library Exhibit Opening

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Urban to wild/Wild to urban

Emily Bonifaci, Ilana Cohen & Tim Wong (MLA ’10) This series of shadow puppet explorations examine the relationship and interdependence of urban infrastructure with urban ecology. The specific relationships narrated highlight the development and decay of infrastructure transportation, energy, and hydrological of Chelsea, Massachusetts and underscores the relationship between transportation corridors and wildlife corridors, decayed [...]

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GSD Student Guide + Guide to Gund

GSD Student Guide + Guide to Gund

The GSD Student Guide + Guide to Gund are now available as PDFs, edited by Dean of Students, Laura Snowdon and trays editor Shelby Doyle. All you never wanted to know about the GSD! Enjoy. STUDENT GUIDE GUIDE TO GUND

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Why are there Planners in my Design School?

Ben Harwood, Master of Urban Planning ’09 Why are there Planners in my Design School? Planners in design schools remind me of hatchling ducks that accidentally imprint on non-duck animals, confusing them for their mother. Sensible observers register this as a disruption of the natural order of things, though it’s still adorable to watch a [...]

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Twigs, Jell-O, Plexi, and Pencil Shavings: An Occasionally Desperate Search for the Perfect Model Material

Twigs, Jell-O, Plexi, and Pencil Shavings: An Occasionally Desperate Search for the Perfect Model Material

Emily Bonifaci (MLA ’10) Dear GSD: For a year and a half now I have struggled in silence. Please help me end this cycle of pain. My problem is this: I have yet to figure out a nice-looking way to represent forest massing of existing veg. on my models. Methods that I have tried and [...]

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Signatures

Signatures

How do we sign our names? From the day we learn to write our names until the day we can no longer wield a pen, our signatures are stand-ins for our actual selves and are expressions of our will in the abstracted world of signs and language. We identify and bind ourselves with signatures on [...]

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City Center, Remixed.

City Center, Remixed.

Ben Harwood (MUP ’09) Most think The Strip is Las Vegas. People look at you askance when you tell them nearly 2 million persons call Vegas home. In the past decades, the valley has hosted some of the nation’s most explosive population growth. A Sunday drive (no one walks in Vegas so a Sunday stroll [...]

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DO! Design Opportunity Publication

Released on Friday, November 5, 2010. Through the collaborative efforts of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) student groups Trays Journal and SoCA (Social Change and Activism), DO! Design Opportunity has developed as necessary platform for the myriad of GSD student work and research that contributes to the discourse on the global and regional [...]

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3 STATES OF HORS D’ OEUVRES

3 STATES OF HORS D’ OEUVRES

The Laboratory at Harvard Experiments in the Arts and Sciences 2010/11 Opening Celebration Thursday October 7th Norhwest Sciences Building (Lobby and Basement Level) – 52 Oxford Street – Cambridge, MA 02138 www.projectonspatialsciences.com MIST CITY Imagine wandering in Mist city, where buildings are not made out of tectonic, solid, impermeable walls out of dead materials but [...]

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gutter 2009

gutter 2009

fierce pussy Artists in Residence, Carpenter Center for Visual Arts. Sponsored by the Harvard Art Museum, Harvard College Women’s Center, the Peter Ivers Visiting Artist Fund, and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Co-hosted at the GSD by OutDesign and Women in Design. fierce pussy is a collective of queer women dedicated to creating [...]

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Park(ing) Day

Park(ing) Day

Carrie Nielson (MLA I/MUP ’11) On September 18th, members of the MLA I 2010 class participated in the nationwide event of Parking Day, laying claim to two spaces at the corner of JFK and Brattle Streets in front of Curious George, with the aid of City of Cambridge permits. Our installation was a commentary on [...]

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FIERCE PUSSY

FIERCE PUSSY

The fierce pussy residency is part of the broader Harvard ACT UP exhibition which is taking place at the Carpenter Center and the Sackler Museum, running until December 23rd.

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Analysis of Tonal Intervals

Analysis of Tonal Intervals

Patrick Jones (M. Arch ’09) Black Flag at La Villette proposes a new performance hall in Parc de la Villette for the Philharmonie de Paris according to the exact program for the actual project now under construction. The project begins with a study of interval in music based on my long history of musical composition [...]

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Sun Crowd

Sun Crowd

Alex Miller (MUP ’10) & Abdulla Darrat (MUP ’10) Despite the many urban interventions that have attempted to transform Porter Square into a public gathering place, it remains a car-dominated environment with the primary role of moving commuters and shoppers in and out of the space as quickly as possible.  Conceptualizing an ephemeral urban event [...]

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Snow Day!

Snow Day!

James Moore (MUP ’10) & Ravneet Grewal (MUP ’10) Cambridge is a stodgy place. It often resembles a museum where people are encouraged to look, but not touch, to walk, but not run. Cambridge needs a healthy dose of spontaneous fun.  Given the choice between several squares in which to stage a temporary intervention, we [...]

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Phantom City

Phantom City

Siqi Zhu (MUP ’10) and Tom Lin (MUP ’10) Kendall Square on a winter evening is bleak, empty, but also potentially atmospheric.  Reminiscent of the menacing and enigmatic cityscape in Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings, there is a psychological tension to this empty space that we seek to exploit in the installation Phantom City. In the [...]

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Urban Oasis

Urban Oasis

Grant King (MUP ’10) and Yijiu Zheng (MUP ’10) Taking place in January, this week-long project creates an enchanted desert oasis and bazaar directly around the Porter Square T Station. An oasis was chosen as the theme because it finds itself limited in extent by a surrounding wasteland – for the oasis this wasteland is [...]

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Bea Camacho at Tate Modern

Bea Camacho at Tate Modern

These images are taken from a performance that took place in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in May 2010. During the performance, I crocheted myself into a cocoon with grey yarn. The entire performance took around 8 hours. Bea Camacho, MArch I bea.camacho@gmail.com

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AN INTERVIEW WITH BERNARD PLATTNER (RENZO PIANO BUILDING WORKSHOP) PART 2

AN INTERVIEW WITH BERNARD PLATTNER (RENZO PIANO BUILDING WORKSHOP) PART 2

Macy Leung (M.Des ’11) *This is the second part of a four part interview series with Bernard Plattner (BP) conducted by Macy Leung (ML) in the summer of 2009. ML:  Why are there a large range of design in each of your projects and why isn’t there a unified style?  You had mentioned while we [...]

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An Interview with Bernard Plattner (Renzo Piano Building Workshop) Part 1

An Interview with Bernard Plattner (Renzo Piano Building Workshop) Part 1

Macy Leung (M.Des ’11) German philosopher Goethe said in Faust that “Technology is secondary to Science and Arts”. Renzo Piano’s ‘Building Workshop’ reflects the importance of craftsmanship, details, technology and architects as builders. As a professional practice in the architecture and design profession, understanding the changes in building and design conception and technology and the [...]

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Farming and the City

Farming and the City

Ilana Cohen It’s August – the height of the growing season in New York City – and not an easy time of year to interview a farmer. Nevertheless, I managed to catch up with a couple of young urban farmers to ask them their opinions of the new PS 1 pavilion by WORKac. The pavilion, [...]

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NOLA Correspondence II

NOLA Correspondence II

Wetlands, Flooding, Climate Change, and Pragmatic Planning in New Orleans Jonathan Tate An Ongoing Correspondence on New Orleans and Design: Installment Two Jonathan Tate is a practicing architect in New Orleans with buildingstudio (http://www.buildingstudio.net/), a firm focused on sustainable practices and nontraditional building opportunities. He teaches design studios at Tulane University School of Architecture and [...]

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NOLA Correspondence I

NOLA Correspondence I

Post-Katrina Housing in New Orleans Jonathan Tate An Ongoing Correspondence on New Orleans and Design: Installment One Jonathan Tate is a practicing architect in New Orleans with buildingstudio (http://www.buildingstudio.net/), a firm focused on sustainable practices and nontraditional building opportunities. He teaches design studios at Tulane University School of Architecture and works with Tulane’s City Center [...]

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MCD House

MCD House

Lukas Petrash A 484 s.f. artist’s home for 3: A Fully Accessible, Sustainable Design An Experiment in Indoor/Outdoor Living Built around the trees, Constructed of scrap & salvaged materials, Reliant on sun & wind, without HVAC. Designed, Engineered, and Constructed by T. Lukas Petrash (a current Masters in Urban Planning student at the GSD), with [...]

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OP-ED: The Subprime Mortgage Crisis and the CRA

Lindsay Finkenstaedt Conservative critics, once again, have somehow found a scapegoat for bankers’ egregious lending habits, which have resulted in the mortgage market meltdown. They say government regulators and Democratic “whiners” have interfered with financial markets, which, according to Phil Gramm, is “an evil akin to communism.” The main target of their finger-pointing is the [...]

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Katrina and the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, Q&A with Brian Zamora

Katrina and the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, Q&A with Brian Zamora

TRAYS : Brian Zamora This interview belongs to a series of interviews conducted by trays editor Aron Chang in the summer of 2007 in regards to the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art and the museum’s ongoing rebuilding efforts. Please refer to the accompanying introductory article, Rebuilding Biloxi’s Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of [...]

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Katrina and the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, Q&A with Marjie Gowdy

Katrina and the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, Q&A with Marjie Gowdy

TRAYS : Marjie Gowdy This interview belongs to a series of interviews conducted by trays editor Aron Chang in the summer of 2007 in regards to the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art and the museum’s ongoing rebuilding efforts. Please refer to the accompanying introductory article, Rebuilding Biloxi’s Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of [...]

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