trays

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 research project ‘Moss Paving Panels’ which has [...]

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 [...]

Chinatown Storefront Library Exhibit Opening

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 [...]

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

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 duckling waddling [...]

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 hate: [...]

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 [...]

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 is [...]

TRAYS Editorial Staff and Judges

TRAYS and Student Forum hosted The Space Of Representation competition from 12 February to 6 March 2009. “We invite you to sketch, diagram, model, photograph, film, write, or otherwise represent a rethinking of the review and presentation spaces at the GSD […] There are no restrictions in terms of materiality and [...]

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 public art and direct [...]

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 [...]

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.

Patrick Jones (M. Arch ‘09)
I used an analysis of tonal intervals in Wagner’s “Tristan Chord” as the source of architectural form.
The Tristan Chord opens the opera Tristan und Isolde and does not achieve tonal resolution until
the very end of the opera. It has since been regarded as a musical articulation of the anxieties and
psychoses [...]

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 that [...]

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 selected [...]

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 centre of [...]

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 [...]

Kate Balug (MUP ‘11)
June 13 – August 30, 2009
Long Beach, CA
Market, a collaborative exhibition by Katarzyna Balug and Los Angeles-based artist Christopher Reynolds, examines the experience that occurs prior to food consumption. The decision about what to eat is influenced by marketing and package design in gourmet and budget stores alike. Balug and Reynolds observed [...]

Ming Thompson
This piece was one of ten winning entries in the online EveryVille Competition at the 2008 Venice Biennale. In the competition brief, the curator of the exhibition Aaron Betsky asks if “the techniques developed in the world beyond bricks and stone, wood, steel, plastics and concrete, can help us shape a more ephemeral, [...]

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 were [...]

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 [...]

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, Public [...]

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 works [...]

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 on outreach [...]

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 the help of friends and family for volunteer labor.
Final [...]

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 Community Reinvestment [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

TRAYS : Joey Crain
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 [...]