Instigations: Gsd 075

Anniversaries offer the opportunity to consider the past as an active interlocutor with the present and the future. For the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, this means highlighting people, events, objects, and ideas in a rich institutional history to bring the collective memory of seventy-five years into sharper focus for design practice today and tomorrow. Attempting a comprehensive account of the institution would run the risk of homogenizing a history characterized so consistently by heterogeneity and multiplicity. Instead, this book employs an episodic approach, framing selected moments as journalistic dispatches from the past. These reports are grouped within paired themes: Design as Research/Design as Critique, City as Practice/ City as Form, the Continuous Institution/The Shifting Institution. Short essays by a range of GSD faculty signal current directions in teaching and research, pointing toward a future that is at once inherited and projective.

Mohsen Mostafavi is Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design. He has served on the steering committee of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture and the juries of the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Contruction and the RIBA Gold Medal.

Peter Christensen is a PhD candidate at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a former curatorial assistant in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.