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At a moment when the word “design” has come to refer to everything, and thus nothing, Harvard Design Magazine 52 examines the state of architectural practice today. Once asserted to be the “mother art” (Frank Lloyd Wright) and “the ultimate goal of all creative activity” (Walter Gropius), architecture over the past century has lost its purchase on such grandiose claims to creative primacy and world-building. At the same time, however, architecture remains a ubiquitous point of reference for a wide range of disciplines and protagonists that influence the design of the things we use and the environments we inhabit. Guest editors Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti and Jacob Reidel start this issue with one simple prompt: what do architects actually make and how is this changing?
The spheres of practice, profession, and discipline that constitute the field of architecture provide a rich framework to consider this question. Christoforetti and Reidel seek to understand architects’ myriad roles in society today and their capacity to make change in a world in crisis. The issue is organized into two sections—“Artifacts,” which begins to establish the history and present context necessary for answering the question at the heart of the issue, and “Instruments of Service,” which turns toward the question more directly and walks straight into it. As a whole, Harvard Design Magazine 52 brings together more than 45 contributors from across the practice, profession, and discipline of architecture as well as experts from other fields that are deeply integrated with architecture or that resemble architecture in its makeup as a professional body and therefore have important lessons to offer.
Some contributors, including George B. Johnston and Chelsea Spencer (who collaborated with Bryan E. Norwood and Jay Wickersham), reconstruct the particular histories of what architects do. Some offer critical assessments of the present or advocate for future trajectories for the field. They include Mario Carpo, Claire Weisz, Matthew Soules, and Renée Cheng as well as Christopher Alexander, weighing in from 1982 with a lecture that would form the basis of his four-part book series The Nature of Order. In a collaborative artists’ project, Tyler Coburn and Siqi Zhu lead George B. Johnston, Grace La, Michael Osman, and the guest editors through a thought experiment to speculate where architects might be now if the past couple of centuries had unfolded differently. Other contributors discuss practices that effectively navigate contemporary challenges, with Sala Elise Patterson on Dream the Combine and Matt Shaw on the Office of Jonathan Tate.
All of these contributions are expressed through a variety of formats, including a rich portfolio of construction coordination drawings assembled by Farshid Moussavi. An essential format that appears throughout the issue is dialogue. Across so many spheres of architecture and such a wide variety of deep expertise, dialogue emerged as an especially effective means of teasing out how specific ideas, innovations, and challenges affect different stakeholders—in architecture and our built environment—differently.
Among the wide-ranging conversations including in the issue are “Values-Based Architecture in A Profit-Driven World” with the guest editors and Toni L. Griffin, Nikil Saval, and Jack Self; “Architects, Builders, and the Failed Promise of Deep Collaboration” with Gregg Garmisa, Phil Bernstein, John Cerone, and Alexis McGuffin; and “Unionizing Architectural Labor” with Ana María León, Andrew Bernheimer, Andrew Daley, Maya Porath, and Fiona Reiley.
The issue was designed by Copenhagen-based cross-disciplinary office Alexis Mark and features AM Service Manual, an issue-specific typeface that draws upon the aesthetics of manuals. Understood as instruments of service, manuals introduce readers to the workings of a given system and comprise enormous amounts of data that become comprehensible when ordered neatly into smaller parts. AM Service Manual was inspired by the genre’s ability to “make visible whatever is beyond the interface.”
For subscriptions and purchases of individual copies of current and back issues, please visit the Harvard Design Magazine website. Harvard Design Magazine is an architecture and design magazine that probes at the reaches of design and its reciprocal influence and impact on life and culture. The magazine considers design’s vital relevance to our contemporary world through an interdisciplinary lens, and it strives to bring design and critical writing about design to a broad audience that includes a discerning and curious public alongside an international readership composed of architects, designers, students, academics, and artists. Harvard Design Magazine is led by Editor in Chief Ken Stewart and Managing Editor Meghan Ryan Sandberg.
