GSD Platform 6


Book Description

A year of research through studio work, theses, lectures, exhibitions and events.




Platform 8


Book Description

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Platform 11


Book Description

Platform 11 is the 2017-2018 installment of 'Platform', the annual compendium documenting select student work, events, lectures, and exhibitions at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. The Harvard Graduate School of Design has always recognized the indispensable importance and values of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and urban design, yet has transcended their individual aspirations through intellectual cross-fertilization and collaboration. The material presented in this publication forms a small part of the incredible range and diversity of proposals and visions and is indicative of the school's commitment, as a global leader in the field, to exploring and articulating transformative ideas through the power of design. It is as important for us to share and communicate the outcome of our research and design investigations as it is to show the fertile circumstances and conditions for the making of these projects.




Platform 12


Book Description

Offering questions of the past to ground questions of the present, How About Now? summons the enduring concerns and preoccupations that designers constantly revisit, reconsider, and redefine in response to a changing world. This installment of the GSD Platform series celebrates--and places itself within--the rich tradition of student publications at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Produced annually, this compendium highlights a selection of work from the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and design, and design engineering, and exposes a rich and varied pedagogical culture committed to shaping the future of design. Documenting projects, research, events, exhibitions, and more, Platform offers a curated view into the emerging topics, techniques, and dispositions within and beyond the Harvard GSD.




GSD Platform 5


Book Description

Platform 5 considers the expanded boundaries of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. It features not only the selections of the work produced at the GSD during the 2011-2012 academic year, but also the potential of that work to address broader questions and inform global initiatives.




GSD Platform 4


Book Description

Beyond a design school, the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) is an immersive environment--a dense atmosphere saturated with creative and intellectual activity. Platform 4 represents a selective sampling of agendas cultivated at the GSD during the last academic year, revealing a diverse mixture of projects, research, and events. Organized as a searchable database, this publication documents both site and situation at the GSD--it is an institutional index. While Platform 4 records research trajectories from the past year, it also has the capacity to set agendas for future work. By framing a set of issues and topics, Platform 4 focuses attention towards particular areas of interest, allowing individual work to build on and contribute to a larger body of disciplinary knowledge. In that sense, the themes within this book become projective, they provide frameworks for future inquiry.




Another Nature


Book Description




Finding Forever


Book Description

Animals are wise and wonderful teachers. They show us, among other things, what it means to love fully, deeply, and unconditionally; to live without judgment; and to forgive even those who have hurt us most. Anyone who has ever gazed into the soulful eyes of their animal companion and wondered what they were thinking will fall in love with the stories of these dogs and their journey to overcome adversity, sometimes against all odds. In Finding Forever, a collection of heartwarming dog stories by author Dobie Houson, you'll meet Gavin, a sensitive German Shepherd who tells the author, an animal communicator, that she has saved his life; and strapping Spartacus, who opens his wounded heart and finds the love of his life on Valentines Day; pint-sized Shepherds, Patience and Eve, both pregnant, both abandoned, and both on death row, illustrate the power of friendship and its ability to heal us and lift us up when all seems lost; then there's Annika, a gentle bunny-soft shepherd whose message for the human race is that we must all expand our awareness and live life with a higher purpose. These are just a few of the dogs you'll meet and fall in love with in Finding Forever: The Dogs of Coastal German Shepherd Rescue, a collection of short stories that chronicles the hope, faith, and courage of twenty-six German Shepherds in search of their forever homes. Finding Forever - A heartwarming dog book that is a profound "must read" for dog lovers everywhere.




Tiny Taxonomy


Book Description

Tiny Taxonomy offers a visually engaging collection of images and texts drawn from a series of contemporary garden installations, which highlight the role of individual plants in landscape architecture. Tiny Taxonomy showcases species that are in cultivation or in profusion, but rarely purposefully planted. A grouping of plants is categorized by common traits derived from an evolution towards feature miniaturization, generating another form of classification. Due to the diminutive size of their features, these plants are often over-looked and therefore tend to be under specified. It seems that as the world around us gains complexity and intricacy, our biological world is tending towards monotony. Tiny Taxonomy considers smallness a design opportunity, offering innumerable microcosmic considerations of the leaf form, flower structure, and physical habitat of individual plants.




Plant Life


Book Description

How afforestation reveals the often-concealed politics between humans and plants In Plant Life, Rosetta S. Elkin explores the procedures of afforestation, the large-scale planting of trees in otherwise treeless environments, including grasslands, prairies, and drylands. Elkin reveals that planting a tree can either be one of the ultimate offerings to thriving on this planet, or one of the most extreme perversions of human agency over it. Using three supracontinental case studies—scientific forestry in the American prairies, colonial control in Africa’s Sahelian grasslands, and Chinese efforts to control and administer territory—Elkin explores the political implications of plant life as a tool of environmentalism. By exposing the human tendency to fix or solve environmental matters by exploiting other organisms, this work exposes the relationship between human and plant life, revealing that afforestation is not an ecological act: rather, it is deliberately political and distressingly social. Plant Life ultimately reveals that afforestation cannot offset deforestation, an important distinction that sheds light on current environmental trends that suggest we can plant our way out of climate change. By radicalizing what conservation protects and by framing plants in their total aliveness, Elkin shows that there are many kinds of life—not just our own—to consider when advancing environmental policy.