Instigations

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.