Instigations: GSD 075

by Mohsen Mostafavi (Editor), Peter Christensen (Editor)

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 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.

480 pages, Paperback

First published September 25, 2012

About the author

Mohsen Mostafavi (1954) is an Iranian-American architect and educator. He is the Dean and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He has been the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University, and the Chairman of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.

(from Wikipedia)