Harvard Design Studies

The three-year Harvard GSD AECOM Project on China aimed at recuperating an idea of the city and pursuing alternative forms of urbanization in response to challenges posed by the developmental city in China. Common Frameworks unites design projects from the AECOM studio with research on cultural, political, and historical aspects of the city.

Spatializing Politics is an anthology of emerging scholarship that treats built and imagined spaces as critical to knowing political power. Essays illustrate how buildings and landscapes as disparate as Rust Belt railway stations and rural Rwandan hills become tools of political action and frameworks for political authority.

Airports are central to the life of cities but have remained relatively peripheral in design discourse. In Airport Landscape, case study projects for the ecological enhancement of operating airports and the conversion of abandoned airports demonstrate, through a range of practices, the significance of airports as sites of design.