Harvard Exhibition: Dispatches from the GSD – 75 years of design (Some Klaus inside)

Dispatches from the GSD Exhibition – Main Wall.

The 2011-12 academic year marks the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and in order to celebrate it, the GSD will host a number of events regarding the anniversary throughout the whole academic year. Along with those, the GSD is hosting the exhibit “Dispatches from the GSD: 075 Years of Design”, which will be on display for the duration of the Fall semester throughout Gund Hall, including installations in the lobby gallery, Loeb Library and fourth floor.

Instead of showing a chronological approach that would be inevitably incomplete, the exhibition, which was assembled by a team of students, professors, alumni and staff, has been divided into a succession of episodes; moments that Peter Christensen, curatorial director, describes as “journalistic dispatches from the past, each with its own narrative and artifacts”. All these fictional journalistic dispatches, whose texts have been written accordingly, have been arranged within six thematic categories: Design as Research, Design as Critique, City as Process, City as Form, The Continuous Institution, and The Shifting Institution. 

General view of the exhibition in Gund Hall’s lobby

Shown in this last area, The Shifting Institution, item [C02.21: A Comic Take on the Harvard Graduate School of Design] consists of several comic drawings, including some cartoons from “Klaus on the GSD” done in 2009 [I am sincerely flattered]. Here are a couple of pics and the accompanying text:

A Comic Take On the Harvard Graduate School of Design. July 25, 2009.

CAMBRIDGE, MA – If you want to know what happens between the walls of Harvard Graduate School of Design, the comic strip Klaustoons will give you the answer. Written by an Alumnus of the school hiding behind the pseudonym of “Klaus,” the blog offers humorous cartoons that capture moments of academic life, general student culture and critical discussions in architecture. Cartoons aren’t new at the Graduate School of Design, where the students’ drawing abilities have been known to serve satirical purposes since the 1980s.

The cartoons displayed are Changes in the GSD (Hairstyles I), Platform 2008, GSD Lectures 2008: Parametric Design (I), GSD Lectures 2008: Parametric Performances, Bruno Latour and Peter Sloterdijk: Networks and Spheres, On Starchitecture, and Koolhaas at Harvard: Ecological Urbanism. In the same display there are three more cartoons provided by the Special Collections Department of the Loeb Library: one by Fran Hosken (c1940s), and two more signed by Wang, from the 70s-80s (Inés Zalduendo dixit)

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Dispatches from the GSD: 075 years of design
August 22–December 22, 2011

Anniversaries offer the opportunity to consider the past as an active interlocutor with the present and the future. For the GSD, this means foregrounding an array of agents—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. Conjuring a comprehensive account of the institution since 1936—its thousands of alumni, hundreds of faculty and staff, and two homes—would run the risk of homogenizing a history characterized so consistently by heterogeneity and multiplicity.

As such, the exhibition employs an approach that is episodic, reveling in moments of the GSD’s history that are as singular as they are important. In the spirit of framing these moments as stories unto themselves, they have been conceived of as journalistic dispatches from the past, each with its own narrative and artifacts. Writing history in the present tense, as this exhibition does, is an attempt to make the GSD’s vitality clear and to claim a future that is at once inherited and projective.

The 120 dispatches in this exhibition begin in 1936 and arrive at the present day to include a handful of contemporary thought pieces from a cross section of the School’s faculty, each expressing in a single authorial voice a reflection on the state of design today and the challenges of its future. The historical dispatches are organized into six thematic categories: Design as Research, Design as Critique, City as Process, City as Form, The Continuous Institution, and The Shifting Institution. Each section contains dispatches that speak to a greater set of themes spanning all of the School’s programs and departments, various media, and all seventy-five of the School’s years. In momentarily stopping the clock, this exhibition hopes to enliven the GSD, and Harvard University at large, with the engagement and propulsion that the past can offer us today and tomorrow.

—Peter Christensen (PhD ’14), Curatorial Director

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Below these lines you can find some general photos of the exhibition. Make sure to check the GSD website for more pics and updates on the exhibition and events. Also, Bruce Mau Design offer a couple of peeks at the  posters they designed for the event (updated here).

Special thanks to Inés Zalduendo and Mary Daniels (Curatorial Advisors of the exhibition and masters of the Dark), Marta Fenollosa and Igor Ekstajn (all additional photographs by Igor Ekstajn)