Druker Traveling Fellowship Presentation 2026, Featuring Elyjana Roach MAUD ’22
The 2026 Duker Traveling Fellowship ceremony at Harvard GSD marked the 40th anniversary of the fellowship founded by Ronald Duker, highlighting its role as the school’s first international travel award dedicated to urban design. The event featured a brief address by founder Ron Duker, who underscored the fellowship’s generous stipend and its purpose of enabling students to study urban and environmental challenges abroad. Australian‑born architect and urban designer Elana Roach, a 2022 MAUD graduate, was introduced as the 39th fellow. Roach presented her “Mala” framework—a portable, relational space concept rooted in Pacific communal traditions—and described the Central Pacific Collective’s 300‑home “Our Future” (OAF) project in New Zealand, which translates that wisdom into affordable, climate‑resilient housing. By embedding indigenous spatial logic into contemporary development, the fellowship demonstrates how design education can produce socially responsible solutions, offering a replicable model for cities confronting housing shortages, cultural displacement, and sustainability pressures.
Michael Wang, "Lifeforms"
The evening’s talk, part of Harvard’s Arts Thursdays series, featured conceptual artist Michael Wang discussing his project “Life Forms.” Wang, whose background spans architecture, anthropology and performance studies, used the platform to examine species classified as “extinct in the...
Jaqueline Tyrwhitt Urban Design Lecture: Deborah N. Archer
The Jacqueline Tyrwhitt Urban Design Lecture featured Deborah N. Archer, president of the ACLU, discussing her bestselling book Dividing Lines: How Transportation Infrastructure Reinforces Racial Inequality. Archer framed transportation not as a neutral utility but as a civil‑rights battlefield that...
How Greenland's "Magic Mud" Could Shape the Future
Harvard Graduate School of Design researchers are studying Greenland’s glacial flour—a fine mineral powder produced when the ice sheet grinds bedrock and is carried to the coast by meltwater. The team notes that the sediment can serve as a natural fertilizer,...
Open House Lecture: Bill McKibben, “A Fresh Start for Our Cities”
Bill McKibben returned to Harvard’s Graduate School of Design for an open‑house lecture titled “A Fresh Start for Our Cities,” a flagship event co‑sponsored by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. The talk set the tone for a series...
How Harvard Landscape Architects Work with Nature’s Furriest Engineers
Landscape architects at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design are pioneering a new paradigm that enlists beavers—nature’s engineers—to shape resilient wetlands. By studying beaver dam‑building and canal‑cutting, the team is developing design tools that work with, rather than against, natural processes. The...
Wheelwright Prize Winner Marina Otero Verzier on Data Centers and AI
Data centers are the invisible backbone of the cloud, but their thermal management systems consume vast amounts of electricity and expel heat into an already warming atmosphere. Marina Otero Verzier argues that this thermopolitical infrastructure reshapes climate dynamics and creates...
Harvard Design Engineering Alumni Ask: How Will AI Change Fashion?
Harvard Graduate School of Design alumni Yichien and Wembo Zang unveiled Upstyle, an AI‑driven mobile platform that transforms a user’s existing closet into a source of new outfits, aiming to curb the fashion industry’s staggering waste. The app leverages image‑recognition to...
John T. Dunlop Lecture: Kenzie Bok, “The Past, Present, and Future of Public Housing”
The 25th John T. Dunlop Lecture featured Boston Housing Authority CEO Kenzie Bok, who traced the evolution of public housing and warned that the nation’s deepening affordability crisis makes a re‑imagined public‑housing sector essential. Bok framed housing as a public...
Virtual Town Hall: Technology, Design, and Pedagogy
Harvard’s Graduate School of Design held its sixth virtual town hall, bringing together alumni, faculty, and students to discuss how technology, design, and pedagogy intersect in the school’s evolving curriculum. Dean Sarah Whiting highlighted recent initiatives, from AI‑driven archival digitization and...