Deadline EXTENDED to January 9! Submit your abstracts!

🎆 Happy 2026 from GSD! Starting off the year with an accurate, edible gingerbread scale model of Gund that students Miu Kondo, Kiyomi Langenhagen, and Sun Woo Byun built for fun before winter break!

Enrique Silva (Lincoln Institute), @lohplaces.bsky.social (@brookings.edu), and Nestor Davidson (@gsd.harvard.edu) highlighted state & local land policy initiatives, efforts by the federal & some state governments to preempt them, and creative ways that states can push back.

👏@theguardian.com names the Ismaili Center in Houston (designed by the GSD's Farshid Moussavi) in the top design and architecture of 2025, calling it "beautifully built and characterised by an inviting sense of openness."

Our partners at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (@gsd.harvard.edu) are now accepting applications for the Pollman Fellowship in Real Estate and Urban Development.

For over 60 years, we have traced how people live, what housing works and what doesn’t, and when smart policy can widen the circle of opportunity. Thank you to A. Krista Sykes @gsd.harvard.edu for capturing our center's past, present, and future so thoughtfully. www.gsd.harvard.edu/2025/12/hist...

Since the GSD's founding in 1936, its students have produced at least 17 different student publications. This fall, excerpts from one, Open Letters, were exhibited in the student-run Quotes Gallery, and an Archives Party at the Loeb Library allowed attendees to examine journals going back to 1941.

Leylâ Uysal grew up in a Kurdish community in rural Türkiye, where she had to persuade her parents to allow her to attend school. After founding Bajer Watches, she enrolled at GSD, where she received her MDes in 2024 and is currently a student in the MLA program. https://hgsd.us/4rXGjdl

In a nondescript office over One Bow Street in Harvard Square, @harvard-jchs.bsky.social keeps a finger on the pulse of America’s housing markets—and tries to connect city planners, advocates, and business groups to solve some of the country’s thorniest issues. Thanks @theharvardcrimson.bsky.social!

With partial funding from our center, @gsd.harvard.edu professor Eve Blau disusses the challenges of rebuilding Ukraine, and how architecture, urban design, and planning can respond under conditions of profound instability and change. www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/articles/ukr...

“There’s no starting gun on climate change adaptation – it’s already happening,” said Charles Waldheim, professor of landscape architecture at GSD. For the past five years, Waldheim’s research group has been simulating a stress test on Cape Ann’s future. salatainstitute.harvard.edu/when-the-atl...

Alum Sara Falkson (MDE '25) is using her athletic and engineering backgrounds to design a line of sports bras specifically for middle- or high-school athletes who might be wearing one for the first time. https://seas.harvard.edu/news/2025/12/alumni-profile-sara-falkson-mde-25

🚨 Applications for the Wheelwright Prize are due February 8, 2026! The Wheelwright is an international competition for early-career architects. Winners receive a $100,000 (USD) fellowship to foster intensive, innovative architectural research. 🔗 For more information, visit wheelwrightprize.org.

Read about the climate-related work GSD students and faculty did in Monterrey: hgsd.us/3SRKCGi

There's our 2023 Veronica Rudge Green Prize winner!! We love to see it

Models in progress in the Trays as we march toward the end of the semester!

Great profile of Jacek Smolicki ’26 in the Harvard Gazette: www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Five GSD faculty are joining the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University as affiliates, working to solve urban problems across fields and disciplines. https://cities.harvard.edu/news/eighteen-harvard-faculty-named-as-affiliates-of-the-bloomberg-center-for-cities-at-harvard-university/

My first for @gsd.harvard.edu, on the shifts—material, moral, and otherwise—inherent to the 2025 Chicago Architecture Biennial. www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/articles/rev...

TODAY @ 3:15 pm: A conversation with the Mayor of Denver @harvardkennedy.bsky.social and open to all @harvard.edu ID holders. @gsd.harvard.edu @hls.harvard.edu @hsph.harvard.edu

Project Air is an affordable, accurate, and highly sensitive indoor air quality sensor developed in collaboration with @harvardseas.bsky.social, @gsd.harvard.edu, and the University of North Carolina. Learn more:

Now accepting abstracts for the 2026 Cambridge Talks symposium, “Surfacing,” 4/24-4/25, 2026, inviting scholars of the built environment to consider the physical production of surfaces and their mediating roles. Deadline 1/2/26. hgsd.us/4pg1wgp

A new paper by our Gramlich fellow Aaron Smithson examines the use of off-site construction to build new affordable housing, including SRO units for formerly unhoused residents to single-family for-sale homes on community land trust plots. @gsd.harvard.edu www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/using-s...

A panel of architects and academics discussed how architects can balance the need to house a growing urban population with the environmental costs of building at a Harvard talk on Thursday. Ramon Moreno Jr. and Yahir Ramirez report. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

The @gsd.harvard.edu seeks to appoint a distinguished scholar and/or practitioner with a deep understanding of housing markets, practice, and policy to serve as the Nicolas P. and Joan B. Retsinas Director of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. www.jchs.harvard.edu/nicolas-p-an...

Two GSD faculty members have been appointed to new endowed chairs established with a gift from Bloomberg Philanthropies: Nestor M. Davidson, Emma Bloomberg Professor of Real Estate, and Rachel Weber, Emma Bloomberg Professor of Urban Planning. hgsd.us/3LJrpXs

TODAY at 6:30PM ET — The GSD Practice Forum Panel will bring together disciplinary experts, practitioners, and students from the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning to address structural hurdles embedded in ethical 21st-century design practice. https://hgsd.us/3Xvyy05

TOMORROW — The GSD Practice Forum Panel Discussion will bring together disciplinary experts, practitioners, and students from the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning to address structural hurdles embedded in ethical 21st-century design practice. https://hgsd.us/3Xvyy05

Shoutout to the "architectural crown" of the museum, designed by GSD Associate Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture Sara Zewde!

In just five years, the income needed to afford the median-priced home nearly doubled—from $68k to $131k. Getting payments back to 2020 levels would require interest rates to be nearly zero, per @harvard-jchs.bsky.social www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/lower-i... #FigureFriday #housing #affordability

TOMORROW – "Black Roots: Grounded and Growing Toward Collective Futures", presented by the Black Student Union and Africa GSD, will explore the complex relationships between belief systems, environments, and lands that shape Black communities across the diaspora. https://hgsd.us/BiD2025

Members of the @harvard.edu & @mitdusp.bsky.social communities, join us next Monday, November 10 @gsd.harvard.edu for a screening of the film To Build Law, a documentary by the @ccaconversations.bsky.social about the growing movement that fights for renovation over demolition.

Watch GSD Assistant Professor of Urban Planning Magda Maaoui talk about @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social's housing policy on Radio France!

On November 15, the new Studio Museum will open in Harlem, featuring a rooftop garden designed by Associate Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture Sara Zewde. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/arts/design/studio-museum-harlem-adjaye.html

Happy Election Day! Are you a mayor interested in the Just City Mayoral Fellowship for 2026? Submit an expression of interest by November 17! www.micd.org/events/2026-...

For her thesis, Sara Falkson (MDE '25) bought sports bras from several different brands and reassembled them into "Frankenstein" configurations in the engineering lab. Now her work continues with her company Robyn. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/23/sports/sara-falkson-robyn-sports-bra/

TOMORROW in Gund Hall – Join us for a celebration of the winners of the 15th Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design, The Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture Campus (RICA) by MASS in Bugesera, Rwanda, and the opening of the coinciding exhibition. https://hgsd.us/3LvM80I

The 15th Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design has been awarded to the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture (RICA) campus in Bugesera, Rwanda. Join us on November 5th and 6th for a celebration of the winners and the opening of the coinciding exhibition. https://hgsd.us/3LvM80I

MERCH has landed! Get your hoodies, T-shirts, and totes for next week's Black in Design Conference at https://hgsd.us/BiD25tix .

TODAY at 6:30pm: Joshua Ramus, founding principal of REX, will reflect on the evolution of ideas that germinated over the 10,887 days since he defended his master’s thesis in Piper Auditorium, when he developed his beliefs that architecture should actively empower its users. https://hgsd.us/48HivTZ

Black in Design 2025: Black Roots (November 7-8, 2025) Continue the conversation over shared meals! Meal tickets are available. Sign up by Friday, Oct 31! There are options to purchase admission to the reception on Friday evening, as well as breakfast and lunch on Saturday https://hgsd.us/4op4peT

TODAY: Join us for the Tyrwhitt Urban Design Lecture, "The Measure of Freedom and Unfreedom". Speaker Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George E. Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning, & Preservation and Chair of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia. https://hgsd.us/4oiyEUA

Happy #NationalCatDay from Remy, making himself at home all around the GSD Image 1: Zizheng Li Image 2: Caspar Bhalerao Images 3 and 4: Anita Kan

This Thursday: Joshua Ramus, founding principal of REX, will reflect on the evolution of ideas that germinated over the 10,887 days since he defended his master’s thesis in Piper Auditorium, when he developed his beliefs that architecture should actively empower its users. https://hgsd.us/48HivTZ

Wednesday: Mabel O. Wilson explores the establishment of the capital city built at the fall line of the Potomac River in 1791, when it was intended to become not only the seat of federal government, but, with infrastructural improvements, a major trading point and port. https://hgsd.us/4oiyEUA

Amy Love Tomasso, a former student @gsd.harvard.edu who is now Director of Policy Innovation at Ivory Innovations, explains missing middle housing, what it is, and what cities and states can do to encourage more of it.

TODAY at 6:30PM EST – Meriem Chabani, founder and principal of NEW SOUTH, will present the GSD's Aga Khan Program lecture, which will frame architecture as a relational and adaptive practice, one that listens, compromises, and evolves across time, context, and encounter. https://hgsd.us/3WGuw4H

Eric Höweler, GSD Professor of Architecture, is interviewed about AquaPraça, a floating venue currently in use at the Venice Biennale that will later travel overseas to Belém, Brazil for COP30. https://hgsd.us/42UHe3B

Shaped like a friend! Read about Biboni, Johnston Marklee's debut furniture collection for Knoll—inspired by the curving, floaty shapes of "Bibendum + macaroni" www.wallpaper.com/design-inter...

TOMORROW – If architects can see beyond the allure of new construction, what kinds of climate-conscious buildings, healthy cities, and collective ways of living might they create? Join guest editors Jeanne Gang and Lizabeth Cohen for the release of HDM 53: Reuse and Repair. https://hgsd.us/42LEe9t