Platform 12
Platform 12: How About Now?
Carrie Bly, Isabella Caterina Frontado, Natasha Hicks
Actar Publishers/Harvard GSD, January 2020
Paperback | 7-1/4 x 10-1/4 inches | 152 pages English | ISBN: 978-1948765367 | $34.95
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
This installment of the GSD Platform series celebrates—and places itself within—the rich tradition of student publications at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Offering questions of the past to ground questions of the present, How About Now? summons the enduring concerns and preoccupations that designers constantly revisit, reconsider, and redefine in response to a changing world.
Platform represents a year in the life of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Produced annually, this compendium highlights a selection of work from the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and design, and design engineering, and exposes a rich and varied pedagogical culture committed to shaping the future of design. Documenting projects, research, events, exhibitions, and more, Platform offers a curated view into the emerging topics, techniques, and dispositions within and beyond the Harvard GSD.
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dDAB COMMENTARY:
The twelfth Platform presents the work of students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design alongside events that took place at the GSD during the 2018/19 school year. The numbered book clearly fits into a continuum of publications focusing on the output of GSD students, but the extent of that lineage is much longer and larger than some might anticipate. A timeline of such publications is at the beginning of Platform 12, with the first — An Opinion of Architecture by Bruno Zevi and others — dating all the way back to 1941, five years after the GSD was established. At least eleven publications with some sort of frequency followed between that one-off critique of architectural education at Harvard and the first Platform in 2008; somewhat confusingly, the latter was titled Platform 08, while Platform 8 followed in 2016.
The student editors use the previous GSD publications as a means of structuring the multifarious and increasingly socially minded studio projects that follow. Heavyweight half-pages with pastel colors break up the many pages of projects and excerpts of essays or GSD events. Quotes pulled from old publications dating back a few years or a few decades are printed on the half-pages; the words are aligned with the way students are now interested in using architecture to overcome structural racism, address climate change, or impact other areas of society. Following them are a full-size heavyweight page that serve as mini tables of contents for the projects that follow. Occasionally, a folded sheet of newsprint is inserted between these pairs of heavyweight pages, each one encapsulating a couple months at GSD and expressing such initiatives as Women in Design (third spread below).
The bulk of the book, like previous Platforms, are the student projects and documentation of events, each one given one or two pages. Atop each page is a question, one posed by the project or one the editors were provoked to ask, such as "What are current student and faculty perspectives on addressing social issues in design pedagogy and curricula?" and "Where do we draw the lines that define a woman?" At the bottom of the pages are keywords that categorize each project or event (e.g., Climate Change, Core Studio, Justice, Plants, Policy) and are listed on an index on the back cover. With references to the GSD publications dating back nearly 70 years, and the inclusion of questions atop each page, Platform 12 acts like a series of conversations spanning time and discipline. Therefore "How about now?" is an apt phrase for students who have asked questions like those above but did not pursue them because they were told those concerns were outside the scope of architecture and design. Now, it appears, the time is right.
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