Harvard Design Press

Harvard Design Press Harvard Design Press is an imprint of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Harvard Design Press challenges, broadens, and advances the design disciplines, and advocates for the value and power of design in making a more resilient, just, and beautiful world. In pursuing new and original ideas on the research and practice of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and urban design, the imprint reinforces and extends the Harvard University Graduate School of D

esign's reputation as the leading global authority on design's role in the most critical issues the world is facing today. From housing, climate change, and social equity to urban ecology, design engineering, and architecture history and theory, Harvard Design Press forges new lines of inquiry, engages established modes of thought, and publishes ideas with the potential to improve how we live as individuals, cities, societies, and cultures, and as one planet.

Three essays for summer reading from Harvard Design Magazine Issues 48, 34, and 39: a skirt printed with a map, an islan...
06/19/2026

Three essays for summer reading from Harvard Design Magazine Issues 48, 34, and 39: a skirt printed with a map, an island understood through its surfaces, and a nation’s expansion using imported sand.

(1) Willi Smith, WilliWear Map Print Skirt, Summer 1986 Collection by Alexandra Cunningham Cameron,
(2) Puertoricanism, or Living at Ease in the Surface by Miguel Rodríguez Casellas,
(3) Built on Sand: Singapore and the New State of Risk by Joshua Comaroff,

To read these essays—and to purchase associated back issues and more—visit https://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/.

Photo of Willi and his sister Toukie Smith, courtesy of Anthony Barboza.
Photo of a 1960s building on Condado Beach by Javier Santiago-Lucerna.
Photo of construction site, courtesy of Joshua Comaroff.

In Harvard Design Magazine No. 53: “Reuse and Repair,” Jeanne Gang and Lizabeth Cohen describe how “The theme of the iss...
06/17/2026

In Harvard Design Magazine No. 53: “Reuse and Repair,” Jeanne Gang and Lizabeth Cohen describe how “The theme of the issue nods to the ubiquitous slogan, 'reduce, reuse, recycle,' from the United States’ first national recycling programs in the 1970s.” They add that “Fifty years later, our theme—'Reuse and Repair'—channels some of the same urgency but focuses it through a more critical lens on the built environment’s complex technical, cultural, and political dimensions.”

is guest edited by architect Jeanne Gang and historian Lizabeth Cohen.

Harvard Design Magazine is published by the Harvard Design Press at Harvard GSD.

Visit https://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/reuse-and-repair/ to explore sample content and order your copy.

Photographs by Maita Hagad

“What, pray tell, are such fancifully drawn characters as Peter Rabbit and the Chesire Cat doing in the august environs ...
06/11/2026

“What, pray tell, are such fancifully drawn characters as Peter Rabbit and the Chesire Cat doing in the august environs of Harvard Yard? Blair Kamin, Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic asks. He adds: “That’s the engaging mystery posed by the Peter J. Solomon (Class of 1960) Gate, the only Harvard Yard portal built in the twenty-first century and, by far, the most whimsical of the gates.” Yet, “The whimsy is no accident.”

Read more about the ideation and creation of the Solomon Gate by architect Eric Höweler Eric Höweler of Höweler+Yoon Architecture through .

“Welcoming and Whimsical: The Peter J. Solomon (Class of 1960) Gate,” written by Blair Kamin, is excerpted from a new edition of Gates of Harvard Yard, published by Harvard University Press Harvard University Press. Visit the magazine’s website at link in bio to read the excerpt.

Sketches by Eric Höweler and fabrication photo of the Solomon Gate, courtesy of Höweler + Yoon.
Photos of the Solomon Gate by Ralph Lieberman. Courtesy of Harvard University Press.

“I’m afraid of the ocean. And maybe I swim the way architects tend to think—in a language of measured perimeters, predef...
06/08/2026

“I’m afraid of the ocean. And maybe I swim the way architects tend to think—in a language of measured perimeters, predefined routes, delimited territories. […] If we are surrounded by water as swimmers and made of water as humans, why we do we collectively “fight” water’s power? How can we unlearn our binary, dichotomous relationship with the ocean? To let wet matter…” – Jennifer Sigler

In Harvard Design Magazine No. 39, “Wet Matter,” contributors engage with diverse water-related issues. From discussions with Supersudaca on the cruise industry in the Caribbean, to chef Bun Lai’s reflections on eating invasive species, HDM 39 brings together a range of perspectives on water’s ecological, political, and cultural dimensions.

Happy World Ocean Day from the Harvard Design Press!

Visit the https://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/wet-matter/ to explore more sample content from the issue and order your copy.

Happy World Environment Day! Today we revisit Thinking Through Soil by Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich and Seth Denizen. Throu...
06/05/2026

Happy World Environment Day! Today we revisit Thinking Through Soil by Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich and Seth Denizen.

Through a sustained analysis of the world’s largest wastewater agricultural system, located in the Mexico City–Mezquital hydrological region, Thinking Through Soil imagines what a better environmental future might look like in central Mexico. More broadly, this case study offers a new image of soil that captures its shifting identity, explains its profound importance to rural and urban life, and argues for its capacity to save our planet.

Thinking Through Soil is published by Harvard Design Press and available for purchase from Harvard University Press.

Drone images courtesy of Seth Denizen
Photographs by Maita Hagad

06/01/2026

Do You Read Me?

Harvard Design Magazine No. 38: “Do You Read Me?,” published 12 years ago today, is about reading and misreading, and the role of design in streamlining or garbling the exchange between sender and receiver, writer and reader, maker and user. Whether written or rendered, engineered or enacted, both message and messenger are designed, and it is the relation between craft and comprehension that is explored here.

was edited by Jennifer Sigler and Leah Whitman-Salkin and designed by With Projects, Inc.

Visit https://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/ to explore sample content and order your copy.

Continuing our Class Day and Commencement celebrations, we honor the work produced by each graduating class at the Harva...
05/29/2026

Continuing our Class Day and Commencement celebrations, we honor the work produced by each graduating class at the Harvard GSD through an annual publication, A-Z. This alphabetical record features a catalog of rich and varied student work from the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and design, and design engineering.

A–Z: Harvard University Graduate School of Design 2020 and 2021 were designed by Huber/Sterzinger and Noha Mokhtar.

Copies were mailed to graduates of each class. Additionally, copies will soon be available for sale at the Frances Loeb Library and Harvard University Press.

Today we mark four years since the release of Design Magazine No. 50: “Today’s Global.”Harvard Design Magazine’s 50th is...
05/29/2026

Today we mark four years since the release of Design Magazine No. 50: “Today’s Global.”

Harvard Design Magazine’s 50th issue is edited by Sarah M. Whiting and Rahul Mehrotra. Its theme, “Today’s Global,” aims to avoid a simple and ineffective return to a mere celebration of the local or the regional. This is a moment instead to foster a nuanced understanding of where design “sits” vis-à-vis our planet and to advance a more productive discourse on globalization. The issue relies on novel examples of design—and even the design of writing—to further today’s global from multiple vantage points.

Visit https://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/todays-global/ to order your copy.

Congratulations to the graduating class of 2026! This Class Day, we look back at The Incidents: “Inhabiting the Negative...
05/27/2026

Congratulations to the graduating class of 2026! This Class Day, we look back at The Incidents: “Inhabiting the Negative Space” by Jenny Odell.

Artist and writer Jenny Odell hadn’t originally planned to deliver the Harvard University Graduate School of Design’s 2020 Class Day Address from her living room. But on May 28, 2020, bounded by the abnormal conditions of a global pandemic, she joined graduates and their guests in a fully virtual commencement ceremony.

“But really, if you take anything away from this address, I hope that it’s the ability to give yourself permission. Permission to be patient, to listen without yet needing to speak, to observe without needing to know. Permission to not make anything at all for a while. Permission to dwell in that space between stimulus and response, to take time to really see what’s there, even while everything rages around you.” – Jenny Odell

Inhabiting the Negative Space is the ninth title in The Incidents, a book series based on events at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Visit https://www.sternberg-press.com/series/the-incidents-series/ to view the full scope of the series and to purchase.

This day in the archives. The Incidents: “Insert Complicated Title Here” (May 25, 2018) and Portman’s America & Other Sp...
05/25/2026

This day in the archives. The Incidents: “Insert Complicated Title Here” (May 25, 2018) and Portman’s America & Other Speculations (May 25, 2017). From Virgil Abloh’s reflections on developing a personal design language to John Portman’s radical reinvention of the city, these publications trace how design thinking can move between the spatial and the speculative.

“What’s my DNA?” Virgil Abloh asks to an overflowing auditorium at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. […] Trained as an architect and engineer, Abloh has translated the tools and techniques of his student days into the world of fashion, product design, and music.

Edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and copublished with Lars Müller, Portman’s America & Other Speculations takes an unconventional and speculative approach towards the understanding and future potentials of the work of one of the world’s most creative, controversial, daring, and prolific architects.

See https://www.sternberg-press.com/series/the-incidents-series/ to view the full scope of The Incidents and to purchase.

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