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.

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.

“I use a sketchbook like a pianist or a dancer. […] I have to draw hundreds of the same curve, similar to how a dancer r...
05/23/2026

“I use a sketchbook like a pianist or a dancer. […] I have to draw hundreds of the same curve, similar to how a dancer repeats a gesture to find the exact right movement.” For Bouroullec, drawing is both practice and discovery: “Notebooks, as a type of research, are something very familiar to me. Sometimes to understand things you need to draw them—exactly like we see in Anni Albers’s notebook.” – Ronan Bouroullec

Anni Albers’s Notebook, 1970-1980 is a conversation between Ronan Bouroullec and Kate Robinson , which appears in Pairs 06 .gsd, edited by Harish Krishnamoorthy , Caro Sepúlveda , Kaleb Swanson , and Tyler White.

Visit the magazine’s website at link in bio to read the full conversation through

Pairs 06 is available for purchase at the Frances Loeb Library and worldwide through Amazon and Harvard University Press .

Pairs 06 is now available worldwide through Harvard University Press!Pairs is a journal of conversations edited by stude...
05/19/2026

Pairs 06 is now available worldwide through Harvard University Press!

Pairs is a journal of conversations edited by students at the Harvard GSD. Each issue pairs subjects with objects: interviewees with contents from a Harvard or external archive.

Pairs 06 features conversations with Stan Allen, Mark Lee, Anne Holtrop, Reto Geiser, Paloma Strelitz, Sandra Barclay, Alexandra Arènes, Ronan Bouroullec, Eli Böernicke, Garnette Cadogan, Joshua Bennett, and Fundación RIA.

Contributors include students Robin Albrecht, Fernando Garrido Carreras, Claire Glass, Klara Kaufman, Kate Robinsonn, Duncan Steele, Mingxuan Wei, and Tristan Whalen.

Pairs 06 was edited by Kaleb Swanson, Harish Krishnamoorthy, Caro Sepúlveda, and Tyler White with the support of Dean Sarah M. Whiting and the Harvard GSD.

Design by Scott Vander Zee and printed by Grafiche Veneziane, with binding by Legatoria Artigiana Adriano Pavan. Photos by Maita Hagad.

05/18/2026

Highlighting the cover of Harvard Design Magazine No. 40: “Well, Well, Well,” which makes visible the changing temperature of the human body on paper.

Health, and the information around it, is messy. As are our bodies and the systems intended to help sustain them. No anatomical chart, in its immaculate precision, can articulate the ooze of our fluids and secretions, [...] or the inequality of access to basic hygiene, nutrition, and medical care. Like health itself, our power—as individuals, citizens, and designers—to heal or to harm ourselves and the spaces in which we dwell is full of contradictions.

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

Visit harvarddesignmagazine.org to read sample content from this issue, which is also still available for purchase.

“A practice that is not as established is documenting what becomes of a building after the years have passed. Yet, how a...
05/15/2026

“A practice that is not as established is documenting what becomes of a building after the years have passed. Yet, how a building ultimately performs as a work of architecture can only be determined after it exists in the world and is used by people over a length of time.” – Noritaka Minami, photographer

Continuing our look at Gund Hall, home to Harvard Graduate School of Design, through John Andrews: Architect of Uncommon Sense, we turn to the catalog produced alongside the book, tracing the ideas, images, and material that further document the building’s history.

John Andrews: Architect of Uncommon Sense features essays from Paul Walker, Mary Lou Lobsinger, Peter Scriver and Antony Moulis, Philip Goad, and Paolo Scrivano, along with nearly 100 new photographs from visual artist Noritaka Minami of existing buildings designed by Andrews in North America and Australia.

Order your copy of John Andrews: Architect of Uncommon Sense from Harvard University Press.

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