UNDOING
HARVARD School of Design
The father of landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmstead has sustained himself as the center of the discipline since founding of it. At that foundation exists a patternage of utilizing landscapes as an antagonism to facilitate the social exclusion of populations and ecologies deemed as sacrificial to the overall public utility. Palos Verdes–a racially exclusive planned community reappropriating colonial Spanish villas; Seneca Village– a predominantly Black and white settler community vilified, and replaced with ‘the lungs of the city,’ or Central Park; Yosemite National Park– construction of a national ecological refuge formed after the war, slaughter, and genocide of local California indigenous peoples who have lived time immemorable, represents the star gems of Olmstead’s early landscape architecture projects. The foundation of the discipline’s work has been the fabrication of idyllic landscapes for the serviceability of a defined public with the affluence and racial capacity to occupy the collective imaginary of citizenship and nature. Indigeneity, racial identity, ability, gender, and other forms of communities’ on the periphery are disallowed this access and right.
The wildly outspoken worldviews of Phillip Johnson had been well understood for what they were: a sympathy for Nazism. Yet, Johnson was able to build an astonishing career within the context of seeking death upon Jewish people. The clarity of his beliefs were of no surprise. He had held them before, during, and after coming to the GSD in the 1940s to pursue architecture. His blossoming interests and consciousness had found themselves deeply vested with the possibility of an architecture completely devoid of its social context or responsibility. A propagandist, Johnson recognized the materiality of an idea as proof of its virtue. His infamous contribution to the Harvard GSD was his thesis house at 9 Ash St in Cambridge, MA. After purchase of the land, he helped design and build the home as a testament to his devoted years of architectural education. The translation of his social beliefs into design might have predated the GSD, but surely was not stifled, challenged, or disturbed while being there. Amongst the greats of his time, present interlocutors like LeCorbusier had established a tradition of architecture who’s scale was demonstrative of its power and its ability to influence the rhythms of life for the public. In his Plan Voison for Paris, extruding towers arrange themselves in geometric shapes from the urban surface to erect a vertical control of the existing city. While never designed or constructed, the design itself became influential years later in the design and construction of Auschwitz concentration camp. Making explicit connections of cause and effect might be hard to draw, but the relationality of social belief and architectural design found audiences with those intended to cause mass harm for the sake of constructing a political reality.