Editor's Letter |
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For years, readers have been commenting on the printed edition of ReVista: “How beautiful!” Now here’s a website to match, thanks to the efforts of the design firm 2communiqué and Kit Barron of DRCLAS. It’s not only a question of reflecting the aesthetics of the printed edition. The new website modernizes navigation, but also is designed to generate dialogue, to bring readers and writers together and build a ReVista community. Enjoy it! Use it! Tell us what you think!
Many a year ago, when I first came to work at DRCLAS, I hosted a summer intern from South Carolina. She was even newer to Cambridge than I was.
On her first day at work, I sent her to mail a FedEx package, instructing her that the drop box was in the lobby of the “really ugly building two blocks down the street.”
She came back defeated. “I looked all around, and I couldn’t find a FedEx box in the ugly building,” she said.
I pressed her for more details. It turns out that her ugly building was the Swedenborg Chapel, a stone gothic revival building that I happen to admire, while mine was across the street: William James Hall, architect Minoru Yamasaki’s 1963 high-rise which Robert Bell Rettig describes in Guide to Cambridge Architecture as “fourteen stories of pure white concrete.”
I should have known better than to describe a building in such a subjective way (even though I still think it’s the ugliest building on campus). Buildings may be made of stone, concrete, glass, steel or bamboo. But in the end, they are architectural creations, acts of imagination, that are viewed in very different ways. Buildings are subjective.
Their very presence helps shape society. The way buildings are viewed, how they are built and who builds them can become ideological battlefield. In my life as a foreign correspondent, I’ve witnessed many fierce debates that ultimately are debates about what buildings represent and how they create a concept of community: should a dictator’s house be torn down or turned into a Culture Ministry? (Nicaragua); should a modern palace—replacing another that was seen as a symbol of Prussian imperialism—be torn down to make way for a partial reconstruction of the original baroque one? (Berlin); should public libraries be designed for poor neighborhoods? (Bogotá).
It was in Colombia that I first discovered how buildings shape the lived environment. The buildings of Rogelio Salmona interweave with the fabric of the society, whether in social housing, public buildings or luxury dwellings. In Nicaragua, I discovered what it meant to have a city literally disappear, its buildings tumbled by an earthquake and never rebuilt. I also learned that solutions are not always easy. City dwellers with peasant roots did not like the Sandinistas’ East German-influenced clean but sterile apartment dwellings that had no gardens and no space for chickens.
It’s not just buildings that shape society, but the parks and playgrounds that surround them, that carve out outdoor living space and centers for interaction, as both Flavio Janches and Anita Berrizbeitia so eloquently explain in this issue.
In so many places where I’ve lived as a correspondent, war, revolution, social upheaval and natural disasters have shaped the way cities are lived in and built. I was recently in the lovely colonial city of Antigua in Guatemala, originally the capital city of the country. After a major earthquake in 1776, the capital was moved to Guatemala City. A friend remarked, “I’m glad there was an earthquake then, because as a capital city, Antigua would have lost its charm.” I had never thought of that.
Major disasters like the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile give architects and urban planners an unusual opportunity to think about the meaning of their buildings and green spaces. Oscar Grauer draws on his extensive experience rebuilding Venezuela’s littoral to give us some thoughts on Haiti; Pablo Allard gives us an incisive view on how a small town was rebuilt in Chile after a volcanic eruption.
As I walk to work every day, I pass the Harvard Graduate School of Design. As I peeped into a large glassed-in auditorium this morning, I saw that students were looking at slides of buildings. It’s not just buildings, I wanted to tell them; think about the way that all those buildings have shaped all those lives.
Editor's Letter
History
Productive Workers for the Nation
Living the Environment
The (Not Yet) Dialogue Project
Thinking Spaces, Urban Places
Book Talk
Social Policy and Anti-Poverty Strategies
Making a Difference
Summer Camp in Las Terrenas, Dominican Republic
Comments
Revista & architecture
Dear June,
What fun to have an entire Revista about Architecture in Latin America. I found the Post-Unsustainability conversation with Mark Jarzombek thought provoking. I think the new printed layout is very successful, and the variation between column size works to break up the different articles visually (although the four column section at the end is a bit harder to read in the current font). The color page section openers help with locating items and thinking more cohesively about a section as it is read. Likewise, the contributors on the back cover are easy to spot. Although I prefer to read with out a computer whenever possible, it is great to have it online for quick reference.
I wanted to comment about your last paragraph in the editor’s letter, which surprised me.
“As I walk to work every day, I pass the Harvard Graduate School of Design. As I peeped into a large glassed-in auditorium this morning, I saw that students were looking at slides of buildings. It’s not just buildings, I wanted to tell them; think about the way that all those buildings have shaped all those lives.”
I have worked with two GSD studio classes that came to Copan and sat in on their project presentations at the end of the class. What struck me most was how anthropological their approach was to the project. Upon arriving in Copan the first two days were spent collecting notes on peoples’ movements and use of public space and architecture. Students were sitting about the town and engaging people with questions and conversation along the way. I am under the impression that all the studios are taught this way and that studying how people over time use buildings and their connected space is really the beauty of what they are all about. Next time I encourage you to do what I do occasionally and walk through the GSD building to see the student projects on the walls. I believe you would discover that the conversations are in large measure about what people do, say, and think about the built environment.
See you en route to our office spaces!
Barbara
GSD and more
Dear Barbara,
Thank you for your extraordinary and thoughtful comments on the ReVista redesign.
As we often bump into each other just outside the GSD, I just wanted to clarify the comment in my editor's letter and to say that I totally agree with you about the conversations about the built environment. I certainly mean by saying "think about the way that all those buildings have shaped all those lives.” that they weren't necessarily doing so already. It was merely a reflection on my own physical experience of walking past the GSD and seeing the flashing images of buildings on the screen.
Indeed, if you look through the architecture issue, you will find the proof of your well-made point. Pablo Allard, who writes about the reconstruction of Chaitén, about as much about peoples’ movements and use of public space and architecture as you can get, is a GSD graduate. So is Oscar Grauer, who writes compellingly both of lessons from Haiti and also of the need for good design in social housing. Not to mention Alejandro Aravena, who in his excellent work in both high-end and social housing, thinks constantly about the relationship between people and their built environment.
I could go on and on, Barbara: Lee Cott, Flavio Janches, Eduardo Berlin Razmilic, Fares El-Dahdah, José de Filippi, James Brown and many of the other ReVista authors who have called the GSD home as students, professors or fellows share my feeling—and yours—that buildings shape lives.
I would love to encourage debate in this cyberforum, Barbara, but in this case I happen to agree with you! I apologize for my ambiguous wording!!!!
june
opening the discussion
I'm sitting at my desk on this beautiful spring day and wondering if I should be commenting on my comments.
One of the challenges of ReVista is not to make it into a book! There are so many different examples of the interaction of architecture and society that got left out of this issue. Why don't you write me and tell me about some of them?
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