It’s 2017. The millennium is in its teenage years—and it shows. The world is acting out—making rash, impulsive decisions whose repercussions may be irreparable. The body politic is moody, volatile, and uncompromising. We were born into Y2K and 9/11; our youth is part of a string of crises and rapid evolutions. Can the physical landscape weather our collective turmoil? Adolescence may be “just a phase,” but architecture, infrastructure, and policy are hard to undo.
What does it mean to be 17 in 2017? This issue of Harvard Design Magazine checks in with teens of all sorts—humans, buildings, objects, ideas—and their impact on the spatial imagination. Like a bildungsroman for the built environment, “Seventeen” dives into the treacherous, exhilarating limbo of the teen years to understand and reclaim this global adolescence.
Like all teenagers, we are asking: who are we, where do we fit in, and how can we, too, make our marks—as impactful designers and as an evolving discipline? In a divided, temperamental 2017, there is much to learn from the teenager.
The magazine, edited by Jennifer Sigler, combines contributions by noted critics and historians including AbdouMaliq Simone, Owen Hatherley, Eva Díaz, Sam Jacob, Beryl Satter, Charles L. Davis II, Lori Brown, Thomas Beller, and Sarah Williams Goldhagen; practitioners feminist architecture collaborative, Urban Think-Tank, Bryony Roberts, Jimenez Lai, and Jorge Otero-Pailos; as well as unexpected voices like illustrator Victoria Lomasko, artist Alex Israel with curator Hamza Walker, artists Olivia Erlanger and Luis Ortega Govela, author Lydia Davis, and many others.
Harvard Design Magazine is a publication of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. The magazine and other publications of the school are available at select bookshops and newsstands worldwide. Subscribe now to the magazine and receive “Seventeen” and other great issues.
Other recent releases from the Harvard GSD include:
The Incidents: Architectural Ethnography
Atelier Bow-Wow with K. Michael Hays
Tokyo-based architects Atelier Bow-Wow and K. Michael Hays reflect on representation, occupation, and the democracy of architecture in a public conversation.
Portman’s America & Other Speculations
Edited by Mohsen Mostafavi
A new look at the work of one of the world’s most creative, controversial, and prolific architect-developers, with photography by Iwan Baan and contributions from Preston Scott Cohen and Jennifer Bonner, among others.
Ethics of the Urban: The City and the Spaces of the Political
Edited by Mohsen Mostafavi
An exploration of cities as political sites in a world of financial and geopolitical volatility and environmental crises. Contributors include Chantal Mouffe, Erik Swyngedouw, Jean-Louis Cohen, Saskia Sassen, Erika Naginski, Diane Davis, and Krzysztof Wodiczko, among others.
