Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning

Students may study for a PhD degree in architecture, landscape architecture, or urban planning. These three degrees are administered by a committee of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in cooperation with the Faculty of Design. The program is intended for persons who wish to enter teaching and advanced research careers in the history and theory of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban form from antiquity to the present; or the analysis and development of cities, landscapes, and regions with emphasis on social, economic, ecological, transportation, and infrastructural systems. (The PhD program does not prepare students for licensing as design practitioners in any of these fields. For information on professional masters’ programs, contact the Harvard Design School, Admissions Office, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, (617) 495-5453.)

Requirements for Admission

Applicants must have completed a four-year bachelor of arts or bachelor of science degree, or a professional degree in architecture, landscape architecture, or urban planning, or the foreign equivalent of the foregoing. Students from other countries must provide proof of their command of English. To be eligible for admission, individuals must also show evidence of distinguished academic work in the field or closely related fields, or distinguished work in the intended area of concentration. Applications from minorities are particularly welcome.

All applicants are required to indicate a proposed major subject of study at the time of initial application. These proposed areas of study should be congruent with the interests and expertise of at least one member of the Faculties of Design or Arts and Sciences.

The results of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) and other supporting documents specified in the Prospective Students page are also required parts of the application.

Academic Residence

Two years of full-time study while registered in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences are required.

Program of Study

Course information may be found in Co urses of Instruction offered by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as well as in the course catalogues published by Harvard’s other professional schools, including the Official Register of the Harvard Design School. These publications are also available online.

Students are expected to prepare in each of the following areas:

(1) General Knowledge of the Field: The PhD is an academic degree, but PhD holders in our fields may be interacting with professionals as well as with other scholars. In fact, many may elect to teach in professional schools. Therefore, in addition to academic requirements, it is required that every PhD student be generally knowledgeable of the basic skills of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design.

(2) Main Subject: The interfaculty structure and purposes of the program require that students cross disciplinary boundaries. All students must master a major area of their respective field, including the historic development and current state of research on the subject. In addition, every student must demonstrate competence in the methods of inquiry used for research in his or her major subject.

(3) All students must also achieve a thorough grounding in the theory and methods of one of the arts or sciences related to their major subject, such as history of art, cultural history, economics, philosophy, government, sociology, or history of science equivalent to at least one year of full-time graduate study.

(4) Languages: Candidates for the degree in architecture must normally have a reading knowledge of at least two languages other than English in which there is broad and important literature related to their field or major subject; those in urban planning must have one other language. Every student must have a level of mathematical skills appropriate for research in the major subject.

Master of Arts (AM)

The department does not admit candidates for a terminal AM degree. PhD candidates may, however, apply for a master’s degree after having completed with satisfactory grades, eight half-courses. The degree may also be offered to students unable to complete the doctorate.

Grades

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences requires that all students maintain an average of B or better in each year of graduate study. All incomplete grades must be removed before the end of the next regular term.

If students are cross-registered in Schools where the grading system does not use letter grades, they should ask the course instructor to issue letter grades.

Faculty Advisor and Student’s Graduate Committee

The chair of the PhD committee will assign a faculty member as the student’s advisor at the time of registration in the program. This advisor will assist in planning the student’s academic program. In addition, not fewer than three faculty members, appointed by the chair in consultation with the student, will be made available for consultation regarding the general examination and the dissertation.

General Examination and Dissertation

Students are expected to take the general examination in the fifth term of residence, and no later than one year after completion of the required coursework. The examination is given only during the fall and spring terms of the academic year. The examination tests the student’s mastery of their general field of scholarship, specific interpretive problems within that field, and their ability to research and write a dissertation.

At least two months prior to the date of the examination, the student should meet regularly with the examination committee (see “Advising”) and, with its help, should formulate a proposal describing the general and specific fields to be covered in the examination and possible examination questions.

The examination comprises a major and minor field. The general field is ordinarily a broad area of history and theory of architecture, landscape architecture, or urban planning (for example, “modern architecture from 1750 to the present”). The specific field is a narrower area of study chosen by the student and subject to faculty review; in principle it should comprise a coherent and clearly defined area of scholarly inquiry which may be interdisciplinary in nature.

The examination will normally consist of two or three written essays, one in the general field (eight hours) and one or two in the specific field (total eight hours). Within one week of the written examination, the student and the examination committee will meet to evaluate the entire examination and discuss plans for the dissertation. Students whose performance on the examination is not satisfactory will be given one opportunity to repeat all or part of it.

Dissertation

The dissertation will be directed by a dissertation committee consisting of one primary advisor and at least two secondary advisors or readers.

Two readers must be from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences or the Committee on Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning; one reader will normally be from the area of the student’s disciplinary minor and one reader must be from the Harvard Design School.

No later than five months (within the academic calendar) after the successful completion of the general examination, students will submit to the chair a written dissertation proposal and the names of the faculty persons who will supervise it. The student will confer with the examination committee to discuss and develop the proposal. The committee will conduct an oral examination of the dissertation proposal, whose purpose is to provide for the student a formal occasion to discuss and gain approval of the dissertation topic.

Students are normally expected to complete their program (including approval of the dissertation) within seven years of entering the program. Students who require more than five years to complete the dissertation after passing the General Examination must petition the Committee on the PhD Program in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning to extend their time.

After the approval of the dissertation by the faculty members who are its director and reader(s), three copies must be presented to the committee on the PhD not less than six weeks before the degree recommendations of that committee are due at the Registrar’s Office. The committee will receive the recommendations of the advisor and reader(s), and must formally vote on the recommendation for the degree. The final copy of the dissertation must conform to the requirements described in The Form of the PhD Dissertation.

Financial Aid

Financial aid is administered under the direction of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Harvard grants are awarded to first and second-year graduate students primarily on the basis of financial need as determined by documents submitted to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the time of application.

After the first two years, financial assistance and employment opportunities as teaching and research assistants will be allocated on the basis of financial need, the capability of the student concerned, and the funds and employment opportunities available.

Students expecting to need financial aid at any time in their program should submit this documentation at the time of their first application to the program.

To Apply

Application forms for admission and financial aid may be obtained from the Admissions Office, Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Holyoke Center 350, 1350 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, or at the website. On the application’s first page, applicants should indicate “architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning” as the “program,” and only one of these three fields as the “subject.”

Further information regarding courses and programs of study leading to the PhD in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning may be obtained by writing to the PhD Program, Gund Hall 334B, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138; by calling (617) 495-2337; or by visiting the website.

Please note that completed materials for application and financial aid are due December 31 for the following September. The program does not guarantee consideration of application materials received after this deadline. All applicants should arrange to take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) not later than October of the year before they intend to begin studies. Applicants for whom English is not a native language should also schedule their examinations in English (the TOEFL examination) not later than October in order that the results will be available by the first week in January.

Doctor of Design Program

The Harvard Design School also offers a separate three-year program leading to the doctor of design degree, which is oriented to the practice and teaching of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. An applicant normally must hold either a professional master’s degree in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, or urban design, or the GSD degree master in design studies (MDesS). This program requires different application forms. To obtain information and application forms for this program, see the website, or write to: Harvard Graduate School of Design, 48 Quincy Street, Room 334B, Cambridge, MA 02138; or call (617) 495-2337.

PhD Standing Committee

K. Michael Hays, Co-chair, PhD Program, the Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Hays joined the Faculty of Design in 1988 and teaches courses in architectural history and theory, including Buildings, Texts, and Contexts from the Enlightenment through the 20th Century. Hays has played a central role in the development of architectural theory in North America, and his work is internationally known. His research and scholarship have to date focused on the areas of European modernism and critical theory, as well as on theoretical issues in contemporary architectural practice. He has published on the work of modern architects such as Hannes Meyer, Ludwig Hilberseimer, and Mies van der Rohe, as well as of figures such as Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, and the late John Hejduk. He is currently working on a history of architecture since 1968. Hays was the founder of the scholarly journal Assemblage, which was a leading forum of discussion of architectural theory in North America and Europe. In addition to his teaching and research, he is Director of the GSD’s Advanced Independent Study Programs and Chair of the PhD Committee. In 2000, he was appointed the first Adjunct Curator of Architecture at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Hays received the Bachelor of Architecture from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1976, the Master of Architecture in Advanced Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979, and the Doctor of Philosophy in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art from MIT in 1990.

Antoine Picon, Co-chair, PhD Program. Picon is Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology. He teaches courses in the history of architecture and technology. Trained as an engineer, architect, and historian of science and art, Picon is best known for his work in the history of architectural technologies from the 18th century to the present. His French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (1988; English translation, 1992) is a synthetic study of the disciplinary “deep structures” of architecture, garden design, and engineering in the 18th century, and their transformations as new issues of territorial management and infrastructure-systems planning were confronted. In addition to four other books—Claude Perrault (1613-1688) ou la curiosité d’un classique (1988), L’Invention de L’ingénieur moderne, L’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées 1747-1851 (1992), La ville territoire des cyborgs (1998), and Les Saint-Simoniens: Raison, Imaginaire, et Utopie (2002)—he has also published numerous articles, mostly dealing with the complementary histories of architecture and technology. He has received several awards in France for his writings, including the Medaille de la Ville de Paris and twice the Prix du Livre d’Architecture de la ville de Briey. Picon received engineering degrees from the Ecole Polytechnique and from the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees, an architecture degree from the Ecole d’Architecture de Paris-Villemin, and a doctorate in history from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

Eve Blau. Blau is Program Chair for the Architecture Department at the Graduate School of Design and Adjunct Professor of Architectural History and teaches courses in the history of modern architecture and urbanism. She currently teaches Proseminar in History, Theory and Urban Studies; Transparency and Modernity, and in the core history sequence: Buildings Texts, and Contexts. Previous courses include: Scale and Modernity: City, Object, Subject; The Sixties: Architecture in the Time of the Vietnam War, and Modern Architecture and the Big City as Form and Idea in Europe, 1890–1940.

Her research focuses on modernism, the city, and issues of representation. Her book, Project Zagreb: Transition as Condition, Strategy, Practice (2007) examines transition as condition that creates opportunities for architecture. The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919–1934 (1999) examines the interrelation of political program, architectural practice, and urban history in large scale urban intervention, and the process by which architecture can become an agent of collective discourse and social change. Two other books, Shaping the Great City: Modern Architecture in Central Europe 1890–1937 (1999), and Urban Form: Städtebau in der postfordistischen Gesellschaft (2003) look at the city and urban architecture in the context of the multinational urban societies of early 20th-century Central Europe and the current post-Fordist economy. Blau’s publications on architecture and modes of representational discourse include Architecture and Cubism (1997), Architecture and Its Image (1898), and Ruskinian Gothic (1982). She edited Architectural History 1999/2000: A Special Issue of JSAH (1999), and is the author of Architecture or Revolution: Charles Moore and Yale in the late 1960s (2001) as well as numerous articles on 19th and 20th-century architecture, the city, photography and other issues in architectural representation. Editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians from 1997–2000, Blau was Curator of Exhibitions and Publications at the Canadian Centre for Architecture from 1984–1990, and Adjunct Curator from 1991– 2001. She has received a number of awards for her publications, including the Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award, the Austrian Cultural Institute Book Prize, the Spiro Kostof Book Award, the Philip Johnson Exhibition Catalogue Award, and the AIA Citation for Excellence in International Architectural Book Publishing.

Blau received a BA from the University of York in England, and an MA and a PhD from Yale University.

Giuliana Bruno, PhD, Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies. Professor Bruno’s work explores the relation of cinema to other visual sites, fashioning, in particular, the bond of the moving image to architecture, travel culture, and the history of the visual arts, as well as its connection to the art of memory and that of map-making. Her previous book, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, combined her interests in Italian cinema, women in film, cultural theory, and the spatial architecture of film. It won the 1993 Katherine Kovacs prize for best book in film studies. Its Italian version received the 1995 Premio Filmcritica, Italy’s national book award in film studies. Bruno is co-editor of Off Screen: Women and Film in Italy (Routledge, 1988), and Immagini allo schermo (Rosenberg & Sellier, 1991), which was named one of the 50 Best Books of the First 100 Years of Film History. Bruno’s latest book, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (Verso, 2002), charts a cultural history of spatio-visual arts, focusing on the representation of affects and place.

Professor Bruno lectures and publishes internationally on visual culture and has written on art and film, among other topics, for exhibition catalogs of the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Lizabeth Cohen, PhD, Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies. Professor Cohen’s research interests include 20th-century United States social, political, and cultural history. Her book A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America looks at the political consequences of a mass consumption-oriented economy and culture in post-World War II America. Other teaching and research interests include urban history, material culture, and popular culture. Professor Cohen is also the author of Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (1990) and the co-author of The American Pageant: A History of the Republic (1998, 2002).

Susan S. Fainstein joined the faculty of the Graduate School of Design in 2006, where she is Interim Professor of Planning. She teaches courses on planning implementation, redevelopment policy, and planning theory. Her teaching and research have focused on comparative urban public policy, planning theory, urban political economy, public participation, and urban redevelopment. She is currently working on a book to be called Justice, Planning, and the City. Among her published works are The City Builders: Property, Politics, and Planning in London and New York; Restructuring the City; and Urban Political Movements. She has co-edited volumes, inter alia, on urban tourism (The Tourist City and Cities and Visitors), planning theory (Readings in Planning Theory), urban theory (Readings in Urban Theory), and gender (Gender and Planning). She is the recipient of the 2004 Distinguished Educator Award of the Association of American Schools of Planning, which recognizes lifetime career achievement.

Professor Fainstein has been a professor of planning in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University and in the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. She has held the Wibaut Chair for Distinguished International Visitors at the University of Amsterdam and visiting appointments at the University of the Witwatersrand, SA, the University of London, Cleveland State University, and New York University. She led or participated in studies of the Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program, the rebuilding of Ground Zero in Manhattan, and the relationship between competitiveness, cohesion, and governance in cities in the United Kingdom. She was a co-principal investigator in the NSF-sponsored International Development and Globalization Program at Columbia and was a member of the board of the UK Cities Programme. She has served on numerous editorial boards and was an editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.

She received her AB from Harvard University in government, her MA from Boston University in African Studies, and her PhD in political science from MIT.

Peter Galison, PhD, Mallinckrodt Professor of the History of Science and of Physics. In 1997, Professor Galison was named a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow; in 1999, he was a winner of the Max Planck Prize given by the Max Planck Gesellschaft and Humboldt Stiftung. Galison is interested in both the philosophical and historical questions that arise when examining the role of experiments in modern physics: What, at a given time, convinces people that an experiment is correct? More broadly, Galison’s main work explores the complex interaction between the three principal subcultures of 20th-century physics: experimentation, instrumentation, and theory. The volume on experiment (How Experiments End [1987]) and that on instruments (Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics [1997]) are to be followed by the final volume, Theory Machines, which is still under construction. In addition, Galison has launched several projects examining the powerful crosscurrents between physics and other fields, including his co-edited volumes on the relations between science, art, and architecture, The Architecture of Science (1999) and Picturing Science, Producing Art (1998), as well as Big Science (1992), The Disunity of Science (1996), and Atmospheric Flight in the 20th Century (2000). Image and Logic won the Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society in October 1998.

Galison’s courses include: History and Philosophy of 20th-Century Physics; History and Philosophy of Experimentation; Fascism, Art, and Science in the Interwar Years; Science and Realism; the Einsteinian Revolution; seminars on Critical History and on the History and Philosophy of Theory in 20th-Century Physics; and Filming Science. Additionally, he leads weekly meetings of Harvard’s Physical Sciences Research Group where students, faculty, and staff have the opportunity to present and discuss relevant topics in the history of science including the history of mathematics and the history of technology.

Timothy Hyde is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he teaches course in history and theory and serves as Area Coordinator for the History and Philosophy of Design concentration of the Master of Design Studies Degree. He is also the Thesis Director of the MArch degree program.

Hyde’s research focuses on of modern architecture and culture, and his writings range from a genealogy of mat-building, to a précis of the work of John Johansen, to an explication of Reyner Banham’s concept of the gizmo. He is one of the editors of the forthcoming volume Governing by Design, by the architectural history collaborative Aggregate. Hyde is currently pursuing an extended study of entanglements between architecture and law, research that includes his current book project, A Constitutional Modernism: Architecture and Civil Society in Republican Cuba, as well as his essay, “Some Evidence of Libel, Criticism, and Publicity in the Architectural Career of Sir John Soane,” published in Perspecta.

Hyde received his BA from Yale University, MArch from Princeton University, and PhD from Harvard University.

Jerold Kayden, the Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design, and Director of the Master in Urban Planning Degree Program, Harvard Graduate School of Design. His research and teaching focus on law and the built environment, and public-private urban development. His courses include: Public and Private Development; Design, Law, Policy; Advanced Topics in Design, Law, Policy; and Planning and Environmental Law.
Kayden’s publications include Privately Owned Public Space: The New York City Experience; Landmark Justice: The Influence of William J. Brennan on America’s Communities (co-authored); and Zoning and the American Dream: Promises Still To Keep (co-edited). He has written numerous articles on such topics as property rights and government regulation, smart growth, design codes, and marketbased regulatory instruments. He is currently completing a book about the “tyranny of context” in design review administrative and judicial decision-making.

As both attorney and urban planner, Kayden has acted on behalf of governments, private developers, and not-for-profit groups, in and out of court. He has argued cases and written briefs, including amicus curiae briefs in several significant US Supreme Court landuse cases. In 2002, he founded Advocates for Privately Owned Public Space to improve New York City’s 500+ zoning-created plazas, arcades, and indoor spaces in cooperation with the City’s Department of City Planning. For the past 13 years, he has been principal constitutional counsel to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

His international work includes advising for the World Bank, the US Agency for International Development, and the United Nations in China, Nepal, Thailand, Armenia, Ukraine, and Russia. From 1992 to 1994, he was Senior Advisor on Land Reform and Privatization to the Government of Ukraine on behalf of USAID/PADCO.
Kayden has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and the “Teacher of the Year” award at the Harvard Design School. He received his AB degree from Harvard College, his JD degree from Harvard Law School, and his Master of City and Regional Planning degree from the Harvard Design School. He subsequently served as law clerk to Judge James L. Oakes of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice William J. Brennan of the US Supreme Court.

Sanford Kwinter, Co-Director, Master in Design Studies Program. Kwinter is Professor of Architectural Theory and Criticism at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is a writer and editor who holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Columbia University. He has taught at MIT, Columbia and Rice universities as well as at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt, the AA in London, and the Universitat fur Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. He was cofounder and editor of the journal ZONE and Zone Books for 20 years. He has written widely on philosophical issues of design, architecture and urbanism, science and technology and was an editorial member of the ANY conferences and publications in the 1990s as well as of the journal Assemblage. He is the author of over a hundred and fifty articles in a dozen languages. His books including Architectures of Time: Towards a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (MIT Press, 2001), Far From Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture (Actar, 2008) and Requiem: For the City at the End of the Millennium, and the forthcoming Soft Systems on the intersections between the life sciences and design. He writes frequently on the work of young and emerging practitioners in the nascent transdisciplinary field of experimental spatial practice. He is currently at work on a book on paleo-ecology and the origins of form.

Neil Levine, BA, MA, PhD, MA (hon.), Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of History of Art and Architecture. Professor Levine teaches courses in the history of modern architecture, from the 18th through the 20th centuries. His published work has focused on issues in the 19th-century French architectural theory and practice and 20th-century American architecture. He contributed important essays to the Museum of Modern Art’s The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (1997) and The Beaux Arts and Nineteenth-Century French Architecture, edited by Robin Middleton (1982). His most recent book, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, was published in 1996. He is now completing a study entitled Modern Architecture and the Crisis of Representation, is co-editing a collection of essays on Rome as a Generating Image in American Architecture, 1895-1965, and is preparing a critical selection of the writings of Vincent Scully.

Professor Levine has been the Bannister Fletcher Professor of Architecture at the University of London, the Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge University, a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, and chair of the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy and the Board of Editors of Wright Studies. He received his PhD from Yale University.

Erika Naginski, PhD, Associate Professor of Architectural History, Harvard Graduate School of Design. Professor Naginski teaches courses on 17th and 18th century architecture, early modern aesthetic philosophy, and the critical traditions of architectural history. Her published work includes the prize-winning book Sculpture and Enlightenment (Getty Research Institute, 2009), a study of public art and architecture in an age of secular rationalism and revolutionary politics; Polemical Objects (2004), a special issue of Res co-edited with Stephen Melville that explores the philosophy of medium in Hegel, Heidegger, and others; and Writing on Drawing (2000) for the journal Representations, with essays on the collision of semiotics and mimesis in drawing practices. Her articles, essays and reviews have appeared in journals such as Art Bulletin, Journal of Visual Culture, Perspecta, Representations, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, and Yale French Studies. She has been a fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Clark Art Institute and the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte. Before joining the GSD faculty, she taught at the University of Michigan and MIT. She was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for her current book project on the intersections of architecture, archaeology and conceptions of history in the late 17th and 18th centuries.

Alina A. Payne, PhD, Professor of History of Art and Architecture. Professor Payne teaches Renaissance and Baroque architecture, late 19th- and 20th-century history and theory of architecture, and architectural representation. Topics of her current research include: [Early Modern] Italian architectural theory, criticism and historiography, architects’ books and libraries, architecture and science, architectural representation, and architecture and its relationship to the other arts; [20th century] ornament and the theory of objects in modernist architecture, and historiography.

A. Hashim Sarkis, the Aga Khan Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism in Muslim Societies. He teaches design studios and courses in the history and theory of architecture, such as Practices in Democracy, Constructing Vision: A History and Theory of Perspective’s Applications in Architecture, Developing Worlds: Planning and Design in the Middle East and Latin America After WWII, and Green Modern: A History of Environmental Consciousness in Architecture from Patrick Geddes to the Present. Sarkis is a practicing architect, working between Cambridge and Lebanon. His projects include a housing complex for the fishermen of Tyre, a park in downtown Beirut, two schools in the North Lebanon region, and several urban and landscape projects.

Sarkis was previously a lecturer in MIT’s Department of Architecture and a research associate in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. He has taught design studios at the Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University, and has been visiting lecturer at the American University of Beirut and the Metropolis Program in Barcelona.
He is author of several books and articles, including Circa 1958: Lebanon in the Pictures and Plans of Constantinos Doxiadis (Beirut: Dar Annahar, 2003), editor of CASE: Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital (Munich: Prestel, 2001), co-editor with Peter G. Rowe of Projecting Beirut (Munich: Prestel, 1998), and executive editor of the CASE publication series (GSD/Prestel).

Sarkis directs the Aga Khan Program of Activities at the GSD associated with the Aga Khan Chair. He received his BArch and BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, his MArch from the GSD, and his PhD in architecture from Harvard University.

Christine Smith, the Robert C. and Marion K. Weinberg Professor of Architectural History at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She teaches courses in Early Christian, Romanesque, and Italian Renaissance architecture; and she has published on Early Christian, Italian Romanesque, Italian Renaissance, and 20th-century American art and architecture, although most of her publications are in the field of Tuscan Romanesque, or on Leon Battista Alberti and Early Renaissance architectural theory.
A book on Giannozzo Manetti’s writings on architecture, Building the Kingdom: Giannozzo Manetti on the Material and the Spiritual Edifice, co-authored with Joseph O’Connor, is in press. This work includes critical editions of, commentaries on, and interpretive essays about his letter written on the occasion of the consecration of Florence Cathedral (1436) and Book 2 of his Life of Nicholas V (1455).

A longer project is an anthology of texts c. 300–1520, from the Greek East and Latin West, illuminating such themes as the architect’s knowledge of geometry and mechanics, the participation of the patron in architectural design, the role of architectural ornament (wall revetment and pavements), praise and condemnation of building practice and buildings, the praise of cities, fictive architecture, and the response to ruins.