“Both Harvard University and the GSD are at pivotal moments. Today's rapidly changing world, with its new and unexpected challenges, has opened up unprecedented opportunities in the areas of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning and design. More than ever, professionals must work across disciplines and national boundaries. The Graduate School of Design, together with the enormous intellectual offerings of Harvard as a preeminent global university, provides a unique opportunity for experimentation. At the GSD we believe that it is our responsibility to construct new domains of research investigation that contribute to making a better world. The transdisciplinary, discursive, and geographically diverse nature of such research can potentially lead to some of today's most innovative spatial propositions—those that can also incorporate alternative forms of democratic social relations. Our extraordinary students, faculty, and staff at the GSD create an exemplary community and environment for creative research and learning that play a significant role in addressing these exciting challenges.” - Dean Mohsen Mostafavi |
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Mohsen Mostafavi, an accomplished academic leader and international figure in the fields of architecture and urbanism, is the dean of the Faculty of Design and professor of architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Mostafavi was formerly the dean of the Cornell University College of Architecture, Art and Planning, where he was the Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Professor in Architecture. He also served for nine years as chairman of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, one of Europe's foremost schools of design, and was previously an associate professor of architecture and director of the Master in Architecture I degree program at the GSD.
“Mohsen Mostafavi has an impressive record of leadership at two distinguished schools of architecture and design, and his intellectual vitality and international outlook promise to serve our Design School well,” said Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust upon naming him dean. “His interests extend across the GSD's principal domains of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning and design, and his leadership style is marked by an openness to new ideas and an instinct for crossing boundaries in creative ways. He is also a highly respected scholar and educator who has longstanding ties to the Design School and who bridges the worlds of theory and practice with unusual aplomb.”
Dean Mostafavi serves on the Harvard University Task Force on the Arts, the steering committee of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, and the jury of the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction. He has served on the design committee of the London Development Agency (LDA) and the RIBA Gold Medal selection committee, and is currently involved as a consultant on a number of international architectural and urban projects.
He studied architecture at the Architectural Association and undertook research on counter-reformation urban history at the Universities of Essex and Cambridge. He has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Cambridge University, and the Frankfurt Academy of Fine Arts (Staedelschule). His research and design projects have been published in many journals, including The Architectural Review, AAFiles, Arquitectura, Bauwelt, Casabella, Centre, and Daidalos. He is co-author of Architecture and Continuity (1983), Delayed Space (with Homa Fardjadi, Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), and On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time (with David Leatherbarrow, MIT, 1993) which received the American Institute of Architects prize for writing on architectural theory. Dean Mostafavi's recent publications include Approximations (AA/MIT, 2002), Surface Architecture (MIT, 2002) which received the CICA Bruno Zevi Book Award, Logique Visuelle (Idea Books, 2003), Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape (AA Publications, 2004), and Structure as Space (AA Publications, 2006).