Superstudio’s The Continuous Monument: On the Rocky Coast, project perspective (1969). Images: courtesy the Museum of Modern Art

Despite its title, a surprising number of the buildings in MoMA’s new exhibition In Situ: Architecture and Landscape more or less ignore their surrounding landscapes. The exhibit covers roughly the latter half of the 20th century, encompassing both built and un-built works ranging in scale from individual houses to entire imagined cities. So it includes a few block-y, Modernist behemoths that hit the ground hard, like Superstudio’s 1969 vision of a Continuous Monument, a geometric grid-like structure that marches relentlessly across the earth’s surface, paying attention to landscape only as an obstacle to be overcome.

But even the less-imposing buildings often ignore their surroundings. Read more…

William S. Saunders, editor of Harvard Design Magazine, and GSD professor Alex Krieger, collaborated on the new book Urban Design, which asks prominent architects, landscape architects, and planners to take stock of the field of urban design—how it’s evolved, where it’s fallen short, and what its purpose should be. I visited Saunders in his Cambridge office recently to get his take on the complex issues presented in the book.

Your book starts out by looking back to the first conferences on urban design, in 1956 at Harvard, which attempted to establish the new field as a collaboration between architecture, landscape architecture, and planning. But now urban design is mostly the domain of architects. Why do you think that is?

I think Krieger is right when he talks about urban design as more a state of mind than a profession. You could be an urban designer and be a physician if you simply thought in terms of how parts of cities should relate, how parts of cities can enliven cities, and things like that. But there is this sort of cultural “number one” spot that architecture has usually had, this cultural status. And it’s kind of bullied its way to the top. Read more…