Page 92 - Architectural Digest - USA (March 2020)

SARAH

WHITING

Harvard University
Graduate School of Design

“There is a real challenge for schools
to redirect the design profession and
push practice in ways that may not
yet be available to the profession,”
says Whiting, now midway through
her first year at the GSD. “Our
mandate is to identify questions that
are relevant and urgent, questions
like ethics, climate change, and
housing. It’s important to make sure
the world knows that design is
not a frivolous add-on to our lives
but rather at the root of how we live.”
Since taking the helm at Harvard,
following nearly a decade as dean
of Rice Architecture, she has sparked
collective conversation among the
GSD’s roughly 950 students and
250 faculty and staff—championing
transdisciplinarity and intellectual
diversity. “All schools have an
obligation to reach out to new
constituencies to let people know
what architecture is,” she notes.
“Design, the most public of the arts,
has almost no public voice. But a
design education paves the way to
all sorts of paths—some that are
familiar and some that none of us
can foresee. There is a deep
responsibility to lead students into
fields that are critical today.”

Dean Whiting is photographed at
Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the
Visual Arts, designed by Le Corbusier.

MÓNICA PONCE DE LEÓN

Princeton University School of Architecture

“Architecture materializes culture,” notes Ponce de León (opposite), who arrived at Princeton in 2016 after
seven and half years as dean of the architecture school at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. “We have
the capacity to put on the table alternatives to the status quo. But if architecture is going to impact culture,
it has to represent and argue for a broad cohort of communities. Diversity is key.” At Princeton, she has DEAN WHITING: HAIR AND MAKEUP BY DANIELLE K AT MLR AGENCY
more than tripled the percentage of underrepresented minorities on the faculty, catalyzing similar shifts in
terms of gender, while also quadrupling the number of underrepresented minorities in each freshman class.
“As a Latina, I have been outspoken about how a lack of diversity in architecture perpetuates its own lack of
diversity,” notes the Caracas-born architect, who has instituted a program with Trenton Central High School
to introduce teenagers to the field. At Princeton, meanwhile, she has focused the conversation, implementing
themed semesters with lectures, symposia, exhibitions, workshops, and publications organized around
ideas like representation. “We explored models, drawings, photography, but also a lot about race and gender
in architecture and in the city.”

Dean Ponce de León is photographed at Princeton’s Embodied Computation Lab.

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