Harvard Design Magazine, Fall 2024

With more than 50 issues in print, Harvard Design Magazine probes beyond the reaches of the established design disciplines to enrich and challenge current discourse. Explore 25 years of design thinking and scholarship, buy our current issue, or order from our extensive back issue catalog below.

In this issue: Instruments of Service

The issue poses a simple question: What do architects actually make and how is this changing?

Guest edited by Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti and Jacob Reidel, assistant professors in practice of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, issue 52’s exploration is grounded in architecture. Once upon a time asserted to be the “mother art” (Frank Lloyd Wright) and as “the ultimate goal of all creative activity” (Walter Gropius’s introduction to his Bauhaus Manifesto), but over the past century it has lost its purchase on such sweeping and grandiose claims to creative primacy and world-building. At the same time, however, architecture remains a ubiquitous point of reference for a wide range of disciplines, practices, and protagonists that influence the design of the things we use and the environments we inhabit—including fields not only directly related to architecture such as landscape architecture, urban planning, and urban design, but also fashion, industrial design, graphic design, and digital design.

Instruments of service are the instruction manuals that architects—and other designers—make so that others can make something. They define the architect’s relationships with labor, construction, clients, and society. And these relationships—along with the agency of architectural practice—are changing as a growing number of external pressures force instruments of service to change.

Cambridge, United States; 225x295mm; 217 pages; Fall 2024