Graduate School of Design ‘Forest Futures’ Review: A Jungle of Design

Visitors to the Harvard Graduate School of Design will find themselves greeted by the “Forest Futures” exhibition, composed of complex images of design plans supported by nets of wooden beams clustered around the stone columns of the entrance hallway. Curated by Professor of Landscape Architecture Anita Berrizbeitia, the show attempts to reconcile the immutable might and chaos of nature with the perceived order of modern design as it both celebrates and seeks to preserve the beauty of the Earth. Though the form of the exhibition is spectacular — featuring creative uses of the modernist space and symbolic methods of display — its content is lacking, as low-quality images wallow in complexity that is never explained to the viewer.

The first image most viewers will notice when they enter — even before the introductory panel of text — is Stanley Greenberg’s “Olmstead Trees” installation. Composed of four columns of three printed images of trees, the canvases wrap around a stray concrete pillar. The black and white pictures depict photographs of trees planted within the 19th century park designs of the famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, best known for planning Central Park alongside Calvert Vaux. By concealing the concrete pillar within save for slim glances through open corners, the sterile modernist columns are symbolically associated with the sublime beauty and size of ancient trees. The verticality of the pillar is replaced with imposing images of elderly monoliths of the forest, encouraging viewers to imagine the rest of the space as symbolic of a more natural design.

This theme of a modernist ecosystem continues throughout the rest of the exhibition, other columns cradling masses of wooden frames and rods that emerge from the ground like shrubbery. The use of non-structural cross beams and connective pieces calls to mind the coiled branches of a tree, particularly as they slant away from the central pillar to create a covering much like a copse.

In line with the exhibition’s goal, many installations strike an incredible balance between the implicit chaos of nature and the recognizable order of design. The Global Forest Change map foregrounds nature without distortions, utilizing a unique Dymaxion map layout to avoid warping the size of landmasses as it illustrates the changes that forest ecosystems have undergone over time. The emphasis on nature is furthered through its material — a dark brown wood for the ocean and a lighter wood for the continents. Yet while the careful triangular geometries, dotted lines, and diaphanous projections evoke a sense of modernity and its technological neatness, they don’t threaten or substantially reconfigure nature itself.

A series of boards against the wall present the viewer with several case studies of natural restoration projects. Through these incidents, the exhibition attempts to highlight some of the more technical aspects of silviculture, including contemporary approaches to data measurement, modeling software, and various techniques to revitalize flagging forests. Although interesting, the panels fail to adequately explain the processes they highlight, leaving the viewer intrigued yet unsatisfied. For instance, “Falling Stands” purports to “investigate Cryptomeria across the Japanese archipelago,” but does little more than present its audience with unlabeled photos and dense technical diagrams that all go unexplained.

The designs featured on the wooden frames of the columns suffer from this obscurity most acutely, however. Prints on the bottom generally illustrate a plan or design of the site photographed and on display just above. Unfortunately, the connection between these two elements is only ever loosely gestured towards and never explicitly explained. It is difficult to locate specific sections of the diagram in the visual context above, especially when extremely technical 3-D models or simulations remain enigmatic.

Finally, these images are of surprisingly low quality, almost as if the viewer is expected to swiftly pass by them without inspecting the prints more closely. In addition to undermining the beauty of the sites themselves, the pixelated graininess dissuades mindful looking and further lowers the chance that a viewer is able to actually comprehend the process and design hinted at by the diagrams.

In spite of the exhibition’s flaws, the images are interesting and the space is exceptionally well-designed. Visitors can marvel at the innovative reconfiguring of the modernist hallways of the Harvard Graduate School of Design while finding at least distant appreciation of the rather arcane prints.

—Staff writer John M Weaver can be reached at john.weaver@thecrimson.com.