Architectural fever dreams
Alexander Watchman talked drydocks. Joe Liao held forth on multigenerational housing. Quardean Lewis-Allen offered a presentation on the Victorian vernacular. Welcome to the annual January thesis review for architecture students at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, a day of presentations throughout Gund Hall. Piper Auditorium saw the most action. Every inch of open space on Jan. 21 was divided into a warren of temporary presentation spaces. Between hour-long sessions, presenters and their friends swept in to hang diagrams, set up models, and wheel poster boards into place. Each of the 28 presentations represented a final product, said GSD thesis coordinator Edward Eigen, an associate professor of architecture and landscape architecture who teaches courses on the thesis process. It’s a last chance to explain ideas and inclinations that will likely inform a student’s lifelong interests. The architecture thesis, he wrote in an essay, is an “ascent up a five-story glass mountain,” a reference to...