‘Urban Intermedia’ is a tale of four cities
After trips to Berlin, Istanbul, and Mumbai, the Harvard-curated exhibition “Urban Intermedia: City, Archive, Narrative” arrived at the Graduate School of Design (GSD) this fall, promising visitors more questions than answers. “This is both a homecoming and an opportunity to raise new issues,” said Eve Blau, adjunct professor of the history of urban form at GSD and one of the exhibition’s co-curators. “We see the exhibition as an experiment and the beginning of an ongoing discussion on new kinds of practices around the study of cities that bring together scholarship, design, and media. The open-ended aspect of the project is key to what it is all about.” The exhibit caps the four-year Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative (HMUI), which Blau co-directed with Julie Buckler, Samuel Hazzard Cross Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS); she curated the exhibit itself with the GSD’s...