For the first time, Design Miami, a four-day art and design festival, has awarded its coveted entry pavilion to a Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) student team. Typically, Design Miami commissions an architect at the rise of their career to design the entire site. The winners, who were chosen last May from 32 GSD student teams, include Joanne Cheung, Jenny Shen, Steven Meyer, Doug Harsevoort, and Yiliu Shen-Burke. The design, titled, UNBUILT, consists of a metal canopy outfitted with pink foam architectural models. These adornments will be built using a range of ideas submitted by various other members of the GSD community. To collect the 200 designs, the team is currently soliciting digital project files from students, faculty, and alumni across the school’s disciplines: architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and urban planning. A team of students will then transform each of them in the final design.
Though many of the student-submitted designs will only be used as models in this structure, and may never be realized into full-scale projects, the team hopes they will represent their emerging skills, research, and imagination.
"It captures something that is so often unseen," said Rodman Primack, Design Miami's executive director, to T Magazine, The New York Times'', Style Magazine. "Most people never work with architects or see how things get designed, so this exposes the inner struggle of getting to something that finally gets made."
By installing the series on the metal grid structure, each design can be viewed from afar, but will also enable them to provide shade to visitors below. At night, lighting will illuminate the canopy.
The completed pavilion will be displayed at the entrance of the fair for its duration from Dec. 2 to 6.
