Unbuilt: Harvard GSD × Design Miami

Unbuilt was the entrance pavilion for Design Miami 2015

"For every building that exists, there is a prospective and invisible city of the unbuilt. In this sense, design is the production of knowledge not only for a singular structure but for an entire field of possibilities. UNBUILT brings this invisible city to light. The pavilion is a canopy of 198 hand-crafted architectural models that showcase a range of experimental and speculative projects by students and faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. While these projects may never be built, they manifest the skills, research, and imagination of their designers. The interior of the pavilion presents an aerial view of a cityscape populated by 198 distinct visions of the future. In other words, the pavilion explores how individual ideas relate to the communal infrastructure of memory, experience, and culture; it is a way to contribute our own stories, as well as those of many others, to the greater narrative of design."

In May 2015, our team of five first-year architecture students competed with 38 other student teams to design and build the showcase pavilion for Design Miami, Miami Beach 2015. The winning proposal manifests, celebrates, and confronts the vast space of possibility from which the built environment is reified, through the often-invisible and usually-undervalued labor of designers.

Concept and execution by →

• Joanne Cheung
• Douglas Harsevoort
• Steven Meyer
• Jenny Shen
• Yiliu Shen-Burke
• Luis Callejas (faculty advisor)
• Dan Borelli (staff advisor)

Selected Press

• Design Miami/ 2015 —Design Miami
• The Most Interesting Projects From a Newly Inclusive Design Miami —T: The New York Times Style Magazine
• Class act: Harvard students honour architecture’s unrealised back catalogue with a pavilion for Design Miami —Wallpaper*
• This Year’s Design Miami Pavilion Has Odd Looks—and Unexpected Creators —Wired
• 200 concept models form a pink canopy in Harvard GSD’s UNBUILT pavilion for Design Miami/ —DesignBoom
• Harvard students create pink pavilion of 200 elevated models outside Design Miami —Dezeen