This issue of Harvard Design Magazine seeks to develop and expand this increasingly vital movement, engaging reuse across multiple scales—from individual buildings to downtown streets and the regulatory frameworks that organize our cities. Highlighting creative and interdisciplinary thinking, the issue promotes the act of bringing new life to what already exists as a powerful brief for designers, their clients, and the communities they serve. We bring designers and planners together with mayors, educators, artists, and scholars from fields including urban and architectural history, disability studies, sociology, and ethnography.

The theme of the issue nods to the ubiquitous slogan, “reduce, reuse, recycle,” from the United States’ first national recycling programs in the 1970s. Although it originated from a grassroots movement to address mounting waste in post-war American cities, the slogan also had the effect of shifting that responsibility onto consumers, rather than the producers of throw-away packaging. Fifty years later, our theme—“Reuse and Repair”—channels some of the same urgency but focuses it through a more critical lens on the built environment’s complex technical, cultural, and political dimensions. Offering “Reuse and Repair” as a pair of concepts to encourage thinking around how systemic change might be enacted, we aim to open a conversation about how designing toward a low-carbon future can go hand-in-hand with the wider work of caring for and remaking our cities and society. 

Common themes have emerged. Reuse has long challenged strict notions of architectural authorship, exposing how design is often an asynchronous and collaborative process involving different architects, inhabitants, and many other stakeholders over time. Chris Cornelius offers a framework rooted in Indigenous values that asks us to consider how our design choices would change if we regard buildings and landscapes as our relatives. An example of asynchronous collaboration can be seen in a new design we commissioned for a languishing public pavilion on Chicago’s lakefront. Originally designed by the architects Ultramoderne and structural engineer Brett Schneider for the 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial, its inventive reinterpretation by the architectural office Kwong Von Glinow exemplifies the promise of a collaborative approach to architectural practice as buildings age.

Compelling cases of reuse also show that the most lasting buildings are often those most open to change. Brian D. Goldstein reflects on the work of influential Black architect J. Max Bond Jr., whose flexible housing designs allowed people to make the world in their own image, even if much in that world was otherwise denied to them. David Gissen and Georgina Kleege bring a disability perspective to Philip Johnson’s canonical Glass House, exploring adaptations Johnson made to accommodate his own impairments—a history that has been suppressed in favor of architectural ideals about bodies and homes. Revisiting her childhood home in Josep Lluís Sert’s Peabody Terrace at Harvard, Imani Perry recalls how the complex’s Brutalist architecture “‘worked’ well . . . even when it didn’t seem to.” Welcoming “a spectrum of Black life,” its design helped imbue her early years with a sense of community that endures. 

This issue of Harvard Design Magazine seeks to develop and expand this increasingly vital movement, engaging reuse across multiple scales—from individual buildings to downtown streets and the regulatory frameworks that organize our cities. Highlighting creative and interdisciplinary thinking, the issue promotes the act of bringing new life to what already exists as a powerful brief for designers, their clients, and the communities they serve. We bring designers and planners together with mayors, educators, artists, and scholars from fields including urban and architectural history, disability studies, sociology, and ethnography.

The theme of the issue nods to the ubiquitous slogan, “reduce, reuse, recycle,” from the United States’ first national recycling programs in the 1970s. Although it originated from a grassroots movement to address mounting waste in post-war American cities, the slogan also had the effect of shifting that responsibility onto consumers, rather than the producers of throw-away packaging. Fifty years later, our theme—“Reuse and Repair”—channels some of the same urgency but focuses it through a more critical lens on the built environment’s complex technical, cultural, and political dimensions. Offering “Reuse and Repair” as a pair of concepts to encourage thinking around how systemic change might be enacted, we aim to open a conversation about how designing toward a low-carbon future can go hand-in-hand with the wider work of caring for and remaking our cities and society. 

Common themes have emerged. Reuse has long challenged strict notions of architectural authorship, exposing how design is often an asynchronous and collaborative process involving different architects, inhabitants, and many other stakeholders over time. Chris Cornelius offers a framework rooted in Indigenous values that asks us to consider how our design choices would change if we regard buildings and landscapes as our relatives. An example of asynchronous collaboration can be seen in a new design we commissioned for a languishing public pavilion on Chicago’s lakefront. Originally designed by the architects Ultramoderne and structural engineer Brett Schneider for the 2015 Chicago Architecture Biennial, its inventive reinterpretation by the architectural office Kwong Von Glinow exemplifies the promise of a collaborative approach to architectural practice as buildings age.

Compelling cases of reuse also show that the most lasting buildings are often those most open to change. Brian D. Goldstein reflects on the work of influential Black architect J. Max Bond Jr., whose flexible housing designs allowed people to make the world in their own image, even if much in that world was otherwise denied to them. David Gissen and Georgina Kleege bring a disability perspective to Philip Johnson’s canonical Glass House, exploring adaptations Johnson made to accommodate his own impairments—a history that has been suppressed in favor of architectural ideals about bodies and homes. Revisiting her childhood home in Josep Lluís Sert’s Peabody Terrace at Harvard, Imani Perry recalls how the complex’s Brutalist architecture “‘worked’ well . . . even when it didn’t seem to.” Welcoming “a spectrum of Black life,” its design helped imbue her early years with a sense of community that endures.