Word: gsd
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Designers trained by the GSD include many of the most recognizable names in American architecture: Philip Johnson '27 (BAR '43), Michael Graves (MAR '59), Ulrich Franzen (MAR '48), I. M. Pei (MAR '46). Throughout the years, GSD-trained designers have have staffed most of the top architectural firms in the nation, mostly on the East Coast...
Still, of Harvard's nine professional schools, perhaps only the School of Public Health receives less attention than the GSD. The school's size and location on campus may have something to do with its low-key presence. Roughly 450 graduate students and 45 professors labor in relative obscurity in the glass and concrete Gund Hall, built in 1972 by Philip Andrews...
Even the school's birth in the winter of 1936 was a relatively quiet event, a mere shuffling of papers and shifting of offices. That's because the three departments that now make up the GSD--architecture, landscape design, and urban planning--had already been in existence here for many years...
...under the management of Harvard's newly-inaugurated president, James Bryant Conant '13, the three graduate schools merged into the present-day GSD. Although the move was intended to unite the three schools, it was most notable not as a bureaucratic change, but for drawing two of the world's best known designers into Harvard's architectural womb...
First came Columbia University architect Joseph Hudnut '09, who assumed the deanship of the newly-formed school. At the time, Hudnut was a hot ticket and his "lectures throughout the country were creating a sensation" according to GSD historian and visiting professor Anthony Alofsin '71. And then came Gropius...