Harvard Design, Issue 51 – Multihyphenate

Relaunched in summer 2014, Harvard Design Magazine probes beyond the established design disciplines to enrich and diversify current discourse. Scholarly, poetic, and visually lush, each issue triggers new interpretations of design’s defining role in today’s culture. Distinguished and unexpected voices from the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning meet those from the realms of art, science, literature, and beyond. A space for dialogue, speculation, and surprise: Harvard Design Magazine opens a door onto the applied device of design, and the people, places, and politics it engages.

In this issue:

Multihyphenation is a compound term referring to alternate modes of creative production: “Collab” culture; “brand X brand” projects; and multiple, or even opaque styles of attribution and ownership among the individuals, studios, and practices that engage in such work. For them, the “body of work” they produce matters more than maintaining a singular creative identity as an individual designer, architect, artist, and so on. As Virgil Abloh—the consummate multihyphenate—once remarked in an interview, “it’s explicitly the fact that I split my time among many things that gives me the point of view to know that what I’m doing is relevant.” Which is to say that one way of navigating a world dominated by multinational corporate firms and global brands is simply to become a multiplicity: architect-hyphen-curator-hyphen-art director-hyphen-furniture designer-hyphen-theorist-hyphen-fashion designer, etc., etc., ad infinitum.

The 51st issue of Harvard Design Magazine, “Multihyphenate,” is guest edited by Sean Canty, Assistant Professor of Architecture, and John May, Associate Professor of Architecture, both from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and Zeina Koreitem, design faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). The guest editors have invited an international group of architects, curators, fashion designers, scholars, and artists to question the issue’s theme from different vantagepoints. Is multihyphenation actually new? SUPERSTUDIO, Rem Koolhaas, Denise Scott Brown, the Eameses, Eileen Gray, even Le Corbusier (the list is endless)—weren’t they all, in some way or another, multihyphenates? Or is something different happening today? Is multihyphenation a legitimate political response to present conditions, or must it always devolve into a cynical branding strategy? And crucially, is this model of practice allowing marginalized voices in the design fields to have more presence? Were there multihyphenates in the past who were overlooked in their own time, precisely for their marginal status?