Overview

Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) is hosting Living Together by Design: Housing to Connect Generations as part of its Spring 2026 public programs. The event takes place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and belongs to the fields of architecture, urban planning, and housing design.

Focus

The symposium focuses on intergenerational design and how built environments can be structured to support multigenerational living. It asks how homes and communities can be shaped, or reshaped, to accommodate the daily realities of families spanning multiple generations under one roof or within one neighbourhood.

This sits within a wider shift in how the field is rethinking residential typologies. The Housing Education Prize 2026 reflects a similar push, positioning housing as a core subject of architectural education and practice rather than a peripheral one.

Program

The event is structured as a half-day symposium. It brings together practitioners and researchers from architecture, urban planning, homebuilding, environmental gerontology, and public health. Panels will address design responses to multigenerational households at multiple scales, from the individual unit to the broader community. The format combines expert-led discussion with cross-disciplinary dialogue.

For context on how academic institutions are framing housing challenges right now, the Architecture section on ArchUp tracks ongoing developments across research, practice, and policy.

Audience

The symposium is intended for architecture and planning professionals, researchers, academics, and students. It is open to the public and available via livestream for those outside Cambridge.

Event Details

✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight

Framing intergenerational housing as a design problem rather than a policy one marks a notable repositioning of architecture’s role in the housing conversation. This symposium places the discipline at the center of a social challenge that has historically been managed through welfare systems and urban planning codes. The half-day format, while focused, risks compressing a structurally complex issue into a single session. Land economics, zoning constraints, and development incentives rarely align with the flexible spatial models the discourse promotes. The GSD’s decision to programme this topic in Spring 2026 reflects growing institutional attention, though the gap between academic framing and scalable built outcomes remains wide. Those following this thread can also read about how residential projects are being reconsidered globally through adaptive and community-oriented design strategies.

Closing Note

The symposium is a modest-scale academic event with a broad disciplinary reach. Its relevance lies less in its size and more in its positioning of housing design as a field requiring cross-sector thinking.