War, Memory, and Landscape in the Pacific: A Conversation with GSD Travel Grant Recipients
As part of a research project supported by the Harvard Asia Center, four Master’s in Landscape Architecture students from the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD)—Emily Kim, Hannah Hardenbergh, Gio Hur, and Carlo Raimondo —undertook a fieldwork-based study examining the long-term effects of war on island landscapes across the Pacific. Their project engaged with sites in Okinawa, Iejima, Saipan, and Tinian, investigating how war, memory, and militarization continue to shape land use, ecological conditions, and cultural narratives, and resulted in a publication and subsequent exhibition, both titled: Islands After the War: A Comparative Study of Landscapes Across the Pacific Theater. All recent graduates of the GSD program, the four Harvard alumni met with the Asia Center to reflect on the origins of their collaboration, the theoretical and methodological frameworks that shaped their research, and what they learned from the field. Islands After the War: A Comparative Study of Landscapes Across the Pacific Theater is on view in Knafel Building Concourse Level, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge until January 2026.
Q: How did the four of you come together and what inspired the project?
Gio Hur: We met in 2022 during our first year in the Landscape Architecture program at the GSD. As part of the same cohort, we sat near each other in the studio on the third floor of Gund Hall and became close friends. That closeness eventually led to a shared commitment to this project.
The initial idea emerged after we attended a student-led, travel-based exhibition at the GSD. I’m originally from Saipan, and I grew up in a landscape where time and ruin shape daily life, quietly but in lasting ways. That experience led us to ask: what if we focused our research on islands such as Saipan, places often left out of maps yet shaped by complex and layered histories? This inquiry pushed us to think more intentionally about the places we come from and the kind of narratives that are often overlooked in the landscape discourse. We travelled to four different islands in the Pacific Theater, drawn to themes such as preservation of cultural and wartime artifacts, the legacies of colonialism and militarization, and the ways memory continues to live on in the landscape.
Q: For readers less familiar with the field, how would you describe landscape architecture and how does your project reflect the discipline?
Carlo Raimondo: For much of our education, we’ve also been trying to understand what landscape architecture truly is. At its core, it concerns the design and physical shaping of a biotic, exterior world. How we organize, structure, and interpret outdoor spaces in ways that influence human behavior, movement, and experience. Yet, it remains an expansive and fluid field of practice, applied across a wide range of disciplines and scales.
At the GSD, much of our training focused on the graphic communication and spatialization of information, particularly through mapping and diagramming, as a method for justifying or informing a design proposal. This project, however, uses those same techniques not to propose new interventions, but to reveal how the landscape has already been designed. In that sense, our work occupies a slightly different position within landscape architecture. Rather than designing new landscapes, we are examining the landscapes of the Pacific as already designed artifacts, shaped by a complex web of human decisions, both deliberate and accidental, and situated within the overarching historical framework of World War II in the Pacific.
Emily Kim: There’s no clearly defined subfield in landscape architecture focused on postwar island ecologies. However, at the GSD, there is a focus on using the lens of landscape as a way to synthesize different fields. Our program cohort—the MLA I—is specifically for students without prior degrees in landscape architecture. I come from an art history and architecture background, and Carlo has a degree in anthropology and environmental studies. Gio studied conservation and sustainable design. Hannah studied American history and literature. This project enabled us to bring together our various fields to explore the concept of landscape as it pertains to postwar space.
Q: Could you each describe your individual academic backgrounds and how they shaped your contributions to the project?
Carlo Raimondo: I studied anthropology and environmental studies at Bard College. For my undergraduate thesis I wrote an ethnography on a citizen science initiative that was compiling water quality data from a river next to our campus. In that sense, I have always been interested in the ways different demographics and fields of study perceive the environment and the ways in which these perceptions overlap. Landscape architecture offered me an alternative lens through which to address the shaping of the material world, and how this shaping prompts a certain understanding of the environment.
Emily Kim: I studied art history and architecture at Smith College. There I took classes that overlapped with their Landscape Studies minor. I have always been interested in access to knowledge: who has access to what information, and how that shapes the way we actually use and interact with space. One of my undergraduate projects involved redesigning the Smith campus map in a way that students from all disciplines would know about and therefore have access to all of the resources available to them. That experience translated to this project, in that meeting Gio and learning about Saipan and Tinian, which despite being part of the U.S. were unknown to me.
Gio Hur: I studied landscape architecture at UC Berkeley, with minors in conservation and sustainable design. Growing up on Saipan, I was exposed to these topics, though I didn’t fully recognize them as such until later. My parents moved to Saipan as scuba divers, and I spent much of my childhood in and around water. Those early experiences shaped my understanding of land ecology and history. You can see these influences woven into our field work. I left the island knowing I wanted to bring more attention to places like Saipan, which hold so much history but are often overlooked.
Hannah Hardenbergh: I studied American history and literature at Harvard with a minor in studio art. Throughout my education, including my studies of landscape, I’ve been most interested in narrative and the power of images to tell or rewrite a story. I have studied the American history topics of photography and other images and their use in the degradation of people and the uplifting of social justice issues. For this project I was especially interested in the images that were produced through war efforts, so visiting the Okinawa archives was a highlight for me. Being able to juxtapose, compare, and correlate certain themes we were seeing firsthand is a really powerful way to tell a narrative.
Q: What were the highlights of your research travel? What did you hope to reveal through comparisons of the sites?
Emily Kim: There were a lot of highlights! The main one for me was getting to see and experience the landscape that we had been studying for so long. And Gio’s uncle taught us how to scuba dive. The Okinawa Archives had so many documents related to World War II, and we met with incredible people who helped us better understand the spaces we were visiting. We hoped to reveal landscapes across the Pacific Theater, specifically Okinawa, Iejima, Saipan, and Tinian, and how they continue to register the long aftermath of World War II, not just through physical remnants of war, but in how people live with, manage, or neglect those spaces today.
By comparing sites in Japan to the U.S. territories, we wanted to understand how different post-war trajectories, memorialization, and restoration in Japan, and ruination and abandonment in U.S. territories shape ecological conditions, land use, and collective memory. While these islands share a wartime history, comparing their post-war realities allowed us to frame them not as isolated geographies but as connected transpacific landscapes. They are linked by war, empire, and ongoing occupation. This comparative view helps us think beyond national boundaries and focus instead on the structural patterns that persist across these places. So ultimately, we hope to convey a lesson we have heard both in interviews prior to and during our visit, and which was clarified during our visit and analysis of these sites, which was that for the people on the islands, the war has never really ended.
Q: Any next steps for the project?
Hannah Hardenbergh: We have a polished book based on our research this summer that will be distributed to schools, libraries, and community members in Saipan by the Northern Mariana Humanities Council. Additionally, the book will be made publicly available online on the Northern Mariana Humanities Council’s website.
Additionally, we produced an exhibition of the work, “Islands After the War: A Comparative Study of Landscapes Across the Pacific Theater,” that has been displayed both at Quotes gallery in Gund Hall, and is currently up at the Knafel Building Concourse (lower level), 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge through January 2026.
Gio Hur: The project has also been gaining public recognition recently, including an upcoming feature in the Marianas Variety newspaper in Saipan. We’re planning a hybrid book launch at the Joeten-Kiyu Public Library in Saipan on August 16, 2025, and will be presenting as part of a panel at the University of Guam’s Marianas History Conference later that month. The panel, One Archipelago, Many Stories: Weaving Stories of Land & Lineage, runs from August 29 to 31. We’re excited about these upcoming moments and hopeful for even more opportunities to share and grow the work in the future.
About the researchers:
Hannah Hardenbergh is a recent graduate of the Master of Landscape Architecture program at Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is interested in the connection between subject and site. She examines the social dynamics that underpin regional systems of water, soil, and flora, seeking to integrate these findings into practice to understand what it really means to belong. Her work explores neighborhood vernaculars, investigating how photography and images shape collective imaginations of place in the United States.
Gio Hur is a recent graduate of the Master of Landscape Architecture program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Raised in Saipan, CNMI, she brings a personal perspective to the complex histories of Pacific Island landscapes. Her research explores how water shapes these environments over time, especially in postwar contexts where submerged artifacts, coastal erosion, and shifting ecologies uncover intertwined stories. Treating water as both material and witness, she investigates how it preserves and transforms these landscapes, revealing the layered impacts of history and memory. Through fieldwork and mapping, she aims to reconstruct obscured narratives and confront the enduring imprint of empire on island geographies.
Emily Kim is a recent graduate of the Master of Landscape Architecture program at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her work investigates militarized landscapes, focusing on World War II airfields: examining their construction and maintenance as part of a broader spatial typology that frames islands as both paradise and wasteland. Working across archives, she uses mapping, diagramming, and photography to trace how the infrastructure of empire embeds lasting environmental and cultural consequences into landscapes. Her work seeks to surface the material legacies inherited from militarized geographies, and engage in the imagining of alternative, decolonial futures.
Carlo Raimondo is a recent graduate of the Master of Landscape Architecture program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Born and raised in New York City, his interests lie in both personal and communal perceptions of the environment. His past work has explored visions of nature and the environment in urban contexts, examining how the material vernaculars of urban space influence the ways in which people dwell within and upon the land. More recent research has focused on the relationship between landscapes as aesthetic subjects and their role in shaping perceptions and paradigms of “the environment.” More recently, his work has investigated the dynamics between the visual economies of tourism and the emergence and function of ruins in the Pacific region, analyzing the oscillating frame of landscape as ruin and ruin as landscape.