Lecture by Miho Mazereeuw

Tuesday, February 18, 2025 at 4:30pm
Reading Room, South Gallery, Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery

Free and open to the public

Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff can RSVP on WesNest, but reservations are not required.

A talk by architect and landscape architect Miho Mazereeuw ’96, Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism and Director of the Urban Risk Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Presented by Wesleyan’s College of Design and Engineering Studies (CoDES). Co-sponsored by the College of East Asian Studies.

Mazereeuw was a student at Wesleyan in 1995 at the time of the earthquake in Kobe, Japan where her parents were living, and has spent much of her career studying the social and technological underpinnings of Bosai (disaster prevention) culture. Her book on the subject, Design Before Disaster: Japan’s Culture of Preparedness (University of Virginia Press, 2025) will cover 25 years of research.

Operating at several scales, Mazereeuw’s research focuses on designing cities to prepare for disasters such as earthquakes, flooding, and typhoons. With the Urban Risk Lab, she engages in extensive field work and community workshops, focusing on the needs of diverse cultures and contexts. The lab aspires to change the course of current global development trends through a radical shift in education and action to proactively embed preparedness and risk reduction in a rapidly urbanizing world.

Her forthcoming book offers a holistic framework to design for anticipated disasters and provides examples of resilient interventions in urban landscapes and architecture. Mazereeuw has also been the recipient of the Janet Darling Webel Prize, the Charles Eliot Traveling Fellowship, and the Wheelwright Prize.

Mazereeuw is both a registered architect and a registered landscape architect, and prior to joining MIT, she was an associate at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Additionally, she held teaching appointments at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the University of Toronto. Mazereeuw received her Master of Architecture and Landscape Architecture with distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.