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The Harvard Graduate School of Design displayed “Envisioning Cluny: Kenneth Conant and Representations of Medieval Architecture, 1872–2025”— an exhibition tracing the efforts of Kenneth J. Conant, Class of 1915, to reimagine Cluny III, a prominent European church destroyed during the French Revolution.

The Druker Design Gallery featured the exhibition from the end of January to earlier this month.

The exhibit highlighted the way destroyed architecture can be brought to life through various modes and technologies — including Conant’s sketches as a Harvard student, photography, and state-of-the-art 3D models.

Architectural history professor and exhibition curator Christine Smith said the exhibit is “a chronologically ordered narrative.”

“It was always intended to be celebratory — to celebrate Harvard, the study of medieval architecture at Harvard, to celebrate Conant, and to celebrate the Harvard collections,” Smith said.

Ines M. Zalduendo, the special collections curator at the GSD’s Loeb Library, described Conant’s reimaginations of the church through drawing, as well as the exhibition, as a “celebration of the architectural imagination.”

“It’s not that the building was rebuilt. It’s actually a reconstruction done in drawing,” Zalduendo said.

Smith said that new 3D and virtual reality technologies allow architects, scholars, and students to engage in the same practice: envisioning different interpretations of the church’s reconstruction faster than ever before.

“It makes it possible to literally see in a different way,” Smith said.

Zalduendo said that because of the damage from the destruction, it was difficult to determine where the eight excavated capitals — decorative pillar tops — would have stood, a challenge that offered a unique opportunity to incorporate emerging technologies.

“The nice thing about the animation is that it could show you, okay, this is one way of arranging it, but then this is another way of arranging it,” Zalduendo said.

Smith said that students in her classes regularly use 3D tools in their projects.

“When I teach a course on how to design a church, the students are required to make a digital model of the church with the altar and the candles and the artwork and everything. So they do digital models just automatically — it’s not hard for them.”

Smith compared the work done by current GSD students to those highlighted in the exhibit.

“The name of the show was ‘Envisioning,’ and that’s what our students do,” she said.

“They envision what does not yet exist, whereas in the show, it was about envisioning what no longer exists,” Smith added.

Correction: April 22, 2025

Kenneth J. Conant was a member of Harvard’s Class of 1915, not Harvard’s Class of 2015.

—Staff writer Neena D. Tarafdar can be reached at neena.tarafdar@thecrimson.com.