William S. Saunders, educator, founding editor of Harvard Design Magazine, and author, has passed away at 72. Saunders regularly contributed to Architectural Record and served as the book review editor for Landscape Architecture Magazine after stepping down from Harvard Design Magazine in 2012. He also offered his consulting services to various design firms. In his books and publications, he was a thoughtful commentator on architecture and landscape architecture, particularly as it evolved in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Saunders was a fixture at Harvard, having conducted his postdoctoral studies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education in 1980, where he taught until 1982. Saunders then held various communications and advisory posts at the Graduate School of Design (GSD) until his retirement in 2012. In 1997, Saunders founded Harvard Design Magazine, a biannual, critical examination of urban and landscape issues and theory meant to help design school graduates stay “in the know.” The magazine relaunched in 2014, helmed by Saunders’s successor Jennifer Sigler, and issue 45, Into the Woods, was released earlier this spring.