Welcome, everyone. As all of our attendees come into the zoom I wanted to just briefly welcome everyone to this event. Today we are very fortunate at Cooper Hewitt to be joined by the two co editors of the wonderful recent publication queer spaces. Daniel Furman and Dr. Joshua Mardell. Our conversation is going to be moderated by George Benson, who is recently of Cooper Hewitt and now is working in the education department at the Museum of Modern Art and my name is Alexa Griffith I am the manager of content and interpretation at Cooper Hewitt and we are so honored to have this conversation hosted today on as one of our pride events, and I am going to just hand things over to George directly who is going to kick off this event. So thank you George. Well, thank you, Alexa. Okay, welcome everybody thank you so much for coming to what I have no doubt will be an absolutely fascinating talk that will leave your minds ringing with thoughts queer or otherwise. Because today we are speaking to the editors of a new and fabulous book called queer spaces and Atlas of LGBTQIA plus places and stories.  If like me you consider yourself the design fan and if like me you consider any space you happen to be in to be queer, then this is the absolutely most perfect book for you. And if you are not queer but simply design curious about how spaces can be queer then this is also the most absolutely perfect book for you. So today we're going to delve into the book with the editors who will outline some of the things that went into the book. And let me then just get through introductions so my name is George Benson I am a white skinned man with short light brown hair and 30 something yes that is something thank you very much. And I am sitting in my living room which sadly didn't make the cut into being in the book. So today I'm an educator at the Museum of Modern Art, where I co wrote their first ever queer tour. I study queer history and have written multiple entries for the NYC LGBT historic sites project, which documents sites and places around New York City with significance to the LGBT community. And more importantly, our guests, Adam Nathaniel Furman is an artist and designer based in London who founded an atelier that creates projects of all scales from plates to skyscrapers in various locations around the world from Tokyo to Milan. Adam is also having some slight issues with his internet connection so if he disappears do not worry, we, he will return. Dr Joshua Mardell is an architectural historian he is a research tutor in the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art and co editor of the Journal of Architecture. He has published widely on 19th and 20th century architecture including in a files architectural history, the journey of Journal of Architecture and the antiquaries journal. We are incredibly keen to hear your thoughts as we move through this presentation conversation. So please everybody, ask anything that pops into your minds as we go. You can do so in the question and answer function at the bottom of your screens. I'd much rather get the answers to your questions than my questions so please don't be shy. So I'm going to start us off with a presentation of some of the many places and stories you will find in the book so let's all take our fingers and welcome Adam and Josh. Hi there. Hi, thanks very much George, do you want to say hello, Adam. I'll give a verbal description of myself. As far as I can. I'm a white man in my mid 30s. I have a beard, blue eyes, messy, brownish hair with a streak of sunshine in it, and a jazzy waistcoat by the Swedish designer 80s, and a faded purple 1980s shirt. But on request by talking about the word queer, actually a sort of slippery term where has had, has served an interesting dual function it was widely used as a term of self description for queer identifying people in the early to mid 20th century, but also had been one of stigmatization and expression of hostility let's say by ill disposed others. The word was reclaimed as a signifier of a new queer militancy by grassroots radical activists in the late 80s onwards, and increasingly serves, I'd say as an umbrella term for unifying the various fragments of the lesbian gay, bisexual non binary and racist community. And it will be worth looking in fact I haven't done this at the etymology of the word in more detail and examples of usage through time but important to say it was often used by quiz themselves in the 50s and 60s even generally to boot in the 70s and 80s as a term of abuse and then researched, I would say in line with a key shift in sexual theory flourishing in academia in the 90s. So, on the streets. So, could we have the which slide the other next slide please. So I'm going to introduce the book I'm just going to try and give a sense of its configuration it's makeup, how it came together and I should also say I'm delighted to be here sorry I was distracted by the, by the connection issues and thank you so much for the invitation. So thank you Kirsten. Thank you Alexa. So I'm going to try and give a sense of its configuration it's makeup how it came together then I'll hand over to Adam who's going to add their own perspective and I'll mention quite a few different case studies. necessarily, again, fingers crossed. Excellent. Okay hello nice to see you. So what you have on the slide here and I should say of course you can you can purchase the book but also be great if you could order it for your institutional libraries otherwise. Those that belong to them or your offices. It contains a forward by the brilliant writer Olivia Lang, and she opens it by quoting this line here from the pet shop boys song being boring. This is from 1990 a song about those lost to AIDS, and she quotes the following lyrics, I never dreamt that I would get to be the creature that I always meant to be. And she's, she's saying that given the, the right conditions queer selves can find opportunities to emerge she says from their chrysalis from their inner hidden selves. So let's chart some of those enabling ecosystem in the book spaces that accommodate queer selfhoods or stories of lived experience in which space and architecture have a prominent role. So places where you have a freedom let's say from guardedness spaces to find liberation from queer guilt etc. And we do this by short expressive vignettes. We have many of them, and these are divided in the book loosely, according to different scales so we have the domestic scale so mostly alternative forms of close kinship. We have the communal scale spaces in which queer communities come together, or were formed and then the larger public sphere if you like. We think about how and why queerness can function or thrive at that scale infrastructure let's say public institutions monuments. So let's go back in time so our own book isn't a vacuum it fills a gap let's say certainly in the historiography in the market we're of course of though part of a much wider scholarship on the history of sexuality and sexual diversity, as inactive through spaces and and one seminal moment that you see here bears mentioning happened in California in 1992 with the inauguration of a new course, and some of you might might be more expert on this than we are being in the US called queer space this was at UCLA School of architecture and they prepared a course syllabus aiming to bring formulations of queer theory that what these were already present in literary theory let's say film criticism history to bring those into the fields of architecture and planning. And then in New York a couple of years later another seminal moment on the other side of the screen for the history of queer space is an exhibition held at the storefront for art and architecture that as you know is still going. An independent nonprofit architecture organization, and this was dedicated to. It was found in 1982 and the exhibition was about defining queer defining space and interrogating the conceptual bonds that unite them. So just to cast myself at this point if I sort of have a cameo in this presentation if you like. I'm an architectural historian, a queer cis man and I'm, I'm interested in the retrieval of things that have been left out of the story things that have been left out of the history of architecture, and history and historiography. So the way that history has been written isn't divorced from architectural practice it's actually really participated it has a lot to do with how architects do architecture, how they see it what's in the canon what's in the survey courses for them to learn about what they're able to find on the shelves in the library, and also what's physically out there what's preserved and noticed. Most unpromisingly and I think Adam will say similar things I was born in 1988 the year that section 28 was put onto the statute book by Margaret Thatcher's cabinet prohibiting the promotion of homosexuality by local authorities which included schools, a model I'm told for Florida's parental rights and education or don't say gay law from from last year. I'm in a small town lecture with Garden City. Maybe you learn about this, those of you that are architects. I don't know founded in 1903 as a socialist utopian experiment in living the world's first garden city and it historically attracted an alternative culture of unorthodox religions, temperance figures, pacifism, even vegetarianism. But there isn't much evidence yet perhaps I should write a book about it of a kind of queer subculture, but rational dress, including sandals, and, and Ruskin flannel was adopted by lots of let's with residents, because they were followers of the openly political writer Edward Carpenter, who lived in a place called milthorpe in Derbyshire, and his sandal maker, lived in Lechvip so there if you look for it there is a sort of queer link. For me growing up in the, in the, in the, in the council estate, the project site space in the 90s, a suburb of a suburb wasn't counter cultural it was it was destabilizing I felt other I felt I was in belonging especially at school, and this would only mirror my feelings later as a burgeoning architectural historian, trying to enter a discipline where queer themes were sidelined even ridiculed, and where there was this inequitable social structure and elitist culture that is still endemic, I would say. Next slide please. I think Adam and I both agree with this we've put this up here. I don't want to kind of I haven't got the time to provide a bigger sort of literature review or a sense of the, the broader discourse to which we owe a debt. But I, I like to turn to this quotation from a book called queer spiritual spaces from 2010, because I think it has the right idea. Many editors warn their reader that this book doesn't provide a definitive definition of queer spaces. So reader if you're an aspiring logical positivist put this book down now before you get disappointed or enraged, and I love that and I wish we, we had this sort of similar sentiment in our own introduction, because doesn't queer space to some extent by its very nature resist fixed definitions. So we were adamant to leave it up to our global interdisciplinary authors, and these extend from academic historians like me to designers like Adam to filmmakers curators, activists, archivists. We really honored their own definitions their own conceptualizations what what queer spaces mean to them and we've tried to be sensitive to a really wide range of identities experiences and cultural traditions not just our own. This is contrary this is to a book that has a similar name to ours Aaron Betzky is 1996 queer space singular. This was important in unraveling the interrelationships between queer sensibilities and design. Very important in putting queerness on the architectural agenda back in 1966, but the title is singular and our addition of an S is a deliberate corrective of the idea that queer space is somehow one single monolithic juggernaut someone one definable So I'm just going to say I've written down a few things that I'm going to say what what queer spaces can be and avoid rather speaking about what they can't be they can be vital ecosystems for the marginalized and often oppressed. They can be permissible realms of self expression and self love they can be sources of validation and homes from home. So I'm just going to run through some quick sort of like five let's say spaces from the book at this point if you'd like to go to the next slide please. And the result of all that put together into the book I think is a magisterial reimagining basically of, of the possibilities of architecture and it tries to uncover spaces and stories that have been missing as I said, but in the process, actually unravel more holistic truths actually include much wider ranging human experiences. And in that sense it really strengthens what architecture is what what architectural history can do who it can serve. And the book is very much for those who are different and for those whose differences have meant that their lives haven't found chroniclers. And the spaces cater, as you'll see now to really all different groups within the queer coalition across time and space. But there were of course inevitable limitations in terms of what could be included. So this on the slide is tail meaner in Sicily. And this has a surviving really quite extraordinary surviving ancient Greek theater that you can see obliquely on the left hand side. These were taken by the German expatriate photographer Baron Wilhelm von Glurden. He lived in the late 19th century and early 20th century. And on the left, this is 1890 from the Paul Getty collection the other photos the same place and a similar date with dog. And then attracted increasing amounts of tourists sorry I live right in the middle of London. Increasing amounts of tourists from Northern Europe onwards from the 18th century grand tour including many what we'd now call homosexual men seeking relative freedom from intrusion. And one of the most famous of those was von Glurden and he'd studied history and painting in Rostock in East Germany, and thus became really familiar with homo eroticism in Greek art and life. And he was advised by his doctors to go somewhere warmer because of what was probably tuberculosis and settled in tail meaner in 1878. So the photography became his hobby, his vocation, and he's well known for this corpus that you see a bit of here of homo erotic photographs of nude or semi nude young men often in mock classical costumes, invariably in pastoral settings, often insinuating sexual availability. So it's a coded homosexuality in plain sight.   But moreover, so all of our smaller spaces we try and extract bigger phenomena from them in this case the Mediterranean landscape itself with this ancient architecture is described by Robert Aldrich in our book as a setting of homo erotic fantasy and boyish beauty to generations of homosexual as patriots in 19th and 20th century Sicily. Next slide please. Next slide. Thank you. At the broader landscape scale. Very conspicuous very public rather than inconspicuous and private. This is the homo monument in Amsterdam. It consists of these three triangles of radiant Rosa Perino granite on the bank of I can't pronounce it Kaiser good act I think canal. And this was designed by the architect Karen Dan in 1987 I think she's a very much an unsung architect. She used her drawings in the book for the first time. It memorializes homosexual victims who were persecuted during Nazi occupation of Holland and you can't see or I think beyond that you can't see the annotations on the poster here, which are in Dutch, but each of the triangle symbolizes something different. The one that you see over the canal symbolizes the present.  And points another points towards answer this one points another points towards and that one sorry points towards and Frank's house, and then the other symbolizes hope for queer people in the future. And the next slide please. I've put this here because this was an important reference point for us when we were putting the book together. It's a great film. It's profound and funny. And it's a really important part of the visual historiography around queer spaces. And it's the 1996 film as you see here by the Libyan American filmmaker Cheryl Dunye watermelon woman. And it's a work of auto fiction about the central protagonist's journey of documenting the life of an unsung black lesbian actress from the 1930s, known as the titular watermelon woman. The character of the movie talks to subjects who might have remembered her and a major source of the narrative drama is archives, old photographs, film clips, newsreels, etc. And the main character visits one of my best scenes is when she visits the satirically called Center for lesbian information and technology or clit. It's a parody of your very own lesbian her story archives or LHA. And the LHA was founded in a brownstone as many of you might know in New York City in 1974, and it was organized really as a domestic space in which lesbians as I understand it were to what to feel let's say, what to feel welcome to to see and touch a lesbian legacy. And so they aimed for an emotional rather than narrowly intellectual exclusive exclusionary experience of the archive, and the LHA and its representation here in this movie are important because they, they really point to the crucial role that archives have within queer cultures, and also to their often rather unorthodox and inventive forms, and critically it transpires at the end of the film that the watermelon woman herself was the filmmakers own creation. Here is that these voices need representation, even if you have to create it yourself. And so in our book we couldn't include all the many pioneering vital queer archives from around the world but I'll mention a couple, and I am mindful of the time. So next slide please. So, I'm going to mention just two of the archives in the book. And I wasn't when we put the book together but really aware of, and it's the extraordinary one Institute for homophile studies, which I believe is the oldest established LGBT organization in the US and the largest archive of LGBTQ materials in the world. And the first advanced educational institution in the US to offer masters and doctoral degrees in homophile studies. It's one of the first LGBT organizations to have its own office and to also act inevitably as a queer community center. And the photo shows the Institute's Venice Boulevard they're all sorts of different sites actually as usual you know they've they had discriminatory landlords they struggled to find a permanent home but the Institute's Venice Boulevard library in 1953, and on the right, the one founder Jim Kipner, sorry on the left of the photo on the right, and W door leg standing outside the same building. So next slide please. And so this is the Trans Memory Archive we also have an archive in the book called the Museum of Transology that's in London. This is the Trans Memory Archive in Buenos Aires, and it's written up really beautifully and empathetically in our book by the Argentine scholar for condo review alter. And it's a project of documenting the very existence of Argentine travesty trans people for posterity, and they used. When the community came together they started by using a closed Facebook group. Members of the trans community across Argentina, especially in Buenos Aires and they uploaded photographs personal photographs usually in print that they scanned, they shared anecdotes that spanned decades. And then as the project got bigger a small team of the community and professional photographers began digitizing more photos from the past, scanning them in high resolution to help preserve trans memory, along with letters and other ephemera, helping them reclaim a hitherto simply uncronical heritage. And as for condo put it quite profoundly in the book he said interrupted by exclusion and violence. And in the past were lost as documenting life was so difficult when existence itself took up all of one's energy. Next slide please. I'm coming to an end. This is the if you just go sorry if you go to that's the Museum of Transology in London the Bishop's Gate Institute and the next slide. This is a lipstick. This this rather ordinary object was actually made extraordinary because it was given as it says here this lipstick was from my wonderful sister who was the first family member to accept and support my transition. So this rather common or garden lipstick that you might find in you know in your handbag has this extraordinary potency but I'll move on from this space now. Next slide. And again I'm mindful of the time sorry. So this is the black lesbian and gay center in London this was the first I commissioned in the book I'll just talk about it briefly, a major center for queer people in the southeast of London founded in the 80s. They struggled again to find a physical space, but ultimately found a tiny office if you go to the next slide. That's under a Victorian railway. A railway arch in the early 1990s. And it's signaled here in the center's newsletter because you have to take the evidence where you can find it. And I think illustrations are something I won't talk much about but the illustrations often very much are important to the spaces in particular in this case self printed in community newsletters, slightly blurry photos, not taken remotely remotely conscious of any hope to be included in a book. It's what survives it's what realistically chronicles this extraordinary place. The center closed in 1999 and it moved to a small volunteer run office, and when that closed a volunteer move the helpline into their home because the helpline was one of the major developers let's say of the community center to help black queer people and the phone continued to ring for several years afterwards. And then next slide please. So just couple more quick examples I really thought this would be shorter, but this. I just want to give you a real sense of the sorts of diversity of the book. Quickly I'll show you a Georgian cottage in Wales and then some working class spaces in Sheffield unless I get told to stop. So this is plus now with include in North Wales and it's a cottage of these ladies on the right. Sorry on the left, the famous Ladies of Clangoflin. And it says it's a gothic with a K a gothic spectacle it's their names are Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponzenby. They eloped from Ireland they settled there together in 1779 and it became their shared haven for half a century. They rejected the impositions of patriarchal domestic arrangements of that time and built this new life for themselves, a new life of rural retirement and self improvement here together. It's important to say that the evidence for this story relates to middle class and upper class women so it reflects the material possibilities and types of record that survived document this kind of relationship. So we mean correspondence personal reflections private papers, forms of communication only available to educated and literate people. So we have evidence privileges middle and upper class people, especially. Yes, we should move on. Yes, especially those with something of a public profile. So it makes it more likely that their documents will be preserved for posterity. As a perhaps the last example because of the time if we go to the next slide, conversely to plus now with famous ladies. The structures of an elitist and patriarchal society in Britain have made it quite rare or rare for the historian to be able to access working class queer voices which were as you can imagine even more silence than elite gay spaces. And it's too often believe that queer lives could exist only in middle or upper class society when they actually flourished, perhaps even more openly and powerfully in the working class culture of 19th and 20th century industrial England by way of the examples that we've put in our book. Sheffield in the north of England in Yorkshire, and I'll end perhaps with this image on the left this is an arc furnished furnace in Sheffield famous now extinct still working district from 1949. And on the right is a photo of a fishing trip that the steel workers made where it was reported that several of them had openly openly had gay sex on the bus which was entirely acceptable. And here and elsewhere including in the pub right in the heart of the industrial estate they conducted same sex relationships free from intrusion and judgment. I'm back now Adam. Yeah, I'm back the internet. Well, let's not jinx it, but hello everyone. I am a short, dumpy, very average Jewish looking person who wears extremely with dark hair and black eyes, very, very, very colorful glasses though and very colorful shirts that that's my, what I look like. I'm going to try and be quick with this. I'm in London very very important to me and the kind of story that ends up with the book. London is kind of the city that saved me I studied in the 90s was a kid that sort of mistakenly came out at the age of about 15 and 1997. This was a context was very much defined as Josh mentioned by a piece of legislation called section 28 which was brought in in 1988 by Margaret Thatcher's government, which has become the template for laws in Russia anti anti gay laws put in place by Putin also run. It's a blueprint for a lot run to sentences kind of form of anti LGBT populism at the moment. I was kicked out of school because of the bullying that happened to me, because the school wasn't really well the school wasn't able to support me because of the law. This happened to a lot of other people at my age, but it was also, I mean apart from being a kind of traumatic thing was also wonderful push over the edge into the incredible queer world of London in the 1990s which was immensely vibrant. It was very wealthy it was wealthier than it had ever been. It was decadent. A lot of what you consider kind of millennium aesthetics was was bubbling under the surface was not bubbling under the surface was literally kind of being created in the soho of the mid to late 90s. But it was also politically kind of fraught so while there was a lot of hedonism going on there was also a lot of activism. There was a lot of violence towards gay people. We were attacked in the streets that was very famously the bombing of the Admiral Duncan in 1999 I was around the corner. The circus when it went off several people died. Many people were severely injured. There were a lot of protests about section 28 also, which only was repealed in 2003, you can believe it, as well as equalizing the age of consent which was 21 when I was young so pretty I did was illegal at the time. But what this meant was that I, at the age of sort of 18, I was already feverishly aware of how aesthetics so these interiors that I was part of these nightclub events that were happening these flyers that I was being asked to design because I was kind of working at the age of 16 because of kind of my situation were intertwined very, very closely with the identity of an entire marginalized but very proud group so for me aesthetics the representation of identity through protest art through interior design through fashion through events through dressing up to drag was absolutely inseparable from the idea of, I guess, space and how we exist in space. And then I went to architecture school can you imagine the change. So there's a sort of like very loud very colorful person who sort of in unable to hide themselves ends up in architecture school surrounded by really miserable depressing looking This is a very depressing person called Patrick Schumacher, who's quite a well known architect in London, who was teaching at my school, the school that I went to study at and there was lots of people, you know, the people wearing black polo next crying in corridors and then you go into room and there's lots of people in black polo next making other people cry to then go out into the corridor, doing lots of very serious looking complicated line drawings and models that look like aliens in black, none of it really made sense. But of course I was like why are you doing all of this. And I tried to bring all of the things that I've been exploring or that I had experienced and I was already participating in as a teenager into the university and it was all laughed away was ridiculed. Josh mentioned the word ridicule it's a very powerful way of othering people to feel like they're not worthy of being part of a group and architecture is very good at doing that. There's kind of another coming out that I have to go through and this is something that's repeated itself throughout my career this kind of process of coming out again and again and again depending on the context, in which I find myself so throughout this, that might my experience at architectural school was kind of me saying no, I am not going to, you know, agree to jettison all of my identity, all of the things that I care about in terms of representation in space through visual graphics through protest in order to conform to your little playground group of people that represent themselves through a particular set of aesthetics. No, and so I ended up sort of being kind of a contentious figure, which unfortunately is what happens in life in society, when you happen to be different and you don't agree to change yourself to fit in you become contentious. And so my work ended up this is some of the work from university back in kind of 2005 2006 I'm older than I look, which ended up becoming more extreme that it, then it would have otherwise been just simply with the fact that in order to exist. I ended up having to be more forceful make the argument more strongly and, and consequently, the same time as the arguments, the kind of visual representation of the work ended up becoming much more extreme in order to kind of pack a rhetorical punch just through the work itself. And this was something that I then took out into the profession so you know I managed to sort of get through university, doing things that were very different from what was around me most of my queer friends ended up dropping out because they were not like they were the differences that I had had as a teenager where you know I don't I wouldn't take stuff lying down if someone's going to hit me I'm going to say exactly what they what caused them to hit me more and more and more. Because I'm a dog with a bone I won't let go. I'm kind of used to that taking a beating as it were, but my friends weren't so I think there was any one other queer kid from my year that I was friends with who made it through to the end of school and they only made it through to the end of school by absolutely jettisoning everything that they tried to express through their work and just adopting the architecture of the tutors. So I kind of went out into the world and I was like yeah I'm going to be able to start doing work. And of course it wasn't like that there was another process of coming out into the profession which turned out to be kind of just as dismissive derogatory, you know, derisory ridiculing of me, then the university had been. And there was a kind of long process of the multiple years of working in offices and kind of trying to get work on the side. And luckily, there were kind of serious a couple of projects which allowed me to do that one was the design. Well a couple of positions bursaries one was the design museum designer residence where I produced a project, which you can see part of here called identity parade and it was specifically looking at how product design manufacturing new technologies and how the location could be used at the service of expressing identity of expressing culture of individuals and communities, not expressing some sort of technical technological basis of the era or expressing your clients needs or anything particularly commercial so looking at specifically identity. I got the Rome Prize for architecture, where I lived in Rome for six months and I did exactly the same thing but for the urban scale so looking at alternative histories in Rome that were queer, not necessarily only in terms of sexuality or kind of gender bending but queer also in an architectural sense of being wildly different from the kind of normal accepted idea of kind of authentic architecture that came from Rome. And I produced my own alternative history. Grand tour project where I kind of created my own version of Rome, this is just some of the story I can't talk about it now but there's, you know, each, each story that was uncovered was written up for an article in the architectural review. It was turned into an animation it was turned into a set of architectural designs. So everything was, there's a whole series of kind of about 10 of these stories that were worked up. They were boiled down into an object, and objects are very important for me because they're kind of dismissed as church cares and silly things souvenirs, but for me they're actually the kind of queerest way of expressing the essence of space is through the visual and the tactile dimension. They are kind of compressions of identity through objects. And while doing this I ended up so I guess having to argue the case for why I had the right to exist within the architectural profession. I ended up becoming a broader thing of arguing for the space for people who might be like me so people who are different, who would like to express their identity that communities that cultures that taste cultures in a profession which is deeply exclusionary so I ended up sort of having to make broad arguments in order to feel that I could have the right to exist and so I ended up and kind of known as an activist or a sort of writer who was arguing the case for some kind of practical or practicing diversity in the profession it's kind of writing a lot and a lot of that is focused was focused towards the city. And arguing that the city needed to be a space that had room for diversity in terms of symbolic expression because our cities, especially in the UK. There's a kind of dogma where they are through planning laws but also through architectural culture there is the reproduction of the existing status quo. So this idea of context which is a kind of terrible dominant idea both on the left and the right of architecture here, where on the right it's about the kind of nativism you reproduce what's already there that's good and then on the left there's a kind of community concern and care for context where you're just reproducing the materials and the existing architectural forms there. And it's deeply exclusionary of this idea that like in liberal professions or in a liberal society like professions should have lots of different people from different backgrounds represented within them our city absolutely should be the rare by version of this where you have the kind of symbols of the symbolization of different diverse peoples embodied in the city around them so they feel like they belong. And these are lots of examples of stuff that kind of theoretical projects that explored that. But then I also do that now through through real projects, which are gradually getting larger. This all the reason that this comes to the, or the reason that the book was so incredibly important to me was that I saw so many people falling away by the falling by the wayside so so many, and it's not only queer people but it's also other people of different ethnic backgrounds, who didn't necessarily fit in and couldn't feel that they could express themselves in the architectural profession who left, but particularly with queer people they were humiliated but like proper architectural hazing. When they would bring things that were considered ridiculous by professors, and then let alone if you make it out into the profession trying to present something which might be considered queer to a planning committee. So I just realized that a kind of huge part or a very important or the most important way that an area of inquiry or a way of working as an architecture student or as an architect the way that it's valified is through references which are shared which everyone agrees are important so there's one example like I always remember it's a student who done some crappy sketch and they put it on the wall, and it was just like a scribbled in charcoal but they went Japanese shadows. The teachers knew the book that the student was referring to which was in praise of darkness.  And they all were referring to something that was considered sophisticated and serious and that they all considered valid now, my friend who on the very first day of architecture school presented a gay archway, and was quite literally told, never present anything like this again, or you will be asked to leave couldn't refer to anything, even though there was lots of references that he could have referred to generally and why this is especially in queer culture. There's nothing with an architecture apart from promo, which is generally what you would be pushed out as that would be considered serious. And so I just thought, why is there no book that is accessible, you know the way that everyone else has lots of books which are accessible histories of all kinds of different lineages of phenomenological architecture or high tech architecture. So I want the queer architecture or queer spaces that students can refer to, and say none of you cannot say what you just said you can't laugh me out of the room, look, this is serious. And so it's hugely important and exciting when the opportunity came up to do this book with the Royal Institute of British architects. Who can reject what architecture tutor can reject a reference or a case study which comes from a book by the RIBA. And also, and so given that opportunity, that's why we kind of went a little bit crazy, trying to get as many voices as possible because we thought this is an opportunity to get the new queer generation to have their voices represented in all their diversity. So we have 55 different contributors, and also move away from the kind of British American centric view of the world. And there is a waiting obviously towards that, but really try and open it up to the rest of the world as well so we have 55 contributors from all over the world we have spaces from the past 250 years, but from all over the world, which for instance, you know, some people who review it don't understand I think Betsky and Dazeem couldn't understand why it wasn't just all about America. Oh, hang on, I'm just going to go through some spaces.   Non conforming and queer community who developed incredibly complex languages of different language of different colored ice creams. So if you got like chocolate and strawberry would mean you that you were into something terrific and other people buying the ice creams could see that too and this was right under the noses of the regime, kind of querying the very monument to luxury for the masses that was so important to cast her and actually still to this day it's a queer center because it's one of the only places with free wifi so people go there to use it to access grinder. And similarly Alan boost bound is very very important architect in 1970s 1980s New York. Who's been unfortunately kind of well like most of these people kind of written out of the histories a lot of the tropes that are considered postmodern which is a kind of a style which was kind of kind of taken over by American East Coast academics in the in the 80s. A lot of it originated with radical queer design of the 70s, especially in New York but also Miami, Los Angeles, and boost band is one of those originators, I won't go into detail but there are there are very important tropes which got used throughout international postmodern design, which directly come from his studio space here and other projects that he worked on. This is something in cheaper in Japan that shows how there is no one type of queer aesthetic it depends on where you are at a particular pace and time, and your relationship with wider society so queer aesthetics tend to depend on individuals but also the kind of situation and disposition of a queer community in a country in a particular time and this is quit to gay men who are trying to escape the commodification of homosexuality in Japan in the 1990s where everyone is expected to be kind of super colorful and happy clapping and bouncy, and they wanted to just not be seen and completely escape all of those expectations. And so that's, that's my presentation I tried to do that as quickly as possible. I'm not sure if it was okay. That was great Adam thank you so much. And thank you Josh as well, I mean fantastic fascinating stuff that we can really get into now and I was actually interested in that space from Chiba Japan, which I believe is called like coffee and director stand that last one you last one you showed. And because it seemed to me that that design was not only queer because of the place, because of the people who lived in it. So by the way it was built. And I was wondering, like, because we're talking for an audience who could be hewitt nation's design museum. How the actual physical design that the dimensions and configuration of it leads it to be where space you talked earlier about how the way architectures taught in schools, particularly in the UK and your experiences so restrictive and oppressive. It seems that the attitudes behind it all of it is severely limiting. And one of the lines that that came out stuck out to me in that entry was that the domestic floor plans collapsed just because it was designed for a homosexual couple. And I thought that was really interesting it seems like that was kind of indicative what you were trying to present with the book. Is that fair to say. And is Adam. Um, what do you mean in terms of with the book. Um, just that there's not it's not just about the people that live there it's also the physical configuration dimensions like the way something is built that can clear a space and obviously that's something that you would do in your line of work. Yeah, it's also conception of what architecture is. Um, you know, and I think a lot of people have found it. Well, a lot of people sort of maybe traditional reviewers have found it a little bit difficult to understand why a train when you mentioned it I think in your in your question sort of why a train character journey in a train character should be considered relevant within architectural discourse. And for everyone who doesn't know the first the first entry in the book is kind of very intent in intentionally chosen to be the journey of the trans person moving between the conservative hometown of Barcelona. Every day and they have to be in the closet in the hometown and the train is on the train this carriage that they take every time is the space in which they can become the person who they always meant to be what meant to become. And that was a kind of manifesto statement, both in terms of why we put it at the beginning because it's meant to show that when architecture space is approach from a quick perspective. It can kind of be anything. There is no one style, there is no one approach this themes that we picked up as you know archives journeys symbolic reappropriation of existing patriarchal symbols. The construction of alternative realities and histories. So there are themes within it but they change so incredibly massively depending on the individuals who are producing them and the place and location in which they are so cheap as a good example. You know that you take that and put that in another country and that could easily be, you know, a sort of radical Dutch artists space absolutely not quit in any way. And I think the reason that Alyssa used that example of collapsing the traditional family floor plan is that in Japan. There was a kind of incredibly strong orthodoxy of kind of the nuclear family home which was introduced after the war, especially kind of basically with the American new constitution that was imposed in 1945. It's kind of immensely kind of heteronormative and patriarchal and it doesn't really fit Japanese culture. And so, and this, this queer couple said we don't want to have a family like we're not a nuclear family we don't want to live in any of these norms that claustrophobic, which is funny considering the claustrophobic space that they brought but they wanted specifically as queer people to escape that heteronormative floor plan and become standard apartment nuclear family lay up, but that's specific to Japan. And for instance, an example my aesthetic, which I consider very queer, but that's specific to me and my upbringing in my particular background if you go to India. That's not queer. I've never had so many straight men tell me how wonderful I dress when I'm walking around Mumbai, because color color and pattern is absolutely not considered to be anything contradictory or it's not considered in any way contradict heteronormative behavior or kind of gender roles coding. Just perhaps then following on from that we have a question from one of the attendees where they're asking, can you talk about the idea of itch and queer performance spaces. For example, they are thinking about contemporary drag quick green culture or Weimar era burlesque cabaret, and they're wondering how or why that the style aesthetics of many of these queer spaces come to be defined as kitsch. kitsch is such a kitchen camp, I suppose like there was recently an exhibition called camp at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You know that kind of historical view of what like where culture is being somewhat limited perhaps to camping kitcheness. Do you get had you have a sense of very similar to the way postmodern is used as a dismissive term similarly so kitsch camp most modern tend to be tend to be kind of interchangeable in terms of dismissive terms to kind of push aside any kind of queer aesthetics from being taken seriously sorry Josh. No no that's fine no I would refer to aesthetic questions to you anyway yeah I think that's right I think there's. There's the common out I mean the commonality of queer and kitsch as being somehow pejorative that's, you know in terms of its place in cultural history is low culture rather than high culture so there's an inevitability that this is thought of differently in terms of groups and so I think it is therefore often a part of quick performance, challenging the status quo, sartorily perhaps at least compass a drag collective is one example we have in the book but we don't have those for some reason I'm not sure why I don't remember those sort of seminal but less camp performance spaces let's say in Berlin and Zurich that we might do what we might well have done. But yeah I think it's about changing the status quo changing the conceptions by implication within the certain contexts heteronormative cannons of good taste. Yeah I mean for me, obviously kitchen camp but you know, understandably you might imagine that I consider them very kind of problematic terms. On the one hand camp, you know that was written by, you know, Susan Sontag sexuality was very complicated she's very complicated woman but she was very much from this sort of high intellectual world of kind of high modern thought in New York. And that whole text is very much the text of a kind of tourist who's visiting something that's sort of kind of almost a colonial eye of interest it's like I'm appreciating it but actually with a with a sort of my nose over my think my fingers over my nose like. You can tell that by phrases like it's the good taste of bad taste that she uses with. She can not quite commit to actually understanding that that a lot of queer aesthetics and a lot of these things that are talked about as camp. They're not necessarily creating themselves to be seen as bad taste or to create a shock effect that it's a genuine culture. It's like a genuine way of designing and thinking and being expressing one's identity and that that's not really understood within the concept of camp has defined by notes on camp so I, I find that text amazing because she's such a great thinker and she's so analytical but also highly problematic in the way it places us as the other, not only the other but we're very much the kind of lesser compared to the good taste.  They look like a lot of fascists, not frankly, the kind of mixing of high and low which the fascists use specifically because they know it works. So I think that's the ethics work on the average person. Queer people gleefully mix things up in a way that can be very easily confused so I've got shout I got shout to that in Rome and called the fascist, for instance which is interesting as a sort of, you know, queer Jew to be called. And I think that's really because they were coming at architectural aesthetics from Jula Dorfler's kind of conceptual point of view and they were what they were seeing was the kind of depoliticization of architecture through the use of historic forms and things which make you feel comfortable. So anything that doesn't use the kind of brechtian idea of distance where something is basically immensely boring, because it forces you to think about it on an intellectual level like think and start. If it's not that it's either your kind of you become very suspect, you're either kind of fascist or your camp, which is not not a great place to be in queer always kind of exists somewhere around. So you always get mistaken for those things so yeah I find those terms very difficult to deal with. And so I want to give preference to people's questions from the group and so. Here's one I'm wondering if you have ideas about how public spaces can be better designed to be safe comfortable welcoming for queer people. Yeah I mean that's just my answer is I and we avoided with the book very much sort of giving clear answers about anything really like what is a queer space and how can you categorize it because we don't think that's very queer but I do with regards to the designing of spaces I think a very simple answer is to have queer people on your team in the design teams people in procurement. And not only queer people people of other backgrounds as well just so that you have the voice at the table of experience so that they can comment on all of the really boring things like lighting positions and material choices. And just having that perspective, I think, saying, how can we design where public spaces is perhaps loading queerness with a little bit too much responsibility for spaces which need to be for everyone. But I just think that those people those voices need to be around the table like for instance I've been trying very hard in London to be at those tables where you know procurement decisions are being made for large public projects and large public spaces, and kind of strategies for councils across their public realm, various public realm initiatives. It's very hard. It's very, very hard to just get there in the first place but I do think that makes all the difference rather than saying there's any specific design moves that you should make. Excellent. I'm going to keep going. Do you have time to stick around at you. And so, I think actually that's also you showed Alan Bugsbaum apartment and and Josh and we spoke about this the other day and it that seemed to me to be a great example of the use of specific materials, wearing a space.  That's a very interesting question. So I think in that particular case the tiles were referencing cruising spaces when they bathrooms and in that sense querying material or claiming it for a queer past that is symbolic. Perhaps a kind of air looming in fact and I don't think that materials per se make a queer space but I don't think that's what you're saying. The example that comes to mind is Horace Warpole, who was an English Georgian man of letters from the late 18th century who built himself a gothic villa out of plaster and a lot of the scholarship on that although it doesn't present itself as a queer space to go there are a lot of the scholarships surrounding is that this was a queer space he was he was a sort of might and he used gothic in in kind of deliberately deliberately subversive defiance of the fashionable style at the time which was the style that his parents used. And I think there are subsequent associations plaster and paper mache and gothic is somehow camp, not least coming from the idea of the flimsiness the literal flimsiness of the materials and that sort of strange way so there's something to be said I think for a queer history of materials but I'm not yet there with what angle that might take. Do you have anything to add. So sorry I'm always just like the, you know the cultural contingency person. Like, it depends on where you are so you know there are there are amazing queer histories in every sort of major city in the world and they tend to have material associations so that. So I mean tiles via Allen boost bound colorful pal became extremely important in postmodern design all over the world but it had a very, very, very, very specific geographically specific origin which was the toilets of the mta which were in white tiles, where they would have, you know, glory hole experiences and stuff and then also be the bathhouses, especially, which he frequented in the 1970s which were, you know, kind of amazing tile, not any time but also sort of terracotta lined spaces and he directly took that because it was something that all of his clients is clear quite New York clients would know and understand. And you know that's very meaningful for us but it's very meaningful because we know that story, but there are stories like that in every queer place around the world, but they are contingent to the stories and the histories of that particular city. And for me in London, you know, just particularly in my experience of the city mosaic is very, very important. And I get terribly excited about it but that's because the Fitzrovia chapel which was the chapel the middle sex hospital where so many of our wonderful gay men died in mostly the 80s but also the early 90s that was that was the chapel that was the place where you would be able to get out of the ward and go and pray. And that's what I try to do in Rome as well. It's about a kind of archaeology a queer archaeology very very specific places, which I think is so much more interesting than having universal principles which I hate.  And there's other, there's other examples around the city as well but that's very specific to London so, and that's what I tried to do in Rome as well it's about a kind of archaeology a queer archaeology very very specific places, which I think is so much more interesting than having universal principles which I hate.   And I really kind of enjoy that. So we have a couple of questions that mentioned Philip Johnson, and one that mentions Paul Rudolph, who is described as reluctantly coming out to their designs reflect any queer sense of architecture. So for people that don't know do you want to try and encapsulate Philip Johnson and Paul Rudolph, perhaps, Josh. No, can I hand over to you Adam sorry. Sorry. So, so yeah I mean the stylistically very different people for Paul Rudolph was sort of, you know, heroic large scale mega structural architecture, you know formed concrete in cancer leave is everywhere. And then Philip Johnson was a sort of, you know the great sort of prostitute of the 20th century he sort of flip flop between architectural styles. And I mean initially began with full on fascism. I think the very first thing he ever designed was after no after his house because he did a glass house. I think for his final year in Harvard, which is an iconic modernist house and then I think he designed the sort of the political band stand of sort of Neo fasc or not Neo fascist presidential candidate. You know did lots of new formalism and then moved on to postmodernism. I don't, I don't know very much about the story of Paul Rudolph in relation to his sexuality but I do find Philip Johnson endlessly fascinating and he's actually kind of, I think the architectural figure that I can't stop thinking about because he's so important for 20th century architecture he sort of sponsored various movements, taking them under his wing and sort of as director of architecture at MoMA presenting modernism, making the international style later doing the same with deconstructivism, new formalism. So he was immensely powerful at kind of deciding who was important in architecture in the United States, but he was a fascist when he was younger, you know he, but he was a fascist and when he was younger in this sort of highly aesthetic in the kind of hitch way so he's clearly there were a lot of gay men around the world who are drawn towards Nazism and fascism. And because of its beauty and it's the strength and clarity of what it presented with the beautiful young men the kind of marches the kind of choreography, the architecture, it sort of had it was also like a fallacy and with sort of evil, with evil politics. And so I think that's why I love for that and actually it was so extreme that supposedly the brick center of his of the glass house that he designed was supposedly inspired by, and he told this as a joke at dinner tables was inspired by the burning remnants of the sort of the smoking remnants of Jewish stettles after they had been annihilated by the Wehrmacht, which he was with. He was actually with the Nazis behind the lines, moving through Poland. So, but he was also the only major queer gay figure throughout the 20th century in architecture and design. And actually I think a big part of the extreme reactions to him have been because of one his protein nature, the fact that he changed a lot throughout his career, different styles but to also the fact that he was always suspect, you know he never fit in. And actually that was part of his power and people like Versace and a lot there's a lot of kind of homosexuals and different creative professions there are always a bit other, and they actually have more power by being different but also being totally mainstream, but they're also deeply hated, hated and not understood. And that person was like that and everyone descended on him like a pack of cannibals the moment that he died. And he's very, very easy to kind of tear apart because he was so honest about everything that he did he's the only one who was honest about his relationship to fascism his a put his kind of not clear apology in terms of writing that he worked with the Jewish community consistently immediately afterwards. Figures like Lena Bobaddi who absolutely were not clear about their relationship with fashion and actually fascism and lots of other figures like local busier and me is Vandera who absolutely covered it up. So, I'm very interested in him because he's kind of everything bad about what you might consider queer, but he's also a symbol of everything powerful about what we might consider queer, as well as how everyone wants to tear that kind of unusual and queer figure who reaches a position of power down. They want to tear them down. So he's absolutely fascinating with me Paul Rudolf I'm so I'm so sorry I don't know I just don't think he's necessarily as interesting as a figure his architect is absolutely phenomenal. But as a figure, I don't know that much about him. No worries. Yeah, fascinating, fascinating. So let's, let's perhaps for our last question because this person has been waiting very patiently they asked the question a while ago. And it is I'd love to hear about one of the speculative examples in the book. Josh, would you like to tackle that. Yes, I just wanted to add to the Philip Johnson bit just a quick anecdote I'm looking at the moment at the Paul Mellon Center for studies in British art at the papers of an architectural historian called Gavin stamp. And there's correspondence between him and Johnson, and Johnson actually gives anonymously $10,000 this is the 1970s a quite a lot of money to the UK Victorian society. And no one knows that that was his donation apart from Gavin until now so I just thought this interest in Victorian architecture whether there's a queer story there and reviving these reviled buildings that need some interrogation but I found that quite surprising. The speculative. I think there's only one, what I call speculative example in the book which is the, which is by the stored group which is run by Joel Sanders in New York I think Susan Stryker as well. Is that correct Adam Susan Stryker said, yeah I think it's both and that this is a interdisciplinary research office really mostly centering around work around issues of transgender access to public bathrooms. And Obama's administration had sought I don't know how far it got had wanted to give trans people access to sex segregated toilets in public bathrooms aligned with their actual gender identity, and this was ascended by Trump and so there in that context as a kind of speculative manifesto design tool to argue for improving access sites not only of utility but also dignity for trans people and we have one prototype that we're able to include in the book for a speculative airport. These are multi user rooms. There's transparent glass from the inside of the stores for reasons of safety so you can surveil your environment shared communal clean attractive washing areas, all gender neutral sustainable means of decomposing human waste caregiving rooms, rooms that accommodate, you know, multi faith religious beliefs, etc. So I think that's the only example. There's an installation by stored at the moment in the museum which is amazing. That's right. Yes, I could pure it. I mean they are awesome. Yeah. Yeah, it's fantastic people if people want to learn more about that they can visit to pure. I mean, not just they could read the book, but they can go to compute and see it in designing piece exhibition. Perhaps we should end it there. Thank you so, so much, Josh and Adam for being so amazing, eloquent, fantastic and and just simply for putting this book together. There's actually somebody that commented saying as a young queer person in the industry of the built environment. Thank you so much for putting this book together and the work that you do. It's so needed and appreciated. Can I just be honest and say so Johnson's Museum. Yes. Oh yes, definitely. Excellent. Alright, thank you. Do we need as any. I just want to echo your thanks to to Josh and to Adam for sharing your incredible book. It is published by Riba but you can get it widely in the states it's wonderful and we're so excited that you came here to share the rich breath and depth of queer spaces that you assembled for the book and you talked about your process and I absolutely think that we had like the practice side and the scholarly side and how they come together in this, in this wonderful project so you know deep thanks from us it could be cute, and we will be following your work with great interest so thank you so much for coming and joining today and thank you to everyone who joined as well this will be posted to our YouTube channel so if you want to refer back to it it will be there for for everyone so thank you all so much. Thanks for the invite.


Good afternoon. This is Guillermo Salvatieri, your host for today's episode of Perspectives on Energy. Today we're going to talk about grid reliability concerns when it comes to installing solar, wind, and how that can pose a risk to the grid, to the overall electric grid. Earlier this week, I was listening to a podcast on the NRECA, which is the National Rural Electrical Co-op's administration. And one of the things that they were definitely discussing was the fact that raising the alarm specifically for electric co-ops that from generally their size aren't as large as most investors on utilities. So one of the things that they're concerned with is that as the industry commissioned a growing number of utility-scale solar and wind projects, these larger entities have the ability to manage and absorb and mitigate that output variability or intermittency that you see in those resources. And again, it's usually they are installing those resources to pretty much replace the premature or forced retirement of some of these older coal or even fossil-fueled baseload plants. They still manage to have some other resources that they can redispatch to accommodate that variability, but when it comes to co-ops, that's not quite as simple or as easy. For the most part, a lot of co-ops are forced to buy power from these larger utilities because they don't have a lot of the same generating resources that are available dispatchable or even part of the portfolio. A lot of times these co-ops aren't even power generators. They may own transmission, they own distribution, and that is pretty much all they are. So in a lot of cases now they're subject to the availability of resources out of these larger utilities that are generator operators, balancing authorities or generator owners. So again, they are definitely raising the alarm. They are seeing challenges coming up and we'll break it down today into maybe five different segments as to why or how we can best describe this, right? So number one, you know, we're looking at the more the grid essentially has become more fragile. So a lot less reliable. And there's a number of reasons for that. So that's number one. And why is that right? Number two, part of that is the disorderly energy transition, right? We all agree we need to proceed with the energy transition. Problem is we've been doing it in this early fashion. A lot of that comes into the form of premature or early retirement of generating units that are well within their useful life. So now this asset, for whatever reason, we'll discuss that a little further. So number three, there's a lot more demand. We have a really great right for the industry in a way, but at the same time, there isn't the infrastructure in place to supply that demand. There's a lot greater level of electrification, not just in residential but also industrial commercial agriculture, for example, manufacturing. A lot more demand that just simply is we're having trouble meeting in this case, right? The other interesting thing that we see here is there's number four, there's really no government agency that is in charge solely in charge of grid reliability. You have FERC, you have NERC, you have the Department of Energy, but they're not really in charge of reliability, right? And that's something that they have pointed out time and time again to see where does the buck stop in that case. The last one, of course, is five, is that the U.S. alone cannot change the climate of the environment, right? While we work really hard and do a great job at this transition, many other countries are not doing that. In fact, they're putting more of these carbon emitting resources online and they did plenty last year and they're going to continue to do so. And some of these emerging economies all throughout the world are doing the same, so we'll discuss that as well. All right, so let's go back to the first one, right? Our grid is more fragile, less reliable, and there was one example of the effects of that. So we had those winter storms back in Christmas Eve of 2022, where you had eight different utilities in the Atlantic States doing rotating blackouts. Feeder rotation, brownouts, and simply because they just did not have the generation to meet the demand of the load. So that in itself presents a problem, but it's a clear evidence of what's happening regarding our generating resources and having that ability to supply base load in the face of this viral renewable resources, which in a lot of cases are not sufficient during these peak or winter months, right? They tend to do better in the summer, but they don't do quite as well in the winter. And the other has to do with the fact that, and even NERC itself, right, they do seasonal studies. So NERC is the National Electrical Liability Corporation.  But ultimately, they are not the government agency that's in charge of maintaining the liability. NERC does a great job, right? But again, it's an industry organization. So one of the things that they've been, I guess, well, one of the things that they always report on, they do capacity assessments. Every year, they do one for the winter, they do one for the summer. That's usually when you have your peaks. And one of the things that they are, they pointed out is the fact that we are, we are, we are really, they've seen like a really steady downward trend and greater liability. And that's been going on for the last few years. A lot of that has to do with this disorderly deployment of renewable resources, right? And it's going to be concerning, especially as we enter the, we're already in the summer months here in trying 23. And we're already starting to experience near misses or really approaching the, I mean, we're not even at the peak summer months yet. And we've had a few issues already with the energy emergency alerts in some parts of the country. So that is coming and it's bound to get a little worse. And moving into that, of course, is this disorderly energy transition. That's point number two, right? It's the premature retirement of base load generating assets, right? In other words, some folks call it the disorderly energy transition. And that usually involves just replacing reliable, dependable, dispatchable base load generation with these intermittent variable resources that are great, right? They're renewable. They don't have any emissions. However, they are not as reliable as some of these resources. So when it comes to actually having availability of these resources, I mean, they could be available 24 seven all year. These renewables are not. And they're often built and as available rather than dispatchable some of these resources. And what's happened, of course, we understand, right? They targeted a lot of these core resource called generators. But some of these core generators were less than five years old with where the state were that whether it was by economic reasons, policy, political pressure, or a number of other drivers, you know, they were retired early way before the end of their useful life. So, so again, some of these, you know, they gasify them, turn them to burn natural gas. That's of course not their optimal mode of operation. That's not their optimal efficiency point. A couple of examples are some of these like coal burning plants can produce 800 megawatts a piece. Oh, and they go ahead and burn natural gas in them. And again, that that's quite a process to go ahead and retrofit that to burn gas.  The unit usually becomes a 600 megawatt unit in that case. So that's one problem right. And then of course the other issue naturally is, is even in the, these winter months that we saw last year. We also notice a problem where even when you have these like combined cycle plan so all these natural gas burning generators. Getting the supply of gas to those sites was becoming a problem you have some of these like a co ops and other smart utilities that they have generating assets, and they had a firm gas contract with these pipelines that essentially they gas wasn't delivered gas was unavailable. There was a lot of demand for gas out throughout the residential sector that in commercial perhaps where the industrial contracts were they were not able to meet. So that presents a problem so now you don't have enough fuel to run some of these generate just some of these generators so you're looking at another problem with having assets so so it's and that part of that was was the force closing of some of these pipelines. So, again, don't want to rely entirely on fossil fuel, but we also need to have everything should be part of a mix and over time right that should be a very measured careful approach to how we make this transition. And rather than proceed ahead at any cost, which of course ultimately puts us at risk from reliability, and it also is greatly greatly makes our operating costs out of control. So because that and that of course will affect everything from the from economics all the way down to the consumer itself themselves when they're trying to buy power. It's something to understand right pretty much everything right now it's pretty hard to build right. One of the other things that they were discussing was the fact that building transmission so so yes say you have a lot of these renewable resources and certain key places you start to get this power to the load centers you got to get this power is that we will So right now is as it stands, we don't have adequate transmission reliability transmission infrastructure be able to move all this new power to all this new demands. So, getting getting a transmission project permitted and commission that takes. There's one project right now in the Cardinal Hickory in the Northwest of the country which is a one gigawatt project. And that thing is has been going on since 2014, and right now it was still in the permitting process. So that just gives you an idea of how long this could take. And again, perhaps some permitting reform would greatly benefit right this this whole process, but building a lot of transmission alone, I mean you, they want to show us the data and see how that would actually work. And what time frame will be the timeline to build all of these transmission assets that would be adequate to meet this growing demands for energy, or at the same time, you know, trying to figure out how to how to use the existing reliable dispatchable resources that we have left, while mixing in with these intermittent renewable resources right. That's definitely a challenge in this case. And the other issue of course is, right, so they're saying replace a lot of these batteries or augment a lot of these batteries. Right now, most batteries only last about four hours, you know, given a discharge, and some of those storms, specifically those winter storms right they they you you have that go on for at least for four or five six eight days. So there's no way you're going to be going to be able to rely on these batteries to alone to be able to like make up for this like a base load, the special ability. It's right now it's not it's just not possible at this time given the cost given supply chain given the ability. And, and of course it's it's also sourcing all these things and getting them built on time. One of the other issues you got to remember too is that is that any the utility industry is very capital intensive right so for them. The decisions are it's a long term decision a long term project so it planning all these out usually requires a careful cost analysis and and and has to make sense financially right you're not going to build rely rely mostly on experimental or new technology especially when that technology is costing you a lot to produce a you all that the energy cost eventually ends up being passed down to the consumer, which of course is going to impact everybody's pockets of the negative ways. So going back to what I was saying here so now number three point number three is more demand. So yes we are seeing a lot more electrification from cooking in the kitchens to vehicles to, but then also an industry we're seeing a big departure away from fossil fuels. We're seeing industrial processes toward electrification right one example, for example is agriculture, where they're no longer using diesel to to run a lot of their equipment and they're moving over to electric well. We have a pretty big agriculture industry so in this case that presents another yet added piece of demand and load on the grid so just one example. So we make this transition and build right we're going to see a lot more demand so our so problem is the challenge here is being able to meet this demand with our current generation portfolio in our mix. So it's not always easy to be able to meet that given given given the way we're growing. So, the other challenge that that I've seen is let's go back to the regulation right so government agencies for right now there's no. There's no responsibility for it but they're not really in charge of reliability right something has been delegated to them by by FERC, which is condom from the Department of Energy, but then again narc is an industry and the entity. So, and I can assure you right the EPA, it's not thinking their focus isn't reliability, when they are making policies. So that's another thing right so where is grid reliability, being looked at is a policy and of course that becomes a national security policy. We are at a point where we are putting ourselves in in a in a rather precarious condition by doing what we're doing. Now, granted, that brings me to point number five right the US alone cannot change the climate. We're looking at. We're doing a great job of making this transition and we're making a lot of a lot of a lot of innovation when it comes to this and a lot of investments. The problem is that a large part of the world. I mean, we're not the only ones that that are taking this on but a lot of others are not joining us and they are in fact, building and commissioning fossil fuel plants, some of them coal brand new coal plants China as one example. India is another and there's quite a few others that that are also building these resources and you're not going to get any of them that would build them anytime soon. That that recently built to go ahead and the commission and because they are available they're reliable they're inexpensive and they have a lot of life left in that. So they're not going to the commission those in exchange for renewable resources, and they will already made that investment. So they want to get their return on that investment. The other thing is of course is that you know they they are able to mine their own, their own source of fuel, which is another interesting challenge now China right now of course is importing a lot of that coal from other places, but they still have the capacity to mine their own. Latin America is another example where they're also engaging in the same thing. Africa, of course, India, they're all doing quite a bit of that type of fuel source for their energy needs, which, you know, at the same time they they are, in fact, some of them are decommissioning more coal plants than we are decommissioning so that is a concern right so so there's something needs to be looked at as far as what they are going to be offered a technology that's cost effective and reliable. And at the same time it's dispatchable and then you know doesn't have was a hand this effect on the environment by by having carbon emissions. Well, again, this is something that as a as a nation here for example impacts for national security when you think about it when you discuss reliability. And so how do we address this issue right so so at this time right the, and I spoken about this ad nauseam in some cases of a small modular reactors. The truth is right that the earliest for we may see an SMR commission and put online and be commercially available will be probably 2029 if we don't have any delays. The, if you told if the government says hey let's build 20 nuclear power plants at this time large facilities, if they say like start right now to build them they probably wouldn't be ready until maybe 13 years from now. So, and that's that's the other challenge there right so it takes a long time to release around and 2035, more than likely will be the time when you see those those commission. Quite a timeline to build those and we're not quite getting closer to doing that so transmission is another problem as well. But commissioning transmission facilities takes quite a bit of time as well. So those aren't as easy to build either. If I in my experience I've seen those be a little bit more difficult to actually site build and be able to get all the easements. There's a lot of ways to be able to build those facilities then you need for a generating plant. So quite quite a different thing with quite a different challenge and that regard and and I just don't see the show me the data where where you'll be able to build all this transmission have that have all this transmission reliably, hence, stably and then economically move all this power from all these are the sources to all these loads, or whether would sink so that this other problem. A lot of times I hear batteries right batteries would be the answer to all these problems but usually those those suggestions don't come from people that are very well experienced in the industry.  So let's think of supply chain if you decide to actually acquire large amount of these batteries right well where are you going to get them from right. You're going to source them out of China or you're going to try and build them domestically. Again, that's another problem was how long how long would it take to actually have them built. And let's not forget how much they cost right and I exactly get cheapest thing out. And where do you install where will you place them in your system to be able to support your voltage and support your your energy needs right. And the last thing I want to point out here is the fact that I'm not denying that this whole climate change problem is real. It's happening we need to address it, but this transition needs to be done in an orderly fashion and carefully because we're we're engineering ourselves closer and closer to a severe putting ourselves in a very risky position when it comes to greater liability over the next two or three years. And for me, I sometimes worry about how how we're doing this. And I often wonder right now, as far as policymakers or as far as as far as anyone that that's really pushing pushing an agenda towards was moving us towards this energy transition, are the only concerned with just this source of energy, or are they looking at grid reliability as a whole, or are they even looking at grid, or is that something they know that they're not concerned with whatsoever because you know they just but in a lot of cases right I mean when it comes to the industry the electric utility industry were very energy agnostic right when I say we because I was part of that for 30 years. So we don't care what we get the energy from all we want to do is perform perform reliably be available be dispatchable economic and of course you know now that the new requirement hate to be low emission or emission free. So for us it does not matter where we get it from. So we don't care what the source will be as long as it's reliable and it meets those requirements that discussed. So in that case right. I would really hope to see some some innovation happen the next three or four years. Now it's the best transition we could see is converting somebody's cold cold or oil or anything else that burns also fuels that could be maybe convert over natural gas. At some point, and that will be a transition that could be that will run for a good five, 10 years, and then eventually as SMR is already or other resources already we can use that to replace that fossil base load generation that's reliable. And that will be something that I think we may be able to get there but again it's going to be a while before we see those first SMRs come online and be commercially available. All right, so you have any comments questions go ahead and place them in the comments below I'll try and reach out to respond to them and follow up either way. When it comes to all these like challenges of course for the operator. There's a quite a bit of training happening that needs to happen right for a lot of these both operators but more importantly some of these policymakers. I think I've noticed that that usually anytime you're looking at changing environmental policy or or using some kind of legislative vehicles, especially legislators probably need to have a little bit more education as far as how the grid would work, and how the science behind grid reliability is is implemented and that's something that we at HSI pride ourselves in having the trading material the expertise the SMEs to be able to deliver that to anyone that needs it and in this case I think some of these legislators probably benefit from having a little bit more knowledge, as far as what their decisions do and how they impact reliability. And we understand that getting to a carbon free future is very important and we're support you and walk with you along the way we want to help everyone get there. Because because we're part of this but at the same time let's make sure we get there reliably. And we do this in an orderly fashion. Anyway, that's all I have to for today. Again, leave any comments I'll try and respond as soon as I can. And thank you again for watching. Thank you. Thank you so much for watching think tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please click the like and subscribe button on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Check out our website think tech Hawaii calm. Mahalo.


Welcome to this special event on re-inventing agriculture in the 21st century. This is a real passionate interest of Dr. Swaminatha, and there he is. He is actually going to be a bit delayed this evening. I just got a word that he is going to be arriving at about 10 o'clock tonight from Rome, where he was chairing and being on food security over the weekend. And so although he won't be here physically, he'll be here in spirit. And I will share a few thoughts from him to also ground us. My name is Dennis Garity, and we, Dr. Swaminatha and I, have in fact worked and interacted intensively in this area for about 28 years now, since I worked with him at the International Rice Research Institute. This is actually the first time that I've had the pleasure of visiting Des Moines, Iowa. And although I studied for my doctorate next door in the University of Nebraska, I do feel like I have been before. After reading one of Bill Bryson's books that dwelt on his life in the city, the first sentence of which was a particularly memorable observation, Bill Bryson, I'm from Des Moines, Iowa. Somebody had to be. Well, with that preface, let's examine the 21st century conundrum. In the 21st century, we know we have to double food production, particularly to forestall food crises in Africa as well as around the world, while making agriculture more resilient to climate change and reducing, rather than increasing, greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. Now that is a very tall order when you really think about it. The realization is sinking in that it has to be a transformation in how agriculture is practiced. The doubling of food production again in the next few decades can't be done on the same model as in the past with the same thinking and the same practices. For doubling food production, once again by doubling fertilizer use, fuel use, pesticide use just can't happen. The explosion of greenhouse gases alone would create a matter of hurtling our small planet down the path of climatic change disaster. So it is dawning on many people that truly fresh out of the box thinking and solutions are not simply an option, they're an absolute necessity. Dr. Swaminathan himself has been sounding the imperative to come up with creative solutions for this conundrum for many years. As far back as 1982, he said that about 80% of food production comes from small holdings. For them, agriculture is the backbone of the livelihood security system. Hence, higher productivity per unit of arable land and irrigation water is essential. But this should be achieved without harm to the ecological foundations essential for sustainable agriculture. The Green Revolution should become an evergreen revolution leading to an enhancement in productivity and perpetuity without ecological harm. And I'm sure if he were here, he would further expand on that sentiment that frames our discussions this evening. But agriculture is a very practical art that is founded on many harsh realities particularly for small older farmers. What are the options that can set us on such a path while bringing millions out of poverty? Well, tonight's program, a rundown is that we'll have three brief presentations grounding the discussions. First, myself talking about how to create an evergreen agriculture. And then my colleagues, Collard Hanusimbi from the Zambian Farmers Union will be speaking on the potential of conservation farming, the Zambian success story. And then my colleague Carlos Cervé from the International Livestock Research Center will be speaking on the future of livestock systems. In addition, we have a distinguished panel of discussions, some of which have actually shown up this evening. And they will be actually giving us some biting provocative remarks to react to what the speakers will be saying. And they include Sam Dryden, Dan Gustafsson, Mahapu Hussein, and Monty Jones will be coming in a little bit later in the program. Well, how do we create an evergreen agriculture that can address the 21st century conundrum? Imagine for a moment that we're practicing much of our food crop production agriculture under a canopy of trees, such as you see happening in this photo that is taken of a maize production system in the bread basket maize growing area of Tanzania. Imagine that these trees are not competing with the food crops growing underneath, but rather quite the opposite. They are dramatically enhancing the yields of these crops due to their striking effects on soil fertility. They are nitrogen-fixing trees acting as fertilizer factories in the field providing tons of nutrient-rich biomass each year with no investment cost. Imagine that producing crops like maize, sorghum, millets, wheat, teff, and other cereals under these agroforests actually increases their drought resilience in dry years. And imagine that these systems increase carbon sequestration above and below ground by an order of magnitude greater than the best conservation farming practices. I said an order of magnitude of 10 times higher carbon sequestration. This is not a dream. This is not imaginary. This is actually a system of agriculture that is today being practiced by, in fact, millions of farmers across the continent of Africa. And I'd like to open up our discussions this evening by looking at a system that is so radically different than anything that western agriculture has conceived for the future, that it gives us some biting ideas about what we might be able to do in terms of out-of-the-box thinking and science. Well, indeed, not only in Tanzania, but here in Malawi, we estimate there are about a half a million farmers practicing this system of agriculture using the species of trees, among others, but particularly phyterbia albida or acacia albida, an indigenous species to Africa that forms the backbone of this agricultural system. The ladies that farm this particular field in Malawi, I interviewed them last year, and they claim definitely that their yields are triple what they were before they planted these trees in their mace fields. And they have been getting these benefits year after year in a situation where they, along with 80% of other African farmers, cannot use or do not use fertilizers to enhance their crop production. The situation is like this. When you look at the growth of cereal crops like mace, millet, sorghum, etc., under the canopy of these trees, you find these striking dramatic effects on crop growth in yield. And you'll see under the tree, the mace growing and outside, same variety, same agronomy, however no fertilizer application, and dramatic differences in yield. We now have a literature of scores and scores of scientific articles published on the effects of these trees in countries across the continent with results similar to what you see here. And in fact, we just got the most recent data from the trials in Zambia, which Koilaar will be talking much more about in the context of conservation agriculture, that show the kind of results that are experienced with mace production systems in association with a cassia albida or phytherbia. And in fact, typically, yields are double or triple from what you know. And if you are using, if you're getting 5.6 tons of mace in Africa, that is a very respectable yield. Because as you know, the yields of cereal crops in Africa have been largely stagnant at one ton per hectare, stuck flat-lined for the last 40, 50 years. So when you're talking about obtaining yields like this without the application of fertilizer, this is pretty interesting stuff. Well, such systems are traditional in Africa, and that's why millions of farmers are already practicing them. But as Koilaar will emphasize, we're now showing how modern agronomic practices using these trees can be combined with the best of the traditional systems of their use in farming, and come up with a situation where as we have the national recommendations for Malawi and Zambia of 100 trees per hectare or 10 by 10 meter spacing. So this is the kind of situation that you'll see in which you can, in fact, grow your crops between the trees using modern motorized equipment, animal power, or small older home cultivation. The distribution of this tree is quite wide across the continent. In fact, from elevations, sea level up to about 2,800 meters and across a wide range of soil types, the map here shows where the tree has been collected and observed throughout the continent. And I'd like to point particularly to the span of the tree's distribution across the Sahelian area, just south of the Sahara Desert. It is the most common tree in the Sahel across that entire zone, and it's banks up what is known as the agroforestry parklands of the Sahel. But one particular part of the Sahel gives us a vision for the future that could be the basis for what we think of when we talk about the Great Green Wall to protect the Sahel from the Sahara Desert encroachment. And that is an area of 5 million hectares in central and southern Niger, the poorest country in the world, where farmers have mobilized to, in fact, regenerate these trees at dense populations across their agricultural landscapes. And this is what it looks like at ground level. In the dry season, the millets have been harvested, but this is all millet production area covered by as many as 150 to 300 stems of these trees per hectare. And Carlos will want me to emphasize that it's not only for the fertility effect, which farmers claim is dramatic even at these populations, it's for the fodder production because these systems dramatically increase the net primary productivity, producing dry season fodder of high quality from the leaves and the pods for livestock in these agro-pastoral systems.  Surely that is a forest, but it's not. That is all agricultural landscape covered by a dense canopy of trees. Now, one thing I didn't mention that is crucial to our discussion is that this particular species of tree, a fertilizer tree, has reverse phenology. It has a physiological trait that triggers dormancy when the rains begin. So it is dormant and it is bare of leaves during the wet season. The previous pictures that I've showed you would indicate that is the case during the time that the crops are growing. So you have no competition for like nutrients or water during the crop growing season. What imaginable possibilities could be used with a genetic trait like this, not only in this species, but in other species to be able to make trees and crops compatible in the future?