All right, good morning, everyone. My name is Alessandro Sini. I am an agent assistant professor here at Columbia University GSAP. I am teaching in the Advanced Sequence Studios and in the Professional Practice. And in the context of my Professional Practice course, I have organized this full semester, a symposium that revolves around the idea of practice. What does it mean to practice today? And especially taking into account all the challenges that we have revolving around climate, labor, equity. And in order to do so, I put together a group of speakers, which are practitioners, academic, researcher, that are here today. Framing this symposium a little bit, we're thinking practice. The disentanglement between architecture and politics is at the foundation of the biases of the profession and intertwine with changing financial and technological regime. These photos of the Crystal Palace is paradigmatic of that. At the end of the first Industrial Revolution, the Crystal Palace, a building suspended between an industrial capitalist future and a colonized past, became the symbol of the future. The political forces of one nation are placed in the hands of an architect task with representing power using novel tectonic materials, such as glass and steel. This is a painting by Henry Wyndham Phillips, which shows actually how the whole planning of the Crystal Palace took place, instituting actually a royal commission for the exhibition of 1851, which was sort of presided by Prince Albert. So the use of steel, as I said, became the symbol of construction, novel tectonic, employing the girder technique in the making of the Crystal Palace. This prefabricated component allowed to advance construction at a speed unforeseen before, one acre per week. The vaulted transect was built with ribs of eight foot per model hoisted on steel columns. A wagon on tracks was designed to allow for a fast placement of the glazed, flat roof, again highlighting technology as the advancement of construction. In the interwar period, architecture became associated with nations and states' desire to exploit the disciplined social nature for governmental and ideological representation. With the advent of totalitarian neoliberal regimes, architecture practice was enmeshed with ethical question manifesting through specific aesthetics. This is a photo of the UR in Rome, an entire neighbor that was built for the World Exposition in 1942, and is paradigmatic of what in Italy became the fastest style of architecture. Furthermore, after the Second World War, the modernist canon, with its exclusionary and anti-intersectional values, changed the architecture practice into a business model that commodified architecture, refusing politics and ethics. Architecture's core value, historically stemming from processes of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy, have shaped this course within the practice and educational institution, preventing the discipline from addressing essential question of social justice, labor, and material extraction. Here is a photo on the left of the Vitruvian man in a drawing of Leonardo da Vinci and the modular of Corbusier, two of the cornerstone of the exclusionary dynamics of the Western architecture canon, both where model after the ideal white Western man's proportion. The modern masters had provided nearly an alpha century of pedagogical domination as figure, subjects, and icons, which lived in perpetuity literally and metaphorically through their lasting influence and their hold on architectural pedagogy and thought. Here you can see the cover of Race and Modern Architecture by Irene Chang, Charles Davis II, and Mabella Wilson, just opposed with one image that is in the book highlighting the modern American house, which became the representation of the heteronormative family, the patriarchal structure, and the exclusionary dynamic of women in the life of the house. Today, architecture began to examine the dynamics that produced the systemic inequalities, such as pathways to licensure and lack of representation of women, BIPOC, and queer community. There are some examples. You can see the Black Reconstruction Collective of the MoMA, a photo from the architectural lobby, and women in practice. Architecture and its related fields are also undeniably intertwined with climate change and fundamental labor issues through economic interest historically supporting the built environment. As a reaction over the past few years, we have witnessed a proliferation of alternative practices focusing on issues of racial capitalism, gender, sexuality, and politics, shaping a multiplicity of an orthodox configuration ranging from cooperatives, nonprofit, and research-based agency. I wanted to highlight a few things here. This is the cover of Lug, which was edited by Bernie Roberts, which is here today with us. Bernheimer Architecture, which is a firm that succeeded in their unionization very recently. The logo of the architectural lobby that so much is instrumental in understanding and promoting this question of labor in architecture. And then there is a photo of the design advocates, a group of designers and architects that got together roughly around COVID as a sort of a collective to help with underrepresented communities and so on with pro bono projects. They're thinking practice symposium aims to promote a dialogue around radical practicing to address the discipline exclusionary dynamics to prompt models that allow architects to reclaim agency over the design processes. Ethics and the conditional labor under which architecture operates. This is slides showing a diagram of the architectural lobby. It is really paradigmatic to see how cooperativeizing architecture allows to intertwine all these questions that are very much a problem today in architecture. The benefit, the structure of the work, the collaboration between the contractor, the engineers, the consultant, and so on. Does symposium ask how to redefine and reshape the practice as an alternative to corporate structure and their refusal of ethics to reengage architecture with its core values of politics in a collective effort to tackle climate change, race, and gender, among others? The symposium centers around conversations that interpret, reflect, and analyze spatial practice to reassemble it into alternative modes that form new kinship among workers, the architects, the client, and the environment. These alternative practices reframe how to approach information gathering and exploration of aesthetics, geometries, and materials in a task to undo the biases of the discipline. These two photos are from a summer, last summer festival, a collective vision that sees the participation of Mario architects and most architects all engaging the local community of a very small town in the south of Italy. Furthermore, the symposium reinforces the strong relationship between the academic space and the space of the practice, a connection that is part of the ecosystem of ideas, speculation, and practice at Columbia University, GISA. So what is practice? What does it mean to practice? How do we conduct practice? What are form of practice? These are a few questions that I ask my student in my professional practice course, but I can rely to the interlocutors today to try to answer or to, in a sense, address. So as I said, to answer this question, I wanted to put together a symposium that is interactive, is where the participant are literally interlocutors to each other, but also everyone here in the room can interact and ask questions and so on. So I try to assemble a group of practitioners that some of them are part of my generation, architecture generation, my office that I co-lead with Nick Roseboro that is here today. And some of them are younger practices, all of them with specificity in the way they practice, in the way they focus on certain parts of the research, and also in the way they structure their offices. So in order to do that, I started to develop this diagram which shows the year of foundation of the firms together with their locality and with their previous experience and also the place of their education. It is interesting to see how there are some overlapping and that's the reason why I hope that the conversation will be a very fruitful conversation. The symposium is divided in three sessions. The session number one is the one revolving around climate. I want to say it's something very specific that the subdivision into the three section does not mean that we cannot talk about the other sort of topics. Equity, climate, and labor are profoundly intertwined. But so the first question sees the participation of Nick Roseboro of Architentions. I'm going to give a brief introduction to the participants. Architentions research operate, this is an agency that operates internationally with base in Rome and Brooklyn, works at the intersection of theory, practice, and academia focusing on architecture as a network condition in continuous dialogue with the political, the social context, and aiming at creating new possibility for the contemporary city. Nick Roseboro is a partner since 2013, a designer and a musician with a cross-disciplinary experience. He also teaches at Syracuse, New York, and Sara Lawrence College where he is the in-doubt chair of environmental architecture and sustainable design. Richie Yao of Dash Marshall or Dash is a Brooklyn-based and Detroit-based firm with three partners, Richie Yao, Amy Young, and Brian Boyer. The studio works across scales from the perfect place to read a book up to the urban proposal that helps cities ensure new technologies such as autonomous vehicles generate positive outcomes for everyday people. Prior to co-founding Dash, Richie worked at OIME and currently teaches a Harvard GSD. Evie Diamantopoulou of New Affiliates. New Affiliates is an award-winning New York-based studio led by Evie Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kold. They have completed a range of work from ground-up project to interiors, to exhibition and installation for institution including the New York Jewish Museum, the Shed, and the Perkevino Armory among others. Evie is a register architect in Greece and New York and prior to co-founding New Affiliates, he worked at Moss Architects. So I welcome the three speakers. First, Nick, they will give a very brief presentation of their work like five to six minutes and then we'll proceed to have a conversation all together. Thank you. OK. Can everyone hear me? Perfect. That's my Zoom, my Zoom times is what I think about. OK. As Alessandro said, I'm Nick Rosberg of Architections in International Architectural Design Studio operating as an agency of researchers led by both of us and based in New York and Rome. I want to start by saying that some of the slides that we're going to show today are, they're not in any particular order and I'm going to speak to them briefly, maybe one that is more important to what we'll talk about within the discussion.  We work at the intersection of theory and practice in academia focusing on architecture as a network conditioning continuous dialogue with the political and social context. We aim to create new possibilities for responsibly living together. Our search for an aesthetic is an ever-changing process grounded in drawings, collage, sketches, and models. We like discrete geometries and grids, but consistently seek new interpretations of their spatial outcome. Researching and teaching for us is a mode of practice, not just in the academic space but also in our studio. We believe in a pedagogical approach to practice where we design and we learn at the same time. We expand our practice through writing and to critically connect to the ontology of our work with the discourse and curating to index the diverse architectural trajectories of our time. Design and research for us is seen as a way to define and bring forth fields of action for the built environment that reconnect urbanism and architecture through processes that promote inclusivity and challenge the current architectural paradigm with society's environmental, political, and social tension. Our research concerning the comments in the collective in the public sphere of the public, culture, labor, leisure, and domesticity addresses critical aspects of our society's production and reproduction cycles. The research aims to reframe the concept of the commons and the collective from a transdisciplinary level, examining how commenting practices can shape not just the urban spaces, but the architecture of the built environment itself and facilitate the accessibility to resources such as the right to housing, leisure, healthcare, education, work, and food. In fact, we look at projects through a multidisciplinary lens beyond the built. One example is transformation. Transformation or re-adapt over use of a building, transiting its original use, the social construct of the building, and research into how to address the structure itself, its materials, and therefore, climate. One example that speaks lightly to this, we were recently commissioned by the town of San Pepinando in Calabria, Italy, along with the nonprofit DCO to devise a vision plan. This plan was developed with the help of this nonprofit, not as a way to solve issues, but to understand the existing difficulties. If one can even devise a plan, it can be limited if engagement is missing from the equation and understanding what type of engagement is needed in that context, specifically. We were commissioned to curate and co-organize the festival as a laboratory of urban regeneration through art, architecture, and culture, with an active participation from the community. It consists of two artist residencies, a series of workshops, and public events as a way to celebrate the town and garner interest. The festival aims to advance a project of culture, urban, and social values of the village by encouraging the participation of the community, focusing on a vision that promotes the commons, centering equality, accessibility to resources, and alternative forms of mutual help. The commons concern with domesticity confronts the power structure and organization of the house and its inhabitants. The spatiality of the house, still defined by the binary relationships of the traditional family, can be reconceptualized through questions of equity, gender, and race. Through transgressing the traditional domestic space, the house and its complex social networks of private and public, and its form can be rearranged to incorporate aspects of collective living. Designing housing for everyone should not be about minimums or fast solutions, but responsible design solutions and transformations of existing buildings that still have an aesthetic value, not only in old values, but new ones that speak to the present and to the future. The question of the right of housing is something we think about in our studio and how architecture and architects can not solve it outright, as one knows, but promotes what architecture inherently was meant to promote. And for that, for us, that is how to live together, work together, and even leisure together. We speak of labor in the discourse and often forget its counterpart, leisure. They both go hand in hand and they are inextricably linked and never to break apart. Yet, they need each other. The sites of leisure are sites of labor intertwined in influencing each other, as seen in this conceptual drawing exhibited at a degree. We work to live in leisure to live, and architecture is intertwined in this cycle. It brings up questions about the practice of architecture and the architect's agency in times of scarcity and overabundance. What needs to be designed, planned, developed, or landscape? Who is your client and how are they involved beyond necessity and desire? These are some questions we, at our attention, think about what we have stated before and related to commenting and collective in housing and other types of projects. Collective spaces of learning, sharing of knowledge and resources, and conceptual ideas that exist as megabytes that maybe help usher, not only ourselves in this room to rethink practice, but those to follow further, not to limit the conceptual underpinning of architecture, but landed in something real by continuing to explore, ask, collaborate, and work together on a way of a new comment. Thank you. Sandra, do I just click on this? Hi, good morning. My name is Rich Yao. I'm a partner at Dash Marshall, our studio is based in Brooklyn and also Detroit, and I also teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. So for today, I think I'll be going over two categories of research within our studio. The first component's called Civic Futures. I'll be speaking about five projects within that, and the second component is a category that we call domestic futures, and I'll be speaking about three projects within that category. So they're parallel, but there's a lot of difference between them as well. This first project's called Made in Korea. We completed it at the heart of the pandemic in the summer of 2021. And if you remember during the pandemic, a lot of the Asian communities, Chinatown, Koreatown, saw a huge drop in foot traffic, partly associated with stigma associated with the Asian community. So this project was built on the corner of K-Town. It's on 32nd Street. It used to be an abandoned, the lot was abandoned because it was meant to be a luxury condo that was put on hold during the pandemic. And one thing unique about Koreatown, if you all have been there, is that it's one of the neighborhoods that doesn't have just bars and restaurant on the ground floor. So you have a lot of bars restaurants which were on the upper floor, some as high as seven floor, and they could not take advantage of the open street programs that New York City had. So with the open street program, different stores and bars can take over the sidewalk or the parking lot in front of their property. The idea came about creating this public private space where different restaurants who did not have access can participate using the space. So when you sat down on the table, scan the QR code, you would get a digital menu and you can order from all the restaurants that just did not have access to open streets. This project we also completed at the summer of 2020. We were invited to propose an intervention for care for Hudson Square. Hudson Square was originally one of the first printing districts in New York. So we wanted to kind of bring this history back to life. So it's a very simple project, simple structure. DUSAN, we imagine was a node where people can come, have a chat about local politics, the weather, have a cup of coffee, similar to the way new stands in the past function. Santa's Hollow we completed last year as part of the Neighborhoods Now initiative with the Van Allen Institute and the Urban Design Forum. One of the unique things about this structure versus the other temporary structures that we designed is that you can, it's designed to be modular and it's designed where you can disassemble it, reassemble it on a seasonal basis. So if you live in Bed-Stuy, it should be going up, I think, around Thanksgiving. This is like a yearly thing that they have on Marcy's Plaza. Detroit Public Theater, this is an adaptive reuse project. It's a federally designated landmark building. One of the biggest challenge for this project was how to convert a building which was designed to house automotive cars into a modern theater. So if you think about a garage, typically the load path is on the ground, you just support heavy cars versus in theaters, a lot of the load path tends to be on the ceiling. So the building was quite beautiful, had these landmark trusses and they had to be carefully restored to be able to hold the capacity of the theater equipment. This is the first show that went up mud row. If you're ever in Detroit, go check it out. Detroit Public Theater is an awesome, awesome organization. A lot of BIPOC-led events and we also designed a pretty killer bar that you can have drinks. It's Friday, it's never too late to think about drinking. People party, this is a self-initiated app. Within our studio that we developed, as I mentioned before, our studio mainly operates in Brooklyn and Detroit.  And one thing, as we're developing projects in Detroit, we notice it's quite hard to kind of accurately depict the demographics of the city and our renderings. So what we created was this app that's tied to the Census Bureau data. This is like the opening page that you would see when you log into it. It'll ask you what city. So recently we just upgraded, I think there should be 648 cities now, all 50 states. So let's say Puerto Rico, it will populate your scene in Puerto Rico accurate to the census data. And the other component that we wanted the app to kind of have was just like a quicker, efficient workflow. So in our studio we're very, work-life balance is important for us. So the faster you get tasks done, the faster we get to go out and be at the parks, see our kids. So here is like the same scene, but you can see that we've automated the tedious tasks of just changing the colors of the clothing. So we tried to have fun. If you log into it, there's multiple themes and you can also create your own themes. The next series of work is, they fall under the category domestic futures. The main kind of thread line here is research into domesticity and the courtyard housing type. So these are three projects which are currently ongoing in our studio, the first project, the Donut Courtyard Plan in Detroit. It's in the Urban Prairie. It's in a neighborhood which has seen a lot of disinvestment. Top corner over there is a project in a very suburban New Jersey context. And then finally the plan up here in Long Island, it's in a coastal property. Images of the three projects, you got New Jersey, Detroit in the middle and then Long Island to the right. So this is MicroMix. This is currently in construction. Like I mentioned before, it's in a neighborhood which has seen a lot of disinvestment. It's for a young family with a young toddler. So the sense of security was really important for them to have a plan where they can see their kids running around in an open space and be able to view them from different parts of the room. The Donut Plan also gives them flexibility in configuring it multiple ways. The Norwood Edition project outwardly, when you look at it, it looks like it might be an ADU. But when you look at it in plan, it's clearly connected. So it's designed for a multi-generational family who wants to bring in their aging parents to live with them. So the whole plan is designed where two families can live at once but it's also fairly connected. If you look at the bottom left, the living room, there's a sequence of inside-outside spaces. So all this connects through sliding doors and windows. So the plan has this flexibility but from the outside, it looks like two different buildings. And then finally, this project that we're calling Two Bar House, it's in a coastal property. Recently, we just got the wetlands permit approved. Two bars parting open and courtyard conditions right in the middle. So it's an experimentation in the courtyard housing type but also like the dog trot housing type. And hopefully it'll go in construction soon and that's about it. Thank you very much. Hi, everyone. Thank you, Alessandra. Thanks, everybody, for joining Friday and early this morning. This will be very informal. So my name is Evidea Mantafalo. I come from Uofilia to practice and I co-founded in 2016 together with Jaffer Kolb who is not here today. So in developing a practice for us, it's been kind of a cyclical experience of alkydine and known and seemingly well-defined sort of model. But each time we do so with the intent to observe, to critique, to question its parameters. We break off, we experiment, we research, we collaborate and then we try again. In other words, early on we made a commitment to making things and we continue to make through questioning the very act of making in a way that is incremental, soft and I don't know, just to repeat myself in a 30 second talk cyclical. We continue to pursue this one project at a time and I figure I would keep this very short today and introduce our practice through a handful of projects. A lot of our work begins or revolves as a practice in New York City around exhibition design and large-scale installation. We've experimented with the impact of, you know, temporal construction and we've experimented with rentals like our installation on the right for the Park Avenue Armory, all of it was kind of brought in a track and left on a track. But it somehow does not feel that that was enough and we invented this project, named Museums Remodeled, to really deal with our own guilt of the things we make, the things we bring into sight and how we might disperse them back into the world and design their afterlives. For that we collaborated with the Department of Sanitation again like a cold call that led us into a lot of additional work for a, you know, for a profit entity. But work that felt meaningful and work that felt like if we did enough, each time it could be more and more embedded into our process, our fees and our structure as a firm. From there, we also wanted to share this project called Rival is Forever commissioned by the Arts Organization Performer in 2019 in which we explored the multiple lives of drywall, specifically as they pertain within the art world. This is something like two weeks of drywall sent into a recycling facility in Pennsylvania for reuse. This is all untouched, CND waste. It's quite amazing. This is me for reference. I'm not particularly small and I'm also not eight feet tall. So I think this can help you orient yourselves. So really we started to experiment with what it would mean to produce a different kind of desire that embeds these five products back into the stream, not as a guilt washing project, but as an exciting one, one that comes from a place of optimism. We built this wall ourselves, which is something we very much enjoy and we don't get to do very much with architects and we were very bad at it. It took two weeks to build a little wall but we trust that expertise could have steered this project a different way. For a party recently or I guess a year and a half ago for the architectural league of New York, we experimented with different types of collaboration. We worked with a party provider from the Hamptons to put together a series of ice joint details that brought leftover materials found in the larger vicinity where the party was happening and held together by ice. So you see on the left the before, the Navy Yards, in the middle are Nasha from our team, Mariah Carey, whose panels we found left over in some storage facility there in the Navy Yards and in the end the post-party picture of everything we brought into the site melting into the sewer after the party's end. We come into this project with the desire to create new types of collaboration, to make new friends, to test different kinds of expertise, see Hamptons ice culting facilities. But we also wanna bring our own expertise as architects, try to understand how it can find a space and meaning in this kind of other context. A long-term project of ours that takes this logic to I don't know the, it's biggest extreme within the realm of our practice is test beds. A project we do, we invented with Sam Stewart-Hollaby, who is a PhD candidate here and maybe your professor for a seminar, if you're lucky. And we did this project in collaboration with New York City's parks department. The project looks to architectural mock-ups, really elaborate artifacts made to test design across scale and sees those again as an opportunity to redistribute resources across New York's landscape. The project came out of the sort of construction boom of luxury developments, millionaires grow, thigh dye happening at some point in 2016, where it was honestly when we started our firms was a lot easier to be very optimistic to harness the energy of architecture that was abandoned of building cranes, everyone in New York City. And this has shifted quite obviously where we are now but this is the kind of genesis of the project to say that there is so much going on but it's concentrated at sites of development that exclude the large portion of the five boroughs. So our idea was to team up with the parks department and imagine us redirecting these resources out into the gardens. And this initiative resulted in a built structure in the Rockaways, in Edgemere, Queens, where we relocated, you see this four panels and a window got broken in the process but that is a different story, to build a community structure. Again, what we brought was the mock-up but also the resources, the labor, the funding, the support that this other kind of industry holds within it or in Alessandro's words, maybe the power that is concentrated in certain types of design and development. Amazingly, we worked with this wonderful people. The garden was able to get even more members. On the bottom image, they expanded to the site next door which was originally designated for HPD and finally was kind of given back to the parks department given the excitement for the project and the number of participants. Just to show something newer and very underbaked, our work with Farming brought us to Project Eats and an initiative, a non-profit foundation run by artist and organizer Lyndon Good Bryant, who we've been working with to imagine a prototypical hydroponic farm within housing development projects that is under construction. It's a sort of interesting question, how one embeds community within the commercial storefront and how a commercial storefront might become an active space of production where everyone feels kind of welcome and included. So you see in this project the sort of band in the middle that mimics produces a storefront within the storefront houses interior hydroponic development and either space of that bar is treated as an ethery and a multi-purpose space in the back run by Project Eats. That's all. Thank you. All right, as I said, this is a conversation. You would see the slideshow that is combined with all the work of the presenters. I know that I guess to start the conversation, someone needs to ask a question or not. We can just start to just talk to each other and understand a little bit the models of Parandi and how it's interesting to note that, well, one thing that I didn't say about the bio of one of these presenters is E.B. also teaches and she's the director of Syracuse New York program. I want to say that because by chance, I guess all the practitioners today, they also teach. So they're also in academia. Other than that, yeah, I mean, I think that the work of these three offices is overlaps in some sort of way, in the way they think about their use of buildings in a way that they think how maybe this is a possible way to tackle sustainability or climate. But at the same time, their models of Parandi is different and I think that what brings the richness to the conversation. So I don't know who wants to start. I can speak quite loudly. Oh, it's on. Hi guys, I'm so excited that you are presenting today because I've looked up to your work for a long time. I think a question that would be interesting for the students and just to get us kick started with the conversations as well is what was the main push that kind of made you start your own practice, right? You obviously worked somewhere else before and there was that point in your career in which you decided, okay, I'm gonna go in by myself. That takes a lot of bravery. What was that thinking at that time? Yeah, happy to jump in. For us, it was a sort of a moment of repose of having participated in a few known ways of producing architecture. Having to speak for myself, I came from a sort of design-built semi-corporate backgrounds in Greece where I practiced for quite a while and that was quite interesting. I think it allowed me to understand how construction happens. It allowed me to work with laborers directly. It allowed me to participate in the field rather than just being in my office where a design office would situate themselves. From there, I migrated to the New York scene and I understood a very different type of production that happens in New York. The Mediterranean versus New York City, it's like a completely other game of collaboration versus liability games, right? The way we produce architecture in America is so tied to the legal context in which it happens. And from there, I feel like there was again a desire to remove myself from this production and try it once again, see what would happen if I was able to bridge the two types of practice I was exposed to in my former professional lives. It just so happens that my partner had similar interests and we just dived into this experiment. What motivated me, I think? I was gonna say stupidity. No, but yeah, I think for me personally, I don't think I can necessarily speak for the two other partners at Dash, but I was kind of burnt out. I worked in two different studios that the hours were long. It doesn't mean that starting your own practice, suddenly you have all the time of day. If anything, it's probably similar. But I had this naive sense that if I started Dash, I could kind of create a new schedule for myself, like have a better work-life balance. So I left two offices that didn't have that and that was just like the gut reaction of why I felt like I wanted to start Dash Marshall and just giving an honest answer. Well, I guess my answer will be very complicated given that I come from music. For me, I guess I never wanted to work for a company, for say, I didn't come in from Seattle, Washington. I wanted to work for myself. After finishing music school, I got into design, web design, there I collaborated with different people. So I was always moving, working by myself and collaborating with different people. Architecture, on the hand, which I always tell my musician friends that architecture is a pretty difficult profession, just as music is a very difficult profession. For me, they're the same. They're one and the same and that's an oversimplification. And so the inspiration to continue within a field that is important for me is just as important as music. It was very inspiring to learn something new and find out that actually there are many things that are similar between music, design and architecture. And not to speak directly about Alessandro, but collaborating with someone who comes from the architecture field and learning from that side and also be able to mix my non-architectural side, help me stay in architecture and transform it, hopefully transform it into something different, not only for ourselves, but also for students and people moving forward. Could I ask you both something? Yes. I noticed one thing that I took away from your two presentations was sort of on the one hand, Nick and Alessandro, your desire, I'm lumping you in because you're here, if I can. The rest of Dash I want. But I noticed there is a desire to sort of package everything under this kind of grander desire of no leisure, the commons, the politics of architecture and all of the projects kind of fit perfectly into the narrative, right? Whereas Richie today was like there's a little bit of this and there's a little bit of that and here are some interests and there is work-life balance and there is also, you know, this design and there is this one off, not one off, there is like a moment in time in which you participate in Korea Town. There is kind of a more fluid way which projects come your way and you respond to it. I'm curious how both of your practices take on this idea of packaging, the narrative of an office versus the kind of day-to-day production? That's a good question. I mean, for us, because we've been researching so long separately, Alessandro had some research before and it's transformed when I came on board. We've been obsessed with the idea of the collective and so in each one of our projects, we've been always thinking about the spatial notion of the collective, not only within the house or a civic space or a public space and I think that we've always tried to figure out how that fits within every situation. At the same time, and this is not necessarily answering your question, but at the same time, we also have a design aesthetic, we have things that we like to push forward and so I guess we've always been trying to figure out how the collective works within that, which is actually one of my questions I was gonna ask both of you actually, but that's all I have for now. To answer your question, I think within Dash, we don't think we do have a style. That's why I think from the work, you see kind of like a really broad range of scales and sort of clients that we tackle, but I think the common thing, the way we always speak about it in the studio is that we always start off by looking at sort of the user, the rituals, so it doesn't matter if the scale is something as large as a civic scale, so like Creea Town, for example, or Care for Hudson, we're thinking in kind of neighborhood scales, it's no different how we react to a client similar to in size similar to that to our domestic clients where we look at sort of like who wakes up first, who grabs a cup of coffee, so that's why we packaged it in two kind of categories called civic features and then domestic features, because for us it's always when it comes down to it looking at the human ritual of how they use space and how to create new interpretations for them. Even People Party, which is an app, is again kind of responding to a need that we see that's lacking, so why don't we make an app that kind of responds to that? Similar to Creea Town was a shed that responded to a need to a community. I think that's all wonderfully liberating in a way, having the practice that even just a few years ago was really about declaration, about big statements about kind of a mission and I think just being comfortable enough to say we're figuring it out and this is how, this is like a core kind of argument that runs between projects so we sort of make first and squint afterwards and I think this process is something that it's helpful to talk about oftenly. I agree with you, I think it's very organic. You know like the first few years of our practice we're like, what are we doing? There's like one coffee shop here and there's like a gut renovation in Tribeca. Like nothing made sense, but as similar to your work as a student, like first year core, you're just kind of learning and absorbing and practice honestly is the same thing. First two years in practice we call it like core one. We're like learning how to write contracts and we wrote some terrible contracts and we suffered for it, you know. But now we have a good contract. Yeah, I have to agree with you. That's like you all do. Yeah, that was, happy to share it, yeah. The comments. No, I agree with you on that. I feel that we, you know, our contentions we definitely made progress come along and you learn from them. I think Alessandro and I have many different conversations on what type of project to take and which ones we don't and we've had different ways of thinking about that. I said we take everything and we find a way to learn from it, which is also very difficult, but also using that to figure out to counteract the research and fund research and so that we have a work-life balance. So that's something that also we think about as well. But I'd re-refuel it. I guess, you know, the first few years is core one, it literally is. And to add, we would take some of those projects also to do competitions. Because most of these open competitions, they're not, there's no promise of payment or anything. So we found a way to use that to experiment through competitions in a responsible way. And in one example, also we did a townhouse project that the client said, I know what the layout is going to be. And we said, but we know what the facade is going to be. So it became a facade project even though we were designing the rest of the four-planet. So we figure out exactly what we're going to focus on. We spend less time focusing on the design of the interior and more on the actual aspect of the project that is important for us. Yeah, kind of jumping on the comment about taking projects on to learn something. I think that's quite the reality of practice, especially for young studios when you're starting off. Before we started our own studio, I was dreamt that it's like, oh, you come out of a great school.  People are just going to come with the perfect project like beautiful museum somewhere. But the reality is some family is going to come to you. They want to renovate this Victorian house and they want to add more moldings. It might not be the aesthetic that you're looking for, but similar to what Nick said, early on in our practice where if the client like really was hard to budge, we would find a reason to kind of take that project to learn something. Maybe it's like fabrication, right? It's like how to kind of like build something instead of like the kind of more straightforward kind of concepts of presenting architecture. And because we're also practice, we had staff, we needed to kind of like bring income in. So we had to be very cognizant that we balance that, that we don't just like push projects away because it doesn't fall into the kind of like the stereotypical perfect architecture projects, right? And as we did that, you know, like there's projects that we don't show, but we really learn how to construct things, how to like run a schedule, how to do CA, all that kind of stuff. There's always something to learn. Yeah, that brings me to a question that I want to ask both because about aesthetics in architectural practice. So how do you see the role of aesthetics in your practice and material choices, material conglomerate in the case of your, the project in the Rockaways where the material is in the material, you're reusing something that's already put together. And in Dash, how do you guys use materials? You didn't really speak to that, so how do you use materials in the practice? Yeah, I think the second part of your question, you know, we're always, a lot of our work is tied very much into sort of our clients, what their ability is to kind of fund a project. So we have to be realistic sometimes with sort of the materials we use. So the house in Detroit, the MicroMix, it started off as a CLT house. But I'm, oh, sorry. It started off as a CLT house, but it got VE because it's just something that was really hard to afford for them. And there was roadblocks in sort of like building department in what they consider CLT and fireproofing. This was, this project has been in the works for a while. It's like probably five years now. So the early parts of trying to get that project passed through Detroit was quite difficult. Maybe they've changed. But it became a stick frame construction. But you know, stick frame construction, I think gets a lot of negative sometimes, but it's just as renewable as CLT, right? So these wood, you're using the same parts. It's not as kind of glorified right now as a CLT, but it does a lot. But generally with the use of material in our project, we try to just keep it very simple. One of our most interesting kind of moments is when we figure out a new way to kind of design around drywall, to be honest. We didn't show one, but it's an ice cream shop in Detroit where we didn't finish the drywall on the bottom part. And then we just let it drip down sort of kind of in reference to ice cream dripping. But I'm also really into heavy metal music and a lot of the logos has these kind of drip. So it's like, you know, for me, that was like one of the funnest detail. Yeah, that answered your question. Well for us too, I think thinking at the scale of the detail has been instrumental. I wouldn't necessarily think of it as an aesthetic choice, but rather one that comes from a place of choreography where materials are kind of considered non-static. Like our architecture and our designs are more temporal than we could ever imagine. Whether that is a house or whether that is working with an overhauled building that is a few decades old, like assemblies feel less, I don't know, long-term or committal than at least I perceived them to be when I was starting out in architecture where we felt like, you know, you build something it's forever, there's this kind of responsibility. And now I think our focus has shifted into you build something it's not forever, it's not in the middle of nowhere and you have to figure out the before and after. And that gives you, you know, I think working with ice is an example along those lines on its extreme or even, you know, in the Department of Sanitation Projects with exhibition design trying to figure out how to advocate for excess labor that allows for a project to be demounted and dismantled. It is a question of specifications. I actually have been teaching on questions of assembly. I think there is kind of a lot of research to be done in how we put materials together and how we can feed back into the market that produces 14 individual components for a single drywall partition. There is so much sort of modernist remains in the kind of Eurasian labor, right? You make a white wall and it takes 20 parts to make and it takes the mudding, the taping, all of it. Then maybe you don't need to make that anymore or maybe the materials, there is a way when we start looking at new types of materials to consolidate assembly that doesn't require this kind of constant act of singular use of typical details, you know. Does this answer the question? Yes, it does. I think that it's answering the question. Alessandro, how do you want us to, there's a lot of questions in the audience and I don't, there's a lot of questions. So you've managed them. I don't know what you want. Yeah, hi, good stuff. I'm curious to hear more about the position of temporary work in a budding practice. Are they always just vehicles for more like permanent work as proof of concepts or do they begin to kind of take on a more enclosed lifetime, a life of their own? And from an ethical standpoint, from a material ethical standpoint, I'm interested to hear more about like the sourcing disposable, or disposal of the materials that are used in temporary structures. Or as a last thing, do you feel like sometimes these temporary structures, installations, museums, what have you, can have an efficacy that kind of like supersedes that of the permanent structure? Yeah, maybe I'll start on that. Speaking about the two temporary structures that we designed, Made in Korea and Bedford-Sibason. So Made in Korea was supposed to be, it was like a temporary project. You know, I mentioned that it was existing in a vacant property that just was stalled.  So we knew that it had like an eight month lifespan. And when it shut down, when the developer was like, we need our land back. You need to kind of get this out. We were pretty frustrated because that was like the time when wood was like skyrocketed price. It was like so expensive. And we were like trying to kind of get it donated or get it reused somewhere. But basically the developer just closed it off and one day brought in Mayor Adams and he did this whole media blitz of like tearing it down. And the entire wood stock was just thrown in the landfill. And for us, the next project, Bedford-Sibason, it was like a couple months after that, that was like our reaction to it was like, we gotta make sure that this doesn't happen again. So it's a similar kind of structure, but we added detailing to it that can, simple detailing that can allow the BID to disassemble it, store it somewhere and then put it back. So it was directly a response to what happened to Made in Korea to make sure that these temporary structures doesn't just get chopped up and thrown into the bin. Yeah. Yeah, there's a couple answers to the question. In a non-permanent project, House on House, we, it was very interesting because the client actually wanted to replace the vinyl siding with wood siding. And we said that, you know, we did kind of our own pre-DE and we said, actually, let's reuse the vinyl siding. Let's find a way to bring something new and bring something existing and kind of marry them instead of just throwing away this vinyl siding. On a different project like Coachella, we initially wanted to design the building, the structures out of wood. So we can reuse the wood if we reuse for a different installation in the future. We had a reverse DE where they said, no, we want to use steel for ease of construction of a grid. In that case, still, we were able to say, okay, then these structures need to be placed in the public space, similar to what they have done with, I think there's the cacti that was done by Archive of Affinities and Francois Carré's project, which they were putting in public spaces. And so in this case, the idea was to reuse, instead of reusing the material, reuse the installations for the public as they were designed. I hope that answers the question a little bit. Yeah, maybe, I feel like I will repeat myself if I go back to this, but I think for us, it's always been a question of choreography, how to, I don't know, think about orchestrated material as they are the actual design projects in many of these temporal types of work that we've taken on over time. And what is, I don't know, ironic about it is that you can say, oh, trash is the problem, we produce so much waste, we're against it, we'll design without, you know, without partitions, without walls. But what happens is we're also architects and we love walls and we think space is meaningful and more meaningful than just like, you know, just put in work on like the permanent part of an institution, for example. So I think negotiating both our desire to intervene and produce something that is meaningful, but at the same time our consciousness as people who care for ecological thinking leads you down the rabbit hole, just research questions, you know, you might end up in a drywall facility in Pennsylvania trying to understand, is this actually bad? Because gypsum is not actually bad, this is where our research led it, it's totally friendly, it exists in your toothpaste, it's not a problem at all, what's actually bad is when you dump it in a landfill and that's when it's in an anaerobic condition and then it produces toxic gases and then the entire landfill shuts down. And that's where the problem is. So I think it takes a little bit of additional work to figure out where the problem is and how to just not avoid it, but engage with it from a design perspective which is where in the end of the day our expertise lies. Hi, I think maybe another way to think about the temporary structures, especially with these three offices, when I look at their work, in one sense, you could think of them being very pragmatic, right? Small office, small projects, that's who you're gonna get, you know, you'll work from it to test ideas, formal or conceptual or whatnot. I think the other way to look at it, if you frame it maybe through the lens of rethinking practice, is that all of these projects and primarily the temporary ones have been able to engage with marginalized communities, BIPOC, queer, whatever might happen to be, and it's because it allows them, these other organizations who may not have the funds or even the wherewithal to hire architects to engage with young designers who are thinking about how to provide our services, if you wanna be like a pragmatic about it, to these communities that maybe don't rely on them. I feel like I live in Bed-Stuy and I see a lot of these sheds that often aren't well thought out and well designed and these organizations or these businesses have an opportunity to work with Dash Marshall all of a sudden, right? And not only do they get something out of it, but I think these communities can also get something out of it that is like a really fantastic idea. And I think other speakers today would kind of align with that message. Hi, thank you. And I'd like to reconnect to the early questions by Alessandro, what is practice? What does it mean to practice? And especially on something that I've noticed a particular aspect, something that I've noticed of your firms that you all design processes, you all mean the project as a process. So can you talk about your approach to process quality? Why? What does it mean to make a process? How does it start? Does it end? What is the process for you in architecture? I guess I'll begin. It's a very difficult question because Alessandro and I have different processes and they merge sometimes and they bounce off of each other and sometimes they create more tensions in the process. But we always start with an idea of thinking and talking about the project. In the beginning it was more traditional, oh, your sketch and this idea and then we start to move away from that and started to bring in the research, reading instead of just pure form precedent studies, we started to look at the context of the project, what is going on there, materiality, what is our current research, how we, for instance, in house on house we were looking in Levittown in suburbia because that was the vocation and so we needed to understand roof pitches that exist there, how if we're going to critique, suburbia are not and if so, how are we going to do that? And so we usually work these days from a place of research as process and that turns into looking at details, sometimes making models, sometimes montage collages, more drawings and moving further and skipping the project itself going after the project is finished, sometimes we still are not done, not necessarily designing but thinking about the project and sometimes we continue to draw the project. Coachella is a perfect example, we want to re-appropriate the design of the project and the project itself from its spectacularization on the side of Coachella as a temporary ritual event. So we kept drawing that and we kept looking into the project to understand architecture as a device, architecture as a device. So we like to look at architecture as process, architecture as common practice within engagement, drawing our office, collaboration with other offices, organizations, non-profits, et cetera. So I think our process is very similar. We're in our studio, we're research first and I think this ties back to kind of the earlier question that Nick had about style because we ask ourselves also internally, sometimes in the studio, how come we don't have a style? Because yeah, like every project that we approach, we pull the kind of expected data points that most architects pull from, so site environment or the client. But we also pull from other things. We, in a lot of our work, there tends to be a hidden narrative. There's a story which becomes kind of like our driving concept in our presentation to the client. We talk about this new narrative that we imagine in the space. And that narrative also becomes sort of like the, when the going gets tough, it becomes like the thin red line where if your project's getting DE'd, that narrative always tries to hold that project together. So to answer your question, the way we operate when we start a project, it's always research first. And then we like to bring in a lot of humor into our project too, so there's many instance, some of them are hidden sort of Easter eggs, but you'll see a lot of reference to kind of, to our heroes, people that we looked up to. So again, I mentioned this ice cream shop in Detroit that no one here probably has seen, but it's literally just drywall, but there's like a reference to Venturi at the corner of like the little building with sort of the clashing columns. There's an auto-wagon reference to that project too. So there's a lot of kind of playful reference to our heroes in our project. For us, really, process is key to what we do and we come to it from a place of repetition, right? Each time we make something, we sort of carry baggage with us and each time we attempt to address it, we develop another kind of expertise. I think there are overarching lessons that we're learning in the process of really how to work with agents that are not typically involved in our projects, how to open up to host the participants and collaborate across the board. We've gotten better at just phone calls at large, just looking for allies and looking for team members across the board. I think overall we would want for all of it to culminate at a place where processes are less individual, where not every time we have to start over, not every time we have to figure out what agency can support us and where we can belong, but where we can actually begin to construct networks that operate across projects and beyond locales. But that is a much longer term aspiration. I'd like to add a little bit that it's something we don't talk about a lot, but I care about in our practice and it's the technical aspect of a process. So a few people I see in the room know me already. They know that I love file naming or the process of exporting drawings and these things. And so in our practice as well, we, like especially me, love the fact that things need to be organized not only to just be efficient, but also to allow people to follow our own process, to go back into an archive and to understand, okay, this version number 1.5 versus version number 3.7. And so I think that that's an also important part of our process. Hi, I was wondering because you're all educators, what do you, how do you see the current state of the relationship between academia and practice right now? And what do you do as educators to try to bridge that gap if you think there is one at all? I think that's a really wonderful question and one that I know all of us think about a lot. I think generationally as educators, we fill a sense of responsibility to, at least to speak for myself to be pragmatic, to equip students with sort of enough facility to be out in the world, to not, it goes back to the question of baggage, right?  I think it's neither nor, right? And I feel like communicating to students that they can exist in between, that there exists practice in both ends of the divide and that they will practice in a world where everything is kind of full, right? Folding into our curricula ways of addressing what is there, instilling them with facilities to work, to think of materiality seriously, to explore ways of ecological thinking with students that is not necessarily the five points of lead designations to really make an intellectual project out of how practice might be diverse specifically at Syracuse and I have some of my students here at Syracuse, New York, so they can sort of call me out if that is in the end of the day and true, but we've been trying and together with Nick McDermott who's here and we'll speak later and together with Nick and Alessandro, we've tried to establish a series of collaborations with firms in New York that allow students to participate in an ecology of offices as a sort of field observers that allow them to sort of shadow people, exist in an office, monitor relationships, understand how practice happens beyond their studio work and beyond their sort of capacity as students or the employees who need to not be fired or be evaluated, who need to ask for a raise, but to sort of embed themselves in that environment in order to observe and report back and converse with one another, to think of producing a sort of community of employees and architectural workers that is mindful of its sort of existence as a group. Yeah, I think sort of bridging the two territories, I think academia doesn't really do a good job about preparing students, maybe I'll speak for my own experience when I graduated the GSD, I didn't think professional practice courses at that time really prepared me what it's like to really start your own practice, like I said, we wrote terrible contracts at the start because we never learned about contract writing, right? So within our studio, there is a permanent position which is through my undergrad, University of Waterloo, which is like a co-op system. Elise over here was an old dasher, she was part of that system. And I love that system because honestly, you either stay eight months in our studio or there's the longer one, which is, sorry, the long one is eight months and then there's a shorter one, which is four months. And for the student who currently fills that role, we always try to be very open and transparent because I think that's the best way to learn. So that student joins every single meeting that we have with the client, even the contentious ones where the client is like, I can't afford this, like why did you design this? And you can see them really getting aggro on us. And through meetings with consultants where you see a design intent and how to make sure that design intent lives on, right? With a consultant, how to explain the projects. And I think those are like valuable experience. I understand it's hard to teach that in academia, but I think that is one of sort of the deficiencies. I haven't seen a great model for it, but the co-op programs, I think there's one in Texas that also has a co-op program. Waterloo in Canada does it really well when students get embedded. And it's a, for Waterloo, it's a fully paid internship. So it's not like student rates or anything like that. It's fair market. I've been interloper. Cambridge University Department of Architecture Center for Entrepreneurial Innovation, Tony Goldman. I have taught at Columbia in a different department, so I have a background. My son has recently qualified at the Bartlett and he was required to do two years of internship paid for, one was Richard Rogers in London and the other one was with Bjork Ingalls here in New York. So obviously what he fed back to the Bartlett was very important. But my question is really about climate. This is the point of this one. I work with UNFCCC and buildings has seen this being the big, big issue, 40% of world carbon emissions. And we've got a lot of building to do for the two million new people that need to be housed. And I just wondered the extent to which the three really excellent architects I see in front of me, thank you for sharing your views, are finding that your clients are able to accept, if you like, that they have a social role, they have an obligation, certainly to look at the carbon content of the buildings that they are asking you to design. That we need to get out of concrete and steel as much as we can. We need to go to Mastimba. I was interested that I think it was, Richie said CLT was too expensive for your clients who had to move. Is there any extent to which all three of you, when you have a new client that you're working with, that you start with, if you like, the zero carbon alternative? And then, if you like, only then, when the client says, do I have to do it, or is there an alternative? But do you start with at least the situation where you're going to zero carbon? In our experience, it puts a lot of pressure on us to make these negotiations on behalf of the world, or behalf of the individual carbon footprint of each project. And I think it takes time. It's not a first meeting kind of our way or the highway, let's do this project, and it will have to be zero carbon footprint, otherwise it doesn't happen. I wish this was the case. But really, for example, in our museum work, it's been, sometimes we started by talking about it amongst ourselves. And then on the second project, we started by talking about this to one team member that was the curator. And then in the third project, we had enough ideas and data and kind of decks at hand to sit down with the museum director. And it was really a conversation because we ask for additional labor. We ask for a model that is less efficient in terms of very strict timelines. And we offer also additional labor ourselves. Now we announced that we have to come here past the end of our contract. It's somewhere in this slide show to count every single material that ended up in this project so that we can then relate this information to the Department of Sanitation who in turn will publicize the material and then make sure that it gets picked up in the two-day window that the museum will give us for it to be disseminated. And amazingly, people are receptive. Every single time we've done a project like that, from foam panels to an entire mock-up, someone says, finally, I have guilt at night. I can't believe no one is dealing with it. But at the same time, and this is where professional expertise and disciplinary boundaries become problematic, it's no one's purview, right? So everyone is like, someone should deal with this. Isn't this very bad? But we don't have a designated person kind of taking on this work. And it does exist in the slippages between all of our sort of job descriptions. So lots of decks. Lots of diagrams, data, and a polite asks incrementally has been our recipe so far. Yeah, we have a project in Long Island that it started and it's related to another project we have in South Asia where we're trying to push for more sustainable materials and for the first one in Long Island, there were budget constraints, as you were saying, and so we couldn't move that route. But we found a way to mingle different, you know, okay, maybe a little bit of CLT here and maybe a little bit there. And so in that way, we'd go through the VE route. In South Asia, the project that we're working on, we really started with CLT as the primary, like 100%. We had client pushback and we were able to get some engineers in London to help us with the project. And they said, why don't you make it yourself? And so the client was very excited about this idea.  But through that exercise, we were able to find out there's a local timber, Pinkaboo, that is actually quite, using beam and post technology, would actually be even better. And so we had to go through this process of through the contextual, you know, the context itself to understand, okay, they can make this, but then actually we might need to look even further into the materiality. So I feel like a lot of this is exactly what E.V. spoke to us earlier, but at the same time it's about the context. And so each context is a little bit different, given that some places are not meeting those goals more and some are meeting them less and more than others. And also there are places that are asking the places that are the worst carbon producers to share or bring a communal idea of how to get to those goals. To answer your question, how we approach it with our clients, it's very tough kind of, you know, aligning with both points that everyone's saying here. If we were to, in North America, we make terrible, terrible houses. Like the standards that we have for housing here is bottom of the barrel, right? It's like the installations on like some of these door systems, door fronts. As soon as you go to Asia and Europe, it's like the level of quality is so much higher. So our tactic, and it doesn't work all the time, is to present it to the client as something that is directly benefiting them. So talking, a lot of our houses that you're seeing here, we try to hit passive house standards. So we speak about indoor air quality, where to them it's they're getting the direct benefits. I think if we were to kind of talk about the larger carbon footprint and sell it on that angle, easily a lot of clients would be like, you know, I just wanna think for myself. So it's a way of speaking about it, I think. We're successful in most cases, but sometimes it's very hard because the client's like, I don't see the value for paying for this. Because unfortunately in North America, what probably drives sort of this poor housing standard is everyone thinks in real estate, right? It's like they're thinking of it as just like a five year home. They're gonna move somewhere else. Versus in other parts of the world, when they're thinking of building a home, it's 20 years, right? There's longer longevity to it. So people are willing to invest in it. Versus here, everything is like five to six years. I'm gonna be somewhere else. I just wanna build a house and sell it. And those houses have the worst details anywhere. I also wanna ask about your relationship to clients. Richie, you mentioned that you had gotten wetlands permits for the house on Long Island. Are you comfortable with building on or near wetlands? Are you comfortable with the economic landscape, which prefigures your relationship to the clients who are comfortable with that? Do you think it's in the purview of the discipline to participate in the formation of that economic landscape? Or is that even a question among the profession at your level, at your age at this time? Yeah, so I don't know if that project is up. So it's an existing single family property as a coastal waterfront. New York State has a great kind of rules around coastal property. So with this new development or the new building that we're proposing, it actually, if we were to renovate the existing building, which is I think 15 feet away from the water, you could renovate it and it's grandfathered and you can sort of build a pool, everything gets grandfathered. So when we proposed this new building, it put it towards 20, I forgot which year the new plan was basically the whole house is now 100 feet off the wetland. So it's been pulled back. And part of New York's wetland zoning is that whole 100 yards offset from the coast just cannot be touched. So the house sits at the back end corner and everything about the house, so the deck for example, does not use pressure treated lumber because of the kind of toxic chemicals that gets used in pressure treated lumber. So everything about the house that touches the ground, the wood is a natural ecay, so no chemicals. Those are kind of like the design elements that we've introduced to make sure that the house is appropriately touching the ground. And then the entire house too is lifted up. So the older house had a basement, all those will get torn down, kind of reclaim that wetland zone. And then the new house sits on stilts, push back, anything that touches the ground are natural ecay structure. Yeah, we have our Long Island project was a very interesting situation because you have a lot of houses that are near the water and most of them were actually lifted off the ground already. And when approaching the clients on their project that they had bought this existing house non-conforming on its lot for zoning reasons that are different from the water, the question of raising the house or not came up in costs and the client obviously had a very, didn't have a budget to raise the house. And luckily the zoning did not, the code did not allow, didn't require us in specific conditions to raise the house. But we needed to study how to deal with the ground similar to your situation. And we had to use the typical at this in Babylon, New York, the way they have to get into the ground and say keep the existing foundation and bolster it up. And we had to use helical piles. And that was the only way to keep the house. Indeed, I said I would never live here. And just to be completely honest, I personally would not, I think that we should not move that close. We should not be living so close. And I think this opens up a whole another question on living close to the water and how to deal with that. In this case, because it's just one house for one family, the idea of house on house kind of played on that. The idea that we're putting a house on top of the existing one. And so that there's this idea that you can escape the water by going above it. Also, the non-conforming lot allowed us to not expand out but also expand up and find a way to adapt the house in a way that wasn't just about putting helical piles in the ground and sea channels for the foundation but also creating an environment that allows you to live with the water in some way. I like this question a lot and I really appreciate you asking it. We do also have two projects in the Catskills that are right over the watershed and sort of negotiated with the Department of Environmental Protection, but I feel like you both have done like a really wonderful job talking about the sort of two portions of it. Maybe to take it a step back, it's quite magical that New York has water that is drinkable and accessible to everyone and it does come from this collective effort to maintain it. And your question is one of how does one prioritize collective interest when you have an individual client and there is a tremendous amount of discomfort in that. Like practice is, I'm not even gonna say uncomfortable, it's discomfort, it's difficult. You're constantly put between an individual who is driven by the markets who relies on you on a system of values that are efficiency specific, that are capital specific and your own conscience to belong in a system that addresses more than one agent. And in the end of the day, for us seeing practice as a vehicle to feed back into that system through producing other types of desire and even marginally kind of address some of the conflict is something that is a real high priority and something we develop over time. And this specific scale of practice allows for it, right? When you're on a 100% office, it's very difficult to be agile when you are in this kind of flexible, malleable, personal, like direct communication with the people you work with and the projects you participate in, you're able to feed back to it. So that's how we keep ourselves going. Session came to an end. It was really an incredible conversation. I want to thank Evie, Richie and Nick to really facilitate all these conversations so important around practicing to sharing for sharing their work, for being with us as the first session in the morning. So I just wanted to say one thing. Lunch is served at 1.15 here in the back of Wood Auditorium, something that I forgot to say before. So I guess I'm... So thank you so much. I'm going to introduce the second.


An important concept in higher mathematics is the change of a quantity. We define the change of a quantity to be the difference between the ending amount and the starting amount. For example, suppose that at the start of a vacation you had $1,000, and later you had $20, by how much did your money change? So definitions are the whole of mathematics, all else is commentary. The change is the difference between the ending amount and the starting amount. And so the amount of change was the ending amount minus the starting amount. Now the ending amount was $20. The starting amount was $1,000, and so our difference $20 minus $1,000. And very important, wherever you have them always include units. So here the ending amount is $20, the starting amount is $1,000, and so the difference is minus $980. One important idea to keep in mind, when speaking about amounts of change, choose one. Either include the sign or omit the sign and include a direction. So in this case we might say your money changed by minus $980, where we've included the sign. Or in this case, since the amount of money you had decreased, you might say your money decreased by $980, where we've omitted the sign. And this leads to a very important rule, never include a signed number with a direction. Now the absolute change is useful, but the average rate of change is often more important. And so we define the average rate of change to be the change of a quantity divided by how long that change took. So at the start of the vacation, you had $1,000, five days later you had $20. What was the average rate of change? So definitions are the whole of mathematics. All else's commentary, our rate of change, is the change in the quantity divided by how long the change took. Now we already determined the change was minus $980. And since it took five days, our rate of change is the change in quantity divided by how long that change took. That's minus $980 divided by five days. We'll divide our numbers minus $980 divided by five. That's minus $196. Our units will also be divided, giving us dollars per day.


and with me is Brian Barbada. We're the co-founders of the Practical Policy Institute of Hawaii, which is the new organization incorporated in January that we'll talk about during this webcast. Excuse me, I'd like to first of all thank Jay Fidel and staff for having us on. We appreciate the opportunity to share our viewpoint and bring greater awareness to the climate change issue for the people of Hawaii. Brian and I thought we would share the co-hosting, so we'll pass it back and forth four or five times and rather than one host and one person talking the entire time. So I thought I would start, folks probably don't know much about either one of us, start with my background, 52 year resident of Hawaii. My main career was with the Campbell Estate Chief Operating Officer and then CEO and then a trustee for about the next 15 years. Overlapping career as a director with Bank of Hawaii where I chaired the Audit Risk Committee for 14 years and earlier overlapping career as a pilot in the Hawaii Air National Guard. And my final position was commander of the Hawaii Air Guard. So that's a thumbnail on myself. Brian, how about your background? Yeah, my background in Hawaii goes back to the mid-70s when I arrived here and I've worked in a number of positions here since then, but I think most relevant to this arm is my long entrepreneurial history. I've been in I think something like 15 small businesses ranging from petroleum distribution to coffee farming to bottled water. We did solar panel installations, construction. So I've been in a great variety of things. Prior to coming out here, I went to Harvard Business School, was a Navy SEAL and originally lived in San Francisco. So that's pretty much the brief on mine. Well, my interest in climate change got started years ago when I would start kind of collecting and clip articles in the paper and magazines. And then that kind of accelerated about two and a half years ago. There was an article in the Star Advertiser by Professor Richard Brill, I'll hold it up for just a second. And in that article, he talked about the main nature's greenhouse gas, which is water vapor. I knew very little about that and I had a hunch that others didn't either. But in that article, Professor Brill mentioned that in the models that climate scientists are doing, they relegate water vapor to a lesser factor in projecting out the impact of climate change. In fact, he used the words unintentionally misleading. So for a guy like me with a lot of audit committee background, that kind of inspired me to dig deeper, which I've done and collected lots of articles and learned a lot more about water vapor. And climate change in general. A lot of climate change articles, op-eds come from organizations with a vested interest. We're pretty proud of our little institute. There's only a half a dozen of us on the board that we have no vested interest. We have no payroll from anybody with an interest in the matter for the six of us or retirees with time to learn. And what I've realized is that misinformation or omission of information often leads to what I'll call subtle perception of the truth. And that happened as recently and the final straw for me was a op-ed piece as recently as January of this year. And I'll read you the quote from probably a very informed individual to give you an indication of the misleading information that keeps getting repeated. And he said, climate change is largely caused by greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere by burning of fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas. Those statements are both wrong. They both again, relegate nature's greenhouse gas to practically a minor role. So we think there's a big need for education and that's one of the four aspects of our institute that we hope to educate the public on. So Brian, I know you've studied a lot about the climate change issue and Hawaii's policies. Do you have any thoughts you'd like to share? Well, I got started in this whole thing, mainly because like all of us, I was enamored with the beauty of Hawaii, the landscape of Hawaii, our uniqueness here. And I'm one of these guys who's been and who's in the ocean all the time and has taken advantage of everything that Hawaii has to offer. So when I saw the first windmills go up, which I believe was on Maui, I kind of was very surprised that that would happen in Hawaii. We have a background with the outdoor circle, not allowing billboards and a lot of other things that keep our visual landscape clean. And I was a little bit surprised on that Maui experience to find that a lot of people thought it was pretty neat that we were finding renewable sources of electricity. And I kind of couldn't believe that, but it was a big deal for me. I originally from California and I go way back there, obviously, and I remember the Altamont pass and anybody can go look that up on Google and see what a visual disaster that is and was. There's nothing out there. It's just thousands and thousands of windmills. A lot of them decrepit and falling apart. And it's the kind of thing that I think wakes people up to windmills. And then I was very, very happy recently and a couple of years ago, I guess it is now to see the people of Kahuku sort of rise up and other people rise up in a sort of a not in my backyard response to windmills. So that really began my interest in the whole subject of climate change. Is it gonna be windmills? Is it gonna be solar? What's it gonna be? And I started looking into some of these things and that's when Clinton and I got together and we both had similar general interests and very specific interests of our own and I decided to start this Institute. I would add again, I think Clint may have already mentioned it that we don't want to be cast as climate deniers. We're absolutely committed to the idea that there is such a thing as climate change. The Institute is a very, very important institution that is for Hawaii. It's kind of about what is Hawaii's role in this thing and what do the policies that the legislature is pursuing mean for Hawaii. One of the things that we think is missing is people kind of looking at the other side of things. There are always trade-offs in everything we do and there are trade-offs in responses to climate change. So those are some of the things we're looking at and that was pretty much the way I got into it. And if you could bring up the slide please about our purpose. I think that probably says it all. Those are the four elements of our mission. You can read them on the screen. I won't read them back to you, but we are committed to investigating things that are unique to Hawaii. We're not really interested in the global issues, the country issues. We're interested in responding to Hawaii. So that's why I'm in it. And Clint, what are your other thoughts about the climate system? Well, Brian, I totally agree with you. Climate change is happening. It's obvious to all of us and agree with you that we're not deniersed. But the real question is how much of climate change is already there caused by nature versus caused by man? Climate change happened well before the industrial revolution, well before we burned the first gallon of gas or burned any natural gas. But what I found, as I mentioned before, is that people just don't understand the basic science of climate change. A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk to a lunch group, a civic group, well-educated, and I made sure there's a piece of paper and a pencil for everybody in attendance. They're about 30 there. So I asked them the question, please put down the number one greenhouse gas. So I gave them some time to respond. And then I asked, how many put CO2? A little bit less than half. And then I asked, how many put methane? And that was pretty much the rest of them. And I said, well, how many of you put water vapor? Not a single one. So that kind of confirmed what I had learned anecdotally talking to various groups after tennis or after golf, that nobody understands the role of water vapor. It's humidity, we know it as a relative humidity, but it's a significant percentage of the atmosphere. On a 85 degree day, 70% humidity in Honolulu, 2% of the atmosphere. So you have that on the one hand. And so let's look at CO2 on the other hand. The second question I asked is, please put down the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere. And after some time, I asked for responses, how many 5% plus you hands went up? How much more than 1% almost all of the rest? How much less than 1% a few hands? And I asked how many of you feel that CO2 comprises less than one 10th of 1%? Again, not a single hand went up. The measurement of CO2 in the atmosphere that everybody seems to accept has been done over at Honolulu on a big island for the last 64 years. In the recent measurements, about 415 parts per million. Most press releases on this relate it to 4,000 years ago. But I would relate it though to what percentage of the atmosphere, 415 parts per million is less than 4100s of 1%. And two thirds of that was in existence before the industrial revolution. So we're only talking about our growth of 130 parts per million being CO2. So we have these huge differences. There's lots more to it that we hope to cover in a future show about how the atmosphere heats up, the infrared spectrum and so forth. Not enough time to get into that here. But the point is, as I mentioned earlier, there's a huge need for education in this whole arena. Right back to you. I know we've set that 100% renewable energy goal by 2045 for our state. And you've learned a lot about the concerns and elements of that goal. Yeah, again, the visual blight was the first thing that drove me. And so one of the things I wanted to look at is what are the scenarios where we might end up in 2045? I think if people look at the energy office report, they do one at the end of each year. There's a new one out right now. And you look at other documents, it can be a little confusing because every island reports different renewables. Some of them are very significant on other islands like Kauai, a lot of hydro, a lot of biomass, various things on other islands. But when you boil it down, the one that needs to get the most attention is Oahu. And I don't mean that to diminish the neighbor islands at all, but the fact of the matter is that this is where most of the people are and where most of the electricity is produced. So I started looking at the whole subject in terms of Oahu. And particularly with respect to the future of the mix of wind and solar. I would say parenthetically that anyone who's talking about some of these other options like biomass and solar and a geothermal, for example, on Oahu, it's just sort of irrelevant. Those are not gonna be big players on the island of Oahu like they might be in other places. So it comes down to solar and wind and it's a very difficult thing to try to estimate what that mix might be in the future. But I think we're at a point now where there are a lot of doubts being cast about wind. And I feel good about that. Senator Rivera from the North Shore is a friend of ours and we've talked to him a bit about wind. Of course, he's very against it being pushed in rural areas like his North Shore. And I think that sentiment probably is shared by a lot of people, but they just haven't seen it yet. So visualization of these things is a bit of a problem. It's the same thing with solar. And I believe that what this all boils down to is wind probably is pretty much not going anywhere, but solar is and solar will be proliferated all over in order to get to these 2045 goals. We're not very far there as we stand right now.  So it doesn't seem like a big deal. But the installed capacity of solar at the end of 2020, I don't have it right here for 21 yet, was only about 16% of the current demand. Current demand is about 10 gigawatts. It's a huge number.  It can get a little mind-boggling. I've had to wade through it myself, but right now solar is not much. When you start looking at how big it would really have to get by 2045 for us to have 100% renewable supply from solar, it's literally millions and millions of panels. We have one farm right now, Kalei Loa, 500,000 panels in Kalei Loa produces 49 megawatt hours or 49 megawatts of capacity. So it's a huge subject and one of these days the Institute hopes to develop some visuals on this so people can see just what the visual scenarios might look like. The other thing about solar, wind and some of the others, but particularly solar and wind, is they are intermittent suppliers of electricity. When the wind blows, they generate electricity. When the sun shines, they generate electricity. That doesn't happen all the time, so they're intermittent. And Hawaiian Electric has struggled with that for quite a while now because to have intermittent power doesn't really displace the fossil fuel power that we're all looking to displace. So how do you fix that? Well, in the last few years, the white night of batteries has come running in to save the day. And now that's how we're converting intermittent power to what they call firm power. That's a very important concept and we're going to be looking very hard at battery capacity, how much backup we really have in battery capacity, whether for the people of Hawaii, it replicates the capabilities of a fossil fuel power plant. It can, but it takes a lot of batteries and it's a bigger subject than anybody's really focused on for now. So, and I think the other thing about 100% renewables that people have to remember is that by 2045, the state is expecting to have all the cars converted to electric vehicles. That's a huge load on the requirements for electricity, as is the rail, art. Both of those things have to be accounted for in the 2045 demand. The 2022 demand is 10, what did I say? 10 gigawatt hours, I get confused myself. And the 2045 demand is gonna be probably 30, 40, maybe 50% more than that based on these things. So the whole issue of electric vehicles and electric vehicle chargers is all wrapped up in this 100% 2045 renewable economy, which in closing, I'll say is pretty much arbitrary. 100% is a nice round number, but I don't think anybody's ever done any real science on why it should be 100%. I don't know that we're gonna really investigate that. We'll take it at face value, but we are gonna try to analyze what that means to the people of Hawaii in terms of the development of these sources. So Clint, one of the things that I've just touched on and I know you're an expert in is land use. What, where are we going with land use and renewables? I'll comment on that, but I'd like to add one thought, Brian, to your mentioning batteries. There's currently the first major industrial battery project under construction out at Kapolei. It will provide, once it's fully charged in one day, 565 megawatts of power. So to relate that to a typical day's usage on Oahu, that's about 2.5%. That facility cost some $200 million. So picture of the cloudy days, like we had December 5th, 6th, January 2nd, 3rd, where we have to draw down those batteries. That's not enough, that $200 million plant won't even last us till 10 o'clock in the morning. So is it gonna take 20 more of those battery installations and $4 billion of investment? It'll have to be paid back by the ratepayers. So we've had a lot of discussion around that issue. So sorry for having on there, Brian, but yeah, let's talk about land use. The current land use by Hawaiian Nut Creek is minimal. The Kahi Power Plant, YAL Power Plant, some fuel storage at Campbell Industrial Park, very low. But if we're gonna add something like 800 megawatts of capacity of solar industrial farms, and it's something like five acres per megawatt, that's gonna require as much as 4,000 acres. That's a huge amount of land. And as Brian mentioned, the conversion to electric vehicles, perhaps another 600 megawatts of capacity, another 3,000 acres. So the point of this, and these are just round numbers to make the point, is that they're gonna run into competing policies. We all know that the cost of housing in Hawaii is the highest or right next to the highest in the nation. Are we gonna take all of this land out of possible circulation for residential development? Are we gonna take all of this land out of agricultural use? We have a lot of goals to become closer to self-sufficiency. So clearly we need a lot of further analysis on the land use trade-offs of setting this glorious sounding 100% goal, that there's a lot of implications to it and a lot of considerations that need a lot for the discussion. Brian, next item on our list of topic to discuss is adapting, back over to you. Yeah, one of the things I think people need to think about is that this is a very long-term proposition. We're not gonna fall off the end of the earth in 2040, 2050, 2060. It is insidious and it's a very long-term proposition which we will be able to solve incrementally. And adaptation is one of those incremental solutions. A lot of places in the world are thinking about that right now. There have been some apocalyptic scenarios of flooding and weather changes, extreme weather changes. They may all come to pass. They're gonna come to pass and we will watch them and we will need to have strategies for making sure they don't become too disruptive or damaging to life and property. But I think for people to think that we have to do things today that there's this paranoia of the end of the world is coming is a little misplaced. For one thing, when you look at forecasts of anything to do with climate change, whether it's temperature, sea level rise, weather, whatever, you always, in 100% of the cases, you find a range, a range of outcomes. And some of them can be very dramatic. In the case of sea level rise, we've got one chart that shows a range of 10 inches to 20 feet. That's kind of a crazy range. And you have to ask yourself, so where in there are the probabilities? What's the likely scenario? What are the downsides of picking one versus the other?  We don't think it's going to be like that. We think there are more time is needed to record more data. I think a lot of people agree with that. It's very interesting that a lot of these charts start from today at basically zero. All the lines are together today. And all of a sudden they rapidly diverge over the next 30, 40 years. That's all forecasting. And it's a very complicated science, climate science. There may be a lot of experts that agree on a lot of things, but they don't all agree on the same things. So we have to ask ourselves, how much do we want to respond to these kinds of forecasts? Which ones do we want to respond to? And how much time can we take to kind of make sure that we're right before we do things that are damaging to our basic lifestyles and environment? And I think one of the things that is a bit risky with this, and I'll just close with this. I did have a company that distributed fuel products. We're just a trucking company that buys from the big refinery and then sends it off to other people. But I know a little bit about petroleum business and distribution. And I know a little bit about the refining business. I think this effort to, in some cases, actually make fossil fuels illegal and to risk shutting down the refinery without a proper assessment of its strategic importance are a little misguided.  That's a whole other subject we'll get into someday. I think you'll find it very interesting if you tune back in, but the refinery and fossil fuels are not just going to disappear. They are huge, they are part of modern life. We really cannot live without them. It's not just gasoline and jet fuel. It's everything. As you turn yourself 360 degrees wherever you are watching this, you will not be able to find one thing in your view that is not heavily dependent on the production of fossil fuels and use of fossil fuels. So I'll end with that. We'll do it again next time and probably devote a whole program to that transition. So Clint, we don't have a lot more time. We've got some closing thoughts. Certainly, hopefully we've conveyed what the Practical Policy Institute of Hawaii is about. We're brand new, we intend to make our presence known through a website. We're so new, don't even have that yet. Quote under construction, as you've seen. We'll be testifying and have been at the legislature and tend to do so at the city council. We've had a couple of off heads. We hope to do more webinars like this, position papers to our community leaders, social media continue the presentations to lunch groups, clubs, associations and so forth. Our primary goal is education of the public. But equally important, perhaps even more so, is that our policy makers, the legislature and the city and county of Honolulu need to make fully informed decisions. There's a lot they can do, policies, taxation, establishing priorities, incentives, subsidies and so forth. And yes, we intend to call some of the, what we think is exaggerated projections that are included in models. We think critical informed judgment and scientific methodological fact-checking is important. There's an interesting letter to the editor not too long ago that if you start with the assumption that the more deviant the facts, the more improbable the projections is always a good place to begin to hunt for veracity. So that's what we intend to do. In the words of Representative Chris Lee, that was in the Scientific American not too long ago. He said that the 100% renewable goal in 2045 was set and this is the exact quote, without doing the due diligence to figure out how this will be achieved. We think there's a lot more work to a lot more due diligence that needs to be done. And we think it's under time, it's time to undertake that due diligence. So again, thank you to Jay Fidel and the Think Tech Hawaii team for having us. We hope to be a regular voice on this webcast or at least participate frequently. I think that's our time limit. Thank you again for tuning in and aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.