Welcome everyone, I'm so excited to welcome today, Ginny Gang, back to Columbia, actually, where you taught in 2015, right? And also to lecture in this auditorium where you've lectured before as well. But this year, New York has experienced what the opening of the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation, the latest addition to the New York Historic American Museum of Natural History meant. And I must say that I'm so impressed, I was telling you now that architecturally you could compete with the ants, which is actually, for those that have been there, there's this amazing installation of the ants doing their architecture slowly and collaboratively. And I must say that is probably the only architecture that could compete with that very successfully. And I think that at the time that there's so many, it's so important to understand what is the scientific role in producing facts, collective facts that can be shared and that can not be denied without more scientific work. The work that the extension of the Natural History Museum is done in facilitating access to science, to promote the way science could be understood collectively and open to different audiences is something that I must say that is incredibly important. And I want to commend you, Ginny, for that. I also think that that's an architecture that is not only catering to humans. It's an architecture that is formed by the wind, by the light, by the circulations, by the flows of the city and the nature of the city is part of by all those more than human presences that the museum is talking about by the geologists there. And that's why I think this project is so successful because it's both talking of the traditions of architecture but also how the traditions of architecture are relating to nature, to forces, to the mineral, all that that is in the museum, in the museum stands for. This is, of course, not the only project that Ginny Kang is done in the city and beyond but I want to also remember that Ginny was a bachelor, has a bachelor degree from the University of Illinois in Urbana Campaign. It's really amazing to see your entire trajectory also mastering from the GSD but also a period of time in Zurich working on urban design and of course your time at OMA right after you graduated from GSD, a time that also you work together with amazing people that end up having, you end up producing a little network of people that had a conversation that we all have followed through your work. And I think that's very telling of how practice, academia, activism, I think works together in networks of people that keep having conversations, collaborating what's probably what the discipline of architecture is about. In 1997, it was the year that the Studio Gang architects opened in Chicago. The Studio Gang gained an international reputation with the Aqua Tower. I mean, there was a moment that everyone was talking about the Aqua Tower. Everyone keeps talking about the Aqua Tower but there's a moment and also attached to many ideas and many stories, like the tallest building that is ever been designed by a team directed by a woman, right? And that was, of course, very important for all of us and very important. But not only that's the importance of this building. It's a beautiful building that is very intelligently using the balconies and the shape of the balconies to make it possible to have a different relationship with the city and with its wind and its environment and reinventing what interior, domestic interiors could look like, but also what is the presence that they could have in the city? And this tower that was actually changing the whole character of the city of Chicago and understanding it is a big part of the work that you've developed for Chicago. And I mean, the list of projects that you've been working on is very long. Some of them are, I mean, my favorite is the SOS Children's Villages Lab Esorio Community Center. This very, very, very important building that is translated into images and form, the collective effort to support children in need and that needed the community to actually support them but is very much also translated into the architecture of the building and how the donation of different materials and even the possibility of putting together different concretes and expressing that through the building that was actually the result of donations, for me it's very beautiful. It's also kind of how the aesthetics of architecture can also be telling a story of community efforts and solidarity and translated that into something that through architecture can be sensed and the meaning of the building as a reality that is composed in a different society is also expressed through its materiality. And I think that the use of these materials in this way was probably one of the most successful ways of translating engagement through form and image. But of course, there's many others.  The Columbia College, actually the Expo in Chicago, the Nature Boardwalk in Chicago and Lincoln Park, so the two both houses along the Chicago River and I think your entire work on the Chicago River and the reverse of what it implied for the city and the long lasting effects of reverting the direction of its current and what everything that came through that and how from a contemporary perspective of reflection on what it implied can be done from architecture. I think it's a big part of your work but also gives a broader scope and culture around all the projects that you've been developing in your practice in Chicago and what this meant.  I don't want to read everything because it's actually, you've done everything, right? But I also think that it's important to say that your practice has been incredibly celebrated. You in 2004, both in 2004 and 2012, your firm received the Emporys Award to the best Newscapers of the year. In 2006, you received the Arts and Letters Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. You received actually in 2011 a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, a big, big event for everyone, for all of us. In 2013, you received the Architectural Design Award and I loved how it was explained exceptionally, exemplary work in public commercial or residential architecture design, acknowledging the broad spectrum in which you operate and which, of course, is crossed by your overall effort and practice and that was given by the Cooperate with National Design Museum. I want to recall kind of two moments that you expressed what your work was about and one is the, in a conversation with Ginia Belafonte that was published in the New York Times in 2016, you said, and so really designing this first, this fire rescue tool started me thinking about are there ways that design could help improve their relationship between community members and police if we looked at the architecture? Not that it can solve everything, but I think you know, maybe it can be part of that dialogue in creating relationships between police and community members which are not just the confrontational relationships. And for me, this is loaded with architectural wisdom. It's not probably an ambition of solving something that no one can resolve or can solve or make disappear, but definitely architecture can work in the way different parts of societies relate to each other. And I think this capacity of architecture to mediate is actually talking of a very different approach to architecture and architecture that is explained in its relational role that represents very well what your contributions to architecture are. And the second is from Michael Bullock that is very, someone very familiar to many of us that wrote in about you in PINAP Magazine, community advocacy, sustainability, environmentalism, interdisciplinary collaboration. This may sound like vast words, better suited to a 1970s political activist that are leading 21st century architectural firm, but they are all essential elements in Genie Kang's practice. Please join me in welcoming Genie Kang. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It's such an honor to be here again. And after the last time I was here, I was teaching a studio, and it was a really wonderful experience. And I met a lot of students that are now colleagues and it was really great as well as the conversations with other faculty members. So I thought I would start today just talking a little bit about what these things are that tie these diverse projects together and then go into the kind of like four, just four new projects that I haven't shown much of before. So, and there's some research elements woven in. So Studio Gang as we, I started the practice in Chicago and which was my hometown. But one of the things that was so interesting was how frequent. Everyone always spoke about this plan, the Burnham Plan of 1909. It's actually the Burnham and Bennett Plan. And it really struck me that it, why are we talking about this plan 100 plus years later? And so I really came to learn that this plan is what drives so much of what goes on in Chicago still and how important it is to have a kind of a plan, a big picture plan. Even though there are things that were definitely left out of it. What I was more interested in at the time when I first got to Chicago was more about the ecology and this fantastic situation of the Great Lakes which is actually 20% of all the fresh water on the planet is present in these lakes. And they are really the reason why Chicago exists. It transformed into, well, from days before industrialization and before Western colonization, but then afterwards as well, this water drove the industrial production. And so all of these natural resources that came from the North and the water to combine to make steel made Chicago that's really this transportation hub. And when you think about how much land that transportation took up in the form of rail, you can see here, it would be impossible for an individual to get to the water across all these rails. So part of what Burnham plan was doing was to, it was like a reform and it was civic minded citizens to help pay for the plan and it was a very extensive plan. So parts of this, this is just part of it is just constantly being step by step realized like the Great Lakefront and the 26 miles of public space along the lakefront. And so, but what, so my practice and our practice as how we started to form it was driven by some different things than this, but it comes back to this in a certain way. Really the unintended consequences of the industrialization, which ended up creating like not only Chicago as a kind of polluted place, I guess, but also this entire rust belt, which is something like nine states and dozens of cities that have this legacy of industrial pollution, contamination with water, land, et cetera, and the loss of all the work that went into creating a steel industry. So this is now zooming into specifically into the Chicago area and the presence of Superfund sites which are federally designated sites that are so polluted that don't even want to go anywhere near those ones and plenty of brownfield sites.  And it's always shocks me to see this picture where you have this landscape in the back, this hill that's not actually a hill, it's just a mound of landfill invasive species, water, poor water quality. But what's interesting to this and why it's kind of the muse of the practice, I would say is that this overlay of the polluted and abandoned sites is actually what makes Chicago and other cities that are in the rust belt, this abandonment is actually what makes them kind of becoming like the last frontier for many species. It's in a very important, important space for life. And because it's not a monocultural, like green lawn that doesn't allow for any animals to exist or the hyper efficient agricultural lands that don't allow for anything else to exist. So these are actually becoming really important network sites. And you can see there the overlay with the migratory path of birds on the Mississippi Flyway. So originally this interest in all this area took the form of an idea about reuse in the practice. And an early competition that we won was based on thinking about how you could redesign the practice of architecture to use things that are available and nearby. And so this is about, you can see the column cluster in the lower right is about having multiple different types of steel possible to make a column cluster, whatever is available at that moment. So it's like, you just design it like a chef would design a meal, what's available. The other unintended consequence, of course, of this overlay is the intersection of birds and flyways and cities and glass, which is a very deadly problem, especially in Chicago and even this year, there was a big event in one day, a thousand birds crashing into window glass they cannot see as they're going along the flyway. I've worked, since this project, which I also worked with Kate or on this project, we've both gone on to work on guidelines for cities and on policy to reduce this threat. But this first project was about kind of thinking about a screen that could also be an opportunity for people to be outside glass, but within a protected space. And that was kind of what the building looked like. Of course, this building never got realized, but the ideas in it certainly did, of all of our projects, our aim for bird safety. This is Writers Theater where we use this kind of screen. In this case, it's a tents and it's a wood intention that holds a walkway that goes around the glass and all the glass is treated with ceramic frits, so it's safe for birds. So then, I think what really becomes more apparent is just like this desire to repair things. It's a desire to take action and our practice through everyone that I work with. We think about it this way. And that is apparent in some of the early work on the river that Jacques mentioned, this idea of the reverse effect. Like, what is, this whole work started as a response to some legislation that we were trying to get passed, which was to make the municipality disinfect raw sewage that they were putting into the water. And so we did research with natural resources, Defense Council and the Joyce Foundation, and we made this book that showed, tried to raise the awareness of the public about this waterway that has nothing to do with a building at this point. The issue of poor water quality, flooded basements, these invasive species coming up, threatening to get into Lake Michigan, and then the potential of all this post-industrial land. So this was happening in about 2010. It was still dumping sewage into this river. And because the river is reversed, it's really pushing the problem downstream and not into the lake where is the drinking water. So what the result of this long story short is there were step by step how to unreverse this river, but step number one was all about like getting some of this in post-industrial land and giving people access to the river, even if it's dirty, even if it's smelly, but just let them understand this river because for so long, the industry dominated the sides of it. So this resulted in a political miracle happened and the mayor of the city kind of embraced this idea and decided to build these boat houses to give students access to the water and to racing. So there were like four of them overall that were planned. And we did two of these, one on the north side and one on the south side. And they were really meant, this is where the architecture becomes really important. So how do you get people to go to this place that they didn't even know was there? So there was this idea of, our idea was like bringing motion into it, trying to make the roof very interesting, taking this kind of stop gap idea of structure and creating something that's very lively and because you need this kind of, it's like a gateway drug for architecture to get people to do something. They need architecture and really good architecture too. It's not just anything. So you can see this is very simple, very simple framing, but with this three dimensional surfaces created by straight elements. And it just makes me really excited to see this in use in so full use today. So like I said, we were just working with this idea of stop gap, row motion. Here you can see how the roof is kind of warped there. But what's really great is what goes on inside. It's youth after school activities, it's wounded veterans. There's different kinds of groups that I did not even know about that existed and they just really use rowing as a way to create better spirit and teamwork. And this is the one on the south side. But so this is all to say that in 10 years time from that, when those came out and there was work done in the downtown along the river as well, there are many more groups. It's basically it made people into stewards of the river. It converted ordinary citizens through all these actions into being supporters and their advocates and their voters.  So I think that's why I get most excited about and why I think architecture can be a political force. Okay, so now I'm gonna go into like some projects that we've been working on for a while that are finally finished. First the Tom Lee Park in Memphis. I might have talked about it for a while because it went on for quite a while. It's on another river, the Grand Mississippi River. Such an impressive river, it's so huge and it changes in elevation like 50 feet at different times. So we, Studio Gang, were hired to design the full waterfront for the city. So the city, basically the river was the loading dock for the city and the main street was everything turned there back on the river and toward this main street. And so we had worked on a whole 16 mile stretch of the river and then kind of zeroed in on a couple places. One was the cobblestone landing, which had this very fraught history and the other was Tom Lee Park. And where the Venice Biennale, we exhibited the history and the future of the cobblestone landing. We actually were able to ship some cobblestones over to Venice and have Italian craftsmen put them into the gallery and told these stories of the different people who experienced Memphis in different ways. So if you remember, Memphis was a city where a lot of these like fake historical memorials to the Civil War people were put up and then they were taken down. And Tammy Sawyer was the one who led that fight. And these are some of the citizens that we found in different professions to give their stories. And the idea was to kind of make a new kind of memorial space that would be more inclusive. So that project kind of still kind of moving along slowly. And meanwhile, they asked us to start on Tom Lee Park. So Tom Lee Park was just a dike, not just an infrastructural piece that was meant to prevent flooding. And it was dominated by this festival, music festival and a barbecue festival. And they didn't want anyone else using it, these users. But we were asked to engage the communities and find out what people wanted. And that was really helpful. We did this youth design leadership group, which now we kind of do that on some of our other projects too. Just to get people from high school, like what would make you come down to the park and introduce them to design professions, I guess, landscape architecture, architecture. This is another project we did with Scape. And so we were really thinking that this city needed to go from Front Street and connect down to the park. So the idea for the park really extended out into the city. Some of the things the students were saying were, we just want a place for everyday stuff, like food and basketball or relaxing. So we have this big stretch of park and so much expectation, but what people were asking for was everyday things. So that was really interesting. So we started to think that maybe the everyday things transform when they come to the Grand Mississippi River and become extraordinary everyday things. So that was kind of the working thesis of the project. We were looking for methods of building. These are really interesting photographs of what the river looked like in these old, they used cranes made of wood to unload wood. And just really interesting working waterfront, it always had been. But the hero of this park, which is named after Tom Lee, is he was a black river worker who basically saved like 32 people that were drowning on a boat that was on the Mississippi River. And he himself, he couldn't swim, but he took his boat back and kept going out and getting more people and saved all these people. So he was a true hero. So now we have, you know, there's that intensity too for this site and that's the site, which is like, okay, whatever you want, you can make it. And so we also got sued by, and the city got sued by the festival, the meet barbecue, whatever festival, and the music festival. And so in going into arbitration, to we were always accommodating their fields for the music, but we had to go through and make agreements about these fields to keep them open, which took like two years on the schedule, but it worked.  So that was a design. We would have these clusters of intensity in the big areas for fields. And so it finally opened on the holiday labor day. It opened up. I have a little video that we can see. So and what's so great is it just mixes everybody. And so the flexibility is really important with our, we call these quad pods that hold up the canopy. There's different activities you can do. It's these everyday things. And but it's been incredible. It's just been adopted immediately. And it's incredible to see how people mix. There were so much strife in this town, I tell you. So it's really fun to see this open. And a lot of, they called the canopy, well the whole park is kind of the sunset theme of the park, but there's all these activities there. And the Esther Gates piece, which memorializes Tom Lee. And then James Little, who did the pattern for the underneath the canopy. So these, and who's a Memphian also. So these are like some of the things that make it really resonate with the population. And I think these swings, they really worked well. Like people are sitting on it that don't know each other and they start talking. So that's just really cool. So then these little pavilions for the food are made with, I'm kind of interested always in these old technologies, how you can reuse them. So we did that with the Arcus Center of Social Justice using cordwood masonry. Here we did, we used this kind of wall made of, these are trees that were about to become telephone poles, but found a new life in this structure. So I like these techniques that don't use any energy. You just use the material as it is. So these are these little point pavilions that have the restrooms and cafes and that's, and then the rewilding I guess of the edges and is really exciting. Okay, so now how do these tall buildings fit into this? And that's something that a lot of people ask. So I want to just spend a couple of minutes on this. We were hitting on the theme of repair and tall buildings, they're, in Chicago, they kind of are a way to make the city more dense, I would say, because it's a city that sprawls out a lot. But this tower that we recently completed called the St. Regis Tower, this one back here, was trying to do something else as well on an urban level. So this is the frozen Chicago River right here. And then this is kind of made of these two core towers. There's three altogether, but the cores are in the outer ones, which makes a space available to connect through the tower. Here's another one of these things that we inherited, this Wacker Drive, it's right along the river, it's multiple levels of highway that were already there. And so we try to open up this tower at the base at the river level, at the upper deck level, and then make different platforms that can just connect it better. So, but that's the radical part about this tower, I would say, is just that you can walk under it and anyone can, it's just free. It's not completely open, there's structure columns, but no core and you can move through there, and people do. So this is really a gateway to the river, which is now, like I was saying, transformed so much downtown. And so during the pandemic, people just started using it fully and to capacity. So that's one way of a tower can kind of repair. Another one that we finished in New York is the, we called it the Solar Carve Tower, but it's really something 40 West, 10th Street. And it's on the high line. And we were really here trying to do is say, how, at the time, a lot of architects were trying to get sites on the high line and lean over it, because you could, and have great views down it. But we were starting to see that this is a park, but it's not like the setback skyscrapers are made to protect the light and air to the street. But here we have a public space in the interior of the block. So it's not protected at all. So everybody can go right up to it. So this project, we took it all the way through lots of zoning reviews to ask for height and to not step back at the street in this case, because of it being right on the water's edge on that side, and step away from the high line. And so after a long time, we were able to get that approval. And so it just opens up the views and brings light down to the high line. So something like thousands more hours of a year of daylight to the plants on there. So that's what it looks like. And the carved areas were the special parts that we just put attention to. This was a weird project for me because we did not know who was gonna use who was gonna go into the building. So we hadn't really ever done that before. So I guess that's what all people at design offices do. But in this case, we just, so it ended up being, it was very high ceilings, ended up weirdly being a car dealer in the building. But there is a good restaurant in there. So there's some public aspect to it. Okay, so then I wanted to now just move into these projects where recent work on what is this repair all about? And a book that will be coming out in February called The Art of Architectural Grafting. It's about trying to find new ways to talk about recycling and reuse, adaptive reuse that just the words are just so overused and we need to, I think to make these interesting, I've been working with the students at Harvard to think about grafting as a kind of new generator of ideas about adding on. And one of the really interesting things about horticultural grafting, and of course grafting, I love it because it's a very old, very, very old activity, human activity, but collaborating with nature and what nature can do, especially plants, because plants are so prolific. So grafting is about getting more out of the root stock, better tasting fruit, nicer flowers. It really, it emphasizes this exciting aspect that I think architecture can bring. So it's not just a quiet thing, there's rules to it. Plus you can't just graft anything onto anything either with horticultures. So there's a lot of interesting parts about it and I think it really works for trying to flush out more ideas around grafting. Grafting, it's really a great way of grafting. Grafting is really, a lot of it is a response to a wound. So even today they don't know everything about how it works.  It's really more like cloning. But there's really interesting things about it in terms of how people thought about it and thought of it as being impure. And that I think carries over to when we think about architecture that's been added onto. If you look at renovations, this is a graph that came out of, it's just a combined data set that came out of the European Union looking at the different carbon contents and carbon savings of different reuse methods. And so you can see that they're not all equal. But one of the best, most carbon saving methods is to increase the intensity of use on what we already have. Less effective, let's say, is like design for disassembly. Because to save the carbon for design disassembly, you have to wait until the building is disassembled and then it has to actually be reused. So it's kind of like, it's not exactly saving in the time frame that we have, which isn't very long, to get this down from 2050. So a lot of the projects that we've been working on are exactly that, trying to increase the intensity and capacity of the buildings. The powerhouse at Beloit College is a great example. A building that was a coal burning power plant. And I love it because it's like, now it's going to be, it is a health center and a recreation center and a student unit. But this shows really nicely the original power plant, the dam. And then this is Beloit College up on the hill. So it's kind of a town and gown. And this is a historic picture of it with the rail coming in. In the 1970s they added the scrubber on because of the regulations about air quality. But it was always a kind of, it's a dirty power plant, but it was also really the foundation for a lot of the jobs in the area. And people were attached to it. A lot of people worked there. So when we went to explore it for new uses, we looked at the way that it had grown over time, which was really in this serial manner. And we continued that pattern and added the new field house at the north. And then looked for what were good matches for the uses on the inside. So for the rec center, there's a track that kind of ties together all these different volumes. There's a pool, there's a classroom, a lecture room, field house, et cetera. And different ways that we could reduce the operational energy of the place. But this is the way it looked when we first got there.  And then you have like really, but grand spaces. So in a way, it's a building you would never be able to have these generous spaces if you started from scratch. And so one of the things that is a grafting aspect of it is how it ties this building, which was before kind of blocking people's access to the water to become a generator of access. So it holds a whole new boardwalk along the river. And then inside of it, it has an elevator that takes you from the high hill of the college down. So it's kind of like this machine for accessibility as well. And I think it's been super well received. It opened up right kind of during the pandemic and made it possible for the students to be able to be together in a very big space. This bridge was added. We added that to connect over from the hill and the college and then you come down the elevator there. This is the floating track and some of the spaces. All of the steel was in there. And these hoppers inside the hoppers is like a climbing gym. And just we tried to work with what was already there. And then this piece, which is that room that had the roof holes and it is now their competitive gym. Okay, so this is number two, the Kresge College University of California, Santa Cruz. I'm going to go kind of faster this because I haven't really talked about it ever before, but we've been talking about it within the office. We just opened. Does anyone remember Kresge College? It's designed by Charles Moore, the 1970s postmodern architect. And it's in these incredible foothills right near Santa Cruz, close to Monterey Bay, in a forest of redwoods. And it's an incredible sight. And a lot of the people that go to school that are in UC Santa Cruz, if they're in Kresge College, they're usually studying environment. So we started with just like looking who already lives here at Kresge College.  And those are like mushrooms that grow on the redwoods. And the students there, the whole thing was founded on this kind of participatory democracy at the time. And it's very hippie. It's very interesting. And at the time when it was designed, they decided to let the students build out their own dorm room so that they were given money and they were just told to like design whatever. Of course, none of these things were to code and there were all kinds of problems. And some students didn't ever design anything. They just stayed sleeping in the sleeping bags on the floor. So there were problems, but it was really an interesting experiment. And this Charles Moore, I did not know so much about him except for he was postmodern. But when I started to learn more about his work and he worked with Lyndon Turnbull, Whitaker, and then Dan Kiley with the landscape, it was really interesting the way that they were thinking about the space as a kind of almost like an Italian hill town in the forest. And then there were these little, what he called trivial monuments that were scattered throughout the streetscape. One was like a mayor's stand. I mean, all these kinds of little follies, I guess, in a way very interesting, but kind of run down at this point. The students were not... When we arrived, the students were not exactly loving this place because it had kind of grown over and there wasn't a lot of sunlight and a lot of these experiments didn't exactly work. So the college asked us to renovate and add new housing and new academic spaces. It was the one college with no academic spaces. This is a picture of how it looked in progressive architecture when it was published in 1987. And then what I found in the archives, our team found this TV show that Charles Moore did to get interaction with students and others. So you can see, so this was on TV, he was drawing on TV and taking advice from people participating. So we tried to get that spirit back. The students really wanted to participate and we coaxed them to come to meetings with these posters, but they really did want to. And so we were really engaged with them from the beginning. These are some of the meetings outside and this beautiful leather. And the other thing was to try to... How to engage with this existing building by Charles Moore. So we participated in... I think it was a 40-year anniversary. This was at Charles Moore's house that they had and we presented the scheme, which was scary because we were afraid they wouldn't like it. And they encouraged us to also have our own voice and to just mix in with the Charles Moore campus. And the college asked us to do many different iterations from keeping everything to getting rid of everything, which we didn't really want to do, but we looked at. And so then there were discoveries along the way. This is the original design for the academic building, which we later kind of inspired by those mushrooms growing down the Sequoia, decided to go down into the ravine with this building to keep it low. So just some modeling and stuff that we did during this time for the academic building with rather large academic building. Here it is. So at the end of the street, the classrooms are up at the top and then all the offices and labs trickle down into the ravine. We had this giant model, and these three volumes here are new residential buildings placed to not kill redwood families and to be visible through the Charles Moore kind of vistas. All of this really, everything's like wood construction. It's really impressive what we could get accomplished with wood construction there. You can see with the resident halls like a platform and then wood construction above. And these are the final, you know, just what it looks like now right before the students moved in. These curving bent residence halls with a new path that connects a loop around that connects into the Charles Moore. So really understanding, these are the little acorn woodpecker vents. It's a rookery there. You can get a feel for it. And so all of these lounges are on the ends of the dorm areas so they can be more social. And here's a picture of the academic building that's stepping down into the ravine in the classrooms. And here's a picture of how you see it when you come across the ravine on this new bridge and new connections inside the building. Okay. I've been talking for 38 minutes so I'm going to speed up a little bit. I just wanted to show you this though. For the frit, for protecting the birds, we used the 12 different species that are on site. So they're like these little critters. I don't know if you can see them. The banana slug is one of them. And the students really love this and it's like their favorite detail and they started to put the critters on all of their stuff. So it's kind of fun to see them adopting it. So these last two are really kind of similar projects that I want to show you. They're both museums that have a kind of grafted extra capacity in them. The first one I'll go really quick, which is the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts. Seven different buildings built over time. Maybe it was eight. Yes, eight. And eight different structural systems and eight different mechanical systems with very strange architecture, as you can see in this picture. But this place is this beloved place. And I remember going to the interview and with some very, very famous architects, we're also interviewing. And I just, I was so taken with this place because it's a school. It's like, it's an art school. It's galleries. It's a theater school. It's everything a museum wants to be today, but they already had it. They just had a bad building or eight bad buildings. So it was really exciting. And you can see in this picture, there's this little 1937 building. That was the original building. So part of doing grafting, let's say, or adaptive reuse, you have to kind of, you have to get to know the building very, very well to see what you can add capacity to. So we found out that with these different systems, only one part of the building could take an additional floor. And then we had to make sense out of the, just the organization, which was very unusual. And what we ended up doing is reorganizing the uses. And then this is the kind of spine that is a bit organic in shape because it had to connect different things. But it also clears the way for the 1937 building to be the front entry. This is up one level. So you kind of, it's the Port Cocher. There's a courtyard and then this original building. And then this is how it bursts out into the park. And for the first time, it really kind of makes it connected. We used white as a material just to make everything calm down and connect. And you would not believe, there's so many materials in this building that just figuring out how to get white to work with the different parts was really interesting. So this is the 1937 front on the left. And the model that shows how the room wraps around it above. And then this is what that room looks like. It's really a cultural living room that's elevated. And on the back, which is on the left picture, the restaurant that pokes out. They just didn't have these kind of social spaces. And they also needed more galleries. This is looking back out to the Port Cocher with the cultural living room up here. And sculpture with Henry Moore that they already had. And then this is looking down the spine area. So it's connecting two different levels. It's bringing in light and making it more fluid for moving around. And everything else is kind of... It was about creating a new identity to this existing building. Okay, and then finally, just to talk about the Gilder Center here in New York at the American Museum of Natural History. It's always hard to talk about this building. I'm going to take a glass of water first. Ten years more of my life, but... But it's also got so many really important themes that it's hard to say hierarchically what is most important. I mean, I think in general, the big philosophical change is we're not separate from nature. We're part of it. But museums set up this situation that made us feel separated from it, observing it in certain ways. And so that was one kind of thing we knew we need to undo because of the urgency of having to be part of nature and love it and be in it. There's the site planning, which originally the building was supposed to be this kind of four-square, clear axis. And looking at the old documents really made us realize that maybe we could make an addition and get some sense about how you move through the building. You can see here that it didn't ever follow its own plan. This is our site here. This is the first hall that they built, which was hall number one. And then they had this courtyard, and then they just started filling in all the courtyards. And you can see it really clearly here. That is where the addition wing is going to go. What's interesting with this one is, so this is on, this is 79th down the middle. And then you have the Central Park West over here. This building here, which is really anonymous looking building, has all of their collections in it already. It was just a stack of collections. This little building was a former power plant, which they replaced with this. And so they had stuck ichthyology into this house, which they needed to come out. So we tucked it back into this space here. The other really interesting thing is, the site is on 79th Street axis. I don't know, maybe we can find some other buildings that are on an axis in the Manhattan grid, but it's pretty rare, I would say. So that was special, and we needed to understand that. Then there's the activity that goes on inside the building. Real science, expeditions. A lot of people using tools like MRI to study their collections. So the collections are really alive, and they are constantly being looked at and new things discovered about them. And then it's just like, what are we building? What is it like in the taxonomy? What would you call what we're doing with this wing? So we started to look at all these different additions that they had, and you can see we named them, we looked at what they were doing. We decided that this new wing had to be both an axial hall, like some of the older buildings, but also an iconic entry. So the new entry that will be on Columbus Ave. So that's what our goal was. It's both an axial hall and an iconic entry.  We wanted to connect to make this flow for the visitors much more intuitive. And even if you run into very different collections, it gives the visitors a chance to make mental connections. And so that red outline is where the original building was supposed to be. This is how it ended up, and then this is a kind of our addition here. And then this idea of editing to kind of clarify the connections. And this is, of course, this big collections core that was there. So there was also the aspect of keeping this park. So even though the original building was supposed to go out and take all of this park, of course people love the park over time. And we worked closely with landscape architects and the community to understand how they were using the park and to try to preserve it. So that's why our building kind of steps back and connects. It pulls back in a kind of deferential way, I would say, to align with the existing weird combination of buildings that they have. I think there's 25 buildings. We made over 30 connections to those buildings. But mind you, when we're doing construction and designing it, this is all closed off from those other parts. So even though the design is meant to make all these connections, there's still lots of opportunity for future, more content-wise connections between these things that we didn't focus on for this project. We were focused on the idea of connecting education and science and innovation in one wing. So this kind of shows the footprint of it. It had to house this big theater. This is the collections core. Everything behind here and out here, a library, classrooms. There's 18 classrooms inside of it. So it's really making a stand on science education, providing that through the museum for everyone. And this is just kind of back in time, a first sketch, which was a collage of just like, how can we get people excited about exploration and discovery? And so, of course, the landscape is geological discovery and exploration is always something that gets me excited, I guess. And we had a fun trip out west to just look at different landscapes and their scales. And then just realize that, you know, these are contingent, all of these forms are contingent on their supports and then there's erosion and things that happen that make them structures. And they're also like human in scale, that was interesting. You can see these benches and they just look like they were always there for people. So to study this digitally and analog, we used every kind of possible tool, but ice being in Chicago in the middle of the winter, it's a good tool. Melting it with water and like a little miniature blow torch to get this feeling of this, because the software really wasn't working at all. It was just blobby, you know, blobby blobs. So we ended up with this is, and I still need a name, so if anyone has a good candidate name for this thing, please tell me afterwards. So it's the design is like this structure that is sitting on columns that it had to be sitting on because everything, the loading for the entire building comes below this space. So if you've ever gone to an event and under the blue whale, everything for that event came through underneath this space. So we could only sit it down on a few places. So it's a structure made of shot creep, it's concrete and it holds the floors of the new wing. So it's a structure, but it's not a cave, it's a, I don't know, what? It's a, that's the architecture. And the thing is there's no form work. We could never do this with form work because it would, everything was different. It's so contingent, it's so dependent on its site. You can see, this is a model we made, but you can see where the like feet are coming down and how it has to span and create openings. This is a view, a little peek into the collections core. Getting into the mockups. So shot create is, it's a way of creating a structure which is used in infrastructure like down below Manhattan, there are tunnels which we went and visited and there are incredible cathedrals under there and people are down there building them with shooting the concrete into the rebar and then scraping it in. So it's a technique used primarily for infrastructure. So we tried to, and the people that do it, some of them are quite, they're artists as well because sometimes they're asked to do things for zoos or make it look like a rock. So they kind of already, they know aesthetics and if you ever saw these tunnels below Manhattan that they look like they're incredible vaulted arches under there. This is just some of the tests and the other really cool thing about construction was that we had to, everything, you couldn't see it for so long because it was filled with scaffolding and then they start at the top and go down spraying the concrete. So that was weird. Usually buildings I've worked on in the past start at the bottom and go up. So it was fun to see that and then to see the scaffolding start coming out and so you get this axial hull with some interesting side spaces and portals. Of course these portals are designed to carry the loads around them so they're not, you wouldn't be able to have a square hull in this structure. It wouldn't distribute the loads. So all of that is structural. There's no finish. The concrete is the finish. It's kind of pure architecture in a certain way. And then this is one of the columns we could not move. We had to go down but this is where we wanted the library. So it's a column with beams that come out and it's the rare book library and the library. This is a little bit before it was finished but it's something that you see from the street. Then inside you have this theater that's in the round digital theater that allows the visitors to see things that you can't see with human eye from microscopic to very, very big all based, designed with the actual data sets from the museum. And then the insect collection that Jacques mentioned. My favorite with these leaf cutter ants who are if only humans could be as cooperative and work together, we would be in a much better place. But they do, they work together and they harvest plants, different leaves or petals. And then this is Ralph Appelbaum's design that they bring it back into these orbs and they ferment the leaves. I think they throw up and then they ferment. I don't know, something like, it's very impressive. But this is just the way that they have learned how to survive and this whole exhibit takes into account the way that they move and what they want to do. So that is the front of the museum, really it's just the inside moving to the outside and then being clad with stone which is the granite that is the original granite quarry that was used for the museum on the other side. So this is on the 79th Street axis. It looks light compared to its neighbor to the right but it is, we felt that because it was an iconic entrance and it was directly across from the Central Park West entrance that they should share materiality. And then this linement I think is the key thing here was realizing that because of the site and being on axis with 79th Street you have this great opportunity to align with not only the building inside but to connect to that but to the city of Manhattan and then the planetary connection beyond in the famous Manhattan Henge events so named by Neil deGrasse Tyson who is from the museum. So with that I'll wrap it up and these are the four offices, Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Paris. We worked together very collaboratively and some of our team is here tonight so thank you very much together. Let's start with the last project. I was surprised to see the huge amount of images very different that you saw to explain the Gilder Center and I, you know, like we saw the ice melting but we also saw this beautiful plan, floor plan with the humans as hunts actually kind of going all the way through the axis and then we saw this image of the sun and many, many others and I mean it seems to have been a difficult project a project that required kind of a very sophisticated approach. I wonder what was the main difficulty or the kind of the ambition that required this huge effort and all this registration kind of languages. Well, you know, with a lot of people when they see this project they say how did you get the museum to do that? I mean that's incredible, you know but that was the least hard part. When they saw the first designs they were like, yes, that's it and then they were totally into it the whole time so that wasn't a problem. They understood it, maybe it's because of their science brain or something you know, like this makes sense and so that was really a nice result but a lot of the hard parts were you know, just once we landed on this design of like how we wanted to do it it was really how to build it how to do it in a budget and just the long time this museum also got sued for this project as well so there's like delays you have to put it down, pick it back up that kind of thing. That makes it hard because the team you know, it changes and so when projects last a long time I think that's probably the biggest challenge the continuity of because there's so much history to it already. But in a way there's really an investment in making the architecture work at many different scales and also for many different constituencies I would say I have a feeling that for instance you even mentioned that the project works at the planetary scale and also then it goes to the the kind of microcopy of images that are not available for humans mostly so I have the feeling that there's something very unique of this project that is really capturing on this idea of architecture operating as a nature or kind of relationship with nature, right? Yeah, I think that like being not trying to force it into a form so in a way that's just like a very natural way of working for me, for us and kind of like letting it letting the forces the things that had to be where they are let them rise and like respond as a response and working with it instead of against it because if you really tried to put some kind of order some Cartesian order into this thing it would just be constantly being compromised it wouldn't work so I think that that approach being very open to what it was telling us is a kind of natural way of working that worked well with this looking for connections looking for what's relevant and trying to bring that in that's been a constant in your lecture and I would say your work trying to work with things as they are and also learning what is their potential I remember this beautiful installation I think it was at the Art Institute in Chicago with Marble Oh, Natural History Museum Natural History Museum National Building Museum For me it was great because you were looking at Marble not as something that could be decorative but actually at this capacity to work structurally and during the geometry in a way that it could be assembled together Yes, that was really about could you put Marble into tension again starting with a floor that couldn't really support stone which we were supposed to be exhibiting stone so there's a kind of reason for trying to make it light and then it's a kind of project where I love doing installations like that or I'm sure that it's something that students when you first get out you might get a chance to do but it's always great to take advantage of that because you can experiment and it's not a building that's going to leak or something like that so the experiment here was how to make it to see how much capacity there would be in Marble and stone which is not exactly like you know everyone tells you stone is not going to work in tension but then after you start looking at it there are some stones that actually do pretty well so yeah it's suspend disbelief You've been I mean I love the beginning of your lecture also when you were claiming this post industrial landscapes as places that have huge potential also acknowledging that even though they were impure I mean mixing words that you were using at different moments or hybrid or but they were basically actually containing more biodiversity or that the one that would be expected right or the one that you could find in this green environment like what does it offer and it turns out to be you know crucible for nature to have biodiversity and cities that have these kind of spaces when a lot of other spaces are becoming too efficient for them to survive so yeah there's like a positive thing in there How does that tension reflect in the development of your work in a way we really kind of imposed hegemony on kind of green environments clean toxicity being disappearing kind of high-end cultures in a way I think that your work is giving value to situations that are much more impure that's perfect but acknowledging that actually they're richer in many ways and that they have much more potential that this flattening of reality Yes that's so true One downside is you know of course there are communities that are burdened more heavily than others with these kind of polluted environments and so that's the reason why another reason why I'm interested because it's also like a chance to give voice to people that don't want this pollution in their space but then you see the Calumet area for example descendants of the steel workers which really is everyone from Lithuanian people to Mexican people, African Americans everyone has worked in this industry in Chicago and the legacy of it is a lot of people living in this area that's polluted but there's also an adopting of birding and active political action and ecology that's very thriving in that area and so it's fun to work with people that are motivated to change things Let's talk about participation because some of your projects have been presented as at one point processes that were participated and you were showing methodologies that you were using and even the effort of curating a group of citizens to work on them or models that could be shared or different options. What is the role of participation in your work and what is the moment in which you included that in those projects because at the same time I have the feeling that also there is a take for decisions that are personal forms Well I think participation doesn't mean that community members are taking your hand and drawing it's a process that is it gives something to the project and it also gives something back to the participants and so it makes us into a team, a co-creating team so my view of it is we have certain skills in our life but other people that participate bring something else and so if you can get that all together and as the role of the architect the one that can listen and kind of tease out the things that might be applicable to design, building design that's what we have to do and then the benefit is it takes time and patience but it is the support for the project like in Memphis for example when we had to go into the arbitration there were so many people supporting this project happening that it just the people that were trying to keep it for themselves they had to back track out because they were no longer the most powerful group it was the groups that were participating in the design and wanted it and so it's also people are empowered to change the city to what they want to see and that is super exciting so I like that power of making it happen and we can't just do it ourselves because you could have a beautiful design and if nobody wants it it's never going to get built how that is different from what you learned or what you were doing in the school of architecture because in a way I have the feeling that the projects that you're doing making happen are incredibly participate in social I don't know how to say it they have a scale they are included in locations that are incredibly sensitive for many people but I think that what you showed us today are projects that are not only explained in the let's say architectural design on the way that you would debate the design among colleagues but they are made possible through alliances that go beyond the circle of architects yes I would say that's absolutely true and it's also there's a spectrum of that kind of participation at least just informing people this is what's happening in your neighborhood to things in between and the most empowering people to say what they feel and have it incorporated and be part of it a little bit is dependent not just on us but on the client or whoever is the owner of the building or the space and the clients are cities that want to do that we've worked with certain clients that don't want any participation but we've attempted to take some of the things we learned from Memphis youth design leadership and ask certain developers what do you think about doing a youth design group and one of them actually agreed and funded us to and worked with us to engage a group so maybe there's hope for those private projects to be more open how do you say, I mean in a way you're an architect that are credibly international and global in many ways you work around the world and also an architect that you live in the Netherlands so I think you're connected to the global networks in many different ways but at the same time you're a well-known architect around the world very much connected to Chicago very much of a US architect in a way as well whereas in the past I would say most American architects would be related to references in Europe, in Italy in a way your references are very rooted in Chicago and your reflection, your book on the river it's crucial to understand how you wanted to practice it's very different in a way the way you speak of where you're grounded I have the feeling that it's also indicating a change for American architects well I know that like just for me I mean I needed a like I amused I needed a place, the city of Chicago which was so interesting to me growing up and all of its aspects like to start to work in that place and just that's where I started to develop a methodology of working and now I feel like so what we're doing is with these different locations is we're doing that same thing in different locations so instead of thinking of like Studio Gang is a global firm that works everywhere we're like these four local firms I guess that then we connect to bring resources to projects that are further afield but it's that I just feel like we need to know the place that we're in to be able to be effective I guess it's just the way I feel is it a different way I don't know, I think there's always been architects that are regional and local but what I think maybe the difference is that we're trying to draw those lessons and then apply them in local ways elsewhere so it was very useful to start in a place I would say and to anchor into that place my first projects were all community centers so like one for the SOS you mentioned the Ford Calumet, the Chinese American Community Center and these places let me meet people from the city in different neighborhoods and understand what they want and why are they different and it really gave me a good look at Chicago and the weird thing was then one day having a developer say do you want to design a tower because I had been doing much more local work and so you know when that offer came I was thinking oh well that's interesting how would we do that in a different way or what's missing in towers and what we came up with in the office was just like you can't go outside so it kind of because we knew that the material was going to be concrete for this particular building so we were working with that like what can we do with this concrete and that's how Aqua came about so it was a big jump in scale but similarly looking for ways to connect people through the building let's open it to the audience I'm sure there's many questions and there's microphones there right there so just raise your hand there's one here and one here I guess I'll stand thank you for your lecture at the very beginning you mentioned the Burnham plan for Chicago and it's kind of resonant impacts on the city and your work and in the context of you kind of focus on grafting it seems like we sort of understand even architectural projects which aren't for using structure or sort of grafting onto the urban ideas of urban plans for a city and things like that and I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to like you know as an architect who's sort of foregrounding a 21st century trying to push for a climate urgency and even just sort of 21st century ideas about what a city should look like how do you sort of find opportunity in these sort of existing plans from the past what are things that you find difficult about working with them or within them and then you're at a point where you're designing really large urban spaces right these like river water fronts and stuff and I'm wondering if there's any conversation happening in your firm about how to set up those spaces to be grafted upon right as like urban spaces that are going to eventually be built on is that something you're anticipating trying to guide is there an attitude towards that okay let me see if I can sort through the question but no I think it's a great great question because you hit on something like one of the difficulties challenges about this idea of grafting is that everybody wants to there's a tendency to want to tear things down and start new because they get very messed up and also because there's incentives to do that like for example there's a great book by Daniel Abrams called Obsolescence he's talking about how obsolescence is a constructed idea about not about a building being worn out because buildings don't really get worn out I mean you can always repair them but obsolescence being an idea about something newer is available and in the U.S. there's a way to take text right off for your building which is obsolescing just because it's not as new or competitive with the next building being built so it's very interesting so there's like a monetary incentive to tear things down that's what we have to kind of bring that would be we should be trying to work against and then you mentioned with I think there's a really nice kernel that you said how do you design something for the next round of whatever is going to come in there and I don't actually know yet but I think that's a very good question it's a very relevant question because last time you know you could graft onto it again so how do you make it somewhat accepting of that or easier for that to happen and I think part of it is that in doing this book on grafting it's like you shouldn't be able to you shouldn't be able to let's see there's a building and there's an addition on it they should be integrated but should not close down the opportunity for the next thing so I was thinking of Leibskins building in Toronto where he did this very radical addition to the museum there and I was looking at that thinking because it's a very interesting almost like a graft but you probably couldn't add onto it again so maybe there's some kind of that's the territory I think we should be talking about I really do think that's interesting thank you as an educator do you have any recommendations on how architecture students can be better prepared to work with participatory methods particularly when it gets rather contentious or controversial for example I'm wondering how you might apply the workshops you did at Tom Lee Park or UCSC to the North Campus development at the University of Chicago yes like again that's how could you apply it sometimes your client wants you to and allows you to do these kinds of interactions the client wants to more control that part so I think the first part of your question how can you as a student learn to do these engagements and I think what we did we got someone to help teach us how to do it honestly because we didn't really have any experience with doing these engagement things so we had someone from the University of Chicago actually who was a facilitator come and do a workshop with us at the studio how to ask questions how to listen how to engage with people that you don't know about these topics okay so that was then but now what I've seen as a trend is now there are special firms that are rising up or starting to pop up that's what all they do so I'm just worried that we won't get to have that interaction as much anymore because we have a lot of team members that would be specializing in that but on the positive side there's a lot more people doing the engagement so there's more voices that are being heard I mean maybe in school we could have some of these firms that specialize in that do of course or do seminar on that I think it would be great somebody here first and then there so you all have a great experience in a lot of public projects that have multiple answers to many social issues and questions when moving you've also done these incredible private condo or real estate development structures how did you find the translation from your experience in these public spaces to the private sector and were you able to add your interest in these social questions to these projects that are more financially motivated yeah that's I think we try to think of the end users in the projects that are because there is a need for housing there's a need for buildings for people to live in and like so it's a good question like I was saying with the High Line project we hadn't really worked with on a project where we didn't know who was going to be in there so in that sense we kind of took the tactic of being good for the public that would be using the High Line being a good neighbor I guess as a building and tried to turn that into a design and so it was like the angles on the building are such that more light gets into the public spaces so you just find your way I guess you have to define what it is you're going to try to push on in each project it might be if it's like a commercial residential housing maybe it's the unit itself like how can you make it a little nicer like for example in Brooklyn where we did 11 Hoyt we were trying to eke out more space for people in these window seats which was part of the that the sod is like these precast elements that created just a little more space and a built in kind of for an apartment that's in a tall building that's a huge benefit like you know in New York City so you got to find out where the place is that you can operate this on yes one I want to say thank you for this and thank you for the gilder I was there on Sunday with my grandparents it's a wonderful place my grandmother who has Alzheimer's was floored by it so I want to ask you a separate question the dean started to talk about Americanness and the idea of having a kind of national identity as an architect nowhere is that more explicit than really with the overseas building operations currently building or has built the American Embassy in Brasilia so I was wondering how you feel about the kind of projection of soft American presence through like the relationship between the roster of like a nation's architecture firms and their presence abroad so the question is two parts do you feel like that project is both a symbol of American presence in Brazil and also how does that project come about how do you get approached by the State Department to become that symbol of America abroad good question yeah I wish I could show that project which will be it's in construction now so soon we're designing the American Embassy in Brasilia so you have Brasilia you know how like to the first part of your question how to operate in that context one of the really interesting things that about Brasilia is I mean everyone thinks of it as this place that was designed from scratch and with all this modern architecture but it's also it's like not the tropical place that it has tried to become it's really a different landscape altogether and so part of our project there was working with local landscape architects to try to bring this prairie landscape that they have the Cerrado into the like into the mainstream that it would be adopted so that's a really interesting part of that project I think so it's you know getting into the ecology again because that's not American it is the place there it is that place but there's also this need for Brasilia to kind of to recapture their native landscape there and not try to impose the tropical part of their country on it so that I think was a nice diplomatic space to be in with that project but then like there is symbolism there's a lot of symbolism in the project which we're on the fourth president that we since we started the project but when we won the project it was Obama and it was eco diplomacy so that was like the goal is like when we get into climate change how are we going to work together to try to help each other with problems and that's become more and more apparent and certain other administrations took away that aspect of it like you couldn't say that anymore so anyway it's it is a political milieu but there's still a need to have a presence and to be welcoming and so the symbolic part is like you know to be open and even though you have all this security it's like how can it still feel like everyone's welcome in there and my favorite story about that project is just that in brazilia there's these sectors so there's the residential sector and there's the business sector and then there's the embassy sector and our neighbor on one side is France and across the street is Russia and so we're in this embassy sector and there's some really cool embassy buildings there too like Mexico has an amazing embassy and so we went and visited all these embassies but in all the embassies there's no one in them like two or three people from that country kind of rattling around and in the American embassy there were like over 300 people mostly Brazilians working in there and I was struck by that it was amazing it's people's job and they were bringing kids in and the weekends to use you know some of the recreational stuff and so it was really just a very vibrant place and I was so impressed by that as an idea about diplomacy like hire people you know have jobs and it was really it's an amazing place so one of the cool things too was we had a garden on our site from Berlin Marks garden that was already there and because we only have one site and we have to build a new embassy and keep the other one open while we have the new one we thought we would be tearing down this garden but we were able to keep it so it's a kind of a preserve it and build new spaces around it so that's going to be really nice too to have a real Berlin Marks piece in there that's about all I can I mean yes you have to be symbolic yes it's um how did we get the project well you basically you put your portfolio together and you make this application and you put a team together and then you compete and we were competing with Tom Main I think was one of the other architects and I can't remember who else because he was coming out when I was going in but it was it's a lot of work to go after it but then the and it's a long project too but it's really I think a project that's needed and it's full of all these things that you have to consider and so our project is really connecting more with the it connects with the Brazilian architecture that's already there the modern and then tries to project an open spirit well thank you very much thank you