 Okay, I think we're gonna go ahead and get started. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Master of Architecture session of the Open House. My name is Mario Gooden. I am the Interim Director of the Master of Architecture program, and I'm really delighted to welcome you here and to invite you to become a part of the GSAP community. I know that you just came from hearing Dean Andres Yake, so I will try not to repeat too much of what he said, although I noticed that Andres did steal some of my slides. But as the Dean was saying, our planet is going through enormous environmental, social, and technological changes, and they manifest across scales and the ways in which bodies, space, ecologies, politics, and aesthetics intersect and are entangled. These intersections are the terrain in which the various disciplines at our school operate, and this is why what we do here is so important and now more than ever. GSAP has always been at the forefront of leading change in our discipline, beginning with the first paperless studios in architectural education that occurred right here in Avery Hall 30 years ago, and Andres showed this animation, but actually I have a little bit more that he did not show. And this really began the digital evolution in architectural design. That change and the change that's needed now is critical and must be both radically experimental and politically engaged. This is what our school excels at. This is what we stand for and what we all work for together. So hopefully if you haven't had a chance to visit the studios during your tours this morning, you will get up there this afternoon as well as visit some of the reviews. But here you see our studios on the sixth floor. You see here Avery Library. And we like to think of the architecture school as being on the foundation, if you will, of Avery Library. This building, Avery Hall was designed by McKinley and White and constructed in 1912. However, the architecture program dates back to 1861. And this archive has been really important to the education at Avery here, but this is not a dead archive. As you will see, Avery is a living archive. It is also the place in which we continue to question what's in the archive, what's not in the archive, and how do we, above it, if you will, continue to construct new knowledge that adds to that archive. Also, how do we work interdisciplinary with a trans-scalar approach to the built-in environment? Our school develops new forms of pedagogy research and practice to address the crucial and urgent issues that we face. This approach is centered around the tenants that the Dean spoke of earlier today, those tenants such as climate paradigms, decolonization, practices of mutual care, rethinking the city and re-grounding our fields. And so here in Avery, and not just Avery, but down on the, here we are on the middle there where you see the cursor in what auditorium, but you see that the EMARC program and the architecture programs actually sort of seep out into the campus underneath the campus. And all of this is part of the pedagogy of learning in terms of these spaces, including the maker space, which hopefully you will as well have an opportunity to visit. So if we think of our studios, we think of the library, we think of the maker space as being important pillars, if you will, in terms of our architectural education. And so it's not, although Columbia, I think has a reputation in terms of computation certainly, but that computation is also grounded in materiality and the materiality of space and materiality of design. Along these lines, again, what sets our program apart, the Masters of Architecture program apart at Columbia, I think from other programs, some of you I'm sure might be visiting some of our sister schools, but I would say what sets us apart is that architecture is not a priori. Architecture is not a given, it's not an assumption. So we continually ask the question about what is architecture? We do not assume to know what architecture is, and I think that at Columbia, architecture is an intellectual and theoretical question and a question of discursive practice. In the source of self-regard, selected essays, speeches and meditations, the writer, Tony Morrison states, my effort to manipulate American English was not to take standard English and use the vernacular to decorate it or to paint over it, but to carve away at its accretions of deceit, blindness, ignorance, paralysis and sheer malevolence so that certain kinds of perceptions were not only available but were inevitable. Likewise, I would say our program seeks to carve away and question the disciplinary boundaries of architecture so that certain kinds of perceptions and representations that have always existed are a given presence. I mean, here you're seeing a little bit more of, I think the Dean went by this pretty quickly, this was the pavilion that was constructed this past semester or last semester, last spring by professors Lori Hawkinson and Galia Salomonov's studio, which was a response to a prompt called Deep Time, and it was an all-school charrette that happened at the beginning of last semester. Hence, our program for the longest time is sought to engage an idea about radical pedagogy, and that is in terms of thinking about climate, in terms of thinking about equity, in terms of thinking about data and design, and we've been on the, I would say on the leading or on the forefront in terms of these issues. So maybe we'll just quickly take a look at our, at the Masters of Architecture curriculum to get you a bit more familiar with it. So at the present moment, I would say, with regards to this question about architecture, it is a question also of uncertainty. Again, we don't presume to know what architecture is, but to ask questions about what can architecture be or what if, if you will, what if architecture? I think that was the old Hewlett-Packard commercial, what if, all right. And so our curriculum is constructed around these strands, the design studios, building science and technology, visual studies, history and theory, professional practice, and then our electives. And you will hear more from the faculty that are here today about each one of these strands in a few minutes, but the first part of our curriculum, and as you know, it's a three-year curriculum, the first part is called the Core and these are the first three semesters. So this is first year and the first semester of third year with a variety and a number of studios to take that you see in the top line in blue and in typical in first and second year. We have about eight or so studios of 10 to 12 students each. Then we have required courses in terms of our history theory and in terms of visual studies and building technology or building science and technology. The final three semesters are what we call our advanced studios, starting with advanced studio four and then five and then six. And these are really our options studios in which you would have a chance to work with a diverse group of faculty who are really bringing a diverse, let's say set of expertise in these final three semesters. But across the curriculum is the opportunity for you actually to construct your own path, to really sort of think about what is your trajectory in terms of the discipline of architecture and in terms of the profession of architecture. So beginning with our technology sequence and I am just going to go through a few slides to give you some examples of each of these very quickly so that actually you can engage the faculty in terms of questions and answers. But our technology sequence is constructed around these four stones, if you will, equity in health design and building, climate and energy and high tech and low tech. And again, you see the distribution in terms of first year, second year and third year in terms of our required tech courses and our tech electives. In the spring, we held something called the Tech Shop which is a series of talks which happened. But our building science and technology is also engaged in thinking about new materials and experimenting with new materials. Our coordinator of the building science and technology sequence, Professor Lola Ben-Alan is also the director of the Natural Materials Lab. So those of you who are interested in thinking about new materials, thinking about zero carbon buildings, thinking about those possibilities. But our tech sequences also not simply engaged in terms of the object and its materiality but thinking about the object in terms of its scale with the city and with the environment. Our tech sequence also intersects with other parts of the curriculum, particularly visual studies and what we call VizTech. And here you're seeing some examples and not only VizTech but also deep into computation with regards to VizTech. And of course, visual studies. Professor Laura Kurgan is the coordinator of the visual studies sequence and also the director of the youngest program, computational design practices. And as I mentioned earlier, it was about 30 years or so when Columbia introduced the first paperless studios which really began, let's say, I would say a revolution not only in terms of architectural education but also in terms of the profession. And our program has continued, I would say, to be at the forefront of computation in terms of design. And a series of extraordinary architectural representation courses, drawing courses, modeling courses, courses on reputation, but also thinking about the inventions of drawing, if you will. And then our history theory sequence coordinated by Professor Reinhold Martin, Professor Martin, and I don't think I really call him this but Professor Martin who also not only teaches history theory but you will also run into to Reinhold on design juries from time to time and maybe even teaching a studio and putting a plug in already Reinhold. But on the, let's say the topic of sort of equity and decolonization that the Dean was speaking of, it was a number of years ago, actually before 2020 that the Race and Modern Architecture Project was launched at Columbia, I think it was in 2014 or 2015 by Professor Mabel Wilson, which then culminated in the Race and Modern Architecture book. We have the Detlef Mertens Lecture Series and Professor Atiya Korakawiella is here today who will also be here to answer questions. I mentioned Professor Laura Kurgan and I should also mention Laura is the director of the Center for Spatial Research. And the MRC program is highly, is also quite coordinated and related to what happens in our Buell Center, the Buell Center for American Architecture and the direction of Professor Lucia Alley. And I think I would be remiss not to add Columbia books on architecture in the city as a sort of, as a leading sort of imprint of Columbia University Press. And the, I think perhaps maybe 20 or so years ago we all thought that books were going to go away but actually books have become much more important and we continue to think about our work and to continue to think about how it is that we put out new knowledge into the world, particularly using the arm of Columbia books on architecture in the city. The fourth strand that you saw was the professional practice strand and our revamped professional practice course called Just Practice. We also have a symposium called Constructing Practice which will be happening again next spring but professional practice is not something which is siloed. It actually occurs across all six semesters in some explicit ways and also in some implicit ways in our program. And of course that is directly related to career services and what you can expect after graduating with your professional degree here from Columbia. As the Dean mentioned, some of you may be candidates for a dual degree and enrolling in more than one program. And we also have a number of interdisciplinary courses that also cut across programs such as our Planning and Cultural Space course, Immeasurable Cities led by Emmanuel Edmasu who's also lecturing this evening and I hope that you can stick around for Emmanuel's presentation. And then the EMARC students also participants in our summer workshops. These were on hiatus of course during COVID but returned this past summer which gives our students or gives you an opportunity to study with a particular faculty for two to four weeks during the summers and these workshops are engaged in work in places like Puerto Rico or through the Global Africa Lab on the continent of Africa or here you see an example of the virtual reality workshop led by Professor Vanessa Keith this summer. But also again, having the opportunity to work across programs. So a summer workshop called the An Atlas of Dust led by the Director of the Masters of Historic Preservation Program Professor Jorge Otero-Palos. And so for the design studios going back to that top strand, some examples from our, you know, from first year and again, I don't think I can overemphasize the notion that architecture is a question. So even for those of you who may have come from an architecture background, I think that you can expect that you're not, you will not just be doing what you've done or what you did in your undergraduate education but that you will be in for something that's really challenging, fresh, but also provocative in terms of asking you to really reconsider perhaps what you think you know about architecture and to think about what architecture can actually, what the possibilities of architecture are. And these are just some examples from the fall of 2021's Core One. Last spring in terms of Core Two and the introduction in terms of experimentation with materiality and new materials through thinking and rethinking if you will, architectural typologies. And I would say that for at least 40 years or so the housing studio at Columbia has been a place in which we've really studied housing and have also been on the, let's say, leading edge in terms of thinking about housing, thinking about housing in urban environments, thinking about housing across the boroughs, across working in New York City in various sites and in various contexts. And some examples of the Core Three which is the housing studio coordinated by Professor Hillary's sample from fall of 2021. And then our advanced studios, beginning with Advanced Studio Four. This is from Professor Nina Cook-John's studio. The Advanced Four studio tends to work, let's say in larger scales of environments or territories if you will. This studio was working in the Hudson Valley. Professor Ziad Jamaladine is working in the Delaware River watershed at the near where Pennsylvania and New York, New York State kind of interlock studio led by Professor Na-Yoon Wong. And then in Advanced Five. And I think Ninyake also had one or two of these images but this is Bernard Schumi's island studio from fall of 2021, situated in the Hudson River. A studio called Extreme Scales by Professor Laurie Hawkinson which looked at, let's see if I can go back here. What you're seeing is a cross section of the BQE, the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and this studio looks at what happened once the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, what happens when that piece of infrastructure is no longer usable and how can that space be appropriated? And this studio again was called Extreme Scales. To Professor Mabel Wilson's studio called Post Plantation Futures, Professor Michael Bell's studio which was called The Removal of Motion. Professor Mi-Mi Wong's studio, a factory as it might be. And we were really pleased to sort of be back this last year sort of fully making models again in person. And again, here you can see how crucial models are also to our investigations. David Benjamin's studio called Climate Architecture and Uncertainty Risk Climate Architecture and Uncertainty. Professor Mark Rosetta's studio called Detox USA. Emmanuel Edmasso's studio called After Images on Restitution and Animism and Diaspora. The MakerGraph Studio led by Aratola and Giuseppe Linogno. And our program has also returned to traveling during what we call our Kinney Week, which happens in the spring for the advanced studios, where our studios travel nationally and internationally for their studio site visits. And these are from this past spring. Finally, your individual trajectories in the MR program is the construction of an individual thesis or arguments, if you will. We actually do not have a formal thesis project, but I would say that the portfolio, your graduation portfolio that weaves together your design, your writing, your drawing, and your making is a kind of thesis, if you will, or final argument. This is the portfolio that you will submit at the end of your time here, end of your three years, as a requirement for graduation and honors. Additionally, your work comes together at our end of the year show, and we relaunched the end of the year show this past year, this past spring. And as in the past, the end of the year show takes over the entirety of Avery Hall, as well as existing online. But this is an opportunity, one of the other opportunities among many others actually, to share your work with others, with your classmates, but also to get a really good sense of the work that's going on in the school at the end of the year. So again, I'm really happy to welcome each of you here and looking forward to reading your applications later. But right now I wanna turn it over to the faculty and invite the faculty to come up, and we can open up the discussion with your questions. So let's see, we have Professor Laura Kurgan, Professor Ryan Holt-Martin, Ziad Jamaladine, Michael Bell, I mean, Blackshire, Lola Den-Alan, there you are Lola, Mimi Wong, Atiyah Kaurakilwa, and Professor Mark Suramaki. If you'll just introduce yourselves, maybe say just a few things about what you've been teaching, and we'll do that with everyone, and then we'll all move it up for questions. So my name is Mark Suramaki, and I teach in the Advanced Studio Sequence, typically doing the Advanced Five Studios in the fall. As currently I also teach a seminar in the spring, individual study sequence on the topic of section as a representational mechanism and a spatial operation. I am a principal of LTL Architects practice here in the city. They conducts a combination of both public institutional cultural work, but also independent research projects that we take on within the office, the most recent of which is a new publication coming out later this fall called Manual of Biogenic Sections, follow up to a previous publication called Manual of Section that looks at low carbon and carbon sequestering materials. It's a long list here. Michael Bell, a professor of architecture. Mario did such a great job of speaking about the scope of the school. Most of us here have touched various parts of that scope, so that was wonderful to see. I teach design studios, a history theory seminar. I was previously the director of the course studio, so I have a real sense of that, but I would just be, to be very brief, and really you can look at the bios online. I remember being where you are, and very vividly for me, it was actually quite a few years ago, but that possibility of engaging in a school and imagining what the school is, according to its own record, versus what you're gonna make it. And architecture schools are really in the process of constantly being remade, so I feel like Mario did a beautiful job of trying to describe that ambition. All of us here, I think you'll see if you read our bios on the website, you'll get a sense of the scope. Most of us are designing, many of us are doing multiple things from designing to writing. Some of us are obviously more truly in the scholarly realm, some are more in the practice realm, but one thing about Columbia I would say, and I think most of us is that we frequently merge those kind of scenarios where we write, we read history, theory, we try to design. So I think you'll see that quality as we go through, thank you. Hi, welcome everyone, I'm Mimi Huang. I am currently teaching core three, which is the housing studio, and I have taught the advanced six and the summer AAD, and I used to coordinate core two. And no matter what I teach, I'm just obsessed with architecture integrated into landscape ecologies. Welcome. Hello everyone, my name is Amina Blackshire. I teach the core one, core two, and have taught advanced four. I have a practice called a tele-amina that looks at bringing analog to digital interfaces productively together. What I find most exciting about the entry, whether you have a background or not, is it's a really productive interchange between all of these different origins. So in core one, we really dive into bringing an idea into substance. And so it's amazing to see the range. I think Columbia is the place so you wanna come if you wanna experiment, explore creativity, break out of kind of formulaic ways of approaching things. So we do that almost from every angle. So welcome. Hi everyone, I'm Laura Kergan. So as you can see up there, I wear a lot of different hats over here, but we're talking about the architecture program. And from that point of view, I always like to underscore three things, which really bring together a lot of the work that I do. And the one is that architects don't build things. They don't physically build things. They draw things, they model things, they design things, they imagine things into the future. And second is that the tools that architects use aren't neutral in that process and they create the world in which they're actually created within. The tools are created within and they have a very big impact on the way that we think and imagine space. And so I often try and get my students to be very aware of how they do what they do and the processes involved in architectural thinking. And then the third is that space is coded. So we think of code as something out there that computer scientists do, but I think space, the way we sitting here, how many people come and sit in the front row, the fact that we know how to sit in rows in this building, everything, every space that we're in is coded socially and politically and physically and also digitally and how those things all come together. So I teach a seminar, Conflict Urbanism, where we all produce a public-facing website and then I also teach advanced studios. Hi, hi guys, thanks for coming. I'm Reinhold Martin. I, as you heard from Mario, I direct or coordinate the history and theory sequence and I forget what color or like one of the bands in the curriculum, MR curriculum. I'll just give you, just because I'm sure you have questions, but a little more detail on that. The entry course in the first year is called Questions in Architectural History, one in the fall and two in the spring. And I and Atia and Mabel Wilson and Michela, a whole group of faculty, all of whom are full-time, either tenure-to-tenure track faculty in the school, teach in the first year. And we've made a point of that because we consider our responsibility is to introduce, pedagogically, is to introduce you and or your colleagues and predecessors to the kind of questions that historically have shaped the field that you're entering. So that takes place. And then there are elective courses after that, but it's very important that there's a kind of foundation course that is not built on out of concrete, but more, I mean to echo Mario's emphasis on questions, on sand. But it's real sand. That's for Lola, that's for Lola. That's my transition. Hi, everyone. I'm Lola Ben-Alone and welcome to the open house. So nice to see everyone. And I direct the building tech sequence. And I also direct the Natural Materials Lab, which some of you had the chance to visit and tour this morning. And at the building tech sequence, we really focus on building technologies beyond maybe instruments or tools that are used for climatic and societal urgencies, but as agents that are perhaps sometimes unpredictable, speculative, sometimes also disobedient as, you know, beyond tools of architectural design. And a lot of the focus we are bringing to the tech sequence looks at decarbonization of existing buildings and materialities of care and health. And with that, I teach the first and the last core required courses at the tech sequence. The first is on environments in architecture and tech five, which is the last core course is really focused on construction and life cycle systems in architecture. And I'm happy to answer any questions about the sequence or the lab. Hi, everyone. Welcome. And my name is Atiya Karakiwala. I teach in the history theory sequence in the MR program. I thought I'd tell you a little bit more about this hour course that Reinhold just spoke about a little bit questions in architectural history. I teach in the spring semester. That's QAH two, you know, you would learn the lingo very fast of, you know, we. So I'm one of three instructors who teaches this course and it really focuses on questions and ideas that have animated thinking across the 20th century, architectural thinking across the 20th century. This course tries to think the history of architectural modernity, you know, as a contested and culturally uncertain category. And so in that way, you know, it really dovetails into this idea of uncertainty that Mario brought up that it really runs through the curriculum. We, you know, it is my firm conviction. I will say that just as we are all modern, that modernity is a global phenomenon in the same way we're all post-colonial. And so one of the things I try to do in this course is bring this post-colonial critique to the history of 20th century architecture. So outside of QAH, do I also teach some of the electives in the history theory sequence? And I'll tell you a little bit about them. One of them is called architecture and development. Another one is called architecture and infrastructure. And the third one is called feasting and fasting. And some of them, you know, I'll tell you some of the questions that we address in these. So seminars have this very intimate environment. You know, it's a small group of students. We really have the capacity to discuss with each other and learn to think out loud and really learn to develop critical capacity in these spaces. And so to give you this example of my class feasting and fasting, you know, we really try and address questions of taste, aesthetic, gustatory, and how they shape networks of empire. So this kind of history theory work ranges from the scale of the intimate to the scale of the planetary. And so I hopefully will be able to, we'll have been able to give you a taste of history theory. And I look forward to your questions. Hello, everyone. My name is Yajama Reddin. I'm an architect, a partner at Left Architects based here in New York and Beirut with a research and a work that is focused maybe on engaging religious and cultural institutions. I also teach and coordinate Advanced Studio Four, which looks at the kind of regional scale of upstate New York with a focus on the rurality or rural area as a site of investigations. And this spring, that's second year, second semester, I'm our program. In the fall, I teach in Advanced Studio Five, which has been looking the last few years at, let's say, unpacking or revisiting colonial and indigenous architecture in North Africa with a focus on Tunisia as a place. And lastly, I do a seminar titled Building Islam, which kind of critically look at the historiography of Islamic architecture. It's kind of building on what Mario was saying in terms of revisiting the archive, expanding kind of the discipline to include maybe histories that are usually not covered within architectural histories at Western institutions. And I also give a summer workshop, which is traveling to Beirut over the summer in the last few years. I'd love to hear from a couple of professors around where did you get your architectural educations and how does it differ or is similar to the education that students would receive here at GSAP and also why did you choose to teach here? That's a great question to start us off. I did my master of architecture at Yale. I was a non-architecture background and there was a steep learning curve. But I remember my first semester, a studio teacher emphasized that when you're coming from another life experience or another discipline, you don't know what you can't do. And so it was a really great cross pollination, which is fitting that I am teaching core one of the skill sets that the students with backgrounds had and then the ways of thinking that I come from a dance and pre-law background. So it was how to bring the analytical and the creative together with architecture. I teach here exactly for that reason that there doesn't seem to be a kind of cap on the ways that you can think about designing, relating to the world, even the ground. And you just have to flush out your idea and make it believable and actually find out how to make it possible. It's a really great question and I think we all were stumped for a bit because it's been a while since I've thought about this question. But I did my undergraduate at MIT. It wasn't called architecture, but it was architecture. Bachelor's and then I did my graduate work at Harvard. And I would say that MIT was talking about what was architecture. At that time, it was the same studios that had been taught for a while. And at Harvard it was this is architecture. And the reason why I love teaching here is that I think that there's a real generosity of approaches and openness to looking within architecture, looking to our colleagues who are teaching slightly different focus. I find myself thinking after I go somewhere else on a review, thinking, I mean, the work was good, but it wasn't that fun. And I just think that we have more fun here. I don't think that the faculty are serious, but the spirit of generosity and questioning and just the openness of GSAP makes, particularly being a faculty member, even being on another jury, just a lot more fun and enjoyable and less judgmental. I'll just be very brief. I did my master's at Princeton University, probably share that with some others. I might teach at this institution, but which was an amazing educational experience. But what I will say is that Princeton is a relatively circumscribed and smaller school. And one of the incredibly, I think valuable inherent qualities of GSAP is just the sort of amazing sort of biodiversity approaches of faculty members of ways of teaching and different modes of thinking about architecture. So I think in contrast to other schools, I think there's a scale and a density here that allows for the kind of emergence of kind of the unexpected in kind of extraordinary ways. Yeah, okay, yeah, all right, hi. So I did my undergraduate at Berkeley and I just realized I might be, except for Mario and I did our graduate work here at GSAP long ago. And then I taught a lot of different places. I've taught at Penn, I've taught at Yale, I've taught at Princeton, RPI, and now I've been at Columbia for about 18 years. And I really wanted to come back to Columbia. I took a while to get back. And it's interesting Mario called all of our schools, our sister schools, and it's hard, right? So we realize everybody's trying to choose between all the schools. And I think every school has good things. Every school has good things about it. For me, why I really wanted to come back here actually is it's larger size. And the fact that within a larger size of a school, I could do a lot more things. So when you're in a smaller school, there's a smaller faculty and there's less, all the diversity of the things that you are exposed to. And I find not only that as a teacher, that there's so many different kinds of teachers here, but also the students. And the students are looking for different things and they manage to kind of direct themselves on their own path, even though there's not a thesis, you really can tell the different strands of pedagogical approaches and approaches to architecture that are at the school. And it really allows you to make those choices in terms of what classes you take. So I hope that helps, yeah. Could I offer a quick counterpoint? I would school at Berkeley. But Laura was undergrad, I believe, when I was grad or close to that. Quick point of reference. First of all, it was an unbelievable experience to go there, but I always thought of it then and now of a far, far less constructed school. So there were amazing faculty, but you had to build the connections and you could in fact avoid them. So the school had lots of reasons for imagining why that was fruitful for me, it was. But from a distance, and I think still today, I used to view Columbia as far more constructed. Mario, I think, showed some of that. But you saw Mario's diagram becoming a finer grain and then that kind of algorithm of mix. So that I think is absolutely accurate and quite true. I got in trouble when I came here, a fun trouble. I told the chair of another school, it was like teaching at a subway station. And I meant that as positive. Tishiko Mori, was chair at Harvard at the time. And she told Bernard, Bernard Shumi came back to me, Michael, I hear you think it's like a subway station? And I said, yes, in the Manhattan transcript sense of the word in that the interchangers are really quick. And so it was never meant as derogatory. It was meant as a school that in a New York sensibility requires you to think fast and there's perhaps less overt sympathy while you're doing that. But in the wood and in the grain of it all, there's an immense amount of sympathy. So you've probably figured out how to choose a school that fits you. But I thought that granular diagram was a really good image of it. Thank you. Hi, good afternoon. Two specific questions for Laura and Amina. I'll start with you Amina. Just curious how the intersection of analog and digital shows up in your work and in your work outside of here as well as potentially in your studio courses. And then for you, Laura, if you guys partner with emerging technology or tech companies or whatnot to integrate or explore new sensors or types of readings in the work that you do within the computational design practice program. Want me to start? Yeah, so just to say a lot of the work that I do actually is done in the school because I run the Center for Spatial Research and used to be the Spatial Information Design Lab. And I feel very lucky in that it's just what I do. So I think there's a lot of practicing architects over here. I'm not one of them. And the work that I do is very exploratory within that realm that you're talking about, the confusing spaces between the digital and physical and how they mutually reinforce each other and also how they've changed so much over the last 20 years. So while I've been here, I've always been the director, the coordinator of Visual Studies, and have curated a number of courses that are open to students all across the school and for the MRT students, for the ones who can take electives. And it's followed the history. We were one of the first schools to have an apatecure. We had an apatecure course. Right now we have a course about physical computation called Metatool, where that whole idea of space being coded and very different kinds of physical interfaces, plus procedural urbanism, which is more smart city approaches and parametric urbanism. And generative design, which is more about optimization or data journalism, which you see a lot, that architects actually get hired by news organizations because they tell stories so well about spatial histories and spatial futures. So all kinds of things. So we're not here to talk about computational design practices program, but it's very open to all kinds of ideas about what practice might be. But it's the same here, I think, in the architecture school, although it's more constrained by accreditation and by what we need to know responsibly and ethically as architects of the built environment. But again, the scale at which we all work is very different and very open-ended. And we all love to talk across those ideas and mutually reinforce one another. Yeah, thanks for the question. I think my background in dance caused me to, when I came to architecture, realize at the very beginning there was a thread that I still work with today, which is that I don't think a form is static. I think a form is dynamic and constantly changing. So architecture is just a still, a pause, and a continuum of time. So I bring that absolutely into my studio, where it makes sense. I kind of hold the computer back from the initial conception in that we live in a three-dimensional world with gravity. We all have a body, so we are intimately aware of how we move through and interact with other masses. So I privilege the analog. And it's also hyper, like, infinitely details and has all of the intelligence. So a project that I did teaching robots rhythm was Robot Double Dutch, taking the very basic, seemingly basic game that a four-year-old could play. I couldn't play it at four, but there's a lot of intelligence. And to try to teach something seemingly so basic as a downbeat and an upbeat to a robot actually is more complicated. So I want to almost disrupt the way we think about the computer is more precise, but taking rhythm is one entry point to showing that there's lots of different intelligence in our body. And so I think of that as kinetic intelligence versus artificial intelligence. Lola has something. Because you asked about collaborations with practitioners and people maybe from the field, a lot of the building tech is about engaging in conversations with practitioners. So three of our core courses actually involve mentoring with practitioners from energy, water, transportation systems, and whereas perhaps less related to realms of tangible and media design, those technologies, those conversations with technologies help students in the tech sequence really develop their integrative systems and support their design studios. Hi, good afternoon. Are we good for another question? So I asked, how would you describe your relationships to individual students, like our accessibility to you outside of class time, like with office hours, replying to emails, or even Zoom calls now? All of the above. Absolutely through office hours, every, all of us, I'm sure, have office hours for our courses. What's up is also a tool, a Slack, and through not only email, but this is a small building and we continuously meet each other. And I personally also do a coffee hour once a semester to hear students' voices about the tech sequence and how their work is evolving, but anyone else? I will add just quickly to the coffee. That's a great question because that's what really matters in a way, is how you gain access to all of this that's being discussed. I can say, so the history faculty teaches a little bit differently in different formats than the design studio, obviously, we teach basically two hours a week in the seminar and rather than the regular crits in which there's more direct contact. So in that sense, we are maybe more familiar to some of you, I don't know, individually in the way that we teach and interact with students from your undergraduate if you've had particularly liberal arts education, but even if you've done architecture, we are the ones who teach the seminars. And so probably the same practices that you're familiar with there would hold here. It's a big school. Laura mentioned this and that's one of the strengths, I think. So in the QAH classes, for example, to pick up on the coffee thing, we don't do coffee, but there's 30 people in the class. So they're large seminars because they're introductory. And I'm just this week scheduling outdoor meetings with groups of like three or four if the weather permits. We have this wonderful office that we have here in front of the building and we can hang out and with smaller groups to kind of discuss the class and everything else that they're doing. So we probably would say the cafe also is an incredible and back now, back to life kind of place for encounters of various kinds. So in that regard, what is most urban about the school? Its size, its speed, its kind of hustle bustle is also what in many ways is most intense and most immediate and maybe even most intimate. So that New York is a place where you meet people. It's not a place, it's just a place where people don't know each other. That's the spirit. Maybe one more question over here. Yeah, so I just have a little question about the environment and the culture. So I realize that a lot of people I've met today really come from very different backgrounds of their studies and undergrad. And I just want to hear more about what are some more interesting cases or some really interesting cases about how their undergrad experience or their studies in the past or experience in the past kind of influence them and how I guess in a sense like what you experience and because things cross pollinate and sometimes you experience that, oh, I want to develop this furthermore. We're developing this idea furthermore. How would you support that? And I just want to hear about some cross-pollination stories about different fields. I'll be very quick. The microphone seems so formal with this size. Yeah, which is not giving the best impression maybe. That's a great question. There's so many standard answers to that and I'm sure you can imagine them that it's all net positive. At the risk of seeming too conclusive, a story that I'd heard when I was much younger was that when William Worcester was dean at MIT, somebody you've probably never heard of, but very prominent dean who later founded the school at Berkeley, he divided urban planning and architecture. Urban planning was for policy and law. Architecture was for aesthetics, you can imagine, a long time ago. But I remember that quite vividly because I feel like for most of my life in architecture graduate schools, all of those terms have been highly blurred. And I often discuss it when I taught undergrads was when I was an undergrad, we often talked about the owner and the user. And when I was a graduate school, we began to talk about the subject. Michelle Foucault, Derrida, critical philosophy. So in other words, we really had to deeply, deeply broaden who we imagined we were working with for or about. So that question about people that are from lots of different fields is utterly critical here. You made me think of a funny story. I had a student at a PhD in economics from Cambridge and a physics degree undergrad from Princeton and we got along great, but that was an extremely diverse and interesting young man. Caltech offers physics and economics, so it's not unusual necessarily to put those together. But everybody can answer that here. Our school has such a range of people. I didn't know Amina had studied dance now, I understand, it'll work better. But I think somebody like Amina in particular or any of us, that's a wonderful question. Yeah, or I'll just, I'll also add, and I know that we're running out of time, that our program, and I would say all of the programs actually like to talk to people outside of the program. So in, for example, in our advanced studios, our Wednesday lectures are actually the opportunity that we have guests come to speak to us who are not within the discipline of architecture. So we had Noam Siegel, who's a curator, come and talk about the Berlin Biennale last week. The week before that we had the artist, Josiah McElhaney, or the month before that, come and speak to our students. A number of us in terms of the studios that we teach also bring outside the discipline, if you will, guests. So my studio, along with Professor Mabel Wilson's studio, had, just last week, Jonathan Gonzalez, who's a choreographer, movement artist, conduct a movement workshop with our studio. So there are, I would say a number of opportunities for cross-pollination, not only amongst the students, but also in terms of getting outside of the boundaries of what we think of as architectural design or architectural education to have this dialogue with others. Can I just, yeah, just quickly, just saw Patrice walk in. We had a student who's a neuroscience student. No, I was just saying, I just saw you and I'm reminded of a joint real estate architecture student. And she went off and she sort of specializes in neuroscience and real estate development in a really interesting way. Or someone who came in with public health and medical, but also went into architecture, now works, what's the famous place? Oh my God, a hospital, research hospital, research hospital that does, Johns Hopkins, yeah, yeah, one of those. And there's people, but then there's people who come in with biology and then they just get really interested in computation and they become really great architects. So there's so many different models of starting someplace and ending someplace that you don't quite know what's gonna happen with the background that you bring in. But we love it when students bring their backgrounds to the subject at hand because then the conversations are just so much more interesting, yeah. So I really, really hate to bring this to an end, but you guys have a packed day. We want you to actually get some lunch before you start visiting studios and visiting mid reviews. I do want to alert you that we will be hosting an online Q and A on Wednesday at 11. The Zoom information will be on the school's website. And also, again, to invite you to move throughout the building this afternoon there. We are in our mid review week, so the Advanced Studio Fives are having their reviews all throughout the building today, so feel free to visit the reviews. And again, if you have any questions, please, if you see any of us wearing these green tags, faculty, we'd like to meet you one-on-one. Please come up and ask questions and hopefully we'll also see you on Wednesday for the online Q and A. So thanks a lot. I'm sure I'll see you upstairs.