 Thank you all for coming out tonight. It's my pleasure to introduce our guest, Jay Valkora, who's founder and principal of the Manhattan Practice Studio V architecture. The work of the office is framed as a kind of reinvention of the contemporary city, exploring a range of issues, including architecture of sustainable communities, progressive adaptive reuse of historic structures, transformative waterfront designs, public space networks, transportation infrastructure, infill and contemporary structures. And a spirit of innovation definitely permeates their work as is evident in their reimagining of New York City's waterfront in all five boroughs, including major designs for Astoria in wood, Williamsburg, Gravesend, Sunset Park, and the Bronx. And their designs for Brooklyn's empire stores and the Bronx Post Office, which combine historic and contemporary architecture are really quite exciting. They've also generated radical contemporary structures, including the award-winning edition for Yonkers Raceway. And then alongside these projects, Studio V is working on designs for sustainable, resilient waterfronts, which I'm sure we'll hear about tonight, including West Haven, Connecticut, and Staten Island, South Shore. So Jay Valkora earned his master's architecture from Harvard, a bachelor of architecture from Cornell, and was a Fulbright fellow in the United Kingdom. And with that, please join me in welcoming Jay Valkora. Thank you. Thanks a lot. I'm going to start with telling you the title. I call this the New Old. And we're doing a lot of different projects now. I'm really glad to actually be here. I'm really grateful to the opportunity to come to Roger Williams. I want to thank Edgar and Andrea, who I originally knew from school, and for introducing me to you guys and to all of you. I'm going to talk a little bit. I call this talk the New Old because I actually really believe in how we can combine absolutely contemporary architecture. I don't believe architecture should have a style, per se. I think all of our projects are very different. You'll be the judge. But I do think that they very much relate to a sense of history and place, and even a more radical interaction as to how we want to interpret how we build into a place. And so I'm going to talk about radical adaptive reuse of cities and waterfronts. I begin here, which is very important for me. This is the grain elevator of Buffalo, and this is the city where I grew up. And my father worked in the steel mills. My mother was an English teacher. And I would go to spaces like this all the time when I was very young, and they had a profound effect on me. These were, of course, the buildings that inspired Lakerbousier, Walter Gropius, Mendelssohn. They're in Verz and Architecture. They're in a series of early iconic books of modern architecture, but these had a profound effect. And my dad worked here. And when I grew up in Buffalo, these magnificent steel mills on the waterfront, which were also creating terrible problems, pollution, other things, as well as jobs and opportunity. But really, today, while I was in Cornell, they started to collapse. They started to, the economy around the steel mill started to come down. And today they look like this. This is where my father worked. And so I realized later, as I grew up and got educated as an architect, that these kind of sites and how we're going to deal with them had a profound personal impact on me. And I didn't really realize it at the time, but as I went to school, when I did my Fulbright Fellowship to the UK, I realized that London was reinventing its waterfront at that time. And I worked for a firm then called Coder Kim, which was part of that process of reinventing the waterfront. I didn't really know it when I was doing it, but that these things would actually come home to where I live now in New York, and maybe even, ultimately, where I grew up. So one of the facts that I think is amazing, and I think it's really important for you guys to think about it as architects, as students, is that you live in a time where something has changed just in the last few years in a way that no one else could imagine. Just a few years ago, something changed in all of human history that will never go back. That is more than half of us live in cities. And that really just occurred from the UN report, perhaps around the year 2015, it depends upon how we define cities, but that's never going to change again. Short of Armageddon or some other event, more human beings will live in cities than anywhere else, and they are our greatest opportunity for making better lives for everyone, for better education, for better equity. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about what it means to reinvent the city. I'm writing a book right now. This is from the Manahata book, and this is a famous book where somebody reconstructed the original environment of Manhattan. And what I love about this is how it goes from the original primordial landscape to what the city is today. And the city, I think, is one of the things I wanna focus on. So in my practice, if I can get this thing off, we focus on architecture, urban design and preservation, and I refuse to acknowledge the differences between these. I actually think that they're completely woven together. I'm gonna show you seven projects. I'm gonna go through them quickly, but that offer all different aspects of what it means to reinvent the city and to reinvent in some way a historic building and to combine that with contemporary architecture. They're all in different places, from New York City to Russia to Niagara Falls, Canada. So one of the things that I think is interesting is the sites that offer potential today. I've done projects in abandoned warehouses, old transit infrastructure, outdated government buildings, post offices, former industrial sites, oil tank farms, or even a secret biological laboratory in Russia. So I think these are the things that actually offer us great opportunities, waterfronts, edges, and terstices. Whenever I see a site that's kind of messed up, left over between a railway line and a highway, a former parking lot, a former urban renewal site, inevitably I feel these are the sites that somehow come to us and these are my favorites. So I'm gonna start with Empire Stores. Empire Stores is kind of amazing. It's a series of 19th century coffee warehouses. They're really Civil War era warehouses. They were built somewhere between 1865 and 1869, and they're amazing. They sit right on the Brooklyn waterfront, right next to the Brooklyn Bridge. Now, originally, this area was known as Fortress Brooklyn. The warehouses made almost a continuous line of buildings that actually made a kind of a Chinese wall. They called it Fortress Brooklyn that actually separated the waterfront from the city. As a matter of fact, the waterfront in those days was not a pleasant place. It was dangerous. It was the dangerous working waterfront, and these warehouses which formed a continuous line on the Brooklyn waterfront, which the Empire Stores was part of the beginning of this line, actually really separated everyone from the waterfront. And at that time, this is actually a historical diagram of the waterfront. It was completely full of wharves. It was all about the New York Harbor. It was all about transport. It was all about the moving of goods. These are the Empire Stores in their heyday. They were used only to store coffee beans. They were never meant for human habitation. They had no windows. They had shutters. They were never tempered spaces. But what's amazing is these buildings existed all the way into our time, and we finished this project just a month ago. So this is the 1886 photo that actually shows tall-masted ships unloading at the Empire Stores. These are pictures of the waterfront from 1924 when it was an active waterfront, and they were unloading coffee beans into the interior. They would hoist it up through winches, which we recovered and found when we worked on the original project. This is the famous Bernice Abbott photo. She was a great 1930s WPA, Works Progress Administration photographer, and she took these beautiful photos of the warehouse with the paintings and the shutters, opened in different ways. This is what it looked like when I arrived in New York. By a kind of a coincidence, my first night when I arrived in New York after I got back from London, a friend took me to a party in Dumbo, and we went down by the waterfront, and I walked in front of these buildings, and there was a burned-out car in front of it that was still smoldering. It's hard to imagine a New York City today, so this was one of the first buildings I saw in New York City, and it looked like this when I arrived. This is what it looked like when we started the project. Now, the area around that is known as Dumbo, down under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, it's funny, it's a New York word, but it's this neighborhood in Brooklyn, which is a really cool neighborhood that's full of a lot of tech firms, young people, great restaurants, cafes, and they built an entire park along that waterfront, but these buildings remained empty and abandoned until just a few years ago. They were originally bought by ConEd, who wanted to tear it down to build a power plant, and the Bloomberg administration purchased the buildings and decided to use the land to create a park, and they also designated in a very progressive way that they would use the money from the development of these buildings to support the park in perpetuity, and so the buildings were leased to a developer for 100 years, and all the money from the development of these buildings would actually go entirely to public programs for the park, so when I arrived, there was a competition, and the buildings looked like this, they were sealed off, they were enclosed, there was no one in them, parts of them had burned down, the huge shutters, partly enclosed them, but were all corroded. A lot of the interiors were open, but when Sandy happened, it actually swept into the interior of the spaces, and it was filled with seven feet of water, it knocked out a lot of the columns, damaged the structure of the buildings. The buildings themselves were also slowly failing. Really, there was no foundation left under them. The only thing holding them up was 150 years of soil compression from holding up tons of coffee beans. The original piers underneath, which were made of creosote-soaked timbers, had completely disappeared. When we looked for them and investigated them with our engineer, they were pretty much gone. It was just compressed soil holding it up, and the buildings were slowly coming apart. So the historic element here was seven historic coffee warehouses, and we introduced a whole program for it under the guidelines of the city that would be tech firms, creative firms, and we decided we made up a program that would include an artisional Brooklyn food market, a public space, a rooftop park, a public park on the roof overlooking the skyline, and a small waterfront museum, and we also had to deal with resiliency issues. And to my amazement, the program that we made up that day and the competition is almost exactly what was built. So these are the buildings today. This is a drone shot that we just took about a month ago, and we completely restored the seven buildings. There's seven buildings side by side. You can't tell from the exterior with individual walls that separated them, but we did a significant contemporary addition on the roof made of steel and glass that actually goes over the whole thing. But the big move was I wanted to create a public space. I wanted to take that idea of Fortress Brooklyn, where this was the Chinese wall that separated the community from the dangerous working waterfront, and I wanted to create a slice through it. This was one of the first diagrams we did, where I said just like the bridges slice through the neighborhood and they create these amazing diagonal views cutting through the fabric. What if we created a public space that diagonally cut through the buildings and reconnected the community to the new extensive Brooklyn Bridge Park, a state of the art 21st century park, which you can see designated in green here. So this is the building today, a drone shot, showing this kind of courtyard. And I'll always remember the first day I sat down with a client and he said, architect, let me get this straight. You wanna make a big hole in the middle of the historic building and you think that's a good idea. And I said exactly, this is one of the key points. I don't wanna just restore the building and look at it from outside and say somebody has their office in there, some restaurants in there. I wanna create a public sequence that passes through and I wanna have it bring you up to a public park on the roof so that the sequence is both in plan and in section. This is what it looks like today. We just actually photographed this a few weeks ago. So it has a very extensive rooftop park. It has a whole series of levels and that's the courtyard within the center. And so these office spaces actually work all the way around it. There's markets and restaurants at the base that are live in the park. There's rooftop spaces, including the public park and a beer garden overlooking it. And it also creates this kind of social space that unites everyone within the building. We call it the creative common. This is a view of that courtyard space where we cut through. And it also allows me to create greater areas of light and glass in a more contemporary language because these buildings were originally designed to keep coffee beans cold and dark. This is a view of the main space looking in which leads into the passage that connects into the community. And there's sort of a spiraling sequence of staircases and elevators. It was originally inspired for me by a lecture by Vincent Scully where he talked about the drawings of Paranese and how these irregular spaces, the drawings of the Carcieri, which Paranese did with these kind of diagonal views up through space, complex spaces. And that was my inspiration for wanting to create this rich vertical environment that would drive up through the building to the public park. We also designed a small waterfront museum. We included that within the original competition in the Brooklyn Historical Museum, stepped up, and it's actually included that. And so there's a public component, a cultural component, on the second level overlooking the courtyard space. On the interior, originally we were told we had to cover up all the wood. We had to meet contemporary fire codes. I'd have to cover this with layers of sheet rock. And I refused to do that. I worked with a brilliant code engineer, a fire engineer, and we found that the wood is so massive, the columns, that it would actually sustain a fire and it would burn for hours before it would burn down. So it actually met modern fire codes. And the ceiling elements, we found we did special tests. And if I poured a thin layer of concrete over the floors, they too would meet the fire code. And then I was told I'd have to cover up the brick on the interiors, but we did extensive energy modeling to show the brick was seven wide thick and it would actually meet contemporary energy codes. And we set the windows inside the facade if you look, they're square within the arches. So they actually don't fill the windows because they never had historic windows. So instead they're set back from it. And that ended up being the way we designed it. This is the rooftop park. This was just when the plantings went in. So you can't really see it all yet, but it has a series of benches. It has very dramatic views of the skyline. It has this elevator that also makes it accessible that kind of pops out into the sunlight. And this is a view of the Esplanade in front that connects through where we've restored the buildings. We had to rebuild the foundations under the buildings, which was very difficult. We had to tooth in a five foot thick concrete slab under the buildings, obviously while they were in place. And this is a view of it at night. So I'm very excited that this was a competition that we originally won. We just now have realized and built it. But to me, what's interesting is how you could take something that would have a public function because it provides funding for the park, but how we could also create a public sequence of spaces and program elements that would enliven those private functions and how we could bring that about. And the second theme to me is how you could take the traditional building because of the exterior we completely restored, but how we could add new and contemporary elements that would contrast with that and help bring new life to it. The second project I'll talk about is the Bronx Post Office. Now, this project came to me when a developer asked me, he wanted to know why we won the Empire Stores competition because he had worked with a very, very good architect. And she also competed for it and I really respect her work. And he came to me and he said, I wanna know why you won the project because who are you? I worked with a much more well-known architect than you Jay and I wanna know why you won the project. So I said, I can't speak to that. I'll just show you what I did. And I pulled out my drawings because it hadn't been built yet and we showed it to him. His name was Young Woo. He's a Korean developer. And he said, you know, you're right. I actually like what you did for that. So I'll give you a call. And then I didn't hear from him for a year and I thought maybe he was just kidding me. And a year later, he called me up and he said, okay, I wanna talk now. I just bought a building. It's called the Bronx Post Office. Now the Bronx Post Office is a really important building in the Bronx. It's actually designed by Thomas Harlan-Ellett. He was a great architect, was built in 1938. It's kind of a cross between classicism and modernism. It clearly has classical elements with a big podium. It sits right on the Grand Concourse, which is one of the most important streets in New York which is based on the Champs-Elysées. And it's a very, very prominent street. And this sits at 149th Street in the Grand Concourse. So it's at a very prominent urban location right across from the largest community college in New York. And so Young bought this and he wanted to figure out what to do with it. So we looked at the history of it to see how we would transform it. It's a really interesting building. It has these giant arches. It used to originally have a courtyard in the middle which we discovered and I found the remnants of it. The post office itself had filled it in. It also has these sculptural elements which are very important, which we're restoring. So it has a series of WPA sculptures. And it's also quite famous because the lobby is landmarked. So it has a landmarked interior lobby and the lobby features a very famous set of murals from the Works Progress Administration by Ben Sean. Ben Sean is a great contemporary artist from the 1930s. Also, it's not so widely known as wife Bernarda. Really equally did the murals. So I always credit them both. So Ben and Bernarda Sean did the murals for the building. So it has an interior landmark component too. These are the pictures of the Postmaster James Farley when he opened it. And these are views of the lobby as it existed. Now the post office over time had kind of messed it up a little bit. They tried to restore the murals but they actually damaged them terribly. They didn't mean to but they covered them with varnish so they were almost completely brown and black when we found them. So, but we could save them and we completely restored them to their original clarity. And the other thing was we had to figure out how to use this space because this building was really important to the neighborhood but it was almost always closed. What I mean is there was a post office in there but it was a postal sorting facility. And today, in the age of the internet with you guys no one's writing letters anymore. So this thing had really been almost entirely empty for about the last 20 years. So we looked at how could we address these historic components? There was a historic lobby. There was this combination of classical and modern elements. We had to address these murals and it was very prominent. It was really important to the community. And then we also looked at what could we do with this building? I was telling some of the students earlier you can have power as an architect to sometimes suggest things. And it amazes me that we would just come up with ideas and sometimes they would really take them. So we were trying to figure out what would be the appropriate use for the building and what would be right for the developer. And we said, well, we could do a kind of a market, a food market because the area was a food desert and it was right near a college and college students always need food. And then we thought, well, there's a need for incubator businesses. And we found that there were small professional businesses in the Bronx that had nowhere to go so we could do that. And then the community college, I said, we should talk to them because even though they're really big, this is a beautiful building and now they've agreed to take a floor of it also. So we're gonna have student spaces in here. And then finally on the rooftop, we said you should really enliven that it overlooks Yankee Stadium, it's not far away. So we said, what if you create a kind of a rooftop restaurant and I'll do an addition on top. So these are the murals as we started to restore them and bring them back to their brilliant colors. They're based on the themes of Walt Whitman and people, laborers working in the countryside. Ben Sean was a very liberal, very strong socialist who believed in telling the story of bringing the kind of countryside into New York and the murals have beautiful colors and abstract patterns and geometries. And then we took the building and I said, what if we could create a kind of a structure inside it, sort of an armature that would link it together, create a series of pads and staircases. We decided to take the old loading dock and make that into the new lobby. The building is an entire city block and there was sort of an industrial loading dock on the backside and we could make that the new lobby and then we connect to a major rooftop addition where I could do a contemporary addition on top. So this is the sort of circulation armature as it works through the building from the loading dock to the rooftop addition and that's what it looks like here. So this is the building itself and the intervention is mainly on the interior on this one because it had to be more subtle and because in order to get the approvals we made fairly minimal clean additions to the building itself. This is the loading dock and I sort of loved the industrial character of this and I didn't want to get rid of it entirely. So we actually just opened that up and made it into a grand staircase. This is the entrance to the business incubators and we filled it with polycarbonate. I wanted something that would contrast with the original silver brick that Ella had picked. So we chose a kind of a colored polycarbonate I felt in the Bronx. We wanted something a little bit more intense. I was willing to go with color here. So this is what it looks like where we took industrial mesh, lighting, color and polycarbonate and we wrapped it into the interior and this is under construction right now. So this is very far along. We hope to have it mostly done before Christmas. This is the lobby and the lobby had been kind of messed up over time but we restored the murals and we opened it up and there were these beautiful mesh screens up at the very top that would actually originally provide security for the postal sorting facility and we opened that up and we're creating a food market hall featuring local restaurants from the Bronx and then these are the incubator spaces above which are also wrapped in polycarbonate and wood. We restored the original wooden floors which are end grain wood floors which are in restoration right now and then finally on the rooftop we proposed something very contemporary. I wanted to create a completely open structure with deployable walls that would open up around the perimeter and a lightweight roof system that would float above and we wrapped it in polycarbonate this beautiful translucent material and this is the exterior and the polycarbonate was just put on about a month ago we found a Swiss firm that would do it a very, very good firm and so it's been wrapped with this beautiful translucent material and we're creating a series of decks and terraces and we're doing a kind of a the client found a great local restaurateur is gonna do a Cuban restaurant with swimming pools on top overlooking it so now and again radical uses is a big part of what I do too so now I have a supermarket, a food hall, a community college, a business incubator office space and a Cuban restaurant cigar bar with swimming pools on the roof and that's a classic kind of Studio V project and a beautiful use for this post office that had been mostly empty oh and by the way we kept the post office we convinced them to stay because that was important to the community but now they take one tiny little corner because that's all the post office needs so they'll still be there too actually on the corner on the Grand Concourse. My third project is the Niagara Falls Riverfront and this one's really unusual even by our standards I was approached by someone who wanted to I basically got a call it was like that kind of joke like do you want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge and I got a call from the city of Niagara Falls, Canada and they said we have a bridge and we want to sell it to somebody and so I went and met with them and I'd met them before I did a little bit of master planning work for them but they had this astonishing old bridge and they didn't know what to do with it now that seems kind of strange that it's made even more complicated because the bridge actually crosses the international boundary that goes between the US and Canada in addition but it seems the Canadians owned the bridge and the bridge was a liability for them because they didn't have any use for it they would no longer use it as a bridge it was a railway bridge but they had posted a bond where in order to take down the bridge if they destroyed it would cost 26 million dollars so they wanted to find someone to sell the bridge to for a dollar or a dollar as they say in Canada so that they could find a use for it and they had to actually figure out how one could generate an appropriate use for a railway bridge so as always we did our research and I was interested that this used to be the center of the city Queen Street is sort of Canadian for Main Street in America so Queen Street was the name of the Main Street which actually ran right by the bridge and it's on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls but it's also it's further away from the tourist zone which is Victoria Park which we think of as Niagara Falls so it's a bit further around as a matter of fact the Main Street had significantly deteriorated these are the historic photos of the area which also included a major train station and there's a historic train station which is still there today and this was part of our scheme is how we would integrate the train station that is still there they don't use the bridge anymore into it when I did research the location of the bridge also was really cool it was actually originally a robling bridge robling was the guy who designed the Brooklyn Bridge and this was a great suspension bridge which was here prior to our great arch bridge as a matter of fact the story is amazing where to get the first cable across they literally did a competition in Canada with kids with kites and whoever could get a kite to the other side would get the magnificent sum of 10 dollars and one enterprising young kid got a kite across and they used the string to take a bigger string and a bigger string until they eventually got the cable across and that's the true story of how they started the bridge part of the reason was that it passes over the whirlpool and the Canadian River is so powerful here just below the falls that it was too dangerous to cross the river so this was the only way they could actually build the bridge in roblings time in the 19th century it was replaced by the Michigan Arch Bridge here which is the one we got to deal with there were no drawings of the bridge so one of my challenges as an architect was I had to figure out how to get drawings of it I found these drawings, historic drawings there were no as built drawings so I had to hire a bridge inspector who hangs in a boson chair to actually go and give us the dimensions of all the bridge members and we modeled it in CAD and figured it out so these are the historic photos of how they built the second bridge now they didn't need to have the kid with the kite they could do it from either side as a cantilever and this is the bridge as I found it so it was this magnificent rusting structure with beautiful views looking directly at the falls as you could see here on the Niagara River and so my challenge was the city said can you please tell us what we should do with it because we want to sell it to somebody but we don't know what to do with an old bridge and we thought for years we could sell it as a bridge but we don't want to use it for an active bridge anymore so we'd like to know if you could do something architectural with it so this was an unusual one we took a look at it and there was a decommissioned railway bridge the lower arch bridge there were a few approach bridges leading to it also that led into the downtown into the main street there was also the historic train station and there was a rail yard next to it that was contaminated but empty and no longer used so we came up with a mixed use program that possibly would be suitable for commercial development we should augment the rail station which they wanted to extend with commuter service to Toronto they call it GO Service we thought that there should be a park component a public component and then we came up with a whole series of different studies including using the bridge for a cultural facility, a hotel and a conference facility including rezoning the area around it to allow some taller structures and so this is what we started to look at so this was the scheme as we developed it now it's larger it includes the bridges off to the right going off one of the first things I proposed is if you want to really develop the bridge it's tough to build on a bridge so we said why don't you take the railway site next to it which was 80 acres and we could actually rezone that for commercial development and the bridge would be the head of it it would be a kind of a gateway and so we developed a larger scheme the bridge is off to the upper right part of the drawing I guess I can't point to it with this thing can I point with this thing? Ah yes so the bridge is over here and there are two railway bridges there's a limited access bridge here which is still used which is a current bridge and there's the former railway bridge which is here and this was the rail site that was immediately adjacent to it which we also rezoned for commercial development as we developed that we showed that you could create a series of commercial buildings with gardens in between and we thought there would be a market for this in Niagara Falls so we rezoned it for about a million square feet as part of the approval and then we developed a scheme for the bridge itself which included an approach along a series of smaller bridges kind of a mini-highline if you will and we rezoned one area to actually for a tower on the edge of the escarpment and the city was interested in rezoning the area to encourage development and then we did a design for the bridge itself and we said that one could do a hotel facility or a residential condominium facility along with a hotel conference facility adjacent to it. These are some details of that where they wanted to include some elements like an auditorium and a series of smaller bridges with gardens on them like the Park Street Bridge and the Cataract Avenue Bridge along with a series of restaurants and cafes and then the bridge itself would actually form a hotel conference center and we also looked at putting a small non-denominational chapel in the middle of it for people who wanted to do weddings so these are the preliminary drawings that we've done of the scheme and we have so far have done the rezoning for it. We also included an extension to the railway station here there's a historic railway station and we proposed an intermodal transit center with a parking garage and a new train station on the other side and then this is a view of the new train station here and then finally for the bridge itself we found that we did a full structural analysis of it after our bridge inspector looked at it and what we found was that if you left the bridge the way it was and you let it continue to rust and you did very little to it that it would essentially support a three-story building for 500 years and so it was so expensive to modify the bridge that we felt that if we actually just left it in its current rusty position and did a lightweight structure this is a lattice shell structure oops, a lattice shell structure here that's covered with ETFE foil that we could actually support that and so this project isn't yet built but a developer approached the city after this and has entered into different agreements to buy the site and they haven't done it yet and we did rezone the adjacent property so this one remains to be seen if this one's going to be realized yet but the city has not yet dispersed the site and so we're waiting to see what's going to happen the next project is perhaps even a little stranger and this was one of the most unusual projects I ever worked on I have an old client named Anthony Lanier who's a really interesting character who lives in Washington D.C. and his daughter married a Russian guy and Anthony has a bunch of computer companies including internet and digital services and he found that there were a lot of highly educated young people in Russia who were looking to maybe get out who had very strong digital educations and Anthony would sponsor them and bring them to the United States and in the process for doing that he was approached by some people in Russia that were looking at a city which is called Novosibirsk now I didn't know that much about Russia when I first started talking to Anthony about the project and I don't know if you guys know it but the three largest cities in the Soviet Union or in Russia are Moscow and St. Petersburg and the third is Novosibirsk it's in Siberia and it's on the Trans-Siberian Railway and it has an interesting history so Novosibirsk is this very large city you can see here and near that is another small city which is called Akadem-Gerodok Akadem-Gerodok it was kind of for many years in the original Soviet Union kind of a secret city which is where all the biological laboratories were and where they had their chemical weapons to threaten others and Akadem-Gerodok was almost kind of like a utopian city at least by Russian standards because they would take all of their scientists and they actually understall and dammed a huge waterway created a giant lake and created kind of an ideal city in the middle of Siberia where no one could get at it where they conducted all of their experiments and next to that is an area called Kultsevo and now the biological laboratories have all been decommissioned but if the people lived in Akadem-Gerodok the original laboratories were located here in Kultsevo and they were now trying to figure out what to do with it and today when you go to Akadem-Gerodok it feels like Berkeley that's full of young people hanging out in internet cafes like kind of hooking up, doing different things so they wanted to try to figure out how to do a development that would attract these young people to stay in Russia instead of just leaving because they didn't have anything any kind of social aspect to the life there so this is actually a picture of Akadem-Gerodok which by Russian standards was this kind of utopian landscape set in the green area so it was very interesting and then this is a view of the site itself the site was also interesting because it had these series of kind of brutal Soviet style repetitive buildings in this giant campus and we were given this site here the other interesting component was they had a former river that they had covered over most of it but they wanted to daylight that and bring that back and actually make that into a major feature kind of a sustainable feature if you will so these were the views of the original site in Kultsevo these were the kind of Stalin-esque sort of buildings marching along not very human in their scale oriented strictly to the cars and then just the Siberian landscape which was kind of open and beautiful and green so this sort of contrast of these kind of Stalin-esque buildings intermixed with this beautiful landscape that was quite stunning so this is a computer model that shows it and you can start to see it a little more here so again these are the kind of campus of relentless marching buildings and then we were given the site in between so one of the first things I had to figure out was I'd never been asked to work in a site of a former laboratory or a former secret laboratory and we thought that the river offered a clue but they wanted to create a mixed-use program they wanted to create residential, commercial and exhibition space and they wanted to create kind of a human scale that would be in contrast to this kind of brutal 60s and 70s scale that was on the site so the first thing I had to do was figure out what is a Russian model of urbanism and I looked all over I looked for books I looked for research online and I found very little so I really dug into it and I found that there's something there's sort of a kernel at the heart of every Russian city and it's called a Kremlin not the Kremlin that we think of like the Kremlin but Kremlin means like a citadel and the idea was that there would be kind of a heart, a citadel which really in most traditional Russian cities was at the center of them and so I started to research these and there were these kind of compacted medieval cores that were truly at the center of most traditional Russian cities and I thought could that be a basis for a more human kind of urbanism and how could we, in a contemporary way, reuse a sort of a compressed Kremlin a contemporary urban core and how could I use that to generate a new form? So we started to create these sketches that were kind of unusual figure ground inversions playing with scale playing with complexity within the site superimposing it on these kind of repetitive Stalin-esque buildings and we started to play with the shapes and forms to see if I could make them respond to site conditions, solar orientation and so I started to create a series of diagrams to create perimeter blocks that compacted, opened them up in various ways created a network of open spaces major sequence between them and we really started to sketch out this kind of unusual idea of creating a contemporary medieval city and as we developed that we started to fit it into the site as kind of a contrast and an antidote to the repetitive mechanical nature of the brutal buildings from the 60s and 70s and oriented it around this reopened waterway and landscape feature and so this was what we developed and I started to experiment with different kinds of materials too there's a, I looked at making it out of wood a special kind of torrified wood which is a highly sustainable material and readily available in that area it's actually done in Scandinavia quite near the Russian border and I looked at creating more rich and compacted streetscapes and yet still using contemporary forms not actually trying to mimic medieval forms at all except in plan and detail and complexity but to do them with quite contemporary buildings then we also looked at how we could open up courtyards to solar orientation create open green spaces because the weather there is extremely brutal it reminded me a little bit actually of where I grew up in Buffalo where the summers are very hot and the winters are very very cold so we thought could we create microclimates and capture green areas and because the winter is so long there and then finally we also took that waterway and we made it the center point and opened it up because they have huge need for recreation there and because the summer is relatively short people use the outdoors tremendously and so we would restore that natural landscape and bring it back into the city but we also created winter gardens and other environments and skating areas so there would also be a great environment within the winter and so that's our project for Novosibirsk this one I must say is on hold with the current Putin government now this one actually the person we worked with on this I believe the Putin put him in jail and so that project isn't going ahead but we'll see now this project is going ahead and actually just got a major approval by the city this one is called Riverside and it's in Staten Island on the south shore Staten Island, you know for those of you who know New York you may or may not have ever been to Staten Island to take in the Staten Island ferry but it's one of the four islands of New York City and it's a completely different environment than the rest of New York as you might know it it's very very different and this is all the way on the south shore so this part of Staten Island was actually inhabited before Manhattan was so it has a very very long history and it's very unusual these are some of the buildings that were that were there there was an old mill on the site and I was kind of taken by this wooden architecture and there are remnants of the mill that still remain that we're going to be incorporating into the designs and there were also these famous old farmhouses and I like their kind of pragmatism I like the nature of the wood I was remembering that project that I designed in Russia where I experimented with wood and I like these kind of folded roofscapes but in addition to that I was kind of amazed there was also one house on the site and the client said yeah you know I'm just renting that house out but you're gonna tear that down and I looked into it and I found that actually it was the original Disis Way coal house it was two of the founding families of Staten Island it was from approximately 1860 and I said why do you want to take that down and it had been changed and modified a bit over the years like it had vinyl siding on it but it was still the same house and I said let's just strip that down and restore it and bring it back into the original and when I also looked at it I found there was a plain tree to the left visible in this photograph so it was about a 200 year old tree so I dispatched an arborist to go look at the tree and save the tree too so we elected to save the house and the tree which was not landmarked or protected in any way now the site was also interesting because even though it had long history and had been inhabited for over 200 years but it had overgrown so these are views of the site where it was on the waterfront that's the outer bridge in the background it's called so it had this strange aspect where it was very green very beautiful and kind of industrial at the same time again a classic Studio V site and so I looked at this and I thought how could I incorporate some of the greenery because it's a massive site and how could I incorporate the buildings into this greenery and how could I kind of respect the industrial character of the site too so we posed the problem it wasn't given to us that we would keep the historic house and we would save the 200 year old tree which we did and the client wanted me to do basically a large retail development so this was a very large retail development about 500,000 square feet and retail is still prominent in this part of Staten Island so as part of the approval we said we would include a waterfront park we would do a major wetland preserve in order to save some of the open space we would do over 10 acres of restored wetland and we'd actually restore it back to native species into a higher quality wetland and I would do this commercial center for him which would include restaurants and cafes and terraces kind of enlivening that waterfront and then we had to do parking and other things and I had to address resiliency and we also added an interpretive walkway so here's the site and it's very unusual, this was the old Mill Creek this is a major road this is that huge bridge, the outer bridge so it's a very complex site with a lot of contours and this is how we've developed it now we've done over 30 acres of green roofs we're building a public street that leads to the waterfront where we've just now done a study to add a major new ferry that would connect to Wall Street I'm bringing the street back and around and I'm extending a series of open spaces and a major waterfront park and a 10 acre restored wetland and this is the view of the front part where we kept the small house which was up here on the roadway so the little coal house was here and we decided to create a garden and wrap around it and save the one old tree so this is a view of the house itself from the highway with the tree which is quite large and this is a view of it from the side which actually now becomes the entrance to the whole development and so we've turned the house it's going to have a restaurant and it's going to be the new home for the community board for the facilities so we're going to actually create a public facility within the house as well as a restaurant and cafe and they could do weddings and events there it'll actually become a focal point of the neighborhood and then the building itself is kind of built into the landscape the parking is underneath and we folded the whole building into the landscape with very very extensive green roofs with these kind of folded roofs that mimic you know in some larger scale the original mill and the original farmhouses we brought the street and we actually brought it underneath so that there's a parking level so this parking is actually below the street it's a private street and that lifts the entire site up out of the flood plain and makes it resilient so it lifts the whole thing up this is one of the greatest areas that actually suffered under Sandy and in addition it allowed me to create this major new waterfront park here with a whole series of boardwalks and esplanades and then this which is a sensitive nature area the Department of Environmental Conservation worked with me where I could make the whole thing accessible but through the boardwalks people wouldn't be able to go down and damage any of the environment and then I could create a larger public plaza here and put restaurants and cafes here overlooking the waterfront so this is a view where we created the link to the waterfront one comes across from the upper level down a grand staircase that forms an amphitheater and creates a link to bring people to the water these are the restored wetlands and the boardwalks that we're doing over here and the larger public plaza over here and in various places we allow you to climb right up onto the green roofs of the buildings itself to overlook the waterfront this is one of my favorite views it actually shows the whole restored wetlands so here's the public park and again I'm making the buildings out of wood now I'm experimenting with wood where I wanted to break down the scale and use all natural materials so I'm using this material it's a heat treated wood called torrified wood which allows it to last for about 50 years without rot it's a very sustainable material it's done with soft woods and it actually makes it extremely durable and it's quite beautiful so you can see here we're restoring all this with native species and eelgrass we're creating a small beach and a get down with fire pits and seating this is a view of the main walkway that leads down to the waterfront and extends over the roadway and this is a view of the central courtyard that's the outer bridge in the background where like the high line it extends right over the street so the street is below and the public spaces extend right over and allow you to go down into the park without having to cross the traffic this is a view of the central court with the wooden architecture and we actually gather all the stormwater from the site and bring it into the central court and down through and recharge into the ground and it also brings light and greenery down into the parking garage level and then finally we decided to add an interpretive walkway where I had a big debate with the department of environmental conservation but I wanted people to be able to go in and enter into the wetlands and so we would create an ecological center there and tell the story of the wetlands and the history of Staten Island and we incorporated that into the project as well and this is a view of it at night just two more projects so in different scales going back to the new old all different kinds of scales I've done very few private residences this is one of the only ones I've done but this is one example it's the we call it the J plus K residence so this is an old historic building in New York City on 29th street at Broadway it's quite a beautiful building a second empire building and we did a significant addition on top of it for one residence so the building itself was the site of one of the last farmhouses in New York it was actually at the time of the Civil War about 1869 it actually had this old farmhouse in it and this is a view of it here it was called the Casper-Samler Homestead and in 1882 actually 1869 it was built this photo must be from 1882 it was a huge building for its area it was one of the grandest hotels in New York New York was progressively moving further and further to the north the area around Madison Square where this is on 29th street had become the kind of new theater district and it became kind of the grand hotel district and this was a fantastic hotel it was the first building in New York City that had a telephone Mark Twain stayed here Oscar Wilde when he toured America stayed here there was a magnificent bar in the hotel called the Silver Dollar Bar where Diamond Jim Brady used to hold forth so it was this kind of wonderful hotel and it had this great street character and over the years it transformed and changed it was a great hotel until the time of the Great Depression and actually the building fell into terrible disrepair and they decided to resurrect it as a factory it seems almost inconceivable so in 1937 it was converted to a factory and they drove steel through the center of it and used it to make clothing for Lady's Mile then in 1979 it became a cooperative and became a residence where a bunch of artists and crazy musicians and filmmakers took it over and restored the building to a degree and landmarked it and made it into a co-op and then over time the co-op developed where it had more and more professionals in it and more work was done on the building so these are some of the photos of it when it was a historic grand hotel so here we had to work with the different layers of the building and what was interesting to me was when we got there it was a very simple kind of 1970s apartment and we said well what can we do and as we drove through the layers of the building we found there was kind of an 1860s layer which was the wood of the old original building most of the interiors were gone but we found the old wooden structure there was steel and infrastructure from the 1930s and we thought could we add a new layer and the neighborhood around it had transformed considerably and now it was known as Nomad so we tried to really bring together two types it was almost like a townhouse in the sky where the original hotel was like a loft and it's on this level and then we added another level to it and then we added a garden, an outdoor room and kitchen on the roof so this is a view where you could see some of the different layers of the apartment we exposed all of the wood which had been covered up for many many decades and so the wood is all from 1869 and this steel which is kind of old fashioned steel we had to fireproof it and to mess and paint it is from the era of the Great Depression and then we thought we would add our own contemporary layer that would speak to the 21st century we created vertical spaces that connect all the different units together we created elements that would tie them together like this cantilevered staircase and in every case we tried to reveal each of the different ages of the building so you could read these different parts of them and add this new contemporary layer this is a two-story library that leads up to a skylight with views of the Empire State Building this looks back into the tower over here with this extended library and bookcase these are the old original angled wooden columns of the original structure that had all been covered up that we discovered this is a clear story that we put in that frames a view of the Empire State Building and cantilevered of black and steel stair that leads up to the second level of the master bedroom with a kind of a sliding door here and we created different spaces that would allow one space to open to another so for example this is the master bedroom which has large sliding doors that open onto a terrace we found the original 19th century handrails they were broken up in pieces around the roof and we restored them and put them back together to create a garden these are different spaces flowing into each other such as a dressing room and a master bath and you can see how the different spaces open into each other these are a Swiss system that slides into the wall and disappears this is a glass room that's a wet room that contains the tub this shows the historic handrail we literally found this broken up all over the building and had to kind of put it back together again like a puzzle and then we found the guys who had actually done all the planting for the high line and we hired them to design a series of gardens and plants that would go throughout and we would link them on the different levels including the terrace, the original tower and this is the roof level with the garden where there's also a second kitchen for entertaining this is a view of the total rooftop and kind of all the layers brought back together so the last project maybe is the most unusual of all and this one is a project that we made up but it's showing signs every day of becoming real I was giving a talk at the Municipal Art Society which is a very, very old famous New York institution Jackie Onassis had helped found it it's been around for many years even before Jackie but she helped rejuvenate it and change its purpose and I was giving a talk on equity in design and talking about how waterfronts and edges create new opportunities for equity for affordable housing, for schools, for public spaces and parks and there were three young people in their 20s that were also giving a talk and they talked about their vision which was they wanted to create a special park space for a neighborhood in New York called Green Point and Green Point is a really unusual neighborhood because originally it was a very industrial area and now it's changed over to be one of the coolest areas of New York it's part of Williamsburg where there's a lot of young people there's a lot of energy and creativity and there's kind of a push and a pull between what is the new character of the neighborhood and what it used to be and they had this idea that they wanted to call Maker Park where they wanted to create a park that wouldn't just wipe clean the industrial past but would somehow celebrate the original industrial character of this community and make a community maker space which they felt was part of the ethos and character of Green Point so Stacy and Karen and Zach were giving this talk and they spoke after me and I went up to them afterwards and I said that's such a cool idea I'm really interested in what you guys are doing can we help and so we decided to offer our services pro bono but because I work with all these other engineers and lawyers and scientists and environmental specialists I called all them up and asked them if they would volunteer too and to my amazement every single person said yes not a single person turned us down so all of a sudden we had a whole professional team behind a project that wasn't quite real but that was based around the vision of three people that were just community activists that all had day jobs but they wanted to create a really special park so we got to work when we looked at the site there was something really special about it it was funny it had a bunch of industrial oil tanks it was called the Bayside Oil Site of Kent Avenue but when we looked at the past we found something really interesting it was the site of the original Astral Oil Works and the Astral Oil Works was actually founded by this guy who was actually a very famous American entrepreneur and his name was Charles Pratt and he started this oil works but he also did a lot of other progressive things he actually created some of the first social housing in all of New York City which he created for his workers and the guy came to him and insisted that he sell his oil site to him and he was very demanding about it and Pratt decided he would sell it to him that guy was John D. Rockefeller so he sold the whole site to him for a very large sum of money and he used that to found something which is called the Pratt Institute and the Pratt Institute was very unusual because it was one of the first schools in America to allow women and it was one of the first schools in America to allow people of color in and it was very dedicated one could even say it was one of the first early maker institutions where it was dedicated to the practical aspects of making things as well as the intellectual pursuit that would drive the ideas behind them and so the site all of a sudden had this whole history as we got further and further into it that played to the story of making and it had something that was interesting in that now today the site looks like this this is the base site oil property and there were 10 of these big tanks and there are three different types and we thought could we actually keep those could we do something special with them so we started to develop the design that we became known for reusing industrial artifacts reusing components but this was one of the most challenging of all a bunch of oil tanks and there were all kinds of issues safety, pollution, access but at the same point the trust for public land has designated the Brooklyn Industrial Waterfront as one of the most endangered spaces in America do we want to wipe all that clean or is there a way to reuse that is there a way to use it in a more interesting or radical way so we went in and documented and photographed them these are some simple photographs of the tanks they're two layers they have an inner layer and an outer layer the idea was if they ever had a spill the outer tank would capture it so there's kind of these strange Richard Sarah kind of spaces where you're between the two layers of the tank an inner one and an outer ring so these are actual photographs that we took Stacy's father took these photos which I always loved and then these are images of them where the grass started to grow in between them and when you climb up on top of them they have incredible views of the Manhattan skyline and there are these beautiful spaces and the curves between them so we thought maybe we could inhabit this with Park Space I also brought in Ken Smith a good friend of mine who I work with a lot who's a famous landscape architect and I said Ken help us design this park so this is what the tanks look like today there are 10 of them three different types out on the water and the whole park land is much bigger and the city by the way had already decided that they wanted to do a park here so this wasn't just a completely crazy idea the city when they did a rezoning many years ago had designated this area for a park but the city had kind of and I regret to say it messed up because they designated as a park but it was privately owned and they never secured the ownership of it so they promised this park to the community as part of a rezoning and a lot of people wanted a park here but the city didn't control it and they did a rough scheme for a park here which they did very quickly it looked like they did in a week or two where they essentially just wiped everything out and planted grass and some trees and we said can't we do something better than that so there was a lot of emotions about this the city behind the scenes was negotiating to purchase the land the people who owned it were holding the city over a barrel they did it finally sell it to the city for $240 million and the city closed on the property but while they were doing that we were developing our schemes and gaining public support so our concept was to keep this industrial loft building here which is in good shape we went and looked at it and this could be the community makerspace and to keep the oil tanks here and to cut off the tops and leave the outer rings and make a few select openings and fill them with gardens so our idea was to propose taking this and turn it into this and we brought in Thornton Thomasetti a great structural engineer who showed that actually the tanks were actually very strong and could take the cuts and it wouldn't be a problem it would hold themselves up if we cut the lids off but we brought in Matt Carroll who's a fantastic remediation specialist and we said well there are some oil spills under it which isn't too bad but what if we filled soil around it the tanks were already clean they'd been empty of oil for years they're actually spotless but we could put soil around it and in the tanks to actually protect against any contamination in the site and inject oxygen in and let natural microbes remediate in situ and we could do that instead of tearing the tanks down and digging out all the soil and trucking it through the neighborhood which would take 20,000 truckloads and would take approximately seven years in order to truck all the soil out and release the contaminants into the air or you could remediate it in place and plant on top of it and actually inject oxygen and microbes so we looked at the tanks themselves and we came up with a series of ideas for how we could fill them with all different gardens and part of our thinking wasn't to design it perfectly either but we would work with local artists and local groups and some of them could change over time we could do different ideas for them so we started to develop them one could be wildflowers and one could be a hanging garden one could be for children one could be for artists so we thought there could be a range of different uses maybe one could remain enclosed and be an auditorium or performance space and you could climb on top of it and get a view out over the skyline so this is the first one that we developed which is a grove of birch trees and wildflowers set within the tank these are the actual proportions just by cutting the lid off and creating some simple openings the second one we thought what if we filled it with water and you get the reflections of the water on the walls and the vines growing up the side and that could be a very beautiful environment I raised my kids in the city and they went to playgrounds I thought what if we create an adventure playground in one but we could combine it with artists and murals and I'll never forget one person came up because the project is controversial and said how could you have your children go inside that tank and play and I said sir excuse me let me just ask you one question do you have children and he looked shocked and said no and I said I've raised my children in New York City they grew up going to public parks and they don't want to sit on a lawn they would be the first ones who would race into that tank and play in there they would be the ones who would want to go inside because that's what children want they want adventure and play this is the larger view where we made sure that even when we were creating the tank gardens that we would have many other things too so when the park was originally planned it was before the iPhone even existed so they had forgotten certain things like they didn't address resiliency they didn't address ecology and habitat so we tried really to make sure that we addressed every part of the community so we included soccer fields we included other playgrounds we included a large lawn because in the way they wanted a big lawn we included a very large restored natural habitat at the inlet because this is one of only seven significant inlets on the East River and this is one of the best ones for natural habitat and finally one of the ideas that was really interesting we were just contacted by a special group in New York called the Billion Oyster Program and the Billion Oyster Program is a fantastic group that's dedicated towards raising a billion oysters and releasing them wild into the New York Harbor because oysters are one of the greatest cleaning devices for water ever known every single oyster every day can process over 12 gallons of water so when the New York Harbor used to be full of oysters it was one of the greatest oyster habitats in the world the oysters would actually completely clean all the water in the harbor every two days completely and so they're trying to find a way and they have a huge program where they're getting state and city funding but they can only do 10,000 oysters at a time and by the way you need millions of them because they have to hold on and process themselves they have to kind of get a virtuous cycle where they can grow on themselves and so if we do one of these tanks which we're thinking about doing the outer ring and using it with ambient water to grow oysters and put them in the inlet and then the oyster larvae will actually go out from the site and migrate into the whole East River and the New York Harbor and so now we're getting support from the Billion Oyster Program because they wanna go forward with the project these are views that show the great lawn and we actually wrapped the entire lawn with a whole berm that goes around the perimeter which protects the neighborhood because the site will flood during storms this is the inlet where we show the restored natural habitat where we wanna restore it as a kind of gray-dated meadow with salt grasses and finally this is my favorite view that shows where we berm up the earth around the tanks and create this natural dune landscape where here we have the waterfront here we have the inlet coming in with human powered boats a series of openings within the tanks and the views of the skyline beyond so we just met with the mayor's office and we just finished a remediation plan showing that our scheme will cost about $26 million but the other scheme will cost about $200 million and now that the Billion Oyster Program has come with us we're commencing to do a series of meetings with the community and to continue with the mayor's office and our greatest hope is to actually make this project a reality because the city is committed to building the park they're tied up in lawsuits with the different groups that actually polluted the site and we think ours may be the path forward so if I leave you with anything with this this is a project we just made up I'm excited that we're winning a bunch of design awards and things for it but really what we wanna do is make it a reality and to me what would be exciting is that not only can we create a great public space not only can we really affect our neighborhood but can we also do something that gives something back and that preserves part of this history so I come all the way back to the big themes and conclusion I think it's the edges it's the left overs places it's the interstices it's the gaps of our cities these are our greatest opportunities as designers these are the place you as young students will find where you can go forward I think that we need to also look at what makes these sites unique we need to know their history we need to look at the aspects and artifacts of them that are left and figure out how we can use them in creative ways and also how we can introduce the great themes of our time not only contemporary architecture materials but also sustainability resiliency how can we make these neighborhoods safe and finally something that we use a lot how can we use the tools that we learn as architects our ability to present our ability to work with people the way we can create drawings and things so that we can actually use zoning tools entitlements, policy initiatives a lot of my firm is built around for a young creative firm as we've grown using these tools in order to enact greater good in order to do community outreach in order to create innovative mixed use programs and finally most importantly to hopefully create beautiful and creative designs so now I come back full circle where I started because the next project which we haven't done yet is the grain elevators there's a crazy guy in Buffalo with a big cowboy hat who actually bought five of the grain elevators and he called me up and that's where we wanna go next thank you and I'm glad to be if anybody if you guys aren't tired I could take a few questions if anybody wants to ask something there's this guy Rick Smith and he owns a company next to them and along the way he tried to get an access through the grain elevator for his metal company just to get to the river so he called up Mr. Cargill who is a guy who actually owned most of the grain elevators a huge international shipping concern and they said actually we're getting out of the business and we wanna sell you all the grain elevators really inexpensively so Rick actually bought them so I'm talking to Rick about it but his goal is to create a community arts and cultural facility and possibly a state or federal park so we're starting grassroots where he's actually already brought in a whole series of arts programs sculpture programs performances, music and he's beginning with that along with tours up and down the river but now I took a bunch of students and again now that we have enough success that we could do pure research projects we've now done complete three dimensional digital models of them all which was difficult we had to do drone flights through and point clouds and model them all and now we're developing a program for arts and culture a small artist in residence program a performance space kind of a hotel really like an art youth hostel and maybe one building with condominiums to help pay for it too and we're starting to develop that right now yes what are some of the challenges that you have in breast-built spaces versus airing versus airing ideas that have a much higher level basically what difference between New York City and Buffalo? That's a great question you know it's funny I feel like I've been practicing on New York and waiting to go home to Buffalo to do something there and the challenges are different like New York is an incredibly dynamic city that has a growing economy and obviously that offers a lot of opportunity but at the same point I think the lessons you learn from one can apply to the other so Buffalo for example and I don't know if any of you have been there lately or are from there is also reinventing itself it's downtown is coming back cities are coming back everywhere so Buffalo is not New York City nor should be nor Providence nor each place has its own unique character but I think that we can learn lessons from one that apply to the other because many of these themes and I've tried to show today even in all different places our waterfronts these former industrial spaces do offer opportunity so it might not be high-end condos on the Buffalo waterfront but actually that's happening too I think that it's more a question of scale and I think it's also finding what's unique to each one like Buffalo is starting to develop a whole architectural tourism industry Buffalo originally had so much great architecture back in the day Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and James Sarenin that actually the architectural tourism industry in Buffalo has grown tremendously and so I think that if we really created something with the grain elevators that was outstanding there's a recent example a museum was just done in South Africa I'm going to go to take a look at it where they just did it in a former grain elevator Thomas Heatherwick did it and I think that if you created something as outstanding as that you would actually draw people and they would want to come and see it too so I think that I think that there are things we can learn from each of them and I think each place will also be unique and different and we have to find creative approaches that work for each one you know it's a good question I actually think about that a lot other questions please This is a small, political school on the edge do you, I don't know how long you've been here but do you see any ideas for what this university could do in its nature going a lot faster different I mean I don't pretend to know your town and what's happening here in this university I was interested you know someone was telling me a story earlier where actually the university looked at originally purchasing a series of warehouses along the waterfront now I know that scheme didn't come about and I think any institution has to look at a combination of where their real heart is where their main campus is and if they want to reach beyond it but I do think as schools grow and one of the interesting thing about Roger Williams is you're an intimate size you're an intimate scale but many schools are creating secondary branches like I look at Cornell where I went is now creating a whole branch on an island in New York City so I guess I can't answer the question realistically for you because I don't know well enough to say but I'd be interested in learning more and I can say that the waterfront here is fantastic to me I've really enjoyed the opportunity to go around and see the finely grained scale the layers and layers of history of it here I think that you know and I look today at some student projects that we're trying to address the waterfront you know and in Newport and in other areas so I think that the reinvention of the more finely grained you know waterfronts that I see here in this area and around New England I think offer huge opportunities but I couldn't say to you how I think Roger Williams plays a role in that yet because that's really evident the way it presented is the sensitivity to historical research in the project and I just wondered if you could speak a little more about how that plays out in your confidence do you have any engagement consultants to do a little bit of research with you or can you guys kind of go about that yourselves and then how that moves into... It's a great question the first simple answer is we really do all the research ourselves and one thing you know as you guys are in school I always think about what relates to you but you always do a lot of research for your own projects with digital tools with the internet it's incredible what we could do if you really learn to use it well so I think it's important that we we do all of our own research we work with great resources we work with other groups, institutions and so forth but really there's great access to it and really it's become important to our process and I say that not only as a way of generating ideas because no site is really a blank canvas but also that thing I referred to earlier about this is a funny word to use but power we use that to get our projects to go ahead so for example that project in Staten Island there was a previous project on that site that the entire community hated and someone worked on it for like four years and they just completely threw it away it was hopeless and they came to us so I was walking into this toxic situation where you know here's the new guy and we've spent four years fighting this but when we did all this research it's funny some people think I've had that people ask me like are you talking down to the community explaining their community to them and I'm like no people really respect that and when you tell the story of a community and try to bring it to life and do this research I often find that disarms people and they engage into the process and they want to learn more so when we did that in that project in Staten Island you know Staten Island is a very different place it's very conservative compared to the rest of New York it's totally Donald Trump country it's very very different from New York City it's like another universe and I thought I would be like the Manhattan guy coming in and they would take me apart and they loved the project they loved the idea that someone wanted to do something world-class in Staten Island that respected the history that figured out the house that wanted to create the park that wanted to save the tree and they rallied around us so I think that kind of research can also give us as designers, as architects great power to achieve the kind of things we want and then that made the developer want to pay for the park and all that because he knew that was his way forward and that was the price and he could include that within his development and that worked out well so to me the research isn't just an academic thing like we're doing this because it's cool or interesting because that we're using it to drive our agenda to create better places and better design and that for me is a really interesting thing and that's something you're all learning now and that's something you can take with you that could be very powerful so is that good? Thank you all very much