 This is very exciting for us. We're very excited to sort of kick off this idea of making and the emphasis that the school is giving on making to this event where we invited some fantastic artists and thinkers and friends. And it's very exciting that the school is in this place where thanks to Amal and to Amal and Raus and Josh Jordan, there is a real attention to making and to what that means. And in particular, also thinking of the Fabrication Lab which has just been renamed the Making School. So the emphasis is all on the idea that making is not just about representation. It's really more of a conceptual endeavor. I am Adaholla. I'm one of the partners at Lotec. We've been, Giuseppe and I have been in the school for 15 years. And our work has always been somehow all made physical. When Giuseppe was really interested in digital culture, we asked our students to make a book. And they worked on a monograph which was the most favorite school in the entire school. Then Giuseppe got interested in digital fabrication. And we're asking our students to make this really essential volume starting from single material in the making. So our work is always a little bit at odds with the school. But we do that because we believe that there is real value in the idea of approaching making from a conceptual stand. We ask our students that their work is about testing and investigating that is exploratory, that the work hesitates, that doesn't try to find answers, but rather to raise questions. We ask our students that the work is very subjective, is very personal, is very much about themselves. In that sense, we also ask that the work is untuned, that they don't worry about pool, that they worry about really what they have to say. We also ask that the work is obsessive. Our methodology is very iterative. We ask them to do things and then again and again and again and again. We believe that there is real value in repetition and iteration. And that somehow this is also a therapy week. That by doing things over and over, you're also operating some kind of therapy. We also ask our students to look very close, to look at things that are very close to their life, very close to the space that they have it, very close to what they already know, what's already with them, their mind, their hands, their skill. Underlying our classes, there is very much the desire to push the idea of a personal voice, to explore interests and curiosity, but also to explore your own skills. So the work is very much suspended between what you like, what you're interested in, and what you're good at. And finding the bridge between the two. So to trigger this event, I wanna be from a piece of writing from another kind of maker, from David Goldblatt, who's a photographer. My first awareness of a bulgy particular that I can recall, was that the bulge is made by the flattened flesh of my inner thighs as I sat in shorts on a bench at kindergarten. From where I sat, my bulge seemed more pronounced than anyone else's, and I tried to hide them with my hands. After a time, I realized that my inner thighs were no different than others, but it remained an area of the body of which I was especially aware. I have never been able to decide whether my sense of people's body is something I share with others or whether mine is different or perhaps more acute. Nor am I sure of how long I've had it. What I do know is that it has been for me with me for a very long time, and that it is often intense and detailed. I seem to have an innate propensity which has been fed by life experiences and heightened by the hyper awareness that photography sometimes enables and demands. Of my life experiences, one that was crucial was that of working in my father's shop in Rampford Tain, where I acquired the consciousness of bodily particulars that was technical rather than subjective. My father was a man outfitter, whose ability to intuit and remember and satisfy customers' needs was almost legendary. The wife of a miner who had once worked in Rampford Tain's estate and was now on a property to push hundreds of miles away, my phony men say, Eli, our daughter is getting married and Tom needs a new suit and shirt, tie, shoes and socks to go with it. That was all she needed to tell you. Within hours, an outfit would be in the post. Trousers altered to fit, sizes, colors and style, and airing the right for the man, his tastes and your vision. Under my father kindly yet firm guidance, I became reasonably skilled at applying some of his presets, one which was never ever to ask the customer his size. It was our job to know or to discover the right size and to set in close the feeling that appealed to his tastes and it was right for his purpose. Thus it was that I learned to be conscious of how a man's body was, of how he stood and was proportioned, to estimate and measure the girth and length of trunk, arms and legs so that they could be brought to a proper congruity with jackets and trousers and as well to understand lightings and needs and how this might be best satisfied. I learned to look at a man and his feet, their length, build and breath, and to judge what shoe size, fitting and make, and last to try on it in order to find what would best suit it and fit it. I could examine neck and arms and make a pretty good guess at color size and zoom length before confirming with tape measure. After my father died in 1962, I sold the business and became a photographer. The outs-fitting skills have rusted but that awareness of the body, of its proportion, size and build, and of what is declared in stands, clothing and ornamentation has become sharper and broader. So I'm obviously very interested in in the idea that Dave Goldblatt had this feeling of the bulges which I'm sure many of us can relate to. When he was in kindergarten, we're talking about circa 1934, 1935, he was born in 1930 and this picture is from a series that happened in 1975. So it's 45 years later, basically this is a live effort. And that's really what I want to underline, what we have here today for artists whose life effort is their work and their practice. We will see a little bit of what they've done, because obviously this is a short panel, but we are very excited to have them here. They're dear friends, colleagues and people that we, whose work we love. I'm gonna give a very, very brief introduction to who they are. In order of appearance, Evie Day is a sculptor. I'm not gonna say anything about academic collections, museums, exhibition, awards. They're super qualified. You can look in their bio. The G-SAP website, we're going fast now. They're on Google. This is like beyond the organic food, there is the post-organic, that's where we are. We don't need to say anything about it. So Evie Day is a sculptor whose work is very much about suspension, is the fine gravity through suspension fabric lines, and is very much in relationship to architecture, also to sexuality, being a woman, and humor, and humor. Marc Gansblas is also an artist whose work instead explores the connection between material practice in art, science and industry. He's also an amazing maker, and I need to say that from direct experience. We have worked with him a few times. Marc uses video photography print, publishing an object making, to enter a dialogue with laboratories, factories and institutions, and collaborates with scientists and artists. Sarah Oppenheimer is an artist whose work extends the boundaries between sculpture and architecture, a manipulation of standardized spaces, this rapid experience of spatial continuity, and that he re-orients and clarifies the experience of the environment. Alan Wexler, last but not least, Alan Wexler's work is between architectural design and art, altering perception of domestic activities. This for me is very interesting, especially in thinking about the idea of staying with something that is very close, and I really hope that you look at that. Alan's work investigates painting, painting, singing, and socializing, turning this everyday moment into theater, and reaching it. So we asked these artists to respond to two prompts. The first one was why the material? Why the material they're using? And including that, we are also hoping to dig a little bit into their personal subject. And then the second one is just, we asked them to show the projects. And for us, the idea of showing two is to show an effort in how each one of them states and states their works, states their actions, state their voice, their personal voice. So we hope that the first half is gonna be that presenting, the second half is gonna be a conversation. We hope that the makers in this room will make us hear their voices and participate in the conversation. Actively, I really trust that their work and the proximity of their work will generate some interesting sparks for a new discussion. Thank you so much for having me here with all of you at Columbia and in the architecture program. It's not an architect by any means, by any stretch, but my work I have, you'll see, there's a dialogue there, and I love talking about work there. And also, these topics are fantastic because I was talking to other panelists here today, and I'm great work, and that this is the part, this discussion, this conversation is something that curators don't write about, critics don't write about. You only really know from your peers or, I don't know, they've come to your studio because this part isn't really, this is the meat of what we do, it's the making of something, which way or another. And thinking and making a life idea, it sounds like making some messy looking or hands dirty when you met, but we all think a lot, but you have to make something, and whether it's in the computer or otherwise. So it just tends to be very generosity to this idea. And so at Projects, this is one called Bride Fight, and what you're looking at is, this is situated at the Leverhouse here in New York and from Avenue, so it's a semi-public piece, and what it is, is two bride gowns. They're real-scale princess gowns, and I'm just gonna describe this as, there's three ingredients, primary ingredients to it, which is the bridal gowns, the accessories, hair and shoes and gloves, and then there's hardware, oversized hardware. We're intentionally oversized, we've got turnbuckles and eye books and huge washers, and you have very, the largest test monofilament, we get 400 times the test monofilament, and all of these materials are designed to withstand the sun and the salty sea, so they're very, they're more than what is needed to suspend the dress, let's say. And with that, the third and most important ingredient is really tension, and I say that because the heroine's gowns, I'll go back for a second, is just that the tension here, for the piece that we were looking at, if I could take the strings away and I could just have it floating like this, I have no interest in that, and when I think about that, like, are there too many lines, if there are enough lines, it's really about drawing into the space and using this monofil, which is translucent, but it's really heavy as you really see it, and it is kind of extension of the drawing and the trajectory, it's kind of a stop-action. There's a lot of things I could talk about with these, but I just, the materials are the concept. The materials are the content. The material, like, these wedding gowns, or the two of them, there to there, it's not about a person or a bride, it's sort of about just culture, and then suspending it for, I mean, it was rather literal in a certain sense, but I got there through many, many, many pieces before I realized this piece, by the way. This wasn't just like a one-off, it was sort of a culmination of many pieces, but the tension is a real ingredient to the work and without it, it doesn't make any sense. Here's just briefly, you can just see like these gowns, they're vintage, they were worn, they're so huge, they could stand up on their own, which is why I did the piece, I saw them, and in a consignment of their, literally they're so huge that they're opera costumes, essentially they're built in exactly the same way, and I did have some experience with opera costumes, and they're constructed, and you know, it's like they're constructed and built to be like the driver of the car. So like the bride, all they have to do is step in, and it's like everyone knows who you are, what your role is, you don't have to say anything in your favor than everyone else, and it's your day, it's your one day. Traditionally this idea, this narrative, so there you are, and it's doing it for you, and so I, but anyway, so I've worked up a model, these are Barbie bride and gowns, and I have a great above and below, and in my studio I have a great above and before I can screw into it, and this is how I work out the trajectory of how many lines and of course the changes of life, but it's not, it works pretty well having a grid, and also sort of the force and tension with something like a regular grid, I find it just enhances this idea of like you're pulling things apart in a K.I. kind of way, and here's another close up, and here's working in the studio, so you can see the ceiling a little bit there as grid, but this is making, so I'm giving it a play both ways and worrying about tension, and so you could basically remove the dresses, and you would have, Tess has a sculpture standing there, it is its own skeleton, it is a sculpture, and this is on, but I don't build it, I have to build it together in conjunction, I have sort of an idea of where I want the fabric to be, but it's a slow process, and you're constantly going around and around and around, and trying to work it out like this, so I could, someday maybe I'll be gutsy enough to just take everything out and then see what it really looks like along the way, maybe we can scan it or something, and so here's just another view of this thing that I also, the idea of it being abstracted where am I in time, I'm almost done with this piece, is that I wanted to recognize it, we all know what a wedding dress looks like, and to sort of dissolve it to a certain extent so that you can see it's changing, so the critique is not so much, you know, wedding gowns and the lighting is terrible, it's just that it's a dissolving culture, we see through it now, it's another way of deciding the kind of celebration that you want to have, and so that's kind of where my critique lies because it's also materiality of all of the excess of the pearls and the hair. So the second piece I'm gonna talk about is not the glass house, but after the glass house, I was commissioned to do a project with one of the other buildings on his estate, so just as a frame of reference on his property, we can, he has several other civilians they all have a different era, so the one that I work on is this, and it was known as DeMonsta, 25 to 95, it's very 90s, and it was a really interesting challenge, so do whatever you want, they say. Okay, so what I'm responding to in a way is, first, it's titled DeMonsta, so there's this implied narrative of, oh, it's a funny monster, or maybe it's a joke architecture because there are no right angles anywhere, so that's why it's a monster. It's a monster because, I don't know if he was thinking necessarily except for that it's a very animated working thing, and then the inside of it, it was built from a subtle model, so the interior, they didn't have any plans for that, whatsoever, so when you walk in here and there are no right angles, you, there's a flat floor, the floor is, I think it's low, but everything else is curving and the ceiling is bowing, and it's straight and pervious, people get a little bit of motion in the inside, and so with that, and my interest in tension and control that I'm trying to figure out how to do it, you can see the ceiling, I mean that scale, so I'm like five feet, and then there's maybe another five feet of that corner, and the ceiling's going this way. So I'm thinking about DeMonsta, and I'm thinking about what, okay, you can see scale on the outside again, and I'm thinking about tying it down, because it's like, how do I kind of control it, and thinking about DeMonsta, and what if there was an opponent to DeMonsta, there was some other like Louise Bourgeois spider out there, or coming across the landscape, and I had previously worked with, and I continued to work with fishnet stockings as a kind of language that has to do with wire frame and structure in space and illusion of space, and also as it's doing its job when it's around a woman's leg, which is a bit of a contrast, and I like to use it in a way as an idea of feminine and industrial building, and the spider man I used in his costume, fishing line as his web, his net, and the idea is I love spider man, but there's no spider woman that quite has the same feeling as if this is spiky striptease showing his thumb inside, but that would be great to sort of like bring a little more balance there with spider man, so there's fishnet being all there, and so through this, gave me the idea of this is my proposal drawing to maybe tether it down with this spider web, and then I thought, okay, what would I make it out of? Am I gonna knit that? Am I gonna use my hands? Handmade is fabricated, it's all those things, because it's such a different way. Handmade, like handmade is not gonna do it in this, like it's not, you know, I could need it to be outward, and I need it, but I need it to just have an industrial feeling, and so I found climb ropes, and you can order them sizes, and so this was the mission, and here is the tensions, you've got, in this case, you've got the rope, and you've got the building, I consider an ingredient in this, the building is the other material, and then you have tension, this is then, so we've really tied it down, then it's time to go inside again, and see, and detail, so I've been inside in just another complicated angle of the Virgo inducing lack of structure, or lack of geometry, really, so what I did was, I followed all the contours with slotted angle steel, and certain areas were cut in many cases, just to go around the curves and then straight, and I've been working with this material for quite a while, framing, and I'm using it as a suspension framework for my work to make it a portable work experiment, and so I use the, these are elastic cords, and I found it on site in another one of the millions where they just use it as a stanchion, and so I said, can I borrow that, and so I'm sort of like, yeah, I think maybe you can just like, corset the stanchion, put a stanchion in, but I got it from the top, and now maybe this is a way I can think about, like, bringing in the chaos through, closing some geometry, some kind of vortex, and some kind of perspective in it, and this has been the other angle, and you still have plenty of chaos and shadows, and it's difficult to see, because the ceiling there is, it's falling down, like it's overhanging the stuff, and there is one more element here, which is, yes, I put a giant speaker underneath the floor, and I'm done with the wood, and it's my cat purring, so just adding to the ambiguity of the monster, is it a monster, is it happy, or a figure inside my mind. And this is a 360 photo, I've come to talk about it, and it's still like, and then what I do is I built a model later, because now there were no plans, so I still could never get a total grip on it, so I took the record set, and now I measured everything, it was much easier, and so now I have this thing I've thought about, then taking it somewhere else, and using it as a scale model to build without walls, or just this odd shape of working with it in that way, and you get a sort of like pulling the seams out of this mysterious line, so I think I'm done. That's it. Thank you very much for having me, this is really a cool opportunity. Here's those corner, so I work across disciplines, I guess I'm an emissary here from metal in some ways, but I guess at the outset, I'd like to just say that metal work, specifically with steel, has, it informs my work, right, whether I'm using it or not, and by that I mean that in a lot of my work, and this is not my work, I'm saying, but in a lot of my work, there's like an underlying material facticity, there's some kind of baseline that goes back to the structure of materials, and I think that that is about contending with scale and the scale between the world we think we live in and the world as it is, and when you're working with the technical material, of which metal and steel in particular is, it allows you to engage the world in a one-to-one relationship, especially when you're working with industry or science, where I find myself sometimes. So through inter-mediariness, through kind of mundane objects, you get to enter into these larger flows of economy and society. So this is from a residency that I did at Coler in 2006, so I'm showing two projects about 10 years apart. And okay, so Coler, right, everyone know about Coler, they make toilets, sinks, bathtubs, faucets, industrial castings, generators, all kinds of stuff. They're based in Sheboyka or in Coler, Wisconsin, which is near Sheboyka, Wisconsin, but they produce all over the world. They produce in Mexico, China, but their flagship factory is in Coler, Wisconsin, which is a one-horse town, it's a factory town. It's the site of one of the worst labor disputes in American history, right? In 1934 and then in 1954, there were very violent strikes. Mr. Coler showed up with a shotgun to create the strike at one point. So what I was interested in, so in the 70s they had an artist residency program, right? Along with Corning Glass, a bunch of different industries had spaces for artists in their factories. And so Coler has this opportunity for artists to come in and work, either in the ceramics department where they do a lot of slip casting, or in iron and brass foundries where they do bath hose, sinks, and faucets. So this is the factory when I was there, right? There were 5,000 people working, 24-7, right? So three shifts every day. And it's still the dark satanic mills, right? It's one of the best factories in terms of hygiene, but it's serious. People are dying slowly from the work that they're doing. So my studio is in between where they did the finish grinding on bathtubs and on the cast iron bases, and kind of like storage. And at lunch break, people would be like kind of slayed out in the break room. And some of the people that were doing the grinding were getting carpal tunnel, like their tendons scoured out from carpal tunnel, sinker, and things like that. So it's had an industry. This is on the scrap aisle in the back after iron casting. That's a glowing pile of paper, so things get out of there. The scrap stream is coming from all over the world, mostly China and India. And what's happening is America and other parts of the world have different standards for raw materials, right? Or for the cast iron, especially when it gets into food-based appliances and things like that. So scrap gets bought from America, goes to China or India, gets reprocessed into new objects, sent back here, becomes strapped again in places like Kohler by it, and then have to kind of recalibrate the scrap, right? For American makers at this flagship factory. So the factory's 100 years old. So they consume as much electricity as Milwaukee, right? They've got three 70 ton furnaces running 24 hours a day. So this is one of the furnaces. It goes about 40 feet down, and that's the top of the furnace, right? So I was thinking about how to work with a factory at large, right? Not to go in there and make one object or cast iron thing or a brass thing or a ceramic thing, but how to collaborate with the whole factory. And what I think about is if you follow the raw material, you'll meet everyone, right? So the iron comes off the train, the scrap processing, goes to the furnaces, goes to the production line, and comes up other science-finished products. If I follow that, I'll get to collaborate as many people as possible. So how to follow cast iron. At the same time, I was researching meteorites. Just. I was. I was. I was. I was. I was. I was. Iron meteorites are basically the same as the center of the earth. We're gonna be in iron meteorite at some point. They are indifferent to humans, right? They're out in space. And then a meteorite is a social object, right? It's this idea of scale, right? Iron is indifferent. Steel is a social material. It's made for us. So meteorites are cruising around in space, and then in a very short period of time, they become social objects when we witness them, right? So this is a painting of a meteorite landing in Siberia in 1947. It's called the Seacoat of Meteorite. It became a pop culture event. There were songs about it. So a coach would stand. Everyone knew about it. It was a couple thousand pounds. And it landed in a sparse part of the country, but enough people saw it, right? So it's indifferent, and then it becomes social. So meteorites, because they fly around in space, pick up a lot of radiation, or some radiation. So they have a signature. They have a certain chemistry, and they also have a certain radioactive signature. The chemistry has a lot of nickel in it, and then there's this kind of baseline radioactive level. Here they are finding a chunk of a seacoat on a meteorite. It's just tons of it. You can buy it on eBay, or at Rock Show if you're talking about that. Right? Here's one piece of cyborg. So I was thinking, okay, here's iron that has a signature, and here's whatever, 210 tons of iron that pass through the factory every day. Can I get a little bit of this into their production line without losing that signature, and then use it like dying in a water shed, like in a stream, right? Can I follow a radioactive piece of iron through a fact? So I work with our engineers and try to do some tests on chemistry and how to have a particle not dissolve in molten iron. Here I am throwing a small meteorite into a massive melt furnace. That's not how it actually happened, but that was kind of a gesture. I want to know. I want to know. I want to know. How it actually happened, right? So now I'll show you how it actually happened. So this is what I make. And this isn't my work, really. It's a water fountain that they have been producing for a hundred years, since the 20s, I guess, and mostly for public schools and prisons. And underneath the lighted ammo is cast iron, right? And it's fantastic. So I picked this object. Let's include a meteorite in this object. Okay, so the way you actually do it is you grind up the meteorite until a large amount of particles and then put them into the sand molds, right? So here are the sand molds on the production line. We put the molds for the furnace or the master molds for the furnace, right? Here are the master molds that used to push into sand, resubonded sand, to make the molds that go into production. I put a tag in there that says, you see Code Allen? Because if they're banging out a thousand millions of pounds, I need to be able to identify which ones. I only did 18 of those. So which ones actually have meteorites in it? So then, talk to the technicians, engineers, chemists to figure out where in the mold to put these things so that they would kind of freeze. I wouldn't be able to see particles inside this thing. Right, so here I am putting meteorite dust into the molds. There it is. Close the molds, deport the iron, and then it goes through the whole thing. And it's basically, it's not a hands-off process, but it's fast and serious. So I wasn't hand, this was not an arc foundry. This was a production line. So there's automatic shakeout where the molds get broken apart and then it goes through the basement conveyor. And this is, you know, there's no way to do this cleanly. There's so much silver in there, it's insane. But that other side comes to the cast iron bases, right? And then they go to enameling. I don't have any pictures of enameling, but it's beautiful. They sift powdered blacks onto the mold, or the heat idea, the basement and then sift powdered glass onto it. And the sifting, the way the enamel falls always has to be perpendicular to the surface. So there are these incredibly skilled people that sift the powdered glass. And it's a dance, right? They're trying to keep the surface of the sifter of the flow of the glass and the basin perpendicular to each other. Two minutes. Sorry, okay. So in a thousand years, if you cut one of these in half and look at a microscopic image or the brain, you can see these particles. We did tests to see if there was failure. We did electron microscope images. Here's the high-manifold content, meteorite iron inside the matrix of cast iron. Two minutes. Okay, this is Bob Kaffner. He works in the Brass Gallery. He's been there 25 years. He was in his backyard and a meteorite fell. Yeah, a copper meteorite, right? There's no chances of getting hit by a meteorite. There's no odds, right? But there are no copper meteorites. So it's a piece of man-made material. It's a space jump that landed in his backyard and he walked over and picked it up. So that's, all right. I'm not doing the next project super quickly. This is, I mean, you're, I don't know. And it hits a car, you know, a statement you want, right? Peaks up the yard and it hits, you know what I'm saying? So the next project is, this is the gates of Versailles. I'm gonna do this project in one minute. Okay, this is the gates of Versailles. I was looking at the gates and fences as datums, right? Like the line from which you can observe the situation. The gate is a number of subject. It's the boundary to the subject. Versailles is the subject. The gate just marks the line from which we observe the subject. You see a gallery of show-guns and packs in an old carriage house. Right outside is, I don't know. Right outside is this back staircase, the service staircase. And there's this railing. And it's early, but right for the 1650s, right? And I was thinking about labor and debt and patronage in our world and how skills are transferable, right? So whoever had this commission for aristocracy in 1650, you might have been in a relationship akin to being an artist now in terms of class division, in terms of skill and how we attribute skill labor. So I decided to remake this railing. And this is the one that I made. So I trained as a blacksmith a long time ago. And I was shooting a lot of video before this. And I just wanted to see if I could still use those, you know, somehow reactivate those skills to deal with something that I was concerned with at the time. I did a full scale drawing. This is just based off those two snapshots, right, those photographs of the realm. And this is like years after I took those photos. So start making scrolls, start making a frame. There were, I think, 17 or something, different scroll tools and some master tools and you start making individual scrolls. Right, and you just start fitting it. And whoever made this railing in comparison to 1650, you know, a railing that's been through all these from revolutions and local wars, had to do a very similar type of indoctrination, this adjustment of the scrolls to fill a grid, right? They might have done it on site. They probably did it in their shop and part on site. So it was all just tweaking, it has to happen. So it took me about a month to make. And the whole time I'm just thinking about, you know, I'm thinking about my hourly wage. I'm just gonna hand it up with this thing. But what is this artifact? And that's the finish, and it's okay. It's like some blacksmithing, it's not, it's, there's a lot of problem, but I think the best I could. And so this informs, this works, right? This is a print, this is the final work, one of the most recent work, and this is just some offset prints that I made last year. And it's just my house in Brooklyn, our apartment. And the neighbor's house and my neighbor's house. So, yeah, that's how Steele came up with this. He formed through my life. That's it. That's it. A very interesting place to jump off on. Because I am thinking a lot about boundaries in different ways, I think, but also originally ways. And if I, someone would just say, this is like an extraordinary combination of people. I was really, really excited to be here with you guys. So thank you for, thank you. So anyway, in general, my work is engaged with the problem of the division of space. And at the space line, there is a presumption that space is divided. And that the thickness of a building's boundaries perform a kind of mechanical and temporal labor. Then considering what happens when this thickness becomes visible, and what if the boundaries volume is emphasized rather than obscured and opened rather than sealed. So that the boundary itself becomes the volume of space or the volume or location where the investigation occurs. The insulated glass unit, a sealed sandwich of glass and gas, is a common material in building facades. Simultaneously, a window and a wall, the IGU's glass filled void performs mechanical work. It acts as insulation by controlling the passage of light and heat through the boundary plane. The IGU exemplifies the mechanical temporality of the architectural boundary. Daylight penetrates its surface. It expands and contracts both the materials within it, but also the construction joinery which it is connected to. To a building in motion. Actually, one moment, I'm not quite done here. I'm a bit confused. What I'm going to speak about today is a project that rather than breaking into two projects, I've decided to think about this project in perhaps two different veins. One being how it materially coalesces, and the other, and I would say inextricably, being how the project performs a specific labor, and that is a kind of mechanical work. What is the mechanical work of this element as a temporal body? The piece S337473, recently completed at the Wexner Center for the Arts, explores the interrelated mechanical and material functionality of the IGU. When it comes to a building in motion, drafting conventions are largely limited to the representation of a pivoting door. The turning of a door is drawn as an arc in plan. This arc represents the total possible positions of a door, the door at all times. 360 degree rotation extends the arc into a circle. When the trace of this movement is viewed in elevation, or at eye level, the circular path appears in a line. Years ago, the studio began to play with shifting the orientation of this rotational axis. The geometry of the glass volume in this early mechanized prototype is based on the IGU. Two layers of glass are separated by two aluminum bars. A volume of air is sandwiched between glass planes. Phototypes scaled up. In this case, two boxes were assembled and mounted on first in the studio, kind of off the shelf tubing, steel tubing, and later on a more refined or at least more considered support structure. Orienting the axis of 45 degrees, the rectangular element rotates from vertical to horizontal. This reorientation of the axis of rotation also transforms the apparent path of motion from a circle to an ellipse in both elevation and plan. The representational convention of multiple viewing planes naturalized in the four viewports of computer aided drafting systems. And here I would say in terms of tools, that is a primary tool in terms of the way that I am generating work and interfacing with fabricators and other consultants as time goes on. It became an essential conceptual guide and methodological tool in the development of the work. The point of view in a representational system became inextricably linked to the point of viewing in processional space. The orientation of the objects and the position of the bodies developed relationally. The studio developed a script to explore this problem parametrically. Here, the dimensions of a rotating element are numerically defined. The path of rotation automatically updates as the geometry is modified. The rotating element can be reoriented along the x, y, or z-axis. Reorientation realigns the rotating object with the model's world coordinate system and thereby changes its relationship to both the axis of rotation and the viewing plane. Collision during rotation is marked and positional change is traced as volumetric form. Rotation is enabled by a kinetic detail here shown in section through the axial centerline. Not only does the glass geometry rotate around the central axis, but each internal kinetic component also rotates around this axis. S337473 at the Wexner Center for the Arts transforms the IGU. These switches are positioned at 45 degrees to the primary axis of procession. Each switch bridges and marks the passable space. They're first encountered as by the visitors they process upwards towards the entry of the gallery space. S337473 also rotates along 45 degree axis in elevation. Rotation around this axis transforms a lintel into a column and back again. In an ideal world, the glass element will have a constant velocity throughout the full arc of rotation. It will move smoothly. The digital model presents the work in an ideal state. Any imbalance due to material specificity or sighting creates irregularity in motion and results in significant changes in acceleration and velocity. Here we have a picture or a video, a short video of an accelerometer that was attached to a working model by the Ohio State University's Department of Mechanical Engineering. And here they are looking at irregular weight distribution across the axis of rotation. The ideal model demonstrates constant speed throughout a 360 degree rotation. But the empirical model imbalance across the rotational axis creates eccentricity in motion. We attempted to think about how this equilibrium might be calibrated materially. How in fact we could compensate for the digital error that was occurring or the digital perfection perhaps that was occurring and the material error or disequilibrium in the actual physical object. And we used grasshopper script or standard grasshopper script to allow us to think about how we might counterweight this imbalance in the actual physical thing. But what was required in the end was something much more immediate, I would say. And that is that within these large volumes, there were a set of cavities between the inner and outer skin. And we took bars of steel and basically attached it to this aluminum extrusion on the interior to offset some of the weightedness. And what that did in the end is it allowed us to not perfectly balance these elements because, and just so you know, these are manually adjusted, but in fact to materially modify them so that they would land in a horizontal position. So this is their state of rest. The glass was engineered to resist a multiplicity of forces. And one of the things I think that's materially notable about glass is that in fact glass, there's much to be said about glass that is not, many materials that go into glass production that are not visible in that glass production are not thought about. So here we have a picture from the cleaning where these pieces were assembled at a factory by the name of Adnora outside of Toronto where a rigid S interlayer was laminated between the two lights. Here, this is a photograph of that process. The fabricator wanted to speak to us about the strength of that particular interlayer and had one of their employees demonstrate its resilience by actually shattering an erroneous piece of glass. The narrow profile of the glass created tremendous stress between the upper and lower bars. Here we see an analysis of the connection between the glass and the structural support. And here we see jigs that I developed in tandem with the fabricator, which would allow us to place the metal supports which were mounted to the glazing in a perfect alignment so as to avoid stress across that rotational axis. In order to mount them with SG interlayer initially, it required that the glass and stainless steel bars entered the autoclave simultaneously. But when they pulled the bars out of the autoclave, in fact, we had a kind of major problem. And we were on a very tight exhibition schedule. So we were, in fact, a week away from the install when this occurred. And these, what happened was the expansion coefficient of the stainless steel bars did not match that of the glass and the SG interlayer did not, in fact, have the flexibility because it was so rigid to absorb that error. So they came out of the autoclave basically like structural bananas. And what we ended up doing was using a far more conventional IGU preparation method, which is structural silicone, to mount the stainless steel bars onto the elements. The axial discontinuity between the two kinetic, the upper and lower kinetic detail became incredibly important in thinking about the possibility both of equilibrium and of material analysis. At times, this discontinuity appeared opaque. At others, transparent. The transparency, of course, is determined by the position of glass, the position of the sun, and in this case, the position of the camera. That's a fantastic panel. I'm so honored to be here. A little bit about my background. I'm trained as an architect. And sometimes I go to cocktail parties and people ask me, what do I do for a living? And sometimes they say, I'm an architect. And then some will say, oh, do you do houses or your residential? Well, I'm not really an architect, I'm an artist. And every time I went to cocktail parties, I'd be flustered and my wife got really angry so one evening, I came back from a cocktail party, sat down and I wrote down 20 responses to the question, Alan Wexler, what do you do for a living? And I may printed them as calling cards and I put them in my wallet so when that question arises, I can answer them a little bit more clearly. So I'll read you a one sample. Alan Wexler, cocktail party response number 14. What kind of work do you do? I'm an architect and an artist's body. My studio is a laboratory. I sculpt with gravity and heat. I paint with rain. I use everyday and ordinary activities, eating, sleeping, and bathing as media. I investigate the built environment archeologically. My work looks at simple things. The sight line between two people sitting across from each other at a table, the many positions of two bricks in relationship to each other, how the floor meets wall. My work defines habitable space and the wall that separates inside from outside. I invent ways to walk through walls. So I'm only gonna show you, well, maybe two projects, but in, I can't read the date, I think in... 1990. 1990. I did this project called Chair of Day and for 16 days, each day I made a chair. I would limit the time. In the morning I would decide, today I think I'll use my Bosch jigsaw, the next day I would use my table saw, sometimes I would use a hand saw, sometimes a chisel. I'd start in the morning and then by the end of the day, finish a chair and I'd do this for 16 days. So as an example, the chair on the left is called Broken Plywood Chair. I renamed it in memory of Alvaro Alto. Used to be Charles Ray Angel, I realized that's anyway, long story, eight hours. I wanted to take a sheet of plywood and gently drape it over an orthogonal frame. So what I did is this is on the North Fork of Long Island where I've had a studio. I took a sheet of quarter inch plywood, put it in plastic, wrapped it in a drop cloth plastic polyethylene, polyethylene, put moisture inside, let it bake in the hot sun for seven hours while I'm building the frame. At the seven hours I take it out of the bag, I try to drape it over the frame, of course it doesn't work. So I take the plywood and I strategically place bricks under the plywood and I drove my car over it. The one, the next one, you write. That one is a very bad mortise and tenon job. A mortise and tenon square peg in the square hole. So my chiseling skills were not very strong at that time. I've gotten better over it as I get older. And of course the chair wobbled like hell so I had to add a lot of wedges to reinforce the chair. But sometimes I think part of our work as craftspeople and makers, I like that phrase, thinkering, that was used in an essay, in a recent essay and a book on my work, thinkering which was actually I discovered not invented by a research scientist at Xerox Park nor was Pallavan Danelli who used that phrase in 2002 but was actually invented by Michael Andante in the English patient which coincidentally I'm reading like two days ago and I come upon the phrase thinkering. It's the combination of thinking and making simultaneously. And I think we all do that. And so just be wary of good craftsmanship. We get sometimes so good and skilled that the craft gets in the way of content. So I'm gonna move to this. This is about 2000, is that a date? Anyway, it's about four or five years ago. So many years, over 30 years I say, what would happen if today, 30 years after doing Chair Day, I do a project which is Chair Day 2012. It would be very different series of 16 chairs but I went to an Ikea and they had a super sale of their Stefon chair and I filled up my car with flat-pack Stefon chairs. I came back to my studio and I made an axonometric drawing of a Stefon chair and I made 100 Xeroxes of that chair. So this in terms of material, I think I'm stressing in this particular talk wood but also in this case Xerox. It's something that I've returned to many years in fact I was talking to Sarah about a project they did a long time ago at the mattress factory and to generate ideas for the mattress factory I took the floor plan, I made hundreds of Xeroxes and I started transforming the Xeroxes. I didn't think of this as an actual chair. All I cared about was the two-dimensional surface. The carbon on that two-dimensional surface of pure abstraction. I could violate it, I could manipulate it, I could twist it, I could turn it, I could take an exacto blade, I could cut it apart, I could rearrange the parts. I could take Prismacolor pencils and draw into it. I can do all kinds of operations to these Xeroxes of a drawing of a Stefan chair. So I forgot the name of the thing one sees as we know from rubber ruins, not rubber ruins, I don't know if anybody, so then if I go more closely, just zooming in on a few of the Xerox transformations and I said, wait a minute, maybe in fact those are proposals for the transformation of an Ikea Stefan chair. So I assumed it on a few of these as examples. So for instance, here's a chair where I'm extending the elements of the chair into space infinitely and this one, I took a piece of yellow buff tracing paper and I cut it and I glued it on top of the chair. This one I took the stencil from another page and I took some Prylon spray paint and sprayed it and then shifted it and this one was the last one in that series. I took an Elmer's glue, glued it over the drawing of the axonometric of the chair, swept my studio floor and sprinkled the sweepings onto the chair itself. So this is the yellow drawing, the trace glued onto the chair, the interpretation of that chair is called one equals two. So which is the real chair? Which is the real chair? The crate or the chair itself? This chair, I remember one of the drawings I did was an axonometric, I cut the things out and I just took a pencil and connected the two backs of the chairs and cut off the legs. I tried to do that, it didn't work. So this is my version of a love seat. So two people need to sit simultaneously in the chair to balance each other, otherwise the chair falls. It's very easy in Photoshop or with an Xacto knife to separate the elements of the chair into back to a kind of flat pat version to the elements of the Ikea chair, which is flat pat. And then so I interpreted it as one interpretation and I could probably have done 16 variations on isolating the elements of the chair. This is only one solution, oops, I'm doing the wrong thing. This is only one version just using threaded rod and nuts to separate and make the elements of the chair appear to float in relation to each other. I had gotten at a flea market, I do a lot of flea marketing and yard sailing and a lot of these things enter my studio and later on in my work, 30 years later might be, oh, I bring something out, I look at it differently because I'm working on a project and it becomes a part of my work. So there was a dress form that was expandable. So you could take a dress of a woman's body that was very petite and by sliding elements of the body apart from each other you can make a larger person. So I took the elements of that and I kind of ripped on that and made a chair that allows it to expand and grow inside. This is two chairs together, I think I call it interchange. It's interesting when you're making something because the making comes for me, the making comes first, they don't premeditate. I have two chairs in my studio and I say, what would happen if I made the four legs connected together continuously? And so the, and then I realized after I finished this project, what it means. I painted this chair Benjamin Moore, interior grade, semi gloss, China white. This is Benjamin Moore, interior grade, semi gloss, Navajo white. So I didn't realize when I was doing this project the political implications of this chair, but all the work we do has today's meaning. Sometimes the meaning happens in advance, sometimes it happens after the fact and then it might lead to another project. And I think that's the art of making. This is called body language. So the, my feet pushing around, I love this laser, that's cool. So in the legs of the chair, I put pencils. And you know when you sit in a chair and you're sitting around a dinner table and you're moving a chair, you kind of lift up a little bit and move it forward to get comfortable and you're having a conversation around a table and as you have a conversation around a table it's making a drawing on the floor. It's basically scratching the floor. Especially if you don't have little foam pads underneath. So I was exploiting that problem and turning it into something that's positive. So the scratching of a floor, which marks time, we talked about it in architecture and design positively as patina and age and things aging with beauty. You know, wrinkling and so on. It's a beautiful thing. So here the pencil legs make a drawing but then the problem is when you sit on that chair the pencil points break. So very simply there's a drill of hole in the leg and then there's a little spring. So as you sit down, the chair, the pencil is retracted into the leg. This is, I took the idea chair and I burned it. A piece of charcoal breaks off the chair and the charcoal is then used to make an axon of metal drawings. I have two degrees in architecture and I couldn't draw very well but axon of metal is what I can do. I can't draw people. So chairs became a stand-in for the way I rendered human activity or human interaction. We project ourselves into that thing and we become the chair and the chair is anthropomorphic in that sense. This is called selflessness. So in this case I take one chair and I sacrifice a piece of the chair for the sake of my guest. And I raise the chair with my guest to become more important than it. And then the next one is selfless, selfishness which is where I sacrifice the chair to raise myself higher than the rest of the individuals sitting on the table. Simple transformation of the seat to become one continuous bench. Detail. The crate, for me, your crate artwork, sometimes the crate is somewhat more beautiful than the content of the crate. That's scary, but it happens. I've done some project called crate house where the crate became rooms of a house. This is another version of the crate house done with the chair. And then here is an idea of precision and imprecision. So I took my Bosch jigsaw and I love tools. I collect tools. I took a Bosch jigsaw and I cut the corner away really fast without hesitation, without thinking about it. This one, I took this chair and I tried to fit it into this chair. Then I had to do it very slowly in meticulous and I still did do such a good job. You can see the gap in here and I tried to get it as precisely as I can, but one is very fast and one is very slow. And I like that dialectic between precision, imprecision, and so on and speed. This is my version of the refilled wheel red chair, red blue chair. I think mine is a little better. Because mine, the force is the vector diagram of a body sitting in space. The forces pass through each other because mathematically there's no such thing as with refills overlap each other, they might pass through each other. That's a self-portrait. It's the amount of weight, that's my body weight in concrete bricks. You see it's floating three quarters of an inch off the ground. Not too much, just a little bit. You know the Japanese tea room is only one stepping stone above the profane earth and yet it's a spiritual space. You don't need to make tall buildings to create spirituality or to lift yourself into the heavens. Three quarters of an inch is plenty. You can do that. A scaffold, the scaffold is a material I've come back to over my career. It represents works in progress, potential, makes things flow. This is what, this is called the table for the typical house. It reminds me of Mieshondero's Great Country House, which I've always loved. I've just taken X walls and extended them through the typical table and there's one table, typical American family, four people sitting at the same table sitting in separate rooms. However, my table has one salt shaker, bottom mustard, ketchup and pepper. So there has to be some sense of communication within each of those rooms. We don't, this is a floating plane. Don't look at all of this. Like in Boonrecht and Puppetree, you don't see the puppeteer. Forget the scaffolding. All you see is a floating plane. And then a prize. This is, I was asked to do a sculpture for the campus which is still there. That's the version of that in St. Alumina. And the last project, this is a project that my wife and I did for the Hudson River Park called Two, Two Large Tables. That's an aerial view of it. It's a 29th-year-long Hudson River. And it's two horizontal planes. One plane is at a table height over here. One table is at a table height. One table's plane is at roof height. The problem with a table that's 16 feet is you can't really have a good conversation. So the problem creates a solution that is about innovation, which is that you cut slots in the table, which allow people to enter the table from four different places, from four different directions, and form a community. And it becomes a kind of clothing. The chairs in each case are exactly the same as the chairs in each other. They're positioned exactly the same. In each case, they hold up the two horizontal planes. And the last one is my riff on the Two, Two Large Tables done with the step-on chair, called Two, Little, Two Large Tables. A little plug for a book that just came out of my workbook was sort of making me feel like I'm designing large, beautiful chairs. Thank you. Again, thank you all for coming. I think it's like an incredible body of work chemically as it's way too big for us to talk about today. So inasmuch as we strive as architects to be, as crafty with material things, space, reflection, feelings, as we are extra crafting with wood, steel, glass, maybe you could talk a little bit about the connection between the material and the material in this work. Let's start, Sarah. So I think particularly in the relationship with this that I was speaking with, it was a really extraordinary lesson in a new notion of materiality. And for new to me, which has to do with the possibility of equilibrium as a driving aesthetic condition and as a sensible condition meaning one could sense it materially without necessarily having a language for it. So it's easy in some ways to talk about quantitatively. It's easy to talk. It's even, I would say, in many cases, it's easy to model things materially, digitally. I think the number of people who talked about that have already spoke to that. But its sensibleness, how one senses it in some ways moves outside of the condition of its materiality. It actually is its materiality. I guess I would say it's our present engagement with this materiality that is its immaterial condition, which is reflection is an optical relation to describing a physical condition or achieving a physical condition. And I suppose one could actually say reflection is a material property, but that our experience of that is a bit more complicated. Maybe I'd pass a slightly different version of the same question to Alan, especially in the context of talking about explicitly in architectural history to talk about architects painting with light. Some of the rhetorical minders that you use to describe your homework. So what can you say about your capacity to use interior things as real things? Well, I think it's about how we work with materials and physical properties. But if we're good at what we do, if we make materials transcendent so they convey psychological conditions or poetics or spirituality, how can we take a brick and make it into an ethereal, sublime material, the most basic. I'm right presently teaching interior design. And it's interesting, and I tell my students, what I'm trying to teach you is alchemy. How can you take the most mundane materials, like lead, and turn them into gold? How can you take, if you're doing objects using cardboard or chipboard, how can they become incredibly valuable and meaningful and spiritual? So how can they transcend their materialness? And that's so I think in EV Days, for instance, you talked about the flimsy, the flimsyness of fabric, the translucency of fabric. And that gets even more ethereal when you contrast it with aircraft cable and turnbuckles and espos and nickel-plated hardware. I think that the contrast, and I think Louis Pond, of course, talks about that a lot, how his work is really transcendent. How does it convey meaning? In some of my work, it's not just me, but it's also a humor. I mean, I potentially play a humor to some extent because I think sometimes to break through preconceptions about the world, we need to be lighthearted. And that's a good entry point into more profound things, I hope, by entering with a sense of humor. So I have one comment in what you're describing about this alchemical relation. And it has to do with the theme of instruments and how when you have an instrument, and you're tuning that instrument, you are in a dynamic with that material thing. And so you are responding if there's a kind of symbiotic response, call and response that you have with what we may call material, we may call the immateriality or its collective existence. And I think that that relation of tuning is part of the problem of making in certain ways. I want to turn a little bit the conversation starting from Maddo's introduction today, a little bit the intention also behind this initiative today and also in the coming months and over three years in Colombia. Thinking by making is the topic here. And I would say also making as a discipline, making as an obsession, making as something that is painful and joyful and repeats itself. And it's very clear that all of you who are very obsessive in what you do, they stick with almost my newt, my newt things that you keep repeating. This is not my first time at the rodeo, right? Stretching those two gowns in there many times. And I know all your words very well, so I know how painfully you stay with you. So I would love for you guys to talk a little bit about that. However you see fit, what does it mean? What does it mean to stay with something? What does it mean to stay with something throughout your life? What does it mean to stay with something throughout your day? What does it mean to not sleep at night? Because you need to figure out how that thing doesn't break and how that movement. So it's a concept, you know, the reason again, not to be too polemic, but the reason why we are also pushing in this direction today in the school is to counter, not to annihilate, but to counter the facility of making shapes and making shapes and making shapes and making shapes in a computer or however. And then, you know, show them on Instagram. And basically that is the obsession there. It's the obsession of creating images, not even things, but images of things and images of images. And you said that discipline, there are a lot of artists and definitely the four of you show is extremely strong in that direction. So I would love for all of you guys to say something about that. Just an example. It was Neil Young, right? Neil Young said, it's all the same song. Right. That's true. Right? It's all the same song. And but it goes from material thing also in that I don't know about you all, but I mean, I've drawn so many lines in the sand. And it's absolutely not that, but this. And that's the thing that keeps you up at night. And the deeper you get into the material, the more you believe in the efficacy of the material, the more you can move into a space of speculation that a four hour. Right? So I don't know anything about anything. But if I know a little bit about a little bit, I can draw a line in the sand and say, all right. You know, I'm going to put the credit card down on that. So there's this hedging against the complete guesswork of waking up and doing this tomorrow. And it's not hedging, but it's like the best bet is by really studying materials. At least that's how I think about it. I go back. Necessities of the mother of invention is not true at all. Leisure is the mother of invention. When you need to do something, you go with what you know. So the more you know the material, the more you can find something out of that. So that's at least my bet. I'm just trying to get it. Maybe. Yeah. Just to say something about my process is that, which, like, you couldn't do this. I work with this flexible material, like, put it on, put it on, put it on, take it out, like, add, add, add. Like, it's such a fast way. And I need to work on it. I don't need to work on it. It's just like, imagine the focus of all the planning every one of the steps to try. You know, it's just phenomenal. So now I'm sticking with something that's like, hard core. And I feel like I'm sticking with these materials because of, it's like I'm drawing in the space and drawing around my body. And I can say, like, oh, what if I took two dresses and exploded them out of these honey? No, it sounds terrible. You know, it's just, all of my ideas sound terrible on paper. But I go through the process and keep pushing it. But it is, for me, this flexibility remains. And then at the end, honey, honey, honey, do you see the final thing? Like, OK, I decided to use the lines I want. It's not random at all. I mean, at all. There's something slack in one of those things. I mean, I start to get sick. It's just because it's not a thing anymore. And I don't want people to see it being installed or taken apart. Because when it's slack, it's nothing to do with what it is. And I feel I'm totally naked and bleeding or something. Because you can't stand it. I don't know. For that case, I accept admiration for all your work. And just to say that, think of my elastic movements. And I feel like, I imagine you're so, I know that there's a lot of formulae or netbacks that's what's going on. But it's like, once you commit to that thing, you go into the oven and then the didn't work. Because there's a slight variation after the cooking. But I have to say something about your comment about your own work. Because it's interesting. I don't think I see your work that way at all. The way you're seeing it. The thing that I am so observing in your work is how challenging the ground is. The ground is this great problem. And in a way, the ground becomes the unspoken counterpoint to the complexity of the non-ground. And so you have this really beautiful tension. It's the tension. But it's the tension of the anchor. So you're like the grid. And then it was fascinating to see your studio. And how those points are starting to array on the ground. What does that mean to you? Is it the territorial map, the body, all these things. And so in some ways, for me, looking at your work, I see complex constraint. And it's a two-dimensional realm. So to me, I'm not seeing. I guess it's really interesting to look at the process of the actual final thing. But I'm so glad I'll see your work out. Because the other element is tension and gravity. But there's really about punctuation when I was using this word about where you are in space. It's about if that space is a generic space, or how it used to be this strange old Johnson pavilion, or whatever. It is a context to be considered more or less. And so for me, especially when I was using my use of feminist bench on reality of these mundane things that I'm wearing in the dress or not wearing in the dress, it's still a big issue. I mean, it's an everyday. And what you say about using humor is a way to get to the more complex healings. I was so grateful you said that. Because I struggle with how to describe humor and wanting to get further. But this oversized hardware in the floor and the ceiling is sort of to say, like, it's a problem. And her living with it, we walk around it, we go forward. It's there. Well, it's a vertical and feminist problem. Yeah. Yeah. Especially nowadays with humor. So it speaks to this climate, in a way. This contrast between the kind of masculine feminine as well, is the cliché of the mass. The cliché of the hardware versus the software. Great. And the software, not that software, that's in the fabric versus standing steel. There's an architect or friend of mine early on who said, don't lose those troubles. It doesn't make any sense, do it? And I was like, exactly. I'm so glad about that. It bothers you. It's exactly why it's awkward. It looks unnecessary. It's totally necessary. Because I'm trying to make material be something different. And if you look at Victorian hoop skirts and whale bone constructions, they're not unlike the hardware or the structures that are designed to define gravity and to make things appear to flow in space and materialize and break apart. But I wanted to speak about this word obsession. Because I think it's a dangerous word, actually. Because I don't think you would use that term if you were talking about a research scientist focusing on a life's work looking at microscopic cellular structure, some phenomenon. That their life in the studio, I meant the laboratory, were much the same kind of people. I think it's not something obsession. It's a rigor, it's scholarship, it's invention, creativity. And it happens within science as well as within our world. So I know it's a little pet peeve I have because a lot of artists use that term obsession to be obsessive. But that's really a bit of an illness. When you're in control of any of the obsession, it's kind of scholarship and rigorous experimentation. I used the word obsession. I know. It's not letting go. Exactly. I know exactly the meaning. But maybe I need to be a little careful. Because there's some people who wear obsessive disorders are really hard to find. No. I think it's interesting what Evee, what you pointed out, the difference that you saw between the way that you work and that works. And in this forward, between the four of you, there is the more artisanal, the more handmade, definitely over there, the made through tools that are bigger than you, bigger than your hands, and industrial, and everything more over there. Although Mark actually showed two opposites. Something that you, the steel, are in the UFF molded, or whatever it's called, like back in the 1600s. And instead, sort of stealthily going into the production of color. But I think that that is an interesting thing. Because the idea of this obsession that I'm talking about, or the idea of really caring about the making, and the discovery, what you discover to make things, does not have anything to do with whether you make it yourself, with a knife and a thing, or whether somebody else would make it for you because that is a little bit of a myth, the difference between the artist and the architect. The artist is on the sculpt with the chisel, and the architect does the drawing, and then somebody else builds it. But there shouldn't be any kind of care or consideration. So again, I guess wanting to be polemic, before I said not wanting to be polemic, not wanting to be polemic, the problem can be in architecture right now, where you negotiate, and then somebody else figures out how to make it, and what it is. Ultimately, really figuring out what it is. Because if you don't know how to make it, you really don't know what it is, and what you're doing. So the idea of... Not for me, it's an opportunity. You need a thing that's the exciting thing. Well, the world is the opportunity, it's not. It's the opportunity that the relationship, however you think, if I'm saying this, and you were talking about, what did you say, how you take a break and make it, I mean, sublime, right? And then I'm thinking about Mark's drinking fountain, right? And then how you take something sublime, right? You become this really banal, right? So it's, you can go in any direction. Yeah, you can go in any direction. And there's something sublime in here, you're drinking from a fountain, and then you make it. Yeah, it's an opportunity, but it's also a responsibility that's what we're really talking about here, right? The responsibility of the artist, to figure out something they can... The world can see it's something useless, something completely minute, something very... Instead of going in depth, and this is something that we talked about, right? When we came to your studio, how you can spend months just figuring out the jades they can do, they can help you know what to do. It's not very different from you going around your sculpture and pulling here and pulling there and pulling... It's the same fever. It's the same fever, right? So I want to say something about that, because it makes me think of... It makes me think of this idea of post-user occupancy, that data collected after a building has been inhabited. How you know how a building is unless you've actually been in the building and experienced that building and or more. Remember how collected a set of data and sensors and I fed that back into your next digital object. And I feel like in some ways the possibility in the kind of process of making is that feedback loop. It's that feedback loop between... And whether it's something that you're doing with your hand or your eye or in any number of ways, it becomes a kind of cyclical... Whether we call it a processor or not, it becomes the core of the investigation. And you are in that process the entire time. So from the beginning, to the testing, to the making, to the evaluation, and so on and so forth. In architecture we run the risk of right now of doing just a little piece of it in the middle, somewhere in the middle, right? For the sake of that photograph that is published on Instagram and other cells, right? Because in the end then the architect creates a shape then engineers and fabricators and industrial fabricators figure out how to make it. And then clients and politicians deal with the consequences. But the architect only deals with the consequence of that thing being done, photographed, published. And that is, so if anything, you only want to improve on how that looks, the next project looks on the next photograph, right? So this responsibility of being with the work from the very beginning, with this baby, from the embryo, all the way until you're alive is basically what we're talking about here. Does that... It really works or not? Huh? And then you know, but it... Works or not? Well, I mean like with Cal Trava we have an architecture school here so it's very obvious I suppose. But I remember hearing some people talking about Cal Trava oh, it's so good, but it's so terrible, it's beautiful, it's really, right? It's like, oh, but he's just a problem. You know what your own contractor was. Like he made the picture, it was him, right? And then you know what your name is higher to have to, like I wouldn't even choose them, but you know what I mean? And that like, I mean, architects don't necessarily get to go through that process for a lot of practical reasons. But also I feel like to select, so that you are through like putting in the right doable process. Along, I mean, I think that getting our head around what I, I think that I have a really problem for me is the study of progress and means and calculations. And I'm not sure if I agree completely, I think that artists perform a different type of research than scientists. Even though, I mean, I love it when the conversation falls apart because we behave differently. I think that we all have different approaches to think progress means and the exchanges that we go through to achieve certain goals. And the relationship between kind of a material diligence in a practice and how we kind of abstract those goals can be. There's something there, I think. And if a lot of times when I call it talking to engineers, you know, there are very clear criteria about what success and progress and, you know, something working is. And I'm sure, I'd like to hear it when you, I'm sure you've had all kind of different experiences talking to engineers. Like, how do you all reconcile this kind of abstract goal maybe that you're going to perform? And speaking to someone who has a different set of criteria. So, I mean, I'll jump off that but then, I work with a lot of engineers and I also teach with engineers. I think a lot about engineering and I think that's the possibility of having a correct answer is a radical disciplinary difference. Maybe I'll take a minute to jump in before we turn the questions out to the room. But as an institution here that is operating in a sort of critical intellectual studio and also has a place of making that's supposed to substantiate the work of that studio. Maybe you could each talk just briefly about your studio's, your places of making, how they've evolved along with your work or vice versa, how things have changed between you and the places that you've been in for years. I'm not excited. Yeah, I'm just going to have a shot with all kinds of tools and all this stuff and everything you need to make mostly in battle and stuff. And then the big problem is that you're only going to make holes with a drill press. There's nothing else you can do with a drill press besides make holes. So, if you want to make holes, fantastic. But it felt like it foreclosed and everything else. So I got rid of everything. Basically, in my studio now, I can put all of my tools in cabinets and I don't have to look at them. So I can walk into a room and do anything. So I'm having to walk into a room and do something, holes, or cutting something, or, you know, if I have to cut something, I can do it. But I just found that totally claustrophobic and confusing to be married to all this stuff. So I think of my studio as a prototype facility and everything is set up so that everything is kind of interchangeable unit that can be swapped out and re-arrayed as a different type prototype. One thing that has struck me in terms of the climate market is the issue of scale and one-to-one. I think one of the great challenges of making things in contemporary societies and artists is that the spaces, architectural spaces, are vastly out of proportion with the human body and therefore the small rooms that we most often work in. And so the problem of filling is a great problem that is daunting at best. And one of the things that the computer and the prototype needed to do is to not have to make a one-to-one in your not-fuge Bilbao-scaled space. Well, coming to me, that's my studio at Bilbao. I have a studio and sometimes I have a regular assistant. Because there's a lot of correspondence that happens when you're working with lots of materials and it's something that takes over your life pretty much. And sometimes you make money, sometimes you got it. It's very difficult. So I would say everything like when you say swap out, there's, you know, people sometimes work on a project and then there's a bunch of interns or I can actually work like hires and people literally know certain skills or I'm working in a museum or a warehouse for the site eventually, but there's nothing centered, you're working in a jersey and you're working in a warehouse. And so it can be on site or it can be in my studio and I try to stay away from the computer as much as possible because if you want to have a tactile experience, I think I'm better at that than where I would want to be. And then everything in my studio's on wheels and I would say that's the primary thing. And then I always have a great ceiling, which are just a lot of people in the clothing and the like, but I'm not sure if it's home and it's heavy duty enough. But I'm working on that and I'm not just up there. I'm always reminded of that. Why am I doing something up there? It's air, it's on the ground floor. It took years and years to find the place where the ground floor was more elevated, upstairs. And not that everything in my house collapses, it's very small. It should get through a door, a normal passage. So there's a lot of times that I'm on instructions and guides and photographs and I'm on instructions about crates, it's being sort of off the value of the act with instructions and stuff like that. So I have a first world problem, I have two studios. I never know where, what I should do is even one. But coincidentally, my studio on 20th Street is the fourth floor, so I get, I think it's a great way of not having to go to a gym so I climb stairs constantly during the day. And it used to be, my apartment. Just got me some apartment. I was at the tent of ours. He was my landlord. So now that studio has great vibes and I've got a lot of inspiration because he's an aura in my studio. When I go to my studio. But I do think, and I have a studio on the north work of the island, which is larger and I can open doors. I'm working in the woods. I like the loneliness of the studio. That's one reason I have degrees in architecture, but I chose to practice or look at architecture from an advantage point of an artist because I love being alone. I don't, I'm not so good collaboratively. I like the loneliness of the studio. And the studio for me is a really sacred space. It can be a space of solitude and energy. I can, if I want to change ideas, I switch the music from one type of music to another type of music. It might have been the right frame of mind. And also tools are really important to me in my studio because sometimes I love the sound of a tool and it generates ideas for me. And I remember recently buying a 22 gauge pin nail, a pneumatic 22 gauge pin nailer. And it was, the sound was so wonderful and the nails were so thin, they were like little really thin, like almost like thin so that I could, I could mock stuff up with quarter inch or even three 16 inch plywood and drive the pins through the edge of the plywood without splitting it or even gas wood and just glue and pin and I can mock stuff up very quickly. And I think that's something because it seems like you're looking at the results of what we think is what good work, what these guys do. This is great work, but you know, so you're looking at results. But there's a lot of work that comes out of like, and I'm sure all of us do rough drafts. And I remember going to a lecture fairly recently that Jennifer Egan is a wonderful writer and I think she wanna close her for a visit from the Goon Squad, it was a wonderful book and just did another book called, Manhattan Beach. She said the first draft is like thousands of pages long done by hand and it's crap and it's not good. The fear of doing something in your studio, and I know for students especially, you have to come up with this great idea. Don't worry about it, the first idea can be really bad. And if you want to work with that work obsession, you stick with it and they will slowly become profound. The more iterations, the more yellow traced layers that you build on top of the original bad drawing or the layers in Photoshop or in AutoCAD or SolidWorks or Rhino, those are all tools and you should enjoy the tools. I love Photoshop as much as I love my Bosch Jigsaw and my 22 gauge pin nailer. For me, there's no distinction between the computer tool and the pin nailer. And I work with them intermittently and I love the pencil, but I love these pencils and the pencil has to feel good in my hands. It has to have the right smell, the texture, the surface of the paper. Same thing in the computer. I think, oh, I'm more of a visceral person because I like the sound of things and it smells of materials. I love working when I'm working in my studio and I'm working with Cedar. It exudes a beautiful smell to it. And I think part of the active architecture is making drawings that aren't as visceral, but they can be and you can make, maybe most people don't make chipboard models anymore. Or if you do the laser cut and the premeditated before you cut them, rather than just taking out a Stanley utility knife and hacking way at it and gluing something up and generating form in service to program on the board. Anyway, it's a long-winded story about my studio which I think is a really sacred space, but one thing I'm always telling my students are graduating and they're used to really great tools. I'm teaching at Parsons, we have really good wood shops and nail shops and sewing machines. You can make amazing work in a studio that's the size of a kitchen table. So don't let the studio or the tools get in the way of doing great work and working all the time. I mean, don't stop working. When I started after graduating school of architecture in 71, RISD, and I came to New York, I didn't know what to do. So I said, I'm gonna plot my hours just like I punch a card in a factory and I'm gonna work at this table at 615 Hudson Street, my first studio on the third floor in a little corner and I'm gonna sit there for eight hours every day and I would write down, I'd list a piece of paper, the time. If I got up at lunch, that didn't count for eight hours a day. If I didn't get eight hours and sit five days a week, I worked on the weekends. And I think then I got started with time when by itself. So I think that's really, I don't know, I'm just talking about a teacher. I'm just talking about a teacher. I may have a little bit of an affair with it. Don't be intimidated by lecturers. I'm sure you've had a lot of split sweat and tears and if you can have all of that then the exciting day is when then really successful would mean that much. That's the 33 o'clock, but if there are a couple of questions that are burning over there, bring them on. Anybody? An example, in your, when they didn't bring a film working in the kiln, in your change to the silicone, can you just go into specifics about how you got over that yourself and the specifics of, yeah, what that meant to you and how did it reach the final expression? So I have a great fortune and difficulty of working with people who like to try new things. And so there is a technical, the technical expert at that particular factory became a friend and he was really excited about trying this out. And I also worked with a consulting structural engineer who also was really curious. And this gentleman at this application facility was in charge of the ovens and the tempering. And you know, we went up there, spent a week up there in Toronto, outside Toronto, watching, tracing the process of the piece going through its kind of business failure. And I think it was just extraordinarily stressful on a personal level. And at the same time, the intent was not to have that on to be that on. The intent was something much greater. The problem there was not to make sure that that room actually worked. That was the kind of specific, that was one of many little details that actually became a huge detail. But in that process was an extraordinary amount of learning. And when I look back on what happened, I now say, ah, it's fancy coefficients in class. If I'm going to UV bond, if I'm going to use ST Contrary, I'm going to use PVD, and I'm going to bond it to some other material, and I have to think about not just how it's acting in the world, but also how it is being formed, what are the processes through which it is being formed. So I think it was a very notable failure. It was a great failure. It was also incredibly stressful and distressing. I mean, I think it's probably like a little too close to a lot of people's reality here. There's some time frames and maybe things, but I also think it's great advice in general. From a sort of perspective on professional slash artistic practice of people that you meet. You know, we are a community of architects of desire. We admire each other deeply, but the people who will be your heroes are often the people who are not our success. They are the people in other practices and professions that can just rise up to the sort of level of abstract thinking and the types that you're making things. I think that's like, for those who haven't been out in the field yet, I think that's something to fix school for them. Learn to read the school. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Lisa, everybody.