 All right, so, I'm going to introduce the presenter of the second session, which focuses on equity, on very important issues in architecture, and, all right, so, in this second session, we have three practices, A plus A plus A, and the office is represented by Ashley Kuo and Andrea Cheney, and then we have Jerome Hafer from Brent Afer, and then we have Bryony Robbers, which is from Bryony Robbers Studio. So, I'm going to have a very brief presentation of them. So, Ashley and Andrea, as I said, they are part of A plus A plus A is a woman-led multidisciplinary design and architecture studio committed to making places more inclusive, collaborative and joyful. The studio has three partners, Ariana Dean and Ashley and Andrea, which previously work on residential, retail, office spaces and speculative projects with firm including RNN architecture, family, New York, agency, agency, on a stanesco and food, New York. Additionally, Ashley work as an adjunct research scholar for Columbia University GSAP, specializing in research for the Waste Initiative. Andrea Cheney, her work, focus mainly on public projects such as a library, public housing and hospital prior to found A plus A plus A, working for firms like NAND Architects and Leven Bats. Jerome Hafer is a licensed architect, public artist and educator based in Harlem. He is the principal and of a world-winning Jerome Hafer studio and co-founder of Brand Hafer architecture. Hafer is assistant professor of architecture at City College Spitzer School of Architecture, where he co-directs the new place memory and culture incubator. After practice, critically engages built environment, projects in both urban and rural context, often looking to marginalize histories to unlock a new imaginary for architecture, design and cultural infrastructure. Brenner Roberts studio is a design and research practice based in New York City. The studio works across a range of scales from community engagement and programming to public art and urban design. They expand modes of design practice to address the lived experiences of communities and the current inquiries of the public realm. Grounded in intersectional feminism, the studio learns from anti-racist and disability justice movement to center embodied experiences often marginalized in the built environment. Celebrated the full range of physical, emotional and cultural experiences that people bring to public spaces. So I am really very, very happy to have all these people and professional here. And so we're going to start with Ashley and Andrea. Feel free to come closer. So we are going to talk about practice, not too much about our projects. We're not going to go too deep into it, but we're going to present kind of like the frameworks that we work through and the thinking that we put or organize our work around. We always like to start with a picture of the three of us because our names are Andrea, Arianna and Ashley and that's why we're A plus A plus A. I think that's really important to what the practice is. It's really a relationship between the three of us. The three of us come from very different places. Myself, I was born in Peru, raised in Canada. I'm Peru and then moved to the United States to New York for grad school. Ashley was born in Taiwan and was raised both in Taiwan and in the United States and we met in grad school at Chisab and Ari came from Florida. So those backgrounds really cannot resurface as like identities that we put on in the practice. Very early on we built the practice off of the Chisab incubator and one thing that we kept being asked when we were building the practice was, you know, what are you? What do you want to be as a practice? And that was really confusing for us because even though we came from architecture school, we didn't quite identify ourselves as people that wanted to do capital A architecture. In fact, one thing we were sure of is that we wanted to apply our skills, the skills that we had at Florida Architecture School and apply them to some type of practice. And very early on we were doing diagrams such as this one which really were words of things that we enjoyed a lot and we had a passion around and we started kind of trying to figure out how they were connected and those connections started giving birth to practice and types of projects. One thing that we have kept going with this is always making sure that this is not a constraint so that the grid expands and therefore there's more things that we're interested about that keep connecting back to this. Oh, this is a very blurry picture of two chicken playing soccer and the point of this picture which used to be high-res but I actually like how it's not high-res now. It's a really wonderful metaphor of what our practice, how we like to think about our practice is very fuzzy, it's very non-defined, it's playful and it's not afraid of getting down and dirty, right? If you really think about the way in which we have built the practice itself it's framed around three specific words which are listening, doing and playing and if you put that into words that make sense for the public. We are a multidisciplinary studio that's committed to making places more inclusive, collaborative and joyful. So starting with this word listen and listening, we do this a lot and we do it at different scales in different ways. Listening sometimes means spending a full day with a coconut vendor to try to understand what he needs on his every day and ultimately figuring out that he's not just a coconut vendor but he's also the person that will keep your keys just in case you get locked out of your apartment and he will also make sure to watch your kids after school for three hours while you do groceries. So listening means spending time with with our clients for a full day. Listening also means showing up at community engagements or even community meetings that we're not necessarily invited to or have very little to do with projects. This specific meeting was of the Friends of Tompkinsville Park which is the site of a project that we're working on right now and they were discussing what to do about the turmoil of the fact that the site was the place where Eric Garner got killed. In the more advanced and more complicated part of listening we also like to design experiences and experiences of engagement. This specific example is an scavenger hunt for the site of Tompkinsville Park which identifies place makers in the park and re-thinks them by asking people that engage with the scavenger hunt what is the relevance of these markers in a site like this in 2023. So the next part of our practice that is this idea of doing so this is Benedict Cumberratch giving a dramatic reading of a letter from Solowit Davis. I won't get into it but you should listen to it. So doing means doing things that people haven't asked us to do but that we feel very strongly about. So this is a project called Assembly for Chinatown where we started at the beginning of the pandemic to build fully subsidized outdoor dining for small businesses in Chinatown. Doing also means investing time in the creation of these projects which can involve organizing events like this where we're painting and building alongside volunteers and local community members in order to again listen to their stories and their narratives. Most importantly to build relationships, empathy and spaces for collaboration. This act of listening and storytelling becomes important part of our process creating opportunities for knowledge that is outside of the traditional canon. Canons which have largely been dictated by cis white western paternalistic ideologies giving us the opportunity for empowerment and insight and issues into creative ideas for making positive change. Doing also means creating things like this which are inclusive tools in order to communicate ideas and provide necessary resources or using the skill set that we have to help small businesses. Another part of what we do is this idea of play which is our last recurring theme. This is when doing becomes enjoyable and fun. Our projects often involve activities outside of architectural work that can mean designing youth workshops, experimenting with plants as a medium, tufting, etc. This is a project of ours called Healing Spaces where we designed and built shared healing spaces for a group of youth from Brownsville over the course of five weeks. This project was a direct result of their visions and their actions and helping shape the future of public space in their neighborhood. Our proposal, another part of, sorry one second, let me, I'm just going to fast forward first. We also tried to bring this level of playfulness to our teaching. This is some of the work of past students who explored and questioned ideas of food justice through the creation of physical object and toys. For us this idea of play is also the act of taking joy seriously whether it's working on residential renovations for multi-generational families or proposals for public space activation. So in the end our practice is as much a creative endeavor as it is an exercise in cultivating meaningful relationships with our projects, our partners, and our clients. Thank you. Hello everybody. You can still come closer. You still have time. All right. Thank you Alessandro for having me. It's great to be here and to see some friends and some new people. I feel like we actually don't do this that often. So this kind of slightly intergenerational dialogue I think is really nice. And I feel like it used to be more of a thing and is less of now but it's really fascinating. So I'm excited to participate and I will show some of my work. Yes. So thank you for the introduction. My name is Jerome Hayford. I live here in Harlem. I used to teach here at Columbia as an adjunct for several years and now teach at city college down the street with Lane and many others. I see a few former students also in the audience. And you know the work I'm going to show is work that has come out of the co-founded practice with K Brandt Knapp called Brandt Hayford and then also work that is increasingly being done under the the premise of Jerome Hayford studio as I have sort of taken over more directorship of the practice. So is this working? Okay. And so I kind of show this kind of network diagram which I think is maybe indicative of most of us up here to some degree which is to say you know I sort of you know explore this notion of an expanded practice which is really kind of increasingly a feedback loop between academia between research and then built projects and activism. And I think you know to some extent for example the kind of academia and teaching which I think all of us are involved in also in a way you know you could say subsidizes the practice but I think it also in other ways sort of decouples the practice from serving capital exclusively right which I think is this question of economies that we're operating in which is really sort of important and sort of late into all of this and to also this kind of particular type of practice that I think is gathered here today. And so you know this was I think amazingly touched on by some of the previous comments but I wanted to give a short plug to one of these one of the bits of activism which is like my fourth job that was on the screen which is this initiative that's been going now since 2020 called Dark Matter You that maybe folks in here know about which is a network of academics recent grads and practitioners which is BIPOC led that is really sort of attempting to produce a kind of alternate network an alternate institutional model and sort of explore other modes of practice and I think also kind of implicit there is this sort of troubling of the figure of the architect which I think Alessandro and then Ashley and A plus A have brought up which is to say you know sort of to reframe that this figure of the architect as which is sort of historically kind of raced as white male quite privileged bourgeois serving sort of certain types of capital etc etc so something like Dark Matter You which I'm involved with is really trying to trouble that notion and I think when we do that we begin to kind of open up new imaginaries for architecture. And so these are just some slides of some of the I guess earlier work of the practice and maybe slightly more recent of my independent practice and collaborative work practice which kind of emerged out of these sort of community engaged projects in New York in various neighborhoods in New York and then increasingly in Harlem which I will speak about briefly and I would say in terms of the research where am I going now yeah and that and you know the first slide had a lot of these sort of temporary installations sort of civic projects and there were also some more I guess normative capital A projects again with Harlem clients over the years that includes sort of the again more the sort of typical things that these small independent practices are asked to do in the early years and so then you know about relocating to Harlem now about a decade ago that has become kind of a locus of the work it's where I both live work and teach and so you know a space like Marcus Garvey Park in the aerial view there which is about a block from my home is this is again a kind of site for a continued practice right for motivating a sort of practice and so here's some some examples of public artwork which is still a major component of my practice my expanded practice that we did in in the park this project was about six five or six years ago and these are this is some more recent work which I think you know again is increasingly my connected to my research which is really attempting to engage and center historically marginalized subjects spaces and modes of cultural practice which I think then kind of reorient architecture reorient some of the aesthetics of architecture and reorient some of the ethics of architecture which is that has then come to characterize some of my practice and then here's just some other projects in Harlem this one was also in Harlem I have I did a dining shed as well we did a dining shed so this could be like the dining shed symposium so this was ours you know and then kind of you know again this sort of geography of Harlem which begins to intersect you know a kind of research practice looking at sites you know all within a certain kind of close neighborhood and ecosystem of partners and folks and stakeholders which include myself and sites like the Harlem African burial ground which is in the center drawing there which has been this kind of ongoing research which also appeared in Brian's log that she asked me to write about a few years ago which sort of really unpacked some of these ideas of a kind of alternate canon of architecture which has then led to sort of again exploring other additional sites of in particular black indigenous erasure and historical significance and what that sort of means for our discipline and how to kind of produce cultural infrastructure and a sort of architectural vocabulary to speak to those sites so these are just some images of other constituents also some blurry images that have been kind of characterizing this this sort of national geography of stakeholders who I've been working with both in a kind of institutional container and then outside of an institutional container which again are sites in particular of sort of black diaspora indigenous historical significance and erasure so these are just a few of those sites that have kind of come in and out of the studios but also now are kind of clients and I think also this this slide is to sort of highlight a kind of economy in my practice that is increasingly sort of grant funded work which which is its own sort of world and landscape of funding right but I think is it's interesting in how that has kind of is now taking up an increasingly larger sector of my practice and represents a different kind of relationship to capital and capitalism right okay and so and then you know those sort of sites and clients some of them nonprofit community groups also kind of intersect then some of these sort of experiments in let's say housing that we've been doing over the years in the practice so this this project for a kind of co-housing in Cleveland we won a competition for about five years ago it's still in process so I think Dash Marshall was talking about how long some of these things can take and then you know some other some other images there of that of that work and I want to show a more recent project kind of within this landscape indeed I wanted to mention of you know public memory of an architecture practice you know for me is kind of this this medium to sort of serve core work to serve sort of urgent work and architecture obviously you know we're talking about architecture facilitating things like housing public space but architecture in many cases you know or in some of the ways that I'm trying to sort of explore it is also serving kind of a public memory discourse which is increasingly sort of urgent and really sort of part I think we're instrumental in that in certain cases so this is the the sort of first place competition entry that my practice was one of the winners for for the international african town competition african town is the site of the somewhat recently rediscovered clotilda slave ship which you know had this kind of rediscovery and new york times articles around 2019 of this sort of a very kind of tangible history one of the only sort of tangible histories and sort of tangible archives of the slave trade which then this community african town which you see mobile alabama there in the background is this of sort one of the sort of only examples of a kind of existing link to africa of the of sort of descending community from that remnant slave ship so this competition uh was sort of mounted by that community and by rene camp rotan and some others to uh sort of um sort of question what could some cultural infrastructure be what would a kind of black imaginary be a kind of afrofuturist imaginary be that would in this case also be a very public statement of this history where this history is being denied contested and and sort of um is always sort of threatened as a kind of public statement so these are just some images of that of that winning competition entry uh that I will go quickly which uh which then you know I've been trying to test some of this sort of vocabulary some of these aesthetics and more recent projects so this is the most recent um set of installations uh in harlem this is also in marcus garvey park uh called sankofa uh which is part of a sort of multi-year initiative um that then had this very interesting sort of community design charrette process which really challenged me uh I think in really great ways to sort of and we had a kind of really great discourse around these this a sort of aesthetics of the installation and how that was not resonating with the harlem community folks who I was talking to so we sort of worked on how to kind of soften give some texture give some other sort of afroindigenous qualities to this installation which I just rode my bike from this morning because we're taking the plants out and we want to save them over the winter so that's my sustainability plug uh and then you know I just sort of end on some some projects that I can't really show but that that are continuing this work um this is a this is a permanent piece that I am working on for the east river uh in harlem and I think that's the last slide thank you hi everyone can you hear me all right um it's great to be part of this event and be a dialogue of all these wonderful practices that I admire so I'm briny roberts and I'm going to talk similarly sort of to the previous two presentations I guess more to process and the approach to thinking about practice more than specific projects and I will talk about that relative to the three practices and collectives that I'm a part of so my own studio briny roberts studio um wip collaborative which is a feminist collaborative design practice and an emerging global collective called feminist spatial practices so um before I talk about the specifics I want to frame the ideas behind all this work um which is really the theme of feminist spatial practices so I'll do that through mentioning this diagram that I worked on with abry achan a recent gseph grad I was commissioned by efflux and the goal of this work was really to sort of expand how we think about what feminism can do for the built environment so often the discourse tends to focus on just issues of representation the sort of numbers of people identifying as women or non-binary in practices in academia um but you know there's so many more ways in which feminist practices can expand how we think and how we make um so it's about different ethical frameworks about how to practice how to be in the world and also openness to ways of knowing and working that have often been marginalized in architecture practice so on the left hand side here you see you know several themes that are about ways of knowing expanding sources of knowledge beyond existing canons by finding ways of learning from lived experiences of people who've been historically marginalized and often paying greater attention to embodied knowledge and experiences as ways of knowing and in terms of ways of making um many of these practices are really thinking rethinking the norms of how a practice operates often through collaborative ways of working that aim to be more sustainable for both communities and environments so although I sort of you know work across several of these different themes you know as an educator just go back yeah as an educator sometimes writer researcher um and practitioner I'm I'll just focus today on the three themes on the right collaborative practices spaces for non-conforming bodies and alternative materialities which focus a little bit more on practice so in terms of collaborative practices I think it's exciting to see this sort of generational resurgence you could say of collaborative ways of working many of which you see you know in the practices preventing presenting today and for me that matters both in terms of how designers interact with communities and then also how to structure your own practice internally so how to interact with other people that you're working with so in terms of sort of facing out towards communities in my own practice I experiment a lot with processes of co-creation and thinking about how to do that to sort of collaboratively imagine what's possible for a place in multiple ways so not only through conversations but also through making things together walking sites together really trying to understand narratives through oral histories through dialogues and the work that I do in particular is focused on the public realm so thinking about how to collectively transform public spaces and then I'm also part of these other practices which are rethinking how to structure a practice so WIP collaborative which stands for work in progress and women practice is a feminist practice that explores a sort of cooperative model non-hierarchical you know equal ownership decision-making and we do practice we sort of our shared practice among independent practitioners so each of us has our own practice but we come together to do work that's at a bigger scale or you know more kind of research oriented than we're able to do on our own and you can see here a diagram on the left that's just sort of a conceptual expression of how we think about the seven of us working together and also always being in dialogue with other collaborators and then recently with Abriana Akin after we did that diagram you know we always thought that diagram was going to be limited because it was coming from our perspectives even though it was informed by dialogue with many scholars around the world many different feminist practitioners but the goal was ultimately to create a much more global collective open source framework to celebrate feminist practices and also to kind of build community and support practices in the work that they're doing so this is now happening you can sort of see what we're doing here on our instagram page and you know feel free to join us for any of these events which are open but ultimately we'll be launching this online platform that's kind of an interactive open source knowledge sharing platform and a way of connecting and supporting practices oops and then to kind of move to the theme of spaces for nonconforming bodies so this is if we think about you know architectural terms this would be more program so how to think about shining a light on the programs that support bodies have been marginalized in the built environment and you know in the practices I mentioned this is happening in part through research so as Jerome pointed to the importance of grant funded work which I think can be really meaningful in enabling you to dig deeper to work with you know other scholars and historians or advocates and to think about larger scale change such as policy changes so the first two projects on the left here are ongoing work with WIP and then the next two are through my own practice and research and teaching but they're all thinking about how to sort of support bodies thinking about bodies super intersectionally not only about gender but also race and disability to sort of focus on programs that have generally been under resourced and not explored enough in the fields of architecture such as spaces for reproductive justice or spaces that support neurodiversity and then just some examples of how that plays out through design work so in my own studio doing projects like outside the lines at the High Museum in Atlanta which emerge from a process of collaboration with disability advocates and self advocates in Atlanta to think about how to create a space in particular that would support communities that are visually impaired and also people with autism and other developmental disabilities so thinking a lot about how materials spatial sequencing sound and social spaces can sort of be more varied and support a range of experiences and similarly a project with WIP that we did in Hudson Square a couple years ago responded to a long-term research and engagement process we were doing also speaking with young people with families people with disabilities particularly people who identify as neurodivergent to figure out how public space could support a range of activities and engagement and a range of sensory stimulation even within the kind of intensity of New York streetscapes and then in terms of alternative materialities this is another maybe more indirect way of engaging with these histories of gender in the built environment I've always been really drawn to sort of excited by histories of you know the decorative arts textiles ornament which historically have often been gendered as female and have not been taken as seriously as a sort of tectonic projects of built architecture but I'm interested in how we can kind of learn from those forms of craft and making and start to kind of explore them at much larger scales bring them into public space how that actually shifts the tone of public space kind of can reference moments of what we might consider typically as domestic and now that can shift expectations for even the kind of behaviors and social interactions that are possible in public space so these are just some of those projects where that's been explored and to me it's really satisfying to think about this at multiple scales so from the really intimate scale of bodies and how design objects can interact and encourage interact with bodies and encourage maybe non-normative forms of moving through space to larger scale civic projects where in this case at the City Hall in Columbus Indiana the textiles created a very different environment for socializing and and lounging and was typically kind of welcomed in that space or at Lincoln Center this project for a festival for people with autism that introduced this this softness and leisure again to sort of return to that beam that is typically not encouraged in these monumental public spaces and then lastly a project that's in the works opening in a couple months which is also thinking not necessarily in terms of softness but hopefully its relationship to the landscape is a softer touch about how to explore themes of memory and local histories in a way that encourages interaction and kind of sensory exploration among the public and that is it for me yeah it is so incredible to see how diverse is their approach and their work but also intertwined with the previous session somehow there are elements of you know this this idea of public space leisure but also joyfulness and in all the three offices represented here so again I don't know who wants to go first but you know I have of course I have many questions for all of you but yeah as as as we did before I mean feel free to be an interlocutor among among each other I don't know yes Duncan actually so you're you're asking about the friction between non-profit organizations that want to create those type of spaces and spaces that already exist like that often in our practice that those those two quite overlap a lot um we're currently working in a project that I showed a drawing of it is the triangular square square triangle park uh in satin island and is it it is an existing space and it's being um activated by a non-profit that literally is located adjacent to the triangle the way that that project is being funded currently is through the local center um it's a very small amount of money that has been allocated to that project for the amount of scope that the non-profit is actually asking for so we actually purposely built into our contract that instead of doing what typically you call CA we are actually creating a package of information that can live beyond our involvement in the project so that the organization can apply for other grants to expand the project beyond what we're doing right now so does that answer your question? Yeah I could just um maybe answer it in another direction too that I think um a lot of times the projects that I do come from a sense of dissatisfaction from institutions or communities with the existing public spaces and a sense that they're not they are not activated they are not working as sort of hubs for local communities um interestingly they often tend to be modernist spaces that I'm asked to kind of rethink the kind of grand empty concrete plaza so I think it's an interesting also preservation question of like how to wrestle with this this legacy of the built environment that's not necessarily serving contemporary urban uh context and so yeah kind of then trying to understand who's not being served what are all those histories how do those become expressed because ends up being what's interesting about the work yeah yeah I think maybe related to that is there are a lot of spaces where at public spaces where the intention isn't really being or the goal isn't really being achieved at the end of the day maybe it's like a negative way where this part that we're working on is actually people come have complaints of danger and feeling unsafe but then there's also instances of public space that are being used and misused in interesting ways and so I think that kind of has both in that way where we can learn from those types of public spaces the one that comes to mind is Columbus Park in Chinatown where there's like a ton of older generation people who are kind of using that space almost like an outside living room and so learning from those types of spaces becomes really important when we kind of use that as a precedent to show you know public spaces that might not be working well at the moment can have the potential to do something better and working with communities to understand what exactly they want for those spaces to align with what the sort of public realm or design of it already is existing yeah yeah um I I think I'm getting the the question I mean there's there are a lot of public spaces in the city that that don't work very well or not used that are underused a variety of reasons for that um you know even though I'm not always so optimistic about the role of architecture in that case I think there actually is a there's a lot that comes down to the kind of designer in the room and even though this is like a cliche should be a cliche at this point I am still pretty astonished at how often sort of design decisions are being made for for a variety of spaces in a city like New York without people who are really who have their ear to the community in that room you know it's really amazing to me so it can be even if that person is not the architecto ideally they are the designer you got to have somebody who is from the community in in that room you know and a sense of imagination I think I think we're we're sort of in a gen a new generation where there's not that all of the architects designing for these spaces are not sort of designing these heroic sort of modernist vocabulary I kind of think the other people involved have way more power than we do in our projects also like the nonprofits that we work for the people who are community leaders have so much say in what happens and so for us it's almost like okay how do we support you by giving you like our skill set sure and I would say we are also members of these communities you know this is again like like we're our discipline is so laden with this idea that you you're we're not human beings and we're not members of communities ourselves so yes and we like recouple our our subjectivity our political embodied selves to the process and then it's like we're also members of these communities or you become you become member of the community through the remember your memory we are all members of multiple communities we may not be members of the communities we're designing for so you know maybe to ask a question to build on that I think you know one of the things I love about both of your practices both of which I show like to my students and you know I'm a fan of is that I I mean I think the kind of baseline is there's a level of engagement and like co-creation with community members but then I think there's also an interest in addressing content subject matter that is intangible and kind of difficult so talking about trauma healing you know stories identities and you know the process of engagement is a big part of that but I think there's also a push on some of the maybe typical materials or methods of bringing things into the world aesthetics to return to that question that are intentionally you're intentionally pushing on that in order to address those intangible topics and you know and maybe that has to do with an awareness about your own kind of embodied subjectivity as well as a designer so I'm just curious to hear if you have any thoughts on that or want to share more about that I mean I think about this a lot because from the moment we started our practice we kind of put the process of engaging first and then we make something after that and a couple of years into the practice we started getting asked can you come and talk and like present and put your work in slides and we were like we don't have anything you know like we don't really sometimes we don't make drawings that are architectural quote unquote architectural drawings it's all kind of like in the moment and it's all about showing up and it's all about like interactions between people and conversations that sometimes make the project rather than like putting it in a drawing so we end up sitting at our desks and you know trying to recall or like looking through the camera roll what what did we actually do and how can we make it into a drawing and it turns out that those drawings actually don't necessarily help with the process of the project at the moment they help to inform what's the next project that can come out of the project that we just did for example the scavenger hunt drawing that I showed with the yellow background that I did like three days ago and it was because I needed to digest why that was important for the project right now and how we could push it to the next step of the project yeah I mean we could go down a whole tangent because you know it came up I think in the question about this relationship between academia and practice which I immediately was sort of sitting there wanting us to then discuss what practice is because again there's a presumption that practice is these things that this thing that the people at SOM are doing in that shiny building for a certain kind of capital subject and whatever all the rest of us are doing or whatever I do aside from that is something else so we can maybe can get back to that later but then also what is an architectural drawing you know I would say that that is an architectural drawing and that you know we again we have to be we have to be questioning you know what we've inherited as a sort of legitimate practice model and legitimate byproducts of practice because it's outdated in many cases or incomplete and you know frankly a lot of what we're even calling architectural drawings would not have been called architectural drawings 30 years ago so you know yeah yeah I think that's a really good point and then to Brian he's question I'm glad you raised it and I feel like a lot of us are kind of in this walking this this territory but I've you know I have started some talks by very explicitly refusing this kind of again trope of community social engaged practice and sort of aesthetic conceptual practice because I very much am interested in both and the two are very much related and you know there's a kind of value judgment and an aesthetic judgment being placed onto like community work I've had people tell me I do too much community work and it's not sort of you know high enough when I think you know whatever it is that I'm doing is extremely sort of conceptual and sophisticated and can also be community work so I think we also need to be sort of questioning the sort of buckets that work gets placed into your architecture today and also you know that you do community work so you have to might not just be archibabble right but it's sophisticated yeah you don't need to build I actually have a question to layer on top of that which I think some people might be interested do you charge for community engagement do you like put put it on the contract as in the fee schedule do you write community engagement this much money well so most of my projects are like fixed fee projects so I will put it in my budget to explain where the money's going but it's not a separate billing process if that makes any sense so we I do I end up doing more but you know these days yes often it is it is in there and then this gets back to in particular I think again the kind of non-profit world is more cognizant of the labor of community engagement which sometimes becomes a really difficult thing where there's an honesty of this project does not have the budget to do community engagement right so there have been those conversations right which in some ways is refreshing to have those honest conversations of we do not you know we don't know how to pay you to do what to do that labor right yeah I feel like we find ourselves a lot of time trying to convince clients that that should just be the norm in like larger public projects um there was an example of we didn't show this project but one of our first things that we did together was a farm worker housing in a community in Florida where there were developers who are already kind of making proposals for housing without having already engaged with the community who's going to live there and once we kind of brought up this idea of like okay yeah why don't we like ask them what they want because I don't think that ever came across their minds and to them they're like oh this is cool yeah why don't you do that and then immediately after our sort of like workshopping stage they they gave a presentation about like the design of this housing and we're like oh you designed it yeah you already designed it but it's I feel like there's that struggle and I think we're always trying to convince people that it should be a part of the process and we should be getting paid for it and I think nonprofits do a great job of doing that um but when we're not working with nonprofits and we're trying to do work outside of those organizations it becomes very difficult and yeah I don't know if you have advice on that but yeah something actually you wait sorry before uh something actually that Ashley learned from Food New York was in order for the client to respect the work that you do you have to charge for it so we've been evolving since that project in the mockery we've been evolving the way in which we um charge but also write our contract so that say for example if the project doesn't have the budget to reach a very specific conclusion then we just frame the project as something that will reach that in the next round of you know fundraising but always make sure to put community engagement first that's the first phase so even before SD we write community engagement and it has a very specific fee because it's valuable and because you know you should be respected as it's having a monetary value as well. When Richie from Dash was talking about climate I was saying um he explained they have a strategy which is to just shift the value proposition from think of all the good you'll do for the world with your little house which of course people have a hard time accepting or wanting to pay for um to think of the benefits for yourself of these kinds of practices for the interior air quality and the and the the the value that returns directly to you do you have similar strategies for trying to say figure out how to value the community engagement or community building efforts that you guys are doing obviously putting a lot of labor into um and which so much defined I think the quality of the practices you guys are engaged in to situate that value from yourselves and the community and back into the people or institutions that are paying for that work. Yeah I mean um I think one thing that pops into my mind is in certain cases that a greater assurance of the success of the project and and the reception of the project I think you know there's a kind of pragmatic political calculus of this is going to be more successful and and and save a lot of headache and heartache later if if if we do some kind of you know and and you know for example the in in our street shed the sort of restaurant owners some of the people who are part of the bid were also like the clients but they were sort of the community but there still is a something to be said for some at least embedding like one larger gathering or session into that process that's just gonna I think I think that's one value proposition that it'll be more successful. I mean I think I think it's a it's a really interesting moment because I found that like a lot of both institutional and then public clients they know that community engagement is important but there isn't necessarily familiarity with like the full richness of what that process could look like so there might be like kind of default methods you know like the ones that are required um and then the advocacy I feel that I end up doing is like okay how can we also think about this and in an expanded way you know how can we think about more constituents you know they may have identified one or two you know community partners but it's like a very narrow bandwidth and so you know broadening who's being who's speaking you know who's being asked about this project and then the kind of methods of engagement and like the timeline I mean I find that the the advocacy is not only for budget but also for timeline that most clients want the design immediately the first step and so having to kind of push on that and say okay can we just before you see an image can we just talk to someone first um that that's a hard thing to argue for um but it but definitely arguing that it will be more successful and that there will be more buy-in and more activation that if you want to activate a space you have to actually talk to the people about what they want to do there um and I think another dimension of this that's interesting just in terms of like industry is that um you know there are now these separate kind of industries of community engagement specialists and so depending on the scale of the project it becomes an interesting negotiation of who's doing that engagement and you know how much of that of those services do you want to take on within your own small practice and how much do you want to have a specialist do but then how do you make sure that there's actually like dialogue and good feedback between the specialist and your practice so it actually is part of the design and I think also practices like our scale and focus can end up getting asked only to do the engagement so that comes to me often too and then it's a struggle to say well I have design ideas too you know I want to be able to like have a bigger scope um so I think it's an interesting moment when all these things are kind of information and it feels like both the clients and the fields of design are figuring out like what's our turf and how much is our scope you know can I pick up on this point on community engagement um the challenges of Southern Italy London and New York is about climate and equity equally massive migration coming in uh is there a situation where architects have a role you have a role in your practices to actually um engage with how to plan for this it's happening um how this works with local communities that are related to the people who are incoming perhaps but also in terms of the conversion of existing buildings for housing migrants that are coming in and how they fit within the local community we've had I think in London about a million additional people come in the social housing has not kept up with that it will be a big plan going forward to what extent do we within issues of equity as architects need to engage with our local communities to discuss how to deal with this rather than if you like having uh us and them situation and often we come from the same backgrounds except we got here 20 years earlier is there a situation where community engagement with this would be helpful in terms of integrating the new communities that inevitably will come as part of the library yeah for sure I mean I feel like we keep going back I keep going back to the most recent project that we're working on because it's just fresh in my mind but um one of the developments that is currently framing the park is a shelter for 300 um families that are of single mothers and low income and it's been the the project has been delayed for about three years and is finally being completed in Davia the project that we've been hired for is to design a spice market an afro-caribbean latin food and spice market in in the park um and through conversations with our client or the non-profits there's three of them that we're working with we got to understand that because there's going to be this huge influx of um people into the space that we have to start rethinking who um who the spice market is serving right it's not just going to be about selling things but it has to also be about mutual aid it has to be about this whole ecosystem of uh food who can afford food what type of foods uh who are going to be these people so yeah we I think we do that through we do that specifically through the community engagement not just with the community at large but also um trying to bring that framework into conversations with the clients uh yeah I think I love your question uh and I you know I don't know if I necessarily have the expertise to speak to the specifics of the kind of migrant populations but I think for me your question touches on some of these things that are very much becoming part of of my work and I think the work of others up here in terms of sort of cultural resiliency and even like preservation in an expanded context uh so I'm working on some sort of some sort of more forward-thinking preservation type projects in Harlem for example uh which again I think comes back to these questions of aesthetics right and the aesthetics of safe gentrification and how you know there is this vocabulary uh of the way that the city is going to look as the neighborhoods grow as they are rezoned and then you start to see these high-rise residential buildings popping up on 125th street right so then then to your maybe some of your question how do we as maybe preservation-minded architects of a new generation start to use mechanisms like certain kinds of community engagement certain kinds of even memory work work with these communities to to ensure that maybe it doesn't look like every other city around the world's gentrified sort of dystopic dream but that there are kind of other ways of existing in the city other ways that the city can look being sort of elevated in how we how we rebuild or how we kind of build up and densify these these neighborhoods thinking about it a lot not sure again this is like a this is an emerging territory I think that we're that we're sort of entering into for the field of architecture in the field of architecture yeah of course yeah I have a uh can you hear me okay great um overall great work um I had a question that relates a little bit more to the post installation of of a community engagement project um I think everyone here can attest or understands values and appreciates all of the work uh the process that it takes to come up with the final project we understand what it what it is to talk to the community be part of a community board community engagement project um all of these diagrams the the ethos everything that goes into the final installation do you guys as designers heavily involved in community engagement do you ever wonder worry or are nervous about how the final product and I say final one quotes because we know that it's sometimes not the final it's product it's of a bigger picture obviously but for the general public do you ever worry or wonder that that overall work that you did to come up to this final product gets lost in translation or someone just looks at the installation it's like who came here and just put up posts with little lights or who came to the to the center of our plaza and just created for them it's a play days or a play a little temporary gymnasium and they don't really know the overall work that came that came to create this this landscape right so I just wonder as designers do you guys ever worry wonder you know does this message actually come across to the general public not those involved in the community boards which sometimes it's a handful it's just 15 20 people who are passionate right so just just was always curious that's always on my mind for public work that I do and things like that so I just wanted to hear your thoughts yes all the time yeah I think that for us it's always how can we make sure that the final result is never a surprise to people and I think part of that is not just like doing one community engagement event but making sure that you're thoughtfully including people in the process and through all stages and not just ideation but for us I think like the act of fabricating something together even if it's you know insulated or maybe you're doing it on the street kind of makes it known to a community and people that they're allowed or not allowed but welcome to partake in it and I think giving people that responsibility kind of makes it so that you know this is not a surprise at the end but makes them feel like they had a stake in it and they had a hand in doing something and so it's yeah I think it's just thoughtfully trying to make sure that engagement is included in all aspects of your process from like the beginning to the end and not just having one event that fixes everything always make sure to throw a party at the end and invite the right people that are going to you know be living there and these people never are a part of the community board meetings yeah yeah I would also just downplay like the importance of the intention coming through like I don't know how important that really is in the end I think in my mind it's like you're you know through this collaborative process there's the production of some kind of framework for activity and life and interaction and hopefully once that's in place this whole new ecosystem of relationships and experiences is possible so and in my experience that's always like surpassed expectations that people make something their own in ways that you could never expect and they're so much more interesting than what you might plan for so I think it's actually more about like learning from the way that people respond to something sort of valuing like post occupancy analysis to call it something super dry but that's something that WIP did with restorative ground like we sort of we're doing drawings to understand how people would transform the spaces in ways we couldn't imagine so yes the intention I love that yeah the intention I don't know it it doesn't seem so precious in a way even because um yeah I think I think you know having a certain judgment also of what kinds of things are going to work out work out well and have the right kind of people involved like I have definitely you know had possible projects come into my landscape and I'm like I'm getting not the best feeling about how this is being set up so it's really like you know we all exercise judgment on where we're going to put our energy and then yeah sometimes things you know you know and back to maybe your question especially when you're starting out like you know and and certain kinds of temporary work the stakes are relatively low and you're going to make some mistakes right things aren't things don't always work out the way you thought they were but then maybe something happens that is part of a longer arc of time that I think we have to be prepared to engage so sometimes sometimes very meaningful relationships will emerge towards the end of a project and then that leads to a significantly larger project years later so you know I think just being a little bit it's not to take us off the hook of like the importance of having a certain cohort involved at certain times but you'd be surprised that like when it's a longer arc in our heads of a community relationship it can be years many years I was gonna say I think part of this is also the people that you invite to these whether community board meetings or community workshops like what are they getting out of it sometimes people have things to do and they don't have two hours to spare to like work on a workshop and what we find helpful is making sure what while we're planning these engagements that there's either monetary fee that's attached to a stipend given to people or some sort of incentive that they're gaining something out of this as well so it's not sort of like a one-way street yeah every time that we work with youth we build them to the budget that there's going to be a stipend and that sometimes comes out of the project budget sometimes it comes from the nonprofit that we're working with budget towards different programming so it's up to us to build the engagement to overlap with that programming that's already specified another thing that you reminded me of talk to talk about is in architecture lingo or this is what I learned when I was like working at offices there's a saying of like you always have to do so much handholding with your client you know in our experience my experience in the work that we do I actually want the client to hold my hand and bring me in all the time because the client is the one that has kind of like already a position within the community so I really want them to like invite me to dance you might invite me to all the things because regardless of like how many complicated things we think about about engagement the most meaningful way of actually making a connection is just like showing your face and being like hi I'm Andrea how's it going um sorry I have a quick question in the back um just piggybacking off of that community engagement um naturally we've kind of been seeing this whole new realm of architectural community engagement in this kind of post-covid landscape especially New York I know Jerome you made a joke about it being kind of a dining shed symposium and I know that initially that community response wasn't too warm towards those structures and then especially now kind of post-covid how zoning guidelines are now making them only part-time temporary structures so I'd love to hear from you all as people who run practices if that community engagement has changed in this post-covid landscape like have people been more welcoming towards as you're saying like pulling you in and and welcoming you into engaging with that community or has that pushback been actually a little bit more fierce have they become a bit more protective of this ecology that I've established especially through the pandemic as well it really varies not all communities are the same so some communities might be super inviting for example when we worked in Chinatown we already knew some of the community there we both come from um half Chinese Ash is Tony so we kind of already understood the basis of the culture um so it was easier for us to engage with that community um with other communities we really show up with a very different disposition so mostly listening and mostly uh learning so I mean the pandemic did bring a importance or it made it more important to engage with community but I don't think necessarily that it changed for the community itself that we're engaging with it changed more for us and for the client um yeah I mean I think I found that there's maybe even more awareness of how important public space in particular is for kind of community life um so even slightly more opportunities um since the pandemic but I think it has brought up all these new challenges you know like during the pandemic so trying to do engagement during the pandemic um required all of these new formats of you know either zoom meetings or mirror board brainstorming I did a lot of phone interviews um and you know in some ways I think the multiple formats have actually enabled more engagement afterwards because people who you know didn't have childcare and couldn't come to a meeting in person can now come to a zoom meeting but it is a different feel I mean it's different than showing up in person and being able to you know share space so it's kind of you know the pros and cons I think are obvious but um I haven't seen any decrease in interest I have a question for you all like maybe about your own communities and it's just striking how you all belong to this multiple ways of practicing and the shape of each practice of each practice I think it's such a great group to talk about you know um working with different collaboratives transitioning from you know weep to uh brandy robert studio to the feminist collective what what does it mean to sort of belong to all of these environments or to share authorship between you know three partners or to work with dark matter and uh brand hayford and hayford and uh kuni how does one belong and develop a practice when you have many many practices yeah I mean I love that drum said his four jobs because I also feel like I have four jobs it's like it's a few too many jobs but um but I think that you know it's obviously like self I asked for it and I think um it's just became really clear to me the need to kind of find your people and like find the communities and or make the communities that are needed to um to have the kind of conversations you want to have but also and it's not making communities because all the people already exist but it's just like in the act of of pulling people together I think there's so much power and like solidarity and just seeing the resonances between different kinds of practices different perspectives and um for me it's been really transformative to feel like okay I'm not like this one person trying to do a thing but there's actually hundreds of people doing related work around the world and like I learned so much more when I'm talking to them um so for me it it's like a kind of survival mechanism too and source of inspiration it's it's like a really smart biz dev strategy I think that's the business development strategy I think that's the way that I see it someone once we've had many mentors in the process of building the practice starting from new ink but I do remember this one advice which was in order to make your practice bigger and sustainable you need to put yourself out there and joining things is the best way of doing that like you join boards you join community boards in your in your building you join like the community board in your neighborhood you join schools you you know you just put yourself out there and then people start to recognize you I think that's because we're in a proper class I think I want to say that but at the same time I think um I think that working with a lot of people brings your ego down which I think is healthy it allows you to have conversations that are fruitful beyond like your own self-doubt um I wouldn't I wouldn't have ever thought about starting a practice if Ariana and Ashley hadn't been like we should just do it just like Andrea I feel less social but I do find it helpful as a way to not just like be so insular in the way that we see things in the way that we do things um so yeah just like being able to talk to more people is also a form of research in a way in exploration which I enjoy yeah I like these answers I do I do think you know to that like network diagram that like wearing the multiple hats can feed one another in productive ways um but then there's also I think I mean at least for me you know that for something like dark matter there's just a bit of a kind of ethical imperative in terms of like you know meaning in the work and you know when I was trying to articulate you know architecture is this sort of this sort of medium that I have chosen to express kind of deep work right and you know there's just not enough people who look like me or like other people up on this panel who are architects so something like dark matter is there's just an ethical liberatory imperative to that that also you know helps me be excited about getting up in the morning and doing this right so you know so and and I think um we're I don't think it's just our field I think we're witnessing just a generational shift in how people relate to work and again relate to sort of meaning and what they're doing or kind of the different hats that they wear to sort of motivate a kind of constellation of efforts that they're part of yeah but you know there's also there's also still plenty of folks who want to wear one hat and that's maybe okay yeah and I also want to you know just not to be like the only practical one but like I wanted to mystify this idea that the type of practices that we run are like perfect and we are fed out of it and that we be rented of this like we all teach you know that helps at a plus a plus a we're not all full time we do things on the side we have you know side incomes I think in order to run these type of practices that like put values forward we need to be scrappy and we need to have different types of incomes and sometimes those collaborations allow for that yeah I also want to mention that being able to do multiple things I think is like a huge privilege as well I know that I mean Andrea has had kind of history with trying to get the right visas to do certain things and I appreciate the sort of mentorship of people but also the community around us who have or organizations that have helped us in our process of developing a studio together like we've had subsidized office spaces for example as something but it is incredibly I think privilege and I feel very lucky to be able to do it but there's nothing wrong with like having one hat also I just want to point that out but yeah I do I really appreciate being able to do multiple things at once I wanted to draw one thing out from this in this conversation that's been touched on a few times but it is kind of the role of you know there's the architect there's the community but there's also the city you know this and the very complicated set of city agencies that were always you know dealing with and in the there the cities had many ways of historically trying to engage with architects from the kind of DDC design excellence programs things like that which have I think I think we've seen another set of relationships with the city starting to emerge and a lot of the practices that are that are here I think the pandemic forefronted that in a lot of ways that when say the city's rules started changing and we were suddenly able to kind of be on the forefront of those rule changes we the city went from being a kind of static burden to something which we realized was also run by humans as someone pointed out we're all humans and community members the city is run by humans and community members it turns out and the but that you know some of the people in this group are a part of design advocates which I think one of its central insights was this idea that by banding together in the group we could have more efficacy in our dealing with the city we didn't approach the city saying hi my name is nick I'm the partner of a tiny office you've never heard of called future expansion and we have some great ideas for you but that we could as a group we could say hey we represent not only architects but small business owners we're being affected by these things you proclaim to care about and we are really good at engaging communities we're really we could be a useful hinge between the kind of desires of the city at least as stated and the kind of the work on the ground and I think all that all those the kind of effects of that sort of work on the ground are these kind of questions of even about the changes to some of these programs that from DOT and groups like that which you know I design advocates and other groups I think have all been part of those conversations and been part of those we work with this with DOT and things like this but I sort of wonder where you see it and it's not to say that those things aren't very frustrating those those interactions with the city you know the the fact that they became possible seemed wonderful and then the fact that they still you know they're already easy solutions it's the first gesture maybe and something bigger and so I kind of um and then lastly I think it's it does seems like it's also maybe the hinge to these kind of questions about an immigrant crisis or all these things these things which are city policy which are are bigger than our offices are bigger than individual communities like it's the next step up in the hierarchy and to say from our our offices to our communities to our neighborhoods to our city um and so I'm just curious from you guys like how you where you see the productivity or where you see your strategies in dealing with the city specifically um will lie yeah I mean I could offer two two thoughts on that I think one um you know I think size does help and so you know one of the projects that we're doing with WIP is with Design Trust for Public Space and Rona Carbon Architects and that is trying is aiming for ultimately you know policy change around how public spaces are designed so that they can be more neuro inclusive and that's like a long-term project of building partnerships and having you know it's like a three-year project um and the funding is coming from grants and foundations and things um and so and Design Trust is sort of the you know the mediator the connector that makes that possible um so I do think you're right that like these larger advocacy sort of king glomerates are really helpful in in having a voice um in change but I do find that actually a lot of the agencies are very receptive again like they know that there's something missing they know that they should be better and they want to learn from research that architects can do but it's like producing those channels and those formats um but I guess in contrast I actually end up doing a lot of work outside the city in my own practice most of my projects are not in New York they're in smaller cities or even towns you could say often in the Midwest and I find that that's a really different situation that is often really refreshing that like when you're dealing with a small context you know you only need to know a couple people and like pretty dramatic change can happen through these very personal relationships because everybody knows each other you know and you have a couple people who are advocating for different way of thinking about public space or you know more investment in the arts or something and they all want to high school together and so you know there's like it's just a really really different terrain um and and I actually find it often kind of exciting because they're also wrestling with huge questions of social change a lot of these cities are you know the demographics are rapidly changing partly through immigration partly through a lot of people moving out you know and like recruitment of new communities coming in um so there are like similar themes but a very different scale of agency and yeah activity I completely agree um I I've had to learn a thing recently which is kind of difficult for me to swallow but architects are always very very late to the party um in the work that we've done with non-profits or even like clients that are for profit that have been like have a specialty they like I found that we come in and I always think okay the project starts now but the project has the project and the thinking has been going on for a really really long time and we haven't been invited to the party until like okay can we do the sign now or like we might do something now um so I find that actually the non-profits that we've worked with have already done the heavy lifting of building relationships with city orgs and even you know know them so well that they have them in their phone and they text with them all the time so that has become quite helpful um again in Staten Island like Staten Island is part of New York but it really works as a micro town and everyone knows each other and so the non-profit that we are working with walk into these like parks office and you know all the time so so questions yes thank you for the really fascinating conversation so there is something that I'm not sure understood that in case I have a question understood that you said in some cases the giving giving back for the community was also monetary right you said that the giving back to the community to engage them in the participatory process that giving back was monetary money cash okay so I'm an architect as well I've done several participatory process in totally different context Rome, Italy, Turin, Italy, Calaf, a small village in Spain and from my point of view the reason of the participatory process is to build community and to make the project belonging to the community so my question is if you arrive to the point you have to pay the community to the to participate does it mean that maybe the way you started the process the first phase the one to invite people that one is not working and maybe you should look another way because if you give money you don't make community money it's for the single person maybe if you make a collective lunch I'm saying a random thing that makes community if you make an exhibition with words from the there are several examples so I want to understand I don't never done anything like that in New York I think but I think you raise a really good question and I think the most direct way to answer is you're assuming the community doesn't exist already and that you're creating it with your project well the truth in the context that at least we have worked in is that community already exists and we are doing engagement to become part of the community and to get feedback on something that we might create for this community the reason why we build in stipends for community engagement especially for youth is because our type of engagements take a long time and because time is money and because if they're not here if they're not spending their time here they would be spending their time in their part-time job you know so yes I think that you know sometimes you get the opportunity that engagement creates a more solidified community sense but at least for our work we always assume a community already exists and we are just being invited late to the party I also think that part of it is getting people who maybe isn't interested in community engagement but are imperative to the project in a way so the youth I think is a perfect example maybe they don't care they don't want to spend their like Saturdays doing something like that they want to hang out with their friends but if they're getting paid for it then maybe that's enough incentive to bring them here to actually be a part of the process and hopefully get them interested and engaged but yeah just kind of understanding like who it is you're trying to bring in and making sure that what they're getting in return is worth their time yeah I think the last part you said is super key like that that sense that there's something there's a benefit for the people involved and so for you know I think there's a couple different contexts so like a community board people have already decided they're going to volunteer their time to be part of that and to give feedback to processes so like you don't have to pay them like that's an existing you know institution but I think I think there's just more you know discourse around these issues of labor now and this understanding that you know people are going to come and spend their time and basically contribute to your project well yes I agree but I think there's also more and more awareness particularly around nonprofits that like there is this expenditure of time and effort that it takes for people to participate so even just transportation right like someone if they're coming from a different borough to be part of your workshop they're spending money on transportation they're not working at their part-time job there's the there is some loss for them some sacrifice in being part of it and so it's like an acknowledgement usually a modest one you know I mean people don't usually do it for the money right but if I squeeze a question in thank you so much for presentations it's amazing and I think what the power points like don't say is how much work goes into it it's so full of joy and I think joy has been this recurring theme and and I'm also seeing so much labor so much time beyond the kind of traditional timelines and it's hard to squeeze it all in 15 slides but I'm curious about about joy in your practice and joy is and I feel like maybe this is kind of a feels like a key term to me in terms of rethinking practice it's not the same as happiness joy is not not reward per se or or a certain kind of like how traditional practice might understand success to be so I'm just curious about how joy or even like libertarian coalitions might like what is the concrete I guess your your approach to joy and maintaining joy in practice yeah I mean spoiler alert we're not making a ton of money doing this if you want to make a lot of money go be an eye banker or maybe cross-enroll in the real estate program here or elsewhere but you know like I maybe lots to say you know I think this gets back a little bit to even the kind of post post covid world we're in where um you know even before that I think you know the decision to really dedicate oneself to something like architecture I think this there's a lot of meaningful hand wringing around the financial proposition of that but you know I think speaking from a place of relative privilege there is a point at which I would say for me and probably most of the people in this room or part of this panel the pursuit is is not to make as much money as possible uh and and I think increasing numbers of people who are privileged enough to even think beyond immediate survival are really questioning that as a kind of ethic and a sort of american you know late capitalist pursuit anyway we go go down a rabbit hole but um you know there's also this element again of kind of community building uh and activism which can also get very sort of um intense and and kind of emotionally draining given all of the crises that we're responding to and that we're trying to solve because we're architects uh when you know I often try to remind myself and other sort of collaborators co-conspirators um that I'm involved with that you know we there is a lot to be said for you know centering joy and kind of a speculative project within activism or within sort of mission driven work um because if we get caught up in simply sort of reacting to white supremacy to late capitalism and you know stuck in a reactive paradigm always then we are not permitting ourselves to sort of imagine and dream which I feel like is really important for us to do and also really important to enable you know these sort of community members we're talking about to do go on and on yes I totally agree I think also part of for me is for selfish reasons I there's a lot of anxiety around our work and just as a student and as someone practicing that if you're not doing it for joy it gets a little heavy in the way so I mean super selfish reason but I do agree with everything you were saying as well we do have as a as a practice a goal which is to be first sustainably um economically sustainable within the three of us that has been our goal I think from the beginning to be able to pay the three of us fairly and fully for our time and then when we're ready to be that way which you know fully a hundred percent to then start to grow in a way that also can sustain others with this with the same standard and I think that pursuit in itself brings me a lot of joy on top of just being very in love with my partners um I just really like them so working with them it's really joyful I love that question thank you for that I think we don't talk about it enough you know that in in theory this is a creative profession and in my mind creativity is is a kind of joy and it takes to actually be creative takes this sort of some unstructured time and exploration and play just to see what could happen with the material with the shape with an idea and um and I think that it takes a lot of fierce protection to like carve that time out of a practice you know an academic career whatever um and in but for me it's always a constant struggle of like trying to just carve out that time or build it into the process for each project but I think it's really important to do and for me that is a big motivation behind rethinking practice like rethinking the format of practice um so that I have that freedom to like make some of that space and then be able to hopefully make work that offers that you know for other people too um and I think just to so that we don't inspire despair in the students it is definitely possible to make a living in architecture some people even make a lot of money in architecture um the yeah the road of the particular road that um at least to Rome and I travel of of you know is not is not incredibly lucrative but I think it is possible to find these alternative ways that can be sustainable financially sustainable as long as you don't dream of you know having a beach house or something I don't know and I I want to make a a plug there is a slide of it but the the October most recent issue I think one of the last print issues of architect magazine which is the a is publication it's the most widely circulated sort of architecture periodical for the profession uh was a takeover by this organization dark matter you that I'm part of and it's called the justice and joy issue uh which again is part of sort of resisting these kind of tropes these binaries that like social justice work has to be always very sincere and react reaction based um that there is a very very important space that must be created for especially marginalized designers marginalized people to think imaginatively to be creative and to contribute in that way um as well all right I think we came at the end of the session number two these are really necessary and timely conversation really we're thinking how we can practice how can we sustainable but sustainable also within the ecology of the idea of practicing because it needs to support us and and it is very interesting to see all your work and what you're doing so I really thank you so much for that