 Hello, we're live. We're the first one. Welcome, everyone. Hi, everyone. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for tuning in. So we're just waiting a few minutes for our tour guide to join us. But I want to say a huge thank you everyone for joining Cooper Hewitt's first ever Instagram live design studio tour. So while we're waiting for our tour guide to join, I'll briefly introduce myself. My name is Megan Mahaffey. I'm an educator at Cooper Hewitt and I am coming to you live today for a special behind-the-scenes tour of a world-renowned architecture firm and 2020 at National Design Award winner for architecture, Snow Heta. So we're just waiting a few seconds here for Craig Dikers, our tour guide to join. Let's give him a few seconds to log in here. Craig is the founding partner of Snow Heta. He's one of the founding partners of Snow Heta and he currently leads the New York office with the other partners. Oh, and I think here he is. So this October is National Design Month at Cooper Hewitt. Oh, Craig, hello. Welcome. Hi, good to see you. How's it going? Very, very well. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. Yes. Great. Well, Craig, thank you so much for joining us. I think we can get started today. This is our first ever Instagram live virtual studio tour. We're so honored to be joined by you, Craig, one of the founding partners of Snow Heta. And congratulations again for your win this year, the 2020 National Design Award winner for architecture. Hello. So if you just joined, hi, everyone. I'm Megan Mahaffey. I'm an educator at Cooper Hewitt, joined by the unparable Craig Dikers from Snow Heta. And I want to quickly say a huge thank you to Target who has made this all possible. We're doing a whole month of virtual programs this October in celebration of our National Design Award winners like Craig. So thank you, Target. And thanks to all the viewers for tuning in today. So Craig, we're going to go on a virtual tour today. Shall we get started? Sure. That's great. And I'll give a thank you to Kelly Tigera who's holding the camera for me so steadily. You can't see her though. She's just over there. But we're together here in the studio, six feet apart. And we are just going to take a little walk through. I want to talk a bit about our process. I won't go through a specific project from start to end, although we will begin a little bit that way, but rather show you different components of the process as we move through the studio. And some of the projects you will have been familiar with and others might be a little bit of a mystery. The project behind me here is the Willamette Falls Riverwalk project that we have been working with for a number of years. And it's a quite large project. It has to do primarily with landscape development and habitat restoration in a waterfall just near Oregon City. It's the second largest waterfall by volume in the US behind Niagara Falls. And you can see a bit of that behind me here. And this wall shows you a lot of the different types of things that we might do. We register and walk through the site. We get to go through it very well. We make hand sketches. We take photographs. We work with computers. But most importantly we work with a lot of logs. And you can see some of them spread out here of all different types. Some are extremely conceptual. For example, maybe this one, which is like this crack with things going through it, a landscape artifact. Some are a bit fun and interesting as it has a log that we created a kind of a log with a bench attached to it. There are some of the features that you see here. And other portions are more detailed. This is a very intense model showing all the upboards of the site in a very very detailed way. Some conceptual thinking and some views of how we might imagine this structure. But most importantly is this diagram here at the very end of all of these drawings that you can see now. And that's a really amazing work that our landscape architects biologists and partners and some of the architects joined together to create. And what it shows is the cycle of life throughout the year of flora and fauna including human act. And the idea is, and you can see this sort of, it goes from the beginning of the year down at the bottom it says January all the way to December. And we look at where humans are the most active, where other types of animals and fish, for example, and birds are also using the site. And we try to create a calendar for the year where these worlds can coexist. And that was what it was an attempt to make here. So it's a rather fascinating aspect of this project and something we tried to carry through on all of our work. This is a rather intense version. What you can see here is our big TV room. We can actually try to use this as a meeting room whenever we can. You can see more than one project can leak in here. So we have a few smaller living rooms, but as much as possible we can activate the space of different projects in the use of tables in different ways. We also meet sometimes here and we'll talk more about that in a moment. And then just on my left is the kitchen where we would normally use our food to be prepared and so on. Obviously it's quite... Here's some drawings and sketches and models that I thought would be interesting. It's a big table so we'll move rather quick. Our sketches I've made because they were easy for me to get out of the drawers to show you today. There are some things like plans for Times Square. This is Times Square and some of our early studies on how they might work and plan with people in different areas and how we might secure it. And actually behind me is our tables and chairs that we co-created with Vesta Furniture. They're in Times Square and you can see one of the little prototype models of the chair that you'll just see right there. And then here you can see for example some studies on San Francisco Museum of Modern Art at S.F. MoMA. When we started the project at S.F. MoMA from an urban perspective we wanted the building to create a kind of bowl which you can see in this very early study model. The roof moves down and it was designed this way to allow sunlight to access the sculpture gardens and other portions of the site around the museum. That's where this shape came from. But this was a very poor design functionally for the upper levels. Very inefficient. So we looked at how we could recreate the shape without making an actual swoop like this. And here you can see what we did to resolve that. This was a very early conceptual model. You can see in elevation it's a rectangle. But if you're down low, and I'll recreate that for you for the camera, maybe you can see here, as you look across it and below you get the same swoop that you would have gotten with this model. So it's simpler form but it gives you the same quality. And that's how we can develop the form. Furthermore, if you're familiar with the Museum of Modern Art of San Francisco, this thought is very unusual. And this was an early conceptual model just made out of cardboard stacked on top, cut in an unusual way. And it gives this ripple effect that actually is what the final building. And here's a model of some of the final services. This represents where we moved. So very early and quite late. These were about three years apart. Wow. These models. And we put inside the building as well as a model of the material with the Richard Serres sculptor. So we make big models as well as small models. That's fantastic. So where would you get inspiration for a structure like this that's so unusual? Does it come from the people that are going to use the space, the environment that it's in? I would say all of the above. We are struck by certain characteristics we learn as we talk to people. We do a lot of research by going there. We don't just research by going online and having pictures. We like to talk to people. We went to the museum, interviewed people before we began the process of design. We walked the streets of the city. We experienced the maritime climate in San Francisco, which is quite unique. And of course one thing that really stands out in people's minds is the fog of San Francisco. It rolls through the city and slices San Francisco in sections. It almost moves like a wall across the city. And so that struck us around the beautiful. And so some of these early studies were trying to recreate that quality as if the fog had moved across the building. And so that when you're in this place it would feel natural to its environment. And that's how we came up with those kinds of ideas. And then the models are always just tests. The swooby shape, which I was referring to earlier, as I say, had to do with the sun. So it follows the shape of the sun as it passes over the site to allow sunlight onto the ground above. Wow. Yeah. And when designing a museum, of course, you need to consider the safety of the objects inside it too. So how fascinating. I can see the inspiration from the fog coming through. Yes, it's true because a museum can't have a lot of windows into the gallery. So you have to create another sort of character. Here you can see another model where we're showing some of the galleries and how you move up and down. So I'll move along here. I'll just show you some other things. This is just a nice little sketch of a tower we made once. It was never built, but it was a residential tower. It had a very beautiful quality. A number of towers you can see on the table here. And quite a lot of hand sketches. So you'll see we do hand sketches as well as digital work. Here's some hand sketches for something that went on to be the Ryerson Student Learning Center in Toronto. This is the original concept model. And this is the final design. So there's about another, I'd say two years between these two. And you can see in some of the early sketches how the qualities were sort of developed in tandem with one another. So Craig, I have a question. First of all, what material are those prototypes made out of? And how many would you say you make for a project? Well, I would say we're scavengers. We use any material we can get our hands on. So this happens to be just some leftover junk wood that was in the model shop. This is a 3D print. Some of these are made of wood or plaster. Some are 3D printed. This one is just packed out of foam and then glued. These are you know the yellow stickies that you write a note to someone on. These are post-it notes just cut and then just stuck on. So you're just moving fast. We move as fast as we possibly can. I wanted to show you some fun things as well. These are some of my private sketches. So they're not architectural although some of them relate to architecture. So these are sketches I made while in Rome. This is a sketch I made of the Colosseum. There are different layers of how quickly it took to make this sketch. So this was the final sketch. This is the middle sketch and here's the first sketch. Well actually the first sketch was a drawing that was made blind. Wow. Seeing this all laid out you can really see your process, the iteration here. The difference between that first blind sketch and this final one is fascinating. Wow. What kind of pen did you use for this sketch? You'll notice for me I use blue pen a lot. I'm also a scavenger for pens so I can have any kind of pen. I can grab a hold of any kind of piece of paper I can find. Personally I don't like to have a notebook. I just like to draw and do stuff and throw it around. I don't care. I just make it and it just gets spread out. Right now I have a little pen tell pen. It's always blue, almost always blue. Although sometimes I can't find one. So this one sketch is made with black ink. It was actually a sketch we made for one of our staff who just had a baby. So in the office they organized a blanket for the baby and all of us sent in sketches for the blanket. This was my little sketch among many others. Wonderful. There's a little dog I sketched. There's sometimes some humor in the sketches. This is the pope trying to figure out what toilet he should be in. Oh look at the hut. Just a guy I saw in the street. Wow. And some of them are about details. Very small things. I found an old set of drawings from Alexandria Library in 1989. These are the original prints. The original drawings are much larger. Here's something nice to show you. This is the exterior wall of the Alexandria Library in the very first sketch. At this time there were no computers. So we had to do this by hand with collage. Can we zoom into that a little closer? That's all hand drawn individual little pieces there. And collage. It's both collage and hand collage and hand drawn partly. The drawings here are all hand drawn. Those are made without computers. Computers really weren't used at this time. What I wanted to share with you is I found my old copy of the Rosetta Stone that I bought in a museum. And this wall was inspired by the Rosetta Stone. So you can see the relationship there. Wow. And then over here is something fun. I pulled this out because it's at the Cooper U. It. So we've been working with John Gray for an exhibition which you can see some of the sketches here in the little model we made in the Cooper U. It. I was supposed to have already opened but COVID came upon us and it's been delayed. And I think it will be opening either sometime early in the next year. That's a little exhibit design we made. So this is a design for an exhibition. Yes, that's right. So it's not our work. We're just supporting John Gray who's from Ghetto Gastro and Smithsonian to help lay out the exhibition design. Yes. Wow. I wanted to show you one other thing real quick before we move along that I really think is nice to see. We made a museum for natural science in Guadalajara in Mexico. And when we talked about it, this was one of the first sketches. If not the first sketch that we created for that project. We didn't know what it was. It was just something cutting through and we could feel the energy of nature carving out something. It didn't mean a lot. And then at least it didn't mean a lot functionally. And then we created this little model from that which was made in the shop and it was just a kind of conceptual thing. But you can feel as if the water had carved through a big block. And some funny strange things happening that were just for fun really. We tried to have fun. And that eventually became this. So it became more complex. Again probably, well in this case, a shorter period of time between these two maybe a year to go from here to there. Yeah. You can see some of the themes are kind of drawn through along through the different iterations. Yeah. Especially when you hold that up. Yeah. Wow. I thought that was fun to show. And one other thing I wanted to show is this is another project we're working on right now. This isn't going to be built. But somebody had seen that and they were inspired to make this on a different project. There were certain things that were relevant to them. So they picked this up and made this. Wow. That is the highest compliment, isn't it? I'll just finish real quick because I know we wanted to talk about things in the office. But I did want to show you some fun things here. I was on the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award high school call the other day. You know when we talked to Lincoln High School in San Francisco and I made this little sketch during that workshop that we had. So I'm planning to send it to the high school. Hopefully they can get it soon. It was a lot of fun to work on. And something else happened during that workshop. When we were brainstorming with the students and during that brainstorming process you created a 3D. I don't know if you still have that. I don't but I can recreate it in all of two seconds. This was a fascinating technique that you used. I just took a sheet of paper that means nothing much to anybody. And then I smashed it up into a little ball and then I unfolded it. And suddenly it had structure and shape. So that became the project. Can you see the model and the paper? Wow. You can see the points that have come through from just the paper. Yeah. Or you can turn it over and it's another building. That's fantastic. If you think about the brainstorming and prototyping process of getting ideas they're really so intertwined. We make things all the time. We're moving. The problem is, and we can talk more about this in a moment, of course, being separated as we are it's harder to be energized from each other in the room. So we're trying to find other ways to build that energy back. I'll just move over here real quick. These are more projects. Here's a crazy thing as we walk past it. It's something I'm trying to get built right now. It's a helium balloons holding up a canvas. Wow. So you get a portable room just by filling up the balloons. So it's a kind of a place for an event. That's so creative. It reminds me of the movie Up where he floats away. And over here, this is realized to look at. These are some benches or rather stools that we designed. And there's several things that I love about them. They're very similar to the alto stool so that they stack in the traditional way. You can see how they stack. I'll stack one of them now. So for example, if you want to store them, you can stack them. And you can stack them all the way up like the alto chair. But the difference is that the shape is just bizarre. And even though we've drawn it and I threw the stool a million times, if I close my eyes I couldn't tell you what the shape actually is. And what's nice is that they are modular. So even though you think modules have to be square, they don't. So if you come up closer and tell me, I'll show you that you can just put these together in different ways. You see how they fit together or you can just change it to another edge. You can type another one and put it in over here maybe like that. And so every time you put it together it makes a different shape. So they're never modular but never repetitive. Yeah, oh wow. And that shape was hard to make so here's some of the early sketches. And you can see we had to make, even by hand, without the computer, how that shape can be stacked. Because it's not obvious we failed many times before we got just the right shape. Yeah, so that process must have taken some time to ensure such an organic looking shape is able to be produced. Yeah, we had a little group of people and one person was really good at making models and testing things. So if we weren't there, you can draw it but you really need to test it and over type it. Yeah, absolutely. And this is interesting because Snow Head is an architecture firm of course but it seems like you and your team really consider not just the building but the environment and how people are going to interact in the building and the whole structure and system that you create. Yeah, that's true. We're about 30% landscape architects, roughly, and we're about 100% interior architects and then we have product designers and graphic designers in the studio so we are a collective of different interests. Wow, that's great. Well, this has been what a wonderful tour. Is there anything else there that I'm in the last few minutes that you may show? How much time do we have left? We have just about five minutes left. Well, I'm just going to walk slowly to the model shop and we'll end there. We can take questions while we're walking. This is the studio as it is now. We've put up some cardboard dividers so that during the pandemic we can suitably separate people. We have a check-in system so that as you come to the studio you have to go through a health check and so on and we limit the amount, the capacity of the office so that we won't be fully occupied. Although actually our space is rather large and by law we could bring the entire studio in here and still meet the health code but we've decided to not do that so we're only allowing less in than we are legally allowed so here's a fun prototype. This is, we work with a group called Pencil. These are high school students who made this little model here. A lot of people in the studio volunteer their time to work with these high school students out in East Brooklyn Brownsville area. I can't remember the exact community where the high school was in but it's their students come and made this and we're going to just end here. This is our model shop. Wow, we've got a few questions here. Many asking what advice you have for high school students and early career professionals on entering the profession, especially now. Did you say high school students? High school students, college students and young professionals. When I was in high school I didn't know I wanted to be an architect but I had natural inclination to draw. Like many young kids was getting into trouble wherever I could so I was making cartoons and strange things on my book covers. Making cards, I just love to draw and I love architecture also just naturally because it's everywhere so I spent a lot of time looking at buildings and learning about them and I went to the library a lot. In terms of college level, it depends on where you're going to school but when I was at university because I didn't start as an architect I spent a lot of time understanding and learning from other colleges before I became enrolled in architecture and even after I was enrolled in the architecture school I still kept going back to the other colleges. I would spend study over in the astronomy department or I would eat my lunch over at the ballet school or I would go over to the physics department and walk down the hall and be amazed at what they were doing. So broadening one's perspective is extremely important and I spent a lot of time out just socializing and having friends making sure that I wasn't studying all the time because architecture is about life and if you can't have a life it's going to be very hard to design for it. Wow that's beautiful I agree. So where are we now, the model shop? Yeah there's some few models. So we're in a 25-30 store bill or something like that. I don't remember how many floors but it's a skyscraper and we're on the 10th floor and we're really the only setup like this in the whole building so we had to negotiate to get a model shop in here. We had to get a special ventilation to be filtering air outside. We had to get vibration controls under all the heavy equipment so there's a lot of heavy equipment in here. Table saw, drills, jigsaws, sanders, everything hammers, all sorts of things and we work with wood and work with a three-dimensional printer as well as the more traditional type of laser cutting that you're used to and we do things with our hands and we try to use it as much as possible. That's great. Yeah like it sounds like you are hands-on firm so what a great luxury to have this space right there in your office. It is. We often say that if you're only thinking with your mind or your brain you're not really thinking. You also need to think with your whole body so moving around, doing things, making things in addition to using your mind creates a more complete process. Now even people I know that who are paralyzed are not able to move and those people even imagine in their heads that they're moving. So it's an interesting condition of human life. Yeah. Wow. Well Craig, thank you so much for welcoming us virtually into your studio today and before we sign off I wanted to just see if we could talk a little bit about collaboration in the virtual world and now that you know everything is Zoom meetings and Instagram live how are you and your team collaborating through the screen? Yeah, of course we are trying to be as safe as possible so people are mainly working at home. We use different techniques that are technologically available that most people are using now things like the Muro board. We use the Slack channel for informal discussions. We send things around by email sometimes because you see the number of hand drawings up there but even draw something in your hand and just hold it up and look at it. And then we try, we've had a couple of meetings here in the studio that were controlled but we were able to use the space as best we can. There's a lot of talking and the biggest issue in my mind is not burning people out. The technology means that the separation of people means that in a studio space I might walk over to somebody and just ask me a question. Hey, what about this and this and this and they're being answered whereas when we're separated we have to like set up a Zoom call, we have to make an appointment and they have to you know fill in the space make sure that it's possible and you know that one question suddenly takes 30 minutes which we've only taken three so we're trying to streamline that we're trying to give people as much breaks as possible. It's tough but I would say so far we've been successful. People in the studio are extremely creative so they found ways to collaborate and plus we're built on the spirit of collaboration so it was easier I think for people to do as opposed to some other types of studios that are more either hierarchical or siloed. So it's a frame of mind I would say. Absolutely. Wow, well with that I think you know you've got, we've heard some great things, some great stories. Thank you for welcoming us again and congratulations on winning the 2020 National Design Award for Architecture. We're also inspired by you and Snow Hedda's work and to our viewers thank you for joining us and I hope you will all tune into our huge slew of programs coming up at Cooper Hewitt. You can find more information about all of them at CooperHewitt.org slash ndm. Alright, thank you. Yep, we'll see you later. Bye. Bye.