 Right, so, is this officially the last talk of the semester? I think so. I see some students here. Yay, you made it. And I'm glad you did, because it's really a great pleasure to have both Sharon Davis and Louise Bremerman today to introduce their inspiring work and practices. Both are pioneering new forms of engagement and practice in ways that I think are really meaningful and important for us at the school. And we're particularly delighted to have Sharon back, who's one of our most interesting and unique little guys. Sharon's story is very unique. And one that, as architects, I think we really fantasize about. She had a successful career in finance, and then decided that her love was really architecture and the built environment, and so she decided she'd pursue her dream to become an architect, but not as any kind of architect. But one who strongly believes in the transformative and continues to believe in transformative power of design and the possibility for architecture to really enable communities to create environments that will connect to their past, but also project them into the future, and hopefully a better future in which they can shape new kinds of work processes and life for themselves. Sharon's and her master is an architect here at Columbia. She sat in 2006. She's been in the limelight, specifically, but a number of awards include a Game Changer Award from the jobless magazine, recognizing her work in Wanda, in particular. In 2010, she received the Women for Women Active Citizens Award and in 2006, the Lucille Meister Golden Fish Memorial Prize from Columbia University. Today, we're also, she will share with us two projects. I think in Wanda, the Wanda for Women's Opportunity Center as well as the Hostel of Sharon Houses. The Longside of Sharon is another very inspiring architect, Louise Braverland, whose work is succeeding and moving together, a refined aesthetic sensibility, design invention, and a sense of an architecture that can be inclusive and accessible across a broad audience. Louise is a graduate of Yale. We'll excuse you today. And I think her practice is also really inspiring and focusing on very elemental solutions but that always find ways to kind of unlock complex architectural problems and you'll see the results are quite interesting and uncommon. Her work has won numerous awards and been recognized by her peers. Resulting in addition to anthology in the AIA and I'm sorry I'm missing the lunch today, but I'm glad you're here today with us. And many in addition to preserving the work of the firm, in particular at the recent Venice Architecture Bureau, is today she will focus also on two projects, the central arts material at Honsu, an art museum in Pueces in Portugal that encourages public participation with art and village health works, staff housing, and also the dormitory in the first genocide village of Kikutu Burundi. So very unique practices. Please join me in welcoming both Sharon and Louise today. Hi, it's really nice to be here. I know I don't look like someone who graduated almost 11 years ago, just over 10 years ago, but it's wonderful to be back here. And the time that I graduated, which is relatively shortly after, was the financial crisis and there was not a lot going on in New York in terms of architecture. I was very fortunate to have this sort of serendipitous connection with this non-profit who asked me to come to Rwanda and build and design an occupational school for women. So Rwanda, just to locate for you, is in East Africa. It's landlocked, it's tiny. And in 1994 they went through a terrible genocide where almost a million people were killed in 100 days. So most of the people killed were men, but the women were also traumatized by a lot of rape and other types of things. So at the end of the genocide, there were 70% women in the adult population and the people who basically they're still recovering from that emotionally. So the organization that hired me is Women for Women International and they worked in eight countries for a genocide. They help women to sort of repair their lives and help to build communities by teaching women vocational skills so that they can go out and run their own businesses and feed their children and take care of their medical needs, et cetera. So this is a group of women in Rwanda having their graduation. It's one of your programs. You can see them very excited to dress up in their best clothes. I just like to remember who the client is. So my very first trip to Rwanda, one of the things that really struck me and stayed with me through the design process was watching women collecting water. So as you go down these rural roads in Rwanda you'll see women constantly, these yellow jerry cans, and they're going to get water for the day and it takes them sometimes four to five hours a day to get to and from the end of the month or the water. So I initially thought, wow, these women are digging their children and doing everything else that they do around their household and they're spending five hours collecting water and they're going to work and make money somehow, too, just was very much in my mind how difficult this whole life was for them. So just sort of living conditions. This is an image of four women collecting wood to cut the ones for pot meal only for the day. But it's really here to show you kind of the scale of the life that the rural community lives in, which became also part of the design process. And this is our site, runs a gorgeous country, it just hills and valleys, it's on the equator, it has great soil and agriculture is the main product and most people are the subsistence farmers. This funny shape you see here four times is the shape of our site. For some reason it was not an actual square which I can tell you that if you really want to know the reason why. So with the client I sort of determined four major things that were important and the first one to me was just trying to understand how I was going to make a place that felt welcoming and inviting to women who lived in this sort of scale of home and building in a space that's supposed to capacity just for 300 women. So imagining a school house, a two-story school house with rows of classrooms, I couldn't figure out how they would feel or I felt they'd be very intimidated by being in such an environment. So that got us to thinking with the client about how we could do things differently and sort of came up with this idea of a village concept. The second was creating community because the women tend to be more successful when they finish this program if they have bonded with other women and work together. The third is for the August that they wanted to do the organizational group work and then security because of the genocide women feel very vulnerable and so feeling that they're in a safe space having a security gate around it was also very important. So I started out working on a Topo model and you can see there's a steep slope and we were looking at things on the equator so it's actually quite good. It's a nice temperature but the sun is very hot. So we were looking at prevailing breezes dealing with how to work things around the slope and on the right hand, on your right hand side was the top of the slope and it was adjacent to the road so up there we had a gatehouse and some market spaces for women when they graduated to be able to sell their goods and then as you walked down the slope with a sort of rectangular building you see here was the administrative building but it also created a secondary sort of security so from here to here you walked kind of through this so this also gave another step of security for the women and then this large area in the middle is the gathering space where all 300 women get together at the end of the year and have their celebration and graduation and then we started looking at how these classrooms become clusters and create a warm sort of embrace I think of that open space and then up here which is the lowest point is where the demonstration arm is so here's the site plan which also includes the orange includes some dorms and showers, etc. for people who are coming from far away and the purple is a canteen and kitchen where some women learned cooking skills and hospitality and they have the best pizza which is all wonderful because the diet in Rwanda is pretty much one dimensional and then the market it ran at the bottom so this reminds me so much of my experience being a student in Columbia so I arrived on my first trip and the first thing I wanted to know was what's the history of building and architecture in this country and it mostly didn't exist anymore there were a couple of tourist places where you could see this so I drove two hours south to this museum and had a replica of a King's Palace this was a King's Palace I felt in love with it obviously it's an incredible structure all made out of reeds and this is the ceiling the interior and I wasn't really sure what was going to happen after seeing this I went back to talk to the women and sit in on a class afterwards and I found out from the teacher that they always see the women in a circle so the women are taught in groups of 25 and they're always seen in a circle and the idea is that when they do this they tend to bond more with each other and become more successful when they graduate if they've done that they would form a cooperative and work together, etc so the circle became important in the meeting I was like, ah, a circle and then I sat in on this class and one of the things working for a school initially was the community was there and I had a translator so I was able to really hear the stories of the people and get a sense of who they were with relative ease for me they were talking about human rights, women's rights reproductive issues women were telling their stories of rape and losing husbands so I immediately realized that it needed to be a very intimate space I didn't want windows, doors I wanted it to feel very private when women were in there there were no distractions from the outside but obviously I still wanted ventilation and daylight there was no electricity at the site when we started, so that was important so here you see the circle and you sort of see the privacy aspect of it and then from the classroom we started looking at how could we to make sure we covered this space your rounds of solar coverage was an issue and then the roof sort of comes back to my initial experience of seeing women collecting water so we ended up with a client's approval creating this rainwater collection system and the goal was to collect enough water in the two to three months of rain to feed the campus for the entire year so we had huge cisterns underneath to collect the water and then a locally available water cleaning solution which is UV and sand and then it's probably fed to the different locations so the idea was women weren't going to reproduce this kind of thing in their homes but the idea was to show that rainwater was an option for collecting water that might save them some time this is just a diagram showing no direct sunlight but indirect sunlight filtering in the ventilation coming through this is an image of a cluster of three you can kind of see I think the rainwater chains are here that sort of take the water off through and then down into the cisterns I'm just going to show you a couple of images this is the women in the classroom and then the other interesting thing about this project was the women who donated the funds for the school really wanted the women to learn brick making as a different vocation so being very naive at that time I said sure we'll teach the women how to make bricks so the first thing we did was going around and looked at the existing brick making cooperatives in the community they were all made by men because women were not in the construction industry at all and they were very unstable so we started looking at what are best practices for brick making and we added a few simple things one is sort of a size hips so this is just earth boggling a little bit of sand and things about making bricks there so we required very little women mixing it we mixed it very well because it's in this container and then introducing a steel mold with sharp edges where the other costs used just wood frames the funny thing in the middle is the aluminum logo and then flat surfaces so that the bricks wouldn't kind of work on the earth and then in the background there a shaded area for them to dry up getting by again so it's quite a learning process for all of us to figure this out they made over half a million bricks for this project and I'm just showing you the construction images we also end up, by the end of the project we had 30% of the workers on the site were women and it continues to be through there to this day where I go back all the same time now on the construction group so that was a very satisfying experience this is where the dorms are and the showers and bathrooms and the demonstration farm from down below and then more of the demonstration farm next to the canteen and this is the front on the street so we did create that wall all the way around for security security fence it sort of undulates and becomes part of the different programmatic spaces so if you go from left to right it's a fence on the left and then it curves back and becomes the back wall of these little shops and it comes forward again to disguise the clad though water tank the gravity of the water back down and then it goes back again to create this little market niche where we can sell vegetables so that's the end of that project I'm going to show you another project that was quite close by in room 5 it was a dormitory for partners in health hospitals so they needed to make spaces for their doctors as inexpensively as possible so this project in terms of construction cost about 45 dollars per foot it was a series of eight bedrooms and we made two wings to break up the mass and then a space in the middle it's a shared living and eating cooking space and it was again on the slope so we were also dealing with that the most interesting part about the project was we asked I don't really talk about the little materials but obviously the earth, the bricks and sort of following up with that on the exterior where we were just creating privacy along the gradual hallways we asked the community to collect eucalyptus branches for us that we came up to do and so this whole thing is made out of just eucalyptus from the site this is just showing another diagram like one of the classrooms we've had the day lighting and customization and shading is working this is showing you the shared space where the top is the kitchen and then the dining area and then the lounge so that's how we dealt with the slope with the two wings coming off and we also were able to provide a couple of small amenities like each room a little outdoor terrace we were trying to make it nice even though it was small and inexpensive and I'll just show you a couple of images this is the interior hallways where the eucalyptus makes this nice shadows on the walls the shared space this is one of the dorm rooms and that's it thank you thank you though this is to admit it I'm personally familiar with that category of products that you may always have seen on TV you know these sort of self-help products that run in the middle of the night and you can see the actress one of those ads probably something like me because I was up in the middle of the night I just went around repetitively I was awake and it was kind of pensive pensive and so at about the clock you made us and that was a question and ultimately I realized that it was about architecture not how to do it I've been doing it for a while so I kind of know how to do it but why to do it and over time I really found no quick big solution to my question so so luckily soon after those long-winded nights I ran across the language of the artist Jenny Holzer who in my 1980s piece the survival series said use what is dominant in the culture to change it quickly so here we have a person who's using her aesthetics to evaluate the tempo of her times and to use her art to comment on how to facilitate social change her words not only echo my instincts that architecture could embrace both aesthetics and community but responding where I get very repetitively on the ground which was just because we are poor like you've seen many of the people in Sharon's life that doesn't mean that we don't want a building that isn't beautiful so toward that end I believe Jenny Holzer's approach is a paradigm for our architecture consumers both artistic and cultural boundaries and extend to each all strata of society and today her words clearly serve as marching orders I know orders are unique as I strive to create architecture of both art and aesthetics and community so it's always our goal to create culturally, aesthetically and sustainably situated buildings and it's just particularly true in Montecas, Portugal where we designed a building that you see here centered on arts named Hierophonso it's a 20,000 square foot museum to honor one of the portugals who loved native sons named Hierophonso and here you see our graphic in the museum but what did it actually mean to situate a building in this strongly direction of Portugal which was in the north of Portugal almost in Spain and so our search became only faceted and we started a series of conversations that addressed everything from the broader perspective of the 1974 influx of modernism which went quite late into Portugal which was caused by the stronghold of a dictator who was there for 42 years and then we also went all the way to the other end of the spectrum and it asked questions about the beloved Portuguese masonry white concrete culture so it's prophetic and there you see that's the concrete it's buried in Portugal it was prophetic when I arrived for the first time at the site in Bauticas because it was raining and it was not just a little drizzled it was a torrential valve core and maybe the pounding of the rain was a reflection of the macro issues that were going to affect Portugal going forward because Bauticas, this sleepy little village which respectively had one city hall and one other public building which was a library a medieval jail that was all that was there other than houses at the beginning of the crisis in the 20th year we really just ruggeded it in Portugal but in spite of this I was hopeful because I had a true affinity to the family of Major Afonso our local architect was amazing and particularly to the ambition of the mayor of Bauticas who was a mayor of a small town with a big dream to collaborate with us to create a compelling museum with the generosity and the spirit so that was what we did the visit inspired us to take the initiative to expand the program of the museum as well as paying homage to the artists who formally practiced with Le Corbusier and also with Oswele Meier the design of the museum is a light contemporary feel with a lot of light coming into it which is tricky in museums and also included rich materiality of Portuguese design yet we also opted to explore the central major Afonso foundation which was recently inaugurated design by Amar Cesar in the nearby town shop so this was a regional development that we were interested in creating so museums are cultural institutions that amplify their relevance when they are tied to the enhancement of the public realm at least that's what I believe they're not just an singular building and that said we would have been remiss not to see this opportunity to design the museum in its broadest context so emerging architecture in landscape we initiated the idea of a real civic presence of the museum and making it a link between the emerging urban center and pastoral and artist this was an early sketch and an early drawing to form a core in its cultural region and simultaneously develop a democratic and it's a very important civic space to rotate this community our plan was to expand the intact museum down its walls and our public was to create a platform to really help transform the lives of this small community which was on the verge of some million dollar problems that's exactly what we did we created a bifurcated building that became the connected tissue between the village and the surrounding countryside and then sliced into the hillside that was there and then it was quite sustainable and was composed of two connected parts a light filled cultural center in the front that faced the national highway and the town and in the rear nestled in the back a below-grade exhibition space that was topped with a green moon park this was something that we initiated with these wonderful clients and they said go for it so first the urban face was emblematic of using a landscape and architecture and the interior spaces of the entry hall really connect seamlessly indoors and out and you can see the entry space and those of the children here because children are here all the time it's constant and so it really brought the community into the space and the former mural of the artist as well as his sketches we brought his art right out to the public these were spending near upon those sketches that wrapped around the entry hall and he prepared them especially for this museum the stairway brought you to the children's library the outdoor cafe and to the auditorium on the second floor and all the spaces are designed to be used 24-7 so it was total sustainability it was very flexible just like I understand you doing here in Columbia every space is being used for five different events that's the way this museum ran as well so then on the pastoral side embedded in the hillside below is sustainably planted free roof the exhibition space just shows you know to the rural area the pastoral area and it literally grows out of the motica soil for the adjacent walls that maintain the earth or cyclokian walls composed of the sustainably regrouped stones that was actually dug out of the site of the structure and in the exhibition hall visitors can view art against the background of native rustic stone almost creating a feeling of viewing art within a corner because the stone is right out there this is a shot of the ring of park looking down at one of these aerial shots and you can see that it was designed in the spirit of the major afanzos a geometric abstraction of work and in addition the landscape architect of rural marks he's Brazilian but of course he's a Brazilian in a very tight relationship and he was their hero and that work was also an inspiration for this park and so you see it delineates an abstract design and these settings are further because the park has some variable changes in section that really created a fun place and for a study to life for the entire community ok so now we're getting more into Sharon's territory subsequent to this we're going to fast forward to Burundi which is in East Africa we were engaged to do multiple projects for a non problem called village health works started out with a massive plan on a 48th site which sort of came about and really didn't exactly happen as with many with some initial ideas but this was a close genocide village they had a genocide between various tribes in the 90s so this was sort of the beginning of a rebuilding effort and we also worked on the Burundi on the homeless health pavilion but what we ended up building at the end of the day was an 18th bed dormitory for medical staff on the site because it was a health site and we really explored what would I believe the romance between very East African elemental aesthetics inventive off the grid sustainability this was 100% off the grid and we looked at this as a model the buildings built on the site subsequently to create a sustainable community for both the community and this 48th site is looked at by various people in the country as well Burundi is one of the I think the fifth poorest country in the world so as with all of our projects in the early phases of development we began by immersing ourselves in the culture of the community and here's a video of my impression of the village this was the first time that I approached YouTube Parliament actually and it's delightful people are very vocal and lively and you can see the clothing is colorful and people laugh and it's very endearing in place particularly for the first time but then I began to dig a little deeper and here's actually this is a house of one of the residents and you see on the left you see the exterior and again it's rather charming and if you look on the interior and you get to dig a little deeper you'll notice that there's no real water that's a big problem that Sharon spoke about there's no way for waste removal and so the basics of healthy living are really not involved in the way that people live so this led to a bunch of questions that weren't getting into the weeds that were about questions about sustainability landscape collaboration context transfer of knowledge which is a big one community building because they all come into play if you do this kind of work and so our question these answers are really kind of rigorous here we dug deeper and deeper to find out what would be a proper way of what was an appropriate project to do within this context and so what we realized is that we observed and participated in a series of what I call hybrid conversations and the first one was the local conversation because we noticed that people hung out and their conversations were rather communal they were outdoors, they were informal this was just the time for a long way which is why outside could be too what would be the global conversation because we were these people or our clients so we needed to communicate in a way that was reciprocal and engaging and we needed to listen that was hugely important and of course the sustainable conversation anything we realized and what we learned was that anything we did would have to be of course low tech land-based logical, simple as possible simple and complex that's not so simple and local materials and then there's the aesthetic conversation we're all architects here we really do that makes a lot of sense both for the community and also in our aesthetic knowledge so we started to look at the aesthetics of the community and then we realized that there was a symbiotic relationship between the patterns of the craft inherent within the local built form and also the exquisite Burundian landscape so taking together these elements became a kind of aesthetic armature of how we designed this building we looked at it as this building would be a reflection of these ideas and so if we incorporate these things together I want to show you another short video and it's a clip where you'll see the synthesis of my research where a cluster of women are sitting in patterned gar sitting in grass and chatting about how to make sustainable that they're making old baskets this is an early design drawing and you can see that again this building grows out of the landscape that was embedded in the hillside and cuts a skewed line in the landscape and the magnificent views were in the mountains the magnificent views of the mountainside this was another rendering and in it you can see that we realized that porches were a place that seamlessly connected inside and out and there are elemental spaces that personify the porosity that I've discussed before so consequently they became a generative seed for our design and why was that well porches are places where conversations create social fabric people hang out and chat so I can see all the colored areas and this drawing were personal private porches between the rooms so here they were actually got built there that was where we engaged with color and here we see public porches right out there in front where Dr. Doris is a public porch where people also hung out and then porches frame magnificent and transverse views of this landscape so they had that other aesthetic possibility porches are also places for integrated architectural pattern and so if you have this variegated east-abrogated pattern we wanted to create a design that integrated pattern not just as a pastiche it was something that was tacked onto the building but something that was integrated into the formality of the design so on the large scale you see porches as a pattern and on the smaller scale you see a pattern again on the first floor so the same elemental design was that established the aesthetics of the building also advanced sustainability porches are places for optimized ventilation and eliminating there was no possibly a direct addition in here because we are 100% off the grid so we placed the windows for ventilation how there arises at the top of our walls yet porches were great but they were not enough of a design move to deal with the fact that we were 100% off the grid we were in an anti-roll situation so we also included a bunch of other technical devices to save energy there was a nearby solar array which was not that far away on the site but we also had solar water heaters and we sited the building for a grid which I mentioned and a series of other constant use and attention to sustainable methods the greatest efficiency was probably that the human efficiency because what we do here the villagers use local bricks instead of machinery which would consume fuel to build the building and we use local labor which creates transformable jobs for the skills of the members of the community and just like Sharon said we had daily Skype calls with the community and in the building community during instruction here you see the beginning and every day they sent us a picture and every day I asked the question how many women were on the site and that was a time of an ongoing discussion because both men and women shared a project for involvement in construction if you learn how to be a plumber or a mason and earn $3 a day which is really good salary you can live a nice life and take care of your family so our participation in this project involved a reciprocal exchange of information so here you see the inquiry into some of these construction workers we were picking out some stone to use in the project and this is an example just by this chat of how we learned about the community and simultaneously made some comments to try to improve on maybe some construction and architecture of the project and we ended up the way we did the construction we had regular construction documents but we did 57 construction step diagrams and when we had these step calls every day we referred to step number 15 or step number 16 because individuals are an international language and everybody understands them and here you have step 57 again which is a big deal and we reached that and so what did we do here we used the construction methodology which is effectively concrete structure to build this building but we amplified it we strengthened the amount of rebar we adjusted it for size of the concerns so we worked within the community and brought additional knowledge to the construction so it was a real reciprocity so to wrap up aesthetically intriguing architecture driven by a social imperative is what I believe is the natural instinct of ours to create both a beauty a community and I believe it's within our grasp as architects to design and inspire and spread of emergent architecture in these communities and to keep that duality in all the projects that we do we can seize the opportunity to initiate and to innovate and really to become global citizens because that's one of the best parts of this kind of work you really see the world for a lens of possibility and I understand what it means to create what I started out with the architecture reflective of both part and functions so thank you both for the great presentations and I wanted to jump in a little bit on the questions sort of being mindful that a year is graduating you know in a few weeks and one of the many conversations we have here at school is how does one of our things shape the kind of practice that we we wake up every day to a vision that we need to be contributing and it does strike me that you have very unique practices and it's not and I'm not generally a few of those things and so I wanted to situate these current projects rather than the other work that you do but also better suddenly these projects are opening a door that is getting wider or are there kind of more possibilities and how those kinds of projects are really also then maybe the feedback to the practice here and what is that because clearly you set up emotions certain you know very sort of a typical construction process whether it's the making of material on the site or finding additional diagrams to that are not typical construction documents so the whole construction process is a different process that engagement with the community is you know it's kind of a little bit different to the idea that the building is not just an object it is we are also thinking about the context very very broadly and so just by displacing yourself in the context there's a way that you are rediscovering architectures, possibilities and then how does that reflect back on your work here as maybe a place I wanted to get that way Sharon do you want to start George? We'll try Is that working? Well you mentioned a number of things so I think that how it relates to how I practice here is an interesting question for example when I first graduated I hadn't got my late certification and I was very interested in doing you know the rated buildings which requires that your materials come from within 500 miles but having worked in Rwanda where we were literally using materials on the site and the focus was I think just logically what I found was labor is very inexpensive people need jobs and materials are very expensive so how can we use how can we spend more money on labor and less money on materials that reverse up here and so for me talking about bringing something back with me so I don't think of a local material being within 500 miles I think of if I'm going to make if I need a stone countertop it's going to be whatever the stone is but in terms of quality I'm going to say that as a given not the showroom is the coolest stone in the moment and I like that because I find it like it's a design challenge the more you sort of figure out problems the more interesting the solution is going to come so that's an answer to one small part of your question what does it have to do with authenticity and who you are as a person and what your level of comfort is with risk or not and I think I take in terms of the fact that I'm entrepreneurial and I'm comfortable with a certain amount of risk and I always love her for the long shot you know this is who I am so doing this work in other countries or I remember when we were doing the library here in New York City I was in a building and I remember kind of suggesting raising my hand and say why don't we just blow out the whole side of the building and open the doors and make it like Tanglewood because this is a library and there could be this outside situation so this is I think you have to as students in particular you work in situations that make you feel comfortable or where you feel most natural and if you start whether it's in New York or in Portugal or any of these other places you'll realize it's pretty small and the people are people look a little different on this and that but I mean I found people want a lot of the same things and I was saying wherever you are to kind of move towards doing architecture very best you can and it's different in different places but I think you have to be comfortable taking initiative and if that's your personality then maybe some of this work might be a good idea for you that's the thing just to pick up on something that you said that when you're in architecture school the work you're doing is you're so passionate about the work you're doing interesting assignments you're looking at the cutting edge of everything and then you graduate and you're most probably doing interiors or an office building or a apartment building or something like that so they as as an architect to maintain the passion that you started out with and it's different for everyone but just finding that passion somehow in the work that you end up doing sometimes that means going to a room or a room D to find that but it is this kind of work is very satisfying I have to say very rewarding I agree with that I love going to work you know I'm not one of those angry architects I really enjoy work I look forward to getting up in the morning and thinking about these things but one piece of advice for young people based on what Sharon said is that in order to go out and do these things I think it's very important to which is not what we talked about all in school there was zero discussion actually no I did go to Yale and we had a building project which was a little bit towards construction I'm working on a competing project here oh good it's helpful but at those jobs that you're going to doing these interiors or whatever you're doing I think it would be great to learn as much about this construction as you can I'm not a big person but I understand the purpose of getting registered or licensed because in a way that means you it's sort of certifying that you understand construction because once you understand the basic parameters of construction then you can move it around and do interesting things with it but it's not just line drives you know the working knowledge of capacity and then you can change those things and so those early years out of school are a great opportunity to learn about plumbing and then you can learn how to make plumbing more sustainable it's a step by step process well certainly I think these are very specific projects that are I think also fulfilling because they bring everything together to a scale that you can really engage in as an architect and I think that's very particular and very different from the blown up scale of projects that many architects are most engaged with now unless it's broken down into little pieces where you are assembling experts it is becoming a part of that totality again and I think it's really incredible in those kinds of projects with the satisfaction of bringing all your knowledge together whether it's about people use about the history of the site or the history of architecture I think it is architecture and it's more satisfying I think that's kind of really interesting to compare what we've lost to at scale and you started at scale as your first problem which is what is the scale what these women getting together and you both mentioned also aesthetics of course and there's a real sensitivity in the work and I was curious how what was the relationship which was triangulated between the community and the NGO or the client what was that triangle in terms of the kind of scale desires, yours the communities and how the buildings were receded in the end and whether that is kind of also transforming future construction so I thought, in retrospect I thought very fortunate that the first job that I had was women in the classroom where I could sit down and hear what they had to say and a kind of translator available and their conversation was already happening I just had to sit there and listen to it typically you don't have that and so you have to create that environment for yourself so in the second project that I was talking about we also did a plan for the entire town a master plan and we brought the community members together and had them actually do their own charats so first they drew and they were incredibly meticulous and accurate they drew their own homes then they drew their new homes then they got together and in smaller groups those different elements of the community and stood up and presented them to each other so sorry, I lost my train of thought but that is your kind of converging desires towards that building and as you can see even at 45 dollars a square foot you can make something that's beautiful livable and comfortable and so those are the things to be that are important especially as I look at countries like Rwanda where until I go there I see more and more huge buildings in the capital and they're almost always made with concrete and then more and more glass but that's the crazy thing to build with there because they don't open windows and here you have this sort of perfect climate all of these is shade and everyone's locked inside these glass towers and there's no air conditioning and there shouldn't be air conditioning because they have no power so it can be frustrating to see the direction that growth goes in and what they think they want for what actually will work well for them in their climate and in their program well, bad aesthetics aesthetics are really important just slapping things together here we're doing architecture and I guess in terms of relationship with clients really understand where they're coming from we could always really spend a lot of time listening, I'm a previous at an all job really listening to where the client is coming from and I guess the truth is we always then see can we amplify that can we make it I mean like in Portugal for example they can say oh we want a museum with a green roof on it I think I noticed that there was a little there and it was up in when we were standing there at the very beginning and the first design we showed them had a green roof on it and we said where, where and it'll insulate the building this is a tiny little town this is a town center it would be your central part in the middle of Boticas which is a tiny little town and the mayor went like yes because he got the sense from that they were very interested in building up this town in the region in fact because the artist was born in this section of Portugal and ended up living in Lisbon, outside of Lisbon later on in life and wanted to bring his work back to that area of the country the clients there I find the clients who work well with this method are generally those who are a little more expansive and who are receptive to thinking about possibilities and so when we say something I think you shouldn't go this way we sort of say show the picture or show the model with the green roof on it that they were not expecting and then there's this dead silence and then you're there and then you sort of talk about it and then they go if they are receptive and they go yeah and it sort of starts it takes a while for sometimes some new ideas to percolate and then they make comments that modify our ideas and it becomes a real collaboration and I think the second point about aesthetics is really important is to study if you're doing building a situation in different places I mean they're just different and they're different communities not that they shouldn't all be aesthetic holes but thinking about the history of these places and trying to dig deep into what is the notion of African pattern it's very interesting the clothing that you see on these women very colorful in pattern is actually Dutch it's not indigisly African appearance and in African aesthetic the pattern because the women took it on women and men so then what is in aesthetics it sort of starts in Europe maybe and it's a whole large conversation about Africa who's in control of the situation which is actually very complex but aesthetics are about reciprocity and you take the initiative so I think maybe I should open it up because I want to make sure we have time to answer some questions but the audience you mentioned that women for women is in 8 countries or 80 8 they're all in Africa they actually started in more USAID and started in Sarajevo, Kosovo then moved to Africa and then into the Middle East if you could both both of you can tell us a little bit about how either the clients are already following that because it's not like very interesting NGOs are they in the quarter to New York the women for women is in the quarter to DC it was completely serendipitous I have a friend who is a consultant for NGOs she helps with marketing in PR and well this is relevant I think so if you're in New York City or in DC a table of women because it's all women work members one woman announces that the government is getting into this land another woman raises her hand and says okay I'll lend it and nobody knew the name of the female architect in that room except my friend who knew me and I had just graduated so but the donor and the founder came to meet with me and they were both huge risk takers the donor was an artist and she came up with this very making idea and I kind of said that you know there are female architects but we all just hit it off and so off we went my friend was working in Afghanistan quite a bit and part of our contract with the US government is gender capacity building for women to work in our office with women and we're building a building for our work in the dormitory of the American University I'm just curious, does this think you're okay with that standing up? I know that it has been I'm not in touch with them so much and they don't know so much about what's happening right now but they have been in Afghanistan equally it's incredible on the premises we had done affordable housing in New York earlier on but that was a while ago and I got this call it was like you don't know me but this woman you know I'm the executive director of Village Health Works and we were looking to build it was also a women's project started as a women's health affiliate so she was very interested in the fact that we had done affordable housing I guess the women think it was important as well and and that we did it on a tight budget because that was their situation and so she we met and we talked she's a very compelling person she actually is my client to this day she's no longer at Village Health Works and she said well I met her and I actually didn't know where one of you was so I got off the phone and I went on Google Maps and I looked up and I said oh there it is you know and we met and we hit it off and then she said well you know we're having this board meeting half weeks and would you like to come? I was like one of those things and so I said just give me 24 hours you know music and um yeah I thought about it I'm a client it really is kind of a video cinema brand experience sorry to keep talking similar story we want to talk about Burkina Faso similar story about Burkina Faso just it's next to Ghana interesting gear practice model there's a brother firm to the two of yours in a mass design group people here are probably more plug-in than I am but I was very intrigued at the architecture record conference they presented and that practice is not a profit because your clients are not profits but he's like the executive director not the president and maybe in the day it doesn't make a difference but I like this in terms of business practice of architecture and revolutionary that the practice itself design firm is a non-profit and there is very much beautiful stuff in Africa it works with the lower footprint low density so Michael was in his third year at Harvard when he went over there and when I first googled Rwanda architecture after I was introduced to this client the only thing the only thing that came up was a picture of Michael still as a student doing his first project there so I sort of followed him along they're huge now and are doing things in many countries and he's done a great job of collaborating with other non-profits that will do things like provide students to come and work with someone with them or he's been great at sort of in-kind donations like people or a staff or whatever and he goes to every global conference that non-profits are at and he spends a huge amount of time fundraising and it's very impressive Louise can attest to I tried to start a non-profit to run so that I could choose my own projects and I'll be dependent on client to bring me a project and Louise was on my board and honestly after five years I was so tired of the administrative part of it because you're a non-profit responsible to New York State and there are a lot of rules and regulations and you spend the most of your time asking for money and making your case and trying to follow all these regulations there's not a lot of time left over for design so I think I'd love to work for Michael but I don't want to be Michael so you know it's very interesting the projects Sharon and I we both have our own firms and they're relatively both cheap type firms and we would meet once a month for breakfast and we'd share resources, engineers it was like we were a larger group because we had each other it was a very lovely relationship and then I was on her board for her non-profit I agree with Sharon first of all these projects are labor intensive it's called and it can have a staff and more people equitably I mean the issue of pro bono also comes up a lot in this and it's really other than doing a sketch you're handing it over to somebody which is not what we do neither of us this pro bono thing is not something that's feasible for my office but I get different strokes for different folks everybody works differently I am actively involved in design just like Sharon is and yeah I'm happy, like a traditional firm but it's really interesting to me though what it says about the state of the practice that in order for us to contribute to social change we're starting to have to become non-profits which we all are just but because I think for me it's a question there's been a lot of talk about contributing in social engagement and I think it's great and I'm kind of wondering but at the same time if there's been this drop in fees and it goes to work faster it's become harder and harder to get out of the last five campaigns competition needs to be a competition office competition offices is to do very well it's impossible to survive as a competition office so it's interesting to note though that paradigm shift where there is a kind of recognition it's pragmatic there's a recognition about law doesn't kind of work out one of two I mean you're finding a different way that's why I'm also interested in the practices of all women and how we balance things out but it does say something about where we are that you're starting to have some problem models as a model so I would say a couple of things one is a friend of mine John Kerry wrote the book the power of pro bono and it's a great book but interestingly he's something else he no longer really believes in a sense that that you lose you lose the sense of value which is really key for the process and then when you lose the sense of value you lose the sense of timing as well so the client relationship changes dramatically and you can get yourself into a well let's just redesign it let's just redesign it it's not a healthy place for the architect or for the client to be in but I do find it very involved in this fundraising so I will sometimes do a shorter contract that is for schematic design and then for certain renderings to help them or I will show up at a cocktail party where they're trying to raise money and I'll explain what the design is that kind of thing I think can be very helpful to the client but it is it's also a long road if you're starting with a client and they're still trying to figure out how they're going to raise the money it's going to be years before you want to build something so it takes a lot of patience too I find that but it also makes me think of all sorts of things like accounting first you know the way there is an echo for example I was thinking about this question of labor and the use of labor to build because people need jobs and then you left with the question but after you built the building then what happens to that which reminds me of the situation in the so called first world where clearly this question of employment in this country or this kind of declining industrial base being eaten alive by outside giants that can produce this stuff for much less like China's still in the United States that can't compete and that crisis of labor there but also here as I left asking the question what happens to the building then what after the building is completed what happens to the building I don't think this is true for all the people that work on my projects but one of the most satisfying moments of that project was towards the very end as we were preparing for the opening and it was all coming down the last minute the project manager called me and said oh my god all the masons are leaving because there's a government project now down the road and they want to hire our masons because we're the ones that have skilled masons and everyone else is basically unskilled so they had an ad on the paper saying if you work at the women's center you get the job first so obviously that doesn't happen to everyone and the women's work has gone through the rounds of being able to sustain us all so it's definitely an interesting question sometimes it's an happy ending I'd like to say there's also an issue after things have been wide open right now and there are many other people coming in that think it's a huge influx from the Middle East and also trying to have workers who are there already pre-organized and a little more they have the machinery for example I'll give you a little bit of a story you are one of these calls and to the engineer said and for the concrete we have to do a slum test you know and bringing the slum tests I'm sure you've learned about that but anyway so there's a dead silence on the other end of the call and obviously you didn't notice and you have to bring this to a lab to test there is no idea where the lab is so they found the lab they're very resourceful people we have the next day at the conference call we found the lab, it's in Lujan Gora do the slum test blah blah blah bring the slum test into the lab and it was a concrete gale so that happened three more times and so then the engineers questioned us and they did a lot of pictures take a picture of exactly you know what did you put in the mix and this site is adjacent to Lake Tanganyika which is right down the hill so apparently they were putting river rocks in the concrete which was smooth as opposed to aggregate which sort of connects to the cement and strengthens the cement and then the news was they needed to chop up the river rocks or get aggregate so they didn't have the machine who had the machine the Chinese company down the road so for a steep steep price they chopped up they came with the aggregate and that's just to show you that they had the machine and that becomes these are issues about first world and Africa we have to move right now I always hear the conversation this is not one place Africa is a continent but these are issues of I think ethics also it's down to you know some of the things we talked about going to Iran where we've seen glass buildings but outside investment is coming in and they want because they think that investment will be guaranteed by everything like this because they got it from the first world this is such dealing with that is a huge issue President Pikali would like the capital city Pikalis to look like Singapore but there's none of the natural resources for powering a city that looks like Singapore I think it's true and there's something I think that what modern buildings they do and I don't think that's so bad if you think about what is modern in the African context it's a very interesting problem I mean what is modern but you know it's something that's been gone over before but there's one of which countries got independent when they had these X colonial imperial which were an attempt at the kind of hybrid of what might be modern for Africa but then this modern just gets lost I don't think it gets lost I spend a lot of time looking at Shadrach Woods all those projects that were done at that time I think architects today would go back that I agree but the politicians the society do this the desire maybe because they then jump to this other image I think so but I think it's really complex and interesting because I think today that period in the end of late modernism was fascinating what was going on in Africa and the show right now shows all that and the new book pictures and I don't know if you've seen it but it's a great show that's probably more European, Euro-centric I guess you're calling it but it should make me kind of catch up yes and I think people doing it today not only looked at that effort I looked at all that work it was fascinating and a stepping point it's great well I think architects are looking at that work that if you're a developer developing a building as you would do at any other place you're not looking at any kind of work here we're holding out in the AC I think architects are very much changing the past so legacy and that one can work with really incredibly productive ways I think at this point the cities are not necessarily getting looked at with architects as are most cities but I think if there's education out there in a way that and just usually knowledge that history is here as well I mean I'm not I'm a New Yorker so I think we're having an issue here that's what I mean and it's so cool it's actually here it's also here great, well thank you both it was really inspiring and great to send it off to everybody the few that are still in the room when it was finally reviewed so thank you thank you