 Hello everybody, welcome to the Chisab Incubator Spring presentation. My name is Awusin Shang, I'm the program manager at Chisab Initiative. We're very excited to be uptown at the school this year, presenting, discussing the work our members have been undertaking during the fourth year of this platform. The Chisab Incubator Fund in 2014 is an initiative that provides recent graduates with a collaborative environment to explore and develop their new ideas and projects at the intersection of culture, technology and the city. It blends a professional setting and a culture of entrepreneurship with the communal creative energy and resources core experience by students during their time at Chisab. The program expands the territory between academia and the profession and it allows members to share experiences and skills while building the professional network and connecting to critical issues in New York and beyond. We are located at the heart of downtown, credit scene at 231 Bowery. The Chisab Incubator is an uncork tenant of New Inc. Funded by the New Museum 2013, New Inc. is the first museum-led culture incubator for art, technology and design. As a unique university-led initiative, Chisab Incubator spans multiple disciplines that draw on the strengths of the school, its faculty, its vast alumni network, the resources of the New Museum and New Inc. and the proximity of Lower Manhattan's playback technology industry. What you have seen on the screen is just a brief record of the series of projects, initiatives and events that orbit around the Chisab Incubator's individual practices. All of them consequences of multiple interactions and as a result of organic development in an incredible dynamic setting. Great conversations, book launches, office hours, panels, professional workshops, group therapies, mini and max lecture series, network events, tours, visits, happy hours. All of these operate in a specific location outside the school. I want to thank everybody who helped and is helping to make the Chisab Incubator the rare, unique and exciting space. We all can develop methods and practice with trial and error, explore new endeavors without depression or financial success. Be interested in innovation and at the same time apply technology and critique the newness. We're together at the intersection of an educational institution at Chisab, a cultural institution at the New Museum and a neighborhood of the foot-out with creativity, arts and culture. But what I really, really want to highlight, especially on this time of the day, is how Chisab and the Chisab Incubator provide a space and a platform where we all can participate. The possibility of belonging to a place, a safe, physical and intellectual environment and radical configurations of private practice, research, events and public engagement could not only coexist and in fact can occur all at the same time, fostering, impacting, promoting and expanding cultural value in architecture and the city. Thank you very much everybody for being here. We have a huge lineup today. I think we have 16 amazing practitioners who presented their work. We're going to go fast, so we should stop for the presenters. Take on the phone so you get a recorder. I'm going to be timing for a minute. I'm sorry. I'm Ashley. This is Ariana and Andrea. We graduated from the MRC program last year and started A++A out of the Incubator. So our practice is based in New York, but we come from an array of cultural backgrounds. We started with an interest in collaborative practice that would allow us to create projects with other designers, but also projects we felt would have a larger social impact and offer the opportunity to work directly with local communities. Early projects included workshops with food office hours in Chinatown, design sheriffs at New Inc. with other designers and our friends and pop-up gallery shows. This served as a foundation for us to continue defining how we want to work and build our practice. In the meantime, we've been developing a larger self-initiated project in Immokalee, Florida called Rural Assembly. It's a community-driven affordable housing project for farm workers. We started as a research proposal about affordable housing across rural America at the end of our time at GSAP, grew into a way to test our approach to design in a real-world scenario. We began Rural Assembly by approaching different nonprofits in Florida with a vested interest in housing. After getting connected with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, we were able to host workshops that creatively encouraged farm workers to talk about housing issues and imagine an ideal home. Through these community ties and our subsequent partnership with the Immokalee Fair Housing Alliance, the project has evolved beyond research into a schematic housing proposal on a 10-acre site. Our role evolves from hosting workshops with the farm workers and developing program requirements with the Housing Alliance to developing an initial design proposal to assist with fundraising. We hope to continue this method of working in Immokalee as the project moves forward. Well, we realized through working in rural assemblies that our value lies in the process of community engagement as facilitators between communities and the building industry. Through this understanding, we've organized our practice into APLSA-PLSA which is a science studio and Blank Assembly which is a science consultant. The idea is that they are seeding to each other. Facilitating community engagement can offer design solutions with a variety of timelines and scales of impact from the creation of ideas to the creation of physical architecture but without the pressures of working within a traditional model. Thanks to the opportunities presented at the incubator we've created a network of and thanks to Augustine's guidance, we've created a network of advisors and collaborators, nonprofits and even builders and developers. Through our time there, we've been able to develop a more clear idea of what our practice is and what we hope to continue to do in the future. Thank you. Hi everyone I'm speaking into the microphone I'm Caitlin Blanchfield and I'm Farz and Lutz Fijian. We're presenting some work we've been doing together at the GSAP incubator. I graduated from the CCCP program in 2014 and I'm actually still a GSAP student in the PhD program right now and then Farz congratulated me in 2012. So what we've been working on is a project called Modern Management Methods which is a research and exhibition project that has spanned several years in several sites but the most recent iteration of which will be an exhibition at the shed this summer. So it was really fortuitous that when we were accepted to be part of the incubator we also were accepted as open call fellows for the shed's inaugural programming. And so this is us on site doing our project in Modern Management Methods that through research and through innovative imaging technology examines the historical narratives of modern architecture and the ways that buildings have been preserved and the values codified in those processes of preservation. So initially we did a project in Weissenhof-Siedlung in Stuttgart, Germany and this most recent iteration is looking at the United Nations headquarters here in New York City and so this is us on site X-raying the building and we're working with SOE Studio who are also incubator members and you'll be hearing from. So one thing that's been really great about the incubator has actually been this opportunity to kind of forge collaborations and new working relationships. And we've also had the privilege of sharing some of this research at the Fitch Colloquium here at GSAP working with thanks to Jorge Itero-Pilis who had some conversation with David Benjamin who I think is here. So GSAP has also provided this really nice platform to talk about the work. And so here we are X-raying the speaker's podium at the United Nations building and again looking for moments within this architecture that the X-ray allows us to see that speak to the processes of its reconstruction from 2008 to 2014 and the stories of international modernism and new regimes of security accessibility and internationalism that are kind of baked into that process. We've also been lucky that through through our kind of the ecosystem of the Columbia community when we finished the first part of the project from Fitch the results of that were seen by the Office for Publications here so we're now also working on a book project that is going to be published in summer and so that is going to compile both of the surveys we've been doing on Shtutka and also on the United Nations headquarters and it has contributions from various authors as well. And so the project kind of entails us wearing different types of lead aprons. Here we are in the Le Corbusier in NSW Heritage listed property with a portable X-ray machine. Our project is both looking and trying to reveal moments in the building after its undergone reconstruction where new technology and new ideologies have been inserted into historic fabric so we're kind of looking for that but it's also sort of an aesthetic investigation so our requirement as an architect and a historian is to try to create really high resolution images of this modern building so as we're trying to get this high resolution we've found out that we're having to turn more towards medical imaging and to borrow techniques from that industry and in this case we're borrowing an X-ray from a force dentist. And so this is the results of the X-rays from Shtutka and the moments and the things that we're looking at and we're really pumped that in June we're going to be here in the shed and we've also been working with Michael Adlstein from the Historic Preservation Program who's kind of put us in touch with everyone so we look forward to celebrating the results with you June I think. Thank you. Hello, my name is Cristina Gobernabesudo I'm a founding partner of the Industries Architectural Agonism and while my office is somewhere else doing more orthodox work of architecture that is building in Perse now a library in Milano I have tested different formats and different issues as well in my coming back to New York I'm going to stay at the Neurink in the New Museum and I'm going to summarize it in four projects and four terms as well the first term being performative and the first project is Epic Architecture. Epic Architecture takes inspiration in Bertol Brecht Epic Theater and tries to engage architects in issues that have to do with politics, society, ecology, etc. through two different formats, the first format being Epic Architecture Theater Company that is a company that had been doing shows in two continents and had 40 members so far and that had written, plays states and performed them in few cities already and also through design I have just finished a proposal to make an architectural device that would produce and state these kind of shows as well through the streets of Milan and that it would be called La Machina Civica the second term and project through the term investigative it's the book of scenes it's a typological study of architecture that had been forgotten by the discipline because it's very bad reputation architecture that had to do with the seven deathly scenes greed, lust, etc. I have also investigated this issue through two formats, a series of advanced studios here in this house and in other universities as well and also on site in deep field work here is an investigation on love hotels in Tokyo and now I'm doing the same in New York as well yeah the third term is collaborative this is a project that is not mine it's an artist that her name is Lysnava Pitchnook the name of her project is border a magnetic field and she went to Calais that it was this immigration of a huge camp as you know in the border of France many people gather there are thousands of people trying to cross to the United to UK and you know the French government burnt it literally and drowned it and she went there and gathered all these kinds of objects but on which we come in Kiko's SMA cards samples and all these kinds of things and she did with those 20 kilos of stuff these very architectural elements these terrazzo and she's producing a book about the whole process in Paris and I'm collaborating with her in the book and we are actually going to present the book as well if the new museum at the new ink in June the term would be theoretical and last summer I joined the European Graduate School, the European Graduate School is a university that is in Switzerland I started a second PSD in philosophy critical studies and art and this is like a space that they call themselves an intellectual society with people like Slavo Shishek and Angela Davis and Louis Nancy and all these kinds of people and I'm making a test and writing dissertation and a book about the idea of rejection and absence in architecture as a trigger for discovery because I think that now in a world that is exhausting its resources and now in a moment and in a culture that acts as if we were in constant and permanent growth maybe what we need to do is exactly the opposite and use rejection and absence and negation as a tool for discovery and actually this term has been very much exhausted in literature and art but it has all this taboo in architecture as well, thank you Hello everyone, thanks for being here I'm Valerie while at GSAP I pursued a master in architecture and co-founded a collective focused on entrepreneurship and design called AFRAME My name is Lily Kwong and I majored in urban studies at Columbia College I ran a landscape design practice specialized in site-specific botanical installations Hi, I'm Julia Cho, I studied historic preservation at GSAP before I got PhD in cognitive psychology also at Columbia I've been looking for evidence of links between spaces and the human cognitions and emotions At the GSAP incubator at New Inc we formed a cross-functional team and called it DUO Joining our various expertise we became interested in studying people's emotional interaction with nature in urban space I had a botanical installation at Cadillac House called Summer in Winter The installation consisted of a high density of exotic plants creating a jungle ecosystem of sorts It featured over a hundred different species and over a thousand plants To access Lily's plant installation visitors must first channel down an aisle displaying an array of shining Cadillac cars placed between columns covered in digital screens mirrors and neon lights Amid disorienting ricochet of flashes, visitors are invited to engage with the very different atmosphere of Lily's lush green space The contrast provided a unique opportunity to study the impact of the transition on psychology and physiology We decided to design a pilot project to guide our investigation The traditional paradigm of study takes place in a science laboratory Participants are often shown static images of urban or natural spaces and asked to self-report their experiences We were interested in bringing the experiment outside the laboratory We researched various metrics and narrowed possibilities with a wristwatch sensor collecting physiological data including skin conductance a well-tested emotional indicator We geared participants with a chest mounted camera and asked them to gesture and point the interesting feature during the visit We asked participants to take a walk from the lounge showroom to the playing area and back to the lounge showroom We also assessed their self-reported emotions before and after the walk We recruited 14 participants through Lily's Instagram platform Over the course of four weeks we had close observation of each participant's interaction with different spaces at Cadillac House Our findings verified the idea that each of us makes sense of the world differently Here we extracted a small portion of data from two very different participants, X and Y Their contrasting psychological data is a testimony to the individual difference from their attention and memory For example, someone with background and skills in architecture design pays more attention to contemporary architecture might show many spikes in the showroom area Someone who grew up in a tropical island the visual contact with certain planes, though exotic to others might trigger a familiar theme from the childhood memory there for many spikes in the playing area In their post-walk interview both reported having enjoyed the visit and found the playing area most peaceful and comfortable However, the skin conductance data illustrates a granularity of emotion, their mere verbal report. This granularity would help researchers and designers validate how individuals adapt and develop new judgments in response to biophilic or nature stimuli in urban spaces This matrix displays how the data could be visualized to provide feedback It displays history and prediction at the individual and the collective levels At the individual scale this visualization could enable personalized emotional learning With a large data set, artificial intelligence and machine learning could enable the visualization of a heat map that predicts how people are going to feel in certain spaces Imagine a software that provides scientific feedback on how specific design gestures make people feel This could be particularly useful for decision making in large-scale urban interventions We could even imagine a future in which nature paired with swarm intelligence could respond to individual psychophysiological states Earth's fissure could maybe take up the challenge with a gallery installation Hi, my name is Gam My project at the GSEP incubator over the past year has been basically about trying this question through several projects To start this was a study of Myanmar, Burma's new capital city basically using a technique of extracting roadways to analyze kind of an urban regime of control and power and also the aesthetics of what that control might look like This was funded by a kidney grant from Columbia GSEP after I graduated It was also published in April Review which was also run by Columbia Most of my time at the incubator has been spent working on a project called Territories of Territory Extraction This project seeks to draw the geopolitics of Singapore's sand mining and sand importation regime through various means For instance, looking at deforestation in Batam Island, Indonesia This is a chronological study of the growing areas of sand mining kind of open cut locations on this particular island and then feeding those kind of drawing techniques back into looking at the landmass of Singapore itself and creating a series of these kind of territorial wireframes which are generated from satellite imagery They create a kind of a false topography Those are color coded by time overlaid So for example, this is about the last 16 years or so Yellow being territory added in 2010s, blue area added in the 2000s Again, another one And this is all culminating in a project that I'll be starting this fall at the Ohio State University as the Milton Emerging Practitioner called the Great Great Strong Agency which is seeking to explore the megalopolis of the Great Lakes watershed which is the area here and using the legal framework of environmental protection to establish a kind of remapping of the public sphere based on water as a resource And so I close by saying thank you to Augustine and David for the time It was really fantastic being at Newink this past year Thank you to those of you who sat through me trying to workshop this presentation for like four hours It was really great Thank you My name is Steve Sanchez and I graduated from the real estate program in 2016 with a focus on hotel and resort development For the past year at the incubator I've been working on a new hotel project called Groundhog Retreats Long ago, artists and writers started building colonies in remote locations after intuitively figuring out that nature is good for the brain Now, a lot of evidence-based research proves that right Research shows that when people are immersed in natural surroundings, they're more creative, they're more productive they share less signs of stress and become better problem solvers Groundhog Retreats are inspired by these artist colonies they're designed to re-energize and refocus all types of urban knowledge workers places where individuals and small teams can escape from distractions back at home and back at the office do some deep thinking and get real work done Our first retreat will be right in the middle of New York's Catskill Mountains about a two-hour drive from here We're renovating an existing Inn & Spa and the name Groundhog is inspired by its historical name La Groundhog, the farm in Spanish Most people are familiar with the history of Jewish resorts in the Catskills but as a Spaniard, I was surprised to learn that by the 1940s, there were about 20 little villas and retreats that cater to Spanish-speaking New Yorkers The existing Inn sits on 31 acres and it faces the Osofis Creek and protective forest lands Just upstream the creek forks into two and creates a private island that belongs to the property This is where we plan to build Wi-Fi enabled workspaces in cabins and tree houses One of the main reasons we chose this location is because it's on a main county road and has access to commercial-grade internet speeds The Inn has 34 bedrooms and approximately 25,000 square feet It really has good bones with a yoga studio, fitness center, pool tennis court and common areas and restaurants we can adapt to our uses For downtime we'll improve its fitness amenities and of course offer plenty of outdoor activities such as hiking, skiing, fly fishing and river tubing Using principles of activity-based office design will offer different workspaces for different work modes For individual work desks in each hotel room, a quiet library and cabins in the woods For collaboration, meeting rooms co-working areas, a tree house office and video conferencing booths For socializing and community building we'll have plenty of eating, drinking and hangout spots and of course outdoor patios, fields and forests work great for all of these purposes We're also creating programming focused on productivity, cognitive performance digital minimalism and well-being For a pre-arrival to checkout we'll provide content such as goal-setting tools and workflow routines guests can use during the stay and hopefully apply to their everyday lives back at home If it all goes well, we'll close on the property this summer and finish the renovation next year Once we're open we'll welcome freelancers, entrepreneurs and startup teams to visit We're also looking to partner with New York's best companies to work for to provide their employees access to Grand Hub as a unique workplace benefit that enhances employee experience and demonstrates the company's commitment to work-life balance and human-centric practices With today's tools and technology great work could be done anywhere and companies are being redesigned to accommodate the complexities of modern life While co-working and flexible office space providers are already disrupting commercial real-estate markets I see opportunities outside city limits to create new spaces that satisfy the workforce of the future Thanks Okay Okay, hello I'm Karen Cubie and I was first introduced to the potentials that architecture has for addressing health equity through my work running New Housing New York the city's first competition for affordable and sustainable housing which resulted in this project Via Verde which is a showcase for how design can promote better health and healthier living Currently most of my work work is with city agencies on projects connecting architecture and health like this one which is called Mental Health by Design where we went into 15 high-need high schools and turned disused spaces into various wellness environments This project is by Pierson Rich Office I also worked with the city on a number of publications in Spain These are three with the Public Design Commission Department for the Aging and the Department of Health Right before I started the incubator my first book came out Housing as Intervention Architecture Towards Social Equity This is a 17 SA volume of architectural design, the British publication which examines how housing projects and the design processes behind them might be interventions towards greater social equity and I was super happy that we've been getting some recognition I've been at the incubator and I've also been elsewhere Since this book came out I've been on the road a little bit These represent talks and also research and some amazing synergies. I'm thinking about Mexico City was especially amazing because Hillary Sample's housing conference here had amazing architects from Mexico City who I then visited while I was there including people working with InfoNoveet their version of HUD This was going to be the moment in the presentation I'll still talk about this part One thing that's super amazing about being able to work with Augustine and to them all for this opportunity but I think what's amazing is being pushed to take risks and to apply for way more things than I normally would So I was going to take this moment to put some spin on getting comfortable with rejection but I just got this big grant two days ago It was so exciting and in about two weeks I'll be able to tell you which grant I got It's a secret right now but I'm super excited This is a really great book that's very old This is a great book from 1997 and it was a comprehensive book of case studies on affordable housing We haven't had a really really good one in over 20 years so I'm going to make it and the writers gave me their blessing So that's coming up Another thing that's coming up is the culmination of my time at the incubator Visualizing health equity contributes visions for an equitable future where every New Yorker has the opportunity to lead a healthier life A half day workshop resulting in a publication the program explores potential impacts at the interdependent scales of the individual the building, the neighborhood, and the city and thinking about the publication inspired by the Viewer Center's work 10 years ago So in general while in residence at the GSAP incubator I'm further developing my practice toward the goal of ending racial and economic disparities and health in New York City Amidst appalling health disparities and dwindling public support for well-designed housing I can think of no more urgent issue in architecture than asserting our discipline's value in the realm of public health There's currently a nine-year difference in life expectancies between East Harlem and the other side This must end. Thank you Hello everyone, I'm Diana Cristóbal one of the members of the Architecture Collective, NICNOT that we cannot be here today so we have prepared a very brief presentation instead I would like to begin by discussing the notion of the commons which has been a continuous concern for our practice If the idea of a common good has historically referred to those resources that are not one's property but that are available to all today this term has been reclaimed in different ways by various disciplines It is discussed in economic, social and political theory and architecture where it is more related to the more traditional ideas of the public realm Our collective contributes to all these existing discussions by addressing architectures of commonality through a procedural perspective that is by highlighting the labour practices legal frameworks and participatory techniques that articulate an architectural project In 2017 a school that we built in Nicaragua in collaboration with Alok Alengio discussed these ideas into practice This school tested the idea of the commons in two ways First, through an indigo campaign that brought together a diverse set of people from over 30 different countries to provide the necessary funding for the school and that also encouraged some to participate through alternative ways such as providing legal or technical advice and second because we chose a construction method that had to be designed and built collectively This was a form of building that required great collective effort but no expensive power tools or highly technical expertise The airbag system The airbag system is a construction technique that until recently has most living use for emergency infrastructures and self-build It originated as a technique to build protective barriers for flood control and in the 70s began to be used by the United Nations in some of their developing programs However, its organizational, aesthetic technical and environmental potential have not yet been developed So in the school that we built in Nicaragua we responded to some of these questions We collaborated with engineers to improve the structural integrity of the system We explored new aesthetic possibilities and we organized design workshops with the community to include them as active participants in the process This school was the first step of a larger project that looks into the question to transform a bag of earth into a form of building that has collective interest The second instance of this exploration happened about a year ago with our runner-up proposal for a pavilion in Covernous Island in which the airbag was applied to New York City public spaces This was a zero waste pavilion that was to be collectively built during the summer and then collectively dismantled into the island's landscape So currently we're working on a series of prototypes that continue testing the airbag system as a catalyst for the commons Playgrounds that take advantage of the material's plasticity creating geometries and spaces that could be possible to achieve with prefabricated materials In the first one of this type will be built with Brad Institute next summer Landscape and water infrastructures that take advantage of the solidity of the material to create topographic operations for gathering places and cultural events Small scale structures that host educational programs for cultural institutions and that can be quickly built and dismantled and structures for food production where the airbag also performs as a biological habitat So in such cases plants, fungi and other small organisms can grow around the airbags and become a skin that transforms and changes with the environment Nevertheless, the airbag is only one of multiple mediums and techniques through which our collective addresses issues of commonality And so they also include exhibitions pavilions and housing and urban projects Two of our current projects, for instance include a pavilion for a design festival in Spain that recovers local spaces of storytelling and reconstructs them in the underused courtyard of the city library and an urban proposal for the city of Oz that developed from our winning entry in the European competition The first one of these projects reclaims the notion of the commons from a performative standpoint re-enacting moments of collective storytelling using existing spatial typologies and the second one reclaims the notion of the commons using a participatory framework through the design of one board game that serves to promote public participation and that is actually currently being tested in Norway We believe that such projects could lead towards a common practice of design where technique and process become a priority And so we hope to provide inventive collective imaginaries that contribute to a common good Thank you very much Hi, I'm Laura de San Ciero and I'm from the Advanced Architectural Design Program 2008 So, established in 2009 plus as a heterogeneous practice with international presence in the fields of architecture urban planning, design and consulting for the industry working on different formats, scales and geographies. We collaborate with disruptive clients and talented makers to conceive and activate spaces and conversations We are an international architecture and design studio that is human centered with strong presence in New York, Sao Paulo and Mexico City At this studio we have three main focuses the products which are product design of furniture and modular systems the practice which is the work directly with clients and the research where we have the curatorial work and experiments in multidisciplinary collaborations The products which started as a natural demand from the clients for the project as here is a personalized item that range from workstations and benches like furniture and art installations This allow us to deal with the seers of local craftsmen in a smaller scale but one that possesses an entire different set of challenges experimenting with different materials and basic forms to create functional everyday objects from different purposes in the workplace, home or the city The approach is anchored in the power of collaboration and the understanding of the built environment as a physical and cultural landscape with materials and social repercussions Valuing research, functionality and longevity over fashion we conceive spaces and products that authentically reflect our clients and their times while providing them with a long-term response to their needs Reacting to aspects of place, time function and client goals we place materials and methods of construction above formal assumptions The studio aims to identify and explore relevant relevant crafts and technologies through an ongoing research complemented by the built work which provides a three-dimensional laboratory that cannot be represented through other methods In this context, aspects like functionality and efficiency are given priority over design theory, ensuring a successful physical experience For the Venice Biennale, we presented Walls of Air For the Basilium Pavilion, as a response to three-space themes suggested by an architect The exhibition attempts to uncover the visible and invisible walls that have built Brazil It showcases several large scale maps that weave together a narrative of issues that affect not only Brazil but also other countries in the Americas And the question of scale here is crucial To discuss urbanization, we have to look at multiple scales at once and explore their interdependencies In this exhibition, we look at the architectural scale, the scale of cities, and the scale of the Brazilian territory at large As we started to move between scales, we realized that the first wall we had to break was actually the one that separates architecture from the other disciplines Our pavilion is a result of a collaboration with more than 200 professionals from 10 different disciplines We put together a multidisciplinary meeting, including lawyers, engineers, filmmakers, political theorists, indigenous activists, mathematicians, doctors, historians, environmentalists, geologists and more than 20 artists Processing resources from an extended set of data, from 2,000 sources such as the NASA, the Global Forest Watch, satellites from Germany, France, England, and the US, and many more These drawings we created embraced from the small scale of the physical walls that separate the public and the private domain, and that are felt in our daily lives, to the large scale of Brazil's territory and the invisible social and political walls that have shaped the reality of Brazilians today And after all this experiences and conversations with clients and collaborators we felt we needed something more personal and intimate We felt that fiero, which means iron and English, is that connection between all these worlds and formats Fiero besides being a solid material is also my last name Thank you very much My name is Rajiv and I graduated in 2010 From places and spaces to positive faces a little icon is here to draw attention We are creating visual content designed to spark discourse and catalyze action. As an architect my drawings were an instructional story of how to construct one's environment As an illustrator my drawings are a story to construct dialogue From architecture I learned it is the details that build up to a larger whole. A little icon we boldly show the smallest sensibilities of the issues that are present in our social environment in order to have a larger conversation I'm going to talk to you guys about a few of my projects. So my first woke piece was Immigrant Lady Liberty With the growing xenophobic rhetoric in our country this image was meant to provoke action and it did It opened up a dialogue about immigration the hijab, women's rights within Islam and so on I even received hate mail probably usually from my uncle but the overwhelming response was positive it allowed people on both sides of the issue to have a constructive conversation. Here you can see it was featured in posters for change from traditional architectural press and that received a lot of big press including The Guardian and a full page spread in the Sunday edition of The Washington Post This piece is called Light Out of Darkness and it touches on multiple issues Inspired by the Indian Festival of Lights we wanted to celebrate the advancement of LGBTQ rights and the growing Me Too movement in India. In our signature style we are opening the door to shine light on the taboo issues and since our medium is digital it is fast to procure So when I was a kid one thing I really enjoyed was not thinking that I would get shot at school As gun violence continues to be an epidemic in this country we have to be loud and bold with our statements. On the left side we'll icon partners with Future Coalition a parent group to youth advocacy groups like March For Our Lives and Walk Out To Both We did a social media series of shareable content pieces to get youth vocal and active on election day 2018 On the right side is a self-produced sticker campaign to ask if the GOP has become complacent with gun violence in this country We passed out over a thousand stickers in the March For Our Lives rally in DC where we received a lot of high fives and a lot of raised eyebrows One of my very right wing Republican friends was like gee that's badass I'm like no no no The success of it though was that people were forced to state their opinion on the issue and this created a better understanding of someone else's view So who here voted in New York City? Raise your hand Alright this is not the sticker you get after voting but it could have been this place third out of 700 plus submissions in a contest for New York's new I Voted sticker and I'm still pissed about voting And so what we are doing here is we're involving the community in our work through crowd elected commissions It's like a community more meeting but for art On the right is a submission for the new pop's logo that will adorn over 500 spaces in the city We are thinking about how an icon image can represent multiple things the rigidity of the buildings the foliage of the landscape and the overall icon of a public space and finally low icon can never forget his architecture roots We are taking our bold illustrations back into the built environment I've partnered with link NYC to be featured on their art on link series and we're working on a set of images that deals with temporal space and the moving user We've also been commissioned to do a large banner that's a 10 foot by 45 foot piece at the immigrant legal center in Omaha The past year the incubator has been seen tremendous growth for low icon We've developed a business model of licensing agreements commissions in our direction We did a rebrand from what started as a children's company to one of art for millennials by millennial and while our names as little our bold design, our voice and our mission to draw attention to social issues and make the world a bit brighter remains big Hello my name is Marcella de Signore I graduated in 2017 and I'm an architect, educator and also the principal of Extopia So one of the main projects this year at the incubator has been the publication of Urban Machines Public Space in a Digital Culture So I will talk briefly about the book and then I will talk about a project that I'm currently building and developing in New Orleans So over the last few decades an increasingly collaborative and interdisciplinary work has been developed between architects artists, urban and media designers that has defined a new landscape of projects that integrate the urban, technological ecological, political and social scale to engage information technology as a caravane tool for expanding and altering public and social interaction in the public space So the book itself aims to present a critical historical overview of the impact of information technologies in public space but also providing a vision for possible photos future scenarios for the public realm and digital culture So the book is called Urban Machines as you can see and so the first thing so the book frames urban machines as interventions that are physically plugging in the public and urban space but at the same time are a system that function as a system and test relationship between what we call the city, the technology and again the social scale environment, space and technology are different forms of use are intertwined to produce a space that encourage new modes of urbanity and again what is really one part of the research for the book is how we can define new forms of public life So in more detail the book is divided in three parts essay, case studies and conversation they say it is divided in four chapters that talk about how we can operate in the digital cities looking at interacting integrating, expanding hacking and networking as one of the five categories of investigation the case studies section represents an historical overview so the project selected looked back 15 years spent 15 years back and the project has been selected for the capacity of again catalyzing relationships between citizens, place and technology and the conversations actually expand on several themes including city data technology participation, network, scenario planning open source city and more So the book itself and the research that I'm currently doing and I will continue to do after this book in the PhD that I'm currently writing the dissertation so the book itself expands on the local and global form of planetary scale computation looking at how this affects public space and city life through the lens of developed urban prototypes so all the projects developed again are more scaled but have the potential of impact in the city in the long term looking at prototyping, reputation and long term implementation in conjunction with the book with the research developed for the book my practice at Stovjam has tested over the last 10 years build projects looking especially at the notion of urban machine so what you see here is one of the projects that I'm currently developing in New Orleans and it's currently under construction so this is part of a competition that I won in 2016 and it's still under development so on the left side you see the prototype that was built last year as a small testing device to again test a large scale and then I feel this part of the New Orleans city strategy to see how cities can lead with water and how again we can rebuild infrastructure to infrastructure through the lens of resiliency so the project itself built on the rich history of topography and pumping stations and systems in this case and the project becomes an inevitable responsive three dimensional map of the water infrastructure looking at responsive systems and real-time data as well the video, yes here we go, perfect so data field again as I said is currently under construction so I'm working with the city of New Orleans different organization and looks again at the water network of the city of New Orleans and to establish a platform for citizens to share and communicate the challenge and opportunities to live with water so the project will open hopefully next year and will be one of the largest in-scale public urban place-making intervention in New Orleans located along one of the main canal, the main water infrastructure and will be part of the new water market plan for the city thank you very much okay okay, hi everybody my name is Joe Brennan and the project we worked on at our time at the GSAP incubator is called Reuterminal so what is Reuterminal? Reuterminal is a digital finance tool that streamlines the real-estate acquisitions process by automating and optimizing traditional real-estate modeling so we'll get into that a little bit more in a bit but it's an entirely web-based tool which means that anyone with Chrome can largely not use it it's a very we try to make a very streamlined and clean interface which is a very far cry from the messy grasshopper definition that spawned this model so we spent a lot of time sort of refining this really robust, crazy grasshopper optimization model down to something that was clean easy to use so it originated actually as a service that we would use for our architecture firm to one, try to help generate revenue but also try to use it almost as a business development tool, get these booklets out there, show people that we could understand real-estate, we understood zoning and we understood financial modeling it was actually conceptualized by Mark Madera who's one of my partners on this project and also a GSAP alum and school of real-estate alum and basically what we wanted to do was we realized that additional real-estate modeling was great for innovation and a lot of the tools that they were using could easily be automated and optimized using grasshopper and Galapagos and those sorts of tools, so we could recommend the highest and best use for a site instantly based on all the zoning data, all the financial data and all the market data so we made the leap to decide to turn it into a product, we got to the finals of the Columbia convention community startup competition and a lot of our clients that we were talking to basically were telling us this booklet is great but I still, I want to be able to use this tool myself, I don't want to have to call you and order the report and then wait for a week, we're on the report and print the booklet, I want to be able to just test it out and within five minutes make a decision about whether or not it's worth pursuing so we said okay, we're going to build you guys a tool, so based on a lot of initial user, not even user but potential client or potential user input, we streamlined the interface, we gave them the flexibility to input their own values so it's not a prescriptive tool, we do recommend a solution but we also give them the ability to override the data and determine their own solutions using our optimization engine and so we also wanted to make an Excel user friendly interface, so this looks a little bit like Excel and you can navigate through it like you would Excel but there's a really powerful optimization engine and some visualization tools on the back end that make it a little bit more robust and help you get the solution much faster so what I really wanted to talk about was sort of how we progressed into started at the Columbia incubator, so at the top are some mockups for some of the visualization changes we want to make the interface but also some additional features that we want to add but one of the things that I think we learned since we launched our alpha program in January is that a lot of the things that we felt people wanted, they actually don't want so getting these things out into the hands of the users early I would have wished actually I would have done it sooner but so in addition to that so we expanded from three properties to three as a code which is 6500 properties in our database and building out that database is a pretty tough task for us we're also accepted to AlmaWorks which is an accelerator by Columbia it was an eight week intensive workshops once a week where we met with people and gave us a lot of feedback on our pitch and our business model and that sort of thing and then we also launched the alpha program as I mentioned in January so right now what we're currently doing is we're refining features based on user feedback and one of the major things we're getting is that our address search is very clunky and doesn't work that well so that's like a major thing that we're working on rather than building out some of these additional features that we thought people wanted you realize we need a better address and also what we're doing is strategically expanding our property database so right now there are some manual aspects to that so we want to take neighborhoods and zip codes that people are actually looking for for real estate rather than just randomly picking up so that's where we're at and I just wanted to say thank you everyone at the incubator it was a great few months and I think we learned a lot and made a lot of progress so thank you we're practicing called mutual projects and today I'm presenting a project that we worked on with a few collaborators through the GSAP incubator called mutualisms building cooperative practices in design so mutualisms is a platform for events workshops and media exploring the possibilities of cooperative models of ownership decision making and income sharing for design practices so it starts from the idea that collaboration is increasingly important in the design fields but that the organizational structures and business models haven't caught up to this evolution in the way that design practice operates and they remain hierarchical rather than finding ways to properly value and support new forms of collaboration and so it's not a survey of cooperative practices but a form of collaborative production knowledge and tools for rebuilding design practice and so we're looking at ways that small design practices in the States and New York mostly could be reorganized as worker owned businesses which are more democratically governed and equally income sharing practices so it started actually as an attempt to cooperatize our three practices Melissa, Nile and Marlisa and I and through that we found that instead of really focusing on trying to make this work as a group of four we decided to shift our focus to try to bring in other people into this project and so that's where mutualism as a project came out of this attempt to first kind of look within this group for how to prioritize our practices and then instead of pursuing that we decided to create this platform where we could engage other people to discuss things and so we've been working on three series within this project Mom's Call Mutual Friends which is a series of meetups people who are working in the city at a particular point in their practice that is more or less similar to us where they have some projects but they are looking for ways to grow their practice and we want to meet up and talk about working progress and then there is a series of workshops where a particular question about design practice and how it could be transformed into a cooperative practice that we explored and then there is a series of video skillshare videos that we're working on now the first piece that we launched was Mutual Friends so the idea of this is that and the graphic is not a closed event but it's a worded mouth event where whatever happens stays in the room we wanted to be something where there's a lot of trust that's being built where people are comfortable sharing works that is not fully worked out so we've done three of these this spring we felt they were really successful, got a lot of feedback on it and we're now actually starting to organize the next round of these and part of the idea of the project is really that it is a relatively open platform so if any of you want to help co-organize the next round of these with us please let me know because part of the idea is that it does continue to grow it's something where even if it starts with us it continues to sort of radiate out so we're interested in working with other people on the next round of these events and the workshops and so thank you to David and Augustine for the opportunity to do this and it really did grow out of the last round of the incubator, Niall Greenberg and Marlys and I were both in the previous session of the incubator and that's sort of where this idea of re-organizing our practices cooperatively came out of that so yeah, thanks very much tasting tasting that's why I'm wondering how to this is Hailey Ramos we are SOE studio the first practice in New York City dedicated to developing and implementing digital tech for advancing historic preservation our focus during our time at the incubator has been to push the boundaries of the field and to establish our professional practice as an experimental studio today we'll be presenting some of the projects we have completed and are currently working on what you're seeing now are some recent 3D models from photogrammetric scans of Aztec and Mayan artifacts which are currently located at the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City photogrammetry scans like this are just one example of the type of digital documentation work we do that will show our app in action and it basically overlays paintings that were once situated on the monument's walls and were removed and now exist on canvas at various locations around the world and the app will be available for download in May and it can be used on site by visitors and if you're interested in learning more check out our website at www.soe.studio we're implementing a similar approach for current AR project which will be available this fall at the Old Essex County Jail in the City of Newark which is now a ruin our practice has grown from completing small scale projects focused on individual objects and building elements to large scale projects that capture entire sites we use latest scanning technologies to create as built drawings as well as facilitate adaptive reuse of historic structures over the past two months we've been using these digital tools to document a historical landmark in New Canaan, Connecticut from the scanning data we are able to create a 3D model and as built drawings of the site that we will use in a later phase of the project to design an upcoming exhibition that will be open this fall in addition to scaling up our studio's work has evolved beyond just the digital and we've just begun the research phase of a design build project restoring a historic home in New Mexico using tax credits built in 1927 the home is in the southwest vernacular style and is located in the Silver Hill Landmark District in Albuquerque we're using the digitization methods to assist with our efforts of preserving the structure these are just some historic photographs from different contributing buildings to the district and these images will help inform our design and preservation decisions for our own project we recognize that preservation is a practice to greatly benefit from emerging tax and we have continued to work with historic preservation program here teaching workshops and giving lectures on scanning methods additionally while at the incubator we have formed interdisciplinary collaborations with alumni and current members we work with Bica Rebek and her class in the CCCP program presenting our work on digital and physical replication we also just finished an exciting project with fellow members Barzina Katelyn at the United Nations a continuation of the project modern management methods this is a photogrammetry model of the United Nations Security Council conducted during our field work this space was a vital location for their x-ray scans and we used 750 high resolution photos were able to begin to process and produce this 3D model that you're looking at now we look forward to continuing our collaboration with GSAP faculty, alumni and we look forward to sharing some more of our exciting work soon and we'd like to thank Augustine and the space as well we're the last ones I'm Greta Hyde-Hanson and I'm Sean Wolfgang-Rofi and we are Wolfgang & Hyde I'm going to briefly summarize our work with this prior to GSAP like many firms we started as a couple and became business partners our first collaboration was turning our one bedroom apartment into a two bedroom for guests with a top hinge trundle bin in 2015 I founded an instruction company which specialized in art and fashion renovations and buildouts and Greta would often consult on these projects like this apartment renovation we did for an art collector who wanted a lot more light fabricating, constructing and installing large-scale art installations for Red Bull Studios and Chelsea like this installation for Nick Levo, Ryder Rips and we also worked with a number of artists like Fong Boy and we also did their expansive gift shop and then their offices in Greenpoint one of my favorite projects in our early collaboration was this limited edition Red Bull Cocktail and a box that's coming up there it is the solid walnut box was designed to have specialty cocktails by their famous mixologists as a promotional tool in 2016 we started working our collaborators with the artist team in a just below and we started designing, building and installing their crazy exhibitions all over the country and in Europe Istanbul and our most extensive one was this 6,000 square foot bunker in Cleveland, Ohio where we created a natural history museum that we fabricated from pretty much scratch designing like these wood ceiling elements and then our last project prior to GSEP was this submission for the Van Allen competition the holiday design and this is a restaurant and this is another collaboration with the artist Freeman and Lau which we completed last year and since then we've been really busy many of you have actually noticed probably working away and spreading out a lot and growing in numbers and we've really used the space like seriously used it we're grateful to everybody in it and behind it and so the following projects we've started them all and some of them completed in the last 7 months which have gone very quickly this is a retracal in the East Village which we finished last fall and it's on 5th and A and they have very greasy pizza which is called Rhode Island Style a lot of our work have been collaborative this is a team effort with an architecture firm called AB Architectin and it's a concept for a nature resort, hotel and spa in upstate New York in a location not disclosed we also put the tree out we also collaborated with a designer named Celia Emery on this renovation for the Harlem School of the Arts which is a non-profit art center and we worked also on this competition for Monument Avenue Enrichment to rethink the statuary along Monument Avenue we proposed to actually lower the statues into pools that are sized by the circumference of the pedestals so visitors hear down at them instead of looking up at them and let time and water do what it will this is a restaurant ceiling installation in Nashville called Pemrose Park and that name comes from a Shel Silver Scene poem that had an octopus next to it so we're hoping that this ceiling arose in tentacles and lastly this is a shoe and clothing store called Wish in Atlanta and the concept behind this was to bring the form of docked work down to the floor and that's the basement