 All right, welcome, welcome to Columbia University and congratulations on your admission. Yay. Some of you are here and some of you are online because some of you are all over the world so those are, where's the camera? I don't know, where to look over there. So there's many people that are online that are in other parts of the world, other time zones and so welcome to those of you that are online as well. Super exciting to see you all. We're gonna have a, it's gonna be a fast paced day, you're gonna be exhausted by 5 p.m. But you're gonna see a lot. So the idea today is, first of all, for you to meet each other. So those of you that are here, that's easy. So definitely turn around, meet and greet to meet the faculty and I'm joined by Professor Andrew Dulkard and Professor Erika Avrami. You're gonna meet a lot of the other faculty today at lunch at 12.30 to meet our wonderful staff, Sarah Grace Godwin, who you've been in touch with before and some of the current students. And so as you can see, you are from all over the planet. We're a very international program. We educate you to be working in preservation wherever you are, making an impact locally but also to think about your impact internationally, to think about the global reach of your ideas and your practices. So you're gonna see in the program, in the curriculum, this balance between your local condition and then the international condition as well. And part of the richness of our program is where we all come from and our backgrounds and what we bring to the program. So we're a very open program, very welcoming program. We're a small program within a large research university. So we all know each other's names. We know maybe too much about each other but the faculty is always around, always available and you get that to work with people very closely. So the next couple of years, the students that are here can tell you a little bit about that, their experience about what it is, the life in the program. So part, can we switch over to the presentation? So I think that, I'm trying to, I put myself in your shoes because I think about what you're going through right now and the admission and I'm thinking about the emotions that you must be kind of going through in terms of, oh, the admission process, what do I do? And so I just, I think it's sometimes very important to just, to listen to your emotions, to listen to your gut and think about when you got the admissions call, were you happy? Obviously everybody's anxious, either way. That's, you're here for a check with your emotions. You're here to kind of understand the place. Is this the right place for you to make a decision? So listen to your gut. That would be my only advice today. Is this the right place for you? It's a wonderful place. If your gut tells you it's a wonderful place, we think it's a wonderful place. We've been here for a while. I think the students here are also happy and we are within a large research university, beautiful campus designed by McKim Middenwhite. This is where we are, but it's something that, like everything you need to know your way around. So today you're gonna move around some of the different buildings. You're already in a, the school is spread out through a number of different buildings. We're spread out in Bayer weather, which we're now in over here. This is the key map. This is low library where you just were, okay? Bayer weather, and this is where the Start Preservation Studio is in. So you'll be very familiar with Bayer weather. Avery, where the library is and a lot of the classrooms are. Beale Hall, which is also where some of the classrooms are and some of the faculty offices are as well. And then Shermore Morn, which is where the Preservation Technology Lab is. So you're gonna be moving around those buildings. So it's a little mini campus within the large campus. Think of it that way, okay? Now, our faculty have introduced Andrew and Erica, but I'll let them just say a couple words about their research. Andrew, this is our full-time faculty. You don't, I don't wanna make you get up and, but. So. If you wanna come over. Yeah. I'm a graduate of the Start Preservation. As you can tell from my books, my passion is the architecture development in New York. I've heard a lot about that, but over the years, I've gotten really interested in the vernaculars of architecture, the everyday architecture of the place, the kinds of buildings that we might be working on, give our communities their character. So I got really interested, for example, in tenements. And I'm now running a farm involved in buildings. So, and, so I added that to my interest in preservation. And I've also got really interested in how buildings tell stories about who you are, about culture and community. And I'm a co-founder and co-director of the NYC LGBT Start Science Project, which focus to bring a history of LGBT life in New York. As reflected in buildings, as we have the family's website, we're interested to see if we should look, if we can get it. We'll be very proud of it. So, you know, so I can recall that here. I teach a mayor of architecture, I'm a teacher in the studio, and I'm required and then I teach a mechanism through the seminar on maybe physical history, physical, the semester. And of course, in the class, the semester was for the architecture development of New York. So, I'm happy to talk to anybody about any of these and I'll talk a little bit more about the studio with a little bit of water. So, I'll turn it over to Eric. So, welcome everyone, I'm very excited to be here. Like Andrew, I'm also a graduate of the program. And I started out in architecture, moved to preservation and then on to work outside of academia for longer than most of you would probably be lying. So, I work at the conservation institute as well as the environment spot and then transitioned into a full-time position here at Columbia and hard because I was very interested in personal research related to conservation policy. Much of my work, the studios that I teach in the classes as well that I teach engage with questions of publics as well as more of the geographies and how does it work to identify heritage, understanding its meaning and its significance, seeing how people interact with heritage across landscape, urban environments, as well as within individual buildings, really invoices our decision-making processes about how to preserve these places or who engages, who benefits, maybe privileged or not privileged. So, much of my work really moves in that direction and consequently, it also engages this issue because of that, again, how we build the environment, which is like, just in the middle of a half-gassing, we represent a lot of global greenhouse gases or tribute to the people in the environment. So, looking at how that to temporary situation influences our decision-making about how to manage those. And please come talk to me about your news. Okay, so we're gonna, I'm just online. People can't hear very well, so when we do the studios, I'm gonna ask you to come up, because apparently this is the only thing that the microphone here is the one that works. So, I'm Jorge El Terpilos, also a member of the faculty, and I came to preservation, you know, I was trained as an architect. I studied urban design, I studied history and my doctoral work, and all along, I was wondering, I'm looking for something that I'm not finding in all of these different studies that I'm doing, and it was my love of old buildings and my love of existing places. And so, in fact, I realized that all of these, all that previous education led me in the direction of historic preservation. But it's not an obvious thing, because actually, when I was going through architecture school, nobody mentioned the word preservation. So, I had to, in a way, discover it on my own, and I discovered it through my love of architecture and my love of history and my love of art. So, I practice at the intersection of all of these things in what I call experimental preservation as a way to think about the kinds of things that we preserve very much related to the work that Andrew and Erica do, thinking about what is it that we should be preserving and how do we go about preserving it? What does it look like? So, how do we bring the technology, the science, the way we act with our hands in historic buildings? What is it gonna look like? And what are the relevant things about buildings? So, some of my work has to do, for example, with the dust on buildings, the smell of buildings, and the kinds of materials that we sometimes look over, as well as the ones that we pay a lot of attention to. And so, I'm very interested in the ideas that our work in preservation generates and how those ideas are also generative of different kinds of methods and approaches. So, very interested in creativity. And I think, in talking to you, all of you have very creative pasts and we wanna see you put them to work as we work with existing buildings. And as Erica and Andrew and their work have done, change the world through your engagement with existing buildings. Because ultimately, you get a different perspective on the world when you engage with existing buildings because you decide what's gonna be around when people walk the streets. We have a great deal of faculty in the program that are adjunct faculty as well. Andrew, Erica, and I are the full-time faculty. The folks on the screen are adjunct faculty. Now, what does that mean? These are people who have practices. They have some of the leading practices in preservation in New York, New York being the largest preservation job market in the United States. So, good opportunity for you to get a job, which I always say, your job search begins today. Okay, so, a lot of these folks lead these offices are gonna also help you find a job when you get out. They are architects. They are planners. They are conservators, chemists. They are historians. They are folks that are working with their designers, their artists. They are, yeah, I think I kind of covered the whole, the whole bit in computer, yeah, computer experts in artificial intelligence, machine learning, a real mix of faculty. So, you're gonna meet them all in your classes. You're gonna also meet our staff. I think you're gonna, you've met Sarah Grace. You'll meet Lee around today. And Mika, who is the lab manager, you're gonna meet her in a little bit when we go on the lab tour. So, let's just say a little bit about the curriculum. So, a couple of words that, you know, just to keep in mind. Again, I would say, I mean, you're thinking about this program and you're trying to come out with an impression of what this program is. I would, I think the word creativity comes to mind for me. That the way that we approach things is not path determined. We don't teach you here one way of doing preservation, but we teach you to think for yourself and make lateral connections. To think creatively and to think also critically. So, don't take things for granted, yeah? And we do that through the curriculum that we abbreviate into the slab curriculum. So, that means preservation has a lot of different facets. Okay, it's like an object. You never see the backside. Can you see the back of my head? No, right? It's still in my head. So, you'd have to look around my head to be able to see the front and the back. So, preservation has front, backsides, top, bottom. So, we cover society, social dimensions of preservation. Who are we doing this work for? Who benefits from it? Laboratory, science, technology. This is the work of bringing the building into the lab, understanding the science, understanding the materials, and then going out to the building. Archives and history, these are objects that come from the past. So, we need to know what that past was about and that past is distributed among different places, archives, books, so we need to know that history. So, the program deals with that. And the buildings themselves, the buildings as technological artifacts, as aesthetic artifacts, as cultural artifacts. So, understanding that. So, the program, all of the different parts of the program are gonna cover all those different aspects. The studio is where it all happens. It all comes together in studio. We're a studio-centric program. So, in studio, you're all going to be working in teams. You're all gonna be working on projects. You're all going to be trying to bring all these different parts of the curriculum together in your work. And you're all gonna bring different kinds of ideas to it. It's very different. We celebrate your backgrounds. I remember when I went to architecture school, the teachers told me, okay, your first year we're gonna deprogram everything. They use that word, deprogram, everything you've ever learned about what is architecture and we're gonna reprogram you. And I think back, like, wow, how horrible, you know. This is not the way that we approach education. We are actually really interested in your programming and what you bring to it and how we can build on that. So, the classes that you're gonna be taking are gonna feed into that studio work. The first year is the first semester this is your schedule for next fall. The first semester is all required classes. And as you move through the program you get to no required classes. So, you move from a foundation that is common to everyone and then as you move through the program you have more and more electives. The second semester you have electives, the third semester you have a ton of electives and then the last semester, actually I take that back, there is one required course the last semester which is your thesis, which everyone does. It's your individual, this is where your programming comes into place. This is where what you really want to do comes into place. So, let's talk a little bit about Studio One. I'm gonna invite Andrew to come up please. Studio One is sort of the center of the first semester and Studio One is geared to teaching everybody about how to understand buildings, what you can learn from buildings, how you understand buildings and how you interpret buildings. So, we do a whole series of exercises. We use New York City as our workshop. Most years we have chosen an individual neighborhood in which to work. And as it says over here this year is we chose Stuyvesant Square to work in but this year we experimented and we did a building type. We did progressive housing this year and that worked really well. We're not sure what we're gonna do next year but we do a whole series of exercises in Studio One that teach you how to look at build, what you can learn from looking at buildings, how to photograph buildings, how to research buildings. And how do I... We do a really great project at Woodlone Cemetery. Woodlone Cemetery is a really beautiful landscape cemetery in the Bronx and it has the largest number of mausoleums of any cemetery in the world. And everybody gets a mausoleum and everybody gets the key to the mausoleum and everybody does a measure drawing of the mausoleum. I know it sounds maybe a little creepy but it's incredibly fun. You can talk to the students about doing this. It's really beautiful and we go up there in the fall when the landscape looks great. And then we learn how to do biographical research on the individuals who are involved with the cemetery and we also have the Woodlone Records here in Avery Library and you get to use the Woodlone Records and if you're lucky, compare the drawings you've done with the drawings that the architect did. So that's a key part. And then the culmination of the studio. We do a lot of archival work. We go to Avery Library. I'm a big believer in using Avery Library. So here we are learning how to use maps and atlases and real estate prospectuses and all kinds of non-traditional research tools. And it all culminates with everybody doing a project where they have to present on the significance of a building. So you really have to take everything that you've learned in the course of the semester and synthesize it into an argument for why a building is significant. It's something that preservationists have to do is they have to get up in front of an audience and persuade in many cases and talk about the significance of building. So we do a lot of training in how to speak, how to get up and speak in front of the class from the very beginning of the semester, you'll be giving lots of presentations and we invite lots of people from the community to come and hear what you all have to say at the end and then the papers that come from that we archive and they get used by people all the time that are researching neighborhoods or researching buildings use our studio work. So it's an exciting centerpiece of the semester which I teach depending on the size of the class with either one or two other faculty members. Coordinate Studio Two, it's in your second semester in the spring. As Andrew mentioned, Studio One really uses the building as the in-road into understanding heritage. In Studio Two, we're looking through the lens of community. And in that sense, it's a very public facing studio in that you will begin to engage with community members and you will produce a report that the community can use that goes up on the school website. And you're really applying many of those skills that you learned in the first semester, learning new ones like the application of GIS, how to do community-based interviews, things like that to understand again these larger built environments as well as the publics who inhabited them over time and today. And using that information, students then develop proposals. We call it sort of instrumentalizing heritage so that the end goal is not simply to say, okay, we found that historic building that still survives in the landscape and so therefore we must landmark it or designate it so it always survives. We recognize that so much heritage doesn't survive. Many publics have been disadvantaged over time. And so we look to instrumentalize heritage, meaning using the methods and skills and approaches of the preservation enterprise to bring some of these stories to light through the landscape, even if the original buildings or the original materials don't necessarily survive. And so students produce proposals that really start to move in exciting areas dealing with restorative justice, social inclusion, environmental sustainability, et cetera. So I'll pass it on to our head. Don't go too far. You're gonna come back for Studio Three. So as you go through the sequence, you're, again, each of these studios, you're taking classes that are going to inform them. You're taking history classes. You're taking building technology classes. You're taking conservation classes. You're taking policy classes. You're taking theory classes. Okay, so all of this is building into the studio where you're actually putting these things to practice. When you go from your first to your second year, you have a summer in between. We're gonna get to what happens in that summer in a second. But when you come back in the fall in your second year, you're doing your thesis. You start doing your thesis research. And the fall there is a wonderful thesis class that prepares you to do research. And then you do your, that you really spend that second year writing your thesis. And you have in the fall two studios, one which I co-teach with architecture and one which Erica co-teaches with planning. And so the one with architecture looks at different questions of adapting the existing built environment creatively. We do an experimental preservation plan. There's people that are more design oriented, but also people that come from different backgrounds that are part of the studio. And we look at adapting, we look at adaptation, we look at what does it mean to change things? If you remove a piece of material that was very important, well then you can't tell that story anymore that was associated with that material. So that's the, we talk about these questions. So this is a travel studio, it's cross-cultural. When the pandemic happened, we stayed local and we did this project at the Jay Heritage Center. John Jay, one of the founding fathers of the United States was a student at Columbia. He was first Supreme Court Justice and lived right down the street in a town called Rye. So this was his estate. And one of the things about him is that he was a major abolitionist. He wanted to write into the US Constitution the abolition of slavery and he couldn't do it. And so he did a gradual abolition was what he put into writing. He was also governor of New York State. He was much criticized for that and also because he owns slaves himself. So we dealt with how does the material traces of that place help us or inhibit these stories? We use a lot of advanced technology in these studios, 3D scanning, different ways of 3D scan with LiDAR scanners or with photogrammetry. Here we're flying a drone. That was minutes before we flew the drone into the tree and lost the drone. Material studies, so paint samples, looking at the traces of these materials in the studio. We get very deep into the materiality of things. And how do we deal with that materiality? What are the design choices that we're gonna have to make once we study these materials and understand their backgrounds? Here, for example, we were able to find some wood underground and we were able to figure out there was a building there. We found some photographs. What did that building look like? How could we reconstruct it? It turned out to be a bowling alley. One of the first bowling alleys in America. Should we restore it? What color was it? All of these kinds of things are questions that we ask. We also work with 3D printing. So once we do these cans, can we use advanced printing technologies to restore these buildings, to use these, you know, create these elements? And then we think about the larger aesthetics. This is the United Nations headquarters in Geneva. We did a here, this was a human rights addition to that center. We've been working in embassies, highly politically charged buildings. Embassies of the United States that are sold. They're being turned into different programs. We worked on the U.S. Embassy in London. Now it's turned into a hotel, but we had some thoughts about turning it into a library. We worked in Mexico City. So you'll be traveling to all of these places. This was last summer, last fall, excuse me, we've been working in Venice on adaptations to climate change. This is an open-air theater that is now flooding constantly and so students design different ways to adapt this building so it can continue to be used in light of climate change. We use these trips as an opportunity to meet different people, to understand how preservation is done in other places. So we meet with a lot of the people that are in charge of preservation, whether it's in Italy, here we were in Venice or in Mexico, we visit sites, we talk to the preservationists that are in charge of these places to understand how preservation practice is done at these places. So that's one half of Studio 3. The other half deals with planning, policy, and Erica will introduce you. I'll do this briefly because Jorge really covered some of the ethos of Studio 3. But in the one that I co-teach, it's urban planning students and preservation students. As preservationists dealing with the built environment and dealing with publics, you are in the midst of a lot of other societal agenda items, whether it's economic development, environmental sustainability, community development, land use, et cetera. And so what we tried to do in the context of these studios is allow you as students to really grapple with some of those other agenda items and to do so in partnership with urban planning students as well as with students on the ground. This was a studio we did in Freetown in Sierra Leone where we work with students from Fort Bay College, coming from geography and a number of other disciplines as well. These studios have been organized in collaboration with World Monuments Fund. So students are able to capitalize on work that has already been started within a particular locale. And World Monuments Fund has generously published the student reports, meaning that it's a real publication. You can put it under publication, ISBN number, registered with Library of Congress, the whole thing so that when you graduate, you have that on your resume. And it's important that we do this because a lot of the work in this studio, as well as in studio two, is built on the premise of reciprocity. We as preservationists are always looking for information, we're engaging with communities, but that process can be extractive sometimes. And so in order to develop collaborative relationships that really enable communities to be empowered around their heritage, we try to develop as many reciprocal actions that we can. And the idea of the report really underscores that, that we are giving back, that there's something that lasts well beyond the time we spend in the field. And we worked in Montgomery, Alabama, we've gone to twice. We worked in Port-au-Prince, Haiti twice, Ethiopia, Myanmar, and I mentioned Sierra Leone. So I think that was it. This was Montgomery last, this past fall where our studio actually focused on the use of heritage sites in filming and TV and how integrated that is with community development and economic development in places all around the world. So as you can see the program is focused on places, buildings that people use that people live in, that people have, you know, they love, they hate, they, that's sake, they engage with each other. We really believe that these heritage sites are articulating a social world and we have a responsibility to that social world. I think this is quite unique in our program. We really are in the trenches, so to speak, in that way we are related to other, you know, as Erica said, a whole world that's out there that manages the existing built environment, planning, architecture, the arts, et cetera. So you will be engaging with all of that. As you do, you're gonna be developing your own ideas about what preservation is, and that's your thesis. Now your thesis is a contribution to our discipline's knowledge. So high stakes, because in one year you're gonna have to get a sense of what is preservation and what's missing, what can you contribute? You're gonna be working closely with us to think about that and what can your contribution be? So there's a long process in that sequence where we really help you along. We pair you up with a thesis advisor and we help you during that, set up what a research is, set up what your research question is and then go ahead and do it. Some of you are going to be doing more preservation technology and conservation oriented theses, so you have the laboratory, this is Michelle who's doing, I think that's Michelle. Is that Michelle? Okay, she's doing inhibitors of salt migrations through stone, and so she's testing those. This was Supreme from last year who was working on projections inside historic places on how to tell the story of places through projections. As you finish your thesis, we want you to make a change in the world. We want you to take these ideas and put them out there and there are different ways in which we support that and one of those is the Onara Prize, which is the largest money prize in the school. It's $25,000, it's like having a rich relative that's gonna help you out when you get out of school and it's gonna allow you to go make those ideas happen in the world. So this is for the next six months and it's a competitive prize, but it's a graduation prize and there's other prizes, Kenny travel prizes, writing prizes that encourage that transition. Couple words about research facilities. You're gonna see these in a second, but just to flag them for you, the Preservation Technology Lab, which is a wonderful place where you're gonna be taking a lot of classes. It's both a facility for teaching and learning. It's also a materials research library so it has an incredible materials library of fragments of historic buildings and it is a place of research as well. Research into the past. What do we mean by the past and the Preservation Technology Lab? Well, it's this idea of preservation, experimental preservation, applied to art and architecture and science and technology, bringing the material past together. That's what you're gonna be doing. So it's a very creative place. It's a very exploratory place. We ask you to wear protective equipment so that you don't spill anything in your eyes. We ask you to make mistakes, go out and play with stuff, make it your place of research and you get your space to do the work over there. So it's a wonderful place for you to do work. Avery Library as well. It's gonna be one of those places you're gonna be in and out of all the time. This is one of the greatest architectural libraries in the world. It's not just books. It's archival collections of the drawings, models, correspondence, photographs of some of the major buildings in the world. So you're gonna be working in here in classes and so on and also you're gonna be in the context of a group of people who are ahead of you in their work. So you have PhD students that are going to be in contact with you. There are post-doctoral fellows at Columbia across the street in the Italian Academy that you're gonna be going to lectures and understanding their work. So Columbia is really unique in the academic community that we foster over here. And there's opportunities for you to engage as a student in them but there's also opportunities for you to engage in teaching and research and different kinds of work around the program. So some of this will help support you financially as well. So being a teaching assistant in a course or a research assistant in different projects that the faculty has or different hourly paid positions. You might, for example, be a technician in the laboratory. There are opportunities, some of these teaching assistants and research assistantships deal with scholarship. So Mimi, for example, who is working in Future Anterior, it's our scholarly journal and you get to work with authors, you get to do the research, you get to edit people's work and you get to network through Future Anterior which is one of those teachings. Some research assistantships, Erica is leading a university-wide research initiative dealing with adapting the existing built environment. This involves number of faculty across the university including the climate school and other schools and there are research assistants that work with Erica in that initiative. So you're gonna be part of a lot of different kinds of work and research that are happening that are gonna link you up to a new kind of reality. And so this is part of this academic community that involves more than classroom, more than the curriculum. It involves being with each other, hanging out with one another, having a cup of coffee, talking to one another and we create opportunities for that, bringing in some of the leading thinkers in preservation, some of the leading practitioners in preservation to the school through our lecture series. And we go out to dinner with these people. So you sign up for dinner and you get to talk to them, you get to engage with them, you get to have a moment and really open up your mind but also create a network. Part of you becoming a preservationist is also starting to connect up with other preservationists that have done what you're interested in. We have a number of lectures and also international symposia where we bring in some of these great thinkers to Columbia on different topics. Every year the topic changes and really a big part of the program is showing up. I'd say like 90% of your success in preservation is just going to the event. Maybe that's too high, but let's say a high percentage. This is totally unscientific percentage that I'm giving you over here. But being part of the community, showing up for these things. Some of these colloquia deal with different things. Last year we dealt with preservation in China. We had some of the leading Chinese preservationists and architects giving talks. And between the first and the summer, the first and the second year I want to highlight this because this is a very strange thing. During the summer we actually pay you to study in summer workshops. You sign up and you get paid, get supported. This summer we're taking students to Cuba to study preservation in Cuba. We do also local workshops where we're studying the way that buildings decay and how that tells us things about the environment. So these workshops are a very important part of your academic studies. Here's one where we've been studying the way that dust deposits and the rate of decay on Avery Library. And you do wind simulations and rain simulations and then deal with these three-dimensional scans and annotating them, telling the story, each one of those numbers is a story, it's information about Avery Library, the building that you walked into this morning. We have a number of field trips to local factories, places where things are made. So here's the hot dip galvanizing plant. You can see a piece of steel being galvanized into this bath, different trips where we are looking at the history of places, Brooklyn Heights. Archives, we visit not only the archives here but also New York Historical Society, go to the Met, the wonderful thing about New York is that we have these incredible riches and we use New York as a laboratory. So I'd say going back to your gut check, New York, how do you feel about New York? That's gonna be a big determining factor for you. And New York is a very exciting place, there's always something happening. So you're gonna be in the context of an amazing vibrant culture. And we're gonna go from New York around to different field trips. This is the Glass House, which is in Connecticut. There's a whole kind of network. This is a really interesting, there's little secrets that you're gonna find out. These are the pillars, these are different stones that were tested for Grand Central Station in New York. Before it was built, they put up all of these stones to say, which stone are we gonna pick because it's gonna decay, which one's gonna decay faster? And they left them out there. So they're in Ben Portland Park and this is Professor Piper who you'll meet in a second taking students there. Very close to, we are very close to the Association for Preservation Technology. A lot of its leadership, CEO, executives, our members of our program. Some of the students back there, won the Association of Preservation Technology prize. There's a bridge building exercise. We've won it twice in a row. So the prize is in the lab. So we're very proud of that. And then we have different trips, different ways of, this is our end of the year party where one of our alumni has been spending his life preserving this amazing historic fire boat and he sometimes takes us out on this fire boat and then takes us in front of the Statue of Liberty and fires off the cannons and we all get wet. So another important part is career support. We want you to get a job. We want you to make lots of money. So we help you along the way to get that job through first career services but then mentoring programs. So one of the very important things about the program is we have a very large alumni network, the largest in the country. And we pair you up with those alumni from the beginning so that you can actually, they're gonna be your helpers, trying to sort out the profession. Maybe I'll pause there for, it's 11 o'clock. You're gonna go see the Preservation Technology Lab. I'm gonna go teach class. I'll see you at 12.30. We're gonna have a big lunch together. I'll be a little bit late because I teach class till one but either Dean's gonna speak around 1.30. We're gonna have lunch just down those stairs and then we're gonna come in here. We're gonna grab lunch down there and then we're gonna come in here. You're gonna meet the faculty here. So all the Preservation folks will eat here. But this was a lot of information to digest. You probably only had one or two cups of coffee. So any questions so far? How, and also for the people online, feel free to turn on your screens, ask any question. No questions? Do you guys wanna say something? Oh, you have a question, please, yes. No. Can be either. Can be whatever you do. Hopefully it's a slab thesis where it has all the different aspects of preservation but your focus will be probably in one or two. You can take electives anywhere but we encourage you to take electives in the preservation program but you can take electives wherever you want. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, the question is, are there any departments outside of GSAP that we commonly work with? So yes, we work with archeology a lot. We share some resources with the archeology lab, with history, of course, art history, architecture history, which are in the arts and sciences with the climate school. We've done a lot of collaboration. I mentioned Erica's collaboration with LeMonde Daherty, Earth Sciences, Earth Observatory. Yeah, so we absolutely. And of course, you can follow your own interests in all of this. Questions online with those folks that are far away? I couldn't hear that. Careers and alumni. So alumni work in a lot of different areas of historic preservation. So you're gonna see alumni working, kind of big buckets would be private practice, nonprofits, and governments, okay? So government bureaucracies, you're gonna find people in planning offices and state historic preservation offices and national park service. They're working as historians, as conservators, as planners, et cetera. You're gonna find people in the nonprofit sector. We mentioned the World Monuments Fund. There's a lot of preservation nonprofits. People are executive directors. They're preservation officers at the National Trust of Historic Preservation. Or there's a lot of nonprofits also at the local level. There's international nonprofits, ecamos through the United Nations and so on. And then there's private practice. And in private practice, you're gonna find architects, engineers, specialized in preservation. You're gonna find planners that have planning offices, specialized in urban planning and so on. And you're gonna find also people that are doing preservation consulting. So how to do, for example, a nomination, how to help a foundation get something nominated and on the national record and so on. And each of us on the faculty approach this through different ways. And then you're gonna find, I myself work at the intersection of architecture and art. Andrews does preservation consulting. And Erica's worked in the nonprofit sector for many years. So these are the kind of jobs that you will, more, you know, more or less, right? It's already a very wide set, but it's always focused on the existing built environment and the society around it that needs and wants that heritage. Yes, some people do, it's a question is do people work jobs when they are in the program? Yes, depending on how much you work, we have a part-time option. So there are some people that, for example, are architects or engineers in New York City and some of them will do the program part-time. But many people have 10 hours a week work, for example. That's, we try to say that's probably a max that you wanna be spending in. So for example, some of you are research assistants or TAs and those are max of 10 hours. I think the max is 20 hours. You can do two 10 hours. Some people have jobs outside of Columbia. Some people have jobs outside of Columbia, yes. And there's internships that we direct you towards. There are a lot of these different organizations. They can be more hands-on. They can be more on the planning section. They can be, you know, that depends. Ellie, could I ask you a favor? Would you mind going up to class and telling them that I'll be a little bit late? Oh, you did, you texted. Oh, I forget about the fact that you can do that. Okay, yeah. So internships, we encourage you to work internships to over summer. We encourage you to work paid internships. We don't like you to work for free, but you know, it's obviously your choice. You'll be in close contact with Preservation Alumni. We're very fortunate. It's a really fun group. You'll be working with them, there's a pub crawl, there's all sorts of events, you know, that they sponsor to bring you into the preservation profession. So you'll have a great access. And I always say it's a tremendous privilege to have this access. And so don't take it for granted. Take advantage of it. Go to the events, meet the people, be introduced, go find those jobs, but don't take it for granted. I think I've been, I don't know, this thing, what happened to the, oh, my screen just shut down. I don't know, was that you? Okay, the mentorship program, again, we're gonna pair you with some of the alumni. And it's very, you know, informal, speed networking events of various kinds, going to talks, going to different openings, exhibitions, so you're gonna have a great, these are some of the places where people, you might find people working. Again, this is just what we could fit on the page, you know, in terms of logos, but you're gonna find a lot, will help you be in touch with the people. And your thesis is gonna be a way to get into contact with people out in the field. Yeah, places where people work. There's a lot of people that work in New York City, obviously it's a place to start. Or so said Frank Sinatra, no? Any other questions? Was that not Frank Sinatra, Andrew? Andrew is the world's expert on all Broadway plays, by the way. So if you need to know anything about it, like a line of a show. There you go. Okay, there's a lot on jobs. I know that's a big concern for many of you. How am I gonna get a job? There's a fantastic job bulletin and the school has all of these different resources that they put at your disposal to find a job to put you in touch with people. There's a lot of doors that open up, but I always say, you gotta walk through the door. You can't, the door is not gonna stay open for you forever. You gotta walk through it. So you gotta be motivated to do that. We had a dean a long time ago that said, try to get your foot in the door. And once you get your foot in the door, keep it there. That was Polshek. Price should stop. There's a lot more. Okay, this is just a quick intro. We're gonna have the whole day to talk and answer your questions. I want you to go see the lab. I want you to go see Avery Library. And then we're gonna reconnect at 1231. And then this afternoon, Andrew, Erica, and I have office hours. We wanna meet with you. We wanna talk with you. Don't leave without sitting down with at least one of us, okay, and asking your questions. And the same for those of you online. If you want to meet via Zoom with us today, please go ahead and sign up, okay? We'll be available. Great, have a great time. Enjoy yourselves. We'll see you in a little bit. Start, because it's only, you know, I will present myself. Hello, people in their houses. So, I am Mikna Tal. I'm managing this lab, the Preservation Technology Lab. While I'm, okay, I will do it a little bit about myself. I come from the conservation world of architectural finishes, conservation. So it's basically mural and plaster and paint stencil. We used to do a lot of paint reports and documentation in a house. That's, I'm coming from Israel. That's where my accent is from. That's where I also pursue my, you know, degrees and meet with us today. You see Richard Piper. Piper, say hi. Hi. My name is Richard Piper, but no one calls me Richard. Everyone just calls me Piper, so that's the preferred, so big 10. And Heather, hard ford. Hard ford. Hard ford, also huge. So Piper is teaching the metal class and he's basically the most knowledgeable person in New York City about metal. So I hear and can also testify. Every question I have about metal would be, shh, Piper. And Heather is scientist that handle concrete and water. And then Piper's actually speaking in our class section about cast-iron. Okay, so here in the preservation lab, it's kind of like I divide, okay? So we have the, what we're very proud about is our material collection, which divided into two. And if you want to like stand up and look, you're welcome and if you want to rest, that's also okay. But the people, maybe the people that are close to the drawers, if you open the drawers, you will see that there are lots of materials basically what we have in the built environment. So that's marble and sandstone and limestone and concrete and plaster and granite and what else? We have wood and metal, obviously, and pigments and pavement from Brooklyn. And it's all for the goal that our students in the end of these two years will look outside with their eyes on a very far away building and will know to identify that there are bricks, terracotta and lead in the building that was, you know, like very, you know, like you just know because you look and you were trained to identify. So that's why we have those materials then, you know, let's say you have a project on the public library and the Fifth Avenue about the massive lions that they have there. You're like, what is the, I hear myself, Feli. I hear myself. And you're like, let's, you know, you can take the sample from here of the Tennessee marble go with it to the lion on Fifth Avenue and match it and identify and see, okay, this is how it looked when it's raw, but this is how it looked when it's sitting outside in Fifth Avenue for the last 100 years and what will happen to it. So we use that. And then we also have the architectural fragment collection. So you see many types of fragments. You see concrete, you see terracotta, you see a layer of Chicago, you see some metal from downtown there. So we're gonna, so this is, you know, each sample, we know where it's from, you know, for us exactly where they came from. They want you to do something like this. And she doesn't say, what is this junk? And when you say to her, this is a piece of talent. It's made entirely with Mr. Shells, lined from birth place or shells and place or shell disaggregation session at home. It's wonderful. We'll have to just put it in the collection. So she's really patient with us. And I'm always astounded that those large sink, the billion dollars, this is a small burden upon her. Haven't been thrown out because they're too big and they're sitting on the floor. They're over that corner there. She's really very patient with us because each of these pieces tells a story and she's willing to listen to the story. I like the story. So that's the material part, and then the second part will be the technology that we're very much putting our art and the climate on it. We have some, because the commentation is a big part of the preservation or everything. Why is it so? It's just the volume's on over there. Sorry. So I will just share with you some of the things that we have. So we have a thermal camera and a very expensive kind of SLR camera. We have scanner, a 3D scanner that can scan those models that I put outside and then we can look at it after. And we have a small scanner that can scan fragments and this is how I did that. You can pass it around. By the way, you can touch everything and you can pass anything. So that plastic white thing. So we scan this sample. We can take it. So you scan this and then you have this. Now, what do you do with this? I don't know, but we, you know, we spare them. So we play, we try, and if it's, you know, it's really nothing, it's just that it's nice that we can do this again. I'm not sure what we're supposed to do with it. Someone knew one day that it's where we're here. And what is, oh, and we have XRF, which is pretty amazing. So you see that those samples over there, that's, I think this, that is done by Dana Liedler, the second year student. And she brought samples from a campus in Jerusalem and she brought them here and she's testing each of the sample with the XRF. So the XRF is basically a very smart gun that shoots radiation. And when the radiation hit the sample, it creates it and bring it back to us, you know, common people. And we can see the elements that is in, so she's checking them in the video. And she also have results from the queries in Jerusalem for where this stone we're taking so she can do, you know, like, what's it called? In Paris? Okay, looking at the oven on the stairs. So, and then there's another student who's here. Michelle, there you go. And we're very lucky to see that she's here today with us. Thank you, Michelle. I don't know my name, you can tell me. You can take this slide, share it with me. So Michelle is a second year old. I'm great. I'm looking at salt damage to forest building materials and I focused on stone. And there's been these compounds that have been identified to try and prevent stone, damage to stone because of salts. And so here I have some of my controls and some of my treated samples. Doing accelerated weathering for wet dry cycles on salts was really, really hard. And that was kind of the crux of this thesis, but there's some stones over there that were exposed to salts and I've used desalination techniques to try and remove them. There's been samples that were sitting in salts for days at a time to see how they'd weathered that way. Let's, so we also, so we also, I will finish and then you can add any other words. We also have the VR class that we again tried to figure out what we can do with it. For the field, if we look at the model, if we are, if we look at a fragment and maybe like, take this, that place where it was taken. So we like, you know, that's the thing that we're really interested in for us. And of course, for the VR class, we take the VR class, and our material-based class. And for thesis in your second year, if you are in material, the lab is kind of the only support system. So, and by the lab it's going to be us. And, you know, we, we, we, we slash I is this one kind of one of the students The assistants here are doing, you know, whatever we get into this. And the important thing, maybe the most important thing that we have here is our analysis, which is Deli and Pila, where you met Pila right here. So, Pila and Deli, and they are, you know, every year I have one open position for the first year and two for the second year. And it's been an amazing bonus to have you working with me and they do so much. You know, everything you see, you know, the organization, the material, the helping with Pila is helping yesterday to the first week of scan. So they're like my, you know, they're a big part of the sub. And that's not when anyone is interested to work with me next year and send the position for probably the endowments to the last few minutes.