 My name is Olga Stella. I'm the Executive Director of Design Corps Detroit and we put on these monthly drinks by design events March through September. We're excited to see a lot of familiar faces and a lot of new faces. We're especially happy tonight to be hosting the Cooper Hewitt and a wonderful panel of past National Design Award winners and I'll have the folks from the Cooper Hewitt tell you a little bit more about that. But the other thing that's happening tonight is that we're celebrating the Detroit City of Design initiative. About a year ago just about today we released the Detroit City of Design action plan which lays out an ambitious vision to drive inclusive growth in our city through the practice of inclusive design. And you know when we when we release that action plan a year ago over 50 organizations joined with Design Corps to say they wanted to be part of it. They had projects that could help bring the action plan to life. In fact over 60 projects. Today we released a report. We're running some slides on the back wall over there with some of the highlights that really show the impact of those 50 organizations and their work. They've touched over 70,000 people in the last year. They have worked together reporting over 239 connections between themselves which just really demonstrates the strength of this coalition. One of our values is collaborative action and accessible opportunities. And when you look at the report which will be in your email and on our website you know what you'll see is that you know these are organizations and projects that are touching all corners of the city touching all kinds of people. People who may not normally under you know feel and see the ways the design impacts their lives. And we're just really proud to be stewards of the UNESCO City of Design designation for our city. Still the only one in the United States. Yeah and we're gonna try to keep it that way for a little while and until the US joins UNESCO again we will be the only US city. So at least another 18 months. But when you look at the work of the partners and just the impact in the first year alone I mean it's just such a great sign of what's yet to come. And working together little by little Detroit really will you know become known around the world as a place where grassroots action, inclusive design, inclusive collaboration is making the difference in creating a city that's for everyone not just for some people. So we're really excited to be able to host a Cooper Hewitt here to have all of you and to keep that momentum going. So I'm gonna turn it over to Ruky and you hold Ravi Kumar from the Cooper Hewitt to introduce the panel. Thanks Olga. Like she said I'm Ruky new whole Ravi Kumar and the director of education at Cooper Hewitt. I'm gonna set this large folder down so I can actually hold a microphone. But we're really pleased to be in Detroit. This is a great town and look at all of you here. And thanks to the Design Corps Detroit for hosting us and making us a part of Drinks by Design. Cooper Hewitt is America's Design Museum and our vision is for everyone to discover the importance and power of design to change the world. And what better group to talk about change the world than the group that's in this room. As a museum we're doing this by preserving design stories and asking really important questions about the future of design. Next month on May 10th we opened the Design Triennial on Nature. The Triennial is a global perspective on contemporary design and really looks at where are we going in the future and how can design and nature work well together. Simply put Cooper Hewitt is a platform to explore our world by design. It's a message that we're sharing far and wide thanks to our new campaign that you saw on view as you entered today. A huge thanks to the team that I have here. If you're in the room I'd like to recognize Rebecca Armstrong, Michelle Cheng, Chris Gautier who's at the back, Vaso Janopoulos, Cara Hunt and Kim Robledo Diga were a small group but were all over the city. Olga mentioned the National Design Awards. This was established in 2000 to honor lasting achievement in American design. The National Design Awards is our most prominent education initiative. We celebrate our winners at Cooper Hewitt every October and then take them on the road to cities around US every year. This year we're pleased to be in Detroit and we're also celebrating the 20th anniversary of the National Design Awards program. To mark this occasion we're adoring a new category of award emerging designer to recognize the achievements of an extraordinary young talent and providing a springboard for a new career on the rise. Thanks to the major support from Target, Adobe and countless friends Cooper Hewitt in our NDA cities program helps the next generation of designers be a help with design literacy. We're also helping energize the next generation of designers and leaders through design workshops in areas where there's limited exposure to design. The NDA cities program has already impacted hundreds of students in Boston and San Francisco and now we're able to do the same in Detroit. We invite you to help us as we strive to make design more inclusive and ensure its opportunities are available to all. This week we've been training teachers and introducing students to design design thinking and design stories. Yesterday we were at Lawrence Technological University. This morning we had an absolute blast with third and fourth graders at Charles H Wright Academy of Arts and Sciences. Tomorrow we will be at Lootington Magnet Middle School and Stephen H. Mason Academy. On Saturday it's almost guerrilla style design but join us at the Belt Alley for a collaborative drop-in design activity where we will be designing an unending park and it goes on forever. If you haven't heard about this look out for more on cooperhewitt.org slash Detroit. Tonight I'm really pleased that we brought together four of our previous winners who are involved who are really involved in shaping Detroit through design. Our conversation will be moderated by Kara McCarty, my colleague, who's the director of curatorial. Kara has organized major exhibitions and most recently are critically acclaimed Access Plus Ability which has been on view in Davos at the World Economic Forum and the road ahead reimagining mobility. The mobility exhibition has actually been our source of inspiration for the projects that we've taken to several schools this week. So welcome everyone and without further ado I'm going to hand this over to Kara. Hello everyone and I'm thrilled to be here. I want to thank Design Corps for organizing today's event and I want to thank all of you for being here. I'm really excited by the turnout. I'm excited to learn a lot more about Detroit in the next hour and my immersion in Detroit started this morning when I arrived at the airport and I had a taxi driver who was I think it was the best preparation for today's panel discussion. Taxi drivers are often my the best litmus test for what's happening in a city and when I got into his car he said I said where you're going I said to Detroit he said to Detroit can you hear me now oh there we go I can hear myself so so I got into the the taxi cab and I said where you're going and I said to Detroit and he said the big D and I said is there a little D and he said no Detroit is coming back that's why it's a big D with a capital D and then he proceeded to tell me all the exciting things that are happening in the city he's lived here for 30 years and he said that it really hit rock bottom and the last three years he said it is so exciting all that's happening here so I'm very excited it's a very exciting time as we know for cities today and we have a really robust group of panelists here who are working all over the country and I'm interested to hear about ideas that they're bringing here and what they're learning from Detroit as well so immediately to my left is Richard Rourke partner at Olin base Olin which is based in Philadelphia he was a 2008 landscape architecture award winner next is Chris Reed founder and director of Stoss landscape urbanism based in Boston he was a 2012 landscape architecture award winner next is Craig Wilkins architect academic and author from here in Detroit 2017 Design Mind Award winner because he's the only panelist who is from Detroit and living in Detroit and next is David Malda principal of Seattle based Gustafson Guthrie nickel and he was a 2011 landscape architecture award so essentially it's a panelist of our architecture a landscape architects and I would love to just hear how just for a moment how you each why you chose to study landscape architecture it's a very interesting design discipline for so long landscape architecture was in some schools almost the sort of secondary secondary to architecture but in the last in recent years it is just especially the last decade has really catapulted to be so instrumental in the transformation of our cities so if you could just say a little bit about why you chose landscape architecture I'm gonna start you're an honorary landscape architect we can vote on it so I'm a landscape architect because I wanted to know how the world was put together still still don't know how the world was all put together but that that that was the driving motivation I had no idea what the practice was but I had some people at my university who took a look at me and said you're a weird guy and where you know you're interested in connections so there you go for me I was studying cities in college first of all it was a discovery to me that you could study cities as an academic topic I had already always been interested in that and when I went to school just started looking particularly at the 19th century American city and the work of Olmsted and then a series of landscape architectural practices who were really reshaping cities in very significant ways the 19th century parks movement was really a response to social reform efforts they were initiated from the idea of reform in the city cleaning up cities making them healthier places particularly for a lot of the workers who were there and the park systems that Olmsted conceived and designed you know took on issues of making nature in the city but they also took on issues of flood control providing healthy spaces they integrated parkways and transportation ways and I started to realize the impact you could have on cities and people writ large through the lens of landscape but landscape practiced in a very integrated and expansive way not necessarily the way it had been practiced for many many decades during the 20th century fair enough so I had always intended to be an architect that didn't work out but I started studying started out studying community development in art history which is a very typical combination and then went on into architecture and intended that all those things that I had studied about community organization and how groups you know gain their voice and projects evolve as well as complex systems and then the whole art history thing would all come together in architecture and so I did that I studied architecture and then stayed on and kept taking landscape classes realizing all that stuff that I was interested in seemed like it was coming out at least in those classes more and more in the discussions about landscape and then I think the the final thing was walking around cities and realizing I had stopped looking at the buildings and was just looking at free ways and weird spaces around them and all of this other infrastructure and streets and and decided then that that maybe was where I was most interested okay I'm not a Lansing architect however my my my interests have over the last 20 maybe 25 years have included not just the object but the process of creating the object and where the object actually is so landscape is a part of an integral part of how I see the practice of architecture at least from my perspective other people have different it's interesting that on my way in to the building I ran into a former student who was telling me that you know what I don't remember the advice but he said you know I'm gonna take your advice I'm gonna apply to a Lansky program but the and I completely applaud that because especially in Detroit and I think this is absolutely true that Detroit has something that most cities if not all cities in v we have an abundance of land right and if you want to rethink how you design a 21st century city it's not about plopping buildings everywhere it's not about trying to repopulate a city that at one point was 1.8 million people which is great because that's what you needed for the industry in the city to survive we don't need that now so what are you going to do with this it's a gift what are you gonna do with this gift and you know if you are not involving landscape architecture in that in that question in that fault process in that planning process you are wasting this moment in time that probably won't come for and to another city for another hundred years so in that sense you know we're brothers up here you know I honestly believe that well that's the the all the land can be a blessing but it can also be a big challenge right now right because of how decentralized everything can be and how to but that's what I would love to hear everyone talk about this evening Craig is he was awarded the the design the National Design Award because of his design mind and a wonderful connector author architect activist recent publication activist architecture which is really a very engaging and inspiring publication and very very relevant and Craig you said something recently about Detroit as a shrinking legacy city you said the old solutions no longer apply our problems at this time are different architecture should be about that about responding to society now all of society for the future so for each of you you're all with exception of Craig are working elsewhere but you're also working here in Detroit and I would love to hear you talk about how you go about making one of our legacies the cities which is a post-industrial city today feel relevant and maybe you could do that through the projects that you are currently working on in Detroit if you could maybe say the projects that you're working on because I'm not sure everyone is aware of that and what the challenge was and how you're trying to make that feel relevant I'll start I have no work in Detroit but would love to have some work in Detroit I was part of a team that worked on Detroit Future City and then the number of subsequent projects and Olga who introduced us this this evening was was part of that work as well so this was previous administration pre- bankruptcy and all that but we were looking around the city with a with an amazing team of people some of whom were from out of town some of whom were from here DC DC was involved Dan Patera folks at Hamilton Anderson and a number of others and one of the things that struck us too was the the abundance of vacant land and of course up until that point so many people had been talking about loss loss of population blight all all all the issues and at the very beginning of the process frankly there was a lot of pent up anger understandably so among residents who had lost services and all those sorts of things but we started looking like Craig had implied or said at at vacant land is real opportunity no other city in the United States had this much land available for reimagining and we knew from the start that that normative urban design infill approaches would not work here there was too much land not enough people not enough economy to support that and so we really started to think about what are the various ways that land could be reimagined there were already a lot of amazing groups and individuals doing community agriculture and farming there was some good work going on the ground emergent around issues of stormwater and green infrastructure there there were the beginnings of initiatives about tree planting nurseries things that that that eventually spawned initiatives like hans farms and we started looking around and saying you know there's really something here how can you imagine investing in landscape opportunities in landscape programs in a way that would completely reshape the city and simultaneously make investments for new development in pleat places where people already lived there was also the opportunity in between to put in place some pretty interesting new ways of living in the city some of which people were doing already by default they didn't have a choice sometimes they didn't have electricity they had to live off the grid they had to grow their own food but we we saw some energy and some potential there and said if you can do this as a choice why not integrate it into the way in which Detroit was imagined as a 21st century city and so for us these ideas about reutilizing landscape in in an array of productive and socially active ways was really at the heart of that project we're now taking those lessons to other cities so we're working in st. Louis on a 20-mile greenway greenway that both connects some of the stronger areas of city and some of the areas that have been historically disinvested discriminated against in st. Louis is a very sharp color divide in that color divide is really white and black and so our proposal really moved across that line and said in order to do this project properly you had to invest in places where poor and disenfranchised people lived and make investments there as well and so some of the lessons that we had started to think about which are now actually being put into place with the current administration here are now being exported to other places like st. Louis through through some of this work Richard maybe you could follow up and talk but I know that economics are really a driver of a lot of your way of analyzing cities and maybe you could talk about your eastern market project sure and I think it builds off naturally because Dan Patera and DC DC were also involved and it built off of Detroit of the future city vision as well in terms of looking at areas of Detroit and their economic future the Detroit Eastern market 2025 strategy plan was a really a revelatory experience for me in a planning process because the questions were started starting with Adam Smith is like capitalism is you know land labor and capital and we never really think about what the labor is like some like the people who just show up for the factory or something and we have a way of looking at infrastructure and how we build an economy in a way that we're waiting for a new manufacturing plant to come or some other large industry to come in and going back 250 years when we were an agrarian society all the economics was landscaped and now today there's no economics outside all the economics is inside except for farming and I think the the interesting thing about the state of Michigan is that you're both a very industrial state and at the same time you're a farming state and these two economies get figured out in eastern market where you have these different levels of industry players from the big factory types to farmers and the scale of farming from industry scale farming to actually small family farms that actually still do exist to the restaurant tours to the the grocery systems that depend on it there's a two billion dollar nexus in eastern market and the crazy crazy thing about this place is that people go there and they like it but it's an economic engine it's like I'm walking into an economic engine that's what eastern market is and and that that that for a landscape architect that was just like whoa people enjoy being inside an economic engine because you can exchange real things there you can you you can actually have a relationship with what sustains you and you can take joy from the people who are providing that and what the eastern market vision was about was how do you how do you keep doing that now and eastern market has had real problems because the scale of logistics you know has driven a lot of the food supply chain to say rather than work with all these kind of like dense city areas let's just go out to a green field next to an interstate connection and make it work there and the the vision that we needed to take on in terms of looking at the landscape and looking at finding what to do with the land was asking how do these businesses exist today and have a footprint in Detroit and you can actually retool to the modern food economy here because you do have that opportunity of land but what's really special about it is that at eastern market you can be somebody who like has their own specialty dishes and there is a commercial kitchen there that you don't have to you know go through all the rigmarole with the insurance you don't have to you know find the capital to build this facility you share it and what we need to do today what I'm what I'm advocating for is we need to have a new infrastructure that's an opportunity infrastructure that allows more of these things where we we're not just waiting for a big capital venture to come through but we're providing an infrastructure where people can share insured spaces where people can get to work in ways that they don't need to buy a car for that this this kind of thinking needs to play out into how we think about the economies of the future and that was you know a learning moment at eastern market and the planning work that we did sure just add on to that briefly we were one of the finalists on the West Riverfront competition finalists unfortunately and then and then I have also been doing a little bit of planning work with Rosetti in the Brewster Douglas area and that project I think in particular is one that to me had a lot of really intense moments and thinking about this city and the history of the city we're certainly thinking about what is it today what is it moving forward but a big part of how we approach design is trying to understand how to find some resonance with what's already there you know when we're working on a landscape we're always working with something that's already there it's people it's the ground it's all the the stuff that's been built up over years and years of a lot of different ideas and a lot of different priorities that have been tested and tried and you know usually only partially realized and then at other times completely erased so you know that neighborhood went through drastic transformations over the last hundred years from Hastings Street to a free way to housing towers and now you know what what should be there that can respect all of that and engage that as best we can but you know no one's living there on that site today and so how do we find some way to connect people to those stories especially the ones that have been wiped out and not just in a explicitly didactic way but that can be part of it but also just to make it feel like it's still familiar like it's not something that's totally foreign and has been brought in so we spent a lot of time trying to understand the history of the place what are the stories what what are people not getting exposure or connection to now through talking to people through archival research and maps and all that kind of stuff so that we can try to get that conversation going about all the things that have been here and still matter but maybe just have gotten eroded with time I can want to try to maybe connect a couple of things here looking at sort of this economic engine being in an economic engine and this idea about sort of looking at connecting wow I have never been told I have not not loud enough this is the first okay better okay good so so the the most recent I do a lot of consulting with organizations institutions and firms both here and around the country the most recent is probably the the DIA competition for their town their the DIA Plaza competition and you know it's it's it's telling that the the lead for that project was a landscape architect our conversations consistently among the team was very much about maybe not so much about how to be in an economic engine but how do you sort of rethink the landscape how do you rethink a space not through the not through the lens of economics but through the lens of civics how do you think about encouraging people to get out of their increasingly tight bubbles we get our we get our our news from things that sort of reinforce our view of the world we tap into social social media that reinforces our view of the world there are very few spaces today that allow for that sort of happenstance where you bump into somebody that doesn't think the way you do and you have to engage that person you have to think and maybe hopefully that engagement makes you think differently right so that that's not an economic it might lead to something economic right but that's not the goal the goal is to actually get people to engage each other face to face not on Facebook not tweeting not Instagram you know this is this is the public ground and it's public for a reason right it is public because we want folks to actually have to work out face-to-face messy questions messy issues and so that was really the kinds of things that we wanted to do in our sort of our proposal for the DIA project we are our our central focus with that landscape can do that that working in the land it's not a building it's a space it's a place it's a place where you feel comfortable and it's also a place where you feel comfortable having maybe difficult difficult conversations that you might not have any place else so that for for me the the and you know I'm saying it for me but I also you know I'm speaking a little bit for our team that that the the idea behind our proposal for the DIA project which is the most recent one that I've worked on I've worked on here in Detroit is that we're we're trying to use our public space as a public forum you know this is too easy to put stuff down on Facebook it's too easy to put stuff down on on on Twitter and so how do you use our shared environment our shared landscape that we can't ignore we all have to walk outside our houses we all have to we all have to engage the city in some way we all have to engage space in some way how can we shape that space that encourages that happenstance that encourages that conversation that encourages us to to maybe not watch and this is I'm not this isn't a pejorative thing but not watch Fox News all the time or not what or not listen to NPR all the time right how do we engage people and because we we are increasingly becoming siloed and in bubbles right the really the one of the few things that we share is the landscape how do we use that to trouble that bubble so one of the the things that I've been hearing you all talk about and I've been reading about is that actually a lot of these I mean it's extraordinary all the number of projects that are going on in Detroit right now I mean it's like all eyes on Detroit right now in the world I mean there are so many of the best architecture landscape designers urban designers from around the world who are working on projects in Detroit right now it's it's I don't think there's any other place like it so and there's a lot of these individual initiatives in this large space that we're talking about how are we how are you engaging the communities to really find out their values to sort of create these new neighborhoods that that they feel are theirs and who do the social and to have to encourage the social interactions that you're describing like how are the streets changing in the areas that you're you're working on and I think that's a really big challenge that we have wherever we're working which is how are we taking advantage of our experience and ideas but not just dropping those in you know from afar and unfortunately I think a lot of times that gets boiled down to a discussion of program so what's the right program to go in this park and in that sort of the extent of what public engagement means but when we think about a like a park say I think the goal is exactly what you're describing it's a space where people for different reasons are going to come there and they're going to see each other whether it's intentional or unintentional in that kind of interaction I believe is beneficial in in part of what's you know the best about cities as opposed to just interesting old buildings or you know something like that so the engagement process is we like to try to approach it is one it's not just us we always have really good teammates wherever we are that's the key thing because they know people and those people know people etc but we also I think it importantly strive to say that that public process is actually starting in that engagement process so it's not just let's all figure this out so then we can do a park so then maybe the park can do that but that our conversation that kind of engagement and crossing the paths starts in the design process and I think that's that's a really important aspect of public space design especially when so many public spaces now are really just a host to a lot of very discreet consumption opportunities we take this issue on in a number of ways you know a lot of the engagement we do we're certainly interested in asking what do you think and what do you know but we're also interested in getting people out of out of a room out of an environment where they're simply responding to thing prompts we've put on the table for them a lot of the work we're doing now is highly interactive it's highly engaged it's on sites it's testing out ideas it's getting people to let their guard down and not think in a room about maybe what I think I want my kid to be able to do but actually have things available in a particular place which offer kids the ability to do things and then they can actually give us feedback on what it is that they think and like and and frankly how they're just responding to what's in front of them in a very unselfconscious way and so we try to break down those barriers so that people can just interact and be there with us we also have in St. Louis we're having some pretty important and tough conversations about the city's past and its legacy of social relations and race relations with Tony Griffin we're working on an equity strategy that really talks about race and social relations and says what what is equity what does equity mean to you we're not interested in giving people our definition of what equity is but actually figuring out the ways in which equity can play out in a particular community but we are pushing the issue we are in the research work that we've just completed certainly we want to talk about the city's iconic history some of the real heart and soul of what people already know St. Louis is but it's really important to us and the team to put on the table some of the harder histories that St. Louis has experienced to be able to talk about those histories and confront those issues as a starting point for real conversation about what the future can be if indeed this project is going to tackle some of the most pressing social and racial and economic issues in any city today how is it that we acknowledge what's already happened as a starting point as an honest starting point to be able to build new conversations on and I think again for us so much of that thinking was really born here in Detroit in terms of the ways in which that we were engaging people the role that design could play and designers could play even though some of those questions are not design issues actually in some cases design can help move us forward as a as a vehicle for bringing people together and I think they're a great opportunity but that was that was as we know for so in so many of our cities design has brought about a lot of the social injustices the the federal highway systems the public policies and it's I think as you said Chris it's really important how how can design play a role in addressing these social injustices and I think that's going to be one of the key things moving forward and considering any solution to our cities and you know here in Detroit where so many people who remained in Detroit without when it had really declined so much with 40% of the people I understand still do not have internet access here in Detroit 30% do not have a bank account savings account I mean there's just a lot of things that are really really going to be critical in as the as the city moves forward and taking into account I have a taxicab confessional yeah yeah were you the driver nobody nobody nobody trusts me to drive anymore so I was I was on the way here the guy was telling me about what a park is in Detroit the park is an open space and three other things in it and and I and I was like thinking about this this conversation that we're that we're having is to be really honest about landscape architecture a deep dark truth is I'm always jealous of architects because most of the time the client comes and says here's the program these are the square footages you make design out of it you know or you there's a few things that need to be tested or there's assumptions that are way off the you know wall in terms of cost per square foot but there's a pretty concrete idea about what the program is going to be in landscape architecture it's the creative opportunity is nobody knows what it really should be but you spend about half your fee trying to get to a program that people are like yeah I want to do that and then you spend the rest of the half being down to what you can actually do sad but the design I think at its best is an active creative and collaborative intelligence and what we try and do in our in our dialogues is really build program as fast as possible and we really need to be more adept at creating programs for landscape because it's not about being kind of nice you know or something that you should do if you're a good person you make landscapes it has to be desire and drive and I need this to be a part of my life and there are there's a lot of good reasons why we do need it to be a part of our life we're all dying way too early and part of it is because we're not living outside we need to live outside more we need to do things outside more and we we need to create structures that get us to that point so what the dialogues that need to happen with communities what do you really need to do out there and I think health is a major component but a reason to do healthy things outside why it's way better than a gym that's a way of thinking about I need to have this landscape so for eight years I was director of the design center the Detroit Community Design Center at University of Michigan he it was located here in Detroit and like all design centers you know they're primarily set up to provide access to professional expertise whether it's architectural landscape urban design planning public policy because we're a public institution and so sometimes communities and neighborhoods that sometimes almost all the time there's some community or neighborhood that needs access to that information so that they can sort of maybe begin to rethink or even initially think about you know their their place in the world and their their location within a metropolitan area or a city or whatever so we were sort of the you might sort of say we were like the public defender and law we provided the kinds of services that allowed people to push back on issues that perhaps didn't necessarily serve them like I don't want the building in my neighborhood or I don't want you to buy up I don't want you to speculate in my neighborhood anyway so that's if you that's just a very short probably less than accurate understanding of what design centers do but when so that that that required us it was it was a it was not actually I take it back it wasn't a requirement it was our mantra it was our reason for being was to actually work in neighborhoods and communities in you've probably heard this a thousand times before but I'm just going to repeat it because it's actually true is that we approached architecture and we approach design not we wouldn't we didn't want to design for someone you want to design with someone right we wanted the folks to be part of the process and here's here's the thing I'm gonna say and hopefully this isn't being taped because I'm gonna somebody's gonna come back on me on this it's being taped okay you can you can edit this out right it is I the way I ran the center is that I wanted us to be obsolete and what I mean by that is we wanted to educate folks in the process we wanted to give them the language by which they could actually have conversations with the city they can have conversations with developers they can have conversations but our housing advocates that they didn't need our help they might want our help but they didn't need our head we wanted to we wanted to sort of provide them with the tools by which you feel confident about stepping up to the microphone in a zoning adjustment council and say no we don't want that and this is why we don't want that or yes this is where we want you to invest your money and here's why that that was our position like we we couldn't be everywhere and we didn't want to be everywhere but we wanted people to be able to to actually own the the the hopes and desires that they had in those locations not you won't always be successful that no one was promising that but what our process was yeah we can provide these professional services with with you and we can give you the sort of the tools that we you can you can you can step up to the plate and make your argument and you know we can stay with you as long as you want but we are hoping that you won't want us to stay with you longer because you can take it from here so that was always our goal and try try arguing that at an institution that is funding you we want to be obsolete well that doesn't make any sense if you want to be obsolete well stop funding you now anyway that's another story but that was our goal that was our goal it took a little bit we had people hired people who work with us it was it was kind of a thing for them to have to come to that position but they understood what the objective was that that that the being obsolete may not be in a year it might be 20 years from now but the goal was that we won't need community design centers anymore because we've educated so many people that they know how to similar goal of Cooper Hewitt is to empower our visitors with design and knowing how to question their environment and become much more active in the in the design process and so we have similar goals I'd love to keep asking questions but I'd also like to turn this over to the audience and we welcome about 10 minutes of Q&A anyone has questions with a microphone want to raise your hand if you've got a question so no question I can I've got okay a certain degree of insomnia okay I'm gonna repeat the question just for those of you who may not have heard is that what are the key attributes one needs to become a successful designer empathy really caring about a place in the people who are there yeah being inspired and then messing with it the willingness to admit you fuck something up and you want to do it again before it's before it's real the the ability to know that you have a level of expertise that needs to be respected but other people do as well also that you have to keep learning about everything and just be kind of obsessive about everything you're touching because you're an expert in some sense but there's always a lot more so it's it's kind of both you should be obsessive about your design values but you should be open you know you should be penetrable and you're you're not it you're not an island if you're designing for everyone so you have this dynamic to maintain of being like totally committed to you know the art of making amazing space and form and performance but you can't separate that that those values from the people who have to live with your values just look and listen and learn from everything around you the ability to ask a question and then like write notes when people respond I don't see you writing it okay we're gonna move on another question right here oh I just had a question of how our landscape architects at landscape designers responding to new ideas about mobility great question in the automotive epicenter of the world I think mobility is a huge issue because it's part of our boundary problem like like we live with some systems of mobility that actually you know create and enforce separation if we need to move at you know 70 miles an hour that's gonna put some offset distances between us but I think that you know we're the you know everybody's talking about the the driverless car now being a thing and I actually had you know a couple of clients say you know I have clients building a 7,000 car parking garage and I'm asking them is this gonna be useful you know later but I think the the other mobility issue has to do with I think it is is too full we have the the rise of the autonomous vehicle and we also have the need to not move ourselves with just motors we have to move our bodies or we're gonna die and those are those are kind of the two poles that we're wrestling with I think when you're talking about mobility in landscape to you it's not isolating mobility because that's usually when we've gotten in trouble in cities is when it's like all about the bike lane and then you forget about the other people even though that's you know radical thinking or it's all about the car and you end up with freeways so remembering that it's space and it's shared and it's a part of a whole bunch of other things that our landscapes have to be doing we don't you know get to just do one thing anymore yeah we do it all the time I mean and there there are folks that are equipped to talk about smart cities and all that stuff what fascinates me is actually the incredible adaptability of the street right I mean yeah it's put in place yes it was designed for the automobile in favor of other modes of walking around and human beings and all that but I think around the world you see this incredible way in which people are reimagining cities streets all the time and that that for me is is what's interesting to it is there is this piece of infrastructure it does a lot of stuff there there's stuff underground the stuff on the ground it moves people around and yet you can still reimagine it over and over and over and over again it can become a temporary party space it can become parking spaces that turn into gardens the the street edges can be reconfigured and in St. Louis where the streets like here just to why they're there over capacity for for what's needed you know the Greenway project that we're doing will completely reimagine some of those streets but the the fact that you have a piece of infrastructure that can continuously be reimagined according to whatever the values of the people are and the technologies that exist is what fascinates me great another question over here softball question for you what cities do you consider to be the landscape design role models or icons that we can kind of look to for inspiration here you could say you're you could say Detroit I I need to because I've been depressing the audience I I think that that the Detroit is is is fascinating because it is an incubator for basically a lot of of the new ideas that are that are happening in landscape in terms of like looking at landscape as as an economic engine looking at you know letting people have more free rein over you know space that is you know quote unquote you know in somebody's theoretical parcel database and I think that how we draw borders you know with our with with our cells and in the way that you're thinking about watersheds and the water crisis you know in Michigan has actually you know created some really innovative thinking about you know how we're stewards and how much should we pay for it and I think that that you know the quender cut you know I think that the all the properties that are just like you know people are doing their own kind of you know seed bomb thing is is like it's it's it's powerful the lack of control in some places and in a positive way because a lot of people have said hey nobody's coming in to do it we we have we have to do it so I think that channelization is really is really powerful I think there's a lot of cities that have incredible legacy histories of parks of multifunctionalism I mean I think the Olmstead legacy we're always trying to to beat it or rise up to it you know Olmstead you know first saw you know parks as this incredible social mixing ground and he he really did need people like you know you're talking Craig about like we need to go out and see each other I mean Olmstead was highly reactive to that because he'd just been through the Civil War he was on that he was on the Sanitary Commission and and and he saw the conditions people were living in by not knowing each other and not seeing each other and the critical you know faults that that was that was causing so you know Boston and New York have that great Olmstead legacy although they got to design every damn place at least once Philly is a great one coming from where where I am in terms of the they looked at the the the Skookle River and they said you know what that needs to be floodplain needs to be parks and it has been this enduring continuous value proposition ever since for the health and welfare of everybody in Philadelphia I'm working in Los Angeles on the Los Angeles River right now and the my client is the county public works in charge of pipes and sewage but they are working on our plan is us is about looking at landscape mitigating gentrification mitigating displacement using land banking strategies for thinking about permanent supportive housing so you should look at the cities that are are coping with their the realities now I think as measures and then you should look at the cities that have park bones that are holding them together I would answer the question exactly the way you positioned it and forgive me for that but I don't know how many people how many people here are familiar with love land technologies okay this is not necessarily a plug but they are an awesome organization they have done the kinds of things that you know the city was not able to do because of funding or focus or whatever they they have mapped the entire city of Detroit they found who owns what property they have linked it to tax basis it is it is it is an amazing resource if you're thinking about how the city develops however it is primarily an economic thing it looks at tax basis it looks at how long it's it's about where money is going and it would be an amazing thing if there is someone in this room not me who would actually look at with the same kind of depth and sensitivity how places help these how lots of being used right that is that's different than how much money it's bringing into the city or how much it might bring into the city how much the city has to invest to cover the fact that you know there's no taxes there's no tax base here how are how is how are these places being used and engaged that would be an amazing starting point for trying to rethink how we shape this city I don't know if other cities have the kinds of conditions that we have I always I think of Detroit is being just sort of sort of these urban conditions on steroids it's just sort of hyper here it really is it's just really sort of hyper here and because I live here I can sort of say this and maybe get away with it that I don't I don't care about the other I care about this place right and so really mesh the two together man we can have a city-wide conversation about where are we going in the next 10 years and how are we gonna include everybody in that process two random thoughts for you one is the beach particularly a beach like the beach along the coast in Los Angeles which is highly accessible to a lot of different people in a lot of different communities I find that to be an incredibly democratic place that's right on the edge between land and sea it's subject to incredible environmental forces and it's just an powerful mixing ground on the other hand you know Renaissance Italian gardens which are just fantastical places especially now that they're getting older and older and older and things drip and accumulate and get mossy and dirty and you know wonderfully mucky right there's a moment I went into to a cave and there's a hole in the cave and it was a warm day and all you could feel was cool air coming out of the cliff right the complete immersion insensorial experience was what really struck me at that place so I'm gonna ask you a question directly now that was an indirect answer Minneapolis all right okay well I can't believe how fast our our has passed I think we're all going to be here for a while so you can continue your questions one-on-one with the panelists as well as myself but I would like to thank in addition to all of you who for coming this evening I would like to thank design core mogo for lending us this really inspiring space and Detroit dart