 Good morning. Good morning and welcome to this year's 2017 Fitch Colloquium. Thank you all for coming. Dean Andraus couldn't be with us this morning. She sends her regrets. I'm Jorge Otero-Pylos, the director of the Historic Preservation Program. And I want to start by thanking everyone who made this important event possible. This is our most prestigious event of the year as a program. First of all, of course, Dean Andraus. Also, Stefan Bodeker, where is Stefan? I saw him in the back over there. Director of Communications and Events in his team, and especially Paul Amitai, who's in the back with a blue shirt, co-director of events and public programs, who really put the conference together and has been working with all the speakers to get them over here, and is behind this phenomenal poster, I think our best poster yet. This is a collector's item with a missing piece of the moved monument from the middle of the poster and the wonderful program. Also, Laila Catelier, who's a co-director of events and public programs with Paul. And Justin, who is in the back, our student who is in charge of making sure that all of the images show up on the screen today. Devon Gray, who is in the back near the programs, our new program manager for historic preservation. She started about three weeks ago, so she hit the ground running, organizing this conference. And of course, to all the speakers that have come from far and wide to share their knowledge with us this morning. And a particular word of thanks to my colleagues, Andrew Dole-Cart and Erica Avrami, the full-time faculty who are really doing today the lion's share of work in helping to moderate and to shape the discussion because ultimately a colloquium is a discussion. That is the main idea, is for us to talk to one another and to share our knowledge. And they will be taking your questions and launching questions to the speakers. I also want to acknowledge Martika Sehwin, widow of James Marston Fitch, who has presided over the Fitch colloquium since it began 16 years ago. The first one was attended by James Marston Fitch, the founder of our program. And as you all know, this was the first historic preservation program, a master's program in the United States. I also want to acknowledge the Fitch Foundation and Preservation Alumni. I see Bill Marash over there on the board of Preservation Alumni for their continued support of the preservation program. We couldn't do what we do without you and for helping us promote the event today. The day will be divided in three panels. We have a morning panel. This is the most caffeinated panel. This is, you know, the morning starts strong. Then each speaker, the moderator will introduce each speaker. Then we're going to have a round table panel discussion after that. Then we'll break for lunch and we'll come back for two panels in the afternoon. And I advise you to also caffeinate right after lunch so that you don't take a siesta after lunch here. Snoring is strictly prohibited in Wood Auditorium. So let me, I wanted to give you a little bit of background as to why we're doing this conference on moving monuments. And just say a few words about that and I'll have my first slide here. If I may. Yeah. Thank you. XC2 preservation is born out of an attempt to move valuable historic buildings and monuments out of harm's way, out of the hostile environment, into a more nurturing and safer context where they may survive. Now, how we define a hostile environment is really up to us but here I thought I would start with the image of the taking down of the Bastille because certainly after the French Revolution, monuments came under threat. They were considered to be monuments of the monarchy. They were considered to have the wrong ideology embedded in it and they were taken down. Very difficult to take down the Bastille. But they were taken down in order to make sure that that ideology didn't survive. Now, the practice of XC2 preservation is not unique to preservation if you think of wildlife conservators. If a species is under pressure, their environment is under pressure, they might take that species out and breed it in captivity for a while with the intention to put it back into the wild. But whereas XC2 conservation and in the world of wildlife conservation is a well-established and well-discussed and important practice, we don't talk very much about XC2 preservation. Now, however, we might, if we do begin to look at it with a little bit more receptive eye, we might find that XC2 preservation is at the origins of historic preservation. Here, an image of the statue by Bernini of Louis XIV being taken down by revolutionaries in the Place Vendome during the French Revolution. And in the middle of the fury of the Revolution, people like Alexandre Lénoir took the time to go find these monuments and move them to a new place, a new place he invented called the Musée des Monuments Français, the French Monuments Museum. And he's considered, because of this action, as one of the founders of preservation for creating the safe environment for all these monuments to survive. Now, it was very difficult for him to do this because, of course, he was putting his own life in harm's way because revolutionaries looked upon him with suspicion as a potential undercover monarchist. And he had to go out of his way to create the right setting for protecting these monuments. And that right setting involved interpreting these monuments such that visitors to the monuments would understand them to be reflective of the decadence of monarchy, so that when you would go through a historical sequence seeing from the medieval ages to the Baroque all these monuments and he would carefully interpret them so that people would come out thinking, oh, my God, the monarchy was a terrible thing. And in that way, the environment helped protect the monuments from people, helped protect the monuments from people by recoding the ideas that were typically associated with these monuments that were meant to celebrate the monarchy. Now, the fear, of course, of doing this type of ex situ preservation that Le Noir did is that these monuments will be released back into the wild and that they will be back in the streets someday where the idea of interpretation is less controllable. And if you visited the Louvre Museum recently, you will be shocked to discover Bernini's statue of Louis XIV sitting right in front of the famous pyramid by Ayempay. Now, this is a copy taken from the mold, the original mold by Bernini, and it was put up by François Mitterrand, a socialist. What is a socialist doing putting back a statue of a monarch? Well, I think that's part of what we want to talk about today because these monuments are heavily charged, culturally and politically and historically, and we have to really unpack the reasons for their moves and the ideas that go behind their moves. Now, of course, some of the early examples of large-scale moving of buildings come from Scandinavia, both in Norway and in Stockholm and Sweden, where farm villages that were dying out under the beginning of industrial farming were moved, relevant structures, significant structures, typical structures were moved into what were called open-air museums, a typology that was replicated around the world and here in America in a number of places that I'm sure you are all very familiar with, but here's the famous example of Skansen in Stockholm with all these farm structures really telling the story of a life that was being lost. And they were very careful to actually introduce costumed interpreters, so the life ways, the people that go with the monuments. And I think this is very important because here in the preservation program, our focus is historic buildings, but we think of historic buildings as more than just the bricks and mortar, but also of the communities that go and live with them and need them and survive because of them. Now, because XC2 preservation is done in extremis as a last resort, we also tend to think of it as a one-off. So each move is considered in isolation from the other, something that had to be done but really shouldn't be repeated. And there's also a sense that something of the value and meaning of the monument is lost when it is moved out of its context. And that is why, for instance, the history of interior standards for historic preservation caution against the moving of buildings as something that diminishes its value and might actually lead to a false sense of history. And this is the complication, the messing with the document, the messing with history. Now, the consensus opinion is that moving buildings is something to be avoided in preservation, so we tend to also avoid talking about it or writing about it in a comprehensive way. So when moves happen, however, they draw a great deal of public attention. They're celebrated as great technological feats. Newspapers write about them, as with the Temple of Abu Simbel, which was built in 1244 before the Christian era. Now, this is a really interesting example. I think that ties into some of the ideas that Chan Bilsil will talk about today. In 1959, Nasser, the Egyptian president, announced plans to build the Aswan High Dam, which would cause the Nal to flood the location of this temple. As a non-aligned power, Nasser played geopolitics, pitting the Soviets against the Americans to see who would pay for the dam, and the Soviets were the ones to pay for it. Now, Americans didn't want to be left out, so they presented the Soviets as destroying Egyptian culture and themselves as leaders of a grand international coalition to save Egyptian culture, all done under the cover of UNESCO. Now, we just announced that we're leaving UNESCO, so I guess we can't continue to do this sort of work. We owe a lot to the scholarship of Lucia Ale on this whole Nubia campaign, as it was called. The short of it is between 1964 and 68, a multinational team of archeologists, engineers, and skilled heavy equipment operators carefully cut the temple into 20-ton blocks, dismantled, lifted, and reassembled it in a new location 65 meters higher and 20 meters back from the river. With an air-conditioned chamber behind it to keep the temperature of the stones low, because obviously if you have a whole mountain behind you, the thermal mass keeps the temperature constant, but if you don't, then you have a problem. So they had to artificially air-condition the temples in the middle of the desert. Amazing. This was a project that cost over $40 million. And Americans donated the lion's share of it. Now in gratitude, Egyptians gave America what is known as a counter monument, the monument that you receive in exchange for doing the work of finding a monument in Egypt. And this is a long tradition. And we got the Temple of Dendur, which now was moved to the Met, and which was used as the backstage for Kerry's 2014 speech against the destruction of monuments. And monuments are these places that draw us and draw our attention and that are used as theatrical backdrops for political maneuvering. Now this tendency to treat every relocation as a technological feat, as a one-off, has indeed an effect on discourse, on the way we think about preservation. What we have in the library, if you go to Avery Library, are monographs. Monographs of individual moves. They are fabulous moves. Janet can tell us all about those in the afternoon session, the portfolio on the moving of Cleopatra's needle to Central Park and others. But we don't have many books to read the topic of XC2 preservation comprehensively. There is a 1927 brochure from a company of movers, and then there is one book on the moving of historic structures. Then there is, as Connie pointed out, a brochure from the National Park Service from the 1970s on how to move historic structures. Thank you for that. So with this conference we want to change this. We want to start to give a more nuanced account of preservation that examines this central practice of what we're calling XC2 preservation. Now part of the challenge today is to think together about how we would characterize, even define this notion of XC2 preservation. What are the conceptual threads, the motivations, the desires, the frustrations, the pitfalls of XC2 preservation? If it is true that XC2 preservation involves moving monuments out of a hostile environment, if this is true, if it's true that it's always done in extremis, then we might begin by asking, what is it that we expect to get from the monuments we are taking with us to safety? And the image of a burning house comes to mind. You know, what do we take out? And isn't it crazy that we take out anything so that we shouldn't be running for our lives and we would like weigh down our flight to safety with some object? Why do we take these objects with us? Why are these gates right outside of Avery Hall? It seems to me that we... One of the ways to think about this is that we are unable to remember who we are. Unless you have a phenomenal memory, some of you might. I don't know, but I don't. I don't know, for the most part, significant events in my life. I forget about the minor events, like what I had for lunch a couple weeks ago, things like that. These things vanish from memory, and so we're constantly trying to recover ourselves, constantly trying to retell ourselves the story of our lives, of who we are, and we find that we need certain things to do that. We need photographs, we need text, and of course we need monuments. And so, as all of you know, the word monument comes from the Latin monare, which means to remind. A monument is an object that's supposed to help us... our memory recall. And monuments are really important at the level of the self. We need these objects. But they're also important at the level of culture. Groups of individuals need monuments for a similar purpose, to remind them as groups who they are. And so these gates here are really meant as a reminder of what Columbia is, of what Columbia the institution is, because we actually don't remember. We were born into it. We don't know what Columbia is. We don't know what Columbia's culture is, or was, or has become. We need to reconstitute it. We need to retell the story of who we are, and we do it constantly, and monuments are fundamental to it. Now, I would venture that we move objects to safety because we need them in this way, because they're vitally important to us in this way. Vitally important in the same way that an organ is vitally important. We can't live without our liver, but we really can live without monuments. So what is it that we actually need from monuments? What sort of life sustenance do we get from monuments? And so these gates are really important in asking that question when you think of the fact that they come from the entrance to the North Church, where King's College, having just been renamed Columbia College after the War of Independence, held its commencement ceremonies. In 1857, the institution moved from King's College campus at Park Place to Midtown, to 49th Street in Madison Avenue. Now, in 1875, Columbia is already in Madison Avenue. This is when the North Dutch Church is torn down, and the university thought it important to go recover this piece of its past and bring it out of this whole hostile environment of the ever-densifying downtown. In 1896, Columbia College changed its name again to Columbia University. In the year it moved up here to the campus on Morningside Park and then installed these gates in front of St. Paul's Chapel. So they're again in front of a chapel. Now, I have to thank Professor Richard Piper for pointing these gates out to me, because I had never actually seen them. I'd walk past them every day, but never really noticed the fact that they were there, never noticed the fact that they were relocated from a previous location. So why are these gates so vitally important to Columbia University? Certainly, Columbia would have continued to exist without these gates, but someone somewhere thought that it was essential to the institution's identity to have it, to remind us of the origins of the institution and of its connection to church and to put these back in front of our church. Now, we don't have much time to get into this connection to church and theology, but we are also sitting on the side of an insane asylum. As you all know, the last building of which is where we keep our faculty, which is Buell Hall. And I have to thank Erika Vrami for pointing this photograph. This is the building of Columbia University, and this is where Philosophy Hall would go, and Buell Hall has now been moved to this location over here. And there you have... Oh, Kent Hall. Thank you. Kent Hall of Philosophy is just over. And there you have, now, a course for everyone in the preservation program. You, of course, be looking at the fact that the porches are now gone, and they, I guess, were too hard to move and they didn't put them back, but there you have it. We have these two moved structures, Buell Hall and these gates, sitting right next to each other, the insane asylum, the church. And in fact, there's something crazy about moving monuments. There's something completely maddening about it. There's something completely maddening about the fact that we don't know who we are and that we have to reconstitute our reality. But in a way, this is part of what preservation is about. This notion of testing, what is real? And in fact, in religion, we offer ourselves a safe spot as a culture to, as adults, ask ourselves the question of what's real and what's not. Is there life after death? These sorts of questions that, if asked in any other context, would really cast us as pretty much crazy. But the same kinds of questions about reality are the kinds of questions that we ask with monuments because we ask about what is real in history? What is, who are we? What is our culture? And here's another case of development. This is the famous case of the chapel on Varick Street, St. John's Chapel, where we lost this chapel to the modernization of the city. So what it means to modernize a city, or meant for the 19th and 20th century, was to widen the streets, to make the streets bigger, to improve traffic, to improve circulation. But as part of that, and we have to thank Max Page and Randy Mason for their work on the book Giving Preservation of History, what it also meant is thinking about memory, thinking about the way that the monuments that were being destroyed, moved out of the way, really were an infrastructure for telling ourselves the story of who we are. And here, of course, is the destruction of this church, even though the congregation fought really hard to save this. Now with every move, with every change, there is the possibility that things are going to be different. Monuments, if they are for us, a way to establish a continuity with our own past, a way to retell our own story. When they're moved, that story, and when they're not moved, is an artificial story. And it has to be necessarily artificially constructed because in reality our experience every day is a radical discontinuity, is a forgetting. So our mind is constantly forgetting and reconstituting and monuments help us to recall. So if we make any changes to a monument, the fidelity of that recollection is instantly called into question. Changes in the location of a monument can stand in the way of our ability to be reconstituting in a faithful way, to understand our culture in a real way. But interestingly, over time, we assimilate these new locations. We assimilate the new stories of their new emplacement. And this is actually really important and worth examining. And the reason why I mention this is because today, Spain is on the verge of breaking apart. Today, Carlos Puigdemont, president of the autonomous community of Catalonia and the parliament of Catalonia, as we speak, are debating whether to declare secession from Spain. Now in this country, secession led to civil war. So this is a really important moment and what does this have to do with monuments and moving monuments? Well, I would argue that a lot. Here is a view of Barcelona. Right at the time of 1913, on the brink of the World War, when the new subway was being installed. And as part of that urban modernization project, a number of archaeological remnants came up. And the question was, what to do about them? Beginning in the 1920s, the Catalonian architect Adolf Lorenza and the historian archivist Agustí Duran proposed a number of building moves and questionable restorations to create what has come to be known as the Gothic neighborhood, the historic center of Barcelona. Now the medievalizing of the historic city involved moving buildings such as the Casa Padellas, which you can see over here. This is the location where it used to be. You can see this building over here, is this building over here. So this building was actually demolished and this house was moved from where they were building the subway lines to this location. Now why? It was meant to enhance Barcelona's King Square, which is in the image above over here as it was restored. This is what it looked like before in the 19th century. Parts of which date back to the 13th century, but it also involved removing all traces of the baroque, this grand baroque stair going up to the palace, these additions over here, so that it would look more medieval. This door over here, legend has it, is where Columbus came back to tell the king and queen of Spain that he discovered America. So why did they remove all the traces of the baroque? Well, it was a low point in Catalonian history after the Crown of Aragon lost the Spanish Civil War of 1701 to 1713, so 200 years earlier. This was known as the War of Spanish Succession. Fought over who would succeed Charles II, a famously childless king to rule over a vast empire that has encompassed this country, also central and South America, as well as portions of Asia such as the Philippines. Charles II had cousins, one French, a Bourbon, and another Austrian, a Habsburg, Charles Archduke of Austria. Both of whom claimed the throne. Historians describe it as the First World War, as it was fought in Europe as well as here in America and in North Africa. Now, Catalonians sided with the Habsburg dynasty, alongside Austrians, the Dutch, and the British, and Castilians sided with the Bourbon dynasty alongside the French, Bavarians, and Montovans. Catalonians lost the war, and with it, they're right for their merchant ships to trade with the Spanish Empire. No more Catalonian ships bringing gold from Mexico and Peru. So, Florenza and Durán planned to move the Padilla's house 200 years after the War of Spanish Succession, after the Spanish-American War had left Spain in shambles at the end of the 19th century, and Catalonians began to imagine secession from a bankrupt Spain. This house, the Padilla's house, was symbolic for Catalonian secessionists because it had been the residence of Rafael Casamigiana, one of Barcelona's conseller and cap, or head council member, of the Council of 100, an institution founded in the 13th century as the self-governing civic government of Barcelona. Now, one of the ways the Bourbons punished Catalonia after the War of Spanish Succession was to abolish the Council of 100, and with it, the Central Court of Catalonia, and indeed, Catalonian self-governance. And the last conseller on cap was Rafael Casanova in 1713, 200 years before the move for this house was planned. He's considered the forefather of Catalonian secessionism. Now, in 2003, during the lead-up to the current secessionist fervor, the title was revived in 2003 by the current political party in power, Convergercia Unión, and tweaked into a conseller premier to align it linguistically with Prime Minister, which is more recognizable by international audiences. Now, the Padilla's house, but it has this nationalist connotation to have a Prime Minister. The Padilla's house and the King Square, which now sits, where it now sits, are a creation of 20th-century men, of historians, of architects, of financiers, of others, whose secessionist imagination anchored itself in the idea of returning Catalonia to its blender of the Gothic 12th century, when the Kingdom of Aragon was thriving with an economy and with a powerful Mediterranean merchant fleet that could compete against the Genovese and the mighty Venetians. Most importantly, the Gothic was well before the Kingdom of Aragon married the Queen of Castile on an October day like today in 1469, binding the fate of Catalonia to the rest of Spain. He was 16, she was 18. Most 16- and 18-year-old Catalonians today have been taking on school trips to visit the King Square and the Padilla's house. For them, these buildings are real historical documents. They've stood there as teachers pointed to those monuments and told them about the historical roots of Catalonian self-rule in the Gothic era. Teachers have a hard time telling any other story in that space. In part, this is because Florenza and Durán did such a good job at erasing the material traces of two centuries between the 1716 abolition of the General Court of Catalonia and its resurrection as the modern Generalitat de Catalunya. They manipulated monuments with an eye to shaping the future, the long future, one that we are now living. They wanted to set their ideas, their ideology, their politics into stone. And they did so with existing stone. It is worth remembering how constructed this reality is at every level on every side. It would be more accurate to describe monuments as monumentaries, perhaps, especially those that are moved, which, like film documentaries, are based on real documents but interpreted through the editorializing eyes of the film director. Monumentaries should be viewed with the same critical distance, but alas, their constructedness is seldom discussed or appreciated. And so today, we're here to discuss the constructedness of monuments, their history, and the way they shape our reality and our future. And so, I would like to welcome Erika Avrami, who is going to introduce our first panel. Thank you very much. Good morning. Jorge, thank you very much for a provocative opening introduction, getting our minds thinking with all of that caffeine in us now. Just a matter of housekeeping. We will have our presenters speak. We will not take questions immediately after. Instead, we will wait until all have spoken. They will join us at the table up front, and then we will have a dialogue around all of the papers and all the ideas presented. We are honored to have five distinguished panelists with us this morning, each working within the urban context, though at varying scales, from the shifting of individual structures to the wholesale relocation of communities. These diverse projects and perspectives challenge us to think beyond the preservation of historic buildings as a material enterprise oriented toward authentic representation. They compel us to engage robustly in social-spatial dynamics that form notions of heritage and define its instrumental role in society by exploring quite literally places in motion. I'm going to introduce all of our speakers now so that we can sort of get that out of the way. Tony Mazzo, our first speaker, is a civil engineer and the principal and CEO of Urban Foundation Engineering, an excavation and foundation contractor specializing in difficult foundation work in the New York City metropolitan area for over 36 years. Tony will be presenting his work on the relocation of the Empire Theater here in New York, a Times Square landmark, which was part of the 42nd Street Redevelopment Project. In 1998, the Century Old Theater was successfully moved 170 feet and set in its new foundation in less than five hours. Krister Lindstedt is a partner at White Architecture with 30 years of experience as a practicing architect, urban designer and planner. Krister has served as the design lead for several major development projects for the City of Stockholm, balancing issues of identity and memory while seeking to mitigate the effects of climate change and social segregation in one of Europe's fastest-growing urban centers. Krister will be discussing his work on the relocation of Kiruna, an iron ore mining town, and Sweden's Arctic Powerhouse, a project that will move the entire city and its 18,000 residents two miles east over the course of the next century. Amanda Schachter and Alexander Levy are co-founders of Slow Architecture, a design firm practicing in the United States and Spain. Slow Architecture realizes designs for wide-ranging private clients, public agencies, cultural and educational institutions, and grassroots initiatives linking realms of urban and architectural design with artistic production and social action. Amanda and Alex will be presenting their proposal for the relocation and adaptive reuse of the abandoned Westchester Avenue Station along the Lower Bronx River, one of 13 station stops designed in the early 1900s by Cass Gilbert and abandoned since the 1930s. Finally, Mary Ellen Carroll is a conceptual artist whose work occupies the disciplines of design, writing, performance, and film and stands at the intersection of conceptual art, architecture, and public policy. Mary Ellen's work Prototype 180 is a project in Houston, Texas involving the 180-degree rotation of a single-family home in an aging first-ring suburb. By interrupting the relation of the house to its context and existing street typologies, Mary Ellen challenges the city's unregulated land use and lack of zoning policies through urban alteration, social action, and political theater. Unfortunately, Mary Ellen is not able to join us this morning, but her colleague, Michael Isabel, will be presenting on her behalf. So without further ado, I would like to introduce Tony Mazzo and ask him to join at the podium to speak about Empire Theater. Good morning. Thank you all for coming. What you see before you is the Empire Theater, a historic landmark facade that was constructed in 1912. And I'm going to tell you the story of how we moved it, some of the public stories and some of the untold stories. And I hope that when I finish, you can experience the experience of what we went through, trials and tribulations, in order to convey this building, 170 feet down the block in Times Square. This is what the theater looked back in 1997. The site was some 250 feet long, and as you could see, the theater experienced some modifications in the last 90-some odd years before we actually moved it. The front doesn't look as eloquent as it did 100 years ago. The history of its experiences going through the vaudeville days of the 1930s, where a lot of performers made their debuts, including the famous Abbott-Constello, Who's on First Act, which was promoted and marketed when we moved this, and I'll show you some pictures later. So in 1996, a colleague of mine who worked for a construction firm asked me to meet him on 42nd Street. So I said, okay, and we met across the street, he says, turn around, Tony, take a look at that theater. I looked at the theater and he said, for our city ratners, the developer here, they want to move this theater 170 feet down the block, 170 feet from here to the other end of the site. And why do you want to do that? Because in order to make, give the site some symmetry, the architect said, well, we have another landmark theater over here, and then this one's right next to it. So we thought it would give better balance and better symmetry if we can move this theater all the way to the other end of the site. And he asked me, he said, you know, Tony, the rest, quite frankly, they don't really need the rest of the theater because it's all common brick and the ornamental features of the arch inside the auditorium can be reproduced. He says, but look at that facade. This is what they wanted to preserve. This is what they wanted to move to the other side and let that be the entrance to the new AMC multiplex theater that now resides on the west side of the site. So I looked at my Tony at two heads. He said, you want me just to move the front? And he said, yeah, that's all they need. I said, well, look, I tell you what, I would rather move the entire building. He said, why would you do that? I said, because structurally, it sat there for a hundred years. It's got good memory. It has length, it has depth, it has width. It's all reinforced. I think I got a better shot at moving the whole theater, just moving the front facade. He said, you can do that. I said, yeah, I think I can do that. So he said, okay, well, give me a price. You want a price on this thing? I said, I never did this before. So how do you know you can do it? Because I know I can do it. Okay. We had previously engaged in almost all of the landmark theaters during the Renaissance of Times Square that started in the mid-90s and ended around 2005. So this was going to be the jewel of the Renaissance of Times Square. And how can I say no? So, okay, Tony, give me a price. And then we want you not only to move, but we want you to design the move. You want me to design the move? Okay, I could do that too. I wasn't backing off down now. I was too far into it. So I said, okay, we could do this. We are a structural engineering construction firm. We are one of the noted ones who have done some very fancy shoring in town and occupied buildings. And the Landmarks Commission has learned of us and trusted us and said, okay, you're the guys. You're the guys can do this. But you better get everybody's approval beforehand. So there was a lot of checks and balances going along. And finally, we got into a contract, a design bill contract in the middle of 1997, August of 1997. And then we started putting pencil to the paper. And then construction started shortly thereafter. And first we had to come up with a basic concept. Okay, how are we going to move with theater? Well, let's see. We got to convey it along something. So why don't we create a track system of rails? Because railroads move on rails. Why couldn't we simulate a rail system so that it could convey in a controlled manner from point A to point B? Okay, that sounds good. Well, what are you going to do to put it on rails? Well, we got to take this theater off its original foundation and place it on a steel carriage or a dolly with roller skates on below it so that we can literally push it along its rail system to the other side. Easiest said than done, right? So let me walk you through this. So this is interesting enough. When I said this was during the highlight of the Renaissance of Times Square, you could see there was construction across the street. In New Year's of 1998, just to put more pressure on, there was another contractor performing an excavation for a new development across the street from our project. And unfortunately, in his excavation, because he didn't know what he was doing, he undermined the landmark theater and collapsed it on New Year's Eve. Yeah, uh-huh. So you can imagine how the level of scrutiny had elevated thereafter, which they called me back on the call, but okay, Tony, you sure you got this, right? And you sure you can... I said, yeah, yeah, we got this. I said, you had the wrong guy across the street. You should have called me. So let me take you through the steps. It's really quite simple. I don't want to oversimplify it, but I don't want to lose you either. I hope you still got some caffeine in you. They didn't stand this. But let me take you through this. So the first thing we had to do was we had to get under the theater and create a temporary foundation that supports the rails. Not that the theater already has its foundation, but we needed to create a temporary foundation to support the rail system. So we came in, we excavated inside. We took the first floor out, and most of the theaters that were built 100 years ago didn't have a basement. They had some passageways to move air, but they really didn't have a basement. So the theater space that we sit here was sitting literally on ground, on the earth. So this is a shot at street level, and we got underneath there, and we thought the first thing we got to do was start to put some piers in the ground. So we took some sauna tubes, and we filled them with concrete, and these piers, which were founded to rock, started to become the system of foundations to support the rail system. And this is a picture of the level of the rail, to the carriage, and just let me give you a few more shots. So now we started to develop, and we started to roll a little bit. So from the concrete piers, now remember, we're working inside the theater, so everything had to be threaded through those openings. We set our rails, and we devised an eight-rail system. Eight-rail system of typical H beams. These are not railroad beams, these are H beams, because we use common materials that we're used to handling in construction, and that we could use later on. Above the rail system is the carriage system, and you can see we have little spacers, and I'll give you a better picture of that, where this is the blow-up of, here's the rails, they're sitting on the piers, this is the steel carriage, and I'll give you some more pictures of that later. But see this thing here? Those are those structural steel roller skates. They're actually called Hillman Rollers. They're manufactured by a company called Hillman in New Jersey, and they vary in capacity from 10 tons to 40 tons. We used 44 of those guys, those roller skates as they're called, in strategic locations to support all the load points to keep the theater supported through its travel. So as you can see, this is not the simplest operation, because you can't get big equipment here, but now you can see how we made openings through the side common brick walls. We didn't disturb anything that was architecturally preserved, and we started to set the rails in place, and then the steel carriage above. We blocked the spacing while we were wrecking before we could put those roller skates in. And then above that, we started to put some needle beams in to carry the perimeter walls. Now I was asked before how difficult it is to move a theater, and quite frankly, and the structural books will tell you that theaters are actually more robust in their construction than normal buildings, because they don't have interior columns. Therefore, they have to span 65 feet, and they have to support upper balconies and so forth. So it turns out, and this is just a number, that the resident frequency of most buildings commonly built are 2.0, but the resident frequency of theaters is 4.0, and all that really means is a magnitude to tell you that theaters of this, typically theaters like this that don't have interior columns are much more rigid, much more robust, and all the weight of the theater structurally is supported by the perimeter walls. And if you think about a wall that's 65 feet tall and 20 inches wide, that's a tremendously deep beam if you can visualize it. So what we did was, if we knew that we can space these beams accordingly, and this straps some transfer girders to grab the walls and place that load onto the carriage, we would have, we got something. So this is now a picture of how we come out, we stick the rails and the carriage beams as they stick out of the wall, okay? You can see this is the exterior wall. Notice that some of the limestone here was removed, but then can be restored, and you'll see later that it has been. But this will kind of give you a feel for, okay, we're progressing along. And then we had to put back the first floor because the theater needed some diaphragm at its hips because we're going to move it by its hips, so we need to give it some kind of rigidity at the base of the structure that's being moved. So as you can see, we came in and we started to, these are the top, this is the rail beam, this is the carriage beam, and we started to lace it together to give it stiffness and keep the base of the theater square because if it started to rack, it would start to deflect and structural cracks would occur and that was not in the plan. So here we go, now we're starting to take shape. You can see how we needled all the walls with these channels. These channels sit on grillage beams, these grillage beams sit on the carriage, the carriage sits on the rails. And so this is a picture from the other side. You can see this is for identification purposes only. And now the system of these eight rails are starting to take shape. It's getting time, it's getting close to showtime. We were scheduled to move this theater March 1st of 1998. We were in, this is like after the new year, so we were then a month or so of engaging in this journey. This is a picture of the rear of the theater. This is the opening where the proscenium arch was. They didn't need the stage house behind the theater. They wanted to preserve from the proscenium arch forward to the architectural facade at the street side. So this looks like more of the same, so I don't want to bore you because there's some really good stories. I got to tell you about what happened. Here again, this is the proscenium arch opening. We're starting to get the final things in place. And so we then get to the point where, okay, now we've got to be on the outside where we have to move the theater in open space. So this was a much simpler foundation system. It was typically, as we built inside the theater, peers were every seven and a half feet on center, but on the outside, we could do this much more expeditiously with normal construction techniques. Albeit we drove pairs of pipe piles down to rock. And then we poured conventional pile caps. Notice they had the same spacing and the same alignment for the eight rails that are going west. By the way, this is the Port Authority Building on 8th Avenue. And so that once these pile caps are cast, we set the rails. It's starting to take shape now, right? And the clock is ticking and the pressure is building and sleepless nights started to emerge. And then all of a sudden, we were ready to move this thing. And so the question is, how are you going to move it? Okay, you have everything in place now. How are you going to convey it? And so what we did was we... Oops, let me go back. Oops, I'm sorry. I'm going forward. We employed these six-foot-stroke hydraulic jacks. Each one of them having a 25-ton capacity and we built these steel shoes that grabbed the rail, right? Kick it and push. And then the jacks would retract. You would then kick again and push. And so cyclically in five-foot cycles, we had intention of moving this thing seamlessly. So this is a picture of what I call the pump house. This is behind the theater on the east side. And remember, we're pushing this thing west. So we have eight separate valve systems so that each hydraulic jack was assigned to one for every rail. Eight jacks, eight rails. And the whole idea was this. And it sounds so simple. You have eight rails. Okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to move all of it, retract, push all of it, retract. And with any kind of luck, we can move this thing within the day's time and we're all happy. But now the fun starts because we wanted a dress rehearsal before March 1st because we said, listen, the whole world's going to watch this, including my mother and father. I can't... So I know my father's going to be all over me if I don't do this right. So we wanted a dress rehearsal. I'm kidding, but we wanted a dress rehearsal. So the week before, we were allowed to move this theater 20 feet. 20 feet's enough. Okay, we can get the bugs out. But it turned out that when we started, what we didn't realize was... And we had eight jacks, I told you, for eight rails. So we figured, look, no matter what happens, we can navigate this thing. It starts to drift left, okay, push right, and we can navigate this thing and keep it centered on the rails. Nice concept, but sometimes it doesn't work. So we started moving. And the first five-foot stroke, we saw it start to drift and we said, oh my God, it's coming, it's drifting. What are we going to do? Well, look, stop with these four, just push with these four, push it back. And we pushed with the other side and it kept on still drifting one way. We said, oh, we got to stop. Something's wrong. So we went back to the drawing board and what we did was we thought about how do railroad cars stay on rails? Well, they had that flange on the wheel, so it stays on the rail. So what we did was with those roller skates, we built some horizontal rollers on the sides of them so that it hugged the top flange and it would take the ride. And that was a very poignant discovery, but we know we also discovered that we had twice as much thrust than we needed because when we held up on the one side and pushed with the other four, we were still moving the theaters. And now we had twice as much thrust than we needed. And the science is the frictional coefficient from steel to steel at rest is like 0.5, but in motion it cuts in half to 0.25. So now we had twice as much ability to thrust, so we used it to our advantage. And what we did was we said, okay, we're going to move it two, four, six, and eight. And while he's retracting, we're moving with one, three, five, and seven. And actually we started to move it concurrently. And we were actually able to successfully move this theater in five hours such that this is the publicity stunt this is Advocate Stella with Who's on First Act, okay? This is how we moved the theater. You can imagine at the success of it we had tremendous amount of publicity in the news, on the newspapers. One of the things I show you is a joke where they say, hey, you guys can do this. So we had a lot of recognition, but nothing, nothing was more rewarding than making the front page of the New York Times on Monday morning. Three time-lapse shots. And this was indeed something that we treasure as something that's memorable, a tribute to what man's spirit can achieve and what my parents' college tuition paid off. So I want to thank you for your time. Thank you very much, Tony. I would now like to invite Krista Lindsted up, moving Kiruna, a community reinventing its city. Hello and thank you for inviting me to speak here today. I'm going to talk about the town of Kiruna and it's the great transformation that it's going through. The town is being moved due to the land deformation that is caused by the mine. And its fate has certainly resonated within me and I hope that the existential predicament that Kiruna is in gives us a chance to reflect on cities in general and about the role of cities, its artifacts and how they serve communities and cultures through their collective memories. And I will tell you how we approach the task that was given to us to offer a vision, a strategy and a master plan to set this in motion. And I will describe some of the features in the existing towns so that when we finally take a look at the new town and all the things that the community aspires for there we can get an idea of the role that buildings and monuments can play for a community like Kiruna is being uprooted. So it's an industrial town in the very north of Sweden. It has a subarctic climate. There's lots of snow in the winter and the temperatures can plummet to minus 40 degrees Celsius and Fahrenheit, I understood. The Sami people have a long-standing history here and the reindeer herding passes here still. The sun doesn't set at the height of summer and it doesn't rise in the depths of winter. 18,000 inhabitants live within the town. It was founded in the year of 1900. It was considered to be a model town. It was placed by the Mount of Kiranavara up here which was developed into the world's largest underground iron ore mine and it was placed at quite a distance from the open shafts that were used then. The iron ore seam is around 80 metres wide and sloping 60 degrees below the town as you can see in the section below here and when establishing a new level at 1,360 metres below ground a land deformation will affect the whole existing town the town centre by the year 2033 which is the planning horizon. So for this we would need a city that can get up and walk as this visionary image by Ron Heron of Archigram from the 1960s and it portrays a group of walking cities that are able to move to needed resources or habitable places. But before buying into this machinery what is this identity or this entity that we call Kiranav who are the people, what do they say and is their built environment of any future value. It was, as I said, considered to be a model town with ambitions exceeding those of other mining towns in Sweden and the best architects were invited to draw up the master plan and design its architecture. And three areas can still be distinguished it's the railway company's area it's the area of the mining company and it's the area of the local authority that has cohesed into one town. There are a number of buildings that have been identified as of high cultural significance in red and there are some areas of groups of buildings that would have their value built up together in a group. So this, for example, groups of minor cottages in the former company area they are even replaced and synchronized in coloring and this is a group of buildings in the former local authority area and a town center has developed in the middle with a variety of architectural styles and functions and this whole town center is listed as of national interest being in a way a national monument and the church was put in the center but beyond this Kiranav has become a sprawling town where many use the car to reach to nature in the periphery which many people do in their free time and this is although the Kirunians as a role cherished to be outdoors. In 2004 the local authority agreed to move after the mining company wished to establish its new level and the mining company will reimburse the town and all the property owners for lost property to 125% of its value and this is the economic driving force for the move and in 2012 we won an architectural competition in collaboration with Gelardi Hellstein Architects from Oslo and the relocation was given a 20-year perspective including up to 5,000 residential units public buildings, workplaces, the provision of public space and the relocation of key buildings. Over half of the population will be affected first hand in a 20-year perspective so we asked ourselves apart from the necessity of it are there any positive opportunities that will cover for things lost like the view of the mountains so that individuals will be engaged and choose to move which is not self-evident that they will. Most people accept the move they're well aware that mining is their source of wealth or main source of wealth but we found a variety of attitudes depending on where you live in which stage you're in and life and generally speaking people building families for example were most critical and also most contributing in the planning young people tended to be excited and older people saw more acutely what is being lost on the way we learned that Kirina has developed a unique mix of people unlike most small towns in Sweden but that the mining industry risks leaving people out the future town should have more meeting places have a broadening of the economy should offer more opportunities and lifestyle choices we also learned that people identify their town not only with the town itself but with its immediate surroundings the setting by the wilderness so the new town must acknowledge this there is a great pride in the history of the town and we need to bring things from the old into the new and help people and generations see their present and future challenges in a wider perspective like Georgia was talking about earlier and the relocation of Kirina means that much will be lost but it also means an opportunity to reinvent the city so here are some of the strategies that guide our work no one left behind means that the new town should connect all residents during the whole process of 20 years rather than implementing a satellite town we take use of Kirina's pre-existing fabric a compact town with meeting places in nature it carries the new features that are meant to serve Kirunians in confronting their challenges it shall enable a more active town life a greater range of opportunities and at the same time with a closer relationship with nature green fingers shall serve as gateways to nature we lose the wonderful view but we have to have a more intimate and direct and functional relationship with nature urban reuse means that we should take use of existing resources whenever we can and this image at the top right is a conceptualized space for this we call it the Kirina portal it is to be a virtual and physical meeting place and store for urban recycling where the old city can be reused and transformed into the new reuse is as much about the working of a cultural identity as using our resources wisely Kirina is far from other populated areas the mining company will move some 30 buildings of high cultural significance in an agreement with the town the wooden church from 1912 is one of them and the national government administration oversees these negotiations since many of these are of national interest the process of overlooking the artifacts has been managed in four stages summarized as describe as in describing the artifacts the origin and development interpret as in interpreting how its features have societal importance evaluate as it's significant the significant values that it owns and its vulnerability to change and the final one enable as in how it can reach its potential and in this case in a new setting it's called the dive process it's a tool often used in Norway and Sweden for handling our built heritage among many stakeholders in my role as an architect I've taken part in the last of these stages and behind supporting the everyday life the city's places and their architecture can also trigger personal memories and they also carry a shared history among people so this is of course hot substance in Kirina so here is an illustration of how Kirina develops from the present condition the deformation zone expands eastwards from the mine if I set this in motion and the new takes shape in the east and in the next day the new town integrates more with the existing fabric it's a planning horizon of 2023 and the town in that 2033 perspective it develops north and south creating green fingers and Kirina's new center and its most dense part and most diverse is of course the town center around building which we will return to in a short while the deformation zone is planned to become a public park the parts that can be walked on an active and useful space that is often felt like a threat in many mining communities and the new town zone is closing in and projecting the deformation movement way beyond the present scenario the whole present town is erased and the new town expands north south and west these diagrams show the access to people within a walking distance of 500 meters in different phases in red being the most intense and they illustrate how the center of gravity is changing and becoming critical in about 2023 when there are actually two center of gravity but over time Kirina will be a walking millipede of a city in reference to Ron Herron so here's a glimpse of what the new town can be like before I return to the question of how we can take use of the existing Kirina in the new town square and the park create gathering places in the town's most central location as well as a place for easy access to services on a daily basis we will visit the square at the end of this tour the park is oriented towards a mining tower the only fixed point in this former industrial landscape that this site is the tower will hopefully be accompanied by the new Sami Parliament and beyond that the park also serve as a gateway to the wilderness here we stand in one of the green fingers the green corridors looking towards a neighborhood of singly family houses well outside the town center now let's take a look at some of the existing buildings and groups of buildings with historical value in one way or another as a source of knowledge or experience or for future use and we should see how their properties can be carried into the new the church Tony is this something that could bring you to Kirina? it's often seen as the most beautiful piece of architecture in Sweden by experts and by the popular vote it's a national listed building it shall be moved in one piece and placed in a prominent and visible location on a height that can be planted with mountain birches like it is today the Vickers house exemplifies a number of buildings that can be taken from the old town center into the new and placed within a block neighboring other buildings it will be placed close to the church as it is today the fire station demands a more free-standing location that the more compact blocks of our new city cannot offer but it can be placed along the park and if you don't mind the mind-boggling comparison this park can take on a similar role as the mall in Washington DC as being this playing field for or this field of monuments and memories a group of minus cottages that I talked about before the spaces in between them is important for them to be understood and they can be placed in a less dense periphery of the town the sheriff's house is placed by a local street and a local park in a less dense neighborhood where single family houses are not an anomaly then there are the buildings that we wish would have gone into the new but will not be the homestead of the founding patriarch of Yalma Lundbom it was moved this summer to a specific company park by the mine like a small scansen we wish it would have gone into the new town but with the experience growing of moving buildings the stakeholders are more confident which I believe will can result in an opening up for many more buildings to be brought into Kirina which would be a blessing EMPES, the hot dog stand a much-loved institution here it will find a place in the new square but probably in a new building this is of course not historically listed but I show it here to stress the popular discussion and the emotional forces that are in play right now and then there is the town hall a landmark building from 1956 although it is or was national listed a building that cannot be taken down but it will be taken down to the dismay of many art historians and architects the mining company and the local authority agreed that in relation to all the other things that they want to move this is not prioritized and by the way not it's the only brick and concrete building that has been considered so it seems like they are more the wooden buildings they are more easier for as they consider them to be more easy to move so let me just summarize what we tried to achieve for further discussions here today it's an arctic town where people value outdoor life highly we can support this by creating an active interface between town and nature it's an open town with a potential being something more than merely a mining town and we can support this by creating this compact town with a meeting places and foremost this square as a landmark and then there are buildings and artifacts that through their historical role and aesthetic qualities simply put plays an important role in making up the identity the church and the bell tower of the town hall are examples of this and are preserved in new locations you can see the black bell tower is from the old town hall put by the new town hall that will be planned for opening up this before the end of the year so all of this they serve both the new town hall and the bell tower serve as or represent the search for excellence that is a part of the identity here that is needed if they are to build a robust society and as I see it these features tell of a small town with the money from a big iron ore seam or a big mining company but it's still the small town and they try to lay the groundwork for a close and responsible relationship to each other to nature and to its cultural heritage it's a small community with a great challenge and I'm very glad to have had the chance to share it with you thank you thank you very much Krister I'd like to invite Amanda Schachter and Alexander Levy Bronx River right of way reclaiming Cass Gilbert's Westchester Avenue Station for the Waterfront okay so here we have Westchester Avenue Station and one of the only existing photographs of the original condition of the station from 1912 it's a building it's one of 13 station stops that were commissioned by J.P. Morgan to Cass Gilbert for the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad and four of those were built and are in existence and this one is at Westchester Avenue and to situate you it's a little bit north of Hunts Point along the sixth train you would see it if you got off at Whitlock Station you would see central Bronx and in a drawing of the station what you can see that Cass Gilbert designed is it's a two part station house you have a head house that was on the at the street level and then a waiting room that was hovering over the tracks you had a masonry head house and a steel latticework waiting room that was over a steel bridge and people would go down to the tracks or you could continue to Edgewater Road along the Bronx River so there was a bridge taking you to a road from one side at Westchester Avenue to the Bronx River and this was the station, a drawing of that and just to situate you a little bit of where it is here's New York, the 13 lines were to go from Port Morris and the Bronx to New Rochelle 13 station stops right here and this is the New York New Haven you can see a little bit of what the railroad was most of it has been absorbed by Amtrak so where were these 13 station stops going what was so exciting about making these at the time you know the Bronx was a place for amusements let's say weekend amusements you had the Morris Park race track where you had cars racing and then more relaxation there was a monorail to City Island that you could go and relax by the Long Island sound and at Glen Island which was a little island right off of New Rochelle you had a casino place that you would go on the weekends and what's more a great amusement park was something that was considered the first amusement park and the dip was completed the same year as the station house well none of that exists today all of that's gone all of these monuments let's say of Bronx of the turn of the 20th century but we still have the station and here is the station today you can see it you probably recognize it from the drawing but much has changed in terms of the location where it is it's in the middle of a great let's say a morass of infrastructure everywhere you have Amtrak which is there you have the Sheridan Expressway you have the Six Line Station and yet you still have a neighborhood a big neighborhood, a growing neighborhood right around it on all sides of it so here you see the station house and it's really been derelict since the 1930s but it stands there and there's a beauty to it and people in the neighborhood who know it are proud of this building and they see it as a marker in their community and just to show you a few images the station is tiled in polychrome terracotta and this is the waiting room you can see a little bit left of the steel lattice work and the bridge that's been cut off so basically over the years little parts have been taken away from the station you'll see a little bit of that more later and the bridge that was leading you to Edgewater Road was cut off so it's just kind of an amputated bridge some more views from the Sheridan you can see the back one of the verandas has been bricked in which actually has preserved some of the details on the inside but from the outside parts have been covered there's some graffiti on it as well but there is some beauty to it a lot of the ornament still remains you can see the New York New Haven and Hartford symbol there and Westchester Avenue New York New Haven you can see that there's a lot of the original detailing I'd just like to mention you see to the left actually like the veranda and the Bloomingdale Asylum Building that Jorge was speaking about this morning this portico was removed when Robert Moses put the off-ramp of the Sheridan Expressway exit 3 when you drive if you drive this portico was removed to make the exit ramp so you see the shadow of it there so that was another amputation on the sides that we'll see but we got to go in one day it's actually closed off but Amtrak let us go inside one day they opened the door and let us in so we could see what was going on and basically a study was done of the building in 2006 that ascertained that the head house is actually in very good is in good structural condition and a lot of the detailing is maintained there the waiting room is not right okay it's suffered on the outside there is a nice there is some of the terracotta tile that's still there so it's not nothing but when you look inside you can see that the structure is in trouble it's compromised here yet when you look out the window through the waiting room and you see the bridge you feel like something has to happen to this building because it's only 8 feet away from a new park which is concrete plant park that was opened less than 10 years ago and here you can see kind of that extension the bridge wanting to go across and be part of this park you see this road and this is in the winter but if I show you also in the summer there was some transit mix concrete corporation that was repainted and turned into some kind of archaeological remnant and a wonderful park was built in this place you can see the building kind of still hovering behind in the background not touched up the only thing that hasn't been touched up but what you have here is a park where people go fishing, they put in boats there's canoeing, kayaking it's happening at this park it's called concrete plant park go back one slide or two actually there to the left here as you see there's so many vying rights of way sorry is this on? yes it is let me just say quickly to the bottom left diagonally up in the screen is a department to access it's a maintenance route and it needs to be maintained so it goes right through the middle of concrete plant park it's about 14 feet wide it's concrete, it has to support heavy trucks so once again these are challenges to make a park space or to make any kind of space you have to deal with all sorts of parallel access points that are ambivalently coexisting on the site okay so we came upon this building, we actually discovered this building when we were kayaking down the river we were doing another project called Bronx River Crossing and we discovered this building from the river and we started to ask about it and we had heard that people had tried to rehabilitate it in the past especially when they were making the park there was an idea that the park needed bathrooms maybe this could be an access point a way to have a park person there and give access to the park so we kind of saw the building from this vantage point rather than seeing it from the railway vantage point, our first view of it was from the river so we started to see it as this river building that could be part of the way the Bronx River was now being used so and we had gone down the river and we realized okay, what's going on here there's this new greenway and there's a riverway and both are becoming are being used there are new activities happening people are bike riding on the greenway people are kayaking, canoeing, you had the Bronx River Alliance leading weekend clean up, leading weekend trips, there was a flotilla once a year taking a big ball down the river so you have all these this is the Amtrak bridge actually going over the river, you have all these beautiful sites here, it's clean up that happens all the time kayaking and canoeing trips I'll make a quick mention Robert Smithson has a concept of the monuments of the future when he talks about the Paseik the monuments of the Paseik it's an incredible article he wrote in the 60s about monuments and this monument to the future that he talks about it's the ruins of the future that that pillar that's in the middle of the river was a pillar that was intended to take one of the fourth cloverleaf off the Sheridan expressway onto the cross Bronx expressway that was never built so there's this pillar sitting in the middle of the river that was to support a cloverleaf that was never constructed so it is a ruin of the future so there is this idea that the Bronx River is becoming a place of action and enjoyment of monuments and of the natural environment oh yes and so actually what we find over the time that we've been working on this project it's been a few years now we've received grants from the Fitch Foundation through the Blinder award from the Kaplan fund and it's slow going obviously and there's a lot of resistance but what's happening is we've also rediscovered what it is we're preserving or moving or keeping in one place and the river says a great deal of what we discovered one of them is that the New Haven sorry New York New Haven and Hartford Railroad was a piece of infrastructure with many nodes this was one of them and that's the red line and what you're finding is that the green line that follows the river that goes around the Bronx Zoo and then goes up to Westchester and Yonkers and the river itself at its source the only one of the its fresh water almost all the way down is these are pieces of infrastructure that by having having gone bankrupt and having become abandoned these nodes along JP Morgan's railroad could be repurposed as a new infrastructural system one that is emerging now which is the greenway and the blueway let's call it this is where we saw this exitude preservation having legs yeah so it's this idea of a network transfer you take one network which is defunct in terms of these station stops and you transfer it to a new network that's growing and that's building and this is kind of a diagram of what that means to do that transfer how do we take the station and make it something that was useful to one piece of infrastructure and move it move it both conceptually and physically so that it could be part of a new network and just to situate you a little bit about more specifically about this site of the Westchester Avenue station oh yeah so well you can get dramatic and understand it's dramatic but it's actually true they call this the triangle of death and it has to do with asthma rates we have the brockner running along the base of this drawing we have the Sheridan running up along the left we have Westchester Avenue crossing the river that we talked about earlier we see the center of that circle in the middle is Westchester Avenue station maybe we can point to it you see it if you get the pointer there you go and then you see the crossing of the IRT the 6 line going across the river there what you find is asthma rates are very high you have cross sprunks you have brockner, you have Sheridan and you have and yes at least those three if not brockner itself underneath all contribute and the Hunts Point terminal market where trucks are constantly coming in and out you have an air quality problem and you also have the fact that it's a lowland a mold problem increases the asthma rates as well so you have two vying issues they call it the triangle of death it's a very dense neighborhood and you have all of these rights of way trying to take the lowland near the river for their own use and they're at odds with each other and what Concrete Plant Park did with Bronx River lines as they emerged 15 I would say 15 years ago they started pulling debris, cars, tires appliances out of the river and cleaning up the river itself bringing back nature to the river itself then the Concrete Plant was closed down and it became the site of this park it became the focus of what would then become this blue and green infrastructure that was saying happening and I think what you're seeing here is how tightly all of the pieces of the infrastructure are interlaced with each other so really moving something from one piece to the other of feet, we're speaking feet maybe a few yards so many lines of infrastructure intersecting in one place so maybe we could ask the idea was let's have some access to the park so maybe all we need is access why not just continue the bridge and come let's say it's 8 feet and enter the park, why not do that and the truth is it was done and it was tried in 2006 the youth ministers for peace and justice who was responsible for the park had a study done and they did they priced three options to see what would it be like to actually leave it in place leave the building in place and just have a ramp and a staircase to the park and the matter just dropped at that point because there was nothing impelling it forward because the building was still on the site and when we went by we said no this is a two-part site this is a two-part project you have a house and a waiting room we need to actually come to the river so why not actually take the waiting room and bring it to the river so it could be used for actual river activities and then keep the head house on site so why not split the house to sort of send the signal that something had changed on the site that now it was the river where things were happening and that the train was passing through but the river was the site of action and what's interesting is once we did that people started to be interested they started to see possibilities we were approached by the Roe New York and they were asking are you here? and so we took that original idea and we said maybe you could we would bring the waiting room forward and you could add to it so it started to spark a discussion just this idea of moving the building got people thinking and they started to see this building as something that could be more than a piece of the past of some kind of train station that people didn't know what to do with and what occurs here is that the movement itself isn't just about displacement it's about embracing the void in the middle we talked earlier about the amputation of the parts of this building the portico to the right which got shaved off in the off ramp the bridge that got cut off in the right of way to the river the in between gets preserved once the building is moved so there's that splitting but you're also embracing the bridge so there's something about that just to show you one of the original drawings to understand the waiting room on the bridge but I want to and this is another, we want to show you a video that talks a little bit more about it but just to explain a little bit about the site the striping this idea about moving this building we would be taking it from Amtrak over the DOT line which is the orange line into the parks into a part of the park that's actually owned by parks so you can kind of see the different layers of ownership that are in this very tightly knit space we're now going to tell you a little bit we are paddling a mile and a half up from the mouth of what the Lenape tribe call the aqua home or lower Bronx river amid tidal salt marshes and other riparian landscapes and vegetation willows, silver maples and American sycamores land of the Bronx will be settled by farms in the 19th century by neighborhoods and industry our story begins after 1898 when the Bronx is incorporated into greater New York City 1903, J.P. Morgan purchases the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad and plans a series of stations in the Bronx the architect, Cass Gilbert known for his 1899 commission for the United States Custom House of Bowling Green is selected to design the new station houses all the way along our stretch of river is a structure clad in exposed steel and tiles of polychrome terracotta bringing pedestrian smoothly from street level above to tracks below through an arched entry hall tower and vaulted waiting room down open stairs, outdoors to platforms Westchester Avenue Station is one of a string of 13 stops Morgan commissions Gilbert to design along the Harlem line of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad about eight of the designs are realized presently only four remain repurposed or in ruins at Port Morris, Hunts Point Westchester Avenue and City Island a limitation of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad is that it does not reach Grand Central Terminal Morgan anticipates that the city's heart will shift northward to 135th Street but 1960 New York City zoning laws leave the terminus isolated and remote from mainline nodes of New York City transit infrastructure. 1920 New York City extends the inter borough rapid transit system to Tullan Bay Park as part of the dual contracts project an elevated line emerges out of the subway tunnel at Whitlock Avenue along our stretch of river the extended line RIRT also begins to stop at Westchester Avenue adjacent to both Westchester Avenue Station and the Bronx River Waterfront by the end of the 1920s Morgan's New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad is no longer turning a profit by 1931 the Westchester and by 1937 the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad filed for bankruptcy late 1940s the transit mix concrete corporation moves on to the Bronx River building and operating a concrete batch mix plant along our stretch of the river the lower Bronx River waterfront despite activity and contamination of industry continues to serve as a preferred embarkation area for leisure time on water excursions three piers of Westchester Avenue serve as docks for fishing vessels headed for the Long Island Sound Coney Island and the Jersey Shore the Bronx Queen a decommissioned World War II destroyer is reincarnated as a fishing yacht returning each evening to appear in direct alignment with the old Westchester Avenue station houses raised walkway 1958 construction begins on the six lane Sheridan Expressway the Sheridan rends a long deep trench between the Whitlock Avenue neighborhood and the Westchester Avenue expressway off-ramp runs within 10 feet of the Cass Gilbert designed station house requiring partial demolition of the building's basement and severing it from the local street along its west facade 1970s and 80s Amtrak takes ownership of the railway running between Westchester Avenue station as part of the northeast corridor right of way for service between Boston and Washington DC the old Westchester Avenue station house which is new levels of neglect and decay remaining unused the Transit Mixed Concrete Plant closes down in 1987 and the waterfront on our stretch of river becomes a local dumping ground the piers where the Bronx Queen and other leisure vessels once dock lay abandoned and disintegration in 1989 the Bronx Queen sinks off of Perth Amboy 2006 Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice works with the Bronx River Alliance and New York City Department of Parks the Transit Mixed Concrete Corporation land an adjacent waterfront to transform it into a new green space called Concrete Plant Park ecological rehabilitation begins on the waterfront with extensive salt marsh restoration and the installation of a canoe and kayak launch only the Cass Gilbert designed station house remains untouched and derelict the site of its ruins made more stark and curious amidst the area's revitalization the Bronx River Greenway made out in 2005 and currently in long term design and construction this 8 mile ribbon for pedestrians and cyclists is planned to stretch from Soundview to Muscat Cove on the lower Bronx River our stretch of river at Westchester Avenue sits at the heart of this new access 2010 the old Westchester Avenue station house is listed among 20 right of way structures in a report issued by Amtrak that the railway deems in need of demolition meanwhile the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission includes Westchester Avenue station on its endangered buildings list 2012 the abandoned Cass Gilbert's design station house of Westchester Avenue is poised to become a revitalized local connection to the Concrete Plant Park the Bronx River Greenway and the lower Bronx River Tower Entry Hall at street level steps away from the elevated Whitlock Avenue stop of the 6 train on Westchester Avenue and Entry Hall invites passers-by to the Park Greenway and River waiting room down by the river the station house waiting room slides away from its precarious position over the tracks and down to the waterfront transforming the building into a Park River Greenway house that sits on piers in the same location as the one-time dock for the Bronx Queen we're the videos finishing up there's some close-ups a beautiful afternoon on land Concrete Plant Park is open you can visit the outdoor bridge over the railway to rent a bicycle and continue on to the restrooms in the Entry Hall from here on your bike you can ride down the ramp and head south along the Greenway to Hunts Point Riverside Park and back across to Soundview Park at the mouth of the river or north along the Greenway to the Bronx Zoo Botanical Garden and on to Muskrat Cove and Westchester here we are paddling a mile and a half up from the mouth of the Aquahung amid restored and thriving 21st century tile salt marshes willows, silver maples American sycamores industry, neighborhoods and infrastructure the transformed old Westchester Avenue Station house transports us there great so with this finishing image sort of closing the circle of what we see is the move of infrastructure and that indication in the building itself there's a resistance too this idea of moving monuments part of the idea of moving a monument isn't that it's easy part of it is that there's friction that there's resistance and that the little motion that is engaged in that resistance makes for much more meaning so one of the things we found is in our research James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men where he was asked by Fortune Magazine to just go down and look at some sharecropping families and write a 10,000 word article he ended up writing a 10,000 word article that wasn't printed in its entirety and he turned it into a book and his stay with the sharecroppers that was meant to be for a few weekends ended up being for almost a year and one of the things he writes in the book of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is about the sharecroppers being this these people that were marginalized and were I guess mistreated in their endeavor to survive and subsistence farming and tenancy and he called what his job was in being there was resisting the request of Fortune Magazine to do the breezy article and be a still point and we found that there was a counterpoint to this idea of moving the monument and saying that by staying in place he moved people thank you much Amanda and Alex and finally I would like to invite Michael Isabel to speak about prototype 180 on behalf of Mary Ellen Carroll good morning Mary Ellen was here unfortunately she had to leave quite suddenly so I will be Mary Ellen Carroll today wasn't quite prepared for this let's see how it goes good morning I'm Mary Ellen Carroll this is a television Baghdad on Thursday January 17th 1991 a group of us gathered in front of a 27 inch Sony Triniton television set in a TV room at Colony Hall in Petersburg, New Hampshire Petersburg there was one bottle of Jameson's whiskey and the TV was tuned to Channel 9 WMUR broadcasting CNN headline news analog signal the video being broadcast showed the first U.S. bombing raids in Baghdad it was the official start of the Persian Gulf War codename Operation Desert Storm colloquially known as the Gulf War four wire television equipment was not allowed into Iraq and journalists were to file from Iraqi state facilities in anticipation of the war moving to Baghdad CNN had negotiated ahead of time to install this four wire it is as simple as it looks basically two open parallel phone lines one in each direction CNN had the only live audio coverage from Baghdad and it was because they had this device for their reports from Baghdad excuse me I made some notes to myself that I'm having a little trouble reading so pardon me they successfully did it I start with this detail in part to begin where the Fitch colloquium ended last year with its focus on preservation and war and how we have now shifted to catalytic acts and this year's convening XC2 on moving monuments this is kind of like my notes on here it's worth noting as of writing this from the most recent statistics from the UNHCR that an unprecedented 65.6 million people around the world have been forced to move from their homes among them are nearly 22.5 million refugees over half of whom are under the age of 18 there are also 10 million stateless people who have been denied nationality and access to basic rights such as education healthcare employment and freedom of movement but those UN figures do not include the most recent natural disasters or acts of God in insurance parlance of the hurricanes fires and devastation that has been reeked not to mention the turmoil of our current political state it never seems that it can get any worse and then I returned to my studio late that evening in 1991 and after rereading some notes that I had brought from my micro finance and development work and the building and utility projects I did in the Philippines in the 80s I added this subject card policy to my index system I often work with unsuspecting materials that include the law radio frequency IP etc okay I'm going to go back there are two key things to point out from this card from 1991 first that we are still living in the political epoch we need the use of policy as a material I was also thinking about performance and movement and what and how it causes things or people to move ten years later stuck in traffic on the 405 freeway after a critical theory seminar I taught at UC Irvine I was there because I was finally there was finally evidence that the students in the seminar were actually thinking I had missed my 15 minute window to avoid traffic and it would take me four hours to get back to LA our discussion was on America and movements the readings were taken from Stein's lectures in America and Baldwin's The Fire Next Time I like to think that their ability to think that day can be attributed to those texts and as Stein wrote it is true that generations are not of necessity existing that is to say if the actual movement within a thing is alive enough a motor goes inside of an automobile and the car goes in short this generation does not connect itself with anything that is what makes this generation what it is and why it is American and this is very important connection with portraits of anything and I say portraits and not description spiral jetty the next week I began discussing the impact that the GI bill had on art and architecture post World War II and the creation of VHA and FHA and ring cities in the development of land art that subject card on policy and the notes from a conversation I had recently in Las Casas with Donald J. in 1992 about the importance of the final decision to locate his work in the U.S. rather than in Mexico as he originally intended it was in 1999 when I typed the following in a bungalow on the border between LA and Santa Monica okay this is Bilbao flooded so to Guggenheim Bilbao Frank Gehry art in the public was eventually usurped and successfully so by architecture and most notably by Frank Gehry's Bilbao which just celebrated his 20th anniversary we're all familiar with that portrait and its evolution and how most art in the public is so utterly successful at failing and the grafting of art as forms on to and as architecture is less so as the financing mechanisms were integrated into the building facade it was the flooding in 1983 and again policy that precipitated the building of Bilbao as I tell my students in architecture and public policy traffic on the 405 architecture is inherently a political act okay now this is a description of prototype 180 I'll read it to you to make a work of art whose process will make architecture perform in the age of the political and to treat policy as a ready made the catalytic moment will be the revolution of a structure and its surrounding property 180 degrees following the rotation everything about the building and its surroundings as a system will be reconsidered and if necessary redesigned and manufactured as the work of art I had no idea where this would be but in reflecting on Judd's advice to me I began to narrow my focus to the US to identify where it would work policy as the next expansion of the foundation of the work and as a material itself was also to cite the work in an urban location and with the consideration that it would be necessary for something to be done but to avoid the snare of artists as displacer gentrifier or developer Houston selected itself as the site as it is the largest city in the United States without zoning there's no zoning in Houston there's not little zoning nor there's their zoning there's no formal land use policy but there is a policy that reflects the culture of free enterprise a wild catting mentality that was developed from real estate and the Allen brothers who were originally from New York the planning policy or ad hoc form of what is not zoning and land use measures include an array of deed restrictions density zones, tax increment reinvestment zones airports, buffering zones, historic preservation and lot sizes but there is not a comprehensive plan that is for the greater good for the greater all they've tried to pass zoning three times but has always been voted down by the way, zone Houston would have caused an equivalent amount of flooding from Harvey and perhaps that is suggestion for next year's fifth colloquialism on acts of God be they natural or how ideological shifts affect building typology there are two words for this Joel Austin and it is Joel Austin and the conversion of the basketball arena into a giant television studio if you're not aware of this former Houston rockets stadium now mega church 3579 people have been a part of prototype 180 since the start of 1999 okay mapping Houston and there were a number of items that we were looking at all at but these area were the blind policy were the policy blind spots first ring post war developments that are just outside Houston there is a detail of the area of Sharps town okay hurricane hit in 1961 this must be in Sharps town six days later the Sharps town center gigantic shopping mall was there Ted Kennedy cut the ribbon an aerial of Sharps town center and the freeway that goes through another area oh this is Keith Cherry this guy is great the structural engineer is fantastic this is Betty towns she's a realtor in the neighborhood and this is the house 6513 sharp view condition for public city and county wrote down the address and sent a certified letter to AIC management this is a park which is adjacent to the backyard of that home site so you see the left the rectangular lot the parks right at the back the house is situated towards the front of the property and that's an after idea this is Dr. Ramesh Kapoor he owns 50 single family homes in Houston always a bad idea to negotiate someone with someone who knows you desire what they have this is the house in the front the derelict house in the neighborhood that was otherwise quite lived in the letter I wrote to the Sharps town civic association talking about due diligence giving the approval for the 180 degree revolution work and deed restrictions the rendering of what the idea of it would be once it was complete it was Hurricane Ike forgive me if I don't understand the flow of these pictures but we're good in there this is the destruction I guess to the home site and the trees in the property what is this if you formed an LLC on January 17, 2007 it says if anyone can guess what the acronym stands for I'll give you an addition of the photographs the standing challenge out there for you this shows things radiating everything radiates out from the site and the focus is on Sharps town this is the section one and can be replicated and scaled these are other houses up for auction in the neighborhood for a 50s era mid-century type place here's the another house and here he is again final closing day June 29, 2007 paperwork that we did this is the house on the day of closing the side rear section in the deed restriction that says that 50% of the street facing facade needed to be in masonry what would this be with the cedar tongue and groove siding the development of a porcelain cladding material at the Kohler company happened so that was the conceptual cladding for that here we are making some things this is the sink actually at the Kohler factory here I am making a sink there it is here it is in a collector's home okay rice university we partnered with the rice building institute in the fall of 2008 and designed a water system this is a rendering of that happening designed a new water system with the city of houston to retrofit the existing systems in the areas we installed bee hives and had permaculture classes also a good security measure there's some names of graduate students who've worked on and volunteered with the area to help make maps and everything for the project this is some REEP weatherization program information solar power and then those things are installed at the home site here I am speaking at a mayoral forum in houston student the architecture is inherently a political act the first question was a yes or no answer would they support a new zoning policy and laws in houston everyone said no tried three times to have zoning in houston this is our high grow thing that we designed it was an inspiration in the ball court in amsterdam so that the balls do not go into the canals from the playground hydroponic curtain wall this is the building system and divider for the property that we filed a patent for this is the patent this is kind of a rendering of it so along the side of the house that would be more detail for you prototype 180 and innovation territory became the identity for the work but it would be open to respond or move within the time it is existing this is terry riley's composition there is more information about the super wi-fi network that was set up with some people from rice with locations all over the place there is the house right there on sharps v drive this is another part of that process here is the mall got that so this is this guy not sure who that is this is rick perry i think you guys all know who rick perry is former governor of texas and the texas energy secretary he is the current energy secretary i believe when he remembered what that department did and was so here is some more so this has got to do with another solar panel on the roof of the building or another building here we are back at the home this is the north facade the front is brick about to have the final moment and there is a question of what is the work of art for those that may have a more conventional notion one thing is that the detritus is not used as a material autonomy hence the dip tick is the final moment before the revolution was started photography has another form of preservation with an 8x10 camera 30x40 inch c prints front and back next edition on November 11 so here is the back now this is the beginning of the actual process to move this building the prep took 3 months started in august of 2010 digging trenches to get underneath the home installing railroad ties this guy by the way there is one guy in here i will point out who is an amazing guy with one arm doing a lot of this heavy lifting installed some jacks to get the building out the hydraulic system beginning to see a little bit of daylight through the bottom of the house the level make sure everything is level now it is 5 feet off the ground and we are getting close but if a crack foundation happened October 1st 2010 2 p.m. the revolution was scheduled for Sunday October 10th 2010 two important things one being close to the world trade center so when the building moved I ran I believed that the expletive I said was oh fuck the next thing I did was think of Richard Sarah yes I did think of him and what did he think when the work number 3 fell on the rigger bray johnson at the walker in minneapolis this often gets confused with the 1988 incident of the city the law in sharps town is that when they were planning out the homes they would do 10 at a time say a ford production type of thing more accurately a military method of construction form work put the steel in call the inspector who would give the okay and then that would happen in the cover of night we had structural engineers examine the structure and give the okay for the structural move thousands of homes over the years but a slab and without enough support steel in or under will do exactly what it did collapse houston was built without regard for the carrying capacity of its roads just as it was built without regulating the amount of impervious cover that would be shut in water into streets storm sewers rivers and buffalo by you Keith cherry came back and said what do you want to do what do you think I want to do I think this was a good idea and to encourage people Charles Renfrow and others in addition to the visible work that we were doing was also the invisible and in order to have an audience and watch the process from any anywhere in the world with internet access we installed wireless cameras this was 24 hour seven days a week wireless video transmission from building's POV out into the yard You can see a split screen of both cameras. So this was a kind of a revolutionary, I guess, at the time. 2010 there was not a lot of live streaming of things. The capacity for the internet wasn't as strong as it is now. So this was done with some people from Rice University to help set up the technology for all that. Okay, November 11th. I'm gonna start a little film. It'll show you a bit of the process. Hopefully that's what's gonna happen when I hit this. If you keep looking to the right, there's a woman standing on her roof. She's very upset about the whole thing happening. So that's something to keep in mind. That's Keith. A little audience in the back there. There she is, yeah. You get the idea, I think. Okay, so this is sort of the stills of the same process. Moving it out into the street. There it is, empty. And as I wrote here earlier, the site empty. Seeing the county from the city, separating the sculpture from its plinth, imagining the public space, and what would the expansion of the park be? And would it be from the city moving to the country, to the county, or the county moving to the city line? This is right out of the line between the city's proper and the county that's adjacent. Bringing it back in. It's an aerial of that. A new foundation was poured, and with enough steel, we put it down, reconnected it to the foundation. When they started to anchor the structure, or the panaceo, as I had everyone who spoke Spanish working on it, calling it, we noticed another issue. The structure was bow-legged. As someone mis-measured and made it 10 inches larger. So that's a bit of a problem. Okay, so this is gonna, talking a little bit about some of the distribution and dissemination of the project. GSAPP exhibition from February to April of 2011, policy timeline that we have continued to make additions in an ongoing basis. There's a dip-tick here from the exhibition. The video you just saw right there. Here's the model that we have built. Showing it, you can flip it over and you see the other side. There's my sink that I made. This is the display of the process and the paper trail to get this all done. We had a lot of dealing with the city of Houston to make this happen. Here's some more stills from it, process. Documentation of process. As documentation, not as a work of art when a foundation or what has been described as the ass falling out of the house happened, it became a thicker narrative. The live stream from the site continued to have that going after we moved the house. Then there was a drought, barren land. I want to go back to the site and remember that Houston is a swamp. The majority is clay with topsoil, but it is a swamp. So first of all, to build with a slab on grade method is problematic, perhaps naive, but also over 100 days of over 100 degree temperatures that would kill most living things, but it didn't. And what we became extremely enthusiastic about was that this would be our plant specimens. So I had botanists from A&M, Rick Perry's alma mater, and Rice and you of Houston, et cetera, to come out and start to create a taxonomy of what was growing on the property, such as this. We take images of each plant or grass or tree or whatever was surviving in that heat. That was until I received a letter from the Civic Association requesting that a lawn was planted in mode. So here's some more imagery of the place. It's still continuing to be distributed and disseminated. It was at the Generale Foundation in Vienna in 2012, and the 2014, 2015 was in the Gallery Stodd Park, Kunsthalle Kremse in Kremse, and it continues and will continue as it is always changing. There's always movement, and when I conceived of this in 1999, it was exactly that which I had in mind, that I was to be vigilant about the process and that it determined what it needed to be. As Henri LeFavre said, wrote in the Urban Evolution and as the second critique, and this is where I would say that this is what the foundation, is the foundation of prototype 180. It attempts to open a path to the possible. To explore and delineate a landscape that is not merely part of the real, the accomplished occupied by existing social, political and economic forces is a utopian critique because it steps back from the real without however losing sight of it. Removal of the structure has always been a part of the process, and I was in talks with the Houston Fire Department and Underwriters Laboratory to do a controlled burn. And as someone tried to categorize the work as ontological and like metaphor, which I am against, I was adamant that it was not. It is epistemological. Here's the Google Street view currently. Brings us to more recent moments in Google and at some point will not be every five years when you have a street view, but it will be simultaneous. This is from July 7th. Hurricane Harvey, September 3rd. This house somehow was not really affected by Hurricane Harvey so much. This is right after September 3rd. This is October 10th, after the cleanup. So there was a little bit, but not like some other areas of Houston, still the house with its nice lawn. Here's the Google Earth view from this morning of the place. You can see it's now at the back of the property. Another view. Here's a rendering for an exhibition that will be in Basel in 2018. A rendering of the park. Returning to the rendering from the meeting with the Civic Association and how it will become reality and thinking about preservation and the partnerships to then create the stewardship. Okay, so I'd like to invite everybody to daringly unbuilt at Prototype 180 for the final performance and the announcement about the stewardship for the work. I'd like to thank Jorge Otero-Pilos and Dean Amali Andrayos and Professor Fitch who started the colloquium and my fellow participants and finally in closing. When we took down part of that very architected and dare I say intelligent and elegant Mesian extension of the facade that created a privacy wall, we discovered that the bricks had the following marking with some forensics we discovered where they came from along the Rio Grande. And in closing that form that is a material that is baked into a brick that could be the instrument of a performed act that can also give voice to a movement necessitates and ending with solnit who was being quoted frequently these days and who understands movements and wrote recently in her brief essay on blaming women for the acts of men. I have spoken, which I do, which is one of my faults. I am crafting an apology for that out of dynamite and back hose which will be ready presently. Also invite you to Houston to watch that apology. The Prototype 180 will be crafting November 11th of this year. Thank you. Under very, very last minute conditions I'd like to invite all the speakers from the morning panel to please join us at the table. The best laid plans in this realm of managing the built environment oftentimes don't translate to time either. So we only have a few minutes for questions because we definitely want to get you out for lunch by 12.15. So I will start off the conversation and hopefully we can continue some of this dialogue through other sessions throughout the day. Thank you to all the speakers. I was struck in all the presentations about a few things. One, Jorge made the comment about how oftentimes these moves, these change of context are about protecting these monuments from people which I found to be really interesting and I kept thinking about because in all of your presentations what we saw was that that change of context was probably less about protection and more about valorizing these places for new purposes within communities and that this was in fact very much about re-engaging people with these places and being very aware of that social dynamic. And so I was wondering as well if each of you could talk a little bit about how you manage the social dynamic because you all alluded to it. We heard a lot about the technical, for example, moving the rails and the theater, but we also heard about the way in which you had to navigate the media in this process because this was a form of public performance in moving that theater. In the case of Kiruna, we also heard about how there was this important outreach to the community because this was as much about how the community felt about this shift as it was about the actual challenge of moving an entire community. In the Cass Gilbert example, this is about re-engaging a lost piece of the past with contemporary society in the way in which they're using this greenway and this blueway. And certainly in prototype 180, we're seeing these political challenges of policy but not policy in the case of Houston and the way in which that simple 180 degree shift starts a social dialogue that is so compelling. So if you could talk a little bit about how you really navigated or managed the social aspect and the community perception and potentially engagement. Well, we really have to thank the newspapers as if the buildup to the project, it was covered from top to bottom as far as how we were gonna do it, who was doing it, why were we doing it. And the public interest had elevated to a point where the day of the move across the street on 42nd Street, you could not move from the curb to the building was filled with people. They were fascinated with something like this that you don't ordinarily see and no less to do it in the heart of Times Square. I think they were embracing the challenge as we did. And so people were riveted and couldn't wait to see how this was gonna all go. And if the truth is that it moved so slowly that the client actually put yard markers along the path just to see the transition from one point to the other. And if I can quote my associate who was interviewed by the newspapers after the move was completed, he said, well, what do you think? He said, I don't think the pigeons on the roof knew that the building was moving. And it was all well received. We were covered by Dateline NBC. As you know, the New York Times, we made the front page, which is everybody's dream. And all the tabloids, there were news broadcast that night. And the public managed themselves. And actually, we just sat back and took the ride after that because there was nothing to manage. Everyone just reveled in the idea that this kind of thing can happen. And we were very pleased about the whole thing. I could, the first couple of buildings have been moved this summer and there's been rows of people walking along the truck and it's finally a message for the Kirunians that things are happening. So it's a very flashy and interesting happening in Kiruna. So in that sense, it's a very social event to move buildings. And it's also the most exciting thing in the whole event of moving the town is moving actual buildings. It's the presence has been preceded by a dialogue with people where there have also been a topic of what to bring. That's been something that the community or the town, the local authority has cared about. And then in the end, it is a conflicted political process with a mining company with their experts and thinking about practical things and economy and things like that. And then the town or the other side, the experts from the national government who care about the national interests and then the town. And usually the town is in between these two other parts. And they are the ones to care for what people want to bring. And that is a political hot issue. And then the third aspect of it will be when it finally they've chosen the buildings and they put in the new town. What I didn't say were that there are a lot of conflicting interests in putting them in different places. For example, the Sami people have long been not so well taken care of by the church. The church and the Sami people have a conflicted history. And so that plays out in the town design and we're not putting them right beside each other. So then it becomes a very social event. Yeah, I would say our project was social from the start. We discovered the building going down the river with the Bronx River Alliance with youth ministries for peace and justice and about 50 kids, high school students from the Bronx. So we already, we discovered the building in a social framework and it's never left that framework except for actually being at our desks and working on the project. It's really been about discovering the project together, showing the project. So at this point we've presented this project in so many places in the Bronx and community board meetings at the Bronx River Alliance's Winter Assembly. We've talked about it and I was telling someone earlier today it's already become a way people are thinking about the project even though it hasn't moved yet. So basically in the Bronx I'll see people even on Instagram they'll be posting, they'll be passing the building, they'll post it and then they'll mention and we have to do this project at slow architecture. Like it's something that people want to see happen because it's something that we've built up with people there as we've gotten to know them and trying to make this happen. So I would say it's been social from day one, from the day we kayaks passed it. There is, it's something charged in all the things we've done this morning has to do with that anticipation of motion that it's definitely about the charge, you actually sense the sparks of the charge that Jorge began this morning with which is that it excites something in us that we know that buildings are removable mentally. So the moving of them requires of us a change in our own thinking and it creates tension, anticipation and kind of an excitement, positive and negative. There's a worry but there's also, there's a wonder and we definitely feel it. I think people want the Bronx to improve and I think that they see this as almost an embodiment of that chance for improvement when they see the building about to move. I could speak just from my experience having been the documentarian covering the process, interviewing neighbors and kind of watching the process unfold from the beginning. It's obviously social in that it was being purposely put out into the world via a live feed which is quite boring to watch but it's POV of a house. As much coverage as Mary Ellen could get through newspapers locally or whatever and then the people who actually lived in the neighborhood as you saw the lady on the roof. I think because it's a house that moved into the street and reparked itself at basically flipping the property, most people didn't get it at the end of the day. The neighbors were like, why are you doing that? The structural movers had never done that. They typically moved buildings across Houston or picked up an old church from one place and moved it to another place. So you had a crowd. You see the people at the back of the yard that was kind of an art crowd invited by Mary Ellen to be a witness to this process. Then you have the neighbors who are inevitably gonna show up and then right around the time that was really happening, school bus let out. So you can't see it in that video but there are a lot of kids watching this process and not understanding. I think the neighborhood itself, the people in that neighborhood were glad to see something happen to the property. It had been vacant for 20 years or something but didn't understand quite what it was that was happening and then I think you heard me mention that I wanted to do a controlled burn to burn the house down. The fire department was on board but the Civic Association in Sharps Town had a problem with it. I think the lady next door probably had a problem with it. So there will be another way that that happens on the 11th of November but I think that just the social aspect of this it's involving a lot of people from the university so there's their kind of ripple effect of what this one group gets to do the live feed and other groups are designing the agro wall and all those things are kind of coming together and rippling out at the same time. I think everyone uses it as a calling card and something that we've done in the past kind of show process and then I think the exhibitions that we do with it and the showing of it and Mary Ellen's much more eloquent way of speaking about the project are how it lives in public life. So that's it. Your comments strike me in this process because in preservation oftentimes we are very enamored with the before and after photograph sort of it was in this place in this context and it was either restored or potentially moved et cetera and even in this morning's discussions about how changes in context necessitate that move from one place to another the way in which the story, the narrative is not at all sufficiently told in that before and after photograph and in fact it is the place in motion. It is the longitudinal change and the action that's taking place in between those two things that really galvanize social interest in some way. The idea that you are there watching that theater mover the idea that those first places start to shift and there's a moment for engagement or that the community really even if they didn't fully appreciate the dialogue that was being incited through this motion it actually made them engage in some way and the fact that you've put an idea on the table that is mobilizing a new kind of social capital. It begs the question that I hope we'll talk about later in the day of sort of how do we not only document that the place in motion that space in between the before and after photograph but how do we capitalize on it as preservationists to really bring in more opportunities for engagement. If anyone wants to comment on that we have maybe one or two minutes. Just a short comment on there is a photographer in Kirina who is documenting this and not much has happened yet as I mean there are a few things the town hall is coming up on the surface. So when but when you look at his photos you understand there's a lot of things going on in the community. So I must agree that the house moving is just one very specific event but there's so much going on around it and people doing different things to be able to do it. So that's certainly a part of the story. Yeah, I mean there is a wonder in seeing something as large as a building moving and that's a wonderful moment but you can also have movement where you take the building apart and then all of a sudden it appears in another place. So in a way that's the way we envision how this building would move. It's not in a position to be lifted up. I mean maybe you have a plan that we could actually slide it off perfectly and I'd like to talk to you about it. But the way we see it is you'd have to catalog each of the terracotta tiles and then reassemble them later. So you wouldn't have that wow moment. On the other hand one thing that we are doing is we're taking the building apart. That's even another way of thinking about it. It's not like we're lifting the whole building up and moving it and by seeing the two pieces apart from each other you'll always be reminded that they were once together. So it's in a single direction. Let's just say in the X direction. And so there's that idea that the two pieces were once one thing. So it's there in your mind but you never get that wow moment. I would just add as the person documenting Mary Ellen's process in this I think part of it, part of the showing the kind of behind the scenes of it all. The paperwork trail that she had to do and which I followed her to a lot of meetings and filmed and kind of interviewed people with her to kind of gauge a sense of the communities feeling about it. And then the time lapse and a lot of still shots you didn't see. There's a lot of documentation of the process but not just the physical part of the process. I think really the number of meetings she had to have and the kind of convincing she had to do with people that I've filmed and documented I think is an interesting part of the way of looking at that. And while it took a lot of planning for us to engage in moving the theater and all the press coverage before the day that we moved it was all week. It was obvious that there was nothing much more to say but to capture that moment. I think the New York Times did that by just the one article, with that three time lapse pictures just so everyone who didn't know about what was going on was able to catch up to it. And it was just a small caption the description of what happened. And that was in and of itself a summary of all the hard work and planning and angsting and execution of a successful project. Mr. Did you have one more? Yeah, I was told about the project of moving a small village in Alaska, the Kivalina. And what I was told was also how they documented the different artifacts and objects and buildings and kept it very transparent. And that was a large part of the project and that is something very inspiring, something that absolutely should be done in Kirino. So I think that was the bell. I heard the bell. I want to give folks enough time to have lunch and get back promptly at 1.15 for the next session. And if I can ask the audience to help me thank our panelists this morning.