 Thanks for coming everybody. I'm still Steve White and I'm really happy to be here to welcome you all to hear Mark Sexton FAIA of Crook and Sexton Architects in Chicago and for the opening of an exhibition of the firm's work in the gallery afterwards I really appreciate welcoming Mark and Two other people from the office one of whom is still here John Roberts silver in the in the front row and Jason Zachary Lee if I pronounce it close close to accurately to the school John and Jason have been here over the past several days Installing and making the exhibition with several of our students Michael Alfredo Michael Orlando And I think those are keys. I'm sure I'm forgetting somebody Tom Mitchell There are a handful of things I'd like to mention prior to Mark speaking with all of us It starts with sharing a few thoughts I've had about the firm from when I was an architecture student in another Midwestern School in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I know that may sound remarkable. I don't look that old, but I I must be and goes from there Kirk and Sexton's work emerges from the tradition of Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and Mies van der Rohe But it's been a central player in expanding the vocabulary and in really opening up architecture in general over the last 30 or 40 years With great creativity and playfulness while developing an even more Inspiring and maybe relentless interest in experience and detail I think in some ways it's probably difficult to imagine now given the way schools and the profession has gone over the past 40 years How important and notable The firm's expansion of that vocabulary was At IIT in the 1970s everybody learned how to how to design in certain ways and and it was the same in a lot of different schools But particularly at IIT and I think the kind of creativity and evolution that you see in the work Is really one of the great evolutions in at least American architecture There's also a strong love of architecture in general in the work and in their associations I think we can see this in the exhibition that you'll see in a little while And I'm sure in the lecture that that mark will start in a few minutes Mark's partner Ron Kirk made what was for many of us who were here a decade or so ago I can't actually remember how long ago it was, but I think it was longer than 10 years One of the more memorable trips to our school the work was certainly interesting But the way that we were engaged and the way Ron talked about Architecture and making architecture and engaging with people and for the brief times that I've interacted with with mark It seems like a similar love of just doing it and talking about buildings and understanding things and and not only from How they may design buildings but are all kinds of different architectures And I think that's really one of the great things about Chicago architecture culture or hopefully Things more broadly, but it's certainly a feature of Chicago Just Chicago in general about architecture and and mark is certainly part of that And I know we're going to see some of that and I just want to appreciate that again in the brief interactions I've had with mark and In all the great trips to Chicago that I've had and some of you have had I think you can feel that And it's a great thing for you all to make the effort to bring that to Roger Williams And Finally, I think With that love of architecture that the firm has there's a there's just a great sense of collegiality with others involved and with people in general And just to point out I think several people May have had Ron as example. I think he taught for for many years at IIT I know my brother-in-law who's an architecture Chicago did John Hendricks had Ron for studio in general I've anybody I've known who's been in and out of Chicago. It's like oh, yeah, I had Ron or or you know Oh, Ron was great or oh, yeah, how's Ron or this or that and I think that kind of spirit that came into the school And also the way that that mark and the firm engages with schools and and again in making a tremendous effort to do this here It's really appreciated They're willing to reach out and and bring what they do and share it and talk about it and And talk about any range of things similar or very different from what they do and it's it's really a great quality To have and I it means a great deal for them to take the time to come to the school So thanks mark for coming and being part of our school and for enlivening things with us And and being here so please welcome mark Sexton from career concessions Thank you, Stephen and and students and faculty of Roger Williams What what I'm going to talk about tonight is what we what we call making architecture, which is not a it's not an original title, but as Steve said we actually have a great love for the making of architecture certainly talking and drawing but ultimately the making we've been Ron and I've been partners now for about Over 38 years long time I was however not a student of his if I if I were I don't think I would be sitting here today Because he was rather rigorous guy But we're actually dedicated to to again building Pieces of architecture and sort of the thrill of that there's a lot of tough and sometimes Disappointing aspects of architecture But one of the great things is actually to see something you work from the very beginning to the end you actually see it built John who's in the front seat here along with Jason were great collaborators actually getting the the gallery completed The portal that you go through is actually something that is of right now It's actually was designed and fabricated in August and it's something that we're trying to develop with fire a con and skyline Glass a new product that actually is an exterior pattern on glass So you're actually the first people who will see it We sort of loved whether it would be successful or not We didn't really care because it's the act of making that actually informs so much of our work So what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to go through this It's 38 years. So I've got a lot to talk about but I'll try to make it understandable the very first Project as Steve mentioned was a steel and glass house It was with Ron at that point had a partner Keith Olson and it was sort of a Sort of in many ways their graduate thesis coming out of five year Bachelor of Architecture degree from my IT This idea that this house could be very me see and yet had something else Happening with it. It was no longer. Just Directed head it had subtle moves here The frames are going up and both Ron and Keith were the contractors for the job So this idea that you Parts of everything out. No, that wasn't really the case especially when you first start So here the frames are are being applied It was being done for a young man who actually wanted to live in the city But wanted the aspects of sort of suburban life It's a very sophisticated series of of basically Rectangular forms brought together in a U-shaped house very sort of obscure and Even a bit obtuse on the outside yet when you go on the inside It's light-filled and here's where you start to see the intersections of planes and volumes and sort of the extension Things that were developed certainly by Mies van der Waal what we learned at the school But really applied in a new way way like the next generation of architects You can see sort of the sense of really warmth and scale and proportion and What was what was quite good? I joined him just as the house was new in completion I was working with Ron and the furniture, but it got the cover in 1981 of progressive architecture for the older Architects here. We all know the importance of architectural record actually came out once a month And that's the only way you got any information this an architectural record unlike today Were you in in 30 seconds? You can find any architect in the world But getting the cover in 1981 when in fact the whole world was going into post modernism This was quite unusual that there was a like a modernist house on the cover So it actually sort of led to our our career Several several months after I joined the firm we had a Thone a was a furniture showroom had decided to get five Chicago architects to do their showrooms They gave each one of us five thousand dollars fee and construction cost so For five thousand dollars, that's what you see here And it was really only about five hundred square feet The only requirement is you had to show it you had to show at least one piece of their furniture Unfortunately, most of their furniture was rather ugly with the exception of their cafe chair, which is sort of a An element from almost the Vienna cafe society. We actually liked it and here we had no money We had it was no lighting. There was no budget. So we again made this the office fabricated all the pieces Installed it. We had to install it at night because it was all union labor. This is at the merchandise Martin Chicago Essence of art always plays in to the work we do. It's not directly copied It's something that's in the subconscious in this case. It's Robert Irwin playing with screens and sort of space in an infinity So that certainly is an element of the design Process, but also we loved we had no idea how this was actually going to come together We had done models But to you actually fabricate the whole thing and see how in this case perforated metal and and fluorescent tubes Work and was actually quite wonderful. The chairs almost danced through the space There were lines on the floor and the ceiling and then these these perforated metal frames and Plastic pieces you can see the chair and this sort of moray effect that happens with the Perforated metal you can see the chairs almost danced through the space. We're sort of quite delighted with it again It was very small turns out that a Woman from the Art Institute Saw it and wondered, you know, could you live in something like this? She was so enamored with it seeing that we had no work. We said of course you could And that led to the painted apartment So it's a quite an unusual client who came to us as you can see with this with this image She lived in a Mies van der Rohe Apartment building in Lincoln Park and her children had grown and she was living there alone And she really wanted the two-bedroom or three-bedroom unit to be almost a studio So you can see here We call it the painted apartment because floors wall and ceiling are all painted the actual reference Believe it or not. This is actually a direct reference versus the Robert Irwin Just as we were starting at Ron and I went to go see the movie right after Apocalypse now the Francis Ford Coppola made called one from the heart. It's a spectacular movie Totally panned by every critic in the world We loved it because of it was all filmed in Zobatrop Studios So it was all a studio production. Nothing was done outside and was sort of an amazing Sense of light and color and sort of saturated neon. These are some of the images from it We saw it and we were so blown away by it We actually applied some of the elements of it You can see some of the paint and some of the lighting and some of the pieces to it So you can see See how in this case screens that we had used at the first showroom now Become more animated because they're curving and we've got natural light on it So we became quite interested In how they all work together and again because the woman was so adventurous as she said she she couldn't afford the Paintings that she wanted to buy she wanted to live in a painting and that's to have an argument to have a client like that Say, you know her art was actually the apartment is quite quite unusual And you can see here we actually designed all the furniture and I was the contractor Which meant that I was both the contractor and the painting sub I painted the entire apartment So all the stencils that you see on the floor I Would work all day and then I would go to this apartment at night and work all night and then work all day and work All night, so I was working 120 hours a week being the contractor So this is quite near and dear to my heart You could see the the stenciling on the ceiling the floor is actually pretty easy It's the ceiling that becomes a little bit of a challenge But she was such an adventurous Client we said, you know, we we've got a great design for a dining Table do mind if we bolted to the floor. She said do you think I'll ever move the table? We said I don't think so. She said great bolt it So it was but we worked for 200 hours on those forms to get them just right for the chairs that were there And that led Sort of I'm going I'm skipping some years and projects one of the great projects that we worked on was Herman Miller because of the the incredible legacy that they had with Eames and The other groups of I can't remember all of them now but certainly Charles and Ray Eames as their as the great sort of designers that they had used and and you can see here the influence that they had and Herman Miller is sort of in their DNA and So what we what we did is we said, you know, Herman Miller really takes a very simple material and elevates it by Proportion and connection and sort of the it's used so in our case We really thought that the showroom needed to change for a year instead of repainting it You could paint it with light so you can see here. We have sort of glass panels that we then Sam blasted a dot pattern and then use that to really change the lighting and in the showroom We have a model of this in in the exhibit gallery The ceiling was a very low ceiling and it was low because they were very Immense ducks and that air supply and we realized well, they just occur at particular points Why do we always have to go to the lowest common denominator with the ceiling? Why can't the ceiling sort of move almost like You know the the topography of land where things affect it So we came up with this very simple just painted particle board ceiling at this point this is 2000 so this is all cnc'd so this is where the computer starts to come in and starts to influence how we make it Again for them. It was quite extraordinary because it fit into their this sort of ethos of Herman Miller again standard products And materials but used in an elevated way We do all sorts of things we do what we did a plastics factory in in Wisconsin so one of the things that people ask us if our other what's your sort of what your specialty? We have no specialty. We do architecture in this case This was for a very high-tech plastics forming company that the owner was dedicated to really giving the people who work there rather than a concrete bunker Really natural light in this beautiful northern, Wisconsin environment. So that's what you see here the separation between Manufacturing and the front office sales and management was simply a transparent glass wall The idea that everyone was working for the company. They had different duties, but they were all part of the same organization and transparency so this fit right into our You know our our experience and you can see here the sort of young lady who's working at these these molding machines again most typically done in a in a dark concrete block or precast concrete warehouse now has natural light overlooking the the beautiful, Wisconsin Sort of land This is a so it we extended we started actually doing residential work And then started doing a lot of commercial, but we actually had an opportunity to do a residential project This is down in the panhandle of Florida The gentleman's house had burned to the ground and he was looking to do something quite extraordinary This idea that he wanted a house that actually you you couldn't see any light fixture. You couldn't see any supply air supply No outlet was exposed and he wanted almost no furniture in the house So we thought again we're very lucky to be graced with a client that has this sort of Vision he had the land and he wanted He grew up in Ohio and actually was stricken with polio when he was a young man So he wanted openness light and sort of expansiveness. So he had this this house Quite an extraordinary house. We ended up spending five years in design and building We actually were down there every week two people from the office were almost full-time on the job Just getting it built so the building process, but as a sort of a reference or an inspiration It's actually in some ways the dune grass was so beautiful and how it intersected how both plant and soil Intersected we were very struck by that. We developed this System we called it sprouts where the entire house is actually held up by these stainless steel sprouts The idea is that it has to be 12 feet above mean high tide Because of FEMA regulations for the hurricane that may bypass it this time So you can see the entire house is actually lifted on these sprouts are quite beautiful quite They're almost like sculptures in in among themselves And then and then there's simply a sim a simple stair that elevates you from the ground To the to the house itself. The idea is that this might blow away in a hurricane Title surge, but the rest of the house would remain and it turns out that it did just as we were finishing a hurricane hit It and he actually stayed in the house, which is sort of crazy So you can see sort of the again attention to structured detail and transparency is Another project that we're and I'm sort of jumping around but it is going sequentially children's museum in Chicago is a it was a quite an interesting competition They wanted to to put it in the land that is now occupied by what's called Maggie daily park, but it was actually a blank piece of property right next to Millennium Park Just to the east so between the lake and Millennium Park there was a there was a several about 14 acres of land that that was dedicated to park but also could be a children's museum and The requirement was that the building not be above ground So that we had to do a building that wasn't a building and it was a very controversial project because building anywhere along the lake in Chicago is Prohibitive you can't do buildings along the lake because of the lakefront protection basically Daniel Burnham set it up so that the entire lakefront is Building free now there are exceptions to that Lake Point Tower McCormick Place and some would say parts of Millennium Park But with the success of Millennium Park this area became a very hotly contested area our design was actually Again only after the fact did we realize it was inspired by almost a Fontana painting where we were taking the canvas and actually opening up slits in it and Driving light down into the earth through these slits so you can see here Again without having any of the building go above grade we could we could bring light and openness and sort of a Pathway into the park through this so you can see sort of these are images of What was what was produced again? We had about a 16 foot drop from? The the street that you see on your left to the actual park and we took advantage of this This is all again. It looks like it's above grade, but it's actually all following the grade line There's another image of that in the in the exhibit you can see So this was we we sort of won the battle but lost the war because just as this was ready to go into construction the 2008 Sort of financial crisis hit and they were unable to raise the fund So we've we've actually got them in another location a more a more frugal way of handling then a Project which I'm going to go into a little bit more depth and this is crown fountain If any of you have been to Chicago, it's actually quite a quite an extraordinary piece that we were we collaborated with but in in 1930 this is what Chicago looked like the lakefront the really important lakefront you can see Buckingham Fountain for people that have been there You can see the Art Institute, which is the building sort of in the middle and then railroad lines everywhere So you can see just how much commerce and and sort of Manufacturing was the heart of Chicago not so much trees and green space again, 1930 as as little as even 20 years ago 1998 it was just a big hole in the ground. This is really the front door of Chicago So these are it's interesting and of course now in 2004 when it opened It all the railroad tracks have been covered and there's now about 3,500 cars under this under this park. So it's quite an extraordinary accomplishment and in our case we were asked to To consider working with an artist by the name of Jean-Mé Plensa This is the little animation. He did of these two twin towers Which are quite, you know quite unusual And and initially these are some of the sketches initially Ron and I said, you know No, we don't do other people's design work because you know, we're a design office but we looked at it and we said this thing is just so unusual and The artist had never built anything like this before in some ways. It's sort of like working with a With a house client. They want so many bedrooms, you know so much in their kitchen and what have you in some ways It was like that. So we started working With him on this and then of course if you've been to Chicago It's right across the street from the Art Institute very much in the center of town It has been built and I show this image because it's built and it It is to look as easy as ballet. So I don't know if any of you dance, but ballet is not easy It looks easy, but the idea is that what is it that that we're trying to do We're actually trying to make it as weightless and effortless as ballet So I'll go through a little bit of what we call the again the making of this piece the glass blocks in this case Jame plens of the artist from from Barcelona had this idea of this these two towers with glass block And we had mocked up we had made some glass blocks or had purchased some and sort of started mocking up how LED and glass blocks work together And so this is actually the form of the glass the molten glass in a in a in an iron basically form piece you can see and this we actually went to the to the The foundry or to the glass shop and watch them actually pour these individual Molten glass into each one of the forms so you can see here the guy on that That lower left is actually the highest paid Employee of that glass company because he's the guy who snips the the the block It's plus or minus ten pounds by one ounce so it's actually quite Extraordinary we had twenty two thousand of these to make so this guy snipped each one of them as they dumped the glass in And you can see now the glass Cooling This glass didn't exist no one had ever made it before we had Developed the whole process and then work with this manufacturer to to develop it and then started putting it in front of an LED panel the idea is that that Jame's idea was that it was a fountain with LED and glass block And I always maintain if you knew anything about those three you would never put them together But that's the genius of of the piece so we started looking at on three sides It's got an obscure coating on it or it's actually formed in the block itself on the fourth side, which is the LED image side You can it's clear It's water white too because we didn't want them one part any color into it now Some of you again have either seen or seen pictures when it's all done It seems very easy, but when you're doing it the first time not so Structure in this case it sits over two levels of parking garage and we have the computer systems the pump systems for the whole Water system what we call the gargoyle and the water cascading down the face of it And then we've got a fan system that actually cools the tower So it's pulling in air from the garage and actually cooling the tower because the heat Given off by the LED We had this great idea. We said The crown family had supported this so they were basically the patrons the city of Chicago would eventually own it But and what it turned out? They had worked with a very large firm in the city of Chicago for about a year and a half and gotten nowhere And they were going to abandon it, but they decided one last step instead of giving it to a large room Let's give it to a small firm and see if they can do it So we were given and we didn't know that at the time, but we had come up with this great idea We basically are going to take the glass blocks We were going to form them and then we're going to put a compression ring around them in order to hold it in place And then clip that compression ring Onto the fountain. We thought it was brilliant. We actually got all the blocks made So instead of glass because we took forever to get that we made them out of wood and We put it in this sort of big compression ring just as a test. We pulled in Steve crown the patron We said you guys Thank God you hired us because we know what we're doing We put that up and we moved at a quarter of an inch and all the blocks just came flying out And it was like the biggest embarrassment and Steve crown said, you know It's good that it happened in your office instead of in real life and we said oh my god Like we were really we thought we were hot stuff until that happened And and the reality is until you mock it up and go through it You can do all the drawings and calculations and all that in the world It's actually the making and doing it and finding out what doesn't work. This was like a fundamental This is what led us to the solution because this solution Compression ring around a three foot by four foot series of blocks We were relying on the blocks and we said let's do the exact opposite Let's not rely on the block at all. We don't care about the block That's counterintuitive, but that's what this failure did So basically what we came up with is this idea of a grid any block could be taken out Vandalized or what have you the grid would still hold it all together. You can see here This is a section detail section through. I've got a tee Stainless teal tee that the blocks are actually glazed into every block has four Four metal frames around it and each one is glazed in and then each one is brought together and In this case you can see the stainless steel grid system. It's really a grid system You can see the guys actually laying up a whole face in a shop in Florida The pieces are then shipped to Chicago with pieces missing clipped into place And erected that way corner brackets the The offshoots here Basically take the lateral load from the wind the gravity load is is held by the the the large structure in the center We've got a model of this in the gallery And so that was a again quite a quite an extraordinary process the LED the system with LED was it was Again, it's now 15 years old 16 by the time we were doing this. We were doing this in 2002 We were trying to figure out what LED would work. What was the pixelation how it worked? We did a shootout Jean May is the the gentleman in the the leather jacket Steve crown is the man The patron he looks like a patron. He's got a tie on And then I'm off on the side. So we're all working in our back gallery. Ellie This is sort of the technology of LED. So everything's sort of hidden in the fountain You don't see this but it's actually quite quite a high degree of technology that had to be incorporated We were looking at again two different manufacturers So this is something no one teaches in architecture school And this is what is the adventure of architecture when you're actually working with a world renowned artist You're working with the crown family, which is sort of the Rockefellers of Chicago And you're doing something that's never been done before. I mean, it's quite exhilarating It's also quite terrifying because if you're not successful your name is all over it So in this case we started understand we just tried to figure out what what was it going to look like? We had no idea you could do all the drawings So we actually mocked up a section of the glass block and the LED We put it up about 20 feet in 20 feet high 25 feet in Millennium Park at that point Frank Garry's Pritzker pavilion is still under construction So we we tried to understand so and and you can see here again Steve crown the gentleman on the right of this picture Really looking at it. So again trying to understand it. We actually then mocked the entire screen up in Outside of Salt Lake City, Utah Turns out that the guys who were given the contract for the screens said yeah Yeah, you know part of the contract was to mock it up and they said you can come to our factory and and see it on The floor we said no no no no we're not gonna see it on the floor We got to see it vertically and they go oh no we can't do that We go well Then you're not going to get the rest of your money turns out that their next-door neighbor true story Roller coaster fabricators so they knock on their door. They go hey Can you put this up the guy goes piece that cake? So what you have behind here at the very top a roller a piece of roller coaster these crazy cowboys from the roller coaster Fabricators got this up in a day and a half. We went out there and looked at it Spectacular was in the winter to show me is all dressed in I mean this is the first time We actually saw the image of how big this thing was going to be it also pointed out some of the problems They said no don't worry about those horizontal lines. You won't be able to see him Yeah, we can see him so they we had to change that so you can see that's the tab to handle the wind load on the LED side So you can see it going up Water features so this is probably the scariest part Jame had a Just this little diagram here. This is what he wanted to have happened We we we sort of said it was a garg we called it the gargoyle But the concern I have as a as an architect in the city of Chicago water is used to fight riots And we said oh, I can just imagine Aunt Millie getting blown over by the gargoyle when it goes off So how do you what do you do here? Jame of course he's just an artist from Catalonia So he had no license he couldn't go to jail and he said well if that happens level one that would be me in level two So he had a great great laugh because he said I'm just an artist But it turns out that we actually worked with the the people who were fabricating the fountain and actually went into their pool and Actually felt exactly what it felt. Yeah, what it what it felt like the idea was just a big shower head That if you get a chance to look at it so up to this point has been now on for 14 years We've never had any reported problem And so that's what that that's what that piece is and I have to tell you that I've never done the biggest water feature We've ever done is a couple of urinals and bathrooms except for this So this idea that you are a generalist and not a specialist is is Really what we try to strive for in our office The problem is we've never used any of this knowledge on another project never did a fountain again So it's great, but you can't necessarily replicate it. This is a half-size model of the water flying off the The top and we were concerned about almost sheets of water flying off with wind So we ended up convincing the glass block guys to curve the top So you can see the glass so it's actually detailed down to the last Even curved block at the top of the fountain and then lighting a finish up The lighting is actually quite Important because of how you you perceive it and so rather than down lighting it which is typical We actually up lighted it you can see again LED 15 years ago so it goes through on the other three sides that don't have the image it goes through this marvelous Cycling of light that it changes the appearance the outriggers that actually support that grid wall Get sort of highlighted and reflected in that so it gives it some scale It's actually quite nice and then of course in the water. We've got light that happens That up lights the the entire piece so it's actually quite quite beautiful And then some just some of the images of how the piece works again Many of you may have seen it if you haven't been to Chicago Millennium Park This is certainly one of the great, you know, one of the great features and this is what we were very surprised It had been taken over by children just using it as This is sort of this the swimming pool of the center of the city of Chicago. It's amazing What literally a half an inch of water does for an event and I we have to report that even even though College students have tried to drown themselves After 14 years, there's been no college student drowning in this fountain So you can see sort of how it even works in the winter Which is quite wonderful because typically fountain shut down although the water doesn't work the images and The lights still works and it's sort of framed by the Great South Michigan Avenue Building you can see opening night And I think this this image more than anything shows the power of art and architecture I think this is what we go to school for this is what we we labor so much to affect people like this to have a real Almost physical relationship with with someone you've never met So so that actually led to another project a competition for a Jewish center Just down the street. So Millennium Park is over on the far right This site which was a an open building site In Chicago. It was actually the only open site in what is considered the historic street wall of Chicago So Chicago is actually preserved The street wall this particular building Wasn't didn't have a building on it. So it was some open We started looking, you know just from a standpoint of who was on that street Louis Sullivan Henry I's Cobb Were just a couple of very close neighbors In this case Marshall and Fox With Benjamin Marshall again Louis Sullivan with the auditorium theater and Daniel Burnham with the transportation Building so sort of great and we're in the middle of it. So this was our really first major commission And we said, you know, you know, what do we what do we do? How do we look at it? And so what we looked at is this idea of a street wall this historic street wall when you think of the word wall You think of something that's generally plumb and level and Straight well as it turns out these photos show It's anything but plumb and straight. It's actually like Every building it's looking to get more light and more view into the building So you can see these bays and this sort of well what what I refer to is almost a vibrating wall It's actually quite active Here and so influenced by mese van der ohe the Architecture actually started iit and was part of our foundation We started doing the same thing But we wanted to do it to the whole building because the building was actually fairly narrow only 80 feet wide We wanted to get um effectively a 21st century bay. So we started doing Studies like this and You know our our study process was really making models because we had no idea what we were going to do for the facade We just knew it had to be special. We started doing this was one that happened very and we just looked at it We said god, we've never seen anything like that wouldn't that be cool To do so we started refining that you can see here some of the refinement Model after model probably in the neighborhood of 20 to 30 of these models trying to get the form Again, whether it's related to Cubism or not It just was something that we felt that the facade Could be sort of multiple readings of the same sheer wall. It was certainly open And transparent because it was the only side that was light We ended up doing renderings and we actually got this both approved by The spurt is bored and the city of chicago and I remember going to a City hall meeting and they said okay approved and we got ron and I got in the cabin We said, you know ron we just got approved We have no idea how to build this none at all and that is a thrilling But we had just finished the crown fountain. So we figured we could figure it out So here you see the building as just an elevation. It's basically just a cartesian grid You can see how it's broken up into individual apologies for the the size and then what happens is this is it sort of exploded in an Accent of metric and so what you have is if you have a rectangular piece of glass That's flat. It's fine. If you take that piece that rectangle and Simply slope it you just have a slightly longer piece However, if you slope it and turn it as is every component of our facade You now have a parallelogram. So it's infinitely more complex Um, so that's what you start to see and that's what we had to start figuring out So what we figured out in this little animation is that Bear with me. This is supposed to work a little bit differently that the mullion couldn't be in two places at the same time So we had to figure out how you could make something and that's what this we call it The why mullion was such a breakthrough in development. You can see here the glass facade is able to rotate Yet the mullion stays exactly in the same place So we've got some image of that in the So the idea was that we were going to do really just To sort of skin and bones very simple just a mullions and the skin attached to it You can see that movement in the floor slab and you can see in this case the mullions going up Um, and then literally the skin being placed on it. It's actually a very extremely simple system You can see here again We've got those mullions each one of the mullions has a specific sort of form and place But once they get put in the glass just simply clips into place You can see him even dropping the pieces of glass they clip in almost like a A coat hanger onto a clip that holds it You can see here guy caulking And ultimately you get this movement which we were quite Interested in because the building had to be both part of the street wall yet separate from it because it was from a different century The part that's part that is we think sympathetic is the sort of size of the glass about seven About seven feet tall to about four and a half feet wide Which is very similar to the windows up and down michigan avenue yet apart from it because we were actually having it move The entire building was moving rather than just individual components of the building You can see how it changes because of the light. We ended up putting a frit on it You can see so it's actually quite marvelous about how it changes over time Entrance Development but as much as the facade is important, but it's like a face of a person It's really the inside that counts and so the question We always had you know, we were scared about and and Said we had to what sort of promised on the outside of the building has to be fulfilled on the inside because that's where That's the soul of the organization. It's a cultural Spurtis Institute is a cultural. It's not a religious organization It's dedicated to really the enlightenment and dissemination of jewish culture and thinking So it's a it's a it's a great institute great Sort of scholarly it basically is comprised of of an auditorium gallery space a library and College classrooms and our idea was to really put a slot through the building to bring to drive light into the building We weren't relying just on the one wall the back wall opens to a 16 foot wide alley. So Doesn't really and then an auditorium that was sort of connected to everyone So the auditorium is actually on the lower part of the building and the galleries are on the top part of the gallery You can see again very very straightforward auditorium Entry three-story entry so that as you walk in again What you see on the outside is you you get more of that on the inside and the auditorium is actually this again we took in in this case plaster and actually folded the wall of of the auditorium So it became sort of an element that although on your first visit you may not understand it But on subsequent visits you realize that was really the back wall of the auditorium and sort of open To the to the space And then the top floors top two floors are very open large opening in these are the these are the ninth and tenth floors in this case 18 foot ceilings Quite open to natural light being driven deep into the building core through skylights You can get a sense of how that works here and then finally The the top of the building one of the requirements that the city had is that the building have A base a middle and a top and this idea of putting like a top on a building a cornice wasn't really It wasn't it didn't work with how spurt has thought in the sense that Learning is a never-ending process and that to cap it or to put a top on it was something So that actually is something that we learned from the leadership at this particular institute So rather than having a top we sort of carved this Sky gallery or sky deck out of the very top of the building so you can see it does have a distinctive top it's just not a top that is as As regular or as standard as you might see on the building on the far left Um And then I think this is just about the the last the last project or nearly the last project I'm going to show is a a federal office building Turns out that it's in Miramar, Florida. So it's an area that we'd never built in other than a house This is it's about 20 miles north of miami. So it's it's between miami and fort lauderdale Sort of looking at the area. This was a competition that we first submitted And they had shortlisted Our firm along with five other firms the five other firms were helmet yam was in it Norman foster Rex assam taupe and tom pfeiffer. So it was quite a quite a Quite a significant group And we started looking at it So we had gotten through what they call stage one of a selection process stage two you were to go in And basically talk about how you'd approach the building You didn't go in with the building design because you hadn't been not given a program You just went in and said how are you going to design the building? What what what approach lots of architects go in and they talk about themselves for an hour We were determined to go in and talk about the building So what you're seeing here is really the presentation that won us the project So what we did is we started at 30,000 feet or maybe it's 100,000 feet above and we realized that it was right at the edge of the everglades the the building site so it's always So the building site again sort of dumb south florida development But In 1900 it was all everglades and so what we realized immediately is what this site wants to be It wants to be everglades. It's been everglades for a million years And we wanted to bring it back. So that was the first insight. So there's the land So they called this 20 acres of improved land So improvement in florida is putting 18 inches of gravel over the everglades Which is such a bizarre idea that We just said we had to do something about it. So this was this was the land This idea of improvement So we asked What what should a 21st century federal office building be and we went back to this great man Daniel Moynihan started the gsa design excellence gsa is the government service association I guess yeah And They basically are the landlords for all government buildings and this guy started said why why are our buildings Why why shouldn't the government buildings be the best buildings in our country? Why are they so many times? You know the worst and so he developed what they called these guiding principles for federal architecture and The great thing is is to reflect and this is like the first guiding principle Perhaps the most important reflect the dignity enterprise vigor and stability of the american national government Quite embody the finest contemporary american architectural thought Qualities that reflect the regional character and traditions An official style You know Greek revival or even mid-century modernism is to be avoided And this is an amazing sort of last one design must flow from the architectural profession To the government and not vice versa. This is the insights that daniel petrick moinehan Had and then finally the development of the building should be considered the the site should always be considered as the first step um In development so examples of gsa architecture the federal center right in the middle of chicago by mese fandro and uh oldenberg with a Excuse me called her with a with a sculpture sort of great federal architecture But there's also examples of not so good federal architecture This is the hagel building done in 75 when it was the middle of the energy crisis and they said Let's just make small dark windows and huge floor plates It's a miserable building or let's just make really really really big Buildings with no landscape and put a courtyard in the middle and call it a day So again 1976 not the highlights of of federal Architecture so what we did is we went in with this idea this this is exactly the presentation we gave We said sort of there's here's a site boundary The federal office building was going to be about 400 000 square feet. So if you're working on projects again It's a fairly large building. So there's the the building. They had a parking area For up to a thousand cars. They had minimum setbacks and ever since McVay, there is a hundred foot setback. This is now required for all federal buildings So that's just a given it's like a new requirement So, you know, but we said, okay, you we have to embrace these things. You can't you can't fight them So then we said in this case we with this idea of sort of restoring the wetlands and the habitats and maybe even developing a nature preserve That was sort of the the sort of site plan for for and then we developed and presented this methodology for effective environmental design in the case of The federal government the great thing about them is you don't have to convince them that sustainability and environmental Design and buildings is important. They already get it. Some of our private clients We're always trying to convince them but in the case of gsa and this But how do you do it and a lot of times they'll say, you know, let's put a lot of pv And let's put a lot of windmills on it. Well, no not really the way to do it is to start Fundamentally with architecture. It's massing. It's citing and it's orientation That lasts for a hundred to five hundred years. So its life cycle is centuries Building enclosure. What is the skin of the building? How does that enclosure work? Wall roof 50 years HVAC lighting controls This idea of how they work Well, that's a third that has a 30 year life And then actually the last thing although it's looked at, you know, sort of as a juicy element is all the alternative energy sources This idea of bio fuel cells or whatever you sort of interesting But turns out that it has like a five year life to it and it's still being developed So you actually don't embrace this and we call this sort of inverted Triangles because if we say the cost and the maintenance of operation those bio cells even the pvs and solar Both solar and wind, you know require a fair fairly high degree Level of maintenance and care the the the sort of base building systems automated building systems are very involved take a lot Your orientation requires no maintenance and that's actually where you're going to get the most significant Impact from energy use. It's your orientation. So this is like I hate to say this is like kindergarten yet most architects don't understand this And I think that's why we we use this all the time to even remind ourselves that these sort of inverted Triangles are are are really important So what we did is we said, you know, if we take a standard a standard floor plan and say, okay Here's our program which is space for people in core Yeah, that would be fine. But what happens if we push the cores to the side the the benefit with that is we have now flexible space Cores are in the end. We have now an open flexible program space We oriented so that the east and west sides are blocked, especially in south florida north and south can be open Sun is high in the sky on the south side in those warm months low Certainly on the east and west but blocked. So these are just these are like the simplest diagrams also Blast is another element that comes in so the cores can help with that blast side So then we said the problem with this as a whole building is it ends up being just too too dense So we said what happens if we break it into bars, you know, these bars that are only 60 to 80 feet wide So that natural light so that no one is more than 30 or 40 feet From view and light. So we presented this As an idea and then we said well, you could still connect the ends. So now you've got sort of like courtyards And again, we have no idea what we're designing. We're just saying this is our approach So if I take a section through that and I start looking at that section And I start saying well, how how can it work? Um, so this is a sort of the let's say a three building section Again, we had no idea what the program was but we know that there's going to be a secure perimeter So what we said is well, you have a secure perimeter big fence that stops a 55 mile an hour truck from ramming into the building Or a big moat, right? So it's a very um standard system But we said, you know Look at what you have there. You already have your secure perimeter. We can actually Actually conceal your secure perimeter by using the everglades We thought for sure every one of the architects we were competing against Everyone was going to do this, right? Why not? You know Nobody did it. Okay. We were the only ones we said it's like right in front of you And this is a great secure perimeter. So then we said, well, what else do you do? You know, there's a blast. You still have blast mitigation You know, maybe you slope the building so the blast isn't as significant Maybe there's a screen on it that helps with that blast mitigation. This is gsa ended up being for the fbi Security is a big deal But we still said, you know, you have opportunities for actually Supporting some protection from the intense sun We we had done something like that in another project So you're actually seeing the presentation that we gave to them This idea that you get a perimeter courtyard that you still have views out very important So we're not covering the building the idea of an interior courtyard We said great the d is supposed to be after the r. Sorry Uh, but this idea of an interior courtyard Um, can you take that courtyard and actually develop it in a way that the building mass actually blocks the sun So you don't have direct sun coming in so we could shape the building and we had done that on another project that we had just completed Um, a little bit different, but we were using some of our past Um, past examples, um, the idea of even some amount of diffused light that would reflect in to that Is another possibility so you can see sort of these are the diagrams We did but the the biggest concern we have is what I call the florida You're blind and cold when you walk into a florida building Because your eyes have been subjected to 10 000 foot candles and it's 92 degrees and you walk into a 74 degree Building that has 40 foot candles. So again, you're blind and cold So we said we were going to do something in our fundamental design Whatever the program of the building would be we were going to say Well, when you when you're outside and uncovered in south florida, you're at 90 degrees and you've got 10 000 foot candles Um, but we could start by simply just giving you a covered outdoor canopy all of a sudden It drops the temperature just two degrees because it's not direct sun and all of a sudden the foot candles go from 10 000 to 5 000 We do a semi Outdoor covered area sort of inside outside and also we drop the temperature another three degrees All of a sudden the foot candles go from 5 000 to 1 000 We go to a semi outdoor controlled area where we do some native Vegetation we may in fact have some fans there to move the air So all of a sudden you go down to 81 degrees fahrenheit you go into a courtyard that's now Controlled it has no direct sun and all of a sudden we can drop it another couple of degrees and actually drop the The foot candles down from 500 to maybe 250 or even 100 So that by the time you actually enter the building the process of entering the building is a transition And it's every human experience is this this isn't something that only the young or the old experience Every one of us experience we said hire us and this is how we think of the building And on top of it so we left the the interview and the the gentleman from gsa said You know whoever gets this building. We want it to be an iconic building So on top of everything we had promised the idea that it had to be an iconic building was like I said oh, I walked out saying oh whoever gets this They are so lucky because they're doing it two days later We get a call that we won and I found out later the reason we won Everglades and that Regression into the building it had nothing to do with the design of the building because we didn't design anything It was just our sense that comfort And pathway into a building were really important south florida. So that's something we had never thought of before We had never brought but we we got teams of sort of environmentalists and landscape people We all worked through design ideas and this came forward. So that's actually how we how we won We developed three separate diagrams for it and The ultimate one that that actually was was selected was remarkably a three-bar building This idea that the bars actually came back The bars ended up being running again the length of the bar So south is at the bottom east and west the sort of very tough Orientations are the ends of the bars. We have very minimal Ends and the idea that the site runs through So you can see here But in order to fit the program the the bars had to be 400 feet long So if anyone's been in a building that's for I don't know how long this building is 200 twice as long as this. So I mean that was the that's the idea We then shaped it sort of like a road then instead of on a grid It actually is like a a path in a park that has some shaping to it and then ultimately That's it became a two-bar building with the third bar being the parking structure and What is a utility building basically their maintenance building because they have about a hundred FBI cars boats and all sorts of vehicles and then so So the thing is we we're actually determined after making these buildings so narrow to actually connect the occupant to the site But we realize well, we have to do something with the sun even on the south side Because of the march in october weather systems. So i'm going through here just a very quick animation About how we thought you know a glass wall could have this sort of screen on it exterior screen perforated that would actually Support sort of dappled light coming into into the building And you can see sort of this is what what we developed We love the form of it typically where solar shades are sort of horizontal and sometimes vertical But actually this shade nim is exactly what the sun does it rises low crest and then drops again So we were actually just using the sun And duplicating the path of the sun on the south side of this building you can see here Um, and so what this animation does is december 20th, okay? This is the the the shortest day of the year In south florida this little animation if you look at the floor So the animation shows what happens with the floor So i am getting some direct light into the into the building But on december 20th I can handle direct light into the building because typically even in south florida It could be 50 60 degrees so i can handle that so that's what this animation shows We were we were concerned about how much we would put in front of the glass with these great So it's actually march 20th and october 20th. That is the real problems. This is where it can be 80 degrees 85 March break In south florida where you actually don't want any sun directly in so this animation just follows Look at the floor again. You'll see tiny little peaks of sun sort of making its way in So this was sort of the process we went through in order to design The the exterior shades and the great thing about it is the shade was purpose built had a function But ultimately really became the character of the building the glass also i'll get into this is what as As architects you really get into this You'll spend days weeks months or in this case years developing a glass in this case This is an insulated glass unit that has The outside which is on the left side of this is where we put our solar shade So we get a lot of protection from that solar shade But not complete so we still put a ceramic frit which is a dot pattern We put on low e coatings these are energy coatings that if you don't know about now when you start practicing You'll know a lot about and then ultimately laminated on the inside with an rf ir shield Radar frequency infrared because it was a high security building and that we were determined Couldn't change the character of the building. So this is a this is a A recipe of glass that really had never been put together before quite extraordinary quite involved We got a call. Hey, can you tell us what glass and we convinced them That we couldn't tell what type of glass to put in the building unless we put it on a flatbed truck Enclosed it in a structure drove the truck around the site and looked at it east west north and south They called me up the senior guy called me up and said are you crazy? Well, we're not going to do that just tell us what the glass is and we said No, you know, it's a design excellence. It's the only time I pulled the design excellence card We have to do this this ended up being about 75 thousand dollars I think 12 or so different samples of glass and it was amazing because we got it out there And even the contractor who thought all glass was the same Just like all stones the same just like all architects are the same not really was Amazed that all the glass looked different You can imagine that if we didn't get this right the entire building which was all glass would have been a disaster So we insisted on this and it's sort of thrilling to go through these samples and to sort of see how it how it works You can see it being it's a concrete building. You can see the shape you can see Yes, your tax dollar is going to this building for the fbi Which is actually quite extraordinary because of of of actually the value they got out of it So this is the finished finished building again just about 20 miles. You can actually see it from i-75 On your way to to miami Quite extraordinary. Again, this is the front You can see some of the details here. We've got some more. I've got a model of this Sort of a water feature at the front And then one of the things that working with gsa design excellence, you also have what is excellence in art they have a they have a art program in which Generally one half or 75 percent 75 percent of 1 percent Goes into the art of the building and in this case we were on that art panel and The artist was Ursula von's writing vars. She does these beautiful Cedar sculptures. You can see it peeking through The the window here upon the entry She's been exhibited all over the world quite extraordinary Ron and I would go to her studio and we would work with her Fabricating the piece because the piece was really purpose made for this particular lobby In fact, we changed the entire lobby so that her stair. I mean her piece was really enveloped by our stair We had a completely different stair design, but she's a remarkable person So like again, this is sort of the second major artist. We were working with they're working together She loved the building. We've become great friends and just working with her Developing this piece and you can see it sort of before And then after with the the lobby before the piece was put in and then the lobby After the piece and you can see it's like a it's a beautiful sort of pulling in what is on the exterior back into the building So what we what we presented with our design you can see here these sort of two Two Wings of a building Actually was delivered again. This is one of our images. It's remarkable that it's delivered like this and as close to our vision That that we had but I think for us the the more important thing is is and what we're probably most proud of Is we took a site like this instead of thinking about the building only which is what architects think about Think about the site go back to daniel patrick moinehan The site's the most important we took a site like this 18 inches of gravel and turned it back into everglades and for us That's really the great accomplishment of this project So i'm going to conclude with just um Two things One is because we had done a secure federal building and actually was good looking instead of a bunker State department for their embassies had a big competition And we are one of five architects country-wide that are doing Um in our case rehabbing of embassies throughout the world because we proved that we could in fact It wasn't like in our in our first idea. Let's do secure buildings But that's the world we live in especially overseas buildings. So we're now Doing this is where we are in the world We're doing every one of these projects is a project a crick and sexton project Which in so many ways is what we had always dreamed of doing affecting people In our case we had never imagined that we would have affected people in nirobi We've got a project that's under construction in papa new guinea. We've got something in Buenos Aires We've got something in vancouver. We got something in iceland Each one of these projects is again our vision for how we can make the world a better place Through attention to materials to attention to proportion and to actually making architecture So I want to conclude with our last project and in many ways A current project that everyone in the office loves And it's actually very similar to every one of those high security posts that we're doing throughout the world It's an organization called igrow chicago It's on the south side of chicago and so many of you read about how deadly chicago is And the problems that we have with our city with crime and Just disenfranchement Of people in their neighborhoods. So this particular organization is really dedicated to creating safe houses for young students grammar school students In that very difficult hour between when they're allowed out of school and when they can go home with their parents That's sort of 230 to 5 30 or 6 o'clock time where it's very deadly on the south side of chicago these poor children Didn't ask to be born there. They're just given So in this case There was this peace house this idea that gangs in this area Had said okay, we'll this particular house this particular area is off limits We won't we won't do it. You can see these kids just you just want to play They just want to skip rope. We got involved with this organization. We transformed this house Into this house and in so many ways it has a lot to do with what we do with embassies where there's protection There's a wall around it. It's not open to everyone. There's security But without security there can be no play. There could be no joy and happiness So that's what this house. So what the house does it ends up being sort of a catalyst of this whole area One house led to a garden that led to an orchard that led to another garden that led to another house That is now turning into a campus in the Englewood area of the south side of chicago I mean, it's quite extraordinary these kids after school Learn yoga So in some ways when you talk about our favorite project When I see this it's how it's used And the difference it makes to people's lives each one of these kids is again having this Incredible wholesome relationship with both building and street. This never happens on the south side But yes because of this peace house and you can see the garden is behind it and the area is changing This is the power the real power of architecture get involved Get building get involved in communities get involved in areas that you are needed More than anybody to make the world a better place So when we see this basketball court just open we see the transformation of our little block And again the power of what we can do as architects We're just amazed. So again, that's sort of our story Um, and I think I I end with this because this one in so many ways like the crown fountain And and the federal office building it has profound effects on people's lives. That's why we're architects And these are the last two that we're doing Thank you any questions or Or I answered everything I Nate has stopped raining No So what you'll see in the gallery again, I mentioned it is Is we're really dedicated to making you know to making models to making drawings To actually being involved in the construction side this idea that architects just do drawings and sketches on napkins And they're not in the trenches the trenches are where the real fund is so I'd encourage everyone to To sort of see and we've we've we've dedicated some walls to what we call the the big walls are some of our larger projects that We hope you get a sense of sort of scale material and detail and then On the on the far wall we ask some questions that we're dealing with and we're trying to not give an answer But we're trying to at least Stake our position or point of view with this So some of it might be a little hard to to read but um some of it's also on our web page But it really is I think it's an extraordinary time to be an architect It's it's a challenging profession because there's a lot of people who say no to things and they don't see really what you can do But on the positive side when you can actually influence People's lives and really make you know, that's part of our mission statement We we believe that we that architecture can inspire and improve life And I think that's what you know, that's what we're trying to do and that's what we're trying to do by making and by Ultimately by making you understand the sort of essence of what the solution should be It's not just an applied solution or something you've done before It's actually something brand new which is is quite interesting because each time you do something new Takes a lot longer, but you learn a tremendous amount Sure, and john who is in the front row. He is also very much a A spokesman and a and a diplomat and emissary for k and s Thank you