 Welcome, welcome to the dean's lecture at GESAP, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. I'm Waping Wu, the interim dean of the school. Tonight, we have our very own Galia Solomonoff to give this dean's lecture. I also want to recognize we have hundreds of students probably listening in, watching the YouTube, because today is also the big open house day at GESAP for both the school sessions and the various different programs today, especially M-Mark. So we always make sure we have our very own faculty on this day of dean's lecture, and I also want to welcome all of you, students, faculty to be here to celebrate Galia's work. And so tonight, we gather here in Lenaupi Coking, the unceded ancestral homeland of the Lenaupi peoples. I ask you to join me in acknowledging the Lenaupi community, their traditional territory, elders, ancestors, and future generations. And in acknowledging as a school that Columbia, like New York City and the United States as a nation, was founded upon the exclusions and erasures of many indigenous peoples. GESAP is committed to addressing the deep history of erasure of indigenous knowledge in the professions of the built environment generally, and in the Western tradition of architectural education specifically. With this, GESAP commits to confronting these institutional legacies as agents of colonialism and to honoring indigenous knowledge in its curricula. Galia Salmanoff is an associate professor of professional practice in architecture at GESAP, a long-term colleague here at Columbia University. Galia teaches advanced architectural studio and lectures on topics of art, public housing, and Latin American architecture. And just as the title actually captures, Galia has a very active practice. So Galia is the founder and principal of Salmanoff Architecture Studio, SAS, an award-winning architecture firm established in New York City in 2004. In that firm and in her capacity, Galia has worked with over 40 internationally recognized artists designing site-specific, multimedia, permanent, or temporary art exhibitions. Besides many private homes and hospitality projects, her firm, SAS, has renovated the art alliance for the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, the Jewish Museum of New York, and is working on the art master plan for the underlying in Miami. SAS is housed at West Beth, an artist complex in the West Village of New York City. With over 70 completed projects and commissions, her firm, SAS, aims to make art accessible to all publics. As a member of Columbia's global network, licensed architect and leader of a minority and woman-owned business, Galia regularly travels with students and engages in discussion of gender equity, art, architecture, and how to expand the democratic mission of architecture in all of society's spheres. So after Galia's lecture, and also our very own professor, Mabel Wilson, will respond, and then together they will take questions primarily from the floor. I think our audience, the YouTube will just be listening in. So Galia and the floor is yours, and we welcome Galia. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Dean Weepin-Woo. It's an honor to be here tonight in this room. I don't know what has brought all of you here tonight, but tonight I'm going to share a bit of how I got here and the work that I'm doing today. When I was a student here at Columbia, it was unusual to share personal details. The line was the line, the work was the work, and the personnel was stashed in a corner. Things have changed, and now who we are and the work we do features in the way we talk about work, in the way we work with each other, and so today I'm going to share some personal details, and the idea is that we can have a dialogue that is deeper and more involved together. I look forward to learning also personal details from you one day. And so we start in Rosario, Argentina in the 1970s. My parents were renovating the house that we were living. We went to the architect's office. This is not the architect's office that I went to. This is ArchiZoom in Italy, but it was like this. In this particular office, there are many women architects in Argentina, and there were always women architects at this time, but in this particular office, it was mostly men, kind of white shirt, open up shirts, roll up sleeves, kind of a very relaxed setting. And I remember, I was seven, and I remember perching over the drawing of the house. We used to live in a double high house, and realizing that what I was seeing was a drawing of my house, and it was a plan. And I remember being completely hooked by this idea that I was seeing something that I knew and that I could move and that it would make sense to put the table here or the chairs here, and it felt like it was like a hook, something like it clicked with me. Argentina, I am from Rosario, Argentina, not from Buenos Aires. Rosario is a city, it's a progressive city. It's a very, it's a city where Che Guevara was born. It's a city that, it's rural. There's no aristocracy in Rosario. Everyone there that has money, has land, cows or fields. And in the 70s, it was a very progressive and very liberal time. And, but then, and my parents, and my parents were, studied in France, and I was born in France in the 1960s, also very progressive time. And in 1968, just after I was born, things happened in Paris, in Paris, 1968, and my parents decided to go back to Argentina and expand the kind of idea, the revolutionary ideas that they had become familiar with, and they were familiar with in Argentina and in France and they came back to expand on that. That's my mom and my dad looking at the camera. That's my dad in a meeting, in a political meeting. And by the time I was ready to go to high school, things have turned, violently turned, and there was a military government, a one, there was censorship, and many difficult things, curfew, and at that time I had to choose a high school. My parents were blacklisted, and that meant that I couldn't go to the high schools that where somebody could determine, a board could determine your acceptance because no school would risk accepting me and with my parents or my sisters with the history of my parents. So I went to a technical school that you could be admitted by taking an exam, and it was an engineering school. So out of a thousand, more than a thousand people that applied, a hundred got selected, and out of those hundreds, we were a female. And so this is not my school, but this is so you remember that at this time, we used to draw a standing up, and it was a technical school. So we didn't, we drew perspectives, my math, with mathematical tools, I did carpentry, milling, metal milling, all these different techniques. Fundición, I don't know the names of all the techniques, but all the technical expertise that engineers, people training to do engineering, we are doing at the time. And then in 1987, following my then boyfriend, now husband, I came to the United States and first I went to City College. At City College, Max Bond was the dean, and Max Bond was, like my parents, had been in France in the 70s and 60s and 70s, and he was a very progressive thinker that thought that we could change the world, that we architects had a mission to change things. And it was him, it was Max Bond that told me Max had gone to Harvard, and he said, you know, you should go to Harvard or Columbia, and Columbia was down the block, but it was the world away. And so I applied to Columbia, and Bernard Schumi was the dean at that time, and it was a very welcoming time. A lot of people were coming from different parts of the world, and lecturing, the lectures were on Wednesday nights, they were open to everyone. This room was always full of people and energy, and there was this sense, even though it was coming from 20 blocks away, that this world had something very bubbly and very kind of that was happening. But in the early years, it didn't feel, even though it was a very welcoming place, it didn't feel that welcoming to me, because people, you know, there were a handful of people with accents. Most people were from here, and so I had a couple of classmates that were from other places, and it was a struggle to feel that I was feeding in. Many of the people were coming from similar schools and knew each other from undergraduate schools, and there was nobody from City College, there was one person, Yolanda Daniels, and she was a classmate at City College that was already here, but now things have changed quite a bit, and so this is Columbia in the 90s, different haircuts, and yes, in the 90s too, and because I am an architect, I need to put everything in paper and kind of see things, and so here you have a graph, and you'll see this graph again, everyone in blue is Columbia, and then you have the timeline at the bottom, and so the 90s, I was at Columbia 1991 to 1994, Saha Hadid was teaching here a lot of amazing, out of my six studio teachers, four became deans, Robert Stern, Tom Hanraham, Peter Lynch, and Huells, and Stan Allen, I went to school with people that are now head of industries of big offices like Bill Sharples, Greg Pascorelli, Charles Renfrow, Sara Dan, Simon Eisner, so a lot of people that are now doing a lot of interesting things, and I have the feeling that that will be the case for everyone studying now at Columbia and in this room. So one of the lessons here is to pay attention to whoever is sitting next to you. When you are in a studio, there's an emerging network, and it's not just the people that are studying with you, it's everyone that you're going to come into contact and everyone that you're going to work with, so pay attention and consider how you overlap and how your mindset expands with other people's interactions, and so here you see Columbia and here you see, architects are blue, artists are yellow, a family and friends are orange and red. And so at that time, after Columbia, I worked for Bernard and I worked at Lerner Hall, and I was already putting myself on a path of really wanting to do buildings that were going to get built, and understanding that when you build something, things change, that you have to be, it takes a lot of consensus to build something, and therefore you need to build that consensus and not be completely encapsulated in your ideas. And so we worked on Lerner Hall, which was a great experience, and then in 1996, 97, Fabian and I bought this loft in Chelsea, and we renovated ourselves, we build it ourselves, so you see the carpentries, plywood, very simply done, that's a stretcher bar with mesh and glue, the bathroom, we bought the bathtub, we did everything else, all these things, the craft work more or less, and then here, for example, this is the kitchen sink, and it's done with a cast from a paint tray and a bucket, and we learn a lot from doing this, and we use the colors of Fabian work at the time, and this kind of orange and green throughout the house, and then the project got published in a Dutch magazine, and that connected me to OMA, Rem Kulhus was in New York, Dan Wood, who was a classmate, was working for Rem, he organized a meeting, and I started working on a project that was then being, it was a competition project that was IIT in Chicago, and some of the fixations, well, orange is the color of the Dutch, so my fixation overlap with their fixation, and so there's a lot of orange in this building, and again, I went into designing bathrooms, it's one of the things that I've done a few times, and I enjoy, and this is the corridor of the IIT, and in red you see here people that were at OMA at the time, I see Gary Bates there, and Dan Wood, Amal Andraus, and it was Bjarke Ingels, Ginny Gang, and so I got to live with people, and share and complete basically my education in the Netherlands, and that took me to a project that is called Effective Brick, this is a project that I started with at Columbia as a student, it was in Jesse Rice's studio, it was one of the first paperless studio, and in South America, Brick is the venue or the material of choice to do most architecture, and so I was trying to bring the tools, the digital tools that I had learned here, and find a way of bringing those into the tradition of Brick. It was called Effective Brick because I couldn't imagine affecting a millenary tradition like Bricks, and so my way of interacting with Bricks was from the point of these are my Bricks, these are defective, this is what I do in an expressive way with Bricks. This is the work of Eladio Dieste, an engineer, Uruguayan engineer, this is a church in Atlántida, then in situ, so the Bricks that you see here came from here, so the way Eladio Dieste would work is he would create a way of making Bricks in the sites where he was going to build the building. So with the idea of the Effective Brick, I went into designing and casting our own Bricks. We casted 600 units in a mixed project, mixed way between digital fabrication and physical fabrication. We took a studio in Brooklyn, we pour the Bricks, we created molds, we casted about 600 units, and this was exhibited in an artist's space in the year 2000, and with the help of, the director then was Claudia Gull, and through the help, with the help of Leslie Gill, a professor here at Columbia, I got introduced to Claudia Gull, that became a grant from the National Endowments from the Arts that financed the project, and that became an exhibition, and basically started my career as an independent architect. It allowed me to break away from OMA, come to New York, establish my firm, and then I started, because it was an artist's space, it still exists, and it's an artist-run gallery. No curators, no collectors, no galleries, artists, and so it put me in a group of people that were artistic, and that I could dialogue with, and then they started telling me, well, I'm doing this apartment, and I'm doing this studio, and I started to work with many artists. The first artist's apartment that I did after our own was Glen Ligon, Glen Ligon is the artist who did this piece, America, and so we proceeded to test 40 different shades of brown to find the right brown, he wanted brown and white, but only an artist, only a painter, I would say, would have that level of obsessiveness about the type of pigment, the type of medium, the type of, you know, when it dries, how it's going to dry, is it going to shine? How much, is it going to be washable? And so we experimented not just with ready-made paints, but we made our own, and so this is Glen Ligon, and so it ended up being a combination, some for the refrigerator, some for the walls, and so the apartment is done in a few tons of browns and a few tons of white. He did interior design, the decoration of that, and then after that, I came across a group of people and we formed OpenOffice, and OpenOffice was a group of architects, we were, I was a licensed architect, and Lynn Rice was a licensed architect, Lynn Rice was a classmate from here at Columbia, and then we formed a group with other people, and we, at that time I thought, okay, there's two types of firms, there's the corporate firm, money, big projects, big firms, and then there is the atelier, like small projects, no money, no compromise, the architect artist, but I thought artists, the artists that I know, bear in mind that I grew up here in the 80s and 90s when there was a lot of successful artists, I met Shamil Shalbaskiat, I met a lot of successful artists along the way, and so I knew that artists were doing very well, but very well I mean they were able to leave from what they did, and so I decided that OpenOffice was going to be like an artist practice, that we would take projects, the key was like every project that we took, it had to be built because we couldn't make money if the project was not going to get built, and so we decided to take projects that were sure built things, where people had the money and had the need for the projects, and so one of the first projects that we came into contact through Jessica Stockholder and other artists was Diabicon, and so Michael Govan, the director then needed somebody to measure the building, he was going to give the building to Richard Meyer, it was the time of the Getty and all that, and so we decided to measure the building and we started doing the project, and I could talk about the for a long time, but I'm going to tell you three things about the, one, the four core, the parking lot is organized in the same way as the buildings inside, the buildings are planted in the same grid as the columns are inside, and so that created a kind of rhythm, a kind of rhythm and organization that carries from outside to inside, it was a beautiful building already, there was, it was building with magnificent light, it was a factory, this is a fact, it was built as a factory in 1928 to print the Nabisco cookies boxes, the cookies were done in Chelsea Market, the boxes were done at Dia, at this location in Bicon, and then the other thing that I'm going to share with you tonight is that the entrance was also an important decision, usually when you go to a museum, you go as a group, everyone comes in as a group, in this particular museum, we wanted people to approach the art as individuals, and so we allowed the building to be the way it was, two equal buildings, a wall comes at you, a column comes at you before, and you have to pay attention and decide whether you go to the right or to the left, so if a father and son approach the project, the building together, it's two decisions, it's not one decision, there's not enough space for two people to go at the same time, and that was a deliberate decision for us, and so this is the entrance to Dia, we did a lot of work, it's not very noticeable what the work we did, because the idea was to modify the building with precision and in a way that the art was going to be noticeable, not the architecture to be restrained as architects, and then the other thing that I'm going to share tonight, I can share more another time is this drawing by Michael Heiser, so Michael Heiser did this drawing in 1967, we are talking now about 2003, 2002, and so he had done the drawing, by the way, the project, Dia Vicon was done with Robert Irwin, artist Robert Irwin, Michael wanted this very sharp edge, he had never done it before, we were the architects, we had to figure it out how to do it, and this is the exciting part about working with artists, they know very clearly what they want to do, and it cannot be compromised with something else, but at the same time, we have to find a way of making it happen in a certain amount of time, and so the way we did it is, we took the wood floor out, we took some concrete out, we created a detail, this was a trial and error detail, but this one worked, and then the pieces had to be 20 feet, no 19 feet, that was the space that we had, and so we had to chop the concrete downstairs to make the piece, and then the pieces were done in cotton steel, and then the concrete, three inches of concrete was poured in, and then a towel by hand with hard water so that the edge would be very sharp, that's Michael Heiser and his dog, and and so we've done many different projects with different groups of people, and by 2003, after 9-11, and by 2003 my partner sort of open office had left to California, and I decided to continue as Solomon of Architecture Studio, so the work that you're going to see now is SAS work, we've done, I didn't count, but we've done a lot of projects, these are projects of residential institution, exhibition, and commercial work, exhibition design is one strong part of our firm, we've done about 40 exhibition designs, and we could do, we could, you know, we have the man to do exhibition design all the time, we cannot afford to do exhibition design all the time because it's super time consuming and very strict work, it requires the top of mind of the people in the office, and so we do two or three a year, and right now we are working with American Society, but we have worked with many different places, so I'm going to show you, so one of the things, this is a detail of a piece by Fabian Marcaccio in Akron, Ohio, an installation that we did in 2006, and here this is permanent, and it's silicone over the light, and a painting as a facade. This is a work of Fabian in a gallery in New York, and in Malba in Buenos Aires, and then at the Jewish Museum, we've done a number of shows, and so Isaac Smith-Rachy, Marc Chagall, The Power of Pictures, all these shows are in the same three rooms, and so one of the things that you get to do, and it's fascinating about designing exhibitions, is that you get to work with the same space and make it completely different, change completely the message, change completely the atmosphere, and so for early Soviet photography, it's yellow, black and white, very graphic, very strong, and then for Modigliani, it's purple and much more moody and long faces, and kind of like the purple changed, we use about seven different purples, and so you think you're seeing the same color, but you are moving through a kind of family of colors. I always say colors coming in families, they are not the same, because they change from one surface to the other, and so the way the pedestals are, the way the art is mounted, all of that is considered in relationship to each artist. This is another set of rooms in the museum with several shows here, and so I'm going to show you in a little bit more detail, Burle Marx. Why Burle Marx? Burle Marx is one of my favorite people, he's dead, I don't know him, but it's one of my favorite people in the world. He was a painter that became a landscape architect. Everyone that is my student has seen this work several times and for different reasons and at different scales, but one of the things he realized is that if you are in modernism, you're looking at landscape from a tall building, and so landscape become an urban painting, and so he used pavements and plans to paint Rio de Janeiro, to paint the different cities he worked on. That's him. And so in the show that we did of Burle Marx, it was at the Jewish Museum and it was of him as a painter artist, and so we worked landscape and painting together. This is a tapestry 200 feet long, and the work is just extraordinary, and so what we did is we created this large table so that you could see the work in a kind of landscape format, and also we took down all the walls of the room, and that's the table in section. Burle Marx, the house for Niemeyer in Rio de Janeiro, and for the Jewish Museum, we've done a number of different projects, and this is the restaurant with Myra Kalman, an artist. She did the wallpaper and a lot of the graphics, and this is just down the block, but a completely different set of mine. This is Capo Maza for La Riga Egocian. Now we are in like 2014, 15. And so this was also for art, and but a different requirements of the space and a different level of material detail and refinement. And around this time, when I was completing Capo Maza, I realized that I was still looking for a male partner. I had two male partners, I was doing work, but I still felt that I was not enough, that I needed an English speaking partner, a male partner, somebody that could overcome my shortcomings. I don't know if anyone in this room feels that way, that if you feel like your accent is an issue, the fact that talking about money is uncomfortable, what else, the fact that presenting, your throat gets congested when you have to present. And so I was looking for that person for whom that is easy, and that was not me. And so at this point, when I got the last check from Egocian and I deposited the last check, I realized, wait a minute, what am I doing? Who am I looking for? I'm doing exactly what I want to do. Somehow people are trusting me with these things. It's uncomfortable to talk in public, it's uncomfortable to ask for money, it's uncomfortable to go back and say, I need more, we spend more time, but I'm doing it. So what am I doing? And so at that point, I realized that maybe if I gave up some of this aspiration of being a different type of firm or a larger thing, I could be happy with what I was doing. And so my mindset changed and I realized that over time I had internalized sexism, that sexism was within me and that I needed to get rid of that and proceed in the way that I was doing things and that they were coming to me. And it seems, and I realized also how many women, amazing women were in my life and were doing exactly what they wanted to do. And it was a moment of saying, I'm going to do this and it's going to be okay. At the same time, it didn't mean that I was giving up on these, over the years we had always done competitions, RFQs and things like that. It didn't mean that I was giving up on all these projects that have not happened. This is a center for Jewish history in the middle of Manhattan. This was a bus station in Uberlandia, Brazil without air conditioning and without glass. So maintenance would not be an issue. This was a public library in Rosario, Argentina, 2012. So that there'll be no need for air conditioning. It would always be cool. The section positions the library underground partially and there's a chimney effect so that you don't need air conditioning and the light kind of diffuses. And or a curve less factory. Many of you that are my students have heard me talk about when are we going to have the space between buildings have no curves anymore where cars and bicycles and people can start walking and there would be no separation and we can all use the space. One day when GPS is safe, we can do that. And so this was a factory in the Navy yards without curves where cars, tracks and people could work under one roof. Or a church condominium in Harlem. A condominium on top of a church or a re-imagining of NYCHA Fulton houses. NYCHA is the New York City Housing Authority. This is a block away from my house and you have towers in the park and all this unused land. And the solution that people always think is like we have to sell these and have some other developer develop it. And so my solution and we presented these to various community boards and the people at NYCHA and the people that live in the buildings is to create a three floor podium with a lot of activities and a lot of space that can be rented so that people that live in the buildings do not have to give up any of the land and NYCHA can generate a new source of income from the rental of building these. And so I haven't given up on all these work or all these aspiration, but I decided to keep working in the way that work was coming to me. The other thing that I realized at that point is that the ideas that I wanted to do and the things that I like, it was not really about me doing it. I was part already of a community by teaching and I could tell my students these ideas and they can do it. And the work that I have done is not really my own. I have inherited a lot of ideas from the people that I have learned from and my students are very equipped, are better under feet, they're learning to talk about money in a different way. They're learning English with more proficiency than me and they can do this work. And so I realized that the reason why I was teaching and the reason why I was excited about teaching was because I was seeing, it was basically like parenting a new generation and letting things flow from me to other people and that generosity was something that was very helpful to me. In the meantime, residential work is a constant in our firm and so what I'm going to show you now are four houses. The first one was for Taylor Swift. I don't know if you have heard Cornelia Street. So I'm going to show you the kitchen where it all happened. And so this is a house, it was a two-story house, two-story garage on Cornelia Street and we extended it two floors up and one floor down and created, this is the in construction, and created a pool in the basement. The lighting was done by Jerve de Costet from L'Observatoire and so the house has no backyard. It's all internal, it's not a very posh house, it's only 17 feet wide. And so we did the best to create a luminous and exciting house. The interiors were not done by us and so this is the kitchen of the song and the bedroom and the stairs and the library and the pool. And this is another family because one of the things that I love about doing residential work is that when you do residential work, in this case, Ronit came first, the mom and for this family we've done five, six projects and then there's a family of five and so I'm going to show you the third project that we did with them. And so Ronit and the family are very different people and what I love about doing residential work is that you have to accommodate these five people with different personalities and different needs and so in the case of this house on East 7th Street, the idea was to marry the inside and the outside and make every floor have outdoor space. And so this is the section of the house, everyone that is my student knows that you design houses in section. And then this is the front, the front is very traditional, it's landmark and so the front is the front, nobody knows what is happening behind this house and then behind the facade, we only change the stairs of the front and then in the back, it's large windows, all new with cedar and glass and so this is the living room looking to the front, this is the back, cedar and large fixed windows and then the windows that open let's see, I think I can point with this. Well, the window that opened there is with wood so that we wanted large pieces of glass and not a small pieces of glass, so everything that was small, we covered with wood and so you can have ventilation and light separate from one another, oh and now, all right. And so there you have the windows, the fixed window and the operable window, a very large sliding door, all the different floors, the kitchen and then the other part of the living room, the dining room facing the back, the house from the back, the second floor and this is for another family, also the couple call me when they were pregnant to baby proof one stair and it escalated into renovating the house and doing a number of in situ installations with very interesting artists, so this one installation that you see, the stainless steel swing bench and cube is by Ricky Trabaniha, again, this was the first time that Ricky was building an stainless steel piece and so we figured out how to do it for him, now he does it all over the world and then the stairs are to the left and these are the stairs, the stairs are by Jim Lambie, again, the first time that he did a stair was here and then MoMA has a stair and a lot of people have these stairs now and so this is the way it was figured out how to do the stairs and paint them and how to put the lights inside the walls, the railing inside the walls so that the stair would be the diva of the story and then this is Ricky's piece on the ground floor, it's inside the cube, there's a dance bar so the girls can practice dance without being seen from the street. That's a cube open, the swings, the way the swings are hooked to the beams, we had to put a beam above, the shop drawing and the section of the cube and the swing. Upstairs, the house, we left some of the choice, the ceiling that was there, this is an 1870s house, so it's 150 years old. It was a carpenter's house, so the shop was downstairs and the house was upstairs, we left that open and then that is there that you see, so in every floor the stair goes a different direction and so that is there that you see, you know when you are in an airplane and they open the wings to service the airplane, I realized that they were using these very beautiful cables and so when I came home after flying, I was like, we have to research, what is this cable and this is a stainless steel cable that is, because when they fix a plane, they have to fix it very quickly, they need to know where the lines go very quickly and so they have every color in the rainbow so that they can fix the airplane quickly, so we use in this case pink and orange, but there's hundreds of beautiful colors and so this became a way of baby proving the house because it's soft and also of making a railing and also being very inexpensive. All the art that was done here was at the beginning, so it was done for a fraction of the cost that now that work cost. Isa Gessen on the pedestals, Yves Klein on the table and Damon Hertz on the shelves and Kusama upstairs, the parents room, very conservative, very calm, she's a psychologist, the bathroom, the girls, so for the girls we need a section so the older girl is above, the younger girl is below and there are all kinds of different windows from one girl to the other so that they can, there you see them playing in their bedroom, upstairs is the parents, the father is a politician, so he can have calls at night and talk loud and close the door and the parents' outdoor space. This house, it's just finished construction, I do not have pictures of the finished house, I'm going to walk you through some of the construction, this is in cold spring, landscape, it's very important to me, I love working with landscape and so here you have a modern house for a family, for a couple, they want to see nature but they don't really want to be in nature and so what we did is we did two patios that are completely mosquito-free, bug-free, humidity-free so that you can have comfort but at the same time be in the middle of nature and so here is the section, the house is to appear very modest, the side that is one story, it's towards the town and so when you approach the house, it feels like a very modest one-story house, on the other side it opens up and it has a big living room and so this is a section of the living room, tall living room and the bedrooms are similar, seeing from one bedroom into the next and so here is the house as is nearing completion and what you see is two layers of glass and so this glass disappears into the concrete wall so see that, so the glass partitions completely disappear into the concrete wall and so when the weather is perfect you can open it up and you are in nature but when there is a tiny bit of humidity or whatever you can close it and you are in a perfectly hermetic apartment now when you open, you have to have a railing so we have glass, I try everything you could imagine to get rid of that railing but you need a railing, right? And so this is the living room, the living room and the fireplace, this is the study downstairs, the gym downstairs, the bedroom upstairs, the kitchen in the back, the study, her study, oh no this is the guest room, guest room and this is the reflective pool nearing completion where we're also doing a pool for them but this is for to put a piece of art and it's also a Jacuzzi outside in one of the patios and this is a client for whom we are working right now and a house that we visited with the students in Calabasas, California, this is Timo T. Schmid from the Eagles, fantastic person to work, this is the third project we do for them, for Timo T. and Jean. And so this is in Calabasas, very different setting, kind of a, Calabasas is east of Malibu in the mountains and so it's much more like a desert and so this is the plan of the house and so what we try to do in this house is to make the house work with the slope so it's a five level house but it really appears as a one story house because it climbs with the mound and so here you have the section, you have one level for the living room, second level for the media room, third level for the kitchen, four level for the laundry, then you zigzag to the guest rooms and the storage and then the master suite is over the living room and so this is the house being built, many different roofs, the landscape, that's the window from the guest rooms out. This is the section, the studio for Jean, the stair on the side of the house and a view from one of the corridors going to the living room, the living room, the living room being built, the house and this is us two weeks, like last week or when we were in the kidney with Timo T. I'm going to show this and these are, I'm going to conclude the night with the inflatables, that is a project that very dear to me started in 2011 and has a new life now with Lori Hawkins, so this is the first one, this is Bob, 2011 Bob and Bob was kind of, not so, you know, sport is so much nicer, but Bob was so cute and so this is us building Bob and creating the structure for it and Bob is high, Bob is over you, so this is the students made this because what happened was that it was supposed to come for graduation but it was 15 days late and so it was very disappointing but we did a lot of fun things while we were waiting for Bob and so this was done with Lyam Gilik, an artist that teaches at the art school, very difficult to work with an artist, with a conceptual artist, I had worked with many artists, conceptual artists are more difficult than painters or sculptors or video makers and so this is the process of building and discussing art, it was 21, 22 students, 12 architecture students and 10 art students working together, that's Lyam, this is the inauguration day of Bob and then now we did a spot last year, 2021 with Lori Hawkinson and a group of about 20 people between Avery and Fairweather, that's a spot, the day that was finally up, working on a spot, a lot of fun to do that and a spot at dusk and at night and this is what is coming, this is what is coming for next graduation, fingers crossed and I want to conclude tonight, so I want to have time to take questions and so I want to conclude with these, throughout history, the Hunter Warrior makes for a good story, we have invested so much energy in the Hunter Warrior, the Hero, the Conqueror with their Spires, their Cannons, their Missiles, their Rockers, their Skyscrapers, but that story is winding down and it's giving a way to the real story of doing things together because we must unite to solve so many problems now, no matter how we got here, now it's time to take a problem, any problem, smaller, large and solve it together. Some years ago, when I was driving back from RISD with Yehuda Safran, he shared a story with me that has stayed with me and the story that he told me was about a king and a prince, but I'm going to make it about a queen and a princess and so the story goes like this, a queen is worried about the princess becoming the next ruler and so wants the princess to learn to be a ruler and so sends the princess to the care of an old wise woman. The princess go to the wise woman, but they are doing, and they do chores and so they clean and they mend things and they tend the fields and they pick up fruits and they do the same thing the next day and so the princess gets impatient and tells the wise woman, I didn't come here to be a housekeeper, I come here to be a ruler, when am I going to learn the things that I need to rule? And so the wise woman ignores the princess and so they keep working and then one day when they are tending the fields they hear a loud noise and they run towards the loud noise and the carriage had tumbled down the hill and there were two people inside that were very badly hurt and so the wise woman and the princess bring a boulder to the carriage and a stick, open the door, take the people out, they take it to the house, they cure them, they take care of them and they get progressively better. As they get better, the queen, the wise woman asks the princess, do you feel ready now? And the princess respond, well I don't really know, I don't really know where I'm supposed to do, I don't know if I can do this again. And so the wise woman says, there's only one lesson here. Do what you have to do with whom you have next to you and do it now. And so what I want to wish for you tonight is that you do exactly that. You do what you have to do with whomever is next to you and you start doing it now. Thank you, thank you very much for being here. Thank you so much for that, Gallia. I mean that was absolutely fantastic. Oh, thank you. And so many questions that I wanna ask but we're gonna have to have a cocktail maybe to get through all my questions. So I'm going to maybe say a few things, let you get your mind together but I'm sure there are just lots of questions in the audience for you. But I wanted to talk a little bit about just the constellation drawing that you showed because I think what it tells us and especially because this is, there's a virtual audience out there and they're thinking about practice and the narratives that you speak about especially at the end are about often individual genius. I have a very limited set of influences and that's what constructs my way of practicing architecture. And what I thought was very, very smart and authentic and truthful is that the way in which we construct our knowledge base and the way we practice is actually from family. And it is actually through classmates and friends and people that you encounter as you move through these various institutions that we actually occupy. In institutions I would also say offices, right? And so I think that's a really amazing way to kind of like chart, like a set of relationships that show us really how architecture unfolds. So in that, I also wanted to maybe ask you more about the in situ, right? Because I learned about Eladio D'Este actually through you because if I recall correctly, you went back and you studied his work through a kidney. Yes. Yes, and that's exactly how I- Wait, Sara then. Yeah, and maybe you could talk a little bit about that. But also the fact that the bricks are made there, right? And that church is absolutely amazing and I've always wanted to go see it just because of the level of invention and also the engagement with local material and also local labor, right? It's an incredibly beautiful project. But the other in situ that I thought was incredibly powerful was that sink and bucket that you are actually making do with what you have there. And there's a whole tradition of assemblage art or depovra, that kind of deals with that moment of context. So in situ seems to be very important and you showed us a lot of drawings of details, right? To show, even if it's hyzer in the joint and how to actually put the floor, something about understanding place is really important. But the other part of the in situ in your work is also about the dialogues that you have with people. The dialogues you are actually having with hyzer, the dialogues you're having with other artists like Glenn Ligon or the families. And so can you maybe just share a bit more about how that becomes practice for you? Like how do you evolve that question of the in situ, right? And why that is so necessary? So there are many problems that you can think of. One thing that I didn't say was how important Jesse Reiser as a teacher was in the sense that he would say, don't wait until you have the idea totally formed to go and draw it. Start drawing anywhere, you get there. And so the idea that you start anywhere and you move, the way we think about architecture is by making it and not by simply closing our eyes and imagining it has changed and has informed the way I do things. Maybe also because I went to a technical school where everything had to be made and drawn. And so you would have two drawings, the drawing before, the drawing after. And so at the office we still do that, the drawing before, the drawing after. And so doing things, building things, it's what I like to do. And so we do things whether you call it in situ or problem solving or inventing a detail constantly. And the reason why I'm working with artists, it's very productive. It's because they tell you, I don't know how to do this. And so that kind of frankness of I want to do this, maybe you and I can figure out how to do it, becomes a kind of, sometimes with residential clients or fancy clients, they don't have that willingness to explore a detail and to fail. Because in order to do that heiser edge, we try many different things. And so it crack here, it crack there. And so that still has to go exactly to the edge or half an inch below. And so the way that somebody allows you and pays for the trial and error part of the work has been an important part of growing. And that also happens with museum exhibitions. We tell people, we never done this before, we never stretch goals 12 feet. We've done it in small places, but so the Ms. Rahi show also had a lot of trial and error. And Isaac is also very involved in doing that kind of experimental work with fabric. And so when you are working with a dead artist, when you're working with a state of, when you're working with Luis Abulchua or I don't want to kill anyone, or Fred Sambac, people that we used to work but we don't work with anymore, we work with the states, you cannot have that dialogue anymore, the states are very conservative. And so it is important to work with people that are willing to have things not work out. And Eladio Dieste experiment was at the gigantic scale. And he not only used clay from the site, he used workers from the site. Everyone that worked in that church was somebody that was part of that church. And so ideally I would like to do that. I would like to do work in situ and with the people that are going to use it. Yeah, I know those hyzer details are amazing. I mean, they really are beautiful. I mean, I've been able to, because right, I mean, the way you see them now they're kind of blocked off but I've actually been able to actually go and look into that. And it's really stunningly beautiful. But I do want to follow up because I had a conversation with some University of Michigan students about that question of like conceptualizing versus making, right? How, you know, and you know, we're all architects and we're still all information to some extent, how do you work through that fear? And that's what I was talking with them about what you do not know because I think there's an ethic in that. And it sounds like that you had that revelation also about practice, like a preconception of what practice should be as opposed to the practice that you actually made for yourself. Fear is a component of doing things. And it's very present when you're doing an exhibition design and it opens a certain day and it has to be ready for that day. But I think that we do mock-ups and we do things that, and we work incrementally. Usually we do something and then experiment a bit more and change things progressively. So I would say that the calibration is between making and concept and also gradient. Like not expecting something to be completely new and kind of going modestly forward. And also, you know, I want to mention a lot of the people in the graph are people that have worked in my office. A lot of the people that are working in my office, many of them are ex-students. And so we have a kind of, we support each other. And so I always tell the people that work in my office, if everything is going great, it's your project. The moment something goes wrong, it's my project. And so don't try to cover a mistake. Don't try, you know, if something went wrong and things go wrong often, just let me know and we'll deal with it. Don't try to say, you know, it didn't happen. So I think that creating a supportive environment where difficulty, I wouldn't call it failure, but difficulties are part of the everyday, you know, the everyday making. And we have, you know, any given day, we have four or five projects under construction. So problems pile in. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I have to say, the Douche Museum is one of my favorite museums that I think it has to do with the way Claudia, it's not only the curatorial projects, but also the curatorial requires a way of envisioning how it engages the work. And I always just think the exhibitions are mind blowing, you know, I mean, the ways in which, you know, different, whether it's Roberta Burley-Marc, I saw the Chagall, which was phenomenal. But I also think it's having a director that has that vision of understanding, you know, like what is possible in design curatorial spaces, exhibition area spaces. So why don't we open this up to questions in the room? I'm sure there are some. Hello. Yes. Thank you so much for such a great presentation and a really honest presentation, which I think we're all craving moments of honesty through this time of turmoil. I was very intrigued by when you talked about your idea of discomfort, and that is something that I'm also exploring this semester. And I'm wondering in your case when you got that moment where like, okay, I don't need another partner, how did you deal with that discomfort? Is that something that just disappears or is that something that you still deal with on the daily basis or maybe monthly basis or yearly basis? Like what, how do you confront that? Yeah, I mean, if somebody, for example, is going to interview me on the phone, I know I won't get the job. It's just so hard to talk on the phone with somebody that you don't know. And so there are certain things that I feel that are difficult, but I think the realization was that I blame myself for having internalized that sense of discomfort. There's definitely something out there, but the overcoming the difficulty, it's, I feel it on me. And so my sense is that acknowledging the discomfort, it's first, and then overcoming the discomfort comes only until after you acknowledge the discomfort. That doesn't mean that the discomfort is completely created by you. There may be external factors to whatever discomfort society brings upon, but one has to be the first to overcome or to acknowledge that it exists. And then things happen. It's part of getting old. Back in your, all the way in the back. You need a microphone. How's it going? Thank you again. I don't know if you're early mentioning how G-SAP was the place where everyone was coming to talk, but I feel like it's those that are already here that most of us are most excited to be seeing. So thank you. But my question is, because you do a lot of work with artists, and this is always a question, and it dates back to let's say the beginning of modern architecture. What is that line, I guess for you then, between let's say art and then architecture? Especially because the work you do tends to then be with artists a lot. So. Yeah, thank you for that question because that's a very important, it's a very important subject. The way I see it is like an artist needs to convince one person to do the work. The artist himself. The architect needs to convince a lot of people. Architecture is about consensus. You need somebody to pay for it. You need somebody to build it. You need somebody to permit it. Very important permitting is such a difficult thing. Permit to build it, use it, maintain it. And so it's a much longer negotiation, but it's also a very different process of convincing and engaging different people. And so I think that the biggest difference is not in the form or in the material or in the message. The biggest difference is in the process and the amount of people involved in making that process happen. So consensus, I would say, is the biggest difference. The consensus about art comes after the fact. We all agree that Jean-Michel Basquiat is a great artist. In order for Jean-Michel Basquiat to do the work, he didn't need us. I mean, there was always that, you know, the essay by Robin Evans' translation from Drawing to Building, where he, you know, he was amazing, kind of social historian, but also architectural historian, where he's looking at the difference in the way, and I think he uses Terrell, if I remember correctly, and the way in which Terrell draws his spaces, and the way an artist would draw space versus the way an architect would draw space, and the fact that the architect understands that what is drawn isn't what is going to be produced. Yeah, and it reminds me when you said, well, they're the drawings before and the drawings afterward. Yes, yes, and the architectural drawing for something that is going to be fabricated is really a suggestion. And it's a suggestion to the engineers, it's a suggestion to the permitting authorities, to the boards, to the fabricators, and so it's kind of like, it's part of a process. And so I think of drawing as a way of suggesting and changing things slowly. Yeah, I mean, for me what that helped was, to think about that the artist works in Evans, the artist typically will work more closely with the thing versus the architect who's working more mediated, and I'm just wondering in the sense, so how do you gain a sense of the kind of craft of construction, right? Because you're not working directly on it, you're producing a set of instructions essentially for others, and so how has that evolved, I think, over the course of your process? We have a very established way of doing construction administration. We do weekly visits, sometimes twice a week, one with the contractor, one with the contractor and the consultants, or twice a week, one with the client and one with the contractor. It's really important to, or the contractors, it's very important to have intimacy with the contractor so that the contractor, you know, one of the things about most of our contractors are male, they're some female, but one of the things is to understand pride. It's very hard for somebody that is working with their hands to take notions from somebody that is working with their head mostly, and so coming to the site in a disarm way, in a humble way, and saying, why can we not do that? Just explain to me, why are you saying, I'm being humble and allowing that person to tell you, honestly, without trying to appear self-assured. And so the process of building and engaging the contractor and doing construction administration that way, it has been very fruitful. In exhibition work, that's where we started because exhibition work was easier to do that kind of more intimate way, and then we took that way of working to residential work. And so we have a lot of construction meetings. So I actually have a question, thank you, Gallia. I really appreciate this conversation and starting with this anecdote of school started kind of learning, drafting a line on a board to kind of this identity-based practice that happens more. And I have this question of when did you kind of create this map of your life, especially because I appreciate this mic drop moment of unlearning sexism and on-site, on-construction sites kind of dealing with very masculine energies and contractors and kind of how that fits into this map of who we are. And when did you make this kind of identity map of people and influences, and kind of how would you shift it to add things beyond people, if that makes sense? I actually did it for you. I did it for tonight. I've been thinking about it. The last time I lectured was November 2019 in Argentina. And when you lectured in a place called Santa Fe, Argentina, and it's in the middle of the Pampas, and there were a thousand people. And it's like, because they're so eager to have different ideas. And so everyone comes. Everyone that hears that there's going to be an architect came. And so when I was talking to them in Spanish across the continent, I realized that I needed not just to explain the work, but explain how do I know these people? How do I know these artists? How do I know a musician that, how do I know Timothy Schmidth through a contractor? A contractor recommended us to Timothy Schmidth, and that's how we got to work with him several times. So the matrix of who do I know and the different levels. So there are different levels, different sizes. People, you know, it's a grasshopper. And so people that have influenced me more are larger. And people that have influenced, but they're all, ideally it should be on time. Because right now they are when I met them. And so the graph started as a way to explain to you students, not you colleagues, you students, how important it is, the people that are next to you now, and to not be sidetracked by the stars coming and going. Because the stars are around you now and you do not know who they are. Did I know that living with Bjarke Ingels was going to be something that entertain you? No idea, you know. I had no idea that out of the 70 people that were working in that office, he would be the one that will be recognized by most of you. And so that thing changes, yeah. I mean, what's great about that constellation is there are a lot of people also that were influential on me. Exactly. Yeah, so that's what's really remarkable. Andres. Well, thanks so much. This was an amazing lecture. And I also find that it was very, very valuable and so, so much appreciated, I would say, to explain a practice, because a practice is not that easy to talk about. It's full of compromises, it's full of, let's say, difficult decisions that you're not even aware of. There's many different forces that are part of architecture and the effort of going to that and explaining what happened through practice, I think was incredibly beautiful. I also know the entrance of the Diavican, which I never realized that it was doing that, that you explained, making you be aware of your decision-making. And I love that. And I think that it also speaks of attention that you brought to your talk, that it's how being aware of being an individual is very much a collective project. Yes. A project that has to do with you being situated in the collective. And I found that your lecture was especially brilliant on that, that you were very much acknowledging how your personal trajectory, the building of an independent voice was very much about being aware of being part of a collective and relating to it and understanding how it operated. And I found that it's a brilliant way of explaining practice. Probably this is not that much of a question, but if you could tell us a bit more about that, especially because I know that in your dialogue with artists, that was crucial. You were talking about artists not compromising, but then finding yourself a way to negotiate with them, even with those that had passed. And I remember the motion of seeing your exhibition of Feliciano-Tentrion, that was also an artist that was struggling to build his individuality in the way he was situated in the HIV crisis, for instance, and in the force of being segregated in his migrant condition. And the show was very carefully situated in that effort, both as an individual voice and as part of a collective. So this tension of the individual emerging as part and situated as part of a collective, I'd like to know more about that. So very interesting because, and I have asked my students, should I talk about me personally? What do you think? And they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I was like, no, I'm not going to do it. But then on Saturday, two students came to interview me and we talk about this thing and are they here? Yes, she's there. And so I don't remember your name, but, and so she said, yes, you have to, this is, so it decided me to talk about me personally because what she said was, I was like, now there's all this emphasis about the individual person as it was that important. And she said, it is important because we are going to do something from who we are and we're going to change what we're going to do together. And this is a person that lives through communism. And so she was explaining how important is to be an individual when you are within a collective and be able to voice that rather than, we were talking about one nation, when you don't have different political parties, when you don't have ways to voice your opinion. But if you have a common project and you can change that project and you can express yourself, so I decided to bring to bear who I am and how I got here as a way to open up the conversation, not really to talk about this anecdote or not that anecdote, but then, you may understand better where I want to go if you know that my parents were liberal and kind of left wing people that were blacklisted in Argentina. It may explain some things about the way I react to power, or some commonalities. And if I know about your family history and Franco and all that, I probably can relate and understand other things too. And so I decided to bridge that gap of the personal, not because I'm interested in my personal story, but because I feel like that honesty could bring us all together to a different commonality. Yes. I think this will be the last question. Oh, we're not going to. I think it was, well, take that off for a second. I found fascinating the fact that you were weaving the personnel and the material together as if it was one. And this is very unusual. We generally, especially in an institution like this one, we go around the abstraction and the conceptual and you took it from exactly the other side. I liked your institute, right? But it was the institute of your life as well as institute on the site. And so that created a completely different sort of mode of approaching a piece of architecture. And eventually arriving at that larger, I could even say conceptual design, as you know. In other words, a larger image of what the world can be. And I thought you did it fantastically. Thank you. Thank you. One more question. Hi. Hey. First of all, yeah, amazing lecture, super inspiring. And I actually just wanted to ask you a little bit more about that question of individualism. So in the story you were saying, do what you have to do with the person that is next to you and do it now. And I wanted to talk to you a little bit and ask you about that switch when you went from the collective to being your own firm and that switch from having partners to having employees and how that affected you. How did you know you were ready basically and how you made that whole difference in your life? And yeah, I mean, do you see, obviously you still work with people as partners, whether they're the artists and everything, but yeah, if you can elaborate more. Yeah, when we did OpenOffice, we had this idea, I had this idea that it was going to be like a soccer team in the sense that you have free agents that come and go and you pay them for the game and you have the stable team or trainers. And so I was thinking of, I used to be a swimmer and so I used to think about myself as a trainer more than as a swimmer. So I would be training and focusing on the larger picture but I would have people coming and going per project. And we had a lot of projects like that but the IRS doesn't work that way. Taxes don't work that way. And so if you have a bunch of people coming and going, you end up with a crazy tax bill. And also if somebody suits you, you are completely unprotected because you're not a corporation. And so I had to change to be a corporate. So OpenOffice became a limited liability corporation and then when we separated it was very complicated and we didn't have any assets but just separating, this is going to be me forever, that's going to be you forever, this project you can talk about, this project you cannot talk about, all that. And so the next time around, I wanted to call it something else. I don't remember. And so I went to Bob Stern who had been my teacher and I said, I'm going to open my own firm. 2004 was this, 2003, 2004. And I'm going to call it, I don't remember what it was. And he said, Galia, if you do not call it your name, it's because you don't trust yourself. And if you don't trust yourself, how are you going to go out there and ask anyone to put any money on your firm? And so it was with that understanding that I switched to SAS. And I thought about Atelier. So I thought about ASA, Atelier Solomono of Architects, but it didn't just, so I went for SAS, a studio, also trying, also the other thing that Robert Stern said is like, you have to be loyal to this cost. Don't move around anymore. Don't go anywhere. Just be in New York and be loyal because you're already a foreigner. He put that idea in my head. I think you're already a foreigner. So you have to be loyal to the cost. You have to call it your name. You have to form a corporation. This is the lawyer. He sent me to Bob Herman, who put the firm together. And so all of this became this less amoeba-like structure. And the amoeba became, I am a professional corporation, PC. And so I love to have a more fluid work structure. But I work, you know, when you do a home, even if it's a modest home, it's the most money that people have. You cannot be toying around with some, you know, what happened if the IRS, if I need to pay more, or if I get a lawsuit and I cannot finish a project. So I worked in the most protective entity possible, but it's not intellectually the best entity possible. It's what is permitted and it's what works and what I don't have to create a specific template for. But I do think that there are many different ways for you guys to envision a practice. And I think as you say it, it's evolved over. You've had to kind of figure out exactly what works. I'm very interested in these models where people are part owners, where, you know, and so ideally I would like to find a way of transitioning to having the people that work in my office being owners of the firm, with me, you know, minority partners and things like that. So if anyone is a business savvy person and wants to join the firm. I know who you can, I have a friend you can talk to. So I just want to say thank you, Galia. This has been an amazing. Thank you, thank you for being here. Thank you, thank you. Thank you, Mesa, thank you very much.