 All right, I think we are ready for the third session and then concluding remarks. So the third session sort of main topic is labor, but as I explained, this is through the lens of practicing. What does it mean practice today? And also the question of labor, equity, and climate are intertwined, so feel free to ask questions that pertain to all these three topics to the presenter of this afternoon session. So I have the pleasure to introduce three speakers. Amaline Ang, she is a Singaporean Australian architect and cartonist, a graduate of a CCCP program at Columbia University School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Amaline's research lab practice explores architecture as media, as environmental matter, and as the representation of spatial information. Amaline's ongoing work revolves around building information modeling and the entanglement of drawing with labor and material system. She is an assistant professor at RISD. We have Nicholas McDermott, co-founder of Future Expansion. He is a Brooklyn based firm with an enthusiastic attitude for the creation of new architectural and urban possibilities and a desire to generate a new body of work for and from a change in city. Nicholas is a registered architect in New York State. He is a lead accredited professional and serves on the board of directors of the design advocates. He also teaches at the Yale School of Architecture. The Future Expansion is led by himself, Nicholas, and also his partner, Deirdre McDermott. And then, Office of Things, Ken BuBui and Lane Brick. Office of Things is a practice with five partners in three different locations, New York, Charlottesville, and Chicago. Their work explore the construction and transformation of the built environment by integrating artful gestures into everyday spaces. They aim to bring a sense of place and community to their work. Lane Brick is a registered architect in New York and Georgia. She supports her work through research, writing, and exploring issues of urbanism, authenticity, and the interaction between people and the environment. She teaches at the Spitzer School of Architecture. And Ken is a registered architect in New York prior to founding Office of Things. He worked at Johnson Shoe in Toronto, Peter Eiseman, and Seven Years as a project architect at J Associates. He also is in academia and teaches at the Yale School of Architecture. So I am happy to have Emily as the first presenter. Thank you. Everyone, nice to be here. I'm, as you can tell, I don't have an immediate practice name or a kind of LLC structure of that kind. I'm mostly a research-based practice. And I am a licensed architect in the State of Victoria in Australia. And currently, my obsessions have been around acts of specification. So I think instead of showing the tile of work that I've done, I think it's more a deep dive the six minutes that I have into two exhibition projects of late. This one is Planetary Home Improvement. It's a project that was installed in Prague in the Czech Republic during Omicron. So it was of an interesting time. But I think I was and am still kind of asking about not just the forms of architecture, but the kind of tools and methods with which we specify architecture and how material and data might coincide or come together to produce maybe alternative understandings of where design might live, whether it's looking a bit upstream or downstream in systems and infrastructures we're kind of implicated in. So this project, I might kind of flip through here, is a kind of digital and physical deeper along with two of my collaborators, Gabrielle Vegarro, Christine Georgier. Also, we met at GSAP. We're really interested in this idea of materials being geological and actually this idea that actually an architectural intervention is touching on like millions of years of life formation. So if you think about buying steel stud from Home Depot, you're actually tapping into the Archean era. It was kind of a way of taking ourselves a little bit out of the supply, just-in-time demand, supply and demand of materials that we often have the consumer relationship with our materials when we go to Home Depot as consumers or when we specify materials as architects. So the big thing of this exhibition was really to create a website that scrolled backwards. This is a fast, you can still log on to it. It's iPhone-friendly or phone-friendly, I should say. But it does make the shopper go backwards in this consumer interface. And you can kind of like grasp at these objects and click on them. And sometimes they'll have specifications that tell you something else about the materials and how they have been extracted and so on. The QR codes in the gallery were affixed, also they link to this website that they were affixed to materials that we found in construction sites in Prague. And this is something that, as a practice, I hope to continue working with since it's a nebulous space of, I guess, contingency with salvage and materials that you may find short in supply or kind of crop up occasionally in abundance. These are drawings that we produced for the exhibition. And there's something about, I think, this kind of sectional understanding of extraction. You know, Bruno Latour talks about critical zones and like actually all the intervention that we're doing is really like within the, you know, a few kilometers above and below the grounds crust. And so where are our products coming from? What are the kind of acts on this kind of planetary scale, I guess, that architects feel maybe sometimes a bit detached from or disengaged from because they're too far upstream or like questions of waste, for example. Too far downstream for us to think about meaningfully. So we decided to step back and kind of really delve in to, you know, metals, plastics, rocks, and wood. There were transducers affixed to these drawings so you could kind of even listen to the sonic. They turned the materials which the drawings were mounted on to, you know, plywood, polycarbonate and so on. So you could listen through using them as speakers to the sounds of extractive and also just like the creaks of the earth, I guess, if you. So it was kind of a playful, I guess, approach to this question of entanglement with material life. This project I did want to spend a bit more time on because it's been top of mind. It's a project that was just exhibited in RISD architecture in the kind of main gallery we have in September. It's called Deeper. There's also a website that still exists so you can forge through that. The subtitle is called Gross Domestic Practices. And I think maybe this is something I want to, yeah, maybe have a chat with everybody else about what practices might mean as a verb form as opposed to a noun form, like a firm, this idea of a structure, what salvage practices in this case bring to architecture as a material economy is like a space of action. So anyway, this project is kind of, you know, 3D scans of all these samples that we've brought into the gallery and staged as bays as well. It's kind of a follow on from the previous exhibition but this time really engaging with New England supply chain. And by supply chain, we don't mean like global networks of materials being transported but scrap yards and local material reuse centers in New England, hardware, wood and dust, which I'll get to. But this is a web map that also still exists. You can click on it and the idea is what does it mean to supply? Like what does it mean to have suppliers or think about the supplier? And we often think that, you know, I don't know, architects like have the most novel thoughts about these things, but really like salvage has been going on forever and it's a huge, it's like a really energetic industry of materials. So we visited a bunch of practitioners I should say working in antique wood salvage, recovery of barns, reconstruction and other depots that existed within the New England region. Also New York, it's fascinating spaces. We started to draw them and interview the people who run them. A lot of them are passion projects like the granite broker in Connecticut, right? To the salvage wood broker out of a rental barn also in Connecticut, to Providence Library of Things and Boston Building Resources to cooperative organizations to the soil bank in New York which is very exciting for us. So these are some images of like our site visits and I think just by stepping out of the project mode we were trying to work on this for a year just really unraveling what it meant to exist or witness existing within this economy of like material movement, let's say. And we started making these artifacts that were reclaiming and taking on some of these materials, soil bricks, thinking about adobe, thinking about depaving and thinking also about impervious surfaces and how we could undo them kind of materially as well. Of course they came with drawings. I think this was like really an exploration of specification and organization and how architects, it was a conversation about file formats earlier or something and naming. And that's something I get obsessed about as well. But even using, for example, like see, like off, like actually maybe I'll, I might show it in a bit, open source, software like open nest to nest other things rather than just CNC fabrication sheets. So this is a kind of, I guess, moment for us where we wanted to practice in the salvage space as well and like what it meant to labor with the materials, to store them in various corners of the school and our house, which is not ideal, but it's kind of like living with a lot of this contingency of material. It's kind of a detail of the shelf unit in the exhibition, which also used scrap wood as part of the kind of shadow line joint. And we did a lot of biomaterial testing to really, yeah, interrogate what it meant, I guess, even at the prototypical level to be engaged with the waste ourselves. That's something that I think is new for me in my practice that has been so reliant on representation and drawing and the give out systems and infrastructures through drawing that actually cooking up some of this stuff in my kitchen with like brick dust and sawdust that we had sourced from shops and so on in New Bedford and Providence really kind of brought home how much labor it took but also like how exciting a lot of these things are when you kind of think of material like something as non-structural and supposedly useless as dust as potentially something to recoup and reimagine alongside other more unit standardized materials. It looks like I will not go back to that slide. So I will do this and just say that these drawings were a part of a larger question for, I guess, the modes of representation we do today where photogrammetry scanning have crept into our lives and as a cartoonist, I also try to put forward other narratives that are not just like a jectocratic and kind of thinking about do-it-yourself videos that show labor, that show hands, working with materials in some case sawdust can be used as gap fillers, as repair, substrate. So thinking about like knowledge, where knowledge comes from as well and maybe thinking about, yeah, ways in which they're actually incredibly mundane and time consuming spaces just spent cleaning and recording materials. Anyway, so just to wrap up on the side, I am still kind of keeping up with more of an academic context practice like research, writing, organizing forums and more representation-based work. And this is a recent one called Planetary Accounting, seen from a warehouse and it's a scene from Revit. It's trying to think about Revit as a craigslist or Revit as a space of salvage. Like what does it mean to communalize something as dry as BIM to think about inventory differently and acts of maybe counter-inventorying? And this is just a throwaway slide to say that I can't help, but just kind of go into like cartooning corner and that's in a way, it's like kind of adjacent to the kind of architecture practice that I do, but it's also, I think a good way to talk about narratives and ways in which that even work that is intelligologically tooled into a project might help you reflect back on what it is that you care about as you carve out something as nascent as like an expanded practice. So yeah, that's it, thanks. I'm Nick McDermott, co-founder of Future Expansion Architects. We're in the Guwanis neighborhood in Brooklyn. As Alessandro said, I founded the office with my wife and business partner, Deirdre McDermott. I'm very excited to be here in conversation with everyone today, everyone on this panel I admire and thrilled that there's a kind of chance to put a lot of these projects together on the wall and sort of see what happens in the kind of conversations that we're following on. So for my part, we're in our office, which is now about 10 years on. We're working in many ways and in thinking about the question of labor, specifically, which was the heading of this portion of the panel. It made me reflect back on the kind of many forms of labor that do go into our projects from things like this project, which was commissioned by the Van Allen Institute in 2017-18, which is a temporary public art installation, but the kind of labor that goes into a project like this, which is fabrication-based, which means working very closely with a shop of highly skilled people on a project with kind of incredible constraints around budget, around the kinds of things you can do in public. That's one form of labor, the kind of design and the building and installation of something like this happens with a kind of certain set of people for a project like this, which was completed in 2021, 2022. In Brooklyn, this was in addition to church in the Park Slope neighborhood. The kind of form of the project, including the forms of labor that go into a project like this, totally different than the kinds that go into that sort of public art installation, working with a general contractor, who has subcontractors, we have consultants. The web of labor is very different and impersonal in comparison in certain ways to that sort of intense fabrication effort of the previous project, where decisions are being made we come, we see a mock-up, we touch things, we adjust things, we decide in this last one, for example, these are cardboard tubes, they were wrapped in this film to make them look like steel tubes. We went to be able to unwrap them and recycle the cardboard in the end, but just things like the waterproofing of that, like rubbing different surf waxes across these things, it's very different than something like this which has to last a lot longer and where surf wax is not appropriate material specification. But this project was, the client asked for a, they just needed to make the church accessible, and so they had done a study prior to our involvement where they decided to put just an elevator on the back of the church. We talked to them and getting to know them, getting to know the kind of church community, that part of the problem was the way that the old entrance work was on the corner that had no access to this garden that was next to them, and so we drew up a plan and convinced them that the proper location so that people who needed wheelchair access weren't entering the back, the exact opposite side of the church that everyone else, and that no one really had accessible access to the garden, that this was the right spot, you could come in from the sidewalk and move. It made the project three times as expensive, but one of the things that we were able to do was to help them raise the money to fill that funding gap, and so we developed drawings and models, took them to the Bishop of the Methodist Church, and got as well as others and got a few grants, and this was then kind of fully funded. But what, the project I'm gonna dwell a little bit longer on today is a project outside of the city, but one that touches on labor in a way, kind of puts, let's say, labor in our own offices, sort of environmental thinking together in a way that I think may be appropriate for the kind of topics of the panel. But to start, when we're thinking this project, which takes place in the Delaware River, two and a half hours outside of New York on the border of Pennsylvania, and it's an existing working farm, and so many of the things that we were thinking about as we went into this project were I've had a long interest in the American Granger movement, which from a kind of labor point of view is incredibly fascinating, but it's really the moment after the Civil War when the industrial agriculture was getting started and it was facilitated by trains because you could move agricultural products across the country, you didn't have to worry about spoilage as much, refrigeration was starting to happen, and small farmers were getting screwed because these kind of industrial conglomerates were starting to set the prices, and so the Grangers joined together, they essentially formed a, in order to form local cooperatives and they built little range halls, and so it was a kind of, it was a cooperative with a spatial dimension in the sense that they all met, they all had these kind of community meetings, they would do things like buy one tractor to share, all this began happening in response to sort of forces that they couldn't control, but at the community level began to rest control for themselves. This is, for me, very inspiring in the life that has a kind of spatial and architectural outcome, and then Wendell Berry, who's a kind of incredible writer who writes about these issues of environment, racism, and industrial agriculture in the 60s, and really finds in it a lot of it an answer, the answer for him very much is about labor and about, are the ways in which Americans have been separated from the kind of fundamental acts of labor that support their own lives, so. And then the final thing on this slide is this poster from Design Advocates, a journal that we produced as a group in 2021, and this essay on the bottom called Empowered Structures that I wrote, but kind of talks about the kind of genesis of the group, Design Advocates and Our Goals, but very much Design Advocates was about trying to find other ways, accepting that we all worked in our own small offices, but trying to find productive ways to come together, to work together, to achieve things at scales that one can't do in those small offices. So to both say, the small office is a kind of wonderful thing with a lot to offer, but that it can gain a lot when we come together. Listening to the last presentation, one of the things that remind me of, and one of the things I've been very excited about Design Advocates is we're always specified, we think of specification as something that happens with materials, but we've been fantasizing about, well now that there's a group of us, what if we started writing labor specifications? What if we wrote into our contracts? How could we use essentially the tools, the instruments of service to specify other things, to do other things? How can you write things in contracts? There's no reason you cannot specify labor conditions. It's totally possible. One could do this. No one does it. I've never heard of that happening, but it could totally be done. And so that's the kind of things that through something like Design Advocates, we're able to sort of have those discussions. How should you implement that? How should that language work its way into a contract? I think these are, for me, very exciting topics. So, oops. Okay, so the project that in Delaware County on the Delaware River is the working farm. It's located, the farm is here. Our client, however, is not a farmer. He had bought this farmhouse in just a little property around it 20 years ago. And slowly as the farms around him failed, he continued to buy land, eventually subsuming the land that the active farmer is on. And to this day, the farmer, so the deal was kind of like, okay, you can, the farmer, Herm, this is his farm. He can farm all this land that was being agglomerated by our client. And the client gets the kind of incentive of he, then the land is agricultural land, so he pays less taxes because it's agricultural land. So if the kind of win-win in Herm doesn't pay any rent. So, but when we started doing this project, the question was, what do I do with this land? I've sort of accidentally found myself owning 400 acres. It's not a rich person. The land prices were insanely low as these farms were failing. And so we were working with the client to try to figure out what to do with the land. So our first thing was like, well, what is 400 acres? We're city people. We do not measure things in acres. So we, 400 acres, it's a working farm with pastures and woods. It supports currently one working farm in two homes. In New York City and our neighborhood in the Guanis Canal, that same amount houses 4,300 of homes at about 57 people per acre, so you can get a map that's a lot more than. At the same time, the zoning, the rural zoning would allow you to subdivide this land and build 125 homes on two acre properties. That's perfectly legal. And that's not only perfectly legal, that's what happens. That's what the strategy is. When you've accidentally accumulated 400 acres, you die, you sell, your heirs sell it because they have to pay the taxes to the developers and they cut it off and they do that. But we don't like that outcome. And so what we've already done with the client is we use the legal mechanism of conservation easement to detail to go into how it works. But essentially what we've done is in perpetuity forever, traded the rights to develop the land like that and carved out seven pieces that can be developed in exchange. The land is massively devalued and there's no tax burden when it's passed on eventually because if it's not valuable, you can't do that for hasn't about you. So what we did is we, this is the property. So this is the scheme with the two of those seven are the farm and the other five will be developed. And our idea is in working with the client was to import a model from Earth from the way we know from New York City to this place which is the cooperative, like you buy a cooperative apartment building. So what we're doing is we're building five little tiny houses and we're developing it and we sell shares in the land like just like you would do in a co-op, it's the same thing. And so what you get from that is you get your house but you also have rights to use all of the land as your own essentially just the same way I can use my cooperative apartment at the backyard and I can use the lobby. But here what you get to use is a pond and a forest and a field. The farmer will get a free, become a shareholder too in this cooperative and continue to manage, continue to farm the land for free. And so this is like a kind of win, win, win. The real estate taxes stay low, there's no tax burden to the IRS and then the farmer becomes a kind of land, right? There's a value to the management of the land that the farmer does. That is a value that the real estate system we think could support in a way that the agricultural system no longer supports small dairy farmers. So we're gonna, we're just gonna tucking these things in. The final aspect I'll mention is red dots to this kind of idea of community building are ideas that we'd like this to be a model. The client really wants this to be a model. It doesn't matter to say 400 acres what you need to do is say a lot more acres than that. So we're developing a series of public, this is why it's called, and this other one says we're all pops privately in public space. The idea is that the red dots become community facilities that anyone can use. And so we invite hunters and swimmers and hikers where we're working with the trust for public land to connect into another trail system that exists. And because we think that only through people caring about something so they can get saved as a project becomes successful. So to do that, our first thing that we built, we finished this year is this, sort of see the pond back there. We built this building, which is a sauna, a wood-fired sauna composting toilet, a shade structure, because this is literally in a cow pasture. It's very, very hot. And then this pond. And so anyone can use this. It's just a community thing that we built. Now this comes down, the labor question for us here was that we wanted this to be buildable by someone local. So we literally founded a guy down the street who was just started his contracting office. And his only credential was that he had built a deck for our clients, our client knew him. He was like, he's the son of the guy who runs the tractor store. So we thought, oh, this'll be great. He's got a family, he's local, like he wants to be a contractor. We can help set him up in this community by giving him work, the work that will last. So the other secret objective of this sauna was also to train him to build a house without screwing up a house. He can screw this up, it's okay. And we built it with the hemlock, local hemlock that's milled in the mill that's a mile away. This is just agricultural fabric tied on with bungee corns, welded, steel welded by the guy who fixes all the tractors locally. And so the theory was sort of like this idea that there might be these kind of ripple effects if you can think about through the lens of labor and material. But that you have to then, if you're thinking about labor and material, that implies thinking about the shape and the framing of the house. Like you have to do things that can be done with this labor pool. Labor is, they're not that skilled. And so how could these things ripple out was kind of the question. And so we have this idea where we're always talking about like tolerance in the office. Like if you're specifying something with impossible tolerance in my mind, that's like not a detail here. All you've said is we don't have time for a detail. You just have to get it perfect. Just do it perfect. That seems so unfair to people in the field. So one of our first pitches was okay, what if we have something like this? The glass house of standard size windows and reasonable tolerances. Like that's our design objective. And it can have things like a kind of community roof that's a public space, things like that. And so that's what we're doing. But the plan changed a little. So it's an 800 square foot house. We built this model because the framers had no idea they'd never done anything like this before. So you can see they have the model on site. It was a framing model to show them how to do it. They were like so happy to get them on because they did not understand the plans. So this is the house that's under construction now. That's it from earlier this week. It has this, it has this, the roof deck. It's just a one story house, but there's a staircase that takes you to roof deck because it's got the best sunset on the property. So that's just a kind of public space. The trail goes to the roof and you can, anyone can use the roof deck. And this is the little house, just a one bedroom with those kind of living, just two squares, like the idea of like, what could be simpler than building a square? You build a square and we'll just, every house will just be squares, different combinations of squares. And then I'm gonna end just with this project very quickly. This is something else we're doing in the office. Like I think like the idea of like us as architects and being able to look at the city is so important and not to accept the narratives that kind of come to us. So we did this during the pandemic. We drew these six blocks in Brooklyn and they're each different housing types. So one is the Clinton Hill co-ops, one is the parks, is a park's typical park slope block, one is Williamsburg New Construction, the apartment buildings that I lived in in South Brooklyn, which are co-ops, kind of these eight shaped co-ops, high-rise public housing and then low-rise public housing. And what we were interested in was like all, we're always told like park slope is a kind of urban paradise in a way. What we found when you look at the data is that park slope has by far the lowest density of any of these blocks. Park slope, you would have to double the residential on this to get to the medium density of these other blocks, of the medium density of the six blocks and it has no public green space. So part of our curiosity is like given that, given that the communities need green space and density, why do we think of that as a great urban block? Like why do we think of something like Bushwick houses which are public housing, high-rise towers, why do we think of that as so bad? They're very dense and they have essentially a public park. And we compare this to the Clinton Hill co-ops which are the exact same building forms. People are always like, yeah, but there's just such ugly buildings, they're terrible. Like the Clinton Hill co-ops, which are the exact same building form, are incredibly valuable, they're in a great neighborhood, but they're wonderful buildings. They also are entered off the street. You have to go to internal courtyard, just like you do with these. And the value of those is incredibly high and it's well-acknowledged. This is considered a blight that must be fixed. And that doesn't make, to me, that makes no sense. It's like, this seems to be solving two of the city's objectives, this solves one. What's wrong with this? And so we're, in our own work, this is just the final slide. You know, we're thinking about it saying, this is the building we're building, it's not done yet, so this is kind of teaser shot of 67-init apartment building in Queens. But trying to bring in some of these ideas of thinking at the scale of the block, it's not a full block at all, but it's two properties and it touches two streets. So we're able to get the client to build this commercial outdoor space in the back that hosts things like food trucks. It's essentially, we commit them just to put the parking underground instead of on this deck, and to leave the deck open as a kind of commercial space. So it's a kind of small gesture in a way, but there's this thought that just like with design advocates, maybe working at a bigger scale is good. Thinking at the scale of the block suddenly seems to me to unlock a lot of potential rather than just the scale of the building. Thank you, Alessandro, for inviting us. We admire so many of the people who are speaking here today. We're has spoken here today, so we're totally honored and humbled to be here to discuss kind of our office a little bit. My name is Ken and this is Lane. We're two members of Office of Things and perhaps in light of like today's conversation, especially with this afternoon session about labor and practice, I'd like to return to a word that's been used a few times, collective. I think Nick brought it up in the type of works they like to do and loosely as well as Bryony and the work that she does with her other colleagues. And I maybe offer an alternate reading to that word and not to devalue any of those other versions, but our own version is slightly different. At Office of Things, we believe in a collective power to learn, to share and also to kind of expand our resources, our labor, our skill set, our knowledge and that each project can continually reinvent this organizational structure that we've started to develop. So like briefly, there's five of us. And we started off as friends, went to grad school, architects, all went to do the thing, we all worked at offices. And over time we became united in this idea that as a collective, we could share in our experiences, discuss questions of practice, take on challenges of details, like all these different scales of what we do in our practices that we were working at, but use each other as a resource for solutions. And we started to think that like, why couldn't we use that on our own a little bit instead of like reifying it to our respective offices? And that these questions that we tackled could be tackled by ourselves and potentially into projects of our own making. So very early on we decided that having four other people with you gave us this large shared pool of these resources. The things that's happened over time is like we've grown and changed. And this flexibility I think is one of the things that has been touched on a couple of times over the course of today. Like being small has its drawbacks, but one of the benefits is that you are more nimble and you're able to think about atypical project configurations, atypical kinds of things that you define as projects and so on. And so over time really what we've worked to do is to expand this network beyond just five of us, but to include fabricators, artists, builders, contractors, programmers, friends, other architects. And so each project itself takes on a different path that has different needs. It needs different people even from one phase to the next. And so for us this is a collective that allows us to be at once small and also big. And this allows us to kind of have a safety net for when we don't know the answer, which is often. But also to take on very, very kinds of projects. And so one of the things we wanna do today is to walk through a couple of projects and think about them through the lens of how we build the team that makes them. Yeah, and each of the products kind of take on a different capacity in that kind of reinvention. So the first one is a series of projects actually, a series of immersive spaces that are each carved into existing buildings. And the goal is really to create these small spaces for a respite, for escape, for meditation, for kind of focus on yourself and we're gonna also kind of outward creating a space where you can do both at the same time. And one of the things that's been interesting about those is that they take all of these larger questions. You know, each one requires a huge team and like a process of coordination to get to. You need to have the drawings, but you also need to have the programmer. You also need to have music composed. And you also need to have someone who installed the LEDs and the lights. And you have to have someone to build the millwork and like build the walls and all that stuff. And so there's like this very interesting confluence of many, many different fields and practices. And it's the coordination and navigation of that that is something that's been really interesting about that process for us. In these cases, you know, we're still working through these ideas and testing what each iteration is and watching the idea grow within it. But we also like to work with other architects and artists. So this is a recent installation that in Chicago where we worked, Vincent ran. So we have kind of like different leaders for different projects. Vincent led this project because he's in Chicago. He worked with a local artist, Akema Brakeen. They both teach in Chicago and then they worked with a client, I am able. And so the three of these three stakeholders together come together to build this design and to like actually fabricate the pavilion. And then also to come up with the way that it carries on in this life. I think we talked a little bit about what happens after this. After the festival of the pavilion was that, then it has to be dismantled and then it goes to the client's courtyard as its second life and so it can live there in eternity. So this is an opportunity where the client begins to be a stakeholder and begins to start to help design this. And then kind of moving towards the other direction, like some projects don't necessarily need collaboration. And sometimes it's important to be able to say like, this is a project that's one person can take with like a smaller team and push further. And so this was a project that I worked on primarily with a programmer trying to design a sense of space and place in an office that we didn't have, the client was not interested in building anything or spending a lot of money but wanted to cover like thousands of square feet of corridors with a design. And so what we ended up doing was really just shining lights on these walls and then working extensively in the field after the installation of these lights in order to compose the project. And I think one of the things that became really apparent in this project, which I suspect is familiar to all of you is like knowing when decisions have to be made. Some decisions must be made very early on. And then other decisions you not only can but often should just postpone making them as long as possible. So just trying to understand, we knew that shining lights on walls might be cool. We didn't really know what this would look like. But then we have to like take a leap of faith that it's going to be all right. And then you get these unexpected moments that are really beautiful and artful but are not at all what you thought you were gonna start with at the end. And so giving yourself space to discover this and giving yourself like a team of people that you can constantly be working with and talking to who are as invested in you in seeing the final design, right? And giving everyone a space to have like a voice at the table because key to the way that these projects come together. It's a good example of a small project that like Lane did on herself on her own. We have a team in each of these three cities that was on Joe mentioned and we rely on each other for feedback, critical thought. If the project is larger or requires a more nimble practice, we usually have two people per project of the core five. One usually takes the lead. In some ways where we try to buck a trend in many ways the clients tend to not want to buck trends so they want the point of contact to be the same person all the time. You need to know who to call and there's a problem. Exactly, and so our structure tries to be resilient in that way. So if one of us needs to go on vacation the other person is there in like a traditional office setting but that nimbleness comes in when we do something that we don't have any experience and so we were asked to do a lighting installation in this residential lobby in San Francisco and nothing at this scale or what we had wanted to do was materially cast this acrylic arch or like I called it the Sailor Moon Crescent thing. And so here we relied on our array of colleagues and in this case a fabricator to come on very early and join our organization in some way where contractually and boring stuff they were under our agreement with the client. So all of a sudden we're held liable for their work and we make sure that's aligned in our vision but that we can then hold kind of design decisions to be very internal and throughout the fabrication process. And so that was again reinventing what our organization could be like per project and I think this example here allowed us to navigate new realms of this process that we've now luckily and fortunately been commissioned to do a few others again bringing in that same fabricator because we have that connection now and kind of understand how each other work. And then maybe just like last quick one in a more conventional way, we also do a more conventional architecture practice. This is a residence that came to us from an architect friend who works at another office and what we find interesting in this project with respect to this conversation is that our friend had this connection to do renovation for a park avenue residence. She does not have insurance to do it herself. Fundamentally that's how our practice. She came to us with this idea that like would you guys want the project in some sort of loose collaboration where we fold her into the organization. She is under our umbrella on an insurance level and that we carry the project through together. And so far it's been pretty fruitful. What's also interesting is that it's a co-op that if anyone knows, it's like really arduous task to get through. So if we can imagine these rings of influence, here we have a second architect being the co-op architect, their engineers that we're dealing with. But also we found issues of repair that we needed to go through. And so expansion grows into engineers that we never had onboarded initially and structural repairs that were never part of the scope. And so we're trying to consider this project as equally nimble in a maybe more conventional way as opposed to some of the other projects. And then just like, just to quickly enclosing, I think for us, we have no idea how this collective grows in the future as projects get bigger, longer, as teams might get larger. But I think what our collective likes to imagine is that we're all buying into that process of reinvention and having to figure it out, making mistakes. And knowing that each project kind of grows the collective in kind of like a very informal but in a familiar way, so that's it. I think that one thing that intrigued me about this ensemble of practitioners is the fact that I really wanted to generate this conversation around labor, but also around this idea of practicing collectively. And I think that, obviously things on one way, you guys cover that, but in a sense, also a future expansion show that this idea of collaborating with this many different entities. And so, and also one thing that is really dear to me as a topic is that all this like a Western wide canons of architecture produced a very specific effect on the skilling the architectural workers. So the object of criticism that I framed the symposium from is the Crystal Palace that is really the epitome of the skilling is the beginning of a really, the skilling, the architectural worker for an industrialized way of producing efficiency and so on, which taps into this whole idea of B.M. and Revit that Amaline was talking about in one of the research that she has, which also folds into the idea of the specification in architecture, what does it mean to specify and so on. So I think that this really is the embodiment of all this topic. So, yeah, that's. We'll be allowed to have our own questions. Why not? I really love the work. And I was curious, Nick, when you brought up tolerance as a question of material tolerance, but also I think like this nimble practice that you're both mentioning and maybe it's like kind of a broader kind of turn towards kind of seeing your peers not as competitors, but as kind of collective resources, like thinking about, I don't know, I'm just curious about like tolerance and kind of around you as a practitioner, but also like, yeah, the kind of technical like material tolerances as a labor, like the question of labor specification was also super interesting as something that is, like, yeah, why isn't labor law for architecture like a valid and actionable thing? So, yeah, that's not much of a question, but more just terms. I don't know if this is exactly a response to maybe building on this question of tolerance. I think there's this weird aspect of architecture, which is that we sit and like provide a service, make drawings in a very traditional sense. And then someone does the actual labor of making the building. I think Nick, you talked about this with the farm, like showing up and seeing someone figure out how to actually build a thing and that there are a set of techniques involved with this and there are a set of like best practices. And that is so much of the work that in a sense, I think maybe what you're getting at is like, how do we start to blur that boundary between the design and then the thing itself, sitting completed in a field surrounded by other two-acre lots. Right, yeah, I mean, the questions of like, I mean, I think that's exactly right. It's like, how as architects do we situate ourselves in this, we think we're so smart, but there's always the builder, the client and then kind of us in the kind of classic three-part pyramid, which the question is very much like, what are the allowable interactions between these things? And then, and how do we make this things the most productive? And we're, we've inherited in this country, you know, it's a very specific set of ways in which those things tend to function and they play out through the very mundane things that we think of as the kind of instruments of practice, you know, for ever, which are essentially our drawings, the things we produce that Lane's referring to, then someone else builds. And so part of it's questioning that. And then I think that for this question of tolerance for me is like always been like, that's one of the direct kind of ways outside of the contracts and everything that we very much interact with, that everything cannot be pinned back on those instruments of service. Like our own design decisions very much impact the lie, like not only the lives of the people in the field who are going to execute them, although it's certainly that, but also like the contractors who are running, who are organizing that labor, because the general contractors and organizer of a bunch of other trades. And so like in things like this farm project, or really any project, you as an architect, I think you get to this point where you realize it's like if they're wasting time or they're doing things over again, they're losing money. Like they're like these people are not going to be, they're not, they're gonna come out of this job having lost money. Like, and that's my fault. Like how can we work in ways? How can we design and draw in ways where, that's kind of where I think tolerance comes in for me. It's like, wouldn't be amazing if like all of our details, like the guy could be five inches off and it's still exactly right. You know, it's like, boom. Like that seems like a great design. Like that, like, isn't, why isn't that a question for design? I think our professional so offers us such a privilege to be able to speak and work with contractors. And often we get this, especially in an academic setting where we often like disregard the role of the contractor or downplay their role and how to build something. And we come with an attitude that we're better than them. And then the kind of the oft made responses that, you know, we're a part of this team and we got to work together. And like you're saying it's costing them one to redo a detail. I often think about how this imagined world where we're tighter with the contractor or we are the design build office that, you know, that exists out there in the world that that relationship becomes not just more akin to one another, but one where we can expand our own scope, right? The part of new residents had a huge issue where there were structural issues that we had to repair and that was on in our scope. But what I found interesting there was once it got into that realm, they never asked the architect us to be involved. Like all of a sudden repair was not in our purview. And so repair became the contractor's issue and his resolution with the co-op board and the client. And I thought that was so odd to me that because it's been titled this other type of design, if you could call it that, that, you know, all of a sudden I don't get to say in how it's done and I think if we could place ourselves off of a pedestal and think of us as repairmen as well in many cases, especially if you're talking about like NYCHA housing, like all of those things where we can get involved on a very ground and detailed level world. I think we've become richer for it and I think the community becomes richer for it as well. Things I try to keep in mind is like what decisions really matter that I like, I refuse to budge on and which things I will gladly give away to tolerance to like which things matter less and trying to like understand that everything falls in the spectrum of that, right? And there's a couple of very big gestures that matter hugely. And there's a whole lot that could still be negotiated and should be, and I think maybe to your point, a lot of these projects come as conversations often with the client. I think that one of the earlier panelists talked a lot about this is like, what does the client, what does the community have as input so they're not seeing something for the first time and they're like, oh my God, you did this, but really that they've seen it and they've had input to it and they've become a conversation and I think that that both eliminates the need to persuade, but it also means that you get other thoughtful people's perspectives. I think as long as you think that that makes a better project, I think you're in an okay place. But it's interesting too to think about it like down to the, because I guess I'm, I do think it's a nice connection to make to the like the lighting strategy so smart. It's like, if we have this thing and we kind of dedicate this thing, we put this thing in and we'll adjust it to get the results in the field. Like I think that's a kind of perfect example of like clever tolerance employed and to the thing within the constraints of a budget. I guess the labor also trickles down all the way to like the online like to the, to like it's labor and materials we kind of divide. But of course there's, you're bringing up those sort of labor involved and the production of the materials or like the labor, you know, the material itself is heavily labored, right? Yeah, no, I think about, I mean, tolerance is so kind of, I think the like ability to be so off but also kind of exact is kind of an amazing place to be because if you think about salvage, no two boards are alike, right? And this is idea that you can, you know, you kind of have to be in touch with the stockpile to be, to then start designing or something like this. And like there is a limitation also, like in terms of how many adobe bricks you can make at the Clean Soil Bank in Brooklyn or like, you know, just transportation mostly, it's kind of like also transportation. So I think there is that like a lot of background, like material movement and also then cataloging what you have and figuring out like what you're going to do with it as part of this kind of, I guess labor of working with materials that aren't standardized or have like quirks. But I think one thing that was really interesting is a lot of people at the exhibition commented on the precision of the shelves which we, you know, designed up these garage angles that we had bolted together with these pieces of scrap, wood scrap from the wood shop that created that kind of shadow line and ability to like adjust the shelves between the bays that we had. And it was like a kind of crazy process where like had to drill press like the scrap multiple times to get it to like work and nothing. So it was kind of a funny and the building was like the floor of the galleries also like incredibly uneven. So like, you know, you can plan to an extent but I think part of the experiment was also to live in that uncertainty. And yeah, I also love to hear about like the training of the builder through the project. I mean, that's also like a wild thing which is kind of like, yeah, how does that play out? It hasn't worked out as well as we thought. I mean, it hasn't away. I mean, the idea was that, yeah, we give them that they could, their first project had been the stock that the client had already hired them to build and I mean, it could not have been simpler an eight by eight square on the edge of the water. We're like, oh, it's pretty good. And then the, you know, then we had them do the sauna and it was still, like I said, it's all wood construction. It's very simple, but it has, you know, it's got the sauna as the fence creates the kind of fence line with the cow pasture on one side and then it curves around to make the sauna. So it has these two curves in it. And so that we knew that would be a challenge and it was and worked through it. We, he was still, you know, I'm very serious about like the kind of questions of like, is it only makes sense if it's economically feasible? Like, so is, are you still in business after this? Like you gave a price, can we do this for the price? Like that's the, that at the end of the day because you're gonna, we need you to still be in business because you need to do the house. So, you know, we were able to, but you'd also don't want to bankrupt the client. So you're, you know, it was a way of kind of getting us involved in that process. Like in a real, it's like the stakes are very clear here. So that it turned out fine, you know, took longer than it should have. That's the one thing we find is that the time, if you can get the time, you end up taking on more in a way. It's like, okay, you pause, do not spend any money. We'll figure this out, you know? And then we'll come back to you with some ideas because we just don't, it's painful to, if when the job would get really big, you know, they'd have to, they'd bring in, he'd like bring in subcontractors. Like he'd bring in labor from a crew that he knew and from his former life in Virginia. He'd bring them up, he'd put them in the Airbnb locally and they had like a week, that's what we budgeted. So you're just, it's like, you know, it's like the sands are going through the hourglass and every second is precious. And it's like, if they don't get what they were supposed to get done this week, they go back to Virginia and it's very, you know, because that's what we budgeted. So, yeah, things have been, the process has been, it's been good in the sense that I think he's really, he's gotten a lot better. He's been very painful, him getting better. And we've tried to, you know, make that not economically ruin us for the client. So we'll see, but it's just been a tough process. But I think that's kind of what you accept, right? Like that these are, they're just not going to be smooth. But you have to, you know, you have to have the slack in your own processes to make it work. You remind me that construction is hard. Like no one is happy when their house is under construction. It always takes longer. And there's always, it's always more complicated. What I love about that is that, you know, in other words, I think to me it sounds just like the contractor's part of future expansion, you know, for that sense. Like they're learning your aesthetic and how to build what you want. You're also making models for them to understand how you want things to be built. So if you, if we loosen the terms with which we define our boundaries, like if you had another client in the same area, would you go back to that contractor after this project? Well, that is interesting. So one of the things that we hoped would happen has started happening, which is that the contractor now gets calls from very fancy architects saying, ah, it's all you're doing this house, will you? And but then they call me for a reference. You know, and they say, hey, how's it going? It's the future expansion school. And, you know, those are hard conversations. It turns out it's a longer school than you thought it was. Here's about thresholds and what you mentioned about instruments of practice. You mentioned that with some of your work you wanted to include these labor advocacy into written into contracts. Have you gotten an opportunity to do something like that? I'm curious about how you advocate for labor that other people are doing to build your projects, but also for your own. How do you build in the time that you think will take to actually detail something in the manner that you would want it to be built? Right, the time that it takes you to do the drawing or perhaps do a model instead of the drawing? The labor inside of the office? I don't know, you do get better and better at that. I mean, we're a six-person office, two partners and four employees. We're, I think that one of the other panels like it came up just like kind of like what started, what caused you to start your own office or what was that process like? I mean, for us, I got really lucky. I, my background, I did a liberal arts background. I came to architecture kind of late. My partner had done like a five-year BRC at Cornell. She had known she was gonna be an architect since seven. She said, which I can't understand that. You know, and when I was teasing each other because she's like, she can't believe I wasted so much of my life before I figured this out. And then I can't believe she never read a novel in college. But it really has worked for us in the sense that like when she, by the time I was ready to take this on and start an architecture office together, she had been working at a high level for a long time. And she knew I knew nothing about construction. I had, my office jobs were, I worked in an office for three years. I mostly did competitions. I quit, got licensed and, but then it was like, I just had like an incredibly experienced architect join me. And so that has helped a lot, you know, and at least in the kind of feeling of, because when you start, you start with like a lot of naive energy, but you also, I think you learn to really value expertise very quickly as well. And so, but having that at least that comfort that like, we're not, that she knows how to design this correctly. I cannot screw it up because she's gonna look at it and then she'll fix it. That was huge, but then the, I think the labor is more about, I don't know, just running an office is hard. It's not liberating in many ways. It's like you take on so much, like the fact that we can support ourselves through our practice, our two little kids, four employees, like seems like an economic miracle to me. I'm still not sure exactly how it's, we're all working, but it does. And once you get it there, but it's a lot to have the responsibility for these employees know that your kids' lives are on the line here, you know, all these things. And that makes you be efficient. It makes you like, you have to figure that out. You cannot, you lose a kind of luxury of like, well, as long as it takes, it takes, like that's not the case. Like we have, we set schedules and we keep schedules. I think if we return to the question of expertise and labor, I think, you know, one logic behind the five of us starting an office together was that we came from five very diverse offices that, you know, are from very good architecture offices. And we all had specialties and different types of buildings and levels of skill sets. And so we thought that, you know, if we were to do a project, why couldn't we pool our knowledge and in the aggregate form an expertise, right? None of us were experts enough to do a project alone, perhaps, or maybe struggled to. But in the aggregate, perhaps we could formulate one expert. I mean, I think that takes like, that takes a lot of humility and knowing, it takes a lot of failing and messing up and hoping that like, it's not a critical failure and you'll move to fail again on something else. But like a lot of humility knowing to when you want to ask someone for help and when you wanna reach out. Like we do this to the day, not just to this day, like not just within our office, but to friends, to fellow architects, to you all. As soon as we get your email, I'll ask you for help. The contracts that you're writing for your clients on the proposals, right? So you break down the projects and phases, but say for example, if you have a project that you know it's gonna be much heavier, conversations with the contractor, do you then decide that the CD phase is going to be very minimal? And then my CA phase, which you charge hourly, is gonna be much heavier. You know, do you do those type of things or do you, like how, yeah, how do you negotiate that? I mean, I would say for any contract, we, if through experience, like over many, many projects and proposals, we do a worksheet that estimates how many hours each phase will take, right? Depending on the client relationship, the contractor on board, the complexity of, in our case, the architecture or the programming, like depending on what type of project it is. And we're, try to be as honest as we can about it. And then that, you know, that's like the number that you wanna hit, right? But in many cases, you know that that's not gonna fly with a particular client or for whatever reason. And, you know, we scale back or scale up from there. It's like a position of being totally open, seeing where everything lays and then kind of tactually going in each one. I would say as like, as a practitioner and maybe the other practitioners can also weigh in, even if your CA phase is heavier, charge more at the beginning. Cause the project may close out and get more of your fee. Yeah, always up front the fees. I mean, concept design is very expensive. Yeah, it should be. I mean, that's where you're providing the most value anyway, but we tend to do monthly for CA and not hourly. And we don't list an estimate. We say the contractor will tell you how long it's gonna take to build the building, but it's how much per month it's gonna cost us to be on site. And so if the project doubles in length, we get paid monthly, you know, it's just known what we're gonna get paid, but it's not our fault that it's gone long. It's the contractor's fault. And so, I don't know, I think trying, those, these things are difficult and it's totally true, you get what you, you just saw, we kind of sometimes think of it in three ways. It's like, are we gonna make money on this project? Is this a client who is gonna be really beneficial to us in the long run, even if the value isn't in this project? Or are we gonna, is this project gonna turn up? We think that the factors to produce like a really great design for there. And so if, and we'll get something that we can, that will be very valuable to our portfolio. If two of those three things seem likely to be us, we'll take the job. If not the two, don't take the job. No, I was gonna ask. I know I just was having a reflection on like question of value labor budgets and just thinking about exhibitions and like, like, you know, usually kind of think about maxing out the budget. What was surprising for the deeper project is that we saved money. And the, it was really interesting actually speaking to scrapers and folks working in this like secondary material economy of reused recycling. And they really don't see it as trash at all. And in fact, they were like, if you give us the hardware back at the end of the exhibition, we'll pay you or you could might might recruit some money because you know, the rate of copper or the rate of whatever it is. And so it was just like somehow weirdly, and you know, because we were also looking at off cuts and like what we might do with them. I think a lot of them would just give in to us for free. I mean, obviously like a very exceptional kind of project but I'm, yeah, I don't know. I just felt shaken up by the idea that you could be under budget. Amalit, I was gonna ask you how you approach, maybe building on this question. It's like, how do you approach your labor within a research project? That is a great question. It's really hard to cap your time because it's one of those open ended things, right? But it's also like you don't want to let it kind of bleed into endlessness so that you feel like you're just being, you're just giving a lot and not knowing what's happening. You obviously can't pay yourself within an academic context because you're asked to do these things just out of the sheer existence of being in academia full time. And so there is, it's like difficult. It's like, oh, this ratio you're meant to teach supposedly 60% and then 30% and then 10% service. So the research is 30% but really that's not true. There's a lot more teaching and there's a lot more service. And so then, but what I've been trying to do and still not perfect but doing blocks or days where I can actually account for project work versus because I think it tends to blur and bleed into all these other things and because it's like a melange, like the desktop is kind of, all the projects seem related to each other but I try to discretize a little bit by the days and take a break, some kind of break on the weekend because I think the week ends. I think this is also maybe a question about labor in academia and what it means. I wanna hear also from anybody who is also teaching alongside doing the thing that they love is it can feel extractive at some point. And so yeah, finding just some sanity for yourself and some kind of accounting but yeah, it's different from like billable hours and like, yeah. Do your illustration, does your illustration work folder at the same time? It is my side. Yeah, no, I get paid for that. Do you, gladly, do you treat it differently in terms of time spent because I imagine you can understand kind of like how much time is gonna be invested in X drawing? Actually illustration is a lot more open to like actual commission like funding than architecture in academic settings and I mean like drawing like in architects newspaper for example, they recognize labor. They give you more than you ask for, which is wild and they're like, this is the rate, this is the rate for illustrators. And so we often compare our profession to lawyers and doctors and why don't we get the same X and like illustration has been something eye-opening for me because also the time, it's like not a time thing per se but it's also an act of commitment. It's also like a kind of, there's a value that is like significantly higher than I don't know, let's say the many hours that you might take going to a review which somehow is not counted as labor at all. So I don't know where that ends but I think it's very refreshing to step out of architecture and see what other fields are doing. Other creative fields that may not appear to earn as much as architects, let's say. Sorry, so a bit of a... It is interesting, I mean I think that like, because we're, if you think about the way that as a business, right, you have the money that comes in and you have the money that goes out and at least on the revenue side and then the labor side, the pressure on the labor side from laws and minimum wage laws, minimum salary laws, all these things, the pressure is upward. The pressure on the income side is downward, is enforced that there be competition. It is enforced that we not collude and say, well, I'll set a nice price that's a living wage for us as business people. There's no such thing as a minimum wage for an entrepreneur, right? Like, the pressures are one is down, that it is in society's interest. They want us to charge as little as possible. It's not a policy to raise our costs, it's to lower it because we're seen as providing services to consumers, so the consumer is the one that is cared about in the laws and there's lots of great reasons for that, right? But it sort of treats architecture as a nascent monopoly waiting to happen and to crush everyone with our... It's like the Grangers versus the guys with the train. It's like we've got this giant locomotive and we're gonna crush the competition with it. But so our pressure is always downward in what the money we can make and our costs are always, always upward. And I think it's a strange predicament, but that's the kind of predicament of entrepreneurship. And I think it's so great to hear these kind of like, like Amal and Yaikir, like the description of that kind of way of like the discovery of this waste stream economy, like this one can start to fantasize about a whole another way of setting up an architecture practice that say that in a very entrepreneurial way, just said that you can care about all of these things, but you could just reframe it as a business plan in which one can start to work through a whole another set of realities in order to produce at the end of the day space, which is the thing supposedly we all are trying to produce. Beautiful space, right? You know, for people and those are the moments I get like so excited or even like I think with you guys A plus A plus A, like the way when you described the growth of the office, it was like, okay, our hope is that we'll all establish the kind of acceptable, you know, living wage that allows us to have some joy in our lives. And then, and then we will just, as we think about adding employees, we'll just think, okay, so we need another one of those wages to give to that person, right? It's not like, yeah, it's just like, right? It's like a nice simple formula. It's gonna involve a lot of entrepreneurship on your part to make that happen. But once you've cracked that, then there's like a, which I'm sure you will, that, you know, then there's a kind of way of thinking, of kind of resetting that calculus, which just is always driving the two numbers and abstractions. Yeah, entrepreneur is not, I mean, I think that's the, we're still running, I don't know. Yeah, no, but I think it is the way that I, like, I mean, to me, that's, yeah, I think that's, I think that's the exciting moment is like, if we separate these terms a little bit, it's like there's something, you know, there's something called a small business and then there's something called a startup and then there's something called an entrepreneur and I think they all are a little bit different. It's like the startup is, which sometimes I think we wrongly aspire toward, like the premise there is that there's gonna be three years of insanely unprofitable burning of money that is venture capital funded because the product that will come out of it will be so valuable that it will compensate for that. And the system is set that, you know, if one out of every hundred, it works out for the venture capitalists are covered, it's all fine. Like we are never, one would have to think about architecture as a kind of product, which plenty of people are, you know, and it's not a bad thing to make that model make any sense because you're gonna have to, at the end of the time burn, you're gonna need the things generating so much capital to pay everyone back that they're great rates. Like then there's a kind of small business which has no real aspiration for growth, right? Like I want to open a laundromat or something, right? Like you just need to, you just kind of need the spreadsheet, you need to know how much you can charge, you need to know how much your costs are gonna be, you need to get a neighborhood where the rents hit the spreadsheet. And then there's the entrepreneur which is something different. And the entrepreneur is trying to say, I think that there's a value out there that's kind of untapped. And I think that in the setup of the business that we could tap into that value, we can be profitable enough to sustain ourselves and the employees, we can set healthy growth amounts like, like all these things, one can map out the kind of lifespan of a practice in that way and say these are the goals for labor. I think it's a great question. I think that's something we could do, architects could do better. I think that's one of the things that like, I hope design advocates does better. There's a great group, Peggy Deemer turned me on to this great group in Australia that they're a big cooperative. But one of the things they are doing is they're trying to make more business for architects in general. So they have this incredibly well produced, very cute TV show where they go interview architects and clients together and they let the clients kind of talk about what a great process it was to work with the architects, how much value it brought to them, all these things and they just broadcast it. It's like a show on TV. It's not one of these home building shows that we have that completely falsifies the labor. You know, it's like, you can get a great house in a month, like, and these two handsome people will build it for you. Like, it's not like that. And it's a way of just saying, yeah, I think the architectural value proposition is completely unknown at this moment in time. I also think you've heard of you examples from the previous speakers about how engaging the community, telling people you're an architect, working with your neighborhoods in some ways is propagating your profession and your business or your entrepreneurship. So, and it grows in some ways that you don't expect, I think, like years on the line. It's, I think something that we've often think about in our office and we've talked about here on the side is like, this is like really a long marathon of a race. Like, if you're thinking about the input and outputs of an immediate contact or an immediate project, it's probably the wrong way to think about it. And you've got to think about it many years out, many projects out before you start to be able to like tie something together and see the fruits of some of the things that you're putting down now. I think part of that is because it's so slow, right? I mean, I'll see a friend and tell them what I'm working on and then see them two years later and I'm still working on the same thing. And I still have the same sentence to say about it because there was three years before that and there's like another three years and like things go so slowly, which is not always bad. I mean, to maybe just drop the Australia plug there. I think maybe the practices that you're talking about, like I'm thinking of Nightingale, which is speaking of collective and this nimble practices, grouping together expertise, like social enterprise and they're trying to change also ways in which we build affordable housing and own occupant dwellings. They're on their fourth, fifth project now, different architects taking on this model, which is kind of interesting. And they have a lot of visibility. Also like retain, repair, reinvest is another one that's not so much about entrepreneurializing the discipline of profession with new buildings, but it's about caring for existing stock, repair and community investments. But they have like a big media following and that. So I don't know, it's kind of interesting, I guess like the entrepreneur is maybe not my go-to word for what I'd like to at least try to do in my own space, but there are a lot of like social enterprise-based practices that bring, come together even if they're different practices. Our very extended timeline and you know, like if I meet you in two years, you're still working on that project, but on the opposite and you know, this conversation really brought to the forefront certain questions that I recently discuss in my seminar. And the question that construction is very slow, but then when it is about to design and what the client is usually on the opposite side, that is always very fast. There is always this idea that we need to produce this specific project in a very limited amount of time. Besides the limitation of that limitation in exploration and so on. And I think I'm just gonna comment a little bit overall also on this sort of idea of expertise and the fact that the architect is the person that you know, resolve things is quite bit of you know, this Western wide paradigm of like, so we would accept the fact that we are not perfect and then maybe altogether collaborative we become expert on something. But how do we tackle this problem that it's often trickling down to our employees for example, like you have to put such and such on that project and schematic design needs to be done by this time because the client and there is always this pressure on the delivery because the delivery it was what makes us, you know, efficient. And that also trickles down on how do we quantify, quantify the time, quantify the fee opposing to this sort of a line that efficiency is also what we do. So recently, this massive amount of views of being softwares, particularly Revit, it's really creating a very big limitation in certain design explorations and so on for the sake of efficiency because we know that Revit is not necessarily a software through which you design or explore but there is the problem of efficiency that is looming over everyone. And I don't know, I just wanted to throw it there since there were a few. I have maybe picking up on one thing you mentioned Alessandro, I have, I think that our work like has to be possible if everyone who works is paid and if everyone gets to go home before dinner and if no one has to work on weekends, if we can't do this, then we should change, then we are terrible entrepreneurs. We should change our practice, we're not charging enough, like something fundamentally must change if you cannot do that. I think we've, many of us have worked at practices that don't believe that. And I don't think that the work is better for that kind of environment. That's what Richie said, right? Like he left the offices to start his own because he felt exploited. And they do fantastic work. Like you can go home when it's still daylight for most of the year. Like I feel so strongly about this. I mean anecdotally, like the hardest thing we've done in the past year was how to figure out the pay structure for our employees. Like that was a tremendous amount of reading other larger offices and office handbooks and just trying to understand where these offices are, how are these offices are approaching the structure of their office, how they pay their employees, what benefits, all these things that it was just like such a crash course for us to be able to grow and it's like a part of that kind of entrepreneurship. But then, sorry Jerome, I know you have a thing. I saw you. I think the other thing about like thinking about, like how do you actually do that? Because there are deliverables, there are expectations, there are clients who are like, hey I'm paying you a lot of money. And you're thinking, well this is very small compared to the rest of the project. But they want to see something immediately and soon. And so one of the things that we try to do is to be open about the schedule with our team. And so then you work backwards. You say look, we have to present something by this date. What is reasonable to get to and then back into that? And if you can't make fancy diagrams and if it's more about conversation, then that's fine. And so then it's like a conversation among the team about what we're gonna deliver and how we're gonna present it that meets the schedule rather than saying, okay well we have a deadline and now you're gonna have to cancel your plans this weekend. So it's like, we might lose a few projects. But that's fine, we have the agency, we can do it. We should all do it. Yeah, I just wanted to sort of pick up on some of this. I think all three of the panels there's kind of multiple conversations happening at the same time. And I mean, I think in some ways, I wanna commend the work of this panel and think about it in the context of the other three in the sense that if you think about all three of the practices in some ways presented quite different, put some quite different ideas on the table and I feel like it's not gonna, this isn't something, I think you can be a good entrepreneur. And I think we, but I think we can, I think you three are also sort of rethinking a client sort of relationship. Like I love sort of the way, Nick, you're talking about this kind of farmer guy, right? And also then, and then the sort of training of the contractor. And of course, like I'm sure there's a ton of anecdotes to go along with this that I really, maybe like whatever, but I just think that I think that we do need to really continually question what it is we're trying to do. And like you said, like we're trying to make beautiful space, sure, but that is inherently political, right? And, you know, and so I just think that there's, and I love the kind of Home Depot sort of work. And I just, I think that, you know, it's not like we all have to put on necessarily this like activist or nonprofit hat and go change the world. And I do think that they're, you know, I want to take more seriously what the three of you are doing, what the three practices are doing in terms of even flipping potentially some of these client service provider ideas, right? Like what would it mean to start to almost cultivate clients? Which is kind of what you're doing really all three of you in different ways and really think about a different, again, what it is that we do and what it is that it means to be an entrepreneur vis-a-vis what we do and also be an entrepreneur, I love how you described, how you described the term because if we, again, if we were maybe in a different school or department, when I hear entrepreneur, I think like I'm going out and this is back to my comment which I want to qualify from last panel, you know, that the sole pursuit of not only my degree in school but then what I go to do is to accumulate as much money as possible, right? But I love how you sort of said, no, you know, maybe being an entrepreneur is finding a sustainable model that allows me to do these different things, right? Or cultivates a client landscape that allows for us to do these different things, right? And maybe grow a little bit. So I just think there's ways to sort of think about this landscape especially in a rural context that could really, you know, set us 30 years further and think about who are not the clients, who are people who are not our clients, who could be and should be. I really love that, oh, we love too. I just wanted to say on that note, that's really, I think that's an interesting question. We don't all have to be answering the same question at the same time and doing everything. Like I think if like the conversation about material banks right now is also changing the client landscape as to like looking for other kinds of materials to, you know, that are culturally acceptable, socially acceptable in the kind of, you know, idea of like, oh, I'm hiring an architect to design something. So like what might it mean to create different kinds of networks or, yeah, supply chain relationships with people that not everyone has to carve out their own, you know, relationship with the granite broker or something like this, but there's a sharing that happens that maybe other people are dealing with other things and so, yeah, I think that's a really spot on comment. And well, I think it sounds like you're also getting at this like expansion of the architect's expertise beyond designing us like specific, but beyond like saying how to build a stud wall and like some detailed drawings and understanding like how you waterproof the bathroom or whatever and into finding the materials that will become the object at the end. And it's, I think that this expansion of the expertise is something that is bucking the trend. A lot of architecture is more about specialization now where you get a mechanical engineer and electrical engineer and like you get a like a spec writer, you get a structural engineer, you get someone to come in and do the lighting design, you get someone to come in and design the kitchens and like you can quickly start to take the scope of the architect's design and start to meet it out to different professions that are all specialists. And so then the architect becomes kind of this glue that sits between a bunch of other stuff. And so it's really interesting to me to see that you found a place where you could actually expand that instead of giving it away, you like go take another piece of like the rest of the world and you add it to our field. And I think there's something really beautiful about that. If I could just follow up on the last question. One thing I think that was maybe missing from all your presentations for me was your understanding, your relationship to each other and other architect's offices practicing in the same place at the same time as you either through like informal conversation between you or in your relationship to the profession as something that has like regulation and related to like national regulatory frameworks and whether that might trouble the conceit of the entrepreneur as a way to define ourselves as architects, I don't know if you have anything to say. As a professionalization. Yeah, like if you're going to talk about creating value for our work, for the work of the architect, is that related to all architects? It related to the title of architect. Is that like legally something to be discussed? You mean when you say what are the regulations that you're thinking of that might prevent that conversation? Like the licensing of an architect and the discipline as a profession, which is not similar to entrepreneurship and that everybody is kind of bound to a code and. Oh, right, yeah. I mean there is a movement, I mean the professionalization thing is there's a lot of conversation around whether that's a good thing or not and whether it does for that very reason. I'm not an expert on this, but I read essays about it about how there was Ralph Nader for example. These people really pushed hard to get rid of the idea of professionals in general because it limits competition, it's anti-entrepreneurial. Someone has a great idea for a house. They can't bring that idea to the market because they've got to go do three years of school, three years, you know, right? It's like it's a gate, it's gatekeeping and it's a protectionist in that way. But you guys are already on that track. I mean we're all, it's the kind of system we're stuck with and I think there's, I don't know, I mean listen to Jerome talk and I think he's painting a beautiful picture of a kind of really progressive entrepreneurialism for architecture that in that telling, it seems to me, it's a kind of invention at a really, a way to kind of bring personal things to market more effectively in ways that both satisfy your own set of values but also can be profitable. I think that's definitely one approach. I fantasize about that but I also fantasize about the opposite in which collectively, yes, we make a case for architecture much more strongly and the value of it can rise in the same way that it's obvious why lawyers get paid more. I mean, if you're in legal jeopardy, you're weighing the, I might go to jail and lose something, I'll pay whatever this guy says to keep me away from these terrible outcomes that the value proposition is incredibly clear. So I think it's a kind of unfair thing to compare us to. I know we do it to ourselves all the time but I think there are other ways that it has become very confusing about what is the value proposition of architecture societally and we could all work together on that problem. It's also squishy, right? I mean, on some level, we go to school and we spend hours working and trying and testing things and starting over, name going back again and starting over again and like it's all in the name of good design and that's such a nebulous term. And that's a nebulous term, not just inside of like an architecture school but also like in society at large. And I think one of the things that I loved about seeing the public interventions in this morning's panels is that these are these opportunities where talented and thoughtful architects through many, many avenues bring thoughtful design to our public spaces which is something that in this country there is a serious lack of. And we don't value the public spaces if they're not designed well, if they're all these like sad modernist, windy, sunny or shady at the wrong times of day spaces and so then you try to find ways to make good design out of public spaces and to me it's in hope that at least like one person stops and says, ah, my environment, what a nice place. And maybe if one person does that each time you install something in a courtyard or in a plaza or an intersection then maybe we can have this broader appreciation for our public space and for also the thoughtful design of that, I don't know if they... Well, maybe I'll add too. I mean, if that makes me think that like, because we're often trying to be our own, the thing we do, people are always trying to make us obsolete. Like we work in some sense, right? We're always trying to productize architecture and take our office design away from architects. Yeah, I know. We've outlasted, we work. Yeah, we beat them, we got them. But, you know, there are people trying to make modular home products. There is this kind of constant idea that there's something wrong with the way that we do it and that it should be done more efficiently, that efficiency is a problem. I think that's, I think it, well, efficiency is something we have to grapple with. I think it's something we also resist all the time, that somehow the idea of efficiency is like the thing is really tricky, because it just leads to, that's how our phone was sold to us. All these things are sold to us is they'll make your life better, everything's gonna become more efficient and we find ourselves more and more frazzled at the end of the day. And so clearly it's not, doesn't work. I read a study once that showed that that cars, every time in a gas powered cars, every time an innovation was made in engines, there's an option to either make the engine, either that innovation could go to make it more fuel efficient or more horsepower. And they always go to more horsepower, regardless. And it just so they can sell, even though we don't use it, no one needs 450 horsepower, but previously all those innovations were going to the horsepower and that's always how efficiency works. We build up more highways to decrease the traffic. What are you gonna get? More car traffic, it's not, it always works that way. So I think we're, I think as architects, we're always, I think part of our resistance, the positive societal resistance is trying to frame other forms of value that are not efficiency, like there are other things that doesn't absolve us from being good entrepreneurs, but yeah. I had another question. First of all, I mean, these conversations are amazing. Eight years out of school and just wanting to have these types of conversations with anybody, it's really hard to find. Just being like transparent with your business model, your fees, your practice, and everything is really wonderful. So props to whoever put this together. It's completely amazing. It's right there. So I had a question, maybe, not specifically to your guys's panel, but maybe to everyone here. For example, a person here from WIP working progress. What I noticed a lot in these projects is the topic of collaboration, collectiveness, bringing in other designers to help you fulfill a project. I guess my question is, what does your guys's take on giving credit to those collaborators and acknowledging that in fact, you weren't the only one on the project? And I say that only because even a simple diagram from Office of Things, putting your five partners, even putting the other people behind it, just acknowledging the name is, for me, that's very respectful in a way in our career that is very egotistical sometimes and it's just me, me, me, me. And then when you brought up the project of the apartment, acknowledging the fact that somebody came to you even for the Office of Things and was like, someone came to you who didn't have the expertise and was willing to collaborate. And just the fact that you merely acknowledged that, right? And it wasn't an Office of Things project, it was the fact that somebody came to you for your expertise in your collaboration. What is your guys's opinion just, I guess in architecture as a whole, on giving credit to those who help you, especially now that we're also talking about labor. I mean, giving credit, that is labor. It's labor into the design you put in your hours, things like that, so I just wanted to speak to that. Yes, give credit. But maybe in a roundabout way, I've had this thought recently. I think a lot of us came from practices that worked with an architect who would often hire AOR, architecture record to stamp your drawings, right? And you would act as a designer, but the credits that you would have in publications as a result of this relationship would always be hierarchical. There is the designer architect and then there's the executive architect. And you see that for every high rise in the city without a doubt. And maybe this pertains differently to us because we haven't done a sky rise. But I think for us, when we come into a project with a collaborator, we bring in a sense of humility to say that we don't know all the answers and neither do you, let's work together on some level ground. And that credit is given because we believe that through this process, we will come up with a better project and that the hierarchy is actually fluid. Like in one sense, partner A might be taking the lead in another month, someone else might, right? And so if that's the case for every project, then why wouldn't the credit be given equally? And I think that might be changing. I don't know. I feel like I see our contemporaries getting projects published, whether or not who is stamping what, I think the terms of collaboration and collectivity are more used now than perhaps they were in the past. And it's something that we've talked about often as people who do stamp drawings, right? Like, I don't think we'd ever take on a project where it wouldn't be collaborative. It's also, it's hard, right? Because you want to try to get, you wanna try to get credit for the things that you do. But you also, I think it is important, and we try to check ourselves and talk about this often, right? It's important to always remember that you didn't do this by yourself. No architecture project comes together by yourself. I think of like movie credits as an analog. And I make, every time I go to the movies with Ken, I make him sit through all of them. Because it's like 20 minutes of watching names go by, because these are all the people who go into making a movie, and sure their names are small and they go by quickly, but there are like thousands of them. And this is true for architecture too, right? And that's, there's contractors, there's consultants, there's people who help with like the early phases, the later phases, they're like, they're press agents, there's like all this other stuff that goes on. And there's- The film group is interesting because they're all unionized too, right? So each of these different sectors- Maybe the architecture unionized. Each of these sectors of labor, you know, cinematographers, visual artists, I guess are trying to become more unionized, but that might be an interesting analogy for our field. That reminds me, but to give credits to my friend, Jacob Riedal, who runs the professional practice sequence at Harvard GSD. He said, he said in the forum the other day, to that, that's how they should do architecture awards, should be like the Oscars, you know, where you give out the best lighting designer on the project, you know, and just like, they could do essentially that. Essentially, it's take the movie credits, just like, you know, these are the team up, here are the, here are the 30 projects, and let's just think about them as team efforts, and like, what are the equivalents of those things? Cause it's obviously true, you know, that much goes into a project, and the parts have to come together in the right way to make it successful. I mean, I do just want to add that, maybe also thinking about it, not so much as you have the vision and you're getting people to help you with the vision, but it's more like, also a person, like what, like collaboration is this thing where you're like, oh, just throw it around, but actually it's like, kind of ways of working with other people with also, like coalitions, different people with different interests, but share a moment in a project that everyone has a kind of vested interest and like they see themselves in it too. So yeah, like every project website, we try to do a bit of the movie credits a little bit, like all the TAs, all the RAs, and I think that's, yeah, it's also like, you know, when you go out to, we try to do a supply, a supplier directory, also with the direct connection of people who would like to be connected if you want 18th century barnyard floorboards, please go to the website and you'll find them directly, but yeah, I think that's, yeah, credit, yes. I think this will be the last question, but hopefully it's a good one to end on. I think with the idea of labor, something that I've been thinking about with something that's always come up in, I guess creative practice is non-productive time. So like how do you account for how one of my professors once put it is like, you spend most of your time, you have to give yourself more time to do like design work because most of the time it's like you're like not even, you don't know what you're gonna do and you're trying to just figure out what you're even gonna do and that takes up like the bulk of that type of like design and I guess there's like also sort of like pressure or expectation surrounding it and like for instance, right now I am, we're like maybe few weeks from finals and the only thing that I've made so far is like a little three panel comic that I've drawn for my project. Yes, so and I think for me, there's like a certain pressure that like, oh, like I need to produce a certain amount or that like there's expectations and then what happens when you don't meet those expectations and I think that also comes into like labor where it's like you wanna be able to give yourself more time to do things but then at the same time, you don't wanna be keeping yourself up at like weekends and holidays and so on. So I guess how do you account for like non-productive time or like when things don't go your way? I think that's a really interesting question and one thing that for me has become hopeful in thinking about like the non-linear process of like brain thought into a project is trying to think through drawings and to think through models and to think through like things rather than thinking through thoughts inside your brain so that the non-productive time is productive. It's just not linear, right? And at the end, you have at least a bunch of sketches and to stop thinking about like, this is my sketch drawing, my draft drawing. When it's two weeks before finals, I'll start my final drawing, right? The draft drawing is the final drawing. It's just like partway through. I found this book at the library recently. It's a book of Piranesi prints and one of the things that's really beautiful about it is that some of the pages on one, on the left side of the fold, you'll have the first pressing and on the right side, you'll have the second pressing and you'll see basically a drawing that of like some columns, some arches, some like whatever ruinous dark things. And then you'll see that he added and like worked further on the plate and so you see the traces of the earlier drawing underneath the later drawing. And they are, though they're two final and beautiful objects in some sense, they're also like they grow out of each other and it has a trace of its former self as a drawing. So you're not like drawing in pencil sketching or thinking about it and then trying to make a plate. You're working through the drawing itself. I think that's a helpful way to think through things but also to have something at the end. I mean, I also think about my work at all hours of the day. If I can, as someone that didn't graduate that long ago, I was pretty rebellious against getting licensed and going through the process of getting licensed because I thought, you know, I went to school for such a long time, I should have the knowledge to actually start a practice and do this. But then I decided, you know, I actually need the knowledge to do this. So I started the process of starting for getting accredited and realized a lot of these questions that are coming up of like, how do you bill, how do you account for time that is, as you mentioned, non-productive within like the building of a practice? It's actually information that is written within those like books that you need to study for for your exams like the non-billable versus the billable. You always charge three times the amount because you know that the amount of time that it takes to design and like create and stuff. Like it's productive time ultimately and it takes care of that. But I think that if you are thinking about whether becoming an architect or not, just for the sake of being a person that likes to learn and likes to be informed and likes to have a seat at the table, just look at the information. From someone that like was for many years not wanting to be accredited and not wanting to take the exams. You don't even need to take the exams to know like these things, right? You can just read them. Don't be afraid of the exams. Yeah. Also they're not hard. I didn't know that. I took one a week, just I just, in between jobs, took six weeks off, took studied, passed them all. They're not hard. I fail many times. But were you working when you took them? Yeah. Yeah, see, don't work. When you take five, six weeks and you don't have anything to do, just get them done with them. Then you'll never think about them again. It's impossible to do while you're working. It's also easier when you're young for sure. That's the thing. I think we are basically at the end of this incredible day of conversations. I actually would like to ask to Andrea, Nick and Jerome and Raon into maybe, yeah, I'm wrapping up. I think that, I think these three sessions really are the embodiment of our idea of rethinking practice is. We had so many conversation in the context of my seminar, but we have this conversation constantly in studio. And sometimes this conversation are very abstract. Today, they became really materialized in front of us through the work of these amazing practitioners, but also through their work through academia. We can see that it was really in the air to hear how the practice is intertwined with this system of educations and pedagogical lines. And we heard it. There are many things that needs to change and these are mutually going towards each other into the space of practice, but into the space of the academic space. We talk about studio and how studio is set up. Studio comes from the Bozar school and with this idea that there is the artist and the artist has many assistant and that's where the problem of all these like many long nights in studio are promoted is through this system of very white Western ideal of the master and the artist. So there is, we have seen so many alternatives today. So to the ones that are students and they are about to graduate maybe next spring or someone else in the summer. So you can look up onto all this conversation, rethink about all this conversation and think about what you are willing to do and what is your balance and what are your value or what do you value in our profession. And I think that's a little bit the lesson that we learned today besides like literally the fantastic work that each office is producing. At the end of this day, I also want to thank again all the participants for sharing your incredible work, for fostering this conversation. I want to thank all the students that participated and people that came from outside of course and few special thanks. I have to thank Dean Hake for the fruitful conversation around this symposium that started back in May. Everyone involved in the organization of this symposium, Barjan Polman for the early work on this. Kendra Sight that is here and she's the director of internal exhibition and events that was an invaluable collaborator attended in very meticulous details. Stefan Boddaker for his support. And then I would like to thank McLean Regan which is part of an office called Mediums of Design, newly formed out of last fall 2022 professional practice course. And now it's an office together with Zina Sabah and Nikola Snapyodov. And then I would like to thank and also, yeah, I give credit to Megan and her office to help with the chronogram drawing that we presented at the beginning. Marie Buden, the director of the EMARC for the many conversations we had about practice and how to change practice and especially in the pedagogical space. And then my partner, Nick Roseboro with whom I lead architecture for always engaging in critical conversation and to be hard on me all the time. So thank you all.