 Welcome and thank you all for being here. My name is Catherine Morris and I'm the curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and I'm thrilled to see you all here today to be participating in the second of our ongoing series of March events celebrating the fifth anniversary of the Sackler Center for Feminist Art which we're very thrilled about and which is housed in a incredible installation and architectural feat done by Susan Rodriguez who is largely instrumental in co-paneling or co-directing today's panel so we'd like to thank you for that and I'd like to thank Jess Wilcox the programs coordinator of the Sackler Center for helping making today possible as well. I will try to thank you. Today's panel women shaping our world, architecture, gender, and space focuses on the fact that the past decade has seen an unprecedented rise in both academic and popular interest in the possibilities for cultural adaptation and examination in the fields of architecture and design. Today's discussion will focus on the ways in which we can understand how architecture and gender interact in both domestic and public spheres. We are so pleased to be hosting four women prominent in the architectural field who will share their views on the social and political implications of their work. They are Anne Forgeron, Principal Forgeron Architect San Francisco, Tony Griffin, Director J. Max Bond Center City College of New York, Susan Rodriguez, Partner Enid Architects and aforementioned architect of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Karen Stein, Writer and Architectural Consultant New York. Today's discussion will be led by John Kerry who I will introduce and John will go ahead and introduce in a more comprehensive way our four panelists. Our moderator and panel co-organizer John Kerry is a Brooklyn-based advocate, speaker, and writer who has pioneered a career exploring the intersections of design and social change. His first book, The Power of Pro Bono was published in 2010. He's also the editor of publicinterestdesign.org and his writing has appeared in an array of publications as diverse as CNN.com, The Christian Science Monitor, Fast Company, and Good Magazines. Among other honors, John has held the Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. Thank you all for being here and at the end of the discussion today we'll be able to take some questions and we look forward to having an interaction. Thank you. Well thank you all for celebrating St. Patrick's Day with us here. We forgot or didn't get the memo so there's no green showing up here but we also know it's a beautiful day and are grateful that you're taking your time of your weekend to join us. So we have a great conversation structured I believe. We hope to make it as interactive as possible certainly amongst the panelists and welcome as many questions and thoughts and ideas from you all as well. The presentation will be videotaped and broadcast on the Brooklyn Museum website and I'm sure there'll be some other kind of live tweeting and that type of thing so we've included just a couple of hashtags women and architects and then actually the handles the Twitter handles for Brooklyn Museum is just Brooklyn Museum and I don't know if anyone else tweets but mine is John Kerry so you're welcome to tweet about this. So we have a great group of panelists and one of the things despite the fact that one was just read I actually never enjoy hearing people's bios read verbatim and so I just wanted to tell you a little bit a couple of little anecdotes about each one of the people here because they're really extraordinary practitioners in different ways. A couple of which are working as licensed architects and then two others of which are kind of broadening the way that I think the public really comes to understand design and so Anne Fuzeron who's kind of in the middle of this side of the table is somebody that I know best. She's a practitioner in San Francisco does really extraordinary work a lot of residential work but also some really important civic projects in San Francisco. She could she can she can probably raise both actually so and she's also just published a beautiful new monograph called Fuzeron architecture opposition composition and it's from Princeton architectural press it just came out a few months ago so I encourage you to get that but we met because Anne had done over a decades of work for the Planned Parenthood affiliate in the Bay Area so it has been working to improve and dignify these really vital health centers women's health centers in the Bay Area and so that that was one of the I think best projects featured in my book and so really delighted that and here all the way from San Francisco so thank you Anne. Susie is going to go is going to speak first and so I'll pass her for now. Tony Griffin on the other side of the table is very distinguished city planner she is formerly the director of city planning the exact title you can clarify if need be for the city of Newark. She's also worked with Anacostia Waterfront redevelopment efforts in Washington DC and has also worked in Detroit a city that we all know has some major city planning challenges facing it today and Tony's recently returned full-time to New York and she's a director of the newly reconstituted J. Max Bond Center Max Bond is a legendary architect that passed away I think just last year 2009 and and so Tony is in the process of envisioning how to basically take his legacy and move it into the future and how to address needs that that design you know might not have touched before so we're really excited to have her here and then Karen Stein who can probably raise her hand and just has is an architectural writer and consultant and she's doing some really fascinating work these days in Brazil working to bring together design professionals as well as public leaders and so she might talk a little bit more about that and for many years she was with Fiden Press a really fantastic publisher based here in New York and then finally Susan or Susie Rodriguez with Eniad Architects is the architect of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center here and their firm has a approximately 25-year history with the Brooklyn Museum and has done a lot of other really exceptional projects that you probably know and might not even know as they're as they're associated with her firm but very much important to New York urban life and so we're really happy to have all of them Rebecca with the Sackler Foundation has been helpful in making this happen as has Jess Wilcox so before I invite them speak I just wanted to try to set the stage a little bit the the panel and the description are expressly about gender and space gender in place gender and politics more than just the politics of the profession but I come to this as somebody uniquely interested in the politics of the profession and I've watched as a number of things have taken shape in recent years there was there was a major building a high-rise tower called Aqua that came to the skyline in Chicago and it was designed by this woman Jeannie Gang who has become even better known recently for winning the MacArthur Fellowship the MacArthur quote unquote genius award and as this this new and very innovatively design design building at least the facade is is quite distinct and unique as relates to other buildings in Chicago was being was coming to light and being published in the press a lot of people talked about this as a gendered building and that it was feminine that it was curvy that it was all these other things and it just it kind of created this whole like side discussion that I think is is one that nobody's really reconciled to date and then more recently we have a brand new addition to the family and this is the beautiful Barbie this is architect Barbie and this is something that that also has generated an inordinate amount of discussion celebration on the part of the American Institute of Architects they adopted her like one of their very own and yet other people are really really kind of put off by by architect Barbie of course this is this is about the 100th career that Barbie has had and it won't last very long but it's a it's a really fascinating case study in gender politics that's relates to design and then finally I just wanted to give a little nod to this woman that that I had a chance to work with through the AI and Norma Scholarich she was the first African-American woman architect and she just passed away about three or four weeks ago and and she did she has this very storied career you know was the first woman in her class initially and just wanted to give a little ode to her but to this day there are very very few by by most estimates less than 100 African-American women architects 270 okay that's a big improvement out of 105,132 okay so we've got some real statistics on this one not that anyone's counting can Tony can you repeat that statistic I was going to save this for my remarks but I'll do it now so there are just over 105,000 licensed architects in the U.S. 24 percent of them are women 279 of which I am one are licensed African-American female architects let's just let that sink in for a second so with with that the way that we structured this is that each one of the panelists will will have just a couple of minutes to talk about either an image that they've provided or and or a small reading that they've brought or just another thought that they might have and then I have some prepared questions and I know that you all might have some questions as well but I wanted to to turn this over now to my co-organizer Susie has been tremendous in helping us refine who's on the panel what this would this whole discussion would be about and she was doing all that on top of her very busy international practice and so very happy to have her leading this with me thank you well it's great to be here this is going to fall over this is the counterweight the water I was thinking about structures I find it's really interesting to see I wasn't sure who would come and it's interesting to see as many men in the audience and and I think John's courageous to join for very opinionated women on this topic but I think it's a it's a tricky topic and I think all of us have done a lot of thinking about it but I think we don't dwell on it and not that we maybe should or shouldn't but I think the fact is is that we all are really trying to make a difference in the world and make the world through our work more humane and dignified for everybody and so I think with that in mind I just have a couple of thoughts and the image of I hope you've all walked through the dinner party gallery by a triangular room to think that that was never in a triangle triangular room before it was kind of a shock to me and so it was a great opportunity to work with the museum and to really celebrate the voice of women in the arts world and just generally and one of the things I hope when you walk around in a counterclockwise way as Judy Chicago's intended that you reflect literally on the fact that the space is lined with glass and that is really intended to both its subtle angling really infinitely reflects the importance of the guests and the dinner party and its role in really women's voice and feminist art and beyond but also it subtly reflects you each of you male or female or child in in that wall to make you think about your role in in society and your role in the context so so moving beyond this immediate place one of things I hope we can talk a lot about is just what is our role in in this and what is the role in the design realm and how we can make a difference and I an anecdote is at last weekend I was up at my alma mater there I opened a brand new architecture school and Cornell's notorious when I was in school in the 70s and early 80s for having no women on the faculty there was one and they ran her out of town kind of thing and so it's changed a lot it's a place where I don't know if it's 50 50 I'm not always very good with metrics but there are a lot more women faculty I've taught there a number of times and but I was taken aback because after a whole weekend of events there was not a female voice in the presentation and any of the symposium that were happening to really create I women were involved I've been involved but nobody was there as a woman to be a participant and it surprised me but there was a really great exhibit and it's the Johnson Art Museum up there and this is what this image is and it's by a an artist named Surika and I want to read you just what she said about this piece and the relevance to today I think is that we all have heard over the years so much about breaking the glass ceiling you know it's kind of an overused metaphor and I think it presumes that women individuals are trying to move up you know move up and I think we're just trying to move and get things done and I think that that's really important so the name of the exhibit and this piece is in line of control and I think the issue of a line is actually more relevant in the line that we cross that we walk and that we have to have the courage to move and over is really really important and this image is actually a really a video and it's in line of control a mere marker pen traces a random boundary an ant is caught within this drawn frame unable to get out because it imagines the drawn line as a boundary it hesitates to cross the line but never stops walking towards it in a way in anticipation of the unpredictable finally at the end of the video which this is by choice or chance it comes out or crosses the boundary in the spontaneous one-shot work the artist contemplates a being's behavior when confronted with boundaries real imagined and metaphoric boundaries are made by human conditions they are often imposed assumed accepted and acknowledged surika's video addresses several implications of a boundary which acts as an agency of control power and bifurcation be it of geography gender color or otherwise this particular work plays on the ambiguity of our choice to be in or out our indecisiveness in our euphoric awareness of and against something which we have been deeply conditioned into through the discourse and practice of art one becomes aware that a boundary is a construct like the pen line to the ant and i guess i found this a very provocative condition because i think that these lines that we draw for ourselves and that are drawn by others are incredibly dynamic and sometimes you find yourself right at that line should i and making that decision should i really push and as it relates to issues and points of view as a woman and then sometimes you find you are so far on the other side of the line and in very hostile territory and then you know like reading the times today and reading about one of these republican candidates that you realize they're setting the line so far back and so right now for i think that trying to be careful i think all of us as women coming together the idea of women and community and men are very much a part of that is giving us the continued confidence to be effective and to really be able to step up and but confidence is a lot of it uncertainty and to really have the guts to know you know what your intuitions are good and but you can really choke yourself with these lines and i think we all probably feel that at times and but to really be able to also realize when you're crossing the line what you're endeavoring to get into and i think my last thought is that and we a couple of us all had dinner in the last few weeks and just about the skills and the level of excellence you need to operate in i think is really really very utmost importance so i guess we can just go this way but anyway i think everybody will hopefully will bring a point of view to to each of this and you know i think that we all practice in different ways and i we hoped to get people with shared ideals i would say yet on the other hand doing it in a very very different ways and engaging the public realm and in very formative ways okay now i don't know what to say she's such a good job so um anyway um i i think that i you know i i engaged in the world as an architect because i have my own firm um as a woman that i run on my own which puts me i guess in the three percent realm so not quite as bad as african-american women but you know not so great either so um and so i operate in that world constantly and half for many decades now and for me that is the reality of how things are and and whatever that means and however it means and however many lines get drawn in the sand and there are many believe me at many different levels those are the sort of realities of what i try to sort of interpret i think the thing that i found over time more and more and this is um there's a little slide of mine somewhere this is this slide um i was just in paris and there's been a big discussion in europe right now about women and their rights and there was the woman woman's day or something like that that what i think was the eighth of march but there was this huge billboard in paris and one of the most prominent avenues in paris and basically the billboard says for those of you can't i'll translate easily which what i love because it said and what about if women were and then in parentheses it says also the future of the law and i think this is exactly for me the thing i mean in essence i would say the same thing about architects and what about if women were also the future of architecture and i think that you cannot present a society in which you hold back any gender any ethnicity um anything and and expect that you are presenting really the best that this society can do and so my goal on a constant basis on a database basis is to find ways to both promote myself i guess but also really to promote myself as a woman in field and to and to present that as a constructive construct but also one that has a certain form of militarism i say or feminism which i know is bad word these days but i will be glad to take it again because when i look at the republican party and i look at what they're trying to say to me i have no way but to feel that i need to be more radical so this is my coming out as a radical person again i didn't do it since the 70s i've been sitting back trying to get the business going but now i sort of feel like enough is enough like there's just so much abuse that one can take i mean i cannot sit here and sort of listen to this discourse about everything that i have believed in and asking the line to be drawn around me to become so small you know and i have a daughter too so i very much believe in those things that we can do to sort of bring forth all our voices and and this is again about being constructive it's about realizing the places that we've drawn for ourselves and the things that we've accepted and not accepted and about wanting to talk about how we can do better as a society to make these barriers disappear or at least be different you know and that's maybe it maybe they'll never quite disappear i don't think we all make architecture that's necessarily feminine like you would talk about all but i do think we approach problems differently which is great i think that approaching the problems differently is what makes society more interesting i think it's the same thing with people of different nationalities and ethnicities in the same way and it's that dialogue that for me is incredibly important and so that's why i'd like to see us discuss today and you can argue with me about this if you don't that's fine and you want to just touch on this quote that you gave as well oh yes and so this is the other thing i think about four or five years maybe three or four years ago and there was a big symposium was it at MoMA you girls might know better than me about women in architecture and in the end Nikolai Orosov wrote a piece in the New York Times bemoaning the fact that there weren't very many women in the field and he said you know the thing that happening is that most women are keeping houses rather than making them and so i then proceeded to give a lot of lectures throughout the country about my work and stuff like that and and brought up on the thing of saying that what we try to do is build houses and not keep them and that that's really what my office is about it's about the making of the architecture that people then occupy so that's and that's i think and i he wasn't being disparaging i mean he was just commenting on the lack of women in the field and sort of asking why that is and there's a lot of different theories about this but it's not a number that's jumping up really high and we have some stats recently of how even women's um the presence of women in the field has decreased in the last past two years i'm sure a lot of it has to do with this recession but nonetheless it is a field in which it is easy for women to withdraw from because it's hard for them to find their place in it i just it reminds me that um it about that line i was talking about is one of the things that i hadn't been asked for a number of years and it was asked the last week is do you work full time you know i mean and i and i also by the way have um 10 male partners and so they don't ask me that but the the fact is is when you really work i would say kind of over time and then you really on too often get well do you work full time yeah so anyway we do that i think we'll keep house when i'm not working i'm not a practicing architect i've never been a practicing architect i've spent most of my career writing about architecture publishing architecture advocating for architecture so uh when john asked us um to each prepare an image um for our remarks i was somewhat um i guess i have to say i'm somewhat annoyed because i don't have i don't show my own work i show other people's work that's what i do so um i'm not claiming that this is my own work it's actually the work of um the artist uh Hiroshi suji motto and it's the image that sprang to my mind in relation to this subject um it's uh as you can see an image of of the water and of the sky and i think the thing that relates in my mind and maybe it's a muddled relation is um you know the effects of gender are pervasive and but they're also evasive and um in this image the horizon line is obscured and so i think that point of what gender the role that gender plays in things is a very movable one so um you can say here that you know the horizons out there but you don't quite know where it is and that there are a lot of other things in in play and so i think that it's the kind of haziness even though we know it's really something that impacts uh uh uh in many ways in the but it's not the only um issue we talked a little bit about issues of race but there are issues of class and education that also are at play so um this is sort of my i would say little uh uh gambit to to enter the discussion i would say that i had a funny um uh kind of experience as a result of this because i thought okay well here's a hazy image let me try to also present some facts about women in the profession and so i went to the website of the american institute of architects thinking there would be some very easy to find facts about how many women there are in the profession and i was shocked and i would like to say appalled that the facts that i found about women in the profession on the american institute of architects site were from 1974 and and these were the facts that women represented at that time in 1974 39 percent of the labor force and in 1974 the percentage of women architects was 1.25 so that was pretty surprising to me now we've already heard that um that that's growth and you found a number clip that might be more recent than mine but right now um the u.s department of labor says that women represent 47 percent of the labor force and they think that they project that women will break into 51 percent in the next couple of years when that is exactly but so women represent 47 percent of the u.s labor force and the architectural profession is roughly in the low 20s yeah i found 24 you found 24 i found some other numbers um interestingly and this is more for that in terms of my increased annoyance about the aia they managed to celebrate barbie architect barbie in a very large way but none of the facts behind it um uh but i did find that the rural institute of architects um in in in britain had more recent facts and it showed that actually during this economic um recession women dropped out of the profession at a higher rate than men which is an interesting thing and any of us who have spent any time at schools can see that the percentage of women students is roughly 50 50 so there's something that happens there are 50 50 women to male students and then something happens um you know in the first 10 15 20 years and so hopefully that's something that um that we can talk about and it's something that's been happening for a long time because it was 50 50 when i went to school and that was unfortunately not yesterday and i won't tell you how long ago what well then there was a dip because i was eight of 47 you were oh yeah i know we probably had years and i was in california too as you know i was in the midwest so maybe the remarks i prepare can tie some things together and i have to apologize for because i wrote remarks which i never do but i'm a newly tenure in progress professor and so you're supposed to write so i'm using this as the opportunity right so let me paraphrase this but maybe my remarks kind of a more of a story that relate to this image above so as john introduced me um you know i started my career at som in chicago as an architect and i became licensed in illinois but the latter half of my career was spent in the public sector and in 2007 i was hired by mayor kory booker of newark new jersey to be his planning director and in the first really week or two of my job there i was invited to a meeting which was a planning meeting for the commemoration of the 1967 riots they were planning a march they were planning a ceremony for the a mounting of a plaque on the precinct where this happened um and it was all rooted in what you can imagine at that time which were racial tensions uh economic inequities and a real um lopsided political representation in the city both by race and by gender now i'm from chicago and i was just kind of struck by the stateliness by which they were commemorating a riot or civil unrest or civil disobedience because i didn't remember them doing this in grant park celebrating 68 and i didn't remember them doing this in boston um commemorating when architect and african-american ted landsmarked was stabbed with the pole of a flag a flag pole with a flag hanging on it so i just thought this was really interesting so weeks go on i start to get into the content of my job as planning director and one of the the major projects we did was the master plan for the city which required me to really understand the the trends and dynamics of the city i'm just going to read a couple of them to you so in 2007 newark was a city of about 280 000 people 51 percent were women and as we know 50 percent of this country is now female uh 25 percent were children under the age of 18 and 31 percent of those children were living in poverty only 35 percent of the population had a high school education and nearly 50 percent of all households were women so it's very clear in these demographics that um the the the city is very much and it's it's populace is very much female oriented the caregivers of young people are very much female oriented as they are running household at 50 percent of the city um so the images that i put before you are from the 1971 plan of newark done by skit morrowings america now i was struck by many things number one i had never seen blight rendered which is the image on uh the uh right i hadn't seen that before but once i got past that uh what struck me is and it may be a little fuzzy to see i apologize uh that in the center of each of those images is a african-american woman on the the right hand side she's pregnant in the blight situation and on the left hand side she's carrying her newborn through the newly renovated urban renewal model city uh neighborhood now this happens to be work that was in the same neighborhood of the demographics i was was telling you before and about the riots um what's interesting is the demographics of 1967 and the demographics of 2007 in the center ward of the city are not very much unchanged we as policymakers and designers and others and elected officials have allowed the same concentration of poverty and families and women and children to live in the same contested spaces for nearly 40 50 60 years and so we should be asking ourselves what can or should women do as designers and policymakers to become more proactive in addressing these very specific needs of this very large constituency that's living in our cities can architecture produce new housing typologies that accommodate the working mother should planners be thinking about how to limit the number of trips either by car or by public transportation that a working mother has to do within a week um can we be thinking about our public realm in ways that facilitate places where children can go out and play in their box and there is a constituency of of neighborliness again that watches those children so there are you know two ways to think about this notion of women and architecture the women who are inhabiting architecture as spaces in the city and then what we've been talking about through some of the earlier conversations is women in architecture and our role in it so we've rattled off the very startling statistics good news is 50 percent of students are now uh women when i was in college at Notre Dame in my undergrad there were eight women out of 47 students so i don't know what that dip was about but it's very interesting that it was but you know women are staying away from the field why is that is it because of salary is it because the hours are too long is it because we're not getting uh or there's no sense of public recognition um or is there misrepresentation of the role of women in the workplace um i have a colleague who teaches who had a female student come to him recently and say that a female professor of hers um told her that it would be impossible for her to have a demanding career and a family at the same time is this still what we're telling ourselves and our daughters in in 2012 i i submit that one of the things that i want to talk about today is how we maybe begin to redefine the perception of what architecture is i sit here before you with a Bachelor of Architecture i have a fellowship from Harvard um i've licensed as an architect i've been a public city planning director and now i'm a professor how we think about the field as inclusive of landscape architecture urban design planning sustainability perhaps is in that perhaps why some of the answer to how women think about their role in this profession and more importantly the fact that while we're 50 percent of the larger population less than a tenth of one percent of us are shaping that in the traditional field of architecture but if we allow ourselves to expand that definition there are so many ways as design professionals we can really contribute so i hope that our conversation can build off of some of those things how many people here are architects in the audience great so it's it's awesome to see that being a relatively small number actually um and so some of the stuff that that has been with our statistics well that's true uh so we might have glossed over some things as to like what it takes to become an architect or a designer of any kind so if you have questions like that along the way we can certainly try to decipher or decode some of this stuff there were so many points so many points we can jump off in this in this conversation uh but i i have to admit like i come to this a day after some very disturbing news that you've probably read about relative to this activist like daisy and apple and his appearance on this american life and that kind of thing and then even as it relates to the work of invisible children in this big film called cony 2012 if you haven't seen the news you probably will at some points i won't i won't dwell on that but i've just been feeling like very emotional about some of these things that have kind of come to light and um i kind of feel the same way about some of these statistics when they come our way and uh uh on a more hopeful note as i was you know kind of preparing for this panel with my partner uh courtney martin who's here um she asked a question that she suggested i posed to the panelists and it too struck me at like a very deep level and the question is this do you feel do each of you feel at home in this field and if not what would make you feel at home in this field you know my first reaction is yeah i've made myself at home in this field okay i i yeah why wouldn't i no qualms no here we go see the rest of me okay as an african-american woman um it was in of in Notre Dame and then at skidmore rings in maryl so i was really pretty alone um to me it was important to be good and that is it i didn't think about the color of my skin and i didn't think about my gender i sat in the middle of a room with white people and we worked and we designed and we strove for excellence i want to be an architect ever since i was 14 period so when i went to school and when i went to work this is what i focused on and i didn't focus on anything else and it was interesting because there were other women at us women at this time and i do remember conversations that they would have by saying oh you know i didn't get to work on that project because i was a woman or oh i'm only being asked to do the technical work and that the design would present and i consciously remember saying to myself this is not going to be a reason why i don't excel and this is not what i'm here for so there was never a question in my mind that said well do i feel at home or not this is what i wanted to do and i was doing it kind of unencumbered and there were never any obstacles in my way to do what i wanted to do now i never would have guessed that i'd be doing what i do right now i'm not in a million years i wanted to build buildings and for a while i did um through the types of projects i got exposed to i found that you know there was a much larger larger set of issues as a designer that i wanted to play in so when i say i made it my home is when i make this very scary decision to leave som as an associate partner and there were only two black female associate partners there at the time and lots of my mentors thought i was crazy to do that like you should want to be the first black female partner well that wasn't why i was in the field i was in the field to make change and so i made my home by expanding the way in which i wanted to practice in it so by moving into this field of urban design moving into this field of planning moving into being on the public side as the client that the shaping policy towards good design was what i did to make it my home so um i guess i would sort of say it's like any relationship um if you're going to pretend it's perfect then you're probably not really there there you know so i it's like i mean so yeah i mean i feel like this is the relationship i have i don't have enough imagination to go on and do anything else i'm really just too tired to too old to do anything else and i do like the things that i do do when i do them but there are things about the relationship that if i could change i would change because i feel that they don't serve me or the world the best and so that's what i would say about it so yes of course you know i would be a masochist if i'd stayed in this and felt you know that it was terrible all the time but as most relationships i feel that there is vast places for improvement and sometimes it's more frustrating than others so you know it's that juggling that you do to do i mean i i guess i think of you're not supposed to criticize the question but um an architect is who i am i'm a design yeah i think about it i live and breathe it i see that lens of the world that's the way i see the world as my father complains you know architects are so critical about everything but so it's nothing that your home or not it's just you're not always at home with yourself so i wouldn't get into that but um but but i think that the complexity which is back to what many of you said there's so many ways to be an architect and i think this isn't really gender specific it's personal to how you want to live your life and you know you can have your own practice you can form your own partnerships you can write about it you can lead and you know think about it in a broad way and so i think you have to find the best way you can be effective to use your skills to make a difference you know and i think um what you know again yeah you're right i nothing if you're really trying to do something it's never easy and so you know i think it's being a woman in this field i would say at times it's very lonely and um but i also know that it's up to me to make it not that way so i mean i have befriended groups of women and the work i do like rosalie genevros here who runs the architectural league of new york and we have an incredible group of people on the board and it's an incredible community so i feel sort of back to um the best minds being put together that's how you make your home you seek people out who share you know kind of common ground and passions for what you do so you know i think it's up to everybody to make it their home including men i mean do you feel like yeah no i think this i think it's the same i don't you know i mean i think it's just being an architect and being in the design profession is really quite important but i think it's really misunderstood a lot of it in this country um you know i happened to be working on just not for me but working on it as a on a building committee and the appreciation for design in some ways is so low and um so i think that's a shared advocacy that all designers you know we were going to do a number of years ago with uh at the league this thing with michael bay root who's a graphic designer you know design matters and put it up all over the subway and make people realize how critical it is and i mean you can't even turn on your computer anymore you know you can't be anywhere everything is designed and i mean the fact that people aren't conscious of that that even the subway maps and the graphics and so it is our world and we're responsible for it so john you you said does it mean the same for men i think some way yes in some ways no i think inherently as we traditionally think of architecture the house is already set up is male right so every anyone can make it their home in the way that they want but i would submit that the construct of traditional architecture is male karen i just want to let you respond as well um i think a lot of it i mean you said what was the question that you feel do you feel at home in this profession i think a lot of it is the parameters of what you call home i mean if it's your job title that might be more restricting than the community of people as susie said that you interact with you know when you work in publishing which i've done for many years there are actually a lot more women in publishing than men and maybe it's because you're overworked and underpaid and so somehow but anyway so i i i think that that um you know in the day today um i always had this very interesting experience when i was at architectural record i was writing about architects and most i mean 99 percent of them were male and you know i was would find myself in this situation of interviewing these guys and you know all all of the greats in the profession and you know at some point you do start to think about the sort of gender roles you know being the listener and the and all of that but you know it's what you do with all of that you know um you it's what you do with that it's how you then engage with other people who have similar concerns and issues and that you keep moving um somebody talked about sort of earlier about that you know it's about what you do um and i think that that's ultimately how you find your home by continuing to engage with what you do and and meeting people that are either not in the company that you work with or in some other organization that kind of keep you that help your momentum but so like one of the questions i have so now i'm going to ask questions that won't change the rules around here so you know because i i mean i agree fundamentally that in in some sense it's about each of us sort of taking leadership in our own lives instead of pushing it forward but so at some point though let's not talk about the glassing let's just talk about the glass wall right it's not even up it's just across in a way for me um you get to a point where you just like you feel a little bit surrounded in this box and you ask yourself you know what are you supposed to do so and i and i and i've been thinking about this a lot because there's been a lot of discussions about women in business right so let's just take it out of architecture just women in business recently and there's been a lot of talk about that in europe and the discussion actually started for us in california because there was this realization that facebook which is you know the biggest start of boom entrepreneurship company in america in the last you know decade probably has no women on its board none zero okay this is california 2012 no women on the board don't know why exactly i mean they have incredible cfo who's a woman um and so then coo co sorry you're right co and then um apple doesn't have any women no no no so in france and in europe they've been talking about having to put women on boards of companies and they've set some rules about this about how this should happen and say you really like to have 40 percent women on boards by 2015 or something like that and the only country that has made it mandatory is france and it's the only country where it started to happen funny i don't know why that is so and and so the woman who runs the front you know the i don't know what the woman's rights league in the eu said you know the united you have a friendship i mean the european union said you know i uh i don't like quotas but i like what quotas do right well yeah i get that i mean nobody maybe likes quotas but you really like what quotas do so you know the question is i mean how much more dynamic do we have to be and this is a question i post because i don't know i don't know the answer to this but i think you have to realize that sometimes it takes more than one person to do something it takes a family a group in this particular case probably women i have to tell you because i mean i know the guys want to help and that's great but somehow you know and you can of course and so can you but also us women have to help ourselves right i mean we also have to take it on we can't assume that other people are going to fight this fight for us without us being present so and i don't know what the answer is but i think that you know the the example of europe and the difference that it's made and and and seeing how to push that agenda to some extent it takes really this kind of reorganization of your thinking and maybe doing things that you don't like inherently but that you need right now as a constructive way of moving on is just a question that i asked to all of us really because i'm wondering about this all of a sudden it takes intention yes it takes yes like the conversation and vigilance i think right yeah you can apply the same argument to why we did affirmative action 40 years ago why and the what it produced and why some people feel like you don't need it in the same way with the same kind of lever that it had before it's the intentionality sometimes that you need to propel cultural shifts i mean i i also think on a sort of left governmental quota basis i think it can be incredibly personal and each one of us has that role is being given a chance if you aren't given a chance if i hadn't been given a chance by the founder you know original founder of my practice you know who took a sort of opinionated young woman and gave me a chance you know and supported that maybe risk that he was taking it is and and i had to live up to what the chance i was getting but you know i mean that's very personal but i think each and every one of us give people chances you know men or women but you see that women do get passed over young women you know they're they're kind of and they have to both really want it and be really hungry and they have to make people aware of it there there's just you have to go a little bit further and that's still the still the case and what about what about women as role models i'm curious if part of this is also related to seen women that can that you can basically aspire to be like and if any of you went through that if that drove you in any way that was actually one of the original drivers for the architect barbie thing believe it or not really barbie was going to be a role model exactly so verbatim so curious if that if that was part of it explain that to me exactly where's she going to be a role model i wasn't the advocate for itself barbie is that that's really depressing i you know i have to say that maybe the thing that i found the most difficult and somebody else talked about the loneliness is that you know when you have your own office and you're a woman and that there's only three percent of you in the united states you got to find yourselves i mean it's not i mean luckily since this goes a few more because of this kind of sort of somewhat liberal tradition and probably the east coast also you know so but it was hard i found one of the things that i found the greatest way of kind of meeting other women for me which is incredible in a sense is that i helped organize this national design conference it's based in california but it's a really and and many years ago when it when i went there um there were no women speaking none zero it was all and actually most of them were white males funny enough and so i just couldn't take it anymore i just went up to the organizers and i said you know i have to join and i have to get women to come so and they let me do that so and i was able to find there's a lot of women architects out there but they're not all necessarily like living in san francisco or they're not necessary and so we got people to come internationally and that's i think been really great in terms of sort of learning about being able to reach out to this much larger community and being able to make friendships with these women and understand how they operate and some of them operate huge firms and smaller firms but you know we get also you know of course people like genie gang and stuff like that have come in sejava and all these people so i think it's it's finding that family too is really good i think because you then begin to be able to talk to other people who might have similar concerns or similar but you've all either have your own firms or have worked in firms and so what does happen to those women that are 10 years out of school and that start to disappear from the profession i mean what what's happened i think some of them don't work you know they have children and or they do you know other kinds of jobs that are related to architecture but aren't directly i mean i know a lot of them who don't work and what made them make that careers change i think there are a lot of different reasons but what do you think i mean i think some of it i think people get to a point that they make a choice and they see that maybe they don't have the energy the talents or they don't have a supportive partner i have to say that's like one of the most key things in terms of being able to do anything it doesn't matter being architect but to do anything to have really shared partnership um well if you have children like i have a son and you know it's a really shared family unit that makes things happen they left this morning for san francisco and i'm here um so you know there's a lot that you have to figure out but back to the people leaving i find there are a lot of women who don't want it they don't they're not in it you know because maybe there are other choices um they if is a time commitment um you know boy do i wish i had some other female partners um but you know we have i have a statistic somewhere but we have i think about 33 percent women maybe a little bit more 33 um but you can see already very few of they're setting themselves up for being less engaged just partially engaged you know they're they're there to have their job and when you asked are you home in the profession it's a job it's a profession it's not um yeah i mean it's about it's it's really about the culture of the workplace again this is whether you're an architect or not so 50 percent of us are in the you know in the workforce right but have workforce cultures change to reflect women and their other demands of family to support them in the same way it is always already set up for men and their support systems to affect them so it gets back to housekeeping keeping house designing house sort of phenomenon so has our workplace culture adapted to accommodate accommodate um a successful ambitious woman and her ability to excel in that workplace and her family life so it requires the family unit choice but i think it also requires us our workplace culture has to change a little bit to do that and i found in my time at som um that because that culture was so unforgiving to accommodate that women just had to make individual choices so many of my contemporaries you know started a family and they couldn't keep up the pace and the pace wouldn't change to accommodate them unfortunately so they had to make these individual choices i think another reason goes back to the point i was raising around um that we should be thinking about is how to get women and the profession overall to expand its definition of what it is i think this is necessary for maintaining practice as well as just how you think about the different ways to use your architectural education to affect the things that you care about that you went in there to do and not everybody will be can be or wants to be genie gang just in the same way that everybody won't be frank gary so that is just a fact that's given it does not mean that you cannot have an illustrious and impactful and insteller career affecting this world that you went to school to to um alter and i think the profession itself has to start talking in these broader terms in order to expose women to a broader range of opportunities in which they can be equally successful whether that's entrepreneurial and starting your own practice which so many women do and are very effective at why our publications and medias and things are talking about and lifting those up more is another kind of topic but again there are different ways with which perhaps we can practice and maybe that's part of it i also just kind of going back to the architect for everything i might be the only woman on the panel that isn't so offended by it and i guess i say that as a kid who used to play with barbie's um you know no one exposed me to what an architect was and in fact i will admit uh one of the things that inspired me to want to be an architect is mike brady on the brady bunch he would come home with his drawings he'd have his whole office and color pencils and i used to draw all the time as a kid i was like so that's a job you can do that remember he made buildings look like lipsticks a white man inspired me to become an architect what is wrong with my barbie carrying that same thing and a little girl going oh you know this is something i can be the challenge i do have with it though is that you know you know you're saying ai had this big ceremony yeah you check the box and go okay we we probably that's what i was that's where the rub is but i think you know i wish you had brought me an architect barbie because i don't get what you know but this is this you know you can't these are not one-off things you do and problem is solved yeah i just want to say that i know it's funny about mike brady because he had a drafting table in his home office and that's what i wanted i wanted one of those drafting tables i had the exact same um reaction but the the thing about the architect barbie that offended me was not the architect barbie but was that that was sort of the representation of women on the aia website so that's what i had a problem yeah and just just to put a fine point on there have been two women in the 150 year history of the ai that have been been presence of ai two women of 150 and um you know there's approximately three women on their 59 person board of directors it's it's like heavily heavily male dominated and this is a profession like but they were just so excited about this doll because if you were to ask them if they'd gotten it right though her tube would have been black not pink yeah well that's true uh they do have they do have a racially diverse version of that doll i don't know if you've seen that so i need this one yeah yeah it's uh it's wow this is your quest yeah i'll try to find that one in particular so let's open it up to um to the audience uh i see a couple questions up here Mercedes first um the in touch with young women and say look stop planning for this like partial engagement like be fully engaged in this i mean what what is your role in that um my personal choice was through education and teaching so i had made a conscious decision at a certain point in my career that i wanted to split my time between practice and education so i started teaching at harvard and now i'm at the city college of new york and i thought that that was the way to kind of get in front of women coming through the field and help them understand how broadly you can impact it so on a regular basis through the curriculum i create i feel like i'm interested in it's it's gender neutral in a way because i think as young folks coming up in this field you all need to understand the ways with which it's important to diversify the way in which you practice you know i think mentorship is tricky all of my mentors when i were younger up until really really recently have been men and majority white men i think you have to find a mentor is someone you connect with around your shared goals to help you succeed and has that as your best interest and you shouldn't care who they are now i did my my very best friend who i met on the first day of high school is also an architect and she's also african-american she has our own firm in chicago there was this point where and we knew of norma so i was so really glad that you have that slide um we sort of woke up in our 30s and go you know what we don't have any women to help shape us as professionals so then what we did is and what i would advise is and what i did is i looked outside my field to help continue to build my professional mentorship so it doesn't also nor so it doesn't all it doesn't need to be someone who is exactly in your field as well so the women who i come across who i would say i mentor because of our personal relationship really do kind of run the gamut and a lot of them have come through my teaching in terms of how i access them um i uh actively um pursue um young women bringing them into our practices interns and hopefully as full-time employees i teach also off and on and i always find that it's a really important time because you do see that hesitancy you know the line that people draw oh i'm just a girl and i'm supposed to be doing other things and saying you know if you really want it this is what you got to do and you know and you still have a life you know i think that people um you have to speak up you have to really be good and have great skills and you have to really know what your point of view is and you have to make a i i think it's very easy to move around and not be certain and i think you have to develop a certain clarity i guess because you have to make a lot of decisions i think in anything you do but i think it's really it's really wonderful to see young women who i know had been looked over you know and a lot of times by the time i'm teaching they're usually in fourth or fifth year and you can tell that there's some innate talents in there that nobody's really given them a chance yet so it gets back to my point there and nobody's had had that dialogue that you were talking about Tony that you know i most i would say i've never had a woman as a mentor um but the the man have somehow listened to me you know and uh and had it it was a very great active dialogue so to try to find that i think you know i would think anybody you need to keep doing that too you know even you keep looking for mentors when they're because i think when it stops being reciprocal you know and young people now i mean i think i still think of myself as young but um but you realize you know being more than 30 plus years out of school and the advent of new technology the collaboration you have with people that are just out of school is so fantastic because you know i got the hand and the experience and they've got the tools and the machine and new ideas and it is so much fun and i think that just actually um one of the things i think that tedium sometimes about these this topic and conversation um can be can be inspirational but is to realize that you have to try to find something that you love to do that you can really give um wholeheartedly to because then maybe some of those decisions are it is hard to make and so that you're really get pretty um engaged and excited and then it makes it easier and work with great people and i know you do a lot of mentoring um well you know i i mean there's a mentor program through the aia and so i they've got me on that and so people come through my office and stuff and i've had women work in my office um that have gone on to open their own offices which i think is the greatest thing and i i mean i can actually mentor women and men i mean i taught a lot for a long time i stopped now because i just can't do it i can't run the office and teach at the same time it's just too much um so so i've had a lot of students that have then gone on to open their own thing i mean sometimes working in my office is not the greatest way to kind of enter the politics where people leave and think oh god i'm not doing this for living forget it so i don't know if that's always helps but anyway we try to do what we can and i think the moderate is on conferences at other conference i organize where i i always get really fantastic women speakers to come i think in a way that that's the most broad range that you can have because men and women like sit in this audience and and find and discover these new talents that they may not know about and i think that that's one of the ways for them to engage it and some of the people are just architects but they also do a lot of other things some of them are actually urban planners or writers or thinkers and and i think that that for me is probably one of the ways that i think is the most effective is to see and to discover other voices and have it i i don't know if all of you find this but i feel like i am the mecca for getting resumes from women around the country you know and they go on our website and then they realize oh there's one girl in there so and i get all those resumes i mean so many of them and you know to that to me that is one of the we recall this is where we started the thing at dinner at the league last year called the good girls club because we lose sleep over this is what billy ten and karen and leslie gill and myself and we were lose sleep over this responsibility and you get so bombarded with requests and that you know you can't get to it all and it's really you know it's a hard it's hard so anyway so i know there was the karen did you want to respond as well i'm sorry i can get another question okay um there was a question right here um this is a never there was any else about the audience who were architect 101 um is there a women's way of solving the problem you know my answer to that is probably a cop out so i'll just give it to you anyway but i guess it's the same thing as you would say is there a woman's way of writing you know or is there a woman's way of painting i mean fundamentally i think some writers you could make that case more easily for and some others not so i think it's the same thing in architecture architecture is such a broad field and there's so many different ways of doing it and so many different ways of approaching the problem so i think that that i would have a hard time sometimes if i read a novel blankly with a you know with a author's name taken out of it knowing whether or not it was written by a woman sometimes you wouldn't you know i mean i think there are some books that are clearly so feminine there's sort of point of view so i would say that it's a very much more sort of complex interesting problem than just yes or no you know yeah well i think yeah i mean you know again uh same thing i think some of us are you know more apt at negotiation than others and more diplomatic than others i wouldn't put myself in that category stuff can you have a little twist on this question can you are you can you identify spaces that were designed by men um i can sometimes i'm on these i do a lot of juries and i was just on one here for new york and there were certain buildings that i just absolutely knew were designed by guys i was just no doubt but also i kind of knew the architecture sometimes so you know i mean but but still there are some that you're like okay just okay no doubt but not but not in your favor yeah that's my favorite exactly that's true and then in that case they're 98 percent of them anyway so i could want to be wrong a few times but but and there but there weren't absolute buildings that i looked at instead of a woman had to design that you know and let if i unless i knew the building and of course so i don't think it was that obvious but here's would you say would you say would you say that one space where you might be able to measure that more it would be a public bathroom well they yeah well yeah yeah you'd laugh but as an architect i am obsessed with critiquing public bathrooms and how they don't work in terms of the sequence of what you do as a woman in the bathroom right you can sometimes kind of tell when perhaps there was a hand involved that understood what you do in a public bathroom so that could be one little example of something you can kind of do as you're out in the bathroom i think a better way just to quickly answer is i think making and designing work is personal so that very personal and that so i think that very often the personality of the individual and team of people that are involved will give the character to a space in a place so depending on the scale of public work at etc so i think that's more relevant to the specifics of gender i think it's again i have to piggyback a little bit on susie's answer because i do think the nature of design is personal as an aesthetic right i think program the programmatic aspect of design i think is what what my comments were about earlier so if we think about the different demographics of female households and particularly female households head of households with children the way in which for example certain federal funding programs allocated to housing and how they restrict the design of certain housing isn't necessarily reflective of the changing dynamic of households which may be several children three to four grandparent the way in which we use the kitchen and dining room space kind of all is one not a separate room here and a separate room there with a wall between it so i think the sort of programmatic and functionality kind of components of how we think about our demographic need to be more aligned and both men and women i don't care who you are as the designer needs to make that connection more i think then it gets really to this sort of person personal sort of approaches that you take on how you further articulate that as a design but i guess i was thinking about it differently because aesthetics are one thing you know whether something looks good or not but the issue of the personal is actually what your what inspires you when you do your work in terms of some of us are much more inspired by program and program for non architects that means you know the function functioning and all the things you're talking about yeah yeah and there are some people who really aren't interested in that they're really interested in making it look nice and so to me the most inspired work comes out of really engaging and understanding if you're asking specifically about a house i actually have only designed residences really for myself and i just did a sort of exhibit for a family not a real house and it's kind of interesting to to think about that dynamic but the changing i don't think women designers can be are more responsive to the changing role of family i mean i think that's just that life is different so but i but i also your question was funny because i think we have been talking about design and i think that um the the i guess the responsibility of what we do is designers it is about you know making the architecture but it's thinking about architecture and design and its impact as you move along the streets i when i did teach at city college in my first teaching job in the 80s and i remember there it was first year and you know i hope all of you who aren't architects go out and leave here and there's a great quote from corbusier one of the titles of his first architecture book it's eyes that do not see and i think opening our eyes and being responsive and to actually think about you know what is that experience when you wake up in the morning in your room and where's the light come from and all those sort of qualitative things are about sensitivity to place and a consideration of that and i don't know that that's really gender specific i think it's very personal and you know things that might um spark your interest when you walk around or questions that you would ask when you're looking at things have to do with your personal kind of engagement your personal history and things that might be kind of jarring to you but challenging so any case yes question right here and then we'll go in the back and there are a lot of women on this board and the local chapter also alternates its president so there's a woman one year and then the man next year and that kind of thing and so obviously i think the perception is not there that there is equality in the aia and maybe it's because of the national and i don't really know what it is for other chapters but i'm kind of interested to hear from you what you think that aia besides maybe updating their website obviously they need to do but um you know what they should be doing to well can i just tell you that um in preparation for this i contacted somebody at the aia in order to get information so it wasn't just the website and then i contacted susie because she's actually a member of the aia and an f aia and i so jan i said no but i and i thought she would be able to we got it was hilarious the email got passed around to five or six people what was that title who all said you know oh we'd be happy to help you but nobody actually had any information and so information is actually a very valuable thing so it's great that they're women on the boards they're it's great that women are involved but if you're not actually somehow making it easy to understand what the picture is then you're missing part of the opportunity the aia is the american institute of architects it's a professional organization for those of you don't know so i it was actually kind of shocking to me how little information we got based on the number of emails that went around yeah and and also the aia defines architecture very very very narrowly yes yes and so it not at all in the way that for example uh tony was describing as architecture for the public good or in terms of city planning or urban planning that kind of thing it's it is a very very narrow thing however it claims to be the voice of the profession and i think that that's why we expect more from that organization and i'm heavily involved i've been employed by them but i'm also a very big critic of them expressly for that reason because i have higher expectations and what they're fulfilling right now so sir in back yes thank you that now definition of my to speak to my question and here we are came out only 10 months ago i worked in career counseling and the job projection literature from practical hiring to your statistics is very very negative about job possibilities for architects i have some of these students who are creatively gifted in the broad sense of design product design package design like r.i.t programs what do you say to young people want to go into this field whether it's interior design or architecture in that sense because the literature is suggesting it's kind of like what a lot of the lawyers are facing and it's always a delicate balance between the courage to bring but once the reality you know how much you speak to you i mean i think you said it yourself it's a delicate balance because i mean certainly if you're speaking to people who are interested in let's say design and publishing which you know is a sort of subset that i've occupied that's an even bleaker picture and on the other hand if you just kind of repeat how bleak the picture is it's not going to get better so i think it's a delicate balance i think it's about information and it's also about what people really care about and what motivates them and trying to make them those things come together in some way to move things forward you know we're a service industry ultimately and the problem with service industries is they go through incredibly difficult cycles of boom and bust and so you know when i started when i got out of graduate school there were no jobs and then all of a sudden there were not enough architects and then there was another dip and then this time has been the worst dip of all but so it's really hard because i have kids calling me and asking what they should do and i'm like well i don't know what to tell you because five years from now we're going to need more architects and you are not going to be there on the other hand i understand that you can't spend the next five years you know waiting waiting or waiting tables and trying to pay your loans off from graduate school which is no cheap you know thing so it's it's difficult but it is and ultimately i think architecture suffers through these cycles even more than certain businesses and you know that is very difficult and it's very difficult for the profession because i guarantee you that five years from now we're going to have problems with finding the right kind of employees because there will be a generation of kids who will have opted to do something else legitimately because they need to be employed and they need to find you know another way to be employed so i don't know what there is no really great answer and apply it in many many different ways so if someone were to decide okay i will not go for a classic narrow plea by architecture but more broad design and could include interior design of a space design is that kind of strategy you might recommend i just i i i just don't know that there are curriculums really set up and either junior or four-year institutions that allow that to happen because of the technical requirements of architecture for example that education is very very narrow i mean i i can count the number of electors i have over five years on one hand almost it's and i think this speaks to it as we're sort of talking about the broadening of the definition the broadening of the field the academy has to kind of come alongside of that too and perhaps in this really changing economy which requires diversification which is very entrepreneurial i think some aspects of our academy also have to evolve to try to find ways of mimicking a more liberal arts structure that allow i think that kind of exploration and skill building that you're talking about but i don't think i don't know of an example where well that exists that specific means schools today a lot of schools are talking very much about interdisciplinary education you know in design and it's a bit of a debate because you know landscape architects are being mixed with architects and urban planners and so on and there's a clear benefit to it but then there are also some clear concerns about the depth of knowledge one needs to have i mean after all one of the big things about architecture is liability and there's an incredible depth of knowledge one has to have and so interdisciplinarity i mean knowing more about other fields i mean to me is always an attractive thing but you also have to be able to perform at a high degree within your own field so i think that there's a juggling act there as well that if you broaden the definition how do you also keep the the the depth of field that you need in order to succeed in that profession i mean there's a there's such a broad opportunity though in terms of people who are interested in design now in terms of digital design and you know one of my clients i'm doing a new center for design and media for mass art it's a one of the top 10 public art schools in the country in boston and to the point exactly i mean you do have to make some decisions in the beginning what you might want to become expert in because they have a notion i don't know if any of you have heard about it's called a t-shaped student in that before you can actually collaborate which is the top of the t the broadening out you actually have to bring a particular expertise and know how to it because otherwise you're really not collaborating at a very high level so you know but i do think you know in so many of these schools there's not there's the whole web design you know digital design film and media and the whole ability for design as a means to communicate architecture and interior design i mean those are definitely one way to do that maybe in a more permanent way but i think that design is a much broader issue and i think the the needs for society to be visually literate the same way you kind of need to be able to read and write is becoming a non-negotiable part and so you know i think there are i think architecture is one thing design is broad though i mean think about how great the graphics are when you turn on your computer even the graphics in any of the publications so i mean there's a lot you can do and it's a great education for whatever you might do in the future it's a it's a great question though yes right here this world of architectural design wow that's stopping i mean i i spent a lot of my time actually working on sort of social type issues whether or not architecture will save the world is still to be seen but let's just say that i i do think and we do have we have learned that bad designs such as Prud Aigo is actually a mistake and and throughout the world those kinds of buildings have been torn down um because they have promoted within certain classes and in certain cultures i mean it's very complicated because you know some of the buildings of Prud Aigo that everybody hates they're the same buildings that you have in brazil in brazilian people love living in them so you also have to see that it's a context thing but but let's just say that there are ways in which i think certain certainly architecture can improve and enhance um you know the way that people interact with space so when we do all the work that we used to do for Planned Parenthood i mean a big part of what we talked about all the time was you know just sort of making spaces for women and men who are disenfranchised who don't have a lot of money that have a sort of dignity um that's important and essential to both people who work there and also people have to come there and enjoy the services or use the services and that that's an essential part of how i think that you know good design is but that's just sort of saying that there is democracy in design and that design doesn't have to just be at the top tier but also can you know be brought down and really matter at the lower tiers too i mean i think the word dignity isn't what really um operative word because i think you need to as designers in the work that we do is give dignity uh to daily life and i think that has a lot to do with the scale that i think every opportunity to design anything is important but i think that uh there's so much focus in the press on the monumental we have i haven't met him but we have a great new critic architectural critic for the new york times who is actually focusing on daily life i mean there's you know all those great museums we all love to do them and we've all had you know the chance to be involved in one way or another with great public buildings but some of them are about a daily life and some are about specialized conditions so housing i think is a really important um think but you know getting your driver's license going to plan parented going to hospitals all of this has to be brought down to the human being and to be recognized on that scale and you know prude i go and just sort of grossly over generalizing it was this monolithic huge you know kind of housing complex that really um it was very hard to find your own home with it but i think i mean i don't know if you were referring specifically to the movie that came the documentary that came out about prude i go because i i it was actually quite fascinating yeah you know architecture was one of the players in that story maybe you could say architecture had a starring role but there were a lot of other roles in that story that didn't that i mean my analogy is kind of dying but that didn't actually play their part i mean so there wasn't funding to for upkeep of that and so what i found fascinating in this movie is that people who lived in prude i go when they moved in at the early stages said it was the best place that they ever lived and they loved it and that what really fell apart was the context in which prude i go existed so the financing for maintenance um the financing for some kind of security and all of those things that made living they're quite wonderful at the beginning so i mean you know architecture plays a role but it has to play a role effectively with a whole lot of other things um and if all of those other things aren't addressed if you build an incredible building i mean there are there are a lot of great monuments out there that have that are not being maintained so i mean these are you know buildings exist in in a world and they have to be part of that world and that and that world has to work they have to work in concert with that so so i mean it's there's an ongoing life of a building there's an ongoing life of housing complexes that have to be effective so um it was very easy to draw the conclusion from prude i go that the buildings were bad and i'm sure there were problems with the buildings you know but the buildings the whole thing was bad right but but i think that's just quickly though when people render what do architects do they make buildings or design spaces but the fact is is if architects don't get more involved in deciding the whole framework for which things operate and end up just becoming the makers of the product then that that's where a lot of it goes wrong i mean i think but karen's point to all the different aspects of any kind of vital community is about government it's about a lot of it's about money and you know and then the issue of how that sets the structure you know if architects just sit down and take it and we'll do anything i mean that's where ethics and quality is a really vital part so i think assessing those things and being part of setting the frame for success and you know i think that's why the issue of sustainability is only not just about building performance but it's making things that can stand the test of time and you know none of us have a crystal ball that we don't know where the future is going but you really do have to kind of think long term about making large-scale works in society but i think that you know as architects unfortunately we're not always given that chance and frankly we're not always asked to come to that table you know and i think we can't take on always i mean i think if we're asking and we can help make those decisions that's great but oftentimes you know you you're at the bottom of the food chain and you inherit the program the money the sort of discussions and a lot of other people on top have made these decisions for you and then give them to you as a result and they're not always good decisions and and being able to find the dialogue i think to make them to to improve the decisions of the eat to me or to work with them is really if you can is a great thing but you can't always and so i think that that's part of the issue right so this would be exactly why i took my architect's license and degree and left Skidmore Owings in Merrill and became the deputy planning director of Washington DC because i wanted to be on the other side of the table that made sure that that voice was at the table in urban policy making and so again it kind of goes back to my larger point around architect and architecture your education or what you're doing and just beginning to broaden the field with which you can begin to have impact so my simple answer to your question is yes not in isolation of all the other factors that architecture is contributing to in terms of setting up our environments in our social life so i had this quote i was going to read from max bond and i read it because when my center was approved at city college it was called the the max bond architectural center and you've heard me talk about my background i just found that term both dated and limiting and so i just recently well let me read the coat and i'll tell you what i changed the name to so max uh quoted when he was reflecting on his career that my work has been guided by my belief that public spaces and buildings should respond to their physical social technical and cultural context as well as the needs and aspirations of their users i have sought to express this view through architecture practice professional advocacy public service and teaching so he is an individual in susie you knew him so embodied all of those things and really believe the social uplift was embedded in the way that he thought about design and what he was executing so i just recently got approved through my faculty changing the name to the center to the jmax bond center on design for the just city because i wanted to make sure that the work that we did and designers and folks who aren't in design understood the value of design the import of design towards this thing we call a just city and we can have a whole another debate around how we view that and what it means but it links those two really specifically and intentionally and so i've only been there three months i'm still developing what that means but we hope to have a whole set of programs and discourses and projects and research that help us forge the examination of that very question that you asked because i think that we do well i love that quote um and i love the way that you've kind of taken that legacy for it i think that's a beautiful thing we're at 90 minutes and i think people are getting antsy but i see one more hand up and then i'm going to make some closing comments and then we're going to give these panelists a round of applause so one last awesome question no pressure no pressure what was my i guess it was just more the nature of being in home in a profession because i i think being an architect is there is a professional side to it but i think as i said i think it's what i do it's not something that anybody else it's not an environment it is who who i am so i you know so as a question and invite i mean it means you know there's the expression make yourself at home so it's as if somebody's inviting you in so i guess i thought that one of the reasons you responded to it that way is that nobody nobody's been inviting me it's it's my thing but though i will give you like this can't be the last thing said but i remember um that things about you know being at home like as i i have all these different attitudes it's like being invited to the party and nobody talks to you there's i remember when i actually was honored by getting an award for one of my projects and i ended up going to one of those i'm not a a convention and to get the award and i was looking for my family and i walked into this room and this older gentleman with a pin on set and excuse me madame this is only for fellows and so there's some of these walls that get built up now i am a fellow uh or fellow what you probably still asked that question yes you probably look at me and think i didn't deserve to be in so i think some of the professional sides of this but i think that the only way to to do this is not get too hung up on the board so you know that's how you persevere and then you just do really great work and you know and talk about it yeah i do think that's a a perfectly good way to end um uh and as a as a writer i haven't more recently as a writer and as somebody that hasn't been a traditional practitioner i haven't always felt at home in the profession and so maybe that's why that question resonated with me so much so i'll leave it at that but there this is this is women's history month and there have been a number of efforts both locally nationally and internationally to to recognize this um a few a select few of them i just wanted to highlight there's this incredible series called makers women who shape america uh that has four designers profiled amongst 100 women leaders and these are most often women leaders that you've heard of uh you've probably heard of at least a couple of the women architects that are our profile there but that's very much worth having to look at this month and then also there are organizations that have been around for decades looking at women architecture and so there's the owa organization of women architects for anyone that's interested in that there's an archive at virginia tech university um that is is focused on uh women architecture and buildings designed by women and that kind of thing so there's a lot a lot of different types of resources it's hard to point you to any one place so you can understand the breath of them but i uh would encourage you to look them look them up if you're if you are interested and then um finally i just wanted to say a very special thanks to these great panelists um they they do most we represent again a still a very narrow part of the field but i know that they're doing incredible work that are trained you know that it's really transforming the lives of both women and men and children and others and um uh whatever you can do to support women like them and architects like them uh the better so thank you all very much for coming