 I'm going to introduce this event and kick it off, then we're going to have a few brief discussions and then kind of panel discussion and we will ask for some participation from the audience as well. We're going to do all of this in a kind of rapid fire. But just to start off, I want to describe a little bit of what you might not already know exactly what it is. I think the most important thing to say is that it's a collaborative environment for recent graduates from GSAP to develop new projects about architecture, culture, and the city. We currently have more than 20 recent graduates working on more than 10 teams on a diverse range of self-initiated projects for one year of membership. So in case it's not already clear, this is a physical space in the city for a couple of things that the school has been interested in for a couple of years. And one of them is exploring new modes of practice. We will talk more this afternoon about what exactly that means. And another is for prolonging the transition from academia to the profession, or at least kind of complicating that boundary. And our members have been doing that for two and a half years now, so this is our third year of operating at the GSAP Incubator. More specifically, the physical space of the GSAP Incubator is located on the Valerie at Newly, which is the first museum-like incubator created by a new museum. I will hear a little bit more about that in a moment. And one of the things that I think is so unique and exciting about this is, I mean, not only is the GSAP Incubator probably the first architecture school-led incubator in the world, but I think, you know, regardless of that, I think we have an incredibly unique kind of context where we're at the intersection of an educational institution, you know, a Columbia GSAP, a cultural institution, a new museum, and an incredibly interesting and complex urban neighborhood at the Valerie. And the combination of those things makes for a really exciting kind of energy. So the last couple things I'll say is that the GSAP Incubator, of course, should be understood in the context of other incubators and co-working spaces, and everyone knows we have a lot of those in New York City. There are a lot of them around the world now, you know, ranging from manger spaces to co-working spaces to things like WeWork, to even Columbia's own startup lab, which is a very similar structure of a one-year program for recent graduates, but it's mostly for other departments other than architecture school here at Columbia. So, of course, we're similar to some of those programs in certain ways, but we also believe that we're distinct from some of the other incubators in a few very specific ways. First, we emphasize the humanities as well as the sciences. So, of course, architecture is a combination of art and engineering, and in this spirit, the GSAP Incubator focuses on kind of the humanities as well as engineering and sciences that are more typical of other incubators. Second, projects in the Incubator operate through critique and doubt and historical references as much as they do through action and technology and the kind of buzzwords that are more typical of other incubators. Third, there's a lot of discourse in the GSAP Incubator just like there is, you know, uptown at Avery and we emphasize deep critical thinking as well as concise cellular visions. So you'll see the trend here. I'm not saying that we don't emphasize the importance of entrepreneurship, that we don't emphasize the importance of distilling your idea into one or two sentences, but we're deliberately a little broader than some other spaces that are incubators and some other approaches. And finally, we emphasize metrics and measurements of success beyond growth and profit, beyond the financial metrics that are literally the main indicators for some incubator spaces, including the Columbia Startup Lab. And so we're very deliberate about that and we know that, you know, from our work uptown at Columbia GSAP that there's a lot of ways to make architecture. There are a lot of goals of architecture beyond just making buildings in the most efficient way possible and we're kind of engaging that in various ways and our members are engaging that. So this is a space that's an open experiment. You know, this is our third year. We've been changing it every year. We've been learning from the past years and in a kind of true GSAP spirit, we're exploring these ideas, prototyping them, debating them, extrapolating out from them to new definitions of architecture and kind of learning and adapting and adjusting along the way. And so with that, I want to introduce the speakers that we have for the event who will talk a little bit more about what they're doing in and around the GSAP incubator related to some of the topics that were included in the title event such as entrepreneurship, new modes of practice, research, architecture, culture, the city. So I'm going to introduce all of those speakers in a row right now and then they'll come up and each present briefly and not only followed by a panel discussion. So our speakers include Karen Wong, Deputy Director of the New Museum and Mastermind of New Inc., also adjunct professor here at GSAP. Tate Carpenter is founder and principal of agency agency and adjunct assistant professor here at GSAP, Dominic Leong who's a graduate of GSAP. So I'm scared of GSAP being, or the GSAP incubator being about graduate projects. I graduated in 2003 from A&G, founding partner of Leong Leong and adjunct assistant professor here at GSAP. Ms. McEnany graduated in 2004 from the Historic Preservation Program. She's executive director of the SS Columbia Project, Alejandra Navarrete graduated in 2011 from A&G, principal at NAMU Studio and visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute. Lauren Johnson, Brian Day graduates in 2016 from the MR program, our co-founder of TwoSpace. And finally, Ike Ureback graduated in 2015 from CCCP and leads the studio, Sevilla Soon, and his adjunct assistant professor at GSAP. So we'll hear each of the presenters in roughly that order, and then we'll all kind of have a discussion about some of the issues that are raised in the presentations. So with that, I can apparently get into the experience. I'm so excited to be here, continually uptown. I think we're going to talk a lot about what great energy there is downtown, but I did want to thank Columbia GSAP as well as my students for making like every Friday just so invigorating and it's certainly given me a new kind of energy for my professional life. So where I'd like to start here is we'll be able to talk about innovation and entrepreneurship. It's hard not to go to Silicon Valley and look at this organogram of Google, which is of course alphabet being the holding company of all these different initiatives. And then I'd like to kind of frame your museum up in the same way, but of course we're quite tiny. But again, this kind of idea in terms of what is a 21st century model of a museum and can you work outside of your white wall spaces? And of course for us, the answer is truly yes. And so we have a number of different platforms, and I'll speak specifically about a new link today. So one of the key things that when we started to research about five, six years ago was this idea of the number of freelance workers that will evolve by 2020 and the type of spaces that these freelancers will want to be working in. The importance with that is also this 2012 report from the Center for the Futures, where essentially New York City graduates twice as many artists and design graduates than any other city. 56% of them have plans to start their own businesses. And yet there is really no infrastructure in New York City to be able to complement, you know, of course the amazing education you can find here in New York. In 2012, 2013, when we were serving the city, we noticed that there seemed to be incubators and work spaces from tech to business to fashion to food to science, biotech. It was everything except for artists and designers, and we thought, hmm, maybe there's a gal here. And would it be interesting for a museum to experiment with the idea of a workspace that was also very much about a community? And so this is where we feel we live, kind of at the intersection of artist, resident, business, co-working spaces, tech incubators, universal media labs. So, quickly by the numbers, we've been four years in operation. Our formula currently is about 40 full-time meeting that people spent a year with us. There's about 60 who are part-time. The key thing to understand here is that as a museum, we're very interested in developing a model that was self-sustaining. So meaning that as an operation, the fees paid by the membership basically pays for the operating budget of this platform. The female to male ratio, oh, this is a mistake. Our female to male ratio relationship in year one was 30-70. We have very specifically tried to create an environment which is reflective of New York City demographic. So year three, we were at 50-50. We're at year four. We remain at 50-50. We are also 45% non-white. We incubated more than 100 projects, and more than $10 million has been raised. But the key thing to understand here is we're much more interested about cultural impact, social impact, radical ideas, rather than how much was successful in New York, which is exactly what they were thinking about for the G7 incubator. So this space, and obviously since we are in an architectural school, this was done by Soil, Florian, Annenberg, and Jane Blue. We had a tiny budget. Most of it was spent on infrastructure, which included a far, far still row as well as making an elevator that was going to be used for more than two or three people at a time. And so, and I'm embarrassed by these pictures. These particular architects don't really like people in their pictures. Very clean spaces. It's super messy now. But I wanted to, I think, really give them a short amount of time. I think the best way to really talk about new age is really the type of members we attract. So it's an application process, as well as an interview process. It's highly curated, meaning that we are really looking for an interdisciplinary group of folks who we think ultimately not only will be white long friends, but will end up collaborating. In year three, we had the group DISS, an artist collective, one known for curating the art Berlin biennial a couple of years ago. And they came to new age, specifically with the idea of could they develop an alternative model for art school. In this case, we have Stephanie Dinkins. She brought a project which she had been working on for a couple of years. A few guys are interested in AI. That's Venus 48. She's the first robot, and she happens to be female and black. But her interrogation, which is to have a number of conversations with Venus 48 over the last seven years, was to decide and understand black female identity that was engineered by white architects. Since being at new age, she's really become a thought leader in the field of AI and race. And so we're particularly proud of her in terms of her metric of success, is now really kind of traveling the world in conferences and speaking about her work. We also had Frances Swong, who is a data legalization of artists and scientists. And this is probably one of the success stories that came out of year three. This was a scientist and an advertising person who came together, and they were really interested in democratizing the idea of museums. I think we all can still pretty much agree that museum spaces do tend to be elitist. And what they were interested in was could they make a museum in the shape of a kiosk that would then be distributed at DMVs, hospital, restaurants, libraries, airports. And they came to us pretty much with this built prototype. And what they really wanted to look at was, you know, should they become a nonprofit? Should they become a business? What kind of distribution systems should they work with? And they ended up going to the nonprofit route. And within three months, they got their first grant for $300,000. Since I've raised $1.5 million, they now employ, I think, about a dozen folks. So it's really exciting. What they plan to do is essentially create new exhibitions every six months. And it's done as a subscription model. So essentially, if you're a hospital, let's call yourself King's County Hospital, you would buy a subscription for the year, and then these would be delivered, and then they would be turned out with a second exhibition in three to six months time. Another character is Jonathan Boebrow from the MIT Media Lab. He worked a lot with hardware and software gaming. And in one of the ways that, again, how we like to connect, he infected the museum besides the museum providing space and programming and professional development, is he has developed a new kind of Lego-like origami game, which he was able to finance on Kickstarter, and we will premiere at the new museum store during the holiday season. This is probably one of my favorite projects, which is called IMAIA, Life as Technology. His grandmother was blind. His mother, a graphic designer, developed a new type of braille that was not based on the DAW system, which apparently takes about a year, a year and a half to learn. This system, based on pictograms, takes about two days to learn. So essentially, about only 2% of those who are impaired visually actually have learned braille, and they only hope to revolutionize the idea of hand those who are visually impaired, as well as the friends and family of those who are visually impaired to be able to learn this language together. So he's now developed the printer, and he remains at New Inc. for a second year to really now look at distribution. And then one of the key things that New Inc. does is really try to partner with other brands and organizations to make sure the work kind of gets out into the world. This is New Inc. by Southwest, where I think we've been known there every year since we have launched. We've also worked with Red Bull Arts, where a number of our experiential installations were demonstrated in an exhibition-like format about years ago. We worked with Microsoft Connect, where they chose a team of engineers, sound designers, architects from our cohort in, I believe, year one, and worked with the musician, Matthew Dier, to create this installation, which we demoed for a weekend. And then most recently, we're working with Bell Labs, where three of our New Inc. members are in residence there, working with engineers to essentially data an idea that they have, and then subsequently, actually all three of the artists were commissioned to then take it to the next level and bring it to a presentation situation. What's super exciting as well is the Nut Foundation gave us a major grant to develop a museum track. And I say this to segue into GSAP Incubator, because one of the GSAP Incubator members applied for the museum track and was accepted, so she went from GSAP Incubator to New Inc, which was really just another way to hang out in our space for a minute. I will tell you guys that she just received a fellowship, and I'm super excited about the particular project she is developing, specifically at this notion of the Knife and Foundation, again, the beliefs that technology is going to be critical within the museum environment, but only the wealthiest of museums have really been able to figure out how to use technology, like a MoMA, like a MET, who can afford 100 people in the digital department. What they want to do is can folks at New Inc. start to develop platforms, projects, hardware, software that could democratize the museum landscape and essentially smaller regional museums could apply these types of technologies to their working life. So that's a quick snapshot of New Inc. and I'll turn it over to, I guess it's... I'll take it. So I'm Tay Carpenter, and I teach the Core One sequence and also the events for sequence here, Scales and Environment, which is coordinated with David, and then also Dresher of the Waste Initiative here, which is a new applied research platform that I'll talk about in a little bit. And David asked both Dom and myself to talk a little bit about how we started our practices and about, let's say, alternatives both to practice and how we work today. And my practice, honestly, started by accident. I had always had a vision of starting a practice at some big point in the future when I was ready, but of course that never really happens. So at the time when I started my practice, I was on a Wordland Fellowship at Rice University, which is a recent teaching fellowship in Houston. And in the summer of 2014, I was approached by a friend who was involved with the nonprofit organization called Big Brothers Big Sisters, which is a mentor organization between children at risk and then putting together like-law mentorship relationships. He asked if I'd be interested in putting together a concept design of their new 20,000 square foot headquarters in Houston where they just purchased the land. And I was under the impression the entire time that this was for fundraising and that this was more of an ideas project and that they just needed some images for a possible project. So I worked on the project that summer, I hired two students and presented them with a concept design that they were really happy with and I sort of thought that was the end of the story. But then I got a call a couple weeks later saying we need construction documents immediately and we'll get started on the project as soon as possible. So this is the project, this is from about a year ago. This is the back of the building and it's in a pretty visible location along the I-103 way looking back towards downtown Houston. You can see Phillip Johnson's pencil place in the background. But I talked about this because as you can imagine there was an enormous amount of growing pains in starting a project in that capacity. And so within about two months I just set up a website, got business cards, formed a limited liability corporation and really established a publishing platform for my practice to do this project. And this is just one experience project and it's recently completed. It will be opening in January 2018. We just went down to photograph right before the hurricane actually. And I think in the spirit of practice and starting practices this project more or less happened on a couple laptops in my garage apartment in Houston. And it was really the momentum let's say for starting my own practice and I think I probably could have used some incubation at the moment. And so the garage apartment is obviously very different in Houston than what it is in New York City. So I have a studio in Williamsburg right by McCarran Park. This is Columbia and my studio. And we work with a bunch of interesting people that are building, it's about five stories. And you know on my floor for example there's fashion designers for humans, fashion designers for dogs, there's a coffee roaster and acupuncturist which all is sort of a bad stuff for a joke. But I actually find it incredibly nourishing and liberating to be working around people who do things that are incredibly different from what I do on a day to day basis. And so in addition to the project in Texas my practice also operates between writing and research and speculative design and we really engage with contemporary environmental conditions through explorations of new materialities and new subjectivities. And these are just three quick examples of projects that we've been working on recently in which we're exploring an aesthetics of accumulation that looks towards geology and large time scales and hybrid forms of representation. So this is a winning design for an island that's formed in the North Pacific subtropical gyre which is also known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The idea is that it's co-produced between nature and human waste and produces its own species and ecosystems. On the bottom is a souvenir for the current exhibition for our architecture which is a bi-directional core sample for Sunset Park which reads both the past and the future through its material stratification. And then the last project on the top is a project with a time scale from now until 10,000 years and it's basically a test-fed design for climate engineered carbon sequestration strategies. And this is just, you know, in five minutes in the talk. This is just sort of an example of what we do but the work we do in the practice is an environmental imagination and an awareness about our own entanglements with the world. And just to wrap up the work of the practice is of course tightly linked with teaching and my research here at GSAP and the Waste Initiative is an applied research platform that is just really recently launched which explores the possibilities for the role of waste in relationship to architecture in the city and we're interested in rethinking waste and disposability in terms of its value proposition and also the potential resource. And so the plan for the initiative is to operate between design studios seminars, summer workshops and also to really develop continuous longer term projects on campus through prototypes and physical design speculations in the real world. And I think what differentiates the Waste Initiative work from my own practice is it's tied to academia and to Columbia as an institution much like, you know, the incubator is and I think that then provides a platform to collaborate across departments with experts in anthropology for me, for experts in anthropology environmental engineering, the Earth Institute and then also for work to unfold at a larger scale. So, thank you. I'm John Leong. I don't have a presentation but I tried to explain it. So yeah, I'm partnering with Leong Leong with my brother Chris and we have a small office that's about 10 people. South of New York South of New York again and I think the trajectory is essentially graduated here and went to work for dark for like, about two to five years and then it was kind of loom ladders and doing competitions and stuff on the side and eventually that sort of turned into like a couple real projects and that was for fashion designer, flagship store and also townhouse and I think at the time it was sort of like right in the club economy tank in 2009 and we were sort of in this strange predicament where we had this opportunity to work on a global scale with this fashion company that was scaling in spite of economic downturn so from the very beginning our practice was very much based in New York and also very global so we sort of formed a lot of our constant practice around this kind of, you know global, global kind of mentality so we were doing these projects in Asia and we're also doing a lot of experimentation within the neighborhood of Barbara's side actually doing a lot of self-missued projects and galleries and filming by themselves so we, I think our mode of practice is really a kind of product of circumstance opportunity as much as it was about an idealized concept of what we think architecture should do and I think what we've learned is that in spite, like every generation, every individual every practice is very unique to its time in economic context geographic and that even though we have inspirations for different practices that we look back over in history that it's really, we've learned really important to at a certain point let go of that and just sort of embrace where you're at in the world in a particular moment because that is in a way the only way to actually develop I think agency or relevant ideas so we have always thought of I guess there's three diagrams that describe our practice. One is this kind of like feedback where you have disciplinary issues obsessions like the history of ideas that you kind of are indoctrinated with or inherit when you go to art school that in a way also becomes your own baggage and then you have like professional issues which are issues related to actually practicing in the world and things like control, precision how you deal with technology, how you function from an economic point of view sustainability over the long term and then we always think of a kind of larger cultural, social context and that has to do with ideas that are not necessarily perceived as architectural but kind of issues that we think are integral to how you understand the world and to try to figure out how architectural thinking can emerge so for example working on the largest LGBT center in the world so issues like sexuality and gender how does that start to fall into how does architectural thinking relate to that for example and so it's really this kind of constant feedback loop in our mind between these three poles and I think it's a we kind of started off our practice intentionally not doing speculative work we said we don't want to be a kind of competition we want to be things that have some kind of engagement so the idea of engagement is somehow a filter to decide what kind of what ideas come out of and what kind of filters come out quickly and the other diagram okay the second diagram is essentially this idea that if you look at it like kind of XYZ or X and Y axes you have time on the bottom axes and sort of complexity and kind of productivity on this axis and the kind of technological environment kind of Moore's law network effects which produces kind of X natural acceleration of change and then you have kind of human evolution which is sort of this very subtle kind of I don't even know it's a geologic time and then so you have this huge dissonance or chasm between how we evolve human beings versus kind of increasing complexity of the world and then architecture is sent out just about human evolution but just kind of goes like this and so this is kind of like I think an increasingly kind of contemporary phenomena and something that as a architect or an architect of practice it becomes very challenging in a way to be able to operate in like with agility speed and to be able to kind of accelerate with the rest of the world because everyone knows architecture is an inherently slow kind of process which is essentially traditionally architects you can think of it as a two by two so you have we design things and we figure out how to realize them so that's kind of documentation and going through the construction process and you can say this is sort of like inherent fundamental service or practice of architecture and that's the slow, that's the slow one and then we're interested in this kind of other axes and I think in a way like every I would say like to sort of operate this kind of fast and slow pace this other axes is like the fast axes so right now we think of it as like strategy and kind of experience and I think we kind of navigate between these two poles and try to switch speeds and constantly try to find ways of shifting our practice to actually have modes of engagement that are relevant for contemporary culture so examples of that are doing things like exhibition design but also in a way similar to the incubator is that this component of critique and research which oftentimes is not a kind of part of the typical architectural scope that that kind of deep thinking also actually allows us to kind of accelerate in certain situations because there's already a critical position to relate to the world so that kind of starts to rotate into these other axes so we're kind of trying to get into projects sooner try to actually use the agility of thinking as a way to engage the world even before you make anything so this production is always quite solid so how do you start to actually use a kind of critical capacity as an expectation of what kind of architectural practice has to offer as a general service for the environment I mean the current projects are working on range from doing furniture small scale objects, artifacts all the way up to the scale of the city and we're doing the larger stuff in the D-Campus in the United States of Hollywood so it makes these projects and flushes the queens and hotels in San Francisco and the point is I think the other thing we're interested in is the kind of the, what leads to new typologies and if you kind of think about the value of space today as opposed to 20 years ago before the internet when, in this case now the primary and medium organized people information and powers is not space and it has used to be for a long time so a lot of these kind of collectivities and acts happen in these kind of mediums at a certain point not always but they come back to space so you can look at this from like retail projects you can also look at it from recent protests in Charlottesville but there's a different value of space today and so I think that necessitates a lot of investigation into new typologies and we're kind of fascinated in how social organization translates into new typology. Hi, it's great to be here, I'm Liz McEnany as David mentioned I'm a graduate of the historic preservation program in 2002 my career has kind of ranged since graduating from Columbia I've had the privilege of coming back as both an adjunct professor in the urban design program and the preservation program and I now teach at NYU Tandon School of Engineering in the integrated digital media in the sustainable urban environments program. This is just some photos of some of the projects that I've worked on I spent about three years working in northern India doing site interpretation plans I received a grand grant to document the architecture of Makuto Mozambique I've worked closer to home curating an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York on a history of land use on Staten Island and even more recently the landscape that I've come to love is the Hudson Valley and it's that landscape that I'm going to talk about today. So in 2009 I first started working on the Hudson Valley projects and for those of you who might remember this momentous event when it passed by 2009 was the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's discovery in quotes of the Hudson River and this was supposed to be a year of massive celebrations the state had put aside money to give to cities in town so there were going to be parades and fireworks celebrations but if you remember in 2009 that's when the economy collapsed so instead of having a year long celebration a lot of these towns there are very angry people there who didn't want to talk about the past they didn't want to celebrate the past they wanted to talk about what was happening at that very moment so with some collaborators we received funding from the Hudson River Foundation and the James Kaplan Fund and we rented this historic bar a 1930s railroad bar and in the spirit of Obama's whistle-stop campaign we took the bar from Albany to Point's Saff all the way to New York City and we stopped along the way and we brought together heads of various organizations so big activists and we had a conversation about what was happening at that moment and from this conversation we developed a series of white topics ranging from food to education to economic development but the reality is that very few people read white papers so while we thought we were putting forth this resource that people would have to actually plot the path of the Hudson Valley in the future we realized that we weren't reaching our target audience which were everyday people living in the valley so we took another shot at it and we made a documentary film and the film is called Hudson Rising we've screened it here at Columbia in the past as part of their urban design program what was supposed to be a 3 month 10 minute film turned into a 3 year 56 minute film where I did everything from walking up Olana as the producer of the film you have a lot of downloads talking to people at hip hop festival in Newburg and walking into lots of restaurants we ended up having well over 56 minutes of footage something about 250 hours and there came this moment in time where we were lost and we couldn't figure out how to tie the narrative of this film together and the film really was supposed to be about urban planning it should be the relationship between open space and the cities and agriculture so at some point in the past I heard about this project to bring a steamboat to the Hudson River and at that moment of desperation when I thought how would we tie this narrative together it dawned on me that it's all about the Hudson and it's about the connectivity each Hudson University in town was so connected to the waterfront the cities in town were all connected to each other and they all had such a connection to New York City so I bought a plane ticket to Detroit which is where this alleged Hudson River both was and I found the Asset of Columbia on the roof in front of the house with our director on that very first visit the boat ended up not making the final cut in the film I'll say but I just couldn't forget about this project so the founder of the organization actually passed away shortly after our visit and the future of the boat was kind of up in the air and it was one day I woke up and realized I'd probably spent about 80 hours that week thinking about the boat working on the boat working on the boat thinking about shipwrecks and I realized I was sunk and this was the project that I had to work on so when I introduced you to the Asset of Columbia project this is the boat it's a 115 year old steamboat about 30,000 square feet of usable space I'll talk a bit more so for those of you who might know for 150 years there was this incredible history of these big surgeon boats leading New York City and had to point to North so hiking, the gypsy all the way North to Albany and really these boats were the people's boats these were boats that allowed all New Yorkers the chance to leave the city to step onto the water and to escape they weren't boats for the wealthy they really were for the average New Yorker so we're bringing back this tradition and what we really see our vision being is having this movable cultural venue a destination where you can again leave the city and head to point to North so the project is part cultural venue of how we really get people out of the water how we use our 30,000 square feet and partner with organizations artists, designers who want to do things on board content but we also see it as an education platform we're calling it our steam education which might be a little bit on the nose but we're actually going to be able to restore the 115 year old steam engine by motion again so it's this amazing laboratory to bring kids and adults into the engine room into the boiler room to actually see how a steam engine operates and it's also an economic development project so a lot of what we do is we do outreach to all the Hudson Valley cities and towns and talking about the fact that we have the capacity to bring 1500 people to any one of these cities and towns so if these cities and towns don't want us to drop people off, we've been working with cities and towns to figure out the tourist infrastructure that's needed to build the docks, to partner with cities and towns on the Department of State DOC applications and to partner with cities and towns on economic development money related to rebuilding waterfront infrastructure the project some might sound like a crazy project but it's financially viable we have a business plan we've vetted the business plan by a lot of people in the maritime world and we are revenue positive so really that's I think kept the board invested in the project is knowing that once the boat is restored we will have that revenue and that includes we'll have our net revenue on top of spending money on events and cultural programs we've raised $4.6 million to date in the past two years we moved the boat from Detroit to a shipyard in Toledo we spent a year there and rivets for placing two chairs in the underwater hall this gives you a sense of the timeline that we're on we're realistic, it's a long timeline 2023, plan for a wedding 2020 plan for a wedding in Kingston we plan on doing the bulk of the restoration but one of the things we found the boat is now docked in Buffalo but we found that a lot of artists musicians, performers have kind of fallen in love with the boat in our current space so it's not all or nothing we can start doing events on the boat now raising revenue from events on the boat now so here's where we come from from Detroit to Toledo, now in Buffalo our next big journey is to the Hudson River as you can see we are not taking the area now we're too big in all dimensions so we have a great journey ahead of us as we're only 2001 else to get the boat to the Hudson River so near the society we spend a lot of time talking to the Coast Guard and shipping companies and our funders and insurance agents to figure out how this is going to happen so it looks as though the total happened in 2019 due to the stabilization work that we have to finish in Buffalo these are some of the cities and towns and state parks that would have been working with to interest them in the boat's arrival a sense of what we can do the boat is a dockside revenue so we're looking at docks north of Canal Street, south of 42nd Street in the Hudson right now and are in some early conversations because as the business plan shows the bulk of the money is actually earned dockside so it will be dockside 3 or 4 days a week but the whole thing about the boat is the boat has to move so we'll be able to move up the Hudson River to New South and also do cruises around Manhattan great learning experiences for steam education steam camps for kids during the summer and then making it all happen it really wouldn't happen without our supporters so we've reached $1.25 million from New York State to date we currently have a $500,000 matching grant from New York State that we're going to use in Buffalo to do prep work for hotels we've had great partners including Columbia, it's amazing to be part of the incubator space we've also been lucky to partner with and to get all the students and faculty out of the river here's just a slide that shows our funding needs a chance to see kind of our post narrative operations that we are revenue positive so we're really excited to be out of the incubator because we see ourselves moving from a purely preservation project to a cultural project so we're using this year at the incubator to figure out partnerships to really help brand ourselves in this space and to hopefully get people up to Buffalo to see this and the second thing that we're doing is while we are a non-profit organization we're exploring the option of becoming a high-grade for-profit and not-for-profit organization because with the investment numbers that we're showing revenue well it's a small revenue, not a 30% that an investor might want to see there are still investors who were approaching in Pigeon to see whether they would want to come on board so if they do that will change but I wanted to share one thing of being here at Columbia it was really as a student that I experienced the Hanzibali for the first time I took a class on cultural landscapes went out and had lunch on, oh this is this is maybe my reference or this is Pigeon, Hanzibali initiative on board about I had lunch on this porch about 15 years ago as a student at Columbia and long ago 15 years later we went to Davis and this is our board member and I'm presenting on the report so it becomes full circle G-SAP all the way so thank you good afternoon thank you I'm just seeing David, Paul and G-SAP for the invitation to be part of this amazing panel and discussion my name is Adriana Marrete-Yofis I studied here at Columbia and I taught here as well a couple of years ago and now I'm teaching at Pratt Institute and I'm the principal of NAMI studio there is an office that works at the intersection of art and architecture to design spaces for alternative social, cultural and material connections since 2005 since 2005 I've been practicing in Spain as a designer, researcher and curator in speculative designs during competitions in different offices as for example solid architecture and receiving several prizes that later turned into big structures in this case a social housing building in Madrid and while doing competitions I co-founded a collective of architects called Batman that was working around questions on citizenship and identity to engage agency of the citizen in the transformation of the urban environment we work on a series of projects called City Create City proposing site-specific interventions exhibitions actions and events all these images that you have seen here are from Toledo Creates Toledo and City Creates Toledo and Cáceres as part of like this longer and data of City Creates City we had also the opportunity to work as editors on a publication including our contribution with a text and an interview to the book in 2014 after graduating here in Colombia from the AD program and after practicing some years in New York I was selected together with the after belonging agency to create the also architecture in 2016 the project entitled after belonging in residence on residence and the ways we stay in transit and allows analysis how architecture intervenes in our attachment to places and collectivities where do we belong as well as our relation to the objects that we own, share, exchange and produce how do we manage our belongings this contemporary transformation the way we're trying to describe has destabilized the notion of residence and the mining, spatial permanence property and identities and we were looking not only to the asylum seekers centers from previous images but also our own houses that were open through home sharing platforms or the spaces of massive tourism to the Caribbean Sea or other geographies and we proposed different platforms to analyze the role of the agency of architecture beyond the building the after belonging publication for us was a space for architectural production and experimentation we commissioned more than 20 new essays for the publication so it was not understood only as a catalog of the exhibition the conference was a space where architecture is presented connected and contested incorporating relevant voices into a discussion and two exhibitions that we created and designed and the residence exhibition were sites to test new spatial configurations in different material experimentations and two additional platforms that we launched for the first time on this edition in 2016 was the Academy that was a student forum gathering more than 120 students from like 10 different universities around the world into a knowledge sharing experiment the Academy for us was a space to test work protocols and academic conversations and finally the embassy that we launched at the closing event of the Triennale was a special installation that we did at the Oslo City Hall that represented the ideas of the state as democracies and as a space to test the agency of art and architecture to rethink political representation and this year, well, two weeks ago I just got a grant from NISCA that is a funding program from the state of New York to work on a one-year-long research project that I will develop as an elevator the project, this is not your door the spaces of this exclusion in New York, the lottery, the membership and the application explores the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion at three different scales the domestic leisure and educational spaces in the city of New York the first case study will look at the contemporary domestic interiors of mixed income developments resulting from the inclusionary housing programs and we'll come back later to this case while I explain the ecology of the year-long project and the second case study analyzes the leisure interiors of social class offering privacy, security and comfort I think it seems particularly relevant to look at these spaces nowadays as President Trump spent more than 30% of his presidency time in his Mar-a-Lago private club and so this space has become his winter White House as he on his own words providing a space for informal access to the president to his 500 members together with the proliferation of initiatives as the global energy program that facilitates rapid entrance to US and other countries these privileged associations activate exclusive communities and alternative forms of citizenship the project will focus on current forms of membership derived from this social class and the role in the definition of daily life in New York the initial study will include business clubs, university clubs fraternities and sororities but also beach clubs and well-being clubs and others the third case study will focus on the educational settings of colleges and universities these spaces are now responding to a discussion on fair admission, diversity and minorities as the government is on the last month questioning and investigating the affirmative action policies with the contemporary the regulation and privatization of learning spaces universities face challenges of becoming global forces run as and for business focusing a little bit on the methodology of this next year the project applied to the first case study the project this is not your door will map and draw the connection between the transformation of the urban landscape the admission to these interior environments and the design of new communities articulated through the legal documents of the law day in this case but also the membership and the application processes this regulation and documents running access shape these spaces of New York City or the spaces of New York City designing economic class, gender, age and race differences on the other hand this research will also analyze how the notion of home in this case is represented in different media and how is occupied by its residents it will focus on the design and representation of the domestic interiors the lobby and amenities the spaces of well-being and will also focus the attention on the technologies providing an immersive experience to unbuilt structures and apartments with the oramas, three-dimensional holographic projections augmented virtual reality and 3D walkthrough available in our own computers at home and to establish a connection between the representation and technologies that the media and the real estate market is using and the actual daily life of the inhabitants the project will chronicle the community's experience I will do a series of site visits and interviews to the residents and experts and I will commission a series of photo essays from local photographers in order to document these interiors so this protocol will serve for the three case studies and will result in three essays that will include the graphic material of the map the photo essay and the excerpts from interviews to the residents and the experts on the topic these are like the three possible photographers and the aim is not only to unveil and raise awareness on the relationship between the legal frames and the places we inhabit but also to envision alternative models of inclusion and accessibility thank you very much Hi I'm Lauren this is Ryan and David we graduated in 2016 and I guess we graduated from the incubator just this past year so we're going to talk a little bit about our projects and kind of what we did while at the incubator QSpace is a queer architecture research and design collaborative we define ourselves as mixing queer theory, social justice and design practice aside from producing projects such as coded plumbing QSpace is a platform for research projects by students and professionals working in the built environment so as the movie may know we ourselves started at Geesap in 2014 as a student organization called QSAP QSAP is a little bit remarkable in response to what we viewed as a huge lack of conversation and mentorship from open linker folks in the field of architecture through social events QSAP provided mentorship a space for LGBTQ students at Columbia and brought lectures and programming that reinforced the impact of queer people in the fields as a side note on being openly gay in architecture we actually googled gay architect the first kit is from an architect form from 2009 it kind of was just speculating on the sexuality of a few male architects that are not other sexuality that survive at work and some Chinese to be like this is happening so that's kind of the state of things but back to QSAP at the end of our final year there was a major event that brought queer theory social justice and design practice together in a concrete way and that was the passage of North Carolina and Houseville too so we decided we needed to be proactive and that the buffering bill issue was a design challenge so we decided to use space almost a professional side of the student group along with and it also started our passion for the bathroom and our first project coded plumbing so a little bit of background on HB2 along with other bathroom bills like Texas, Kentucky they often define gender as quote biological sex and dictate that people must use a certificate in schools and other public spaces and the impact is that these bills criminalize transgender and gender non-conforming folks putting them in impossible and sometimes violent situations as architects we began to investigate how gender binaries and the codes which govern architectural production could be reimagined and subverted in the physical space of the bathroom so the way we started was actually just a few feet from here in the bathrooms of Brownies invited the public to unwrap the plumbing codes and design standards at a one-to-one scale this then went on to a Van Allen exhibition on the street so what we were doing was copying the codes of actual bathroom bills we emphasized the bi-political dictation of gender and sexuality in spaces that typically are considered banal Just a quick shout out to Mark Taylor for letting us completely destroy the bathrooms in Brownies and Michael so then we received a Kenny Grant another shout out to G-SAP and on that we traveled to North Carolina to do site research on how HP2 is inspiring a bathroom resistance movement and we met with LGBTQ leaders and individuals to discuss how the bill is impacting our communities and actually when we were somewhere over there in Asheville was when we got the email that we got into the incubators so that was a really exciting moment for us so what we discovered while we were there was a lot of open resistance and signage declaring safe spaces a lot of attempts to express inclusivity a lot of signage on doors like screw you HP2 everyone welcome here safe space so we learned also from people we talked to that the single-stop locking facilities were often considered to be the safest spaces for a binary system while encouraging signage such as this was a great sort of a bandaid an effective bandaid on the two gendered system oops wait we also learned that bathroom bills and gender segregated facilities don't just burn trans and gender non-conforming folks they also impact families and people with disabilities with other sex caretakers so we found the three main types of bathrooms which I'm sure we're all aware of with varying degrees of separation the signage indicates who can enter while the public subjectively determine who has made the correct decision or not so this possible was us to what we're doing now and our idea of the audience's restroom so the idea where everyone can go together wash their hands and whatever else we do in the bathroom so it's an important step to designing more inclusively and as architects and architects can design and fight for these spaces it should so beyond legal codes I'm working with the plumbing code in that sort of changing in New York City there is another layer which is design standards as architects follow so beyond the code we sort of have some rules about that sort of like add to the gendering of bathroom spaces on the left and these are drawings from the Van Allen exhibition on the left you have a men's bathroom and see the standard urinals stalls on the right a women's bathroom and there's just minor details actually there's minor details in women's bathrooms you'll have trash cans between each stall for sanitary products which do not exist in men's bathrooms probably you've never noticed that that's not a thing and some men do actually menstruate so that's an issue and the other thing is a shelf below the mirror that we mostly have in women's bathrooms it's like where we come in our purse and do our makeup and stuff like that so when we really kind of peel it all away I totally lost my... when we really strip it all away there's just fixtures, convenient ways to eliminate waste from our bodies wash our hands so we are kind of trying to think about how these fixtures can be reassembled and reimagined and how we can untangle these Victorian notions of gender and privacy and safety and create something that reflects an expanding understanding of inclusivity so this is what got us into the incubator and while there we began compiling the interviews documentations, drawings and the design insights that we collected into concrete outputs so while there and still today we are sorry, I just went off track there we are beginning to build our outputs and just to give you our elevator pitch even though the incubator is not one it was one that you do go through the workshop and it's something that does bring you back to where you are so central to our practice is the belief that design and should play an active role in responding to social change and we hope to offer the tools to create it so as part of our output we are working on CAD blocks so this is an example of a really standard CAD block package and probably a lot of you recognize in this room architects download and plug these elements into composed spaces that are considered standard such as fire stairs furniture configurations and yes even the whole rooms like bathrooms so our output for coded plumbing will include CAD blocks, 3D models signage and even written guidelines for how to convince your clients so we will offer this free online toolkit as alternative solutions empowering architects for the tools to become better advocates for inclusive bathroom design and of course my CAD block is complete without some queer scale figures including iconic RuPaul so but we are continuing to focus on our protocol of creating space and conversation on designing the queer community so we are building online and IRL communities and resources for queer voices in the profession and academia we use the incubator as a space to hold events like sign making parties for queer architects protests together events, we participated in events like the Florida Union Fair which we found out about through the Newink Slack Group which was a sort of like a social justice like science fair where we sat in a booth and talked about who they were as an organization and we were able to kind of meet collaborators and talk about what was like a post-selection moment like let's all do something so that was great and we also are active on social media we have to call it like give activism and create a gift from a really angry and circulated on Twitter mostly among other people who are also angry so to be determined how effective that is we also have been working with students as our LGBTQ groups in their architecture schools the idea came from meeting with several students who are in New York for the summer and come to the incubator to meet and talk about collaboration and wanting to get involved and wanting to go back to their schools and start something similar and engage with professors and other students so we've sort of set up a Google Drive with resources and we're hoping to build more of a social network between students all over the country so one of our projects that was unexpected in the incubator that came out of it was our critical happy hour it was an event it was a series in collaboration with F Architecture, who sat just behind us in the space and it is a series of events that examine how design thinking and critical discourse can create change the idea is to create a space for conversation and the action we hosted four events in total while in the incubator engaging with people from the New Inc. section of the incubator institutions like the AA and even recent GSAP students we're hoping that this event is going to pick up as we are currently moving into our new space in our recently converted basement building F Architecture join us there and slowly building artists and collaborators back in that space our next major project we are beginning to work on is a clear architecture archive an online archive of architecture and urban planning projects on clear topics in the built environment through this project we're seeking to broaden the field of architectural discourse by both reinterpreting its history and shining a light on lesser known works and figures we're hoping to establish a queer body of work not just from queer identified designers but on projects that impact their identities and we also just received a grant so we're going to really start diving into this project and doing some public programming with Van Allen in the spring I think is when we're supposed to do it so we're really excited about that and that's us being behind the horizon is awesome this is the last lecture so yeah thanks for having me as Karen mentioned in the beginning I'm talking about a crossover and I'll talk about the physical transition of changing from one corner of the space into the other corner and how all this physical connections or things of physical proximity or the footprint effect led to all kinds of projects basically 90% of what I'm doing now came in some direct way from the GSF incubator in the past year once you start tracing it physically tracing it into the space it becomes quite an intense self-effective experience I'm an architect here graduated actually only two years ago but it feels like forever I've been working between New York and Vienna establishing more of traditional architecture practice in Vienna we're a partner we're actually making buildings and more of a speculative practice here I teach two classes here representation and also classical tools for shows about exhibition design and I also have a new name because it's hard to pronounce and right now I'm running under bus but we'll see it's easier to say and I'm doing a bunch of sort of consulting and freelance projects under that name based on the incubator so to start with a zoom in I've seen it sitting in the back Q-Space was right in front of me my table is usually messy and you see a sort of table that I used for my building and for pinning up and there's a printer up there which was extremely useful so I think the first thing about incubator was the physical infrastructure space allowing you as a young architect to place your things to have a fixed desk not kind of a co-working thing where you have to check in and be at a different desk every day to really kind of inhabit that physical space and that really allowed me to develop these architecture projects in the past year this is one a small community center in North Austria that is still not under construction that's been gone for four years hopefully next year you know the good thing is when you work on something for so long you can draw it over and over again so this is sort of the fifth iteration I've started to just hand sketch over the glance so it's an ongoing process but the other project that kind of started later it's more of a corporate nature it's an office building in Upper Austria and it's an office building for a factory that one is actually a start construction for September so that's really exciting as a webcam that I can go on and it's just a pile of dirt but it's really exciting to work and it's basically it was interesting to be working on an office within an incubator because this is quite a conservative company trying to convince them of the most basic ideas that actually may be running into people kind of the point of this lecture that this is a positive effect was a hard sell actually in this world there are machine building machine building company and they really wanted their own offices they wanted to close the door they wanted as little interaction as little distraction as they saw it as possible from other people and so creating kind of an open courtyard things that seem really straightforward creating kind of a social zone creating a space where people can meet but we did it and now the building is this is a view of the eight years and so this is I'm just sending an email and the email said there is a you should apply for the future active platform it was one of many emails I have to say that we have to do this but I don't know how actually it was past the deadline past midnight I just moved together a project it was to set an open call for ideas a European network I don't know if you know what it is but I'm going to just send it in it was an online form, pretty easy to apply then somehow the email that I got accepted into that program landed into my sand folder and the team called me really excitedly oh my gosh you're in but it hadn't been perfect on my year I went to Ljubljana where I was born in last February which is conveniently just a time when I quit my job at the Met so I had time to go and travel and I spoke there that deals with this kind of matchmaking conference so you were supposed to have a match with local European institutions and they would invite you to come to their festival or event or lecture and they would fly you into the country and you would be able to do something there so this was an organization I did in Graz where in a storefront in the house that I took to which is it was based on the city of Femeraldi and it was really just spending a whole weekend something in a way without too much there were almost no drawings that proceeded that it was kind of a very intuitive process and really ripping off that idea that architecture can be almost nothing and then anchored by a very solid real marble column in the middle so the movable objects, the things that are usually in a space became too heavy to move because nobody could pick this up it was too heavy so the walls were actually the Femeraldi in very strange way we had a collaboration with a young Italian firm called Amore agency they did a performance in a space and this was just one out of this I went to Christina and I led a workshop there at the National Museum which was really interesting because there was no information to be had before I arrived and they were opening in February 2018 and I thought there would be a collection to work with but it turned out not to be the case or the guy with the key to the collection never appeared so we worked with the building itself worked with a bunch of young architecture students from Pristina came up with some ideas for how to mention the museum experience and she works at this very high New York level but this experience in New York all over the world museums are starting with these questions that it could be kind of a model or interesting to consult beyond the New York level but sort of consult in places that really have questions and issues and here there were really customers trying to build a national identity as a place so this museum was a very important function the media was extremely interested and everyone wanted to talk to us and learn about this workshop that we were doing so it was an amazing experience and then that was an indirect effect of that but through the people that I met at the platform I heard about the Biennale call for Stimiglia for the year 2018 and also got selected to participate as one of the authors in the student contribution so this is a work in progress, the topic is about water I can't say too much about it yet but this all came out of just one little email this is me talking to F architecture on the couch just in the back they they you see the room in the presentation this is where we also gave one of the incubator presentations this is where I pitched my class my seminar to her so in a way who knows, maybe it would have happened maybe it wouldn't have, you don't really know but it definitely was a chance to talk to her in person say, hey, I have this idea for a seminar and then yes, after the conversation it's actually something I'm still working on it's a comic book about what it means to be a professional woman and just a bias hopefully I will complete it one day I'm still working I keep collecting good situations so it's almost like a form of entertainment something happens and I'm like, oh, I can draw it and it feels like drawing is a good way to deal with it because if you would write it down it would just sound like a very epic long boring story and then this is me talking to Julia Kagelsinski she is the director of New England and I always are with her because she seemed cool and I was talking to her about my project and I had already at the G7 I was about museums from working at the Met I got all these ideas about thinking about exhibitions and analysing them and trying to understand how the exhibition process really works but this is the point last year when I was quite lost honestly I was like, yeah, I have all these ideas I need sort of a structure an infrastructure to do it and I need deadlines because otherwise I won't do anything and she said well, there is this my foundation grant that we just got and that was a month before the deadline so I was like, oh, cool and I didn't even see it as something that I would apply for but then I was seen and even other people who were at the school and Dr. David they all kind of were like, yeah, you should apply and so that led to this a few months later wow, I'm an in-meter but I mean you know, it just basically was a summary my application was basically a summary of ideas that I had collected in the past year that just have incubated which was very much about sort of the backend of the museum process so you can sort of simplify it in the kind of figure of the checklist, which is kind of the piece of information that you get from a curator when they when introduced to the exhibition and so the problem for the exhibition designers is that from this list, so there's something that happens between the list and the exhibition itself that the exhibition designer is in charge of and it took this sort of magical process that you both when the doctor really knows what exactly you're doing you're kind of like taking information from the list putting it into different software and then at some point you create a plan and present it after the curator so what I've been doing now is really really breaking up that process step by step into the elements that are visible, the presentations and the elements that are invisible and all the actors that are involved with it because obviously not just the curator the exhibition is one of just a bunch of different depending of course on the scale the exhibition and the complexity but there can be dozens of different collaborators, obviously the construction team at the end, that sort of your two pinpoints you know the curator and the construction at the very end, the conservators all these people and kind of mapping the data the data set to come out of that so each person that is involved in the exhibition adds more information to your checklist and so the idea of what I'm prototyping and what I'll demo there's a demo day in January and what I'll demo in January is a prototype of that parametric checklist and so this is defining these pinpoints where there's this no adequate software at the moment or people just waste time to simplify very efficiently working with this and so this one's kind of very technical but actually the challenge is more human than technical it's more about you know if you think of the castle workshop more about connecting existing technology with those smaller institutions and helping them kind of use it in a very productive way and the idea is that this kind of back end processes would also form the front end because once you have that information in auto it would be also much easier to create a VR environment or a map or things for digital apps online things that will just come out of one centralized information model yeah this is me right now in this space quite happy these two other two women and I'm working with a girl she's she's actually not that she's so proud but somebody with my student connected me to her because she was at Waterloo and then she invited me she works with me which is great and you are him in this space yesterday so the effort keeps expanding there are new connections that's it, thank you we want to give a chance I think first for any questions for the audience but then I would like to invite people so to come up afterwards and talk more informally so I probably will resist not having a question but I will not resist the fact that for kind of quick observation that I think what we've heard today I think it's worth stating is I'm incredibly diverse in a range of different projects and possibilities for graduates from G-SAP young new modes of practice you know and we've heard about research lab, a non-profit several commission based firms but they're also kind of blurring the lines between commissions and other projects some curatorial and branch based projects even an activist organization some started at G-SAP and continued at something like the incubator or at least after school and some are continuing to work out at G-SAP either at the incubator or uptown or both in different ways and I think all are kind of incredibly interesting and productive and I think could cause us to think about practice and think about what it means to to be working in architecture culture in the city so I won't I have a couple of questions in my head I'm not going to ask but I'll go to the state I'll turn it over to the audience anyone who has a question that they want to ask a group of all or of one of the individual presenters I'll start a question since I know who it was to be and it was somebody who wrote the question was so amazed to see like we've been up in the past year it's really amazing and inspiring I guess that question is kind of like more also designed like how like in the design in taking your practice as a project and as a design project like the design of new financial models is kind of I think one of the biggest exciting and challenging things and in design we don't really learn that it's kind of like one of the things for the real world so it's interesting in how you approach those in terms of new structures, new like types like the subscription model and the things online that is becoming kind of relevant but how things like that or other mechanisms of funding makes the conception I'd say that maybe we learned a lot that something we could be really helpful for because I think QCES probably obviously we're an out of profit and after several conversations with mentors there it was like well are we like do we really want to like do a career all the time or like go and so we like became an LLC all the time so I think it's a lot of trial and error as we said just got our first real money grant and that's new and that was really just a matter of like looking off from Augustine being like a plethora of this plethora and so yeah I think right now we're still kind of granted that and have other thoughts but I'm interested in learning thinking of new ways to sort of like grow as an organization sort of like a lot of resources I think I never really in leading GSAP how funding is such a key part of all the projects we're doing but I don't know if that's something we could have been taught here in class I tend to think not but I think there is a hustle that has to happen that everyone got to GSAP obviously you don't have a hustle in but it's a continuation of this at least for our project we we're not entirely sure that we're going to raise our 18 million we can tell you we're constantly outfitting corporations foundations the state, government, individuals and it's going to just be kind of continuing to have that flexibility of seeing what comes through and how adaptable we have to be at those moments I think we have a lot to learn from you yeah very crazy this is something that we have been doing really in my case that I work as an independent designer is very precarious so I sustain my practice through teaching but teaching is not only like a financial income but also it's a space where I'm like exploring and expanding those research interests that I have so through that and then I was invited to to an event here to talk about like new practices and I was like telling the students that I check the grant like everyone this is kind of like having a problem like okay, which is the next grant so like through teaching and grants that's the way I survive I guess yeah it's similar here I think you have to become really comfortable with not knowing what's happening on term because again when I quit you know 10 months ago I had one project but then I think by one thing is that this assignment is really reachable, thank you I'm still this sound second round I'm still learning a lot and I agree that I'm not sure if the school necessarily people need more of that in school when they grow it's also an argument for everyone and it's something you're very aware of by drafting, you know this practice you have to do it but I think the short uncomfortable aspect is what this is like now you have to come learn that but it's helpful to position yourself as an expert in something even though you're not and people will come to you and if you, you know, I really spend probably weeks this year negotiating contracts and I made a lot of mistakes and I haven't had so much just negotiating a lot of contracts like for one project we did a special assignment that they should have and they just wanted to work on one more and you know they spent a lot of time but they didn't care because it was not in the contract so I think it's this world self running won't be the first this problem is what we want I don't know about Tomas, but we'll see about that I was going to add like the, I feel like when graduating from G7 you're going to like trajectories to go work for the firm and you leave and you start sort of like low and like learning to assign value to your work and yourself like it was something we learned in that incubator space which I think why incubators are so special like don't make the architecture they need to hear so the incubator is like more up here like I'm sorry I'm just going to ask about that what do you mean and it's like, you know we with someone from the G7 we're like oh well, you should be coaching it this way like your work is all yours, you should be pitching you used to mention pitch and we didn't know what a pitch deck was graduating from G7 we're like, you mean our slides? and so those are the kind of things to learn like learning between being architects, watching the artists around us and watching the people that were like legitimately the incubator like raising like millions of dollars for their tech startups that was like a really interesting confidence of people and sort of being able to be like I'm going to borrow that or like I can learn from that I think was a good way to learn I was going to say I spent a year in the tech incubator on another product that I didn't talk about and I think that they take away from that was pitch all and I remember the first few emails and you know you checked your email and they were back and I realized it's just about volume send a lot and then maybe you'll get one response or two responses but I think that's part of it it's just keep sending things out there and you'll ultimately get responses now I wanted to expand on your idea about the role of G7 incubator I think it is a very important platform to establish that urban connection so I was like working for a year at home and now I'm like at the incubator having this meeting with like cultural agents presenting what I'm doing here in the feedback so I think like establishing those links is like very important in order to advance your practice bring the level of discussion to the next step and like figure it out which is your audience how are you going to address your audience which is the format and so on so I think it is an important space I don't know what is going to happen in the future as the new it is going to be renovated but for me and for all of us I guess it is it is important it is an important space of course I will stay it's our our host and leader I'm going to ask a very maybe it's a very stupid question but sorry, not a stupid question but it's like what it means to have enough space on Bowery I think because you are there you have become an amazing drawing about all the connections that have been in physical space and trying to go back to architecture what it means to have a real office space I mean probably connected with a romantic idea of the architecture studio most of the people renovated and still going to work for someone came in that space and it's true that for me as the manager and for them we all and David that we are all learning from each other but I want to know what's your expectations or your idea before coming in what it means to be in Manhattan in terms of what it means to not be broken and still be in the island I don't know if you have any thought about it for me it's a luxury to be very close to the new museum like you cannot work for more hours a five minute break you can go to the museum look for your romance mission and forget about your daily life problems but I do have to say that I have some contradictions or some comparatory feelings because we have the Bowery vision on one side but then if you work for five minutes suddenly everybody is having cocktails at three o'clock on a Monday so I'm also those creations it makes it very interesting but also questions how do we manage to be in New York I don't know at work live on work and survive with all those spaces of execution that I was talking about and it's like when you're like making the structures of power continue but I think it's a very nice space for me it's funny you said specifically called out being on the Bowery my first studio project at Columbia was the Bowery this was in 2001 and there were still five gas stations on the Bowery that fancy $15 cocktail bar just opened next to the Bowery mission and it was just a radically different place so every time I walk by I still see building circuit 2001 and remember what classmates work on a project so it's kind of a little nostalgia coming back to that space but where I'm particularly excited about the incubator is our project had been hosted in what you could call an early incubator it's a collective preservation organization and it was a wonderful space to be in but it lacked an urgency and that was driving me nuts and I think that the one thing I like about the space that we're in is there's the urgency of powering a frenetic element to it but also the space itself but all of you, you're all like there to do this and you're getting stuff done and it's a fast moving and I think that's the most exciting and appealing thing about the space in general this isn't a space that's quiet and doesn't run thing but when you kind of look over and run it's not going to work fast so I think that kind of energy in this space is really a big attractor we cannot put urgency and I think you mentioned deadlines what's your take on the fact that you can be there for a year when you're kicked out you're incubated you're free to leave but clearly I was not yet at the end of the year well I think that's part of the same answer as with Jesse where you have to kind of get uncomfortable without knowing what's happening in a year and I'm definitely I'm thinking should I be just like an infinite incubated person that will always hop from one to the next and next is Nula and I'm there I mean I think it's a new people like that I think there is a whole crowd of people who just live from one fellowship to the next and when does it stop it's also in terms of the range of age it goes until 15 I was thinking also now I kind of have an office an active service but I don't really have a physical space so I do my own space that I designed is that even an office because it's sort of very different from the traditional notion which a lot of my friends in Vienna are doing they find a space they set up they kind of create an identity with a space and set up the friend images that I play on the wall and everything is very thoughtful and then they sit there and they wait for projects but it works out usually but it's a different approach than to just run all this without really having your own space I brought my dad and I'm really proud of that and he was like you have dismantles so you just have to be comfortable with that in between stage maybe it's changing the way that ideas and projects are being produced compared to the European model what all these new spaces are bringing is probably a new way of experimenting new way of producing projects and also I think that the question that Jessica seems very important because that's something that we as managers travel to see where we find resources to these people to fund their project it's very complicated because all the other creative practices like film, theater, art or even the tech industry they have that so well organized I mean there are people who work in tech here I mean not the one that is going to be built the one that the real states is going to jump into what happened with all these practices and how in the middle I think that's that's the big question and the person I thought is the incubator is really a mixture between what an academic, what's the relationship with the school, but also how what is the fuel, what is the funding for all these expanded practices it's true that we are defining every year because we have an input for kind of a new environment you mentioned that besides learning from each other you said you know watching what other people are doing there was also the idea of mentorship that was mentioned and I was wondering are there formal practices within the incubator for mentorship of both the members and what does that look like and just if we could speak to maybe that a little bit and viewing they have the staff all hold off the showers and I think for that like actual members you had there's more of a structure like working kind of but I'm really allowed to go to there it's kind of an exit in between so you can kind of get entered as much as you want to it sounds like force upon you but those sessions were really helpful and we went to a bunch of like information sessions and kind of showed our faces and did as much as we could and it was really helpful I mean it's true but you don't only have access to the infrastructure that we saw it's incredible but also our Giza members have access to the new professional development program you know information and mentorship and advice from business model to storytelling to funding etc also in our size I start like inviting people to host some kind of office hours some of them are more general depends on the needs of the people and I think that I don't know it's interesting to see that they incubated something in between I think David said before like between all people are already outside the school the alumni network and also the student personally like me being in the middle I all the time work between Francesca it's running services and it's my link and my connection with the current students we're right now sending them to the student to see if they want to come and talk to our members again this is a trial we're working on it we don't know how it's going to go and also even before she's the one that is connecting the project with the whole alumni network so somehow the incubator connects different points of the Giza and I think that's incredible yeah two specific things you know just like everyone's saying but two specific things we're experimenting with this year and our spirit of trying out different things as in learning as we go is kind of flipping it a little bit having the incubator members hold office hours for current students so thinking you know you guys are already raising millions of dollars starting your own firm creating an activist organization you know doing amazing projects our students that are here now at Uptown school should be coming to you from internship and so we're going to try to offer that and we also know that there's an incredible network of GESAP alumni who have been doing this expanded modes of practice before the tournament today was popular and we're trying to bring some of them into the mentors as well and one thing my own take on it is that there are a lot of other incredibly successful programs for like teaching you how to start up a business or teaching you how to use tech in new ways and we're trying to think of what is particularly unique about what we could offer as an educational institution and that's why I personally have shyed away a little bit from saying like we need to offer this professional development we need to teach our students there are a lot of other if a project is coming in and needs those things I would probably recommend they maybe go somewhere else but if they want to be engaged in this hybrid between the academics and the profession if they want to give back if they want to be in this creative community where maybe there isn't already an existing business model for it so it doesn't make sense to look at previous business plans that's open for the people that's also part of it is the members are helping each year to help push it a little more in one direction okay so I think anyone who's you're all of these diverse business and still interested thank you for staying please may you come up and informally ask questions thank you thank you for staying and thank you everyone for the great talks thank you