 I'm Caroline Payson. I'm the director of education of the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, and I'm thrilled to welcome you here tonight. This, for those of you who are new to this space, is the Cooper Hewitt Design Center, where we're housing all of our programs until we reopen in the fall of 2014. So we hope you not only continue to attend these programs, but we also have youth programs, family programs, and programs for toddlers. We're also hoping that you get so used to coming here that you come back downtown when we reopen in 2014 with 60% more gallery space, better circulation, and a whole new visitor experience. So we're getting close to those plans, too, and are super excited. So far, we've had almost 13,000 attendees at the programs we've been doing here at the center in the year that we've been open. And we'd like to thank Target for funding the center and funding the majority of the programs that are here. Tonight's talk with John Reddick and architect Jack Travis is the second in Cooper Hewitt's new Harlem-focused series. Over the next few months, we'll be welcoming designers, architects, artists, and other practitioners whose work engages and involves the Harlem community. The series is curated and led by John Reddick, an architectural consultant and Harlem historian. And they're designed to be a way to highlight the work that's happening here. And we want to talk about design in the widest way possible, whether it's landscape design, architecture, construction, rooftop gardens, and urban woodland restoration. And so we hope you join us for the additional talks that will be happening. We have one coming up in June as well. We really want to explore the way design impacts and affects this neighborhood. And are grateful for Target for funding this as well. Tonight's event is being live webcast and filmed, and will be available on our website at cooperhewitt.org. So if you want to recommend this to some of your friends who weren't able to make it, that would be great. I'd like to take a moment to introduce John. John Reddick is active in architectural preservation and has written on Harlem's architectural and cultural history. He's a graduate of Yale School of Architecture. And his love of architecture, African-American culture, and history have been conveyed in numerous occasions through tours and the articles he's provided, not only for Cooper Hewitt, but for places like the Studio Museum and El Museo de Barrio, the Whitney and the Biography Channel, and New York's Historic District Council and other institutions. So please join me in welcoming John, who will talk about our guests. Thank you, Carl. Well, welcome. I've lived in Harlem since 1980. And we've seen a lot of changes. And one of the things I saw feel in all the changes that we've seen, that there's been a lot of engagement by people in the neighborhood of various professions that not only influenced the changes in Harlem, but have also influenced some global look at urban space and the ideas of urban interaction. And so I'm delighted to have with us tonight Jack Travis, who is a contemporary of mine. Maybe he's probably a little younger than me, but I'll make him a contemporary for the moment. But Jack is an architect. He teaches at FIT and Pratt. And he's been a long time member of Community Board 10. And looking at a professional career that can really engage the community and look at design in ways that not only educates the community, but raises the bar in terms of the community interaction and how that can impact the physical environment. So I was very pleased. I love the particular building that we're going to talk about tonight at the Harlem Hospital. I don't know if you have been up there yet, but it's a signboard of really this historic interaction of African-American artists during the WPA period. And so it brings out, I think, of touch-tomb when they glimpse behind the wall and saw great things and made the world kind of see that. And I feel like you've accomplished in your design in many ways that interaction of making something very public that the public hadn't seen for a long time and really forced the issue. It's called the mural pavilion, this building in honor of those murals. And it's made a very public statement. So Jack, if you want to come forward, I'm really glad to have Mr. Travis here tonight. And I first became aware of Jack when he did a project for the Armani, one of Armani's first stores in New York on Fifth Avenue. And I said, who's this young architect? He was a fabulous interior. He's gone to some other marvelous interiors. But he really had that, even now, you can see he's very dapper. And it's kind of really an aesthetic sense that really bridges the African-American culture, but also looks at the African influences and the past and brings them forward in a very contemporary way. So I'm glad to have this opportunity to kind of talk about some of that tonight. And we have a loop we're going to look at first of the panels being installed. So we'll run that for you to start. Well, that's what we're looking at now. First of all, I want to say thank you for having me to Cooper Hewitt Museum and to John and apparently to Target. To begin with, what I want to do is play a short video, three minutes, and then have a short three minute loop on myself and my work and then start the presentation. I was graciously invited to this meeting today on my father's involvement in creating and allowing for the creation of the moral pursuit of happiness. I have been made aware of an effort to preserve the mural in its present setting, which currently resides in the corridor of the old nurse's residence. In and of itself, this is a tribute to the artist and the artwork and is a testament to the curing spirits of all those people endeavoring to keep alive this historical work. However, I will be so bold as to submit a few thoughts regarding some of the difficulties my father encountered in obtaining permission to depict the African-American subject matter of any kind and the compromising consequences of doing so. At various times of my life, my dad would recount some of the obstacles he faced in executing pursuit of happiness in particular and from the outset, the consensus as seen by one of the hospital administrators was that depiction of black subject matter was not something you saw in artwork of that period and therefore was not to be seen at Harlem Hospital. This position taken by the hospital administrator flew in the face of what art was all about. My dad stated that the man was so arrogant and opinionated regarding this issue, he suggested they meet later to discuss the problem at length. And by the way, would it be OK to bring someone to take notes? The administrator agreed to this. The result of the next recorded meeting was that if the mural pursuit of happiness inclusive of its African-American content should be denied, the notes of that meeting would be released to the New York Times for all to read. Because of the racist overtones inherent in the objections of doing the mural, the administrator yielded to my father's demands. Hence, pursuit of happiness was coerced into being. You can be sure there was some consternation on the part of the administrator who could and I believe did have a moderating effect on what should have been a total victory. My father did not fully elaborate on this aspect of the battle for artistic freedom. He did state, however, the location of the mural was inadequate. To clarify what I believe my father's intentions were in fighting for this mural aside from the African-American subject matter, I will read an excerpt from a paper written by him entitled The Position of Art in Present-day Society as I see it. And I quote, we see how the misconception of art and its place in society is influenced in its development. But while many of us might not be able to furnish our homes with antique or period furnishings, we have not decided that furniture is something not intended for us. But in art we have allowed a lack of chronological knowledge and knowledge of technique in art to grow. Then have accepted them to indicate a lack of aesthetic ability to appreciate things so far outside our reach. The fallacy of the idea is illustrated very often by people whose opportunity for visual participation in art has been very limited, as indicated by such statements as I don't know anything about it, but I know whether I like it or not. This attitude of itself impeded the development of a better understanding of art by its indifference and a lack of facilities for expression and visual participation in art. I end of quote, my father, if my father could be here today, I think he would clearly see an opportunity to bring pursuit of happiness out of its present, cloistered environment to the hearts and minds of the Harlem community where visual participation would no longer be impeded. Mr. Hayes, he lived to be like a hundred. He lived a really long, he had a very long life. But he was part of the WPA, interesting, if we kind of look at today and how things are kind of transitioning, during the WPA was a period where the systems had failed and in the world of art, they started looking at culture for the everyday man. So if you go and post offices and other buildings of that time period, you'll start to see the mailman delivering mail to all sorts of people and the images and all that. And so for African Americans, it was a chance to show our lifestyle and our history. And when they wanted to do this, they met an objection, the group of artists when they wanted to do that. And it was a team of these artists working together. And to fight for that, which is the story in the painting, they start in Africa, they look at traditional methods of healing related to Africa, and they move into the 20th century, moving from the South to the North. And all this is conveyed in a series of murals at the time were considered political. There were other murals in the hospital that were showed the blacks as surgeons and all that. And that was seen, deemed acceptable. But this departure about looking at black traditions were really being challenged. And so the artists for them to pull this off had to really go public. He mentions the New York Times article, which really was significant and allowing them to portray what they saw as their own true history. So for the 20th century, this was not only just as murals in the building, this was what kind of breaks through. Because only in Harlem, they have this ability to leverage their numbers and their history that push this agenda forward. So they're significant in a lot of different ways. It was on the strength of that fervor that you found in Mr. Hayes that we focused our intent on what the design concept should be for the work of the architecture and the interior design. I wanna play one more video if I could. My name is Jack Travis, and I was born in Doulton, Louisiana. I practice architecture here in the South Bronx. My main focus has been over my career, interior design, even though I've trained as an architect. Design is the creative direction that one has or takes that actually connects with one's life purpose. It's the artist and the designer's role to make things happen so that we can see a different world. We can see a different way of approach. As an environmental designer, we start with the plan. Often we start with the two-dimensional layout because function is very important. And we try to understand basic relationships of how people live, but even those become cultural. So how much space does one need? What is the proximity of space for the parents to the children? Where is the communal space? And when does the public private space begin from the streetscape? All of those things are very, very cultural. So as an African-American architect, I am searching for a definitive aesthetic that not only defines who I am, but also offers the world a different viewpoint of a more positive aspect of living. I would say that my goal is to create an aesthetic or add to an American palette of aesthetics that comes from an African or an Afrocentric or a black base. I always tell people that in environmental design, there is no definitive black aesthetic. Not that it's not there, it's hidden in plain view. We are so connected and we are so transformed as African-Americans. But what is it that binds us as black people worldwide? It's our African-ness. So for me, I go back to the continent, I go back to Komet, I go back to Egypt, North Africa, and then I go back to Zimbabwe in South Africa. I want to know more about the historical transformations of creation of architecture and design from the continent. But when I think about blackness and I want to create something, that line becomes something else. It certainly not straight and the movement and the motion can change at any point in time. When I draw lines now, it's about how I feel. It's not about how I think. So I always find that I'm the most creative and I feel the best about my work when I go back to who I am and I try to bring that forward in a positive way. We continue to do theoretical investigations, show our work and to align with other people that do the same and we hope that something will emerge from what we do. That's the goal. Okay, so that's an introduction basically on the background of the murals and how they energize and charge us to approach the design concept for the hospital and a little bit about me and who I am. So what I want to do, and I wouldn't mind if you had questions if we had a little banter as we go through the slides so that everybody's not listening to me. Opinion. That's true and that's good. That's good. So tonight I want to talk about basically three things. My work and what drives the energy. I want to talk about the hospital itself and that project which is a series of projects under one project had and then talk about the murals specifically and then on that note. So the idea of a black aesthetic in the environmental design disciplines is the beginning or point. So I was looking through a magazine a couple of three years ago and I saw this ad for I think Chrysler car or something like that but I was reading this information and I thought that's exactly how I feel about the kind of approach that I'm taking now to environmental design specifically architecture and interior design because it is about a cultural directive. When I look at projects that are slated for this community and for other black communities worldwide it's not so much a problem with the fact that there's talent out there that can actually execute projects. There's not a problem with people in the community who have the ability to build projects and there's certainly not a problem with programming and actually having projects done. What I think is the biggest problem is an identity, a directive that tells children that they count, that tells people that there is something about what we do that is embedded in their cultural paradigm for who they are and I think that that's what's missing most often and so I focused on that over the last 15 years of my progress in my career. So tonight we're gonna talk about three things basically. I'm making a more visible black, keeping it black and making it blacker and black people six stories high. So let's start with making a more visible black, right? If I were to talk to you about black music or black dance or art, I mean all of us can get an idea or have some sense in our head that there is such a thing. We can at least discuss it but when I talk about architecture there seems to be a ghost in the room. I usually ask people how many can they be two or three black architects outside of New York City? Almost no one can. Maybe there's an uncle, maybe somebody knew someone growing up almost all the time they're male but there's really a few people who can name more than one or two black architects, right? So architecture, interior design, interior decorating, interior architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning has been sort of absent and it's proliferation of a design aesthetic that has a black or African base, right? And so about 10 years ago I found this in a magazine at Pratt Institute. Prattler is a publication on the left side of things but I thought that this was again very telling in the fact that who says what architecture is and what architecture should be about. And it's been a directive of mine ever since I can actually remember that architecture again is for people, right? And so it's always been that way for me first. It's been less about a formal investigation, even a spatial investigation as a primary directive. It's been about how people use space and how people move through space and how people can actually better themselves and maintain themselves within the space, right? And so at the end of this article it basically talks about a true architecture and what it needs to be not only for people who come from my neighborhood but as a directive for, as we go forward, the population. I think very few people know that in 1960 there were three billion people on this planet and one billion of those were Chinese. The first time we clocked one billion people on this planet officially was 1803. And at that time people thought that there were more people living than had lived in the entirety before that in history. But just 130 years later, 1930, there were two billion and 1960 were three. We now have seven billion people. So what happened between 1960 and 19, 2012? Population. Population explodes, right. Population and population. Exactly, so if you look you'll see that in 1977, 1988, 1999 and then in 2011 we increased billion fold each one of those 10 or 11, 12 years, right? And so now the question is what does architecture, what is architecture's role in the larger society, right? And it really has to go back and be reflected on people. A large part of that population, that new population are people of color. And so again, this cultural dynamic along with this earth-centered dynamic, a sustainable green paradigm, really becomes now very important for us to look at. So why a black aesthetic? What drives my business? And my directive is three basic premises. Children need to see faces that look like their own, right? Working and existing and creating and building their communities. Then the question, what if Africans came here as immigrants and not as slaves? And then black architecture does exist, as you'll see. But under so many layers it's hidden in plain view. Just seem to your point about young people seeing the black image. When I was growing up, if we saw a black kid in a commercial, like a Rice Krispies, it could be the most mundane commercial. We would run around the house and tell our sisters or brothers and mom, dad, look, my God, there's a black kid in a Rice Krispies ad or whatever. I mean, it really moved us. And after that, I used to think, if it meant that much to me to see myself, how much did it mean to me all those years that I never saw myself? I can describe the euphoria about the seeing, but I can't describe the oppression of not seeing myself. So I think that's a good point that you make in terms of, there's images out there, there's images that define our culture. And in America that's a melting pot of everybody, how much can we do to make sure that inclusion's there, that everyone feels comfortable? Exactly, and I have Netflix, and we all do, and we all have YouTube. And then you start watching these movies over the last 50 years or so, and you see just how absent we are, or how matter of fact, or how nonchalant. So a lot of these kids in this modern society, and they have all these computers and all of this access to imagery, they don't see, first of all, themselves a lot, and they see a lot of negative imagery. And so what happens is things keep perpetuating, and they don't sort of let up. They sort of, they adjust, but basically the same sorts of things continue. So in the last 15 years, I have evolved what I consider to be 10 principles of a black cultural design directive. And if you look at the first four, they really have nothing to do with design, right? Economy, simplicity, ease of construction, and ease of maintenance, those are four conditions that must take place almost in every black community worldwide. There's not one single black community that I can tell you about that is devoid of a sense of, a high sense that economy has to perpetuate anything that happens on a major scale. Ease of maintenance is very important because once something has happened, if it's not maintained again, and it runs down and people sort of like, perpetuate that sort of situation as well. The middle three have to do specifically and directly with the cultural dynamic of blackness, spirituality, heritage, and something that I call duality or irony of the condition, and you might wanna talk about that. And it is about being two different people. W.D. Du Bois and the Souls of Black Folks talked about it. A number of other people have also talked about it. But it's this idea of being two people in one to exist in a Western society which all of us find ourselves being. It's not that all of us aren't multiple people in order to get along. We have a business side, a business head. We have a creative side, a creative head. We have a head when we come home to our families as opposed to being out with strangers that we don't know, yes. But for African-Americans, what I'm saying is that there is this other way of being that has a cultural connection that has to be either curtailed at best or denied at worst in situations that are outside of our community, particularly when they warrant advancement, either financially or politically. And then the last three are three of the 10 that really have to do with design, right? This idea of earth nurturing. It's a natural situation with the way that Africans and people of African descent build on this planet. A strong indoor, outdoor relationship. We are front space people. I moved to Harlem in 1994 and one Sunday I was walking out of the street and I heard a policeman on the bullhorn say this and I swear to God it's true. He said, okay, all the cars that are triple parked, you must move, right? Triple parked because there's no way to stop double parking. And why in this community, and why is double parking so, so, so important? And why do people cross 125th Street like it's urgent through the traffic and then get on the other side and have no place to go? Right? And you see these things constantly or you see where the basketball court is in a projects and when it's next to the streetscape, those kids claim that space. The young males claim that space and nobody elderly, nobody with any children anything is gonna get any kind of connection into it. It's because of that streetscape. So as people are passing by, whether they're walking or driving and people are doing activity, there's a natural connection for us to that streetscape. So when you're planning a situation for a residential, you have to plan first for the elderly, then you have to plan for the children and then you have to give basically the rest of it to the younger males but you have to understand the relationship of what drives that energy in those kids. And then finally, this intense use of color, texture and pattern. I was at a AIA convention in 2000 in Philadelphia and Ricardo Legaretta, a Mexican architect, won the gold medal, which is the highest design award that one could win from the AIA. And as he's showing his work and he's Mexican, as he's showing his work, all of these buildings with color are coming up, like purples and pinks and reds and there's an audience of about 22,000 architects, mostly white male. And there's sort of this like subtle hush over the rope and then he realizes and he says in a pause, he says, you know, we Mexicans, we are irresponsible with color and the whole room broke up, you know. And I thought, I gotta go talk to him because I can tell him that Africans, we're more irresponsible with color. Color, pattern and texture in an intense overtone is something that is vibrant. One day, I was driving down on Lenox Avenue and if you can't hear me, raise your hand because I'm terrible with these things. I was driving down Lenox Avenue and I saw the Schomburg in the distance and at the time, there was an Indebelli show, this tribal group in South Africa that the women paint these houses, these beautiful, rich colors, almost like in a geometric abstract pattern and then with a lot of literal interpretations thrown into them. But someone had draped on the front of that stairwell, an Indebelli pattern and I could see it from about 10 blocks away, driving up and I thought, you know, that's what Harlem needs to look like. Harlem needs to look like that and if Harlem looked like that, our children maybe they wouldn't be wearing their pants halfway off their asses up and down the street. It's this visual dynamic that constantly says, you know, that's our most powerful sense. It says, who you are, what you're about and whether or not you count and that's the way these kids take it. There are other factors, yes, but the visual dynamic is very, very important. So here are the 10 principles that sort of drive the force and in environmental design, there are basically six areas of interpretation, there's artwork, embellishment, applied motif, ornament, form and space. It's usually those first four that as African-Americans we can manipulate. The power of the last two economically, politically, et cetera, become huge and almost outside of the realm of what most African-Americans can actually and Africans worldwide can actually, without great assistance, get our hands and heads around. So I was watching No Better Blues the other night, Spike Lee's third movie, fourth movie. And if you look just at the cinematography of that movie by Wynne Thomas, the set designer and Ernest Dickerson, who is the cinematographer, there is a black aesthetic in that movie that in my opinion, Spike Lee was never, ever able to reach in any of the others. But if you look at how that movie was shot and the ward robes, et cetera, the costumes, just an incredible black aesthetic with this background of the brownstones, the neighborhood at a very, what I call, Eurocentric sort of setting. But in that Eurocentric setting, we are able to make an Afrocentric meaningful place and space and that's what those first four are doing. So my thrust is that we look at form, we look at space and we take it to that next level. So in the past, I've had opportunities to work with a number of people, starting with Giorgio Armani, who gave me my first job and started my office. And Spike Lee came after that because I had worked for Giorgio Armani. Yeah, exactly, it's all connected, right? And we did Spike Lee's first brownstone in Brooklyn. We did five of Wesley Snipes's eight houses and as we know, he has a ninth house but we didn't do that. But we did five projects for him and this was the very first one. This was the LA Resonance when he was making four movies a year. It was a great time and he allowed us a lot of leeway to actually try to look at again this idea of an aesthetic. We also worked on John Saunders's house in Eastings on Hudson. John is a sports commentator for ABC News and for ESPN. And we've done a number of interior projects in Harlem and in New York City in general all the way to Brooklyn and Staten Island as well as Queens. This is one that's on 110th Street, 100 St. Nicholas. And it's a... And this one, I see like there really is form in here. We can see the curved wall and some of the aesthetic you talk about. Now we don't see as much color. What was the client's feeling on... Well, the idea here was to explore form and to make a hut, to make this one center place from his living area, a place of gathering in his dining area. So the dining area was where he said that he'd like to meet and greet his friends and they sit around and they talk. His assistant pastor for my wife's church at the time, Dundee Holt. And that was the idea. So you're in the foreground in the living room and then you walk down this corridor, I think to your left, to the bedroom areas. But it was this centered space that had the spiritual energy that he was actually looking for, right? This is my daughter's room. She's here tonight and she gets tired of this, but let's bring it up. And so the idea was the child's place, for African American female child, what kind of place should actually be done for her sensibility. Her bed is built into the floor, floor is raised, right? And then a number of these cultural, visual, afrocentric icons are thrown throughout. But we wanted, again, to look at space and we wanted to add color by, again, embellishment. Well, we'll get the class opinion during the question and answer. Okay. And then lately we've been doing on the series of what I call Paper Architecture Studies on Black Cultural Aesthetic. And the first one starts with this idea of looking at an icon building Philip Johnson's Glass House in New Canaan, built in 1947 by the owner Philip Johnson, iconic architect. Johnson has a real connections to Harlem. Philip Johnson was gay and James Baldwin was gay. And Philip Johnson's first great love was a black entertainer named Jimmy Daniels. And later in his life he says that was his greatest love, but he didn't have the nerve in those days to follow through on it. And Jimmy Daniels went on to have, so it's interesting to see the two in that sort of a causative life with a very open house and a whole nother house on that site that wasn't as open as the Glass House. Well, exactly. I mean, you just brought it up. The idea was to take a gay black celebrity. Oh, interesting. I didn't even talk. Same program, exactly. Well, that's good. Same program, same site and do a visual dynamic of what it might look like. And this is my interpretation of Glass House from an Afrocentric aesthetic, right? And then this one you saw in the video, this is an attempt at a suburban retreat. And then this one you also saw is a passive solar house, again, integrating earth and sustainable green ideas with cultural dynamics. The house is built halfway into the earth. So all of the soil that was taken out to excavate is actually then put on the top of the house so the house is almost totally submerged in the soil, right? And this is for Phoenix, Arizona, where I went to undergraduate school. And this whole again, directive goes all the way down to the details, the materials, looking at furnishings, which we call small scale studies and architecture all the way through. And then just before we get to the hospital, this is a project that you all know of. On 116th Street, I work with Fred Schwartz, architects on the Kalahari, same kind of directive that you see in the hospital, right? So working on Harlem Hospital, no. That was, I want to say Howard Stern, it's Robert, Robert A.M. Stern. Not necessarily, I mean he talks about, when he talked about that design, he talks about sort of African influence in terms of the grid and all of that. But if you look at it from a distance, it was much stronger in his talking about it and the drawings that it ever comes through in terms of the architecture when you physically see it. So if you look at it, there's this kind of shadow pattern, but it doesn't have that kind of three dimensionality that he's talking about in terms of you really read it out from the building. Well it's interesting though on that project on 110th Street, I think it was three iterations before they actually selected an architect that actually built it, right? During the second iteration, Bernard Schumi, who was then the Dean at the School of Architecture at Columbia, came into my office and interviewed me to be on his team for the project. And he also interviewed Yolanda Daniels, who was a professor at Columbia and one other person, I think, and he chose Yolanda. And Yolanda and he did a series of some very striking images for that building. One of them was of a Jim Bay drum, which is actually on the internet, which was incredibly three dimensional and very provocative. But then I think they dropped those contestants and then they went for a third iteration and Robert A. M. Stern won. Now Robert A. M. Stern won, part of the reasons I think is because about two years before he had given a symposium at Yale, he's the Dean at Yale and currently still is. And a black female student there, she moderated this symposium on Black Culture and Design. And he was there all three days for that presentation and apparently gained a lot of information and thought that he gained enough that he could actually do this without hiring me or anybody else. He didn't hire Yolanda or Jennifer Newsom was the student's name at Yale at the time, as far as I know. Yeah, you went to that. Yeah, yeah, and he was there. I have to admit, I saw him every day and he was very focused. And so then I hear that he's doing this project. But the Kalahari is the Harlem Hospital or the two that we're involved in in the community of the two large projects, right? And then on the side here, the left side, you see the design team and our clients down at the bottom of the design team was very large, huge team, lot of meetings, a lot of discussions, very fluid team, no major hiccups. And at the end, we're all still friends and that's always good, right? So the first iteration was, you know, in our proposal when we won the project was to have these mirrors go across the entire lot, the two blocks. And we found out that we had enough money to do the new patient pavilion but it would cost about $40 million alone just to bring it to 135th Street going south. So that's still a vision of the hospital, but that's on hold right now. And here you see another perspective of it. Well, one of the things, if we could just go back really quick, you know, they're talking about, you know, make it large. I mean, as soon as I saw this, I kind of thought like, even this technology has come about in terms of how to do this, in terms of window detailing. I thought it was a very black project in the kind of sense that it was in your face in terms of something that really, you couldn't get access to before. I would take tours to see the murals. These murals were on two sides of a very narrow corridor in the old nurse's pavilion. And even though it was open to the public, if you took people there and they heard me talking in that hallway to a group of people, they would come out and make a sleeve. They were really strict about it. So I felt like it was almost a secret that now was really much this billboard. I really felt that that was an aesthetic that you wouldn't see this use in other places. So you felt it. Oh, yes, absolutely. It's that intensity that we talked about earlier. Absolutely. And so just quickly, going through the project itself from the Architects Viewpoint, H-O-K, where the Architects Richard Cervé is a good friend of mine. He was the project manager. Excellent job. Ken Drucker was the designer. Ken was a little bit hesitant of the black thing. He's a modernist, strict, modernist, very good designer. And all he wanted to do was talk about design and skin and glass and metal. And for him, it was about glass and metal and his purity. Let's talk about skin blackness comes up. Well, not for him. Yes, for us, it did. And I tried to explain him there's 147 shades somebody said of black skin. He didn't care. There was silver, there was silver polished, silver brushed, and maybe in a pinch, there was maybe, you know, bronze. But that was basically it for him. Then he sort of mellowed through the process as we all sort of talked. But here you see the bulk of the new building. And this again is one of those drawings that you have to do for the building department and for clients to get an idea of square footage and zoning to make sure that your building meets all the requirements. You can see that the top is stepped back. Another requirement of zoning. You can go six stories on the street. Then you've got to make a step back so that you get natural light, sunlight down to the streets. I believe I was working with Bill Perkins's office at the time when they were looking at this. And politically, there was a lot of push to have this visibility in terms of the art. I think on the hospital side, they were getting a lot of pressure from the elected officials. And so for a lot of the public art projects you see in Harlem, the level, particularly the ones I've been engaged in, they never would have come to fruition at that level without this real political push. And so the test in this back and forth is to try to bring quality, talent to bear, and political muscle to bear to have the physical show up in the end. Because we have these studies all the time, but to get them to fruition, there really needs to be this kind of political muscle behind it. Well, you're absolutely right, John, because what we find is if the client is not on our side, we just don't get picked. For instance, we know that HUD's doing a new building. The NBA basketball players did a new building and nobody ever called to us. Or anybody like us, doesn't have to be me, necessarily. So you're right, it definitely comes from that push. But the yellow shows our site and the whole connection between this building here, which is Ron Brown, which is an existing structure, which is a very difficult connection, and the tower that's to the south, right on the corner of 135th Street and Lenox, right? And so here's a plan of the campus. The emergency entrance is back here for all the vehicles, et cetera, and for emergency drop off. And then over on the north side, there is another emergency entrance right off the street. And then the main entrance, as we all know, is on Lenox, which is on the west side, or Malcolm X Boulevard, or 6th Avenue, whichever your preference. And then there's an atrium between the two, which I'll talk about. Our new building, the new patient pavilion here, and the existing tower. So here's another view specifically of our building itself, sitting in between the Ron Brown building and the tower building. And you see here is the atrium down below, which gives the city and the community this wonderful public space, like a public living room. And we're gonna talk about some of the interior finishes on that later. I forgot how many connections there are out there, so let me just go back one, two. And so again, quickly you can see again the level of increase just for the construction of the building. The construction of the building, the urban siting, the interior design, the landscaping, those are four distinct, different project directives, but they're all integrated. And the first iteration, of course, is the urban plan, but after that comes the architectural presence. All of the programming into the building, which was a heavy, heavy programmed building. And then the materiality of what should actually happen in the skin, and then lighting studies, material studies all the way through, structural studies, as you can see here, all part and parcel of the process. Landscape architecture, Elizabeth Kennedy, who's a black female landscape architect extraordinaire, she is a Harvard graduate, and I believe she's gonna do a talk in the summer here as well, but she was on board. And again, this whole notion of, again, an African garden, or what can we do to make a sense of outdoor space, connect to a sense of Afrocentric indoor space? And she was, again, very, very open to that, but, again, wanted to do it in her own way. And I think she was, again, very successful with a lot of her proposals. The problem is budget, right? So a lot of the things that she has envisioned and had approved for the project are not in place as of yet, but they're on board, and they will go ahead. And it was a very elaborate study of trees for the outside on Malcolm X Boulevard, trees running through the atrium, the steps going east through the building, and then out the back of the building at the emergency exit. This was actually going to be a green campus. She even found linkage and protection components that had, again, a sense of a pattern from an African print that we had been looking at. And then we looked at the kinds of plantings and things like that that we could actually incorporate that had more of an African or black cultural connection. And so again, briefly, the idea of these murals inside the project quickly became the focus, right? And so if we could actually hone in on what these artists of the WPA period did and drive a design concept directly from that for the entire building, we thought that that would be apropos. Almost everybody that I spoke to in the very beginning of this project were heads on with what these murals were about, what they needed to be, and how could we actually get them to a point where more people could actually see them. So we thought, this is a perfect beginning, right? Virtus Hayes' Pursuit of Happiness, which reminded me of something that I'd seen before in Washington, D.C. by Hilliard Robinson on the facade of the Langston Terrace Housing Project that I visited, I think, about six years before this project, which was called Up from Slavery. And I thought we should probably be doing the same thing. We should be looking at the diaspora, how we come from a place to make new places, how we come from a history to make new histories, because that's what we have to do. There's so much that most of us don't know about our history. And so if we could actually do that in the design, we thought that that would be a good thing. So we identified three places on the continent where the majority of slaves we were told came out of, so it's Angola in the south, in the middle it's the Ghana Gold Coast, as all of you know, and then on the north, still Sub-Saharan is the island of Goree, Senegal. And so these three destinations, we connected with 15 destinations in the South America, Central America, North America, and the islands. And so we tried to tell a story on that migration. Part of the big story was going to be told in the atrium between the two buildings. And so we had a vision of a heritage wall, what we called it, and on that heritage wall was going to be a scarification of material to talk about the difficulty of progress, but the actual making of progress as well. And in the floor plates themselves, we were going to choose 15 plaques, three on the upper side of the east part of the atrium, which is what we called the motherland. And then the steps we saw as the middle passage, and then once you got down going west, you came into this flat area, and those were the 15 destinations, the point of call for each of the new histories. Well, one of the things, I've been in this atrium space, it's really striking the pattern of materials that you draw from fabric, and talk about that a little bit. Yes, and first I want to give note to Bernadette Berry. She's here, can you raise your hand please? Bernadette Berry worked for me, and then she worked for HOK through the rest of the project, and the lion's share of what you see in terms of colors, patterns, textures, were all selected by this young lady. She did an incredible job, and when we charged her to go to look at Brazil, Barbados, the South in America, the Gullah Islands, these are the places we looked at, Haiti, Jamaica, et cetera, she did an almost incredible investigation and brought probably about 10 times as much stuff as we actually decided on. So she really did an incredible job. And I still feel like there's this kind of African and Western dialogue, there's this kind of modernist aesthetic in terms of frames of building, but there's this other level, a very sophisticated interpretation in terms of materials and color and pattern. Well, for me, I went to Arizona State University, undergraduate, then I went to University of Illinois graduate, and everybody knows that almost all these architecture schools are strict, modernist sort of factories. This is what you're going to learn. Then I worked for SOM, right, and I have a colleague here who worked with me at SOM, and she knows that's what we did. It was a really strict, modernist, formalist, theoretical approach to design, where materials were seen as honest and simple, and again, very sophisticated. And so- Like jazz. Like jazz, we can do that. Exactly. And so for me, it was to go back to the beginning of something that was the opposite of that in a way that was sort of found, that had a patina that wasn't perfect, that had a slight tinge to it that was still wonderful. That it all didn't have to be sophisticated to a certain level, with a certain mindset, clean, et cetera, that there was another kind of sophistication, and that I could marry the two based on who I was. And to me, that was the point of departure. In music, a lot of European composers that were modernist composers, they loved jazz because it had this room for improvisation, and that no, like where we might go back and look at Mahler or Schubert and say, it has to be played, we judge it being played exactly the same over and over again, when jazz always allowed for this change, that there was a structure within that structure that could be variation and a chance to show off someone else's talent. It wasn't like a rivalry, it was a chance to sort of infuse the music with something that was unexpected. Exactly. And for me, when you talk about music, it starts out with the blues. The blues to me is the root of jazz. And in the blues, not only do you have, one, people learning to play themselves, for themselves, by themselves, people with raw voices learning to sing for themselves and for people who look like them, and then people who connect on a circuit that many call the Chitlin circuit. And they found places to play to actually connect to those people. To me, that's where architecture still is for us. It's still at the state of the blues. And while I love jazz, and jazz has this great technique level to it, it really is about us singing the blues. And I think the minute that we understand that, we'll sing the blues and we'll make the blues great, and the blues, when it's great, becomes jazz. I can't jump to jazz because I see so much blues in architecture, right? But within the blues, I'm seeing Sun House, and I'm seeing Muddy Waters, and I'm seeing what it can actually become. And that's what's exciting for me. I like the fact that it is tarnished. I like the fact that it is unsavory as well as savory. And I like the move to that level of sophistication because to me, that's the journey. The journey is what's important to me. Well, Karen and I have a friend that we talk about, Harle, I'm changing. He said, well, we want the funkiness to stay. We want a little bit of the, you'll see some of these storefront churches and some of these buildings that really have a certain kind of energy of a period that really is like an individual trying to come and make their self-visible in another way. And I think that, you want a little bit of that mix to kind of stay in the community. Exactly. And that's why when I go to Chelsea Market, for instance, I just love it. I mean, I just sit there and I watch how old connects to new, how surfaces that really could have been finished weren't and how new surfaces come in and just make their own statement. And then you can look up in Chelsea Market and you can see stuff that they totally forgot about that it is still, nobody cleaned off the paint to even make it look better, it's just there. And so when you go through that place and you look at the details, you see that it is really quite a special place. And I find the same thing when I go to West Africa and I walk through the villages, there's just something going on. And you know what, what I find in the villages, no trash, zero, no trash. And so when I'm looking and I'm thinking, why do people think that this place is unsophisticated? Why do they think that it's rough? Why do, because we're used to a certain sophisticated way, but our certain sophisticated way has this downside too. And we're not oftentimes looking at the downside that it has, right? But the villages are really refreshing. Well, just thinking about growing up, my grandparents, nothing went to waste. We're in a culture where we discard everything. But if you look at the African-American quilt, you look at the range of pig that we cooked for good or bad, nothing was discarded, there was a value in everything. And I think in 20th century culture, there's a stepping away from that. I think in certain ways when we're looking at food and stuff, we're going back to that. But I think in our culture, nothing was discarded, so everything had a value. So if you go into some of these villages, the bottles, the plastic bottles are used for something, nothing has kind of just said that we can't use this as a way of kind of making it all work. And now they're building mud huts with plastic bags and plastic bottles in the actual construction of these houses, and these houses look interesting. They're not just basic round hut forms. So I like that, and I like the whole transition of that. And then here's a plan to the floor again that you can see these plaques that were gonna be embedded into the floor plates. Again, all the materials picked by Bernadette, approved by H-O-K, and then you see those angled lines. Those lines are directed towards True East, which is the direction of the motherland, Africa. So a parent could come in with their child and they can say that's the direction of the motherland. And that's what we did. We went back and we looked at some of the the way houses were embellished, painted with these applied motifs and what these motifs were about, the meaning behind them, et cetera. And a lot of them were very abstract. And then all of a sudden, you'd see like a chicken or an airplane. And I remember being there once with Peter Malafani, a South African architect friend of mine who's since passed away. And I went to this woman who was painting and found out she was the daughter of the wife because the first wife gets to paint the black lines and to set up the motif. And then the second wife, third wife, or the daughters fill in. And those women are able to pick their colors with the first wife. But one woman was painting and she painted a chicken. And this beautiful mosaic, you know, and I'm, again, black, but I'm Western. And I said, oh my gosh, she messed that up. And so I went to her and I said, why did you do that? Why did you put the chicken in? And she said, because it came by. And I thought, I love that. That freed me, you know. And the same thing that I saw in an airplane, I went, it must have flown by. Oh, come on in. Don't walk around the projector still. You won't be impressed. Don't stay there. You want to affect the projection. They can see, they're fine, they're fine. That's us, that's what we do. We make space. And so we not only looked again at physical structures, but we also looked at patterns like most people do. And we wanted to figure out how we could actually abstract those patterns, but we had people come in to tell us about the meanings. We didn't want to get away from the meaning. And in some of these things, you can actually do that, right? So we needed to have an idea. So we looked at Kuba, Mud, and Kente, which are the three natural African claws. Everything else is not, which I did not know at all. So all these patterns that you see, even in these African markets, are not African, which is amazing to me. They're actually Malaysian. Yes, and they actually are made by people in Malaysia for the most part, but Indonesia and places like that. And then there was a Dutch company in the 1800s that was transporting these things, very lucrative business, and does so today with a number of other companies. And what they do is they take the fabrics to Africa, sell them to the Africans, so the Africans can sell them to the world. Go figure, right? But Mud, Kuba, and Kente is important. We have 10 more, we got to get through this, right? And so then we wanted to connect with the African-American aesthetic. And so we did, we looked at blues and jazz and the colors that certain artists put in their paintings. Well, the Bearden, if you ever see the movie Gloria, there's a movie with Janet Rollins called Gloria, and Bearden did the film credits in the very beginning of those, and this is one of those drawings he did for that movie. I believe in that. All right, so let me just go through real quick to show you. And so the fusion here in the slide began, right? So here's another shot, again, of several plates showing the interiors. We did designs in detail for the elevator cabs, all the flooring, the walls, every place throughout the entire building. Bernadette was basically in charge of almost all aspects of getting the interiors done, all of the materials and finishes, and all of these boards are hers as well, which there were several, for virtually one for every major space in the hospital project. Even the children's space, as well as the patient rooms, right? So a little bit about the murals, I'm gonna go very quickly, and the project team, I should go back to this because again, here's a whole nother project team. Again, for the murals, separate from the campus and the design of the building, right? We had a glass fabricator, of course, a mural, a preservationist, and then a mural art consultant on this team, right? Forgive me, you won't be able to read these. I had a lot of text in here just to let you know about the artist, but you heard Mr. Hayes' son, hopefully that'll suffice a little bit, but there were four artists who were selected. There were seven actually selected, four were restoring, and Charles Austin was probably one of the, if not the most important, one of the most important ones with Mr. Hayes, but Austin was in charge of all the four, actually in charge of the seven, and with that seven, 35 other artists helped them to create these murals. But he was the one that had the organizational skills, and he actually did two of the murals. One, magic and medicine, and then modern medicine. Both of those have very, very strong tales to tell, but you can go on the site from the Harlem Hospital or from Columbia University. All you have to do is type in Harlem Hospital murals, and all of this information will come up. Alfred Krimi was the only white artist who was selected. He had the most credentials coming in. He was older. He's from Sicily, his Italian background. Not sure how he was with the racial aspects and tones, but did not finish. He only did one of, I think four murals that he was, first goes rather that he was commissioned to do because he had so much other work, and so he left the project. Never got a story on that. It was really interesting in the gloves that they have on white uniforms, but their hands are black, even though they're wearing gloves. So it's just trying to tell something in that. And then this was the only mural that had all white people in it as well, by the white artist. Very interesting time. And then Georgia at Seabrook, who was just a wonderful person, amazing artist. The last one alive, she just died a year ago, December in 2011. She did a wonderful piece. The only woman, again, working on the project in the seven. And of course, Mr. Hayes, who was the most prolific, the most vocal, outspoken, and the most radical militant artist of the bunch. And with he and Austin, they actually got this done. Without their militant fervor, they're behind the scenes politicking they would have gotten, none of these artists would have worked, right? And so you heard about the controversy, very, very quickly. There were four things that were said in this letter. The one that really struck me was that Negroes would be offended by seeing Negroes. I thought that that was just absolutely crazy, but that was, again, the time. And the controversy was suppressed, as you all know, and the murals were done. We chose a lot of the colors for the glass on the building from the murals themselves. So what we did was we went through a process of extracting color ways from each of the murals and then trying to line those up to make some sort of rhythm, like jazz, music, and to come up with color schemes, right? Ultimately, you're going to see how we laid up the panels, but this was the original plan layout for the Verdes Hayes Gallery, which was, again, the most prolific. Four sides painted and a small gallery hallway to the offices. Down below, I should also mention that Mr. Alston's two pieces were set across from one another in a dip-dick arrangement. Then in Ms. Seabrick's piece on the top and Mr. Crimmie's piece on the bottom, they had individual places on different floors, right? So the hospital had this incredible criteria that had to be met in order to get these panels out of where they were and into a gallery. So we did a lot of different reiterations on how this gallery should work. My thought was that it should be along the streetscape so people could walk by, not even come into the hospital but be able to see them. HOK agreed, we tried to work that out. It's very, very difficult. Here's one option that you see here down below. This was the gallery, which we thought was the most advantageous. Then I thought that the angle was a little weird, so we straightened it up. We thought we could do that but we had too much program. And then these were some presentations to really try to push that to get some of the program out of the hospital in order to do the gallery right, but the gallery lost. And ultimately I love what was the compromise and that's this series of galleries here. That's this one here where Vertus Hayes is. This one is where the two Alston pieces are. Then back here, looking south, is where Mr. Krimi's piece is. Ms. Seabrook is going to have her own location in the actual atrium area, which I thought, since she passed away, they actually changed that location and I thought that that was actually great. So if you go over to the hospital now, you can walk into the atrium and you can see them working on her piece. Black people, six stories high. This is the last of the three. So the idea again was to bring that art forward so that people can see it without coming into the hospital because so many generations had been around Harlem, had never known the art was even there. So while we were talking about winning this competition, I just said, let's put black people six stories high. And of course I was looked at like what the hell is he talking about? Because the process that was actually done was not even invented. The actual process of getting these murals to read, the way that they read at this level, at this scale was actually done on this project. This project has already won three awards, specifically for the glass paneling. There are three different pieces of glass. And in one piece, the actual fritted information is placed on the glass and then burned itself into the glass. It becomes part of the building, right? And then you have to have a sandwich so that you have a good insulation barrier between outside and inside, right? And then you have to be able to let light come through these spaces. People have to be able to see out at night, but then people have to see the imagery on the outside. It can't be too diluted so that people can't see it, right? And so David Balick just did an incredible job and he stayed with us. I'm sure he lost a lot of money on this project, but he stayed with us in order to do it. And there are 429 panels here, all procedurally placed and done. You saw in the presentation earlier when you first came in, all the laying up in the factory and all of the iterations that we went through. And as the designers, we did models and drawings and studies in order to, one, make the cavity such that it was insulative, and then two, to actually make sure that the paint, the image on the glass worked from both sides, inside and out. And then finally to make sure, again, that all of this can actually be done and laid up construction-wise. We needed so much private funding, you can't even imagine. For instance, we had a $2 million electrical problem starting out, you know, there was a vault that Con Ed was not willing to build for us, you know, because they said, you know, if you wanna do what you wanna do, you're gonna have to build your own vault because we think that we have enough power for the hospital from our vaults, but we can't take additional because of your program. So we had to find the $2 million to do that. And the project was that way all the way through. So yes, the artwork is about 10 million, it was about four million, four million, or six million dollars now, and all that money was donated, right? And so here you just see some reiterations almost done, iterations of how we had to look at the pixels and how we were actually going to get the paint on the glass so that close up, you can actually work it out, but then far away, you can actually see an image without distortion. And since you're gonna be looking at this thing from across the street, cars driving on the street and people walking along the streetscape, as well as people on the inside looking back, and if you go into the gallery, you'll notice on the second level on the east wall, you can actually view back down onto the galleries from an upper area, a reception area. So there were, you know, three different ways and four or five different depths that we had to consider in doing this glass, and we just basically crossed our fingers. And we did a lot of mockups and we did a couple of full scale mockups, and here is a model that was actually done with light in order to see how the panels would actually work. And the ultimate view is the view from the streetscape, right, and what that's going to do to you at dusk and what's that's going to do as you get into the evening. But in the daytime, people have to be able to look out from inside the hospital. And so there you have it. This is the actual photograph, it's not around there. Yeah, this is David Warcall, he's an incredible photographer. You know, he did my daughter's room too as a favor, I cannot afford this guy. So again, I want to end with this whole directive of a black cultural directive because for me, it's about intensity, right? We have to do more because we need this. And as I said, you know, the more people know that they count, the less chance of them wearing their pants hanging off their butts around town. That's a parental. I think that's bigger than parental. And so I want to end with two quotes. The first one is by Derek Bell. And it's like, basically don't shoot the messenger. The problem is so deep. And we talk about it, it's surface, some of us really care, some of us get emotional, but it's really in the intensity of the doing that is important. My whole directive in my career is to bring about more of a black aesthetic in environmental design. And that is the laser focus, and that's the way that I think that we have to be. Finally, Gore Vidal in 1960 said this, you know. This is the state of his thinking about the world and I totally agree with this, you know, that we are all in a prison of sorts. And by that he means that we're bound up and wound up by so many of the things that we think are correct, or the things that we would like to think that are correct for our own well-being, et cetera. But there's a role to play for the artist and the designer. And I had designer here, he didn't in 1960, right? And art is that look out so that you understand the prison and you can actually then navigate yourself within it. But it's that look out. So tonight, it's my hope that I've given you a look out. Thank you. So we have any questions while we're, yes, Karen? And we hit a little air. I just wanted you to talk about, and I'm sorry if I missed it at first, but your building really connects two buildings at Harlem Hospital that are named for two Martin Luther King Pavilion as well as Ron Brown. And they both had some connection to Harlem and just in their story and why they're named that. I mean, I thought that might be as much of a fun. Well, Martin Luther King, he was stabbed. I don't know if people know this, but there was an incident where he came to sign a book signing at Bloomstein's department store. And his life was saved in the 1950s at Harlem Hospital. He was taken from there to Harlem Hospital. And so I think he had a life changing. And he gave a great speech, a little girl wrote him a letter because he said the letter opener was so close to his, the main artery that if he had sneezed, he would have died. And he made a speech about that based on this little girl. So I'm so glad you didn't sneeze. Everybody talks about how close to death he came. So really, Harlem Hospital was significant in saving his life in the 1950s. And then Ron Brown, his father, had been the hotel manager for the Hotel Teresa. So Ron Brown literally grew up in that hotel. And at that hotel, Charlie Rangel worked as like a bellboy or whatever. So that had been a significant place in Ron Brown's life. So I think that's what kind of drew those references to the hospital. Right. And our building is the mural Pavilion. So it is now an homage to the artists, the four artists, the seven artists who actually created these murals, which was the first time that African-American artists worked on African-American themes for a government project in the history of this country. And I think the first WPA project, which Hilliard Robinson eventually got the Langston Terrace Housing Project that I talked to you about after these artists got this commission. I think that's one of the things, I think young people here at WPA, it was the work progress administration. And for a lot of people were out of work, architects were out of work, photographers, writers. Another WPA, and you can search it now that everyone can go online. So people like Ralph Ellison, these great writers were writing for the WPA. George O'Keefe, Alfred Stiglas were, you know, photographing and painting and documenting into these programs. And it was the first time that government that was really sponsoring artists to look at the broader population. And, you know, the Walker Evans, great photography series, all those people were brought forward under the WPA program and actually talked about everyday people instead of just the leadership, again because the leadership sort of under that time period had failed in a way that was the beginning to look at the broader population. And so much of the art that we look at as 20th century art really came out of the momentum that was kind of fostered under the WPA program, a lot of oral histories and things from that period. Greg? Awesome presentation, thank you. Oh, thank you. Just wondering, I mean, the pavilion is like a museum. I mean, it really takes on that quality. I'm just wondering, are there narratives or is anything in writing along the way that describes what has happened there? I think they're building, the website has some information and the hospital plans have a broad level of program, like he was talking about all these programming issues. So I think as time passes, I think I don't know what the resources are, you can probably talk to that. But there's a program to look at this as being a real attraction in terms of coming to the community and interpreting the history of these murals, which are significant. They're beautiful. Yeah, well, in our proposal, design proposal, there was a lot of text written information as a part of the way finding package for the hospital. But when 2009 happened and the markets went tanked, went south, a lot of the interiors and a lot of the finishes and a lot of the cultural stuff was put on hold, right? But we hope that's exactly what that is. They're just on hold. So they're gonna be plaques on the floor. They're gonna be signs that are gonna talk about all the way through the gallery as well as the atrium. What the designers were intent was, what the murals were all about, what they represent, and some information on the artists as well. So we're hoping that at some point, and again, we have to find funding for that. It has to be a private entity that that happens. I mean, even organizing for this talk, I was reaching out to the hospital and trying to see the schedule and they're just trying to get a schedule together in terms of when they're gonna be accessible for people to come look. So hopefully we can email our site and post some times in the future when they might be open. Is this a question over here? Yeah. Jack, yeah, good afternoon. Oh, I'm sorry. You do some very fine work. I'm in view from the Nicaragua days at the Homestate Office Building. We're trying to get work with the School of Construction Authority. I'm a registered architect also. This mural, so this mural is yours and Bernadette's design, or is an existing mural that you guys made into this front wall? Well, this is your little snapshots from the much bigger mural project that he showed you was a corridor of several panels that tell different stories. And they pulled out details from that mural. So the gentleman here, he was like a conductor, like say a Duke Ellington, and there was a Jitterbug dancer in the corner. And that was from a segment that looked at religious and entertainment music that was part of the mural. And then the middle one was the kind of arriving in the city and the jobs that were available to African-Americans in the city. So you see a nurse, a secretary, an engineer with an M. I always think that was a Morehouse College. And so it starts to show that what the city offered in terms of black opportunity. And then the one at the far end here was at the end of the hallway, and it was the transition from the rural life to city life. It's kind of hard to read the details there, but you see some classic things like the broken wheel, which has been used in sort of allegory painting and historically. And so moving from that system to the urban system. So this is like three snapshots out of what were seven panels in the original building. Right, there were four artists that we took information from and put into the gallery. And we looked at Mr. Krimi's work and there were no black people in the imagery. We looked at Ms. Seabrook's work and her work was very, very torn and damaged, right? So that left Mr. Alston's pieces and Virtus Hayes's pieces. Then when we looked at the fervor that Mr. Hayes had and wanting to tell our entire story, we thought that that's the one that it should actually go on the building, right? So they are actual panels from Virtus Hayes's installation that we photographed and then we fritted and then we placed on the panels and then we sort of Photoshopped, for lack of a better word, some of the imagery on it because with the maestro, there were three girls dancing with their dresses up way up and we thought that probably that's not the best image that we wanted to do. But again, in order to crop and to Photoshop, we had to go to the art commission and a number of other people to talk to his son and everybody else to get an approval to do that. But we wanted to have the original works on the face of the building which is driving the entire design concept for the entire project. And now to the self, there's a proposal to cover those lower floors of the old hospital. And would they be Virtus Hayes' images as well? Well, if you see there, what I think we did was we just married images for the presentation. We don't know, we need to take the time to figure out what the next continuum would be because for Mr. Austin's pieces, which I thought was very provocative, magic and medicine and modern medicine, I would love to see those two sort of played in some sort of way on the other side of the building as well. It's not my choice, but I'm Jack Travis. And the second part of my question, as a former federal commissioner at the Department of Buildings, your facade, did they give you a hard time with your facade on your plans in terms of being the energy code and fire ratings? We didn't get a hard time from anyone. I think HOK did their homework. And I think that David Baylick and his way of approach, how he's gonna make these panels, how those panels were actually gonna be detailed and placed on the side, all that work was done. And because of the controversy, to be honest with you, two things, the controversy that happened in the 30s and the fact that the community board had saw this project when we won the commission and wanted exactly that. They also wanted people in the community to work on the project, but that didn't happen as much as we'd like. It was an easier time to go through the channels because there was so much backing. And to be quite honest, Harlem Hospital was amazingly supportive all the way through. And so was New York Health and Hospitals. I can't even tell you. DASNY, I didn't know anybody at the top from DASNY, but we got, again, no negative energy from anybody. It was one of those projects that is just sublime. Sometimes that does happen, but you need a core that's that strong to be able to carry you through the bureaucracy. And certain things have this essence that speaks to everybody. That helps you ride all those other waves. I think it really makes a difference. And I think there was a powerful history to this. And it was so much unknown to the community. So just even bringing it out as a story brought a level of support in terms of what people thought and wanted to see. Right, the only problem on this project, money. That's really the only project problem. Down at 59th Street, Columbus is something like 65 feet high, right? They even built the living room. Did anybody get to that? They've been to the living room. That project was finished in less than three and a half years. Why? Because the Italian community came out in others and they donated privately and that thing got done. Frederick Douglass took, what, 12 years? Well, you're partly because Jack wanted him on a column just like Frederick. Well, that's a whole other story, but I wanna talk about that. But that took 12 years because, again, it's government funded for the most part and people in our community still are, we have money, but we're reluctant in some ways in order to give that money and we don't have that kind of free giving that you would find in other communities. To that, I was involved in that project and we actually got the federal money to do that, but it became such a big project and it's up to the contractor in the end to phase the project and he was making so much money, he was doing the boom period of Harlem buildings like this building being built and once the city lets a contract for the street, everybody that wants to build on that street has to deal with that contractor for con Edison service, for the sidewalk, for everything and it was so profitable for that contractor to have the broader contract of the meat and potatoes of what he always does, sidewalk work and all of that, that he made the circle the last thing that he did and so it went up Morningside, not Morningside, whatever the street, I think it's Morningside and all that, so he just put it off and so the stone came from China, that took forever, all these other kinds of things because that wasn't his expertise, that little level of detailing, so that's always the... I don't see that happening at 59th Street, that's all I'm saying. Well, there's sidewalks though, if you look at 110th Street from Fifth Avenue to Frederick Douglas Circle, there's no side of Central Park that looks like that and we were able to get federal money to do that because we were seen as an underserved community and there will be hard press on every other side to ever get federal money to upgrade Fifth Avenue to Central Park West because people will say those people can afford it and those people will never say why should we pay for sidewalks, so I challenge you, while when you walk across 110th Street, it's the nicest, both sides, we got funding for both sides of the street, it's the highest level of improvement to Central Park on the sidewalk side of any side of the park. Yeah, this gentleman has a question. Hi, I really enjoyed your presentation and I learned a lot, thank you. I had a quick technical question, I noticed in one of the slides you had the windows animating and I wondered if that was showing the lamination process or whether the windows themselves move. No, the windows are fixed, that's a very good point, it was just showing the lamination process. And it wasn't even as technically detailed as it needed to be because there were actually three panes of glass, so there's a cavity wall and then there is a design wall. So that middle piece of glass is your insulation piece and most dual panes stop with that. The third piece is where the artwork is and it's married to that particular piece of glass which I believe did not fit the criteria for an insulative sandwich, so that's why we had to have three pieces of glass. It was another point. Yes. You said that, you said that Hilliard Robertson was an early inspiration for the facade work. At what point in the design process did the idea of taking the murals just from a restoration and preservation gallery piece to the facade take place? How early on was that? Well, I saw Langston Terrace housing in the 90s, right? And so I realized that Hilliard Robertson had actually gone to Germany and had studied Bauhaus design and went to DeSalle to the campus, and he did this after he was going to work on this project. So knowing all of that and then visiting some of the residents in the place, I went to Washington, D.C. to visit a friend of mine at Howard University and then I went by myself over to Langston Terrace housing. I got off a bus, I walked through the streets and I saw people looking at me through the windows and one woman comes out and she says, may I help you? And I said, no, thank you, I'm fine. You know, I was taking photographs. Another woman says, can we help you? And I said, I'm an architect, I'm just here looking at this project. And she goes, do you know who designed it? This is a woman who's living in the projects. And I said, no, she said, Mr. Robinson designed this. And I said, yes, I do know who designed this. And she says, do you want me to tell you about this five different families? Walk the streets with me from our projects and talk to me about this particular building and about the fact that the playground area was centered and that they can watch all of the children play from the waking spaces, you know, the kitchen, the dining room, the living room. And then the bedrooms are on the outside, on the streetscape so if anything happens late at night, people can get up right away and go to the window, right? There's only a few entrances and each entrance has only a few small number of apartments and so that you should know who's coming in, you're building it out so you can control it. And where the children play, there's only two entrances, one on this side and one on that side, so no drugs, no prostitutes, none of that stuff can actually happen without a whole number of bunch of eyes looking in. And so I was just amazed, and I was amazed also that it had an eight-year waiting list when I went to see it. It was approaching its 50th anniversary, 1988. In 1988, it got it actually. And so I was just taken away. So when I saw this project, to answer your question, it was from the beginning. I said, let's put black people six stories high because I found out about Vertus Hayes and what he was trying to do and I remembered immediately, Hilliard Robinson. And then when I found out that they both were doing this work under WPA, I found out that Vertus was first in the commission. And I don't know if those two ever got together, but boy, they really should have. So from the very beginning, it was my sense. Thank you. Thank you. We have one. Hi, Gwen. Hi. How are you? Sorry, that little shoo. I have a comment and a question. I'm sorry, I apologize. I didn't see the presentation from the very beginning. So if it's redundant, I noticed in your presentation, you had Augusta Savage-Mitchent. Now, Augusta Savage was such a very prolific artist from that time period. And she taught so many of those artists like Jacob Lawrence and Charles White. And she's very instrumental in the Harlem art scene. Did she do any murals there on that site? I don't think so. But one of the team of artists was Morgan, you know, Morgan and Marvin Smith, the photographers, Morgan Smith worked on this project. And they said they were directed to it by her. Okay. And so she might have been on another WPA project or whatever, but she was always seen as like the gatekeeper for a lot of the artists. I think she knew about the project and directed a lot of them to do like apprentice work and stuff under this project. Because she knew it had money associated with it, they would have some income. Right. Well, the reason that she was mentioned briefly, as you said, is because that she and Alston actually worked together in a group, a studio called I think 406, right? That's the photograph you have. Yeah, that's right. And so that was the collaboration. So, yeah, she knew about the project. But you bring up an interesting question because there was only one woman on this team. Why wasn't she chosen to be on the Harlem hospital team? Why couldn't they, if she really wanted to do it, why couldn't they make it so that she could do it because they actually got it done over the head of the hospital? So all that politics is lost. We at least, we don't know. But now what year was the mural, where were the murals done? Were they 39? Were they around 30? In the 30s. Yeah, because who we just, I guess the Savage had a huge project for the New York World's Fair, which is 30. 39. This harp, so she might have had that big commission and been really focused on that commission, but had her ear to the other opportunities under the WPA. And so she didn't need this other commission and really kind of maybe made a way for the others. That's all speculation, but that's possible. But you said you're gonna do something on another side? Well, yeah, the south side. The south side. Yes, we actually had two phases for this project and the second phase was to renovate the tower, right? But again, 2009 it crashed and everything sort of subsided. But we had a hundred and, in the beginning we had $109 million to build a new patient pavilion and I think $75 million to renovate the tower. And one of the reasons they wanted to renovate the tower is because of this need for private rooms in order to get government funding. If you had wards and you had a lot of two-person rooms and it was a certain percentage of your rooms, then you weren't able to get certain funding. So, but that's on hold. In fact, there's a lot of things on hold, right? Because we did a full package and we're seeing Miss Seabrook's work being done and we're seeing a lot of things happening very slowly but there's a lot that in terms of finishes, in terms of cultural dynamic, that's gonna happen hopefully and continue. And I just want to say, before you leave, you should come up and see this image on here because that's not doing it any justice. No, you should take the subway. You can take the subway right out here at 110th Street and you have a 135th Street and it's right there. I just want to help you want to do that because this is glorious when I'm looking at here. It's longer the proportions and this guy, Mr. Warco's work is to die for. We'll take one last question and we're gonna have to, we have one lady in the back here. I have a question. Maestro is Cab Calloway. Well, certainly he's styled in the Cab Calloway kind of dress but you don't see the chorus girls. There's certain things in here that are so true to the culture that we don't talk about but the jitterbugger and the orchestra leader were darker-complexed than the chorus girls are really fair and so there's a little commentary there. This great image of the movement from the south to the north that really shows a woman that braids, this was done in the 1930s before we started saying all that was kind of the end thing to do and they just show a person in the field working and she's got the braided hair so even as a document cultural history document it's a very interesting mural to look at. And also Mr. Alston's wife I believe was white and there's not any mention of that except that there's one picture of her and one of his picture and his trip diptychs, yeah, she was a nurse and in modern medicine there was a woman holding a baby who is white and so he was really interested in looking at equality as people are the same that he wanted to show the doctors as the same and that second mirror modern medicine and one of the reasons why he was so charged was that he, equality was the focus so with Mr. Alston and Mr. Hayes it was like Malcolm X and Martin the King. You really think about it and that happens everywhere we are. We have Martin the King and Malcolm X. And also if you look at the murals there's some inaccuracies in Africa if you look at the headdress and everything which are like Inka Indians in some terms of the headdressing and stuff is not really true so you wonder if they were looking at National Geographic or something where they were drawing some of the images on the African cycles they're not totally true to the kind of the dress and stuff of the period but all which is fantastic. Just a quick comment, when people ask me what is the inspiration for what I do when I talk about African and Afrocentric? And the first thing that I say to be honest look we don't know the history so what we do is we try to look at as much as we can on earth as much as research as we can and then in terms of design I go with the feeling because as I said before when I was young and I wanted to become an architect I knew when I was 10 years old and I wanted to become an architect. And then in the first house I ever designed was a roundhouse. I don't know why I did it but then one of the professors said you know that's an African you know impleuvium hut from you know West Africa but I didn't even know any of this. And so I'm thinking like the woman who draws the chicken I'm gonna draw chickens in my design. On that note. Thank you, thanks everyone for coming and in two weeks we're gonna have a photographer Albert Velbrek who lives here in Harlem has documented a lot of Harlem architecture was also documented architecture around the country so we'll have a broader view of that and it was interesting. I've talked to him a little bit in preparing for the next talk and he came here from another country and he lived in Harlem, went to City College and he started to look at architecture. His window on American architecture was through Harlem architecture and even in documenting things in his early period here he's showing that Harlem before it changed he was here right before a lot of it changed there's a lot of bridge in terms of images and stuff so I encourage you to come back. That was a fantastic photographer because he also did my daughter's room. Oh really? Someone's gonna be doing a dissertation on your daughter's room 20 years from now. Thanks a lot. Thank you.