 We're very excited to be here tonight. Welcome. It's really, really a great pleasure to have Harry Cobb with us this evening. Harry's a founding partner of Pay Cobb Freedom Partners. Founded in 1955, the practice and Harry's projects in particular have given cities, institutions, and corporations around the world some of their most iconic buildings. Just in preparing for this introduction, I was struck by how readily different people immediately offered their, quote, favorite, Cobb project. The Portland Museum of Art in Maine is my partner Dan's favorite. Laila Catelier, who I would like to take this moment to thank for all her efforts in organizing events at the school, offered that the allied Bang Tower, also in Dallas, is her favorite. The Hancock Tower in Boston is, of course, all of our favorite. The John Joseph Mowkley United States Courthouse and Harbor Park in Boston are what introduced Justice Breyer to architecture. Justice Breyer currently chairs the Pritzker Prize Committee. And my personal favorite is Placeville Marie, one of the very few sites in Montreal that I was consistently inspired by in my time as an architecture student there. Harry Cobb is also a lifelong educator. He has taught and lectured at numerous universities across the US and internationally. And from 1980 to 1985, he served as a studio professor of architecture and urban design, as well as chair of the Department of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. This was a memorable time of great energy and debate at the GSD, where he continues to teach occasionally as a visiting lecturer. An accomplished writer, Harry, has often reflected on the role of architecture, but also of architects in shaping cities with a commitment to civic engagement to the public dimension of buildings and to their responsibility in responding to the existing urban context, as well as to form that context in new ways. Harry has often suggested that it is the two terms, place and occasion, which his work has embraced as significant generators of built form. Harry also continues to generously contribute across the professional and academic worlds as mentor, supporter, critic and more. Indeed, his deep love and concern, as well as sustained attention and endless curiosity have meant that he is incredibly attuned to the next generation of emerging architectural talent, as well as acutely aware of the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead for all of us and all of you in the future. I share all these facets of Harry's extensive contribution to architecture in light of the choices we are often asked to make as architects, between theory and practice, between the academic and the professional world, between designing a commercial or an artistic practice, between a highly focused practice or an expanded one, et cetera. And so it is inspiring to be joined this evening by an architect whose extensive reach and influence, depth of thought, as well as richness of building, teaching, writing and mentoring, are seemingly the result not of choosing, but of refusing those false choices in favor of engaging architecture's multifaceted complexity as discipline and practice with every possible occasion. In many ways, Harry's recent publication, Words and Works, 1948, 2018, Scenes from a Life in Architecture, embodies for the reader this sense of unique accomplishment and almost completeness, as one follows his path in architecture through what he wrote and thought at the time, together with the ups and downs, the resounding successes and perceived failures, but also the evolution, continuity and transformation of our ideas he has been able to discover and propose through architecture in its encounter of place, context, identity and history. The stories told are remarkable as much for their significance as for the ways in which they are told candidly, but with the greatest possible insight. I do not know of a recent architectural monograph that has produced so much excitement, so many exchanges between architects comparing notes as to their favorite story, project, paragraph or sentence. It is common, if not entirely founded, knowledge that architecture, unlike other forms or practices, unlike other art forms or practices, is such that it enables one to get better at its practice as one gets older. I don't know if Harry feels his capacities as an architect have become greater, the greater his experience, but I do want to thank him for his unique and inspiring generosity. He is a model architect citizen for many of us, and the increasing admiration his work, his intellect and his graciousness have invited will, I suspect, continue for generations to come. Please join me in welcoming Harry Cobb. And thank you all for welcoming this geriatric outlier to your lecture series. Even the venerable Richard Sennett, next week's speaker, is at 76, a youngster in my eyes. He's also a friend and intellectual sparring partner with whom I have long enjoyed a lively give and take on matters of mutual interest. Most recently, the fault line, as he calls it, between the city as lived and the city as built. This is, in fact, the central theme of his latest book, and it is more than worthy of your attention. Half a century ago, I myself had a bruising encounter with Sennett's fault line right here on this campus. When our firm was drawn into one of the earliest and most notorious episodes in the epidemic of institutional community conflicts that erupted across the United States from the mid-60s onward. By the spring of 1968, the relationship between Columbia and its neighbors in Morningside Heights had reached a dangerously inflammatory nadir. And when the university began construction of a large gymnasium in Morningside Park, the ensuing public outcry set off the student strike that shut the university down for seven weeks and forced it to abandon the gymnasium project. Six months later, in the hope of somehow extracting a positive outcome from this furor, the trustees commissioned our firm to prepare a master plan under which the campus at Morningside Heights will be arranged and developed in a manner that will not only be in its own best interests, but will also take into consideration the interests of its students, its neighbors, and the city of New York. We recognize that the outset, before putting pencil to paper, indeed, before even beginning to think about possible solutions, we needed to listen to the many voices, both inside and outside the university that were crying to be heard. In the event, this listing activity continued throughout the 16 month period of our work and retrospectively may be judged as its most important achievement. An appendix to our report lists no less than 314 meetings with groups and individuals representing the university's internal constituencies and external neighbors. The central proposition of our master plan, propositions were first, consolidation of existing university functions, then scattered throughout Morningside Heights neighborhood within the boundaries of its main campus, and second, the accommodation of all future expansion within those same boundaries. These goals were to be achieved through the renovation of existing facilities and the construction of several new buildings, the most prominent of which were a pair of towers, framing a large underground sports complex, the gym in the South Field just north of Butler Library. Although several of the peripheral buildings indicated in the plan have since been built, this centerpiece proposal was not adopted and indeed was probably never seriously considered by a university administration led successively by three presidents in as many years. Our report was neither accepted nor even acknowledged by the trustees who had commissioned it and the only small satisfaction we could find in this unhappy episode was a modest, if palpable improvement in the relationship between Columbia and its neighbors. Nearly four decades would then pass before my next and much more rewarding affiliation with this university. When I was privileged to chair the Bewell Center advisory board during the early years of Reinhold Martin's directorship, a period that saw publication of the Bewell hypothesis on housing the American dream and foreclosed, a catalog of the important related exhibition mounted by Barry Bergdahl at MoMA in 2012. I greatly enjoyed being a part of all that. My talk this evening takes its title from a short essay by Sanford Quinter in which he advocates radical anemnesis or controlled remembering as a necessary corrective to our in-the-moment social media drenched culture. To support his plea, he invokes Thomas Pynchon who in Gravity's Rainbow introduced the concept of temporal bandwidth, a literal scale on which to measure the degree to which one's being remained psychically and existentially linked to its past and oriented toward its future. The more cut off from these it is as the temporal bandwidth shrinks, the more its being becomes concentrated in an increasingly detached present, the more unmoored it becomes and the less it is able to rely on stabilizing continuities of coherent unfolding and becoming. The antidote, Quinter concludes, is the flexibility afforded by controlled remembering not only of what we were but in the same emancipatory act of what we might be. Memory as a deliberate act of will that projects one squarely into the stream of history beyond the shackles, the smug certainties and the petty stakes of the present. Through selective memory, the future becomes possible, a future that the past could not think and that the present alone dares not. Quinter's words resonate profoundly with my own experience which has taught me that controlled remembering a rigorously disciplined act of recollection having nothing to do with nostalgia is indeed essential to the practice of architecture. For it is surely at least in part owing to the emancipatory power of anemesis that architecture like every art finds its own voice and thus commands the means of expression by which a built work having satisfied all requirements of use and technique may yet illuminate and give meaning to the human condition while giving shape to the physical world. And as with every art, it is the distinctive revelatory power of that voice, something not flowing from any other source that ultimately validates architectures claim on our attention, its appeal to our imagination and its authority as an indispensable manifestation of our culture. Now a characteristic predicament in the program of society to which the voice of architecture has often been eloquently responsive is the occurrence of ambiguity, paradox and contrarity in the purposes that buildings are asked to serve. As a matter of fact, the need to acknowledge and often to celebrate the coexistence of divergent and apparently irreconcilable intentions or ideas is a theme occurring throughout the entire history of Western architecture. To give substance to this claim and bring it into sharper focus, let's consider a few well-known built works that are in this respect, paradigmatic. The Church of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, designed by Isidor of Miletus and Anthemius of Trails, was built by command of the emperor Justinian and dedicated in 537 A.D. The richly orchestrated spatial drama of this great church arises from its hybrid nature, the superimposition of a domicile building form on a basilican ground plan. Structurally Hagia Sophia is a brilliant tour de force, but this accolade does not begin to explain the emotive intensity of its interior. What stirs us in this extraordinary polyphonic composition is the bringing together of two powerful but opposite intentions, stability, absolutism, wholeness, symmetry, juxtaposed with asymmetry, incompleteness, anxiety, and aspiration. Each of these opposing value systems is rendered eloquent by the presence of the other, and they are synthesized in a way that greatly intensifies the dialogue between them. Here, architecture has given voice to St. Augustine's conception of love as a dynamic and energizing force, a forward movement of the mind. And yet here we also see this characteristic Christian impulse, this anxiety of spirit, brilliantly joined with its opposite, a reassertion of absolutism and immutability in the temporal affairs of mankind. Among the works of the 16th century architect Andrea Palladio, one of my favorites is the Palazzo Chiaricati in Vicenza. Here we see the resolution in architecture of a different kind of paradox. Are we to read this masterful array of superimposed orders as a projecting porch of a private house, or as the colonnaded enclosure of a public square? Marvelously, it is both. And this splendid ambiguity gives the building a richness and poignancy, which is entirely owing to the architect's skill in simultaneously acknowledging these entirely opposite intentions. The key invention here is the audacious clustering of columns, a breathtakingly brilliant device by which the otherwise evenly spaced colonnade has been articulated and given its double meaning at once a public arcade and a private entry. The miracle is that the architecture of the building is in no way compromised, rather it draws its particular vigor from the necessity of simultaneously promoting two very different readings of its posture in the city's public realm. In the 17th century Church of San Carlo a la Quattro Fontane in Rome, Francesco Borromini gave entirely new meaning to the discourse between Dome and Basilica first evidenced in Hagia Sophia. Here both forms have been radically reshaped so as to produce a dynamic and highly integrated spatial construct wherein the aspirational and the immutable are joined to form a geometrical complex and infinitely suggestive whole. The indispensable operative element in this great work is the undulating entablature that distorts the array of columns below while forming a base for pendentives that then make the transition to oval dome above. The discourse thus engendered redefines the nature of the struggle between aspiration and absolutism. What in Hagia Sophia is presented as an unresolved conflict between church and state. Is here declared to be an unresolved conflict within the church itself. A conflict brought vividly to life by the genius of the architect. The carpenter center for the visual arts at Harvard is Le Corbusier's only built work in North America. This small but exceptionally complex and highly charged building masterfully addresses the disconcerting ambiguity of intent reflected in a seemingly hopeless disjunction between the aspirations of its program and the limitations of its site. The stated purpose to be served by the building was the integration of the visual arts, both their appreciation and their practice into the everyday life of the college. But instead of being granted a suitably prominent place in the Harvard yard with its spacious quadrangles crisscrossed by diagonal paths, the carpenter center was relegated to a cramped and altogether marginal site hemmed in by preexisting buildings. The architect's response to this dilemma was to compress the absent space of the campus into a single diagonal path in the form of an open air ramp plunging straight through the building and offering views into the studios at its heart. This extraordinary invention, the architectural equivalent of nuclear fusion in its compaction of energy, does not try to conceal, but instead vividly dramatizes the building's awkward predicament while at the same time artfully achieving the programmatic goals which that predicament would seem to have placed out of reach. The Caltrans district seven headquarters in downtown Los Angeles, one of Tom Mayne's most provocative built works, invites a question similar to that raised by Palazzo Caricati. Is the enormous void in this building's otherwise impenetrable volume to be understood as a gathering place for its employee occupants or as an extension of the city's public realm? And as with Paladio's great work, the answer is yes to both readings. But whereas in Vigenza, the double reading is accomplished through the subtle articulation of a colonnaded porch. In Los Angeles, it is the product of a boldly forceful voiding of the building volume and a complimentary extension of a secondary volume so as to frame a civic space that oscillates marvelously between conditions of interiority and exteriority. This altogether thrilling space, further dramatized by Quixote's light installation, resolves without suppressing the paradoxical predicament of a public service bureaucracy grown so large that only a perfect act of architecture as here performed can make its presence not only tolerable but intensely meaningful to the public it serves. Diverse as they are in size, character and purpose, all five of the buildings we've just seen vividly exemplify the remarkable capacity of architecture to illuminate ambiguity, paradox and contrariety as they occur in the programs and purposes that buildings are asked to serve. In the course of my own professional life, I've faced a number of challenges that invited indeed compelled me to call on that same capacity. And I will touch briefly this evening on several of these. But since I'm speaking here to an audience largely of students, I should first give you a glimpse of the education that launched my own life in architecture. I'm one of only a very few architects still practicing or even living for that matter, who were trained under the teaching program established and led by Walter Gropius at Harvard from 1937 to 1952. Hence I was the beneficiary or victim, depending on how you look at it, of an ideologically driven pedagogy that through its mistreatment of history as much as through the methodology of its design studios profoundly shaped the practice of architecture, especially though not exclusively in North America during the decades immediately following World War II. In characterizing the handling of history at Harvard under Gropius as mistreatment, I don't mean to imply that the abuse of history in schools of architecture was at that time unprecedented or even unusual. As a matter of fact throughout the nearly four centuries since formal professional training was first introduced in France, there has never been a time when history has not been in some way misused as an instrument for placing architecture, practice of architecture in the service of a prevailing ideology. But unlike earlier pedagogies which privileged one historical period or style over another, the pedagogy of the modern movement as practiced by Gropius sought to protect the student from contamination by all of history. So as to clear the way for what was intended to be an entirely new architecture liberated from the tyranny of dead styles in which art, technology, and social purpose would be powerfully joined for the benefit of humanity. This attitude toward history, an attitude that reduces Pynchon's temporal bandwidth almost to zero is elegantly summed up in one of Franz Kafka's most memorable aphorisms. The decisive moment in human history, he wrote, is perpetually at hand. Hence those revolutionary movements that declare everything preceding them to be null and void are in the right for nothing has yet happened. Now the perfect architectural analog to this aphorism and analog to cast a powerful spell on the imagination of my generation of students was Le Corbusier's Plainvoise of 1925 in which he proposed to eradicate the historic center of Paris sparing only a few monuments and replace it with an array of cruciform towers set in a vast green space. To understand the wide influence of that tabula raza approach to city building had at mid-century, when you'd only notice an extraordinary proposal on the right by one of my own professors at Harvard, Martin Wagner. In response to a call for, quote, the best planning ideas for renewing Boston, unquote, he suggested, I believe the year was 1944, that the entire downtown be erased and replaced with a single building in the shape of a gigantic question mark as if to ask why bother to renew it when you can just as well remove it. The image on the left shows the Boston of my childhood, a city that was full, self-satisfied, deeply resistant to change. A city where in the custom house tower and the state house dome remained as yet unchallenged on the skyline. As a student, I was wildly enthusiastic about Professor Wagner's proposal. It perfectly catered to my frustration and discussed with what I perceived to be the hopeless backwardness of my hometown. At the same time, it nourished my generation's hubristic confidence that we could, we should, and we would remake the world. My own Harvard thesis project, while more modest in scale, displayed an equal contempt for the historic fabric of Boston, rather than work within that fabric, I chose to cast my proposal for urban housing as an aloof and emphatically autonomous cluster of towers rising out of the water, adjacent to but disengaged from the city itself. By the time I submitted this project in March of 1949, I had already convinced myself that Boston was hopelessly moribund, socially, economically, culturally, politically, and that nothing of interest to me was likely to happen there in my lifetime. So I abandoned my hometown and hurried off to New York to join I.M. Pay in his then fledgling practice under the auspices of the legendary developer William Dekendorf, Sr. Little did I foresee that the reward for my early infidelity would be a series of challenges that obliged me to think deeply about Boston throughout much of the ensuing seven decades. Among the five built works that I spawned, I wanna discuss two that most vividly exemplify the central role of anemonesis in my search for a positive outcome to the predicament of architecture in our time. The John Hancock Tower, Boston's tallest building, was completed in 1976. The floor plan of the tower exhibits for the most part a rigorous adherence to the discipline imposed by those characteristic internal systems, structural, mechanical, circulatory, operational that largely determine the design of every tall office building. But we may observe the presence of one feature that seems to challenge the hegemony of internal systems, namely the skewing of the end walls so as to produce a notched rhomboid rather than a rectangular plan form. While this deviation has been accomplished in a way that is coherent with systemic elements of the plan, it nonetheless cannot be explained by reference to any identifiable internal need. Yet more pronounced aberration occurs in the plans of the lower eight floors where one long side of the rhomboid has been rotated outward to form a trapezoid within which the structural grade is extended to a not entirely comfortable intersection with the enclosing walls. This peculiar form becomes explicable only when one turns finely to the site plan and sees the building in its urban setting. The rhomboid tower rising from the trapezoidal base is then immediately perceived as a response to the particular external situation of the building, most notably its adjacency to Copley Square and H. H. Richardson's Trinity Church. But just what was that situation? This of course is the question to which our answer engendered so much fear and loathing in my erstwhile hometown. To help orient you during this discussion, a red arrow or a red dot appearing in this and subsequent images will indicate the site of the future Hancock Tower. I began with the observation not in itself controversial that while Copley Square and the monuments populating it clearly embodied the vision of an ideal city, the experiential reality at street level was something very different and very troubling. A public space desecrated by the rupturing of its enclosure and the intrusion of massive commercial buildings that seemed to render the space itself irrelevant and meaningless. Indeed, so chaotic was the urban scene surrounding Copley Square that it appeared at first to defy rational analysis. By this time however, I had at last that's 25 years after GSD, I had at last come to appreciate the city as a living organism in a constant state of change. A dynamic process that can no more be understood by looking at a single image than kind of World Cup match for example. I therefore argued that the only way to determine what ought to be done now was to understand how Copley Square had reached this impasse, to place it through an amnesis in the stream of history. Although that history with the extraordinary topographical transformation it embodies has its origins early in the 17th century. It's immediately relevant episodes date back to the 1830s when two railroad lines were built to link Boston to its western hinterlands. These rail lines crossed in the middle of what was called the Back Bay blocking its tidal flow and causing it to become stagnant. The health hazard thus created combined with pressures for growth led to the filling of the bay. A vast project that provoked numerous proposals for laying out this new form territory. With the single exception of the wonderfully imagined who planned on the left which was unfashionably baroque in its inspiration and was immediately rejected in pure Boston. All these plans while exhibiting a confident clarity in the handling of the area between what is now Boston Street and the Charles River displayed an equally marked ambivalence reflecting deep puzzlement about how to handle the area just to the south where the rail lines crossed. This ambivalence remained unresolved as the filling advance and consequently what was to become Copley Square was never really planned but simply stumbled into shape largely by accident between the arms of the St. Andrew's Cross formed by the rail lines. A decisive moment in this story occurred in 1871 when Boston's leading Episcopal parish decided to build a new church on a trapezoidal lot in what its rector recalled was then quote a desert of dirt, dust, mud and wind. Here we must pause to ask a question. Why when they could have had their pick of any number of splendid corner lots in the well-ordered blocks of the back bay why did the wardens of Trinity Church decide to go way out in left field so to speak to the remoteness of the then non-existent Copley Square? The answer explicitly stated in parish records is that they wanted their new church to be surrounded by streets on all sides so that as a freestanding edifice it would proclaim Trinity's autonomy and by implication its primacy as the church in a burgeoning city that then saw itself not without reason as the Athens of America. In the pursuit of this goal they invited designs from six of the country's leading architects five of whom submitted designs like the one you see here a competent if uninspired exercise in the then fashionable Gothic revival style. And then there was the proposal submitted by H.H. Richardson. It has often been noticed by critics and historians that Richardson's competition design as represented in his perspective drawing was compositionally awkward and stylistically confused. As James O'Gorman writes certainly this project his project was not measurably better than several of those who lost. We do not know he adds specifically what swung the committee in his favor. Well, it's true that we cannot know in as much as there are no surviving records of the jury deliberations. Yet with this drawing before us together with the parish records documenting the vestry's reasons for acquiring the Copley Square site we can surely surmise by Richardson won. He won because he alone among the invited competitors conceived and presented his project as a bold and absolutely unambiguous symbol of the aspirations both explicit and implicit that motivated his prospective clients building enterprise. When we consider this drawing gawky and even absurd as it may appear to a critical eye we cannot fail to marvel that an architect who was not yet entirely the master of his art had nonetheless so thoroughly mastered the companion art of seduction. An art practiced here with such consummate skill that even the shape of the drawing around Dell emphasizes the strength of his conception while concealing its weaknesses and by its cosmic connotations certainly reinforces his claim to be without question the man for the job. I'll interrupt to say that probably everybody in this room knows but maybe some students don't know that Richardson was famous for saying there are three rules for the practice of architecture. Rule one, get the job. Rule two, get the job. Rule three, get the job. Although Trinity Church has built is vastly superior to the design represented in Richardson's competition drawing the strength and weaknesses of both are remarkably similar in kind so that the official Richard Richardson authorized photograph of the completed building shows it from the same angle albeit from the opposite side. Clearly the architect's aim was to display to best advantage the powerful composition of apps and transept surmounted by a central tower while concealing the unfinished West Front which the architect struggled with for more than a decade but never resolved in a form that his client could afford. Unhappily and ironically Trinity's disappointing West Front feebly embellished by towers and a porch after Richardson's death was soon made to appear even more conspicuously wanting by its forced confrontation with the magisterial facade of the Boston Public Library built to the design of Charles Fallon McKim who as Richardson assistant had himself drawn the Trinity competition plans. With Trinity Church, the public library and the Museum of Fine Arts framing Copley Square Bostonians entered into what would become a century long and still ongoing debate about the character and purpose of the city's most important civic space. This debate has evidenced in an amazing variety of unfulfilled dreams and unsatisfactory fulfillments has been accomplished by two opposing phenomena, vividly illustrated in these images. On the left, the unceasing vigilance of Bostonians in protecting the integrity of the square from what they perceived to be inappropriate incursions and on the right, the even more relentless pressures for change to which the square was rendered vulnerable by virtue of its peculiar topographical setting. In the perspective of history, it is clear that the outcome was never in doubt. Citizens of artistic taste might rise in protest and where else but in Boston could such a headline have appeared certainly not in New York but their efforts must in the end prove fruitless against the onslaught of change that ironically was concentrated in the Copley Square district precisely because it was so firmly excluded from the residential enclave of the adjacent back bay. As Boston outgrew its historic downtown, the largest commercial space users including the John Hancock Insurance Company found that only in the vicinity of Copley Square could they acquire sites large enough to meet their needs. The Coup de Grasse came in the early 1960s when the rail yards became an enormous mixed use development with a skyscraper as its centerpiece and the railway line became an expressway. After suffering those indignities, Copley Square, a distillation of memory extending cusp-like into the territory of invention had been so desecrated that it had lost all credibility as a meaningful public space. To recover its meaning or more accurately to find new meaning, the square so we believed must welcome rather than reject a dialogue with the new scale of urbanization that had engulfed it. We saw the Hancock Company's need for two million square feet of additional office space as the appropriate occasion to launch that dialogue with the aim of it last joining memory to invention for the benefit of both. Seizing this opportunity, we proposed that Copley Square should have its own tower. Our proposal was not well received. Indeed, the response in Boston was one of shock and horror. What we saw as the right building in the right place at the right time was seen by almost everyone else and above all by our fellow architects in Boston as the wrong building in the wrong place at the wrong time. But after nine months of acrimonious public debate, the necessary building permits were obtained and in the fall of 1968, construction began. The one point I wanna emphasize about this episode is that permission was granted not because I had succeeded in converting people to our way of thinking, for with only a few exceptions I had not. But because had a building permit been denied, the Hancock Company might well have carried out its threat to move its headquarters with its 12,000 employees to Chicago where they were just completing another Hancock Tower. This brazen exercise of political arm twisting in the under part of our client naturally contributed to the widespread opinion often explicitly conveyed to me in person that my colleagues and I had prostituted ourselves professionally in accepting and carrying out this commission. To compound the agony during construction, the building endured a series of mishaps that caused us and our client to experience the rare privilege of being for more than half a decade simultaneously vilified and ridiculed. The most notorious of these problems publicized worldwide was the failure of insulating glass units that necessitated removal and replacement of all 10,334 panels in the curtain wall. Many in Boston saw all this as entirely just retribution for the egregious overreaching of the city's largest corporation. Mercifully, however, an entrepreneurial t-shirt artist didn't lose his opportunity to find a lighter side with which I was able to outfit all three of my daughters in the otherwise miserable summer of 1973. Although the deceptive mutability of its image may suggest otherwise, there is nothing mysterious about the design of the Hancock Tower. It perfectly illustrates my view that the architecture of a tall building is 99% logic and 1% art, but don't you dare take away that 1%. The extreme disparity in size between the tower and the church was, of course, the central predicament we faced. We chose to deal with it not by creating a gratuitous distance between the two. This would only have exacerbated the problem, but by bringing them into close proximity while positioning and shaping the tower in such a way that it becomes the contingent satellite and the church, the autonomous center in the composition. To accomplish this, several aspects of the tower's design may be cited as essential. First, the attenuated rhomboid planform placed diagonally on its site emphasizes the planar while minimizing the volumetric presence of the building so as to effectively disembodied the tower as seen from the square. Second, notches bisecting the end walls accentuate the weightless verticality of these planes and make legible the tower's non-rectangular geometry. Third, a bullnose corner detail facilitates the crucially important transition from trapezoidal base to rhomboid tower. Fourth, the tower's uniformly gridded and reflective surface, stripped of all elements that could suggest a third dimension, mutes the obtrusiveness of its enormous bulk and defers in all respects to the rich sculptural qualities of its much smaller neighbor. Fifth, the tower does not stand on the ground but rather slides up weightlessly through the surrounding pavement from which it is separated by a continuous one-inch wide slot. Finally, the triangular space created between the church and the broad face of the tower pays homage to the apposital view of Richardson's building. Clearly, its greatest strength. Reinforcing its intended role as the architectural sign-assure of Copley Square. With regard to this latter aspect, it should be noted that the three-story high lobby at the base of the tower is sheathed in precisely the same manner as all of the floors. Had the monumental scale of this interior space been celebrated on the exterior, it would surely have destroyed the delicate balance in the dialogue between church and tower. On October 28th, 1980, precisely 39 years ago today, in my inaugural lecture as chairman of architecture at the Harvard GSD, I summed up my view of the matter as follows. We adopted a strategy of minimalism in the design of the Hancock Tower not for ideological reasons but because the situation of the building demanded it. In the determined pursuit of our goal to achieve a symbiosis between the church, the tower and the square, we excluded everything that did not contribute directly to this end. For we believed that only thus could we temper the inherent arrogance of so large a building and endow it with a presence that might animate rather than oppress the urban scene. Today, almost four decades after writing these words, I find that I can still subscribe to them yet I also find myself still confronting a few questions that just won't go away. Can this gesture of accommodation justify that act of transgression? Is this performance appropriate to that occasion? Does this tower belong in that city? To each of these questions, the answer, it seems to me, must finally be both yes and no. This persistently disturbing ambiguity wherein the building discloses the anxiety of its predicament, perhaps explains why among all my built works, the Hancock Tower is as close as I have ever come to poetry. It is also as close as I've ever come to silence. The building's restraint to the point of muteness is refusal to reveal anything other than its obsession with its urban context is surely its greatest strength, but also its ultimate limitation as a work of architecture. Despite the phospholeness of its gesture, the tower remains virtually speechless so that the voice of Richardson's great church can continue to be heard. This self-imposed silence is no doubt why when it was announced in 1991 that a new federal courthouse was to be built in Boston, I so eagerly sought the commission to design it. For while the skyscraper had been obliged to remain mute, the courthouse, so I believed, would be invited to speak. And I longed for the opportunity to build in my erstwhile hometown a truly public building, a building to be experienced not just externally as object, but internally as space, and a building that not only need not, but clearly must not remain speechless. Well, I got my wish. And then standing on that splendid site overlooking the harbor, and a city so transformed as to be scarcely recognizable as the Boston of my childhood, I faced the question, what should this building say? Luckily, I could turn for help to judges Stephen Breyer and Douglas Woodlock, two superb mentors who took me in hand and generously instructed me in the elements of American jurisprudence. Together, the judges and I looked for relevant precedents among 20th century American courthouses in both modern and classical modes. Dissatisfied, we found ourselves going back in time, hoping to encounter a courthouse embodying those qualities that we sought. Probity, clarity, and restraint, together with an unequivocal declaration of openness to the public being served. We found these qualities vividly present at last in one of the nation's oldest courthouses still in use for that purpose. The Hanover County Courthouse in Virginia, built in 1735. Here, in December 1763, Patrick Henry argued the Parsons cause. And as a well-known painting depicting the event vividly suggests, the courthouse was at that time a center and symbol of its community. Playing an important public role that Stephen Breyer in particular was eager to recover in a form appropriate to contemporary civic life. But then we had to face the really hard question. How is it possible to transpose those qualities so perfectly embodied in this one-room courthouse to a huge structure housing 27 courtrooms embedded in more than half a million square feet of bureaucratic support space? Our response took the form of an L-shaped building with courtrooms arrayed on three levels behind a glass walled atrium overlooking Boston Harbor. In envisioning this courthouse, we sought to make a building that would be perceived as appropriately emblematic, yet open and accessible to all. That's why we rejected the courtrooms in tower configuration that regrettably has become the typological norm in court houses of comparable size. Judges Breyer and Woodlock explained to me at the outset that aside from its spectacular waterfront setting, a key factor in their selection of the fan pier site was its perceived appropriateness to the status of the federal courts as both a part of and apart from the local communities they serve. And early on, they also drew my attention to another interesting paradox, that while the courts must rely extensively on precedent in adjudicating the cases before them, those cases often require them to address societal problems that are entirely unprecedented. It is no exaggeration to say that this courthouse embodies our shared intention to acknowledge and indeed to celebrate in architecture the opposing terms of these two paradoxes. While this intention is clearly evident in the building's exterior, with its reference to the traditions of its place on the one hand and its emblematic departure from them on the other, it is in the experience of its interior spaces that our preoccupation with these dualities is most explicitly revealed. Having passed through and monumental entry arch, the visitor proceeds through the skylight reception hall to a central rotunda that seems to affirm unequivocally the separateness of the judicial process from the everyday life of the street. A separateness embodied both in the serene autonomy of its cylindrical form and in the equally serene abstraction of the Elseworth Kelly paintings on its walls. But when upon arriving at one of the upper floors, one emerges into the gallery that gives access to the courtrooms, a panoramic view of the city and its harbor offers a vivid reminder that the courts are not so separate after all that indeed they exist to serve the contemporary needs of the ever-changing world beyond their walls. Then turning toward the courtroom, separateness and respect for precedent are again suggested by the half dome entrance and further reaffirmed within the room itself where large arches dignify equally all participants of the judicial process. Judge, jury, witnesses, and the interested public while the dome ceiling declares a centrality of the litigants to the proceedings taking place therein. Here also, the duality between respect for precedent and openness to the unprecedented is embodied in the stenciled ornament which recovers a traditional New England craft in a new pattern derived from the structurally innovative form of the conard glass wall and closing the galleries, a wall through which upon emerging from the courtroom, one encounters once again the life of the city in all its splendid diversity. Finally, after descending to ground level, one may enter the harbor park and perhaps pause to read some words carved in granite that were once spoken by Justice Breyer. Quote, this most beautiful site in Boston does not belong to the judges. It does not belong to the lawyers. It does not belong to the federal government. It does not belong to the litigants. It belongs to the public. In the harbor park, one may relax among friends and enjoy the water's edge in company or in solitude while the courthouse behind holds the park in its gentle embrace. And here, as dusk falls, one may see affirmed in architecture the principle that every citizen shall have equal access to the law and to the guarantee of due process embodied in an independent judiciary. For despite our preoccupation with ambiguity and paradox, the unambiguous assertion of this principle that the courthouse and harbor park belong to the public and that the courts in their proceedings are open to all was from start to finish our most important goal in the design of this building. And I dare to hope that one may also sense here an echo of the voice that inspired us, the voice of a little one room courthouse in Hanover County, Virginia. Although both of the buildings we've just seen were completed decades ago, the skyscraper in 1976 and the courthouse in 1998, I do believe that the questions asked and the answers offered therein are still relevant today. Nonetheless, I imagine that some in this audience may be tempted to ask, well, what have you done for me lately? So I'll end this talk with a brief glimpse of a current building project for which ground was broken just last Friday in Charleston, South Carolina. It has been estimated that at least 80% of African-Americans alive today can trace their ancestry to enslaved forebears who survived the middle passage to disembark in chains at Gadsden's Wharf. Coincidentally, just steps away from the Emanuel AME Church. Traces of the original seawall still exist, as do the foundations of a nearby brick warehouse in which new arrivals were held, sometimes for weeks, while the traders awaited a rise in prices at Charleston's slave market. As the place where many thousands of Africans from diverse cultures first set foot in North America, Gadsden's Wharf is not only just the right place to tell the story of African origins and American destinations. It is indeed hallowed ground, hence the special challenge presented by the International African-American Museum to build on this site without occupying it. On a elongated parallel pipe bed, 400 feet in length and 80 feet wide, houses the museum on a single floor, hovering 13 feet above the ground, and supported by 18 cylindrical pillars of oyster-shelled tabby that rise from a surface of the same material, thus leaving the entire ground plane open, except for service cores framing the central skylight stairway. The building's long sides are clad in pale yellow brick, while the glazed end walls are framed by African sepele louvers directing views at the eastern end toward the Atlantic and at the western end to downtown Choste. At ground level, Walter Hood's splendidly imagined African ancestors' memorial garden embraces the entire site. Deploying elements of low-country landscape as it celebrates the arts, the crafts, and the labors of African-Americans. The garden is bounded on one side by a shallow pool, a metaphor for the Atlantic, whose sharply defined western edge marks the original seawall of Gadson's Wharf, while its soft eastern edge, each and boundary evokes the limitless ocean beyond. Here, then, a purposefully unrhetorical work of architecture quietly affirms the power of place as it shelters and frames a richly articulated work of landscape art. Thank you for your attention. So I just have a few questions, and I wanna be able to open up to questions from the audience, so not so much a response, but a few comments, questions. So first of all, I have a deep respect for your relentless pursuit of architecture in the public realm, regardless of the building's program. So thinking about the office building and such, and your absolute commitment to the active building. And this is one of the quotes from your book that I left. As an enterprise, not just of envisioning, but of accomplishing a built work with the intention that such a work may illuminate and give meaning to the human condition while giving shape to the physical world. So I think this concern for the human condition is something that resonates with me. So I have many questions. I just wanna ask a couple, and then I'm hoping, again, that we can hear from the audience. So I'm gonna, I'll start with one about this skyscraper as a citizen that you talk about, which I thought was so interesting as a way of you positioning that in the book, and specifically about, you call a radically contingent posture for the tower in Copley Square. So thus, however effective, you say the office tower may be as a beacon of corporate or entrepreneurial achievement, its programmatic limitations would seem to condemn it a a priori to the status of monument without meaning and a symbol without substance. So, and you call it, I love this quote, an enormous and indigestible object that is inescapably banal, exploited alienating and inhumane. So, however, at the same time, you argue for the citizen, skyscraper as citizen. So, with the proliferation of tall buildings, this is a really broad question, in this city today, can you discuss what that might mean here? I mean, here we're living with this proliferation, you built in Boston, but this, you know, this, at the one hand, the kind of skyscraper citizen, and then this kind of alienating inhumane in non-public building, right, that closes itself off to the public. Of course, we shouldn't forget that the New York City zoning law was provoked by a building that precisely matched my banal and inhumane, the Equitable Life Building down on Broadway, is it, Broadway? Which achieved a density that had been unheard of and provoked the initial zoning law in New York City. So we've been living with this problem, and we'll continue to live with it. Density, you know, I think an unexplored, still unexplored or insufficiently explored aspect of urban design is still high density, low rise. I doubt if it's ever gonna happen in New York. Well, maybe in the outer boroughs it might happen, but the way it will happen in New York is by the preservation of certain districts, obviously that's, so then that raises the question, which of course the Hancock Tower raised in spades, which is what about the relationship, if you're gonna have tall buildings intruding into, around Greenwich Village, for example, or how do you manage that? And my problem is that all of our buildings I have a lot of respect for the motives of people who want to limit heights, to make rules. Problem for me is that the city doesn't live by rules. And I've never encountered any generality about the city that I would want to defend because I think everything is in the specifics. Everything is in the specifics. Now there are very few cases as extreme as the Hancock Tower, but we do, nonetheless, I'm gonna say something that I didn't put in the lecture, but it's because, which is that in a case like that building, and this could be, it could happen in New York if you were building next to certain key monuments. I would maintain that the relationship between Trinity Church and the Hancock Tower is so intimate that in effect they become a combined work. Now that's a kind of outrageous thing to say, but it's the only way that you can escape the banality of the tower is by making it into something that feels like a companion to what it's next to. And so, and of course, that's a very difficult thing to do, and it's completely understandable that rules are written, zoning codes are written necessarily as generalizations. And I think that you could argue that those generalizations prevent the worst things from happening, but on the other hand, they may not permit the best things to happen. That's, because the best things are always gonna be exceptional in some way. But nonetheless, well, let's take, I didn't show this building, but the building that was on your announcement, Seven Bryant Park, is our most recent office building in New York. Now that building is a perfectly ordinary building. It respects absolutely the existing zoning. It doesn't challenge anything, because we didn't feel it was appropriate to challenge in that location, but that's not the task. We didn't want to be to be a skyscraper around Bryant Park. We wanted, what we wanted was within the existing zoning to make a building that seemed to respond to the presence of the park, that seemed to speak to the park, because I think that's really what I mean by skyscraper as a citizen, is the building that speaks, that you feel somehow that it's interested in you, that it has something to say to you. And to me, that's, in the end, more important than any specific rule I could write, and that's... So I wanna ask you a question. I was thinking about that building, actually, and you had said, you have said also in the book, I'm gonna quote you again, architecture is a critique of culture carried out through form. So I was thinking that the buildings presented here today formally speaking, I don't know if you'll agree with this, present an obsession with geometry, with pure geometry, synthetic geometry, or Euclidean geometry, and also the drawings of the cone that you had next to the courthouse, that you saw, employed to articulate complexities of the building's relationship to the public. So can you speak to this? And I was thinking of Bryant Park, or also the courthouse. Also, maybe. Well, yeah, Carpenter Center, well. Since it was in there. I mean, that's an extraordinary performance covered in the center. It's almost unimaginable to me how he could extract a positive outcome from what he was given to deal with. So it's, but again, it shows, and that, I mean, we just have to insist on the importance of architecture as an art. We have to insist on it, we have to. It has to be, and again, because what separates our art from other arts is that our art is so entangled with the way the world works, with money and power and so forth. It's inescapable. And of course, I've written about this in the book. Also, it's a really ethical problem. So, I think I've lost my train of thought. So money and power. Money and power, I just want. Money and power and architecture. I mean, it's part of, that's why I don't think one wants to be an architect unless you're willing to face the music, to face that dilemma. It's a very, I, in my life, have had some very gifted friends, much more gifted than I, who simply couldn't face that dilemma. They just, but I think, so that's, for me, the reason that I gave this talk, this strange title, is that for me, this act of controlled remembering is a very important way of getting at the substance of architecture. You have to, it's an, anyway, sorry. So I'm gonna ask one other, I wanna ask a question about a detail. It's more than a detail, and then I wanna open this up. So I wanna ask you, is that the, when you spoke at Cooper Union, we talked about this, and there was a question about, or you were discussing the entry into, the obvious entry into the Hancock Tower, and maybe the not-so-obvious entry, and I was wondering if you could speak to that and talk about that. Well, it's a dilemma. Dilemma. See that, it's a true dilemma, because, and it's like other things, that's why, when you talk about, there's this ambivalence, there's a deep ambivalence. It's not just about the entrance, before we even talk about the entrance, the Hancock Tower is a very, the plaza is a very windy place, and you can criticize it for that. And the question is, does the achievement of the building visually justifies being a windy place? The same thing applies to the entrance. The building really resists entry, the pure, the doesn't want entry. It's totally about the quality of the object in space. So, any entry is odd. The one we have there, I think, is okay, but as I've often said, although I never express this to our client, the right way to enter the Hancock Tower would be to enter Trinity Church, go down to the crossing, take a stairway down and go under the street. In other words, the only entrance to the Hancock Tower is the Trinity Church. Well, it's impossible with the way you detailed it also, when you showed the detail of the gap, right with the... Yes, well, that's it. It doesn't want to be... So the entrance bridges that gap, which doesn't want to be bridged. That's exactly it, it wants to be... So that's a... I love that. But you have to, those things, and believe me, we throw... Of course, that entrance went through several. In fact, it's been rebuilt at least once, because anyway. But one thing that I'm very happy about is that we didn't allow the lobby to be expressed on the outside, because the lobby has been trashed totally in the intervening years. It's hidden in the perfect volume. Better that you don't see it. Just reflected in the church. Which brings me to another point. You have to get used to the idea as an architect that you lose control. If you have any control at all, you lose it immediately. It's almost impossible to prevent bad things from happening. Well, with just a few moves, you kind of closed the situation there. So, does anyone want to ask me a question? I'd like to open to questions. Okay. Okay. Yeah. You were designing the Hancock building today. How would it look? Would it be the same? Well, first of all, it would never happen today. It couldn't happen today, because there's a new law in Boston, which is that you cannot cast a shadow on a public space. And the Hancock shadow is notorious. So, and it's one of the things that it says. So, I don't think the Hancock Tower would happen today, but there's, and I wouldn't, it's pretty this way. I wouldn't, it's pretty this way. There are always other possibilities, but I'm not the right person to think of them. You snuck it in before they changed the rules. I'm interested in the way in which, what this companionship between the John Hancock building and the Trinity Church developed over time and is as very, I mean, I totally agree that the placement and the design of the site and the trapezoid and so forth were actually crucial to the orientation of the building to the church and the way in which it was going to, I don't know if you never mentioned the reflect, incredible reflection, which every image shows, the reflection of the church in the tower and whether that was something you knew about immediately or that was what you were going for in a way was to sort of open, have a mirror, mirror the church in some way. But there's the other thing about the wind and the shadow and the incredible atmospherics of the building that is, it's like this, it picks up the light and I'm very, and I guess you could say most skyscrapers do that, but really most don't. There was something about the shifting of the way you oriented that picks up the light and runs it down those funnels on the side and so forth that is just like a staggering. And so that atmospheric also is not 100% controllable. I mean, you're not really making a device for light in order and stuff like that. That's a typical architectural claim, but it's not really, it's kind of accidental also if it comes about in that way. And well, first of all, I hate reflective glass. I hate reflective glass. Well, that doesn't show your images. So I, but in this particular case, now you can say, you can always argue that the client's program should have been different. And then the tower wouldn't have had to be so big. I mean, there's a whole back story which I haven't told you because the Hancock Tower as built is not the first project, it's the second project that we did for Hancock. The first project was totally different. So, but this was the outcome. That's another story we take a whole other lecture. And so, I don't think that you can ever, I think that in any situation where you have extreme differences of scale, there is going to be a question that's going to be some downside. And, but the reason that I think the downside in Copley Square doesn't wipe out the upside is because the tower is seen as belonging to the square. That's the real reason for it, it's seen as belonging to the square. And that's why the building has been accepted. I mean, having been fought tooth and nail as a design, the odd thing was that the minute it was finished, it became accepted. So, but because I think people do understand that it's about that place. It's not just a huge intrusion. It is a huge intrusion, but it's a huge intrusion that's made with respect for that place. Now, you can still say it would have been better if it weren't so huge. And you can say that about, you know, this is what do you, I can tell you that when we received that program from Hancock after they rejected the first scheme and asked us if we were interested in doing a two million square foot building because we had designed a much smaller tower with some surrounding buildings, a totally different plan. We thought long and hard about it. It would have been a very easy and very natural thing to do, to say no thanks. Because all the motives that we love to hate were in that. This was an act of pure kind of greed, real estate greed of ambition for, you know, the chairman of Hancock was furious because Prudential had built that tall building and he had to be taller. And all the motivations behind the Hancock Tower are somewhat questionable. And therefore you could say, well, why do it? And the only thing, that's why it's so important to understand that I'm a Bostonian because truthfully, we've done buildings in cities around the world and I would never presume to do in any other city what we did in Boston. And the reason for that is that I felt that I understood the problem better and my fellow architects in Boston. I really believe that I understood the problem but you have to be kind of, first of all, you have to be ready to take the heat and there was a lot of heat. I mean, it really was a very unsettling experience from that point of view. But by the way, you started to ask about that you're not buying the Anemesis and that could lead to a whole discussion which we shouldn't have tonight. And I'm ready to acknowledge that it's a bit of a stretch. Nonetheless, I was so taken with Sanford's piece that I had to sort of weave it in. Alliquent lecture. I was struck by, it's the historian's question. You did Hancock almost about the same time as complexity and contradiction came out. As what? As complexity and contradiction came out. Yes, the same time. A few years later, yes. Yeah, construction started, 68. And the book came out actually 67. Says 66. Anyway, the question I had is much of your language, ambiguity, it almost was like both and an attention to the past, but not totally to the past. Context even, which is a word in Venturi's thesis, reminded me of him and yet the results are so totally different. And I was just wondering if you had reflected on that and how you would situate your own much more minimal approach to those issues in those terms. Well, yes, I've thought about it a lot and across that book, had an enormous influence. But the influence of that book was not as powerful as perhaps fact that during those years before the book came out, you know, I myself finally had an opportunity to begin to understand history. The history that I had been denied in my rush to become an architect. I think you're absolutely right that the words that I like to use are very comparable to the words that Venturi liked to use. And the fact that the outcome is different is nothing actually to me validates the words because there are so many interpretations possible. You know that I competed against Bob and Denise once for the National Gallery in London and they won and they deserve to win because they really did grasp that in a way that I couldn't do because I don't, see, I never, I don't have an ironic bone in my body. And Bob is nothing but irony. So that's what makes, but I think that I think in the end what it comes down to is that it's all in the specifics. It's all in the joy of the way things come together. It's all in fine, so you know, I've come, obviously, I was part of what Bob Venturi was rebelling against and arguably, but I myself began to drift away, first in Fredonia from some of the sort of, how shall I say, the principles that we seem to be working with in the 50s and 60s. Well, we shouldn't go there, but it's hard to, Bob Venturi's book is extremely important, but to me it would not be as important as it is if you didn't also have the work. And you could argue, if I had to give up one or the other, I'd probably give up the book. Although a lot of the work doesn't measure up to the book, but when it does measure up to the book, that's, for example, Wu Hall at Princeton, tiny little building, just thrilling, breaks all the rules, any rule you ever invented is broken in that building, and yet it's thrilling. So, you know, that's what you need is that, so that's why, I don't know, it's a tough choice. Fortunately, you don't have to give up, there's words to give up his buildings, but if you had to choose, I would still go for it. You know, the truth is that today, he and I would agree on a lot of things. Which doesn't mean that we'd be doing the same thing, where he and Denise went in a completely different direction that I would never go was in the idea of symbolic form, literal symbolic form. That's just a place that never interested me. But in our lifetime, he is the master of finding a contemporary, of refreshing the classical language in a truly inventive way. That's why, of course, to call him, I mean, it was unfortunate for him that it coincided with postmodernism, because it's not kind of put him in a camp that he didn't want to be in, it wasn't him. And there's someone's junk out there. But history will sort things out. Venturi will, it's already and will continue to be recognized as one of the great architects of our time. I quite like the concept of endemesis. I thought it was very fitting and the fact that you referenced the equitable building is also fitting because the Department of City Planning is there now, which is itself an act of endemesis. It's this kind of uncomfortable remembering. This, I thought even the PowerPoint snafu was interesting if you view it as endemesis. We're left wondering, what is this alternate universe where the quote unquote right PowerPoint was chosen? What would that have looked like? Thank you, well, you're very generous in that spirit. I think this idea of discomfort and comfort, when I first saw the images of the International African American Museum, I thought it was maybe a little underwhelming, but after you explain it, I think it's a very uncomfortable thing to confront there. And you have this capacious, almost comfortable space to contemplate these things. And I've been in a lot of your buildings and they're all pretty comfortable, right? They're not uncomfortable. So I think there's, but then when you explain them, there's this tension there. There's this, the endemesis, right? There's something very, there's the oscillation. There's the, there's something to latch on to. So I guess the question is about, should the space itself be comfortable and so that the thoughts can be more uncomfortable, I suppose? Well, are you talking specifically about that project in Charleston? Or about... Yes, and then more generally. Because there, I mean, the real, the building in Charleston houses a museum and the exhibits in the museum are being designed by Ralph Appelbaum. So it's a different thing altogether. And what we provide is the framework for that. And then the building is a framework for the landscape. So the building, I don't take offense at the fact that you call it underwhelming because it's designed not to take center stage. Take center stage there is the landscape. It's a huge challenge for the landscape. I mean, I think Walter Howard is rising to the occasion, but that's where the challenge is because that's where both the comfort and the discomfort have to be. In other words, it's a place where you should be uncomfortable. When you come there and you see and you realize that you're standing at a place where people arrived under those terrible conditions from very rich cultures and went into slavery. So you can't, on the other hand, the museum is not about slavery at all. It's about where people came from and where they went. So it's a, and the landscape has to speak to both of those. That's why that pool that isn't very well represented either in words or in images at the moment, but it's a very important element because it really is the metaphor for the ocean and the edge of the original. And you're gonna, when you arrive there, you're gonna know that that's the place. That's the kind of moment of truth, if you will. And then a lot of other, and there are a couple of other places which are very memorable related to the warehouse there. But then there are other places which are designed to stimulate the senses and to, you know, they expect to have lots of festivity, lots of music, lots of dancing. It's gonna be, you know, it's supposed to be alive. So it's a very interesting challenge. And Walter happens to be one of the people that I think really understands that and is going to, but our job as architects was to set the stage in a certain sense for the landscape. And we do, you know, but we want the building to be to say something. And that's why the choice of those three very simple materials is important. The oyster shell tabby, the brick, and the wood, the wood is an African wood. The brick is really there because we wanted a material that embodies craft, putting together, and we want it, but we don't want it to be a standard brick. We want it to be a brick that you sit up and take notice. So it's an unusual shape, has much thicker mortar joints than standard. The mortar joints are almost as thick as brick. It's gonna be a total, but it's gonna be a brick building. It's gonna be crafted. It's gonna be built on the site. It's not gonna be prefabricated. It's gonna be built on the site. So that kind of crafting, I think is important for us to say in this place because it would have been in a way very easy and perhaps less expensive to have one of the wonderful new materials that you can put up in pounds, and it would serve the purpose, but it wouldn't have the resonance that we want here. We want people to be moved somehow. And the building plays a minor role in that, but it still plays a role. I mean, I was thinking of this quote of yours, an art of indirection, where you say, I love this, where you say, we don't make the building, we make an elaborate set of instructions that direct the work of others. I love that. So that's what architects do. We make an elaborate set of instructions to direct the work of others. Yes, it's a huge problem. So that's an enormous, it's an enormous problem because it's just another way that we're enmeshed, you know, where we can't escape. You can't build a building without the work of others. You can paint a picture or compose a musical score, write a book, but you can't build a building. The architect cannot build a building. So it's, again, learning to balance those things and figure out how to make, I mean, even in, if I think back to when I was in school, we were literally, you know, the first three volumes of Le Corbusier's of the year of Complette were our Bibles. The last four hadn't come out yet. And at the same time, there was Alto, in whom we didn't have much interest, and he built that wonderful building at MIT, which we again didn't have. I mean, yes, we were interested, but somehow didn't mean very much to us. Means much more to me now than it did then. And in fact, I did, you know, so Alto was a bit of an outlier, even though he was present in Cambridge at that time, but I'm getting off the track, I think. The elaborate set of instructions. Okay, thanks. Thank you.