 I wanted to start our conversation tonight around some of the ideas that actually Caroline had brought up with the design triangle, which as she mentioned we just announced it in the press today. We're looking in exploring nature in contemporary design and everyone who is sitting up here, their work touches on nature in some way. So it's something I've been thinking about quite a bit I think many of us have and I know each of you have in your own way and so actually Ann I wanted to start with you and ask you what nature means to you in your work. Okay well I distinguished between nature and landscape so nature is an idea not a place. A lot of people say I'm gonna go out into nature but to me that means they probably are going out into a landscape where the touch of the human hand isn't so obvious but for me nature as an idea is the physical chemical and biological processes that sustain life and so working with landscape design and planning it's important to me to work with both these physical chemical and biological processes or natural processes as well as social and cultural processes because landscape is a mutual shaping of people in place to express ideas and to create a habitat for us and for the living organisms with which we inhabit the earth. So does that do it? Yeah absolutely you know and I think you actually touched on something which is quite interesting that to many people when they think about the concept of nature you think about going someplace else that at some place it's not the built environment somehow or the city I mean can you comment more on? No interesting yeah. Right so I was very frustrated in as a young professional working in a landscape architecture and planning firm that Ian McCarg was a partner in. Ian McCarg wrote a book called Design with Nature that was published in 1969 and the frustrating thing to me was we were working on in the office on projects for ecologically designed resort developments and new towns and meanwhile I was living in West Philadelphia and taking the bus every day down into the city and watching the city crumbling and it really bothered me that we weren't looking to apply these ideas of ecological planning and design to designing cities and making them more livable more beautiful more ecologically sustainable so I decided to write Design with Nature for the city which was my first book the Granite Garden urban nature and human design so for me the city is not separate from nature and I think that is really it is so ingrained in society to think of city and nature as separate but natural processes don't stop operating at city limits so if you think of nature as processes as opposed to a place then it opens up all kinds of opportunities for design and for thinking about how you can design with these ecological processes to create a more resilient more sustainable more economical city to build and sustain and more beautiful I love that idea about nature as processes there's something that's very powerful and potent about that and a Sunanda thinking about your work at the mediated matter group can you talk to that about nature as processes is that a way that you approach nature yeah definitely so I think in our group we tend to not just think about products but definitely how processes happen and how you can design with them over time and talking about what's nature and what's not one of the questions that comes up with us a lot is what is natural versus synthetic because right now we're in the age of synthetic biology so we are able now to edit genomes edit genes and then start working with those engineered systems you can basically design how a living organism interacts with its environment and that's sort of what I'm working on in particular in our group and when you think about that tiny level of a of a bacterium for example you can expand the same thinking across scales to how a large scale piece a printed piece a 3d printed piece for instance can interact with the environment around it and I just started reading in mccargs books actually and we were looking at if we're creating something that is biological and large scale in an environment that's changing of course all the time and it's exposed to sunlight to win patterns things like that what are all the different pieces of information we need to make this piece of architecture work with the environment around so one of the things we want to do is start looking at environmental DNA and look at the different species that exists there and see if instead of introducing entirely new species we can take those ones that already exist in the area and engineer them to work in a specific way so not just looking at GIS data or GPS data or win patterns but also what is already living there and really looking at sequencing that environmental DNA is that like microbiomes or is that like what is that yeah it's sort of the microbiome of an area yeah so there's a bunch of different techniques you can do to sample soil or water and look at all the different DNA fragments that exist and so you can have an idea of what different species are there and then hopefully in the future what different enzymes so specific patterns of DNA or RNA that you find no it's interesting you know and I mean so much of you know the work that you guys are doing for instance coming out of the mediated matter group is so interesting I mean thinking around materials and systems and ways of building that enable a structure to vary its properties based upon external environmental conditions I mean that's something that you know I feel very much like we you know are still living with you know these these principles of modernism right and these materials of concrete and steel and we very much kind of eschewed growth and change in the built environment in a way using these materials so it's interesting thinking about how a material could degrade perhaps in response to environmental conditions I love that you know nary always points out like our skin for instance can certainly vary its properties it can become more porous it can change its melanin content it can become more stiff you know all in response to to the environment and so how could our built environment potentially respond and replicate to some of that so it's it's exciting and for you Mikiang I mean you know kind of going back to this idea as well of nature and situating it within your work I mean what does it mean to you I think I think people use the word nature and it's there's a kind of romantic quality to it it's like this distant dream of something and I think it's a very dangerous position that we've taken that we are as human beings not part of the natural system and I think that's why we find ourselves where we are today that we are when we when we see something that's so distant and separated from us I think we can then do things that we do to the natural world we can pollute the environment we can and I think that that is really clear here in the United States where we have these national parks which are pristine they're perfect and we gate them off and and then we when we live in the city we don't really fully understand a lot of the systems there are some people who talk about how the the kind of little pieces of nature that we have in our backyard our gardens are the place where we learn about what our place is in the natural world but I think one plate one example that we found through our practice is that it's where young people play they understand I think from a very very young age when they're in diapers still they see a dandelion and then it's turns into kind of seeds and there's a way in which young children teach us about being in awe of that process but I'm always wanting to be very careful about being too I can't think of a better word than romantic because I think it's it makes it like a dream but it's it's real you know we don't take care of we're not resilient an example I can give is we're doing a project in a botanic garden and Charlottesville of Virginia and we showed the client this map of they were insisting on they only want native plant materials but if you look at a map of showing those plant zones in 2050 and then 2070 it's like completely different you know and I think it's a very for me it's like this question of like what is natural how can we be more nurturing to the environment that we live within and how can we also have a kind of more flexible definition of what that is because it's changing at a rapid pace and so it's it's a very complex question I think in nature is a word we don't actually use very often because it's too difficult to talk it's like beauty it's a very difficult world yeah yeah no it's and it's very loaded I mean there are certainly traditions that we're coming out of with very much a romantic idea around nature which I think is you know very rooted in like 19th century philosophy and theorists and think about like Walden you know in this very kind of romantic vision of you know living in with nature and whatnot that to a way it hasn't served us well I mean there there are some horticulturalists who talk about the city beautiful movement and that it actually has a kind of racist edge because it was defined the kind of beauty and the nature and bring that into the city was a way of actually pushing out underserved populations from the city and so I think that it's a word that's so loaded because some African-American communities look at it with suspicion almost but in other ways there's a lot of research which shows that even just one tree or even a painting of nature can make us feel just a little bit better you know physiologically so it's yeah you know and that's a thing I mean it seems like there certainly is a connection with health I mean do you find that in your work you've done work like with the Chicago Hospital I mean how does that factor in it's a huge sea change in the last there's some people in audience who I've worked with on a project here in Boston I'd say even 10 years ago there was this real sense with these kind of clinical environments every square footage every square foot matters you know and there's always this discussion of you spend five million dollars on a garden not that we've spent five million dollars on a garden here but five million dollars on a garden and then how many MRI machines can you purchase for that you're taking over 5,000 square feet in the city but there's a lot of research out there which which shows that within three to five minutes engagement with the natural world actually regularizes our heart rate normalizes our brain function everything in the body and it's something that we all know intuitively you walk along the beach and you suddenly it's something kind of transforms in your body but it took a lot of kind of psychological research to allow for because there's always a financial impact in the work we do you know how do you make that decision and for you I mean a lot of the work that you're doing in Philadelphia for instance right now you were just mentioning to me before the panel that you're about to begin writing a book I hope I can say that kind of summarizing the 30 years of the work that you've been doing with this river that's been covered over and what not and I can't help it even think about health in particular within that project I don't know if that's something that you're dealing with in particular absolutely I'm starting the book a couple hundred years before I entered the scene so it's it's important to think of places as it being in the process of becoming there they're they're not static and they're being shaped by natural processes and interplay with economic and social and cultural processes so in order to bring people into this 30-year project and reflect myself on what I've learned over that period of time I found I needed to go back a couple hundred years and talk about the processes that shaped this place over time that both it was West Philadelphia as an inner-city neighborhood there was a river that flowed through it that drained two thirds of West Philly that was buried in a sewer in the mid 19th century and over the course of the 20th century particularly post 1950s it became increasingly segregated racially to the point where it's extremely segregated racially but people today don't don't perceive that as having placed today having been it's the result of all of these things that have across time decisions that have been made I think this this this particular microphone doesn't really like me so there I'll back up and say that I mean it's it's it's a I discovered in and and I discovered this river I'll tell you how I discovered this river so I was a first-year graduate student in landscape architecture and I went to the supermarket one day and there was a huge hole that stretched for an entire block from building wall to building wall and I looked down and there was this big brown rushing river and I said whoa there are rivers underground we're walking on rivers and we don't know it we're literally walking on rivers that was in West Philly where I'm now working so I came back when I went to Penn to start working at teaching at Penn I took up the study of this buried river and noticed that there was a high correlation in low-income neighborhoods between vacant land and the buried floodplain the buried valley bottoms of this of this river so there's an association which I'm telling the story in my book there's an association between low-income people and particularly low-income people of pot of color and these buried valley bottoms which have a higher water table which if you go into the basements there are there's there's mold in the basements so you have these associated health issues and for the past 30 years I've been working with various people in these neighborhoods to study how it developed over time and to develop ideas about how to rebuild the neighborhoods and the vacant lands that exist in these neighborhoods while addressing restoring the the urban natural environment like the water quality that's the the city's rivers are polluted by combined sewer overflows so I've made some proposals about how to detain stormwater on these low-lying vacant lands in order to reduce combined sewer overflows and rebuild communities at the same time but but it's and this has resulted in policy changes in Philadelphia with their adoption of green infrastructure to deal with their combined sewer overflow problem but this this I found that over the 30 years this issue of people separating city and nature has been an obstacle to get through to persuade people to take these this approach to ecological design in the city and to solve multiple challenges with single solutions and I think that idea again of like a process of place being something that's constantly becoming and I love the idea that your your starting point for your book is in that moment when you saw this rushing river under the street you know it's looking back a hundred two hundred years you know that ultimately there are all these incremental decisions and choices that are made along the way which end up resulting in the current state of things well actually it does start with me looking down and then everyone my readers go down into the wormhole and travel back in time to discover a man named John Guy who was an African American dump master who was charged with filling in superintending the fill to fill in the valley bottom after the sewer had been buried so that brings race and race and river together I hope that's gonna be a part of your book you know there's just connecting with that there's a project that we're working on Richmond which is the lumpkin jail and it is was one of the primary locations where African slaves abducted African slaves were detained and sold and they they have the foundation and so they found that actually the slaves were detained in the lowest part in the Chaco Valley region and so when they were they just projecting the like 20 year 50 year storm they were in these prisons but they were also the water level was kind of a chest high and then people who were running this system were okay maybe he's just telling me I've spoken but I do think like there maybe there is a common interest that we hold in the the relationship the cultural relationship with the natural world and that the separation or the romanticism of that has led us to where we are today another interesting story that we just read about last month is when African women were abducted in Africa in South Africa and they were brought here they actually hid seeds in their hair so that they could prepare to grow rice when they came here to Virginia and so there's a very powerful narrative that all plants have and all systems have and I'm fascinated by that you know and Sunanda what do you think about this idea of you know this the separation of you know the human and the natural world how do we bring that together how does design work to bring that together yeah I think hmm okay I think right now I've been focusing a lot on not the human because so much of nature is not human or not human shaped so I think it is really interesting to think about social dynamics and all the things that humans have created in human history but I've been sort of stuck in this place right now to thinking about earth history so billions of years and humans have just come in the last sort of second of that and there's so many things that talk about what you're saying about you know even how seeds travel from continent to continent that are really interesting to see and humans are definitely impacting environment really fast and that's something to be aware of and I think that's where design starts to come in so in the work that we're doing right now we take a lot of inspiration from what's been happening over the last hundreds or thousands or even millions of years and then see what does that mean in the context of design today so we're doing a project right now looking at natural pigments so like melanin for instance and melanin has existed for millions and millions of years and it's been found in you know squid ink sacks from the Jurassic period for instance and it's the exact same chemical structure that exists today in squid ink sacks and melanin is so related to personal identity and racial identity and things like that that sometimes it's easy to think about it as a human thing but really it exists in all the kingdoms of life so I think when I think about issues like this I take a step back away from the human away from our species our kingdom or everything and then see what unites across all of biodiversity and how can we think of design looking across biodiversity I love that so I'm very excited for this project I look forward to reading seeing what comes out of your thesis you know and thinking of this idea of biodiversity and whatnot I mean of course I think all of us were perhaps unsurprised but a bit jarred by the IPCC report that just came out in October telling us that you know in 20 years time or so there could potentially be very systemic and catastrophic changes to the world as we know it so thinking about this idea of climate change where does design fit into this and I'm gonna leave that open to any of you you know I mean what is design's role within where you know where we find ourselves currently I think design has the capacity to teach us to be better stewards of the environment and we haven't been very good and that catastrophic thing is actually happening now you know it's just so incremental that we don't notice it it's sort of like you know I look in the mirror and I every day and I don't notice the new wrinkles that show up on my face as I age and I kind of equate that with the environment that we slowly accept these unbelievable things that are happening to the environment because they are happening so slowly and you know I really believe although I think there it's important to have a kind of big vision and big plans but that a lot of cities are doing this now they are legislating ways of integrating at the more granular level ways of kind of trying to rectify some of the some of the resiliency issues that we have not been paying attention to and so it's it's just like block by block every project to try to understand where is water coming from how does the wind move through the site and and then I think tying that that's separating that investigation and that design strategy from people but understanding kind of teaching people not only you a part of the environment are you responsible for taking care of the environment but you are part of this whole system and there's an integration yeah but you have to tell it as a story it can't be an academic thing or you know I was just reading I used to be a musician and I was trying to figure out I was just reading some medical papers about this I might blow your mind which is that sound in you probably already know this sound does not exist except in your brain it's just molecules moving around and it's not until it enters your brain that it becomes those sound waves become meaningful and it's not even just entering your brain it has to get to this part of your brain called the amygdala it's like going around and I feel like our job as landscape architects is to not just teach people because that doesn't get into the amygdala it's kind of making meaningful connections and that that's what design has a capacity to do at all levels I mean Christina Kim who is not here tonight because she's in LA but she is a person who understands the natural processes and her work even though it's fashion design kind of connects us with her with with our bodies with the natural world and then with the people who make the clothing and I just think it's so wonderful that there are three women sitting here and I think that that is if we can say anything I think women are capable of think doing three things at once we're constantly doing that I think design has a lot to offer in terms of mitigation and adaptation to climate change but one of the big challenges is making adaptation and mitigation to climate change pleasurable right because I think just putting on a hair shirt is not you know it's not gonna get everybody's buy-in but designers should really put their minds to what you were just talking about about making these natural processes and social and cultural processes that contribute to climate change tangible and then also to find ways on all levels from product design to landscape architecture architecture all the various different design fields have their own contribution to making the public aware of climate change and and action being action-oriented but also making it pleasurable I love that idea of pleasure you know and and and kind of picking up on a bit of even what both of you were talking about you know of all these different design disciplines and us as humans really you know integrating and being a part of it I keep thinking and coming back to even this idea of collaboration you know of course it's collaboration with one another and it's collaboration with nature and that obviously you know we're all a part of this and we're all in it together how does collaboration for instance work with you guys it mediated matter you know within your practice you know thinking about approaching some of these really salient issues yeah I think we so we think about collaboration all the time every single day and also one area always calls productive tension so in our group we're like the rest of our department we're very interdisciplinary so my background personally is in biology if you couldn't tell and neuroscience and I joined nary's group was the first biologist there but before then there were mechanical engineers computer scientists and computational designers product designers and architects so already there was quite a large array of people of different backgrounds and I think every single project we do we try to figure out every single aspect of it so that there needs to be novelty or some sort of complexity coming from biology from mechanical engineering from design but I think design is generally the umbrella under which we think of everything else and so I wasn't trained as a designer so I'm sort of learning as I go over the last four years but one thing that I've noticed that design really has to offer in terms of making change not just for climate change but also to address many many other issues is designers seem to be very good at making frameworks and synthesizing things so you can put on different hats and you can see where paths are going and where they intersect and without committing to only one type of technique technology approach or mindset you can sort of move in between recruit people from different fields and start to work to a common design goal so I've seen a lot of how design can really make people come together and make people come together to address complexity in a lot of ways so I want to take a step back for a moment and shared with us that fantastic story of you seeing the river that kind of seeded this whole project now that you've dedicated yourself to for 30 years or so and Mckyoung you mentioned that you used to be a musician so what where was the spark for landscape architecture does music play a part in any of this yeah I think it's really I mean there's the obvious connection between music and designing the environment where music is an immersive experience it's you can it's I think I entered design thinking about it design in a different way because in music you can close your eyes and enjoy the music more when I was in design school which was a long time ago visual visualization and I think it still is was so important but in landscape it's a multi-sensory experience you smell things it's constantly evolving experience I think one of the things that we do when we teach we try to teach through pleasure or what is to redefine what beauty means in the natural world in the landscapes that surround us whether it's an urban plaza it's a university quadrangle or its botanic gardens we still battle a little bit of this kind of picturesque notion of beauty in the landscape which is so and then we also have a very old-fashioned view of what landscape architecture should be today and I would say it frustrates me a little bit because if architects were still holding up other historical architects from the early 20th century as we do with Frederick Lohmstead we would just kind of look look a scans at them and so I think there is this kind of resistance to looking forward but in our landscape we try to teach our clients the importance of process so that the trees start small and then it grows larger it doesn't start large or that grasses turn brown in the winter and some things actually die and don't come back or we design playgrounds that degrade and don't come back and and just I think that's an important lesson about our own bodies the environment the natural world is that it's not permanent it's not the I think this new notion of beauty is the imperfection itself and we all learn that as we get older that it's not that kind of perfection that that makes the beauty but it's the complexity as you had said earlier yeah you know there's God there's so much that you just said that I wanted I know I'm like how do I pick one I mean you know for one and I think just you know coming off the heels of this exhibition that I'd worked on thinking about sensory design and and multi-sensory experience I mean it's interesting even when you just mentioned that and thinking about being out in the landscape immediately I sort of close my eyes because there is something that we live in such an ocular centric world that everything is so everything is so based on the visual you know and we have our social media feeds and we're constantly snacking on images and you know and whatnot but there is something that is so ultimately human about our senses and particularly about being I hate to say it out in nature but honestly anywhere you know being aware of sounds and smells and and whatnot and you know and I think that all of that is a part of what we potentially experience is beautiful I think beauty is incredibly important within all of this work is even an entry point I mean when you talk and about this need to make mitigation and adaptation pleasurable for instance there's something about beauty enabling that at least providing an entry point into some of that I think often about a lot of the work that the media and matter group is doing and oh my god I mean so much of what you guys put out is unbelievably beautiful so I mean immediately you're drawn to it but then all of a sudden it opens up all of these other ideas which is what's fascinating so I don't really have a question I'm just I think that's a really good point because there are some in landscape architecture we we walk this fine line and I remember there's a landscape architect who slipped my name a slit my mind but he said to me when I was much younger he said as landscape architect you have to choose if you're gonna be a human are you gonna try to be like God you're gonna try to make nature and you'll never win but I think you know it's the natural world is everywhere around us and it's I think that the idea of beauty is another word it's like takes will take us like three weeks to to unpack that word but it's it's it's what designers do they bring this kind of tapestry the and I think when you work in the civic realm and bringing the resiliency the the cultural the social you know our social infrastructure is crumbling in America we're not connecting with each other and I don't I think that they're all interconnected you can heal the environment you can heal people's minds and then you can actually get people strangers to start talking to each other all in one that's what design is it's that layered approach yeah of conversation of dialogue of framing of synthesizing ideas oftentimes I even think of design as an interface or as a bridge of you know with very complicated ideas let's say in translating revolutions that are happening in you know the scientific realm or whatnot and they make a much you know they make all of it much more approachable for us but taking a step back sorry did you want to say something yeah I mean just our mics yeah related to that I just wanted to say that there is a certain amount of urgency that I I feel when designers speak listening to all of you really there's sort of the there's a lot of responsibility and urgency that some change needs to be made and designers will be part of that solution or be part of the change in some way and I find that super admirable because a lot of the work that is done in different realms of science or engineering even are kept within labs or within certain environments they don't necessarily get out and a lot of what I've seen designers do is bringing things that are being being made now different revolutions that are happening and bringing them into the rest of the public context and so that starts to really shape what happens in the future and I yeah I was agreeing also with the idea of pleasure and beauty as well I think in a lot of the videos that you that you see of our work there's things like cells growing or there's a plate changing color and a lot of these of biologists would look at and be like well that looks really weird but then you tell them what it is and it's a simple blue-white screen or something like that so it's something that biologists do every day but a designer looking at it made it look something totally different and it made people want to engage with it and learn more about it and start to think about it as something that can actually be a tool and that I think is cannot be understated how important that is and that's interesting too I mean for you as a trained biologist and neuroscientist I mean coming into this space and now thinking about designs much more you know I really I think that so much of it really even I'm constantly reminded of E.O. Wilson's book Conceliants which is this idea of kind of this integration of of disciplines if you will and I really feel like we're beginning to even see some of this Conceliants between like biology and design and engineering and you know things really are coming together and are you know they're no longer things that are existing in these silos that's right I think that that the research that's being done is so important because it gives us both the information we need to do our work more effectively but it also empowers the design because it you know a lot of the people that who are our clients you know there it's a financial decision for them many times that's the foundation of how they make decisions and when there's scientific information that tells us about how our neurological systems are working and how it's actually strengthened by something that we've done in the design and that's kind of proven through research that supports what we do and what we can do and expands are the way we can empower people and even and touching on something that you mentioned of and this was in our earlier conversation of even thinking of design almost as a research process you know thinking of it as kind of a form of research can you talk about that a little bit for you and your practice and you can use my mic for me design is a form of research I do what I call action research which is it's important to say that I don't just test ideas in practice I generate ideas through practice because it's through design practice so design is a is a verb as well as a noun and and it's yeah I can't imagine I'm not an armchair theorist I can't imagine my my my work in practice drives what I write about the five years I spent in practice before I started teaching really has shaped the kinds of research questions I ask because the the work I'm that I do the research I do and the writing I do are to facilitate to to make it easier for practitioners to practice but also to reach the general public about what's possible through through design and I love that idea of generating ideas through design and design is being a verb there's something very active oh that's really important because it's I think that a lot of theorists don't think of design is generating ideas it's and putting yourself it's more like well for me West Philadelphia in my work in West Philadelphia has been a laboratory for sure I hope that I've made the place better has a result of my work and my research there too but it is a laboratory and I am testing ideas but I find that more times the majority of time it's the generation of ideas it's not just the testing I may start out by wanting to test some ideas through practice and then I discover something even more interesting than whatever it was I set out to test do you do that in your practice I mean do you find that ideas are generated through your practice yeah I mean I when I first started my practice I I was able to do that financially because I got a teaching job and so there was a kind of blurring of those I was living in Providence I had a little garage studios students would come over and do things and so I think our practice was built on that kind of the studio model and so I've always called our practice a kind of multifaceted collaborative but it's it's we're put to shame by the kind of range but we do have architects graphic designers industrial designers and landscape architects in our practice and we do believe in this kind of smaller pool that that creates more innovative results because people we we argue a lot and it's a it's a kind of like it's not we're working with somebody who I won't I probably shouldn't say this in public but it's really on the back of my mind who's you know has a very top-down structure to their office and it's so strange to me that everyone's like yes yes yes that's right to this one person and to me that feels so dangerous because I don't know if one person can innovate for 50 60 years and I certainly don't know if I can but you know I think that it is this kind of intertwining it is a dangerous place when academics the the kind of pursuit of ideas and the pursuit of making real places are so separated should be the same because in the sciences and medical practices they would never separate those things and so I see him coming closer together I see the most interesting designers actually through their work they're not necessarily writing white papers but they are through their work research and post occupancy report reports understanding how to make the world a better place to live well I saw in when I was in in graduate school that Ian McCargs he was the chairman of the department but he also had a firm and that I later came to appreciate when I started working in the firm how ideas were were explored in the studios at the school and in courses and then taken and put into practice and and worked on further in the office and there are firms that many of them National Design Award winners where the principles are both their academic practitioners so they are both they're both teaching and there and there's an intimate connection between their teaching and what they're doing in the and the ideas that they're exploring in the office because the teaching and it allows them to explore ideas that you're just too constrained in a practice so when I left practice and decided to start teaching I wrote my first book The Granite Garden Urban Nature and Human Design inspired by McCargs book Design with Nature which generated a practice for him so he already had his practice and some of the chapters in the book take work that was being done in the office as part of the check but some of the chapters are studio projects that were being done in the school and when he published that book he opened up a whole new word of world of practice for himself and had clients coming who wanted who were pre-selecting themselves to come to him and say I want to I want ecological design you know I want to do design with developers I said you know I want to build a new town that's that will grow up in this in this woodlands and and be an ecological city so when I started when I wrote The Granite Garden I was thinking of how to write a book that would create a clientele who wanted to hire me to work I wanted to do which was to design to do urban ecological design and I had to decide I wrote the book while I was started as a young assistant professor and when it came out it was reviewed in the New York Times book review and people started saying so do you have a practice and I had to make a decision about whether to open an office or or not and I decided that I could that I wanted to pursue an academically based practice where my salary at the university would support the kinds of projects I wanted to do where I I didn't have to find a client to support those projects so my teaching my research is was very much practice-based as well as theoretically based but there are a number I mean I just can just go down the list of so many firms that are really academic practices where they're their teacher practitioners they may not have time to also write but there's this generative energy that goes between the university and the continual meeting and dialogue with young people and their ideas I remember Lori Olan told me once it's Lori Olan a National Design Award you should be okay Lori Olan told me once that when he taught a posed a problem in for a studio class that he already knew there were the a solutions the B and I don't mean a B like a is better than B but as different so there's the a type solution there's the B type solution there's a C type solution and then there's the X which comes out of you know some way out of some students mind which is totally different than anything that he could have imagined and that this was really kept him on his toes and regenerated him and he'd go back into the office and take these ideas with it yeah so keeping us on our toes I want to throw it out to our audience members does anyone have a question for our panelists this evening yep we have a question over here hi and I'm again thanks for sharing in terms of urban design this kind of area so Kevin heatherton his article talking about the rhythm and noise he views that the city is an archive archive so the derelict of the city is kind of the city of the rhythm and it is encouraged people to visit the derelict of the cities so I want to know how your view about the derelicts of the cities and if there is if there is a derelict where you change it and how you evaluate the value of it thanks so you mean derelict yeah derelicts oh well I'll answer the first I'll speak to the first part of your question which is about the soundscape of the city which I think is extraordinarily important and there's a man named Murray Schaefer who wrote a book called the tuning of the world that was first published in I think it was the early 80s and he then went on to found a soundscape Institute and studied the soundscape of various cities it was really important work and there's an ecological acoustical ecology association so I had an experience once in Paris in Park de la Vallette where they had the sound installation and I was walking through the park I absolutely agree with you that the city is an archive of sound no question it's an archive period but certainly of sound and I was walking through these sound and various sound installations and I got to this one part of the park and I heard birds chirping I looked around I didn't see any birds and I realized there were speakers in the shrubs that were projecting this the sounds of birds and I kept walking down the path and I noticed that there were these these speakers that were like triangular so that it came you got the sound from in front and then as you pass by you got it coming from back down in this place we've got it down now we sat down in this place I sat down in this place and and I was listening and I realized I couldn't distinguish between what I was hearing from the speakers and what I was hearing from the environment around me and part of la Vallette is right by the boulevard Paris Frick which is the belt highway that goes around Paris and so there was the sound of trucks and cars and nearby and but my ear got tuned in listening I must have sat there for about 15 minutes then I got up and left and I walked out of the park into the city and I heard the city in an entirely different way this soundscape within the park the sound installation had tuned to my ear and I began to hear the city the base rhythm of that neighborhood and then I began to hear the syncopation and then I began to hear other melodies coming in and out like they're not really melody but they were whatever you could call them I don't know I'm not a musician but it lasted for about a day and then it dissipated but I've always wanted to get it back I don't know how to get back that tuning that occurred as a result of this of this design of the sound installation in this park and I think this is the kind of thing that also mcyoung was talking about earlier about the power of design to heighten our sense of the perception of our senses to hear and see things that were otherwise invisible or in audible to us and through design one can can can really tap into the potential for human for human perception that we don't we don't have ordinarily so anyways that wasn't about derelict maybe somebody else can pick up about the derelict I don't really know how to answer your question either but I do it I don't know if it's connected somehow in my brain it feels somewhat connected that my son is a music composer he's studying to do that so he's really it's very abstract and he showed me the difference between sounds that surround us now which are pretty much digitized and when you actually see what they look like they're actually digital digitized images because they simplify the sound waves whereas sounds that come from directly from an instrument or from my voice coming to yours and they are actually these curved shapes and I would love to have somebody do a study to see how that's affecting our bodies and our our minds that we're more the sounds that we hear in the city are these kind of stepped shaped sounds when you visualize it versus the sounds that that may be coming from nature or more direct connections to each other that are actually you know I didn't believe it when I saw it and I saw my son let's zoom in a little bit more to that curved those curved shapes but there is a difference that there's this kind of simplification of sound in the city which is probably different I mean I don't know if you know the composer John Cage and so since him there are all these other young composers nowadays if you're interested in learning look at who's won the Rome Prize in music composition the last four or five years and you'll see they're also crossing a lot of boundaries but they're interested in some of the questions you've asked and probably be able to answer it a little bit better than me any other questions yeah I'm wondering if any of the panelists would be able to talk about a nice panelist I've been talking about so yeah just the dynamic whether it's a project or an idea so could you expand on that a little bit the historical landscape so whether it's to say a historic landscape that was designed by a significant designer or specific occurred in this place or a group of people that that occupied this place whatever it may be versus the tension of a Danish colleague of mine spinning var Anderson has written a very interesting article about this and if you go to a website Marna's garden calm and one of the on the website that I have a bunch of publications that he wrote that have been translated into English and one of them is on preservation where he distinguishes between many different several different kinds of approaches to dealing with historical landscapes one is reconstruction where you try to I'm not going to get it exactly right where the idea is that it's it's an exact reconstruction and there's not much room for design because he says this is the task of the technician you know the historic preservationist technician the next is restoration where he says design begins to come in to play and he's got one more and then the final one is he what he calls free renewal where there's it may be a new place within a historical landscape where the designer works within the spirit of the original but with a sense of freedom and renewal and in dialogue with contemporary design but it's a really it's I didn't do justice to his article I would I highly recommend it you know I think all lands for preservation all landscapes are historical and so our work is about uncovering that history and interpreting it and abstracting it and that that's another level of education want to teach people I think that's a whole other kind of panel but it's I think the more we know about history more politicians would know about history the better off we would be and the history is like ecology it's not fixed right it's a constantly evolving moment it's very artificial when you learn history you know and this year I just think how long a year is even this month or a day right so it has kind of artificial slice to it and I we always try to think of our work as uncovering current current cultural conditions and how it relates to the history of the place because there's always a connection but I don't believe that I do believe that you look forward you know that that creativity is about understanding what that means to look forward that and that always is about honoring the place and where it was before yeah just to underscore that the landscape architect Ian McCargg said every place is in the process of becoming that is actually that is a great way to end so if we have one more question we do have time for one final question yeah yeah I have a question to the panelist about in practice of landscape handcraft plays an important role and computer techniques plays another important role if we look at the picture of 50 years ago when architects and landscape architects work they draw the drawings by hand they build clay models but nowadays people will like to see and the fancy digital renderings cool digital modeling that's the tendency of the techniques so I want to hear your visions about in the future in the practice of design what kind of role handcraft versus computer technique I think it's both I think young people have a tall challenge in front of them because you have to learn both it's a kind of intertwining and learning which tools are most effective for what because digital digital technology is still not good enough in certain things there the kind of manual technology still trumps digital technology but I love digital technology it lets us build in ways that we never could build before and it also coming from music to design I think I just learned last year how to make that translation a little clearer in my mind because when you play music you are making decisions live you know you're playing the note you can change it as you're performing it and in design it's often there's like six degrees of separation till you've actually gotten the project built and there is something very nice about Rhino grasshopper technology is that we actually send that file directly we bypass a lot of middle people middlemen and we're able to actually get as close it's like playing music is as close to the material and the fundamentals of making it and so I think eventually those two technologies will come together but I don't see why it has to be neither or you know I think they're both amazing and there's a way that they can interface with each other or at least that's what we do yeah I can attest to that in school right now we're definitely doing both and there's the added challenge of or added opportunity rather of when you find a technology that isn't working the way you want it to work you can write something new and especially at MIT I mean you obviously know this there's a lot of opportunity to have the freedom to do that and all the tools are available so some of what we're doing right now is modeling not just you know a structure and how it responds to sunlight for instance but can you model a single cell and how that goes into a colony of cells and how that colony of cells could grow into a living material so there's many different scales you can look at there's different sorts of you know you can use Rhino grasshopper you can just start writing things in Python there's a lot of different ways to go about it but at the end of the day I think every time we're in a meeting we always have paper and pens because that gets everything across fastest you know I think the digital technology that the paper and pen is a more collaborative tool making physical models that's a way in which everyone at the table can actually draw something where's a computer is scaleless it's you know it's one person and so there's strengths to both the motto of MIT is meant at Manus mind and hand and there is something really important about discovering through that relationship between manipulation and practice and thinking that's very generative and I don't see really I didn't grow up in with computers I didn't it wasn't until I was well into my career that I began working with digital with the digital and I still you know mainly I imagine things and I work with my research assistants who actually implement and implement them but but I do use I do do photography and I do use Photoshop and it's extraordinary some things that you can do with the digital and so I echo my co-panelists here and it all depends and we are just so lucky to have that range of things to work with from the digital to the pencil but also it's you know the digital involves the hand too and with that we will call it a night thank you to everyone for joining us this evening thank you to our fantastic panelists