 Welcome everyone. My name is Andres Hacke, I'm the Dean of Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. And it's such an honor and a joy to open this event today to discuss and to celebrate this amazing book that many of you have been reading, New York Global Critical Writings and Proposals 1970-2020 by Richard Plant. An introduction to an event to discuss the work of Professor Richard Plant can only start by acknowledging that he is unquestionably a worldwide leading authority on housing and urban development. In these buildings, it is relevant to note that Professor Plant started teaching at Columbia in 1974, when the school was still called the Graduate School of Architecture and Planning and was processing the effects of the 1968 protests. In the book, The Making of an Architect, 1881, Richard alongside Martha Goodman, your very long-term colleague and friend, published a piece called Anatomy of Insurrection. There, they said, the students in 1968 focused on the contradictions within the profession and school, within the profession and school which had existed since their inception, most basically between responsibility to fulfill needs related to the welfare of the society as a whole and survival within the constraints of the American economic system. For a school of architecture in New York City, they said, the issue of defining social purpose is more immediate than for schools located in more idyllic settings. As the American metropolis, New York has harbored the most pervasive forms of wealth and poverty. This is probably even more true now than there, or even more. And that's something that is very relevant to the work of Richard and Martha as well, but now we're talking about Richard. At the time when the world is facing a huge housing crisis, with 1.8 billion people globally who do not have adequate housing and 150 million more across the world living in homelessness, Professor Plant's voice is one to be heard. From 1992 to 2015, Richard served as the director of the master of science in urban design program. In 2005, he founded the Urban Design Lab, which provides research and pedagogical opportunities for collaboration between Columbia's Earth Institute, the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, and the Ful Foundation, the School of Engineering and Applied Science. In January 2023, and of course, this is just a few things because there would be 20 more to be added here. In January 2023, Richard Plant was named Professor Emeritus at GISA. 50 years from when he first came to Columbia, Richard is presenting his new book, New York Global Critical Writings and Proposals 1970-2020. It is a book that was made mostly in parallel to his journey as Columbia professor and provides a retrospective reflection of the intellectual and political project that defined his trajectory. The book gives a detailed account. I mean, I'm sure many of you have enjoyed this book, seems so relevant now. I think this is a book that definitely is setting a discussion that we need to have and providing information to have it informed in an informed way. The book gives a detailed account of how, since the 1970s, social inequality and climate crisis became inseparable from architecture and urban design, and the unavoidable reality in which architecture and urban design operated. In Richard's case, this has also been a pedagogical project anchored in the specific knowledge of architecture and urban design. Richard has built interdisciplinary alliances, practices, institutions, and he has committed to community engagement around the world. Actually, I remember when I first came to Columbia, your lottery presentations were actually lectures that would show that's basically how you were connecting actually with these communities, working with them, repeating the work that you did previous years with them, connecting them with things that you were also developing in other parts of the university. This book adds to a highly proliferous production of research and a scholars that includes Richard's work as a history of housing in New York, 1990. Who could miss that book? It's a book that is a reference in housing. It helped probably all of us here to understand all the struggle to promote social justice to housing and to challenge it. And to learn how racialization happened to housing, but also how many experiments were intended to challenge that. And that richness is something that probably all of us have read in the city through Richard's book. I remember to have visited parts of Bronx that they had never been to or Queens with your book in my hand, trying to find the buildings that you were talking about, the sculptures that were introducing the garden apartments and finding that they existed, that those communities were there. Two other rags, hand blitz in history, Keen and Keeney Valley. Chittick Rives Urbanism Ecology Place with Lars Muller. And you also have been the editor of Housing, Form and Public Policy in the United States, the Urban Lifework, Formation, Perception, Representation, Eco, Gowanus, Urban Remediation by Design, Urban Climate Change Crossroad. I'm very happy that today we can discuss New York Global, a book that is at the same time an account of Richard's reflections as an architect, as a researcher, as a teacher, as a colleague, and most important or something that is inseparable from all the above, a citizen. And that's something that I remember, Reinhold, keep reminding us how important it is to be what we do and also being doing that as a citizen. It's my pleasure to open this session full of people that know a lot about your work, Richard, and that have been influenced by your work. This opening will be followed by Richard's words, and then by Mary McLoad that will also be intervening, and then we will all engage in a conversation with Kate Asher, the Paul Milstone Professor of Professional Practice at GESAP, Michael Well, Professor of Architecture at GESAP, Adam Lubinski, Associate Professor of Professional Practice, Reinhold Martin, Professor of Architecture and the Chair of the Columbia University Committee of Global Thought, and Mary McLoad that will join us after her introduction. So please join me, welcome in, Richard Plans. Okay, thank you, Andres. Andres has always been very interested and supportive of my work. And I always thought, you know, I had this idea that architecture could be more than what it was when I studied in a polytechnic, you know, and things were going to change, and they've certainly changed. And I've always been interested in Andres' take on that change. So I appreciate a lot your words. I thought we would like have a small group of faculty and sit around discuss this book kind of BS. I mean, there's so many faces here that, this is like Twilight Zone. So I'm going to try my best to deal with this. I put together quite a few slides as always, but I will go quickly and then we can go back to things that are of particular interest. But I thought, well, I had to reread the book several times. And then I thought maybe some important issues were the mutations relative to the studios that were taught, the advocacy component. I never taught a studio without a client, I think. And I taught 68 studios, I believe. Maybe it was a 78 studios and 68 seminars. And the question of history because I've always been interested in history and then language, cognition, urban cognition, which has, of course, evolved tremendously since I first thought about it back in 1967. So I'm going to go through a whole bunch of stuff relative to these questions and then we will do whatever we're going to do. Here they are. Yeah, 78 and 69. There was a lot of, you know, it was all kind of fun. You know, some were more fun than others, especially for the students, I suppose, but you guys can fill me in on that. There were some interesting ones. I think the joint architecture engineering students were very interesting. And I did one of those. I thought I didn't know I did that many. And toward the end, there were the architecture planning studios. And it always seemed to me that this was the way to go, that we can't just talk to each other even as professional, even in professional education, especially now. And then there were all these research seminars. All usually had clients. They had something to do with somebody somewhere with a problem. And they usually, you know, they would find out and they'd come and ask, can you come here and do this or that? And whenever we could, I would. Then there were three, I think, three important things to mention from the very beginning. Faber, of course, and his ideas about praxis and how urban practice was going to be a new discipline and how praxis itself was evolving. So whatever I thought about, I mean, this is back, you know, in the 60s, he published that book called Explosion. It was 1969, I think. Then there's the question of participation, that is, who's the architect and who's the client and how do these things, how should these things get mixed up? And that, of course, was DeCarlo, Giancarlo DeCarlo, who wrote the first very polemic essay on the question that he called it, Participation. And he asked for a mutation between architect and client. And then there was the history question, which, as I said, interested me a great deal. History, as Tafori said, not history as object, history as problematic somehow, right? And that was also very important to me, especially in the first, like, 20 years or so. I was very involved with writing history of the environments that we, you know, studied. The politics, yes, I have to say, and the first essay is Vietnam. It's a kind of a crude essay, but I really wanted to put that in there. It was very passionate. It got me into a lot of trouble. Right after Kent State, of course, there was that. Kent State, so, you know, 90 minutes away, the students were killed by our own military. And so, of course, the war came home, and this was extremely important. And I tried to connect this somehow to the larger picture, especially in our cities of what was happening. Then we wrote this statement to the university and to the government. There was a kind of meeting, and I gave that talk, whatever it was, and there were strange men there in suits and ties taking pictures. And I never did do a foyer request, but I'm sure there's something somewhere. And it got me into a lot of trouble at Kent State. So here I am, 50 years later at Columbia. Mutations. These are just quotes from the book. And this just has to do with the idea that, of course, the studio is an amazing research, like a vehicle. I mean, you have these great minds. You have the possibility of thinking and saying things without, you know, without recourse. And so I always believed in a studio should have a product. It should be coherent, and it should address someone's problem someone. This starts in Penn State. There were other things at Penn State, but the mantra primer had to do with, the mantra work had to do with this new vision of a studio. We had a house in Mantua. We lived there for a year. It was abandoned. We fixed it up. George, were you ever there? I think you, no, you can go there. I'm not sure that house is there anymore. That was 432 North 38th Street in case anybody's fulfilling. And Mantua was arguably, but I think, you know, the most violent place in the East Coast, for sure. And we found that to be very exciting because we could, of course, try to understand the structure of the place, the, you know, the causes and effects. And we did a very early modeling, which I'll come to later. And then we moved from Mantua. That was two years. We did the report with a public health service so there wasn't a lot of government interested in what we're doing. Nobody else is doing this stuff. So, of course, the government was interested. Then we moved to San Liocho in, outside of Naples in Italy. And that became a very long-term project. George was there. Who else was there? I don't know if anybody, no, I don't think so. Well, we're survivors. And, yeah, we worked there intensively for three years, did a report of that work, rather extensive report in English. And it was only last fall, republished in Italian finally. And we, there was a big party in San Liocho. That's the new report. It's a complicated story, but it's in English and there's a copy of Navery as well. Here is the final event. And then 50 years later, full disclosure, that is me. And then the newspaper wanted to know what I looked like now and I hesitated, but anyway. And here we've got a convention relative to that work, several of the intensive teams here, the active team, people here, not here. Here are some of the intensive teams that were run by a team. So 50 years. And to me, 50 years, you know, that's about right probably. I mean, the problem with these normal studios is you come and go and it goes in the waste basket. And I was always very, very, you know, critical of that phenomenon. You know, it's a generalization, doesn't always work that way, but it's a tendency. Okay. And then Colonia Dizap comes to San Liocho here. The following, so the following year, I started a Turkey project. Turkey, I have some notes here, but if I read the notes, it's going to take too long. The Turkey project starts in 74 and ends in 2016 with the final publication of that report. And we made field visits in 74, 86. David, you were in 86. Anybody else was 90? Maybe it was in 90. April, were you? No, 94. And then there was another one, 97. And April was involved in the thing in Vienna, which I'll talk about in a moment. Oh, let's see. Al Medioli, this is Mark, Mark, Mark, whatever. Okay, so it's coming, it's all coming back to me, but this takes a little time. And here we are. We, we documented a beautiful place on the end of the peninsula, Bodrum Peninsula, which was without electric with, I mean, it was untouched in 74, but about to explode. So it was a place of maybe eight or 900 residents and grew by the time we finished mapping in 97 to about 150,000. I think now it's up to 300. I don't know, you would know probably. Well, tourists, I mean, it's a condominium, whatever, waterfront thing. So all that material culture, you know, it's very interesting anthropology. David knows that because we talked about that a little bit back whenever 87. And this was a study that I considered to be an anthropology to built environment, which I thought was extremely overlooked. I mean, it was a famous department here, but they did pots and pans and you know, that kind of stuff. And I was interested in buildings. So I won't go into that any detail, but we can always come back to any of this. Here's the first meeting with Suha here myself. Here we are trying to get organized. Here's Ataturk on the wall. Penny and Miranda are here. Mark is here. Here's Suha. Here's some consultants from the town. And Michael Sorkin, who somehow just showed up. And so I thought I put this in because now Michael's stuff is in Avery, all his archive and stuff. He has six more feet of boxes than I do, but I'm working on that. And Alessandro, you know, and Ignacio back there in Ira, they've helped me out because I'm using a little some space in their office and have been going through literally thousands of slides. Anyway, that's here. This is just one little vignette. This is 1974. Ali and Nesb Yavuz. They had a beautiful house. And here they are in the last year we were actually there for field work with Kathy Way, who's a GSAP student. Ali had passed away, but Nesb was still still functioning in that beautiful house surrounded now by condominiums and whatever you can imagine. Here, another family, a fantastic house. This is all disappeared. But I do want to say one thing and then we'll come back to it about cognition and representation and language. This drawing, this technique took a year to develop here with a group. It's Al Medioli here by any chance. Al. Well, he was very important in this and we had to develop the technique of how to show a tree, how to show rocks, how to show dry laid, you know, stone and this and that. We developed a whole lexicon and then the drawings were made by literally patching together, you know, the patterns, sort of like my sweater, but I'm coming back to this later. And then we move from Bodrum to Vienna. I just mentioned this because it's interesting. And we worked and April was part of that team. We worked in the architectural center on this project working with the Turkish community in Vienna and the Turkish community in Vienna did not have an easy life. So we had a very interesting moment of putting together their stories and making the exhibit at which you see here. I think April is here, right? Where? Oh, here, yeah. Then April goes on to study urban planning here, PhD, whatever, you know, whatever. And then the other long, these are all like real studios. These are long term studios and we go to the Adirondacks. That was eight or 10 years, probably realistically 10 years. I was studying in this village. This was a place where the New York intellectual community was in the summer people like Henry James Felix Adler. It was a very interesting urban intellectual outpost in this wilderness, especially in the 19th century. So we were very involved with this place and I won't go into detail on that. But again, this was done with communities, a local museum. There were always clients and there was a huge need here. I mean, nobody was paying attention to this place. Davidson did give us money from Kaplan, so there was some support, but you know, they were really needy. Let's put it that way. So it was perfect. That's in Franco and Studio. He's a good painter from New York. They had a studio up there. So this is all about advocacy. This is another quote from the book and I'll show a few more slides about advocacy and the positive side of working in places with some negative problems. And we're students. Team 10 Primer came out in 1965 and this was our Bible. Forget about Le Corbusier. Team 10 was it and I especially liked this picture. This is a cafe, I believe, in Dubrovnik and I said, wow, if urban studies can be like this, I want in on it. This is too good to be true. You sit around and drink and talk about stuff. So when I went through all these slides, I found what I call table shots. So these are you guys sitting around a table talking about somebody's horrendous problem, but with some libation of some sort. So here we are in Sarajevo. We worked, of course, in Mostar. I don't know if anybody here was in... Oh yeah, you were everywhere on these things. So here's the GSAP crowd. This is Iñaki who contributed. We jointly wrote something about Mexico City. He's here. This is Riapala Campanio. So these are the kind of places that we were and we did a number of studies which Andres mentioned. We did this new urbanism series. This was against the new urbanism thing that was going on out in California, wherever they were. And so we have, of course, Naples, Caracas, Mostar, Prague, Caracas, Larguello, Baltimore, Gowanus. Then Princeton Architectural Press got sick of publishing these things. So we just went on Lulu after that or did whatever we could. Here we are in Mostar. This is a front line. We were there right as the shooting had stopped, most of it, but tremendous destruction. And it gets to the question of urbanicide, which, of course, remains a huge question today even more so, as we all know from just looking at the newspaper. That was the front line. This was the famous bridge, which, of course, they destroyed. So this is 68. Actually, my first trip to Europe, among other places, I went to Bosnia and Mostar. It was a beautiful place. I mean, here the cities were burning, you know, Newark, Detroit, whatever. And I go to Mostar, and there's Muslims, Christians, everybody's living together. They're living well. Food was good. The wine was even better. You know, the whole thing was good, which we see here. I found this slide. And then in 1998, don't forget. So that was a very important experience. They've since reconstructed the bridge, but it looks sort of like this, but it's new. Here we are in Caracas. Now we get to Alessandro and Ignacio, and who else was in Caracas? Oh, of course. You actually did two studios there. Who else? I don't know. Well, we did two studios there. The first one was a highway was going to cut through a big piece of informal so-called fabric, and then this was the famous mud slide, which enormous destruction. And we were asked to come there. I think originally Chavez thought it was a great idea, and then he got a little bit crazy and thought the Americans were going to take over his government because it was a ship out in the water and stuff like that. So we did the studios, but of course, as is the case in our line of work, you know, politics change things. But anyway, that was Caracas. Then we have Belgrade. Belgrade was very interesting. They were still very unhappy with the NATO bombing. This is, of course, the military headquarters for Serbia, and here we are. This is Columbia folks outside. We always worked with students also from the places where we were working. Actually, this is now the building. I don't know if you saw in the Times two days ago. I mean, this is what Jared Kushner is now after. He wants to put a luxury hotel in there. And Trump has been after that for 20 years. Now Trump's probably having money problems as we speak. But anyway, they got their eye on this site. And this is 2002. So 20 years later, it's still there. Here we are in Harkiv, which is an amazing town. Two million people. This is where Sputnik was developed. This had a huge technical capacity, 50 universities, and now, of course, in deep, deep trouble. But we were studying what could be a post-Soviet, further post-Soviet development in the town. This is a great, there's prom building, which God knows what it looks like now. A tremendous constructivist development. Here we are finally in Kumasi, in Ghana. Okay, so wait a minute. Now we're getting into Sagi, where is this? This is Sagi, and who else is here? Oh, yeah, right, you're there. Who else? Austin? You weren't in this, right? Which one? Oh, you were in Harkiv. Oh, all right. Well, you know, it gets a little mixed up, because I... And we did, in the urban design lab, then we did a hospital design for them with some doctors, which is very interesting. I won't show any of this stuff. This is Victor, body loss, and I think that's Victor, right? Who taught in the UD program here for a number of years. Well, this is Victor, at least, here. Victor graduated in 84, yeah. You graduated in 79, right? And Rick, 76, was it? Yeah, so we got a good spread here, and Carol was extremely helpful as a student. I'll never forget that, because there was a little bit of tempest here. We were still kind of crawling out of the situation, 68 and all of that. And now she's been very active with the alumni, I think. Rick's work with Baruch Houses is in one of the first, that was one of the first reveals. We actually tried to add housing to, you know, to NYCHA. I mean, it's the same discussion now, 60 years later, actually. Nobody figured this out. Justin, which studio were you at? You were in the studio, too, right? Apart teaching. Ah, right, yeah. But Justin taught. You're still teaching, right? Yeah, right. The Bronx, the Mott Haven studio, that was also very intense. We worked with a community organization up there. The community was not quite as in bad shape as in Mantua, but almost. But we started experimenting with media and cognition. We're using Xerox machines. We're using the first computer studio at Columbia, which was 1989. Anybody in that studio? Carla was in it. Carla had Frosty. And communication's very important. I mean, what we couldn't do the publication, we got the exhibit out in the discussion. So that's at storefront. And here it is downstairs in Avery. And let's see. And the same we did, we did the several studios in Brussels, very interesting ones. This was an exhibit there. The base did the map of Brussels on the floor and polyurethane over it. As far as I know, that is still there. What else? Oh, Detroit. We did the Detroit studio. Here was the storefront exhibit on Detroit. This is after they changed the facade. And then there was a whole series of pop-ups in Detroit itself. Okay. Oh, this one I put in. Yeah, because the public space aspect of these studios was very important, especially for the exhibits. Here's one in Salzburg on the summer academy in which we pasted. We had to think about pasting photocopies up to this. And here we pasted it on the bridge, which was a very... They wanted to destroy the bridge, which nobody wanted. And so we pasted the exhibit there and had a very enthusiastic pasting committee. This happens to be Hubert's father, Hubert Kulpner, anybody remember Hubert? He was now at the ATI, I think. He came and helped us. Then there's, of course, the Urban Design Lab, which starts in 2005. And that sort of solved my dream of having an integration with science, with hard science and soft science, basically. And it was very interesting, although they weren't always very nice to us, but, you know, we did what we wanted to. And this was... this were early projects and how... Sorry, you can't read this, but how they integrated with different disciplines within the Earth Institute. Because the Earth Institute now is in the climate school and there's a whole different thing going on. And this was one of the first publications around climate, which we did with Maria Paola. Suto is here and I would have to say, without Maria Paola, there would not have been an Urban Design Lab. So she had her... she was into the whole thing. And here are some of the reports from the Urban Design Lab. We did a lot of work with Dominican Republic, which is still ongoing through Columbia World Projects. And of course, here Puerto Plata and Dominican Republic, here Haiti. I don't know, is Richard here? Gonzalez? No? Well, he was very involved. He taught some in GSAP, but also was doing a lot of work in the Urban Design Lab at that time. And then we did a lot of water, what you could call water urbanism studies. And most of these have to do with the Hudson River or Upper Delaware. This one was in Seoul. I think these are still on the website. I guess it's still active. I don't know. And let's see. History. History is a complicated question. But I always had... I had trouble reading Tafuri, but I always thought he had some interesting ideas that you could use, right? So he's saying... Anyway, this is my take on Tafuri. But anyway, we started doing the... at that point, I know it was earlier, but we started to do the Urban Design Seminar. And one of the things I insisted on doing was taking a piece of urban fabric, analyzing and understanding the history, but with the intention of then understanding how that understanding could be used as a tool toward a new intervention. So many of you were victims of this process. I always wondered why you allowed yourselves to just do black and white. But they seemed to do it. And I insisted because I thought for the purpose of this study, color was noise. I didn't want noise. I wanted just the pattern. And my sweater testifies to the importance of this strategy. And my good friend, Daria Doroshu, who's taught at FIT for I think as many years I've been here maybe as a great artist, she has contributed a sweater using fabric swatches from, I don't know how many, 20 years of my fabrics and typologies. Okay, we're getting close. Here's one of those reviews. Here is, here's Varyn, who taught in the program. Varyn is over here. EJ, who is always very good about coming and sitting through very long meetings. This is Vanessa, this is Richard Gonzalez, I think. And of course they put these very large drawings on the walls, which I insisted on. I think I'm not sure that would work anymore. Maybe it could get students to do that. You have to tell me somebody, is there any students, present students, let me know what you think. Anyway, Praditi was fantastic. She put together two large volumes of all these studies for the last 10 years. And really deserves a lot of credit for that. She was also very important in the final stages of getting material into the Avery archive. So it's Chris or Terry here. I mean they were great at slowly absorbing all my stuff, which you can see is rather momentous. Okay, New York City. This was the first study, which led to the second study, which led to the book of 1990 and then 2016 I think was the last issue. There was always a lot in the beginning, a lot of interest in Europe in this work, more than here I would say. So the French published, Mardi Gras published this one in, when was it, 783 or 4 or something like that. Manuel de Sola Morales, he tried to get it in Spanish, but it didn't work. It did get published in Japanese, which was weird, but you know, whatever. Let's see. And this study was important following up on the studio of 76 in the precursor to the urban design lab. I started this thing called Urban Design Research Group, and we had a contract with NYCHA to figure out how to reconfigure public space, especially around safety issues, public safety. And that followed up on a project here by Oscar Newman, Defensible Space, which was in GSAP by the way in the early 70s, I guess. I forget when that book was published. It's a well-known book. I mean, it's still useful to read it. So I put this in just as a question of continuity. And then finally, I think we will go to language. Well, I went to a technical school. I knew computers were going to be important. I didn't know what they were, actually, but I knew there was something about this that was going to mean something someday. And I knew the value of digitizing, which is of course what we do with computers. So I started looking, this is 67 already, I started looking at, this was a road study in Bucks County, a locational study for the road. And we started to correlate all these factors, digitizing a dialectic system, positives and negatives, and then overlaying them by hand and figuring out what the path of least resistance would be. That's basically what it is. Okay, so I throw that in because this was actually my master's dissertation, which was completely crazy. I mean, more crazy than Daria's sweater was really, but was all about this beginning of the cyber age, the new information. And I read it now and I did read it and I thought, well, how did I ever think of such crazy stuff? But anyway, this was Mantua. And Mantua, we digitized a huge number of social and physical environmental factors, modeled them into what we would call today, like in the Data Science Institute here, an agent-based model. That is, something happens and the other thing shifts and it shifts around in order to make decisions. And our problem was how to decide where the new infill housing would be when this is kind of the final map. And here we are. Again, I won't go through this, but it was complicated. But then finally, when we get to 91 here, we have the first computer studio and there was a bunch of silicon graphics machines, which probably nobody knows what they are now. But that was the pioneering stuff in this guy, Christos Tuntas, and Eden Muir taught this course. And it was miserable to do this because you had to plot each point by hand. But that's what we were doing in 67 anyway, so why not? Somebody else should suffer in the same way. So anyway, so yeah, this was, I won't go into these, but this was modeling of dynamic modeling of Mott Haven for basically physical, social issues. This is Karla's. This is Min Suk, who's a great architect and soul by the way, a graduate of the school. Ian Gonzalo Verra did a very interesting study of fires. Of course, the place was on fire basically. And from there, we then, in the Urban Design Lab and then with the Data Science Institute, move into social media, especially Twitter. And this was revolutionary, of course, with Twitter you could see in real time how space was being occupied. And then you could attach sentiment to the tweets. It's all pioneering stuff, but I'm sure DARPA and the Defense Department is much more advanced than anybody else at this point. But these were Data Science Institute days when you put up your poster. And this was my experience with science, peer reviewed stuff, which I hated, but I understand it's important. I mean, science is so different. I mean, you do something and then there's a record and the record is there, right? And you build on the record, build on the record, build on the record. The problem with architecture is, you know, I don't want to say too much here, but, you know, I mean, no architect really wants to go back and see how their building works. Just we know. So, all right. So anyway, that's that. And then we have other studies. This is Twitter distribution in New York, which of course concentrated where the population density is highest. This is an interesting study of Twitter hotspots in the subway stations. Of course, people get out of the subway and they immediately send a message because it doesn't work inside. That's because they're changing now. Anyway, this is an interesting one just being published now about how the COVID changed the Twitter dynamics in New York City. It was Carmelo Ignacolo, who is now at MIT, just got his PhD, who's worked with us, who was in the urban design program several years ago. So that's it. I'm not even going to read this. This is all in the book. You should have memorized these things by now. But I saw, you know, I really want to see what other people think of this thing. So I'm looking forward to collegial discussion. We are all friends. And we'll keep going. Mary, Mary, she's of the faculty. You are, you've been here long as now. Yeah. So you're going to say something, right? No, I don't know. Taylor, Taylor's here. Now I see people. I'm just coming back. Taylor worked with the alternative suburbia thing, which I didn't show. But again, it was a Penn State study that then became very important in the studio we did in Genoa. And he did a beautiful housing scheme with that. You know, okay. This is, no, all these faces, but would you want this? Yeah, yes, forward. And do we have to hold it or whatever? I'm going to, I actually wrote something out. I was the opposite of Richard. He thought it was going to be a small gathering. I thought it was in wood auditorium and it's going to be super formal. So I'll try to improvise a little bit and not talk too long because that was such a great presentation. And more specifically, before we turn to Richard's remarkable book, I want to pay tribute to him for all he's brought to the school. This is our one chance to really say thank you to him and to express my own immense personal gratitude. He was there when I began. He's the person who actually interviewed me when I got hired and we talked together. I think Ken gave him a nudge about hiring me, but he put up with it. Okay. What might not fully come across in the book, despite its close connection to his teaching at Columbia, is this immense contribution that he gave to the school. I think you got a sense of it from these amazing images. But I'm going to go back to 78. He was the chair of architecture then. We had a kind of chair and had already with the support of the close colleagues, Kenneth Frampton and Dean Jim Polchak, who was the dean at the time, done much to transform the school, which as you all know, had really gone through a lot in 68. I arrived the first year, this is fall 78, of the implementation of the third semester housing studio, in which Richard played a fundamental role, both implementing and directing it. And as you know, remains, even if it's transformed over the years, something he commented on, such a fundamental part of the MR curriculum. I didn't do the slides. I'm forgetting it. That was supposed to show as 50 years, not just at Columbia, but globally, where he's had an impact, which we saw. What? This? It's hardly considered in the light, because they were very fine. Everybody used 3-0 pens in those days. Anyway, I arrived to the first year of the housing studio. And just to give you a little background of how things change, it was then organized by typology. It was Mu or Roe housing, perimeter block, that was Ken Frampton's favorite. Ray Don, which was, I taught one year, I think Eden Murr was in that studio, in fact. And sometimes experiments in mixed typologies, such as high-rise, low-rise configurations. At that time, we very much envisioned housing as social or public housing. And so we tried actually to be quite pragmatic. I think this got challenged later on. Came up with fairly realistic, or we could say semi-realistic solutions, following more or less city codes. But of course, students rebelled, and that was fine. Then as now, students worked in teams. But what you might not know is the faculty worked in teams as well. There were a lot of really strong debates, sometimes passionate, and in the case of students, divorces. But I don't think any of us actually split ways. And I taught with Richard one year when Loretta Venturelli used to normally teach what we called carpet or patio housing. She knew well the Inacasa, the Libra projects from Rome. But she was, I don't know where, maybe in Marfa, Texas then. And Richard and I took it up. Led to fairly rigid schemes as you can look. It was a challenge to make it work. Besides Richard among those teaching housing in those years were Kenneth Frampton. I mentioned Max Bond, Michael Mostuller, who I think was a former colleague of Richard's for Rensselaer. Okay, really a great housing teacher. Loretta, I mentioned Roy Strickland, whom I also co-taught with once in myself. Now, one of the wonderful things about teaching the housing studio. Okay, is that the right slide? The New York City was our laboratory. Richard, he showed those amazing images all over the world. But what I really experienced working with him in those years was just learning about New York. I discovered neighborhoods in Queens I'd never seen or heard of, but also learned so much about the remarkable housing stuff in New York. There are the books you've already seen. He skipped his first edition. And this was some of the amazing projects we looked at. They were Sunnyside Gardens, Forest Hills. There you can see it with its landscape built, Forest Hills, Jackson Heights, which was a special favorite of Richard's. That's an old photo. I don't think they're onnings anymore. But I'm sure they're not. I was just there at Great Tude, by the way. But Richard mentions Jackson Heights several times in the book. It's an amazing community in terms of housing options. Or even the grand concourse for elevator buildings. Well, we explored a variety of scales in housing. It was clear that Richard, like many others in the faculty, had this commitment to low-rise, high-density housing. As an alternative, this is the early 80s, to both the towers in the park, public housing of the Moses era, and the low-density Nimaia projects that were being built then in the destroyed or devastated areas of the Bronx. Why is this so stubborn? And some of the studio projects actually addressed this sort of alternative to densities that I just mentioned. Two other very related concerns to this that Richard would continue to pursue in his other studios, not just housing, urban design, were first the repair or renovation of existing high-rise public housing projects of the 50s and 60s. And this included adding low-rise housing and commercial structures along the street front, and rethinking this was critical to him, the ground plane, as not exclusively open public space. And the second was what he called the urbanization of suburbia, again working for this intermediate density. Both of these efforts are again discussed in Trenchin essays. It's a word Marta Gutman used to describe the book, and I think it's really pointed, especially, for instance, in the essay towers in the park, explaining the work of a 1976 studio. For me, there's almost always a pragmatic activist dimension to Richard's studio teaching. And you might note the phrase in this quote, enlightened and pragmatic approach. There was always this real dimension. I think he got frustrated with someone like me who got a little too in the theory world at times, even though he did read Tefori. Anyway, the goal was really to address the extensive urban blight brought on, and this was so visible in the late 70s and 80s still, in part by urban renewal and suburban flight. Another aspect which he didn't talk about was Richard's leadership. Low-key, full of ironic, self-effacing humor, you got a dose of it today, but also, which you might not have noticed, very strong willed. He had a great commitment to diversity, something he shared with Jim Polshek in those early years, despite their sometimes heated differences, and it would not be until many years later that we had as many black and women faculty, not to mention minority students, as we had during Richard's and Max Bond, who followed him's chairmanship. Among the women, some full-time, some adjunct, who were on the architecture faculty, and there were others in planning, were Adhikarmi, Susanna Tory, Amy Anderson, Barbara Lytzenberg, Gwendolyn Wright, and I think only Berkeley could talk about as many. When I went to Harvard one year in the 80s, there was only one other woman faculty member. Columbia was really exceptional at that point. I think it already came through. Something I just want to emphasize was a strong commitment to social justice and social equality. It's not an accident. Andres already pointed to this that he wrote with Marta Gutman on the events of 68, and one of the essays in the book is actually revisiting his thoughts about that, a conference organized by Jonah Ackman at the Buell Center in 1998, where it's a really good essay, too, reflecting on what changed, what didn't work, et cetera. But it was despite, you'll find some sort of semi-snide remarks about theory at times in the book. But Richard was immersed in it. He may not want to admit to it, but we had this magazine called Pracey, but she had a very large role in getting to happen. And I don't know if you can see it, but it's not the sharpest of slides. That's standing on my part. But he has an essay there on style that he wrote with the guy Ken Kaplan. And a kind of a clue to the kind of real intense debate that was going on. So I would say this period is strangely socially committed, but also very much involved with architecture, which might be the big shift with 68. This extended, of course, to the global scene, you don't need me to repeat what he did so well. So I will ignore Turkey for the moment. I might mention Darius at Cuba with a historic preservation studio. And I think he got Bobsnern upset when he told me, because Bobsnern, I think, was a director of preservation in organizing this trip to Cuba. He was like, what? Yeah, go ahead. What? I haven't been using my mic. Can you hear me when I? Hello? Works. So there's this Cuban student in preservation. And he was very keen. You know, well, actually Havana has the largest intact Baroque quarter in the world. It's very beautiful. So he wanted us to go to Cuba. And everybody thought, well, Bob should like this because, you know, he was kind of into Baroque himself. I mean, he was postmodern, whatever. So Bob was totally against it. And he said, you're all going to be communist dupes, et cetera, et cetera. And he told them, and they insisted, of course, then he told, I mean, his Cuban guy was tough. So then he told them, well, if you're going to go to Cuba, I'm not allowing any preservation faculty to go with you. So you're going to have to find, and you're going to have to go with a faculty member. So of course they came to me. And I said, wow, Cuba. So that's my Bob Stern story. But I think Bob would have liked that he's standing in front of this college. But this is actually the university. This is very much Low Library in Havana. Yeah, I was about that. But I asked my students. I think it's a different era. This was designed by Stanford White, I believe, the campus. I trust you. I don't know. Anyway, I could talk about other things that he didn't mention. There was a very strong long link to Leuven Catholic University. And one of the essays that really struck me because of my own fascination with Algeria is they did a project together redoing a kind of housing, rather desolate part of Eastern algears trying to knit the fabric together. That's just one of Richard's sort of repeated, even as it changes obsessions. How do we repair? We think our mistakes, the afterlife of buildings. In New York global, this political commitment to architecture, and I have to admit sometimes I can't quite put my fingers on his politics, but we can talk about that. This comes for me best through in the book with the quotations. And I only list a few of the names. There were so many more. Lots of economists I'd never heard of and some ecology people in the introduction that I also had never heard of. But you get an idea of the amazing range, a kind of erudition that he wears so lightly and so unpretentiously. But it's really there in the book. And I want to end with two quotes I chose that I thought summarized it and he already gave us one of them, although I added an extra sentence to it from Giancarlo de Carlo. Sometimes translated participation, I think another time legitimizing architecture. And the other quote is by the amazing French ancient historian Paul Venier, which I think is so appropriate for this moment. Every patchwork culture with its diversity opens the way to inventiveness without a doubt knowing wanting to know only one culture once owned is to be condemned to a life of suffocating sameness. And for me, this just has such resonance exactly right now. Thank you, Richard. Yeah. No, that was there. Yeah. Well, I'll have to go back and look at that problem. But there was that that was pieced together from notes, handwritten notes. And that was highly influenced by Lefebvre. The audience, what we're talking about. The first essay, the one that Richard referred to called Vietnam. And I have to admit, I live through this. He was a little older than me. But, you know, it was my first exposure to the computer. Put punching in draft resistance cards. But anyway, he uses the word in the essay that puzzled me post Marxist and neoliberal. And I don't think I heard those terms. Post Marxist certainly not before about 89. No, no, no, that's from Lefebvre. Neoliberal. Here it is. I have a feeling your notes got edited. Maybe we can. There's this in top. This is the kind of thing the faculty used to get stuck on. Now, I mean, there's amazing colleagues here that have been reading the book. And it's also a moment to, to reflect on the book. And of course, Richard's legacy, both in the school and beyond. And it also opened it to the audience at one point. So I would propose that Michael, you start and then we follow and Richard, of course, when you want to, to respond or clarify this. Yes. I'm still worried about the neoliberal. Yes. Post Marxist is definitely in Lefebvre. Neoliberal. I don't know if that was. We all stopped with that because it's in an essay data 1970. Yes. Three of us. Three of us. So as you read the book, you'll see. Thank you. You have so many former faculty members and students and people that have been an important part of the urban design program and the school here. It's wonderful to take a moment here to speak. But of course it feels pretentious to try to replace all of the voices that were with you while you did this. I read the book and wrote notes about trying to respond to the book, but after we're, and I've known Richard for 26 years, at least personally as a friend, but I also thought afterwards that wait a minute, it's, we should look forward. And the book is organized in a very careful way. Precisely, as you mentioned, to try to make sense of things that were real time contemporaneous shared among colleagues, people, students, and that were live. And part of the reason I think obviously that you put this together was to try to not lose studios and all this work. You know, you were a bit vulgar about it to the trash can, but clearly it's not in the trash can, none of it anyway. But so then I thought, okay, a little bit personal. I did not intend to end up in Columbia myself. It turned out I was close with people here and it made sense. And I did a book called Slow Space that in 1998 that involved a huge amount of the faculty. So something very organic happened. And I landed at Columbia, which is been wonderful. But I also got very involved with housing in Houston, Texas, teaching at Rice University. And I backed myself into reading housing while very carefully Clinton era housing while in 1996, hope six, 1998 quality housing work responsibility act. But these are, you know, arcane laws that nonetheless had very real effects. So that led to, you know, becoming known about housing and staying with it. It led to ultimately being offered to lead the housing studio at Chisab, come from Texas to New York, and not having read your book until I got here. And not being super acclimated to the New York City system even though I've formed, even though of course I knew what I'd been here many times. But I tell the personal side because when I came here, I very quickly dug in and thought, you know, I need to talk to people who know this better than I do. I had a direction. But, you know, so I talked to Kenneth and I talked to Richard. I said, well, how did you found the housing studio? Why did it happen? And I said, you know, Bella Abzug housing is a right where you guys overtly political. You said to me, no, no, no, we were not overtly political. Housing itself was political. And then you made a comment. Stephen Hall made it political when he made it about artists and banners. Gwadis Gwendikinow another Stephen made it more poetic when he took over the housing studio. So I say all that because the more I got to know Richard and I see it reading the book carefully is this is the simple point I would make because we all have to talk here is the throughout the book you and you said it here today you're alluding to migrating into urbanism and the hard science and then the messy problems. I thought horse riddle wicked problems when I read that. But the problems that don't have a profession to solve them. And the soft the soft sciences and very early in the book is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut. And you know the part for me about yeah, I read. Yeah, yeah, I saw it. So the Vonnegut part, you know, as much as many people know Vonnegut well, I read it in college or high school very carefully and was obsessed with it. But there was always looking at the word, the world to a kind of absurdist lens. Vonnegut, the character sees a Hertz truck drive by and he thinks the truck hurts. It's in pain. But so it's a person who's like linguistically estranged from this is Gilbert Trout. So this side of you is the more I read the book, the more I thought it's so important that you did the book and that we have it now and all the people that have been part of this because there's this constant attempt to mix hard science, soft science and soft sciences, culture, art, policy, law. I think. And perhaps the fourie. And then there's this other thing closer to real history that you're trying to do. But the hard science and it's all I think in search of an apparatus that allows us to work on something that requires a different sort of profession. I always thought you kind of graduated out of housing and invented urban design so that you could do that. So I could go on. But that is the part I would come back to is that as much as it's a history of things that you encountered and did, there's a locomotion to the way you organized it that absolutely is saying we need to keep trying to invent this other profession or whatever it's called. And the last several years ago you muttered something with your typical as Mary said quietness but seriousness that you weren't quite. Forgive me if I'm quoting you out of school, but I'm going to do it. You weren't quite sure we were still in architecture school we were doing something equally important but more spread out and I'll leave it at that. But I really think that what you are this book is so valuable because you're trying to describe this kind of character which was you that is trying to map out a way to address all of this. And you're not willing to do it through traditional practice nor as you say explicitly in the book you weren't too interested in being part of the then new avant-garde. So I'll leave it at that there's much more but it's a pleasure to read this book I must say it's really remarkable. And for those of us that teach and invest a lot in teaching it's an incredible template for how to record and keep what happens with all the people. Thank you I mean I picking the essays I was helped a lot by Audrey is she here and then I'll who was then a student and it was very interesting to me because there was a lot of stuff right. It was very interesting to me to try to have a perspective of a current student looking at this stuff and she gave some very good advice and it was a question whether to keep Vietnam in there or not and things like that so but my I think there's also the question of continuity and my thought was everybody should make the same book I mean you know it's important I mean scientists do it I mean they publish these arcane articles and you know they just keep reading them and it's like you know whatever and and it's very interesting to see the people here because most of you were part of this continuity somehow you know even faculty Ira's back there I mean Ira was in Maastar as a student at Temple right yeah and then came then she went to Harvard but then she taught here in Ecuador in urban design I'm just thinking oh I mean there are all these connections to be made and they're very positive but they should be maintained I mean the problem is I think loss of information is a problem in our discipline you know but anyway no you guys should say whatever yeah well well first of all I want to join Amarian and others in thanking Richard for so many things you know that go typically unnoticed and unrecognized amongst colleagues over many years for myself as well I've been thinking trying to think of a kind of vocabulary with which to summarize this and I don't really I haven't to say to thank you for the friction there's a kind of you know directness I think Mary did actually you summarized it well unvarnished kind of like hallway kind of conversation that I sort of see leaking into what you were showing and I have such appreciated that one can speak one's mind yeah right and you know and because that is not always the case in academia the other thing I wanted to acknowledge you know and I think you kind of said this in different ways but over these years you taught in the graduate school first of all of architecture and planning 1P and then you know what we know that should be yeah I know I remember that this is where I come in somewhere in there I do recall these conversations sadly but but you also have consistently regularly taught in Columbia University your participation your formal affiliation with the Earth Institute your collaboration with colleagues like Trisha Colligan for example and C's and the science institute and so on and I think that you know it doesn't you made this much more legible than it might have been to us by showing us the teaching and then the records of the teaching in such a systematic way and that I think it's kind of almost paradoxical you know after all a kind of very specific teaching format the studio and the study of these kind of traveling studios and research studios and so on you demonstrate very concretely the necessity of connecting between the heart and all sciences so that is something that can't be done just anywhere and I think in that regard you've shown us something that we can do we don't necessarily always do the other thing at a more personal level we share is this polytechnic situation both of us now are away you more than me personally around Troy New York and some other environs around there and I think that you know there is something to that as well I've always felt that I am I consider myself the product of the Team 10 Primer maybe even more so generation well yes in a certain sense I don't want to go into that but in a you know I this is I'm looking at Sandra there's a few people here who I know from that environment and there was something like six copies of that book in the Rensselaer Library yeah it was headquarters of this and during the years for me so we were separated by some techniques but none the less so all of this you know in a sense is what I read and see between the lines of the text and your wonderful presentation which I think you know in fact it supplements the text it's almost like another book that you just presented to us on the screen so you did yeah you should because this is boring that's not boring I mean it's a book okay just one one thing because I I'm curious I really am and you've mentioned it a couple of times we're circling around this Vietnam question and apparently it was an editorial decision to include the essay to me okay look there are different ways to read a book one of the many ways that we all know is through the table of contents this table of contents is very carefully organized and they're dates and one can read you know one's way of teaching as well as the kind of semantics again that showed up in the research that you explained but on page 21 even in the table of contents this title Vietnam stands up and it doesn't you know you didn't do a studio in Vietnam and yet it seems structural to the rest of the project and I just want to ask and just to give the audience some sense of what I'm at least trying to get at is after the now controversial neoliberal quote which has to be some you know kind of a projection onto your handwriting or something I don't know how for you transcribe this but nonetheless the concluding yeah it's worth checking in any case the concluding paragraph I'll just read this paragraph if you don't mind I want to know the kind of trouble this got you into first what maybe our colleagues would like to know also what informed the inclusion ultimately of the essay you know in a manner that provokes this kind of discussion and what you know I'm looking for the discontinuities as much as the continuity space so here it says our society is ruled and you gave us a little disclaimer you know this is like Juvenelia I read it a long time ago I don't know and yet it's here as the first essay our society is ruled as no other has been by the drive for production as production is powerfully oriented towards consumption and as our consumption is limitless so is production to produce something means to destroy something else whether Vietnam or increasingly our own cities a dilemma of our production is that we must grow until there is nothing left to destroy with quote unquote urban renewal we posit change through destruction right so there's a kind of I mean today we might say a Marshall Bowman kind of a theme you know right you know here but I don't it doesn't seem to me just that our universities are further geared to this production and no amount of well-meaning special courses or days of concern teachings and so on I suppose also will solve such problems required so this is the militant claim right and I think what Mary was referring to is a kind of I think correctly a kind of reparative pragmatic that courses through the rest of the book and certainly through the presentation is a little bit at odds with this kind of militancy required will be a withdrawal of resources from the lucrative production market to the job of making workable alternatives maybe it's the workable alternatives that we've been looking at we must begin in the university and so there's you know on the one hand there's the sense of the sites of learning as as themselves in a sense the barricades and figuratively and of course you begin with the first slide was Kent State but also the university as an interface or kind of locus within the world like in other words the teaching not as separate and as something abstruse from or somehow at some remove from these contradictions but that's something that belonged to them so I'm just honestly it's just a kind of open question as to how now you read this you know what the plus the last paragraph is a bit much you think but you know this was I mean we I was already into Vietnam for 10 years when the army came to my house my parents house when I was still in high school and and tried to recruit me into ROTC and they said well you know it's a big world out there and things are happening and you probably be much better off you know you know basically saving your ass and and that would have been well that was yeah they'll probably the last year of high school now my mother wouldn't let us join the Boy Scouts because she said they were paramilitary and slammed a door on that guy's ass but this was like and whoever of my generation who went through this they will absolutely tell you probably you had some of this right I mean this was horrible and I think today you know so I and then I didn't know whether to put that it was a personal decision because I think people should understand where this started you know and why it's so weird but you can add to this so quickly because the essay is 1971 Vietnam and my older brother the same thing happened 70 it's after Kent State yeah coming to recruit my older brother I remember that same thing but you talk about the great acceleration and you know 1945 forward but then you begin the book with 1970 and you know you quote Richard Nixon in here in destructive ways but I was also said what's not quite mentioned directly is the end of the Bretton Wood Streeties and you know leaving the gold standard and the beginning of a different acceleration so you know that little 26 year window from the end of World War 2 to 1971 forward is the neoliberal economy thus it is weird to slightly see that mentioned as before but along the line of you get what I can think you get up to 1987 in the United Nations our common future document and the beginnings of sustainability as a global problem so this incredible in a very short series of texts that are kind of extracted largely from syllabi I think you're commenting well yeah windows are the devastation and I agree with what I have very much placing the site of education both on the ground in front of the real evidence but continually pulling back out into policy you're quoting 1960 housing so very specific about laws very specific about economic moments but then on the ground and IL-2 was wondering about the degree to which the activism appears belligerent or not can I say something that Richard wants to talk but I left out a passage about he did have militant side that persisted at least through 86 and I would say even longer when I first came there was a Brassini exhibition and we were all furious that this is somebody celebrated in complexity and contradiction fascist architect and we were all upset that his fascism wasn't acknowledged so we all wrote almost everybody on the faculty signed a letter to the New York Times that's one example that's in the archive okay another one that he actually mentions in the book and Richard was always a major voice in these things but we all were pretty vocal was the demonstration we had calls at the end of an era in 86 in front of the South African Embassy a consulate excuse me everybody except one faculty member that was full time I think was there and we all got arrested fortunately not put in prison except Max Bond who had already been arrested twice and had to leave before they clamped the things on us and it really was a case of planners architects all acting together in collaboration and acting I mean that's what struck me so much about Richard was there was this when I said pragmatic it was not just designing realistically but actually acting but I'm not sure there was that kind of activism very clearly after 86 was the 80s well in Rome the Iraq war when we did the Lardarello studio it was a big demonstration that was good we were all there the colony group we had he kept that militant streak that was the only point I really wanted to make but let me just say the production thing that's live fabric that was yeah of course it was a little incoherent and it was this kind of you know rally and all this stuff and the kids were dead and oh my god so but that was the idea that we had gone over the top with consumption and was being driven by this crazy production that had to there was no end right there was no way to stop it and that's what that was about which isn't very clear here but I didn't change the text and Lefevre was a big influence right at that moment his book Explosion came out just you know a few months before and everybody was reading Explosion and all that so that explains that what happened was no I don't maybe this should be we talk about this in the street but what happened after that thing and all these guys in the suits with the cameras didn't that didn't go down well with the university and lo and behold Jim Palsche came along at Columbia and I said finally and get back to New York because Penn State was way in the country and it takes a six hour bus trip to get here so that's how that came about plus I had a very low lottery number I think it was four and that was extremely disturbing so I'm just going to jump in just so we don't run out of time I have to admit that the reason that I don't have Richard's book on my lap is because I had it on an Amtrak train yesterday and I found it absolutely gripping and I dogged your pages and I underlined a lot of things which I felt terrible about on the one hand but I got so excited that I wanted to talk about all these things and it's probably too late to talk about all those serious things that I wanted to talk about since we're on a sort of personal note I just wanted to maybe ask Richard to talk about before Vietnam because one of the things I didn't know about Richard until I asked him to do a piece about where in Lincoln Center for the history book that we did via the DIRS collection some years ago here at Columbia was Richard as a student and everybody submitted these very kind of serious pieces about housing and the grid and very academic and terrific but Richard submits this deeply personal take on what happened during those years when the battle for Lincoln Center was evolving and I'm sure most of you know what was going on and the reason I kind of wanted to fill in that piece of Richard is because I mean you're so many things you are like most other faculty here and intellectual but I think what makes you so interesting is your humility and your humor and your ability to kind of just be yourself through this all and so when I read this piece about the very young Richard I was so fascinated by because it told me so much about what would come through and all the rest of those comments that are in the books and those situations and I thought maybe you just wanted to share a little bit about that part of your life that you might not know. You can read this thing in the book it's pretty good I thought you know it's like but we hated Lincoln Center, hated it and I was a student and I had some friends and we worked in an office in the summers that's when I decided I didn't want to work in an office when I graduated I figured let's try something else here but anyway one of my friends was at Yale and they were a bunch of students at Yale Art Music students actually I studied violin for nine years and my mother was quite you know not well known or anything but quite accomplished pianist and vocalist and music was very important and when they Penn Station was one thing but when they ripped down the old Metropolitan Opera that was too much and we went I remember what I wrote about the week before they ripped it down one of the last performances I remember paying like 50 cents I was way up in the top you couldn't see anything but the acoustics were great much better than now and listen to that I forget what it was I remembered the opera anyway what's his name from Brooklyn anyway doesn't matter that was quite a while ago and it seemed the criminality of that you know there was nothing wrong with the auditorium it could have had the backstage rebuilt because it was built in 1890s I think it was pure politics it was Moses it was the idea that if they needed the opera in Lincoln Center for legitimacy right but the problem was if there was this other house down Broadway it was at 39th street people would go down there and there would be another opera company so they knew that very well and that's how that thing came down was completely bizarre and actually criminal so that that got me started on a whole bunch of things into the 80s I would say and I never separated out postmodernism and all of that from that kind of trajectory right I would have to think more about that I just want to make one other comment and then I'll hand it over to Adam no no no it's okay I opened up that opportunity I found myself reading some of the comments that you made a long time ago and thinking about how relevant they were still to the profession into the world we live in I was absolutely floored by some of them which is when I took my pen and started circling them because I started thinking how much has changed and how much hasn't changed both in terms of the profession its relevance, its ability to reach out to the rest of the world and also in terms of our world and starting with Vietnam at this moment in time is such an interesting place get in what's going on with universities and everything else so that probably was not in your mind at the time you were thinking about it but it really made me think about where are we on that trajectory and are we moving in a circle I mean our students now I don't know how many current students are here but I've thought about this recently and whether the experience of this moment will be at least for some students as they were for some of us so so profound and you know so that's yeah that's a good question I don't have an answer for it except we were at a moment we were at a moment in 68 I mean the cities were burning you have to remember that too things were happening and we had to absorb it all as like 20 young 20 somethings which was tough but Adam you're a victim of two Caracas studios would he I was ready for a third that was amazing I think I may be your only student up here and we saw a lot of maps actually it would be one map that I would love to see is a kind of map that shows the spatial distribution of your students over time it would be amazing but also to see a drawing of that that creates the kind of intellectual connections between them one of the things I loved about your book was seeing the notes that had the names of the students in the studio and how many of them the ones that at least stuck around New York that I was able to place you know actually beyond my peers older than me there was one studio that you had which three very different people all in one studio you probably know them and Henry Erbach and Joel Towers all in one studio and I was thinking what a crazy bunch that must have been but to but to imagine what that map would look like to me it made me think about the idea of connection and adjacency and actually a theme in your book which is propinquity and you know what what creates connection and adjacency and propinquity and I think where you land is quite interesting and in some ways I'm starting with the end of the book which speaks to Lubin and where you talk about that as such an interesting of a place that kind of bypassed modernism and that they destroyed he tells this story you'll have to read it Lubin in Belgium destroyed in the First World War and they rebuilt the medieval core and it's a really beautiful moment in the book where you talk about that actually you know back 100 years ago there was this example of what cities want today and need today and how it was something that completely bypassed what we saw throughout modernism which to me one of the kind of most nerve wracking essays by a planner was called Community Without Propinquity Melvin Weber and he there's a lot to hate there but it raises that question again where you are taking a position about what a city should be and what propinquity is which is more tied to a walkable city that creates connections now you do something a little bit sneaky where you talk about spatial and intellectual propinquity like that as the kind of mythical ideal which is different than just imagining a place as a dense urban fabric so I want to come back to that and ask you that question because it seemed to me and it links to the history of the city in Syria that you cite with the Paul Veina essay but I think that's quite interesting and whether you are holding out a kind of ideal for a city and what that looks like and how it performs and so it's interesting to you. One other thing that I wanted to just talk about in reading the book that I really loved was the snapshots in time assuming that you didn't go back and tweak anything and to me it felt and it was a little bit like I don't know if anybody saw the movie Boyhood by Richard Link later and he shoots the film over 20 some odd years and what's amazing about the movie is that there are these scenes where you think oh wow he's wearing those sneakers or he's got that tee like was that tee shirt really from that year and so there were all of these moments with reading your essays where they were jarring where it's like wow were people really saying that in 1970 so to contextualize the little argument I'm actually going to come to your defense because in the very first essay Richard uses the term neoliberal which I went down a wormhole, you probably went down some wormholes it is a term that it was not a pejorative but it was in circulation among what we would call neoliberal economists today Milton Friedman and folks like that but what is amazing about it is that you are capturing these things in your essay that I was thinking were people really thinking that in 1970 you wrote about gentrification at a really early date and so that was a real pleasure to read but also made me feel like you were pretty intellectually active and engaged with what was happening and really ahead of the curve in so many ways so I just wanted to thank you for that second neoliberal reference is legit yes now the other thing I don't know but I think see your studio and Ignacio and Alessandro were also involved with anybody else with Caracas I don't remember no they were very important to me because I started to think as I did in Living about why was the largest reconstruction project in Europe at that time never discussed by historians that's where I get off on the history question in the Caracas case you have a city that it's probably 90% 80% I don't know so-called informal and what's that I mean it's actually and that's where I started to think about this formality question because that's our perspective it's not informal it's formal it's just a whole different set of rules right and different outcomes so I thought so that studio was very important I mean all these studios I learned a lot I have to say probably more than students well hopefully not maybe it's a good moment to open it to the audience so I think there's a mic to pass but who was the I'm George Miller and I was fortunate enough to be with Richard at Penn State marching against the war at that time you were in that I was in that you know for me what hasn't really been said so far is the influence that Richard and his investigations have had on the lives of so many and for me as a student I grew up in a town of about 5,000 people in Northeastern Pennsylvania and with the investigations that we did and we heard about Manchu and we heard about other projects that Richard was doing but have the opportunity to go to Italy which is you know the gateway to the world and really grow and see places that are of importance to architects was really special for me and I think the other thing is that the relationships that you build with people Richard showed some slides of an event that was just held a short time ago people that we met 50 years ago and we know their families and their grandkids and it really means a lot of connection that you can have with people and the way you see the world that's an overlay of all of this kind of study that we were doing which I think was important and I simply want to say that it's time probably to talk about the future also I really enjoy these kind of stories from yesterday but you know we've got some pretty serious challenges in front of us right now and not only in this city but look what's happening in the Middle East I mean how we can provide housing in places for people to kind of go about their lives day to day is really something that needs to be addressed again I think the study of broad programs not only here but also across the country need to be reinforced because it connects people connects ideas it connects places and it's important so what's that song somebody said don't stop thinking about tomorrow I guess that's a few years ago too but you all remember that guy yeah I think one thing I was one thing about San Leotra was that that event last fall was extremely empowering because the community of course is you know people are passing away and all that and moving away and all that but they're struggling against huge economic forces for development it is a UNESCO site now so that event was it surprised me that very important that they could get together and I guess we were the catalyst I mean we're the excuse for doing that 50 years later the other thing that I would say and I really applaud you for your continuity and focus on the issues of housing and the importance it is worldwide I mean somebody said how many how many families are without housing today it's really critical that we all do what we can to focus on that so it's almost worthy of marching in the streets again isn't it Austin I see we have many of the usual suspects here sorry Austin I don't really have a question I just wanted to say this because there's been a lot of talk about continuity and this kind of amazing sort of train of thought that's just been rigorously upheld over the course of this five decades of thinking and all of that is absolutely true but to go back to Adam's point about propinquity and since George is here I'll mention you know my old boss Harry Cobb used to talk about the architecture of contingency and the Jason so in the context of pedagogy that contingency I just want to say Richard when we were in your studios and also when you hired my first teaching job when you brought me on to the Prato Plata project when I saw it from the other side there was this there was that arc that we felt privileged to be a part of but there was also this incredible attention to what the students themselves were interested in the contingency of individual imagination and individual sort of projection and sort of your willingness and generosity to dive into our weird sometimes totally relevant investigations and you were just sort of right there with us you showed that photograph of Harkov as a student to get to engage on a project where we were talking about oligarchs and gas and not really showing any design and you were just incredibly supportive of our of sometimes our refusal to participate and also our wild deviation so I just wanted to say thank you for that generosity that attention to contingency and propinquity pedagogically it taught me personally sort of how to think and claim agency as a designer and I just have you to thank for that well thank you, I mean I learned from you guys actually the advantage of the soft science side is exactly this kind of diversity and it's a huge advantage not that you don't need both hard and soft but the studios are an amazing instrument um yeah I've had like almost half yeah I guess about half the day as professors and I was a student here and yeah I think one thing that I found really interesting about all the conversations today was and reflecting on the like long legacy of the studios where you did have students from multiple different programs and kind of like encourage this desiloing that is common at a lot of schools and I think it's still always an ongoing challenge please bring back the cafe and brownies current students these problems like you said about the future current students at GSAP are going to be writing things like this in the future are going to be solving these problems and so I think it's incredible to have this faculty up here that have such a legacy of talking about these things and doing these things so I think it's very encouraging to speak on that and speak kind of brings back to this question how in the midst of the biggest upheaval in zoning in New York City in what 60 years most of it around housing probably not with the amount of actual critical thinking that needs to be going into it at the same time a lot of city agencies folks in them kind of ground up are talking about shifting the culture in city in zoning and in city agencies to one where housing planning design is looked at as a health question, as a public health question housing is not an architectural problem it's a public health problem and I am kind of curious on your thoughts on what are the future conversations what are the current conversations that can connect this path that you've drawn into the next phase of studios the next phase of courses and the next generation of architects, planners, activists, etc oh man what should I write my dissertation on so I can get a job you tell me I don't know I think there was an interesting article in The Times today about Paris and the fact that the majority of housing units in Paris are somehow government owned or certainly subsidized and because housing is a basic human right and that's something that we have never gotten straight in this country I'm afraid you're the expert actually on how things get done well it's very interesting to work to listen to Ignacio those conversations in their office I mean our subsidy system is so screwed up that it's impossible to understand how things will proceed without a major overhaul but it's certainly the way things are going with our politics doesn't seem I mean this requires major major noise to get straightened out it's a big concern all I did was write history sort of and that's an interesting story too I mean when I did the book by 1990 I wanted to do a book that wasn't about architecture because I thought the architecture books in a couple years they'd disappear unless like somebody does a book and okay fine they get a review and that's the end of it I wanted to do a book that would be useful for a long time and that wouldn't be the normal sort of architecture book and it would be about housing because it would be you know more than just the designs right and one of the things that I have found very interesting is that it actually has been I think people still use it from what I hear is part of that the syntactic structure the removal of color the black and white that could be I don't mean that at all no but throughout your talk you came around to syntax and I was thinking of everything from Susan Sontek to Noam Chomsky to where linguistics was and the way Peter Eisenman used linguistics or Mario D'Andosono's Venturi, Scott Brown but that part of it allowed it to be transmissible and the digitization project which turned out to be your thesis I guess well no but this project of basically making it transmissible through some sort of syntactic focus the black and white thing is I could say a little more about that I think you're right see the interesting thing about this book is when I gave it to Ramon Pratt you know what act are he's a great guy doing this for years I don't know how he keeps going but all these books are all these colorful things I mean it's like God you know and some are way too sick or way too thin I don't know what they are so he seriously asked me he said but is black and white an ideological problem for you and I said yes Ramon I remember that phone call he couldn't believe it because it's probably the only book in his whole list it's only black and white but I thought well let's not distract here from the message right I mean let's not have noise even for this for the yeah for the 1990 book yeah I think you're right that's what it was I think that's why the course remained appealing people wanted to still experiment with trying to test the viability of that it wasn't necessarily a wholesale endorsement but it was definitely a desire to test that anybody that went to the reviews in the last couple years I was always curious there myself wanting to do this this is the disarming consumer if you try to make him the center of attention he will make him the periphery very quickly even though he's in the middle right now just for efficiency sake who was in the book here in Mexico City I want to reflect on the pedagogy piece and maybe it's fundamental today but I do believe the way in which the studio's force collaboration is such an important thing that I got out of this a professionalism that was cultivated within three semesters right I mean if you didn't like your team you had to for three semesters so I've gotten so much I mean sure it was a graduate educational experience but there was a degree of professional training that we were being prepared for and I think having to reflect on that is really an impressive thing in which you know you immediately apply that in the office right at least for my experience and to get architects to collaborate well it was really great we had that kind of experience in an academic context where we could explore theory different from well at least from my experience very different from practicing in the real world and then interjecting is to be delivered and I just want to thank you for you know really working succinctly and with other creative faculty to put that kind of programming together that was the idea but you should think that the UD faculty are here they are on the front lines of this they are now and I don't know Justin David I mean they had to enforce that idea and it wasn't I think summer was the most difficult moment then the students then kind of got into Gita if we could close with this yes I want to pick up on what you said because Richard it's been such an honor to teach with you but you've been able to look into the future right and think about what things are going to be important now is a very special moment in time in history and yes I think everyone's teaching whatever they are teaching plus climate risks and all but what about what's happening in politics and whole cities and countries being destroyed how should we think of that and how should that impact what we teach I should say something about this I'll say one thing I think learning has to become even more intense because we actually don't know exactly what we're doing but I'm thinking like thinking back to the Turkish project there was another faculty member Michael Schwaring I don't know if anybody remembers him he was here and he had a connection in Toti in Italy there was a whole like little circle of expats there Beverly Pepper the sculptress and the woman who taught it and Barnard wrote a fantastic book on landscape and nature landscape painting and nature there was a little circle here and so they after certainly actually they want me to do a studio in Toti because it was this kind of group and Toti was somehow trying to coalesce as a new kind of community but I had already committed to go to Turkey but now being sort of partially relocated in Toti I understood how much I still don't understand about how cities work I mean that is a medieval city that's before the Enlightenment we're taught how fantastic is the Enlightenment the name itself and for me it's been an amazing experience to understand how that place works it's pretty intact I mean it's a thousand years old fabric right and and I think learning from these places in a kind of systematic way but creative way is very important in design schools absolutely and how to do it is a question if I could never I'm sure no one will ever do another 50-year studio project you know in any school I mean that was a moment of of turmoil and intensity where you could actually grab something do something with it right but I think we have to find those occasions now I mean I'm just thinking how should Harkiv be re-made and we were thinking about post-Soviet city well now forget about well now it truly is post-Soviet you know and of course Gaza and oh my god I mean there's and I mentioned of course Syria so it's a moment of huge opportunity if we could I did see opportunity and I tried to catch it let's just say that what I caught I don't know thank you thank you Andres it doesn't get better than this right