 So, I'm going to, even though on the panel, as Kate mentioned, I'm going to talk about the 2014 moment when the streetscape was passed, but I really am going to use this as an excuse to kind of zoom out and talk a little bit about kind of what WXY is, but more importantly why a architecture firm is doing all this planning work in Brooklyn, which may sound a bit strange because in a way we're going to talk about a lot of buildings, but in fact architecture and design firms have been a real engine for why Brooklyn is what it is today, and I think that in a way the panel is going to reflect that as well. So here we are, zooming out, and you can see that little red wedge that is in a sense not only is the now called the Brooklyn cultural district today, but in fact is defined really by what's been happening around it, but that wasn't always the case. In a sense it was one of the first building blocks, and if you look at the kind of other building blocks are there, one of the plans that we did not in 2014, but I think it was actually 2012 with HRNA was called the Brooklyn Tech Triangle, and in a sense it was not, we were hired not by the city of New York just to get back to this public-private partnership. The study itself was a public-private partnership. It was the Brooklyn Navy Art. It was a bid, the Dumbo bid, and it was another organization which is a series of bids which is now called Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, but really at the time was a series of bids Fulton Mall and Skirmahorn, et cetera, et cetera. So really the plan, unlike most master planning which gives you a territory and you plan within it, you know, you do a good job making shapes and connections and it's in a way completely understandable. This was an understandable plan, right? So the brief was, and I remember Andrew Kimball standing up in front of all of us bidders, you guys pretend you're the bidding group, and he stood up and he said, if we knew what we would want, what we wanted, we would have already sent this RFP to four of you. So at the time, that really struck me as interesting. The fact that there was questions in the city that those, you know, great minds out there actually didn't know what they wanted enough to be able to write it down in an RFP. So his response was, so therefore we got together, us three separate groups, and we want you to tell us what you would do and we'll tell you the amount of money we have. So anyway, so we all knew what amount of money they had, but we didn't actually, other than knowing there was a fear of essentially the Watchtower buildings, but a fear of residential development overrunning everywhere in this area so that the kind of emerging job market that everyone was seeing and being pretty excited about would therefore have no place to go. Well, the same was true when, you know, the beginning of what was really the BAM cultural district happened was looking at a lot of city-owned property, and this was a huge amount of foresight because none of the new economy jobs we're talking about were happening in 1999. There was just creative artistic vision, there was Ken Smith, there was Diller Scafidio, there was the BAM organization, there was Harvey as everyone calls him, and there was a desire to do a world-class venue for BAM. So it was really all about BAM, right? So when after doing Brooklyn Tech Triangle and coming up with this idea that the connectivity was not there and not going to happen without some effort, downtown Brooklyn said, you know, we're still having a huge, a really hard time getting the public design commission to approve the streetscape plan, which we had from way back when as part of the BAM cultural district. And I, you know, I was like, so why are you having a hard time getting approved? You have no problem RFPing these sites, developers are going crazy for the sites, the economy is with you, what's the problem getting the streetscape approved? Okay, so take a look at this diagram. We, no one knew where the BAM cultural district was, so the first move we did before answering that question was coming up with a theory that if you pin this cultural district using its public spaces, you can then explain why the streetscape might matter. And at the same time this was happening, Fox Square, which is now under scaffolding, but Fowler Square, which many of you have hung out in, right, where Lafayette and Fulton crosses and Atlantic Terminal, where Barclays is, became clear that those were these nodes, both of transit, but of places people needed to hang out before they did their next thing. So the shape of it came out of what was there, but these triangular wedge spaces, it was clear why no one could approve a streetscape plan because it's very hard to perceive a bunch of diagonals. So it gets kind of back to architecture. And so that was when we started the streetscape plan in 2014, you guys, it's only 2016. That's what it looked like, oh, 2013, but really well into 2014. And here it is, I don't know, this is Jacob from WXY's picture that this is maybe two months ago, it's a completely different place also. So at the time, and still it's true that the problem was that this is a public-private partnership, the streetscape. It was set up by the city that each developer, as they did their building, would also do the streetscape and also do the plazas. The plazas seem to be no problem. Can Smith's Plaza in front of theater for a new audience, is there the plazas where you could work out because the city had policies about plazas, so you could downtown Brooklyn and everyone could work them out. Here's an early example, we did Albee Square as part of the Fulton Mall streetscape, Fowler Square, actually Quinnell Rothschild, I believe, did. And I think Fox Square at Signee Nielsen. As I mentioned, Ken Smith's original take on the plaza is still there in front of theater for a new audience. And what Grain Collective has done, and you'll see South Plaza, in a sense, still builds on that idea of the streetscape is the streetscape, but the plazas are where the culture and the buildings get to mix. And that was core in the original master plan, was that the public realm was just as important for the cultural buildings, maybe not for what happened upstairs, but for the culturals in order to kind of make it more like Brooklyn and less like Lincoln Center. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the Lincoln Center Brooklyn Cultural District thing, but before, I want to just point out what we're dealing with. Still half of it looks like this, but it's about to be not like basically everyone's backyard and be more like the cultural district. But underneath that, in terms of the history piece, and many of you may know this, but it was already the Brooklyn Cultural District. But the culture was theaters, movie theaters, originally live theaters. And you can see it mapped, this mapped, the theaters kind of mapped on it, as where you get the greatest number of intersections, which is all these diagonals, imperceptible. But kind of a great place to put a theater. So these are, this is the Brooklyn, this is the Brooklyn Cultural District. Just, it's not there anymore. Although I have to say I was really relieved to know the strand was urban glass and kind of a shout out to Pentagon here. So during the process, after figuring out why the streetscape hadn't been approved, there's still the question and coming up with a solution that I'll tell you about in a minute. The name is a huge issue. And we didn't talk about the name with the high line. But naming things actually sometimes determines their fate. Probably developers are better at this than architects, but architects are also engaged in trying to understand what's behind a name. So this is, so these are all the names this was called. And really you can see Kate referred to this as the BAM cultural district. If you talk to Mark Morris, that was an insult, okay? Basically, you were kicked out of Mark Morris if you walked in because people would walk into Mark Morris and they would say, where's BAM? And they'd look at it, so what's wrong with us? What do you mean, where's BAM? We're Mark Morris, and then they would try and raise money. And people would say to them, well, I just gave money to BAM. Aren't they gonna give it to you? So there was a huge problem there with the name. And so basically, this was in Brooklyn, which is why we got to the cultural district. And then it got to be the Brooklyn cultural district. And as it went through, and this really was the city pushing this. Under the Bloomberg administration, this is something that the DCA was really Department of Cultural Affairs sensitive about, which is that Brooklyn had many, many cultural that were investing their energy, their time in this. And they were all being labeled BAM, and BAM was fantastic. But everyone who was developing property wanted to keep calling it BAM, because that was a brand, right? But changing a brand is almost apparently as hard as changing a sidewalk. So the issue on this name and I think design has to do with whether your tools are conscious or whether your tools are subconscious. And when it comes to streetscape, what's great is you can be explicit in text, but it just starts to build subconsciously. So if you start staring at these pictures for a while, you start noticing that Neven Street Station cultural district, Fulton. You're already in Brooklyn, so you don't need to be told you're in Brooklyn. So the argument was in New York, we don't have to have everything spelled out for us. We can be in Brooklyn, call it cultural district, and know it's the Brooklyn cultural district, and know that we're not in Lincoln Center, getting back to Lincoln Center. So this is the other, how this solution basically to the streetscape is we decided that the most important thing the streets had to do is transform from day to night. They didn't need to have form because the form stuff is happening already in the plazas. The form stuff is happening in the buildings, which you will see. But what they needed to have was rhythm, and they needed to be able to be in a way played or played out by developers. So this is basically the district, you have to zoom in. This is the northern part just to place all of the buildings that are happening. This is the southern part, we're gonna talk about the south side. And you can see very faintly, this is the first sketch of essentially the idea of doing a kind of more lines than you need, more saw cuts, a kind of fret pattern that you would slide these solar lights along the lines, and they could be done in any way that whoever the landscape architect or the artist or the developer decided to deploy them. But that we did lay out in a way either parallel or perpendicular to the buildings, a kind of idea of these very flexible rhythm. In the end, what was approved was only perpendicular to the buildings, not parallel, if Kate Levin's out there, thank you for decreasing. But you lose somethings as a designer, but at least the idea's still there. So this is basically what was approved. And so that the highly reflective glass and silica carbide concrete helps during the day to sparkle, but at night it really comes up. So I'm just flipping through this. The planning gets and all those interviews with all the controls get down to builders, pavement plans, and down to Bam Park, which is sort of the last piece that we're doing with Quinell Rothschild, that pins down the cultural district. And to relatively, the rest of this is kind of off the shelf.