 This last session is going to be introduced by Michael Bell who is a professor here at School of Architecture and was director of the EMART core program for about 14 years and also ran the housing studio for more than a decade. And so Michael will introduce this last full presentation of panels and I welcome Michael to the podium. Thank you very much everybody. Welcome back. I've run many conferences in this room. Some of them over two and a half days. This one has a really nice feel to it and those of you that are here it's really great to see you. As everybody says thanks to Hillary for inviting me and for organizing this. I don't know everybody speaking. Many of you have met the first time but I've really enjoyed it and I hope I meet you again. This has been a pleasure. It filled in a lot of gaps frankly and work that I'd seen but I had not seen presented. So I appreciate that immensely. It is interesting to be back. I did direct the housing studio for 11 years and core design studios which includes the first three semesters for 14 before not only was it time to move on but term limits should be invoked. So just for the sake of just rejuvenation I actually moved into taking a ton of housing issues that I'd worked on for years in the housing studio into a seminar partially because if depending on how far you want to get into the intricacy of housing as policy, philosophy, economics, people, sociology to do that all while you're doing design or to imbricate the two is of course difficult and design of course might be its own discourse that deserves to not have to know those things in such detail perhaps. I want to begin before I introduce, well I will introduce the speakers first and then I want to take about five minutes to make an introductory comment. It's a pleasure to be here. The title of the panel is design at a certain scale. Let me find that actually after this whole thing. Design at a certain scale. As somebody who's a moderator at the conference I will definitely listen carefully to the speakers and then try to pull questions out and hand it to the audience. However, I do know the work of everybody speaking and in fact I've known the work for years. I know the people moderately so I will have something to learn here today. Jim, joining us from the University of Toronto, which has a significant reputation as a academic and teacher but I think has an even greater reputation as an architect whose work stands apart from what we might think of it in terms of publications, etc., with some humor and I might be wrong about this. I remember logging on to the Jim and Sutcliffe website some number of years ago and it seemed to me when you hit the website you got a full page picture of the work where the picture ended up about two feet by one foot and I always wanted to figure out how to do that. Never did. But it struck me like Jim and Sutcliffe were really interested that the architecture was really evidence or that somehow the picture of it had to be large so you could really take it in. So that's something I might go back to. Our second guest in this panel is Lorcan O'Hurleyhey. I've met Lorcan O'Hurleyhey many times over the years. I had the pleasure of actually touring one of his buildings about six years ago in West Hollywood, the condominium next to the Schindler House, a remarkable work and an incredible place to work. Lorcan teaches at USC. I will save some more questions about that and bring it up when we speak later. Mark Norman will present via videotape. I think the snow kept him in Michigan, Ann Arbor. Mark is trained as an urban planner. He works between urban planning, economics, development, policy, and law. And I know he does a tremendous amount of consulting around the nation on developing affordable housing. And then finally, Weston Walker will join us from Studio Gang and will present work in Chicago. It's in the program so I'll let you refer to that. I take the panel, if I now go to my notes, designed at a certain scale is I, knowing Hillary a bit, assuming the goal here was a little bit to end with some architecture that may not need an explanation, that this is precise work that is really realized and executed and maybe supersedes a lot of the policy or historical questions that we might kind of ground housing in. But I thought I'd take a moment to embrace that idea and also talk about maybe why it's important, and this would take three or four minutes. The housing studio at Columbia was begun by Richard Plums and Kenneth Frampton. And it was begun, I understand, relatively informally. It was a group of studios around housing that formalized into something more substantially part of the curriculum. And in running it one day, I went back to Richard and I said, well, when you began this in the 70s, I think 75, was it political? And Richard said, well, no, it wasn't very political. And I said, well, what about Bella Abzug and New York Congresswoman and housing is a right, which came up in the Mexican context today. And of course, in the US, it's not a right. And he goes, well, everybody was interested in housing, so it wasn't political to be political about housing. And then he said, what was political was when Stephen Hall took over the housing studio and proposed housing on the Gowanus Canal for piano players and mathematicians, meaning it became more poetic and experiential and phenomenological. So it was political within the school to make this kind of change. I know Lorcan worked with Stephen in the early days. So the studio has evolved through the years. In many ways, it is a really important part of the building. And there's incredible faculty from Gwendolyn Wright to Richard Plums to Kenneth Frampton to Stephen Hall to Tom Hanrahan for a while. Robert A.M. Stern, amazing voices have gone through this studio and not to mention everybody who teaches it on a regular basis. The version of it that I would bring into the table now is I think maybe some of the architects we're going to see are challenged with being both architectural and urban. And that their work has a kind of burden of bridging urban, social, and economic questions needs along with the needs of actually being an architect and being responsible for everything from the aesthetic qualities of architecture to a better not leak. And in that regard, I would just point to a few kind of historical moments. The 1937 Housing Act, largely written by Catherine Bauer, was 13 pages long. And it was a kind of reluctant act if you read it the actual legal document where it had language such as no room should cost more than $1,000, no apartment can cost more than $5,000, which seems like a lot of money in 1937. But it also has very strict but quite enormous numbers attached to what's possible. The 1944 Housing Act was largely about quote unquote slum clearance. And it was really understood as about urban renewal and about bringing something back at the level of the city. And housing is, of course, what's being built. But the larger question was really urban and the health and future of the city. So between these two Housing Acts, one of them is demonstratively about housing for the poor in a political economy that doesn't really believe in that kind of thing. And the other is urban. So I would say that in today's climate, anybody working in housing, particularly in the U.S., where it is indeed not a right, you find yourself navigating every one of these questions about how is it justified? How is it designed? How is it built? So with that, I want to say it's a real pleasure to have this group. And I would say let's begin. And we will start with, if I have the schedule in front of me, I believe it's Bridget Shim. No, Lorcan O'Hurley, he will be first. Okay, thank you. Okay, well, pleasure to be here. Thank you, Lorcan. I just wanted to further, I see this more of a dialogue discussion, not really a presentation. I'll make it very brief. But this idea of bridging is essential, what you said. We, in our practice, and I would say collectively, a number of architects see architecture as a social act these days. You have to address this. Oh, sorry. You do have to see architecture more as a social act and do work of consequence. It's simply necessary. The nature of this typology is embedded in the culture of cities. It's something that you're not designing isolated objects. You have to really embrace and understand the complexities, the political, the social structure for these types of projects, and economics, which is equally essential. These are all private developments primarily in cities as well as public, but a lot of private developments. So these all issues really drive our work. And we actually embrace it. We see it as a bridge between how do you bring design to these other parameters? Is it how do you engage? How do you engage in politics? And we deal with it all the time. The cities are pushing back on us. They're recognizing the difficulties of doing these projects. We have neighborhood groups who fight tooth and nail against density and urbanism and are fighting to push back against that. So you have to find a way to bring good design. And that is your asset. Our clients recognize that. They see, well, for us to be able to get through this enormously complex process of getting approvals, if you bring good design, and you're designing a project on the street, and your project is a homeless housing project and is the best building on the street, what happens is they say, well, I can't quite quite obviously I could live in that building. So I'm OK with that. So this idea of bridging has been embedded in us for a number of years. We've been deeply involved with multifamily projects and hybrid programs for the last 16 or 17 years. I started my practice like most Los Angeles firms. You start with small houses and additions on hill sites and small retail. We had an opportunity for one of my clients who liked one of my houses to say, can we apply these ideas, these explorations in a house? Can we apply it and jump scale? And that was the primary driver of what we started with. And I took the risk of doing that because there's a lot of complexities with that. So this idea was the primary driver for all of work. Today, up here, we have two projects. This project here is in Los Angeles. It's a homeless housing project permanently or previously homeless veterans. And this is a product in Detroit, which is an interesting point with our career. We've had a wonderful opportunity to do a number of products in Detroit. And I know Maurice was very eloquent in terms of how he described the work in Detroit, so I won't go too in great too much detail of that, but very interesting place to be working right now. So with these projects, it's to me, it's how do we, what are the tools, where the medium are we using to create something that's essential to me, that public private divide, as you build these projects, certainly within Los Angeles and urban infills, what's that engagement? What's that edge condition between your building the sidewalk and street and adjacencies? So we use a number of creative strategies that we use to tackle these projects, where you'll see that are the ideas that underpin all of our work. And I'm only showing two projects, but we've done quite a few. But what's helpful for us is these ideas drive all of our work, and it's something that has been very essential to us. Yes, it worked. Okay, so with that in regards, that fluid interaction between the public private is essentially the critical thing within our work. We see it as a third space, that borrowed space. Can you create buildings where you take or you scoop out space that's in the private development, give it back to the public? And how do you then argue the case to your client that that's essential to these projects? So the tools we use are strategic voids, which is a key issue where we push to create opportunities for social interaction by carving out spaces within the massing of the structure of the site or conceivably embed the public sphere into the otherwise private developments. And this is essential in Los Angeles. It is a privatized city. It grows based on that concept. Most of the buildings are built to the property line. You put a six-foot wall on the edge and you turn yourself back to the street. We're trying to invent that. We're trying to turn that inside out and rethink that convention. For me, it makes the architecture better. So we see it as an asset. And that's what I'm saying is it's no longer about the object. It's about really embracing all the different levels and complexities of doing these projects. If you take these parameters and constraints and pushes against you, it actually makes the architecture better. Argument is the key thing. You have to fight for it. And that's what we do. Additionally to that, we do look at this idea of activated edges, which is a way of looking at eroding away the edges from the street, from the street, and a sidewalk, and begin to create these public realms. So a number of these cutbacks, which is a building we're doing right now in Los Angeles, these are 20 to 30-foot pushes pushing back from the property lines. And the argument is, for our clients, is it makes the architecture better. It creates this wonderful environment for people. And that's something that we push with all of our work. Equally so, with these ideas of strategic voids and accessible edges, we also do work with a series of materiality inventiveness off-the-shelf materials. We like materials. We think it's essential part of architecture. It's visual. That's what we are. So we bring that to it as well. So these tools, these three critical tools help us in the way we process these projects and design them. So this idea of working also with off-the-shelf materials and finding inventive ways of using it, or unique ways, is essential because we have economic constraints in our projects. So we can find something that can push against the conventional of the stucco box and the nail on windows, which has existed for most housing for many, many years. Certainly, you can look in the 70s that existed. So we're fighting that quite a bit. So we're gonna look at, in terms of this process, this lecture today, is I'm gonna focus on two projects. One in LA, which is our project called Martin Luther King Boulevard. And it's one which is a supportive housing project. The second one is in Detroit, and we're gonna look at about the various strategies we use for both of these projects. The challenge in LA today is with regards to limited housing availability is crucial. There are an enormous lack of housing in Los Angeles, and certainly a lack of housing for homeless. By looking of supported housing is a key component of what I wanna do today. That's the essential type of housing in Los Angeles that needs to be tackled. So the second one in Detroit is also embracing the nature of the city and how it's looking for this push, the urban renewal that's going on there is very exciting. The project I'm showing is a ground up building, which is highly unlikely in Detroit. There's quite a few projects that are more refurbished projects, so that's somewhat unique in that way. So the two projects are gonna be interesting to look at in comparison. There's a very, very clear image of Los Angeles. The city's growing, it's rapidly growing. There are close to 15,000 people moving to Los Angeles each year, and you can imagine that greater density. That said, the region has very limited available land, and that's something that is the thing the most critical issue in Los Angeles, the value of land is so high that creates enormous issues with the city. So the solution is to embrace density. Right now, there is density in the city, as you can see. It's more of a carpet of density, but there's an enormous density there right now, and we're looking at vertical as one element to go. So these type of projects we're doing in the city is also embracing the idea. Eric, our city is open to loosening the height restrictions within the city, so at least we can start to develop projects that will provide housing, not only affordable housing, but homeless housing, and that's essential. So with a large demand for housing, there are more and more residents that are priced out of the market. As a result of the homeless crisis in LA, which has reached its highest level yet, clearly 75% in the last six years, so 75% people more homeless has happened. That's how much it's grown, 75%. If you can imagine that in the city, it is extremely problematic and critical. The amount of homeless living in LA right now is currently 55,000 people, and that's quite a certain, and it's growing. So this is the challenge we have in Los Angeles, and our task is to bring strong, equitable design to these types of supportive housing projects. And it's something that I've always felt very, very committed to with our work. We think that architecture should be for all socioeconomic levels. We see architecture as social condenser. We see buildings as social condensers, really essential. So on our Martin Luther King project, it's located where the most underserved parts of the city is with a poverty rate of 33%. So this is, in South LA, poverty is at 33%. The actual graduation rate is just over 4%. So within the context of a very wealthy city, there are areas that are in great need. And this is an area that we are work deeply involved with. We have over five or six projects in these areas. This is the site. You can see right here, it's next to McDonald's, and this is a very typical LA scene. It's got a very conventional, architecturally insignificant area. The buildings tend to have fences on the edges, and they don't want you to come in. We're trying to rethink that convention. So with the project that we did for the Martin Luther King project, we implemented several strategies that opened the building towards the street and fostered a sense of community. So with this in mind, this is the massing of the building we did. We wanted to create, again, this idea of a social kind of engagement or gathering space, a public space, with the building. Given the constraints of cost, we had to push the building up so that the parking was on grade, which is a very important component within supportive housing. We can't have the cost of pushing the building underground. Another crucial issue about LA, which is absurd, is parking. They are still requiring, with the zoning, to have parking for homeless housing. That adds over a million to a million and a half dollars to the overall cost of these projects. It is beyond ridiculous. They have to, we're working with the mayor, Ryanair, Art Garcetti, to try to rethink that. It makes sense. And what happens with these type of projects is the developer's hands are tied. It has to be a way they provide that. But if you take that equity, you have a great opportunity to incorporate that into more units or incorporate better architecture. But right now we're in a constraint with that issue. So this idea, principally from a design strategy, was push the building over the edge, create a, still provide this outdoor space, but raise it up so it is a raised podium to tuck the parking underneath. And also on the corner, provide on a lower level a retail component in a community room above. The scale of this building is a way of engaging the adjacent buildings, which are one to two story buildings. So that one move there, allow that condition where you can start to do it. The larger component of the building is next to the McDonald's. So that's okay. You can go up four stories there. So that's the party of our project here. So again, this is talking about the design strategy we do with these projects. So keep in mind, our goal is that all of our projects have market rate all the way down to homeless housing has to have the same level of design. And that's what we're pushing, that there has to be democracy in the way you provide design. Here's an overall axonometric of the project. There's the public space. We folded down the stairs so that there's a relationship to the sidewalk and street. And we also took the roof of this component and folded this down as well. So at least it's opening up and bracing this sidewalk and street. Again, rethinking the convention of these type of buildings. Total of 26 units, close to 100 beds, four beds per unit. That's the other intriguing issue. I would say half the people on the streets are families, including kids. So you're building units that are three to four beds. Now they're not the individual units that you have anymore. So this is a hybrid building where you have three bedrooms. You have two bedrooms and you have a number of single beds as well. But it's a very complex situation where given that the nature of how expensive is to rent in the city, families are on the street. And that's the dilemma that we're dealing with. And again, 55,000 people are on the street. And this is 26 units. So you can see how challenging it is. How many of these buildings would you need to do to even scratch that? Section of the building is right here. You can see the parking is below. My belief is that has to go. We have retail in the front, community room, and then you have the central space here. All the circulation are pushed to the courtyard area. So we have exterior access. You have a wonderful quality in that way as well. You can start to engage these buildings on that side. Here's a view from the street. So here's a rendering. You can see how, forgive me, we're trying to look at the street view, engaging the park, engaging the common open space here. We're folding down the roof down here. So there's a sense of openness to it. Retail here in the community room above. And again, bringing architecture to this. So that's the building circulation around the courtyard. There's the image of it from the street. So you can see the architecture is coming together. We're still pushing ideas about materiality, working with metals, cement board panels, also formally carving the building away. So you have this open element here. Putting the fence up at the top is also equally as important. Just details inside. This is the circulation on the courtyard. Again, pushing idea of outdoor access. It has that quality. That's very important. Strategic voids from the circulation areas. You bring light at all different levels. And again, detail is embedded throughout these moves. So this is extremely important. If you from the third level looking down to the courtyard, and again, this is a place that hopefully as time goes by because it's a place for people to gather and feel a sense of community and home. So that's that project. Now I'm gonna jump cut to Detroit. Los Angeles, supportive housing for previous homeless veterans, crucial. Detroit, as Morrison mentioned earlier, a very interesting, fascinating city to work with. I will just talk briefly about this particular project. These are the number of the projects we're doing in Detroit right now. There's Brush Park. Our project I'm gonna talk today is called Baltimore Station. It's in a Milwaukee junction area. And it's an interesting area. This is just an image you always show when I look at Detroit. This is the nature dealing with. You're dealing with a very different context. As you know, Detroit and LA are very different landscapes and conditions. Although they are both sprawling cities designed around the automobile, in LA we're confronted, as I mentioned, the kind of idea strategically designed projects in dense and full lots. In Detroit, however, we're faced with the inverted figure ground relationship where we end up with the dramatically underdeveloped neighborhood fabric, as you can see. So how do you design buildings and architecture when you end up with a series of fields next to it? And that's something that we're constantly dealing with and challenged with our work. This is a drawing we're commissioned by our client in Milwaukee Junction. The gentleman's name is Peter Cummings and the development company is called the Platform. He's doing a number of projects here, but this was an interesting drawing that shows all the different areas and in a way the neighborhoods that's surrounding our site. Our site is in the middle here. And it shows the different areas. Wayne State University right there. You have a multiple area. You've got Motown area. Different areas and siloed neighborhood areas. So our project was really looking and embracing that idea. How do we take that area and embed and develop this project that somehow becomes in a way a social condenser for all these neighborhoods? It's an urbanist project. And that's what we're strategizing for. We're trying to bring it all in here. The site here, this is the context where we have the Ford Piquette Factory, of course, a wonderfully historical buildings in the area. Amazing context. So here's our site. These are the areas, as I mentioned. Wayne State University. You have Motown area. You have the low density residential area. You have a new center area. Equally so historical. And then the midtown area. So how do you create a building that acts as a social condenser to create and bring opportunities for people to live here but also embrace all the different, more spread. You spread your wings further within the nature of Detroit and look at that context. Because you don't have the adjacencies. And since there's new figure ground, you have open spaces, but can you go and look at the communities and neighborhoods and look at a building that become a condenser, social condenser of all the different areas. So this drawing here represents bringing all these people into the building. And that allows for greater architecture, opportunities, live, work, loss. You got ideas for co-living. Multiple other different strategies, but can you put them in one building? That becomes urbanism. It becomes a fascinating way of approaching it. Here are some three or four ideas. Massiness there, carve out the middle, bring light, look at the entries, fold open the edges, the entries. So it starts to create an interesting massing. And here we can see that these are the two openings, the building. So there's the void that goes all the way through and then you step down the building because a further development will be two to three stories. Equally so, all the different outdoor spaces are related to the programs next to it, whether it's live work, co-living component, or the other people are living there. It might be young professionals who are working in downtown Detroit. Our idea is this is going to be a place they live and it connects the city that way. It starts to create new arteries and new connections so perhaps those areas start to be developed from a social standpoint. So it's more of an urbanist strategy this building. There's an overall massing. So here are all the different programs. Not only the program within the building, but also outside. This idea that these can represent outdoor spaces where people can gather and hang out. Again, social and civic connectivity is crucial within the building. Think of it as a microcosm of a city. That's our goal with this. Section-wise, the co-living component is really interesting. We decided to compress all the units that are around the social spaces in the middle, made it vertical and made it open. So it's not just being, it's more democratic. Each level has this space that can go outside and engage and meet people. So that's the section of the building. We also embraced the idea of the context. This is a metal staffing process that is certainly used within cars and we wanted to really capitalize on this idea of locally sourced materials. So we engaged a company that is gonna start looking at these panelized systems for the exterior of the building. This goes back to this idea of inventive materials. That becomes the facade of the building. Again, design overlaid with these other social aspects. How do you locally source materials? How do you work with the community? Not only create a social condenser, but also look at the design components to provide what you need. So that's an elevation of the building. And this could not be done normally unless you work with people who know how to do this. If they're working the car shells and metal stamping process, we showed them what we're doing and said, that's easy, we can do this. So you go cross boundaries to other fields and they have fine, wonderful ways to produce it. I believe architects should cross boundaries and learn from arts, learn from other people and bring it to the world of architecture. So that's the elevation of the building. There's a view from the street, drop the building in terms of the mass into this corner. There's a future development here in here that most likely would be two-story volumes. So that led us to create this volume. And that's the way you start to manipulate the mass into the building to embrace the context and recognize it. Don't think you have to take a different scenario. It actually makes the architecture better. That's what I'm saying about parameters. They make architecture better and that's what we tend to do. And on the roof we're also embracing the idea that in Detroit there's a wonderful culture of gardens and lettable gardens. So we're bringing that component to it as well. This is all something that's very exciting. What's exciting about the project is, Wayne State University is also equally excited about it. The students at Wayne State, they see the co-living component, which is a simple bed with a single sink is a good thing because then when they leave school and come to these buildings, they can go out and share the living dining kitchen. It's a way of continuing that so they're not just locking their door and being isolated. Why not bring these opportunities socially to bring people to these buildings? And that's the thing that drives this work. It's also, our work for us is the primary driver right now. LA is about urban infill, stitching in, Detroit is looking beyond and try to see these buildings in some ways of engaging greater and longer reaches to other areas. And that's what we're hoping to, that then that could connect the two areas. If you go to Motown, if you go to Wayne State University, you build your building, perhaps the edges between the two start to be developed from programmatically retail, other type of wonderful community, wonderful programs. And that's our driver. So thank you on about 22 minutes. I'm over. First of all, can you hear me at the back? Good, thank you. Thank you, Hillary, for the kind invitation. In a way, the conference focuses on housing and I think it really is maybe redefined as urban architecture, which really acts to frame the collective spaces of our cities. And in a way, Toronto's a city where I live and work. And I would say the kind of, it's a city that I think of as having English and British parents. So the downtown core is a kind of series of skyscrapers, Mies van der Rohe, I am pay, and not dissimilar to many cities in North America. And the fabric is actually a Victorian British fabric. And so these kind of two parents create the city that we occupy. I actually didn't know about Hans's book or his presentation, but I actually thought it was brilliant. And in a way, what I was trying to say is Toronto right now is always under construction. And in a way, there's this rapid expansion of cranes. There's actually something called a crane index. And in the crane index, New York City has 20 cranes, which is an increase in the last quarter from 18. In the last third quarter, Seattle had 65 cranes and Toronto, for the third consecutive quarter, had 97 cranes, which is an increase of nine cranes from the last quarter. So in a way, it really proves the point of Hans's book where in effect it's this kind of condo culture. And I was kind of disappointed. We're actually not in his book because we actually don't do any work for developers. We're actually not considered a player according to his book because we kind of operate in a slightly different universe. And so in a way, what I wanted to do is maybe share some of that. These are some of the images that are not dissimilar to what Hans was presenting, but mine also shows the future. And this was actually done by the City of Toronto Planning Department. So you can see this kind of rapid growth. A few months ago, I was a speaker at the Urban Land Institute. And I actually shared my opinion is that there's been a huge amount of construction and growth, but very little architecture. And I think that we're kind of in agreement. So I want to maybe show some counter projects that are really housing projects, not condos in the private sector. This is a neighborhood called St. Lawrence, 1974, an alternate approach to the modernist planning neighborhood. 44 acres, 3,500 residential units. And what they did is they looked at the existing fabric, which is all this red brick. They actually kept the existing streets and continued them through what were empty parking lots. They actually looked at the historic fabric that was already there, and all the architects agreed to use red brick for all their buildings. They're not spectacular buildings, but they create an amazing fabric. The image on the left is the Esplanade, which is a kind of triple alley of trees, playgrounds, fountains, parks that ties the whole thing together. In a way, also Hans mentioned this, but the idea that Jane Jacobs had nothing to do with St. Lawrence. She actually didn't pick up a pencil, wasn't part of a planning committee. In 1968, she left New York for Toronto, partly because her husband Bob was an architect and he got a great job working on hospitals, but also because her two sons came to avoid the draft. And in a way, a lot of the culture of Toronto is built from people coming from other places. In an interview that she gave, she said that I came to Toronto because it's a place where you can work, it's a place where you can live well, and it's a place where there is hope. And in a way, I would say for me, the kind of St. Lawrence that she describes and is kind of part of the zeitgeist of was actually a very hopeful time in our city. We had people like Northrop Fry, Marshall McLuhan, but in a way, Jane Jacobs was the first global figure who actually moved to Toronto from somewhere else and she stayed. And in a way, what she did is she actually gave a voice to the citizens of the city and provided an alternate way of thinking about planning that wasn't the kind of individualized project. So in a way, I would call her not a maker. She never talked about what to do in a neighbourhood. She only told them what not to do. Don't build an expressway. Don't do this, don't do that. In the latter part of her life, she was actually quite crotchety and had a very bad reputation in city meetings because of this slight negativity. But this is a very Toronto photograph of Jane Jacobs. It was taken in 1986. It was in our modernist city hall designed by Vio Revell from an international competition. And you can see on the left is actually a young Barton Myers and on the right is actually a young Margaret Atwood. So a couple of kind of things that I think are hopeful. This is a thing called Waterfront Toronto. Toronto bid for the Olympics in the late 90s and we lost. So we didn't get the Olympics, but in the end what it meant was to put together the bid, the federal, provincial and city government had to agree to put together the bid package. And the money that they would have put into the Olympics actually formed something called Waterfront Toronto. And it's a kind of three government system that is actually revitalizing the whole Waterfront of the downtown. So everything in green is actually Waterfront Toronto. So as a result, we actually have West 8 doing wave decks. This is the 3XN from Copenhagen. So this huge sector of the downtown is actually being planned properly. And what is the strength of Waterfront Toronto is that they lead by landscape. They design the parks and build them first and the buildings come later. This is one part. This is actually the before picture of parking lots. A lot of this is brownfield sites that require huge amounts of money for remediation of the soil. So no developer will touch it because they can't afford to actually do that for any individual parcel. So it needs to be planned at a larger scale and that's where Waterfront comes in. Not only is it bad soil, but it's also a flood plain. And so this is a park designed by Michael Van Volkenburg called Corktown Common, but it's really a kind of disguise of a massive flood protection landform. So the kind of park and the flood protection are linked together. And then again with Waterfront Toronto, they lead by landscape and public art. So this is a kind of a great piece by Tadashi Kawamata and he's using all of the accumulated leftover lamp poles from the city of Toronto to create a new beacon. In a way then the third kind of public project is Regents Park, which is a late 1940s urban renewal. So in a way Michael was describing this kind of sense of abandoning and renewing the kind of existing fabric, clearing them out. And so this is this kind of modernist vision, a Corbusian vision of towers in the park that was actually the 1940s Regents Park. It was really an island in the city. You could never get a pizza if you lived in Regents Park because they disconnected the east, west and north, south streets from the city. And so in a way again it became an island. Now it's being totally revitalized. So this is what the buildings look like and now there's a kind of a whole series of for market and affordable housing. So again, Jacob's did not design Regents Park but I would say the success of St. Lawrence and the momentum that was created by that helped these other projects continue. And again we have other things right now like the Bentway which was a kind of derelict portion of a sort of elevated expressway that still is in the city with a combination of public and private money, this whole thing has been transformed into places to sit, skating rinks, public art and up to 77,000 people live in all of the condos that are in this book here and they actually are within about a 10 to 15 minute walk of this area. So in a way the condos came first but this emerging public space kind of really fills a need that was already there and it takes a piece of existing infrastructure and deploys its underside to become a new place in our city. So in a way I think that there are sort of hopeful things amongst a lot of bad architecture. So just to kind of quickly give a context, this is an area called Yorkville and a kind of series of these north-south streets and this little project that we did is a kind of urban infill and the question we asked ourselves was can we do an urban, modern, red brick fabric building and can we support this existing system that already is there and is emerging and needs help? In a way, I've been involved in the laneways in Toronto. There are about 120 kilometers of laneways. This image is of the Victorian laneways that exist. Toronto was laid out by British surveyors who never came to the city but this kind of system of laneways is part of their legacy and so we have these laneways and in effect we've looked at ways to inhabit them and in a way done projects that revitalize these laneways and create places in the city that would normally not be there. I would say in terms of the kind of non-developer city, I would say Toronto is this kind of oasis because design at a certain scale which is the topic of this conference situates our work in the scale of the ravines in Toronto and this is a view of the Don Valley ravine. The Toronto ravines were formed about 12,000 years ago so imagine the ice age kind of leaving and scraping everything, flattening the land and re-sculpting it to create these amazing river valleys. The Don River Valley is this one and this is the Humber and the whole downtown is here so the kind of condo world exists down here and the ravines are a kind of other form of landscape in the city. 1954, Hurricane Hazel, 81 people died, this huge natural disaster and it took a disaster like that to make us appreciate what was already in our own backyard. A view of the Toronto ravines in winter and you can see a lone cross-country skier and the skyline. Robert Fulford, one of our writers talks about the ravine as our topographical signature. In a way, Larry Richards who teaches at the architecture school was the dean called Toronto San Francisco upside down so the ravines are almost this hidden topography in the middle of the largest city in the country and this negative topography is evident because this is a subway encased in concrete, the kind of city and then this was actually a former stream that has now erode many meters below the city itself. In a way, Toronto is the stand-in city so many films are done in Toronto, the dollar is cheap so Toronto stands in for Chicago, for New York, sometimes parts of Seattle. So in a way, I'm interested in a Toronto that actually reveals itself. This is an image of a film by Adam McGoy and where the ravine is actually a participant and my partner Howard and I are always trying to situate our work in specific places. Many of our projects are small and they have to claim a much larger territory and in a way we're always thinking about how to kind of bring nature in and working with materiality as well in the same way that Lorcan is thinking about this as well and also this question of materiality fused with light which is a question we ask ourselves. So in a way I just want to share this is a project called the integral house and this is a view of it from the ravine almost hidden in the landscape. Section is an essential part of everything we do and you can see it reads as a two-story house from one side and five from the other and then elevational studies thinking about this kind of use of materials and its relationship to the site and traversing the site even though you're inside and then the spatial sequence allowing you to feel connected to the outside. We live in a 43 degrees latitude climatic zone and we're always wanting to harness light as a force to recalibrate our understanding of place. We actually want to think of ourselves painters with light and then in a way this idea of a program of house having other programs within it. So we're really interested in this, this is a house but it's also a concert hall. So this idea that in effect the program of housing has a role to play that is fusing housing with other programs. It's not just a mono program but when it can engage in other things it actually reshapes our world. So in a way this kind of question of the design at a certain scale a group of Catholic nuns came to see the integral house and when they saw it they really felt that it resonated with them. And so in effect one project which happens at one scale leads to something at another. So this is actually a residence for 48 Catholic nuns. It redefines the line between nature and the city. So this is the ravine and the expressway at the bottom and this is the table land. And this idea of the natural contour is being recalibrated by our understanding of both nature and the city. In a way you can see that the chapel sits in a reflecting pool and this is the edge of the ravine. And that the section shows that there's a single loaded corridor, a kind of skinny building that snakes around. And that you have a double loaded corridor and two single loaded corridors with these additional programs embedded. So in a way this is a view of the urban port from the outside looking in. And then a winter view where you're seeing the existing 1850s house and then a view of the kind of main entrance. And the 1850s house on the site was the starting point the sisters asked if they could tear it down or move it and we basically convinced them to keep it because it created a context. And in a way you see the post-war neighborhood that's part of the project neighborhood and this kind of use of aluminum powder coated aluminum and weathering steel to shape these vertical fins and the kind of lobby, the double loaded corridors, the single loaded corridors and then the kind of use of residential suites. And that we worked thinking about the view from the inside out to the ravine and then also from the outside to the urban porches in the neighborhood. And then the idea of fusing in effect this with another program. So the idea that housing itself isn't enough and linking it with programs in this case a chapel, a residential rooms are directly linked to the chapel for the sisters, pivoting fins allow adjustment through the day and the seasons and then we're always trying to push our spaces into the landscape and at the same time pulling the landscape into our spaces. And we think about our projects a day and at night. So this kind of question of housing needing to do more, how can architecture harness housing with other programs to reinvent our cities to be more humane and how can housing and the city renegotiate and redefine and reimagine themselves together to be more catalytic. Thank you. Thank you, Michael and Hillary and esteemed panelists, beautiful work to get to see. So as you were talking, I was trying to think of some threads I could connect through. What I'm gonna show you, which is just one project. And so through the lens of a case study project to talk a little bit about what why housing design is really important aspect of our practice at Studio Gang and where we see it to have really fertile territory for design innovation that's critical for city making but also just very exciting and there's just a lot to do. There's a lot to discover and to do within this type. Maybe adding to the lexicon that we're starting to make about materiality and voids and edges and use, I wanted to offer up into the conversation the idea of structure and how that can come to bear on residential design, environmental performance and also the idea of verticality to think of a void as a way, as a method of making community is one way but also what are the vertical surfaces of our projects and how might those do the same thing? So we'll start with that. I'm gonna share with you this project here called City Hide Park. It was completed in 2016, 500,000 square foot building, 14 stories, 180 units, one to three bedrooms and also a one acre green roof on top of a commercial base in Hide Park on the south side of Chicago. It's about six miles south of the loop. I think a neighborhood that could legitimately be called quite diverse on the south side of Chicago and if we zoom in a little bit to the immediate context, I think in this case, the need for housing to be augment to plug into its community through a commercial space. As we looked at the immediate environs of Hide Park, there's some really active commercial corridors there shown in orange and it was obvious that our site there in red with the plus sign on it had to really participate in that ecosystem of commercial activity and our client also, the role of the client in all this can't be understated and quite an amazing client we have for this project that is the second largest landowner in Hide Park, second to the University of Chicago. So all those sites in red there are projects, are buildings that our client either has built or operates for residential uses. So our client in this case had a real vested interest into making something that was going to be part of building this community. So just quickly looking at the plant, as I mentioned, it had to have commercial at the base and different sizes of commercial parcels. So this just immediately brings up the question of how do you stack things? And there's smaller parcels for things like banks, larger parcels, there's a large grocery store here which brings with it a really significant loading area and vehicular maneuvering space and things like that. So in a way this becomes our context. There's also parking underneath this. How do you put apartments on top of that? And one of the things that's really tough but also kind of let's say uniform about residential design is it has its dimensional logic and that'll vary from New York to Chicago wherever you're working, but typically in a market rooms have a size and they have walls between them and you start to get a kind of set of modules that build the building. It's not completely mushy and fluid like maybe you could get closer to with an office building where you're working with a very large floor plate. So we have a bunch of tiny rooms on top and we have some very large spaces beneath and the need to have gravity come down through all that. So that kind of sets up an initial question of structure and how can we stack this together and weave it together vertically in a way that's gonna bring these programs together in a more optimal way. It's kind of a framing of a early design question we asked. So if we were to take on as our problem, how could we bring in some bigger spans? How could we still fit rooms of the proper size between columns but get more space between those calls and have fewer of them in our retail spaces and ultimately be able to fit more parked cars between the columns. Oops, skipped ahead. A structural engineer friend of mine likes to always say, form follows parking. So in this case, and this was a discovery that came out of a model shop working with pieces of material and just trying stuff. We came up with this idea of turning vertical columns into alternating stacks of panels. And so there might be like a automatic advance on this slide or something. So I'll just keep going back until I'm done. So by taking panels rather than just a line and alternating those, what we have is still a continuous load path, but that can happen now every 39 feet instead of every 26 feet. So it's just a trick. You can see that the slab edge is supported the same distance at every floor but the actual load paths are further apart. So this allowed us also to begin to take the slab edges and poke them out a little bit into the exterior environment to begin to create bay windows. Thinking about the north, this is really annoying, I'm sorry. Thinking about the north side of the building, the need to harness more light to get more views on the north side. It can be quite dark on the north side of buildings in Chicago. The bay window idea was something that also we could accommodate with this panel column system. Now I will move to the next slide. So on the south side, where the considerations were a little bit different, we started to take these panels and rotate them in three dimensions. The system could become then more of a spatial idea where we could create different types of balconies, outdoor spaces that would be adjacent to the units. Oh my gosh, I hope this doesn't go on the whole time, I'm sorry. And these, we call them stems. These stems are self-supporting vertical structures that kind of lean on the building and they're thermally separated from the slab edges on the inside. So it becomes kind of like a layer of activity, of space, of material that shades the south side of the building and then kind of, by rotating them in different ways, creates a fabric that can be inhabited and create a vertical community on the outside of the building. We think it's really exciting when buildings can look like one thing but also look different on different sides. Here we see the north side of the building with the panel columns resting in the recesses between the kind of pointy window bays of each where the living rooms are situated at each tip. And then the south side of the building takes on a different character. This is a view from the Metra commuter rail platform and you can see how the, when you look at the corner, it really reads like the panels were set free and broke, they broke through the glass and became three-dimensional. So we'll talk a little bit now about the floor plan of the units. This floor plate shape is not just a shape somebody drew, it comes from the consideration of the unit as a place where people live and then draw out from there. And I think that's a key consideration, the inside out and outside in dance that is really like a defining tactic of residential design. We're always looking for what is the, what is the kind of space that people want to dwell in and live in and then how can those be assembled together into an overall whole that is coherent. It's really difficult to do and a really fun problem that is kind of particular to this type. So this is showing the typical floor plan at the top and then four different configurations of the stem balconies that make up those vertical balcony stems. And just by basically by taking those four types and kind of tiling them differently on the south facade, we're able to create the pattern on the south side. A little process shot here showing a tiny model of the whole site. This is a larger wooden model that we made to just look at how, look at the spatial quality of those different balconies because some of them are kind of aligned with the facade, more like a conventional cantilevering balcony and other ones poke out like diving boards. So we were looking at that at a larger scale and then how it all comes together critically at the corners on this model and looking at furniture at the same time and putting people, figures of people in the model so that we're always thinking about the building as space where people live not just as an object which I think has been a theme today. This is my favorite photo of the project. This is a construction shot showing a corner. This is the, this would be the west side turning to the south where you can see the two different interpretations of the panel columns, the 2D and the 3D one coming around the corner. And then when this aggregates together it makes a beautiful pattern and starts to suggest a kind of depth and a kind of space where architecture can live between the outside world and the inside world of a building that's very exciting. And it's a kind of space that makes you just wanna come out and look around and we think of it in similar terms to coming out to this, if you were to live in a suburban neighborhood coming out to the street and waving at your neighbor. Many developers and marketers of residential units will tell you that nobody ever wants to see anybody and that privacy rules the day and when we found that that's not true that people kind of yearn for this or at least certain buyers would appreciate this kind of ability to know some people in the building where they live. So let's talk a little bit now more about the units themselves. This is just the four of them. There's corner units on the left and then some interior units on the right just to kind of show you how on the north side those pointy slab edges are creating bay windows for the living rooms and then on the south side how the space of the unit is carved away to create a indent where that vertical stem balcony is positioned. And I think these, okay, some marketing photos here now but these are interior of the model unit with some kids having a great time but the space at the tip of the unit there where the table is is just bonus space and that can be programmed for the interior as a place to put your table or a place to put a chair. It's not just a result of the massing and then on the south side the balconies almost to me are doing something similar to when you're inside of a building that has a very ornate exterior and you look out your window and you see the architecture from the inside. That to me is very, that makes me feel very good. It makes me feel like I don't live in a building with a paper thin wall that is called architecture but that I live in a place that has an identity, that has a depth, that has a richness to it that I can enjoy while I'm inside of my own unit. So seeing the outside from the inside I think is a nice thing. And this is kind of a drone shot showing how the layer of balconies forms on the exterior of the south facing units. And then this notion of vertical community and views up and down. So here's looking down and looking up on the south side and seeing people. That green is the green roof. And it also, the texture kind of adds to the layering and texturing of the city of the neighborhood and I think this is another one of my favorite photos. It just kind of, for being something rather foreign in its way it just kind of feels like it's okay there. So thank you very much. I'm sad not to be with you today. Hopefully by the time you see this I'm at 35,000 feet. I'm sorry to have missed so many friends in such an important discussion. My remarks focus more on systems and partners and projects but hopefully they can add to a robust discussion. In 2016 I mounted an exhibition titled Designing Affordability. The intent was to present projects from around the world that demonstrated a way to provide both affordable housing meaning regulated units dedicated to specific income bands or those with special needs as well as housing affordability for broader term meaning housing affordable to a wide range of populations by virtue of its location, design, construction techniques, financing schemes or ownership structure. The exhibition laid out seven broad categories in which 24 under construction completed or speculative projects were grouped. They included leveraging land, building simply, constructing moderately, rethinking home life, deploying technology, rethinking public housing and building incrementally. The show actually showed which category each project would reduce in terms of designing affordability. The projects we saw and heard today fell into a number of these categories. Architects can assist in addressing the housing crisis. In the exhibition, architects such as Michael Maltz and Royal Studio, Lackaton in the South piece in which in brief architects have innovative projects that demonstrate how design can lead to lower costs and better outcomes for families. Upon closer inspection, most of the projects while innovative are one-off specific to their geographies or made affordable by virtue of subsidy rather than their design or construction. The exhibition which started in New York at the Center for Architecture then moved to Sydney and then Shenzhen added locationally specific projects along the way. That raised the question for me, how do we make the exceptional conventional? How do we replicate good models and scale them up? We went to the seven elements of the show that might provide models for broadly addressing housing affordability and scale. The comments by brief architecture in Melbourne demonstrates all seven of the elements and includes architects as collaborators as well as investors. With no subsidy, their system can reduce sales prices up to 30% below market rate. You see here a kind of co-living model but each person has their own unit, rooftop gardens and then they did a structure which showed how the savings were achieved at each stage of the construction cycle. And these things included many of the elements outlined in designing affordability and in complete transparency, they actually show their financial numbers. One-star apartments and the Nightingale system which breathe architect pioneered has today developed five buildings. So when we look back in history, how did we get to scale in the past? How did we achieve cost reductions? Looking at Lakewood, California, we see a massive expansion of middle and lower middle class housing and construction efficiency. The profit for the company that developed Lakewood was only 5% but the scale that it achieved was more than made up for the low profit. Looking back in history, how we tackled housing affordability and access to opportunity, the solutions had design as an element but were also a problematic combination of design, policy and finance. Other than Lakewood, California has a specific example but also a proxy for the elements that came together to create our suburban landscape. As noted in the book, Infinite Suburb of the U.S., single family houses make up 64% of homes and 64% is also our home ownership rate currently. This is not about choice, this is actually about finance and policy. It's a confluence of 1920s financial innovation, 1930s new deal legislation, 1940s housing shortage and 1950s investment in infrastructure and technology. You don't get Lakewood without the confluence of the FHA, the Federal Highway Administration, the mortgage interest deduction, tax exempt bond legislation, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the GI Bill. In Lakewood, all seven elements of design affordability are deployed, which results in a dramatic jump in scale, a dramatic drop in development cost and an explosion of water and middle class housing. The large scale suburban subdivisions of which this is one of the largest were completed with immense but hidden subsidies, federal programs, financial innovation, new partners and new construction techniques. And this is 1950, one more interesting thing about these developments built with federal support and expenditures is that they socialized the risks and privatized the gains with their subsidies. But the subsidies were deployed in ways that massed their true cost and differentiated themselves from developments requiring direct annual budget allocations like public housing or public assistance programs. So in Lakewood, 17,000 homes were built in 33 months with the equivalent of 515 homes a month or 17 houses per day. Total construction costs were $96 a square foot and total development costs were $120 a square foot with sales prices in 2018 dollars of $140,000 for a monthly mortgage of $926. In Los Angeles today, that would be a family at 40% of the median income. So what would a more newer, holistic, inclusive and equitable 21st century version of this system look like? The projects in designing affordability or some of the projects we've seen today, how would they fit into a system like this? Which of the seven elements in the exhibition could we deploy in layering innovation and policy and finance? I wanna discuss a number of financing funds which touch on this topic to extent one formulated but not implemented and one speculative. It'd be great to get feedback and spur discussionized as I am list partners to move these ideas forward. Some of the issues I discussed are more fully laid out. In the recent article I had in Karen Cooby's book, Housing as Intervention, Architecture Towards Social Equity. So who are the partners? Well, if we look for example at the Loneham Housing Tax Credit, in addition to a change in the IRS code and in listing of private sector partners, this program has created 3 million housing units since 1986. It also created the space for nonprofits to become developers at scale and a way for both new and established architects to show highly differentiated ways to provide innovative regionally specific energy efficient housing. Moving beyond individual projects to asset classes is typically the way good ideas in housing can scale up. In addition, it provided a way for companies like Clorox, Google or Bank of America to invest in and care about affordable housing. So what are some of the new ways that we're innovating in finance? Well, I would say there are ways to bring nonprofits, private banks, foundations and socially motivated investors into the equation. There are ways also of cities thinking about how to partner with these entities and ways to scale up. And I think financing funds are one way to do it. So for example, with philanthropy, a change in the 70s meant that they could lend and invest from their grant budgets and count that towards their 5% mandated spend out. This means that foundations can help fund the things conventional banks and investors would not like acquisition or pre-development costs. And this number, while relatively small in the endowment world, is relatively large in terms of its impact at about $250 million a year. So the program-related investment actually changed the way foundations can help us with this issue of housing affordability. In addition, university endowments and pension funds have capital to deploy and invest in diversified portfolios. Through advocacy and activism, they're also becoming more focused on impact investing and aligning their mission and goals to their investments. For example, New York City's pension funds have pledged 450 million for non-predatory housing investment. The banks, because of their bad behavior, are now regulated by the Community Reinvestment Act passed in 1977 and are also partners in thinking through innovative ways to fund housing and economic development. With an outstanding rating from regulators typically requiring the bank to deploy 1% of its assets for loans and investments in disadvantaged communities, the number, while 1% seems small, is actually a very large number in terms of the money deployed for community economic development. So how does all of this work together? How do these partnerships come together? I wanna talk about a couple of funds that do that and might give us indications of how we scale up. So the Detroit Strategic Neighborhood Fund, which Maurice Cox will know very well, is innovative in the sense that it looked at three neighborhoods, but what it did was it looked at the kinds of deals that we wanted, not the kind of deals getting built. It looked to neighborhoods that were not attracting investment in housing and retail due to appraisal gaps, lending deserts and lack of comparables. So the partners that came together were a range of foundations, banks, and city agencies. And what they did was they basically mapped through the CDFI, the Community Development Financial Institution in Detroit, Invest Detroit, what that deal would look like and what the gap was. And so the fund was basically created to fill that gap so that the projects could go forward that normally wouldn't and then also prove that there was a market and scale up. That fund that started at three projects now entails seven neighborhoods deploying capital in a variety of ways. So the fund creates the money from foundation and corporate partners as well as city agencies and then can scale up and take into the kinds of developments that we wouldn't see otherwise. Another fund is the New York City Acquisition Fund. So there are a number of issues. CDCs can't compete with for-profits in acquiring land for affordable housing. So who are the partners? It's a range of foundations with program related investments, the actual grants, city agencies coming together to make it work. I'm not saying all of this is easy, especially getting all the parties to the table and negotiating, but it does get some of the most intractable issues related to creating equitable outcomes to scale. So all of this relates to my current work as I look at the problems we are trying to solve and the partners that might bring innovation to design policy and finance. Issues like more and more states passing ADU legislation but a relatively low amount of projects which are typically competed by homeowners with equity or capital already. I believe we could scale up ADU construction and make those units affordable through policy, favorable terms and the right partnerships. Funds for ADU can actually also remove the risk and hassle from homeowners, take the burden off of them but also mandate as part of that affordability so that as we get affordable ADUs we can actually make a dent in the housing crisis. Another issue is parking. What would a parking retrofit and replacement financing fund look like? Who are the partners? How does it reach a scale to leverage land for people instead of cars? We talk about coming autonomous technology but not much about how we actually de-map and reclaim all the automotive space in our cities. It will not be easy to convince cities, commuters or residents to give up an underpriced and in many cases free resource. All the technologies and policies necessary for this transformation exist, however they are disparate and not tied to overall policy goals. The test becomes whether combining various systems and policies already in use can affect urban form. What are the mechanisms that can be used to shift the preferences, regulations and subsidies to incentivize and accelerate change in our cities? How do projects like Tikku from Casa Grande Labs actually get the use of parking for its innovative design? A fund could take notes from and build on policies like California's cap and trade emissions program. Already over $300 million a year from the cap and trade proceeds are directed to affordable housing and economic development. If we can consider cars and the space they claim as negative externalities the way we do carbon emissions, not only do we cap and trade automotive space claimed by cities and large parking operators but also shift revenue streams to more density, better environments and affordable housing. So what I'm advocating and working on is to take the innovation and design and construction, marry it with policy and finance. Once told by a good friend, ask a simple question, get a complex answer, I'll try that, but I'm gonna first say something a little more complex or simple but follow up. A dreadful story. If you know something about Catherine Bauer, you'll know that she was very close with Oscar Stonerab. Oscar Stonerab was also Louis Kahn's partner in architecture prior to the 1940s when Louis goes on his own. I was one of the last people in the world to learn that. Louis Kahn of course has a 20 year history around housing before he in the middle of 1940s wrote the essay Monumentality and begins to take a stance towards institutions and technology and new methods of building. The dreadful part of the story is Stonerab died in an airplane crash with the head of the auto workers union. And the reason I bring it up is not because the dreadful part, but because it belies a story about Kahn's partner being highly active in labor, social organization and Stonerab and Bauer in fact often out there doing the groundwork politically, economically, socially that you wouldn't normally attribute to Louis Kahn. So there's kind of marriage of the kind of analysis that I think everybody here showed up and wonderfully with Mark, but certainly with everybody. Bauer, I went to Berkeley and I learned about Bauer really after I left Berkeley but I bring it up because there's conferences around the term housing. And of course that can become a euphemistic term for a place you live, but when you call it housing of course it becomes more of the industrial practice of housing large groups of people with some concern obviously that it's also an intimate program where the most private aspects of our lives are secured. So I say all that because in the course of a day housing in North America, which I understood going in but I feel more poignantly certainly now from the prototypes of InfoNavit and the method of working with the concrete masonry blocks and concrete and difference but uniform building systems to finally I think everybody here and in particular Mark who get us to cap and trade around parking spots or a housing project that at some level is a structural enterprise first that allows that kind of complex layering and transparency really ingeniously to I think a history of Toronto that's embedded in a work of architecture or enables a work of architecture per se not embedded but is also a geologic history at some level of thousands of years and is also more of a contemporary planning history according to multinational invocations that kind of colonialism. Finally to I think Lorcan really kind of trying to bear the history of Los Angeles in his I assume 30 or 40 percent architecture and I'm guessing the size maybe it's 12 or 15. That's a whole more number. Yeah and so you know one more kind of little piece of information in 2008 as the US cascaded into a foreclosure crisis and a liquidity crisis Americans net worth lost we lost essentially in our private household net worth almost the entire value of our housing. That doesn't mean the housing went to about zero but US net worth dropped 20 billion dollars. The US housing market today is worth I'm sorry 20 trillion dollars. US housing market today is worth about 26 trillion. So I feel like over the course of this day we've been seeing people construct housing policies and the Mexican work within Fonervita and others up to suggestions about the global economy and trading housing equity the way we trade pollution and enable industry to kind of go about its way. I would ask you all seem remarkably confident and natural in the way you're moving across these spectrums. My big question really is really one question. I often feel like as a professor of architecture as opposed to an architect and researcher I have my own body of work that might have fit here today. Of course what are we leaving on the table? What kind of questions do we believe we haven't even in the elegance of your success what kind of questions are we tortured by leaving dramatically unresolved? What's our kind of legacy even though we're all but I don't see anybody retiring at the moment. So especially Weston I'd say. But I often feel like part of what we're doing is framing things that need to be worked on by everybody. The success of Shim and Sutcliffe is unbelievable and notable. It of course leaves it to ask as many questions as it solves I think. So I guess I wonder, I have my own version of that answer. I verge into economics and looking at debt. You know US household debt is it reached 95% of GDP. In 1947 it was 18% you know are we able to sustain debt levels the same way? But I would kind of ask each of you maybe beginning with Lorkan despite this level of achievement and success what kind of questions are on your mind or... Okay I'll have a go with that. One of the issues right now in Los Angeles is I'll specifically address issues of homeless housing. Recently there's been a number of propositions where $2 billion was provided for housing, homeless housing and affordable housing. There was a great dilemma with regards to that money they have to produce 10,000 units within a certain period of time. Right now the cost of each unit is over a half a million dollars, $500,000 per unit. Now you can have four beds in each unit. One of the great dilemmas with these type of issues is that there is a lot of waste in terms of that process and a lot of bureaucracy and red tape. So one of the things that bothers me is that we are pushing against an enormous bureaucracy in such a way that we want to drop that $500,000 to $350,000 and that pencils out part of the issue is that the requirements of parking, the issues requirements of having, they don't lease the land to the potential non-profit developers. They make them purchase it in certain scenarios. So we think that's a great dilemma right now because the money's been provided but we simply, it will not work to pay half a million dollars per unit. Drop it to 350,000 can work so we're trying to challenge that and say get rid of parking. It is not required for homeless housing. It doesn't work. Number of other areas is lease the land to this non-profit organization that drops another 7% of the cost. Equally so, higher parking. Did you say 70%? 7%. Now let's say if you take your overall like, oh, take a bit of a pie. 7% if you could pull out the requirements of parking and make it zero parking. That means you're not playing sub-training parking, you're not providing 25,000, 30,000 per stall. If you provide also the areas, all the other kind of areas that are critical, lease the land as opposed to selling it. That's now the two, three million dollars because of the land value and there's still an issue where they're selling land for these non-profit organizations. So they're in it three, four million dollars before they start building these projects. So in the end, it's a great dilemma. So I would say that's a critical issue. We are challenging it with the Citizens Oversight Committee right now and we're part of making presentations to them and their task is to tackle this issue. How do we change the equation? Then that will solve the problem equally much better. If they don't hit those numbers of the money, it's gonna collapse. So perhaps that's something that sounds great on paper. It's not working. And then it's one of our last, and I'll close this out by saying we are working with now a market-grade developer and a non-profit, homeless-profit developer to push the city out of the equation and not go for the tax credits, not go towards all the requirements that you need. And then you have to, then you have a solution to build them in three years versus five years. It's very, very complex, but there's multiple issues talking about that. I'll save my response to read it right here. I guess I feel like before, I guess housing can't just be housing. It's not enough. And all the presentations, we saw really great ideas about housing, forming public space and parks and some of the examples in Detroit were truly inspiring. But for me, the question is how we combine housing with other programs. So while I was quite critical of the Toronto developers, I would say as a way to get more density, they've actually built theaters and libraries and arts incubators as a way to jack up their density by adding other programs that are like a gift to the city. It's sort of a gift, not really a gift, but in the end, for me, it's the beginning of a rethinking about how to add and embed other programs with housing to create more catalytic conditions. And in the history of modernism, there are some really interesting examples of that, but in North America in particular, we end up with this mono thing. It's a condo, it's a kind of, there's so little rental housing being built for us and affordable housing given the kind of government sort of federal funding is kind of off the table. And so I feel like this kind of question of how the city reinvents itself and how the city remains vital is for sure housing because it's a fundamental cornerstone. But how do we add other programmatic pieces with that, public-private partnerships of different kinds to really make sure that our cities are vital and that housing also tends to be a kind of stereotypical single thing. So in a way, one of the critiques for me of the condos is that they attract a certain market. They see them as a product, the way that the developers describe them as their product. So I think we need to mix that up. And so some of the examples from the 70s in Toronto was actually affordable and market housing at the same time, not a brilliant concept. It's been done in a lot of places, but we're not actually looking at these lessons that we've already learned and continuing to do them. We are actually getting highest and best value, the most expensive square foot kind of dollar for the kind of public, the developer sector in our city. So for me, it's a big question that needs other forces to change the equation. Yeah, maybe just piggybacking on that a little bit further. So if we are to take on the question of program, the question of mixing of uses and taking on questions of structure and how far can we go into our designs? How deeply into our buildings can we innovate to make architecture that actually is affecting, just in terms of design here. I'm not addressing an economic model per se, but we have the ability through design to have real impact on the way people live and to address some of these issues directly through the act of design. But there is a kind of troubling trend and I think I've worked a lot in Chicago and a lot of New York, and this is much more so the case in New York where architects and the whole notion of design tends to be relatively relegated to the outer crust of a building, a couple feet of a building. So the turning of the engine that's producing housing is almost completely separate from what a lot of people sitting in this room might end up doing someday in their architecture job. And I think that's a trend that we have to resist and we have to take on the full depth of the building as the architectural problem, not just how it looks on the outside. But in the case of the project in Chicago, were they called, what was the term for the? Stems, yeah. I'm sorry, Stems. Stems, yeah. The Stems literally produced their vertical transfer from the top to the bottom on the south side, you use something more like a plate to see. Yeah, there. Columns would have behaved like that. But that literally allowed the folding. Yes. The in and the out and thus the depth. And it's harder in more dense cities to do things like that, you know, where that you might have noticed that that was over a one acre green roof. On a tight side of New York, you might not have room to do that. So there are lots of considerations. Yeah, I mean, in a way, come back to this perhaps, but looking at that project, I assume there was something binding it together laterally because the Stems would have had the tendency to tilt that works. Well, the Stems are connected, they're essentially clipped or laterally connected to this lavage is next to them. So they kind of like, they carry their own gravity and they're stabilized with lateral connections. Yeah, that's no, it felt that way. But I bring it up because it seemed as if the structural engineering combined with the sensibility of the units, the north, the south facades, and then some age old question about Cubis thickness, the facade literally in a Cezanne-like way folds open and something escaped that. No, that's quite a remarkable work. But it requires a huge amount of foresight to do that. Lorcan, you wrote up the property and I assume you're saying 7% per unit, is that? Well, overall, I feel, forgive me, the whole pie of doing these type of projects, if you take that 100% cost from the inception to completion, soup to nuts, if you can cut 7% in terms of removing the requirements apart. No, I, the reason I'm asking is if you look at land value, which I've been doing nationwide in regard to housing in California and a residential real estate transaction, land is often as much as 80% of the transaction would be different in a condominium as opposed to a single-family alloy. But statewide, if you look at West Virginia, it's about 5%. So I often tell my students they might consider practicing in West Virginia because 95% of the money will go to the building. Right, that's an interesting problem. But this is clearly an issue and those numbers dramatically accelerated in terms of land values after the 1970s as cities began to come back, metropolitan regions grew in jobs in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas, and center. I mean, just to, just to... It becomes a question of affordability in metropolitan centers, utterly, and architectures concerned with affordability in a metropolitan center where land is automatically, the rise is also attributed to the uber financialization of developed economies real estate after the fall of the 1970s globalization of the economy causes Los Angeles to up to New York. Right. It's an interesting, just to jump in here, is that originally, Los Angeles always looked at in terms of the land is started with a single-family alloy in the backyard and then that value went up, so they created these dingbats. Five to six units, the exact same footprint. Then the land went further, so the whole density in Los Angeles primarily driven by land value, how many more units you could get into it and that's the dilemma that continues to this day. And as you say, it creates such a profoundly difficult situation in terms of people having housing and place to live and that's why you have them on the streets. There's simply or not enough housing that can afford it. No, the real residential real estate is rebounded to values that are higher than pre-2008, at least in the United States and the amount of leverage applied to it is immense, so the question starts to be the sustainability of any of these kind of tax equity models of buying down value incrementally through the IRS and then an architecture for it. But an architect can be strategist, they can be part of it, they can be part of policy, they can get involved, that's what we're trying to do. But in Los Angeles at this point in time, you are part of a group that is certainly the big part of the limit. We are a team, yeah. As a group, do you begin to see a limit to where you... I do think we're making an impact at this critical issue that we're dealing with right now is there's some, I think design plays such a crucial role as well. That's the other 7% that needs to be in place. It's parking, it's land value, and it's also bring good architecture to build efficient buildings with good design. If you combine those three, you can reduce those numbers to manageable numbers so you can provide more housing. So that's my position. But I was very struck by Bridget's because I'll be honest, I have not seen you lecture on that material before. I haven't seen you lecture online, frankly, but not that. But bringing the geologic history into it, certainly it offers an other to real estate value as a denominator of social value. Well, I'm redefining the relationship between the city and nature. So that is a kind of, maybe it's another reading of Toronto that most people wouldn't have. I would say that what I've heard from the morning sessions in Mexico and this afternoon is that in a way there's a huge inequity in our cities between, so the issue of affordability, the homeless, the kind of market value of housing which is huge, and I just would say that architects across the board and students of architecture have to take it on as a really important project. And that in every location, the way that you do it and how the logistics of it is gonna be a bit different because of the kind of context that's created, the public agencies, the land values, the economics are all very different, but that if architects don't engage and are part of the solution in their local condition, then we're really no better ahead. And then it's really still the cornerstone of city building that is kind of there. And so in a way housing takes so many forms and all of them are positive if we can in effect use them to make better cities in whatever way that works in your specific location. So I think for me it's been really enriching to see such a broad range from, and such different latitudes of addressing the same issue which I think has been really the most enriching part that the kind of questions are the same but how people really resolve them and kind of play out this kind of question of like Detroit being less dense and needing more density but not making everything dense but selecting specific areas to concentrate the density. So everyone has to have in effect quite different strategies to kind of to really find ways for housing and other programs to contribute to better cities. And it's so complicated. It's not, there's no easy answer for any of us. And I think the fact that design like I really love seeing the plasticity of the fact that your north side doesn't have to be the same as your south side. That's kind of like a pretty obvious thing but it doesn't happen very often. And the fact that in your project you could actually address not only the different facades but the different light conditions and dealing with the different contexts through structure and the fabric of housing, a balcony can do a lot of things. It's really great. Yeah, I mean directly to what you were saying the value of design there with one element that can do structure and program and environmental performance. That's a three for one. That's whether you pay for that once you get three things out of it and that's the kind of thinking that can raise accessibility to great housing for everybody. We should open this up to the audience. I'll make one quick comment on the way out here. If you stand at Central Park South or Sheeps Meadow and Look South you will see about eight new super tall apartment towers which we all know too well. I believe they're worth about $15 billion in total when they sell out, which on one hand is probably huge money if you're a developer, on the other hand in the scope of the New York City's economy it's nothing. So the degree to which somehow a real estate phenomena that produces $15 billion in private wealth can alter the entire skyline of Central Park after 150 years. You might be for them, you might be against them. I do think that everybody's talks today are bridging some balance between accepting working practice within the constraints as they've been given to us and trying to make them more pliant which I think we've been doing generationally for 25 or 30 years. On the other hand, I think Mark's talk begins to talk about a level of economic expertise where you begin to see there's a different economy coming and we could be designing into a different economy, not the finance of buildings but the economy of a city or of a nation where equity issues and value and who is health well and who is not, hopefully will be adjudicated along less stringent or even violent denominators. So I feel like as a group, this is really showing this incredible stamina to do it now. Certainly we could be on the edge of it. Hopefully we're on a different economy where we're not using the IRS to buy down real estate values indefinitely. I think at that point, I would say let's open it to the audience for about two questions I'm being told by Hillary. I know that feeling of being in charge, thank you. I'm going to get Kenneth the last time we had an anthology of North American architects. It was five architects. This is an anthology of housing through North America. So it's the second North American use of wood, I think. Questions from the audience, yeah. Thank you very much for such an inspiring presentation for all of the participants today. It was really quite special and really just phenomenal. I have both a comment and a question. One is there was some talk today about the economics of projects, particularly as it relates to affordable housing and homeless housing. And in the case you talked about trying to get LA to reduced parking requirements and therefore you could save 7% on a project. One of the things, and I have worked in real estate financing for many years, is how can you as architects work together to reduce the costs, particularly in areas where design doesn't matter as much as cost efficiency. And the reason I raised that is by the end, which is a group purchasing organization and I knew them under a different name, really got into the whole construction area in order to reduce costs through group buying. And they've done this with hospitals around the country. They've done it with many other types of for-profit entities for all kinds of things, whether it's paper towels or medical supplies, et cetera. But there are elements where design doesn't matter as much such as your basic lighting fixtures in some places, internal structure that you don't necessarily see, where through buying efforts, it could really save tremendous amounts of money anywhere from 10% to 25%. And particularly in areas like in Detroit where they are working on larger scale whole neighborhood projects. I think your question is quite critical and clear. From our perspective, the issues that I mentioned to you was critical. You mentioned the other areas that are lighting among other things. The way we do our projects, maybe that's the best way to describe it, or our goal is and aspirations are, is as I mentioned in terms of cost value is to reduce certain areas where there's requirements with regards to parking, as I mentioned to you, with the leasing opportunities and also we bring good design. When our projects, we tend to really cut back in terms of do prefab components with kitchens and bathrooms and make that really cost effective and very, very efficient. We bring architecture and design by looking at the heights of the rooms and looked at the quality of other components to it. So I'm not sure that's answering your question, but with regards to, there are areas that you can reduce cost, absolutely. And that is design. Knowing when to not design is directly, I think, relevant to that. But you know, not everything has to be reinvented or questioned. Some things can be that simple, very cost effective light fixture and that's the design decision. Yeah, there's those ways that all this is more of a strategic about how you put the money where you don't. Build efficiency and bring up lifting spaces for people. You want to get them off the street, you want to create a great space. We think as designers, we can do that within a very effective way and intelligent way that they can do it. For the sake of time, hopefully these questions, I would ask that you apply the questions to the final panel, which I believe will have a probably pretty intense view about what it means to lower cost into a better development. I'm going to not organize the conference today and let us move on to panel five. Great, well, thank you so much to the speakers and Michael.