 Hi, everyone. Thanks for coming. I see some names I recognize both from returning GSAP students and interest students. I am Josh and I'm here to talk about models. So for those who've met me, I'm sort of we're all on the home team here at GSAP, but I'm a full-timer, a regular. I have an office here. I'm both part of the faculty of the school, which is required for developing and delivering the academic content. And I'm an administrator at the school, which means I sort of work alongside Lila backstage, as it were, making things work. In my case, my administrative role is as the director of the shop here. And the shop is not just the shop. The shop's called the Making Studio. And it has been for a couple of years because we really see the space as an extension of the studio upstairs in Avery. That is a space that is intended to be the sort of crucible for design development that the architectural studio is. Not just the sort of, you know, substantiation of physical material for sort of intellectual exercise of studio, but just the same space. So as such, it's run in a very democratic way. I, until the last year, I do have, there are two of us who are now administrators in the shop. But it is me and my coworker, Yona, and up to and around 50 GSAP students work in the shop as someone called them shop monitors, other institutions might call them TAs. But we just refer to them as the crew here. And the crew does everything because there's not enough of me and Yona to go around. So the crew does the sort of maintenance, the teaching, also the just intercepting people for design ideas and help. So we really want, we really try to position the space here as a place where people can come in. Yes, with questions about how the CNC works. Yes, with questions about which type of glue to work to use to glue a particular kind of plastic together. But also with the question of how their critic has asked them to represent interiority and exteriority in an undefined space simultaneously while using materials that don't exist yet, right? So that sort of brainstorming beginning of the project question is the thing that we're really interested in because we're designers and students ourselves. That's really the thing we're best at. So I, being the sort of person who's always in the shop, I am privy and witness to a lot of the model making that goes on in the school. I don't say I'm responsible for it because it is primarily the students work, but I have been responsible and tasked with sort of describing the sort of state and meaning and utility of model making at G-SAP, at this institution, and in the sort of practice of architectural education. So why we make models, why making those models might be different than it was 10, 50 years ago, and what role those models should play in, can play in the design process. We've all had a critic who has either asked us or not asked us to make models. We've all scrambled to make a model before a deadline sort of fill out the deliverables list of a project, but we try to think of it as being a lot more. So here I go. I'm going to share. Just going to interrupt really quickly. I've discovered that the reason why we have fewer participants here right now than normal is that it looks like the wrong link was shared on the website at some point and maybe in the newsletter. Those of you who are here in the room, if you guys have like a WhatsApp network or something like that that you could like share out the correct link for, obviously some people have arrived, so it must have been correct somewhere. I've fixed it on the website just now and I've been responding to emails, but just so if any of you guys are sort of like in some kind of student back channel together and want to share out the correct link that would be great. Okay, it's less pressure for me. And the recordings are available as well afterwards and this is something for those who are either currently affiliated with GCEP, going to be affiliated with GCEP, can always talk to me directly about. So simple question. What is the role of the model in school practice and architecture work? There's a bunch of ways of viewing it, interpretations right off the bat. The first is the model as a presentation. So this is the physical three dimensional representation of your design as designed as built. So its utility ranges from a visual aid and a larger presentation to a communication device to something that's supposed to sell proposal or product to a client to a kind of trophy or artifact in itself as a part of the legacy of the project. It is a representation of what you have made. What we're looking at here are models that were constructed over a long period of time for Ken Frampton's class at GCEP that were recently restaged and photo documented by the model photographer James Ewing here in an exhibition at the Buell Gallery. But what you're seeing is what we might think as the sort of industry standard for the model, meticulously made, museum quality, almost perfect. These sort of presentation models don't have to be straightforward architecture. This is a part of the architectural project that Tatiana Bilbao's studio put together at the Chicago architectural biennial a couple years where GCEP students all contributed models that plugged into a sort of exquisite corpse tower. The second interpretation is the model as a study or a sketch. So we often hear how this or that critic sort of appreciates the roughness of a model right? That's sort of like you bring a half complete charcoal all over it model to a presentation and the critics are drawn to it like moths to flame. People appreciate the roughness or the process of it. So the visibility of thinking processes in it in the sketch. So messiness here is the evidence of work. And if messiness is the evidence of work then a lot of work happens in our shop. In this sense though it's still a presentation model. So it's kind of the equivalent of the show your work component of a calculus exam or something like that. We actually get to see things tested along the way. Another interpretation is model as haptics which is a hundred dollar word for feeling in touch or material. These are models whose utility is a direct communication of texture and other physical senses that you can't communicate through drawing or other two-dimensional media. I would say that some of this work is this work belongs to Allied Works architecture group in Portland. Always representing texture directly into the model touching it as part of understanding it. This is the work of former GSEP students or current GSEP alums Arianna Dean and Matt Davis. Another interpretation is sometimes fur is not fur, sometimes fur is a model. Another interpretation is the model as a demonstration or a simulation. So these are the models of test things. This is what an engineer might call a prototype. So these are models that show the performance of a design under analogs to real-world conditions. So structure, light, color, shadow, all of those things at scale or not at scale. So the model is a construction analog to the architectural design as well. There's a logic in model making that if you can make it out of chipboard, whatever, out of planar, linear elements, things that have analogs in the real world, then there is some sort of proof of concept that the architecture can be made, even if you haven't connected the dots completely. This approach is interesting because it considers the active model making to have these sort of mappable construction techniques and sequences that if in turn, if you become a good model maker, then you might become a good construction administrator on a site. Generally, this method of model making tests the way that things go together and looks for parallels at scale. We're looking for actual architectural qualities like thickness, firmness, heat retention, thermal qualities. The next interpretation is the model as an experiment. So this is the model that tests the potential of a material to be created or to work. It might test a spatial idea in a diagrammatic way. It might test the connection or the way that parts interact. It kind of tests an abstract composition technique, the model as an experiment, and it works as both a material and a diagrammatic level. Another familiar one is a model as craft. So this is the model as a demonstration of the knowledge and handling of tools and technique. You can draw a not-so-curvy line between craft and workmanship and architecture, and these are the models that show that the sort of understanding and mastery of the craft is an applicable architectural technique. This is Giuseppe Lamarau, sanding down a perfect icosahedron made out of walnut. I just watched it in awe as this happened over the course of a couple days. Another way and I think an interesting, we've mentioned it already a little bit, interesting way of looking at it is the model as process itself. So this is the model that is a developmental tool in a design process. It serves to work out complicated and abstract questions and analysis of a site, a space, an idea. This kind of model doesn't play a consistent role. It could be interpreted in a number of different ways. It may not have a predetermined goal or a specific utility to a planned process. It's just another day of expanding an idea into a synthesized design. These are students in the material things class at Giuseppe. Another and the last category that I might sort of posit is the model as a drawing and then vice versa. So this understanding collapses model in the drawing into one object, which if you saw Josh Ull's presentation a week or two ago about drawing, I think the two of us might concur on this. So the drawing sort of collapses the model and the this understanding collapses the model in the drawing and in some cases actually hybridizes the two to one object, model drawing. So those last two ways of looking at a model are the ones that I want to sort of expand upon a little bit for this presentation and to frame it in this idea of a composite model. So what is a composite model? I would say that it's a description of architecture drawing and modeling work that serves this multi-purpose, multi-understanding view of models in the design process that really just sees models as another act of design thinking that's inseparable from the rest of the creative process. It's not just a deliverable, it's not sort of an answer to the drawing. It's part of the drawing, it's part of the process. You know, model making tends to get wrapped up in conversations about sort of the trend, purpose and direction and design. It's drafted into arguments about style and representation, about technology, industry transformation, craft, nostalgia. So it's an identity of a designer as a craft person. I think there's a kernel of truth to all of these things, especially the craft part. I don't think there's an architecture student that comes to school and doesn't walk into the shop for the first time and feel like they're in a lumberjack convention or something. I think there's a much more practical level at which model making makes sense for an institution like this. And I'm thankful that it's been foregrounded so much at GSAP in the last couple of years. And that's that it just provides access to a set of ideas and a language and syntax of work that's just simply not available otherwise through any other combination of digital-born techniques and drawing. You know, model making doesn't stand apart from drawing as much as it adds a dimension to it. So there's this kind of like pop scientific idea that you may have heard of in the last decade that thought thinking, let me say design thinking in the sort of cerebral abstract human sense is actually a consequence of language. This is like one of the scientific papers that was appealing enough to the public that it became part of pop scientific discourse. So the idea is that thinking is essentially just talking to yourself in your head and you don't think without language. So it leads to some slightly ridiculous conclusions like that infants and animals don't think, which I think is kind of absurd. But I think it's useful when talking about model making in particular. What I mean is that physical making is just an additional vocabulary in every step of the design process. Just like you learn the vocabulary of rhino commands, just like you learn the vocabulary of graphic tools, just like you learn the vocabulary of typography, just like you learn the vocabulary of design process, what a charrette is, what zooming in, zooming out really means. That model making and making is another one of those. From conception and ideation to testing and analyzing to representation and expression. You can sketch physically, you can sketch in model form just as productively as you would sketch by hand. The culture of making it GSAP or anywhere I think is really just a collection of our efforts to give a platform to that language. The other things I add where that models are not just necessarily models. Models are also drawing in an abstract sense. Models involve operations on material where something that we might specifically call a drawing does not. More importantly, when we talk about material, material is not necessarily something that you pull off a shelf. We like to think of material as not being an item in a catalog, but that you can invent material instead of selecting. You can build substances and composites from scratch. You can push existing materials to the limits of their properties. You can dematerialize materials. Composite models, just to continue the definition, are models that will hybridize media and methods. Drawing and model making, 2D and 3D, mixed media, audio, video, components, kinetics, and that they are analytical tools or complex objects focusing not always on the representational of the real and physical, but on the expression of other immaterial qualities. This is kind of the important part. That physical models have a unique capacity to capture senses, atmospheres, cycles, seasonality, other time-based or serialized sequences of events, like ecological and environmental forces and pressures, other abstracted understandings of the design process. I mentioned prototypes. I think this sort of back and forth between the two is a really useful exchange in design and architecture in that their roles and definitions get blurred a lot. To engineer as a prototype is a type of model that is advanced past the aesthetic, as they would call it, phase into a functional testing process. It's a tool, not a sketch. It comes after the model prototype. In design, all models are prototypes, so long as they're driving design development. If anything, the basic understanding of a model, a presentation model, is that it occurs at the end of a design. There's some reversal there. Really, all of these definition points that I've been trying to draw a frame around so far describe a type of model that's trying to either do several things at once or capture several states at once. Since the act of design, especially in the developmental stages, is really this act of codifying and crystallizing dynamic motivations and analysis into a static thing, a drawing, a plan, a set of instructions. It's no surprise that designers and students really aspire to this type of construction. That's kind of all the models I'm showing today. It's the model that's a transitional instrument, an abstract machine, and it has a real foundation in design thinking over at least the last 150 years. You might start with what I'm showing here is the images of Maybridge, the sort of father of motion pictures, as we understand them. So motion pictures, serialization, the desire to capture and understand motion, and eventually as an art in architecture, to deploy it to describe new productions of space. You can draw a straight line from Maybridge to Duchamp to the cinematic film strip windows. This is here's Corbusier's sketches for lighting studies during a deployment of ribbon windows in his designs, or the very cinematic film strip motion picture-looking collages of Muse van der Rohe to the modulating actually moving sculptures and devices of Bauhaus in the Holy Nage. You know, jump to the 21st century and we see these serialized landscape analyses of somebody like James Corner or friends of mine from back in Philadelphia, Anu Mathur and Dilip Takunia. Here, one of their massive sort of unpacking landscape analysis assemblages, which often take model form either from them or their students. So all of these things are trying to extend this notion of capturing multiple states, capturing motion, capturing things that are temporal in the state of a drawing or model. The ones that we're looking at now even extend that to urban and ecological forces. Extend that to today, that sort of collapsing of, you know, capturing multiple states at once in a model. And you might look at things that are tipping from the real into the virtual or the mixed reality, like in the case of interactive robotic systems or something called passive haptics, which I want to show really quickly. So this seems like it might be a little left field when talking about models, but I really think the sort of turning the digital back on the analog is exactly what we're talking about here. Let me see if I can new share. I'm going to show you two short clips. The first one we're looking at here is a project from Ryan Johns, who's a scholar and roboticist and sometimes a professor at GSAP where he has a robotic arm that is actively operating on a piece of wax that has a structural analysis of an object he's made projected onto it. So he's changing in real time the ability for this piece of material to be sculpted by something that's choreographed. So you end up with its very glitchy yet functional model. The other thing I wanted to show is something that's called the field of passive haptics, where, which is actually the combination of physical objects into virtual reality spaces. So there's this sort of, everybody looks ridiculous when you take them out of virtual reality and show what they're really doing in the real world. But this looks like a sort of lo-fi, oh look, there's a pod there to take them away. This looks like a sort of a lo-fi virtual reality situation, right? But the important part about it is that the sort of physical component, the model, has been reintegrated into the experience, which is something that's only really beginning to happen now. So that's a sort of framework. The next thing I wanted to go through is categorization of these types. And these categorizations are my own, and they're not something where students pick or choose a category of model they're going to make. It's just an interpretation of the things that I see happen here and across other institutions. So, excuse me, the first type that I would talk about is the sort of recursive model drawing that we've seen a couple examples of already. So these are models that actually use the drawing as a substrate or drawings that use the model as a substrate. So this is modeling on top of a drawing. This is a famous example of Eisenman's building in Spain where you can see that the physical form of the model has been sort of diagrammatically generated from what looks like a seismograph diagram and literally pulled out of the landscape. So there's a lot of really heavy digital metaphors happening here between sort of graphical analysis, between lithography, between architectural massing. But the thing that interests me about it is that it happened via a very sort of low-tech physical process of modeling on top of a drawing that was printed out. Drawing on top of models, either physically drawing on top of models while they're still in model form or photographing models and then drawing on top of them in Photoshop. This process can go back and forth and back and forth. This is sort of the beauty of it that you can take a photograph of a model and draw on it and then print that out, use that as a model, draw on it. The more recursive it gets, the sort of more you're liberated from the form, from it either being a model or a drawing. And some of the most successful examples of these, I think some which come a little later in the slideshow, are really impossible to tell what started first, the model or the drawing. Another type is other two-dimensional, three-dimensional forms. So this is our friend Junya Shigami drawing on top of a photograph of a model. This has worked for one of David Benjamin's advanced studios that happened here a year and a half ago, where there's a sort of diagrammatic cut of a intricately constructed plan where models at different scales are literally extruded out of the surface and sort of reified into their own study model sets. Really, really beautiful package of information that takes like, you know, you could stand there for an hour and a half just reading it to the models of Smell and Allen, which I'm going to talk a little bit about, a little more about. This is a project, a sort of two-dimensional slash three-dimensional modeling project that Leah Meisterlin here at GCEP did with our help in the shop. Mapping geographical and urban systems data on two three-dimensional forms that we then vacuum formed to make a huge mosaic of three-dimensional extruded graphics. There's another type that I would talk about, maybe called information models. Now this is not information modeling, but models that whose purpose is to sort of collate and represent information. So this is our hometown heroes and architects, Mimi Huang and Eric Boongay, their Rising Currents project from a decade and a half ago now. Beautiful aerial model that shows the deployment of their design plus the sort of layers of information scratched into the model. Landscape models that use material to differentiate between parts. I'm always sort of more curious about these landscape models that blend the sort of diagrammatic with the real, where there's layers of graphical information as well as layers of real and physical things sort of intersecting in the same place. I think it's no coincidence that all of the models that I'm showing in this sort of info category are large scale or geographic or landscape models. Another sort of practice that comes up in this category a lot is just layering. Using advantages of physical material of models, of being in a real place, a real space, to layer things on top of each other and using the optical qualities of them to sort of bring out the model. Sometimes literally layered. I have a lot of these. I have a lot of these because I think they're beautiful, but they're also communicating an immense amount of information. So this is in sort of my experience of looking at the models that come through here, the models that really hit on the sort of craft and tactile component and the communication information component at the same time. Models on top of drawing. There are kinetic models. So this is work of a colleague from the landscape architecture program at Pennezyne maybe a decade ago who analyzed a site and series of spaces with a cut out series of transects and moving parts that sort of adjusted as you push things around the model in particular way. So a model that literally provides multiple readings by virtue of it being able to move from one reading to another. This is another Smoud Allen model that has at least a hundred electrified independent moving parts. These are structural prototypes from, I believe, a studio that Akeem Mengis, not a GSEP teacher. I believe he's at the Athea or Stupdart. One of his students tested a sort of a novel structural type and has this beautiful series of photographs May Bridgesque documenting its performance. This, I believe, is a mechanism that's intended to recreate one of the chapters of the book Invisible Cities by Talah Kapino. There's audiovisual models. So models that actually, in this case, project on two surfaces. Not everybody has a projector available to them. If you spend time at GSEP, you will have a projector available to you. So this is a little bit of a higher, maybe level, entry level of technology for making a model. But once it's available to you, this is an incredibly powerful tool. You can't see it animated here, but this is my pride and joy of a landscape model I made in practice about 10 years ago. So this is a little bit of a tool. You can't see it animated here, but this is my pride and joy of a landscape model I made in practice about 10 years ago that has a beautiful series of video effects put together by the architect, Chris McAdams, that both analyzes the site and then shows the sort of ephemeral qualities of the site that you wouldn't be able to see otherwise. Sometimes something as simple as just like buffalo scrambling across this hill in Montana. This is a projector system showing a series of light and shadow studies on an existing model design. And then there's a type that I would call temporal or immaterial. These are models that try, like I mentioned earlier, to capture and describe qualities that are not necessarily materialized or materializable, or to express things that are happening over time. This is a model by GSEP student Aya Avdala for the ADR program. It's her interpretation of Dillerska video, Renfro's Blur building. And I just think it's a pretty incredible take on a structural system explicitly rendered as a tense integrity system. And then the structural members dissolve over the course of the model into this idea of one, the blur itself, but the idea of entropy, this immaterial quality being expressed in a model. It's beautifully done because she worked meticulously hard on it. It wasn't just enough to have the idea and do it. She had to do a lot of testing with weaving it together and loosening parts and getting just the amount of looseness, but it really shows. This is a model by Jackie Martinez, who's a frequent GSEP teacher and architect and landscape architect at Snow Heta, serializing landscape on actual printed transparencies, or turning architectural drawings into literal film strips, so you can see them progress. More of the sort of sort of frame-wise interpretation of landscapes, sectional landscapes over time. This is more of Jackie's work that shows the time-based process of material dissolving in a system that she's assembled. This is a model that involves both the depiction of architectural space and the sort of graphic notation of the architectural ideas and systems inside, wrapping on the walls and sort of marching sequentially down the model. An amazing amount of information. Here's another view of that model from a student at the Bartlett that we saw earlier. A couple case studies to put this into perspective and just to talk about maybe some of the things that are happening here at GSEP as well have been happening. I can't go through this without talking about the Slow House by Dillard Scafidio. If you're not familiar with this project, the images that I'm showing here are a collection of models and drawings that constitute its exhibit at MoMA, but this building, which is a beach house that's constructed in this crescent fashion, really doesn't exist independently from the set of models and drawings that describe it. And as you can see, these models are one. This is literally a mechanism for drawing the building. The tool itself was constructed to do the drawing. A composite drawing of plans, perspectives, collages with the sort of rendering of the mechanism that drew it in the drawing. There is, just as we showed earlier, a sort of temporal sequence of frames, different moments of this house that have progressed through over time. Another compositing of those frames into a massing model. And then probably the most straightforward model of it, but that still has sort of projected or kinetic parts that display different moments. So it's really amazing how this project really sort of hits on this idea of a composite model that is neither a model nor a drawing for pretty much every way that it is documented. So a great example to check out there is the work of Smelt Allen, Mark Smelt and Laura Allen. This team is, again, no coincidence that the word landscape and sort of the landscape practice comes up over and over in this discussion composite models. Pretty much every piece of work that I've seen from this group is an intricate compositing of two-dimensional maps, graphics information with these amazing three-dimensional reifications, either above it or around it, meticulously detailed in mechanical parts, actual working and kinetic parts, often multiple materials that are sort of integrated seamlessly. Here you can see just operations on what looks like walnut. And again, their work and their projects and their ideas are really not represented separately from this idea of this model drawing that does everything. It is the embodiment of their work. And then so at GSEP, there's a couple sort of explicit ways. This is my sort of description of my observations of models that successfully drive design development practice forward. So it happens everywhere and everything. But there are a couple more explicit examples. There's a course that Jackie Martinez teaches called composite modeling where students are asked to, they're basically asked to analyze their own speculative sites in this technique. And these projects, as you can see, integrate a lot of these techniques together. So you have digitally machined plastic working as AV components with cast plaster and material and India ink into them with really comprehensive graphical analysis of those models afterwards. In turn, the graphical analysis is fed back into the model process itself. And these models are so rich that you can take so many different perspectives on them and get a completely novel reading, showing some of the detail. I showed this one because I know it was an accident that turned out beautifully. But showing the integration of two-dimensional and three-dimensional components, linear components, three-dimensional linear components, line work drawn into the three-dimensional world, this is a model that has an active projection on it to understand the systems. So he has these, Haran Wang was a student's name, has these interchangeable sort of stackable program volumes, and then a really beautiful set of moving graphical analysis that sort of explains the project to you and did a really excellent job of keying up the projection to the model, but also keeping it flexible. And then the last thing I talk about is a project that we did in the making studio about a year ago where we sort of spun off a number of material experiments that were going on in the course material things. So this was a student-initiated project that ended up happening sort of in the orbit of coursework. So it wasn't exactly extracurricular, it was something that was tied to material studies that were going on in a course. But one of the things that we really tried to do in the making studio and the shops is to give the space here for those types of projects to take on a life of their own. That is like something that's a really good idea that has legs that might not be completely appropriate for the agenda of the course or the set of deliverables. We try to sort of identify and extract those things and turn them into projects. So this project came from a number of motivations. One, we wanted to intercept the waste stream of foam at the school. So blue foam, pink foam, all kinds of foam are a very frequent model making element in architecture schools. We try not to throw things away if we don't have to throw them away. And this project allowed us to sort of intervene directly in the waste stream of foam which resulted in a very fun two months of collecting everybody's trash from studios in all the spaces. People were really really happy when we told them not to clean up after themselves, but it was something that we had trouble undoing. But we took all this foam. Foam is light. So it doesn't have the hugest carbon footprint in terms of moving it around, but it has the biggest carbon footprint in terms of the materials it uses, the embodied energy and going into its production, and has health concerns on the layout in its cutting and its use. So any of this we were able to sort of drive into a second life was a good thing to us. So what were we going to do with it? The students working on the project decided that it would be interesting sort of intervene in the sort of neoclassical imagery of Columbia's campus. It's a place where you walk around and a new sort of Greek or Roman statue that you didn't know about will pop up in a new corner. Sort of unexpected repetition of these images. And so the students said, well, why don't we make one out of trash and put it outside every hall? Which had like a great idea. So the process was rationalizing the fabrication of this sculpture, which is the Venus de Milo. It is the Venus de Milo, not the Medici. And we set out to build it at full scale. That is seven feet, eight inches tall with the plinth. So a sort of uncanny, slightly larger-than-life human figure. And our machines in the shop have constraints and limits. So does the sort of production of the material that I'm going to show you in a minute. So what we ended up doing was determining the thickest object that our machines could process. And we set out making rectangular molds to compress the waste material together. So we took all of the scrap material we found and all of the trash, packed it as tightly as we could into these forms, which you see the process of that right here, and then filled the cracks with an expanding agent that was pretty much the same material that was going into it. It's actually what we used as a boat flotation foam. So if you needed to escape down the Hudson River, you could grab on to this Venus and be safe. We cut the parts out digitally. So there is a sort of a strong bifurcation in the waste streams of fabrication processes that are either subtractive or additive. So sometimes those meanings are blended or blurred a little bit. But typically when we say subtractive, it means sculpting or cutting away. So that would be the process of cutting wood, sanding something. The CNC mill that you see here is obviously one of them, maybe not so intuitively. The laser cutter is also subtractive because it's removing material, albeit efficiently. But the CNC is one of the most subtractive of them all and potentially one of the most wasteful. What we were determined to do in this project is make a workflow that was as efficient as possible. So we sort of threw, how do I describe this, rigging the CNC system to extract and clean up dust in the way we wanted it to. We were able to save the vast majority of the material that came off as waste. So that means offcuts, which were the biggest part of the volume, and dust. We saved the offcuts. We saved the dust and we packed it back into the next mold and made the next block to mill from. The clever part about this was that visually it allowed previous parts of the process to show up in new parts of the process. So while we may have cast the front of Venus's torso mostly in blue, there was also an orange chunk that it sort of stowed away from a previous step of the process. So it sort of disrupted the, or maybe enhanced the sort of messy collage funfetti birthday cake kind of vibe that this thing had going, and was constantly surprising. So what we thought was a straightforward process for creating material became unique every time we tried it. Even though the physical process was the same, the result was different every time. So we made the parts, ratcheted it together, glued it together, and then over the course of four days, start to finish, it became a full-size statue and sat outside the school. This is Abenov, the tallest member of our shop crew, absolutely dwarfed by the Venus, so you can see how big she actually is. So I hope that gives the sort of like perspective on both what models look like and what they're used for in sort of G-SAP and maybe a contemporary architecture institution and some of the things that go on at the school here. That's really what I have to say and I'm happy to speak to any questions that anybody might have or comment further on some of the things that you've seen today and I'll turn it over to anybody who wants to ask and or Lila. You can put things in the you can put things in the chat as well as just Lila, I don't know, can people shout things out or do they have to chat them first? Everyone can unmute themselves now so you've got access to do that. Obviously you're welcome to turn your camera on if you'd like to join the conversation, there's no limit on that so please feel free to unmute yourself. If you prefer to ask a question in the chat you're welcome to put it there. I'm going to read it just so that we have it in the audio record. I'll read it to Josh so it'll sound like just I'm talking to him if that happens but no problem there. Josh this is actually this is interesting because like obviously as a as a staff member I was you know kind of aware of and enraptured with the Venus but I hadn't seen it in this kind of detail and actually one of the things I was going to ask that you mentioned right at the very end was how long the process of fabrication took so like over the course of four days it was physically assembled. In terms of the the interlocking pieces like the different printed pieces are they flat edges that are glued together or did you make like cleats or like dovetails? They're flat edges that are glued together so one of the things that you one of the things that I glossed over a little bit and I could talk for a long time about the sort of geometric rationalization process of a complicated sculpture because I feel like it's something I've done one too many times but we had to make the decision whether we were going to use straight rectangular blocks for the Venus volume or if we were going to taper and skew our blocks in a way that might more efficiently and effectively fill out her volume and so we ended up just doing straight rectangular blocks because we realized that the offcuts weren't so important because we could just recycle them into the next mold and it wouldn't be any waste. The joints between them however are just joints that the material which is a combination of polystyrene and polyurethane depending on what people threw out is glued together by more polyurethane. It's basically the expanding foam that you squirt into leaky drafty cracks in your door and window frames is what's holding her all together and no mechanical connections. One of the other things that I'll just in absence of more student questions right now that I just wanted to ask you about is these case studies or images that you've collected over time I could tell that some of them were much older than others just by their the quality or fidelity of the images and so I'd wonder if you might expand upon a little bit the ways in which drawings and models created in a very analog way have sort of like transitioned into the digital. There's a lot of fear right that like we'll just become digital creatures and that everything will be made digitally or that like somehow people will stop seeing the value in handmade objects and I just I personally don't see that happening and I feel like that's really evidenced at GSAP but I'm interested in sort of that time scale that you presented without really discussing. Yeah that's a good question because I've been here for four years and so when I came here I used to say well for the last five years this has been happening and now I still feel like it's only been five years that that thing has been happening. So as the shopperson like I have a particular perspective on the utility of making and craft to I don't know just the general idea of learning how to be a designer I don't think that's really changed over time. I think that it's fair to say that in the last 10 years there has been increased skepticism toward the sort of full digital project. That is to say that the project of architecture and understanding the way the things that go together even on an abstract and or digital level can't be understood without physically making things. So you see that I think you see that sort of manifests in a few ways. One in just a very practical way of models being a more comprehensive requirement for delivery and architectural studios. When I was in school at Penn like 11 let's say let's just say years ago there was a different there was a different project going on at Penn than there is now for sure but models weren't frequently required as deliverables or they were just sort of there to tick off the list and not really sort of checked on if they came back. I think since then I wouldn't describe that like what we're sort of feeling and experiencing in terms of model making is a critique or a sort of nostalgic or retroactive sort of project. It's more that the sort of ways that architecture is communicated these days is seems to be more congruent with model making. So that's like the expression of architecture role projects as collage or photo montage which is something that we see a lot more in the last five years just has more obvious parallels and analogs to making models. I think the two things sort of were happening at the same time but at the same time and likewise the making of things via robotics is stronger than ever. So I feel like I hesitate to say that it's a critique or a drawing back of sort of the digital project in the last 10 years because it's still going really really far forward at the places where it's being practiced. Like I spent a week at ETH last summer looking at their sort of robotics laboratory and just like wondering about wondering about in wonder about how far things have come in the last 10 years. Thank you. I think also the last thing that I am really interested in that I feel like you hinted the Venus project obviously hints at but something else that I really think is like an interesting part of the dialogue right now with regards to like individuals personal carbon footprint and like within the school structure like whether models are required or whether they're just created for the designer's individual study. I think that the production of waste and the consideration of materials and or what those materials might mean ecologically to the to the earth I think is really an important question for students to ask themselves even if their faculty is not asking them to think about that. And so if you could just like elaborate a little bit on your thoughts about how to use a term that people will learn soon if they don't snicker about it already like how to be good citizens not only within GSAP but in Mark Taylor would be very happy to hear. In the general world yes absolutely shout out to Mark Taylor for the good citizens idea but just thinking about like this sort of model making like how do how do individual students really sort of like assess their own values as it relates to material use. That's a huge question. I think that there are simultaneous things going on in terms of the sort of ecological project of fabrication because it really is the place in the school where the impact becomes real on a day-to-day level. Whereas like in the sort of professional practice you know the built environment accounts for X amount of the carbon footprint but the model making practice of the professional world of architecture doesn't make an impact. The model making practice in architecture school makes a huge proportionate impact in the school. And so students are thinking about it all the time. I will say that there's not on an individual level there is not a semester that goes by without student initiated independent study projects in the reuse or waste streams or analysis of materials specifically through the shop. So that ranges from projects where students in the vein of the Venus make it their semesters sort of thesis work to reconstruct either models or industrial design objects or practical things out of the waste materials of the shop. There and so I don't have to initiate that that is coming directly from the students. There is every semester there is also usually an independent study student student initiated project that looks at the sort of administration of the shop specifically so how to intercept waste streams coming out of the shop and reuse student waste materials how to change the space of the flow of the shop and how those sort of concerns interact with the practice of design and architecture. So that's always amazing for us because those students come up part of their work is coming up with solutions at this scale. We had a student Mayor Udvardi a year ago do an immense embodied energy and carbon analysis of the sort of top six typical materials that come through the shop and invent a sort of grading system for them and publicize the impact of those materials to students in the form of these elaborate enormous graphics in the hallway. On the other end so that's the sort of like student bottom-up initiation on the sort of I say administrative end or faculty end of the school. I felt really fortunate that the faculty have been and I'm faculty so I can talk about them like this incredibly uh I don't want to say incredibly supportive and communicative and sort of non not confrontational but like it the relationship between the academic side of the school and the shop is not one where we're looking to get things out of each other. The conversation about how models are going to be made what they're going to be made of where it's going to come from how the waste is going to happen happens at the beginning before the syllabuses or syllabi are written and I am often privy to those conversations so like I feel like just that alone is has been incredibly helpful. Then on the back end like the the shop is a shop is an academic workshop and there are there's specifically a conference of proprietors and staff and workers at academic workshops that are working on the sort of ecology and environment of the shop all the time. A group that I'm involved in and I actually get most of the useful tools for helping the shop be more efficient have a smaller footprint like tools that will calculate volume loss and CNC jobs that we can adjust the sort of cost of things to students based on their efficiency of the project which I think is a really innovative thing and these are just like grasshopper and rhino scripts that are written by Josh who's working in Wisconsin's shop or something like that and shared with everybody else. The truth is that there's really no call it industry standard in terms of the safety and impact of materials we use like OSHA and NIOSH don't even really have recommendations on how healthy or unhealthy the pink foam is to use in a model making setting. So we in that sense we have to sort of create the parameters and guides ourselves but I think there's been like I said in these different dimensions a lot happening about that at the same time that I'm very very invested in continuing to be a part of. We have a oh sorry I'm just like pressing the we have a question in the chat from Will understanding the complications due to the circumstances over the past months are there any upcoming projects similar to the Venus at the making studio this fall that that we might be that you might be able to talk about for student initiated projects what is the process of getting a project approved at the making studio. So this is interesting it's operative until the students sort of get here it's not there or at least this summer there I don't think that there are projects happening but yes you want to talk about like sort of the approval process and like what actually the what it looks like to work in the shop and you know the difference between personal projects and academic projects and like you know sort of what is allowed to happen. Yeah so just really quickly to the first point there's nothing happening right here other than us getting the shop ready for the next step and also the shop has been used to make personal protective equipment for New York hospitals over the course of the last three months so that's been the that's been the project in the shop. For student initiated projects there's actually a number of ways that they there's a number of ways that they can sort of come into the shop and get sort of like a life and sort of support and and help and then there's a number of ways that they can sort of be exhibited or have a life at the school. Sometimes individual studios have a sort of exhibition component that is written into the studio and so those naturally so like they'll be I think the giant blue stuffed octopus model objects that I showed in the slides were part of a studio like that so that work was initiated by a studio brief and then sort of concocted and brainstormed in in the shop and we assisted them. I think we like even bought a couple extra sewing machines or something like that so we sort of react on the fly to things like that. There are there's the end of your show every year that always has the opportunity to exhibit large scale objects. In the past some of that has been exhibiting the sort of pavilion type projects that come out of classes that focus on prototyping or testing structural new fabrication type spaces that still happens. We also every year for the end of your show we sort of look and ask around for or sort of pay attention to the work coming out of both the studios and the elective classes for projects that might be able to have a stage at the end of your show so something that might be able to be built larger. I don't know one of the one of the last photos I showed actually had in the background of Venus there was a project that got built out of sort of bent plywood tiling objects at super large scale that was part of an elective course at at GSAP that was then pitched as a project for the end of your show that got built large. The I think the question also just kind of points at the bigger question of like who has access to the shop and like who gets attention and who gets a voice and my answer was ideally everyone. There are 50 something or 40 something maybe almost 50 students that work at the shop as monitors so in some sense they have like an inside line to the shop but we sort of set it up in a way that doesn't give them any sort of special privileges or advantages in getting an audience. Often the students that work in the shop are also just like too busy elsewhere to projects of their own and I'd say for every person that works in the shop and I see as a regular there are four or five people who are just as much shop regulars call them because they've integrated making as part of their workflow that much. I often don't even know their names for a whole semester because I know everybody's uni access numbers before I know their names. I know their face. I can match uni's to faces first and we really like there's not a big hierarchy at the shop like it's you can speak to the monitors or you can speak to me and so it's it's not that hard to have a conversation about a project with you know everybody at the shop at once. Yeah great so I just want to just to follow up slightly about the end of your show portion that Josh just mentioned is there's a certain point in the spring semester where typically although obviously this did not occur this year when due to the pandemic the end of your show is completely online which you can look at on the website if you haven't already please do. Where this sort of like information about what's going to happen with end of your show goes out and there's like sort of typically like a call for proposals to make something and there's usually like a little bit of a budget and whether or not the object that you create and propose costs more than the budget is also something that you know is sort of up up to the student in most ways. Actually this is a really interesting question from Abigail. I think that will answer this question and then maybe close just because we're a little bit over time now and I know that Josh has to teach Interest Studio this afternoon from Abigail. Have you seen any creative ways students have adapted to making models at home while classes have moved online? Abigail I can tell you as an Interest student that you will see next week. Yes in fact I mean some so some students there's the sort of high end call it where some students own 3d printers which have become quite inexpensive now. So some students in the spring semester once things transitioned online were able to sort of seamlessly adapt their workflow and produce immense cityscapes of models at home. Other courses like mine that is mostly physical object based that went remote transitioned to making the objects virtual objects but sort of tried to embed in them as much detail and attention as craft as you might in a physical object. So they made these meticulously three-dimensional modeled objects with textures on them that got exhibited in a show. But I think what you're sort of asking about especially in this sort of period of sort of lockdown and which we may or may not still be in we are still partially in where access to anything was restricted let alone you know a Blick art store or a Home Depot or something like that. The notion that model making might look to found materials and I haven't personally seen that but I've heard of it happening. I know our sort of friend and New York artist Alan Wexler teaches a class at Parsons which basically switched once it went remote to using all just found and available materials at home and the models were amazing and inspiring. One person made like a dinnerware set out of banana leaves which is just as impressive as it sounds. So I think that as hybrid remote partial remote learning continues at our institution or at any institution you're going to see more and more you're going to see more and more model making projects oriented towards the things that people have instantly available. I don't think that I hope not but I also don't think that critics and professors are going to sort of step away from model making or abandon it. Maybe at the scope of production it might happen when the laser cutters are firing for like three weeks straight but I haven't heard of anybody who just wants to get rid of it all together. Great so thanks so much Josh for this. Do you have any final thoughts that you just want to leave us with before before we close? I mean I would just say I would just encourage everybody to you know reach you can reach out to me directly if you want to know more about the sort of things that happen and how they happen in the spaces here. I would you know continue to pay attention to the this shop and other academic workspaces because they really I really believe they are going to be the sort of locus of innovative ways of having students interact with these institutions in hybrid settings just because of the diversity of things that happen here. It's a wood shop in some sense but it's also a library. It's just a compendium an archive of objects and things that people can pick at and choose and see and try and test and so really that is going to require and I think people are making headway in it. It's going to require a really multi-mode multi-dimensional way of looking at what hybrid teaching what hybrid involvement is. It's going to be more than it's going to be more than zoom calls it's going to be more than multiple cameras so I look really forward to the things that that we and other people come up with as we go forward.