 I'm the director of education at Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. Thank you. Oh, thank you. And thank you all for joining us this evening. Our director, Caroline Bowmans, who was scheduled to moderate this panel, had a bit of an emergency. Everything's fine, but she's unable to moderate the panel. So I get to step in. As long as someone's named Caroline, we're OK with filling in with that. So I'm here in her stead. Just to start with a little bit about Cooper Hewitt, as many of you know, our purpose is to inspire, educate, and empower people through design. And we do this through exhibitions, our online content, our discussions like this, education programs, and the National Design Awards. And the Design Talks, funded generously supported by the Adobe Foundation, is a series that promotes dialogue about contemporary issues and design. And it's a chance for us to highlight great practitioners in design today. And it nicely dovetails with our National Design Awards because we're highlighting two of this year's winners. And as has most of the series for this spring semester, where we've highlighted the process and inspiration of many of our National Design winners, including Benaz Sarifor, Jeanne Gang, James Wines, Michael Sorkin, Margie Ruddick, and Jeanette Sadekhan. And all of those conversations, if you happen to miss them, are available online on our website. And they're wonderful resources for those of you who are interested in the idea of the design process. You may be interested in the field of the particular designer, but I think it's also really exciting across the board to kind of listen to people talk about their process and what makes them tick and what makes them make the design decisions that they make. As many of you may know, Cooper Hewitt is undergoing the most ambitious renovation project in our history. We're expanding our gallery space by 60% restoring the historic features and upgrading all of our facilities. And nothing about Cooper Hewitt will be the same when we reopen this fall. We're not only renovating and doing a historic preservation, but we're completely envisioning Cooper Hewitt and redesigning the museum experience. So we look forward to seeing all of you this fall when we reopen, and there'll be some news probably in the middle of June to the end of June where you'll know exactly when we're opening. So we're looking forward to being open as a museum, to welcoming people there to see our wonderful collections and objects as well as having our own place to run programs. This evening, we're very pleased to welcome Joshua Adlin and David Darling, who are partners and founders of the interior architecture firm Aidan Darling Design. Their San Francisco studio is a creative hub and an extended network of builders, fabricators, artists, engineers, chefs and other collaborators and their projects range from architecture, interiors, landscape design and product design. Just to tell you a little bit about our format tonight, Joshua and David will first talk about their work and their inspiration, and then we'll be joined by Mitchell Davis, executive vice president of the James Beard Foundation for some additional conversation, and then I promise we'll turn it over to the audience for some Q and A. Just to give you some background on Mitchell, in addition to his work at the James Beard Foundation, he's a cookbook author, a food journalist and a scholar with a PhD in food studies from NYU. But we'll go back and talk about that a little bit later. And first, let's welcome Joshua and David. Thank you. Well, welcome. It's a great honor and pleasure to be speaking with you this evening. Thank you to Cooper Hewitt, a Smithsonian. I think it would be helpful to first step backwards a bit to give you a context of where Dave and I started some years ago. On the left, just about two years ago, that's me. On the right is Dave in his true form day to day. I grew up in the Midwest, in Northeastern Ohio, surrounded by lakes and waterfalls and forests and fields, a great amount of nature. My father originally had been an industrial designer before finding his true passion in sculpture. My mother was a painter, a printmaker. My older sister was a painter and a ceramicist and a printmaker as well. So surrounded by art, surrounded by nature, and I rejected all of it to pursue my love of baseball. And that was my true passion growing up. And I remember in sixth grade in sociology class, this horrifying statistic that some 85% of all human beings follow their parents in their respective trade or profession, which I thought was just a devastating statistic. And to actually, ironically, end up being one of those statistics is much to my demise. I don't know, we love what we do. But Dave, on the other hand, grew up, and I think at the age of four, knew not only that he wanted to be an architect, but to run his own firm. My background was decidedly less romantic than Josh's. I grew up in a family of engineers in the suburbs, but also from Ohio and garnered a real appreciation for the place I grew up. But I had the good fortune of having a friend in grade school, whose father was probably the only modern architect in the state of Ohio at that time, and his firm and also his woodshop at his house was kind of in the spirit of Charles and Ray Eames, and I really, that kind of imprinted itself in my sensibility and thought, I wanna do this. When I'm five years old, I wanna do this. So some years later, Dave and I actually met at the University of Cincinnati, and then kind of migrated out west. And sadly, at the early days of working amongst architects in the Bay Area, my father passed away, and I brought all his tools and equipment out and kind of inherited his, the heritage of making, making with your own hands. And in that process, I kind of forgave the opportunity to actually go to graduate school, because I had had my fill of pedagogy and really wanted to, a bit more rigorous, kind of intensive self-critique of the work. And these are sketches from one of the first projects that we undertook, which was a sushi table. And it struck a nerve on a number of levels. One, the pure joy of making, but also the respect for those who do make for you and with you. This was a zero-tolerance table, like not a 32nd, but a zero-tolerance table. It is all pin-connected. There's no fasteners, and that rigor, I mean, you literally, I fearfully couldn't drink too much coffee or not enough coffee so that I had the perfect balance because I was afraid that I would destroy this beautiful piece of wood. And that reverence and that respect for the soul of materials is what grew out of these early experiments. And it also- It was kind of metaphorically one of the first things we physically kind of cut when we, it took two people to run this thing through a bandsaw. And it was one of the scariest things when we're both like grabbing this big piece of wood, running it through the bandsaw thing. We have one shot at this. And it was kind of almost metaphorically a great kind of launching pad for our practice. And I think it talks to the dilemma of do you preserve a massive chunk of the tree in its totality and create something as meaningful that will then be passed on generation to generation and become an heirloom. And is that ultimately actually the most sustainable act? Or is it flaying it into 20 veneers and ultimately have it spread around a room that may be dismantled someday? So that's the kind of decision making that we're always contemplating as we pursue each of our projects. So fast forward 15 years and we're blessed to be surrounded by these people who basically give us the energy to do what we do every day. But stepping back, when we started the firm to put it in context, we started talking about it in 97, spending a lot of time in the wood shop. And in the meantime, the first dot com bubble started to inflate and we started hiring people and building the practice and we were resisting the temptation to grow because we wanted to keep the studio size of a large family. We also wanted to, or we also acknowledged the fact that the digital media and the digital technologies were emerging and seducing us and we embraced them, but we also had, as Tim Gunn would say, we had an epiphany that to experience architecture and design and is a conscious, it's a thing of conscience and it involves all the senses, not just the visual and it involves a focus on how the visual connects to the other senses. And so that was really kind of a generator for our practice and we thought these are all, the computer is a great device but how can we fold that into a practice is more about making. So as Josh mentioned, we evolved with this idea of getting our hands dirty. We kind of surrounded ourselves with objects of curiosity and also with the materials and used those to propel and also to kind of imbibe the practice with a vitality. The office is set up around a woodchopper which remains important to this day and encourages this idea of making but also it spreads the possibilities of technique and using different techniques not just digital computer techniques but also physical techniques of model making and prototyping. And it helps us kind of widen our perspective on what it is we're doing and also creates an intimacy with what it is we're working with. So our office has a vast number of materials and tools. So when we're on the computer like looking at a piece of steel we can get up from our chair and go over and grab a piece of steel and see what it feels like and what it smells like and it gives us a one-to-one relationship with that. The other thing about the way our practice is set up is actually these are a couple other models that show different techniques for studying things both abstractly and also literally. And then we use models and physical things to actually sketch as well. This is a winery where we studied a site in different ways and these are really quick three-dimensional sketches which take very little time to make. But as from the very beginning we always talked about the idea of having an office as a creative hub and in order to do architecture, landscape design, furniture design, product design, et cetera to do all that and to have that small family as an office we had to embrace and learn how to collaborate in a meaningful way. And so the office is really this creative hub that branches out in concentric circles and we really regard many of the people we work with as part of that family. We recently had the fashion designer Elkie Valter do a show in our office and another thing we talked about early on was this idea of cross-pollinization and having other design disciplines cross-pollinate and her work is very analogous to ours and we often use, we often reference clothing in our work because it has not just an aesthetic value but also it's tactile, it's structural and it's performative. So it has many of the same aspects. So starting with kind of the object and working to the scale of the room and working to the scale of site, one of our first projects was actually for a client here in Manhattan who requested a writing table be created to that would be both a museum but also truly a writing surface for analog writing and her computer writing but it was our first opportunity to truly collaborate with another maker and understanding another craftsman's ideas and integrating them into the final solution of the table and you'll see this effect of kind of these vitrines implementing themselves in a larger scale of our architecture. This then led to her request of surrounding this table with the artifacts of her life. I should back up and say that she's a survivor of World War II and escaped the Nazis and emigrated to the States and so she lost her childhood and her hope was to recreate her childhood here in Manhattan for not only herself but for her children and her grandchildren and so these first diagrams are just cataloging these incredibly odd but beautiful dolls that she had collected through the years and her hope was to truly create a cabinet of curiosities and so this musical score, these early studies and these sketches that you're seeing are like a musical score of vitrines that would house each of these and behind these vitrines would be literally too deep storage of children's books. She has one of the largest children's book collections in the States and so this skin as you can see wraps around her and this kind of poetic score of dolls weaves around her and to the left is actually a daybed that looks up and down Park Avenue and to the right you see actually a hidden door that will be or that ends up being a little tiny room for her grandkids to hide when they play hide and seek. So there's a bit of Fantasia that she's kind of releasing for her generations behind her but part of this exercise was also of understanding the realities of crafting something on one end of the country, shipping it to the opposite end of the country and have it come up an elevator and be built in another room and so this exercise of systems, here you can see this rigid systems of cabinetry with these vitrines sliding in and then the final product, this kind of moody room with these fiber optically lit dolls to create a somewhat horrifying and also a beautiful experience for her and her grandchildren. So when we started the studio we used to talk about these ideas that came out of making and furniture design and we would argue about whether that could be scaled and whether you could take those same ideas and scale them to an urban design problem and we were lucky enough, this obviously isn't an urban design problem but we were lucky enough to get a commission early in our careers that involved a very large master planning exercise on a vineyard in Sonoma it's the last dry farmed vineyard in Sonoma County and it involved redesigning the vineyard itself which was a real learning experience but also discreet follies in the landscape and structures, a barn, a caretaker house and a main house and our client had this fascination with cartography so we kind of took that as a springboard and developed this idea of cognitive or experiential mapping and how does the body with all its senses encode and decode sensory information and the barn acts as a gate to the property and it actually, the way we situated the structure it acts as a valence that clips your view of the horizon so it creates this sort of for longing experience but it also materially resonates with the vineyard itself and that was another important thing for us is we wanted our work to have an experiential and also physical kind of connection to its place and to allow it to kind of reinvigorate the site so here with the vineyard stakes and the roof and then with a stacked stone wall where the stone comes from the site itself and the walls of the building are we repurposed grape stakes from the old vineyard so it all kind of ties into the history and to the materiality of the place and it's taking that idea that Josh was talking about where first it's a piece of furniture understanding where that piece of furniture comes from and then designing a space around it and this was kind of analogous where the building sits in its room which is the vineyard and has this connection and then you add the experience to that and how is that experience choreographed. The caretaker house has this sentry view over the entry to the property so it's all about panorama. It was organized about a 18 inch thick rammed earth wall the earth comes from the site so it has that physical connection to the site but it also organizes space so that once you pass through that wall you get this panorama over the vineyard. There you can see the rammed earth from the inside and then on the other side of the property hidden behind the horizon of the vineyard is a main house which is actually a fairly large structure so we used the site as a way of eclipsing one's view and kind of masking its size and bulk and organized it in a way that allows morning light to heat it up passively and then throughout the day the light penetrates the house is organized through north south so the light penetrates these long fingers of space and allows a kind of layered lighting and also it's used as there's a lot of gallery space in this property and then you zoom into a more intimate scale and we often talk about the body as being this vehicle for the senses and your eyes are out front navigating and determining your next move and your feet are reading tactile information and acoustic information in this case you get out of a car, you hear the crunching of the gravel on terra firma and then you step onto an entry bridge which we detailed in a way that not only can you smell the wood but you can feel the hollowness and the floating nature of the wood and also you can hear the hollowness as you walk into the building and so this idea of cognitive mapping continues through this project. The materials obviously play a big role in this. The stone we detailed so that not only does it look a certain way but you can actually with your eyes you can kind of feel the weight of the stone the stone is detailed so that it looks as so you can tell it's bearing its own weight and you can kind of feel a heaviness to it which is very important and then we employ nature itself so if the wind is blowing outside you can read that information with your eyes as you look at the silhouette of the trees against a piece of glass. So simple things like that framing the landscape with the architecture and then actually mimicking the landscape with the architecture and creating these layers and these bands of horizon that kind of clips your view as you move through the space. So it's a very choreographed experience that takes that idea from furniture scale all the way to a fairly long protracted choreographed experience and there's a spirituality that comes out of these things that to a greater or lesser extent from one project to the next. In this project here this is a spa retreat in Sonoma we literally graft the building into the landscape. So the physical act of getting to this building and escaping the stress of the day is something we really carefully considered so you don't see it in this image but you leave a fairly busy environment which we did not design and you actually leave the sort of security of that kind of domestic environment and you literally walk through the woods so to speak and we design it in a way that you have to kind of duck under a few branches to get to the stairway and then once you engage the stairway you feel the temperature drop in between these two concrete walls as they carve into the hill and you feel this sense of compression and then on the other side once you descend you arrive at a very open space so it's this idea of having the security of the enclave and also the sense of freedom and egress, visual egress all at the same time and it's a very tranquil experience and then we also we use the landscape on a lot of our projects as part of the architecture so we're relying heavily on the landscape here we're cutting into the hill on one side and then we're looking out the vast landscape on the other side and trying to let the building take the back seat to all that and then there's an idea about milieu or atmosphere and how can we uncover we always talk about uncovering the latent spirit of a place, we did a project on a very large agricultural property in Central Valley of California the sense of place that you get when you spend time there which is something that's really important for us. We typically camp out on all of our sites both urban and rural to really take the time to listen and extract what they was talking about with the latent spirit. Yeah, I mean this is in the heart of kind of agricultural, kind of industrial agricultural California so I'm sitting in my tent at midnight and I hear tractors like serious farming going on in the middle of the night, it's pretty surreal but we tried to, and also it's a very intense climate, it's very hot and so we tried to coal the kind of rural agricultural vernacular and pick up that language, both the industrial part of it but also like the great aqueducts of the Central Valley and use those elements to tether the architecture and the interiors to that context and then also recognizing the vast scale we employ proportion and material that help evoke that and kind of try to reflect and resonate the architecture with the landscape and then at the same time it allows us to create a psychology in this case of cooling and of the sense of grandeur of the existing context and try to literally embed that into the architecture and then there's this idea of this atmosphere or this kind of hidden qualities of space we did a proposal for a winery in Paso Robles, California that where we, and a lot of our work actually we reuse or repurpose old buildings which is far more sustainable than tearing them down and building new ones. Sometimes it's a little more tedious but also it enables us to recapture the spirit of those buildings. So in the case of this winery we are using the new architecture to support both structurally and programmatically the old building. So this old barn that was built in the 1800s can have a new life. So we're creating this building inside of a building and re-imagining what the spaces can be like and giving it a new program. And then there's a social dimension to that as well. This is a scribe winery in Carneros near Sonoma and phase one of this project which just broke ground last week is the remodel of this old historic hacienda. And we spent a considerable amount of time more than I care to mention trying to absorb kind of the qualities the kind of funky qualities that this place has. And through many conversations we started to understand it as having these it's like a palimpsest that has many layers many stories and so the name of the winery actually came out of that conversation of recognizing all these layers and having them allowing them to tell their own stories. So one of the first things we did is document this kind of splendor that this old building has and the design will ultimately kind of reconstitute all these beautiful patinas and residue of the building's past but also give it a new identity. But there's a social aspect to this. In this case we introduced our client to artists and people in the food industry and basically gave their business kind of this made this connection and watch it kind of spontaneously take on a life of its own. So there have been many events at the property which kind of allowed it to These are just groupies for our camping. They just come around and. So that's on the rural side and then on the urban side. Yeah on the flip side again back to the idea of kind of extracting this latent spirit. We were given an incredible opportunity in the heart of the industrial area in San Francisco and Soma where a general contractor purchased this property and wanted to create their headquarters and then add some other rentable space. So they're in addition to creating a very sustainable building but the bar was set pretty low as far as the development aspect but shockingly this is actually a historic landmark building not for it itself but for its association with the left buildings on the left here that was a brick historic brewery but this idea of transforming it allowed us to kind of co-develop strategically co-develop this. So we supplanted just creating a venue which would be all industrial to creating a much more vibrant mixed use project such that there would be a general contractor design professionals and even a restaurant integrated into the building. The idea was to deprivatize the property to create kind of an open dining plaza for the community to gather and break bread. So what we've done is the top floor is a design professional. The middle is actually the headquarters for the general contractor and the restaurant is on the right side and then the kitchen slips below but one of the biggest coups was to convince our client to give up the entire half of the front yard which is a parking lot to this dining court and also convince the planning department to embrace change to this building. So they really basically stated you cannot change the facade of the building. You cannot add new fenestration. What we did was we came up with a strategy where we saved the apertures in red and then we took the apertures that we have diagrammed in blue which were added in the 60s, took the accumulative square footage and created a fourth aperture. So it's a very quiet facade and then enhanced each one of those apertures with these steel armatures which protruded past the building. So you have two entries of viewing and two viewing boxes basically. But equally challenging was the fact that they did not want us to remove the monolithic quality of the building but yet we had two office spaces basically that needed light, needed air, needed circulation. And so we came up with this idea of perforating the facade from smaller to larger holes from left to right and right to left. And what this did was it allowed windows to be integrated behind the screen. So you had light, you had view, you had air. This screen itself actually became a solar shading device and then we maintained the monolithic quality of the building. And this kind of spurred another layer of ethos in our studio of how does every design move have three, four, or five reasons for being. And so you capitalize on multiple design problem solving. I think that's an underrated, if you look at all the design, National Design Award winners, they're all in their innovation, they're really simply solving problems. There's an efficiency. It's not a sexy way of talking about that in a way but it's really efficiency. And it's something that is just very underrated. So here you see as the building goes, these are renderings. As the building turns from day to night, you get this kind of poetic collapsing of the modern, very modern for skin of the building with this very hefty post and beam historic structure below. So it's this old and new collapsing into one experience. And this is again where simple problem solving, we couldn't even afford this grand strategy of perforation without playing with it. So we had to create a system that repeated the 12 panels, flipped top and bottom and back and front so that when they actually milled it, they were able to stack it four deep and you were able to cut the price into a third of the cost. And it's those kind of exercises that only come through collaboration with our makers. And collaboration with the historic commission. And a lot of lobbying. Here's the building in its deconstructive mode and then the final product with the very quiet, simple facade with these vitrines not unlike the vitrines that we started with on the furniture that end up becoming a very sculptural and dynamic facade. This is the top floor of the design studio. And then we were fortunate to be able to collaborate with the new restaurateur in the building, Thad Vogler, who had been renowned for his mixology, experience in mixology. And his goal was very simple. He wanted to create a timeless urban tavern that truly embraced kind of the rusticity of an agricultural experience and simultaneously merged that with a very urban experience. And that there was an honesty to the materials that he was cooking with and an honesty to the materials that we were building with. So here we are again, day one, dividing the front lot in half of the right hand portion would then become the dining court that you see beginning to grow even before the restaurant was brought in. This is day one of the restaurant before we began to transform it. Completely generic space. And we began to work again very intimately with the owner, Thad, and he was obsessed with liquids. So one of the things you don't realize when you're in a restaurant is that your liquids are provided perfectly well at the bar to the people sitting at the bar. But everyone else in the restaurant is basically getting a short shift. And so what he said, the head on every beer, the head on every cappuccino, the cocktails, everything is gonna come out perfectly. And what you need to do that is a secondary bar that is a private bar. So in this diagram, you see two different bars, one public and one private. Everything around it is basically seating. And it was divided into two venues, one permanent, very intimate high back seating and then a more dynamic open plan in the center. And here you see, in section on the lower left is a grotto down below, the main dining in the center, and then the fixed seating is actually kind of captured with this wooden hull, this L-shaped form, which did a number of things. It provided a more intimate acoustic environment. It provided a tactile environment. You could smell the reclaimed oak of the oak staves as you sat in the booth. So here it is in its final state. This collage of reclaimed wood, the actual bar top is a reclaimed barn, beam top, as are the seats, again, the old oak staves clad the walls. On the right you see ductile concrete in its first form in the US, which is a high strength, very sinuous concrete. And this is a, it's a great, and again, one of the things that's a bit odd about this restaurant is we're really, we're creating out of concrete and it's going nowhere. It's a big gamble on the restaurant here. It's a commitment to create a kind of timeless iconic restaurant. So it's this collage of the concrete board form die walls. It was also our first adventure financially into the restaurant world, though unintentional. Basically this happened at right when the dot com crashed. So he lost half his funding and he basically came to us and said, would you kindly invest with your co-fabricators in the restaurant to make this happen? And we did. So the seats that you see is an artisan who custom created these seats. He invested, all the concrete work was invested by concrete works. The metal work also invested in these incredible sculptural light cannons were done by Nick Weinstein. So it's a great, the investors are like family. It's like a great group. So it was truly a passion project in the end. But even like the back bar was created, he had a, the owner had a friend who was a taxi driver who absolutely loved industrial photography. So we created this diptych out of his photography. And here you can see how it collages with the kind of the jewelry of the back bar and what the bar represents. And here again, the ductile concrete was a challenge in a way by the concrete sub. He's like, I've got this technology. What can we do with it? And so our reaction was to create these models of the banquet seats that then became, these are the steel form work that the concrete is poured in. So they pour it from the top vertically down into the form. They peel the form off and then they grind it smooth. It's an incredible material to work with. And here you see it in its final form in situ. So, and again, the only way this succeeds financial is that you create this rhythm of repeated elements and even the MatriD station of ductile concrete. Again, just the proportioning of the scales to the hull and then the collaboration with the metal worker on these light fixtures was all. And again, the incredible Pyrex tubing creating the light and this dynamic interaction with the historic building and being able to create light lanterns basically, which would become the fence for the outdoor dining that both hide the dining and then reveal and entice the viewer in. So, and also planters for them to harvest their crops for the food within. So it gives the customer like a one-to-one relationship with what they're consuming. But ultimately. Visually and literally. But ultimately it's a place for people to gather and come together and make a city vibrant ultimately. So on kind of a grander scale, and I'm gonna go really fast since we're running out of time. This is a new project that we're doing in the Bay, San Francisco Bay area that's re-inventing an old Kellogg's cereal factory and we're doing a production brewery. And the goal, the client doesn't know this yet, but I want it to be the first barefoot beer garden. Cause I've been reading about walking in grass and bare feet kind of brings you into a state of calm. And so I want this to be the first barefoot beer garden you heard of here. But basically it's taking this very banal industrial building and turning it into something kind of in the spirit of the last project more vibrant both during the day and at night. And it does have this indoor outdoor beer garden but also it's very interactive. So the customer experience overlaps with the production experience, which in 95,000 square feet is not an easy thing to do. So they hear the noise, they smell the grain, and it's a very kind of multi-sensory experience. So that's on one end of the spectrum and then swinging very strongly to the other end of the spectrum, like dealing with community, which is really what that's about. And I think it's important that this is, and we're gonna go very quickly here cause I know we need to wrap up, but this is an example of architects seeing a problem within their own community and grabbing it and identifying it and trying to solve it. So this is my son and I, we live a block from the projects and watching the kids at the playground and at the basketball court, basically eating Cheetos and Coke. And we're expecting these children to go to elementary school and high school and perform academically and become useful citizens. Well, it's gonna be impossible if they can't eat healthfully. And so we created a proposal with Alice Waters to create an edible schoolyard, but even more importantly, an organic marketplace so that it actually can buy food within a block of where they live. I mean, it's literally a crime for our own society not to provide our citizens with healthy food where they need it and when they need it. So this is a self-created project. Additionally, we're working in the largest underserved youth population in San Francisco to create a media arts cultural center so that they can understand the power and the viability of the design and media and literary and spoken word arts in their as viable professions. And this is a historic transformation into a modern media arts cultural center. And then similarly for all those farm workers who have children who are the Latin farm workers who are picking the grapes, their families have never gone to college and we're creating a 30,000 square foot ground up high school in Santa Rosa for 100% Latino family high school and they currently have a windowless warehouse that they are sending 100% of their student body to college, it's amazing. And so we're finally giving them a daily high school which will be integrated into the landscape in a really profound way. And lastly, a dream project that we're working on is at Stanford University. We won a design competition to create a contemplative kind of Rothko Chapel for the West Coast in Stanford which is the Windover Chapel or Windover Contemplative Center which is a combination of art, landscape, spirituality and architecture in one 4,000 square foot building. And it's to relieve the student body and the faculty of the intense stress that they're under in a non-denominational contemplative space. So it's a series of water gardens and contemplative interior spaces. So the initial diagram comes from a very narrow site and 30 foot long paintings sliding in and adjacent to a beautiful oak grove. And so you create this kind of womb-like space that you then drip natural light down across the paintings from above and then you open up an entire wall to the adjoining oak grove. And here you see the plan, again a series of water gardens, interior and exterior, and then the interior contemplative spaces as well. So here's a rendering showing an incredibly organic building with rammed earth, highly textured wood floors, wood ceilings where every view when you're looking at the art is equally engaging the landscape whether it's a water gardener or the oak grove beyond. This is the indoor outdoor courtyard, again looking out to the oak grove and across to the paintings beyond. And one of the key drivers to this also was the ability for the students to be able to use it at any time of day or night because stress comes all day long and all night long. So the idea that you could engage it at the paintings from the outside in a protected area at any time. And very quickly some construction shots is showing the formwork of this rammed earth which is a really amazing process. And then as it's stripped a view across what will be a reflecting pool. And you can start to even see already the nature dialoguing with these rammed earth walls in a really profound way and how the light will be raking down from above. It was a really great opportunity to kind of channel a lot of the things we've been thinking about over the years and pull them together into one project. So on that note, a very good friend of ours who we met through the food world. He actually started out as a chef and I think he was a sommelier for Mario Batali. And he ended up in, I think he was at the Rome Academy filming, he got into filmmaking and he was filming Alice Waters over there and has done a number of films. He started this company called 100 Second Video. I hope we got that right. But he, Zach Shapiro. Zach Shapiro. And we asked him to just camp out at our studio and kind of absorb what he saw and what he heard and try to capture that in 100 seconds. So we actually brought that video along and we'll end with that and then we'll turn it over to the panel for some Q and A. There's an ethos in our studio which truly nurtures the exploration of a wide range of materials from the very low tech to the very high tech. Machine has separated us from who we are and our sense of being in the world. And if there's any way our work can reconnect us to ourselves and to place, that's what it's all about. And designing for all the senses is how you achieve that. Thank you for joining us as well. I swear it only took 35 minutes when we ran through it before. The only issue is that you've made us all so hungry with our participants, but. Yes, indeed. I think we'll soldier on. I have a couple of just general questions at first because I know we have some young designers in the room and when one goes to design school, one primarily goes by themselves and then they work alone and they do everything they can to get their degree and then what I find really interesting about your partnership is that I would love to hear a little bit more about how you got to that point and what it means to work in a partnership because I think that transition might be difficult and for a young designer coming out to sort of yet so many successful collaborations results in so much wonderful work. So if you could talk a little bit about that. I will let Josh give his own answer but I couldn't imagine not being in a partnership and quite frankly not being in or being in a partnership with anybody else but it's one of us acts as the, has a critical distance. So while one of us is in the trenches on any given project, the other one acts as the editor. So we're both involved in every project in the office but one of us maintains a critical distance which allows us to see things that the partner in the trenches doesn't see because it's too close to everything. I have seen the most brilliant ideas oftentimes come from the second partner who can see the tree through the woods but the idea of even creating a partnership is a very delicate act because if you, I can't tell you how many partnerships have broken up over the years and it's one of the most important decisions over making your life is who do you want to spend the rest of your life with? And I just remember, I was asked by a lot of people and this is the only one who, who made the cut. You guys want to have a moment? You should have seen us arguing earlier. And you've worked together for how long? 15 years? Almost 16 years. And there are, I think it's important to note that there are trials and tribulations and that fighting and arguing actually is a good thing and that's true for marriage as well as the business partnership. And you talked a lot about, you just mentioned the idea that someone often is the lead and then someone else provides that second opinion that often, how does that apply to, I'm thinking seeing your work here and you're talking so much about work that appeals to all the senses. Do you like divvy up the senses or do you divvy up the ideas? How do you determine who takes that lead? I think that it's happened spontaneously and sometimes the overarching goal gets lost in the minutiae when you're working, when you're trying so hard to solve problems, whether it's budget or schedule or just a design problem, sometimes you lose the bigger, you forget the overarching goal and I think oftentimes the other senses take a backseat to the rigors of the design problem and so that's where the other guy can sometimes step in and point things out. And I also mentioned we have a very democratic studio. It's not just Dave and I dropping sketches off. I mean, we empower our lead designers, all of our designers and we have a small studio, it's only 16 people. So everyone is responsible for designing and carrying their weight and heavily critiquing us and each other. So the project takes on the life of its own and everyone's firing and making sure that we're not missing opportunities. So it's an oddly democratic firm. And I think to kind of build on that a little bit you have a wood shop in the back of your studio, right? Or in the front. It's actually the nicest space in the office. And you've talked a little bit about the aspect of making in your work and then the importance of those kinds of, the tactility of the materials. Could you talk a little bit more about that? Well, it's interesting because when we first started out the wood shop was all we had and so we were always testing. And I mean, to this day, I have to admit my most enjoyable meetings are going to other makers' shops and playing with them on how to improve what we've designed because they're the masters of the medium. And at a certain point, we're co-authoring and directing but they're the makers. And so the fire and the energy, we're always trying to get our studio out of our office and into the makers' studios because the best solutions I think come out from that. And I would add that the most important role that the shop has these days in our practice is giving us a reminder, renewed appreciation for what those other people are doing and the expertise. And part of that is because the scale that we're working on is just getting larger and larger that we can't mock everything up in our own studio. We don't wanna privilege one sense over the other but I think that you make no secret about your passion for food. Where do you think this came from and how do you think it informs your approach to design? Well I think the epiphany that I talked about earlier, we realized that smell and taste which are very closely intertwined are embedded in your memory and you don't lose that. Whereas visual information gets lost very easily. And so the bias towards smell and taste is obvious. And what it does is it actually starts to connect memory to present conscious experience. And that's pretty exciting when you think about it architecturally. And we, as I said, we started the firm at a time when the visual was fetishized with the computer. And we realized that we weren't necessarily interested in objects. We love beautiful objects but how are they experienced? How are they encountered? And what is our work gonna feel like? Not just what it looks like. And so I think smell and taste are kind of the pillars of that. And oftentimes the program types incorporate food, allow you to explore all of it if you're doing it right. I actually have a question for Mitchell. Bar Agricole, which is the project that you talk about here, won the James Beard Award in 2011, I believe. Why was it chosen? And talk a little bit about that. Sure, well I think it's a little kind of obvious in watching the presentation why it was chosen. I mean, I would be speaking for our design committee which I'm not a member of, but I do think that the integration of this notion of finding a sense of place by experiencing an environment and also an experience through the senses is something that restaurants hope to aspire to, that you can't, although we fetishize taste or food, really we're thinking maybe it's scent or even the visual, the actual taste. We don't in fact pay too much attention to it, but we talk about that in another venue, but we don't realize that what contributes to that experience of enjoyment or even displeasure is the physical environment that you're in, the tactility of the materials, the sense we walk into a restaurant in New York and you either kind of love it or you hate it and nothing's happened, but you just entered it. And so I think when you see the care and the craftsmanship in the biggest sense that went into that bar-agricole and think about the guy making the cocktails and the craftsmanship in the kitchen making the food, I think you see a harmony that really speaks for itself about why it won. I actually found that a bit fascinating, the idea that unless you're at a bar, your entire beverage experience is, it's a cliente. You see that in food too now that you sit at the counter and watch the chef because the same thing happened as soon as you have to take it out of the kitchen, it's a different experience by the time it gets to your table. So now restaurants are set up like bars. I mean, the Japanese had this all over us. You were always sitting there one-on-one, that dialogue and that immediacy, but now you can go to 10 restaurants in New York and sit there and be fed just like you're at a bar having that perfect moment by the chef or by the bartender, not even the intermediary, the waiter, who can mess up everything if you're in the dynamic of a restaurant, the front of house, the back of house. Don't touch my food. For Josh and David, we saw those great pictures of Bart Evercole and the wineries, but also the Petrero Hill Project, all of in the community garden and with Alice Waters. Those are very different kinds of experiences, but would you say that there's a common aesthetic that might run through all of those? I don't know if I'd say aesthetic, to be quite honest. I think our hope is that every project takes on a completely honest and unique ethos, and so we're hopefully not dragging aesthetic from one to the other, typically. There's a sensibility that's common. Okay, so maybe what with the common sensibility? And then there's also, and it's one of just considering things that aren't always considered. And then there's also, there is a common theme of repurposing that I mentioned earlier that could apply to many different scales from a piece of wood all the way to a vast urban project, but it also has a social dimension where what we're doing engages on some social level, whether it's the children in a garden or people walking barefoot in a beer garden. A couple more restaurant questions. As I think Mitchell mentioned, we've all been to restaurants, and sometimes food is the least of our concerns, right? We've decided the moment we go in, whether we like it or not. Can each of you talk about what you think makes up a successful dining experience? Who wants to take that? What are the design of it and what might make or break a meal in terms of how design can do that? Yeah, well, I actually, on the front page of the Wall Street Journal this morning, it was a story about shopping with your nose, which is a really timely article. And they mentioned, they talked about the Cinnabon thing, and to some people that they might come, it might be a flock of people following their nose to the Cinnabon shop. For me, I run as fast as I can the other direction. And it's all about memory. And to me, when I smell that smell, it reminds me of a soulless shopping mall. And, but to other people, there might be a sense of comfort. And that's why we all love bacon because there's a mouthfeel that brings us back to childhood. And so for me, it's all about, it starts with food. And you could have, you could be in a shanty and have good food, and it could pull in the greatest or the worst experience you ever had. And that almost creates a virtual space before the physical space happens. So that's how I would describe my ultimate good or bad dining experience. Well, I would have to agree that it starts with the food and you could be on the side of a street in Manhattan or you could be in a $20 million restaurant. And one of those experiences could feel authentic and worth its value. And the other could be a sham and you'd never know which one it is. It could be on either level. I think one of the things about design and food that I find fascinating the intersection there is that the approach is really where the authenticity and the value comes from because just spending money, anyone can serve, open a can of caviar and have an expensive meal. But to make an expensive meal out of an onion and a piece of celery and to put them together to think about the approach that way it's sort of like repurposing old barrels and things it's not that it's the intent that I think that is where the perception of authenticity and value come from. And so for me there has to be a relationship between those things, although if the food is good you're starting off on a better place. But sometimes I think design, to me when there's a lack of harmony between the design, the service and the food it's usually that one aspires for more sets of false expectation and the rest doesn't fit. So that this pleasure comes from the disharmony of those three things because you can have casual service in a casual environment with wonderfully sophisticated but casual food. And if one of those things is off then the whole thing doesn't feel right. For me if the food is bad I'm never gonna consider the others but you do have to find a way to make them fit together I think and that's what makes it good. Josh will probably back me up on this but when we did the project BarAgricul when we would interview for projects we always had this, we insisted that our client care almost as much as we do about each project and for BarAgricul the client exceeded our expectations and that goes to what Mitchell's saying about consideration of what it is you're trying to achieve that client just had a kind of standard that we never thought we would see and it was really wonderful. And similar harmony is a good word because I was gonna say a equal and honest reciprocity between the maker of the food and the maker of the space and when there is an equal and meaningful dialogue between the two then magic can happen and you can sense it as soon as you walk in you can sense it a mile away. And when you get fooled you are heavily disappointed that's nothing worse than walking into a beautiful space where the food is horrible or inverse. But that takes a lot of intent and it takes a lot of integrity both on the owner or chefs part and it takes an equal amount of listening on the designer's part. I would also say it takes a little bit of distance that sometimes I mean my experience has been chefs who can be incredibly passionate and even very sophisticated in their sort of visual representation of food are not always the most sophisticated in their design sense or their space sense and so you also have to let go and let people who can meet you there from the environment space to work together for that to be a success because otherwise you get a bit of a mess which we've seen. And I think that notion lends itself to the idea of collaboration and one thing for people who wanna pursue design careers you can't do it all yourself and even like we're doing a restaurant for Corey Leaf in San Francisco, James Beard Award winning chef he has 40 people in his kitchen and he relies heavily like we do on our team heavily to perform and do the things that they do and it's really pretty amazing to see that work. I think one of the things that we've noticed in the past several years is what we eat movements like slow food and farm to table have gained popularity and how does that kind of changes in sort of our ideas about food and sustainability influence your designs for restaurants and things like that like how do they have an impact? Josh kind of alluded to it earlier in our presentation having a reverence for the stuff you're working with and knowing where it comes from and how it lives in perpetuity is really important both in preparing a good meal and also in designing anything and that could be that applies to the very low tech all the way to the highest tech. I think we're at an interesting moment about food I mean literally like this moment last week for instance where Mark Bitman is writing about organic and GMOs might not be the thing we should be focusing on right now and Dan Barber just released a book called The Third Plate which presumes an idea beyond farm to table that farm to table isn't sufficient in our perspective of the world and what they're all sort of saying I think underlying I've spoken to both of them about it at length is that food is part of a system that actually ingredients don't exist on their own that I mean Dan's point about farm to table is that it just takes a grocery store mentality where you go and get what you want and always expect it to be there and puts it on a farm so that you go you pick the best thing on a farm and you take that and you use it as opposed to thinking about the farm or the grocery store as part of a system that produces food that requires caring for the soil and caring and using the things that aren't really the end result, the beautiful tomato but the cover crops that feed the soil that have to be consumed or used in some way and sort of just a step away from the individuality of each piece of the plate in that instance but I think you could apply it to the design that if you think of the whole thing as a system so the intent isn't just to use these six things and make a pretty space or to use these four ingredients and make a delicious dish but actually it fits into some larger I mean thing your project at the end that tranquility space or the contemplative space at Stanford I think is a perfect idea. It's like how does this fit together and then how together does this move the conversation forward I think only requires that sort of thinking that these guys expressed about approaching a project from the place, the use, the intent of the makers that all of that is a systems approach I think to making, creating a space and you see it in the results I think and in food I think people are moving a little bit towards this idea that you can see it in the food that it isn't just enough to pick the best tomato but actually to think about what helps make that tomato get there and to be a part of that system an active participant not just a shopper who picks it off the shelf I mean I think from the way you guys described your process there's a real similarity there it's the people who produce it it's where the wood comes from it's the physical space it's even the historic landmark board like there's you can't it's not just one of those things right and there's a kind of a macro impact that everything we do will have to the industry so using the mahogany as an example we thought long and hard about that one of the first things we did cut through this piece of mahogany and we had these interesting conversations about as Josh mentioned fileting it into thin veneer so you could do an entire building out of it or does it become this heirloom object that gets passed through the generations which even gives it a longer life and those are the conscious decisions that we have to make as designers and that's the advantage that architecture does have is that it can last hundreds and hundreds of years whereas food is consumed daily but I loved also about that story and that beautiful table was when you said you didn't want to have too many cups of coffee because that would throw out the balance of this thing of what you were doing and I feel like in food we spend a lot of time I find myself saying this a lot lately educating our producers, our makers but the consumers haven't done their part the other side of that I mean that Japanese dialogue between the diner and the chef the notion that you create an environment and obviously you would hope that people use it in a certain way but they also have to rise to the occasion of using that environment in a certain way and in food I think we're trying to I'm trying to encourage the sense that the customer actually isn't always right but the customer might always be willing to learn or be led or explore in a way that you have to interact with an environment the same way I think you have to interact with food I mean it's a little bit like Dan's point you can't just want that perfect tomato you actually have to want the system that produces it and be an active participant the same way with your spaces so there's the Japanese-ness of that project I mean it helped that it was a sushi table but just that notion that it's not about dinner really it's about sort of interacting in this space with this object and what it means I think really applies to food also and will and ought to more I think and I also really intrigued in we'll turn it over to the audience to start thinking about your questions with that balance of that overall long-term impact but also I really appreciated your comment about that being achieved through some short a lot of problem-solving and I think for some of the younger designers in that room that idea that while thinking about that that you're also often looking at things in a different way in order to solve a series of immediate problems and coming up with solutions that you might not have otherwise so yes so that wasn't really a question it was more of that rhetorical question of am I right? No I'm right you are right we agree we'll throw this open to the audience because we're webcasting and this is being recorded with it would be great if you could come up and ask a question into the mic that way it will last forever and it would be great if you could tell us your name and my name's Wendy Moonen talking about the senses of smell and sight and everything I wonder how important noise is a design element is in the restaurants that you're designing Asked like a true New Yorker, thank you Well noise is you measure space with the acoustics but also you it can it can give a space energy but there's something called we call it the creep effect I don't know what everyone calls it but when you're sitting next to a loud creep the creep effect is when you have to talk louder because the space is too loud but everyone's doing the same thing so the decibel level actually reaches it can go like over 80 decibels I think pretty fast and so as tables get seated all of a sudden everyone's yelling at each other and it's just pretty it's fun to watch but not for very long you know it's funny we started to one of the one of our designers moved to Texas and he's like I've got this great commission I'm designing a restaurant and we said well there's two rules of thumb one is make sure you're gonna get paid but also two design your acoustics into the design so they can't be value engineered out so it's so integral to the design concept that they can't take it out because it's the first thing that they do when you get down to that type it's the first thing they do to cut cost but then it's the first thing they add later in a really bad way funnily enough I mean from the restaurateur's perspective I know that every diner complains about the noise of a restaurant in Manhattan but diners won't go into quiet restaurants don't want to be in them so obviously there's a sweet spot there somewhere and often it's the one where it's a noisy restaurant but somehow you can hear that person you don't know how that happens but every the number one complaint and the number one frustration is that no one wants to come into my quiet restaurant and it's all very scientific but it would cost a restaurateur lots of money to analyze it before they open so it's kind of like there's a trial and error aspect of knowing where that creep effect threshold is did that answer the question? More questions? If you could come up to the mic it would be great This is just a follow up question to the stone that was in the vineyard where you could see the weight with your eyes was that rusticated? What was that stone exactly? So we did a lot of research we wanted to create something that was very monastic and very quiet and we did a lot of research to find a stone it's a limestone that had a cleft to it that was very flat and that could be fabricated in a cost effective way that allowed it to kind of sit on itself so you could really feel the weight of it so a lot of stone looks like it's glued to the wall rather than stacked and then the reason is because it is glued to the wall so here it's literally bearing its own weight but it's tied to the wall to a subsurface And where was it quarried? In Washington state Which part of the state? Do you want to buy the stone? Maybe Actually a lot of people have actually asked about that stone That's not his question We started the research in a local quarry and where we actually tromped around in the mud in this quarry and learned about how stone was taken off out of the hill and that led us to a solution that was working with the dimension of the stone as it's quarried so that it reduced the amount of labor involved and the amount of fuel involved in that kind of thing and that kind of led to the design so the design came out of that research and I think and on a lot of our projects, as Josh sort of mentioned you kind of have a vision but you keep it vague enough that when you start to collaborate and engage the quarry or whatever it is the solution is culled out of that collaboration I think that's really important Thank you Hi, my name is Trillby Schreiber and I teach at the School of Visual Arts My question is having to do with food and collaboration and community Do you and your studio have communal lunches of what are even on an occasional basis? Do you support your practice through food? One of our principals actually has self-taught himself how to make artisan cocktails so he teaches all of us how to drink heavily and educates us how to make great cocktails but it's Dave's dream to have a fully working chef kitchen in our studio so that we can all do exactly what you're talking about because he's the foodie, he's the sass But your question about the idea of community is really important as well To be really honest, our practice kind of started to snowball in the residential work early on and we started to feel kind of an emptiness and we wanted our work to vector not just in residential but also in cultural realms and I think engaging in communities that foster or share some of the same ideas about designing for all the senses like the James Beard Foundation Slow Food USA and various other organizations where it enables our whole office to connect to those communities whether it's formally or informally through lunches and dinners and outings and things like that But as far as the collaborative spirit I think one of the unique qualities of their studio is that we actually travel with our staff every other year to a new city and we feast for four days straight and see as much of architecture and design as we possibly can and then spend about two minutes talking about how we're going to improve our studio which makes the whole thing tax deductible A fellow National Design Award winner has an office called Field Operations and I just love Mr. Corner took that name before we could get it but that's a great name and it describes our practice Well, it sounds like a great practice Can I ask a question? Yes I thought it was interesting that you began with that odd little curio room this very interior space actually end in Manhattan and yet your work has evolved to be so exterior or sort of outward seeming you know bringing in the external environment and I would want what I'd love to see is what you would do in New York now which is so different from some of the settings there even the San Francisco one which has a I mean there's plenty of San Francisco ones but a bar I recall in that sort of space like I'd be curious how you would take what you've described and done and plant it on Lexington and then 42nd Street or something We would love to have that opportunity seriously because a lot of it's about slowing down and like we're doing a project in Doha for example in the Middle East and we have an incredible ambassador who is a shake and who is educated both east and west but that opportunity to talk about a completely different culture and landscape but I mean embedding is a curious word these days but really embedding yourself into that context and taking the time to absorb and in this case if it was a social or a community space really taking the time to study the dynamics of Manhattan and then slowly in concentric circles work to that given site and that would be an extra It would be exciting for us I think So if you see a tent on the corner of Yeah, we can't make it That would be the test, right? In the garbage instead of the mud Do you always camp? Yeah You always camp Yeah So even in an urban condition we'll put a tent on the rooftop Oh my God, how funny Not on the restaurant projects but the residential projects for sure Actually some of the wineries we've done some camping My name is Tyler Cleck I'm a fellow Ohioan and Cincinnati grad My question is about kind of your relationship with these makers you know as an architect also we get into these situations where you're kind of forced to you know work with contractors and builders that sometimes are not you know your first choices you know and it seems like you guys have been able to develop these relationships that you can kind of take with you from project to project I would assume Can you talk about how you sort of make these you know take those relationships from project to project and also you know how you have to sort of sell that to your clients you know as this is integral to the end product here as opposed to you know thinking about dollars and cents only and you know bidding jobs that kind of thing That's a really good question There are projects where we don't know who the contractor is going to be at the beginning but when when we're not sure we try to design some tolerance so that there's a little margin for error there's a the project can absorb kind of a a lack of precision and that said I think we also like if it if it's not our first choice contractor will introduce that contractor to subcontractors and other trades people crafts people that will kind of elevate the standard for construction and most importantly we we conclude that we regard them as part of our design team so even if they're not the best contractor they become part of the design team and there's a sense of ownership that's profound when we see on the weekend them they bring their family to the job site because they're so excited and proud of what they're doing it elevates the quality part of the success of that is and we have been dealt some contractors that we had would not necessarily have chosen on our own so in many cases we can convince the client just you know you've seen the quality of the work this is why you'd want to be talking to x y or z when we don't uh... the critical component of that is timing and it's a timing of when you bring the contractor in and we're always pushing our clients to make that decision very early on so that they become a co-collaborator so they become respected as the designer their subs are respected as designers so when the drawings are finalized their subs have co-authored what we've created and that that's where the ownership comes in it's a very european way of working the american way is to to do all your drawings till the end and then drop them off on the contractor's desk and no wonder that contractors like all your architects are idiots you don't know how to build what's because they haven't been there's no dialogue that's been created to extract the most potent details for each and every situation which comes from the makers i mean david i do know how to detail a building extremely well but will never uh... everyone's different every rock step yet the talent level of it of x sub he may do this really well and feel very comfortable doing it a certain way which we have to respect so how do you then i mean one of the other keys to it almost whether you're a chef or whether you're an architect or a designer or a leader in any field it's how do you take this entire room and respect everyone enough that they're willing to gamble and go out of their comfort zone for your cause because it's not your causes everyone's cause and when you get a whole room of people willing to do that you can basically blow away every expectation anyone had and we that's what we try to do every project exhausting but it's worth it well that's all the time that we have and i think that's a great point to end uh... i'd like to thank joshua and david and michelle this conversation will be up on the kupa hua website kupa hua dot org uh... probably in a couple of days after it gets edited and where all the other conversations are and i would uh... ask all of you to keep going back to the site for more programs and to hear more about the museum as we get closer to reopening so thank you all have a good night