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okay should we get started um so first off i'm marissa temple i'm the president of the chicago chapter chicago chapter's been pretty quiet since last march uh with the city being shut down um but prior to that uh you could catch us playing intramurals um hosting happy hours volunteering watch parties um all the works that most chapters do uh but we're definitely eagerly waiting the city to reopen um whenever it's safe to do so as we can return to some type of normal um but in the meantime we're definitely taking advantage of some of the slower times learning to kind of settle and slow down and take kovid for what it is um but we're also always looking for additional volunteers so if you're interested in joining our crew if you're from the chicago area listening in feel free to reach out to chicagohokies gmail.com for more info um and thanks everyone for joining us tonight um brittany do you want to pop on i don't know if you're unmuted or not so my glasses are so weird i am now thanks marissa thank you all for joining us i don't know about you but i spend my whole day on zoom so it's a a treat that you all decided to stick around and continue zooming with us into the evening my name is brittany mabry and i'm the philanthropy chair for our chicago hokies alumni chapter and we're really excited to have aaron with us tonight so i'm going to take just a moment to share a snippet of his background before he jumps into his presentation aaron joined virginia tech in june of 2020 so relatively new to our hokey community and he came to us from the school of architecture at tally sn formerly known as the frank lloyd wright school of architecture where he had been president since 2017 and prior to that was dean from 2015 to 2017. the school was established by as you may have surmised frank lloyd wright himself in 1932 and it has been instrumental in carrying forth its namesake's visionary approach to design and architectural education prior to that he taught at a number of educational institutions including the university of cincinnati university of kentucky taubman school of architecture and design at the university of michigan and the southern california institute of architecture from 2006 to 2014 he was director of the cincinnati art museum previously served as the director of the netherlands architecture institute from 2001 to 2006 and was curator of architecture design and digital projects at the san francisco museum of modern art from 1995 to 2001. he was named artistic director of the 11th international architecture biennial in venice italy in 2008 and has worked professionally for the firm's frank olgarian associates as well as hodgets and fung and he is internationally known as a lecturer curator reviewer and commentator so we're really lucky to have him joining us this evening as well he's written more than 20 books and his criticism and commentary have appeared in architectural record architectural digest art forum the new york times i could go on and on i think um has a lot of accolades and a lot of amazing accomplishments under his belt so without further ado i will let him give his presentation this evening thank you so much aaron for joining us thank you so much uh brittany i'm very grateful for that uh fulsome introduction and i'm very grateful to all of you for spending a few more minutes uh on zoom with me at the end of a long day uh indeed in which i'm sure we've all spent uh a few hours uh doing what we're doing now uh i have to say i wish i was actually there in chicago i miss chicago i have now not been in chicago for a year i haven't really been anywhere in a year so i hope i can get there uh back there i was spending about half a year uh about six months every year for the last five years living in spring green uh and so uh i just recently sent back my uh my my past my easy pass so it's kind of a symbol that i won't be going down the expressway anymore but i hope that i can get back to chicago soon i actually spent a few months living there when i wrote my first book which was on the architect james gamble rogers and if anyone um knows who james gamble rogers is you get an extra award there will be prizes at the end of the day um i also even though you're not supposed to apologize before you start i am going to offer uh a slight apology as justina knows and i think susan knows uh i managed to almost kill myself bicycling home uh down the steep and winding hills of blacksburg this fall uh i wound up waking up in the icu etc and so my mouth and throat are still a little recovering so if i start having frogs and lisps and things like that i apologize for that in advance i look a lot better now than i did when i woke up in hospital i can tell you that um so what i would like to share with you tonight is a is a few thoughts on where architecture is going where it could be going maybe where it should be going the the question that you have to ask yourself when you're in a position uh like that of my my own is if you're going to help about 2 000 uh or 1200 if you just count architects and design students a year come to some set of skills disciplines knowledge and one with hope enthusiasm that they will contribute to the design fields why why are we doing all of this why are these students working so hard why are you as alumni all working so hard in your various disciplines and fields and why are we as a school educating our students and the short answer i have to that you know you have to develop an elevator pitch these days for everything so my elevator pitch is that we are helping our students figure out how to make a world that we can all inhabit and that our children and children's children can inhabit that will be more sustainable in a very deep way not just by using gadgets but by concentrating on reuse and reimagination of what we already have and upcycling rather than recycling how we can make that world open and accessible and enjoyable and equitable for all of its inhabitants and not just the people who look like us or who had the luck of in having an education such as ours and you know we talk about virginia tech's great traditions and it's something we're very very proud of yet we're also very aware uh that black people were not allowed on the campus until as recently as the late 1960s and that many of the privileges we've had at virginia tech and you've had as uh alumni uh were not available to many other people and obviously that's something we want to change and are changing not just in our education but in the practice of what we do in the world of design and finally and this to me is also very important we want to make a world that is more beautiful it in my mind doesn't make much difference if you do all the right things if you do all the right things and they look like prisons they look like alien beings drop them on the earth they have no relationship to our lives our bodies who we are as a community they will not have the effect that they need to have and i'm always very irritated with uh architects and designers i'll give a little chicago uh plug here i get i got very irritated at the last chicago architecture biennale um because the organizers very explicitly said that they really did not think it was important what things looked like and what they were what matters was their social action and i felt that that therefore meant that a lot of the things that you saw there uh in the washington center were really uh missing the mark so beauty is for me very important um so let me show you a few things about what we've been up to uh at the uh over there at cogel and at virginia tech um and uh try to broaden that from there a little bit further into what i think is going on in the world and of course what's going on in the world above all else uh is that we are all coping with uh pandemic um as you also as hokies all know this is a university that is a tier one research institution that knows about health and safety that has an important role to play and has played an important role in the advances in science to help us understand and defeat this disease uh but that also believes very strongly in experimental learning the president of the university president sans mandated that we focus on having as much experience experiential in-person learning as possible and we took that very seriously and so what we did was to rearrange kogel and birchard and the other spaces that we use using not just plexiglas but design plexiglas and coming up with an arrangement that meant that we could guarantee every single student a desk in one of the buildings every single student who wanted it it did not mean that all of our classes were in person but we felt that the core of what goes on at the school of architecture and design is studio teaching and is the work that students do at their desk and so we want to make sure that everyone had the capability to do so and then in addition to that we tried to make use of other spaces outside of those buildings uh including well the weather was good some of the spaces that are sheltered or even completely outdoor around campus then we commissioned this dome that was actually built by buckminster fuller's legacy firm in california and they came and erected it here behind kogel and that's where we can now have uh socially distant reviews uh we had a sort of event performance there and we're hoping that as the spring warms things up soon soon i hope we will be able to have more events in this dome as well in addition to that we have availed ourselves of course of all of the digital means at our disposal if you look at our website you will find a link to the kogo cloud where we are encouraging students to post their work their sketches we think it's important not just to post their finished products but also to show what they're thinking about we're trying to reproduce what is so important which is that sense of walking by a desk when you're a fellow student or a faculty member going oh nice sketch what were you trying to do with that or how where did you get that book or that image and how are you going to use that or could i borrow that and could i use it can i steal your idea i'd like to say the first thing i ever learned in architecture school was if you like and steal it um and that is something we're trying to bring back both in the physical sense uh and in these kind of facilities and in case any of you were wondering no we haven't been vaccinated yet we've been told it's coming uh i guess we're not that essential but uh we hope that by march april maybe may we will uh we will get those uh vaccinations so all of that is taking place here at beautiful virginia tech where we remain slathered in hokey stone and though it's not quite as green as it is in these images it is for me especially as a newcomer a very beautiful place to arrive however and this will transition me a little bit to the issues we are facing what i also arrived when i got to blacksburg and that those of you that come back regularly and come to football games or whatever i'm sure i've also realized is that blacksburg is no longer the small little village growing up around what was a modest land-grant university it is a sprawling entity that has melded almost completely with christenberg's and other nearby towns and that in fact stretches all the way in unbroken line from christian burke through christenburg's to south of 81 and all the way up to price's fork uh where the subdivisions are now reaching even beyond the traditional village of a priceless fork it is also reaching into every area of flat land with the research facilities and other objects that service what has become the fastest growing metropolitan area in all of virginia what is being built is on the whole dreadful uh awful in fact horrible would be another adjective that i think you can use uh and i just realized i i can't imagine that this would be true but if any of you designed uh this particular set of apartment buildings intended for students i apologize a little bit but not too much i'm afraid uh it is really astonishing how bad the additions are uh to what was a pretty little town uh here in the blue ridge mountains but of course that is part of a much larger problem and in fact the problem that i believe is confronting us and is the central problem that confronts us as architects designers and those involved in teaching in that area and that is the problem of sprawl you know when i was up there in spring green it was remarkable that in the five years i was there the amount of open space between spring green and madison which is in wisconsin the fastest growing metropolitan area uh went down by approximately half to 60 percent and the same could be said of the sprawl between madison itself in chicago and of course chicago uh i clocked it now takes if you want to transverse it north-south or if you want to get out of its sprawl it will take you about an hour and 20 minutes if you don't get stuck in traffic which of course inevitably you will so sprawl is everywhere and sprawl is not just the uh ruination of open space and taking it over with a concatenation of human dwellings that reach from here to timbuktu it is of course also the hollowing out of our cities and all of the other factors that go with that sprawl means the complete disillusion of public space of shared community space of therefore a sense of community you know i love using this to illustrate sprawl because as i'm sure some of you will have realized tonight if you were a real audience i could play who uh sorry aaron hey aaron we can't see your slides oh my goodness you're kidding me i'm so sorry oh i've been going on here you should have said something earlier i'm sorry did share screen i wasn't entirely sure until the the last few minutes uh i put let me try it again all right can you see it now yes yes we can and then oh my god that's really that's really awful okay well i won't go through everything again uh sorry that's so weird it showed up with that little green thing around it for me sorry about that um so let me uh so that's what i was showing you this is what we did for uh our co-preparedness the dome and this is what it looks like i'm sure you really want to treasure these beautiful images as long as you can uh and now we're getting into sprawl i think that's where i was all right here i was um so by now i hope people will realize in the flash that uh this is the set or are some of the scenes uh from breaking bad and better call saul uh of course what's great about this is that when i decided that i want to use uh breaking bad as a way to talk about sprawl i googled breaking bad scenery or set and instantly you get that one but two different sites that offer to give you a guided tour of all of the places that breaking bad was filmed in and around albuquerque now what's amazing about that is that the whole point of the show at least from the perspective of someone who is a complete architecture and design nerd is that when you look at those houses there could be a family living in one and there could be a meth lab in the next and there could be a uh architecture school in the third and i say that because one of the schools where i used to teach uh psych was in fact before it became a school a cocaine laboratory that was part of the french connection interesting little back story so in sprawl anything can happen anywhere and there is no clear relationship between the various aspects of this design environment and everything in fact looks completely the same and could be anywhere uh and i once got criticized by someone when i was talking about sprawl and they said i know exactly where i live it's not all the same i live at the exit that has the starbucks and she couldn't understand why the whole room erupted in laughter when she said that there is a kind of sameness about this world of sprawl in which we live where every place becomes every other place and where in fact everything has the same color i discovered this working with students at the university of cincinnati doing a survey of the northern suburbs uh you could do the same thing in chicago we found that the gradations of color went all the way from a dusty dirty uh yellowish brown to a dusty dirtish reddish brown with very little else n between and the german architect jurgen meyer h uh therefore produced what he called the latte manifesto about how everything has the color of latte what keeps this all together what controls all of this is not architecture but of course a systems of control that watch us everywhere at all times and that keep those at that we don't want out as well as of course keeping the weather out and everything else we don't want except of course that we cannot be protected uh and the breakdown of our social uh fiber and our complete disconnection in this world uh in which it is so easy for lies and uh political ideologies to take over from the naked truth of discrimination and social injustice means that this very fragile web of sprawl is ready to erupt at any moment and that also means that the uh previous symbols of what was civic coherence and might like the renaissance center in the background here by john portman uh mean very little as we struggle to find a coherence in our society now in and of itself of course sprawl is not the big problem in the world it's a symptom of a much deeper breakdown of all fixed systems that was um predicted actually by karl marx and friedrich engels back in 1848 when they uh promised that all that will that is solid will melt into air and all fixed frozen relations will break down of course the revolution did not happen instead uh and the corbusier got it wrong as well instead of the revolution we did not get architecture but we got the iphone uh we got the ability to access information to have economic relations and social relations whether it's on chat in chat rooms or through hookup apps or whether it's with your bank and by trading with uh china all in this very slender object that has very little relationship other than itself intrinsically to design in other words we are everywhere and nowhere at the same time we live in a world in which the complete fluidity of information of goods and of people is the norm even in these this time of global pandemic and in which architecture and design has a more and more difficult time trying to define what its role might be it is in fact a place where some wonder whether we are not living in a consensual hallucination and whether in fact we are not ourselves becoming completely part of technology now virginia tech has traditionally uh been a bulwark against this kind of technology so it has rejected the kind of rush into technology in which many other schools have found themselves trying to go with the flow of zeros and ones and bits and bytes to propose forms that are a gathering together in a visual medium of all of the detritus and leftovers of our society now this kind of digital and computer-based work i think is something that we cannot altogether dismiss and i do think that we have to a certain amount go with the flow if only because it is possible to make such beautiful structures as this high-speed train station in hong kong that unfolds out of the landscape to provide a human-made hill that overlooks all of hong kong island from kowloon as well as creating an interior that in a pyreneesian fashion corkscrews all the way down eight levels to where the high-speed trains arrive from guangzhou and shanghai and beyond that even beijing but on the other hand one has to wonder whether this kind of fluidity this kind of easy beauty is not something that is just creating more of the same kind of objects that could be anywhere in the world and uh could have any kind of function within them and in fact also allows for the production of the kind of objects that take the freedom the computer gives you to create forms that have very little to do with our daily lives with how to make an environment that is sustainable or open or beautiful i am more interested therefore in if we are going to use computers and again i do think that we have to figure out how to make computers and computer and communication technology a more integral part of our curriculum i am more interested in how we use those tools as forms of criticism as ways of seeing as ways of knowing as ways of reordering what we see and know around us and reproducing it in ways that begin to offer more critical alternatives i give you here as an example a small building by an architect called vinnie moss of the dutch firm nvrdb and vinnie miles grew up in a small village in the middle of the netherlands and when one day he was sitting as deaths he got a call from the mayor of this town and said mr moss you were born here when you were nine years old you made a drawing and said this is what our town square should look like and you sent that to my predecessor and when you became famous one of my predecessors framed that and it's hanging in our city hall well guess what we need to redesign our city square our town square and we want you to do it however there's one problem no one wants to change it and the only way to pay for it is to put a shopping mall there and no one wants a shopping mall so vinnie mouse went to the small village with a very good photographer and took hundreds and hundreds of photographs of all of the existing buildings and put them all into the computer melded them together blew them up 150 to create the archetypal building that stood for all of the qualities and elements of that area and then printed it on glass so that the effect is a building that is there and not there a building that goes away that is completely unreal and transparent and yet has a presence and even a beauty to it what i would argue is that we are at the ghost or specter phase of architecture architecture has become so flexible so ephemeral and needs to be so spectral and ephemeral to keep up with our fast-paced world that we must figure out how to work with its memories with its imprints and figure out how to work as lightly as possible i for one do not believe in the building of monuments in building for the ages i instead believe in reusing the ages i think that we should not try to make something that will last forever because almost as soon as it is done we will have to renovate it and reuse it and rethink it causing much more waste i think we really need to concentrate on what we already have and there's a very two very simple reasons for that one is if you will ideological or theoretical i believe that in a world of sprawl a world of continual motion a world of continual change we need to produce an openness and an accessibility both to our existing structures and to such shared history as we already have we not need to not make monuments to entrench power or homes for those people to currently have the means to do it we need to open up our existing structures both physically and theoretically as much as possible i also think this has a very important sustainability reason we can no longer afford to use up no natural resources we cannot replenish it is impossible to make a net zero building you will always use up a huge amount of resources even just in bringing the material to the site and in its occupation rather we should again look at how to reuse reimagine and open up our existing structures and we can do so in a way that i believe creates its own beauty and its own design opportunities it's not just a question of uh lovingly restoring what is there it is a question of finding ways to reimagine what is or what was there and i give you here as an example what appears to be this complete fetishization of an existing building by the artist david ireland it was a old worker's house that he bought in san francisco and proceeded over the years to very carefully take selected elements out leave the places where he took off the wallpaper visible and then covered the walls with layer after layer of beeswax leaving as well not only the gleaming surfaces that turned the history into an object of desire and beauty but also the marks of what he had found and where mistakes had occurred i believe that some of the most interesting work that is going on today is where designers are adding on subtracting filling in expanding upon existing structures in the roughest and simplest ways where found circumstances moments of beauty relationships that reach across time and space as well allow people to find a variety of scales a variety of meanings and a variety of textures that they could not find within an existing building the kind of spatial juxtapositions the way in which many different times and uses their marks and their functional elements can come together in one simple set of spaces is to me astonishing especially in a way that is instantly understandable even for those who don't have virginia tech architecture degrees the notion that we can build up what we have out of the leftovers the doors the fabric that we found on site that we can reimagine old structures and old forms with completely new uses is becoming a more and more integral part of architecture uh i the last time i was on the world architecture forum jury which was not this last december when i would have done it again but the december before that we gave the award for the best building in the world so of all of the hundreds and hundreds of entries this was the one building that we as a grand jury decided was the very best building of all the types and all the time kinds in the world it's an old uh tram repair depot that was added on to very very slightly and then opened up to become a library and community center and what i love about it is that it reuses not only the building but also the books and even in some places the paint and also understands that the notion is not to make a complete machine of a building that is enclosed and works in a static manner but rather it works according to the principle that it only heats cools and lights those areas that are being occupied so it has very specific systems that come down to the areas and sense when people are there and allow those areas to be heated or cooled and lit as they are necessary i am continually astounded and fascinated by how architects and designers have found in renovation and in fact in the act of renovation uh the possibilities of new forms and new formal relations of ways of even inhabiting this own this old insane asylum in belgium in a way that promises a new way of becoming sane again and of course it's not just singular buildings it's whole complexes of buildings all over the world we're seeing the transformation of the leftovers of uh our industrial past and you're seeing it in chicago or about are about to see it if some of the plans go ahead i show you here the renovation of uh a central part of the river valley in germany what was once the industrial core of the western world now turned into a beer hall and a museum and a park and garden and a museum and a swimming pool a diving tank and any number of different activities i right before the lockdown went to see the site of the next winter olympics which are happening a year from now in beijing where they are reusing what was once the largest steel mill in the world and turning it into uh the place where many of the activities will will happen and where people will already live i show you here how it's even extending into new built construction this notion of reuse and the flexibility uh when jeff zuckerberg went looking for an architect he traveled all around the world visited various architects offices they showed him great models and he finally worked into walked into frank gehry's office looked around the messy place that that is i i used to work there and said i want this only i need about half a million to a million square feet of it and by now he has almost three million square feet it is made up out of reused materials as much as possible it is meant to be flexible the rawness of these materials allows a direct connection with the human body it doesn't have the sense that it was made for the bosses or for the ages it was made for people to find beauty connection community and work uh in the here and now and with the most humble materials available that can even extend to what you can find in the street there is a firm in the netherlands that has produced what they call harvest maps in which you can organize everything that is in your area area including a whole load of kitchen sinks or a bunch of old washing machines and find a way to turn them into student housing or a cafeteria or take truck tires and turn it into and car seats and turn it into a club and in fact a firm called rotor has now developed a subdivision rotor sub that specializes especially in those materials that everyone thinks are completely useless the elements in 1960s through 80s office buildings and some apartments all that lay in tile all that melamed all that fake wood and bad carpet and they are finding a way to sort it to store it to classify it to detoxify it and to make it into the building blocks for future architecture i was very much brought into this kind of consciousness by living and working in the netherlands as you might have noticed from some of my references where starting in the 1990s a group of designers became very interested in the notion that you could make furniture out of the cast-offs you found at the flea market or that you could take traditional delft blue porcelain and used duct tape to combine it with new blown glass to create a whole new forms you could gather together enough rags and cinch them together with packing ties to create a comfortable chair or you could take the logos of all fortune 500 companies at that point and put them together into a new kind of religious symbol that the designer called the bling bling and that idea continues to this day one of the most influential designers uh some of you might not have heard of though there in chicago you have probably heard of him a lot more than other places is virgil hablo i was actually amazed how few of uh my colleagues when i got to virginia tech had heard of virgil virgil was trained as an architect who got his master's right there in chicago at iit uh and then became a fashion designer a dj now works with vitra works with ikea and uses recycled materials and images and ideas and now is a menswear designer for louis vuitton what is ironic is that uh he does all of that highfaluting work with a very strong social purpose and even more ironically uh the only thing he has not done he's done furniture interiors music art fashion the only thing he has not done is design a building even though that's what his degree is in all of this of course doesn't come out of nowhere and i have to admit to my own biases which by now should be very evident but which are very much rooted in the notion that uh if there is going to be a revolution in architecture if architecture is going to make the world better if design is going to help us rethink and redesign our reality to be more sustainable open and just and more beautiful then it will have to come by gathering together what is already around us collaging it and finding a way of producing beauty out of the amalgamation of what already exists and i probably don't have to tell you but probably one of the masters of doing that is right there in chicago theaster gates uh a man with a undergraduate degree in urban planning uh who then apprenticed for two years with a master ceramicist in japan and produces very beautiful pots by the way and then got his graduate degree in philosophy before becoming an artist and community activist who now of course organizes his activities around the stone island bank as well as around the delta blues monks and the various other activities in which he engages and all around this world the world you can see artists and architects beginning to rethink and reuse existing structures both as a statement and for functional ways we are beginning to see a reclamation of what we thought was beautiful was ugly and cast off and a transformation of that into something beautiful i show you here brilliantly the work of another artist i admire mark bradford based in los angeles who goes around his studio collecting hand bills and announcement from the lamp post and the stop signs brings them back into his studio puts them on canvas slathers them with automobile paint scrapes it off puts on more bills slathers on more paint puts on more bills scrap s away until he winds up with what he calls a map of los angeles a map of the world in which he grew up that is made up out of memories that are both his own and shared and social that has the scale of the city as well as the fineness and materiality of an object that you could touch if it wasn't worth at this point several million dollars we have of course many architects who are doing very similar things a very long time friend of mine who we brought to virginia tech last year was perry kulper now at the university of michigan there are people like marcus passing who are engaging in this kind of combination of computer-based photography based and plan based work to elaborate out the kinds of possible worlds that we might have in the future both as a dream and as a warning who are imagining that we can find within the forms woven all around us the information that gathers all around us the possibilities of new architecture i show you here the work of the french architect francois working out of thailand proposing a museum that would be electrostatically charged so that its transparent skin would finally attract all of the dust and dirt of heavily bloated bangkok to create its own form and its own skin and the same is true of space i am particularly interested in the reclamation of public space that is going on around the world this is a new public square in barcelona which some of us remember as a place of great public spaces of great formality and grandeur well this is one of their newest which is on the outskirts of barcelona in a working-class neighborhood with that just happens to have great views of all of the city over the years he had been filled up first with gun emplacements during the second world war and then with illegally built homes the young architects who won this competition won it by saying take away only enough so that you can see that great view and occupy the space and leave only enough so that you won't kill yourself while you're using it you can hurt yourself you just should not be able to kill yourself and of course by doing so they allowed again memory and materiality to become an integral part of what they're doing of course that strategy has been central to the rediscovery of public space that we saw before coven 19 and that i think has blossomed even during coven 19 in the reuse of outdoor spaces for dining and other forms of public gathering and i believe that the high line which not only is an absolutely extraordinary set of spaces but also has produced over 15 billion dollars of value around its peripheral periphery uh will become an inspiration uh not just for things like the bloomingdale trail which i thought i had in your i'm sorry i thought that was my next slide um the bloomingdale trail which you have right there in chicago uh but such spaces everywhere around the world and of course uh this notion that we can dance and play alive our public spaces should be central to what we're doing so what i'm interested in uh finally is not so much making new buildings as in unbuilding a phrase developed by the architect and artist gordon mudder clark when he took his sawzall all to buildings on new york piers houses in new jersey and the structures up next to the bow board then under construction the ability to find these kind of beautiful spaces within existing structures is at the core of what we're doing it is not should be doing it is not just uh finding them by cutting into the ceilings it's also revealing those aspects of technology that we are ashamed of and try to hide it is abusing and misusing the ways in which we create buildings and interiors it is exploiting the glitches in the matrix to find the possibilities of new forms of order it is taking the breakdown of social structures and finding ways to exploit them this is something that some of you might remember another television reference for one of the seasons of homeland uh in caracas venezuela a building that was never finished and that one night was taken over by homeless people up to the 25th floor they found ways of making it completely inhabitable and completely social these are images taken by the architect the photographer iwan baum working with the architects of urban think tank who went in there to figure out what architecture could do not necessarily to make sure that all the spaces were up to code or to propose additions but rather by learning from the occupants and working with the occupants and showing what was there it is in other words finding new spaces and new ways of use and new ways of thinking about architecture that to me is more important than the sometimes the buildings themselves i am therefore interested not so much in looking up at the latest gleaming skyscrapers as i am interested in the perspective of these crazy crazy russian kids who climb to the top of tall buildings in dubai and hong kong and beijing and look down on what has already been made on the completely messed up world that we have that has its own peculiar beauty and figure out if we can perhaps not jump into that but find a way to create a temporary home for ourselves that is what i tried to do while i was at the school of architecture taliesin where we had a building program that had exactly as it's question how do you uh become at home in our modern world and our students have to design and build their own structures this is a student getting a descript so to speak from uh from uh williams and ted todd williams and billy tim in the form of our pre-final review and over the five years we were there students both created these kind of replicas of existing buildings gathered together the detritus of the desert around us them and painted it yellow because why not found ways of reusing existing structures and opening them up just by the application of film and in one of the last structures that was done reusing an existing student shelter and gathering together all of the dead vegetation to create a new place of habitation in my own work i am continually interested in how we can take our existing structures our existing forms our existing ways of thinking and doing and making and reverse them turn them upside down open them up how we can honor our traditions how we can find ways of building with the past how we can continue the great project of virginia tech and of architecture and design to create a world that is more sustainable more open and more beautiful that's what i hope we will be working on at virginia tech and i hope you'll come visit us there as soon as we can welcome you back onto campus thanks so much aaron that was awesome um i think we're gonna open it up to some q a um and i think as uh you were talking some people had sent in some questions um and the first one is how is the dome holding up in the snow and the cold weather and if you could go back to those pictures um since we kind of missed out on them in the beginning uh okay i will have to share my screen you're going to have to tell me if it's working i'm not getting the green around oh there i am now i'm getting the green around it are you seeing it yes all right from current slide okay got it all right uh how is it holding up it's holding up fine um as i said uh we had an event there last week um the you know geodesic domes have been built in snowy areas for quite some time in fact uh i think the very first walnut no the second one that was built the first one was in carbondale illinois the second one of scale that was built was built in the north pole so they actually are designed to have snow we are able to keep them relatively warm though of course we're very careful with that because it is not the most environmental thing to do when the weather gets a little bit nicer uh we hope we'll be able to more fully occupy it but they they've held up structurally absolutely fine um and students have found ways of using it in ad hoc ways as well as uh for some of our reviews uh including some students who are not um who are not uh architecture and design students there's a person who uh i found playing the bassoon in there uh which is beautiful and i've seen people dancing in there as well uh we're letting all that happen because it's not getting it was getting fairly intensely uh used and now it's in the very cold weather not getting used as often but we hope that we'll be able to use it more intensely in the next couple weeks what's the size of the dough sorry what's the size of the dough oh god i should know that uh better than i do it's about uh 3 000 square feet or round feet uh but i've i've completely forgotten what the circumference is forgive me i i knew all of that i knew everything it's escaped me what would you say are some of the positive outcomes of covid19 on architecture and the future of our built environments that's a very good question um well for one we've all learned how to unmute ourselves on zoom no i do think that we've um realized the importance of of shared in public space uh and i think that there will be a pent-up need and desire for those kind of spaces as we've already seen uh in the kind of proliferation of the tents that we see here in blacksburg and in roanoke as i'm sure you're seeing in chicago um i also think we'll be more disciplined about realizing what we need to be in the office for what we need in to be um in a meeting for and what we don't need uh i personally think that we are going to see and there was just start to be some articles about this we are going to see uh the covet crisis as the turning point at which the already tenuous market for ever more office buildings was going to decline and it would go and become clear that if we need office space it is not to sit in a cubicle or at a long desk but it is in fact to meet to have casual encounters uh to do the kind of brainstorming that we now understand is necessary and possible via remote needs but is preferable in meat space as we'd like to call so i think we'll see a redefinition of the second space of the office towards the third space of the semi-public gathering space and of course that will bring its own social issues with it as well will we see any stylistic changes i don't know i've written several blogs about this i certainly think that you're going to see innovations in terms of fixture design and in terms of surfaces that were already there i don't necessarily think it's going to cause anything but a blip of interest in streamlined design but of course the problem is that you never know hindsight is best uh uh hindsight is 2020 as they like to say and in fact that's a little plug for an absolutely wonderful uh uh video that's out there on the net uh called hindsight's 2020 uh that's a about how one person wishes the world would change because of uh the covet crisis um thank you the next question and actually this is my question as somebody who works in the commercial interiors sector which is incredibly wasteful um we're definitely trying to always sell our clients on reuse and sustainability and preservation but we often find it's a struggle because it's usually more expensive and code dictates specific updates that require bigger changes um as well as the space needing to serve a more modern day function how do you get your clients to buy into these ideas i think that's a very good question i think however that that relationship is changing uh just as the relative uh cost of materials are changing as it becomes more and more expensive to build new and as also the quality of new construction uh becomes more and more problematic not just because of lousy construction but because of ever more stringent codes that makes it more and more difficult to have quality spaces ironically even as they become more safer but that's slightly different discussion sorry look i think it's a real sign of the time that ikea has set itself as a goal of being was it something like 70 recycled uh as of 2035 and they're already up to seven if the place that has figured out how to do furnishings beyond what we ever thought was possible in terms of low cost now believes that they can achieve their goals and their their business goals and their very hard-edged business people if any of you have ever dealt with them beyond shopping there if they believe that they can achieve that while having sustainability and upcycling as a central part of the agenda i think all of us should and you are seeing a lot of the largest contract manufacturers uh the hermann millers the steel cases and those beginning to go down the same route again because of environmental regulations and building regulations they're much further along with this in europe or and in china ironically enough to now uh and i think we're we're still lagging behind but i do think it's it's on the way but i do agree right now it is still a tough uh argument and it also uh though means that as a designer you have to work harder to find materials and find strategies that allow you to get the most out of reuse and it's it's more difficult and of course more time means more money but i think it is should be an important part of our discipline in our profession thank you so much i feel like we have time for one more question and seeing as marissa is our um our alum from your department i think that i'm going to let her pick from the remaining questions which one she feels like is the most important since we only have time for one more um pressure's on um i think maybe kind of going off of what you we just talked about um are any architecture students currently working on any reuse projects at virginia tech and if so could you share those with us um you know i saw that question this afternoon i was quickly scrambling to try and find there of course there are students are working on them but i wasn't able to find any good images of it um there are several thesis projects that look at reuse but in my mind not nearly enough it's not really been an important part of the curriculum and it certainly is part of my agenda and i make no bones about that uh to try to bring more focus of that into into the curriculum uh but it is it is not a very uh prominent part of uh how how we uh have our students working at the moment well thank you so much um and thank you aaron for all of this insight it has been very awesome listening to it all and learning so much more and hearing from you um and thank you everybody for taking an hour out of your evening to join us we really appreciate it um but to be respectful of everybody's time we're gonna wrap up and have a great night everyone thank you thank you for sharing your time with me thanks everyone go hokeys go hokies