good afternoon, all,and welcome to the gsd. we're so happy to see youhere for the open house, which is our warm and welcomingform of hospitality and to tell youabout our school. and as part of the program, wehave this panel this afternoon that's been namedpedagogy and practice. and it serves a dual function. one is to introduce threeof my rather extraordinary colleagues.
i'm very proud tocall colleagues. and that's neil brenner, who'sa professor of urban history, gary hildebrand is professorin the practice of landscape architecture and a principalat reed-hildebrand, and beth whittaker, who'salso a professor of practice of architecture and a foundingprincipal at merge architects. now i want to make two quickprefatory framing comments, the second having to dowith pedagogy in practice, but the first having todo with the panel itself.
and it brings to mindsomething my son said to me the other day-- that myson, the aspiring pythagoras. he said, dad, it'sinteresting that pizza comes in round pieput in a square box and cut into triangular slices. and i like that becausein the context of today, having an urbanist,or someone interested in urban issues, a landscapearchitect, and an architect, it brought to mind what itis we do in this building,
beneath this glasscanopied roof, and the way thesedisciplines come together and interact in verycompelling ways. and i wouldn't want to force anyboundaries between these three disciplines, but rathersuggest the way they are involved in all sorts offascinating interlocutions. and finally, to continuewith the pizza metaphor, if you're wondering aboutmy own role in this world, i teach on the historytheory side of things.
and i like to thinkof history theory as a kind of tripodaltable-like thing that comes in the pizza box. in fact, they'recalled package savers, and it keeps the gooey stufffrom sticking to the box. and that's what historytheory does, pure and simple. look, by way ofdescribing or discussing pedagogy and practice,and what's going to happen is i'm going to invite mycolleagues up in a minute,
and they'll present theirwork, and then we'll gather in a panel discussion. but i wanted totake on these terms. i'm not going toaddress directly the meaning or use, or perhapsmisuse, of the terms pedagogy and practice, muchless their origin, as i am fairly well convincedthat many, if not most, indeed all, etymologies are falseand misleading, which is why they're somuch fun to engage in.
and in fact, give thepanelists the opportunity to define practice andpedagogy in their own way. rather, i want to suggestvery quickly how pedagogy and practice are related. and for my students in thelandscape architecture history sequence, you just satthrough a lecture of mine on how the landscape isproduced with prepositions-- ie, above, below, before, after,to, and from-- the approach i'm about to takeshould be familiar.
so i trust the and. pedagogy and practice. and, as you know, is acoordinating conjunction. it adds to the other thingsor clauses or statements of the same rank. there's no bias. it is just that. they're additive in nature. but we might ask howpedagogy and practice
become cumulative in asense, if not successive. so inasmuch as and is aconjunction-- and keep in mind, and more recently,and has become a noun. and as you will learn when youenter the program and study computer programming languages,and is now a boolean operator. but about that, i cansay absolutely nothing more than that. let's look at anotherconjunction, or. you can say pedagogyand practice.
there's another strifeor possible tension, pedagogy or practice,or practice or pedagogy. how one mightdisallow the other. and clearly what we'regoing to talk about today is foreclosing thatsaid possibility. or is also a correlative. i said pedagogy or practice,either practice or pedagogy, neither practice nor pedagogy. these are correlatives, whichinvolve some type of causation
or subordination. but the most interestingcase for us to make is perhaps pedagogyas practice, which is i think somethingthat probably happens in this school,or practice as pedagogy. and as is a muchmore elastic term. it's a more practical term. it can used as conjunction,a proposition, or an adverb, depending on context.
and all the disciplineswe are involved in are both context-basedand context-producing. it can be used as a conjunction. the student learned asthe teacher practiced. a proposition, where itrefers to the function a person occupies. she practices as a pedagogue. or as an adverb, where it showscomparison or equivalence. pedagogy is asinventive as practice.
and you can substitutefor inventive grueling, revealing, constraining,tiring, et cetera. so what we do withinand beyond the gsd-- and here's thosepropositions again -- with regard to pedagogy andpractice is what we're here to discuss today. and if i can give onefinal gloss to this, i want to suggest a particularusage of the word as. and this is in the formulationof the german philosopher hans
vaihinger and for you historytheory types, he was a specialistin kant who's frequently mentioned in thisvery room in btc sequence. but in any case, vaihinger wrotea book called the philosophy of as if. we can interrogate the partof speech of if in a second. this book was published in 1911. and some of youmight be thinking
that was the same year asfrederick winslow taylor's principles of scientificmanagement, which is telling, althoughvaihinger's book was composed, in fact, decades earlier. but in talking aboutthe as if, we're talking about ittype of operation. not a boolean operation assuch, but operative fictions. and this is what vaihingerwas interested in, of thinking and actingas if the world were
like our reasonablemental constructions of it because what elsedo we have to go by? that's what we work with,that's what we work on. thought, vaihingersaid, is an instrument in the service of life,and these instruments take the form ofuseful fictions. as if. compelling fictions. fully rendered fictions.
while what we do in pedagogyand practice here in the gsd is largely interrogating thefiction of our own renderings as such. so i don't mean to get allphilosophical with this, which is really not my strongsuit by any means, but i wanted to open up a spacein which we can put together pedagogy and practice withoutnarrowly defining them from the outset. and in the presentationswe're about to hear,
and the conversationi hope to stimulate, think about these possibilitiesof pedagogy and practice, pedagogy as practice, orthe as if of pedagogy, where gives rise to practice,or the reverse case. so with that, let me introducemy first speaker, who is neil brenner,as i said, who's a professor of urban theory, aprolific and quite influential writer in this field who engageshis students in the seminar room.
principal, is thata fair statement? no. no? elaborate. yeah. but that's a pointof contention. one of the issues iwanted to address later is where thispedagogy in practice takes place-- whether it'sthe classroom, lecture
hall, studio, office,on-site, off-site. because these tome are important framing devices forhow we think about what we do as practitionersand pedagogues. so, from [inaudible]. [applause] i just teach a lotof lecture classes. that's the only corrective. so welcome everyone to the gsd.
it's great to have everyonehere for the open house. what i want to do is actuallyreflect on the role of theory in pedagogy andpractice at the gsd. and i'm someone who believesvery passionately, very strongly, that theory isessential to every dimension of pedagogy and practice. and so i want to explain why ithink that and the implications of that particular proposition. so i teach-- letme get this going.
i teach a lot of theory classes. and i've been doingthis for a while. and i recap i encounter indoing that a lot of resistance. and when i encounter thatresistance i reflect on it, and try to make sense of, whatis this resistance to theory? and i have a lot tosay about that topic. but for the moment, i would boildown the resistance to theory to two basic orientations. the first one is theorientation towards practice.
so i put what is tobe done? by lenin, but there are manyother versions of it. the idea thatbasically, there are urgent matters inthe world that we need to confrontimmediately, and theory is a luxury that preventsus from getting down to the business ofconfronting those challenges. that's a position that i'm verysympathetic to in some ways. but there's a second formof resistance to theory
that currently is experience--this is really hard to push. hang on. there we go. a second form ofresistance to theory that is currently experiencinga certain kind of renaissance. and i would describe thatas a kind of big data geo-science orientation. this is from a magazine articlein wired a couple years ago, "the end of theory," andbasically arguing that
with the rise of bigdataa-- and we could also add to that the rise ofnew technical capacities for mapping manylayers of the world-- that theory is nowirrelevant or obsolete. we don't need theory because wehave technological capacities to analyze all kinds ofprocesses and regularities without bothering with it. so i fundamentally rejectboth of those positions. i think both of thosepositions are not only wrong,
but in some waysmisleading and dangerous. and so i want to offerthree opposing or opening-- well, opening andopposing propositions-- for why theory matters both topedagogy and practice in all of the design disciplines. first proposition,i want to argue that theory is a basisfor deciphering in life. it's not opposed to therealm of history or practice, but indeed it is the onlybasis on which we can
decipher practice and history. the question isnot whether or not to engage with theory, buthow it reflective we're going to be about thetheories that we always already presuppose inthought and in action. second proposition. interpretations i want toargue-- that is to say, theories-- shape theproduction of space. so every key concept, iwould argue, in the design
disciplines, inarchitecture, and planning has a contested history, andthe meaning of those concepts change over time. and furthermore, thechanges in those meanings of interpretations havereal material effects. so the way weinterpret the world, or the way we interpretthe built environment, the unbuilt environmenthas massive implications for what we cando, for how we even
conceive the possibleof what we might do. so theory in that sense is nowdisconnected from practice. it's an always alreadypresent dimension of practice. and thirdly, i would arguethat theory actively animates political values and struggles. it's connected, in otherwords, to normative thinking. the struggle for the goodlife, the struggle for justice, the struggle for sustainabilityand any other values, equality, that we mightconsider important.
so there's aphilosopher of planning named bent flyvbjerg, who buildson aristotle's distinction between techne,episteme, and phronesis that i think isquite relevant here. so techne is technical,instrumental knowledge. episteme isscientific knowledge, the search for causes, andphronesis is practical wisdom, reflection on thenorms and values that render the world meaningful.
and i want to arguetheory is actually relevant to allof those, but it's particularly relevant tothis question of phronesis. and as such, without theory,the design disciplines are going to beextremely disoriented. we need to be reflexive aboutall of the dimensions, all of the theoreticalinterpretations, normative and otherwise,that we're presupposing. so that's a verygeneral commitment
that i wouldelaborate in relation to a variety of differentfields of design practice and design scholarship. but what i want to dowith my presentation here is just try to concretize someof those general arguments with reference tothe specific field that i spent all my time workingin, which is urban theory, and basicallyreporting on the work that we've been doingin the urban theory lab
here at the harvardgraduate school of design. so the urban theorylab, our core question of pretty much all ofthe work, both abstract, visual and concretethat we do, is to ask the question ofwhether inherited frameworks for thinking about, mapping,and influencing the urban are in fact adequate tocontemporary transformations in the world. so in this sense, theoryis both a starting point
for our work and a goal. so we start withtheory because we're trying to reflexivelyinterrogate the theoreticalassumptions that inhere within all different frameworksof urban scholarship in action. but at the sametime, it's a goal because part of our agendain the work that we're doing is to try to invent newtheoretical frameworks that might more adequately enableus to understand, to map,
and to influence urbanizationprocesses that are rapidly kind of ricochetingaround the world. so to illustrate this idea,i'm just going to interrogate, critically reflecton, in some ways, what i think is one ofthe dominant theoretical meta-narratives of our time. and it's a pretty simple idea. it's just the idea thatwe live in an urban world. so we hear that all the time.
it's usuallyconnected to the claim that 50% of theworld's population now lives within cities. and as i'll explainin just a moment, there are many otherversions of that proposition. but the notion of we live inan urban world- in some ways, i think it's fair to saywe all pretty much take it for granted. but i want to ask thequestion, building
on this kind ofreflexive orientation that i've just developed,in what sense is it really the case that theworld is urban? so the dominantspatial imagination through which thisquestion is approached is the idea of the city. and there are manydifferent interpretations of this condition of the city. and there are many differentspatial representations
of that condition. so it's usually in themainstream definitions, dots on a map, whichare configured according to the size of populations. this is from the united nations. and that's often connectedto the proposition i mentioned a moment ago,that we live in a majority urban world, because more than50% of the world's population that's also fromthe united nations,
and it's repeated far and wide. and it's basically premisedupon this notion of a kind of urban-rural divide. all space in theworld is either-- you've got two choices. it's either urban or rural. and the fundamental, kindof empirical question is counting population, decidingwhich settlements are cities and which aren't, and thenfiguring out the distribution.
so it's a kind ofdistributional model. and the urban age inthis sense is simply the sands in thehourglass moving from the rural side of thehourglass to the urban side. obviously, there are moresands in the hourglass that are constantly beingadded, because the world's population is growing. so that's one dominantversion of this "the world has become urban" narrative.
another important versionis a more economic version. so dots, but nowconnected by lines. so this is from john friedmann'smodel of the global city system in 1906, theidea that global cities are the nodes of command andcontrol of the world economy. so it's not justcity population, but it's connectionsbetween cities that engender the economicimportance of cities. and yet another visualizationof the same thing
from richard floridaand others is this idea, very powerful inmany ways, of a spiky world. so what richardflorida's arguing here is simply that themajority of national gdp is produced within the big,dense settlements that we call cities. and yet another versionof the same thing is the kind of obsessiveconcern of many governments and internationalorganizations to come up
with world city rankings. and there's probably like,100 different methodologies out there forranking world cities, embodying the idea of ahierarchical system of power among cities in the world. but all of thesepositions-- and there are a few other versions of it. there's anenvironmental version. but for the moment, thepoint is simply this,
that all of thesedifferent positions, whether population-based,economic, or environmental, they converge aroundwhat i would argue is not just an empiricalposition, but a fundamentally theoretical andinterpretive one, which is that we livein an urban world, because we live in a world ofcities-- city populations, city economic life, cityenvironmental strategy. and i want to argue that this isnot simply an empirical claim.
there are many empiricaldimensions to the claim, but it's not purely empirical. it rests upon a number ofunderlying interpretive spatial assumptions that, in fact,are highly problematic, i want to argue. so first of all, what arethe theoretical assumptions that underpin thesedifferent widely taken for granted meta-narratives? so first of all, the notionthat the city is a settlement
type, which is distinctfrom other settlement types-- suburban, rural,wilderness, and so forth. secondly, the assumption thatthe city is spatially bounded. that there's a clearseparation of these units from a putatively non-city,or non-urban outside. and thirdly, it's in some ways avery crude and totalizing view, because the model of the urbanworld in these approaches implies that these city-likeunits are effectively replicated acrossthe entire territory.
so settlement type, spatiallybounded, and universally replicated. so in our work inthe urban theory lab, in my scholarly work,and in my teaching, i'm making a lot of effortto critically interrogate this assumption, or this set ofassumptions based on the idea that today, theurban has exploded, and that the inherited setof assumptions, spatially and otherwise, thatwe traditionally use
in scholarship, and indeedin the design and planning disciplines, to think theurban need to be radically reinvented. so once again, i've gotthree propositions for you. so the first one isthat instead of working with this universalnotion of the city, i think it's more productiveto differentiate and diversify the notion of agglomeration. there are many spatialforms of agglomeration.
there are many politicalforms of agglomeration. and agglomeration occursat many spatial scales. and in contrast to whatmany economic geographers and economistscurrently argue, i would argue there are manycauses of agglomeration. the search for a universaltheory of agglomeration, which goes back about acentury, is arguably misguided. so there is no, fromthis point of view, there is no singleform of the city.
so the chicago schools,dart board model, gottmann's famous territorialextension of the urban. if you look at densitymaps of the ganges plain, if you look at satelliteimages of the po river delta, you can just begin toopen up the question of many layers, and fabrics, andvectors of urban agglomeration that are part of contemporaryurbanization processes that are very hard to subsumeunder a generic notion of the city.
second proposition,and in some ways, even more central to thework we're doing here in the urban theory, is thaturban agglomeration is not the whole story. in fact, we need tothink urban agglomeration in a relational way, connectedto a variety of transformations outside of the cityor the agglomeration. outside the bigpopulation centers. so just a fewvisualizations to give you
a sense of what i have in mind. some of these arefrom the 19th century. some are from thepresent period. so logistics,infrastructures, rail traffic, from a brilliantstatistical cartographer named minard in 1861,telegraph cables, so the whole communicationsand transportation infrastructure ofthe world is part of the urban fabric, and ofcourse, contemporary submarine
cables that make allof our smart phones and so much else operate arepart of the weave of the urban beyond and among the cities. also increasingly,urbanization is a large-scale continentaland intercontinental project. this is from felipecorrea studies in the south america projectof the ursa in latin america. so new very large scaleprojects of economic integration that involve huge amounts ofsunk capital in infrastructure,
also creating avariegated, unevenly developed urban fabric acrossplaces, territories, regions, and scales. contemporary debates aboutthe environmental footprint of cities are yet anotherway into this, basically underscoring the point thaturban consumption patterns hinge upon massive landuse transformations in a so-called ghost acreagelocated often far afield. so we need to thinkthe urban condition,
not just via the city,but via a variety of urban transformations. and in a certainway, as my colleague at the eth, milicatopalovic, has argued, putting thecity under eclipse such that we can seethis urban fabric, these variegated conditions. and this brings me toa third proposition, which is a lot of mycurrent work at the moment
on the hinterland. so we need to develop,i want to argue, new frameworks for understandingnew infrastructural, political, and spatial strategiesthat are emerging within the spacethat's traditionally understood under the rubric ofthe rural and the hinterland. so i want to arguethat in many ways, the hinterland is becominga terrain of urbanization. the hinterland,in other words, is
being urbanized, but not becausein this traditional sense it contains citiesor big populations. oftentimes, thehinterland is increasingly being depopulated throughenclosure, dispossession, and displacement. but rather, the hinterlandis being urbanized within this frameworkthat we're developing, because it's becoming anoperational landscape. that is to say, it'sbeing operationalized
through industrial agriculture,industrial resource extraction, industrial forestry,industrial logistics, in order to serve the urban way of lifethat is increasingly being generalized around the world. just to give youa few impressions, this is the cover ofone of our recent books in the urban theory lab. you may recognize it'sthe northern alberta tar sands, a highly environmentallydestructive landscape.
obviously, not a city--although it's close to a city, fort mcmurray in canada. but i would argue we cannotbegin to understand this condition if we classifyit as rural or even just as the hinterland. it's an urbanizedindustrial landscape. but at the same time andperhaps even more provocatively, i would argue that we can'tunderstand our way of life in the big dense megacities of the world
unless we include this conditionwithin our understanding of what cities actually are. so it's not just aboutlook to the hinterland, look to theoperational landscape. it's about how doing thatchanges the way we understand agglomeration itself. and a few other imagesfrom the same photographer who took the cover image ofour book, garth lenz and also some industrial agriculture.
and this one is from edwardburtynsky, who i think is pretty well-known here. and also, waste landscapes. so i just got afew minutes left. and in the remainingtime, i just want to give you a quickimpression of the work that we're actually doingin the urban theory lab, connecting our researchagendas, our agenda is related totheory development,
to teaching, and to a kind ofa research-oriented seminar that i teach every spring. and a lot of it isfocused on visualization and using counter-visualisationsof the dominant urban method narratives of ourtime as a basis for developing new theories. so we do this, as i mentioned,this studio or research seminar, every spring. and we have an end of thesemester kind of review
in which we evaluate the work. and some of the workthat we've done, which i'm going toquickly summarize now, is also an exhibitionwhich we took to melbourne schoolof design last spring, and which in a coupleof days, actually, will appear in theshenzhen biennale. so just some quick impressionsof what this is all about. so here, what wedo is we critically
interrogate another imageor visualization, which is probably one of the mostpopular representations of the anthropocene,or of the urban age. and that's, of course,the nighttime lights map. a fascinating map. we see all of theselights, and it's used as a kind of proxyfor the urban condition. in fact, even in termsof the lights themselves, the map has beensystematically scrubbed
based upon meta-mtheoretical assumptions. so here's the unscrubbedversion of europe. it's pretty sprawling. there's a lot oflight pollution. and they scrub it, becausethere's an assumption that the city is bounded. you also mightnotice-- this is work, by the way, by nikoskatsikis, [inaudible] student here in theurban theory lab.
he's now put in redsome of the areas that they deletedfrom the map which are in the north sea,and various parts of the mediterranean,and elsewhere, related to resourceextraction activities that generate light pollution,and therefore need to be scrubbed out of the map,because otherwise, it doesn't mean what we want it to mean. and here's another classic.
this is north dakota in thebox, where a lot of the fracking is going on. so there's a lot ofmeta-theoretical moving around on this map, even before youcritically interrogate it. but even aside from that-- a lotcould be said about that-- even aside from that, what'smost striking to us given the framework we'redeveloping within our lab is that most ofthe map is empty. so as a kind of test case andas an experimental strategy
for our work, wedecided to actually look at the empty spaceson the map, the supposedly empty spaces onthe map, and to see whether we could useour framework as a way to develop other visualizationsof what's actually going on in these zones. so we looked at the pacificocean, the arctic, the amazon, the sahara, theatmosphere itself, the himalayas,the gobi, siberia.
exactly the zones on themap that appear empty. and it's been a long project,a couple of years now, and we're trying tobring it to a conclusion, basically lookingat three issues that we think are central toglobal urbanization-- land use intensification,connectivity infrastructures, and socio-environmentaltransformation. and just by way ofconclusion, i'm just going to scroll throughsome of the images,
the counter visualizationsthat we've produced. and even within about a week ortwo of starting this research seminar three yearsago, immediately the map started to fillup with alternative ways of understandingthe infrastructure, the fabric of urbanization. they're not empty at all. they're undergoing a processof infrastructuralization and operationalizationconnected to our current moment
of planetary urbanization. so just in conclusion,let me just share with you the work that we've been doing,and which is in our exhibition. so this is grgabasic on the arctic. this is ali fard and ghazaljafari on the arctic. so different issues relatedto resource extraction. this is severalstudents and colleagues in the utl, danielibanez, ali fard. the amazon, a wholerange of activities
being infrastructuralized,operationalized. tamer elshayal, mariannepotvin, danny ibanez and others, resource extraction zones,infrastructural transformations in the sahara. vineet diwadkar looking atthe kind of transformation of the himalayas intoa hydroelectric machine to fuel urbanization inboth china and india. grga basic, again, looking atdust storms in the gobi desert, and asking the question ofthe ways in which beijing,
as it were, is becoming gobi tothe degree that transformations of the gobi are affectingand transforming urban life within the big city. the pacific ocean,matthew brown, a resource extractionzone, a highway corridor, a zone of geopolitical conflict. more on the pacific. and still more on the pacific. and then finally,just by way of ending,
the atmosphere might seemlike a crazy proposition. back in 2003,georg simmel argued that if all of thepocket watches in berlin were to stop simultaneously,the whole city would grind to a haltand fall into chaos. i would make thesame argument today, except the relevant referencepoint is not the pocket watches, it's things likethis, which are immediately connected to manydifferent layers
of infrastructuralizationand operationalization of the orbits. so rob daurio, melanypark, and others in our lab have been trying to visualizethis as an urban space. final point, and i'll stop. so the upshot ofall of this for me is that the current conditionof planetary urbanization, the cities matter a lot. they matter a lot.
but the fundamental issuehere about our current moment of planetary urbanization isnot necessarily the cities themselves, but the ways inwhich all of these broader urban landscapes arebeing operationalized, infrastructuralized,and enclosed in order to support our currentformation of urbanization. thank you very much. thank you, neil, forthose fascinating words. and just is a marker ofmy own antiquarianism.
i referred to seminars earlier. but the term ishould have used-- and it's prevalent throughoutthe gsd-- is laboratories. and that's a spacewe should probably discuss during the panel. so i'd like to introducebeth whittaker, who's going to speak about herpractice in architecture. thank you, ed. and thank you, neil.
that is tough to follow. so we're going togo from as big as it gets to talking aboutteeny tiny wooden dowels, and then slightly bigger. so thank you for having me[inaudible] and inviting me. and i'm thrilled tobe here, of course. i've been teaching at corestudios now for, i think, six years. and i have a practicecalled merge architects here
in boston. so i just wanted to startby talking about how much i enjoyed ed's discussion aboutthe and versus the if, then, the as. all that, becausei am asking myself, full disclosure, every week. is it and? is it with? and gary and i werejust joking, we wake up,
and we're like, which oneis going to lead the day? so the work at mypractice-- and i founded it about 11years ago, 12 years ago. what do i enjoy with teaching? and my practiceis here in boston so i'm not a new york architectthat's flying here and there. i'm very muchworking in the city. not neil's city, but theurban city that i understand, the one that'sfully built, which
is boston, which is not easy. and so there's been thisreally great feedback loop between the physicaland the abstract, obviously, with teaching. and what i love with firstyear core studios, which is what i've been,for the most part, teaching this year-- i'mteaching second year-- is really getting thesestudents that, yes, some have backgrounds,some don't, and trying
to turn very abstract ideasfrom an economical background, a mathematic background,a philosophy background, into spatial, architectural,tectonic ideas. my practice is building. we've been buildingsince day one. and i'm going to showyou quickly a series of very small projects. but i think i need to showyou just enough so that you understand how wework, and how i think
it resonates with the students. so my background beforethe gsd, before i even was a grad student here, wasan undergrad in a design school that had textile design,landscape architecture, architecture, graphics product. so there were a bunchof 18 and 19-year-olds with all this raw talent. we were just making stuff. and that reallyplanted the seed for me
of how i work through my work. i would describe my practice,if we're going to try to, in terms of where we trafficin this kind of big discussion of contemporary practice. we're very much a hightech, low tech kind of high touch practice that'svery interested in the tactile. so we're veryinterested in craft. i would emphasize the low tech. and because i thinki like thinking
about how to makethings, but also because we have had thesesmaller projects to build a body of work, so we have hadto find what i call the core project within the project. so we're not apractice that's been doing a lot of installations,temporary installations, which i am extremely interestedin, but have rather treated our kind of normalprogram typology projects as permanent installations.
so let me just kind of jump in. and what i do in the studiosis to try to really bring home this idea of thinkingthrough making and developing through making,and that there has to be a bit of a hugeamount of faith and leap, especially in thefirst two years of core to get these ideas out, toactually explore and experiment with your hands, and actually tosee, turn around, and then kind of redescribe what you've done.
which is basically whatwe do in our practice. so this firstsmall project, it's called a peg wall-- private,residential loft built out. super small. and so i'm goingto try to just talk about the core project of each. we did a loft build out. the whole thing. but this piece ofthe project was just
an extra room up ona mezzanine level who wanted a secondbathroom and a bookshelf. he had this big book collection. so we tried to combine the two. and so we had this simpleidea about these four by eight sheets of plywood that we wouldsee and see cut into this just grid of half inch routed holes,and then insert 42,000-plus wooden dowels at differentdepths to create this undulating surface thatwould then, therefore,
also become the bookshelf. so super small. we are also kind of aquirky design build shop. i've never actually putthat on our website. but we not just design thingsthat need to be handmade, but we actually make themourselves quite a bit. we are constructing a lot ofthe pieces on our projects, so we may have a big unionshop doing 95% of the project, and then merge comes in anddoes the other 5%, part out
of necessity of budget,part out of passion for actually getting it right. and the people in boston don'tknow how to build this stuff. so we really are hands-onwhen i say we're hands-on. so this is a hidden door in thesurface into this space within. and i'm going to try to gothrough these first few really quickly. but that's an idea aboutthe core project as a wall, as a surface, as away of fabrication,
and very interestedin how to make do with off-the-shelf products. so this one is verysimilar, in a way, in terms of taking these--this is a different project. we were asked to design aprototype for a day spa, where some interesting guys fromharvard business school that have nothing to do withthe pedicure industry, but they know howto make money-- and they have now franchised.
there are like, 20 of them. and we did the first four, andwe came up with the first one. and so we were tasked withinventing a kind of branding mechanism that would be scalableat many different spaces throughout the country. but the reason why i showthis project-- so these are four by eightsheets, similar to the last project,cut wit this pegboard. but just by simplyback-lighting it,
we have hybridised a programwhere it is actually rented out as an event venuein the evening, and they make thissecond source of revenue. so by very simplematerial strategies, we've actually kind ofreinvented the program and choreographed anew way to use it. another project, thisis a clinic of sort. and again, we had a gcbuild out the whole space . and we focused on thewall in my office.
we designed the wholespace, of course, but we actually physicallybuilt this wall. and so this was an idea abouta way of bringing light, if i can go back to thatimage, bringing light down into a two story space that waswindowless because of the way that it sat on the site. so we came up with this way ofdesigning a series of cnc ribs, and then wrapping it ina super thin poly carb surface with littlerods, and creating
this kind of spatialdivider that would actually grab the light and makethe whole lower space glow. and so, pretty simple,cnc method with the ribs, and then us. these are people from myoffice actually making, and assembling, fabricating,and then constructing. ok. so last interior project, ithink, is a lincoln laboratory. mit lincoln laboratory,a fascinating company.
they have like 600,000square feet out in lexington. they are the go-to companyfor the government. they invent the radarsystem for our us military. they collaborate withmit school of engineering on what they callcapstone projects. and if it gets legs,they take it out to the big boysout in lexington. but they didn't have aphysical space on the campus. and so they were losingall these incredibly bright
students to google,another client of ours, because they had betterspaces to work in. so not only did they needa new space near mit, but they inventeda whole new entity, which is called beaver works. and so, our challenge wasto, in a very tight space, try to socially organize inthree very distinct spaces. i'm not sure how this works. the laser?
so this is a classroom. this is a lounge/coffee area. and this is, believe it ornot, a top secret, very secure wall here space forlincoln lab, where they are testing drones,simulated drones, in real time in this corner. so the fbi was atthe opening party. so it was kind of aquirky project, where it's just a lounge,it's a classroom,
and then there's all this reallycool top secret stuff going on that they do sharewith students, so this is kind of a rapidprototyping fab lab of sort. there's a workshopdown the corridor. just again, there are a lot ofthings that i could talk about with this project, but somethingas simple as these objects that divided the space, andthen socially choreographed these three zones invery distinct ways. so we, again, this isa piece of the project
that we fabricatedwith rad lab on-site, and actually made and assembledfor the project, which becomes a kind of room withinthe room, where they have these very particular meetings. and how wedistinguish the spaces with some of theseobjects that kind of mix in with the kind ofstandard construction that you can see behind it,and then these more custom components.
so that's a little bitabout-- we do furniture. we assembled these giant lightscuppers for one of the spaces, and we make these in-house. and so how we scale up. so it's been tricky,because we have been scaling up really fast. in the last like, 12 months,we've gone from kind of work to multifamily housing. i think we have sevenmultifamily housing
projects in theoffice right now, going up to 300 units,everything from a nine unit building to a 300 unit building. we're doing a small hotel. and so i'm trying to carrythese interests from the smaller projects, of course, aboutcraft and material and making, but also how wesocially choreograph-- let me go back one-- the spacesin terms of multifamily housing balconies, and how itdialogues with the street.
you work with what you have. so this is a small, residentialhouse, just 2,000 square feet. i'm only going toshow two images. but the big idea behindthis house-- it's just a box it's two stories--that it has five recessed gardens, which arethe green carves, that are inside the box. so it's an exteriorspace that kind of carves into the interior.
and they provide thesereally interesting thresholds between the interior spaces. so like, a bedroomand a bedroom, a bedroom and an office,a bathroom and a bedroom. but as you can see,it's under construction. it's almost complete. so this is a pretty rough image. but trying to really hold on tothese interests in materiality, and the expressionof the material,
and then how we incorporatethese kinds of social notches and pockets withinthe space itself. this is a schematicfor a 300-unit housing project, where we werelooking at the different unit typologies-- the studio, theone bed, the two bed, and three bed, and then howthat would translate in an unfolded elevation, how itbecomes a facade condition, how you express and dealwith solar orientation, as well as those unit types.
so what we did is wehave different ways of dealing withthe pattern, which are become morethree-dimensional versus more two-dimensional and taut. and so what weended up getting was on some of the surfaces,these flat taut elevations, and then this isactually the side that is holding theone bedroom studios, so that we set up this socialkind of staggered connection
on these balcony conditions. so i hope thatseeing this resonates with some of the early work. it does for me. even though it's a facade, isee the peg in this facade, and yet we're ableto incorporate real life [inaudible] more thana surface into these pockets. and then i think it'simportant that i show you some built work.
i know i just havea few minutes. this is a project in eastboston on a shipyard. this is our site right here. a really amazing site,because it's super gritty. it's so hard to docontemporary work in boston. but we were adjacent toflanked by the shipyard, which is all this yellow. this is our site, and thesevery uninspired triple deckers in east boston.
so we had a reallygood story of how we could gravitate towardthe industrial architecture of the shipyard. and the shipyard isthis amazing place-- there's our site-- that happensto have amazing views of boston from its location. and then this addedkind of culture of these are art artifacts thatare found throughout. so a really wonderfuljob, project to get.
this is our site righthere, where that dead tree is, which we took out. and so, it's essentially a box. and so what we chargedthis box with was, what could we get out of it? it was super low budget. so we wrapped it incorrugated steel. nothing remarkable about that. but what is i think reallysmart about the project
is how we-- and wewere forced to do this, so-- how we had tostack nine tube units. we went with this tubetypology, so floor throughs. and then we needed across-grain second means of egress connector. so how do you cut off aunit in the middle of it? and so what that did isthat forced us in section to go above andbelow this corridor, so we get this split level unit.
and i know i'm kind of geekingout on the housing thing, but it's really hard to dealwith these two means of egress. we were at the zerozoning envelope. and so there's evenmore to it than that. but this thing is packed in. and what happened waswhat seems like-- we went as low as code wouldallow-- 7 and 1/2 feet, which sounds horrible. but they open up to thesevoluminous double height
living spaces, so it worked. in fact, i find them muchmore interesting than a flat. so dealing withthese restrictions, my office has to deal withthe reality all the time, and how it actuallyforces you to innovate. and then the other piece of thecore project with this project is the facade. so again, thinkingabout all the things i've been talking aboutwith the smaller work
gravitating towardthe larger work, we came up withthis system where we would identifyeach of the nine in a kind of more playfulframe that we would-- we call it shrink wrap,but would wrap in this mesh netting, this car-stylestainless steel mesh from germany, on theseribs, which became cables, so that we would providea kind of porous screen and translucence betweenthe streets and the unit,
and how we could start toexplore different levels of depth behind it. this is a balcony, so howthat it becomes the threshold, and the space caught betweenthe street and the unit. how it then changesto just wrapping over the corrugated metal and so on. and so what that affordedwas this really great vertical garden on thissuper gritty concrete corner so the neighborhood reallyembraced it for that.
so just a little bitabout the fabrication. we literally sewedthis facade on. so we're back to the peg wall. so a very dumb box, typicaldesign build, or gc built. and here we are sewing. we found a boatbuilder in a metal shop that would get on board. it wasn't easy. and they literally with us sewedthis facade onto these frames.
these processes are not perfect. this facade is not perfect. it's super safe, but it is notperfect in its construction and craft. but i am insistent that webring this level of interest and investigation intoall of our projects. i know it's going tobe hard as we scale up. but so far, so good. our client thoughtwe were crazy.
every time therewas a budget talk, this thing was on the table. and for me, thiswas the project. so i'm glad it's over. and then i think ijust have one more. how am i doing? do i have a minute? three minutes? so we are working through aseries of schematics for a city
in southeast chinawhere they have asked us to look atan urban village, and in particular, torenovate, which sounds great. and big. but it's a very smallscale urban village, which is a very common conditionwithin these megacities that are surrounded bythe high rise scale. and so i showed them my work. i gave a couple oftalks in january,
and it was surprising thatit actually resonated. i was a little worried, becauseit's the land of the high-rise, that this small,middle scale actually resonated with whatthey're dealing with some of their urban villages. and so we just have a firstpass at schematics, where we've taken on this mainintersection, and they needed it to widenin some places, and then some buildingsneeded to be demolished,
renovated, preserved,reconsideredd-- you name it. so we just have startedlooking at the context. there are a few ancestral halls. there's this incredible sociallife that's sprouting up. they're starting to clean it up. there's all this greatstreet life and kind of ad hoc appropriated program. and again, the smallscale, the intersection. so we have come up witha matrix of operations
where we're carving down. we're taking out above. we're cantilevering out. we're cutting back. and so on. and so taking our approach tokind of small intervention, this is in thiscase, just building a wall that then createsa little sculpture garden with theseruins, and then
carving down, more ambitious,to create this amphitheater for street life. and then also, thiswhole you can do it. you can construct it, temporaryinstallation-like assemblies and kit of parts. so this is an ideaabout a kit of parts that they could put together,and create these pop up workshops throughout the street,painting studios, painting class, different canopyconditions for art exhibitions.
a flowers stand and so on. pop-up library. so i think that'skind of the scale that we're working at right now. and then just to show you acouple of student projects-- i just have likefour, then i'm done. and how i tried to helpthem translate the abstract into the physical, and how iam very interested in, when i say physical, really talkingabout tectonics, and plane,
and space. this is a beloved projectthat's no longer on the syllabus for first semester corecalled the lock project, where we looked at kineticmechanisms that we would then try and translate intoactual architecture. this was going to be a museum,so that was the mechanism. this was the mechanismtranslating to a museum. these are firstsemester students. this is a similar mechanism thatthen translated into a theater
building on the lock. this is a student ofmine from last year, trying to discretize aprogram brief that we gave out to kind of equalize,and then trying to think of a structuralsystem, and a kind of a conceptual systemthat would follow. and then how to turnsomething like this, which is about a kind of spatialadjacency, poetic [inaudible] we looked at, which is something[inaudible] was interested in,
and how to specializethat into maybe a 2d, 3d graphic, a kind of3d collage that then becomes a formal proposal for a,in this case, a fitness center. how we rethink typicalprograms, like a house. we used to do an eight-foot widehouse, which is something we're trying to do in our office. not an eight-footwide house, but how we rethink typicalprogram typologies and invent within those systems.
thank you. thank you, beth. lovely presentation and insightinto dealing with the real, as you so nicely put it. our next and final panelistwill be gary hilderbrand, who's fresh here in practicein landscape architecture, and also a principal atreed hilderbrand landscape architecture. and i just want tosay very quickly,
the luncheon today forthe landscape architecture students, one of them wasinquiring about the history theory sequence here. and one of the currentstudents said, oh yeah, we do that all in garyhildebrand's studio, which is to say his incredibleattentiveness to the history of the disciplineand to precedents, just to say that thesearea's concerns are never so well-sequestered.
they're very nicelybrought together. very, very, very kind. this is the open cover of ourmonograph from two years ago. and i sometimes feel theobligation to unpack its title. i'll do a little bitof that this afternoon. this is one of my families. this is photographs ofour current office staff, about 40 landscape architects. i'm privileged tohave three homes.
none of them is a vacation home. one is where i sleep,or try to sleep. more try than sleep. this is the second one. that's our officein central square, with its library repletewith about 3,000 volumes. sorry. and the third is this building. and it's a privilegeto have three.
this is about my firm. we try to align every daylife with visible phenomena and invisible systems of nature. nature is largelyinvisible in my view. it's things you don't see. the second sentence. i think, is a littlebit like marketing. we shape the land and the city. in doing so, we shapelives, build communities.
that sounds like marketing. but the last thingis important to me, which is that we seesites for what they are and what they also might become. and we make hopefully--this is the aim. this is the aspirational part. hopefully, what we do issome cultural consequence. i have five topicswhere i feel there is substantial overlap betweenmy practice and teaching.
the surface is alive, vegetalcity, indeterminacy, visible invisible, and telescopic. the first one. the ground is a skin, likethe skin on your hand. it has characteristics ofintegument and epidermis. it is a membrane. it's porous. it's pervious. things pass through it.
and the world we inhabitabove the surface of the city can't really exist withoutreciprocal, living, biophysical life below it. i got that from martyfeldman and mel brooks. not really. but it did occur tome that this thinking about the city assomething alive merges very nicely with thisvery scary, wide-eyed man. it really came to me in thinkingabout the problem before us
when we werecommissioned to make what i thought might bean important urban place and we really didn't know how. but they knew howin the 19th century. in these two photographsby [inaudible], you can see that, really,the surface of the sea is made by hand, and is actuallysomething you can operate on. and certainly, thingspass through it. you can't havetrees without roots.
and this little tapping machineis, for me, a beautiful thing. so we made a place inboston that we think of, i guess, as a kind ofthreshold project for us, really a touchstone,a living surface. it looked like that. and then it looked likethe previous photograph. and the idea wasthat the surface was malleable and organic. immediately belowthe surface was
a zone of living materialthat would support trees, not for the seven to 10years that they typically live in a downtown,but for generations. that's our aim, to growtrees for generations. you also have to beable to drive a fire truck over that surface. and i'm just going toexplain how we make it. now there's a whole bunchof spaghetti underneath it by way of utilities.
things that werethere for years. this is landfill, by the way. it was in an estuary. it used to be the harbor. this little diagramexplains all of the things that hold up the surface. and these quick little studiesshow you the uniform surface of the ground, what's belowthe ground as structure, that mass of living mediumwe call planting soil,
or in this case,structural soil, which is provided at about a rateof 1,300 cubic feet per tree. the surface is pulledvery tautly to the trees. but as the trees grow,the surface can change. and if you think just aboutthe blue lines as moisture, we pick up every dropof water on the site, and we deliver itback to the trees through a system thati call life support. and if we have to drain it,we have a drain for it too.
that's what it looked likethe year it was built. we put very largetrees in there. today, these treesare nearly twice the size that theywere seven years ago. and that's wherewe learned, really, to have a commitmentto doing that well. a corollary tothat is my project called vegetal city, which beganas a seminar last spring taught with my colleague,sonja duempelmann,
where we're examiningurban forest typologies, and which startedreally back in that day of building the central wharf,where i learned with students in another course thatthere was an entire science of urban forestry workingon the urban canopy that had no connectionwhatsoever to the people who design, and plant, and buildvegetation in our cities. and i think it's importantto try to close that gap. and so that's whatmy current course
work in the advanced partof the curriculum is about. these are robertpolidori's photographs of hurricane katrina,famous photographs which mark an event whichmade me very angry. it exposed all sorts of evils,and not the least of which is the idea that theurban infrastructure that cools the city andshapes it spatially could be destroyedin a couple of days. and what wouldyou do about that?
so our students turned tothis urban forestry business and tried to illustratematters of performance, which were beinggathered by mayors of cities around the country. and we came up with this. this is sort of between thestudio course and my office. we came up with this littleformulation about life support. if you want tosequester carbon, if you want to shade up to 24 degreescooler the surface of the city.
if you want to harvestall of the rainwater and manage it as stormwater, you can't really do it in anysustained way if you don't provide what'sshown down here, which is a certainamount of medium, a certain amount of moisture,irrigation, inoculation, and an infrastructure thatsupports the spatial world we inhabit above. and our office has continuedthis kind of research.
and i'd always dreamedthat our office would have a kind of researcharm, and managed to do it with the helpof some scientists. i'll pass that, and withthe help of a gst intern from a couple ofyears ago who made these really greatillustrations about what we design as an infrastructurebelow the living surface of the city. and this project originatedfrom the simple question,
could we go back nowa few years later and determine whether ornot those conditions were as we built them? or had there beensome reversion? i won't go into thedetails of it-- well, i'll show you some slides of it. this is another projectthat we examined. it's a christian sciencechurch, a plantation of 200 europeanlittle leaf lindens
that have allsurvived having been planted in cages,those tubes that you see in the illustration. in 1972, every singleone of those trees is alive and healthy,and we really wanted to understand why. and so we looked quite carefullyat how those soils were performing these areillustrations made by stephanie, the intern,by the way, who is now
an employee of the office. that's a peg. that's a plug. and we looked at how thesesoils operate over time. what happens to soils? what happens to salinity? what happens to bulk density? and we try to makecorrelations to treat health. so we have concluded that study,and we've determined really
that these soils largely performas specified 10 years later. and we think that's good news. this is anillustration of how we think of the living surface ofthe city hall plaza in boston. we're on our fourth contract. we haven't scratchedthe surface yet. but we're embarking now on a newproject to reconceive city hall plaza, along with five othercity properties in what i think will be a very much smarterproject than the failed
ones in our previous efforts. back in the vegetalcity seminar, we looked at things like this. dominique perrault'sbiobliotheque nationale, which conceived of a pine forestin the middle of the city. is that a good idea? and is it even possible? so it's certainly,from these photographs, you can imagine thatthe courtyard that's
made by the formationof the building is not connected inany biophysical way, below grade at least, to anyother living part of the earth. it's a terrarium, if you like. however, if youlook at this map, you can imagine thatthere is, in fact, a connective canopy in paris,and that counts for a lot. what we've learnedis that the pine, which is not shadetolerant, and which
was planted at afairly high, tall size, are dying off quitequickly and being replaced by deciduous material. how is that happening? that's happening spontaneouslyfrom birds and wind. and that kind oftransformation over time, that kind ofspontaneous vegetation that is in some way goingto replace that forest, changes the conceptionof the building.
the next subject, indeterminacy,we talk about it a lot. i'm trying to govery quickly here. indeterminacy is a subjectthat is really, really worth talking about,but it doesn't mean that we don't decide things. it doesn't mean that wedon't try to have control. we have, i think, theambition to assert quite a lot of control over our landscapes. if you see our work, i think youwould understand what i mean.
but we're not incharge of nature, and nature's force is somethingthat we have to work with. it grows back at us. in the studio, in thefirst semester core of landscapearchitecture, we talk about indeterminacyas a characteristic of the edge betweenland and water, which in the age of explorationand in depictions of the city, has always been akind of starting point
and a crucial matterof how we describe, especially when navigationwas principally done by water. we've uncovered thisvery interesting usgs map of new haven thatwe're working on a project at yale university, which alsodescribes new haven as a delta. now, i think you just have tosquint your eyes to understand where the estuary used tobe, and where it is today. does anybody who livesin the flats of new haven think they live in an estuary?
probably not. in the course, thefirst semester course, we talk about surface andedge as field conditions that are and will be indeterminate. and i'll just pick thebottom definition here. to say that inlandscape architecture, we can speak about indeterminacyas a quality of open-ended of contingency, and of insome ways, undecidability. and these conceptshave been put forward
by two members of our faculty,anita berrizbeitia and charles waldheim. and these photographsby sugimoto describe another kindof edge condition between water and sky. so many different ways ofunderstanding that edge condition surely indeterminate. these are drawings of thewaterfront of the project from the first semester.
these are hand-drawncharcoal drawings done by students who largelydid not draw before they entered the course seven weeks prior. and these are studiesof the geometrization, the tiling, and plattingof the edge condition. topographic conditions. this is, again, probably week10 where a student probably had never used a contour beforethe beginning of that semester. understanding therole of the tide,
the diurnal conditionof the tide, and the seasonal aspects ofthat, and trying to model that. what you're looking at here isa kind of mylar representation of the high tide, withland coming up above it. you might explain it,and you might understand it a little more clearly here. a topographic condition,which is never the same twice, it's always in variation. and then we move to otherforms of representation
to try to capture thematerial qualities and conditions of the surface. the experiential, allin the first semester. this is convenient forme-- this is the overlap-- because we've worked in theseaport for quite a long time. and at the moment,we are proposing to rebuild pier four,which is next to the ica. the site that we justsaw is right here. so that overlap is convenient.
i don't want to confuse whati do in my practice with what i do in my teaching. but the overlaps are really,really productive for us. we have fantastic material tostart with for the students. our idea here is to rebuilda peer by understanding failed and foundconditions most clearly and to make alandscape out of that. an example that i wanted togo into a little more depth is one on the hudson river.
that peninsula, the secondpeninsula that you see, is a completelyman-made peninsula, a bucolic place that also lookslike this on a heavy rain. pretty tough place. this is, of course,before our project. it has a checkered history ofbeing first a pier, a dock, and then a railroad bed, asiding, than a gas holder site, then an automobilewreckage place, and then finally, in four phases ofwork over a 10-year period,
we've begun remediating andbuilding a new landscape here, which has buttressesto protect the site. this is a grading modelstudy for the buttresses in the intertidalzone from debris. and then when yougo to build this, rising tides really feelslike it's hitting home. this is during onephase of construction. and what we found is thatanother form of indeterminacy here is the fact thatbecause this is essentially
a piece of land madeof rock, very porous, the tide, when it's super high,comes up through the land. and so we have bothinundation this way, and upwelling this way. this was a kind ofan extreme place, but it was a kindof setback for us. another setback, we werebuilding the final phase of this during hurricane irene. the entire site flooded.
that was tough. but in fact, thebuttresses worked. and that that proved to usthat our ideas of resiliency on this site, which weworked really hard on, were in fact plausibleand sustainable. it's now mature. these are photographsfrom last year. and you know, it's becomea complex landscape, one of already maturing vegetation,strongly working wetlands,
and very high usein beacon, new york. the title of the bookis really about the fact that our experience is shapedmore by things you don't see than by things that you do. what don't you see? you can't see theunderlying structure. and you can't see thelife support system. and you can't really see what'shappened previously on a site. you can't see nature's force.
you can't see what weerased, what we took away. you can't see whatwe blocked out. and you can't see what'sbeyond your cone of vision. and we're goingto very quickly go through this project at marshcourt in england, a fantastic house by sir edwin lutyens witha garden by gertrude jekyll, a house made of chalk,because chalk is the site. there's flint here also. and there's also brick.
you can make brickbecause there's clay. and so this house isbeautifully executed out of those three materials,alongside this ancient copse of oaks. we know that this site hasthis ancient copse because it's well-recorded in theland ordinance surveys. you can see the locationof the chalk pit. the house ended up right here. lutyens' plan is a verybeautiful exposition
of this surface condition. drive in and go upthrough a massive cut through chalk, a longdrive that was also cut through chalk,which allowed you the vivid experience of theseancient hazel and oak trees, and then arrival at thehouse, which was a big lodge. there's the drivewayand the flat. this is extreme. you can cut chalkalmost vertically,
and it'll stay there. and over time, itcan be vegetated. so it's actually 30 feetat the deepest there. over time, the driveway, whichhad also been cut from chalk, had been what wecall sanded down. that wasn't the conditionthat we thought should remain. there was no longer thekind of beautiful drama of surprise driving up there. we said we should put that back.
we should put thechalk cut back. and so the beautiful thingabout chalk is you can cut it and also you can pack it. it compacts very well. so in fact, that's what we did. so contractors thought wewere crazy out of our minds to make slopes like that. but of course, theyalready were there. they existed.
and so now we'verestored, in a way, that kind of verytaut passage which made the journey from the bigcut up the drive to the house quite significant and special. looks like thatthis past summer. another quick one here. we had this photographfrom lawrence weaver's book of the tennis courts. it had been sandeddown like the other.
we said, let's put that back. we got out the work. crazy steep. and now we have itreally in that kind of-- so we're dealinghere a little bit with cultural patrimony. it's a question ofa grade one listed building in the uk,which really should be treated in a curatorial way.
and so that's, in fact,the charge in a sense. but we also have the obligationto carry that work forward. and so we have also beenproducing our own interventions out here a little bitfurther away, which i'll just show this one imageof a grove of 100 beech. so hopefully in 300 years, therewill be another ancient copse that we've planted, andsomeone else will probably put a driveway through it. the last issue is thatof the telescopic.
scale knows almost no boundaryin landscape architecture. for me, this is nowmore a personal-- like my personalcorner of the room. small scale mattersas much of the large. i'm going to goright to these images here, and close onsomething about making a real landscape, one thatwas in a quarry, which took us about four years witha lot of time on-site, using as much of thestone in the quarry
as we could-- tailings,really, waste stone-- and not bringing anystone in from outside. jetty walks. this is a house by tony smith,which has been beautifully restored by the architect. and in a sense, wefelt that we were trying to reorder therefuse of this quarry into a usable, spatiallyinteresting and compelling seaside home.
i'll stop there. actually, i want to sayone thing about this image. because another part of therelationship between practice and pedagogy is writing. and i was asked recentlyto write an article about a project thathas just been recognized as having 50 years of growthand beauty a project by dan kiley, the landscapearchitect at the art institute in chicago.
i wrote the piece. what i discoveredhere is something that i wonder whetherkiley, had thought about. you are absolutely under acarpet of vegetation here, and there is reallynothing quite like it. and the reason it happens isthat hawthorns, which can only grow so high, cankeep on growing by extending their branches. and while they're30 feet apart, they
have actually grown togetheras a single mass of vegetation. now, the tree isnot shade-tolerant. and so there are no leaves onthe undersides of the branches. and that is also somethingthat produces that pattern. this just comes fromcritically looking at the urban vegetation,which is a thing that's very important both in mypractice and my teaching and my writing. there are refreshmentsthat are awaiting us,
so i thought we'dkeep the panel brief. and i think the educatedconsumer chooses the graduate programbased on the luncheon and the refreshments, so iwon't keep you from them. but i just had twogeneral comments. and one is the pairing ofneil's remarks and gary's. and then i have a slightlyseparate issue with beth. and what i want to, gary, wasyou had an earlier comment. you said, the questionof what might become,
and then the issueof indeterminacy, beautiful exemplifiedwith kiley garden. i was curious the extentto which you can apply that to students, and studentswho are in a baumschule. we're in a littlenursery, if you will. we're raisingthese little shoes. and it's an indeterminate,yet guided process. so just put togethersome of the themes you see in theworld of landscape
and what takes place inthe studio classroom. and i wanted to pair that withsomething neil said earlier. he began his discussiontalking about the resistance to theory, which i thoughtwas a very provocative phrase. and again, putting this in theframe of practice and pedagogy, what immediately came to mymind was that essay by lyotard, where he speaks aboutthe resistance to theory, but not as the students don'twant to engage in theory. it's the idea that things inthe world kind of check us.
you have to kindof kick the tires, and they offer resistanceto our theories. so there's alwaysthat process what we're learning in thisroom, these classrooms, these laboratories. there's a world outthere where they're going to be tested somehow, andthat process is back and forth, and largely indeterminate. and i thought maybeyou guys would want
to elaborate on those issues. well, this is on, yeah. i mean, great point. and i totally agree with thisway of thinking about it. i mean, for me,theory is a project to grasp an historicallychanging geography. and so i agree with thekind of, whether it's lyotard, or whateverthe position, that there's thishypercomplexity of life
that we human beingscan never fully grasp. and that might be anontological condition. i mean, we candebate about that. part of my commitment isthat the built environment and the unbuiltenvironment-- i think this is maybe a sharedproposition for all of our different practices. it's constantly changing. i mean, all of us areconcerned with the historicity
of the sites that we think aboutand that we try to influence. and that's part of the practiceof the different kinds of work that we do, is to reflecton that historicity as we design ourintervention, whether it's a built form, a landscape,or a conceptual apparatus. but just on the levelof conceptualization, that is a foundationalcommitment. for me, the wholereason why i think it's so important to constantlycritically interrogate
our interpretiveframework is precisely because the world is changing. if you think of theory simplyas a static set of principles, or a static interpretive grid,it can't really adequately grasp, howeverimperfectly, it tends to do so, the constant changesthat are going on in the world. so that the reinvention ofthe theoretical apparatus or the interpretive apparatus isas important as any other kind of more technical orinstrumental innovation,
i think, that wemight develop in order to confront thechallenges of design. i'm sorry. just one last thing. neil, i alluded to this earlier. could you share with ourguests just the notion of the laboratory,your own laboratory, but the space of thelaboratory within the gsd? just talk aboutboundary conditions,
lab scapes, landscape, cities,hinterlands, what have you, and the role of theory,practice, pedagogy, in those types of spaces. well, i mean, there's a moregeneral metaphor about the lab that i think yourquestion alludes to. but just on a more pragmaticlevel for prospective students to understand, we have anumber of different platforms, and laboratories, andvenues in the school within which a variety ofdifferent research and design
interventions are elaborated. so my kind of projectthat i was talking about, the urban theory lab,is one among a whole set of different options,and all of them are kind of constantly evolvingand constantly developing within a sort of broaderorganizational umbrella. in terms of our urban theorylb, the model is basically that every springtime we do this kind of research-orientedseminar together,
in which we spend some timegetting familiar with some of the broadertheoretical frameworks that we're tryingto interrogate, and then we do sort of aresearch project, which in turn then spirals intosubsequent kinds of research projects. so it's a lab in that senseof a kind of collaboration between faculty andstudents to work together both pedagogically, but alsoin terms of broader ambitions.
i think indeterminacy givesus-- and especially, it's the case in thefirst year of studio, but hopefully that is asustained thing-- for me, a beautiful tensionbetween the aspiration to be highly speculativeand imaginary, imaginative, to imagine somethingthat isn't there today, that doesn't erase exactlyhistories, and also conditions that we find there today. the tension between thatand the absolutely truism,
the absolute truism thatthe regulatory world, the political world,and nature do not really allow us to exactly predict thefuture of the thing we imagine. and i love that space. that, to me, is awonderful place to teach. and i hope it's the case thatit's exciting for the students to enter a conversationabout landscape through that kind ofspectacular tension. i don't want to soundgeeky, to use beth's phrase,
but it made me think that wewere talking about pedagogy. and one of the thingswe discussed in my class is the idea of orthopedy. pedia is the same word. but for orthopedics, the imageis the straightening of a tree. right? you're buying the treeto make it grow straight. which is part of the educationof these things, which grow according to their own saps.
so it's a lovely dialoguethat takes place there. beth, i want to bringinto this discussion. and i liked very much yourevocation of interiors. and since gary mentionedyoung frankenstein-- thank you very much for that-- itmade me think of the woody allen film called interiors, whichhad to do with psychotherapy, with the life that'slived inside here. and i was verycurious in the way in which these early projectsprovided this interior,
in a sense, a kind of labor a studio of your own, while you wereengaging in practice, you were engagingin real constraints in the world, the messyidea of making, you still had carved out aspace, an interior, for you to pursue yourpractice in your own technique. and i was curious if maybeyou want to elaborate on that. yeah, sure. so it's interesting totalk about indeterminancy,
because i'm trying tothink, how does that-- because i know you didn'tinclude me in that question, but that's ok-- because you knowwhat you're doing. i've got another one now. but it's interesting to thinkabout that in the context of, i think-- this a littledifferent than what you guys were talkingabout-- but in the context of representation in studio.
and i think somebody saidtoday about constructing these fictions, right? and so there is this, withregard to the student work, it's all fiction. and the representationof it is so strong, because that allowsfor-- you're talking about this in terms of historyand time changing things. but i'm thinking about it inthe context of representation changing the reading of the sameproject or the same discussion.
so with my work, it'sfunny, because there isn't a temporariness toit like an installation, because i'm buildingit hoping it will stay. but we are oftenconstructing it as we go. so we very often arenot drawing a full set of rock solid detailsfor some of these pieces that we're working on. so that's another way tofold into the conversation. so yeah, i don't know ifthat's-- so i think that those
sites in my practice,the core project, those are indeterminate in manyways because of how we actually work through them. and that's why i talkso much with my students about just diving in. it's not aboutthrowing everything you can against the walland seeing what sticks. it's about understanding itand inventing simultaneously with making.
and i think that that iskind of a fantastic way to sort of think about this wordin the context of the studio. i could just add that i wasvery taken with the idea that you wouldn't completelybuild a set of instructions. don't tell my clients that. i just think this isalternative and courageous. but i liken it to what wewere doing in the quarry. i mean, we didn'treally have an inventory of what we were goingto be making with.
and so we would pull itout of the tailings piles, and say, what willwe do with this? and i've never had thatkind of joy before. i mean, it's alwaysa joy to plant. it's always a joy to plant. but it was really fantasticto play with rocks. and this client reallytrusted us to do that. i'm curious about how eachpanelist wrestles with the and, and with to lead the day.
i thought ed's introduction wasreally brilliant in that way, because it reallydoes break apart for us separating ways ofthinking about relationships between practice and pedagogy. as i said to beth earliertoday when ed was talking, it's really the case thatsome days you get up and say, which one will suffer today? so i liked all of theversions, and i can't imagine my life without either or.
so it actually becomes theeither/or, and the and, and the or, and what was the? beautiful. ditto. it is true. i was careful not to saythe word suffer up there. i feel a little anxiousabout it, you know? we're here. we're here now.
we're here today. it's true. but it is true. there's an impossibilityto what we do as practitioners and academics. and yet you get tothe end of the day, and often greatthings have happened. and then you goonto another day. and so it's a constant struggle.
i mean, i don't want toget too personal about it. but i think the practiceand pedagogy, it often feels on a given week completelyintertwined or completely disconnected. and i go through a lotof guilt about that, depending on the week. i also marvel at howwhen i'm in one place, i can forget the other,which is dangerous. and so there's aconstant gear shifting
that i think is extremelyproductive, although extremely difficult. but i am certainthat-- and we're all doing it. the wonderful thingabout the gsd, and i would say most anyserious school in architecture landscape theory, we all havea similar life, which is full. and i think we all embraceit in very positive ways that hopefully, offer somethingto the student body. so i couldn't seeit any other way. what did you say?
something like-- ican't remember exactly. throw another word in. [inaudible] either or. so yeah, they'recompletely enmeshed. so i think that there's timefor a couple of comments or questions. perhaps if i could concludeon a sentiment that was drawn. gary started off witha very beautiful image
saying i have three homes,except a country house, but we'll remedy that. but it made methink that there's a site nearby manyof you will visit once you get to cambridge. thoreau's littlecabin at walden. and he had thisbeautiful expression. he says, i have threechairs in my cabin, one for solitary life, two forcompany, and three for society.
which is to say thistiny space makes itself amenable to thesedifferent types of sociability and thinking. and when gary says he hasthree houses, they're separate, but they're also one. we bring all these aspects ofour lives together in the gsd. and i hope you've seenfacets of that today. so thank you verymuch for my panelists. i'm enormously happy tohave you as my colleagues.
and thank you all forjoining in this panel and coming to gsd today.
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