Restoring Reason, Beauty, and Trust in Architecture, Part 23: A New Humanism

Episode Topic: A New Humanism (https://go.nd.edu/aaf1e4)

“What is the city but the people,” wrote Shakespeare. In this spirit, architect Christian Sottile will share his visions about why the city is human and buildings are faces of humanity. Discover the "Renaissance Operating System" and why beauty is the irreducible secret to restoring goodness, truth, and our collective spirit.

Featured Speakers:

• Christian Sottile, Sottile & Sottile

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/24794c.

This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled Restoring Reason, Beauty, and Trust in Architecture.

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Transcript

Welcome to Notre Dame

Speaker 0:16

Well, good, good afternoon and, and Stefanos, thank you so, so much for this very kind. Invitation and, an opportunity to sort of put, put our pencils down in the low country and come up to South Bend. And I can say this afternoon, it was a joy walking through the studio. Steve has been a great host for the afternoon, talking with students over lunch, just seeing these drawing boards, you know, at at work was, was uplifting for me. So thank you for, for having me. I'm, I'm humble to be here. And, and, and, and it's good to see so, so much good work being done. And, and so it challenges me to say, what could I really share with, with this audience and, and what I've prepared, to share. And I'm gonna go kind of move as faster, as slowly as, as we, as we might want to. were were things that I thought might be of some help, for your, for your students and I, and I think in a sense, and I'm finding more and more I find myself. About the humanist obligation of what we do as architects. Um, and I'm obsessed with it really. And, and so I, I found I talk more generally about it to, to audiences. And so I, I, I, I will just say in advance that I hope my slides are not. maybe too simple in some ways for this particular audience, but I, I really believe that architecture should be as accessible as possible and not a discipline that only architects know how to talk about. So that's been sort of my, my own arc and, and trying to practice and, and trying to, to share what it is that we do. And I think we resonate on so many themes that are important here at Notre Dame. this quote by Kristopher Alexander is one that I, I come back to. frequently this idea that we cannot merely build a thing in isolation, but repair the world around it and within it so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent and more whole. And I think that idea of wholeness has really, as, as I've moved on, has, has resonated more and more in the, particularly the idea why we do this. Who it's for and how we perceive it. Then the, the human analogy is really the core of what I wanted to talk about, uh, this afternoon. That there should be a human analogy always in all work. And I think that unites all, all the, the, the many missions that we have. So, so my plan for tonight is to start with the big question, the why behind why we do this. Perhaps ways of seeing that I'm, I'm still learning about. And then if there's time to talk about some of the, some of the work going from principle to practice. So the big question of course, is why do we do this? And, um, design is an act of beauty. I'm obsessed with this word, beauty, that we have to use it often in public and out loud as much as we can. I was very. Pleased to see the, uh, the, the banner, the, the, the war cry here at, at the school of Architecture. The restoring reason, beauty and trust in architecture. I think that's wonderful. I might put beauty first, restoring beauty because beauty is the thing. It's the irresistible thing. I think that's, that's the secret. That's the secret to bringing people back to other big things like goodness and truth. So beauty. So yes, I, I, I absolutely want to talk about that as much as we can. Of course, we're often told we're not allowed to talk about it, but I think we have to. And then we, you know, when we remind ourselves of, you know, the Vitruvian pillars of architecture, which I know are, are well ingrained here, it it, it reminds me how much, you know, the modernist dictum of form follows function and function follows form. So we spent a lot of time arguing about which one came first, but completely. The third leg of the Vitruvian triad. it doesn't really matter which comes first form and function if you don't have delight. which I think beauty is, is sort of a great, a perfect way to sort of remind ourselves that that is that third pillar of architecture, maybe the most important one. I, you know, over, over time, studying Thomas Aquinas, I was intrigued, uh, at, at his three pillars of good or good design, good architecture, integrity. And consonance, which I think seem fairly related to the vitruvian, uh, triad as well. And, um, so I think there's, there's, there's great truth here that we're, we're working towards. I think it was Lu Kahn that said, architecture is reaching out for the truth. So I think we're, we're all on this, on this journey course. It changed dramatically during the Industrial revolution. I love this postcard, this French postcard, imagining the world a hundred years into the future, I think. The prediction was by the year 2000, an architect would be sitting in this lovely, booth pressing, pressing buttons while the machines, carved the stone. Only thing that got wrong was the booths that the architects sit in today do not look quite this good. And were not actually carving stone often, but cutting styrofoam. So, it mostly came true, just not quite as elegantly as promised. And, and of course, you know, every, every age uses its paradigm. And, and, and the idea of recasting cities as machines, uh, led to, to, to a great human loss in the 20th century. So, so this is really that affirmation that I think you all know very well, that cities are not machines. and, and this quote from, from, uh, Shakespeare, I believe in the Merchant of Venice. What is the city? But the people, it is the irreducible. Act of placemaking. Buildings are people and cities are people. So ways of seeing that. I think I've come to want to talk about that quite a bit more over time. This idea of how do we recover humanity in the work. You, you really have to kind of go back to times when we were talking about it openly, the Renaissance operating system, you might say the, you know, the Intel inside, uh, logo of the Renaissance was, uh, the famous, uh, drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. The idea that we can start to create, you know, a world around optical, optical, uh, principles, and we could even understand the built environment. I think this is one of my very favorite drawings of all time. By Francesco Dior Martini. And I love showing this to people that think traditional architecture is some historical style that, uh, you know, that we don't use anymore. When you explain the dental molding, in fact the, the reason these buildings seems so familiar to you is that you are seeing yourself in the building. I'm also so interested to see how. The research in neuroscience today is revealing more and more that we are looking for people when we look at buildings. It's our first pro aesthetic processing, and francesco's diagram of, of a complete city framed around the human body this moment in time where there's this obsession, around describing the world within the framework of our humanity. so I can talk a little bit about. That and being, you know, a practitioner in Savannah, Georgia, I feel like I have to talk about it just a little bit. This is by no means a, a, a a history lesson, certainly not to this audience. Um, but the idea of planning a perfect city, which has such a, a, a rich heritage from the humanist era, but all these cities were almost too good to be true, too. Perfect to be, human, but quite lovely. In fact, lovely enough. they were our Christmas card one year, as we, you know, framed them as snowflakes. Of course, these ideas make their way into practical applications in, in, in the Baroque Garden or, or in the baroque city as order starts to be reimposed on, uh, the, the, the existing fabrics, or perhaps in London or in Paris. but the world, uh, that, that I practice in, is in Savannah, Georgia. And so bringing that, that idea home to the, to the, to the bringing this idea to the new world, you might say. Was a chance for General James Oglethorpe to create a city that would have all of that enthusiastic, impulse toward perfection that you might have found in, in one of the diagrams of the, of the Italian humanist era. and, and he, and he does it right. So the organization of the Savannah plan, the ward pattern that he, uh, created in fact succeeded and it succeeded over centuries. and, and, and I think many of you are, are familiar with this, but you know, each and then the public lots that would face the, uh, public square designed for civic and institutional uses. and that that formula created an incredibly durable city, over time. And in fact, it was expanded the old family recipe as one of our architectural historians at scad, uh, Robin Williams. Likes to say is that, you know, a family recipe can go on for generation, but you modify it just a bit each time. And if you look at the Savannah plan, you'll see that the wards on the east are actually a bit shorter than the wards in the middle, but they're using the same basic, formula. So the city as it grew over time is in fact, very diverse, but, but framed around this, this core idea of what's public and what's private. We were talking about that earlier with the students. So I look at. The city and imagine it in concert with that diagram, the Francesco Dior diagram, and I say this to say that the, that a city in its entirety could have the clarity of a, of a humanist diagram. And I think this is true in Savannah. When we look at Bol Street as the spine of the city, as, as it had grown, it became sort of amorphous. There was, it was almost too egalitarian. There are no terminated views. And there was a decisive decision in the 1850s to take the spine of the city, the central Axis, bull Street, and to in fact, place a monument in every, in every, square, along that particular axis, almost like acupuncture, reaching the vertebrae of a spine. And then above the, above on the head of the body is our, our city hall, the gold dome of city Hall, kind of capping the body. And there it's. And so it's sort of rem we're reminded of this wherever, wherever you are in, in this particular city, that, that it zeroes out on that center line. I think they say in yoga, you know, you're supposed to find your center and I think there is something great about and, and, and it's. Many, many, hand gestures and Italian that we could talk about. But the one that I I love is when something is really good, it's sort of perfect. You strike that center line down your body. Has anybody ever done that? I know a lot of you have been in Rome, but you do that and just, it's like something's really good. You do the, like, the perfect symbol, but then you pull it down your center line and it just, that's, it sort of sets you in the right frame of mind to understand something's really perfect. So. so in Savannah, that center line is the axis. It's where the addresses go to zero. You can literally stand in the middle of the street and feel your center. And so I, I, I can come back to this diagram, from Francesca de Georgia and see, I can see the city that way. And, and being in the city as sort of my, my center, it's very natural. So the church. That's there at the heart of the body is very much aligned with one of our, our grandest churches in the city. The piazza, the stomach in the center of the city, the seat of governance and power, the gold dome of city hall, the castle on the head where hopefully good decisions are dispensed. And uh, and then the arms and legs being the fortifications, the bastions and the walls that surround the system and protect the body. And I think. We can imagine the city as a collection of buildings or infrastructure or data sets. Um, but we can also see it as a, as a, as a human, enterprise. And I really believe that, cities like, like Savannah have that gift to offer intuitively to anyone that spends time there. So all these words, you know, that we use so often, but sort of forget what they mean, the idea that a building stands at a dress. This is a great diagram by David McCauley. reminding us that when a building faces a street, it is standing in a dress. Very much the way I'm standing here tonight. The role of the, of the skyline, the role of local symmetry around a skyline. As we, as we, and again, you know, in the world of neuroscience, we quickly are, are, you know, learning how, how much we process a crowd of people very intuitively, and we, we look for local symmetry around. Around the skyline and we make quick judgements whether somebody looks friendly or you know, perhaps a little bit menacing. Of course we could be totally wrong, but, but we do it automatically. So why would it be any different when we look at a beautiful lineup of buildings and ask ourselves, are these people that we would wanna spend time with? This one actually looks really nice here. so. So I, I, I think we have to start to remind ourselves that this is happening whether we like it or not. We are seeing the city as a lineup of, of people when we see a, a row of buildings at a dress, of course, it's the same reason why so much of what we've built in the last century is completely unintelligible because it has none of the humanistic qualities. It's a world that's been mechanized. And virtualized at the same time. Certainly with the automobile, but also even with the, you know, the idea that we don't know if this is actually gonna be good pizza, but the brand is a, a virtualized experience that, that we're presented with. So you assume it's just gonna be good enough versus looking inside the window of a restaurant walking down a street. Ironically, the only thing that looks remotely like a building you might understand is somewhere else there. You have to go left. So this idea that the, the, the facade truly is of course the face of the building. And, and this means something. And particularly in a world that we built before, we had zoning and codes and rules to make people build a certain way that we happened to actually do it very well. Um, and I think we often did it because we were gonna put our name, we were gonna tattoo our name on our forehead when we were done. So it's a huge social responsibility that comes with that. A building on Broughton Street, our, our high street or main street in Savannah. that is, i I, I love this building because it was, it's a fine mixed use retail building built in the 1920s by the Lamas family. It had survived the 20th century when everything was boarded up. And, uh, these buildings were at a very low ebb. And the joiner family ran a a furniture store there and kept it, kept the building, sort of from demolition all those years. And then young rule joiner, when he came into his, majority, he said, well, listen, I'm gonna restore this building properly. And he was just so proud of the family heritage. He said, I wanna put our family name on the forehead of the building. And, you know, he was gonna put it up over that. And, uh, of course, you know, with our preservation protocols today, there was a lot of question about whether that was authentic or not, which I actually thought was incredibly authentic. If you're willing to put your name on the building, that's as good as it gets. Of course, the, uh, the compromise was, well, you can have both names on the building. So rule got his name, but he needed to do that. I think that's really important. In fact, for a, a photo shoot for a, a local magazine for his modern furniture store. Rule, pulled some of his furniture right out into the middle of the street to, to have his photo taken. And I realized, you know, they say that people start to look like their pets after a while and, you know, or their dogs or cats and, you know, I, I can't see that building without seeing my friend rule, um, because this building is very much part of his identity. and so these faces do tell a story. This is, uh, maybe a one successful banker that's, uh, fallen on hard times, delivering pizza or a a, a unfortunate split personality here. Gone to, gone to drinking and gambling. Really? We got parking and vodka. So, of course, you know, it's hard to not talk about this without talking about the golden ratio and the way we apprehend beauty and how we're discovering more and more. AI loves the golden ratio'cause it's mathematical. so we better pay attention to that as architects because I think we're gonna be very surprised at how quickly, reasonably good solutions can be presented to us using sort of the, these sacred ancient geometries. And of course, graphic designers know about this too. But we, we, we do deeply seek that. And when we see something that's disproportion, we know something is terribly wrong. And, again, we know this, but that's so important. So how do we, how are we applying this in architecture, today? And I, you know, these are slides often share with audiences that may maybe haven't thought about this so much as this, uh, group. But, the, the, the, the, the use of the golden ratio. Revelation About a year ago, uh, I was visiting my friend Steve Cook, who's a really fantastic, craftsman, uh, with, with wood and, and, you know, does amazing turnings, and he was doing a demonstration turning wood. And he said, well, we're gonna put a curve line in this Baer. And as he, he reached for a tool to do that, and it was a large wooden tool. It looked sort of like a compass. I said, what, what, what are you doing? What is that? He's like, oh, that's my golden ratio. And I said, wait, excuse me. Like I've been in architecture for a while. I, I didn't realize there makes perfect sense. I, no one ever told me there was a, there was a, a, a, a, a simple tool that you could use to have the golden ratio anytime you wanted without having to use math. I thought that's really amazing. He's like, yeah, every time I use it, everything just comes out better. So it's like, it was right by his side the whole time. So I immediately went back home and googled, golden ratio caliper, and tons of them came up. I was like, what the heck is going on here? I, you know, I've never seen one. And who's using these? And um, they look just like this. You can buy one on, uh, online. Anybody? This? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, the furniture maker. I love it. So actually I have one I keep now. So it's, it's a, it's a very simple tool as you can see, and it just always has the ratio whenever you want it. So you don't have to think about it, you can just use it and, um, pretty simple to use. This is a smaller one. His was much bigger. but it, it, you know, it's how Steve, you know, made decisions about the turnings he was doing. And there's many out there. This one looks a little menacing actually, but, but it's a good thing and I, I like talking about it because. It's, it's something that's available. So, so do you know who's using these? The, the ones that you can get on online? The beauty industry, that's who's using'em. That's why the, the corners aren't so sharp because they're actually used to, to shape eyebrows. So if you're, you really want somebody to look good, you want to use the golden ratio, you wanna kind of take their eyebrow up, hit the peak, and then drop it. That's gonna look great. So. You can get these, but they're perfect to have by your side when you're drawing, because you can make good decisions without having to think too hard about it. So that was a discovery. and, and I'm, I'm excited. Of course, we have one at every desk in our office now. I, of course, I like to talk about orientation and the living body. The idea that when people are standing in environments that more or less match their shape. At a bigger scale, bigger, it just happens. It just makes you feel right. And, um, buildings that sort of do that for us, remind us of our body in that upright living position. I'd love to pick on this particular building in Savannah, which is one of the most hated of our buildings. Um, but it gives you that sort of, that, that very dreadful feel when you approach it and you, you can immediately picture yourself in another position. so. I do like to talk about gravity, and I don't, that's something that doesn't need to be mentioned much here. But, this, this particular quote from GK Chesterton, really I, I, I think is beautiful and it's, it's a, a appeal to the, the, the. The cathedral, this idea that, you know, if you could throw stones in the air and that they would hang and be suspended like a rainbow. Uh, it's, which the principle of an arch, you can call it an a front to gravitation, but more correctly an appeal to gravitation that by combining separate stones of a particular shape in a particular way, we can ensure that their very tendency to fall prevents them from falling. It's a, it's an, it's a beautiful way to understand architects. Participating with and doing sort of death defying feats, and we don't really do that anymore. You know, the covers of the magazines present buildings that in fact are designed to make you feel very uneasy as, as you see components that, of course, you know, deep down aren't gonna fall off, but you just can't help but think something really terrible is, is happening here, or something that isn't even really possible is happening here. And, and I think this is malpractice really. I think it's, and, and, and the more we understand about neuroaesthetics and, and how our ancient brain processes, fight or flight mechanisms, when we see things like this are all of our beauty receptors are actually shut down. You cannot apprehend beauty when you're making decisions about whether you need to, to run, because this is a dangerous situation. So any architect presenting. Danger as the final result of the design. I think this is, this is truly malpractice. And then in fact, we're scientifically learning that it's, it's shortening people's lives because it's, it's causing chemical reactions in their, in their body. So it's not about traditional design or, or, or maybe more formalist contemporary design, because certainly contemporary buildings can beautifully do this, can remind us of the role of, of gravity. Gosh, it's important. It's really the ulti. I think it's the ultimate hubris in architecture that we've actually defied gravity. We've actually conquered it. We can do it. You know, what is this really? I mean, truly. what I mean, it's, it's like a joke with a bad punchline. And once you've heard it, it's just not funny at all. In fact, it's dangerous. So an appeal to gravity is something I, I do like to talk about. Of course, the composition of a building, having a, a base in a middle and a, a top meeting the sky, having a beautiful torso, having great shoes. Um, something we love to talk about, buildings that sort of leave you wondering, you know, what, what the parts and pieces are. This is truly a mechanistic proposition. of course, of course. This, famous example in Prague reminded us that even architects like Frank Garry could, uh, remind us of that human analogy. So. We, um, so we have to remember it. of course, do walls have eyes? I like to talk about, you know, the contraction of window as a, as a wind eye is something I think is really quite beautiful. These are two buildings, side by side in Savannah that of course, we can measure the percentage of glazing in each. They're both four story buildings, so you could say, well, their heightened mass is very similar. Um, but of course their percentage of glazing their eyes are very, very different. And you have to ask yourself, you know, who would you. Who, you know, who would you rather sit next to at a party? So the, the wind eye, and it's just why this guard at the Vatican just looks right in that window. I think even color coding the window frame to his uniform probably helped. of course feet on the street. We talk about eyes on the street, the role of entrances, the frequency of entrances we like to talk about quite a bit. That is an absolutely human increment that we have to. buildings that might have generally acceptable, heightened mass and vertical proportions and percentages of glazing and all those things we might de describe as DNA, but have no entrances are, are, are certainly, you know, hostile to the city. I, this is a, another Savannah example, but a building that really is, gets a lot of things wrong. but it actually gets something really right and it, and since it was built 70 some odd years ago, it's always had businesses and it's always had an active ground floor. So it's performed very well at the street. so we count addresses. We've actually sort of made a science at, at counting addresses per block and then evaluating how. Uh, the conversion, for example, of a two-way street to a one-way street changes the number of addresses over time. So it's a really interesting, it's sort of like an EKG meter of the, the health of a, of a block. Not just height mask, square footage, bulk volume, but actual porosity or, or, or the interact interactions that are happening at the street level. Can I visit somebody? At what increment? So, um, so then, you know, to to, to the idea of then how do, how are we actually making our buildings today? you know, and this world made by hand, I, it's hard to not spend time in, in cities that were made by hand and not feel the, the resonance of those that came before you. I think it's hard to pretend that there's any other way, truly, like, yes, we can mechanize, we can do things we couldn't have done maybe a few hundred years ago, but we, but the, the act of the human hand and the making of places, I think is ir, it's irreducible and it's the thing that we have to be the most. Fiercely protective of, um, this is watching a street outside of our office getting repaved, and I just marveled at, you know, one brick at a time being laid to ultimately create a hole that long after they're gone. We all know this was a place made by people. And so I, I, you know, this simple message is that we, I, I think we have to see our buildings not as sticks and bricks, or cities as, you know, pipes and, and, and, and, and infrastructure. But, but really, truly as people, that is the, the thing that, that will bring us back, back, back from, from the, the Revolution and, and it's really a series of revolutions. I feel like we, we've, the Industrial Revolution, of course irreversibly changed the way we would make things the. The, the information age then changed. We, we conceived of a world around data and, and now as we head into a virtual, era where the, the cities, that we make are, are seen as not even, in fact, uh, real at all. so the, the ma the Makers movement, things that are sort of bringing us back to understanding the role of the hand. By the way, I wanna thank the Brock who ran the technology here for giving me. To, on these slides tonight and, and actually get to use my hands. So, so, so you know, these landmark landmark. Books and, and texts and, and the research going on at the Academy for Neuroscience. I think these are all parts of how we're understanding it. What I'm excited about though is science is only helping us understand more and more that these things that we've always known were true, are true. And they're, it's really helpful to convince other people of those same ideas because we all seem to trust science. so we have to get there. I, my, you know, I can't. School, uh, where students are studying architecture without, and I feel like I hardly need to do this year, but the role of drawing, I think is, you know, completely irreplaceable and, and, to not take any shortcuts. You know, this is a 10,000 hour operation to really develop the, the, the, the skills in your hands that allow you to think through your hands. And I think that's, I I put Johanne pal's book up there, the Thinking Hand, which is a great text if you haven't seen it. I think this was a idea popularized by, uh, Malcolm Gladwell, the idea that anything you do for 10,000 hours, you get very good at. Whether it's playing a piano, whether it's drafting, and you think about it, if you, you know, as a, as a apprentice or an intern entering an office, if you're spending 40 hours a week, say, uh, behind a drawing board, it's about 2000 hours a year. So if you do that for five years. Even if you're really kind of bad at drawing, you're gonna probably be very good at it after five years of doing it 40 hours a week. So I think there's n there's, there's never, there's not really a shortcut to it, but it's something that is so profoundly important to, to, to the work that, that we all do. Uh, my mentor actually, uh, was trained in Paris at the Ole in the 1920s when Georgia Tech had a relationship there. John Labe, this was one of his drawings. He was a master and he could draw anything and he would draw. We were talking about this earlier with the students. He would make the drawings first, and then if you liked the drawings, he would make a building about that drawing instead of designing your building and then making a drawing to pitch it to show what it might be like. He would actually make, he would go right to the finish line and say, this is the experience through, uh, what you might think of as a, as a travel sketch. This is actually in, in Florence. But in his own professional work, he would go right to the end and draw the experience of the thing that he might make. And if it was a good thing, then he would make architecture was more of a backup to the experiences that he could reveal through his drawings. And I, I, um, took that, I, I've tried to take that to heart. This is me a long time ago, learning how to draw and, um, I, I actually spent a lot of time growing up in Florence, Italy. So this is my other hometown. A, a place, you know, a place of, of great beauty that affirms these universal ideas about placemaking over time. So draw please. Um, and I've had the good fortune of teaching abroad on, on a number of occasions, and it's wa it's amazing to watch the evolution of, students that, you know, start a trip like this, not drawing very well. And then by the third or fourth week, they're starting to create amazing, amazing drawings with ballpoint pens in their sketchbooks. So. It's well known that the use of our hands to interpret what we're seeing is always going to yield lasting learning. and this is not even a theory, whether you take notes by hand or you take'em on a laptop, the notes you take by hand are always going to help you pass the test, even if they're not as accurate because you've actually committed them to memory. So, so, so, so that's my. To remembering, to, to draw in all that you do. Particularly important today is we're presented more with more and more tools that make it easier to, let's say, well, can I just run a filter on this drawing, this SketchUp model to have a watercolor feel. It's like, what a waste of time, because you're missing the opportunity to actually have learned from doing the thing. So I, I would say we as, as all the tools expand, we have to take the tools that are ultimately humane and, and turn up the volume on, on those, those activities. so from principle to practice, this is the next part of what I was gonna talk about and couple of projects. There's actually one that I'd like to focus on because it gets more to the, the making of a building, the third one. but I. A few slides together of some projects we've, worked on over the last few years. this one is, uh, one in Savannah, called Plant Riverside District, which actually it received the Urban Land Institute's, uh, global Award. Actually received the Congress Renew Urbanisms, grand Prize award just a few years ago. Um. It was, and it was a great project. It was, a part of a, a redevelopment of a four and a half acre site on the river, but it was one where we were able to put public space first. So taking this legendary grid of the Savannah plant and then revisiting this sort of forgotten corner that had been used as a electrical power plant for about a century, and it, it began with connecting the city back to the river and then completing the pedestrian network on the river and on River Street. So a pretty, pretty simple plan. That was the, the master plan for the project. And this was very much in the mode of urban urbanism, urban design at a sort of a block scale, you might say, a few blocks. And then, um, thinking about how the architecture would animate it. And it was a mix of historic preservation. This was actually the 1916 power plant. These were additions that were done in the 1930s and forties, and then a series of new buildings to the east and, and a, a large new building to the west. And then smaller structures on the waterfront. So this was a wonderful project. We worked on it with a, a team of, of, uh, of architects, but we served as design architect for really all of this project, the public realm and the, exterior and, and core interior spaces of the buildings. So great adaptive reuse, uh, opportunity there, which we had known would come, its day would come actually remained operational as a power plant until 2007. And, uh, so if you come to Savannah, you have to let me know and I'd be happy to visit with you and, and walk you about, plant Riverside district. Great example of early industrial architecture that makes you stand up a bit straighter too. There was a lot of theory about early power plants'cause it was a building type that had no precedent. So there was two, two young architects named Stone, stone and Webster, MIT grads. Edited a journal on how to design power plants, and they said, you've got to make these buildings look so good and so believable that people will believe the thing being made inside of them is real because you can't see it. This was the first form of power that was totally invisible and you always, whether it was coal or gas or wood oil, you know, it was always a thing that made power and electricity was, was voodoo. So, so the, the building that they were advocating in in this early industrial. Era were deliberately civic in, in, in their character. And I think it's an amazing, it's amazing that such a building that's, that, that, that has such nobility, more than a hundred years later is, is eagerly adapted to a new use. in this case, the, the central atrium or the, the old generator hall. The turbine hall is a natural science, exhibition. So this was a, a, a really great project, but I'm most excited about the fact that it was a very public realm driven, project. So we could talk about that. of course in housing and I just seeing in the studios today, some of the work going on is very encouraging and, and there's so much, so much being done. Certainly with Dean OIDs here, you does, does not need to be said. Um, but there's so much work to be done in this space right now. We see it as an acute problem. And, and so many of our older cities, and certainly newer cities as well. we had an opportunity some years ago now in Charleston to work on a large infill site, large-ish you might say, in a, in a block, on, on Bay Street there. And you can see the fabric of smaller buildings around. It was kind of a dilemma because you had the institutional investment model, the multifamily box that they wanted to put on the, on the lot.'cause that's how big it was. And, and it wasn't gonna work. So we had the opportunity to really talk typologically about the buildings of the city, whether they were the larger civic buildings like the old Union Station, or perhaps the Bennett Rice Mill, or the Cigar Factory, or the old Murray School. Um, and also the smaller buildings. And the answer to the, the, the prob the problem was to create a building that was a big building, but big enough for Charleston, which was sort of this pavilion. Three pavilions on the street and then using smaller Charleston singles. There were actually three unit, essentially three unit A apart or apartments or, or condominiums in a smaller footprint, format around the edges. So we had sort of a civic presence to the main building and, and then developed a character and a language that was sympathetic to Charleston. You know, this one up at the street, brick, a little tougher, and then wood toward the back row. there, so it just sort of fits into the neighborhood. So this was an alternative to the typical, and I can tell you this was a, you know, a, an investor and a developer that was very familiar with the typical format and, and, you know, fortunately a city like Charleston. Holds dearly their, the, the, the quality of their fabric. So it created the opportunity to, to rethink the model, which essentially get very close to the density you might've gotten, had you put a, a, a box on the site, but created a much higher value environment, which actually immediately I think what they learned was the rental. The rental prices for these smaller single homes was actually the highest on the peninsula. As soon as they finished them, of course that was an unintended consequence, but it was a reminder of the scarcity of that kind of work. So this was a pretty quiet project, but, but I'm proud of it because it's part of sort of building that toolkit, that vocabulary of, of bringing back true, you know, traditions of a place, and then using that to solve pressing issues of housing today. so I guess finally, and this is the part I, I'm excited to share this with you, and I think I've become more personally excited about the idea of the making of architecture. And we spent a lot of time right, talking about codes and, and, and, you know, just understanding sort of the, the DNA side of it, but the actual heart of the matter. I think is remembering that we have to make our buildings as humans, and this is something we can't do as architects. We can't do it alone. So building a culture, rebuilding a culture of artisans and craftsmen that are, that are truly part of that process, um, I think is the only way. It can't, you can't fake it. When you see something that's been made by a human hand, you, you absolutely know that it, it, it, it has been, and, and there's no simulation to that. That's possible. We're very fortunate in Charleston, the American College of Building Arts was founded by, um, former Mayor Joe Riley, to do just that, to create a, a, a, a culture of building well in Charleston. And I think at the time it was created, it was after, um, hurricane Hugo, which was a dramatic, a dramatic landmark in the history of the city. And, and I think it was created with the idea that we'll need these craftsmen to keep Charleston. Alive, you know, long into the future. So we will know how to repair the, the assets that we already have. I think today it's, we have to pivot that toward building new and using these, using the skills and the traditions that are being developed, in a context like this. So we're, we've been very, very fortunate to get to, to work with the A CBA to start to bring them into some of the work that, um, that we, that we've been doing particularly, in Charleston. So the idea of the human hand, like you can't see the old farmers in Exchange Bank and think there's ever a version of Charleston that can be too fancy or, or too exotic. It's like, really? If you, if you're not living up to that invitation in that city, then what are you doing? So, so we, we've, we had an opportunity to work on a, a larger building on King Street. That brought, kind of, brought us back to that. Dilemma of how we build today at an institutional scale, but how could we create fabric that would be sort of emotion? And, and it actually kind of brought us back to the Vienna session with this, the sort of the struggle of the industrial age. and, and, and, and the loss that, that was evident to the architects at that time. And I felt like we could make that analogy today. And, and the, and the. The sort of the, the systemization of our field, the, you know, the, the, the pervasive use of Revit, the pervasive use of sort of automated product placement that, that our, our industry has sort of become addicted to. So what if you could, so what if you could reunite painting and sculpture and architecture again, very much the way this session is did, and you, you would need all three. This is actually the entry to the building and we have these panels, one representing painting, one representing sculpture, and then architecture in the keystone. So. sort of a reminder of these basic truths about placemaking and an architecture that would be sort of intentionally humane. And, you know, these softening forms, these, these laurel arches. Um, that became kind of a theme for this particular design. So this is part of the, the design methodology, how to take a large building but start to create details at the increment of, you know, a single gate. or, you know, perhaps, you know, a carved. Stone inset or a carefully crafted column, capital. Um, and I think we were inspired by the A CBA when we saw what they were capable of doing. We were imagining a columns holding up bay windows, and as we walked through the studios, they said, well, this is just freshman work. I said, this freshman work is better than anything being done today. So we in a sense, sort of designed a building. There was an invitation for craft as a, as a case study. This building is not far from where their, their program is located. And, and so, so it, it, it, it in a, in a sense it's a case study it and it's a case study to kind of call people back to feeling things perhaps that maybe they haven't felt in a long time. You know, the general public, not, not architects per se. and, and, uh, and, and sort of an appeal to emotion. And it's, and it's brought us in very, very close collaboration with artists and craftsmen. This is, um, there's a very fine artist, Carl, Carl Rous, who actually lives in Vienna now, um, but has collaborated with us before on a number of projects, and he, he took some of these early ideas and started to develop them. The representation of architecture on the central keystone. These, these flanking panels of painting and sculpture, creating the invitation for the craftsmen that could then take it beyond that. Um, we have four Keystone that line along the, along the main street face representing the Four Seasons. Um, but each season of architecture, so you have, you know, art Nouveau in the spring and you have sort of a full-blooded classicism in the summer. And a baroque fall and then a chilly gothic winter there. So these were all very, in a way, very simple themes. We felt like this was a building that was part of the way back, the things you could talk about with somebody on the street. They're like, well that's very interesting. I understand that. sort of and connecting idea of art and nature and, and, you know, nothing too controversial here. So. Um, and then we also realized there's, there's numerous opportunities, particularly for a big building, for individual hand carved ornaments. So we began to create general models with, with Carl as a collaborating artist and some of the, some of the, the architects in our, in our practice. what's been very exciting, and I'm, I'm I, I, I'm gonna show you some things that I've not ever put on screen before tonight. I, I put them together because I thought they might be of interest. To the, to the group tonight. But we started to take those panels, you know, the, the, the columns, the keytones and so on, start to really develop them into looking at the capabilities of what was there in the studio. These were parts of the inspiration that we realized that this work could be done convincing institutional, institutionally minded developers that this could be done is also as a, is a, is a, is a leap of faith. But what's interesting is. The art and the, the humanity of this making draws everybody into the story. And, and we've really marveled over this process watching these, you know, hardened developers sort of melt when they see young students chipping away at stone in the studios. This is, by the way, some of you may know Joseph Kincannon, who's a Master Stone Mason, one of the lead faculty at the A CBA. so it's really, it's been a gift and the, the opportunity here is to bring, bring true craft back to the public realm in a very kind of visceral way. so we've had a lot of fun with this, and over the last few months now, we've actually began the process of, uh, making before we, well, before we started making, we said we better test things to make sure they really look right at scale. So that's the keystone around that main entry. We said, we better know what that looks like when you hold it up 20 feet above the street. So we found that the, the simplest building we could use to run a demonstration of that, that's Craig Clements in our office holding up the full scale model, or the keystone that are up above that, up in the air. We actually got kicked out. They thought we were out. We were, um, staging a demonstration they saw off on top of the building. So yeah. It was, it was a, it was a demonstration against, uh, ugliness. Um, so the stone carving is beginning, and this is what I, I, I'm gonna flip through these images, is, you know, there, you're, you're starting to see the work being done. What I love is this is not being done by a machine, and it's not being done by, you know, a well-seasoned craftsman, but it's being done by a whole atalier of young minds. These are the people that will live in this building. And the enthusiasm that they had brought, they spent the summer in the studio. They said, well, let's just knock out these, these, um, rosettes, and that's Albert cutting into one. And we, and sort of in the, in the, in the gothic or maybe the Christian mode, we wanted the detail to be an invitation for the artist to take it further. So we have, you know, many standard sizes, but no standard way in which to, to carve it so that they could. Then leave their own fingerprints. This is Tatum, actually, uh, professor Hartley shared this photo with me. He, he had run into her, on the National Mall at, at the Smithsonian event this summer, and she had actually taken some of the stones from Charleston to work on while she was up there. so, so this is one, one component of the building, fairly simple, integrated, you know, cosd into the brickwork. Also wanted this artwork to be. Unremovable from the building because a lot of times, you know, people look at the students making these beautiful things like, oh, isn't that sweet? Why don't we like add something to the building that wasn't there before? Like, we want this to be a hundred percent integral to the building. You can't take it off. You'll have a hole in the building. So these rosettes are sort of deceivingly simple, but they're actually fully integral into the fabric of the facades and, and so it leaves human fingerprints all over the building. Um, and they've carved quite a few. I think there's something like 68 altogether of different sizes, and they're all beautiful and they're all very different. so this has been a joy, this was sort of a point of entry to the, uh, to the process and it's a great sense of accomplishment and that makes me extremely happy to see, see another generation sort of bringing their spirit to the, to the public realm. Of course, the keytones were. We're a, a way to be very, you know, directly humanistic in our carving. Actually, this is Iris, who's really a unbelievable, she's a graduate now, but she was finishing up and now she's sort of stayed on to help with this project, starting to kind of prove that, that these drawings could be, brought to life and has done a really, a really fine job with, with these Keystone. That's our, our spring. Or gothic winter, which of everyone loves the veil? And then she says that's the easiest one to do. but they're really quite, quite remarkable. so, so, so the, the, the building is sort of shaping up, the details are shaping up the central keystone, which is a major feature. For it. That's Joseph Kincannon. As the, uh, as the stone is unloaded from Alabama and they've sketched onto the face and started to sort of bring the design to life with this large scale, piece of limestone. Yep. So taking, taking shape, she's actually gonna be holding a bronze compass, so making sure the analogy, comes across that she's representing architecture. Maybe it should be a golden ratio. Caliber. So. The stone columns, there are a series of these. They're pulling their, they're rounding them out of square stock and, uh, carving them down. I don't think any of the OSHA requirements are being met here. Somebody pointed that out to me. But, that's, uh, Albert again, again, the columns all have regularity in their shape and their size and their, their locations. But, but all have the impulse and the inspiration of the designer. So beautiful, beautiful work taking shape there and, and a great, great sense of pride in that work stone. We're very excited. These are three, three of the half, half chefs of those columns. That'll line some of the alleyways around the building. also we couldn't carve everything by stone and so pla making plaster models that we could then render in, uh, reconstructed stone or Caststone. Was part of the flight plan for the project. And of course we had ul ultimately we did produce some of the drawings in CAD to make sure that the Revit model would ultimately behave well with these things in it. so the, the caster said, well, can't we just produce, you know, we'll just 3D print the thing right at a cad. Like, no, we really want it to be made by a human being. I think. Well, the, the profiles are pretty simple. We said, we said, okay, then we're gonna make it more complex. Is actually, so in the plaster modeling, this is Rowan. She's, helping us kind of work on these ac cantus garlands, and she's like extremely proud of this beautiful drawing she's made and figured out how to get the pattern repeat to work. So when we get the model, it's, it's going to be able to work out across the, across the freeze, um, or some of the, the details that they've modeled for us for approval. What's amazing is this is being done by students. Students led by really great faculty. And so I think it just, it resonates for me so much to see the talented faculty here in the architecture program and this whole generation, of architects that will bring us back closer to a beautiful world. so this has been a joy, a personal, journey and joy and it's involved so many people and there's just so much excitement around it that I wanted to share it with you. Figuring out how to do things for the first time in a way feels that way. You know, how, how to, how to build that, how to build that garland. So these are the, the, the plaster models. The clay ultimately plaster models starting to set up the, the patterns that will adorn the, the base model, the mother mold, you might say, for the basis of the columns. This is, Steve Kester, who's their lead, uh, plaster faculty member there. And he's been a champ as well. Organizing students to develop even cornices so that they will, would not be just'cause you could extrude them from a computer, but they're not extruded from a computer. They have the imperfection of, of the human hand in them. So, you know, so this process has been going from drawings that, that were produced for the set. Ultimately starting to build the bases, build the framework. We, we, we reached a point, we said, we've got to make sure people know that this was made by hand. So we said, well, what if could we broach the surface on the column? And I, well, why would we do that? It's like, well, do we want evidence? So we spent a lot of time talking about how to create, a pattern of grooving on those vertical surfaces. And Steve made a special template so he could then have students run their hands over. The vertical surfaces in the models so that you would have something that we could not have printed out of a computer would have that imperfection, um, right in the mold. And so that the, those, the attention to little things like that has been part of, part of the journey, part of the learning as these pile aster bases and capitals have been getting built up to really quite elaborate, effect. And, uh, some simpler ones too. Casting, casting of course the egg and dark casting these rosettes into it and kind of working through each of those, those elements. So that's the, the mother mold for one of the more ornate capitals that become part of the building and you can sort of see the evidence of the hand all, all over it. so really excited about that. And, and so is Rowan and, um, other things too. Invitations for detail headers over doors. Which certainly aren't necessary, but are another way to sort of enrich the pedestrian experience, sort of a gift to the street. And, um, students starting to develop those models as well in Clay, looking at precedent, you know, going as far as they could go from the drawings that we were able to create and then taking it further. That's at full scale and it's Iris again. there's blacksmithing as well as one of the trades that, that they teach at a CBA and, and so, you know, that certainly not to be left out. So we have a number of details for the building, whether decorative lanterns that are sort of extravagant, or area elements that are a bit simpler, but also have the unique. Of the, of the artisans making them. So I think we have 16 gates that are all individually, crafted and, and hand riveted together, and really quite, quite remarkable work. Um, their lead blacksmith is a fellow named Matt Garten, who, who's tremendous, tremendous talent. And he's got a whole series, a whole generation of blacksmiths that he's trained. So. So there we are. I think the, the world is ready. It's so interesting that the, the humanistic carvings on this building immediately caught people's attention. You know, Iris was on the cover of, you know, local papers. She started carving one of those Keytones and, um, veranda Magazine, not long ago, just, uh, featured, an article on the College Building Arts. But they sort of come back to this human form being present in the building. I think it's the most powerful way for us to just sort of. A gap between all the theory and the actual practice of making. So that's what I, that's what I prepared. I know there's a lot of slides. Thank you for letting me, um, share those with you. I've not shown any of those photos before, um, of the work going on at the A CBA, but I was really excited to get a chance to, to showcase some of that with you all tonight. So thank you very much.