Transcriber: Ivy Rao Reviewer: Claire Ghyselen
I am an architect.
I love being an architect
and I decided I wanted to be an architect when I was 12 years old.
And I'll be forever ever thankful
that I've had the opportunity of designing academic buildings
There are some really really good things about designing academic buildings.
But one of the most important things is all of you sitting here.
In reality, if we can really do a building,
it somehow facilitates your ability to learn and grow at young age.
What more could we do for society?
And in particular, personally,
if we could do it just a little bit better to actually inspire you.
To inspire you, wouldn't that be terrific?
The other thing that I really like about architecture,
is it's a nasty little problem.
What you start to look at is if you look deeply,
you realize it's always different.
It's different culture, it's a different environment,
a different biological sense to what it happens,
different kinds of programs, different kinds of people.
And what it deserves is actually a unique custom crafted solution,
for you.
Now this actually amazingly is not a problem,
because this is one of the few places in society
where we can actually custom-make something.
You can obviously tell I can get a custom made suit.
But I can actually design a building it could be custom made for you.
But here's the challenge, we have to be courageous enough,
to be willing to fly the prototype.
The other thing that we have to do
is we have to do the quote that's up behind me.
We have to ask the question : "Why do we do it that way?"
And this question of why is not just about architecture.
It's about everything.
It's about everything that you need to change in your life.
It's the doorway open to all creativity innovation.
It's the question "why?".
But when we don't ask that question what do we normally get?
Mid-rise housing.
You may say, "Jim, I'm not buying this idea
that you get all this custom-made stuff.
It looks pretty formulaic to me".
Hard for me to argue.
Why?
It is because architects aren't talented. I don't buy that.
We can always blame the client is not willing to spend the money,
or they're not committed enough.
Easy target. But I don't think that's true either.
I think it's much more insidious than that and it sort of goes like this.
"Hey, I have this idea, I think we should do this."
and you say, "yeah yeah, that's sort of seems like what I thought."
and maybe the next logical thing is we would do this,
and I go "yeah, ok, I'm ok with that."
We start to work back and forth towards consensus.
And we're all feeling good about it.
Pretty soon, we're on a rail.
We're moving efficiently along, very quickly,
feeling good about ourselves to some place.
Sadly when we end up in that place is how much the other people there,
because they follow the same rap.
And we'll find that we didn't get there
on the basis of our imagination, or creativity, or innovation.
We got there because it was a safe familiar path to go.
We'll find out when we land there it's actually kind of boring.
I'm lucky to be surrounded by a whole bunch of people I work with
who work really hard to make sure that we don't get caught on that rail.
As I get older, I have to constantly remind myself
that as I gained more wisdom,
it's not that I know the way to do it,
but I might know how to find the way to do it.
And those are totally different things.
So with the Milken Institute, the public health school here at GW.
That's that building, it's on the right.
I just for background tell you it sits in the upper corner of the campus,
the northwestern of the campus,
right on Washington circle. Great site. It's a kind of an oddly shaped site.
You can see here before the building was put on it.
And right from the get-go,
your start to be told sort of what to do it's a thing called zoning.
What zoning wants you to do is not to build a building is taller than 90 feet
It wants you to fill up the site to about 90% of the site.
And frankly the client rightfully wants to develop all the square footage
it can on the site as well.
This is simple what you do. It's an academic building.
What we'll do is we'll take all the student program
and we'll put them on lower level, the first few floors of the building,
because they come and go,
they make a lot of noise, that kind of the rumbling heard
maybe we can keep the pizza boxes kind of control that way.
Then we'll turn around to take the faculty
and we'll put them up on the top of the building
the views are really nice up there.
And then in the extreme of this, we'll take the most important faculty,
the senior researchers and we'll line them up right along Washington circle facade,
so they can have the great view of Washington circle.
And the graduate students, I don't know of any you graduate students
but if you were you'd understand you're going to get that space
sort of in the back.
We could have done that building. Everyone would be perfectly comfortable.
Everybody would have thought we did the right thing.
We might have even talk to ourselves to think this seems like the right thing.
If we benchmark lots of other academic buildings,
we would have been confident it were exactly where we needed to be.
If we have done that building you might have gone to it
and I'm pretty sure you've never invite me to talk to you on this stage.
So we have to go about it in a different way.
So what might that different way be? So I have a little test for you.
I want you to tell me right now how to get to the top of this tree?
Which branch do you go up?
Too many options?
It's a tough problem. You have to think about it a bit.
Maybe you have to try some.
You'd have to go up a few branches to see what it looks like
and those kind of thing's like.
So it means you have to be open minded about it.
The other thing you need is, you need ambition.
Now this maybe seems like a crazy thing.
I showed that slide before and somebody basically told me
the problem is I had to complicated a tree that I need a simply trip,
that I need to simplify the problem which is part of the problem.
We don't need simpler problems. We need elegant solutions
to complex problems.
Totally different thing.
So, let me tell you through the story of the building.
The convention is, ok, 90 feet.
We've got to go 40 foot floor,
the floor will put 6 stories in. It's almost designed.
And this would be the death of any kind of design
if we were to execute this.
So what we have to do?
If we have to come in and say okay,
we've got to lower the floor to get it to be about 12th.
Then we can actually insert another floor
and then that gives us the opportunity
to cut holes all through the building,
but we still saved the amount of square footage
that the client wanted originally.
Now we potentially have something to work with.
The problem is it's really hard to design this program in a building that short.
It's unbelievably difficult because you got to get the structure to be really thin
It's we have to invent a way to get 40 feet across these classrooms
with this really thin structure.
But that's okay.
We have really smart people, we know what we need to do.
This is where innovation can save the day if you have a little courage.
We figured it out.
The next thing is social geometry.
Maybe you could actually have the radical idea of putting the faculty
and the students on the same floor. Kind of things that might work.
If we did that, maybe it makes sense to put the faculty down
on the residential street which is in this blue bar.
And put the students in their two kinds of spaces,
their introspective classrooms,
and their informal learning spaces and put them out on the circle.
Now, it may seem counter intuitive.
But we have to get this building approved by the city and by the neighbourhood.
I will tell you the neighborhood really likes the idea
that all down their street,
they have small windows and faculty offices.
The faculties are more likely to go home at night and shut those lights off
and calms the whole building down next to the neighborhood.
And so we get their approval. And the city is thrilled.
What they have to animate Washington Circle
is not just a building but you.
You there got awful nights of the night who knows how late you stay there.
But if it's a nice enough building to stay you are there.
And now you are the object that the city loves to see.
We now maybe have something we can work with.
It's a bit like a beehive you can crack it open.
We can bring natural light down into the middle of this deep block.
But the other thing we can start to do is create pathways, bridges,
stairs, other kinds of things and make them irresistible
that you would walk up them.
While we need to be sensitive to people with disability
so they can move around the building,
we also need to understand from what was just said
that the health benefits of having you actually walk up and down the building,
it's something that you might think should be in a public health school.
When you go through and look at other kinds of things,
a kind of cross section of the building,
we have those spaces of quiet repose,
we have those centres staircases,
we have these kind of inward-looking classroom spaces.
Then, we had these things that were fundamentally important
to the way we thought about the project,
and there are these kinds of lounge spaces that set out on the circle.
We also thought it was important to connect vertically.
While we have a very traditional atrium, the thing that you see on the left,
we also have something that I think is much more interesting.
That is we took little bits of space away from the lounges
that sits over Washington circle.
What this effect is doing, it's a little bit like all of us
sitting in a tree.
Maybe me and a few of my friends are sitting on our branch,
and you're sitting on your branch,
and I can see you and you can see us.
But you're still on your branch
and I'm still on my branch and I have a little bit of privacy.
And it's a concept of could we be alone
but to somehow together.
And is that somehow help us
as a community of learners who are trying to search out
and understand important things.
Programmatically we could take a very simple thing as classrooms.
But even there we tried to say
you know we shouldn't make this too obvious and too easy.
The classroom is varied in size
and their kind of represented by these baskets
and we could have stacked them all over each other.
The reality is you could actually stack them a different way.
And when you stack them differently you get an interesting effect,
not only are the objects but the objects, they actually create space
between and around them.
And now we have a vehicle
that says okay the baskets, the objects of the classrooms,
but the space they create around them
start to define these informal learning spaces as well.
It so happens it's very helpful to drive columns and air dusts
and a whole bunch of other things through these things
when they actually not stacked over each other, if you think about it,
than it would be if just track all over each other
but that's a very different story.
So, what do you get?
If you combine all these things together what you get is architecture.
But I would argue maybe there is a different way
of looking at the architecture.
Maybe it's a different way of looking in me;
maybe I'm not just the coat I wear;
maybe it's what's under the coat it's what...it's what whom I am.
So buildings could be inanimate objects.
But I would argue you, when you occupy them, make them alive.
When you go out and walk around the city, look for buildings
and see if they look like they're having beautifully tailored clothes,
a kind of inanimate mannequins.
Or maybe they're not dressed so well
but they're alive.
Thank you very much.