[00:00:05] >> So welcome to another edition of the College of Design Research Forum I am not now and. Most of you know Nancy Greenlee is the associate dean for our. Research in this college but she sends her regrets because she has some other urgent matters to deal with so I'm standing in for ha. [00:00:32] Some of you know me I'm sure. The chair of the school of city and regional planning Nancy is my colleague in the school and I'm also the director of the Center for spatial planning analytics and visualisation but I'm going to keep the introduction small because we have just an hour and we want to hear from our from our distinguished panelists for most of that time so I'll introduce you some new members of our college who have joined us over the past year and therefore we are calling this for a new voices in design and research we have a session of new voices each semester so there will be another one in the spring of 2020 I believe it's March 15th so please mark your calendar for March 5th. [00:01:23] For an out of session of new voices. Let me introduce you to our Had this and then I'll tell you about. The protocols and how we're doing this. So our 1st presentation is going to be by a human Jew ole who is an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the School of Industrial Design and the school of interactive computing at Georgia Tech working at the intersection of human computer interaction and design She studies and builds computational design tools and methods that integrate everyday materials with computing she explores how computing technologies can extend and prance form familiar materials around us and investigate how those combinations can broaden creative possibilities for design does she received her Ph d. in technology media and society from the University of Colorado in Boulder and has a certificate in cognitive scientists from. [00:02:30] From Carnegie Mellon University and media interaction design from you why women soon about 50 are what has been published e.c.m. say she conferences and the maker community widely used by Keith 12 teachers and maker spaces our 2nd presentation is going to be by my colleague. Laura Raman who is being here with us for just short of a year she started January of 2009 Laura is an assistant professor in the school of city and regional planning and her research is at the intersection of real estate finance and social space in a wallet she has explored the uneven housing market recovery following the real estate and financial crisis of the 2000 persistent and concentrated negative equity in the southeast the rise of single family rental securitized nations and rates in single family rentals she has ongoing projects on affordable housing issues among the island in the diaspora and land Kenya issues. [00:03:51] So Raymond and her Ph d. right here in our school City and reason are planning it in 2017 she has a b.a. in history from Brown University and her research has been featured in The Washington Post New York Times Bloomberg Business Week n.p.r.. All very illustrious day. Last presentation last but not the least Ryan Roark is the 2019 and 21 so 2 years so it's a 2 year appointment as the venture next fellow at Georgia Tech School of Architecture. [00:04:35] The venture lead next generation visiting fellows is an initiative intended for young faculty who are at the beginning of their carrier and interested in interdisciplinary teaching and research that merges design technology and culture as an architectural designer and writer she focuses on the role of history in building design and urban planning so Ryan was a 2007 kinky p.f. polecats fellow in London where she studied different the policies of design interventions on 2 old buildings and the attitudes to history that represent our work at Georgia Tech continues to formal tectonic and historical investigation as well as examining the role of men to the mix reality. [00:05:24] What that role will play in the design of the quaint The 1st Century City so I'm going to stop here since I've already taken enough time we have 3 presentations we're going to target about 10 to 12 minutes for each presentation so that we have enough time for question and also we'll have the presentation one off to be other and I would request you to hold your questions and of all people from patients come back here and we'll address your questions at that time so without further ado I'm going to hand it over to. [00:06:16] Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us today I'm going to. I'm an assistant professor we don't join to appointment in the schools of industrial design computing my research interests is in computational design tools and methods that help us make things by combining everyday materials with computing. I approach making as a way to promote creativity and when I say everyday materials I literally what we see what we use in everyday life such as cardboard or plastic wraps from packages or fabrics from what we are bearing in particularly for the past 5 to 6 years I have been quite obsessed with paper so in this thought I will present 2 of those projects the 1st one is paper mechatronics paper make a trial next is our term my research team has used to indicate a new G.'s i medium combining Trajan of paper crafting with mechanical electrical competition complements we call this new medium to highlight the newly enabled creative possibilities fighting to ration specifically the movements by a mechanical design and automation interaction by embodied the electronics and programming done when those are all combined together with paper crafts that opens up new expressive and technical possibilities because that invites stories by computational control movement so since 2014 we have developed a series of computation of the giant tools to support other designers especially beginner designers for the activities of exploring and building their own next as a learning medium. [00:08:01] This process was initiated during my Ph d. and I'm still continuing this in a collaboration with the p.r. agency let me show you some of the work we have I think you here right. What I am going to show you about loving the website paper map that it's optimized for environment. [00:08:29] And in the website people can use that these I simulated users can choose very they want to start from either a mechanism or. For instance if they choose. This is a screen they will see in by changing the look our parents or they can design their own motion on their death they can also change the mechanisms of supporting the kind. [00:08:59] If they finish their design process they can also download the file as a p.d.f. then using this file we can cut and prepare the material. Following the Web instruction they can build the working physical model so far we have developed 12 different movements. Braiding with teachers and students we have workshops. [00:09:35] That's where we study how they can apply this material scaffolding media to feel their own creation. So throughout this project the core consideration has been how we can develop technologists more accessible easy enough to support beginner designers who are not trained in or confident in design engineering but still in a way we can provide sufficient space to personalize their creations and we also see even if they choose same motions same mechanism same parents or so that it's very uncommon to see that even if that happens still there are a lot of rooms they can feeling with their own ideas all of those images you see in this lies are based on open close and. [00:10:39] Mechanisms and you see the whole variety of their own stories here and almost always just like university classes people a few people always want to go part or write and they just of that combine multiple make a movements and modify the parts to make more complex structure and if that comes their higher chance to add more details of their stories so the greatest lessons learned throughout this project has been how paper can be really encouraging and empowering learning medium I want to move on to the next one so my focus in paper mechatronics has been how we can. [00:11:25] Raise the floor really by supporting the the you know designers the other side of my research interest this how we can lift the ceiling by embracing more sophisticated other vessel level of design and craft skills with more emerging technologies in that spectrum the most recent project has been initiated after I arrived in Georgia around the end of last year. [00:11:50] To give you some background as it was based on the collaboration with doctors only and Weinstein at material science to apply his invention of using tribal electric effect to generate power the way his head closer works is when we can that when you can take 2 different materials and separate them certain materials can get electrically charged it so his team has discovered how we can apply disinfect as a power source to generate our power sources and then how we can choose right materials to support that effect applying this technology some of human computer interaction researchers there at the school of interactive computing also have demonstrated with South Park sensing technologists specially on there you become. [00:12:41] So you can imagine my excitement over the last year coming here. So now in the spin project I propose applying this technology to the unique aesthetics of paper crazes when you think a powerful being to the sheet of paper any sort o. paper or by folding it we can make that creates write composed of 2 regions faces and one connecting joint and disemployed make a property can enable the motions of compression and expansion no matter how complex. [00:13:10] Life or you all starts from there and this motions of compression the expansion can be also apply to the interactions in scale from fingertip level to. Whole body movement like that and so the form factors forming those patents that says Galal or orientation or holding patterns in this context impacts not only the aesthetics and they can cut properties but those so the functionality the effectiveness of the power generation so in this study we have been looking for how we can apply this entity as expressive and self part paper based interfaces for sensing in simple actuation just froze it was very recently up to one of the exam conferences pencil embodied in by the direction I'm going to show you the video we have worked on. [00:14:14] Paper we make a crease and we combine fin tape and plastic layer and apply those motions of pushing pull compression to generate. Electricity. And apply that. To operate the sensors and actuators and to support other designers we have developed design editor and series of. Editor supports developing our own crease patterns and also supports where we want to apply the power generation module. [00:14:51] And depending on the dimensions we can also generate the power. Level we need we can download the file then using the file we can cut and scored the material. Then assembling them together. We are making the working module you see this motion the power stick. Blinking only this is applying to. [00:15:31] So we have applied in 2 actions in skill the finger tip level connected to i.r. communication. Sense if you repeat this many many many times we can also act as a small. Bouncer we says a common electronic part connected to the card and we also apply the bigger scale to the costing level connective many l.a. this there they don't know if it's been here so I still see a paper has a lot more. [00:16:10] Definitely looking for more ways to engage myself in the future of paper and tools around it at the same time I see paper as just one example of the everyday materials I mean these are on me so. I'm looking forward to ways to expand the scope of my material for my future study Thank you. [00:16:36] Paul. That's a tough act to follow. So I don't have slides so I'm just going to talk to you about 3 research projects that I've done in the past couple years and then talk about a recent application of that research generally. So 1st off I study affordable housing and very specifically I look at how real estate finance impacts inequality and inequity mostly in the southeast region. [00:17:23] My work started in the aftermath of the subprime and foreclosure crisis where there dental a lot of research on how subprime lending. Predatory subprime lending targeted at minority communities had led not only to a global financial crisis but also to a widening wealth inequality of the collapse of black middle class homeownership. [00:17:47] And a lot of really difficult situations in neighborhoods that we saw here in Atlanta where we had lots of vacancies and all of the problems that vacancies I bring with it so my research started sort of after that and around that whole conversation and one of the 1st papers I did was I looked at. [00:18:07] A different type of foreclosure that made our subprime crisis worse here in Atlanta because we took years longer to recover than cities like Los Angeles or cities like Boston either didn't also have access construction leading up to the crisis and what I looked at was the relationship between small banks and small construction firms and speculative construction that was happening in very sprawling ex-urban locations and what I found was that small banks 1st of all Georgia has a very loose bank charging system it's really easy to start a bank here you can get in trouble in Florida. [00:18:47] With your bank get shut down come over to Georgia start a new bank no problem and there's not a whole lot of oversight you can very generally but we tend to have a lot of small banks that it's. Aren't really pursuing the best business practices or we did until until the Hoosier crisis because I couldn't change them. [00:19:09] So so what I found was that small banks in Georgia were not relying on local depositors to kind of fund the loans that they were making to construction firms instead they were using something called wholesale funding and that's refers to a group of 3 different financial channels which essentially allows you to tap money markets instead of getting money from your local savers and then they would lend that money to small construction firms you know often 2 guys in a pickup truck but sometimes bigger and those firms would do a lot of greenfield construction in kind of far flung counties and it turned out that this construction was very speculative a it got out of sync with our local economy and a lot of those homes failed to sell so those vacancies were very difficult to absorb at the same time that we were trying to absorb all of the foreclosed homes just in talking about market processes. [00:20:08] And so that paper was interesting and it was I just came back from Puerto Rico to give a talk there and it was interesting to them because they had the same problem prior to the hurricanes that have devastated a Puerto Rico they were having a housing crisis but the funny thing was is that they didn't have any subprime lending there all of their lending was kind of the safe government insured kind but what had happened was that their banks had been tapping wholesale funds to do speculative construction and they built far too many homes for people to buy so that was interesting. [00:20:39] Some other research that I did. In the aftermath of the foreclosure crisis was to look at the unevenness of their coverage so there was an understanding. In kind of the 20102013 era that not only were in the midst of a. Of a you know kind of this global crisis but that there were this crisis was happening in ways that deepened racial inequality in our country and there was a pattern and equities in the way that subprime mortgage lending that was was done that made that even worse and what I think I added to that conversation was to say actually it didn't stop there during the recovery period there were forces at play that continue to widen this divide and so what I looked at was the spatial concentration of negative equity in neighborhoods in the southeast I was working for the Federal Reserve Bank at the time so use their. [00:21:39] Catchment area which is kind of the 6 states including Georgia. And what I found was that even if you control for demographics for city for the death. That your home prices fell from peak to the bottom from the amount of subprime lending the the strongest predictor of whether an area had concentrated negative equity was race and it held true for race specifically for African-American race it did not hold true for Hispanics so once you controlled for all of those factors the high negative equity among Hispanic Americans. [00:22:17] Seem to you could explain it by income or by city or for things like that but there seem to be institutional discrimination continuing to occur in the way that African-American neighborhoods were going through this recovery and so I didn't fully explain why that might happen but one thing I pointed to is that the biggest recovery program put out by the government was the harp refinance program and I was able to show that most of those harp refinances in the city of Atlanta were not going to southwest Atlanta which is where the foreclosure crisis hit the worst most of them were going and what we like to call the cheese wedge it was this kind of northern arc of the city I don't know why we call her that she's veggie but that's what they were calling it the Fed at the time. [00:23:04] So you can tell I do a lot of really happy research. Uplifting. But that research I think was. It had a lot of impact it actually helped the Georgia. Structure their mortgage recovery process so they had some funding left over from an s.p. and so they took my paper and they were able to look at it and think how should we structure this you know actually we're looking at very concentrated areas of negative equity and that's different than if the landscape were kind of more evenly distributed so they were able to use that information to craft new policies. [00:23:40] And then I would say the 3rd. Piece of work that I did was to look at how like what happened to all those foreclosed properties that this is just 56 short years ago right now we were drowning in extra homes that were selling for $3050000.00 now we're in the midst of an affordability crisis we're losing low income units you know like I thought over a 1000 a year people are being pushed out of city of Atlanta and it's just kind of the reverse situation. [00:24:11] So my mind kind of goes back to well what do we do with all those foreclosed homes and at the time there were programs to sell those homes to non-profits to use them for low income homeownership but one of the major. Things that happened was that private equity firms and institutional investors decided to become landlords and they recognized a historic financial opportunity for them from them in their investors and they purchased tens of thousands of foreclosed homes including here in Atlanta. [00:24:41] And so. There was sort of a debate among planners are not necessarily pessimists we said well let's look on the bright side look at this do number when we have a lot of exclusionary zoning in Atlanta it can be hard to live in a good town if you can afford to be a homeowner and yet a lot of great areas around here with great schools are exclusively single family homes so maybe this you know big conglomerate is coming in and buying a single family home and turning into a rental that that could create a low income rental opportunity for a family that would like to move to an area of opportunity. [00:25:16] So that was one of the biggest ones and that and that the other hope was that we really had a big problem with vacancies with homes that were becoming very dilapidated. You know folks would strip them of copper and make them completely unusable so they had to be demolished so getting tenants any kind of resident into that home was really important. [00:25:38] On the flip side there was a concern about well wouldn't it be nice to use these properties for affordable housing or other things it's it's rare you get the opportunity to buy land that cheaply and at those prices you can afford a very deep subsidy that will create opportunities for low income people so a lot of people are kind of worrying about whether you know was this a good thing or was this a bad thing so I did a study to see let's look at the topic of housing instability we know that forced moves are really bad for households we know they're bad for school children we know that they often lead to homelessness Fell's that they are bad for Community Cohesion stuff like that we knew that from the foreclosure crisis that's. [00:26:20] A forced move is a very stressful event it can lead to all kinds of health problems and often you're forced to move when you're in the middle of a health emergency because you've gotten sick your pay is less if you're an hourly worker because you've been dealing with that on this and then you kind of fall into foreclosure or later in your rent in your 1st to move right when you can afford them so all kinds of bad social effects happened 1st and so what I did was I worked with. [00:26:49] The Atlanta volunteer League lawyers Foundation here in Atlanta and they were interested in the election issue because that's they work a lot with tenants one of actions and I worked with some folks who were formerly just you and now at Emory to scrape evictions data from the Fulton County magistrate's website and what we found Laurence 1st of all we have one of the highest eviction rates in the country we found that there were almost 40000 addictions filed we found that we had overall and that eviction filing doesn't necessarily lead to using your home so it's like just because I'm late on my credit card payment doesn't mean I go into bankruptcy there is a process in between here and there but we had a very high rate of people just getting that eviction filing. [00:27:33] We also had a very high rate of people being evicted from their homes so about 6 percent of all families in 2015 were evicted and forced to move in and that's just the form of those we know from research there's a lot of informal moves as well. And then we looked at specific places like College Park we found that those rates were extremely high you know 4550 percent of all families were getting that eviction notice and like around 15 or 16 percent of all families were being forced to move so that's really bad for neighborhoods. [00:28:08] And then after kind of compiling those overall statistics we looked and we said Well our initial question was what happened to these foreclosed homes in these single family rentals that now have corporate owners presumably these guys have deeper pockets. They're less likely to have the maintenance issues that a smaller and larger have that might lead to a negative interaction with a tenant that leads to a vacation so let's see do large corporate Lammers have higher that she rates or lower eviction rates than the small mom and mom and pops that we've always had here in Atlanta. [00:28:38] And what we found was that these corporate landlords were really that. Some of them filed addiction notices on a 3rd of their tenants in a given year. And so that research was really compelling because there are a lot of cities all around the country that we're also seeing kind of the entrance of Blackstone and imitation homes and Colony Capital and all of these firms kind of into their rental markets and so it kind of provided the 1st Imperial evidence that hey maybe this isn't necessarily everything that's out on the on the blah blah c Marketing Magazine and one thing that seemed really hopeful to me was that the worst firms were the ones nobody was really talking about but the firms that had attracted the most attention from activist or media those firms actually had the lowest affection rate so I thought you know 1st of all it's possible for these firms to operate with very low housing instability and to make a profit but also I think that shedding light on this issue I mean it's correlation not causation. [00:29:34] But it might have been an impression so. So that were kind of lead less to direct policy than my other work and more to kind of media attention and people kind of talking and thinking about this issue. That it was interesting going to Puerto Rico just this week and talking with them not only about their construction foreclosure problem where they have a lot of vacant homes built in kind of sprawling urban form numb but also how can they use those vacancies as an opportunity and what I said to them was you know back in 2010 we were looking at all these vacancies as a burden we're thinking What the heck are we going to do with all these properties and here we are in 2900 thinking Gosh I wish the city of Atlanta owned this property as we could do so much more of the you know the mayor's campaign to build affordable housing. [00:30:24] That would be such an asset if we put all of those properties into new interests or not all of them but maybe more of them so it was fun it was fun talking with them about the different decisions that we've made here in the Southeast under a lot of pressure and ways that they could think strategically about how to get out of the crisis that they're in come out on top in the years to come so thanks very much. [00:31:02] I I'm I'm right or our. Next fellow at the school of architecture I can pull it misleads here. You know. I wrote this outside time. So my research and most of my design work focuses on new designs done on or with old buildings which I typically call intervention in contrast to restoration or traditional preservation. [00:31:40] So here are some examples of what that looks like countless arguments can be made in favor of working with old material creatively as an alternative to demolition restoration or one to one preservation which itself can have high energy costs. As we both architects and society worry increasingly about our impact on the climate and environment a degree of material or attention is certainly a priority. [00:32:06] There's also a strong economic argument to be made in favor of a mix of intervention and retention researchers in England Germany and the Netherlands have all recently come to independent conclusions that property values are higher all other things being equal in neighborhoods with a mix of styles. But for me the most powerful argument against restoration and in favor of creative intervention comes from the theorists that line a boy him his book The Future of nostalgia from 2001 confronted head on a problem of art that a problem of architecture has been grappling with for a while that nostalgia for the past has negative connotations of regression but it's also a nearly universal human emotion. [00:32:45] Distinguish between 2 types of nostalgia restore it in a style Joe with which seeks to return to a past state of glory and reflected in a stall just a creative and progressive impulse shared across humanity a longing prompted by the fundamental unknowability of the past she writes quote creativeness stalls are reveals the fantasies of the age and it is in those fantasies and potentiality is that the future is born one is nostalgic not for the past the way it was but for the past the way it could have been it is this past perfect that one strives to realize in the future. [00:33:20] So what makes the age of material valuable apart from embedded resources in labor is precisely the suggestion of what could have been in the past Boim concretely links the presumption of knowing what the past actually was with the practice of restoration and with toxic nationalism creative or reflect in the style just a potential antidote to the restorative kind inviting imagination of the multiple alternate realities which the past might represent today a frankness about the acts of intervention and boldness of the modern day mark left on the older stuff are critical to avoid what we know today as alternative facts dishonesty about what actually was. [00:33:57] 2 years ago I was funded by the architecture firm con Peterson Fox to go to London for 6 months and study this issue of new design interventions into old buildings and a lot of my current research comes out of the work I started during that time London is a particularly interesting place to study different approaches of this kind because architects there had to grapple with these issues by necessity for the past 100 years at least because of the city's historic building stock much of which has historic listing status and because of extensive World War 2 bombing damage which forced rebuilding. [00:34:28] I spent most much of my time in the u.k. visiting intervention projects in London and throughout the country and speaking with architects and users about them my plan going in was to identify formal strategies and processes of material decisionmaking So I asked every architect how they documented the existing architectures What were the 1st reactions they had in responding to the existing stuff and how they proceeded with design and I was expecting answers like form or analysis because nothing formal or serial or program but almost everybody responded the same way they all said 1st of all we are not conservation Architects which indicates the kind of ambivalence towards the idea of conservation of preservation in the field and the next almost every architect I spoke with answered the question about what came 1st what the answer narrative each of these buildings was a story and narrative response to what was there before and what it looks like although important was seemingly secondary to or in support of that story so I'm currently in the early stages of writing a book based on this and subsequent research that I've continued called Conversations with English architects about old buildings I've also recently completed a chapter for a book called Ruskin's ecologies in which I argue that the 19th century art in architecture critic John Ruskin's ideas about frankness and audacity terms he used to describe how he believes that imitation of older architectures should be here and out those terms can also be used as a lens for evaluating 21st century intervention architecture in the interest of developing a methodology for working through intervention projects both pedagogically and professionally I drew a series of simplified technologies based on the projects I studied it loved it. [00:36:10] While most of the projects I looked at don't fall neatly into just one of these categories I worked on simplifying these type of logical moves as much as possible in order to develop a studio how they got cheaper working systematically on older buildings. We often shy away from teaching these sorts of projects and studio both because of the perception of preservation of something that a set opposite design and because the task of representing a building that already exists in the world is a huge problem in itself before you even start on the new design how much detail should you draw of the old building you'll find critics will say you need to draw every stone and also critics will take you to task for doing so so recognizing the difficulties of representation that come along with projects of intervention and also the possibilities afforded by working with the already existing as a basis of the teaching a workshop this spring on which I'm calling representing renovation and which will work on developing a cohesive sense system of representation by which to draw and model existing intervention projects so they can be discussed more easily side by side. [00:37:09] Because a lot of the work I do is designing because I think it's critical for me to apply my research project only in this way I also brought some key images from 2 recent projects to give you an idea of the relationship between my design. First project was my mark thesis project at Princeton and 2017 in which I proposed to convert the Renwick ruin a currently uninhabitable ruin smallpox hospital on the south end of Roosevelt Island in New York City into a new Public Engagement building a museum of medical technology history for the adjacent Cornell Technion Institute campus which has been masterplan by a so and opened its 1st phase in 2017. [00:37:47] The Renwick ruin is the site where the managing body will eventually be forced to make a decision to restore preserve or do something else as the Cornell Tech campus marches closer and closer to the site the Roosevelt Island operating Corp is leaning towards preservation which would cost an estimated bare minimum of $40000000.00 as the building is unstable and falling apart fast there's also a strong call for restoration with arguments about whether the building should be restored to its original state in the mid 1900 centuries the smallpox hospital when it didn't have its north and south wings to its early 20th century state as a nurse training facility when the wings were added or to some other state has spent more time as a ruin than it did as an operating building and I argue that its high sentimental value to New York City residents is based on its registration of age and history rather than on a specific architectural or functional history or original aesthetic I see the material its age and its signs of previous Labor as being the buildings most prized and evocative features. [00:38:48] In trying to understand how visitors value the existing rule and I turns to Instagram and other online curation tools as some of the most prevalent avenues of personal storytelling and distribution of building images that are used today analyzed people's photographs of the ruin and I notice that it was generally shot as a relatively close up and yet. [00:39:07] With a focus on materiality local form or a combination of the 2 so I decided to represent the building's insurance facade its west facade that they say is Manhattan top composite image that you see as a composite of these vignettes at approximately the scale of the average Instagram and yet this representational analysis ultimately led me to propose stabilizing the buildings exterior walls the face it presents to the city as 9 foot by 9 foot chunks that could then be used as the living blocks for a new building the strategy preserve the vignette as well as the material as a register of the buildings longstanding role in the city as a loan on industrial ruin. [00:39:44] The final project looked like Ultimately the new design proposes a model of Historic Preservation which instead of seeking to restore preserve or glorify an original building uses the existing building as material for a new building in a way that neither privileges old over new nor indeed the reverse instead this model seeks to highlight the process of continual remaking and reuse and therefore of history itself. [00:40:08] The 2nd project which I did with my sometime design partner and it Percival was a proposal for seeding in Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens New York for the fall a function competition last year we propose a series of modules that can stand alone as individual seats or be aggregated to make benches and multi-functional seating arrangements these pieces are designed after the Parkside facade of a demolished turn of the century 5th Avenue mansion once known as Clark's folly when Clark's folly was demolished in 1907 to be replaced by a luxury apartment building the dismemberment of its facades was featured in the national newspapers our proposal suggests an approach to the built history of the city which is an alternative to demolition and whole preservation the facade of such a publicly presented private building which was famously little used by its owners as a cultural artifact of the city's inhabitants by turning the facade into park seating we wanted to invite city dwellers to claim the artifacts and to see them up close. [00:41:03] What's reuse here is not historic material but the memory of it the project may be in a stall object but it stands firmly against the idea of restoration and recognizes the soldier as a creative act of reflection it asks park visitors to reflect upon the past of a specific building the material past of the city at large and the changes that material over time in a nod to the impossibility of restoring the past we propose a lightweight construction with an underlying plywood structure. [00:41:31] In a porous concrete would facilitate drainage and encourage vegetal growth over time so that the benches would be expected and encouraged to change color and texture over the years with use and storage ultimately this project was intended to start conversations about buildings about alternatives to preservation practices. Are you talking about the 1st process the paper. [00:42:15] My focus as a supporting begin their design or so we did this. It can be quite open but when me going to a classroom supports we focus on the middle school level. Yes Yes So we work with children direct. To 1st 3 years and then recently we started working with teachers so they're helping us to develop the peasant school approaches using those materials so they started looking for specific ways to afford a public school environment. [00:44:29] You know I think in fairness I think it's really valid and great point we really look into how we. Combine more complex you know he's an environment and then based on the 1st 2 years of experiences working with begin their design there's we made that decision that maybe I should be kind of this. [00:44:51] Section project not the whole on their beginner Support Project for to 1st line the reason is that when we started adding more channels and the scene in our exploration. Providing more at the beginning really didn't help so that's where we kind of simplified the approaches but as I showed. [00:45:13] Draw out the process throughout the day was that the physical prototyping process we could see they gradually you know expose himself to more complexity right and that's where they kind of start to learning further and they come back and. Says Well now we are looking for ways to how we can also provide more complex environments from the software as well so that that's where we are now. [00:45:54] This is I was really thinking a lot of up sometimes when I'm talking about is the history of of housing and it's sometimes it's a different history than we see elsewhere but when you're talking about you know historical preservation and how to. Relate the built form to history and in an authentic meaningful and like moral way I'm thinking wow I you know I'm kind of spewing out this whole 15 year history of our housing and here in Atlanta and how would you embody that represent that you know I might be interesting to think about. [00:46:27] You know all the different currents that have happened and how to just create a built form that would you could inhabit that you could also reflect on that is I think a lot of times are built form doesn't it tells a certain history and it's not always the history I'm telling. [00:46:42] That. I was going to say no I'm interested in the ways that uses change over time right while we maintain some form so this question of sort of how to get people to live in smaller spaces or to adapt to the way that they use existing format it and I think that often the impulse is demolished and builds not what we think is optimized right but we know that that's the responsible for a large amount of carbon emissions and isn't and again like I said my interest is especially in the way that we project an attitude towards history at the urban scale so I you know I would like to see some kind of a hybrid approach of analyzing what we need analyzing what we have as you say and then figuring out how we can merge those 2 things I'm certainly not anti demolition but I'm pro conscientious demolition and conscientious retention. [00:47:37] Yeah I mean I think through this the initial expectation was that these guys would buy low and sell high but but these are like this is collateral Now these are financial institutions and they can borrow a lot of money against this collateral and do other things with it so in a sense it's valuable for them to hold on to. [00:48:02] Their incident I mean there isn't a lot of research on. Apart from the study I did there's a lot of. Qualitative work on aggressive renting creases on on terrible maintenance problems that's been done a lot of journalists have reported on that and so these guys by and large don't seem to be responsible Liam arts. [00:48:24] And they've been associated with you know very aggressive eviction practices in other places. And I'll note that my study also noted racial disparities in and where the evictions were happening so that was problematic as well. Like there's fair housing implications for doing that. You know I talked with Irene glance who just wrote this book called Home wreckers he's you know a really smart guy. [00:48:48] And he's written a book about this issue and his feeling is that they're not going to sell that everybody thought that they would sell it this is a short term thing but a lot of people think it's we permanently have a new form of landlord and that there's a lot of consolidation in real estate and rental markets and that we need to think differently about it going forward because the landscape is changing you know usually typically a lot of really constructive builders construction lending landlords these are very fragmented in just trees where you're dealing with lots of small players and because of digital technology because of rising inequality in these you know firms that have come in and a ton of capital that their consolidation is happening in all these areas so. [00:49:31] And the digitization aspect is interesting too because they needed one of the reasons no one ever managed scattered say rentals before it was that you had like you know 10000 toilets 10000 boilers to maintain it was impossible but with digital technology it becomes more possible to actually do this work and that changes the relationship with your landlord when you're dealing with an app not the guy who lives in the next town over is a very different lesion ship so. [00:49:58] It's an interesting area of research I guess that's my answer. Yeah and I think that you don't tenant rights has risen to the fore because to answer your question there isn't really national regulation for landlords it happens at the local and at the state level and so. Like landlord tenant law is regulated is at the state level and then you'll have municipal regulation as well. [00:50:29] So you're going to see more organized around tenants rights in the future I think all right I know where at times.