This is the first of four, as Brian mentioned, events like this.
Atlanta is on the agenda, Los Angeles and Chicago.
I'm going to go to the person here from Perkins and Will.
Perkins and Will has a great pro bono program, and so John Fuller, could you talk about that?
This pro bono, pro bono is a wonderful part of all of this, but alone it's just doing good.
But being part of a larger portfolio of design thinking, it's wonderful.
So let's hear about the Perkins and Will pro bono program.
Thank you, Susan.
It's obviously John Peterson's program, and we subscribe to it.
It's a fabulous program.
And Perkins and Will is a 1700 person firm.
We have 17 offices in North America and three international offices.
And every one of our local offices has committed to the 1% program, and I did some quick math.
And what that translates to is the equivalent of a 15 person firm working full time,
providing pro bono services to the nonprofit sector.
So it's very exciting.
And obviously, with a downturn economy, I'm in a great position.
I'm out in the world giving away architectural services, so it's very exciting from that perspective.
But it's expanding what we do from a normal job perspective.
For instance, in the Boston office, we're working on three initiatives, and
one of them goes to a zoning analysis.
And we were brought to the project by a community development resource person,
who's the liaison between the nonprofits and the design firms.
And we were brought in because a Main Street initiative was very
concerned about their small urban space because the city council was going to rezone the neighborhood.
Excuse me, and they were very concerned with what the higher density zoning was going to mean to their
Main Street, their small urban space, because of a transit line was being extended into the neighborhood.
And with transit oriented development and higher FARs, et cetera, there was a real concern.
So we were brought in, usually we're on the developer side, and we're assessing zoning,
and we're trying to see how we can increase FAR and maximize the opportunities.
And here we're on the other side of the table, trying to help the Main Street folks
understand what position should they be fighting for here.
And we helped put together a great computer model of the square that was being impacted and
assessed all of the zoning implications.
And we helped advocate for some changes that we thought were very beneficial to the Main Street folks.
So it's a great program.
So the pro bono work actually informs your other practice, because there's research,
there are ideas, there are things that you're experimenting with,
that things that you get to do that you may not otherwise have been doing with some of your other projects.
Yes, no?
Yeah, definitely.
I mean, it's expanding what we would otherwise do.
So it's from that perspective, and it's giving folks an opportunity to work on projects that they wouldn't
otherwise have an opportunity to work on.
So it's really been an effective program from that perspective.
Great, and so are those, is that still 1% or are you doing 2% or
because John was telling me that some people give 2%?
Well, actually our beta year was a half a percent, and we've just completed our beta year, and it was very successful.
Every office contributed significantly, and the reality is we didn't spend all of our budgeted time.
So we still have a major commitment to paying projects, but
how we're structuring this is projects that we take on on a pro bono basis are real projects.
It's not like fitted in in between the paying jobs.
We assign a project manager, we prepare contracts, we prepare work authorizations.
We manage it like a very real project.
So we're taking it very seriously this year.
We've increased it to the 1% available time, and as time allows, we'll certainly look to expand beyond that.
It's really interesting because there are many different solutions,
many different ideas around this pro bono or any other sort of more accessible design.
And some firms like Hover Daniels Busby, John was telling me about this.
They devote their marketing budgets to pro bono.
So that's how they do it.
You do it 1%, they take their marketing budget and do pro bono work as a finance pro bono work from that.
So that's a pretty cool thing.
I'm sure there are others in the audience.
Now Deborah Gans, you're a small office, you're a very New York office.
Here you are, here you are.
And you're very committed to New York.
How does your work sort of evolve into, I mean, you're doing all the right things already.
But how do you expand your outreach to New York needs more?
And how do you convince other people to do that?
Thank you for the microphone.
I have to say, I thought all I had to do was ask these guys a question.
Well, you know, I'm going to twirl it around.
It's a really good question, it's a really hard question and it's a question I actually
want to pose to a couple of these guys because I'm constantly not succeeding.
And I'm not succeeding because sometimes, although I believe avidly in an adage, which
is many is the alternative to extra large, that by many small things can make a big one,
that somehow from the ground up you can create something big.
And I've done that in New Orleans with backyard gardens and failed and I've tried it in New
York with school desks and not quite gotten there.
So that doesn't work and yet I've also done some disaster relief housing working with
the United Nations, the biggest bureaucracy in the world.
And I haven't succeeded there either because even though I am in the corridor of power,
I'm not quite at the right door within the corridor of power.
So the top down and the bottom up, neither of them work on their own.
And I didn't address New York specifically, but it is the situation I find here, which
is why I am the small office that I am.
But I really, and both you talked about expanding beyond that bottom up and you talked about
your look and how great it is to be in New York with community plans.
I don't think the existing strategies and tactics work and I think there has to be
new kinds of hybrid solutions and things invented to not just, I mean, I think bridging a gap
is to, that's not really, it's not so dialectical, it's really hybrid, it's from the inside.
And I'd love to hear these guys talk about that.
Okay, Alex first.
The best example of that is Jeanette Sadekhan and what she's done at DOT, she's our new
transportation commissioner.
She figured out that to get a capital project approved takes five years and endless signatures.
However, she had a painting budget that was hers and she could do anything she wanted
with that any time she wanted.
And so between the two curb lines she could restripe.
So suddenly what do we see?
We suddenly see parks in the middle of streets.
We see aggregate that's poured down in epoxy and suddenly you have something that looks
like the Tuileries in the middle of Broadway.
That's a very enlightened approach and she's a good friend of mine.
I think the world of her, in some way that's kind of like my ideal of a trajectory.
She's done this in less than a year.
So obviously she's a unique person who managed to get into a unique position, but can we
replicate that a thousand times on a maybe smaller scale?
I would think so.
Yeah, I think Brian, you may have something to add here.
Am I on?
Okay.
Well, I think that, Debra, when I talk about developing a new skill set, we don't have
it yet.
You're a guinea pig.
Thank you for, no, and so am I.
I mean, I have 10 years of my life that nobody quite knows what I was doing because I was
sort of trying to figure it out.
But just for example, we sell those manufactured units without any subsidy and we make money
doing it.
We sell them to farmers, they're a million times better than the other stuff, so we're
getting there.
Now what you and I need to do, which is the point of this in the book, is to share our
lessons.
This is where we, this didn't work.
Don't try, don't try this.
We tried it, didn't work.
But here's one thing, here's, I mean, let's be optimistic.
Think about, you know, 10 years ago, if you had said, I'm going to, I'm going to stop
degrading the environment, and I'm going to show you, I'm going to quantify that.
And people would just say, you are out of your mind, you can't quantify hurting the
environment.
Well, all right, so here's where I'm going.
Okay, everybody here, imagine, imagine a social equivalent of lead, okay?
I mean, you were talking about greening the code, fine, what about social responsibility
of the code?
I mean, obviously the code started with social responsibility for health and safety, but,
so in five years, think about what the environmental movement has done.
I mean, social and economically, we haven't.
So one of the chapters in the book is about social seed, figure it out.
Social economic environmental design, it's a metric.
I'm meeting with the Rockefeller Foundation tomorrow, cross your fingers.
Deborah's wheels are turning.
I just think that idea of quantification, the footprint of everything, that everything
has a footprint, I think that's a really interesting idea.
Quantifying, you're right.
If we can, if we actually quantify what positive things our buildings are doing, this, this
rocket is launched.
I mean, there's no, I mean, everybody gets it, and think about the companies that want
to be, I mean, talk about supply and demand or capitalism, all these companies want to
be green.
It's phenomenal.
Well, I think the new definition is sustainable too, it has a social imperative component to
that.
It's not just environmental.
Well, think three layers to the stool, social economic and environmental.
It's not just, just like the Sri Lanka thing, it's not, you can save the environment, but
you know, there can be other major problems.
And I think, I think the problem, just one, sometimes the problem with the environmental
movement is it doesn't allow for communities to bring social or economic.
Every community is balancing these three things.
The environmental movement is sort of monopolizing the conversation where you don't have a choice.
It's sort of like, it's about the environment, it's not about social or job creation or,
you know, cholera.
I mean, it's...
Well, it's very interesting because the accessibility movement, the universal design movement has
been trying to latch onto the environmental movement.
It's very hard for them to communicate with one another, so I think the social sustainability
part, once that is part of the regular conversation, will help that movement along also.
So I'd like to address one last question to Lance Brown here, who's the teacher and
big activist in New York, AIA, and I want to come to the local question to Lance.
So you have this really wonderful group of students who are probably more neighborhood
students than kids than Yale has, or maybe not, I don't know, you can tell.
But what is going on in your school and in your educational program that addresses what
we've been talking about today?
You know, I, like Deborah, thought that I was going to get to ask a question.
And my question towards the end was going to be, Susan, what do you want me to talk
about?
So, you know, because I'm ready to talk about anything with Susan.
Actually, my real question for Susan was why didn't she raise some of these questions
with the deans that she had at her disposal when she moderated that panel, you let them
off easy.
You didn't treat them like these guys.
So first, I want to thank you for bringing everybody together this evening and another
chance to spend an evening with the people that most of whom I know.
And to also comment that it occurred to me that much of what's happening here this evening
is an ethical experience with the definition of ethics that was given to me during a panel
on ethics being that only during times like this of interchange and conversation do things
actually happen and as information changed and by God, the idea of learning that John
Haydeck was a design activist, as a mindblower, I was a Cooper student as well.
What happens at City College?
City College was founded in 1969, founded as a school with the express mission of educating
people to go into public service.
That was its founding mission.
I'm not going to say that it is singly in pursuit of that mission.
I think that mission has broadened to allow people to have other opportunities.
But I also know that when I look around the city of New York and as I move through, especially
in the private work that I do, I'm extremely fortunate to find many graduates of the school
in positions that used to be filled by bureaucrats that then were filled by architects.
And I fear, in fact, an alteration in that policy as I'm sure Alex knows in the replacement
of the Commissioner for the Buildings Department.
I think that one of the things, so the school was founded on that mission and had branches
that adhere to that mission, it has a community design center, as does Pratt and about 70
other schools around the country, and these are all constantly on the move and on the
change and adapting to new sources of both clientele and new sources of financing and
support to keep their operations afloat.
It's a hopscotch game, and one of the talents they develop is playing good hopscotch.
From time to time, we have managed to pursue, I think, rather unique techniques, which I
think are reproduced in bits and pieces periodically, but I think the school actually does try
fairly often to have the students engage the communities that we serve.
I think sometimes these communities are further afield than we recognize City College while
it doesn't have the wealthiest students in the world, it has students from all over the
world.
I had a filmmaker come, I was teaching a course on film and architecture, and he started
by asking my students where they were from.
There was one student from New York, there was one student from India, there was one
student from Switzerland, there was a student from Colombia, there was a student from Yugoslavia.
The school has something like 80 languages spoken.
In fact, it is a mini-UN, but it's not any, it's a reflection of the city.
None of the, I don't know how many of these people came to City College to go to City
College.
I think many of them came to New York and then went to a school that was affordable to their
purposes that would give them the opportunities and the access and the wonderful education
they wanted.
So let me ask you this, because of the aim of what the school was set up for, can you
talk about how many people are out there that are actually doing work in government or codes
or whatever, so that there's an architectural understanding brought to these big issues that
everybody talked about here, which always seems to be done without architects.
So you're bringing these people into the community of non-architects, or are you?
Well, as I said, I'm not by chapter and verse, but the head of design for the MTA was a City
College graduate.
The head of the building department was a City College, Valerie Baker, this was some
years ago.
Cycling through, sorry, I mean cycling through the city, there are many, and I'm often surprised
that I find them at the MTA.
I'm often surprised at how far afield they have gone, and I'm always happy when I encounter
them.
So in that regard, I think it's been fairly successful.
I don't know if there are more City College students than students from some of the other
schools.
I don't know that anyone's done that research.
I also think a lot of what we're discussing is not measured.
I wish it were measured.
I actually agree with the, I was sitting in a meeting today saying I wish there was some
quantification of how well we've fulfilled our mission.
I don't think that the people who keep the institutional records pursue that, I guess
given all of the things that people have to do to this day, I don't know that it's exactly
where I put my energy either.
So these comments become somewhat anecdotal, but they're no more anecdotal than having
had, oh, maybe a thousand people in 1998 participate throughout the school and across 116th Street
in Northern Manhattan about a little over a decade ago, wondering again about the measure
and actually going across 116th Street now and seeing things that I think were derivative
of that level of communication and interplay.
Okay, so thank you, Lance.
The measurement here, I think maybe that's a question for the developer and we're going
to have to wrap up because everybody's getting thirsty.
And there's a lot of wine down there.
So do you measure the results of what you do?
Because when you provide the kinds of spaces that you provide and the kind of well-maintained
spaces, surely it creates a different behavior, different aspirations, I mean, your architecture,
your buildings do that.
Do you have any sort of measurement?
You know, most of the measurements that we deal with are financial in nature.
There are all sorts of quantitative or let's say qualitative things that I notice and take
pride in that we benefit from greatly.
We tend to have pretty organized tenants.
A lot of the people that rent from us are people who know people who've lived in our
buildings or have visited them and they want to live there.
But mostly, my sort of transactions and my interaction with people comes down to issues
of measuring quantifying costs.
So what does it cost to live in your apartment building?
And we know the rent and we can tell them that we average $40 a month for utilities.
And they know what that means because they're probably coming from someplace where if they
paid their own utilities, they were getting around $100 a month on average.
So that's something real.
Or they can live in our buildings and we're in walkable areas.
We have bike parking.
We're near Metro and they might not have to have a car and they know what insurance costs
and what.
So I kind of can't seem to get away from these things and I spend most of my time trying
to make things, trying to move forward and very little time actually measuring and quantifying.
But I think those are perfect.
That's that, Brian, I think you might agree.
I always call on Brian for these things because he has this sort of taking something and making
it work.
So what do you think of that?
I think that's right.
No, I was going to say just before he did.
Because multifamily developments are near Metro stations.
You could quantify the savings and insurance and a wonderful example.
Now, why you would is another issue.
But I do think there is a, you know, it's being discussed here.
There's a value of values.
And I think that people will support, you know, companies or anything else that is doing
the right thing.
So, you know, I think that's quantified loosely in people's mind, Russell.
So I do think you get credit for it and it's the right thing to do.
You help people and you help the environment.
So I don't think we have the, but this needs to be made so simple and so clear and even
the qualitative things need to be tabulated.
And when we can show how we've, you know, the one that got me the other day, we've done
a lot in affordable housing and maybe you were talking about this.
I was like, well, I hear about affordable healthcare all the time.
Well, I have an architect, you know, jumped into affordable healthcare in the same way
that we have affordable housing.
You can say affordable housing is an economic issue and just, you know, we never would have
been involved.
It is, I mean, I guess, in the end, the affordability is an economic issue, but we've done great
things in affordable housing.
So I don't know.
It's a wonderful thing to imagine what we could do.
Let's say, in terms of quantification and social goods, you know, after the mayor banned
smoking, trans fats, the remaining, you know, literally the next on the list of public health
issues for non-communicable diseases is early onset diabetes because of obesity.
So it's turning out that this has a huge urban design component to it.
And we're actually trying to write active design guidelines where basically get people
to walk more, ride their bikes, so it's issue of bike networks, bike lanes, figure out code
changes so that stairs won't be tucked away in the back and everybody would take the elevator
to go a floor instead of the stair.
Even ideas about changing rules, about getting greengrocers and supermarkets to be able to
locate into neighborhoods that may inadvertently have them, you know, not able to because of
swear footage issues.
So when you quantify the, you know, the yearly savings from not getting early onset diabetes
over a certain population, now we start talking about numbers that just make the building
profession and the other stuff just pale in comparison.
I think this is actually, for me, wonderful that somebody from the health department has
made this connection and now we're actually quantifying, rule-writing, imagining ways
that end up doing some of the AAs you've been helped in in something called the FITCITY
program.
This is when all the cylinders are sort of firing in the right sequence and the possibilities
are pretty good.
So what I think the missing part is that there are all these great programs and of course
the general public thinks banning smoking, what a ridiculous thing, bars, whatever and
people want to smoke in bars and that's the conversation.
Instead of some sort of talking about what that means to the public health of the city
and what that means to the cost, the overall cost, that's never discussed in the media,
in the larger media, on television, in newspapers, how does the mayor's office begin to change
that because that's where that leadership comes from.
That actually I think has a lot to do with journalism and something that we don't really
have.
We have experts that you see on every of the most dubious credentials where you, and actually
metropolis can play a role in this because you do need a form of extremely well informed
journalist who at the same time is not a tool.
So the role of an interpretive, quantitative journalist who can make these cross boundary
connections in order to be able to present a problem of high complexity in valid but
straightforward terms has never been greater.
If you look at the design process, it's understand, observe, synthesize, visualize, prototype,
and measure.
And too often measure gets tossed out and it's really the only language I think to start
to interpret between these people who are sort of reliability based and they look for
repeatable processes and value as a measurable quantity and people who have deep belief in
something and choose to prove something valid.
And so it's that metrics component that really becomes this, call it the translation between
these two groups and really is quite convincing.
If we would take the time to measure what we've designed, you'd find that actually there's
a lot of data to support all this emotional argument and really create a powerful, compelling
case for the things we're talking about today.
Do you think because business schools and other, and businesses are beginning to talk
about adapting design methods and just what you listed here, and they are in the business
of also measuring.
Do you think when that begins to happen more, because it's a really smart thing, then maybe
Dean can answer that?
I think it will happen.
I think one of the problems with the design profession, at least on the architectural
side is scale, what Deborah was talking about.
I think some of the biggest firms in the countries do measure.
They go back in and I think they do it sometimes surreptitiously about how their facility is
performing to inform their next design.
But a lot of firms just can't do it.
Some in the middle won't.
They go on to the next job and assume what they've done as long as they think the client's
happy and they've been paid works.
But there isn't that level of investigation and it's expensive and the client may not
want to hear it.
So there's a lot of obstacles to it, but there's models for how to do it, but people aren't
doing it in the architecture, not in buildings.
So I'll get Katie in here for the last question.
Because you're a teacher and you are involved with a university, Katie Wakeford, who was
the co-author of the book.
Is it, do you think it's possible to assign, studying some of these performance values
to graduate students or to your students to document them and then share this kind of
information?
Do you mean in the spirit of measurement or the spirit of activism?
Both.
Okay.
Well, I'm going to leave that measurement question to Dean.
You have the researcher background and that is not my own.
But yes, and I appreciate the question from the perspective of activism and if I would
have a way to sort of look at this evening and even look out at this great crowd that's
here tonight, it is all about youthful values and young professionals who want to engage.
And I'm at NC State University, I actually am not a teacher, I'm strictly an outreach,
sort of an outreach initiative and we engage students in independent study with public
service projects in the seminar setting as paid interns and I'm actually an architect
intern doing my internship at the university.
And so I think that there's a million opportunities and happily thousands and thousands of students
and young professionals that want to be doing this work and there need to be more opportunities
to do so.
Would Perkins and Will hire her?
Of course.
Yeah.
No, we, you know, interns are a big part of the whole industry and, you know, I think,
you know, the whole social and environmental responsibility movement really plays to the
younger generation and we find it.
I've been at forums where, you know, it's really been a major component of hiring and
retention of, you know, new employees in the firm and it's, you know, where this consciousness
has come from, it's stunning but it's really remarkable that it exists.
Well my hope has been for a very long time is that academia, the professions and would
work more closely together because it's really, we're all in the same boat here and the press
so I take my responsibility.
You all have taken your responsibilities.
I think it's really interesting that it really puts the question back to all of us.
I mean, I think the questions that Brian and Katie posed in the book are really important
for all of us to say, what is it that I can do, where I am and how do I do that?
So I think that's a really, just very empowering in a way that I don't think we have asked
ourselves those questions.
So I think with that we're going to finish up here and you can go downstairs and get
your drinks and Brian will sign books.
And so thank you for being here and I hope you found this useful.
I certainly did and we'll see you in Atlanta or wherever we're going next.
Thank you.
