It’s Sunday and in Brownie’s Café in the basement floor of Avery Hall, it is a quiet cave and there are only two other students sitting here…  but it's like they aren't even there as from where I'm sitting they can't be seen.  It is a change from the bustling activity that happens here during the week.  It is absent of all the items that accessorize the café.  Tapletops are cleared of everything including napkins.  A long countertop usually full is stripped of the utensils, the coffee, hot water pots, and the tea bags.   Missing are the students who are going over readings or research agendas, or eating among other students, and it is somehow revelatory to find a space that is lacking people.  

The past few weeks have been packed with classes, readings and research as well as working with GSAPP events that my intention of posting once a week may have been wishful thinking.  

I began to write small observations as seen below from the lectures I've been attending, the first two being large events with Pritzker Prize winner Kazuyo Sejima giving the first lecture for the school year followed by a lecture the next week with environmental journalist Naomi Klein and landscape architect Kate Orff.  Both were insightful and captivating to listen to.

Theme: Canopy – Kazuyo Sejima

A full room of students, every chair filled and more standing in the back.  On the screen is the Rolex Learning Center in Switzerland, a white model with a roof like a slice of swiss cheese.  A roof that touches the ground and then lifts up again. A direct connection between building and rethinking how one moves towards it.  “If it is a one story building people can approach from everywhere.  Lift the building and people can approach from the center.  People can pass through from the existing city to the campus,” Sejima says concisely.  Her voice a steady rhythm, an emphasis in each word, her gestures understated (like her architecture), and the audience can only focus and silently absorb.   Other projects show up on the screen: the reflective canopy of the Serpentine Gallery, soap bubbles installed in a public space of Sharjah.  A library extension in San Francisco where gentle, elongated, shadowy figures stand in interior renderings. A new campus in Milan with a public path with a winding soft edged loop. The rendering of the exterior building is surrounded by trees bending in the wind.  Weather elements disrupt the perfection of the perfect white model world.  Near the end we see the ‘Home for All’ project, a map of Japan with twelve locations called out.  Buildings by the sea that have a local vernacular and wait for fishermen to arrive.  One building has a canopy like a beetle shell covering one room, a meeting space, bathroom, a kitchen against the wall and a stove.  The next building has a leaf-like roof.  Simple structures merging the harmony of architectural permanence with the moving world of people and nature.  It’s “not always about a beautiful building,” Sejima says in conversation with Dean Amale Andraos as the lecture wraps up. 

Them: Drain – Naomi Klein and Kate Orff

Naomi Klein walks to the front of the room and speaks first. ‘Is the earth fucked?’   ‘Yes’, and images run across the screen with crowds protesting, then to trash ridden, burning landscapes as a reality.  It is a trailer for her book This Changes Everything.  Klein says we are witnessing the procrastination penalty coined by Michael Mann: we are no longer in a place where changes are going to be easy and unnoticed.  We are in a place where climate change is less and less an abstract issue.  The perspective of climate change was always projected far and away – in the 70’s the logo was an image of earth from space; a distance and an abstraction – but who see this in reality?  Astronauts and god, Klein remarks.  Kate Orff steps up next to talk about her work as a landscape architect.  ‘We are visualizers. We can adapt and engage’.  Her speech is fast paced, as if there is too much that needs to be said and not enough time.  Her voice emphasizes the importance and the urgency of the landscape and its corrosion.  Photographs of the landscape between Baton Rouge and New Orleans come on the screen – views of cancer alley; a cemetery with a petrochemical factory behind it.  Ghostly poles of trees in a swamp that were once vibrant.  These are views of the landscape as a machine for consuming oil and petrochemicals that come from her book Petrochemical America.  An image of a puffy white cloud that is actually a harmful chemical cloud is remarked on by Klein who then concludes ‘It is not that we are addicted to fossil fuels but that our politicians are addicted to fossil fuel money.