Guest lecture: Andrew Frontini

Summary

Andrew Frontini, a renowned architect from Perkins and Will, delivered an insightful guest lecture at Toronto Metropolitan University, highlighting his innovative projects and the stories behind them. Through anecdotes and personal experiences, Andrew explored themes of collaboration, mentorship, and architectural storytelling. He showcased a variety of projects, each representing unique challenges and triumphs, while emphasizing the importance of community engagement and sustainable design. The lecture provided a deep dive into the thought processes and narratives that shape public architecture today, inspiring both architecture students and professionals alike.

Highlights

• Andrew begins his lecture with engaging anecdotes about his career and innovative projects. 🎥
• The idea of buildings as storytelling devices is a central theme. 📖
• Andrew discusses his experience with various challenging projects, highlighting the importance of adaptive thinking. 🏗️
• Community involvement and sustainable practices are emphasized as key elements of successful architecture. 🌱
• A blend of humorous stories and reflective insights keeps the audience entertained and informed. 😂

Key Takeaways

• Andrew Frontini emphasizes the narrative potential of architecture, illustrating this with stories from his projects. 📚
• Mentorship and collaboration are central themes in creating impactful public architecture. 🤝
• Community engagement is crucial for designing spaces that resonate with users and the environment. 🌍
• Andrew's journey reflects the evolving nature of architectural practice in response to societal and environmental challenges. 🚀

Overview

Andrew Frontini's lecture at Toronto Metropolitan University was nothing short of inspiring. He took the audience on a fascinating journey through his career, sharing stories from a range of projects that showcased not only his architectural prowess but also his creative storytelling ability. Through his innovative design approach, Andrew emphasized the importance of narrative in architecture, illustrating how each building tells its own unique story.

Highlighting several key projects, Andrew discussed the challenges and triumphs faced throughout his career. He emphasized the significance of collaboration and community engagement, particularly in projects like the Albian Library and the Daphne Cockwell Health Sciences Complex. The lecture underscored the role of public architecture in shaping inclusive and resilient spaces that address societal needs.

Andrew's engaging delivery and humorous anecdotes provided an in-depth look at the evolving landscape of architecture. His reflections on mentorship and the creative process offered valuable insights for aspiring architects. The session was a testament to the power of storytelling in design and left the audience motivated to pursue their own architectural dreams with renewed vigor.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 30:00: Introduction and Opening Remarks The chapter begins with a welcoming address to the audience, introducing the main themes and objectives of the event. The speaker emphasizes the importance of the topics to be discussed and provides an overview of the day's schedule. Key issues to be addressed include recent developments in the field, future challenges, and opportunities for collaboration. The speaker also acknowledges the contributions of key individuals and supporting organizations. A brief introduction to the keynote speakers and sessions follows, setting the stage for a comprehensive exploration of the subject matter. The chapter sets a positive and engaging tone, encouraging participation and discussion from attendees.
• 30:00 - 50:00: Guest Lecture by Andrew Frontini Chapter Title: Guest Lecture by Andrew Frontini. Transcript: The chapter begins with audio equipment check, followed by the introduction of guest lecturer Andrew Frontini. The focus of the chapter will likely revolve around the insights and experiences shared by Andrew Frontini during his guest lecture.
• 50:00 - 60:00: Andrew Frontini's Career Journey The chapter titled 'Andrew Frontini's Career Journey' is introduced with an audio check. The actual content of the chapter discussing Andrew Frontini's career journey is not provided in the transcript.
• 60:00 - 95:00: Discussion of Key Projects The chapter titled 'Discussion of Key Projects' includes an introduction with a simple microphone check, indicating the start of a meeting or discussion. The mention of 'one, two, check' suggests a routine check typically done before a presentation or discussion begins.
• 95:00 - 117:00: Q&A Session The chapter titled 'Q&A Session' contains a transcript that simply states 'Testing. Testing.' This suggests that the chapter may be centered around initiating or preparing for a larger discussion, likely involving questions and answers. The brevity and repetition in the transcript might indicate a prelude to a more detailed session or serve as a metaphorical 'testing' of the waters before diving into deeper topics.

Guest lecture: Andrew Frontini Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30
• 00:30 - 01:00 Check. Check. One, two. Check.
• 01:00 - 01:30 Check. Check. One, two. Check. Check.
• 01:30 - 02:00 One, two. Check.
• 02:00 - 02:30 Testing. Testing.
• 02:30 - 03:00 Thank you.
• 03:00 - 03:30 things. I thought it was like precious
• 03:30 - 04:00 thing, but there's there's so many of
• 04:00 - 04:30 them, you know, you just write in them
• 04:30 - 05:00 and write phone numbers in them, pages
• 05:00 - 05:30 out,
• 05:30 - 06:00 use as a journal.
• 06:00 - 06:30 So, I guess we'll let it fill up a
• 06:30 - 07:00 little bit.
• 07:00 - 07:30 the
• 07:30 - 08:00 only I'll sit down here Yes.
• 08:00 - 08:30 But you don't want
• 08:30 - 09:00 Yeah, After you're done
• 09:00 - 09:30 with Okay. Hello and welcome everyone.
• 09:30 - 10:00 We are thrilled to have Andrew Fontina
• 10:00 - 10:30 with us here today uh to speak on his
• 10:30 - 11:00 latest publication episodes in public
• 11:00 - 11:30 architecture about here. Um I would like
• 11:30 - 12:00 to first introduce myself. I'm Same a
• 12:00 - 12:30 and also the president of the
• 12:30 - 13:00 architectural course union. ACU is
• 13:00 - 13:30 proudly hosting this event here at the
• 13:30 - 14:00 department of architectural science at Toronto Metropolitan University. Before we begin, I'd like to take a moment to recognize the land on which we gather. We are on the traditional territory known as the dish with one spoon. A treaty bene sorry between the anisha missaga in the hun which represents a shared responsibility to care for and respect the land in a spirit of peace,
• 14:00 - 14:30 friendship and respect. As architects and designers, we understand the profound impact our work has on both people and place. And it is with deep gratitude that we acknowledge this history and reaffirm our commitment to honoring these values today. Today we're privileged to hear from Andrew Frontier at Perkins and Will, whose new book takes us behind the scenes of his creative process. Through 11 candidly told stories complemented by sketches, diagrams, and stunning photography, Andrew reveals the challenges and
• 14:30 - 15:00 triumphs behind the designs of his award-winning public buildings. These stories offer a rare glimpse into his professional and personal journey of an architect, highlighting mentorship, growth, and the art of collaboration in crafting inclusive and resilient public spaces. Andrew's monogra monograph goes beyond the usual design showcase offering an intimate look at the evolving needs of society and the lessons learned am along the way from inspiring figures like uh
• 15:00 - 15:30 Camila Oberlander to the complexities of working with contractors bureaucrats and collaborators. Andrew's narratives are filled with humor, honesty, and reflections of everchanging landscapes of architecture. Whether you're an architect or simply curious about the process, Andrew's insights into architecture and mentorship will inform, inspire, and perhaps even console you at any stage of your journey. So, everybody join me to please give Andrew a round of applause and a warm welcome.
• 15:30 - 16:00 100 Boy, it's a pizza frenzy. I'll just warm up. Don't worry. I'll just warm the room up. I won't say anything meaningful or important uh for
• 16:00 - 16:30 a few minutes about 40 minutes actually. So, um thank you Sidra for that wonderful uh introduction and thank you for the department of architectural science for having me here. It's great to be in the pit. I presented here uh a few years ago actually and and when when I did I had the Daphne Cochwell Health Sciences Complex was like a scribbly napkin sketch that was the last slide in the presentation. So it's been a few years. It is really really it's really
• 16:30 - 17:00 Should I just go? Should I just start? I mean it's it Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's going to be tough. Okay. So I am officially starting the talk. Welcome. Um, and that means I start my timer because I'm a professional. Um, I've written a book. It's called Episodes in Public Architecture. And it initially was supposed to be, you know, a monograph, a beautiful coffee table book celebrating my 25ish plus years making buildings. And
• 17:00 - 17:30 um but I uh I actually um went into uh writing a series of short stories or or anecdotes and and and the first one I wrote, the puzzle box, I wrote and I thought, gosh, you know, this is there's some interesting lessons and themes. I wonder if I could begin to look at the buildings I've worked on and kind of examine the things I learned. So, we form the buildings, but the buildings in their making uh form us and form our career. So, I I made this matrix. So you
• 17:30 - 18:00 got the projects down one side and then things like tectonics, community, succession, collaboration. I was trying to come up with these themes and I was trying to map them and I abandoned this obviously because it's a futile exercise. What I started doing is was to start writing about um about the projects and the projects that are in the book end up being most of them are projects I like obviously, but they're certainly not all of the projects I've led the design of. um just some of them and they're the ones that had stories
• 18:00 - 18:30 that I thought were worth sharing or that really shaped my career. So, I'm going to start off by reading from the book and and I want to say the book our friends at Swipe um Objects and Design have copies for sale. It's pretty nice. It's kind of two books in one. The stories are on these kind of inserts and then the photos and plans are on the glossy color stuff. So, it's easy to navigate and if you don't want to read, you can look at the pictures. But if you do want to read, you can dive in. I'm going to read the puzzle box. This is the design of
• 18:30 - 19:00 the Hazel Mallen Academic Learning Center, which is a library at the UTM campus at the University of Toronto. And the story starts off with a story within the story. So, I'm it's in quotation marks, and I'm reading something that I read to the client um many years ago. At the outset, your library is an intricately crafted box of weathered stone which conceals a second box, a finely crafted cabinet of wood and softly radiating colored glass. This inner cabinet contains a great treasure,
• 19:00 - 19:30 knowledge. Within the radiating cabinet deep in the heart of the library, thousands of books move in tall metal cases, gliding silently on steel tracks. The box lies in a meadow at the northern edge of the campus. The purity of its rectalinear form disturbed only by deep joints in its cladding. Imagine we begin to play with this puzzle. If we lift it, it rises above the ground, hovering above an inner sleeve of glass. At the same time, a great slab of stone remains behind, and a huge monitor window hints
• 19:30 - 20:00 at the glowing treasure within. In lifting the box lid, we have left a piece of the roof behind, and now the sun streams into a southern terrace. These are but hints, and only fuel fuel our desire to get inside. Pull on the right hand side and a large piece of the box slides over. This parting opens a long vista which carries our eyes to the center of the campus. A gate has opened. Within the gateway, the pulling open has taken some floor plates with it and left others behind. The result is a zigzag
• 20:00 - 20:30 chasm which draws our eyes up to the left. There, suspended in space, touching only by the slender bridges which penetrate its lustrous shell, is the inner cabinet, the repository of knowledge, symbolic heart of your experience. Beginning and end of your journey. The room was silent. I looked up from the typed page and the rickety wooden model that I was feverishly manipulating and met the fixed gaze of
• 20:30 - 21:00 the chief librarian. The various university functionaries, campus architects, facilities planners, and project managers drifted out of focus as I waited for her to respond. I can sell that, she exclaimed, her stern mask breaking into a cautious smile. And with that, the journey was launched and a new covenant of trust established between client and architect. This was perhaps my first and most poignant experience with a sort of unwritten contract that informs architecture to a great degree. It goes into effect when the owner of the project vision on the client side
• 21:00 - 21:30 sees that vision reinterpreted, amplified and reflected back to them by the architect. Maryann Maverick, chief librarian at the University of Toronto, Missaga, was not technically the client and I was not technically the lead architect. But at that moment, after she had received my little piece of pros and the somewhat manipulations of the Medcat, we both assumed our respective roles. From that point on, we led the vision for the University of Toronto's first digital library together. A week earlier, I had presented essentially the same architectural
• 21:30 - 22:00 proposition to the same people. I had spent the last month running rogue and ignoring the advice of my firm's senior partner, Steven Irwin, whose architectural predilictions were, in my opinion, out of sync with both the client and the times. This was to moment to show the firm and the university that I was the new visionary. But it did not go that way. After presenting a complete set of plans and lovingly crafted perspectives for the better part of an hour, I looked up to see a veritable Mount Rushmore of inscrable faces. To
• 22:00 - 22:30 the few prefuncter questions asked, I made half-hearted responses. I knew something was way off, but hadn't the strength or insight to figure out what. The meeting adjourned with a series of non-committal remarks, and we went our separate ways. Two weeks earlier, I had presented my vision for an architecture that wo the natural fabric of the canvas in his composition while defining opportunities for new public space to these same people. This approach had won us the commission and in the subsequent weeks I had followed the same line of inquiry to develop what I thought was a
• 22:30 - 23:00 layered and ingenious accommodation of the new library program. How had I failed to make contact this time around? This is a quote here. She felt an emptiness inside. She went home after your presentation. She talked to her husband about it and she just couldn't get over it. She couldn't sleep. She felt nothing. Irwin looked up with a demonic twinkle in his eye. He'd called me into his office first thing in the morning and sat me down in one of his greasy Laour Busier loungers to relay the news. He, as the lead architect, had
• 23:00 - 23:30 received a call from the chief librarian the night before, and was now exacting the perfect revenge for my insubordination with a barely concealed glee. Well, there was no backing out now. Nothing. She felt nothing. Give me two days and I'll give you something. I blurted out and stormed from his office. I had two days, so there was no point in redesigning my what I thought was an elegant scheme. It was going to have to be a repositioning. In a way, Irwin, with his tendency to embellish every communication with a slightly misenthropic narrative flare, had set me
• 23:30 - 24:00 off on the right course, I had just enough time to write a story. There was already a kinetic quality to the design inspired by the university's mandate to put all the bound collections on mobile compact storage units. We had organized the units centrally on each of the building's four stories in a block that we had dubbed the cabinet. The perimeter of the floor plan had been liberated for people to work collaboratively and engage with the campus's natural beauty. A series of public space voids organized light, views, and movement.
• 24:00 - 24:30 The creation of these voids had been accomplished by shifting programmatic um elements outward away from the central cabinet, giving the exterior volume of the library a dynamic quality. Coming out of Irwin's office, I grabbed my partner in crime at the time, Mark Downing. He works at MGMA now. We treated we retreated to the nearby Rex Hotel to strategize. Then we go into a sort of play format. AF, that's me. When in doubt, build a model, but make it small because we don't have much time. MD. Let's make it move like a puzzle.
• 24:30 - 25:00 AF. My uncle, he's an architect, spends all of his free time making these insane wooden puzzles out of exotic woods. You move this piece and that and hours later it might open. MD. What's inside? AF in his nothing. But we better have something knowledge. It's a library after all. So the conversation probably continued in this vein for a while was eventually interrupted by the demands of the looming deadline. Fortunately, there was a precedent for our imagined puzzle in the centuries old Japanese tradition
• 25:00 - 25:30 of wooden puzzle boxes. There were some pictures and sketches in there, intricately crafted wooden puzzle boxes. This gave us the basic metaphor that we hoped would elucidate the merits of the existing design or something very close to it. Over the next 48 hours, our task consisted of reverse engineering the building plans into a 6x6x3 in wooden box that could through a series of manual manipulations be opened up to resemble the building's architecture. The physical bar was to be accompanied by a one-page text that was at once a
• 25:30 - 26:00 poetic invocation and a sort of instruction module. The trick worked and provided a valuable lesson. People struggled to understand the abstract language of architecture. Having worked with many librarians, I can tell you that a little storytelling goes a long way. Stories may help clients to access our propositions, but we need them as well in order to guide our work. Over the months following the presentation, we developed several iterations of the model. These informed the building's form and materiality with increasing
• 26:00 - 26:30 clarity and intent. The rather baroque materiality described in the original text gave way to a much more explicit and reduced pallet. wood, black stone, and glass each took on a role describing respectively the outer casing of the puzzle box, the anchoring elements, and the voids left behind by displaced volumes. The puzzle box metaphor extended to the most intimate details with planes of the exterior facade overlapping and parting to communicate the implied sliding action, interior finishes followed in sync with cherrywood substituting for the phenolic
• 26:30 - 27:00 wood veneer panels of the exterior. After the building opened, my colleague Duff Balmer mentioned that the building look as looked like a 60s te console with operable sections concealing a stereo, a television, and a liquor cabinet. While he may have meant this as a critique of the rather relentless use of the pholic cladding, I was pleased with the comment. If the building communicated craft, operability, and hidden delights, then it had achieved its intent. In our era, we become increasingly used to buildings that have had things done to them to arrive at a
• 27:00 - 27:30 forum. I would argue that the measure of these buildings has to be not what has been done to them but what they do. What is the benefit derived from a formal manipulation? At the same time, we have all become quite used to buildings that claim a metaphorical intent. Actions speak louder than words. So we again ask, what is a building doing with all of its storytelling? While the puzzle box may have grown out of a desperate need for a hook at the time, circumstances and a committed client allowed us to deepen that metaphor, extend its influence, and leverage it to create a unique set of spaces for
• 27:30 - 28:00 people. As the box opened, it created light-filled lower levels looking into sunken gardens, sectionally complex light wells and atria that connected communities of learners, and new public space routes through the campus. The metaphor also included an accessible piece of campus mythology, a story behind UTM's most visited building that conveys the sense of discovery that accompanied the advent of digital learning. So that's a sort of sample of the kinds of stories that are in the book and the kinds of invariable kind of
• 28:00 - 28:30 conflicts with different parties uh and the kind of frictions and then the kind of personally in my career I found a design always gets to the worst possible place and then there's some kind of chemical reaction and you and you need kind of reposition yourself. So don't despair just keep working and and and get a collaborator because without Mark nothing would have happened. So, that's an early building of mine. And there it sits uh this is these photos were taken quite a while. This
• 28:30 - 29:00 building opened in 2007. The design started in 2003. I'm going to backtrack a bit to tell you how I got there because you're all in school and so maybe you can relate to this. I didn't really know what architecture was when I was in high school. I did have this uncle I mentioned in the story, but I wanted to be a rock and roll musician. And here I am in as the basist of the Slinks. And the guy on the right is uh Gourd Downey who went moved on to greater things as you can imagine. But the Slinks were a pretty good band. We just didn't write any of our own material. I was a kind of
• 29:00 - 29:30 reluctant architect as I got. Yes, that's me. Um as I got into the profession and we had co-op terms at Wateroo, you know, I started to realize what we were really up against. The immense tedium, the slow learning curve, the fact that architecture in many cases is just the commodification of space. So someone can get rich and you know nature pave pave paradise. And so it was also kind of a strange time in architectural history. We were coming out of the post-modern movement and into a kind of fragmentation of many movements. One of
• 29:30 - 30:00 which is called Helman Blau's uh you know um piece in Berlin. It's it's a the deconstructivist movement. What what ties these together is a deep vein of critical theoretical thinking. So, architecture has to be about something really deep, you know, history, psychology, structuralism. Um, those aren't things we talk about in architecture. Now, for me though, something that did really move me and make me think maybe architecture was worth sticking with was uh the city of
• 30:00 - 30:30 Rome. We did our Rome term there in fourth year and everyone knows the NI plan. Uh, but what's interesting about it is the idea that the city was presented as its public space. Everything inside the Poche is just black. That's private space. But what I love about this drawing is that there are plazas or piazas and streets, fountains, and squares. But there are also large public buildings. And there's really no hierarchy in this drawing between what's inside of a building and what's out in the public realm. Pat uh Palato de Venetsia and and Patza San
• 30:30 - 31:00 Marco. One's inside, one's outside. But this building really this drawing tells you that there's a fluidity and and and that public life is happening through various thresholds and it's also setting uh life up as a kind of stage the city as a stage for social interaction. This is my thesis just a few drawings. I return to Toronto and you know Toronto's ugly compared to Rome. It doesn't have public realm. It doesn't offer these opportunities. And in the '9s, early 90s, it was in a kind of massive um
• 31:00 - 31:30 speculative boom for office buildings which crashed around uh well just as I graduated actually. And my thesis was about position was well the city's boring, the architecture is banal, there's no public realm. What is interesting is the making of all these buildings. They are interesting, fascinating. They have this kind of mythical richness and and a kind of visceral experiential offering before they become a banal Cadillac Fairview office tower. And so this was about a thickened procenium and a thickened um hoarding
• 31:30 - 32:00 which created a kind of series of movable parks that allowed the populace of the city to engage with a spectacle of making buildings. I graduated into this total recession. I played music in bars. I served coffee. I worked as a mural painter. And then I had this kind of artistic practice. I was trying to be a fine artist. So I retreated from architecture. And this period actually lasted 5 years. I did architectural renderings. I did the odd, you know, laneway house, garage, rena permit
• 32:00 - 32:30 drawings, but there was no real architectural work. I did a series of drawings. I went back to Rome in 93 as a TA and started doing a series of drawings. Um, I thought of them as an art practice, but reflecting back on them, they were kind of touching on the themes of the thesis, the theater of public life, architecture as the structure which choreographs our social interactions and makes them dramatic. Another series of drawings called typologies went one step further.
• 32:30 - 33:00 Instead of having people as the protagonists, I had buildings. So imagining a city that is always under construction and where there are architectural protagonists that move through the city um that have kind of rich uh programmatic importance. In this case it's a giant kind of coliseum or football stadium but it floats and it and it kind of miraculously floats defies gravity and moves through the city picking up uh patrons of the game spectators as it goes. So the idea of this kind of movable feast and
• 33:00 - 33:30 architecture as a kind of very transitory thing. We think of architecture as permanent but if you look around you it isn't. The city is constantly reconfiguring and reshaping. And this was just kind of expressing that to the next level where everyone becomes a kind of actor in a mobile set. managed to get back into practice in the late 90s and had short stints because people were really it was very precarious still with Martin Lee Febber kind of really early uh innovator in
• 33:30 - 34:00 sustainable design. the Fergusons who were had a a practice based on really about social inclusion and the ingenuity of making work lived spaces and and and Nataly Scott Brown who became Nataly Scott who were really invested in the idea of a contextual modernism for this landscape. So those three ideas of sustainable, socially driven and contextual plugged into my preoccupations about public life. And another thing is that I started to learn that it's okay not to work by yourself
• 34:00 - 34:30 all the time. That there's a certain richness that comes with working with others. And this is our canoe trip we used to have in Italian Scott and Tmogamy every year. So I went on one of those. I mean it was intense but it was great. Moving on a few years I was disillusioned because those were really great communities and the work was really interesting but you didn't get paid properly. You got paid 40 hours and you worked 80. And then one day the partner came and said, "Well, I guess we don't have any more money. You can all
• 34:30 - 35:00 go home. There just no sense of how to run a business." And I thought, you know, I went to school for 6 and a half years. There has to be a way to make a living. There's got to be. So, I started shopping around. I ended up in an established firm of Short Tillby Win and Partners, um, a firm that started in the ' 40s and had a good run of luck in some great high modern buildings. to Union Carbide was a Massie Mid Medal winning project and so was the Xerox research headquarters and they were an I was actually the third generation of I well
• 35:00 - 35:30 I eventually became a partner and I was a third generation so a firm that had been around a long time and had a rich crop of uh rich portfolio of public buildings, libraries, university buildings, sports and recreation facilities. So I thought this is the kind of thing I want to be doing. you know, these these other things taught me these other firms taught me things, but they're too small and too badly organized. I want a piece of this. There was a problem with this firm, though, that they really had not managed to navigate the changes in architectural thinking. So, this is the Metro Police headquarters has been voted the ugliest
• 35:30 - 36:00 building in Toronto for decades in a row. You see here the mashup of a kind of brutalist planning framework with a post-modern kind of set of accutramonts and cladding. And, you know, it's really a weird building. And this was the a time where people were they felt that this is how you sold a project. It had to look this way. But there wasn't the kind of thinking that went behind real postmodernism. So a kind of empty skinning of buildings that just ended up looking pretty weird. So
• 36:00 - 36:30 it was my job to sort of I was hired and very quickly tried to mobilize people to think a bit more deeply about what architecture could be. And here I am with my soul patch on the on the uh site of Whippy Library. That was my first like major commission that I won with my partner Steve Irwin. Um and I really was having a tough time uh just trying to stop him from designing a basilica with a barrel vault and like a
• 36:30 - 37:00 clock tower and and this is like 2002 so these guys were in trouble really. Um, I found this guy, Dmitri, who was at the time, he was 74 years old. He's now in his late 90s and he became my educator. He taught me how to draw a building um, beyond, you know, what we draw in school, how to detail buildings, how to put things together. We developed the Whippy Library together. Kind of project I still find, you know, really beautiful and really attached to. But it's really the lesson of this older gentleman who'd
• 37:00 - 37:30 worked detailing buildings at WZMH and other kind of large firms and had this incredible inventory of approaches all pre 3D modeling BIM every he went around the whole building by hand crafting sections and I would draw and sketch what I thought the form would be and then he'd teach me how you build that and he taught many others in our in our practice the same things and an incredible uh educator. And this is a building where we got to frame a public space. Uh it's a civic archives library
• 37:30 - 38:00 and civic plaza. Uh and the idea of a room that is an extension of that. So the first time I got to try out these ideas of you know indoor and outdoor public space uh kind of working together uh and in our climate it's a kind of a very necessary condition. I had the opportunity to enter a competition with some of my classmates. Plant uh Lisa Raport and uh Chris Palmer and Mary Tmaine were the partners and Adrien Blackwell who's a prof at uh
• 38:00 - 38:30 University of Wateroo now and um Peter Shout a landscape architect from Chicago in the competition for Nathan Phillips Square international competition which we miraculously won and it took us 10 years. It was sort of a master plan of which we got about half the stuff done, but it was really about taking Rell's proposition and greening it and helping it be what it it wanted to be initially, a great public plaza. Um, moving some of the clutter out of it and creating specific architectural program elements
• 38:30 - 39:00 at the perimeter which connected the lower plaza to the upper podium and the walkway. And here you see the theater we designed. Again, this idea of a figure that's sitting in dialogue with Rell's um kind of marvelous council chamber, not taking away, but this idea of a structure which is sometimes a stage, sometimes a place to watch a performance that's happening formally or informally in the square and sometimes just a place to sit in the shade. That work dealing with modern legacies
• 39:00 - 39:30 and and kind of crafting public realm into into a renovation allowed us to win the Bank of Canada project in Ottawa in 2012. That's the renovation of Arthur Ericson's Twin Towers. Uh and we created a new plaza which integrated uh on a subterranean museum entry as well as elevator and mechanical components disguised in a kind of topography for the city. I learned a lot from builders too. We did three design build projects at the University of Toronto Missaga and used them over time to frame the central
• 39:30 - 40:00 green and create thresholds between the forested condition that this campus sits in and that inner green. So buildings that are porous that have public rooms connecting the outer ring to the inner green. And this was a necessity of the construction actually. It's a classroom building and the builder said we need somewhere to put the crane for the entire duration. I want it to be one crane cuz we'll never build this in time. Otherwise, can you organize the public space around the crane so it can stay there for the duration of the construction then we'll lit it over. So
• 40:00 - 40:30 this is kind of sure we can do that. He also said you can have one material I get one trade use it as much as you want and in this case it was copper. And so we created these sort of reblocks with public space in between. And those blocks were legible as as objects in the interior. That material carried inside and the kind of atria and crush space for the classrooms connected us to the forest beyond. We got to try that idea again. This project is called Miui Nandowan which in Anishnabic is the meeting place
• 40:30 - 41:00 or gathering of minds. And here the sectional model shows the connection of the ring road which is at an upper level down to the green and using this sectional journey as a as an opportunity to create both a big indoor public room but also connect communities of academics, researchers with the student life below. Um and it's a building where this is kind of a hall that acts as an event space, a student space. They have movie nights in there. Um, and it was
• 41:00 - 41:30 also uh a kind of return to this process of a of a of a I suppose a fiction about how the building is made kind of mythology about the campus that it's a brutalist era campus and we're building on top of it and then we're suspending these elements which connect people between those two volumes. So the idea that we separated the research and kind of undergrad components but then unified with them this kind of filigree of almost catwalk-l like elements and the result is that people are walking across
• 41:30 - 42:00 there's a layering of public space where events can be happening simultaneously without interfering with one another. Now you know this project because it's on your campus and um this was probably the most challenging project to date. We we won it in 2013. I think it opened in 2019. So, a six-year journey, a very complicated zoning, municipal approvals process, a very complicated CLI, and and at the time, Sheldon Levy, the president of the school, had great aspirations for
• 42:00 - 42:30 building the city. One of the asks with it is that it not be confused with a kind of condos sphere around it which was nothing then compared to what it is now and that it somehow stand as having an institutional identity and a kind of personality which spoke to a place of learning. It's a combination of residence and and academic uses but it not look like two things but one thing. So we started with that and the idea that Ryerson's master plan which KPMBB authored several years before really
• 42:30 - 43:00 spoke about vertical campus. So this little map talks about the places where communities form uh where a campus serves communities to meet come together and excel the quas the the large rooms the markets the retail spaces and if we flip them up on our end and put them in a tower how's that going to work a lot of engagement and shredding with different uh there's me with my soul patch still and I different actually I've returned to those glasses that's interesting as my vest phase And uh
• 43:00 - 43:30 we're working with your your your urban institute. I forget the name of them, but working with planning students, um working with your accessibility and inclusion groups, working with the food security group and your urban farming group. This was a pylon project. Everyone wanted to be part of it. And we crafted a kind of vision called uh creating connections for healthy cities. Um and used that as a kind of manifesto. Anyone who joined the team with their aspirations and their asks had to plug
• 43:30 - 44:00 into this idea. Formally, we wanted to take on the challenge of how do we make this not like the other buildings and we start with the podium tower, which is what the city's uh tall building guidelines want you to make. But we thought Sheldon really wants to engage the city. And this doesn't this has not been fulfilled programmatically. There's supposed to be a great food outlet in there instead of some vending machines. Maybe one day it will happen. But we lift the building, we connect through it, we split the volumes to articulate a kind of public realm which goes from
• 44:00 - 44:30 ground up through the podium up into the residence tower and then plugs into a rooftop above the podium. We mounted a a show at the end of design development when we finally gotten our preliminary site plan approval. We hosted a show here in the gallery and it was a kind of giant cartoon strip that went around all of the walls with the artifacts of our production, all of our samples. We even had a CAD station or a BIM station set up for people to like go through the files in a kind of controlled way. And it was like bringing the art architect
• 44:30 - 45:00 studio to the to the gallery, but also telling the tale of this building. And this is where this idea of the protagonist. This building has been through all of these challenges and it's just trying to come into being and everything is working against it. Whether it's the flight path of St. Michael's, whether it's the budget, whether the fact that it's got three developers trying to pay for it. Um many many interesting challenges. And so that kind of got us talking more about representing architecture um as a kind of living thing. Here's a building in
• 45:00 - 45:30 its context which is rapidly changing uh seeing it at different times of day how that public realm is articulated and how the kind of volumes um take a unified approach and are expressing programmatic um kind of flex and and gathering spaces within the facade of both the residents and the academic buildings. A model we made of that. So studying this kind of deeply and uh in many ways uh to kind of be able to tell the story but also imagine what it will
• 45:30 - 46:00 be and then a kind of we really set the stage and a kind of second project was the fitting out of the roof and it's this marvelous urban farm. I I think that's one of the most exciting parts of the project. People go there, they shop, there's a farmers market on Thursdays. So to me that's the kind of future of these buildings. um the idea that like there's a community in the sky. It's people from the street, it's people in the residence, and it's the people in the academic community. This project is the Albian
• 46:00 - 46:30 Library. Um and here for me, this was really a kind of masterclass in community engagement and learning to read a community, one that you're different from. I'm a kind of white privileged middle-aged guy and I'm serving uh community in Rexdale uh across from the Albian Mall. It's a lot of new Canadians. They're move. They're living in affordable um 60s era housing projects and it's kind of a car dominated ashalt jungle. Not a lot of social amenity. And the library that
• 46:30 - 47:00 they had was very important. This is the new library obviously, but um what they had was this kind of beat up library. The original plan was to demolish it or not demolish it but to close it, renovate it and add on to it. And we got this strong outcry from the community saying you don't do anything to it. You can't close it. It is effectively a refuge for us. It is our kind of Switzerland uh uh for our youth who are in a kind of you know there's a a gang gang um kind of culture that it makes it difficult to occupy public space. So the
• 47:00 - 47:30 library is this kind of neutral space and it couldn't close. So we we kind of switched over and design the orange block is the is the building that existed. We decided to build in the parking lot and then demolish the old building and liberate that space. And because it was bigger than we needed for parking, we saw the opportunity to make um a a plaza there because that was the other, you know, the community engagement really talked about needing a place to gather for markets, for
• 47:30 - 48:00 culture, for celebration. So here you see the finished I mean the context for me is pretty amazing. You know the Albian Mall is just like really a brutal place but it the the the in talking with the community they spoke about a garden this idea of an oasis. So the building takes the identity to be a kind of colored scrim which encloses a pavilion with courtyards so that we can internalize these garden conditions and create program spaces within the kind of secure zone of the library but very kind of permeable veil that brings color inside. Dwall Sophillier designing the
• 48:00 - 48:30 parking lot as a plaza getting rid of those yellow markers but creating the whole thing as a kind of checkerboard with green islands in it. And this has been this kind of marvel of marvelous hybrid urban space. Here we see the color coming in the courtyards. And back when Justin Trudeau was popular, he came there and spoke about Canadian cities. you see the plaza in use for a market and a courtyard in use where you have Parks Canada coming to teach kids who've never been out of the city um how to camp which I thought
• 48:30 - 49:00 is kind of cute. So the idea that the library really had faith in these kind of program spaces and thought we can program that and they they've deployed such creativity in the programming of the building uh you know as much as we did in designing it and there's just kind of kind of to me the testimony of reggreening the site. Liia is about working with an artist. Um this is a uh science building at the University of Ottawa which was built through the knowledge infrastructure fund. Had to be built in
• 49:00 - 49:30 two years. Design program built in two years. So frantic rush working with uh PCL a contractor. And when we got to the site there was this this artwork on the existing physics building. I remember this as a kid. There's a story in the book about going to Ottawa as a kid and seeing these. My dad said, "Well, that's the secret service. That's where CEUS is." Those eyes are watching you. That isn't true. I found out it's by an artist James Boyd. He was a print maker and he did a painting using a printmaking technique. Um Derek Loland, who was a
• 49:30 - 50:00 one-time uh dean of the faculty of science, had a quote on their website about, you know, I like these eyes. We were going to get rid of them, but we decided to restore them because they talk about curiosity, which is is the engine behind science. So, we embarked on a mission. uh the we we told the university we should we should actually recreate the eyes at four times the scale and um they said well we we can't do that you're not an artist so they actually procured an artist they got Derek Basant who's a Calgary based artist who works with the idea of
• 50:00 - 50:30 perception primarily as the human body in space and perception and he was our kind of validator of this concept so we took well let's take the sprint the printmaking technique the uh dot matrix and let's think of the point as a kind of common language between science and art. Everything is built out of a single point. It's an atom or it's a pointless piece or it's a piece in an etching. And we began to imagine the building um as this kind of object um which celebrates perception. The windows are kind of
• 50:30 - 51:00 apertures of varying openness which respond to programmatic and environmental conditions. The eyes are screen printed onto a glass raincreen. Um and you create this new dominant presence over the canal inside. It's a kind of panopticon, a journey for exploring math, science, civil engineering, all of the different faculties that are in the space. You wind your way up through this atrium and layering of spaces through transparency, sectional overlap. Again, a focus on seeing and exploring as themes for not
• 51:00 - 51:30 only what you do in the building as a researcher, but also as a human uh occupying space in the building. And the idea that it works at the scale of the city as a kind of again a a protagonist, a kind of personality with its own gaze. Um it works at the level of the interior creating public spaces wherever we can for people to informally collaborate. And it works at the scale of the campus because we framed a new math and computing quad where there had
• 51:30 - 52:00 been nothing before. I'm coming to the end. um a later project. The lesson here was really about um collaboration and learning to take advice from the people you've taught. So eventually they become smarter than you and the relationship of your collaboration goes from being one of mentorship to being one of peers and all of a sudden you're all equals throwing um ideas into the mix. This was a competition for York University School of Continuing Studies, a gateway project. We knew from the campus
• 52:00 - 52:30 architect that it had to be iconic. That's what they said. Uh but it had to be on budget, it had to be net zero, had to be many things. And so for me, the dilemma was how do we focus on public space, the creation of meaningful public realm on campus and still embrace this kind of formalism that we knew the campus architect was looking for. In the end, we created we were given a brief with a box that had the program in it, and we essentially twisted that to create a plaza for entry on one side and a plaza for drop off on
• 52:30 - 53:00 the other. kind of diagonal movement through a twisting steel framework. It was hard to clad. Obviously, it's done as a die grid. Everything is a series of triangular panels that accommodate the curve. And what was interesting is that the orthogonal components which house classrooms within are always in a kind of shifting relationship with the skin. So rather than making a space in the middle of the building as we've done in so many of these examples, it was at the edge and the kind of fluctuating space
• 53:00 - 53:30 between the skin and the container of the program always kind of changing in section and in plan um creates these really unique opportunities for students in the building. I'd got the title wrong. This is actually called blanket statement. And this brings me to the kind of end of my formal presentation. Um to me this is the kind of most recent project in the book and it's kind of the next chapter of collaboration for architects of of my generation. Um you know we're at a
• 53:30 - 54:00 really interesting point in time where some public institutions are wanting to embrace the recommendations of the truth and reconciling reconciliation commission through uh their projects through the built environment and it's been uh happening for a few years. Um but and and in this case we're working with a lady of smoke. We've worked with others two rows Brook Mroyy's indigenous studio and what we see is that these are practitioners who are of a certain scale
• 54:00 - 54:30 and all of a sudden there's an incredible demand on them and they're being asked to do things they haven't done before or they're being asked to do too much or their services and offerings are being kind of commodified and spread very thinly in a kind of token way. So when our old client Toron Public Library put the brief out, it was a net zero building with an indigenous designer and I phoned up a lady. I said, "I'm sure you're getting many calls, but you will be an equal partner and in a collaboration and we will form the design together." She said, "Well,
• 54:30 - 55:00 great, cuz no one else is offering that." And so she joined our team and we kind of ca she really developed this idea of the of the star blanket as a gift which is used in many indigenous communities to kind of honor a commitment to the community and the idea that the Toronto Public Library is this incredible provider of service to to Toronto and that it it should receive its own star blanket. So I mean there was a very robust engagement with indigenous communities all over the city and with non-indigenous communities and
• 55:00 - 55:30 this idea really resonated with everybody and we went through a very slow um consultation process where we would have a concept would be presented to stakeholders and if they thought it was appropriate as an idea then we would turn begin to integrate it into a design and then we would bring that back. So apart from meeting with the library then you know is this the right scale of the pattern? Are these the right colors to use in a star blanket? And so this kind of very slow iterative
• 55:30 - 56:00 um thoughtful process which was was new from you know I've talked about projects that were done very quickly in some cases in this presentation but this was like slow architecture and Toronto Public Library deserves an enormous kudos for this because many other clients want this but they don't want to go slow. They don't want to go thoughtfully. Now this is kind of in the pandemic and um you know a lady's got this blanket idea and people are doing sketches and you know I was struggling with the idea that a blanket is a kind of domestic object of
• 56:00 - 56:30 a certain scale with certain properties and this is architecture so you know you can't just make a sculpture of a blanket or you can't just like paint blanket patterns on a box. you have to somehow and we so we really struggling with how to how to evolve the idea but also how to work together because I wasn't comfortable with a blanket as a building and a ladyia hadn't done a library of this or building of this scale and complexity before so it was it was this kind of moment where I said well you know what we actually need is instead of
• 56:30 - 57:00 trying to design more and draw more we need a methodology this is kind of a new paradigm um we're look as western architects looking at um kind of reference material which is outside of our cultural tradition. Let's create a kind of space in the way we work to bring these ideas together. So I'm out in the backyard. It's the pandemic. Got my pandemic beard and I and I said and this is the 1 to 25 mckette of approximately the building. And uh then I I called a lady up and said let's meet
• 57:00 - 57:30 at the studio. I've got all these pieces of industrial felt and we are going to you know what is a blanket as a form maker? What what is a convincing gest? What is the right gesture? So we spent a day got our masks on. Isn't that nostalgic? And and we spent we had two weights of felt and we did all this stuff and goofed around. While we're doing this, we're photographing, but we also have a handy liar laser um scanning app on a cell on an iPhone and we're scanning each thing we make into these
• 57:30 - 58:00 really rough, you know, meshes on the right. Uh there we are. We brought the client in and we walked them through this whole process. And you know, they just love that because they never get inside what we do. Um but also they were able to kind of contribute to this as a kind of I don't know, it's like a cultural proposition. how we how do we take on new way new forms or how do we make new forms if we use the same methods. So this is a kind of old meets new mashup. You can see some handmade mckettes. We were just working in many different
• 58:00 - 58:30 ways. So we kind of had a process. Um we took these photos of the mckette to the indigenous stakeholders and talked about uh our communities and talked about is this the right gesture? And the gesture we arrived at is this kind of the blanket is wrapping around the program elements and trying to have the program elements as free free floating things within this uh within this embrace. Here the initial mesh and then moving into Rhino um getting Rhino inside and going
• 58:30 - 59:00 to Revit and then actually creating scripts to map out how the star blanket uh would would be laid out as a series of zinc panels on par parallelograms. So Lady's team were doing a lot of hand sketches and and creating a whole series of residents that they then drew over and we kind of defined the geometry. Then we kind of worked with Zer Metals in Kansas City to come up with a modularization of this and an optimization of it so that we could actually afford it because in
• 59:00 - 59:30 architecture compound curvature means money. So, how could we minimize that and how could we get it to the site and kind of uh deal with some of the comp complexities? And this is uh it's current it's actually got a contractor on board last week and it's going ahead. So, we're really excited about that. And TPL's commitment to this is really quite something. There's a section through the building. There's a roundhouse that accesses a garden um with medicinal plants and then an atrium that connects them. And the idea was really to provide
• 59:30 - 60:00 a journey from the street up to the skies so we could overlook Taylor Creek Ravine which was a Hodnoni settlement for millennia and uh to have this resonance with the natural world which is difficult in the build context but becomes possible through this architecture community service hub up on the roof and then how it knits into its context. It's weird but hopefully wonderful. So leave you with these ideas. talked about designing buildings.
• 60:00 - 60:30 What I really am doing now is designing our culture or our practice. This is our 2017 manifesto design powers community or empowers community. And um we really used it to structure how we work, people we want to work with and the space we want to work in. And when we moved into our new digs in 2018, those were really drivers for the design at at Young and Adelaide. And it's become a community hub for people. Um, we have a space, two spaces that we use for external events
• 60:30 - 61:00 and so there's always people coming into our studio exchanging ideas and we kind of want to live this idea of community focused design. But coming back to the initial proposition of animating public space and creating meaningful public space wherever you go and I'll leave you this. This is my brother's painting. When I graduated architecture school, he gave this to me. It's called the practice well I call it the practice of dreaming. He calls it the architect's toolkit. Apparently, these are like Samrian and Mesopotamian ancient objects that builders and and
• 61:00 - 61:30 draftsmen used. And the idea is that you're going to need a lot of stuff in your toolkit to weather the storms of this profession. You may not even know what some of these tools are for. You may not even know their tools, but if you kind of keep your eyes open and your mind open and look for the things that will help you solve the problem, um you'll eventually hopefully get there. So that's the idea of we're all carrying around this toolkit if we choose to not leave it behind. So there we go. Any
• 61:30 - 62:00 questions? I ran over. I'm really sorry. That was the So, I think Cidra and I both have microphones and uh Andrew would be very pleased to take a few questions, comments. Hi. Um I really enjoy your presentation. I think your portfolio of work is really impressive. Um I was
• 62:00 - 62:30 wondering how you made your project plot twist net zero. like what different measures did you take and how did you reduce your operational energy because it is a university building assuming again university students are always using the building. Yeah that's right good question. So the um you know the net zero is a uh operational carbon net zero right so we electrif you know step one the building is completely electrified and then you know um I guess that's step two actually step one was kind of looking at the form so the
• 62:30 - 63:00 twisting kind of gave us a sort of self-shading property and we were able to kind of minimize solar gain it is assembled as a curtain wall which is not the not the highest R rating but it is is like uh with a backup wall. It it kind of creates a high performance R R20 nominal R18 wall which is high for that kind of construction. But looking at the overall set of loads on the building and how it's performing
• 63:00 - 63:30 um you know this was something that we we were able to kind of mitigate through other through the systems that we use electrifying the building and then moving into all a um direct outside air chilled beam system. So very low operating cost but 100% fresh air which is a kind of wellness benefit as well. And then the parking lot just north of the building, the entire roof is a PV array which is feeding the the building.
• 63:30 - 64:00 Nice. Other questions? I I have one. Sure. Go for it. Andrew, it's so impressive, so inspiring. I mean, you've obviously had an incredible career and a lot of Yeah. Yeah. So, my question is, why a book? Like, there's success on so many levels. Why did you choose to do a book and what new things did you learn about your own practice by doing that? Yeah, so that's a good question. So the book started Perkins and Will is like a big company. There's um 3,000 people almost and they
• 64:00 - 64:30 um uh said, you know, you are one of three or four designers that we think are next generation that should do books. And and so I said, "That sounds great. I'll do a book." And then rapidly they said, "But you know, we're actually thinking the books really aren't really relevant anymore. And you know, you could do like a podcast or this." And I but I said, "But I already started writing." And so what happened is I sort of got this idea and I started it's like telling stories and I thought and once I started on that I got really hooked and the idea of telling a story about buildings and in my practice I've been
• 64:30 - 65:00 fortunate to kind of try to have buildings where there is an opportunity for the building to tell a story. So this to me seemed like a self-reinforcing uh kind of paradigm where um you know that the narrative of creation and the narrative of occupying buildings can kind of coexist and and be a kind of feedback loop. So what I learned is that what I learned is that I you know that there's a real con I didn't think I knew what I was doing but I it seems that I retrospectively there's this kind of thread of of of of preoccupations that
• 65:00 - 65:30 that I'm was able to see and then of course when you tell your own story you get to reinforce it. So, it's kind of about setting. It's kind of about rationalizing what I've done and kind of projecting forward on those themes. It's super fun to make a book, but it's like a building. It's incredibly difficult and iterative and expensive and painful and agonizing. So, but but it's fun once it's done. And there I do want to say they are for sale. Our friends from Swiper here. If you want to buy one, it's it's I'll even
• 65:30 - 66:00 sign it if you student discount. I don't know if there's a student discount. We I can arrange something with them if you want. Perkins and Will did supply the pizza for which we're very Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We had a 25% student discount at one point and I I have to talk to them if we can make that happen. Yeah. Other questions? Oh, other questions, thoughts? Yeah. um by going through your projects with kind of that storytelling perspective, did you stumble upon anything in your
• 66:00 - 66:30 projects that you had never really considered until you went back retroactively? Yeah, that's a good question. And I do think the answer is yes. um this kind of when when you kind of lay them all out and you look at them side by side and what they're doing, you know, you you you know, the thing that you knew you were doing on one project. Um you then like we did this exhibit at at at TMU and where the building was like a comic book hero like a protagonist. So
• 66:30 - 67:00 we were kind of deliberate about that and then then later I realized that that those themes are existing in other buildings where the this idea of like an analyzing context and and realizing that your building is is going it's like a person entering a room. They're going to affect the kind of what happens, right? And so are they intentional about that? Do they have a personality? I mean that's the worst thing is these buildings that don't actually have it's like meeting a person who actually has no personality. It would be very strange, right? Uh and their face is all made out of different things because they don't know where they came from. So nobody's really like that. So why should
• 67:00 - 67:30 buildings be like that? So getting intentional about this idea of the of the building almost as an individual that is going to either take or give to society. Another question. Uh yes, can I go over here because you asked one already? Um, I had a question about the more fine arts work that you did earlier in your career and I wanted to know like what are some things in the fine art work that you did that help helped you transition into architecture or maybe
• 67:30 - 68:00 vice versa. Well, you mean if you mean like the f I kind of like did fine art as a kid, which I wouldn't really share any of that with you today, but the stuff I sort of did in between. Um, you know, because I'd been to architecture school and been drawing architecturally, you know, you develop that skill and and so you start to start to celebrate that in in the work. So, so it's a painting and then it's got this kind of background which is, you know, obviously an architect's skill has helped me shape that. And then pretty soon I realized, well, that's the background. Why don't that's actually the most interesting part of the painting. I'll make that the
• 68:00 - 68:30 foreground. And then these ideas about the city as a kind of uh kind of spectacle that is constantly generating and regenerating became a kind of uh a kind of preoccupation which when you move into architectural practice, you know, you it's what you actually are working with. The clay that we're working with is not a static thing. It's a it's a it's it's actually very dynamic. And you know designing definite cockwell health science complexes was was really interesting because we went to city the city the planning department
• 68:30 - 69:00 and they're like you know there's this guy talking about church street is that it's called church street because there's churches on it and all the buildings should be at the scale of the churches and I was luckily we're ready for this guy and we had this slide and said well these are all the projects that are either approved are in the planning pipeline uh or under construction and just a forest of huge skyscrapers that just dwarf the Daphne Cockwell when they're all built now and you can see that um understanding that you're working in a kind of living context whether that's a natural context
• 69:00 - 69:30 or built context is really critical. So I guess the artwork I was doing was about living in the city and the city living and uh and it definitely has fed the work just in the way we analyze and think about the sites we come to. That's great. Well, I promised my colleagues that I would release the students by 1 p.m. for ongoing studio activation upstairs. So, I could suggest that if anyone has any further questions to come on up and and engage uh Andrew directly. Um although he does have a
• 69:30 - 70:00 flight this afternoon. I could stay till 1:30. Okay. Okay. Great. So, we'll go into some informal uh conversation, but thank you very much Andrew and thank you Cidra and ACU for organizing. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, thanks. Sorry, I ran over some Oh, wait, wait.