I Would Prefer Not To: Live Broadcast Transcript

To mark the launch of I Would Prefer Not To, the project’s creator, Ana Miljački, sat down with Mario Gooden and Paul Lewis to discuss the refusal of architectural commissions in practice today.

The live conversation covered the typically unseen process of architectural refusal and its relevance to the profession as a whole, from the stakes of refusal to the forces that drive and constrain architects’ commissions.

Watch a video of the event.

The following transcript has been lightly processed and is provided for reference only. May not accurately capture all aspects of the conversation.

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Rosalie Genevro: (00:05) In the practice of architecture, in which a great deal of conversation is about how to get the job, what does turning down or withdrawing from a committed commission mean? What does the active refusal say? Is it self-protection, resistance, disengagement? On whose behalf is a refusal made? Who does it affect or rebuke or anger? What is the opaque but resonant example of Bartleby the scrivener, who would prefer not to at every turn, have to say about refusal?

I Would Prefer Not To and its examination of the question of refusal is a characteristically inventive and stimulating project of architect and historian Ana Miljački in her Critical Broadcasting Lab at MIT. Ana and her colleagues describe the intent of the Critical Broadcasting Lab this way: “It teaches tools for producing the distance necessary for critical operations—for the understanding of complexity, nuance, and implication. Its members exercise academic freedom of speech, freedom to be critical; its projects are unsolicited and thus motivated by urgencies that are felt privately by those who participate in their research and explication. It aims to cultivate an experimental attitude toward making architecture (and the things that make it possible) public; to produce robust criticism of the discipline’s contemporary, historical, and future entanglements with forces beyond its safe academic outlines; and thus to recover the role of the public intellectual in architecture.”

Over the course of today’s program, you’ll learn more about the genesis and motivating ideas of the I Would Prefer Not To project. I just want to say that when Ana approached The Architectural League about partnering with the Critical Broadcasting Lab to provide a base for public access for to the project, we leapt at the chance. The broadcast interview series that constitutes the project launched on the League’s website and podcast sites in May, with the first installment with WORKac. The second interview, with SO-IL, went live last week, and new releases will become available each month.

Major thank yous are due to Julian Geltman of the Critical Broadcasting Lab, who is Ana’s colleague in creating the project and producing the interviews, and to Anne Carlisle, Sarah Wesseler, Rafi Lehmann, and Alicia Botero of the League’s staff, who are producing the web and social media platforms that provide access to the project.

Now for a little biographical information about today’s speakers. Ana Miljački is a critic, curator, and associate professor of architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she teaches history, theory, and design. Her research interests range from the role of architecture and architects in Cold War–era Eastern Europe through the theories of postmodernism and late socialism, to politics of contemporary architectural production. Along with Eva Franch and Ashley Schafer, Ana was part of the curatorial team of the U.S. Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, where their project OfficeUS critically examined the last century of U.S. architectural offices. She curated and produced an exhibit on the role of copying and originality in architectural fair use with her students at MIT. The exhibition was presented under the title Un/Fair Use at the Center for Architecture in New York in late 2015. Her books include The Optimum Imperative: Czech Architecture for the Socialist Lifestyle, 1938–1968, and Terms of Appropriation: Modern Architecture and Global Exchange, which is a collection of historical essays with Amanda Reeser Lawrence. At the same time as producing all this, she has been very active with the Critical Broadcasting Lab, creating and producing projects including Conversations on Care and See Us Seesaw.

Ana’s gonna discuss refusal and preferring not to with Mario Goodman and Paul Lewis. Mario is a cultural practice architect and director of Mario Gooden Studio Architecture + Design. His practice engages the cultural landscape and the intersectionality of architecture, race, gender, sexuality, and technology, and his work manifests as architectural design, writing, research, and performance. Mario was interim director of the master of architecture program at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia, and he’s also a research associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design program at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, and he’s a founding board member of the Black Reconstruction Collective. Mario is the author of Dark Space: Architecture, Representation, Black Identity, as well as have many essays and articles on architecture, art, and cultural production. He is the vice president for architecture on the board of The Architectural League.

Paul Lewis is a founding principal of LTL Architects and professor at Princeton, at the Princeton University School of Architecture, where he’s taught since 2000. At LTL, his recent work includes Poster House, the Helen R. Walton Children’s Enrichment Center, and a new residence hall at Carnegie Mellon University. Paul and his co-principals at LTL, Mark Tsurumaki and David Lewis, are co-authors of the best-selling book Manual of Section, as well as monographs on their work. They’re currently completing Manual of Biogenic House Sections, which will be published at the end of the summer, which focuses on the intersection of carbon-sequestering materials and sectional innovation in dwellings around the world. Paul is president of The Architectural League.

Over to you, Ana.

Ana Miljački: (05:47) Maybe we can all appear? Yeah.

Thank you, Rosalie, and everyone at the League for supporting this event, as well as the podcast series into existence. And thank you, Paul and Mario, for helping steward this institution and for agreeing to join me on the Zoom stage today. Hopefully, it’s fun for all of us. And thank you all on Zoom, and maybe later on digital airwaves, for tuning in.

I’m super excited to have this chance to pull back the curtain a bit on the workings of the I Would Prefer Not To series, and to do that with Paul and Mario. As you might have read, I Would Prefer Not To is an oral history project conducted through audio interviews on the topic of perhaps the most important kind of refusal in architects’ toolboxes: refusal of the architectural commission. The title itself, as Rosalie said, is borrowed from Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” but it has had many lives in different corners of culture, and slightly different interpretations. In this series we refer to it, or to its particular disposition and form of refusal, in order to address and draw out into the public, for the record, decisions that architects make, and which, because they are about non-engagement, stay hidden from the public scrutiny, and history. Withdrawals of many kinds, but certainly of this kind, tend not to leave paper trails, and are not easy to examine or learn from. And yet, the lessons contained in architects’ deliberations about and decisions not to engage are politically relevant and urgent decisions. to not engage a commission or types of commissions or commissions with certain characteristics, inevitably forfeit potential profit, placing other values above it, at least momentarily.

So I’m excited to talk to you, Mario and Paul, both about some concrete examples that you’re willing to share with us regarding your respective practices, and how decisions about not taking or taking commissions have shaped their trajectories, but also more generally, about this position of non-engagement and how we might think of it in the contemporary moment.

So as you know, I was preparing to conduct one of the I Would Prefer Not To conversations as I would for the recording for this occasion. But the most important and pleasurable thing about the conversation as a format for the production of discourse and knowledge is that, well, it can be steered and shaped live by all included.

So as you know, we are curious to hear from you at what point a commission is not worth it, what kind of line gets drawn with a decision to forfeit the possibility of work, and how such decisions are made in your offices to do. But so I’m going to start by calling on you, and then we can I’m going to let you know, take it to places.

So Paul, let’s start with that one. What is the most memorable or important example of you preferring to say no to a potential or existing commission or mode of practice?

Paul Lewis: (09:11) Well, first of all, I want to kind of reiterate Rosalie’s thanks to you for engaging in this I Would Prefer Not To series. I think it’s super fascinating. I’ve had the pleasure of listening to a number of the interviews, and I think they’re super interesting for multiple reasons that I think we’ll get into, often because they allow people to talk about their work not through a kind of, you know, an exuberance about what they’ve done but the kind of things that occur that you don’t often speak about, which also leads to some awkwardness in the conversation. Which, I have a suspicion we’re gonna have some level of awkwardness in this.

So to your question, you know, in some respects, I was a little worried answering this one, because we don’t . . . Our process for engaging projects at this point, it’s gotten fairly boring, which is that we’re involved in RFP processes. We’ve steered our practice in a way that most of our work is with cultural institutions, education, higher education institutions, not-for-profits, often, where the politics of the client’s source of money, say, the nature of the program: they’re not mysteries. They tend to be fairly clear. And so our decision-making is, at some level, more banal, more pragmatic: questions about the RFP process, etc.

But to get to this stage—because I think, you know, we’re really, you know, kind of very pleased that we’re in this stage, even though the RFP process has its problems—we did go through an early stage of channeling the office based on kind of certain level of refusal, which leads to probably our most kind of memorable prefer-not-to moment. Which was a very . . . Fairly early on, we had gotten some recognition as a vanguard firm. We had, I think, built one or two projects but were mostly known for kind of innovative drawings and architecture played out within that realm. But we got a call from out of the blue from a private client, who wanted us to renovate his SoHo loft that he had just bought. And we checked, and it was the son of a very wealthy family; clearly had resources. And the program was really, on the one hand, seemingly ideal. It was relatively open-ended in terms of budget, and, more importantly, it was open ended in terms of what we were asked to do. We were asked to do whatever we wanted. It was free rein. We just had to transform this generic kind of white apartment into something spectacular that would allow this client to host, basically, parties. Essentially, was an extension of his image through what we were going to give him.

So this—you know, we needed money. We don’t—we have a practice that’s not, you know, funded by any kind of private wealth [laughs]. We, you know, we were young, we needed built commissions. We met. And I think the difficulty here was, we knew that this was going to involve a huge amount of time. There was an expectation that we would drop everything and devote all of our energy and passion to this particular project. There was a relatively tight timeframe, and it would mean everything would really go to this. And then the other problem that came up is that in our limited contact with the client, we realized that this client, who we didn’t know personally, was actually fairly cruel to their assistant. And so even though they were quite pleasant to us, because they were wooing us, in a weird way, there . . . We were, all the signs were that this was not someone who we felt we had any interest in being connected with.

And we turned down the commission. It was actually a fairly easy decision. And it helped us frame a kind of model for how we made decisions in the early stages of the practice, which was really kind of, can be can summed up in a single sentence, which was: Does the project allow for the design of spaces that enhance the collective? And this one didn’t. It was for a private client. It was not . . . It allowed for the design of spaces. So there was an ambition from the standpoint of design, but it had no benefit beyond the personal aggrandizement of this one figure who we didn’t actually think that we were going to see any eye to eye with.

Miljački: (13:54) So did this decision influence what happened to the practice?

Lewis: (13:58) Yeah. So this was the most concrete version of us kind of shifting away from doing apartments. This was the most explicit version of that. And, you know, as a young practice, how do you get work? You have to build and build. And so that led us shifting towards restaurants, right? Restaurants had a public agenda, they were fast, they were quick, but anybody could visit them, within a certain . . . you could at least walk in, right? They were on the kind of domain of the sidewalk; you can look in. So we turned down a number of smaller-scale apartment renovations, knowing that we wanted to focus on projects that the work could be seen, could be part of a larger discourse.

So yeah, this was the most explicit example of where there is money involved. We were really close. A lot of them are small projects, you know, do you do them? But this one came with a certain amount of benefit. It just it ended up establishing a fairly clear line that we didn’t want to cross.

Miljački: (15:05) I have a question. So that obviously directed you towards institutional work, right: the desirable work that you’re now working on and doing. But for me, what’s interesting is that all three members of LTL are participants in institutions, academic and civic, stewarding different sort of corners of the architectural landscape, let’s say. And then the institutions are your key clients: Institutions that are a lot like the institutions that you sort of participate in shepherding. And so I’m wondering how this sort of multiplication of relationships with institutions affects, maybe, the language that you have to speak with the institutions, or even how you navigate that, let’s say, relationship as you work?

Lewis: (16:01) Yeah, it’s a really good question. And certainly, we delight in working with academics as clients, right? There’s stewardship of a longer life of the built environment. It’s very rare you get clients who own build, inhabit, and care for their own buildings, right? And the mission is idealistic: transmission, enhancement of knowledge, service of the greater good. I think, you know, that there’s a huge amount of kind of belief that we have in the value of institutions, particularly academic institutions.

What I think that we kind of realized—and this comes from the kind of being in the positions of faculty administrators—is that there are contradictions that often go unstated in academia, not the least of which is a friction between the desire for a kind of consensus—everyone should have a voice, everyone should be part of the conversation—and a friction with hierarchy that sometimes is not as explicitly stated. Everyone in the room needs to be heard, but some people in the room have or feel they, you know, they have the final say, right? And that puts kind of weird . . .  And it’s often not stated, right? The everyone has a say is stated, but often that hits a certain limit. So I think in being able to navigate that friction: working, recognizing that there is a desire to have collective discussion, using design and the image, the visualization of that design, to foster enthusiasm for what we would call a kind of beneficial compromise, but so that there’s a sense that there’s a trajectory where we’re able to do both. We’re able to work, and get everyone involved in the conversation, while also trying to find a way that decisions can be made with the hierarchies that are often not explicitly played out. That, I think, is the one of the trickier balance . . .

And also, the other thing I should mention here is that, that the degree to which minor problems are major issues. And the kind of pettiness of academia plays itself out in building projects in fairly explicit ways.

Miljački: (18:29) So your own embeddedness in these institutions is useful.

Lewis: (18:34) Yeah. It’s very useful, mostly because we’ve witness it from multiple arenas, right: as faculty, administrators, and now, you know, as consultants effectively, right? So, and I think that goes to what I would, you know, that good design is based on empathy, right? And so to be able to know those positions—that have been junior faculty, etc.—gives, I think, a much greater understanding—have been students, who work with students, who know students’ frustrations—in that process, I think, I’d like to believe, gives us a way of approaching these projects that that uses that empathy to good effect.

Miljački: (19:22) I have one more question in my selection that is a bit of a blast from the past. So your first book was called Opportunistic Architecture. And it seemed like a framework . . . at the time, I understood it as an attempt to say, or as a framework in which you’re saying, “We’re going to try and make architecture in the context, whatever context we are faced with and have to engage.” It felt very sort of important and of that moment. And so my, I have a couple of questions. Do you ever regret this framework? Do you still operate within this framework? Or how has it changed?

Lewis: (20:08) Yeah, it’s a really good question. I mean, for us opportunistic architecture was a way of working where design was foregrounded without necessarily making the issue of the image or the form of the project the priority, but to put the emphasis on the relationship between materials, budget, code, site, program, and that, in a sense, we would be forging spaces that would intensify the social dimensions of the space through those exchanges. So it was a way of working, but also a way of trying to intensify design’s agency without always defaulting to form and image, right? So it allowed us to then make the arguments, you know, if you salvage things or you didn’t demolish that that could be seen as a valuable design decision, right? So it was part of that opportunism. So I think we were we were trying . . . we acknowledged that the opportunism gets associated with a kind of negative capitalism, and we were trying to spin that towards a more optimistic opportunism.

If there’s a regret, it’s probably because that it’s very hard to clarify this as an architectural project, right? And precisely maybe, because it was not about image, it was a way of getting things done foregrounding creative, you know, ideas. And I would say that we still work this way, but that we shifted towards a more specific emphasis—and this is really in the last couple of years—emphasis on the agency of materials, life cycles of materials, and that their role in this kind of opportunism is now at a much higher level, right? Carbon, plant-based materials, issues of carbon, I should say, in parallel focus on healthy, non-toxic, non-petrochemical materials.

But I, you know, I, I don’t think you ever quite get away from past methodologies; you torque them and move them in different directions. And that’s where we are now.

Miljački: (22:17) That’s a great place to switch to Mario for a second. But I do, please think about answering how you make these decisions to take and not take commissions in your practice. I think, especially with a kind of three-headed practice that also has a body, it would be interesting to think about that.

But on the topic of transforming, with Mario, I’m wondering if there’s a way in which you could describe a difference, if there was any, between what it meant to think about taking on and not taking on commissions through Huff + Gooden and now the kind of emergence and establishment of the Gooden Studio.

Mario Gooden: (23:03) Thanks, Ana, for that question, and thanks for this conversation this afternoon with you, and Paul, and myself. Mario Gooden Studio, I guess, is what we’re called now [laughs] . . .

Miljački: Sorry.

Gooden: . . . remains, is committed to working in the public realm, in public architecture, I think similar to LTL, actually. And that’s the way it was with Huff + Gooden when we first started 25 years ago.

And actually, you know, Huff + Gooden began in Charleston and South Carolina, and neither Ray, my former partner, nor I were, also weren’t, from any source of wealth [laughs]. So, you know, at that time, when we started, the way to get work was actually, you know, to do public RFPs. And we, similar to LTL, we’ve worked on a number of higher education projects, cultural institutions, public schools, actually. Which have actually become a bit more difficult to kind of do that, in terms of public schools in New York.

But I think in terms of thinking about the kind of work that we were doing then and the kind of work that I’m doing now, I mean, Huff + Gooden was a, I’ll call that a firm, in which both partners or principals, you know, were African American or Black. So right there from the bat, I think the way that we approached projects, we approached the profession, we . . . and particularly given that context of being in the, you know, in South Carolina, being in a, you know, even though it considered itself to be a kind of cosmopolitan place, it’s still Charleston [laughs]. So, you know, the way that we approached our work and how we thought about what we were doing. And I wouldn’t say it was so much about refusal, we were just kind of very careful about the things that we wanted to pursue. So it’s not so much turning things down, but really thinking about what we wanted were wanting to pursue.

As my practice has evolved to what it is now, to Mario Gooden Studio, I think that certainly remains the same, but perhaps what has changed as maybe the question of audience and the expansion of discourse within the work. Huff + Gooden also was quite engaged in relationships between art and architecture, and being informed by art and architecture. That remains. But now I would say, sometimes, I think that I’m more interested in art than I am in in architecture, and so I’m fine with the work becoming much more blurry, the practice becoming much more blurry, and, I suppose, transdisciplinary. So writing is a part of the practice; performance has become a part of the practice; filmmaking has become a part of the practice. Yes, I still love buildings, but buildings are—I can’t believe I’m gonna say this, maybe this is one of those awkward moments—the buildings aren’t the end all and be all, because maybe so much building is what has gotten us into some of the problems that we’re that we’re facing right now. Yeah.

Miljački: (26:35) I don’t think we’ll edit this one out. I think this is an important, important statement, and maybe actually goes to the sort of question about what architecture allowed, or kinds of agencies that architecture allowed, and the kinds of agencies that this expanded practice has given you now. You can comment on that. But we can also go to the MoMA piece, if you like.

Gooden: (27:03) Well, I think that, you know, the practice, or my practice, toggles between academia and sort of being here in the studio, sort of working. And so, you know, the conversations that I’m having with students are also conversations I’m having here in the studio and vice versa. So that kind of expanded practice, things becoming more blurry, I also see happening in academia or happening, you know, at Columbia. Or maybe it’s just Columbia, I’m not sure [laughs]. But I see that happening at Columbia. And that kind of, as well, actually, I would say, three places: at Columbia, here in the studio, and then actually out in the art world. So I’m kind of moving between those three quite often, and they are really informing each other. So the, you know, the artists that I am engaged with, they’re also constructing practices that I would say are kind of blurry. You know, my good friend Torkwase Dyson is not just a painter, but a sculptor, performance artist, doing many, multiple things. And a number of artists, I think, are not seeking to kind of just be thought of as one thing now, but working across disciplines, if you will.

Miljački: (28:34) Maybe let’s now connect it back to refusal. So your piece at MoMA in in the Reconstructions show was titled The Refusal of Space. And I thought you could tell us more about the role of refusal in this piece, but in general, in this sort of expanded practice now.

Gooden: (28:56) Yeah, sure. Yeah. Thanks for asking about, about The Refusal of Space. In that exhibition and in that work, I guess, refusal is addressed in a number of ways, probably three main ways, and then at different scales.

As you noted, the show was called Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America. There were ten architectural designers that were invited to look at ten different cities. The city that I was looking at was Nashville. And, but more broadly, I mean, first, there is refusal in terms of the ways in which African Americans, Black Americans, Black people have been systematically denied the right to public space and public accommodations. So there’s, I guess, that as a kind of beginning of thinking about refusal, but then secondly, the fact that Blacks have refused to accept those conditions and have often, then, creatively appropriated the built environment and created new kinds of programs and new forms of visibility, as well as, I would say, new kinds of architectures.

And then looking at Nashville itself, the piece was about, I suppose, two sets of events. One was in 1905, when the City of Nashville enacted a new segregation law to separate Blacks and whites on its trolley system. And then the early 1960s, looking at the Civil Rights movement.

In the case of the 1905 event, rather than accept that, a group of 15 black businessmen said, “Okay, we’re going to start our own trolley lines.” And that trolley line moved across the city and frequented places that black people frequented, essentially kind of remapping the city according to the Black experience. So in that case, refusal wasn’t about negation, it was about production, and production of a new way of understanding the city and understanding urban space.

In the case of the 1960s sit-ins, protests, and marches, it was, yes, refusal to accept being denied accommodations, but in the end, it was also a kind of the production of liberation. And I kind of call it the, you know, the spatial production of liberation, if you will, in terms of, you know, the ways in which, you know, collectively, the students marched through the city, re-territorialized the city, the way in which their bodies were used in terms of the sit-ins and protests. And I also kind of call that kind of spatial choreography of liberation.

And then finally, the installation sort of takes all of that, reconstructs the trolley, juxtaposes it with film, animation, mapping, or drawing as a kind of hybrid or an altered architectural representation in the way, I suppose, theorist Tina Campt defines a practice of refusal, which is about creating a kind of new modality of witnessing or representation when, you know, existing modes refuse Blackness itself. So I wasn’t interested in reproducing architectural kinds of drawings, but actually, something which kind of took architectural ways of thinking, but then transformed it or made something out of it, made something different out of it. So taking what might be considered abject, and transmutating.

Sorry, sorry, for the very long answer.

Miljački: (32:50) Oh, no, that’s—I mean, so do you want to link it to the way that you’ve been presenting work more generally, also?

Gooden: (32:57) Yeah, so. And maybe this, now that I’m thinking about it, maybe this is a kind of more direct refusal. A few years ago, I was asked to give an architectural lecture. And my presentations had been moving away from, I suppose, straight lectures for a while, but I had no desire. So I guess this was the kind of I prefer not to moment, which I prefer not to simply present, “Oh, here’s a rendering. Here’s a photograph of the building. Here are architectural drawings,” but instead produced a performance with a choreographer, Jonathan Gonzalez. And this piece, this performance, was called Working on Water, in which Jonathan performed exterior to the lecture venue, I was performing inside, giving various readings and moving through space, while just images and film just kind of projected behind me, all related to architectural work and projects that we were doing in the studio, but I never spoke to them directly, if you will. And juxtaposed with work by Arthur Jafa, by Carrie Mae Weems, David Hammons: you know, artists that I’ve been looking at for, you know, several decades now.

So that began—I guess, this was maybe three or so years ago—really thinking about performance in architecture and are there other ways of thinking about not only representing but, let’s say, manifesting architectural space, you know, in a kind of presentation. And I’ve become sort of increasingly sort of interested in . . .  Jonathan and I are actually working on a new piece that that we hope to have completed this year. That’s called Black Holes Ain’t So Black.

Miljački: (35:01) Maybe do you want to go with this towards education? I mean, I’m interested what it . . . I understand from Campt and her talking about specific ways that refusal might apply to the realm of aesthetic production. And to me, my, you know, brief or fast or whatever, recent understanding of this is that she’s looking for a way to rewire categories, or the whole Practicing Refusal Collective is looking for ways to rewire categories and operate with some cultural debris that’s already there, but also without allowing its existing categories to determine Black aesthetic production.

And I’m wondering with all of this, in a way, how we intersect it with education? What would it mean to, where do we, I don’t know, transmit this kind of attitude and models?

Gooden: (36:06) Yeah, that’s a very good question. And what I’ve been working on for a while now at Columbia. I mean, I think that we have to, let’s say, step back, and even though, you know, there is like Tina Campt or Fred Moten, you know, have been working in terms of thinking about, let’s say, Black Studies, or Black cultural production, I think that what they’re also doing is, let’s say, taking what has been considered abject and subverting that. And in architectural education, I guess the way in which I’m trying to bring that in, let’s say, in terms of thinking about the spatial choreography of liberation, is, is it possible to bring that into architectural discourse and subvert what we think of as the architectural subject, which is, which has been thought of to be a kind of ideal, a universal subject, but was never sort of ideal or universal, but was European, male, able-bodied, and white? So even though, on the one hand, that has to do with, let’s say, Black Studies, I think that in architecture, what I’m interested in is, how do we undo the whiteness of architecture? And can we look to the ways in which, you know, other kinds of cultural production operate as a way of undoing whiteness, and maybe even dismantling the discipline, not just rewriting the discipline? And, I mean, I think I could probably go on and on about that [laughs], in terms of the whiteness of architecture, the whiteness of architectural history, and, you know, the work that’s needed to undo that, but I think that there is much to learn from, yeah, not only Tina Campt, but I’ve also been interested in the work of Arthur Jafa and brought that into, brought AJ’s work into my studio, the work of David Hammond. And yes, the students have struggled a bit with thinking about this and how do we sort of translate it? What is it that we sort of get and ring? But I do think that it’s opened up some really interesting conversations and work which has produced, led to the production of work, and which none of us could have expected, in really, really interesting ways.

Miljački: (38:47) Thank you. I have more questions, but now you can I’m, I’m opening this table so that you can direct some towards me if you want.

Lewis: (39:02) Yeah, I mean, I, I’m kind of reflecting a little bit on . . . Mario mentioned that architecture—and I want to make sure I get, I don’t misspeak here—but architecture is not always the kind of solution for things, right? It could, in fact, be part of the problem, if not a major part of the problem. And that kind of runs counter to a lot of, you know, basic assumptions of architectural education, profession, disciplinary X, you know—“We can build our way out of our problem. If we can only get architects in the room, we can solve issues, etc.” Right? So there’s a lot of tropes that have been based on that: “If we can only get more design, if we can only get more architects, you know, things would be better.” Right? And I’m curious in your conversations about this question of I Would Prefer Not To whether you’ve encountered similar apprehensions, anxiety, about the current state of the discipline. Whether that—it’s one thing about to say I would prefer not to to protect your own position within it, but whether there’s a kind of larger critique of the discipline itself relative to the very problems that architecture produces.

Miljački: (40:25) Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it has depended, or it has been different from conversation to conversation. Right now, we have five that are ready to go, and, you know, there was a warm-up version with some friends before. But I think for me, in order to get at this, the key thing about the series is that I’m asking a fairly simple question, perhaps like the way a historian might, or a journalist, to put something on the record that will hold on to, or index, the moment that we are inhabiting, but in such a way that the different interlocutors actually interpret the question differently to their ends, right? And so what you see, hopefully, at the end . . . you know, I think of it as an infinite oral history, though the League might not like that word. But in my mind, it’s basically, it could keep going. We could keep recording architects on this topic. And you know, both historically, as we move, and across different kinds of offices and individuals, we arrive at different stories.

But so for me, what’s important about this is that then we can compare these positions. And sometimes the question of preferring not to is indeed a private one: It’s about protecting or thinking about the particular sort of disposition of the practice and definition of the practice. But I get excited when I hear, the way that you might at the end of the SO-IL conversation, Jing Liu talking about the power and possibility of a collective no. What would it mean to organize around a set of topics, and socialize around a set of topics, such that the discipline and the profession begin to exert a certain amount of pressure? Because without organization, those are one-offs, or the refusal is a one-off refusal. Someone else will step in, right?

So for me, that one is the one that I’m, you know, secretly hoping for when I talk to people, but I don’t put words in anyone’s mouth. My point is precisely to sort of hear from others what they have to say in this context and to enable a kind of position and a conversation out of these interviews.

Lewis: (43:05) Do you see that the discipline or the profession of architecture needs to have, you know, a better ethical code as a result, to frame and galvanize that collective response, that collective “No, we won’t do that?”

Miljački: (43:23) Yeah, I mean, I find code difficult in this moment. I find a lot of things are being solved through code and policy at the moment. And maybe this is my particular view, from the, you know, the place I’m occupying in academia. But I think that we certainly need a culture of discussing, and maybe of discussing moral, ethical, political questions collectively. And, you know, I think those percolate in different places, but I think until they are culturally present and felt, no code is going to ensure them.

On the other hand, I think, you know, the kinds of things that the League has been doing, taking up a series of very important questions, like that, to me, is a really important platform from which to begin to galvanize. Or, for example, in the WORKac conversation, Dan Wood talks about working with the New York AIA to draft the codes of conduct with respect to the building of prisons. So I do think those are important, and I think, you know, there we can have, we can not have too many platforms to arrive at things. But some of those questions I’d say that we need to, that I hope we can . . . maybe in some small way, these interviews can enable us, first of all, a kind of recognition that that we are not alone in the field that we are trying to navigate as architects, and that we can organize around a set of issues.

Gooden: (45:11) I think it’s, it’s interesting to think about, let’s say, new modes of practice in terms of the collective, but also maybe even redefining the architect, because there’s a certain assumption about who the architect is. And I mentioned this to you, Ana and Paul, probably in an email, that I went back and reread Melville. And I have to say, I was quite disturbed, you know, by, Bartleby. And in his case, his, you know, “I prefer not to”—well, he doesn’t do anything, right? And what I find fascinating about Tina Campt’s Practicing Refusal is that refusal is not negation: Refusal is actually production. So refusal is, let’s say, refusal to be accepted on certain terms, and then remaking or producing something else. And, you know, so I wonder, if the architects refuses engagement on certain terms, then what does the architect do? The architect doesn’t stand still, like Bartleby looking out at the dead wall, like, but the architect has to then rethink who the architect is, and then get to work.

Miljački: (46:38) I mean, I totally, you know, I agree. So for me, I like the Bartelby quote because it sends us into many directions when we’re having these conversations. And they allow us to put forward different models. In the end, none of these are sort of . . . in the conversations, none of it is really black and white. They allow for a certain way of having to navigate, or they present certain models of behavior, that I think are important. But you know, when Žižek reads Bartelby, he proposes that what he’s doing is not engaging the terms of the system. And you know, because of the turn of the phrase, this is sort of what he does. He doesn’t say “I don’t want to do it,” he says, “I would prefer not to do it.” And that’s sort of relevant for Žižek. But for me, what I think you’re pointing to is the fact that, you know, even that story is based within the kind of world of a singular actor with respect to a system, and therefore might allow us to aestheticize and even celebrate a certain kind of resistance that actually is not productive. So that is definitely in the story, I think, as a possible way of reading it. But for me, I’m hoping that you know, the collection of stories we assemble through the I Would Prefer Not To will have different paths out of the kind of impasses that architects find themselves today.

Lewis: (48:24) I mean, I guess one . . I had, in part, listening to these, I had a number of questions. And I’m curious if, when you think back to the responses you got, are there particular ones that have stood out, that have lingered with you? And the way in which Bartleby’s, you know, “I would prefer not to” has clearly lingered with literature and our rereading of it and every decade or so?

Miljački: (48:54) Yeah, I mean, so there’s one particular type of response that, that I think I had to process longer, and I’m still probably processing it. But I was struck by something that Jing Liu said towards the end of the conversation, and then Sara Zewde led with it, and that will be the next the next piece so you will hear it. But it was about the need and desire to say no to commissions and invitations to represent, either to marketing ends of the clients or for the most superficial box-ticking, self-congratulatory pursuit of diversity. And I had not, I don’t know, I had not anticipated it, the force with which those landed for me, let’s say. But I’m sure there’ll be other things that also come out. You know, there are certain questions about climate, certain questions—not as many as your book might promote in the next round of conversations, but this one felt, for me, personal, in a way, both personal and relevant to the discipline.

But I do think that, you know, there’s a kind of . . . I tend to think of this project, and many other projects, as directed towards students. And my sense has been that the students I teach really . . . they feel the weight of both their own historicity, and the politics of their actions, in a way that wasn’t always the case in my time in academia in the U.S., and I think they crave models. And the kind of idea of non-engagement or complicated engagement or deliberations about the ways to engage are extremely important, right? Whether that means saying no to something or understanding that, you know, at a certain point in one’s career, that is a very difficult thing to say, or on the kind of stewarding of a practice. Or that, in fact, there may need to be an entirely different model of practice.

And so there is a question, Mario, in the chat about talking more about dismantling the discipline, which, you know, I got excited when you said that. Not that I want to dismantle it, but I think that some risks we take, we have to take regardless of where they end.

Gooden: (51:54) Yeah, I saw, I saw that when it popped up, if I could say more about dismantling the discipline. And, Paul, I think there was a really interesting article by a colleague of yours at Princeton in the classics department—it’ll come to me, and we’ll have to edit this back in—who talks about, you know, the need to dismantle the classics department at Princeton. And, I mean, I think if we, you know, if we look back at the history of architecture, you know, the history of architecture has been bound with the history of race, politics, and power, you know, from European colonization of the rest of the world up to the present time. And I think it’s important to, let’s say, unpack these pathologies, if you will, of architecture. And in fact, you know, if that leads to a dismantling, you know, then so be it.

Because architecture, you know, as a modern discipline, you know, comes into being in the sixteenth, seventeenth century, you know, parallel to European colonialism. And it’s constructed, is the construction of, a kind of European worldview, or I would say, a kind of white, male worldview. But civilizations have actually built, and I would say not only built, but also designed, for millennia. So before, you know, quote unquote architecture was invented, if you will, certainly as it’s presented in architectural history, you know, invented in Europe. So if we can actually step back, and then think about the ways in which I would say whiteness is inscribed in architecture, in terms of Vitruvius, the ten books of architecture and the way in which that subject gets inscribed in you know, thinking about the temple and theorizing architecture, to Le Corbusier’s modular man to, you know, in a number of different ways. And so I think the dismantling for me has to do with unlearning whiteness in architecture, dismantling whiteness in architecture. And also thinking about who that subject is: That it’s not a universal subject. And also, who is the architect? We assume that the architect is, you know, is also a kind of universal subject, which for the most part is able-bodied; you know, usually, usually male; has a certain kind of perspective. And our, you know, the discipline is founded upon those principles. So that’s why I think that we need to perhaps dismantle the discipline.

Lewis: (55:03) Yeah. And I wonder, there’s another part of that question which goes through the difference between dismantling the discipline and dismantling the profession. And I note that, Ana, you specifically bring the issue of commission and money into the description of I Prefer Not To—that, you know, that those things are tied together, right? So, you know, and I think it’s one thing to look at, you know, academic contexts; it’s another thing to go to the professional, you know, world: the structure of the role of the architect in commissions. And I’ve been kind of really kind of grappling mentally with this, you know: How does one restructure and rethink the profession, particularly in the context of academic discussions about rethinking the discipline? And how do those tie together? And is there, to your point, Mario, is there a way of not just of you, not doing anything, but if you actively pursue things, can you—is there an economic model for that, you know, students, you know, when they’re leaving, you know, how do you form collectives that you can survive? You know, how are there other ways of practicing architecture that are not benefited by the more expensive commission with the wealthier client, etc.?

Miljački: (56:33) I mean, you know, for me, both of these questions are things that I’m taking on and other places, so the idea of sort of author turning into always a co-author . . .

Lewis: A certain book that just came out.

Miljački: But I do think radical change is necessary on a few topics, right? And they relate to discipline and the profession. But as always, it’s not just singularly true of architecture. Architecture is part of and symptomatic of and enmeshed in the system that we operate in. And the system that will have us believe as, as Mark Fisher would say, that precisely the politically mutable cannot be changed. And so we accept . . . this is the kind of the notion about capitalist realism, we accept that, we are taught, that there is no way of changing this, this is a given.

And yet, you know, as someone who comes from something slightly different, where architecture was motivated differently, not by profit, but by some kind of common good, I have a, I have space, at least somewhere in my, maybe, heart, where I, you know, I believe we can do something otherwise. Now, at what level does that begin in the context of this place that we are all operating within? And I’m thinking of the U.S. at the moment, but, you know, I do think there are ways to reconnect the dots, perhaps, of practice such that different things fuel different things, right—that they’re somehow not operating within the logic of, commission, client, architect. Something a little bit different.

Gooden: (58:21) Yeah. I mean, I mean, to your question, Paul, I mean, it seems to me that it might be necessary. I’m not quite sure how we do this, but it might be necessary, then, in terms of the profession to somehow, you know, decouple the profession from capitalism. But of course, you know, capitalism is conflated with democracy. [laughs]

Miljački: (58:40) First we have to be decouple that.

Gooden: (58:43) Yeah, first have to decouple that. You know, and maybe then in order to, and then we have to think of new social structures. So we’re thinking about cooperatives or collaboratives, or, you know, now we’re talking about, you know, socialism or something, right—dirty word. But, you know, I, I’ve seen this also, I see this with, you know, with our, with our students and with the current generation: this real sort of questioning about the profession, about the role of the architect, and about how do we form new modes of practice? What are the new modes of practice? And it’s a question that’s coming up everywhere, you know, not just at our school, but yeah, MIT, Princeton, everywhere.

Lewis: (59:33) Yeah, and it’s the pragmatic kind of moment: Well, when there isn’t a radical change to the economic model you exist in, can you can you still exist, right? You know, Can you survive? You know, if, if the argument is dependent upon a more significant shift to the basis of our, from capitalism to socialism, what do you do in the in-between? That’s a hard one. So particularly if you don’t have money to begin with, right, so, and many architects don’t. So, you know—or you’re going to school, and you’re already in debt. So, so the system has already gotten you into a position of being disempowered. So anyways.

Miljački: (1:00:26) Maybe we can go back to something that’s within the system. A question for you, Paul, and now that you just collectively did this book about embedded carbon, how does that influence, or how do you think it will influence your thinking about what you do and how you do it? And yeah, that’s sort of?

Lewis: (1:00:51) Yeah, it’s been a pretty major shift in our practice that came as a result of just the reality of the alignment between embodied carbon and climate, right? So and it also . . . You know, in some way, we tend to be optimists. We tend to, like, say, “Okay, what can you do in this context?” And it did seem to be an opportunity to rethink the very materials that constitute the building in a very direct and creative way. And even the things that are overlooked relative to the building section. And I’m, like, very excited about insulation now, right. So things that are not—that don’t have a necessary consequence on the image of the building, but are fundamental to carbon kind of calculations associated with the project.

The difficulty—and this is just to point out a kind of an interesting paradox—is that we, you know, built a practice on not doing residential work, and this book is about biogenic house sections. And I think that where we felt we could have agency in elevating the discourse of plant-based building, smaller scale, non-toxic, was through drawings, right?—that making legible what others have done around the world in recent years. And in a strange way, houses are a site of experiment in ways that larger buildings can’t be. And so the book is focused on houses, because it’s a way to show built versions of building from hemp, bamboo, straw, etc., and to see these as actually optimistic, right—as a way forward.

Just as a parallel, we’ve done some interviews, RFP interviews, and in some of those interviews, one in particular, I made the argument that it was a kind of ethical and moral imperative that we engage carbon in the project, and that we . . . concrete and steel and petroleum-based insulations, we’re not going to have a place in the project that we would design. And it was precisely because of those comments—and I kind of I think I may have been a little bit preachy when I said them—they were the reason we didn’t get the project. So there’s a, you know, I would argue that there’s a, that among other reasons, there’s a necessary shift in the very material basis and building that has to happen, and it’s a potentially super interesting time, but it’s not without its challenges.

Miljački: (1:03:41) So how does labor connect to that?

Lewis: (1:03:43) Yeah, well, that’s that’s part of the argument. And part of the argument of the book is to not look at buildings just simply as being kind of the site for the final product, but to look at the varied materials and a kind of larger parameter. Where do they come from? What are the impacts on their harvesting, their production, their labor? Where did how do they go from, you know, raw good to building form? And then afterwards, where do they go at the end of the life, the full lifecycle assessment?

And, you know, again, I think what’s super interesting about bio-based materials is precisely that it has a positive or beneficial . . . The downside is that there’s a level of naivete and optimism that has to be in place in order for there to be any consequential effect. And that’s the difficulty. So, again, it’s almost like you have to be naively optimistic to believe that there will be consequential impacts on the construction industry when there’s not even code in most states to allow straw-bale construction, right? So anyways, I that’s, that’s some of the struggles.

Miljački: (1:04:56) What do you think about naive optimism, Mario?

Gooden: (1:05:05) I think architects are full of naive optimism, right? I mean, the moment we put a pen down and make a line, there’s just like, “Oh, yeah, we can build this,” right? So, and I think that’s a bit of that’s necessary. I mean, that’s how, that’s how radical change happens, right? Otherwise we would never try anything. Because we, you know, we would always be thinking about, what’s the resistance that we’re going to face? How do laws or codes have to change in order for us to be able to do this? So the naive optimism allows us to, I think, to be inventive, right? That’s the only way to be inventive. And perhaps, without being preachy, you know, so much architecture is no longer inventive, right? You know, invention has left architecture. So maybe we need more naive optimism.

Miljački: (1:06:04) I have a different kind of optimism to offer from my own piece of biography. As you know, I come from Yugoslavia, a country that fell apart, and in which at least some members of my generation live with a profound understanding that things can always get worse. And so, when that is clear—and there are many alarming signs about where the planet is headed and the kinds of violence produced by business as usual on that scale—the only choice is to keep trying to change things. And if we don’t somehow at least simulate the belief that change is possible, it won’t be. So it’s a slightly different kind of optimism. Maybe as Žižek can proposition, again, to act today in such a way that it can become worthy history for the future you want to imagine.

So we can add more to that. Maybe before—so we’re almost to the point where we can talk about a few things that I think are here in the chat, if we’d like. But maybe I would like, maybe it would be useful for you both to say something about what you think the League’s role is in some of these big conversations.

Lewis: (1:07:47) I can go first on that, because I’ll be, you know, stepping down at the end of my presidency in a week, week and a half. And I think, you know, I believe in institutions. And the thing that for me, the League is able to do is to be nimble relative to institutional history, within a certain limit. And I compare it to academic context and the professional context. So, you know, a university and they, you know, the professional institutions of architecture. The League is able to ask questions, to kind of produce new programs, think about different ways to engage, frame discourse. I think that’s one of the reasons why the League was so excited by the podcast you put forward, is that it was it was a new model of thinking about how one even thinks about history through what doesn’t get transcribed into that history, right? And overlapped with the very questions that we’re facing. The academic context, students were raising, recent graduates were raising, about what is the role of architecture in the converging crises we’re facing? And can we realistically build our way out of it, or is that actually contributing even more to the problem? So in that sense, you know, the League is, and I’m very optimistic—I don’t think I would argue not maybe not, not naively optimistic, but critically, and with full-informed knowledge that the League has capacity to really raise discourse. And I’ve been, it’s been a privilege to be part of it for the last four years as in the role of the president, so I’m super excited by the next four years.

Miljački: (1:09:56) Yeah, Mario will tell us about them.

Gooden: (1:10:00) Thanks, Paul. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, Paul’s first sentence there about the the nimbleness of the League. And I think we saw that over the last two years, you know, when the world changed in the spring of 2020, then we had the murder of George Floyd. The League I won’t say pivoted, but the League wasn’t afraid to let say, take up these questions. And that these questions become a part of its programming. And to become a kind of place where these discussions could happen, even if they were happening, you know, they were on Zoom, you know, the League was, was becoming this kind of platform.

And I think that going forward, you know, that is certainly still the possibility for the League to be a platform for those questions, but also to be a platform to engage other organizations in those questions, so not just amongst ourselves and the membership of the League, but to know, if you will, form collaborations with other organizations—particularly . . . I don’t want to use the phrase startups, but you know, the number of organizations that have been started by recent graduates, started by others, you know, in the wake of 2020.

Miljački: (1:11:31) What about the established organizations like NCARB? There’s a question in here,  sorry, that you may not want to go there. But there’s something about sort of how new models of the architects might be legitimized, and how do we engage or think about institutions like NCARB and NAAB?

Gooden: (1:11:56) I mean, I think, you know, NCARB and NAAB, particularly NCARB . . . Well, no, actually, particularly NAAB, I would say: That’s really where the academy has to step up. That’s really where the academy and discipline have to step up. You know, why are we teaching professional practice the same way we’ve taught it for the last 30 years, answering the same points that the, you know that the NAAB visitors want to see—you know, “Oh, did you do you teach this? Do you teach that? Do you teach this? Do you, teach contracts like this? Do you teach that like that?” What have you. And I think that’s where we in academia have to push back, perhaps, against the ways in which schools are accredited, or at least how they are accredited in terms of the kinds of questions or the criteria for accreditation. Because while there have been some adjustments that NAAB has made, I think, you know, if we’re rethinking the discipline, we also have to rethink how we we do things like accreditation. Or, what are the criteria, what does it mean to be accredited, and what’s the criteria for accreditation?

Miljački: (1:13:19) Well, I agree about academia, and maybe not the League. But I do wonder if there’s a way to talk about what are the relevant contemporary expertise of an architect, given both the kind of notion of expanded practice that you bring to the table, Mario, and also sort of depth of material and labor understanding that that you bring to the table, Paul? It feels like there is a body of knowledge and expertise that we’re trying to already in some way transmit to the student bodies in various places, and that they are transmitting to us, right, that are not codified in some way, neither discursively yet nor in academic contexts. I’m not sure I want code yet. I mean, I know there’s someone here who wanted it in Q+A, maybe a friend of mine.

Lewis: (1:14:23) I mean, so, so, much of the relationship between the profession and academia is circular, right? So you have contracts; therefore, you have to learn the contracts to be able to then get approved and be able to have . . . You know, you need to know the . . . You know, the professional practice is this, therefore, you have to learn it to be able to . . . I mean—it becomes a kind of production, right? It’s just looping. So, and in some ways, dislodging that or different finding different models is critical, right? And viable models—I mean, economically viable models that can exist. But I do find as that kind of parallel, that kind of story of, you know, buildings being built with architects who stamp it and have never seen it. I mean, so you get the kind of flip side where, you know, the agency of the architect or is almost nonexistent based on what it’s supposed to be, right? So, and I, obviously it’s an outlier within the within the discipline, but it starts to raise questions about what is the expertise, and is that expertise being wielded in a way that is actually the way it’s supposed to be wielded? Right? Or are there unintended consequences?

I mean, I come back to one of the kind of fundamental difficulties of architectural history . . . and, you know, the Western, white architectural history is also an architectural history that doesn’t talk about money, right? And most of the history of architecture is about a lot of money that goes unstated. Budgets are not put into history books—rare, very rarely. And so that kind of question. And I, and I don’t think money plays a role in academia very much, at all. And yet, it’s so kind of key to so many other decisions that get made and power and relationships that its absence in academia has always bothered me. So.

Miljački: (1:16:31) Let me pose our, maybe this is our last question, Rosalie’s question to us, which is, from which direction will change come? Should architects be thinking more from the direction of what society, the earth, needs? And then what architects can provide that is useful, rather than thinking about the discipline first?

Lewis: (1:16:58) Well, I can answer that more specifically, based on what, what decisions do we do? Which is, I tend to think in terms of, what effect can we have? Is there something that we can do? Is there a way that we can, you know, leverage our knowledge or abilities that could have a consequence? And so that’s why we spent two years and a lot of money that we won’t see writing a book to make legible possible ways of thinking about buildings that are within the domain of what architects do, which is specify materials, right? So I’m very much a pragmatist within the realm of what is already there. But how do you how do you shift it? So that’s, that’s just because I want to know—I don’t want to stare at brick walls. So.

Miljački: (1:17:49) What do you think, Mario?

Gooden: (1:17:51) Well, I, in a way, I do think that they go hand in hand. I mean, being a, someone who practices and teaches, so it’s hard for me to kind of separate and say, “The practice does this and academia does this.” But I do think that maybe it has to happen. Yes, there is an urgency, and you know, things take time. Well, architecture takes time. Maybe it takes more time for things to move from academia into the profession. But I guess I’m skeptical about the profession. I mean, yes, you know, the story that we saw in the Times might be an outlier in terms of someone stamping drawings for a 60-story building and never once seeing the building and never even really did the design. But to this question of money, I mean, the problem is money, right? I mean, that’s, that’s capitalism run amok. And that is, that’s the architect having given away their agency. So I guess I’m a little bit leery of saying that it has to come from the profession first, because I’m not sure if I trust the profession. Wow, there’s probably going to be a lot of response to that. But I’m not sure if I trust the profession. I perhaps trust our students more than I trust the architects out there.

Genevro: (1:19:32) Can I sorry, I guess, uncomfortable being like behind there and not saying it. I didn’t mean at all the profession versus the discipline. I meant society, you know, human society and the natural world and thinking not in the direction of what do we have to provide, but what is needed? I mean, it’s changing, I guess, the subject of the question, or the subjectivity of the question. But yeah, I . . . was not at all a question about the profession, just to be clear.

Miljački: (1:20:19) I mean, for me, the thing about the kind of notion about changing the discipline does bring us back to maybe the academic context, or all contexts in which forms of, you know, learning are happening, however organized or not. And, and there, I do think, you know, trusting the next generation by far the most important thing. So the kinds of things we bring into those conversations that are about values that might reorient and rewire the discipline, I think will affect the profession at some point. But yes, what we have to bring as architects, also really important, right? I mean, I don’t know.

Let’s have one more sentence, and then we can close the panel. Who’s going to provide it?

Well, while we’re in this pause, thanks, Rafi, for putting Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s name for us, because like, I knew it would come to me later, and it did—who was the professor at Princeton who wrote a really eloquent essay in the Times maybe a year, maybe even two years ago, about dismantling the discipline, particularly the classics department at Princeton.

Lewis: (1:21:58) I mean, I guess I would . . . I think we . . . One of the things I find really interesting about the “I prefer not to” question is it has to be put in conjunction with “I prefer to,” right? So you’re always doing both of those simultaneously; you just often don’t talk about the former one, or it disappears, or somehow it’s not, it’s not what you can go out and kind of enthusiastically embrace. But to be able to do both of those together and have one inform the other, I think that’s what makes this collection of podcasts so fascinating. So thank you.

Miljački: (1:22:36) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Rosalie, do you want to close up?

Genevro: (1:22:43) Yeah, just to say what an extremely stimulating and rich conversation. We will make the video available soon. And also, I think we’ll do a transcript, because I think this is definitely a conversation that maybe we’ll want to think about multiple times. So thank you all very, very much.