(no audio) (no audio) (no audio) (no audio) - Architecture is about the built environment, but today's guest helps lead a firm whose mission is to use architecture to help move communities forward, to promote social justice and healing and expand the possibilities of tomorrow for cities and their residents.

He's Justin Brown this week on "Story in The Public Square."

(uplifting music) (uplifting music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salves Pell Center.

- Joining us today, all the way from the great state of New York, is Justin Brown, an architect who is co-founder and principal at MASS Design Group.

Justin, thank you so much for being with us.

So, you know, I'm thrilled to have you here today, because you are the first architect that we've ever had on "Story in the Public Square."

And I, you know, as we talked about this a little bit, but what is the role of storytelling in architecture?

- Well, thank you so much.

That might be one of the greatest compliments actually to receive as an architect is when architecture is seen as relevant outside of itself.

Intuitively, architecture has always been one of our greatest vehicles for collective storytelling.

It's made up of materials from the Earth that we all inhabit, it reflects collective values where we want to spend our time and our money and our precious resources.

So when you look at buildings in different places around the world, they are embedded in the fingerprints of the people that designed them, that built them but also that inhabit them.

And those stories are complex and deep, and of different meaning to different people who play different roles in that very long process.

You know, architecture is inherently a social act and a story runs deep in every every building.

So I'm looking forward to getting into that a little bit more.

- Well, we were chatting a little bit in the green room before we came out, and I said, you know, the only architect that I could think of in my literary journey was Howard Rourke in "Fountainhead."

(Justin laughs) And you were quick to say, "That's not architecture."

(group laughs) Why isn't that architecture?

- Well, I think there's a bit of a myth that architecture is the work of a sole genius, you know, that has a vision that is plopped down in various parts of the world.

And at MASS Design Group we really actively try to dispel that myth.

Architecture is the work of a group, of a collective; the design team, the engineering team, the build team, and most importantly the people that occupy the buildings are what define and make buildings important and loved and cared for.

And so I think that everybody is contributing to this process that ultimately the act of the architect is more of that of an author or an editor that's pulling together threads, inputs, from all these competing perspectives.

And in many ways, I think that's more rich, that's more interesting, and that really moves architecture to a scale of impact beyond the object.

It's not about the thing, it's about the process by which that thing came into being that matters so deeply.

- So Justin, we're gonna get into MASS Design in a moment here, and then we're gonna get very specifically into the work that you do out of the Poughkeepsie office.

But I'm curious, when did you, and how did you become interested in architecture?

You know, you're born, you go to school, and then you can go in a million different directions.

What was the influence for you?

- You read "The Fountainhead?"

(group laughs) - Well, you know, it's funny, but there is an element of truth to it.

You know, I think that architecture as an art form was really appealing as a young art student who was interested in many other disciplines as well, you know, art art history and physics.

And, you know, the idea there was a little bit of narcissism embedded in, you know, I'm gonna design something and put it in the public realm and people are going to, you know, their lives are going to exist around this thing.

But I think what actually made it meaningful as a career, as something that I wanted to pursue, was when I was able to connect that sort of individualistic, narcissistic view of the discipline with under a deeper understanding of the social impact that it can have.

And, you know, that really happened for me after hurricane in... - Katrina?

- Yes.

(laughs) Excuse me, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, I was just finishing my first year as a graduate school student.

- And that was 2015, if I recall correctly, - 2004, 2005, Katrina.

- Was it that long ago?

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Katrina was?

Oh, okay.

- So (laughs) time is hard to track these days.

(laughs) - I know that we've- - Yeah, before the pandemic.

Yeah.

(group laughing) - But ultimately it was there that, you know, I was able to work directly with homeowners who had experienced sort of detrimental impact of flooding, and didn't have access to design services to figure out how to move forward with their lives.

And so being able to bring that sort of design thinking to that context is ultimately where the magic happened for me.

And that was also about the same time MASS Design Group was founded.

You know, as students at Harvard, we really were hungry to connect architecture from this realm of art and self-expression and self-definition into one that is inseparable from the people that it ultimately serves.

- So the work that MASS Design does is both domestic and international.

Maybe you can start with some of the international work earlier on that MASS Design did, and I'm thinking of a hospital in Africa.

- Absolutely.

You know, the firm really started around a project, the Butaro Hospital in Rwanda was a project that emerged somewhat organically.

As students, we attended a lecture at the medical school by the late great Paul Farmer.

- Oh yeah.

- Who was talking about the importance of providing healthcare as the foundation to human justice.

Without access to healthcare, we can't really be addressing any other social challenges.

And so he was actively looking to bring doctors to parts of the world where there were no doctors.

Butaro, Rwanda, is a very rural part of the country on the northern side of the country that he was designing a hospital, and we asked him who his architect was, and you know he said, "Oh, I'm not working with an architect."

(laughs) And it was amazing to us, you know, as naive, idealistic graduate students, you know, that architecture would be irrelevant in this context.

You know, haven't you thought about patient experience?

Haven't you thought about the building's orientation to the sun to maximize passive daylighting and ventilation?

And, you know, he said, " Yes, but most importantly we need to get doctors on the ground."

And, you know, we just said, "Can we design this for you?"

And he said, "Sure, if you wanna do it for free."

(laughs) (group laughs) So that was the beginning of the nonprofit model of architecture, which we still follow today.

Yeah.

- That's remarkable.

So what are some of the innovations that you brought to that hospital in Butaro?

- Well, I would say that, you know, they come in different scales.

From a planning perspective, one of the goals of the hospital was to reduce the transmission of airborne illness in the hospital.

So the typology of the single, of the corridor with rooms on either side of it, which is probably comes to your mind's eye when you think of a hospital in the United States.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, of course.

- Given that we were in Rwanda, which has some of the most extraordinary weather year-round, move that corridor to the outside of the building, and that corridor became a courtyard, which was a place for, really, that could be inhabited, that was not just about doctors and having an efficient relationship to their patients, but that used that as an opportunity to expand the experience of people visiting the hospital, and at the same time, diminishing the chances of airborne transmission in those closed corridors, which, historically, were the places where you might come to the hospital with one illness and leave with another.

So really basic decisions like that.

Redundant natural ventilation systems, so that when mechanical systems inevitably fail, we have the building is oriented in such a way that it can still breathe without assistance.

- How much of what you do now, when you're working with clients here in the States, is educating people about what architecture can actually do?

Because I would imagine that you walk into a meeting if you're talking about a school or a hospital or some sort of community space, and people have sort of a very, we imagine what we have seen before, rather than what's possible, how much of what you do is educating those audiences about potential.

- Sure.

I think that, you know, it certainly depends on the context, but these things are not rocket science, right?

Like, if we think about, you know, another example from the hospital project was, you know, if we ask the question that's focused on the process and not the object, if we say, "How are we gonna excavate for this building?"

And, you know, we could rent a bulldozer from a couple hundred miles away, or we could create jobs in Butaro and give people a sense of ownership over the hospital that is in their community I think the answer becomes really clear really quickly.

So it's sort of by shifting the goal from the thing to the process, we inherently sort of uncover opportunities for architecture to have outsized impact.

Of course, context is everything.

So when we talk about the work in the United States, where I'm focused now, we'll have a very different kind of answer to that question.

But that is a really tangible way of explaining it.

- [Jim] Hmm.

- So let's get into the United States now.

Tell us about your office.

It's Poughkeepsie Hudson Valley.

What is the mission of your work there?

- The mission of our work in Poughkeepsie is really straightforward.

It's to take liabilities in the built environment, old buildings and infrastructure that have lost its intended purpose, and transform them into community-owned assets.

We hope that by, you know working in place with the Poughkeepsie community that we can begin to heal the local environment, and also the community that has experienced over 50 years of disinvestment, really, since the 1960s.

- You talk talking about economic disinvestment, and that's true of many many other regions and areas of the country.

- When you say heal the environment, what exactly do you mean?

- Well, the story of the post-industrial American city is one that we're familiar with, you know Detroit and Pittsburgh, Rust Belt.

- Yeah.

- That story exists in the smaller midsize American city as well, and that's really where our work is focused, between 30 and 150,000 people to just kind of bookend that.

And the manufacturing economy, the making of, you know, goods for food, shelter and clothing, essentially, were made in these cities.

- Mm-hmm.

- And in many cases had some, not all, but in many cases damaged the immediate environment with certain chemicals and the like, so when we take an old building that has some in industrial history, oftentimes there's a cleanup process associated with that.

But there's also a number of environmental benefits to working with old buildings.

There's a lot of conversation about designing new buildings that use a low amount of energy.

By working with old buildings, you stand a chance to even have, for buildings to be generative, to be giving energy, rather than absorbing energy, and the reason for that is because the majority of a building's carbon emissions is from its primary structure.

The concrete and the steel that's used to erect the building is an incredibly energy intensive, and emits the majority of greenhouse gases in the creation of a building.

So if you're working with an old building where that embodied carbon cost has already been paid off, and you're electrifying it so that, you know, that building is heated and cooled using solar panels on the roof, you are creating a scenario where by breathing new life into these buildings you can actually create architecture that is not an environmental sink but rather a contributor.

- That's remarkable.

So one of the projects that you've worked on in Poughkeepsie is Waterfront Renewal.

Tell us a little bit about that project.

- Sure, so Poughkeepsie, like many middle-size post-industrial American cities, was founded on a waterway, a creek.

It's called the Fall Kill in Poughkeepsie.

Although our research has identified, you know many brothers and sisters that were also founded on similar creeks, which drove the manufacturing in these cities of those goods you know, food, shelter, and clothing components.

So this waterway, when manufacturing moved overseas when it became cheaper to import that stuff from halfway around the world, rather than make it here at home, that waterway lost its economic function, and was channelized by the Army Corps of Engineers and paved over, largely forgotten about, you know, is a dumping ground of sorts in certain parts, a site of pollution.

But what's extraordinary about it is its potential to become an asset again.

Urban renewal, I mentioned, was this planning initiative in the '50s and '60s.

Huge oversimplification coming here.

(group laughs) You know, that was generally about introducing the car to the American urban landscape and of course connecting between cities with the car.

And we know the stories of urban renewal in cities like New York, Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs plowing through the West Village, Seventh Avenue, '95, dividing Philadelphia from the Delaware waterfront.

In Poughkeepsie, what that looked like was two highways running parallel to Main Street, one that's eastbound and one that's westbound, and it really created, it isolated the economic center of the city from the residential components of the city.

One thing that's fascinating about the Fall Kill is that it bridges through that divide, and so if we were to restore it as a public asset, as a connector, it's a thread that bridges across these physical barriers that have really choked Poughkeepsie's potential to become the city it was intended to be.

Urban renewal envisioned it as a city of 100,000-plus.

In 1950 the city's population was about 40,000 people.

So the population, instead of increasing, it decreased.

So 1980 was about 28,000 people.

So we think there's at least 70,000 people that could be absorbed by the infrastructure that's built in Poughkeepsie today, and the Fall Kill is one of those ways to reconnect the city in such a way that it can function as a cohesive whole.

- So tell us about the cistern.

You sent some images before, and we're gonna use some of those in the show, and I was fascinated.

What was it?

What has it become, or what is it going to become?

- Mm, so the cistern is another piece of infrastructure that has extended past its intended lifespan.

Historically, it was built in the early 1900s.

It was the water reservoir for the city of Poughkeepsie.

It's an underground water tank at the top of College Hill Park, which is the highest elevation in the city of Poughkeepsie.

- It actually made of concrete?

- It is.

It's made of concrete, unreinforced concrete, interestingly.

- Oh, that's a challenge, I would think.

(laughs) - Yeah, it doesn't...

But because it was designed to hold water, corrosion of steel and concrete would become problematic.

So the structure, it's a compressive structure, so it has vaulted ceilings and floors, much like a stone structure would have.

And that lends some really extraordinary acoustic properties to the space, so when you walk into the cistern, if you clap your hands you'll hear it reverberate for seven seconds.

- Wow.

- I want to go.

(group laughs) - You've gotta come.

We invited two metropolitan opera singers into the space.

- Really?

- a father and daughter who, you know, if you close your eyes, you could've sworn there were 100 people in there singing.

- Wow.

- And when I spoke to the young woman afterwards, she really said how unusual it was to be able to sing in chords.

So, you know, when you hit a guitar, you hear four or five notes at the same time, same on a piano.

A voice is restricted to one note at a time.

But in the cistern, she could sing chords.

You send one note out and then another and another, and another.

- Oh, that's wild.

- And it really captures, I think, the potential of the space to find a second use, to find a second purpose.

You bring any... And there are a couple others in the US.

Most of them have been destroyed, but Houston has a cistern that they've converted and used for light installations and sound installations.

And if we were able to do that in Poughkeepsie, this could be a sort of economic catalyst to connect that park to the north side of the city, which has historically seen some of the most disinvestment since urban renewal.

- So a couple times in our conversation here, you've talked about the history of the city that you're working in and sort of researching what it was.

How much time on a project do you spend trying to unearth that existing history before you get into the creative or the community engagement part with partners?

- Hmm, yeah.

You know, one thing that we learned working in our Memorial Portfolio was that you have to understand how you got here in order to understand how to move forward.

There is, it's very very difficult to come up with a solution to a problem if you don't know how it emerged.

And so, you know, urban renewal, in the urban sense is a great reminder about how, you know, architecture is never neutral.

It might have these great intentions you know, to introduce the car, but there are all these negative residual blind spots that exist in any design decision.

And so we really feel that researching the past is so important to unearth those blind spots, those things that we might not be seeing.

You know, solar panels are great everywhere.

- Right.

- But like, and I'm not saying they're not.

(laughs) - Right.

- But they're...

I think it forces a criticality that is really essential to bring to the design process where... And so to answer your question succinctly, and this is another reason to embed in place, we become really familiar with the context and the sort of, that context informs our work in a site that might be five minutes away from another site.

So, you know, there's local history, like the history of a building, this building used to be used for X, but then there's you know, the social history and the urban history, and then of course the, you know, the national history, which all have to be considerations in the solution.

- And I imagine, too, that it also builds confidence in your community partners that you know you're of them.

- Yeah, I mean, I think that we're trying to earn that respect, (laughs) or that welcome.

We've been working in Poughkeepsie really since 2011 but moved physically to Main Street with an office on in 2017.

- Okay.

- And that trust has really been transformative, moving to the place.

In fact, I've moved there with my wife and my young son and have decided that cities like Poughkeepsie do hold America's future, and the trust of the community in which we work is essential to unlocking the opportunities within each project.

We're learning from them rather than bringing answers.

- So the Trolley Barn is a really good example of community involvement, getting the community there first, what do they want in working with them?

Tell us about the Trolley Barn.

It's a project well underway.

- Sure.

The Trolley Barn was one of the earliest projects.

It spans, you know, between Main Street and the Fall Kill and the highway that came by from urban renewal.

And so intuitively as architects, urban designers, we felt this was a really catalytic site, potentially, to connect between those wounds.

But what we needed was the community's input as well on what that should be.

The Trolley Barn historically was where, you know, horse-drawn carriages were pulled off Main Street to be repaired at night and the horses fed.

- [Jim] Oh, it went back that far, huh?

- Yeah, and then, you know, in the '70s, it was a department store, you know, sold dresses.

And when we came across it, it was illegally fit out as a boxing gym.

So, you know, (hosts laugh) the community is complex.

You know, and hearing from all of the necessary voices is an active process.

It doesn't happen overnight.

It is a result of being immersed, embedded, being informally engaged in the lives of the people that live there.

We did at the time, however, hold a number of meetings in the Trolley Barn with the Arts Community in Poughkeepsie which it's immediately adjacent to an artists' studio, and so it seemed like a natural place to begin, but that really was just a starting point.

Today, the building is being developed by an extraordinary group called the Artifact.

They work with youth in the city of Poughkeepsie to show how art, and specifically the curation of art, can become a viable career path.

And so the Trolley Barn, you know, Phase 1 is open.

It's a gallery space.

Phase 2 will be more maker spaces, you know that are purpose-built for the production of art and photography and film and the like, and Phase 3, connection to the Fall Kill.

(laughs) - So we've got literally about 30 seconds left.

How does- - Oh wow, time flies.

- It does.

(laughs) - It does.

- All of these projects together in a place like Poughkeepsie, what do they mean in their collective for that community?

Literally 30 seconds.

- I think that embedded in this work is hope.

I think everyone senses the great potential of Poughkeepsie.

We talked about its environmental potential, to absorb climate migrants, to absorb shifting patterns of work, remote work, changing market forces, but at the same time, if we work with the community that has endured these decades of disinvestment, to hear their vision for what the future of that place should be, we will be able to set a foundation that is community-owned for when those external forces inevitably arrive.

- Justin, this is really remarkable and important work.

We thank you so much for sharing it with us.

He's Justin Brown with the MASS Design Group.

(gentle music) That's all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org.

He's Wayne, I'm Jim, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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