The first crisis I ever had to confront as a young adult was when I graduated from Pratt Institute School of Architecture at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. I was working for a corporate architecture and interior design firm in their healthcare division on an NYU Medical Center project on 3rd Avenue. One day I was assigned the task of surveying a space that was going to be redesigned into their first AIDS patient care unit. My shock when I entered the space became evident as I discovered a makeshift space full of beds filled with dying gay men. No gloves or mask were given to me, and I didn’t even ask for them. No patient had any privacy. I had to measure around them, over them and under their beds. It was scary and sad. One man I spoke to was holding a small teddy bear. There were no flowers or balloons, no get well soon cards, just me with my stainless-steel Stanley measuring tape. I can only imagine what they thought I was doing with it. Years later, working on a project in Orlando, Florida, I ran into Arthur Ashe in the men’s room at Disney World, of all places. We briefly spoke and I wished him good luck. He died a few months later, as did several friends and colleagues in the design world during that time.
I heard on the news recently that Hope is not a policy. But hope is all I have at the moment. Work has come to a halt as our economy tanks. For me it hits home in two areas this time. One is my own architectural office, where my clients have put their renovation projects on hold. Buildings are not allowing the construction teams to enter to finish up the work and new clients have left NYC for an indefinite period. Our vegan clients P.S. Kitchen on West 48th Street has closed. We were doing some additional work there after completing the project over about two years ago. On the bright side—and there is always a bright side—Harlem School of the Arts, where I’m the Architect of Record, continues construction despite closing its programs for kids discovering their talent for the fine or performing arts. Rest assured, we the design team and construction crew are exercising our social distancing as humanly possible. I’ll do my site visits periodically, by all meetings are held remotely.
The other is FIT, where I’ve had to cancel two collaborative studio projects I was coordinating: Kids from the City Knoll Middle School MS 933 are unable to work with students to design a pop-up shop and Hotel Pennsylvania is unable to continue to allow my students access to the hotel as we propose a redesign of their lobby, public spaces and hotel suites. We will continue with these projects, but the interaction with the end users (City Knoll kids and hotel staff), will hinder the user experience principles I’m trying to teach my students, which now has to be done through distance learning.
So to, do we continue our distance learning training. Some instructors are finding it extremely challenging and daunting. I’m slowly getting up to speed each day. The hard part for me is that different situations call for different platforms. One person prefers Zoom, while others use BlackBoard Collaborate Ultra. Some use Google Hangout, Skype or WhatsApp, while my professional clients have their own industry related platforms. I can’t keep up. Even my wife in France wants to switch from FaceTime to Google Duo. “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.”
But what’s a young (gulp!) Jedi Warrior to do? There are too many options. In Design Thinking you research and lay out all the options, discuss the pros and cons of each, narrow the choices down to the top four or five, and then begin prototyping solutions for those choices. This is impossible to do if you’re fighting on multiple fronts platforms. My main objectives are to teach my students in the best way I can, until the end of the semester; retain as many clients as I can, while the economic outlook isn’t getting any better; and keep my wife happy—all challenging in the best of times.
I’ll keep you posted and you keep believing in hope.
