Transcription of Designing Space #196
Speaker 1: You’re listening to Love Main Radio with Dr. Lisa Belisle, recorded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a physician trained in family and preventative medicine, acupuncture, and public health. She offers medical care and acupuncture at Brunswick Family Medicine. Read more about her integrative approach to wellness in Maine Magazine. Love Maine Radio is available for download free on iTunes. See the Love Maine Radio Facebook page or www.lovemaineradio.com for details. Now here are a few highlights from this week’s program.
Roger: Space impacts our lives. When we design our own or we have someone come in and design for us, whatever you do, it’s going to have an impact. It could be positive, could be negative. Generally, you look at avoid the negative, accentuate the positive. That’s what the Space Therapy does.
Eric: The stuff that we learn we in turn put back into the world, which has an effect on the world. Others learn from that so there’s this wonderful cycle in both the education but in the practice of architecture, is that what we do actually affects that which we do.
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Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio show number 196, airing for the first time on Sunday June 14th, 2015. Today’s theme is designing space. We may be more impacted by the spaces we inhabit than we realize. Everything from our access to light to how we experience acoustics has the potential to contribute to our well-being and our relationships. Today we speak with architecture professors Roger Richmond and Eric Stark about the work they are doing in this area and how they are educating the next generation of Maine architects about these important concepts. Thank you for joining us.
On Love Maine Radio we’ve had the good fortune to speak with architects before about the importance of things like light and space. Today we have with us an individual who really has an interest in space. Roger Richmond is a professor in the University of Maine Augusta’s architecture program, a program he founded in the 1980s. He is a design consultant and partner at Space Therapy, a design and behavior post-occupancy analysis firm. Currently Mr. Richmond, or Professor Richmond, lives in South Freeport, Maine with his wife Beverly and Nora the cat. He was the first architect hired to work for NASA. Thanks so much for being with us.
Roger: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. This is a treat.
Lisa: When we say NASA, we mean NASA.
Roger: We mean NASA, National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Lisa: That’s a really big deal.
Roger: At the time it really was a big deal because the era was we were going to the moon. We were ready to go to the moon. Kennedy had established the directive that by the end of the decade, the 60s, that we would have someone on the moon. I was actually in NASA working at the time when Apollo 11 was on its way to the moon. I was vicariously participating in all of that excitement.
Lisa: Tell us what NASA might get out of a relationship with an architect. What is it that an architect brings to the table when it comes to space travel?
Roger: What I had proposed, in the University of Florida where I graduated with my master’s degree I had to do a thesis project. The thesis project, what I wanted to do was the whole country was so excited and agog about space travel. This was a very, very exciting time. I want to do something that was involved with space, something off the earth. I got to thinking about wouldn’t it be amazing if something were to happen like a moon port or something like that that was based on architectural principles even more than engineered principles. The issue of course was engineering comes first because that’s survival, and this is a very, very hostile environment. what I decided to do was I was going to do and architecturally conceived moon port. The only way to get information about this was to go to NASA, so I made a proposal to go to NASA and talk with them, get information for my master’s thesis.
What I did not know was that they were very intrigued by this whole idea of an architect asking about how to design environments for space. After I worked on my master’s thesis they invited me to come there and have a job and be the the only … there were 5,500 engineers and one architect. That was I. I was involved with discovering and writing a book for them. That was one of the requirements of my job there, of writing a book for them about the human experience in a sealed environment off of earth. That started a whole lifetime of study for me on what I would call hostile environments.
Lisa: You discuss the change that occurred during the Industrial Revolution and I guess the introduction of automobiles and how it really impacted the way that we designed towns and cities, and how humans have taken a backseat so to speak. Tell me about that.
Roger: You’re tapping into an issue in architectural design that I call scale. Scale is our human connection. We seek clues and cues in the environment through which we can relate. By then we can locate ourselves more accurately in the environment. Try to imagine why does everyone love to go to Europe. Because Europe was a place that was really designed before the automobile was invented. We got there and we walk around and we have this feeling of how warm the place is and how charming. We put these wonderful qualifiers on it: charming, quaint, this and that. We just walk around. We just love to walk around the cities.
We come to the United States, and the United States is a fairly young country, so it really is more automobile oriented. We design for the car more than we design for the people maybe that will use the environments that we use. Here’s the classic example. Take a look outside. Where does all the snow on the road go? It goes on the sidewalks. What takes precedent? What I try to do when I’m teaching architecture and teaching aspects of scale is to say the car is very, very important. We cannot exist without it. However, don’t let its needs intrude onto the human needs of what makes for a related environment. Done relate the environment to the car, relate it to the person. The car serves the person, not the other way around. Although, I think we lean sometimes to the direction that we serve the car.
One of the interesting things, I find language is very powerful. We will call a room, a volume where we dine, we’ll call that a dining area. Don’t we do that? This is the dining area, this is the living area. Then we paint two strips of color on completely flat pavement and we call that a parking space. Now space is a higher form than area because it’s third dimension. We’re giving more status to the car than we’re giving to ourselves just by our language. The reality is it’s a dining space and a parking area. We have to reverse some of our thoughts processes.
Lisa: When I think about space I think about this vast almost nothingness, but space is actually just as powerful as the things within space. As you’re describing in the work that you’ve written, you describe both sides of it: the thing, the table, the chair, the person that inhabits a place. Then also, the air, the atmosphere around that person, the table, the chair. It’s an interesting backwards way of looking at it.
Roger: We’re a very thing oriented species. Even from childhood the first thing we do is we grab a block. We are very object dominant in terms of our processing, our thought processing, our living and everything. We look at the car coming down the road that’s about to hit us and we don’t think about diminishing space between the car and us. we think about the car is going to hit us. In that space, yes, there is the objects, the table and the chair and the these and that, but there are also these aspects of the environment that have an ambiance, like the level of, say, acoustic echo in the space.
Now if we want to have a space, let’s say, that’s intimate, and we have a lot of hard surfaces that have a lot of reflecting sound to it, if we have a lot of those, then the sound in the space becomes more echoey. There are all these scientific studies, I can’t quite quote one right now, that the higher the reverberation time, the less intimacy is experienced. If you want an intimate experience then it’s not just the furniture. You use the furniture maybe to help quiet down the sound, you use a curtain, you use a plant. You use these things to make the acoustics calmer and more quiet. Therefore, it would support maybe the true nature of the space, which might be intimacy.
Lisa: You were the national competition design winner of Maine’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I believe in that space, in negative space … I’ll call it negative but not in a bad way …
Roger: Yeah, I understand.
Lisa: … played a big roll.
Roger: Any part of a design process is research, and research, research, research. That’s one of the keys. I spoke to lots of veterans. One of the things that was a thread that was going through all of their reports to me about their experience was that when they returned to the United States, they felt they were here, people said they were here, but they weren’t really here. They weren’t being acknowledged. This thought kept playing in my head: here, not here; here, but not here.
I thought what’s a way to express that idea. If I make a statue, it’s here and it’s here. How can I make a statue that’s here and not here? What I came up with was the idea of a cutout of these three soldiers, two of them supporting a wounded third comrade. It was just a cutout, so that they’re there in that sense, but they’re not there because there’s just a void where they would be. It was designed so the sunlight would come through this opening and cast that shadow, that light shadow on a back panel, so that as you walk through, your shadow impacts with their light and then you get to participate in their existence even though they’re still not being recognized. You can’t recognize them, you can’t tell if they’re coming toward you or they’re moving away from you. They’re there but they’re not there.
When I presented that to the design committee for the competition, they got it. I was so ecstatic. They really got that. When I said, “You don’t want another statue because it wasn’t that kind of a war. It was a whole different kind of a war,” when they heard my explanation and I built a model and I took the model and I shined the light on the thing and they can see that shadow on the back, they said, “Okay, we got it.” They went ahead and chose that as the design. There it is in Capitol Park, and I’m thrilled about that.
Lisa: I really love this idea of light being an active participation in the sculpture, because you talk about light as light and water. You make a parallel between light and water. I love that because it’s such an active participate in what goes on in our lives, especially here in Maine.
Roger: Light is a source of so much. Louis Kahn, the architect I studied with at Penn, said that your building never knew how lucky it was until the light shined upon it. I’m paraphrasing, but it was something like that. That was one of the things that he stressed over and over and over again: the light, the light, the light. There’s a big difference between window light, which is a hole in the wall, and designed light, which is light that comes in and has emotive content. It has spiritual content. It may have also task content for working and being practical in that sense. It’s a free energy. We need it. Maine is a tough climate, because we need to the sunlight, and the seasonal affective disorder because people don’t get enough sunlight. I sometimes that we may get that in our offices because we’re not getting enough sunlight.
The thing that sunlight does, and this is the most exciting thing about it for me as an architect and what I want to share with my students, is that there are no two seconds of light since earth formed that have ever been the same. Every single moment of light is different. Now, what’s the relationship of that to us? Every single moment of our life is different. We have a natural connection to … that is almost like another living being coming and keeping you company.
I used to tell my students that you can never feel like you’re completely alone in a sunny space. Even if you are alone and there’s not another person or a pet or something like that, you can never feel alone in a sunny space. Take that same person and put that person in a space that doesn’t get any sun, then you’re going to start to feel alone. The implications of this for students in a classroom, for the elderly in housing that don’t want to be alone maybe, and most important thing maybe in their environment is not how much square footage they have but how much natural light they can get into their world during the day when they may feel alone. They won’t feel that loneliness because the light is another living being. It changes moment to moment. It creates mood, it creates pattern, it creates contrast through shadow.
What have we done with ourselves? We have placed our work world in environments that have separated ourselves from the sun. We live in the cubicle age. It’s not the Industrial Revolution, it’s the cubicle revolution. Because we’re in these cubicles all the time, the light never changes. We get starved. Something happens to us. We will go to maybe a lower level of excitation. This is one of the issues when I was designing for NASA, is what happens when there’s not enough stimulation, because we thrive on that, enough stimulation to operate at maximum level.
In the classrooms, to save heat, we’ll cut out the windows. This might be a dangerous thing to do. Light I was such an essential part of design. It’s a very big part of what I teach in architecture. You must bring natural light into every little spot in the environment.
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Lisa: Sound for you is also important. You alluded to this before. The way that light changes is similar to the way that sound changes. It’s something that needs to be taken into consideration.
Roger: We’re talking about acoustics. I am certainly not an acoustical engineer, nor do I claim to be, but it’s very important, like I was saying about issues of intimacy and issues of publicity, meaning being in the public, each one of those may want a different level and quality of sound in order to support whatever that activity is. If we’re in a space, let’s say that we seek intimacy. It’s very important that the sound level in there reflect and support that activity. If it’s too high reflectant surfaces, the intimacy is going to perhaps start to fade away.
We mentioned in the beginning about this thing called space occupancy or space therapy, a space therapy, a space occupancy profession kind of. We will go into people’s homes. I have a partner in this; his name is Terry Klein. He’s an architect who works in Massachusetts. We started this thing together. We would go into a person’s home, let’s say, and they would share with us issues like, oh, we’re starting to not be as close or not be as intimate as we used to be and we want to is there anything in this environment that’s contributing to that.
We walk around their environment and they present it to us. Then we get into the bedroom for instance and we’ll see that it’s filled with stuff, it’s cluttered. The acoustic levels are very, very high. No wonder their intimacy is disappearing. Here’s the sad part. They will get to the point, being wise enough to go to a marriage counselor. The marriage counselor will say this, this, this, and this. That’s all fine, and then they come home to the pattern and the mold that maybe contributing to the problem in the first place. All the good work that the counselor may be doing is being undone by the environment and they don’t even realize it because it’s so subtle. It’s such a silent partner in their lives. Our job is to make that silent partner more well known to the individual. That’s why we do that. We go into people’s homes and we tell them how this space may impact their behavior over the long-term.
Lisa: There is very real thing that happens when people who are bigger than us or louder than us or have different energy than we do occupy a space with us. You use as an example the big, loud, drunken guy at the bar. We each have an individual sense of our own need for space, but there is a more universal personal space that exists, as seen in things like elevators.
Roger: There’s a science called proxemics. I believe it was a term coined by E.T. Hall, who’s an anthropologist, who is the late E.T. Hall who taught at McGill. He talks about the spacing mechanisms in humans and in other animals. We are actually bigger than our physical selves, than the boundaries of our skin. We extend out in space. You can very easily tell this when you get a group of five to six people standing together. They will automatically space themselves out so that none of them will cross that imaginary line. If you’re sitting at a counter in a restaurant and the person next to you’s glass of water crosses this imaginary line, you suddenly feel very aware that the person is invading. It’s an invasion on a psychological level. We all have these bubbles of who we are around us.
Now, because of that, because of that, we obey these bubbles and we don’t invade them. Now, the interesting thing that you mentioned is that in other cultures that bubble has different sizes. If you read E.T. Hall’s book The Hidden Dimension you’ll discover that the Arabs have a much smaller bubble. Most of our riots happen in the summer. Why would they happen in the summer? Because when we’re warm, that bubble gets wider and it’s much easier to invade it.
When we get on an elevator, everybody understands that I have no choice but to invade your bubble. I’m invading yours, you’re invading mine. It’s a silent pact. No one talks. No one takes up even more space by engaging in conversation. Yes, some people do that of course, but the general tendency … Haven’t you experienced that? The general tendency is I’ll stay quiet. I will contract my bubble as much as I can even though I know I’m invading everyone else’s and they’re all invading mine. That issue right there is why we do what we do in elevators.
Now the interesting thing about the bubble is it’s for us in western society about 40″ by 40″ by 80″. It’s about 6’8″ tall, which is curiously the height of the door. Most doors are 6’8″. They reflect to our bubble. If you were to lower that door until it’s, say, 6’4″, even though I don’t know how tall you are … you’re about 5 …
Lisa: 5’10”
Roger: 10? Okay. If it were 6’4″ it would invade that space. You would unconsciously duck. We are bigger than we are. Now one of the keys to scale that I work with my students on is that can you reference that dimension of that bubble in the environment? Then no matter how inhuman the environment may appear, if I can put that evidence of the human in it by referencing those dimensions or that line … Not only at 6’8″ with the door but I’ll maybe put a shelf around the room at 6’8″. There’s a statement now about the human in that environment. That’s how that bubble starts to impact how we relate to the environment.
Again, going into someone’s home, if these evidences of scale relatedness don’t exist, then they tend to move into themselves, and that will affect how we relate to others, interpersonal relationships, relationships with children. They children have a different scale. They have a different bubble than adults do.
Lisa: There is some ratio that humans are comfortable with, the golden ratio. It has become really something that I’m fascinated by because I’m not really sure how we could use this in today’s society. We’ve done it through the ages so why can’t we apply it now?
Roger: What you’re referring to is this relationship, it was designed by this mathematician, Leonardo da Pisa, not da Vinci, da Pisa. He was Fibonacci. He created this thing called the Fibonacci. It starts off with number one. Then you add one to one, you get two. Two and one is three. Three and two is five. Five and three is eight, la la la la la, on and on and on. That goes to infinity.
What that defines is the relationship of 1 to 1.618. Now I don’t know if this is more technical than you want to get into here, but our bodies our complete manifestations of this proportion. For instance, if you were to stand up, the distance from the ground to your navel is 1.618 the distance the distance from your navel to the top of your head. The width of your nose compared to the width of your mouth, the same formula. Front teeth to side teeth, your first knuckle to your second knuckle.
Our bodies are completely expressing this kind of relationship. It’s also in flowers, birds, bees, the shape of a violin. It’s everywhere. It is a natural tendency for us to want to reflect this relationship, this ratio. I kind of did the play on words: ratio-nal is rational. Ratio-nal. It’s a rational thing for us to do. When we put that in the environment, like let’s say the length of a space compared to the width of a space, we put that into that Fibonacci proportion, then what we’re doing is we’re making that same kind of scale relationship of what I am, what nature is to the environment.
Now here’s the interesting thing. If it gets longer than this relationship, if the space, let’s say, gets much, much longer than that, then the space is no longer stable in terms of its natural desire to want to go into a relationship becomes more axial. What happens is that we’ll have a living room for instance or some other space that’s quite a bit longer than it is wide and they wonder why are we not having good conversations in here. It’s the proportions of the space. It’s saying move, because an axis says move. The activity and the furniture says no, sit and talk. You’re getting these conflicting emotions, these conflicting signals. There’s usually and often a negative result.
What you do as a space therapist, and I guess I’d come back to that, is I would take a piece of furniture and turn it and try to break the axis so it’s no longer that long and I’d try to recreate that proportion, that 1 to 1.618 proportion. I do that wherever I can. I’ll do that in the shape of a chair, in where a painting is located on the wall in relationship to how high it is from the ground to the top of it from the floor to the ceiling. If you can sneak that into the environment, then we have a chance to relate to it.
It’s also an aesthetic thing. If you give a thousand people a whole list of rectangles to look at, 90% of them will pick the one that’s in that Fibonacci sequence, in that same proportion. Proportion is a big part of what scale is all about.
Lisa: There was an anecdote that you wrote about, twins. One twin was in utero, in the uterus, sort of head down, plus one station on his way out. The other one was kind of free floating and just enjoying the greater womb I guess. Then one of the twins in the bassinet, the one who was head down, would always head towards the edge of the bassinet. The other twin was always kicking off his clothing, his swaddling. We are impacted by our environments from our very earliest life stage.
Roger: Yeah, I say it womb to tomb. It’s all spaces. Each space has an impact on us at some time. It’s interesting too because that one child that had his head in the plus one position, in the crib he would always wedge his head in a corner. He was only happy when he was really wrapped tightly in a blanket. The other one rebelled against being wrapped tightly in the blanket. These relationships form very early.
The interesting thing about you’re saying too is that it goes back to childhood. Let’s say you didn’t do well in school. When you were in the fourth or the fifth grade and your parents go angry at you and they sent to your room, and your room was painted blue, you now go through life and you’re ready to buy an apartment or you’re to live on you own. You say, “I hate blue.”
It’s not that you hate blue. It’s just that blue is triggering that environmental memory. It’s called a site-dependent memory. It triggers that emotion in you. I don’t know why I don’t like blue. I just done like blue, or I done like green, or the dog or whoever, whatever happened. Those events, we inculcate those and they become parts of our behavior and part of what we expect from our environments, and how we decided what we like and what we don’t like a lot.
We’re an open system. We are constantly in this symbiotic relationship with our environment. There are two kinds that I consider. I consider the thing called personal environments and public environments. The personal environments are the spaces that you use every day: your home, your office, here in this studio, the school that perhaps your children will go to. They go to it every day, day after day after day. That’s where the power of the environment really starts to impact us.
If you walk into Notre Dame, you’re going to go wow, this is the most amazing place in the world. I am changed forever as a result of it. That’s an experiential thing, it’s not a behavioral thing. It’s the day to day spaces that impact our behavior. When we do the space therapy thing we’re not interested so much in doing the church, doing the bank, doing whatever. We’re interested in doing the school. We’re interested in doing the office, and mostly doing the home, where you spend most of your time. It’s little subtle change. It’s little lack of scale or too much reverberation time. After time, it will start to impact your behaviors. That’s where it becomes important to bring someone in, look this over, and say this is what this space may be doing to you. It satisfies the codes. You have all your furniture. Everything in there is legal, moral, ethical, spiritual and whatever, except that it’s missing this little piece that every single day it starts to worm its way.
I use this little example in my class called boiling the frog. Do not try this at home. How would you boil a frog? If you threw a frog into boiling water, what’s the frog going to do? Zoom, it’s going to jump right out. It’s not going to stay there. Put the frog in cold water, and let’s just say the cold water is our environment, you start turning the temperature up very, very slow. The frog will never know what’s happening to it until it’s too late.
I don’t know if there’s a too late issue for us in our environments but there’s a definite impact on these things over time on our behaviors. That affects our social interactions. Let’s talk about the doctors and the nurses in the hospital. The nurse goes home to an environment. The doctor goes home to an environment. He or she, wherever, is going to be affected by whatever environment they’re living in. That’s their personal environments. Then they come to work. Are they more stressed because of that environment? A little less stressed? Does that have any sort of influence on their work? I contend or suggest that it does, which is why I believe that this service is so important.
Lisa: There are two interesting things that I hope that people will take away from this. One of them is actually that we have an architecture program at the University of Maine Augusta.
Roger: Yes, thank you.
Lisa: A lot of people don’t think about that. The other thing is that this exists, that the work that you are doing at Space Therapy is very real. That people can go to you for design and behavior post-occupancy analytics.
Roger: Absolutely.
Lisa: These are very real things. How do people find out more about your teaching and the work that you’re doing?
Roger: The program at UMA, University of Maine Augusta, is in its 25th or 26th year now. It’s been around for a long time. It’s unfortunately a pretty well best kept secret. It’s the only five-year public school of architecture in New England as far as I know. All the other schools, Harvard and Yale and Princeton, these are all private schools. The public school didn’t have … This is one of the reasons why I moved to Maine in the first place, because I wasn’t sure I thought my architectural education was satisfying enough because it didn’t handle a lot of issues that I wanted to talk about. I thought I would try to start my own program. That took about eight years, but finally UMA and some of the faculty up there in support of it made it happen and we started this program.
We’re now on track with NAAB, which is the National Architectural Accreditation Board. We’re now on track to have full professional accreditation. It’s the best financial deal in the country in terms of studying architecture, because it’s Maine, right? It’s very inexpensive to do this. It really is a very strong program. A lot of the curriculum is based upon these issues of space, which we were talking about school, which is that connection that we have to the environment, and light, which is the thing that gives a space its vitality. It gives it its sense of aliveness. It gives it a sense of personality. All these things to which we may relate. Also, all of this under this big umbrella that space impacts our lives. Space impacts our lives. When we design our own or we have someone come in and design for us, whatever you do, it’s going to have an impact. It could be positive, could be negative. Generally, you look at avoid the negative, accentuate the positive. That’s what the Space Therapy does.
Now, because I am a full-time teacher … well not a full-time anymore. I’m adjunct now, but most of the consultations I let my partner do them, but if they’re up here, he and I might do them together. His name is Terry Klein and he’s a space therapy consultant out of Massachusetts. He’s been my oldest and dearest friend and we’ve worked together for, God, 30 years at least.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Roger Richmond, who is a professor and actually a founder of the University of Maine Augusta’s architecture program, also a design consultant and partner at Space Therapy. It’s a fascinating conversation that we’ve had and it’s great that you’re doing the work that you’re doing. I hope people will take the time to learn more about it. Thank you for coming.
Roger: Thank you very much. It’s been an honor to meet you and talk with you. I appreciate that you are in support of this.
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Marci: When was the last time you took a break from what you were doing, from the work that was piled up on your desk, and just looked up? I know that during the course of my days I often forget to take a moment or two to just breath, look up at the sky, and dream. Terrible that I have to remind myself to breath, but when I do, I feel energized because in those moments I’m able to let go of the daily grind and think more about what I want to accomplish, how I want my business to grow. Sometimes those are the ah ha moments. If we all took a few moments out each day to stop what we were doing and dream a little about our business futures, not only would we feel a great sense of calm, but we may come to realize that these dreams can in fact come true. I’m Marci Booth. Let’s talk about the changes you need. Boothmaine.com.
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Lisa: It is my good fortune today to have on the show Eric Stark. He is an associate professor and the program coordinator for the University of Maine at Augusta’s architecture program. Professor Stark maintains a small architectural practice in Portland doing residential and institutional work. His ongoing research includes community partnering, the use of diagram in architecture, and furniture design. Thanks so much for coming in today.
Eric: Thank you.
Lisa: So you’re not from Maine.
Eric: No, I grew up in California so I spent most of my life in the San Francisco Bay area.
Lisa: It must have been quite an important thing, this architecture program going on at the University of Maine at Augusta to draw you all the way across the country and make it part of your life’s work.
Eric: Actually, I came across the country slowly for different school programs. I actually did my undergraduate in Iowa, studied Shakespeare and theater design. I did a lot of theater work, both design and construction, for a number of years, and then went back to study architecture. I actually went to graduate school in Cambridge at Harvard, and that’s how I ended up on the East Coast. Then once I graduated from there, in my first job I met my now wife. She’s from Maine, so that’s actually how I ended up in Maine.
Lisa: She also holds an important position within the architecture community.
Eric: She does. She’s the executive director of AIA Maine.
Lisa: Her name is?
Eric: Jeannette Schram.
Lisa: Those of you who are listening who have some connection with architecture know that I’m now speaking with the husband of the AIA director for the State of Maine.
Eric: That’s right.
Lisa: This is like the power couple of architecture in the State of Maine, which is pretty great, actually. I love what is being done with the University of Maine at Augusta. This is so exciting because we didn’t have an architecture program until relatively recently.
Eric: We didn’t have it in its current form. There actually has been some form of architecture at UMA for 28 years. It started as a two-year degree. It went to a four-year degree back in 2003. It is a major change. What it’s become is the first professional degree in Maine. It’s actually the only public undergraduate degree in New England. That’s a huge thing. It makes it incredibly affordable. I think it also begins to answer and fill a gap in architectural education specifically in Maine. Prior to this program starting two years ago, the five-year degree, if you wanted to be a licensed architect you had to leave the State of Maine. Now with this new program students, whether they’re getting their first undergraduate degree or coming back to school, can stay in Maine.
A lot of our students, they have families. They already have businesses. Some are true freshman, but it gives them an opportunity to study in Maine, which as I said, allows it so they don’t have to leave the state, but also, they’re connected to Maine. Mainers I think really love where they’re from. This allows them to stay here, study here. A lot of what we do, where we do have a global outlook and we get our students outside of Maine, we’re also rooted here and we understand that.
Lisa: Now how did you get from Shakespeare, set design, to what you’re doing now? What was your original interest in that?
Eric: As an undergrad I went to school in Iowa and I studied theater with a focus on Shakespeare and Shakespearean literature, so I was designing sets, I was building. I like making things. That’s what I like doing the most. I like making all kinds of things. I did that for a number of years on both coasts. I worked in Washington D.C. and I also worked out in California, mostly for Shakespeare houses.
As that progressed, I started thinking about going back to school. Actually, at the time it wasn’t just architecture. I’d always been interested in architecture. I got some really bad advice in high school from some architects. It was back in the 80s and it was a miserable time to be an architect and they let me know that. As a 16 year old I was scared. I was like oh, that sounds awful so I’m not going to do that.
As I started looking back as I hit my mid-20s, late-20s, I started thinking I want to make stuff. I looked furniture schools, industrial design schools, and looked again at architecture. I felt in the world of architecture there was more possibility. I could design buildings but I could also work in the landscape. You could think urbanistically, and you could still design a chair. You could still do all those different things.
That’s what I ended up back to school for. I was lucky enough to get into Harvard and get into a school on the East Coast, which I never thought. Growing up in California, if you told me I was going to end up on the East Coast, much less in Maine, I wouldn’t have believed you. That’s really how I ended up out here.
Lisa: I’m thinking about a conversation that you and I had just before we got on the air about your children, who are six and nine and going to a Montessori school. All three of my children did their early years at a Montessori school and it was very hands-on. There’s something very tactile about the Montessori education. In fact, I went to a Montessori school and I learned how to wash windows and set the table. Everything is very physical, hands-on, tangible. Do you think there’s enough of that in education?
Eric: I don’t, I don’t. I think it’s two things. I think it’s definitely there’s a hands-on quality that’s really important. I can say that because it’s something we do in the architecture program. All of our teaching, we try very hard to steer away from lectures where someone’s imparting knowledge to you. It’s really about discovery. Let’s engage with a brick and see what we’re going to do with it. Let’s talk to someone who actually designs and puts up steel walls and see what that means. I think that’s the beautiful thing about the Montessori program, is on one side it’s very hands-on so you’re actually doing it.
I think as important and perhaps even more so, there’s this personal responsibility to the Montessori education where each student from age three, you are responsible for you. That means you’re responsible in terms of how you interact with others around you, but also that you’re in control. You have some control over what you’re going to do with your day and what you’re going to learn. I think that’s the phenomenal thing that they teach. I see it in my kids. I think the teachers would say they see it more in the classroom than we might see it at home, but they really do. They understand that if they want to do something … My daughter just last summer was interested in the human ear, so she’s like, let’s go to the library and check out books on the human ear. She was seven then. It’s kind of shocking when your seven year old says that. You’re like yeah, but that’s what she’s been taught. She was learning how to learn.
I’m certainly not an expert on younger education, but I think a lot of times that’s what’s missing. What is this individual? Even though they’re little, what are they interested in? What do they want to do and how do you empower them to go out and do it?
Lisa: If that’s not present in some forms of earlier education, then you are getting people coming in as maybe 18 year old freshman or maybe people are further along in their career. How do you bring that out in them? Because I would think that would be quite important as an architect.
Eric: It’s a great question. That’s actually really fundamental. You find a lot of our students who are coming right out of high school, most if not all of their education has been someone giving something. Really the way we try and flip that is initially through just discussion. We’re very open with it, is you have a huge responsibility here. You’re responsible for your own education. You need to take that on.
But also in understanding that they are the ones who are in a sense directing what it is that we’re doing in the design studio. We just did a small visitors center that was located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, one of the projects I did with my second-year studio. The reason I end up with ten different visitors centers is because I have ten different students. The site’s the same, the climate’s the same, the program is the same. It sits on this amazing barren landscape with these three volcanoes. That’s all the same for the ten students. The reason we get ten projects is there are ten individuals.
That’s what they have to understand. They have to understand that there isn’t one answer to this. The answer comes from you. It’s not going to come from some book. It certainly doesn’t come from me as the teacher. I guide you through this but it comes from you. That’s where it is. That’s where it lies. Then we help through a number of different exercises, some that start very conceptually, and slowly move more and more towards what most would think of as a building. We help them understand how do I pull that out. How do I discover what I think this project’s about? A lot of that has to do with conceptual ideas. We were talking about schools. Certainly a school has to keep people warm, it has to keep people dry, it needs a place for the bus to stop, it needs classrooms of a certain size.
But what’s school really about? What does it mean to learn? That’s a question, and others similar to it that a lot of beginning students have never asked themselves. They think of it as school. I went to a school. It has a roof, it has this, it has a cafeteria. It’s important but it’s also not important. Because without that extra something, without that other thing like what’s it mean to learn, what’s it mean to be curious, what’s it mean to engage with others your age, those are interesting questions. Those things all happen. Whether or not you are aware of them or not as an architect, those things are happening in those spaces, so you have to become aware of them.
That’s really the push. It’s a great question because I think that’s so much of the push for those beginning students, is it’s always turning it back on them. They’ll look at you sometimes and they’re waiting for the answer. You just look right back at them and you wait for their answer. I tell all my students my job, pure and simple, is to ask why. That’s my whole job, other than the coordinating stuff and there’s a lot of paperwork and all that. My real job as an architecture teacher is to ask you why did you do that. Initially, it’s a blank stare. Eventually they’ll start saying things, well I like it that way. I’m like well, that’s not a really great answer.
If you’re sitting across from a client and they ask you why does my house look like that, and you say, “I like it,” and they look at you, well I don’t like it and I’m paying for this, so let’s do something else. There’s no conversation in just I like it. Unless you happen to find a bunch of people who like what you like you can’t have a conversation with that. You really have to be able to explain it. You have to be able to explain why I’m doing what I’m doing. I designed it like this for these reasons.
That’s helpful definitely in terms of the client interaction, but it’s most helpful for you as a design. You need to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. You need to have some basic conceptual idea that makes this school different from this school. That’s hard. That’s hard for a lot of people to come around to understand that. Once you get that, the next step that’s perhaps even harder is how do I take that conceptual idea and now turn it into a building that people do have to move in and it does have to keep them warm and it has to keep them dry. It’s the reason architecture’s really complex and hard. It’s really hard. Good architecture is hard.
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Lisa: You do the design work and you’re obviously thinking about materials that go into the designs of the buildings that you’re creating, but then there’s the practical, in the moment, on the ground, actually building of things that doesn’t usually happen at the hands of architects, so there has to be a back and forth. There has to be a crosstalk between you and the people who are actually the artisans on the project itself.
Eric: Definitely, yeah. It’s actually one of the my favorite things. It’s very important that you find those builders and those craftsmen who want to have that conversation. I think all too often, at least in talking to those people, I don’t think architects always want to have that conversation. I think we should. I think it’s really important. I like nothing more than getting a plan to a certain point and being able to work with the builder enough to be like yeah, I’m not sure what we’re going to do there so you have to start. We need to see it before we actually place that window or that bank of windows.
I worked on this project a couple years ago where this builder gutted this space. It was so wonderful because he called me up and he said, “Yeah, you’re going to want to come see this.” Once this ceiling in this third-floor space which would have been about 7’6″ was gone, there was this amazing vaulted ceiling. He knew. He just said, “I don’t think you want me to build what you drew now that you see this.” He was totally right. He said, “All right, I’ll be back Monday.” I said, “All right, I’ll have it all redrawn by Monday.” Because he needed to keep going but it was this great opportunity. He could have been halfway done and certainly I would have walked in and been like oh no. There was no way to know that beforehand. It wasn’t I made a mistake. It was just we needed to have that conversation.
That’s one of the great things I think about in design general but in architecture, is that conversation, whether it’s a conversation between you and a client, between a student and a community member, between a builder and other builders or the architect is it’s a collaborative effort, wk makes it hard but makes it really exciting. There’s certainly some people who are so good at what they do as architects, they sort of have a vision for everything. I’m certainly not one of those people and I don’t think there are a lot of them. You want that input. That’s really the exciting part is all these ideas. The architect is the one who then brings them all together.
It goes back to that concept. That’s why that concept’s so important. There’s nothing better than sitting across from a client or even a builder and somebody suggests something. That client or builder jumps in and is like oh no, we can’t do that. That doesn’t fit in with the concept. You’re like, they understand. You’ve translated it in a way and everybody understands that. Even someone who’s laying trim on a wall makes decision, and you’re like, that is a great decision because it fits with what we’re doing. I’m not sure I would have seen that because I don’t have 25-30 years of experience building. To not tap into that would be foolish. You also want to give it a framework. We’re working on this project, not a different one, so how do all those things that we’re doing, how do we make them all happen together.
Lisa: I love hearing this because there are two things that occur to me. One is that you were describing people saying back in the 80s, “Oh don’t go into architecture. This is a tough time to be an architect.” This is happening now in medicine where doctors are saying to their children, “Oh, don’t be a doctor. Nobody wants to be a doctor. It’s too hard to be a doctor.” I just think that’s the wrong way to approach it. I think we need to be approaching medicine that way that architecture is being approached. That we can no longer come in as doctors and say, “Well, here’s the big design. Here’s the evidence-based medicine. Here’s what we think should happen.” We need to come in an understand this back and forth, this relationship, this working with the team, the working with the patient. What you’re describing really is collaboration. It’s really the same sort of relationships that I deal with on a day to day basis in the practice of medicine.
Eric: Yeah, it’s totally true. It’s totally true. I think, again, it goes back to that community work. We do a lot of that community work. We’ve got students that are actually working in teams, because architecture is collaborative. You have to understand that you have to appreciate that. You have to be able to communicate whether it’s verbally, but a lot of it’s visually. That’s what we really do. You mentioned that architects don’t build a lot of stuff, and it’s true. We draw a lot of stuff. We draw the thing that is to be built. We deal in representation all the time. That’s so fundamental to what we do.
One of the interesting things that’s happening now in architecture though is there is this actual lack of architects. The architecture profession as a whole is getting older. They’re retiring. Every indication is in the next couple years there will be a great need for architects across the country. It’s not just here but across the country. I think it’s a terrific time to get into if it’s your calling. I really think it’s that, because it’s very consuming. It’s all consuming. It changes how you see the world. I think if it is, it’s a great time to get into the field of architecture.
Lisa: I’m very happy to hear that because I’m going to ask you next how do people who are interested in finding out about the University of Maine at Augusta’s architecture program learn about how to do exactly what you’ve said.
Eric: The easiest way to do it is to visit us online. It’s uma.edu/barch. You can get all the information you want there. We’ve got great enrollment specialists. Actually, I’m very hands-on in terms of both explaining the program as well as giving tours of our facility. We actually moved into a new facility three years ago, which his continually growing. We got our first laser cutter. We got our first 3D printer starting last year, so we’re doing some really fabulous stuff there. We’re right in downtown Augusta right on the river, right on the Kennebec. That’s been teriffic. It’s a great location, partially because we want to work in the community to be in the community. Just go to our website and we’ll get you all the information you need.
Lisa: If I wasn’t already a doctor, maybe I’d think about becoming an architect. It’s been great. It’s been a great conversation. We’ve been speaking with Eric Stark, who is an associate professor and the program coordinator for the University of Maine Augusta’s architecture program. Thanks so much for coming in today.
Eric: Thank you.
Lisa: You’ve been listening to Love Maine Radio show number 196: “Designing Space.” Our guests have included Roger Richmond and Eric Stark. For more information on our guests, and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our enewsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as Dr. Lisa, and see my running, travel, food and wellness photos as Bountiful One on Instagram. We love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also, let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our “Designing Space” show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: Love Main Radio is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine; Marci Booth of Booth Maine; Berlin City Honda of Portland; Apothecary by Design; Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage; Harding Lee Smith of The Rooms; and Bangor Savings Bank. Love Maine Radio is recorded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Our executive producers are Susan Grisanti, Kevin Thomas, and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain. Our content producer is Kelly Clinton. Our online producer is Andre Cantillo. Love Maine Radio is available for download free on iTunes. See www.lovemaineradio.com or the Love Main Radio Facebook page for details.