Shaping the 75-mile Amoeba YAF

Summit 2130

Procrastinating about whether to submit a response to the Summit 2130 questionnaire, I spent a couple of weeks pondering my response. The objective for the Summit was to create a provocative challenge for the architectural community and inspire them to be active stewards in shaping the built environment beyond the buildings we design. The prompts were intriguing and I powered through my sluggishness to articulate my responses. I hit enter and went back to my weekly routine of producing drawings and renderings working as an architectural designer for my firm.

The YAF sent out selection emails over the next month and I was pleasantly surprised to have made the cut. I was introduced to our cohort and my teammates Andy Sternad, Pratiksha Achari, Esin Erik, Ethan Coverstone, and Matt Toddy. We brought diverse life and work experiences, and were based in different cities spread across three time-zones. Schedules were shared back and forth, and a weekly evening meeting was set-up to brainstorm and work towards the Summit. With a packed workweek for all of us, it was a challenge to carve out a fixed time each week.

The managing committee had created a digital whiteboard to collect abridged versions of our bios and answers to the prompt: “What is your vision of 2130?”. I was excited to read the thoughtful, mature responses of my teammates and was impressed by the experience they had in dealing with climate change and the damaging impact of architectural practice on the ecology of the planet. Our experience levels in the field ranged from fresh graduates, young architects, to new firm owners. This allowed us to approach the climate crisis with unique perspectives.

Our first meeting began with the feeling you have when you ride the elevator with a group of people you don’t know and refuse to make eye contact, furiously hoping your floor arrives before theirs. By this point in the pandemic, all of us zoom veterans discussed our ideas and conversation started to flow. We were a chatty group for the most part and I was looking forward to collaborating with them. It seemed as if we had started to ease into a sense of camaraderie. Everyone was intrigued and excited to contribute for the six weeks before our rendezvous in Pittsburgh where we would deliver our pitch.

For me the biggest draw of this process was the opportunity to work with AI generated images. I had heard about a lot of these image generation engines, and I was curious to try working with one. Images are our currency of thought, and it was a challenging prospect to share authorship and lose autonomy of the final image or as we like to say, “The Money Shot”. Architects communicate and attempt to impress and express their ideas primarily via carefully constructed images. The notion of sharing authorship of a vital tool in the design process with an elusive being, such as the AI, was a challenging prospect.

The weeks began to fly away, and our team christened the “Archinaries” (Architects-Visionaries) and began with a polite, “Yes and…” approach but we got comfortable to reach a point of healthy disagreement and pose valid challenges to each other’s ideas.

The YAF committee had done an impressive job to curate and set the agenda for these meetings. We worked towards weekly goals by completing tasks and answering prompts. We unpacked and prepared our ideas for what we thought the world would be like in 2130, using a reverse timeline to organize our thoughts. We had an opportunity to work weekly with AI artist Ricardo Rodriguez. It was an iterative process of refining the images that the AI conjured based on our descriptions. We reacted to those images, trying to shape the vision of the future we imagined through our conversations.

The week of the Summit was upon us, and our team faced an early setback because one of us couldn’t travel because of contracting COVID. We were dismayed, as the weeks of conversation and passionate exchange of ideas had really primed us to deliver our pitch in Pittsburgh.

The Summit was an action-packed, two-day affair with inspiring activities and events to network and socialize with fellow participants, alongside opportunities to make the final edits to our pitch. The welcome reception was a great chance to finally meet our team in-person. I think everyone was taken aback by how tall Ethan was outside our zoom screens. The Summit cohort was a healthy mix of young designers straight out of college to seasoned architects with over 15-20 years of experience.

We had an early start the following morning and were welcomed by the dynamic Emily Grandstaff-Rice, President of the AIA who was our host, mentor, and emcee. The day kicked off with a lecture by renowned futurist Dr. Chris Luebkeman. We were allowed time to work in our groups, as we refined our efforts and worked on finalizing our pitch. We heard from Christian Benimana, Co-Executive Director and Senior Principal of MASS our pitch. design. Their ecologically sensitive work with local communities in Rwanda, East Africa was inspiring and thought provoking. Post lunch we were allotted time to work amongst ourselves and received feedback throughout the day from the mentors. The day ended with a panel discussion including Kendra Wiley, Janki Vyas and Elizabeth Resenic. Each panelist has worked as a sustainability strategist to complement and guide traditional architectural practice to be more resilient and cognizant of their impact to the world around them.

The group was treated to an intimate sit-down dinner which turned out to be great fun. We reconvened after the meal to burn the proverbial midnight oil and apply the final touches to our presentation.

As we finalized our slide deck, we kept falling into rabbit holes and existential crises had us questioning everything we had discussed so far. Some sage advice from Emily Grandstaff-Rice steered us in the right direction, “do not overcomplicate, and have fun!”. From being worried about hyper-specific considerations such as, “what is the driving mileage from Indianapolis in a 4-hour distance?”,We flipped our delivery style and let ourselves be a little looser and more conversational with the way we presented our ideas. This interaction allowed us to refocus our pitch to place more emphasis on our core idea and we stopped worrying about mundane notions of plausible driving times between our ‘development nodes’. We repurposed our presentation idea to be more conversational and added an element of performance to it.

Our challenge to the architectural community questioned contemporary urbanism and targeted suburban sprawl. We advocated for humanity to retreat into self-contained nodes as ecology healed and recovered from the devastating impacts of rampant development. “The Archinaries have developed the 75-mile Amoeba to save all life forms from global extinction by adapting human society into a global network of nodes with local resources, local governance, and interconnected technology.”

Our final prompt to the A.I. read as follows, “We journeyed across the nebulous flow to deploy the node. It was chirpy, fresh, and green beneath the canopy. A festive congregation was forming. Conservation is fundamental, the biosphere is cohabited by terrestrial, aquatic simple and complex life forms. Rhythms of technology & nature blend inside living spaces and expand across the horizon and work in harmony to nourish and regenerate the land.”

Our presentation played to the masses; we had members of our team planted in the audience shouting out prompts while Matt and Pratiksha led from the front. Our presentation was received well, but for me the greater joy was to be in the room, which became a fantastic culmination and celebration of ideas and looking at the various futures depicted by the A.I. images.

A question and answer session followed, where participants elaborated on their ideas; and the jury deliberated the winners. It was really inspiring and thought provoking and I felt extremely lucky to be in the room as we absorbed firsthand the ideas that this passionate community of peers was sharing, discussing and molding. In all, the sum of the conversations was greater than the individual ideas in my opinion.

The Summit concluded with a jury’s choice award and a popular winner decided by voting in the room. We were thrilled to be the latter and followed that up with bragging rights across social media platforms over the next few months for our pitch.

The YAF was not previously on my radar, and I was really impressed with their organization and curation of the event. We were dealing with an ambitious challenge and their ability to break it down into digestible and actionable weekly goals created a meaningful process for us to engage with an important challenge.

As an architectural designer constantly chasing project deliverables while also studying for licensing exams, I had discounted membership in the AIA YAF as something not for me right now. However, attending the Summit changed my perspective and I was excited to have spent a few weeks ideating with architects with inspiring ideas on how to disrupt the practice for lasting sustainable global ecology.

So, if like me you are debating whether to submit a response to a conference, talking event or a presentation pitch; take a shot at it. It may enable you to meet a bunch of passionate people and grow in ways you had not imagined for yourself. I, for one, will be looking forward to what the YAF does next!