Vaissnavi Shukl
In our previous episode, we spoke to historian Robert Jan Van Pelt about his work on Auschwitz and involvement as an expert witness in a case against a Holocaust denier. Today is part two of the series, where we are in conversation with architects Anne Bordeleau and Donald McKay, who worked with Robert on creating ‘The Evidence Room’ at the 2016 Venice Biennale. Self explanatory in its nomenclature, ‘The Evidence Room’ is a room with architectural evidence from Auschwitz to assert the existence of the gas chambers used for committing genocide in the Nazi concentration camp. It presents three monuments, a door, a wall hatch and ladder, and a gas column along with a number of plaster casts, as proofs of the crimes against humanity’s and underscores the culpability of architects in creating these instruments of murder.

I am Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off-Centre, a podcast where we highlight unconventional design perspectives, practices, and research projects that reflect emerging discourses within the design discipline and beyond. Architecture Off-Centre features conversations with radical designers, thinkers, and changemakers who are redefining the way we live and interact with the built environment.

We’re gonna talk about the evidence room today. And in Robert’s episode, we get a fairly detailed understanding of his research and the court case and the analysis of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Now His work became the foundation upon which you conceptualize the evidence room for the 2016, Venice BINALI. And since this is a podcast, and we don’t have any visual aids, and the evidence room, especially something where the viewer derives meaning through the experience of the space through navigation, I’m going to take this opportunity to ask both of you to walk us through the evidence room, from your perspective, what

Donald Mckay
the problem is we have at least three different evidence rooms, we have an evidence room now in Pennsylvania half installed. So it will be abandoned, it was just abandoned in place, the beginning of the shutdown, and they haven’t gotten back sitting, it’s sitting there. And it’s in a state of I don’t know what in, in a museum in, in Philadelphia,

Vaissnavi Shukl
and it was in Washington DC, right before No, or someplace else. Okay.

Donald Mckay
So it’s been in Venice, it came to Toronto, where it was much expanded and reconfigured in a way that I think is was probably a better reconfiguration, although the Venice plan, the rooms are invalid in, in Washington, and in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, there, they the evidence room is not part of a sequence of other rooms with other exhibits, it’s part of a larger field of exhibits, but they’re no longer sequentially organized. In fact, the Washington organization was, frankly, a bit cranky, I think, but that’s okay. That’s that it was done in good faith and done well. But it was very tricky.

Anne Bordeleau
I mean, I can, I can give you the main elements and components of how it was first envisioned for the Venice Biennale. And in a way that responded to the invitation that was sent to Robert Jan. And I think it came with the possibility of originally selecting, you know, not so much any room, but there was a perspective of different rooms. And in the end, the room that we fell in was very, it was a smaller room, but which was perfectly for the purposes, in a sense, it was sort of a room that had no external, no access to light from the outside. And it was really kind of tucked between two other rooms. So that’s what Donald is referring to, was an awful lot. So you would come in sort of coming from another room into the center, and then just walk across, and then the next door was in the center, and you go into it was sort of tuck between two exhibitions, you know, it could be a room that would be left open, but then the evidence room was occupying this, this space. So and we knew, in terms of presenting the evidence room, was really presenting the evidence of Auschwitz. And there were two different strategies and presenting these, we never intended to present the, you know, replicas, or reproductions of anything that we’ve been asked with, but at the same time, we’re trying to hold as remaining as truthful as possible, to the elements that we’re going to be showing. So in terms of the evidence, there was the in terms of how they were translated, I guess, imagine walking into a room and there are three, large one to one elements, and these we refer to as the monuments. So these three monuments were in some ways sort of free standing in the room and occupied the it was the center as well as one of the walls and this was the gas column, a door to gas chamber, showing the two sides, the sides of those who were the victims and on the side of the perpetrators, and also a ladder towards another type of gas chambers, which was above ground. And then there was a small hatch that needed to be opened from the outside and that was the third monument. So there are these three monuments that occupy the room that may be from the first upon entry; those would be the components that one will most readily recognize or see and sort of wonder they all wait. All the monuments are painted white, even though different materials have been used to build them. And then they sort of stand in a room, which also is very white. And, and then as you take your view from those key monuments, then you realize that two of the walls are then line and those walls from which you come in we’re the sort of doors punched out of that wall are, well, there’s the sort of the shelving unit, which we call the matrix that also comes with its ceiling. So it sort of lowers and controls the light that comes but also is, you know, it sort of creates a room, it completes the room. And while the matrix is aligned on those two walls with casts, so that would be the matrix, the cast and the monuments. And so the three monuments and some 40 Plus cast, and those casts were, most of the cast were very shallow, they were translating drawings, photographs, letters, using different techniques, and we can go into these later. But it also included three, three, more like three dimensional casts, that were directly cast from objects. And so there was a gas mask, that was really sort of protruding from one of the walls, there was can from cyclin D pellets, there was also a protruding, protruding, protruding sorry, as well as the cassava motor, which was essentially a motor that was used to

for the fans, that would then accelerate cremation to be very blunt in terms of oversight. So these were the three components. There were many ways that could be one of many, those are those that exist, there are elements that could be bought off the shelf and used for different purposes than from the one in which they were used in Auschwitz. But then, in their isolation and the way in which the recasts and they sort of stood as, again, a kind of incriminating element. So I don’t know if there’s anything that you want to add to Donald?

Donald Mckay
Well, there are a couple of things. I’m interesting the the the idea of the room of the evidence room have literally that sort of cage that you see in television shows and films and criminal procedurals, where there’s evidence or something’s missing in the evidence, or someone’s taking the evidence, they go get the evidence, inevitably to kind of cage filing cabinet walk to shelves. So that was what occurred. Within the first 90 minutes of conversation about the whole thing began with a conversation between Robert and myself and his wife, Miriam Greenbaum. When they invited me to lunch and said, Do you want to do this? And, you know, I, I’ve been involved with Robert, some of these projects for years and 25 years, probably. So I understood all of this stuff. But in some sense, I never I never go into it in the depth Robert does, because it’s so karmically scarring. It’s just awful. rather think of something else. But what was interesting is, and this, I think this would be a theme that you’re going to find between Robert and myself is there’s a kind of overlap in the idea of a narrative. And the idea of an experience. Now, if you had to polarize the soul, Robert is a pure historian, and a very interesting amateur architect, and both an architect and an historian. And I’m an architect and an occasional amateur historian. So I, and it’s very clear as I work on anything else, I’m doing that I am much more preoccupied with the experience of something than I have with the narrative of the interpretation. I’m probably pretty close to anti interpretation. Robert is very strong and the interpretation, interpretation, when I think in some sense, and is the most moderate, the three of us, which is a great position to be in it is always helped. It may really be the first couple of hours, we’re we’re really, you know, you hardly ever sit around and think there’s the genesis of this thing, but that lunch was the genesis of this thing where you said it’s a room. And then we said, Well, what happens at the beach? And now if I hadn’t been to a B anally since the mid 70s, late 70s, you know, I’m more Listen, I’m not going back till I’m invited. So getting invited was the thing. But my sense was, as in all of these things, that there would be an awful lot of words, there would be a lot of graphic, there would be a lot of audio visual, there would be a lot of inter or there would be a lot of color there would be screaming for attention. I mean, Renzo Piano, had a room, I think it was Renzo Piano or foster, I think it was a piano room, which was the hottest pink in the planet, you know, like, Look at me. And I thought, the only way that we distinguish ourselves is by being incredibly ghostly and calm. And so And because we’re talking about architecture to talk about it as a room. I mean, I’m not, I’m not going to go very deeply into this. But in spite of the fact I resist the intense institutionalization of both the academy and architecture, I know full well, I am, I have the DNA of an architect. But for me, the room is an incredible metaphor for the self. For Well, actually, that the self sits at sort of the threshold of that room and say, the room was once being and and there’s no way I can escape it, I can speak of mental health in terms of the span of your arms and the space you occupy in your mind. But what was very interesting was to actually say, we are going to meditate and deliberately make a room, it’s a room that passes through in a moment, like a dream. Or you could reflect on it for some period of time, but whatever else it would be, it would first of all be a relief from everyone else saying, Look at me, look at me Look at me. But it would also reward, slow, thoughtful gaze. And, and that’s where I think the collaboration of the three of us is terrific, because I think Robert is second to none. And its capacity to go into an archive and never come out without the right stuff. And it did a magnificent job of taking several narrative strands out of Roberts research in this vast book of evidence. And my whole sense was that my contribution was in somehow saying, you have to be able to experience this as a room. I mean, Robert was at a certain point, I had, that at two weeks after we started, I had to sort of take him out for a sandwich and sit in the middle of the park and kind of go, we’re not doing that. But he was all for kind of trying to figure out how the room would reenact the trial. You said, that’s an event that happens in time. This is an event that happens in space, you can’t turn the space into an act, no one will put up with it, no one will go where I stand and I’m about this. And he got it right away. Of course, what am I doing? Said, you’re a writer, you’re a brilliant writer and a terrific researcher. I tend to make things. And I said if this is about how we express this in a space, it’s a room, not a theater. And we got that and and went and joined the team and and made two loves, one stunning contribution at the outset, which was to help simplify the matrix, which was all four walls. And that was fine. And I was able to figure out how to do it. But we were saving money. And it was actually smarter for it to turn into two walls that were great because it meant that there was a larger conceptual space for these three monuments to locate themselves in. And their location is quite studied, in the sense that they don’t establish any axes ; they’re very much set out in a field. And if you looked at it, you’d say, well, that’s kind of a magnesium field, how these things are arranged or kind of neoplastic cyst or something. And that was quite deliberate given the initial or invalid organization that has this sort of neoclassical building that we’re in. It is in the concept of a room, that that, that you get it whereas most other people sort of thought, I think that this is an exhibition space, I will locate my objects or my tableaus in here. We really did understand it was a room and we initially designed it so that the entire enterprise could have been freestanding, we could have put this room up in the middle of a football field. and it would still be. And in fact, that is finally how it’s evolved. Because in time for security reasons it became much more preoccupied with how to anchor it to the walls, and were very apprehensive about vandalism. And I thought I, it’s two, it has to be as stable as possible. So we fastened it much more securely to the building. And once we had done that the building came to depend on it. So we have to every time we put out or they put up the evidence room, now, they have to actually build a building around it. It’s a temporary building, but it’s a distinct building. So the room and the experience of the room was very important to doing it. But when you get in and gift for arranging this narrative, in the casts, you know, I don’t think I ever entirely understood, all I knew is at a certain point, all the weight was moving to the front of these shelves, and I was panicking. But that’s another story. But it was not really panicking, but I was unnerved. But I realized that the weight had gotten so off the axis of the shelves, we had to reconfigure the engineering in that process, that that really started to build up the layer. So it really becomes an intersection of narrative and experience. And I think 1000 times better for that intersection.

Anne Bordeleau
But I think it’s interesting that it’s very true, that part of that was not a reenactment of, you know, what happened in the courtroom, or that, in fact, it was happening in space. But I think there’s something, you know, I still think it’s very interesting, that specific room where we’re located, you know, in between very busy other rooms, the fact that it was designed or thought about in the context of the Venice Biennale, Ali, and I think, you know, that room was sort of like a room between rooms, but I also think temporarily, like in terms in relation to time, there’s something really quite significant that was happening when we think of people just kind of zooming through all the exhibits, and everyone is kind of competing with one another in terms of like, what is, you know, how much light or how much color or how busy can the exhibition be, so that it will really capture someone’s attention and can be sort of read quickly, or entice someone to stay longer. And I think the way the room operated was the complete opposite of that. It’s in an it in, in, in a way, it opened up, you know, a different type of space, but also maybe a different relationship to time in, in how you walked in. And it was really, you know, it could be completely lost than someone who just walked too fast, and just kind of dismissed the room as like, oh, you know, nice, white, you know, like, just like, clean presentation. Or if you spent just enough time to realize what was being presented, then it was, you know, the familiarity of what apparently, you know, you could sort of dismiss as something of a super sort of clean aesthetic suddenly became very unsettling. And what seemed like a just a fast walk through, had to translate or be transformed into a very involved engagement with what was being presented, because even though there are some of those narratives that were kind of alluded to, in the four different walls, that lied on, you know, on lay on each side of the doors, it was still, you know, not everything is there, the narratives or be only can be deciphered in between all of the fragments or all of the evidence that is being presented. So it takes time, it takes time. And it’s also it’s difficult material to look at. So it takes time and investment involvement. So it’s not really a reaction to or a can’t be a really a distracted view. One really has to immerse himself in the exhibition in order to kind of let it Yeah, to grasp its significance

Donald Mckay
and nailing it there. But I think there’s specific things architecturally that are actually worth talking about for a few moments. One of them is I have an established and perhaps even outsized interest in the problem of thresholds. I think we erect personal thresholds in our in the persona that we make in the world and it’s the same it’s this. Once again, the room is a kind of psyche, I suppose, but for a being with the psyche at its doors, but it It turns out the be anally was very hard to make a threshold into the room was, in fact, what happens are were that this that no one was treating poo in the spaces in that building as rooms even when they’re very distinct. And we were very lucky to find a small one that had two doors. It was great. It was like we were just, sometimes you just fall backwards into it, you got the right instincts, and it goes, it works. But it was the sense that you could be a threshold, or Vana who’s a really terrific gent and the curator of the exhibition, you know, we were with the disciplining that went into controlling the idea of making a threshold into these spaces so that there’s actually a momentary transition. That was a real struggle. And it became smaller and more minimal, but still a space because you stopped. And going through the doorway, you could actually turn 90 degrees and read the walls of that threshold, read the walls of the doorway, because that was in fact, the message. That was where the text was, was literally in the doorway. And then you walk into the room. And any text thereafter, was actually embedded in the plaster casts of the document. And there was no other explanation. There were no tags or anything. And that the other tags for this business came up, and several other iterations and instinctively museum directors and curators have understood that it’s not a good idea, that’s that that spoils this thing. But there’s also two artists that I would have to call up. And one would be Anselm Kiefer, who does not work in things that are pure white, but definitely works in this stuff. There’s actually probably three, but there’s andsome Kiefer and George Segal, who actually also did a holocaust monument, but seagulls sort of plastered full life things. I think, without being entirely aware of it. I think I was quite aware of them. And, of course, then there’s, oh, my God. And he’s going to do this. Well,

Anne Bordeleau
Rachel, white rates are

Vaissnavi Shukl
grabbed, she works with costs. And yeah.

Donald Mckay
And I know that wait, Rachel white read plays out an even more important role in envisioning this and it doesn’t mind. Kefir somehow in mind, except of course kefir. With kefir. It’s all about the texture and the tone and the color and degradation of surfaces and things. Kiefer likes rust, I like Ross too, but I didn’t want that there. We didn’t want that there. But those were all things and the problem of understanding that you can’t really have a room until you have a threshold into the room. It’s not like you don’t pass through an almost invisible membrane, you pass through an introductory space, which is not subordinate. It is actually the space where you can make some sense, you know, put aside your umbrella, wipe your feet, take off your hat and enter or reverse that process. You’ve gone from inside to outside. And I think there was a very much an inside outside thing, which is how, in the end, I’m very happy that almost all the other exhibitors played into our hands. They were not making rooms, so there were no people, we’re not going from one inside to another inside. What was happening on the exhibits on either side of us was they were definitely outside. They did not claim the space in one sense, because one of them was just so over ambitious and elaborate and crazy, that you kind of have this is all about objects. And in every case, they put things in the middle of the room so that the audience could never stand in the middle of the room, the evidence room, you are present in the room, you are not like when some of these artifacts were exhibited in the CCA in an octagon space. Sure enough, you know that we were told no, no, we know exactly what to do. We do this with totally hands off. You can’t say anything we walked in. And sure enough, they had put the gas column right smack in the center of the space on the axis of two suites of rooms with all their lights and things and you kind of go, this is the most shameful thing in European history. And you’ve given it the honored place. And you realize that what happens is, I think the evidence I think that Three of us are actually more sophisticated than we understand. We did not honor these things, but we actually set them up and established them. I mean, the word monument in this case is of course, counterintuitive that these are not things one wants to have monumental eyes, but as opposed to, you know, equestrian statues of Confederate generals, which people do want monumental eyes, these are exactly the opposite. No one is ever going to find these things honored. What they are is representatives kind of ghosts

Vaissnavi Shukl
but it does end up becoming monuments in a way right. I mean, I think even though we talk about it,

Donald Mckay
absolutely. Because a monument is simply a built reminder, you know, that and that so that is the sense of there being what I like about monuments generally and of course, I especially like Santa TAFs, because cenotaphs Mark passing some people and places times without being that place where those people are that time. One of my favorite moments in France is to visit the Cenotaph for Camille CODEL, which is in the graveyard where her Her body was just dumped. No one knows where her bones are, they just know they’re in a box with hundreds of other bones of other people. But there’s a cenotaph, and it’s actually the best of the many, many, many Camille Claudel sites that I visited. You know, most of them are really vulgar or stupid. This one is simply a cenotaph, a monument, but not a monument to that spot, or that time or that person, but a reminder that they are somewhere else. So we did call them monuments. And I think that’s the right term. But in fact, in some sense, they operate as cenotaphs. And I think that it’s important to understand the typology a little bit.

Anne Bordeleau
Yeah, I think at one point, we’re also looking at them as, you know, partly like, relics, just, you know, there’s the dimension of this, but I think in relation to the monument, yeah, we did call them monuments. But there’s so much of the, of the, you know, the way in which even the exhibition presents itself, or the fact that it was one of those interests and extends like memorial to the perpetrators, like, there were so many paradoxes in terms of what was being presented, how it was being presented, that I think, you know, there’s their monuments are they’re in some ways, like anti, or they’re trying to just bypass what monumentality might means in terms of a it’s not really about elevating, it’s really about, it comes from the remainder, but I mean, even this column, which to me, the, ultimately, and this is something that I’m sure Robin talked about, in terms of in the trial, there was a notion that if there was no holes, they would there was no Holocaust, and what would that they were referring to the fact that this column, they could never prove the existence of this column, because, you know, the notion that the hole that would have gone through the roof of the underground crematoria was no longer visible. So the absence of a hole, right was something that we’re trying to, or proving the existence of this hole was partly what the reconstruction of the column was attempting to do. And in that, like, in trying to trying to bring materiality to something that was always avoided, is, you know, there all of these kind of apparent contradiction in how we were working through this, which is also why I thought that casting was such an amazing, medium or process to speak about this, you know, the presence of an absence, you know, the it’s like the positive and a negative light and darkness, the present and the past, but, and if, you know, Donna was talking about, yes, Rachel white read or someone like Giuseppe Benoni there’s also, you know, always, I always go back to the work of the archaeologists, I think, just that if you’re really who was working in Pompeii, and and he made like an astonishing discovery, because rather than trying to dig into the ground to look for things, you know, their presence, he just started becoming very attentive to what was not there. So, you know, using his ears, maybe rather than his eyes, he would just knock into the ground until, you know, it would feel like maybe there’s an echo and then just put a little hole, fill it with plaster. And then those are the cast that we can still see to this day in terms of the you know, what was the people who died in Chattanooga, they suspect it like that you would you would go in CNN, but this the ability to retrieve something that is now absent, so I think, yeah, it’s coming. bringing to mind the Cenotaph as Donald is saying is interesting because Is it’s, it’s a place that actually, in which the body is absent, as well. Right, Donald, if I remember they get as opposed to the mausoleum,

Anne Bordeleau
The steady body is absent, as well. Right, Donald, if I remember like, as opposed to the mausoleum,

Donald Mckay
ya know, the Senate tasks are fascinating because I’m sure that we you know, we have lots of them forever. I mean, I think Roman arches are a certain architectural version of the Arc de Triomphe, those things. But really, my strong impression of them is that they become a 19th century invention, which just exploded in significance after 1918. And you end up with very prominent architects like legends working on a Senate task, you know, that we will have this thing stand here in London to remind us of all those people who died in France. And I, so yeah, I, I think I would still have always called the monuments, I’m happy they recalled monuments, but the sort of sense that they are in many, many, many ways. The cenotaphs are important, the typology is complex. And I think that that’s, that’s true. Certainly, over and over again, as you know, I have conversations with with Americans who will, Canadians are tearing their hair out about their own collective guilt about the indigenous people of Canada, Americans are tearing their hair out about, well, not enough of them, frankly, about, you know, the guilt of three centuries of slavery. What’s very impressive in Washington is that you can go to the Holocaust Museum and hear all about the millions in the millions of people murdered in Europe. There’s no American Holocaust Museum for the millions of African Americans who drowned on the journey or were tortured to death or lived their lives, you know, worked to death, and and then lived in centuries afterwards in states of humiliation and you think, god damn, like, it’s alright to have these reminders. So I like the evidence room, because it’s a reminder, not of how noble The victims were. They were victims, or they were neither noble nor ennobling. It was awful. They were not even in some sense, martyrs, they were simply murder victims of the worst soul. But to sit there and say, we’re going to remind you that this was a deliberate, almost aesthetic practice, this was an act of purifying a place. And in the same sense that, you know, each of us lives in countries where there are over and over again, these people who say, we are going to purify our, our food, our race, our nation, our city, our color. And say that, you know, that’s what I find impressive about the evidence room, in the end is to say, this murder was in their mind a work of art. And we have to understand that Fascism is inevitable and it’s that isolation of politics. So when a young man appeared, apparently, I was not there and was so dismayed at how apparently beautiful he thought the room was. And one of my younger, very bright colleagues was left to defend it. The only thing I would have said to him now is, of course it is and have you ever looked at an SS uniform? It’s the height. With tailoring. It’s like, you cannot look, we were researching years before on the problem of Auschwitz with Robert where we were working through what eventually became the material, which was the treaty for its preservation. We had hundreds of photographs of people being loaded onto trains and taken off trains and wind up. And you could not see those people until you put your thumb over the picture of the SS officers. They were so glorious, they looked so good in those uniforms. And you think Fascism is this association. And so to actually say, we’re going to take your stuff, we’re going to treat it as the commonplace horror that is a beaten up door, a workout iron shaft, a made up hatch piece of carpentry. And we are going to in some sense, assess it for another reason. I mean, there’s a lot of architecture being practiced in that room very quietly. And I think it’s important for us to feel proud of having been architects of this problem, not simply people who walked in and said, Well, here’s the stuff. Here’s the evidence you judge, but to actually say sorry, we’ve formulated this so you now have done liberal we are about how you see this.

Vaissnavi Shukl
But I’ve been trying to gather my thoughts about everything you’ve been saying. And something that, fundamentally is very profound and surprising is, is the nomenclature itself, right, just calling it the evidence through implies that there has been a crime that has been committed or an alleged crime. And the fact that the whole room emerged as a result of a court case with somebody who was a Holocaust denier, kind of just dies everything and puts everything in such an interesting context. And I’m, I’m trying not to use the word interesting a lot, because I was watching the series on Netflix, and it says interesting is a non-word. So I’m going to try to rephrase the way the evidence room comes across is, of course, a monument but also a piece of history that stands today in a completely different context away from the time when it actually happened as a reminder of what had happened. But if we go beyond, you’re not talking about Holocaust scene 2016, and maybe take a step forward towards even looking at it as an art installation. And that’s where, you know, the question of narrative and interpretation comes in is the choice of color. And that’s, that’s something that I’ve, I’ve I’ve thought about, you know, even even after we spoke, the first time when we were looking at your work is the tactile qualities of putting together this room, maybe not, as an architectural space, per se, is we talk about the threshold, and we talk about how everything that is supposed to be seen is put on the periphery leaving the center open, something that’s very dominant, and imposing, which color white usually isn’t, is the choice of the color. And I was thinking about it more in terms of how poetic the places are because the color is set to well aim to homogenize everything that exists within the room. So the matrix or the gas column or the chamber, and one way that I really interpreted the choice of color, and we’ll talk about, you know, the identity of the designer, and how that plays in is in Hindu culture in India, where I’m from, and I believe a lot of other South Asian cultures, maybe even in Buddhism, when there’s a there’s a debt. So when you take a body for cremation, or when you have the mourning period, or the grieving period, and you have a candle and smear, everybody dresses in white, that’s very different from, say, the Western culture where white is a color of celebration, right? So you people generally like brides who wear white during the wedding. And in the Western culture, black is a color for grieving departed souls, the way I was reading White was as a color that somehow tried to kind of slow down time, pause the time if you were to say, or even bring in the element of peace. I mean, just universally White is a color that stands for peace. I was curious, however, how or why you would not have chosen any other color. Again, if we’re talking about grief, and really looking at all the horrific activities that happened talking about millions and millions of people who’ve died. If, if the idea was to memorialize not well, not on the perpetrator side, but the victim side, the memory of the Murdered Jews does. But if Black was a color that would have gone more in that direction, versus white, I’m just very curious about how at this point, you know, the role of the architect or the artists plays in in terms of making something open for interpretation, or how completely the same things had been painted in red if we were to symbolize violence or anger, or what that would have done to somebody’s experience of the space. And then of course, at the end of the day, you always wonder, how does the identity of the designer play and you know, what is our background as people who’ve had a certain kind of education who’ve been born and raised in places where we’ve not experienced this kind of crimes or this kind of violence? How do we stand as a conduit to bring a certain idea to life so that everybody who walks through the space has a certain reading of it, and I know you guys when you when you were designing when we spoke initially you said well, you could just walk past it and not be affected at all, or you could spend hours in the space, you know, going through each and every cost and have had a very visceral reaction to the whole thing. A lot of stuff Sorry, I just turned off. But I’m constantly thinking about this. I

Anne Bordeleau
I wonder if I can just start with Donald, I mean, of course, if I can say, I’ll start with something that, you know, came before I even joined the project, which was why I got invited to participate, which was the selection of the cast. So I think the whitest extent comes from, or is related, of course, we could have done something to the plaster or to you know, what we’re pouring to add pigment if we had wanted to, but I think there was. So the fact that we’re using plaster or actually hydrocotyle, to be very specific, which has a bit of cement in it, but and those cast would be white, maybe is one reason, but I think I, you know, in everything that you say, and maybe even going back to what Donald was referring to in terms of the aestheticization that was, you know, another answer that we can remember that time when this person was saying, Why did you make it so kind of beautiful, you know, like, why like, and, you know, really troubled by, especially, because that’s someone that kind of appreciated the room until they sort of realized what they were looking at. And an eye there, I think there are many answers. I, you know, one of them has to do yes, with the material that was being used in terms of the exhibits or the cast. And that being white, I think, I think casting was, you know, so there’s, it’s not just a color, there’s a materiality, it’s inherent to the material that was used. And it’s a kind of cold, heavy, you know, sort of sobering, you know, sort of, yeah, mute and somewhat to use of pure like, and, and so I think, in a way, also sort of ghostly, like the plaster video only carries sort of a trace of, of a contact and, you know, refers to its dual and temporality. So I think that the fact that it was casting played a big role, certainly in relation to the exhibits, and then the decision to carry this to the mute monument, I think, was also a way of saying, This is not a copy, you know, like, this is this stand as they are. And you’re confronted with a presence. And, and it’s both trying to bring what was being presented closer, because there were elements of the past that you’re trying to, you know, you’re co present with in the room. But I think the White also enables us a certain distance. That was also a very important, you know, I keep referring to, you know, there’s a text that I always show to my students in a slightly different context, but it’s Georgia again, then talking about being like, what is the contemporary, you know, the any saying that in order to be true contemporaries. It’s not those, like those who are too close to their own time, who cannot really sort of establish a distance with it. They’re not true contemporary, they just kind of stuck with it. And he’s talking about the importance of this anachronism, or this, you know, being slightly out of phase. And I think the White enables a bit of that distance. That then lets you look, I even when you talk, I’m thinking of a number of the images that we have from the atrocities that were perpetrated in Auschwitz night and fog. Allah harness film is one of those and even if it’s a black and white film, like it’s, it’s so horrifying, it’s hard to watch. And I think and I think the white it in a way, you could challenge the decision because it seems to make it more, you know, mute and more acceptable. But I think in in, in bringing it to this sort of, apparently neutral and possibly sanitized, you know, like Beatrice eliminates looking at the history of modern architectures, there was this whole effort to sort of sanitize it, we’re not trying to really sanitize that history, make it like, Look harder or easier to just sort of look at, but to notice that to some extent by establishing that distance, and yes, giving it a more well, not so much aggressive but this violent, violently shocking look, then it opens the opportunity to actually really engage with it. And look at it for better or for worse. I think that’s another answer.

Vaissnavi Shukl
The only argument because the only reason why I want to talk about the color is white is generally I’m not saying Beatrice Colombina was right but as it’s associated with a certain like preciousness, you know it’s supposed to be immaculate. It’s supposed to be impeccable. But also knowing that in today’s day and age, we do have the means to change the color of certain stuff. And while there’s inherent color in the materiality of it, and Donald mentioned earlier, there was wherever Renzo Piano or Norman Foster, building a hot pink room out there, I guess when you put it in the context of being contemporary and bringing in the element of anachronism that that makes sense, because it means that I don’t know a certain factor of timelessness to the whole thing, just because of the choice of color and that it kind of makes it more universal or more timeless. I don’t know if that’s what you guys intended?

Donald Mckay
Well, let, I’m gonna slip. Everything I said is sound. There’s two things that I really have to talk about here, though. And the first would simply be coincidence. And that is the thing to understand if you live in the domain of psychoanalysis I seem to live in. i You have a lot of faith in coincidence, because you understand that coincidence is not the coordination of events that the outside world is putting together. It’s the coordination you’re putting your mind that you have in your mind that puts them together. So in some sense, you’d say the white is at least in part prom, the product of coincidence, okay, like you say, plaster. What is the most authentic color for a plaster kind of white or creamy white is it ages until you spend your time with Rodin’s plasters or Kameoka model’s plasters. Do you realize, oh, they age. That’s very interesting. And then we fit well, ours will age. One of the things just to remark on inside this is to say I’ve been in that room when I have walked. I watched two young remarkably stylish women, and they came in and they were entirely fascinated with it. But they ran their hands over every surface. It was as if they needed the Braille. And I was thinking when we installed them in Washington, there were art restores, removing all the evidence of those fingers from earlier exhibits. And I’m not sure you should be doing that. I think these things should get progressively a little grubbier. The same sets that you know the road damn plasters are now you know, various stages of brown and cream and whatever. But the first thing is to simply say white begins as an act of coincidence. The odd thing about the matrix is that it was powder coated in a factory, which had been previously powder coating material for the new Guggenheim in knowing that the new Whitney in New York, and the white that they’re using was referred to as Whitney white, which is the white that Renzo Piano had chosen. So we thought that’s funny. That’s great. So we had Whitney white throughout everything. There’s a kind of like, okay, that was fun. Those go together. And it went on with that, that the notion that white represents purity is to say, haven’t you read Moby Dick, please? The trick and Moby Dick because you don’t know whether the whale is in the end, the great force of nature that overwhelms these murderous sailors are the embodiment of all natural evil, it just it is. And that brings me to the second question, which is to say, it ain’t all explicable. There are blind spots inside it. And just as there are blind spots in our vision, we live with blind spots, the notion that it should all explain itself, it’s a bit like believing in Chekhov’s gun. I don’t believe in Chekhov’s Gun, there can be a gun in the second act, and it can never be used, you know, and the notion that sitting say, what is the white mean, you say, the white is here in part out of coincidence part because it’s a kind of an interesting default. And in part because it does not always represent purity. If you’re Chinese, it is definitely the color of funerals as well. If you’re Melville it is definitely a question. What is this great white whale about it? So it’s, it’s in some sense, it’s a blind spot, not necessarily open to interpretation at all. And I think that’s just as important to say, I can experience this without actually aggressively saying this is what it means, because every time we interpret it, we diminish the experience. and sometimes you just think I want to be in this room and just feel it. And which is why I think the young woman running her hand over everything was really interesting because she was not running her hand over. This means this, and this was that, and that’s how that story goes, she was actually in some sense, committing it to her body when she did that. And people did that again, and again, they and we made it clear people could touch this, you know, these things. And that is to say, when you unless you are reading him Braille, when you run your hands upon it, you’re not sitting there saying, This is what it means you are, this is how it feels. I think that’s really crucial, because this whole sort of thing that you kind of go, the exhibition is not a 19th century novel. You know, the hero does not come out in the end, the villain is not bad looking. It’s like, it’s, it’s way more complicated now. And I think the sense that there’s a blind spot where you just don’t quite know, it’s okay. That it’s that it’s a good thing, that the notion is all it’s one of the problems with teaching. And one of the problems with architecture is I have to explain this. You see, how I do why, how about, we actually just take it in?

Anne Bordeleau
I mean, I think, Donald I, yeah, go ahead. No, I was just gonna say like, I, I like, I mean, I like your answer. I also say, like, another way around this is to say, you know, like, we don’t need to don’t, you don’t need to explain it. But I think, to some extent, another approach is also to say, like their 1520, you know, there are multiple ways in which you can start to interpret it, like in what you said, in terms like this is just about you have to experience it, which was, you know, the absence of caption or that just try to go in without the kind of external explanation and interpretation. But I would also, I’ll just add three, you know, potential answers, just because, you know, if they’re 25 answers, they might as well be none. And it might as well be a mystery. But I would say that for us in terms of working with plaster, even though, you know, Whitney white, in you should have seen, like, I think the image, quite vivid image that I have is the touching up of, you know, like, with tiny little paint brushes, touching up to Yeah, touching up this weight. And I think the White was really a color of care. And, and I think it’s not so much to sanitize, but I think preserving, I remember, like when we’re doing the cast, and we were trying to make sure that they would come out, as well as they could and don’t really get much residue, or we have to be really mindful around them. And at least until they would be on the wall, it was really a way of honoring, you know, honoring the memory and honoring, respecting the material, trying to be as truthful. And you know, being as mindful as we could be in how we are treated, you know, this evidence that in the end to us are important. I mean, I would also say, for me like this, this notion of the white is really like, which seems like a bit of an eraser. Right, it says do like, hit it. But I think that’s all going back to the paradoxes that we’re talking about in terms of the absence, you know, we’re proving the existence of a hole. And then, and I think, finally, I just found it, you know, if there’s something that did go back to the, you know, the origins of some of the mythical origins of architecture, or drawing a line, where it, I think it was quite phenomenal that in a lot of the readings, that the only, you know, it’s sort of written white on white, and it’s really the light that is cast and as the shadow that enables you to actually make out what the image is saying, and that sometimes it disappears, which I think was really important as well, that they weren’t just that easy to read that you have to move around and try to

Donald Mckay
move around.

Vaissnavi Shukl
pick up on something that Donald say on this, this is actually one of the questions that I had thought about about, you know, Donald, and you mentioned, the young, stylish women walking through it and you know, running their hands across the whole thing to kind of internalize the whole thing I’ve ever been to one when it’s been like this was 2014 When Ram kulas was the curator with the elements of architecture exhibition. And I know for a fact that an exhibition like the vnla is accompanied by swift glances of the audience with a need for instant gratification from the pavilions and I was pretty young. I mean, I was still on exchange in my undergraduate program. So my understanding of the things that were exhibited in the pavilion was quite limited, to be honest. But I did. I was one of those swift walkers across the exhibition. And the evidence room in a way contradicts the conventional expectations from an installation. So one can choose to engage, immerse and interpret. But one also has the option of walking by without reflecting or reacting at all. And, in fact, something that answered during our initial conversation, she just said it was a code by historian Paula Wong Lee has said that it’s not a place for showing but a means for knowing almost all the indicators that the evidence through, for example, would never belong to an art gallery. But it could belong in a museum. And I think it did. This is a kind of provocative question. But given the whole story behind the evidence room, and the way it did turn out, and all the places that it’s adapted itself to, you think there’s ever a time when it’ll surpass its meaning or semantics and the symbolism that it has right now and find itself in an art gallery, or you think that’s completely off the table?

Donald Mckay
It found itself in an art gallery, it’s already there. In Washington, it’s an art gallery. It really has no, we’re sitting between a pair of Giacometti’s and the bacon painting. No, it’s an art gallery. And I have to say, I think I think I may have taken a photograph of the thing and related it with Giacometti’s and just sent it to my daughter saying, God, we finally made it where there was gonna be, you know, would you be for me? No, no, it is. And the fact is that Raum, the director of the ROM, who’s a very interesting guy, was titillated by the tension involved in this question. When it came time for the project to be evaluated financially, which we had to, and I’m sorry, if there’s banging in the background, they’re renovating upstairs, and I cannot stop them anymore. Okay, my bad temper, but it wasn’t me it was evaluated. The evaluator, who’s a very wise young, not young, highest middle aged guy who’s been around a lot of this stuff came out and said, The trick with this thing, and the thing that actually makes it so valuable is it’s not like anything else. Said it’s got both of these traditions, and it does all of these kinds of things. We can’t call it an art installation, we can’t call it a piece of architecture, it’s not a sculpture, it is this combination of things. That’s what makes it unique. And to my mind, what makes it valuable. And he was talking about, how do I translate the cultural value of this into a market value, because someone’s now about to put some money into it. And that was interesting, because up until then, we had no we never put we never imagined who has money in it, it costs a lot to make. It was never like there was never a sense of like, oh, gosh, this is we had, we were faced with the fact we didn’t have the money to ship it home, we are going to have to very subtly dump it into the canal. You know, it’s a, it has value as an artifact, and it’s not going to shed that value, it may because of COVID. And because COVID has so discouraged the foundation. And because the foundation is really hanging on the favor zone, more of just one or two people. It may have a very dark period for 20 years, but it ain’t gonna go away. It’s going to come up again, and the manuals and the films and all this stuff explaining how it goes and what it works, we’ll all be there. And it will get reconstructed. I spend enorm, inordinate amount of time right now, uncovering stuff that is apparently lost, partly because I’ve become among other things a publisher, which is very tricky. But we’re publishing some stuff from you know, it was lost in the 60s and you dig it all up, go, this has to come out. And you know, it exists, you cannot deny it, you can’t escape it, it sits there in history, somebody will find it in 50 years, if it goes into a warehouse and is closed up, it will still not be lost. So it will endure. And that and that seems fine.

Anne Bordeleau
I mean, it’s true. It was very interesting to think about, I mean, even when it was being prepared to be presented at the vnla. This is also when we had an invitation to present part of it at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, so to slightly different venues and then at the Royal Ontario Museum, much more sort of rather more general public, and in a very interesting area of the museum, and then at the Hirshhorn Museum. And I think what, to me what was very interesting is, of course, like, these all become context within which the exhibition of the room is being inserted and then read, and it’s then becomes, you know, it’s sort of, it’s interpreted in relationship to itself and the story that it presents, but also in relation to what one might expect from coming, you know, the shift the different audiences and what they might know and what they might be looking for. I thought it was. And, you know, I don’t really have a clear point here, except to say that, every time I was really stung by them, in every venue, I think there was always an urge to try to explain. And I think a lot of the places that we’ve gone to, curators, or the people that were responsible for the exhibition were uncomfortable with this, the fact that it was just given. And I think there were two sides to this one was just also saying that, actually, some of the people that would come don’t even know what the Holocaust is, and, you know, they really felt they had a duty to at least give some ground or some, you know, lessons or some reminders and contacts in that sense. So that was one, but I think there was also the other one, which is maybe more reflective of how contemporary society needs to kind of grasp things or try to explain, you know, explain and be able to understand as though things can be fully comprehended. And, and, and try to give as much detail. So even some of the questions that I think Donald is refusing rightly so to sort of answer is like, well, there’s no interpretation, you know, yeah, it is what it is. And you make of it, what you can, you know, see in it, although there’s a lot of really clear intentions, there are other things that just come from it being right, and it being in different circumstances. But to me, that was very, yeah, it’s, it brings up a lot of additional questions as to what we are willing to engage with, you know, the kind of inexplicable, the inexcusable, the horrifying, the the incomplete, the things that get buried and maybe forgotten, like, I don’t know, like, I think that, to me, is the real urgency and, you know, helping ourselves deal with those elements of our past. And yes, Donald was talking about them, you know, the past in the United States, but similarly, in Canada now, and you don’t you’re, you’re talking to us, and if again, say on the the day after the first national day for truth and reconciliation, where there’s a lot of horrifying. Yeah, you know, there’s a genocide in Canada’s past. And so how is it that we can both honor that truth and also build ways in which we can engage and acknowledge and either forgive? Or, you know, reconciled and to use a term that is being put forward? But yeah, and accept that it won’t ever be fully understood? And we will never be on Earth? Yeah, but yeah. Oh,

Donald Mckay
Have I come back here? Because I think I, and it’s, and it’s explaining or not just as discussing this well, she’s not explaining is a couple of things that I might preface it with. And one is to say, and we should that the Royal Ontario Museum broke its back to put this in context, that it was they in retrospect, we had substantial committees of voluntary, you know, like, people involved in the community in various ways and things and we went through everything, and we expanded the exhibit. And they saw this exhibit in time and space. And so, in fact, it was the creation of a room where people who might be badly affected by the experience of the thing could go to relax and sit back and calm down. Everything was going on, it was actually very subtle and quite remarkable. And in retrospect, I, at the time, I thought, well, there’s a lot of work, we’ll do this, and this is great and terrific. So I get very pragmatic. In retrospect, you get, I realized, how very professional, how incredible they were about actually facing the fact that the context of this thing in a city like Toronto, where more than half of the people in Toronto come from outside of Canada. So it’s like, and that’s primarily the audience, the Royal Ontario Museum or Torontonians. So it really is said, we have to, we have to fill up this whole context. This is, you know, this is an event here. And I think I think that’s, that’s actually a sort of crucial part of the thing that there is a kind of context and it contributes to it. I think the other thing, which is interesting, and it was hard for me to escape it and work with it. And it’s a distinction that I make between ourselves, and the identities that are imposed on it, and refer to and I did refer to, for instance, the current Canadian conscience examination relationship to the nation’s indigenous people. And you think it these things cut 73 different ways. Joseph Brant, one of the most celebrated Indian chiefs and in Canada, had 40, black slaves, these are not easy questions to go looking at. So, but the thing that’s interesting about it is that I think one of the things I liked about the room was that it resisted identity in favor of a kind of self examination. And I think, time we come up against identity, even in the best of intentions, the best moments, we have to understand it as a commodification of our very complex selves, you know, the incredible redactions so that they go into a political or a cultural or an economic marketplace. And one of the things that I really enjoyed about the room and about the people working on everything else is that no one involved in anything ever became preoccupied with an identity. And, and we didn’t present it as a question of an identity, we presented it, in terms of a lot of people this happened to, and I think that’s one of the other important parts we exist and well worth the balance of my life, probably in the domain where the politics of identity are going to be crucial in the marketplace, in political life, cultural life. And I’m a self confessed old white guy, you know. And of all the people I work with aren’t, you know, they’re they’re everywhere, everything else, but what I am, and we laugh about it all the time. But we also all understand, and we’re working on books, we’re making movies, we’re publishing books, right now. There’s a, there’s quite a posse of us at this point. We are trying to figure out how to address what we see as the positive aspects of this question of identity. Without surrendering the much more soulful questions that we all carry around as individuals, and in some weird way the evidence room was able to skirt this dreadful question of identity. to a certain extent, I think it was very important that it did. So

Vaissnavi Shukl
I think this is the perfect transition into my last question, and of course, the Holocaust happened that gets earlier but we’re also as you mentioned, living in a time and age where I A violence and acts of crime continued to be perpetrated in different forms in different geographies by people with different identities. I’m curious if you’ve thought about any, I don’t want to use the word contemporary. But any iterations of the evidence room that reflect upon the well, maybe genocides happening today in different parts of the world, or if the evidence room has the potential, I guess it already has become one, a template or a medium or, or a form to really be a space where different events or different kinds of wild senses have space to be out there for people to experience? I don’t know if I’m trying to find the right words, but I know you get it. My question is what’s next for the evidence room? Does it take a new life, one that is more rooted in the time we’re living in? One that rethinks the space made one that evolves its existing space into something that captures everything? I mean, it’s a pretty weird time to be alive in if you even if you think of COVID and the number of deaths COVID has had it’s, of course, not a genocide, but it’s a mass.

Donald Mckay
You know, what, in the denial of it, it is a genocide. Right now, I would sit down, say that Trump Bolsonaro other politicians like that, who use it for political ends are frankly, fascist murderers. I don’t think we should back away from the politicization of something that has such incredible, immediate, profound consequences for hundreds of 1000s of people. No, it No, it goes on all the time. I am sorry, I’m going to talk for a moment and shut up. I think there are several problems. One is in the tempo of things. You, for instance, cannot make a university behave like a newspaper, a newspaper, the event happens and it immediately explodes and headlines. And the next day, the headlines correct the previous day. And the day after that was the longest story and it goes on journalism is about the immediate moment. The evidence room, in some sense comes out of an academic environment, the product, one man’s research for 30 years in a larger community, with a number of other people who will all come together in the shelter of the university, establish this institution within the university and make this thing and then take it out and present it to the world. That is not journalism. That’s something else entirely. It’s probably architecture. And we could have a conversation about architecture and literature. But I’m gonna leave Sartre at the door for now. I see what you did there. It’s way too big a question. But it is right now. I think there are hundreds of evidence rooms going on. I mean, sometimes they are immediate, sometimes they’re just a demonstration, sometimes their headline. Like I said, we’re publishing right now in the midst of publishing 14 books. Among them is a book which addresses the the maudlin laundries of Ireland, which were basically a class and gender genocide, cultural genocide that went on for hundreds of years, over women who did not behave like the church wanted them to behave, who might have had children out of wedlock or been promiscuous. We’re, I’m doing another one. I’m publishing and we’re publishing another one on the wall between Israel and Palestine. These books for me operate in some sense, the same way that the evidence room does. And there’s more and some of the other things republishing are, frankly, a little gentler, which is a good thing. But it is, no, it’s not the evidence that happens once because someone gave us a room and the time and we had this environment. And we could behave with this kind of thoughtfulness. So it’s opposed to the moment’s newspaper. And the Academy will never be journalism, it will never respond as fast because it has to respond much more thoughtfully. It has to respond to much greater depth. It has to consolidate its knowledge because it has greater responsibility. It’s not there to sell tomorrow’s newspaper. It’s there to try and evolve the true booth as it is verified. And that’s what evidence was about in that case. So is there the evidence removes the evidence room, and it will stand there and it will probably, at some point, seem quaint to someone. And that’s, that’s life that will happen. Other things will happen with there was a conversation that we had for a little while about, could we begin something on walls and as sort of having a fantasy that we actually could begin to erect a kind of colossal exhibition above four or five of the sort of traumatic walls in the world, including, for instance, the, the, you know, the fascinatingly imaginary Donald Trump wall of the southern end of, you know, the United States or the wall between Israel and Palestine, or several others, all of which have to do ultimately, with this most savage application of the idea of identity on people, right? You protect your Israeli identity, you protect your American identity, you protect your Palestinian identity. And it’s all to say, they’re very hurtful, they’re horrible. And we understand that they exist at the level of Regents, China, right now clearly has a whole region, which is walled. There are two big questions. And in fact, 1000s and 1000s of people are tackling them every day, we tackled one, which was, you know, one room one moment, one terrible long story, which in some sense, came to an end, but left a shadow that’s still there. So does it have an influence? It has an influence on all the people who worked on it, it has some influence on some people who stopped to study it, or helped to exhibit it. And

Vaissnavi Shukl
some people who interviewed people who designed and made it.

Donald Mckay
And, you know, in some sense, I would also say that the memory of the evidence room and the team, because it really was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. And I’ve had a lot of great times, demand of the AQa Academy in architecture and art. It was a great experience, and has, you know, managed to inspire me to just keep working through all sorts of other things and all sorts of ways. And I presume that that we’re I know, Robert is, I know, adds up to things. But no, the evidence room probably has the closure. And this is coming from a guy who right now is trying to make a movie, that would be a one 120 minute film loop. So you could come in any place in the movie, and follow. I hate beginnings and ends, frankly, I’m now having a tough time narrative thresholds.

Anne Bordeleau
But I think that’s interesting. I mean, I would say, I don’t think often about, you know, what’s next for the evidence room? Like, I mean, I was even, I think it was. So to me, one of some of the questions that really drew me is yes, I think the importance, also an architectural historian, and I am not engaged in history, just to preserve the past as past, but I really highly value the ways in which we can understand history now when you continue to keep it alive. So I’m always really interested in questions of, you know, how we move between times and how the, how we, you know, the, how we situate ourselves in our own times, and how that encompasses our understanding of past histories, etc. So, all of this to say, you know, there was one of I think, is one of the books that are around is a collection of different writings, it’s called between past and future. I wish that was only my way of introducing that book, which, again, is looking at time, but I think as part of this book, she’s talking about how these essays were prompted, and she calls them exercises in thinking. And I mean, I would say that, to a certain extent, the participation in the evidence provided a pretty meaningful opportunity to think, like through a number of really important questions. And so and then some of these questions remain to be, you know, like, there’ll be other exercises, and there are other exercises where we’re taking, you know, they’re, they’re questions that have to do with the specificity of what we’re looking at, but also broader questions that, you know, even what Donald is alluding to, between the identities and just sort of calmness and you know, our human souls. And I think those are really important questions. So I would say, I think, as a work and you know, in its material existence, I, you know, the evidence group is no longer for our, you know, the fate of the evidence service, I don’t think no longer mine to determine in order to think it lives, or maybe it won’t, but I think that’s it for someone else to figure out, but I think what I really see in terms of some of the lessons both as a thinking exercise, but going back and alluding to what, again, Donald is just mentioning as the the way in which we tackled, that exercise was so incredibly meaningful, like the fact that it was part of Yes, Robert yawns research, Donald and everything they could bring in, but also, you know, Sasha Hastings, who was a participant in this as an arts producer, Bruce Kuwabara, who is a true fundamental believer and the project but and all of the students and, you know, Piper Birnbaum, Anna Besnard, Cova, Alex Ville kuleana along ring Shelburne, all men like Brad paddock. And there’s more and, you know, Carol Kaye fosh, like, I could go on to like, the way in which we came together as different individuals working on this project, and in a reading and all of the questions that you asked him today were questions that we’re asking ourselves in the process and for which we have maybe different answers or no answers, but I think I learned a lot from this process and the act of questioning and working through as architects in a way as designers as but also as thinkers, and as people who care for Yeah, like sharing some of that work and then seeing where it goes next. But I think that’s yeah, that’s what I would say I don’t know about the work itself, but in terms of the process that we collectively you know, undertook and defined together to me that was very meaningful and something that I could see putting at work again whether in the school outside I don’t know but yeah, I would say that was that was the main significance of that work for me

Vaissnavi Shukl
That’s beautiful. No, but I’m so glad to have come across your work and especially want to thank Robert because I reached out to him and he’s like where you don’t want you should speak to and and dawn on them so glad I did. Thank you. Thank you so much. And and Donna for your time,

Anne Bordeleau
You’re always welcome for a visit. Thank you so much Vaissnavi.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.