Marywood University’s New Degree in Virtual Architecture

A Welcome to Practice Disrupted, a podcast where we find ways to create new solutions to current challenges while elevating the value of architects. I'm your host, Evelyn Lee, an architect who spans tech as an angel investor, startup advisor, and founder of Practice of Architecture. Whether you're a seasoned architect or just starting in the field, this podcast is your gateway to think differently about the role architects play within our global community. Hello disruptors. Welcome to this week's episode of Practice Disrupted. Today we're exploring the future of architectural education and practice with someone who's pushing the boundaries literally and virtually. Meet Skav or Ryan Skavnicki, assistant professor at Marywood University and the visionary behind the first of its kind. Bachelor's in Virtual Virtual Architecture.

A Dubbed the Godfather of Architecture Memes by Architectural Digests, Scav is a designer, educator, and storyteller who moves between Twitch streams, TikToks, and academic theory with ease. He's worked at international firms like Koop, Himmeblau, and Todd at Cyark, Taliesin, and Kent State. But what sets him apart is his relentless pursuit of redefining how we experience and create architecture in digital space. From video games and immersive environments to new pedagogical models, he's asking big questions about what it means to practice architecture in a hybrid, interconnected world. Today, we'll talk about how Merriwood's new BVA program is reimagining architecture education, why spatial experiences extend beyond physical walls, and how architects can reclaim authorship over virtual environments. Whether you're curious about design in the metaverse or simply wondering what comes after Revit, this episode is one you won't want to miss. Stick with us as we plug into a new dimension of practice. Hi scap.

A Welcome to the show. So excited to have you on Practice Disrupted. Thank you for joining us today.

B Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here and excited to talk to you today.

A I'm really interested in, of course, diving into this new degree program in virtual architecture. But before we do, and we just ran through your bio, is there anything else, any other interesting stories or things that you can't find in your bio that would be great to hear to maybe kick off this episode? Sure.

B I have a funny story. Well, I think it's interesting that I grew up in Cleveland in the suburbs in Ohio, and there's a lot of people who are sort of from there who go on and move away and do fun things. So shout out to all my Ohio people. But when I was growing up, I was like, I took tap Dance lessons. And I was allowed to play my Game Boy on the drive to tap dance and home from tap dance. And I famously brought my Game Boy but forgot my tap shoes and had to rent or wear some loaner tap shoes. And ever since then I think I was like three or four. I was very young.

B Ever since then I've been really interested in the way immersive spaces kind of capture our attention and take us out of the world for something else.

A That's an interesting introduction. Then I think directly into virtual architecture. Obviously for you that was not a choice when you were going to school and picking an educational program. So can you tell us a little bit about your own career journey in architecture and design and then maybe how you found your way back to that three year old who is immersed in his Game Boy driving to his top lessons?

B Sure. I did a four year B ARC at the University of Cincinnati and then I did my master's at the University of Cincinnati as well. And I did a lot of co op there, strong co op program. So I got to go and study in France at Le Cole Speciale d' Architecture. I worked at Kupemmelblau, I went to Beijing, did all sorts of incredible travel and work experiences. And so I had a lot of experience in the field as a designer and as an architect. And I graduated and finished my master's and I was sort of working and thinking, well, do I, do I go get my license? And I really felt like I wasn't where I wanted to be as far as producing design work. And so this degree popped up at SCI ARC called Master's in Design Theory and Pedagogy.

B And I was like, what in the world is that? So I had always felt very drawn to sciarc, but something kept me from going for my master's. I don't know what, but eventually I was like, all right, you can't keep ignoring this place. You got to go figure out what, what it is about that place that you find so alluring and special. And so I went there for an amazing year and met all sorts of incredible people and then sort of fell into the idea of bringing my ideas into an academic practice. And that's been something that I'm very happy to keep working on. And so that's kind of where my journey began, as well as all the kind of appointments and stuff I've been doing since then.

A I'd still like to understand. Of course, I think you've. When you say appointments and your journey becomes like a much more academic perspective. I Guess after that. Right. And Cyrex, a very digital school, even in theory and pedagogy. So has it always been a digital immersive experience for you, or is that something that has continued to evolve over time?

B I see. So I think a good explanation would be maybe like, I've always been interested in like digital, virtual and media and I was doing memes and, you know, stuff like that. But I think it was 2020, when everybody was having Zoom meetings, that architecture as a practice I think really failed. I think we had a huge opportunity to create online spaces for people to be. And I really was shocked, and maybe not shocked, but surprised at just how. How unequipped it seemed like we were to just produce nice places for people to hang out in that were virtual. And there were a lot of schools that promised or created different online platforms or spaces for their students to hang out in. And some were successful, but a lot of them were sort of promised and never delivered.

B And that really had me thinking, especially when some of these very high profile firms, it got projects in the Metaverse or through video game companies. And I began getting on Twitch and broadcasting myself, kind of experiencing some of these spaces and saying, these aren't even that good. And that was really shocking where there was a famous tweet that was sent out about like, we're not having Zoom meetings. We're going to meet in Red Dead Redemption and Howl at the Moon. And that was a very real thing. They literally had to be doing that because. And so I had my students descripts we weren't meeting in Zoom anymore. We would meet in this virtual program called Sansar, where we would jump around their rhino models at the scale of broccoli or at the scale of a turtle.

B And it became way more immersive and interesting. And so that kind of prompted my journey into very loudly declaring architecture and video games having this moment where we need to really start thinking about them as a much more complex practice than just a video game. Is this thing that you go into, you play and then you go out into the world? No, there's a tying together of these worlds and it is just as much about the space you play games in than the space that they create for you and how that operates in your life.

A If it's not architects or architecturally trained individuals designing the video games now, where do those individuals usually stem from or come from these days?

B So what, what happened was there, every school in the world wanted to create a game design degree because every kid wanted to go into video games somehow and so there was this huge rush to just make game design programs. And nobody really knew how to teach game design because nobody had a degree in game design who was making games. They were just famously the creator of the Sims, Will Wright is an architecture school dropout. This would happen all over the place. So in order to create education, they started to borrow and typically the game design. And there's a fantastic chapter in an upcoming book of mine by Christopher Totten, who writes about game design pedagogy. He has a master's in architecture and now he leads the game design program at Kentucky. And the game design schools are either housed within the College of Engineering, the College of the Arts, and they either get trained to like simulate fur or like draw a character's backstory, you know, and it's really architecture that can be that level of degree or level of knowledge that can embody the kinds of cultural depth and or you know, engineering and execution that game design really needs.

B So sorry to answer the question though. Like anybody in these, These modeling or 3D modeling or game design studios who are just typically just copying stuff that they find on the Internet, you know, searching the Internet for cool building brutalism or you know, searching for cool idea house, madman lair, you know, and just copying from stuff they see. Which is why we see this fantastic influence of architecture, paper architecture, unbuilt architecture like that infiltrates game design and gets put out there and built in a way and it never gets recognized or even understood by the architecture community. These things had a potency that's now changed or different from what they might have thought it was. And it's important for us to recognize and nurture that, not sort of turn our backs on it or say they're just bad copies. It's really being built in a totally different sense.

A Disney has these wonderful behind the scenes series where you can like go behind the Mandalorian for instance, and game design is now infiltrating movies and sets. And you know, it's no, actually it's no longer actors acting against green screens, for instance, but they actually get to act against a virtual environment. So it's interesting to see how that has continued to evolve and how it then becomes like an intersection between a real actor that is being filmed, but also literally the background that the immersive background that the actor is a part of is also. It's like a film of a film.

B Yeah. And there are host of sci art graduates who go into the film. You know, everything is NDA. So I can't, you know, mention Too much. But they've all, you know, they all share with me how their architecture training or their, you know, just modeling skills and help. Because what people understand as virtual. When I talk about virtual architecture, everyone's also always thinking about just like this spaceless medium of totally untethered possibilities. But the apparatus to make these things happen is itself an architecture at the scale of a room, at the scale of your computer, at the scale of your.

B Your domestic safe basement. That is an extension of virtual space in that sense. And the apparatus, therefore, is also an architectural element. And that's really important to me to understand because I think I'm old enough now to where, like, I've been promised my entire life the ability to be able to, like, plug in and disappear and zoom away. And I'm so sick of not being able to do that. It's clearly not happening. You know, like, every product is like, plug in, you know, but it's not. It's when those things totally fail and crash and tear apart that I just love the sort of physical, virtual difference and just learning from it and being in the mess, it's really wonderful.

B So I think that's all a part of what we might understand as virtual architecture.

A And then if you think about augmented reality, for me, there's an interesting series like, of history. So I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The town has become a little bit more touristy ever since Oppenheim came up. But, like, to be able to even put on glasses and kind of see how the town has changed over time, like, from its historic beginning to where it is now as a leading laboratory, notoriously known for ensuring that our stockpile of nuclear weapons is safe for all intents and purposes. I mean, I see, like, yes, I feel like people are like, oh, it's just like, you don't want to live in this virtual world. But I see there's, like, there's applications for overlay that actually can tell you the history of what you're looking at within the physical realm as well.

B Yeah, for sure. And I think that there are also all sorts of projected realities that I think it can help guide. You know, they're also, like, accessible forms of architecture. And I think that's a really important aspect to them as well, is that any kind of mapped or virtual overlay, mixed reality spaces can also start to create new forms of access to just information, to space, to spatial experiences that people aren't able to get maybe in the physical environment that they live in. And so you're. You have all Sorts of realities opening up that aren't so different. I think that's the thing that. That gets me too, is people assuming experiences are very different because you.

B You're having them kind of in a. In a virtual way or whatever. But if they're good enough or if they're, you know, really important, they're just another type of experience.

A So I think we've done a good job inadvertently kind of laying the groundwork of all the things that can come out of a virtual architecture degree, and we'll continue to have that conversation. This type of conversation is very. It's not unique, but I feel like it's very psycharchy in a way, in terms of. You would think that two Sciarch grads would be talking about these things, but this degree program is happening at Merriwood University, which not a lot of people have heard about, even from an architecture school perspective. Tell us a little bit about Merriwood.

B Yeah, I'd love to. So Merriwood is a really exciting place. And I'm saying this because it's true. It is the largest architecture program in Pennsylvania in terms of graduating licensable individuals. So it's a very young program, but it is a professional bachelor's degree. So it's a five year bachelor program which. Which in terms of graduating with professional degrees individuals in the state of Pennsylvania, it is now the largest. So this architecture school is kind of blown up.

B And the funny thing about it is it's the largest major at the university. So Marywood is a very small Catholic university in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which has this beautiful view of hills. It's a really gorgeous campus. It was actually home to the sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which have been here for a long time as a convent. And it slowly has shifted into this school. And so we. It's a very small school in terms of enrollment. It's about 24, 2600 students total.

B But architecture is our largest major. And so the goal here is to grow the school so that it is also focusing on all types of interest in the built environment. So we have architecture, we have interior architecture, we have construction management, and now we have virtual architecture. And one of the reasons why we named it that way is so it ties well into the kind of nomenclature of our programs. Interior architecture, virtual architecture. That's what it's like. It's quite beautiful. I was shocked at how, like, just picturesque it is up here.

B We're kind of right at the edge of the Poconos, and you get a lot of really gorgeous Kind of sunsets and scenes. I'm like being romantic about it, but I'm brand new here too, so I didn't know quite what to expect. But so far I'm having an amazing time.

A But they seem to be, I mean obviously they seem to be a very forward thinking school. Just from a perspective though, how many, roughly how many grads graduates from the five year program are there a year?

B Something like 60 to 70. Yeah, I think we, we usually get about 80 incoming architects, 20 interior, 10 construction management. And those numbers are going to start. You know, they shift every, every so often. But there's about 500 students in this school. I know that that number sounded like, it sounded shocking to me and so I think it, depending on how you define it, it's the biggest school. But we're excited about even being in the conversation because it's grown so much and it's only about a 15 year old program.

A That's amazing. But you said, you mentioned you are new and I think you know, because of you, this, this program is new. So can you tell us a little bit about your idea about having this program? Were you hired to build this program? Did they hire you as a professor?

B They didn't hire me specifically for this role on paper, but during the interview process they discussed, you know, part of the appointment would be coming up with some new program they want to launch that complements all these things, that uses tools and is a kind of a program for the future. And this is when I was, you know, I, I had thought about the other programs that exist similar to this, which would be the fiction and entertainment program at SCI ARC and the master's in cinematic and video game architecture at the Bartlett. They are master's programs. And so my initial idea was to, to start with a master's, but they actually, because the bachelor program here is already so robust and the way that the interior architecture program works is they all start this, you know, they all start together and then later in the degree we just pull out the interiors to have their own studios and that's basically how they get a degree. And now it's going to be the same for virtual. So we essentially you take an architecture degree and you just pull out the studios after the second year, second semester and those all start to focus on kind of virtual reality tools, simulation tools. And the studio is where we kind of explore these tools.

A Enjoying the show. Join a community of fellow disruptors@practiceofarchitecture.com community. Your membership helps support the production of this podcast, Practice Disrupted and funds the creation of more resources for all of you looking forward to growing together. Join us today@practiceofarchitecture.com community. So that was going to be my next question. What is the overlap with the traditional architecture degree? Like one of the things I think is the hardest thing, when I was a freshman, I was young for my year, right? Like deciding when you're 17 years old, like that's, that's going to be your degree program. When all of your friends and peers could wait till junior year to kind of decide. So can I apply to the architecture program and then kind of decide if I land in interiors, if I land in virtual architecture, if I just want to take a more traditional path?

B Yeah, absolutely. And that was kind of the goal that we set up, was that these programs could be kind of discovered a little bit and switched in between, especially in thinking about how you might want to stage your future. So one of the things I really like is that our Bachelor of Virtual Architecture is a four year degree and we then can get a two year mark. So you can do a four plus two. In six years you've got a Master of Architecture and a bachelor virtual and in five you would just have a professional Bachelor of Architecture. So I'm really interested in the first virtual degree as a way to simply ground more architecture students in these tools and prepare them for careers that are popping up now. So it's a fairly traditional architecture education. There's building tech courses, there's structures, there's history theory, and it's like instead of a normal architecture studio where you have to do a NAB accredited, you know, revit building, you're going to be designing an immersive environment with which you might include the apparatus to take it to move it around the city.

B Or you're going to be designing a fully, you know, a full scale interactive exhibit that has a live feed to Twitch. Like one of these examples I always give to people is like the fish door, which is this incredible twitch channel that they set up, which basically in a dam there's only this one type of fish that they have to allow through and other things they don't. And so you, they just set up a live camera and said hey everybody, like let us let some fish in and some fish not. And, and the chat can actually control the door.

A Oh really?

B It's just a way of creating these types of, and apparatus. And what I find so exciting about this is also thinking about how we are becoming like these tools in our day to day life. Like I can Turn on my camera right now and see my kid asleep in bed. Or I can turn on a camera and feed my cats. Like these are things that are extensions of us and that we are just thinking about. Like, wow.

A So I just want to be clear for my listening audience that they are not graduating with a NAB accredited degree at the end of this. So don't be worried about that crossover necessarily yet. They're not necessarily coming for traditional practice jobs, but as we talked about at the top of the episode, there's tons of new opportunity. And we interviewed Rebecca Bookbinder, the first season of Practice disrupted. So at the time I think she was just beginning to do things on the Mandalorian. So clearly there are SCI Arc grads that are going out and doing other world buildings things too.

B The program isn't trying to make a licensed architect on its own. It's trying to maybe take an architecture degree and bring what makes it so special in my mind to other fields and allow students the flexibility. Because I think, and I know that if I had a graduate of this Bachelor of Virtual Architecture of the four year program, that you could go sit in an office and work on a model and produce stuff and you can work in an architecture firm helping with visualization, helping with maybe virtual tools, any of those kinds of ideas or client presentation, and depending on the size of the office, what you might want to do. That said, I think what makes an architecture degree so special is one, the studio environment where you really get to experiment and familiarize yourself with tools and the attitude towards tools that architects can have. I think we don't do that enough in a regular architecture degree. But in reality, the tech world, all these other worlds, they would love people who can look at tools, be skeptical of tools, misuse and break tools, know when to use and how to, you know, how to amplify what they do. And I think that's something that you get through studios and studios are not in other degrees. And that's something that we should be happy about.

B And I think that's, you know, an architecture student or a grad level student from a virtual program can have plenty of opportunities both inside of architecture and around it.

A So I want to get a little bit down to the Rastacs. This is a brand new program. When will you have your first graduates from this degree?

B I guess four years from this coming spring. So our first students are coming in already this next fall, so we already have a few accepted students.

A I imagine you will continue to be recruiting on a regular rolling basis.

B Yeah, that's one of the, one of the cooler things about being a small private school is that we could launch this program. We can do things that can just happen a lot faster. It's not the only good thing about. There's a lot of other things to like about other schools, trust me. But that's one of the things we could do is move really fast on something like this. And so they hired me and this program is launched before. I mean I'm, I started last fall and here we are, which is pretty cool.

A Has the school then had to augment the program with other professors too? Or do you have, I mean, I'd be interested to know if anyone is crossing over from traditional architecture as well. I mean even people with traditional practices to teach.

B Yeah, I'm kind of in network with a lot of people doing this type of work and people who have like moved from architecture to tech or moved from architecture to working on like, you know, meta headset apps and for visualizing revit models and for, for, for working with stuff. So that's to say that right now I'm the only faculty. But we, you know, we have a system where as enrollment grows we can add more lines and stuff like that. So right now I'm, you know, my, my particular appointment is squarely within the school of Architecture as a professor of practice that we can open up more as the program grows. But I think it's really cool to have this program be taught by a pretty traditional building. Tech class is going to be involved in it. And so I think that's part of the exciting thing for me. Selling it and understanding it.

B As a 17 year old, that's where I've been still working on how to get that point across. We're working on it again.

A Back to the kind of the location in Pennsylvania. I mean you're not a California school. Everybody thinks tech, everybody thinks Silicon Valley, I will say, you know, unlike my experience in business school where their career centers are so much more engaged, I would say with their students. What does support look like as you send off your first grads? I imagine you seem to be doing it all right. The recruiting, the faculty establishment. I'm sure you're going to be helping those first grads get off to exciting job prospects afterwards. Is there a lot going on in the area where graduates can stay pretty local or are you finding that that's going to be a broader reach?

B I'm certain that the opportunities will be mostly outside of Scranton. That said, I think that that's a good thing. But what I've found since I've lived here is that we're very close to New York. It's about a two hour drive. It's just the fact that it's up into the mountains that has made it, you know, not super convenient. But there were a lot of people moving up here during the pandemic and working remote from here. And you can get in, you can get into Manhattan for the day fairly easily. Two hours without traffic, two and a half, three, which is, you know, a lot.

B But it's I think closer to New York City than I, than I, than I understood. And they're working on a train again. They're re bringing, you know, doing the train thing again. And I don't know what's going to happen with the current administration, but it's it, it is. The funding was secured for some amount of it already. So that said, you know, that's a great point and I think something that I'm working to establish and build here and you know, building network building, you know, anything I can to infrastructure wise to help students get involved. And I think architecture and architecture firms in general we obviously already have some relationship with and that I think that is a good step. I think if I send any of these students to an architecture firm, they're going to succeed and contribute in ways that are needed.

B And then I think that they are also going to have the challenge of making arguments for themselves in other fields. And I think we've all seen that challenge. I've tried myself, you know, in a way, in a, in a few years ago thinking about trying to join other fields and it's challenging and there's certainly people working on that as well. But there will be that step I think for students to get out into the world and to figure out exactly how to do what they want to do. That said, the way I designed the curriculum is the final project, the fourth year capstone project like you would have an interior or another, other architecture programs. The final project is an open studio so that they can tie their work or work on something that begins to look towards a career path for them. So if they've taken more interest to mixed reality, they could make a game, they could make a film, they could make a live event kind of work. And I'm looking for a gallery to essentially have a gallery show every spring of all the capstone projects and maybe some somewhere in Brooklyn or something, you know, if, if we're lucky or something that, that gets people out there and gets their work into the world in a way that can help them tie their work towards a career path.

B That's kind of the goal of that final studio.

A My first thought that pops into my head is that, you know, everybody in an architecture firm who is not like the designer or the person, project manager, or like part of the core team is thought of as secondary. So I hope that. Or like lesser than. Right. So I hope that as your graduates go off into school, we've developed at least new career paths where they. They can continue to grow and develop in firms in a way that they feel that they are driving their own professional development and they, they have their own level of success in that space. Because it is one thing for architects to talk about how their background translates to another field. We also admittedly have a bit of gatekeeping in our own profession.

B That's really important. I appreciate that you said that because I've run into that exact thing and I think you're spot on in that. I think a student who might do that is going to run into that at any firm. And, you know, even if you get your master's and you didn't go to Yale or Cyark or Princeton or excuse me, maybe I'll say, and if you didn't go to a very fancy school on a coast, you know, you might have run in, you're going to run into that. And, you know, I certainly did as a master's graduate from Cincinnati even.

A I just think of all the head of BIM or technology and so many firms that are essential to literally every project getting done until more recently has never raised itself to like a CTO or even a C suite position. Thankfully, the tide is turning and I feel like that is happening at the large firms.

B I think that what I'm seeing a shift in, as I've now been teaching for maybe seven years or so, is that the students coming in today, they really do want a job. Like, they want to make sure that there is a job. And I think that if I could say you'll probably be, you know, you might be pipelined or you might be kind of in this, put in this box, they could still say, I would have a job, though, you know, and that isn't what we want at all. But that is a concern is to say, yeah, I wouldn't want you in a box. But I would want to say that you can advocate for your skill set in a way that contributes to have a position. And I think that's really important for firms to work on is to continue to recognize that absolute issue that we have as architects, it's not like bad, but you know, some, you know, a fairly like blue collar kid from Pennsylvania might still see a drafting position, quote unquote, as still a step up. And I don't want to tell them it's as good as getting a construction management degree, but if you can say that there might be something there that's at least consistent part of the built environment. But, but I do think that that's another place where maybe I could say, and back on the record like that tying this degree to a construction management undergrad would also change that role in terms of being able to see construction management and virtual tools as things that really, that you could really specialize in.

B And that's an exciting opportunity for these particular students is to work on the construction management end as well.

A You talk about immersive realities and AI and the opportunity there I was talking to the founder of aslab. The details that I learned in architecture firms were just the copy paste details that we already had in our library. Right. But through computers, I am told if I use this type of gyp, here are the 20 different types of fast track you can use to fasten it to your various different sandwich of what is your wall panel and how that changes different properties over time. I feel like that's like, that's a combination of real world modeling coming together with computer modeling coming together with understanding that what was the complaint when CAD first came out? Like what you're drawing is actually, you know, more than just P line right on the screen and understanding what all those properties are. So I do see the overlay. I just hope that, that the culture of the profession evolves as quickly as Marywood University has been able to kind of turn out this new program to see the importance of all of these things, like all of these different perspectives that these degree programs can bring even into practice, let alone all of the different careers that they can have outside of practice.

B Thank you. Yeah, that's really, it is really exciting. And I think that as practice evolves and you know, we work on maybe a master's in virtual architecture as well, which we are working on, is that these, in my mind, Evelyn, like this, this is still just architecture. And I'm, you know, personally I haven't really had to make that a fight with anybody or anything like that or an argument. But this is just for me, architecture reaching what I'm calling a new medium of space. So the space in a game, the space in your cell phone overlay or a Snapchat filter, like these are Spaces, these are environments. And architecture should be the sort of discipline of thought that works on how that interacts with society, how that, how that changes the way we live or behave. And so from that, like, meta perspective, this is architecture.

B And from the perspective also of nuts and bolts of like, how this stuff is built or fabricated or popped up, you know, in different, in different ways for events. I'm also interested in that as architecture. So the way that all of these tools shape the built environment on the real end is like, so exciting and something that I hope we can begin to embrace as a culture of architecture.

A At the top of the interview, we talked a little bit about the more expansive role that these graduates can play both in architecture and beyond. But what does, I guess, and you just kind of alluded to the fact that this all is in fact architecture in a way. So. So where do you see looking into the future of architecture and future of practice? What do you hope this program, this BVA program kind of means for the role of the architect and how we define what the architect is going forward?

B That's a really exciting question. Maybe I'll answer with a story about how I'm 35 and when, you know, when I went to college and when I graduated college and afterwards, all my friends. And this also ties back to being from Ohio. Hardly any of my friends live in Ohio anymore. Some are in Cleveland, some are in Phoenix, in Columbus and all over the. And me, you know, and the thing that we did was we played games together. And a lot of groups of people are similar where you've been playing maybe an online game and you talk through the headset, whatever, you fight people, you do things. And those spaces, to me, have nurtured our friendship for years and caused us to have funny stories, memories that take place in these spaces.

B And to me it seemed like the transmutability of them, maybe the ability to connect is something that I found very profound and important about what other people might dismiss as video game spaces or online fields or whatever those conditions are. Things that I think that I'm hoping the architects of the future can understand are changing the way that we see the physical world. Maybe space distance hasn't seemed so important or so, you know, can. Can take us away with, you know, like installations that are portals into other. From one city to another. You know, you're able to. To get these ideas where you're connecting people. And I think that's what architecture has been about, that it can, that can remain about.

B Like if it's an online space that is well designed. You're going to feel like you're connecting with other people, not like you're in a zoom call. And I think that's what good architecture and good design can give to the world. That I think is so, so important right now that I'm excited for.

A Hi Disruptors. Thank you for joining us today on an episode of Practice Disrupted. If you like the content for today's show, you can find all of our past episodes over on practiceofarchitecture.com podcast. Be a part of the conversation by joining me, our speakers, and other disruptors in our community@practiceofarchitecture.com community. Our social media handle is practiceofarch. That's practice of a R C A H. We'd love to hear from you, so feel free to drop us a DM and say hello. Tune in next week for a new conversation on change in the profession.