Originally recorded on Thursday, June 20, 2025. The full broadcast of the 2025, 51st Annual Ken Roberts Memorial Delineation Competition is available now online.
You can read part 1 of the announcement here. The transcript for the juror discussion following the winner announcements is below.
Joshua M. Nason: Great. Thank you, Ursula, Greg, and Brad. Congratulations again to our eight category winners and our three citation winners. We’re now going to have a little bit of fun and have a panel discussion. I’m going to pelt you with impossible questions and watch you squirm. Let’s see if we can make it through this with having Ursula laugh and cry. If we can get to that point,
Ursula Emery McClure, FAIA: I will laugh, but I’m not sure I’m going to cry.
Joshua M. Nason: You’ll laugh, I will cry.
I appreciate the insight and the feedback that you all have given about these drawings. We went from hundreds of entries to multiple dozens of finalists down to these just eleven projects. Throughout the deliberations, I’m listening to you three talk about this. It’s like we could have given so many awards, like, there’s so much going on.
I have a specific question for each of you, and then we’ll talk more generally and bounce back and forth, interrupt one another. Let’s just go crazy.
Ursula, my first question is for you. When you talk about all this work, you’ve got a type. There’s certain work that really speaks out to you, and there seems to be an industrial nature to this. There seems to be a dystopian aspect of this. Something that surprises you. Tell us about this. Tell us about your type and what you see in this work.
Ursula Emery McClure, FAIA: Yes, I do have a type. I’m being somewhat analytical or what is it called? When you analyze yourself after the fact? Post-rationalization of law? I’m going to post rationalize here.
The actual logic is that I’ve always loved machines. When I mentioned Richard Scarry, I grew up on those books. I think I’ve always liked machines because they are descriptive of their making, they always expose their parts, and their parts are what they are. Like farm machinery or factories, they’re not painted red because red will make you look at it. It’s red because danger, right? Everything has a meaning, and it has value. It’s the truth that gets presented. I think that is why I’m attracted to the technical, right? The dystopic part. The truth is not always pretty. I like to think of it as the human body. The human body gets to wear makeup, clothes on, dress itself up, but inside it’s actually quite horrifying, right? It’s not very attractive, but it’s what makes it work.
That is the dystopic part. The truth reveals all and all is not necessarily dressed. The dressing gets removed. I was educated in schools where dressing was very important, and I didn’t understand. I just wanted to know how to make it. And the making, like when you talked about your firm, Greg, the making is why you love it, right? You love it because of those pieces, and you want to show those pieces. The truth is dystopic because it isn’t dressed.
Joshua M. Nason: There’s a unabashed authenticity to that.
Ursula Emery McClure, FAIA: Correct. That’s why I’m attracted to it. Although I’m not a doctor and I don’t want to be.
Joshua M. Nason: That’s great. There’s a reality that we’re confronted with in those moments. You mentioned that the tractor gets painted red because it’s danger, not because it needs to be called attention to, but in reality, the danger of that machine is what calls you in. That can happen in drawings, right? There were these moments that are what they need to be because of whatever reason, and those are the things that pull us in. It might be red and it might not be red, but it has this visceral authenticity that you can’t deny.
Ursula Emery McClure, FAIA: Right. And I will say that if you look at [the pieces I choose] they’re not all dystopic, but they are all very truthful. Maybe it’s just the nature of KRob. KRob attracts those efforts where the authors are working so hard to express intention with purpose that we get to see their truths.
Gregory Ibañez, FAIA: That’s great. And someone, maybe Picasso said, “Art is the lie that tells the truth.” Check Google for the attribution.
Joshua M. Nason: We’re not in an era of fact checking. Greg, something that stood out to me is that you had very specific vocabulary. You talked about being gestural, emotional, imaginative. You talked about visceral. You talked about the emotive quality of these drawings. Can you tell us how that either applies to your work—your drawing or your firm work? Why are those qualities important to you?
Gregory Ibañez, FAIA: Well, that’s my type. As the elder member of this jury, I physically never touched a computer until I was eight years out of architecture school. I was trained and weaned on hand drawing because that’s all we had. Our technological breakthrough was pin barred drafting, which for you young kids out there, that’s why they call them layers in Revit.
I want to pull away from the idea that there’s a dichotomy between the digital world and then the physical. Of course, they’re different, the physical delineation, but it’s not either/or. It’s both. We often see in many of these [projects] and, not just or. Having said all that, one of the distinguishing characteristics of our species, which is one of many millions of species, we just happen to be the one making the most trouble…There is nothing more innate in our species than the physical act of color through light cones through our eyes, which never goes down to the hand and the pencil or fountain pen without editing through our brains, which are full of biases and refractions and rose colored glasses. That physical feeling, that feedback on the paper, the grain of the paper, the soft lead, the hard lead, the pen, I’ve always been a student of that. I’m not a master of that. I own way too many books on drawing, particularly architectural drawings. For instance, I have a sketchbook of Laurie Olin. A book, that’s wonderful, of his travel sketches. I think it’s an interesting avenue. I’ve always been fascinated by it. I think it will always be important. You can do it off the grid and it’s incredibly personal. No two people do alike. It has always been a subject that I have been fascinated by and labor at in terms of travel sketches. It’s important.
Joshua M. Nason: I agree. I appreciate that. I do think it’s important, specifically as we frame our role as architects, right? The mediums with which we work, what we make, what we do, and what that means in an era where those things are changing. And they’re rapidly changing or at least expanding. Maybe not abandoning, like you were saying, but we’re adopting.
Let’s try to create some controversy and go to Brad. Let’s stop talking about hand drawing. Let’s talk about some digital stuff, right?
Brad Bell: Why are we not wearing AR VR goggles right now?
Joshua M. Nason: Brad, you specifically work with the deployment or the use of technology in various forms. The book that you’ve recently done talks about this use of technology and representation in our profession and in computation. Tell us a little bit about how you think the role of technology plays into contemporary representation.
Brad Bell: Thanks. I really appreciate what Greg identified from the beginning that the dichotomy is not the most productive way to talk about it. We’ve long since moved past that as a form of discourse about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. I do think though that one of the interesting things that Greg and I have discussed is the role of fuzzy logic versus more explicit logic and how the tools begin to lend themselves in different ways of working, and how we use them according to that critical process is fundamentally what’s at stake. It’s what we need to continue to explore and understand as the tools begin to become more diversified and as we oscillate between qualitative and quantitative outcomes in terms of how we’re beginning to decide and determine what we’re going to use at a particular time.
When we were writing this book with my colleague Michael Fox, one of the things that was evident to us is that we go through these stages of using and implementing technology to recreate, for the sake of efficiency, what we already know how to do, right? We’re moving through a progressive state until a critical saturation moment where we realize we’ve topped out. Now, we’re looking for ways to enhance that through this act of appropriation. When I was in graduate school, a long time ago, that allowed us to see the use of animation software as critical to the way that it gave us different methods of seeing the design outcomes, the way that it began to lend us opportunities to work in different geometries, and the idea of that being accessible and almost on equal standing was impactful.
As that’s progressed, we see, even in the various entries that are represented in the winners, that runs the spectrum again. We are past the appropriation stage and the maturation stage in terms of the first wave of some of that technology. I think it’s coming back around for us to understand what do we want to do in terms of exploring that as a medium when we are losing or seeding the role of authorship. We have to be critical of that, but at the same time, we’re also having to enter into that with eyes wide open about what does that afford us? Where does that take us in terms of new ways of thinking? Certainly one can identify that we’ve moved into a consumption based aspect of our representation. Where it used to be that you could create one thing and you invested all of your energy in terms of that one thing, now it’s about setting up the framework to produce multiple things and then curating that as it becomes iterative in terms of the digital technology.
Ursula Emery McClure, FAIA: I want to jump on that. You actually ended it with the word I was trying to think of, which is the curatorial process, which then goes to what you [Greg] were talking about the brain’s ability to edit in the drawing, and what I was talking about when I was talking about being the constructive critic. All of this work presented to us here and the discussions that we read about and everyone taking sides on “what and what,” “who and who,” and “how and how,” and authorship is the value in design.
Still, no matter what we are being passed into or what we’re getting to ask to do next comes in that editorial, curatorial, evaluative process, which anybody who’s been exploring some of these new technologies knows isn’t actually truly possibly there yet. The human brain still has the ability to be evaluative, and that is where the expertise can lie. We all have to remember that when people start saying, “AI is going to take over this,” or “that’s going to take over that,” or “you’re going to not have a job because somebody else can do your work.”
Gregory Ibañez, FAIA: What’s new about that?
Ursula Emery McClure, FAIA: Exactly. That’s been said about humankind ever since [the beginning]. In the end, it is the brain’s ability to evaluate and be constructive. “Is this the right one? No, I need to run it 75 more times.” I think that is a very important aspect that everyone keeps forgetting. There is a reason that you learn how to critique your work.
Gregory Ibañez, FAIA: One of the definitions of poetry is the idea of taking something and seeing it in a different way; A familiar thing, hence, becomes poetic. The curatorial aspect, juxtaposition, placing things in different worlds or universes, as you eloquently alluded to in your selections. But I don’t want to just let pass the whole idea of the harvesting of intellectual property, because at least in this country, for better or worse intellectual property rights are what allows the creative process to happen. We are moving into a new era to where images are harvestable and reusable and certainly designs and architecture can be replicated easily. And of course, everything is built on the shoulders of those that came before. Maybe there is nothing new under the sun? Going back to the human element, you can’t duplicate that. That cannot be duplicated. Whether it has value or inherent value in a capitalist society? Well, that’s a completely different question.
Joshua M. Nason: That’s interesting. I might just scrap my pre-written questions, because this is really interesting, and something that I thought about a lot over the last couple years as technology is changing and as we’re adapting the way that we work. One question keeps coming to mind, and this is not fair to ask to you, so I’m going to ask it to you—What are we afraid of? When it comes to the adoption of new technology, what are we afraid of?
Because the arguments that we’re hearing now, and Ursula you pointed this out, these are the same arguments we heard with rendering, with D modeling, with computer aid drafting. We could probably go back to the pin bar day and find a group of architects that would say, you are stealing my authorship.
Gregory Ibañez, FAIA: I think that’s always happened…There’s always fear with change. I don’t fear that because I would rather someone else drive my car, meaning a machine, that is better driver than me, so I can be busy doing something else. That being said, it’s what is lost in change. In times of rapid technological change, there are good things that are lost. We have automobiles and we don’t have millions of horses being mistreated or dragging people around the streets, but then we have other problems because we have cars.
I think about Mexico, which for centuries cultivated hundreds, if not thousands of types of corn that was used as a primary element of the diet. Then in the era of big agribusiness, they all die out because this one yields the most or is resistant to insects or whatever that may be. There’s a homogenization. Something is lost there.
I don’t believe the physical drawing will ever be lost. In fact, I think urban sketching groups, things of that nature have never been more popular, or at least they’re having a resurgence. I think it is the worry that we’ll discard things that we need to keep. We shouldn’t just throw it away because it’s old fashioned.
Ursula Emery McClure, FAIA: But you’re asking a very friendly audience. Everybody at this table teaches, and as a teacher, we have to adopt. We’re college professors, so that means if we are unlucky, we have to teach an 18-year-old. If we’re lucky, we get to teach a 25-year-old. It’s all good because we constantly have to change to teach correctly. And so, yes, you’re right. We understand loss, but we also have to embrace change. Not only embrace it but gain control of it. We are supposed to be the experts for young people who are coming to us with abilities they have never had before, and that is only going to get greater and greater for every generation.
You’re not going to have someone who is unwilling to change at this table, but we know that does still exist. I could see if you had a juror who was less flexible and adaptable, certain submittals would’ve been just thrown out because they’d be like, oh, blah, blah, blah, that they didn’t even make that. You know what I mean? We are all agreeable to change, because we have to be.
Brad Bell: What’s at stake or up for debate is where we find control relative to that. In terms of the adapting and the transformation that’s taking place, the older I get, the more risk averse I become. If you were having this conversation with a set of jurors or colleagues that were 30 years younger than us, the impact of that question would be very different. In some ways, we become sedentary in terms of how we think about the design process. Certainly education and being in that environment challenges us on a frequent basis. We have to continue to understand and self-reflect in terms of what are we actually trying to teach or educate on.
Oftentimes now I feel like it’s a two-way street. There’s a versatility, a capacity that’s already present. We’ve seen a maturation plateau in terms of the digital tool sets that used to be more linear in terms of how those were taught and understood, but now it becomes conversant. It becomes an aspect of a generation that has grown up in that space, being able to use these and ask very provocative questions. Ones that I think will continue to evolve what we do, how we do it, not just in education, but within the built environment and the virtual environment. We’re being taken into new frontiers that we had not previously. And I think that’s super exciting. I find that to be one of the reasons that I love going back to the classroom again and again.
Gregory Ibañez, FAIA: Most architects of a certain age have lived through this transition, and I applaud it. I can’t imagine practice without all these tools today, but the promise originally was these tools would give us mastery and be a force multiplier whereby the small firm could compete.
In fact, Bart and I had a laugh. Tony Montalto, the design director of HKS, a great and talented architect, had said, “I live in terror of some five-person firm in their garage outperforming us.” And Bart and I looked at each other. We’re in a garage. We’re five people. Why isn’t he scared of us? Oddly enough in the distribution of firm sizes, the middle has actually hollowed out and there are more large firms than ever. There is a polarization. I don’t know if us small firms are really putting fear in the heart of these global behemoths, but that promise still exists for technology. Maybe the clients need to be convinced of that more. We’re small but mighty as we like to say. We play in a sandbox bigger than we probably deserve.
Joshua M. Nason: This reminds me of something that all three of you have talked about.
Brad, you talked about the role of technology and efficiency. I am incredibly skeptical of reducing design technology down to an agent of efficiency because there’s so much more. If we’re just trying to do more and more and more, and I realize that there’s a financial and a time reality to that, but the technology should not only be reducing the impact on our bottom lines and our calendars but expanding the potential for what we’re doing.
Gregory Ibañez, FAIA: Well, that’s the Metropolis. I always like to talk about film. That was the promise…these machines are going to give us infinite freedom. It’s going to free us from all this. But why am I still going through my emails every morning till 11 o’clock and I haven’t designed anything? They have their burdensome aspects that have not been freeing at all.
Brad Bell: I do think that efficiency has its baby steps, right? We take that into an understanding, not just within architecture but in any creative medium. We tend to find other ways to do what we know to be familiar because it retains that control that we find to be essential in authorship.
It’s when you reach a certain saturation point and it begins to clone itself, to take on multiples then people begin to challenge that in an entirely different way. They say, how do I begin to move past notions of efficiency? For some mediums that has lasted a very small period of time. For others, it’s slow on the intake and the transformation takes a little bit longer.
Where are those external forces are coming from that knock it into something else, in terms of a more creative act that pushes the design process forward, especially within architecture? That’s where we open up our eyes and say these possibilities now take us in new directions.
I think we can all agree that we have to be careful about what we lose in that process, like Greg identified, but we are circling back to a moment that we had 40 or 50 years ago. How is this [technology] going to find a saturation point that we can use to be creative in an entirely different way?
Ursula Emery McClure, FAIA: I don’t know if [the audience] gets to see every entry or just the finalist in the winners. I will say that we had a lot of entries. In my skeptical dystopian mentality, I was thinking, oh God, how many Midjourney and Bing generated images am I going to see? Because I’m familiar with their production method, and you can identify very quickly their language. Everyone out there, be optimistic. We had a palette that was challenging and confusing. We all wanted to figure out how it was done. It wasn’t so clearly self-identifiable except for hand sketches, say travel sketches, because the category was very explicit in its description. In all the other categories, it could have been alternative technology because you didn’t really know how it was getting made. And that means that the expertise of the design mind who is making these things, or the artistic mind or the creative mind, that was making all of these images still used their hand.
Gregory Ibañez, FAIA: Putting it in the larger continuum, as a society we’re completely focused on the moment. We think we invented the sunrise. Brad and I had an interesting conversation about a shared interest in anthropology. Homo sapiens have been around 250,000 years, more or less. In 250,000 years from now, the Lascaux cave paintings or the Pompeii tile murals [of our time] will not going to be a video, because it won’t exist. It will be gone. Or it’ll be on a software no longer supported by tech support.
But the mark making on paper or board, that can endure. There’s something romantic about that. Maybe it doesn’t matter. But to me, that’s a powerful human thing putting us in continuity with the world we live in. The enduring quality of it, assuming it’s properly cared for, is very powerful to think about as an artifact of our culture, as well as all the digital work as long as it can be accessed.
Joshua M. Nason: The vestige has a value.
Gregory Ibañez, FAIA: You go to an art museum; however the image was generated, and you see a Cindy Sherman photograph or a sculpture. It speaks to us in an older part of our brain. It resonates.
All the creativity displayed by these entries was awe inspiring. And we had, as a jury, remarkable unanimity…
Ursula Emery McClure, FAIA: Which I did not expect, but then happened.
Joshua M. Nason: I know. It was a little disappointing.
Gregory Ibañez, FAIA: I would imagine our audience would not have expected that, watching this.
Joshua M. Nason: I wanted more fights.
Ursula Emery McClure, FAIA: I’ll say, we did have a strong advocacy for winners. All winners out there need to know that what if it wasn’t one, two, or all three of us, somebody was advocating, pounding the table, saying this is why this is the winner. We didn’t agree in the sense that everyone picked the same one for the top three, but we did share and value each other’s selection.
Joshua M. Nason: I’ve now been a part of KRob for several years, and the work continues to get better.
We have time for one more question, so I want to shift gears a little bit. I know all of us teach in capacities and have done so for a while. This is something that came to me through a series of discussions with other professors and academics. It’s on the role of training architects.
There’s tremendous pressure in the architectural academy to teach everything. History expands, but the amount of credit hours shrinks. The need for drawing expands, but the credit hours shrink. The technology…we have to teach all of these things, not to mention philosophy and other subjects.
If we’re talking about drawing, could you all please speak to the importance of drawing, however you define drawing? I have a very wide definition of drawing. It involves modeling and building and everything, but could you speak to the importance of what drawing does in the training of an architect?
Gregory Ibañez, FAIA: I teach the least in this group, but as an architect who has, over the years, interviewed and hired many graduates, my thought is that we can teach you software. We can teach you zoning. We can teach you all that. What we don’t have time to teach is design thinking. You need to come to the table with that. Then you have the tools to tackle, another false dichotomy, “real world” architecture. If you’ve never had that important part of the architectural education food pyramid, which is design thinking, of which hand drawing is an essential part of that. The people who draw the best also do the best computer drawings in my experience.
This is a great debate, and we’ve sat through a couple faculty meetings about this. I think it is a mistake to make graduates so plug and play into a firm where it becomes, and I’m not using this in a pejorative sense, more vocational, because the thinking skills and the design thinking skills will serve you whatever you do in life The way of thinking and approaching problems, using what’s there, and dealing with constraints, that that’s the most valuable thing. But you have to know history, otherwise you’re reinventing the wheel constantly.
Brad Bell: As one who has seen the development arc of architectural education over the last 30 plus years, it used to be the liberal arts foundation that then began to accumulate specialization on top of that as a way to concentrate it. The sense is now, for a number of reasons, we began to edit out some of the liberal arts aspect of what we used to do, which I think led directly to the critical thinking part that Greg mentioned. Now we have loaded the degree to the point that we’re shifting towards five-year degrees that are becoming more and more about specialization from the very beginning.
As a father of teenagers and an early 20-year-old, I can say that there is a tension between thinking that we have everything resolved and figured out, that the starting line is clear and delineated, and then the end point is fixed. While society begins to say that, it begins to put that pressure upon us, it’s marketed to us—we are not operating in a space intellectually, thankfully, that aligns itself with that. What we are doing is saying that I need to be able to move around, but the constraints of the model that’s been given to us, especially in academia, is actually quite limiting. Not to be nostalgic about how design degrees were historically constructed, but I do think that if you’re not making space for critical thinking to be a part of what you’re doing, then you’re not embracing.
Drawing is essentially what we do. We’re creating delineation that communicates intent, and from that intent, someone else begins to take it. Now granted, there’s direct to file output and there’s manufacturing and design-build. There’s different models that question that, but if we’re not understanding critical thinking through our delineation, then we’re missing one of the absolute fundamental tenets.
Gregory Ibañez, FAIA: Part of the education is learning how to see, and the danger is, at too early in that process, you’re wearing a microscope and not a wide-angle lens. Because this is a time when you’re never going to master anything, but you’re going to learn where to go look for that and how to look for that knowledge. It feels like there’s a recognition that it went too far the other way, but that’s an uninformed opinion. What was the question again? I don’t remember.
Okay. It’s been forever. I had something to do with drawing architecture. It was drawing education. It’s the importance of drawing in the training of an architect, I thought. And that could be an early professional.
Ursula Emery McClure, FAIA: In my current position, Kansas State University has challenged me by putting me outside of what one considers the halls of design thinking environments. It is very challenging, but it also helps me identify the value of drawing in a way that I had not seen before.
I had the luxury of speaking with young people who had been cultivated in the petri dish of academia design…My first semester of teaching students who have no training, but also read Richard’s scary books and also loved to make stuff as children, we were designing a project. They have no ability, no voice with which to express themself. They’ve never had to sketch. They have never had to make a model, unless they made models as a kid, like model airplanes, but even then [they had] directions and guidance. Maybe they all played with Legos. but they have never had a way of expressing what they are trying to see. No voice for that. Their voice was Revit or whatever technology they had been given, which was mostly math problems. They don’t have this recognition.
This was the day that I did cry in class. One of the smartest masters of structural engineering students came in with a drawing. Pencil on a piece of 8.5” x 11” lined paper inside of a plastic sleeve because he was afraid the pencil would smudge. On this drawing, that looked like an eight or nine-year-old had drawn, was his vision of his team’s project, rendered with pencil.
He was so frustrated, and he said, “This is what we’re trying to do. I just had to get it out. I stayed up all night and I drew this. Is this what you want?”
And I started to cry because I realized that is the value. His voice. What he could see in his head. This was his only means with which to express it. He had no tools, no teachers, no nothing. In the end, all he had was a pencil, a clicky engineering pencil with little 0.5 millimeter lead, and he had rendered an 8.5” x 11” piece of lined college rule paper with a drawing from edge to edge, top to bottom, up around the holes and everything to express himself.
That’s important.
Joshua M. Nason: And at least it was college rule that meant that grid was a little tighter than that wide ruled stuff…
I really appreciate this time. I want to thank our jurors for their time and deliberations. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. It’s a great privilege to be here with you all. Again, I want to thank Corgan for our space here, HKS and all our sponsors for this opportunity. We’ve run over time and I’m now super tongue-tied. AIA Dallas, thank you. July 14th at the AD EX in Downtown Dallas. Come see the exhibit. Come see the opening…
Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day.