Hello, Hello, Hello, Library Fest listeners. Welcome to Out Loud in the Library, A Durham Tech Library podcast. I'm your host Courtney Bippley, reference librarian extraordinaire, and I'm here today to share an interview with Volkan Alkanoglu who designed the sculpture outside the Durham County Main Library, in downtown Durham. The sculpture is called Purple S.T.E.A.M., and if you haven't seen it yet, it looks like happy purple mushrooms. At least that's what I see. Art is subjective after all. So you might see something different. Volkan's Library Fest event is on Monday, April 5 at 2pm. So listen to the podcast and then register for the event. I was able to talk to Volkan about this sculpture and record it for posterity. So I hope you enjoy learning about its creation, inspiration, and a few more things besides.
Thank you so much for joining me today, I'm really excited to be able to talk to you about your work that is in front of the new main library, Durham County Library. It's called Purple S.T.E.A.M. So, can you tell me what the inspiration behind it is? What the design process was like?
Yeah, for sure. So first of all, thanks for having me be part of this journey. And it's been a quite, quite an interesting journey. The way it kind of started is that the city and the library were looking for public art to be placed in the kind of proximity of the building, potentially even inside the building. And they requested basically, for artists to apply for this all. it is my understanding that there were over 100 artists that applied and there was a committee that was kind of put together of city members, but also of librarian library members, just also art professionals that then basically took those applications, evaluated them and and created a shortlist of several artists who they wanted to kind of talk to in a little bit more detail to kind of think about what their ideas are. What their experiences is, and how they would go about creating art for this occasion. And, you know, I was one of the, kind of, shortlisted artists and ultimately, I was very fortunate to be selected as the artist that would then be asked to create this art. And that by itself was already quite amazing. And I think what maybe was helpful was the way I wanted to create this art piece. And that basically was to bring the community along with us. And when I say that, it means that I kind of wanted to hear, you know, what, what is the community interested in? What are the, kind of, expectations? What are their aspirations. And we try to really understand that by by kind of creating a community survey. So you know, with the help of the library, we put together this document that would be basically very simple. But yes, or no questions, including also some other questions. And we did that using a social media platform. And we got quite a lot of responses, which was absolutely phenomenal thing, we got over 1000 people participating.
Wow, that's pretty big for like a public survey.
Yeah, it was quite amazing. You know, how much interest and participation that was from the community? And yeah, some of the questions were like, do you like color? Or do you like more monochrome, right? Do you like something more abstract or something more figural? Do you like something that is dynamic, or do something that's more static, you know? And then at the same time, we are giving kind of a visual examples of some art pieces that have those criteria. And yeah, folks, were basically giving us their opinion. And you know, something that was very clear for me what what the brief was, right? Like, what people were looking for, what their desires and aspirations were with this art piece. And I basically took that back to my studio and started working. And also because this is a library, so this is an educational environment. This is a place where, you know, we want to communicate and teach as well. And obviously, we are surrounded by books and stories, and you know, science and data. I was also interested to hear like, what is your favorite book? What, Who's your favorite author? And it's not just the typical novel, but what is also your favorite children's book? That was part of the survey. You know, we got over 1000 responses and kind of looking through them and have to say, you know, we had a lot of amazing book titles and authors that were mentioned. But then at some point, what was interesting is that one book came or actually two books were mentioned quite frequently. And it was the first one was The Color Purple by Alice Walker.
Classic. Yeah.
And yeah, absolutely classic. You know, she won a Pulitzer Prize for the book as the first African American writer for fiction. Again, I think the book, because it is it tells the story of African American women in the 30s, the 1930s in the south, in this case, it was Georgia not North Carolina. But still, the American South, so that was interesting, you know that it came up. The second book that came up is children's book named Harold and the Purple Crayon.
I've heard of it. I have not actually read it.
Yeah, it's also a classic. It's, I think from 1950s or 1955. Author's Crockett Johnson. And this is also an interesting book because it tells the story of a little boy, I think four or five years old or so, who has a magic crayon and the crayon happens to be purple. And the crayon is able to, you know, he's able to draw what he wants with that crayon. So thinking in the story, he wants to go on a walk in the moon shine and he, there's no moon. So he draws the moon. There's no walkway. So he draws the walkway. And he creates adventures in his imagination by simply drawing and you know, towards the end, and he draws his house, his bed, and he goes to sleep. But it was interesting that those two books came up. And they happen to have similar titles with including the word purple. That that was interesting to me. And then I looked up what purple stands for, as a color. Some of us, we know that colors have meaning as well.
Yeah, I feel like I've been told that it stands for royalty. But I don't know if that's the case. Really.
Yeah, it stands for many things. But primarily that creativity is one thing, peace, wisdom, independence, but also mystery and magic. And if you look at purple, it really is a mix of blue and red. So blue being you know, stable and calm as a color. And then red being more peaceful and energetic. And purple is kind of the balance of these two worlds. Yeah, so taking all this information, starting to connect the dots back in my studio. I started to kind of think about what this art piece could look like and how it would translate. And then at the same time, I was also looking into technology. Not just what does it look like, but also how is it made. And I have to say that Durham, and North Carolina in general, is really one of the states or areas in the United States where there's an interest to really push the boundaries, and kind of question the status quo, there's this interest to really innovate.
Yeah.
And there's a lot of companies right now that are doing that. That are investing into the state and into into the area and into the community with that kind of drive. So I was thinking, you know, why not also think about introducing a technology that is fairly unique, fairly innovative, that maybe is beyond the kind of typical construction methods that we know. Which is, you know, either metal, or timber, or stone, or masonry, and so on. So as an artist, I was also trying to kind of push that a little bit. So I did a bit of research and found this company called Branch Technology to space in Tennessee. And what they do is they they use robots, so robot arms, to 3d print structures.
I assume you're talking large structures.
Very large structures. Yes. And, and 3D printing is a technology that's been around for, I would say, for 15, 20 years, but on a very small scale. So you know, like product scale or prototyping scale, but this company kind of unlocked that on their terms, and are able to kind of create very large scale structures printed. So that was something that I was really drawn to, and tried to really see how we could introduce that also in Durham. Thinking about Harold and his crayon, and how you can just draw something abstractly in a way. Getting the information from the community about what they were looking for thinking about it as a communication piece. This is a live library, that there's interesting education. And then this new technology that would allow kind of creating form on a scale that has never been achieved before, is basically how this all came together.
Amazing that it's, like, so collaborative with the community and innovative with new technology. I think that's a lot of what Durham stands for, while also linking back to classic foundational literature that we've grown up with. You are LEED accredited. Can you explain what that means?
Yes, so LEED accredited is a certificate that you can receive if you take certain tests. And it has to do with sustainability. So you know, in the kind of building and construction industry, it's basically a certificate that shows that you have informed yourself and taught yourself and learned what it takes to build in a sustainable fashion. So LEED stands for leadership, environmental, efficiency, I think something in that in those terms. It's just trying to, you know, make sure that we understand that what we do has impact on the world and on our environment. And to kind of reduce that impact as much as possible, you know, thinking about carbon footprints. Thinking, about waste, thinking about efficiency, and so on. So trying to really incorporate that, you know, doing any kind of process that you go through. And it's also my understanding that the building itself, the library, new library is also LEED certified building where the architects and the contractors have been very aware of trying to build sustainable principles in mind.
What does it mean to you to incorporate sustainability and energy efficiency into your work?
Yeah, that's, that's a very good question. And I think you can look at it from different kind of, of different points of view. First of all, you know, every time we do something, it takes time. But we have now capabilities available to us that would kind of help us save time. For example, if I want to draw something, you know, with a pen on paper, and then I don't like the idea, I just have to start over. But I could also code that idea. I could, you know, use computational design or algorithms to create the same thing that I would draw by hand. And instead of redrawing it, all I have to do is change a number and it will update that particular design for myself. I'm using computational design techniques and coding algorithms to design the work that I do. And that helps me create faster ideas, it helps me create more ideas. So it's not just kind of single top down idea where the artists create something with his hand. And then this is one object that gets celebrated. It's more about let's create a system and a structure that can create many, many ideas that we can change and iterate on quite frequently. And it's more like an editor or curator where we start looking into like selecting the best option, selecting the most efficient options, selecting the one that maybe cost the less or has the biggest footprint or, you know, whatever you want to put down there. So that's one way of looking at it in terms of thinking sustainably. That you can actually create systems that are much more efficient than what we've used in the past. And the second is also thinking about how we build, how we construct, how we impact our environment. And that has to do with you know, sourcing material, for instance, locally, trying to understand where material comes from trying to eliminate cost of transportation. Trying to eliminate waste of material, trying to be efficient with how you construct trying to really understand what it takes and not, for instance, create too much waste. Or, let's say, you have a piece of timber you want to cut out of shape, and then you only use 50% of the timber and the rest you throw away because you can't use it. And we want to be more efficient, try to use much more of that timber in the first place. So those are some of the principles that can be applied also, from a construction point of view to be to be more efficient as well.
That's a great way of thinking about it. And so are you, when you design something, are you intimately involved with actual construction of it? Or is your role more of giving the designs and then letting the people creating it do that on their own?
Yeah, so it can go either way. And it sometimes has to do with the scale of the project or the complexity of it as well. In the case of, you know, this art piece we did for the Durham Library, the expertise was with branch technology, who is the company that 3D prints. Pre-printed the entire structure basically, and you know, my my contribution is obviously creating the design of that structure and reflecting feedback from the company saying certain areas need to be thicker, or certain areas need to be thinner, can be thinner, or we need to kind of like make things a bit more efficient here and there. So we were creating a feedback loop between myself the company that was printing it, but also with a structural engineer who's ultimately responsible to make sure that this thing doesn't fall over or fly away. And even in the rare case of snow load that it holds up, right?
we do occasionally get snow.
Yeah.
Occasionally.
Exactly. So it's it's basically a group effort, a team effort along the way. And yeah, in this case, there was other folks involved as well. we have a company called Carolina Outdoor Lighting Professionals who did all the lighting and landscaping as well. It's a company based in Raleigh, North Carolina. And yeah, so there's many voices that come together, and many people that have to work together to bring something like this to life.
Where do you see environmental concerns influencing architecture and design in the future? I know, it's a big question.
That is a big question. But you know, I happen to have an architecture degree as well. So in my previous life, I was designing buildings and museums and skyscrapers. And now, you know, my focus is more on arts and particularly public arts. And for me, it's more about, you know, can we maybe introduce, you know, the community to our environments? Or can we make the threshold between our environments and the community through those, those mechanisms. But the building industry is one of the largest creators of carbon in the world. Building things is not good for the environment, let's say, in the nicest terms. At the same time, it's also it's necessary to do it because the population is growing. There's need for housing in particular, especially in the United States, affordable housing. So those are kind of objectives that need to be considered. And the building industry, of course, also wants to contribute to cleaner, safer, more sustainable building practices. And there's some interesting pilots that are happening, or movements that are happening. For instance, if you look at the timber industry, they're looking at the moment as what's called cross laminated timber technology, just basically using wood. Engineered woods. And you can build out of these larger planks that are up to 40 feet long, I think 8 to 10 feet wide. You can build you know, within a couple of days, you can build a house, right. So you will get these timbers created in the factories, get them prefabricated, get them cut, get windows, put in all the holes for windows, put in the holes for doors for then you would kind of start to kind of create channels for all the wiring and so on and ductwork and then you ship those things to site. And then there's a crane and a crew that assembles these things in days. We happen to actually build one of those houses ourselves. My wife is an architect and she built a house in Atlanta called Haus Gables that received a lot of press, you know, in journals because it's a bit of a pilot for the US. It's one of the first CLT houses that was built and it's one of the most efficient things we've done building such a structure. And it's an industry that's kicking off right now and I think that's going to have a big impact in the U.S. and not just in housing but also in commercial building.
That's awesome. I look forward to it. What has been your relationship with libraries in your life?
I have an amazing relationship with libraries, including the late fees which had to pay on several occasions as a child.
Well, me too.
Yeah.
You're not alone.
Yeah, no, it's you know I grew up in Germany in a small town named Kempen.. I mean if anybody knows where that is, you know. And we had a library that was, you know, not not very large. But I would say it had an amazing array of books available. I was always interested primarily in picture books. So things that I like, comic books and so on, as a child and then slowly transitioned into novels and then slowly transitioned into more kind of, focused areas. Design, technology, graphics, architecture, and so on. So I spent a spent a fair amount of time in libraries. Which you know is, I think was always a place where if you want to get ideas you know you get them there sometimes because it's basically a collection of thoughts and experiences from other people that you can access immediately. And just as an example, when I was a student in design school when I had a task to do my frame of imagination was maybe limited to what i knew from my experiences. So you would go to the library and look at a few design magazines, a few design books, and immediately you would get inspired. Oh and you would be like "hey I didn't know this was possible" right and if you see that other people were able to do that you would even think further like okay if they can do this, I can do maybe even more. So it's definitely empowered me on my journey to go to libraries and to have access to libraries. And I think that's why it's also really important for children, for kids, for teenagers, even for adults to have that access because it can change people's lives, right? It can create something that can create new opportunities and even, you know, if you're an adult and you know you want to kind of change jobs and you don't know too much about that new job that you apply for you have those resources available. And you can look things up in books and you can, you know, you will be more prepared than before even if you if you go to a job interview can then say that you've looked into it and I think that makes a big difference when people show that kind of ambition. But it's important to have that resource available. So yeah, libraries have been important for me. I'm just grateful that they're part of our communities.
It sounds like you've had a long and productive relationship with libraries in your life. When you do research for your projects how do you go about that? How do you do your research?
Yeah, so, I have to say every project is slightly different, right? So you know it depends on the location, depends on the brief, depends on the scale, also of course budget. In some cases it's different if you have you know certain amount versus a smaller amount, versus larger amounts. And then of course it also depends on a bit of a kind of let's say DNA that you have with your body of work. Certain things you've created in the past. I tend to develop things further and if you look at some of the work I've done you can probably read a lineage of ideas within that work. Always expressed in different ways of fashion, always tried to kind of evolve from one to the other. But that's, that's just you know, the way that I work in my art and my designs. But you know, I tend to follow a little bit what's called or what other people call design thinking. And if you look at design thinking a bit more detail there's basically several phases that you go through while creating any kind of creative work. It starts with doing a bit of research trying to understand the problem. Try to understand the objectives of what is, what is asked for. What are you trying to solve? Then you, you try to kind of ideate. So you try to really you know sketch or put the dots together, as I call it sometimes, and come up with things, right? And they could be on paper, they could be in physical form, they could be models, they could be 3d, they could be virtua,l they could be text. So we tried to just create something based on you know the initial input and then one of the next steps is called prototyping or testing. So you take what you've created and you kind of test it against certain kind of criteria. And in simple terms, for instance, does something fall over, or is something too heavy? I mean those are basics that you would have to test for.
They seem important, yeah.
Yeah, they seem important. Especially if you build in the public realm. But also, do people understand it? Do people like it? Do people get inspired by what you do? Right? So you prototype it against certain things and then finally you develop it further, if there's kind of, if you believe there's a way to kind of push this further you develop it and then you implement it, right? So you think about, okay now we have this idea, seems to be something that aligns with everything that we're looking for, and let's figure out how to do it. And that includes many folks. Sometimes, sometimes not too many in our case. And, maybe this is a good time to also thank everyone involved with with this art piece. Because again, this is not just me, you know, doing this. There's a whole group of amazing supportive individuals, intelligent individuals, that have been part of this journey. Starting with Brenda Hayes-Bright, you know, Durham County engineering department. She has been front and center of this. Where it would have never happened without her to be honest. So she's been absolutely amazing. It's been a pleasure to work with her from the very beginning. There's of course the architects, you know, giving us an opportunity to build something because they put the building in place. And it's I have to say, it's quite a stunning design. I've been there a few times and the chance to walk around while it was under construction, you know, also when it was almost finished. Yeah, it's it's an amazing space and Vines Architecture did a great job, and particularly Frank Jackson, who was the project architect who worked very closely with me and the team to understand really. And to support what we can do, what we should do, what works, what doesn't work, and gave us all the resources that were required. You know, we have Nick Gertz, who is my engineer, that basically helps to make sure it doesn't blow away or fall over, you know, and he's a registered engineer that signed and sealed our drawings that we then submitted to the city to get planning application. As I said, Branch Technology, who was a printing company in Tennessee. Particularly Melody Reese, who was the project director on there. And she's been absolutely amazing. We're doing another project with them now as well. And then, of course, there's the library. There's Tammy Baggett-Best, who's the library director, who has an amazing staff that we have talked to very frequently and given us a lot of insight and supported us when we did the survey. And even when we came to site to install, they were very supportive.
It really took a whole team.
Yeah, as I said, this is not, this is something that is co-created. It's not just something where one person comes and drops something. But it's really, as I say, it takes a village, sometimes, I hope it was an interesting journey for everyone, because I think we all learned from this, and we all were able to get an experience that we didn't have before.
I think that, unfortunately, because of the pandemic, fewer people have seen it since it was put in place because it was kind of right before everything shut down. But I'm really looking forward to, when everything sort of opens back up and the vaccines are distributed, more people are going to be able to actually visit in person. The library and the sculpture.
Yeah, and that's also the idea that, you know, it's an art piece that you can experience from different, or in different ways. So you can either walk towards it and experience it, you know, kind of in person you can drive by you can see it from the terrace of the library. It really is this kind of three dimensional piece in many ways. And it also changes you know, during the day. So you know, when the sun kind of moves around, it creates these interesting shadows, and then the sun disappears. And it reads differently. And also the color, which is, you know, we painted the carbon ABS 3D print in this kind of purple color. And we actually did several color tests to understand what's the best fit and this color that we pick, again, we actually picked this collaboratively with Brenda and Frank as well. Yeah, the color changes, right? In the morning. It's a different purple than that during the day or at night.
I have to go see it again.
Yeah, different type of intensity, different kind of reflection. And that's interesting to make. Because those are things you can't really determine when you design it. Those are things that come to life after it's installed. And that's sometimes also maybe the magic of some of the pieces that they create, you know, that you could never anticipate.
What was the last book that you read?
So I'm currently reading a book named Grace and Gravity by Lars Spuybroek. It's quite a thick book. So it takes a lot of time to go through it. And it's, it's quite, I mean, it's super interesting, because it talks about the history of design, you know, in also in terms of how philosophers looked at it. How designers looked at it. How many disciplines looked at it, and Lars Spuybroek is a professor in Atlanta, Georgia Tech, in the Department of Architecture. And I think he spent the last seven, eight years writing this book, so and he's also a friend of mine. So it's quite amazing to to go through his thoughts in this document.
You used to work at Georgia Tech, right?
Yes, I also used to teach there. I don't teach anymore. But in my academic tenure, I was teaching in LA and there's an architecture school named Southern California Institute of Architecture, sciarc. Then I was teaching at Georgia Tech. I was the director of the graduate program in architecture. And then my last gig was at Harvard University. I was a lecturer in architecture there, particularly looking at computational design as a method to kind of create designs and art pieces.
Thank you so much for joining me today. And I really look forward to your talk during Library Fest. I hope everyone listening goes and checks it out and definitely checks out your sculpture in person multiple times, at different times a day.
Thank you for having me, Courtney, appreciate it.
Wow, I have to say that I knew this sculpture took work, but I had no idea how much and how many people were involved. It makes me appreciate those happy purple mushrooms even more. This podcast episode has been brought to you by Library Fest and the Durham Tech Library. Durham County Library, in partnership with Durham Library Foundation, is hosting their first ever Library Fest starting Monday, April 5th, going through Saturday, April 10th, 2021. Library Fest is a community celebration during National Library Week that showcases the library's exceptional services with a fantastic lineup of speaker events. Including one with today's interview Volkan Alkanoglu. Library Fest will be a diverse representation of the many ways the library can be a part of our lives. The link to the Library Fest website is in the show notes. So check it out and register to attend any of the many programs highlighting science, technology, engineering, art, and math. Along with the business offerings, humanities, programming, local history collection, Spanish language events, and much more. The Durham Tech Library is a proud partner of Library Fest and we look forward to seeing you there. Remember to hit subscribe or follow this podcast so you don't miss the next Library Fest interview!