Arthur Mamou-Mani - Burning Man & Parametric Psychedelic Architecture | ProArchitect

we have a nice bouncing chair there I see great before the Corps maybe I need to stop eating cheese too and that's terrible for a Frenchman so we had like flat modules that we would fold and then we would strap them to the next module and so on and so so I called a team in London and like guys we did a banana and it doesn't fit and we all panicked I think the team was already taking the plane orderly right now I'm talking to you because it's you right if I were talking to the general you know have a nice bouncing chair there I see oh yeah yeah it's great for the core maybe I need to stop eating cheese too and that's terrible for a Frenchman the country started opening up no London is not open yet but people are still going for walks you know I'm going for walks and stuff I don't know I'm not really following the numbers and stuff like that not really reading the news that much my wife is doing that I don't know if you're you're following everything but a little bit yeah you know I think it's it's it's kind of always the same thing on the news right so it gets a bit depressing but but I I you know I follow of this key what's going on because you know I've got a business so we need to know when we can go back to work when it's okay to I mean we do rely a lot on what the government says but you know we have people in the office at the moment because we used laser cutting and 3d printing so there's no way we can do this remotely for anything design related and design development and technical design like we can definitely work remotely no problem when it comes to fabrication heavy projects or projects that rely heavily on us testing things and doing things in a factory or at the Fab Lab at the fab pub and that's very slow because we only have one person there because we're not facing each other so we cannot have these live conversations all the time so we need to find a slot where we both don't have any phone calls where and then he needs to kind of you know he has reduced hours there so I mean you know we do our best but it's definitely slowed down work you know yeah and what's happening with this with this new temple did you find a solution for VR well so it's not quite a temple it was more it's a similar size but it was more a sort of an energy theater a place where people could leave art and creative pieces and so we found we found a place called out space and we have a VR an oculus quest and we are experimenting with the oculus quest within the VR space out space for the virtual Burning Man Burning Man has not decided like which platform to use just yet but we are exploring that I didn't see many other virtual spaces that would be a good match the good thing with all spaces that it works with unity and so that means we can program and package unity interfaces you know as in like the whole model and optimized for game engines and then we upload that into the old space and then so we had our site visit yesterday was the team I said in virtual site and we could fly in the sky and look at the project and it's just fascinating isn't it like I've never experienced the project virtually so it's such an immersive way but did you did you use the teleport or did you actually fly through the model so we teleport between worlds but when you're within the world of so the burning and virtual Burning Man is like very low poly but it's like very big and could welcome like thousands of people if not hundreds of thousands but then we have the teleport translation hubs that take us to a much more developed world where we can go more high res and so that's kind of nice and also it gives the artists opportunities to have their own world and very high res within what would otherwise be very low res if everyone was in the same universe so that so you have these different kind of spaces where we can play it's pretty good and you didn't have any problem with dizziness or stuff especially if you try to fly I saw you're right it takes time to get used to it I had to stop after a while so it's definitely not gonna be a week like burning man with virtual goggles and it's kind of weird to go out of that world and be and then in your home which definitely you know when you go to Burning Man you're fully immersed or weak and more you know so it's definitely not the same feeling and I told like but I think it still opens up other worlds which are still kind of better than always being at home so I think it's gonna push us to appreciate these other worlds you know let me ask you a little bit about that original temple in Burning Man how was that you yeah you want a competition right or how was that so I've been going to Burning Man for a couple years with my students at the University of Westminster we were building projects with them their designs and so they would apply for the grant there's something called the art grant and so we had I don't know six by six projects maybe was that received grants and so the first year we went to help them realize it and then and then I've you know I started applying as well with my with my own company to do some projects too and students continued and so at the end like the year of the temple at the temple was one that won the grant obviously with my practice and then we also had two or three student project there so it was a big year that year 2018 the temple itself it's a it's a bigger grant that you applied for separately from the art grant and so that was quite a large change like $100,000 from Burning Man but that's ready man usually helps you with parts of your costs and then the rest you have to fund rate so it's a pretty pretty intense how much did it end up costing them six hundred thousand dollars so that was hard because to pay that we had to do you know events crowdfunding campaigns we had to do we had to reach out to high donors and do dinners like high donor dinners we had to I mean it was just a whole there was a whole team dedicated to fundraising that was a team dedicated to you know obviously the prototyping the prefabrication a team for metal work a team for benches a team for we had 140 people divided into teams and the teams were all you know we it was already remote working we were all on snack and everyone had a channel and so it was a lot of management and like dealing with and everyone was around the world so to kind of and also different time zones yeah it was hard but yeah Oh Jake look I was amazing first of all second of all it looks statically very complex like how did you solve that like who did the static analysis did you have trouble with that so I since I started working even like when I first did my practice I was lucky to come across a team of engineers which they first worked at ramble and they were called the kind of advanced or you know one of those computational groups we weren't you know there was less less offering and stuff where I was I was teaching grasshopper and I've always we always used it from day one bit and so I made them and it was Stephen Melville James Foley etc and then he worked on the verge Burning Man student project which was a giant shipwreck shape and a big fractal made of scaffolding poles and then and then at the same time they asked me to work on a project for Virgin Galactic it was a sort of hotel for the the astronauts before they go to space and and so that was really the basis of Galatia because that weekend we developed a few versions for Virgin Galactic and this one was done using a recursion like loop snake I was just like kind of you know just like kind of loops and so we started our working relationship with those engineers very very early on and it continued then they set up format engineers and since then you know we've been sharing a grasshopper they use carob uh so on on galaxia we had the line setup from grasshopper and then they did the carob analysis then they would send us back the Newton's the kilo Newtons per members and then based on these kilo Newtons we try and maximize tension so we would try and get I think it's the positive values for tension negative or compression so I think right yeah and so we try and direct all the trust members so that would it would be most of them intention number one and number two the amount of bolts and screws would depend on the amount of Newtons so we would have to set our metal plates joints and so that they would basically vary in size depending on the Newtons it's very interesting they gave us the formula for that and then we tried to grasshopper eyes their lives and their principles yeah well amazing that it worked I mean it stood there for some time you didn't have to stand for a very long time how long a week yeah so it only stood for a week and honestly it was the scariest moment because you know those volunteers that I'm mentioning the honors forty people they're not they're not carpenters or they're not professional contractors they're you and me they're lawyers they're people that come because they want to build something and so for example we use ratchet straps to connect the nodes because like otherwise it would be really complex bolts nodes welding and there was just no way to do that so we just did ratchet straps and it actually worked fine I mean if people were shocked because people are used to buildings that are really kind of clean and detailed and architects love a good detail but here is like you know a team of volunteers just you know building a very complex form so but I still think it's okay because if you think of your forms to be volunteer friendly then you know we can think of ways to build and assemble in a kind of sequence that people can learn so we had like flat modules that we would fold and then we would strap them to the next module and so on and so we had redundancies and so that's why the Cameron Bure model was very complex because you had two members side by side and so it drove our engineers nuts like you know like I'm amazed we still work together with them just now it just made us so closer we realized that the boundary between design and engineering is just it doesn't it's no longer something that's so linear you know like they are as creative as us they are as involved as early as us architects and that's really I think it's really important nowadays with parametric design that's actually very central to my work I mean a lot of parameter I work on it's always the question how can you generate the model and prepare it for static analysis at the same time and though because the geometrical model statical model usually very very different because because the statical model is always a sort of abstraction and the abstraction that usually doesn't have much to do with reality you know so sometimes for example I have this example on my youtube channel and also my website I did we did like those Apple store stairs you know the glass spiral stairs yeah so I'm cooperating with an engineering office that does static analysis for them so nice so so I did like I did a model geometrical model parametric that that is at the same time as tactical one and then when you see for example a simple disk on disk like in geometry those are two little cylinders yeah but in an ethical model it's completely different there's not like some kind of spiders with with different members so it's a completely different abstraction than the geometrical one so I had to really build up these two parametric models in parallel this was like 2013-14 and since then I'm heavily concentrating in practice on whenever I have to do something geometrically parametrically always think about these different directions how will be then automatically generate the statical you know and how will we automatically generate the fabrication data just for your fabrication you went you directly export it from Rhino right with for fabrication it was so we had these triangles that would be built by you know 2x4 timber or 4x4 and depending on the forces and sometimes doubled up so two two by fours next to each other and we would unfold it so we would literally just kind of unroll the the module side by side and so create a matrix of components that people could and then each one what we generated drawings of each one of these opened module in a parametric way so when you bake the I mean when you bake the grasshopper you directly have them in the layouts of Rhino which is really convenient and then obviously we had to do paper models to check there was this very big like moments where I'm like I'm in Reno so I'm close to the the we already fabricated all the triangles and and with a colleague of mine we build a paper model like with friends and we and then we assembled what we called the banana the big petal because there is 20 of these bananas and then it doesn't fit my so I called the team in London and like guys we did a banana and it doesn't fit and we all panicked I think the team was already taking the plane or whatever and then we just realized that we just did shrink to fit on the on when we printed and so and so it was it was right but oh my god this moment where you realize you know extremely extremely Carrie you know in parametric's I mean people really don't don't realize that but the scariest thing when you automate everything is that a simple simple mistake one number can result in the whole project being being wrong I worked the last three years on this Kuwait Airport from from for you know and I had a lot of stress there exactly exactly because of that problem because I used right now to generate like the reinforcement for concrete panels for the entire Airport it's one of the biggest airports in the world and you understand like simple number you change it and the whole reinforcement for the entire Airport which is billions and billions in dollars is wrong just because you changed one simple number so that's very scary environment it's crazy and you know I think the answer to that is is a collaboration like when you start giving your file to someone else that's when they realize there's a problem so we always do this like someone will do something then someone else opens the grasshopper then someone else opens the grass over and so by adding several people work on one grasshopper you force this check right but it's not just a check as in I open it I checked it's like I have to use it so I have to like generate more drawings or I have to adapt or work on another part so I realized that if we share the grasshoppers we can optimize them together and so actually collaboration is a great way to prevent mistakes and and errors more brains on to one thing so sharing sharing is one way another way is that literally 50 percent of the code that I wrote was error check you know you just just additional functions that go through the model and think you think of everything possible course you cannot think of everything that that's the problem but I wanted to ask you about the Burning Man for me that's a very very interesting concept because I mean most architects when they study they go with this idea that they want to create something that lasts that that wants to surpass them you know and this you have more like this mandala in a Buddhist approach like you create it and then you burn it I wanted that's what the feeling like is it like liberating when you burn it or is you sad or secret question it's not like I ended up at Burning Man because I believed in impermanence or it's you know Burning Man was a thing first I didn't know I've never been to any places like this like what one would see as a festival or I I was into computation I was giving classes every every week on grasshopper and I was very passionate about the environment and soul aspects and you know Frei Otto Gaudi and all these people that form found and use mathematics but I didn't have this sort of other dimension which is the the sort of fun and the fabrication to a level of and I met a colleague Toby Burgess with who I we decided to teach together a unit and then he comes from the boat making you know industry kind of thing that he was making good you had enough implead different background in a way and then his girlfriend just came back from burning them so so he's like oh you know there's this place in the in the US that has this this kind of really crazy side but also this really interesting aspect that links what we like you know Buckminster Fuller environmental concepts of leaving no trace of self-reliance and and and it links this with the idea of creating fun interactive stuff and at the time you know how much you design him Angus like all these kind of really interesting concepts of generative components all these things was often fairly scientific and not really I've been attempting to say the word fun but like burning man brought such a fun dimension to to parametric design and and it also so people were very engaged and the students were just like equally excited by learning grasshopper as they were as going to the Burning Man and partying and and so I started going there and I'm like oh that's gonna be kind of weird like it's not really my place like I don't know and it unless it's hot and like you're in a tent and you're dirt and you don't reach our and it's I mean I'll text you the details but and but but in and so and so we build its first project and then we realized we could be completely wrong that you know we needed to weld some plates and and so I'm in there with students in the storms you know forgetting half of the laser cutting stuff I can't open my computer because it's dust and so I was completely forced to let go of the perfection of the digital world I was forced to let go of laser-cut imperfect things I learned what tolerance was I learned what you know welding on site was I learned letting go like perfect details and classroom stuff and and just appreciate that you know the real world talks to you in a very different way than the computer right and and so that was my first lesson and then the second lesson was like when you arrive in the place that is pure like pure nature no human intervention and then you build something a big city and then you undo it obviously you burn stuff but you also completely take care of your wastes take care of your water take care of it and know your energy level know your waste and then leave and have nothing left and keep it give it back to nature and as you say it's very cyclical it's very Buddhist and and that aspect then started creeping in the other aspect of what I now consider as letting go of permanence and understanding the circular economy in a very deep way and then you know I met people like West who 3d print with earth and and want to put it back to earth and they are Buddhists there are convinced Buddhist Shambhala this is the ideal city that that disappears you know and it's actually a concept that's actually I think very important now and very sustainable and a fool rewind of our notions of ego and permanence and and this idea that the great architect is one that builds something that lasts forever and the ruins and me it's an interesting point you made so so the festival kind of fit to your personality then you you aside from the architecture portlets yeah it's so when they're being very critical and then slowly I think these principles of the idea that we're all artists that we can all be creative that we all have a responsibility with our with our waste our materials that we need to think with time in mind with costs in minds that we need to be entrepreneurial that we need to raise funds for our project that we're not such victims of clients or our contractors or we we have the power to make changes and matching that's what I learned at Burning Man for sure and then this this now a new project is not a temple so someone else was designing a temple for this years ago yeah yeah it's a nice design she's called Sylvia Adrian and Renzo not yeah no but another one and they built a really beautiful star-shaped pavilion and you know the temple is always designed by someone else there is only one architect that got to build many temples it's called David best and so they tend to just kind of alternate and and the designs are always really interesting because it's obviously it's a temple so it's a site it's a it's secular but it's still like spiritual and and there's the spaces that they create have to reflect that so they come very and they're very meaningful project and the community it resonates with a massive community of people that are pretty open-minded so to actually study the history of Burning Man temples is a really interesting exercise in contemporary architecture you'll find when I first went in sponsor teen the temple was fully CNC cut and there was no metal connections it was by Gregg Fleischmann and he took that concept and you know applied it for refugee camps and stuff like that are aware a man has his architectural aspect because they don't see it as a permanent thing so they don't say impermanent because architecture is just an event space you still hear me because I change the microphone it was just when I go back of course yeah what what's hard no life you tubing my dissing did a live thing this is channel D the light thing and it was our because your life so you are there's no weight when did you do a lot of live thing I did one with the scene two days ago and I did one with a Turkish channel last week yeah I ask you something more about Burning Man later but I wanna I wanna use the time to talk about different subjects that that are resonating maybe with both of us so yeah one one subject that I wanted to talk to you because I find it interesting is that we both have a relatively small office so we both work on our own so you and me at some point we had to decide so not to go find a job it's some some big office where we would maybe have some big lever and work on some big projects but to try to do something on my own on our own and I mean when I was deciding to do that like what I was finishing my PhD when I was and on 27 28 and I was thinking I was kind of researching like all the famous architectural offices in the world you know I would go to Wikipedia and then research us and you in stood you and all this and then wonder how did they start and the story was kind of always the same it's like after the college 1 2 years they worked and then they started doing that on their own and then they struggled 5 to 10 years until the first big project came and they succeeded and I said ok if I want to do anything big I have to start on my own as early as possible so that was my logic of course that's not hundred-percent there are many that started later but I I wonder what suppose you always your thoughts on on that subject on working for someone or for yourself it's a good question right and it's it's very hard to reply is because when I when I graduated was the crisis 2008 not so dissimilar to now and so I struggled to find a job in one of those big breaks obviously you know I reach out to the big names and stuff and but no one and I ended up in a really interesting small office called Proctor in Matthews and they just won a new project like a kind of giant biodome English but all kinds of a good system and I love that concept and so I went there and worked for two years on that day it was amazing and honestly I don't think we ever worked for someone we always worked for ourselves like you know even then I was working because I was learning because I was enjoying it I didn't see it as this is for someone else I think that notion was you know I agreed I didn't feel it this way so it's not like I suddenly said I need my own thing or that I was obsessed with writing my own thing like I would have perfectly continued in an office that fulfilled what I thought was great and I I would have and I suggested some things and they said no and and I you know at some point I'm like well you know I kind of want to do that I wanted to do with 3d printing I wanted to have a Fab Lab I knew that I was excited by the potential of furniture designed to enable other people to customize projects I was very excited at the idea of college you know democratization of design process you know through through parametric design yeah yeah so I you know I wanted to do a sort of X in here like a kind of workshop for other people that was my thinking and I was reading books about entrepreneurs like bridging you know but really excited about the whole idea about business and raising funds and so I made this business final but I didn't know that I would end up having an architect profit at the time I was more excited about technology and creating a new way of doing an office not another architecture office I was excited about a new kind of company for a new kind of thing that is not done at the moment but I didn't see myself as being an architect that had enough skills or whatever to eat even you know the other architects right and I thought as a another very good architect at all I was just excited the level and new technology and grasshopper and all these new things that were happening and I just thought that a lot of the offices that exist ok don't really understand it because they didn't grow up with it I studied at da you know same year as people like Mary Osman and all that and I remember the excitement the general excitement in the class when we saw all these things it was crazy it's like a new world honesty and so the equipment's I couldn't just do normal architecture I just couldn't so yeah so that's nice you know I started with the teaching and then slowly set up my thing and then it became what it became so you started because you didn't find what you wanted to in the other offices because let's say there were more conservative than then then yours you would have like like them to be you know I don't think it's their folder you know I even I worked as I didn't I don't think when you set up an office you set it up with a DNA right was a kind of original thought of what is gonna be the main driver of it for me like the very first thing I did was assemble a 3d printer and they're not to send code to it and that's why we did the seal form by him and that was my excitement at the beginning was around that and how can someone who's never even touched grasshopper are anything really printing out whatever how can they understand the ambition like they can't because it's like if she talked to them Chinese right it's like a different language altogether which I knew because I was teaching it every Saturday but but I it wasn't fair of me to impose it on them I and I did say do you want me to set up a shop here do you want me to kind of and you know how could they know like how could they say yes you know and how do you code this way I think at some point we just need to create what's not existing and that's creating a company I think but how do you see the practice practice now like I'd say 10 years later do you see that death slowly creeping into other offices and eventually it will take over or do you see something that will remain on the side like like we are just as a side service from time to time specific project I hear I hear you know like they they say it's just a tool right I mean of course you know I started by doing freelancing and helping other practices and then slowly that kind of approach created a kind of style or created a kind of and now you know people are like ah look at me quick even my mom all right that's a pun that a project has a certain kind of vibe and that's a parametric you know and so they understand when there's a little gradient or when there is some kind of natural shape that it's the parametric just like we would say you know Indiana the sort of I love Gustav Klimt and all this you know this discussion my hair parametric is equally important as the Secession movement where I think that is created offices like Marge phones there are many Marriott's men you know what they're doing at in the ite but all these different kind of practices that have embraced it as their DNA and I don't think that an office that has started without that DNA can catch up because it's it's it's ingrained into when people hire me they hire this approach yes when I talk about it it's integral to what I say and uh and so I like you know what I mean it's hard to practice if you don't know the tool itself and it's hard to develop such a deep style if you're not if it's not integral to what you do you know but you are mostly hired for design right through the very well like not not to develop parametrically someone else's idea right you're mostly hard for to design it yourself it depends I mean like you know there's still a lot of offices that hire us to help them and we do this and I'm like kids because I learn about other people's yeah you know I give crossover classes to Foster and partners I I still give a lot of his and consultancies and stuff like that you know I work we seem to I know to do a lot of of their classes aggressiveness and consultancy so I still do a lot of that but really I do it because I enjoy it like and because I'd love to learn and I love to I love to teach I love I love it like I love having other people in the class and sharing thoughts and getting their thoughts and I find this so empowering to for everyone to get to collaborate but yeah I mean most of the stuff retained and made a big big income is like is like commissions designs and fabrication because we have you know we have the design studio and may have a fabrication space so use the best-case scenario is the full package design and fabrication yeah yeah I agree I just see you you see you menstral Neri Oxman you Mason mentioned I CD you mentioned the very many and stuff you a lot of sculptural stuff there you know I a lot of things that architects don't even consider it's very marginal it's very very very small percentage of the stuff so since I started I always looked for the ways to push this into the standard architecture you know push this into the 99.999% of other architecture and that's why I always try to work on this on these projects like these airports and stuff like that yeah more commercial projects although that doesn't fit so much to my personality may be more similar to you when you talk about the Burning Man and in these types of projects but anyway I tried to push it and that's why I'm developing now a bit in this Katya direction or so try to develop these digital twins because I think it's important to find a way to push these parametric's into the normal architecture because what is parametric is nothing else than automation and automation is coming to every single field and in our field I've in field of architecture and building industry I feel that automation is way way way behind when we compare it to the mechanical engineering industry to the electrical engineering and so on and so on so I see I see parametric's a bit less artistically than you do I mean I I admire that that side of it too but I'm trying to develop also this automation side this dry engineering side of it because I think there it's also there is also a lot a lot a lot of potential and I always try to tell people that this way of building of fixing everything and then not being able to go back and change something because you're already nine months into the projects and the original room to change anything because everything will be have to be redone I always try to push this idea of a hundred percent a parametric model where you can change anything at any point and everything else will be updated so that you have much more freedom in designing because people are still very very scared of these free forms of architecture that has all unique elements and so on and so on where they shouldn't be I mean we were in theory the the wood CNC machine the the effort it should be the same it's only about the assembly later on and generally the world is going to the direction of assembly I which I firmly firmly believe prefabricated modular so not build on-site that so so so deprecated so old I mean it's dangerous it's polluting and so on we should all build and assemble on-site like all other industries are doing and it's it's extremely slow and you ever getting frustrating but how slow this development is or or does it not bother you bother you that much okay no I know it's funny this architecture versus the what you called normal architecture are not normal you know I it's a funny kind of separation because I mean like you say 99 or 9% of our buildings are you know permanent office buildings or stuff like that but at the same time architects are not the normal thing for construction I think most of the construction happens without even Olympics and is driven by profit and by real estate agents and sorry yeah estate developer and and so even even within that 99.9 percent is I think 20 percent being architected so that says how behind we are going to deal with but I'll tell you like I think actually the fact that we're on the fringe maybe also makes us reverse the equation because when we did Lexia we connected with the general public and a lot of people were really surprised and amazed by galaxy in the sense the general public because they couldn't understand how we didn't use any main structure why everything was structured there wasn't any er key not structured there you know all of it was structured and and they were just they couldn't understand usually they build a box and then they decorate the box and then and so it raises a question and I talked to lots and lots of people in I think what matters is for us to talk to the general public and to get the general public excited about what we do the very fringes towards art I think it opens up a sort of an emotional aspect like you say that a more artistic aspect that actually connects us more to the general public and we it's them that drives yeah you know it's their imagination is them that say you know I don't want to buy something if it's by an architect that I like or if it's the style that I recognize or and so if we can talk to the general public like what the articles does really well then I think we not only increase our friends over like you say of parametric design but we also generally empower architects to to connect more with with with the industry and and and therefore enable our our source of what's you know a better architecture like you say I mean I believe in modular architecture I believe that actually with timber and mass timber this is coming back we have two prefabricated finger and assemble it sounds like we patented the robots called the poly BOTS for doing on-site assembly with Aurra and so I'm with you on that free but you know talking to general public I think is extremely important yes you mentioned that printing with dirt I saw some projects you work on you worked on that printing with sand right is that what you were referring to I saw that you were posting something so we need a project quiz quiz fresh stuff and I mean expand on now as to your prayer and we 3d printed using sand and urine binder in Saudi Arabia so we were commissioned a project there for some kind of sewing here urban furniture okay and we just wanted to do it with local materials and so we found a foundry that was using scent for creating cast metal casts and so we did this sort of interrelated octal trust and then let's kill him by generate the thicknesses and then 3d print that with the sand printers and it was really interesting like people were so confused by this and the general public was super excited again you know oh yeah yeah because I saw some pictures and it looked amazing I didn't know so you worked with Chris practice so you posted the video with him so you know him you know him personally yeah yeah so like you know it's funny but when you start doing practice and people see you are you get like magnets like when you're aligned with a way of thinking you just and then when opportunity comes you're like it's natural to work with the people that you're aligned with yeah and so we just you know you call me and then we just die yeah let's do it and it was great because you know I think he's so good at conceptualizing ideas and he has a such a good way of connecting with with you know to general public like he's he's has 200,000 followers on Instagram he's an extremely humble amazing storyteller and you know and I did sort of more parametric and fabrication stuff so we were very complimentary and and I really enjoyed this collaboration a lot of collaborations in general that's I noticed also that he had very interesting projects that go to modular to prefer prefabricated parametric and I also very firmly believe that that the mast timber is coming back and that more and more projects should be mast timber and pre-act prefabricated as well and I'm trying to orient myself toward that and this kind of goes with this the soul systems and Katia because they are orienting themselves toward that and it's mostly used in the mass timber prefabricated projects now mostly in Canada but still around the world so that's the that's what I'm pursuing right now and I mean you will see hopefully some some results soon but but you also did something with them right yes yeah yeah yeah we're working on a project for nine twenty twenty-one now because he always going to be the same as me but it and we're working with their tools so cachi is now a parametric engine called yeah and so I mean also has a lifecycle and Isis tool with you I think it's fascinating so we've done a lot of work on simulations on my cycle of plastic and bio plastics really going a little bit deeper into the cost you know we did a project with cost the fashion brand last year yeah called Kony Farah just have to go back yeah and then but it was it was criticized by people that thought that bioplastic was worse than plastic and I did a lot of studies into that and and and their own like bioplastic is way better it's less toxic it's better for your lungs it's is combustible the composting facilities are here we just need to learn about it so I you know all this project like I was mentioning was directly they're all educational project they're all here to explain things daya I don't really I know this yellow beauty and I love to do stuff that are beautiful but to me a project only matters if it helps the planet like if it helps understand concepts that will help people and humanism if it has multiple layers of value so to speak not exactly yeah so this would be a continuation of that project yeah yeah very interesting yeah I mean I mean very deep into the subject now I mean exploring the software for its sake and exchange itself and and all others are very very interesting because you see for ten years I program everything is a plug in for right now you know in c-sharp and C++ and then I realized that for example the Katia which is on known to us architects mostly has this parametric's inbuilt into it it's something that we know like in Rhino is history or something like that so it's a very interesting concept that when you realize that that you just simply model whatever your modeling your modeling your modeling your modeling and then at one point you realize that everything you did is saved is saved in kind of a tree structure so you can always go back and change anything anything so this concept itself intrigued me because I again it that fits to my personality like I'm excited by this puzzle solving and by this parametric's like how can I make something that's completely completely interconnected this is what occupies me this hundred percent parametric's so that's why I'm that's why I'm experimenting with now and as I said I hopefully soon I will show some videos and some examples of this this this pursuit but what I wanted to ask you on the business side let's say like we live in the in the age of globalization so we see how everything becomes bigger so they were I don't know 50 car companies now basically there's three car companies that so I sense that in in in architecture we also see the rise of these mammals right of these Goliath's like like zaha hadid like foster partners and so on and so on and from the business point of view do you think that we we will be drowned do you think that for whatever services they would need us for they would just create a team of ten people inside their office and say thank you we don't need you we have this team and that we always have to be smarter than those ten people in order to stay above the water do you see it like that or do you see it as there will always be room for small offices in some way I don't know I mean it's a funny one because you know I give the grass upper classes there and those and so I am actively really have a funny perception of that III I think growth you know like it's not always in size like I don't I think to have an office that at the very forefront of architecture you don't need a huge mega office I think actually when you have a mammoth it's really hard to innovate and you end up with a highly specialized world in which you have the grasshopper guys the rendering guys the graphic design team and therefore you lose this holistic approach which you know I love in Buckminster Fuller wrote a book the operating menu of a spaceship earth of course I quote I quoted last time in my video when I talk about this comprehensiveness that people should be more interesting different fields and not specialized yeah yeah for sure I think because I'm the the Pyrex I think the people on the boats because they they had to know everything cuz when you're on a boat you have no choice and you know we think of I mean she or people that had a overview and any less curiosity and had the means to adapt very quickly and learn everything and switch to medicine and switch to and in that sense not be bounded by specialization or big corporate structures or systems that prevent you from having a holistic approach I think when you say I want everything parametric I think that's a healthy obsession because you'll have no choice but to keep it like fully overall thinking you can't snotty mind the question is how to do that because a people people will easily argue let's say eldunari da Vinci or Isaac Newton they could be Renaissance people because the science wasn't developed then so so much they could know biology and physics and mathematics because the field itself was small and someone could say today if you take biology it has 1,000 branches and each of those branches is extremely deep so you have to specialize but my point in that word at least when it comes to architectural building industry is that the way to not specializing it is automation so every show all those things that you think you need to specialize you automate let the Machine does that and then that lets you as a human rise again and again be a Renaissance person again can over you everything because you don't have to go so deep you let the machine do all those specialized branches know for example let's let's take whatever let's say that the facade element the connection of facade elements 300 years ago there was probably three types of connection now there is three thousand types so you can say I need a person that will learn ten years how to do this three thousand different facial a facade connections because you you have to know that and you can argue no I can make an AI algorithm that can choose one perfect out of these three thousand for you and this human doesn't have to specialize in this stupid thing anymore but they can rise to the design phase so for me I think that automation or parametric's is the answer to going back to this buckminster fuller's ideas of not being specialized by kind of having an over overview by automating this little task you know yeah also that you're right and I also think that the fact that you have a system rather than a finished form like the fact that it's less about the sketch and more about dynamic systems I can have variations to it also forces you to think from the bottom up like it forces you to let go of a preconceived idea of a form and so therefore you don't have this grand architect the last vision and then the sort of all the rest is like beyond concept and it's just like a little team taking care of it it's actually the the parametric model is here to show you a variation so it comes from the model it comes from the material from the machines you use and therefore it becomes way less about the one mind and way more about the systems that you setup and the teams and and so in that sense yeah I guess I guess one is forced to think holistically and cannot keep it all in his brain yeah but but how do you see generally like parametric's I mean I'm talking a little bit about the present and the past again not about the future but in my 10 years of practice I barely did anything for architects or with architects this may be surprising to hear but all the automation I did came after the design was developed and when someone said ok now we have this complex geometry now we have to actually produce shop drawings now we have to have the lists of elements part lists and I don't know what now can we please outta mate it and when we talk about parametric design generally in our in our practice people imagine actually designing with parameters so from my experience that happens very very little but I think you are one of the rare ones where that actually happens so so what is your thought on that that does that actually happen more often than I think or no but you remember when I mentioned that you can't have a practice that just those families like you got to be a practice that has this as its DNA because I don't think that the older generation of architects will understand deeply what but Mr Fuller what was saying which is you know we need to think in terms of systems and I don't think when you're trained with the likes of frank lloyd wright's and who used to be a guy who would have a vision in the brain and literally draw it and then I don't think that's applicable to working with a parametric system I think you know when you look at when you go outside and you look at a natural system you know that it's the sum of many rules you know that it's the sum of meters and you know that one plant will have similarity to another one and you know that there is certain DNA similarity and we know the theory of evolution and we know evolutionary solving and stuff like this that connects us deeply to the natural systems and also why I the style ends up looking natural by the way yeah and so and so I don't think that other offices will have this as a design process to generate lots of options or parametric variations creates matrices of and then understand the fitness criteria of matrices I mean right now I'm talking to you because it's you right if I were talking to the general you know big mystery for your nobody you know it's just we we know between our community that is just a different way of thinking of creating and and I just I I try my best to explain it then and that's why I try not to stay too much within the whole smart geometry you know all the schools that do that and stuff I'd rather connect and explain into general public but I I do think that we should come out of our our bubbles and like yeah I understand that it has a real advantage over conventional thinking and and that people will be really pleased to hear that we can design buildings like nature designs yeah I think so yeah it's just gonna take some time apparently it's not going as fast as we would like right yes I mean you bet you mentioned Buckminster Fuller a lot I mean of course we were all fans of him especially in our field and I slightly wonder about a bigger picture like for example him and this Jacque fresco from this Venus Project and so on though those are the people that have this attitude that I always had the technology with free us all so as the technology develops we will get free to do creative stuff and then somehow on the on the opposite side you have people that are neo-luddites the thing that technology will destroy us and like Ted Kaczynski like the Unabomber that tried to stop the development of technology because it said eventually it will kill us and I somehow when I observe this path I think it can be either 0 and 1 so either we're going to go into the complete utopia or a complete dystopia and sometimes when I see how the things are developing especially when you have these tests like this virus and when you see that the the mentality of people I fear that the dystopia with the development of Technology is much much more likely than utopia what's your general thoughts of [Music] you know of an optimistic future like I'm on the side that technology as enabled so much progress and I say guys technology has connected us has made this confinement actually surprising in your computer poll that just for me yeah you know we can talk online together I've been connecting with people yesterday I was in the VR world like visiting like you know my site like virtually in person like the I see technology as a way to generate new kinds of spaces for the human intelligence to thrive and flourish and I I think you know Ted Kevin king he was obviously mentally ill and and he obviously I don't even want to consider anything cuz he killed people yeah the ultimate darkness yeah and so I but when it comes to you know Bucky fuller are you know what he's created the body of work afraid so the idea that technology empowers people and actually allows people to have more control over their direct environment I think that we've lost technology as it came first obviously there's always questions of our and you know I see a lot of the the factories were shocking at first when they were here in England and like all the Charles Dickens and all these Gary things and then they went to China because we didn't want to I've been next to us and then I mean now you know I've got my Fab Lab down the road and I can generate mass to stabilize for the NHS and it it is so beautiful that technology especially the democratization of Technology and the fight that is so if if we're willing to look into a different that curiosity or if you have good teachers or to understand that technology is not that hard and that we all have the power to learn the mathematics and the basic principles of technology that everyone has the mental capacity to do it and trust me I wasn't really good at math at night but it's just the sheer enthusiasm or the sheer aspect of having a good teacher and Buckminster Fuller was a great teacher Frio was a great teacher and so young being good architects we also need to be good teacher and we need to kind explain to people how simple things are and how exciting they are and that positivity will I think help save lives like you mean the opposite of Ted Kaczynski with you or his fear of technology I I agree mostly with you I agree mostly with you but do you know who Nick Bostrom is Nick Bostrom from the Oxford University it's a philosopher he had this he has this simulation the hypothesis you know if we are living in a simulation you know about that maybe yeah I mean even masks was basically a quoting the Nick Bostrom so here he read Nick Bostrom's book I have it here somewhere it's called super intelligence and basically his he's a very smart philosopher he he he said that there is only three three options basically either we ourself destroy ourselves but either every civilization destroys itself or the second possibility they lose interest in making simulations and the third possibility we live in a simulation because down the road 100 years 2,000 years 2,000 years from now we will be able to create a technology VR technology or whatever that makes simulations indistinguishable for it from reality that's so you either destroy yourself or you lose interest or we're living in a simulation so that's why that's the the probability theory and that's why even masks said Elon Musk said it but why I wanted to bring this up here is because I generally agree with you with technology very very much but this philosopher Nick Bostrom has also another theory that's called the vulnerable world or something like that and he basically says imagine our whole history of humanity and imagine we have like like a bag bag of spheres and inside there's white spheres and black spheres so he says imagine whenever you pull out an invention it has a color so you invent the wheel I don't know it's a white wheel it's a good thing you invent this invent this and says from time from time to time you you pull out grace fears which is like nuclear power so you have nuclear bombs that can destroy the world and so on and so on and he said so far with the development of technology we have been lucky not to pull out a black wall and what could be a black ball he said imagine if we invent a way to make a nuclear bomb that anyone can make in the kitchen that's it let's imagine an invention that's like a nuclear bomb but you can go now in your kitchen and make it he said for example that would be a black ball and he says if in this development of Technology we do pull that out then we're kind of doomed then we either track everything every single person do we track their minds to see what they're about to do we enter this dystopian world or we get annihilated because one crazy person makes it in the kitchen and destroys the world you know so I it's just it's not a question it's just something to think about because because I'm generally on your side very very much an optimistic side but when I read this theory of the vulnerable world I was thinking ah yeah what is that what is it with the development of towage technology we come to the stage where we designed this black ball that could end everything very easily no I mean we already have it like if you see the amount of countries that have access to the nuclear bomb and you see the corruption equally to the level of access to the nuclear bomb and one could say well it would have easily just launched right like just take North Korea or you know I think it's it's not inside people's nature to self-destruct to that level I think that I don't the way that she described that he said where we must be in a simulation because otherwise we'd be destroying ourselves pretty much I seemed a little bit lied you know the The Truman Show complex or the the idea that the world there are higher forces that are controlling things and that for sure we are under the spell of some you know whatever I see it as infancy I see it as not wanting to become an adult not realizing that we have the power over our own world that we have the possibility of changing things ourselves that we are fully in control of our destiny I see it as adulthood right because that's when you leave your your parents it was a stroll for me you know I had to do up psychoanalysis I and you know Freud describes this really well I really think that a conspiracy theory our way to avoid adulthood I'm sorry it's mighty controversial but I think it's a little deeper than then just because I can't imagine I mean and I know that science can be counterintuitive so I saying I can't imagine that this would happen is enough but I just I just see the progress the technological progress around us and even though it's really amazing I mean anyone who's actually put on the our goggles knows that we are so far so far off reality like I was yesterday even asking about why is the model triangular and because I cannot even do a rectangle yeah but so if fact so far off is the question because it doesn't matter if it's hundred years 1,000 or 1 million from now if we come to that point and we theoretically should to be able to develop such technology and there is no reason that says no because it's a linear progression but yeah ok I will leave that aside because we can do another hour and just so if there was this possibility of going that far in technology which I think actually will hit a lot of walls it's amazing and it's exciting but I think it's overestimating the humanity's ability to to create technological advances to think that leap into the simulation maybe those people action humans humans might be might be evolving you too on AI very soon so maybe a I will develop it so we don't know yeah yep yeah but if you see us 50 years from now 100 years from now it's hard to imagine in the 60s no one could imagine what Internet is you know it's very very hard to make predictions very very very hard so let me ask you one extremely dry question and then and then we can close up with some fun ten subjects so the dry question is is bheem so what do you think about being generally about this like everybody's switching to Revit and ArchiCAD and trying to to have this comprehensive models do you have any does that create any problems with you in your practice or is the Challenger I mean in all honesty I never had to go so far in a project that I will have to tinker with a fully BIM model yeah because I think when you do parametric design you're like you say because everything is in grasshopper it's very easy to export ifcs and stuff and other beam experts deal with respect which is not what I wish that we could do I wish you know right now right now inside I know if you know about right now inside but it allows you to regress over within beam and stuff so women read it so we're doing research into it so the workflow I mean what is a workflow is people sending you baked drawings like pwg from a beam model and it's such a mess and I think because it's automated people are less careful and therefore since you're really messy fast yeah and and you're lost in the world of what does it even mean this file you know that that's where it hinders us do you do you hope like me that the world without 2d drawings will come soon whenever you do everything will be 3d oh yeah I mean I could you know I want to say I got fired from the barça's for that but they were like where are your plans and sections and I kept on saying like why did you even show backward yeah it's like we're doing is really complex 3d systems then they're asking about plans inspections and and I think it's just a generation thing surprising to be to hearing that at the pocket to be honest but I was just like I was just like why am I wasting my time teaching something that I don't believe in anymore you know you know Tobias valleys are the love of Architects yeah yeah well I worked with him and I taught with him here at the University and I remember like I don't know 15 years ago one conference he was talk he was working for you in studio when they built the Mercedes Museum in Stuttgart and I don't know if you know that you in studio Mercedes Museum in Stuttgart is very freeform and I remember his lecture fifteen years ago like he was saying we couldn't do anything with 2d like what what where are you gonna do the section where are you going to do like the plan because it's all even the floors on there and then he's saying we have to get rid of that and then I was thinking 15 years ago I don't think anything has changed on that on that matter it's so so slow it is a tool that is pretty useful to understand the areas and stuff at some point or another you need plants or you need a keeping plane of some sort yeah but ya hear that you know a planning section are so crucial to architectural designers I think it's not no longer reliable at all yeah yeah I agree I agree let me let me ask you just what do you do aside from architecture what's what are your personal interest what is your what to call the affair fun that's where this real my wife is so we love to travel I love to walk around with her and you know I read a lot I love I love reading and of you know we've been playing a lot of games and stuff like that I really enjoyed that cool what would you recommend me I mean I was about to read the Spaceship Earth from Buckminster because I just put it on Kindle and anything else you would recommend that you read recently mathematics and art you're blurring the okay no because because you have this automatic blurring of the background turned on skype the cultural history of mathematics and we're okay leaning gamma L was really amazing okay talk about mr. fuller he was part of a school which was called the Black Mountain College uh-huh and you know John Cage they were all part of that school that had holistic thinking so there are several books this one is called Black Mountain College experiments in arms and then I've been reading an ecology philosopher called Timothy marks Norton I think which is a really interesting idea that'sthat's what's happening on my my list of things to read that's interesting yeah thanks thanks for your advice on I'll check them I'll check them out tonight I usually go go outside the architecture unlike when I go to books so that I get a bit of different perspectives on on life yeah and and I usually read several books at the same time like right now I'm reading the Joseph Campbell the power of myth you know him he like the hero with a thousand faces and stuff as the guy that talked about meat which is very interesting and then I'm connected to our story I'm reading a book how is it called a year without pants I think it's about guy guy working for the WordPress company I don't know if you know but the WordPress you know the websites yeah yeah yeah his company's called Automatica he has 1,000 something employees and yes and no and no office they don't have an office space so it's all online so basically one of his workers wrote a book it's called a year without pants how he basically only works online and I wanted to see he explains about the benefits because I'm a very very big proponent of online work you know so I had like I think wow he's so inspiring and his company is so beautiful and then I love WordPress you know it's just yes they just manage to do the impossible right take something very complex and make it exactly what we were talking about yeah maybe accessible to people yeah yeah and I hope we can do the same you know like especially with prefabricated modular I can really think we can we can move everything into the online space and not be limited by the by the by the physical physical one yeah so yeah I will not hold you called you here the longer questions thank you I really appreciate it deep and meaningful questions oh man we didn't even start next time we go on psychedelics and the Burning Man yeah I listen a lot I listened a lot a lot of you know podcasts about LSD and DMT and mushrooms and about Terence Mckenna and so on we like the subject is fascinating no it's I mean it's it's it's incredible the obviously I couldn't escape it and Burning Man so but I was you know I I tried it for the first time very recently LSD and mushrooms they they I mean it's pretty incredible like it's a very it's obviously impossible to explain the connection it creates in your brain is it's so unique that it's sort of rewires things and looks for stone I can see that it's very very scary and but you know it's just it opens up new perspective on things so it's been I'm really really interesting did you experience the experience this this loss of ego so to speak that people talk about yeah the dissolution of the ego is something that I find important and and I think we talked about it's in very key but you know yeah by connecting to systems you on it you you just saw you're you're you're kind of units then you see everything being connected and that's a big core of the kind of systemic the system's thinking we were talking about and like you see Crees in ways that you don't see them usually like yeah actually maybe even though we saw it like look at the tree and spend time looking at it but I mean that's level of complexity like honestly it's hard to find them in a computer how you could reproduce right because it's really really intensely complex and so yeah so being able to just look at trees in this way I think even just that made it worse the right now is a you know we put everything in this drugs category and I really think there's a clear difference between you know you have no killers and stuff and mushrooms it is yes is a very violent I mean it's very intense one yeah you know the mushrooms the truffles and stuff like that like they are just they are put in the same categories but I think they there's something about it that makes it and I think that actually is going to make human section you think more straight I think you know well you know there are theories that that's what made the jump in the evolution there are lots of tears from I don't I think there is McKenna even that in the evolution of human actually when they start using the mushrooms that made the click of consciousness they made a big jump in evolution which it's very social I kind of you know I had one you know I would say too recently but and the kind of interaction you have with people the kind of connection you can establish with another human being and the level at which you kind of understand things is so like you say so side way is so different it's a little bit like looking at a cubist painting it's cubist paintings would kind of represent things from different angles and I feel like it's sort of imposes a kind of cubism so you can only grow from it like yeah and it's you know I can see why the Beatles like you can see how they got this opening experience like yeah thanks thanks a lot and and then let's do this also soon again stay safe talk to you soon bye bye [Music] you

Channel: ProArchitect

Views: 2,260

Rating: 4.9583335 out of 5

Keywords: Programing Architecture, Programming, Architecture, Construction, Freeform, Geometry, 3D, Automation, Milos Dimcic, Dimcic, Digital, Artificial Intelligence, Future, Future of Architecture, Digital Architecture, Virtual Reality, Virtual, Reality, AI, Architectural Competition, BIM, Rhino 6, C#, Development, Rhino Development, Rhino Course, Rhino Development Course, Arthur Mamou-Mani, Mamou-Mani, Mamou Mani, Burning Man, Burning Man Temple, Galaxia Temple, Galaxia, Alt Space, 'Buckminster Fuller

Id: WWrlV9JE2eo

Length: 74min 45sec (4485 seconds)

Published: Wed May 27 2020