Masterclass Rem Koolhaas - 2 november 2017 - Kunsthal Rotterdam

good morning everybody welcome to the master class Byram koolhaas and welcome to the control of course my name is Emily unsink I'm director of the Khun star since nine years and I'm super happy that you're all here the master class will be in English I assume you all speak English and we invited Aramco has to do this master class because of our 25 fifth anniversary that we celebrated last night but and today with you as students and friends of the green star first of all I want to like to thank natural innate longer as our sponsor for the series of the master classes and as a durable partner Furtick installed and this is the fifth master class in a row organized for you students and friends from the Netherlands and abroad and I think it's an unique chance for you all to interact with with RAAM today and with other artists known artists in in this series I also want to thank a new Institute one of our neighbors because they lend our the study maquettes for this building and of course I'll leave it entirely up to RAM and veronik later on to talk about the design of this building the fantastic concept and the many many choices that were made in 1992 or even before that and started all in 1989 but I would like to start with a few of our experiences in this building as the user because a good stall is a foundation and the building and the green star as foundation are the same age so it's not only about the building it's also about the content and the programming and I've looked photographs of the things we're doing here as you know or you might know in the 1992 when it was first opened it was not entirely perceived as a fantastic building it was the critiques were quite severe sometimes not everybody liked it it came in the press with the leaking ramps and problems and entrance and so on and so on so you can say it was perceived sometimes by some people by quite broad audience as a as a difficult building but not for the users the constant theme we love this building and why do we love this building because we can do everything in anything in here it gives us a lot of freedom and it gives also a lot of freedom to the visitor because it doesn't have a route that you have to follow you can really wander around you can choose your own pace you can straw you can it makes you reflect you have to work hard in this building because the ramps and the stair there's a lot of stairs there's a lot of ramps and with that there's time to reflect on art and all the things you can see and with every exhibition we make a kind of a new world and if you come here today you can see the exhibition on Pao DeVoe and the cats and if you come here three months from now you can see a totally different mix of exhibitions and I think that's the strength of this building that we can use it any way we like and that's not only the exhibition spaces but also this beautiful auditorium that you're sitting in today after the master class will open the curtain so you have a broad view on the bark and rabbits of the artist two classes we have a cafe that we can use we had a big party last night and it also is a very festive space and we like to use it and in the summer we used a terrace between the building of the natira historic museum and the star as a kind of a festival space and every Sunday people came here to dance and to enjoy music and art so I think that's what I want to share with you that we we can do fantastic beautiful and very ambitious exhibition like Alberto Giacometti or Jean tangle II Henry Moore and all those kind of things but also very other special things so it was really like a ballad a festival so I would like to say a few words to you know NEPA tale she she will moderate masterclass she has a very impressive track record her she has a PhD in architecture an engineer architect she's a critique and editor based in Brussels and associate professor at the ecole nationale supreme and architecture in lis from 2001 to 2010 she directed architectural publication for nie nai publishers in vallata dam and since 2005 she's one of the editors of baza a journal for architecture and founding member of 16 platform for a young architecture in Belgium and she moderated a very successful lecture here a few years ago I think a few yeah it was a few years ago from oh as 'm so we're very happy that you're here and them of course I want to congratulate you also with the birthday of the green star 25 years so the floor is yours thank you [Applause] good morning everybody we should I'm very happy to be here it's a it's a great moment because two years ago we presented this issue within the console which was dedicated to the first decade of OMA personally I couldn't be here I prepared everything but I was highly pregnant so I had to lay down and I couldn't make the trip so I'm very happy I'm here too today the issue of the first decade specifically presented projects by OMA made between 1978 and 1989 with an exhibition in the boy month in spring of 1989 and what we did was we looked on to the website of OMA and we looked into all the projects that were developed at that time 42 projects were developed at that time and 15 of them were executed amongst which of course also the console the console was a project developed at the end of this first decade at the end of the 1980s a period of intense public debate of great political challenges and of a political context which was very important for me to sit in the meantime the Berlin Wall of course fell down Margaret Thatcher was prime minister of the UK for Swamiji home was the president in France and I'm wondering Ram as a first question if this period of intense public debate and opening an intense challenge in context wasn't a first step towards anticipating and I think it was very important and actually yes last night we talked about it you mentioned there fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990 the Soviet Union disappeared and in 92 the Treaty of Maastricht can you can have a show of hands for all of you who know the treaty of myself do you know what it means okay so this is a really depressing situation of Europe today the Treaty of Maastricht is the defining treaty that was responsible for the current iteration of Europe and the European Union so the Treaty of Maastricht was an enormous leap forward in the definition of Europe it discussed for into the Euro and introduced the single currency and a whole series of other ambitions and it really is extremely important to understand this building as a manifesto for a new Europe and in in that sense I really was tangibly and physically inspired almost to try to find an architecture also new architecture that would do just this to a new in Europe it is a project within a series of projects in the office of OMA where the idea of the collective becomes important I'm wondering if at that time within the idea of collectivity and the new Europe if the Consol brought other projects like the groovy C terminal the tri-county blow tech boom greg sports cetera our projects that are searching for new ways to deal with the collectivity I think that of waiting in that time there was a kind of feeling that the digital would move change everything and that our culture was changing drastically and that things would not no longer be the same it's actually interesting that yesterday we had a car meeting where a professor explained how culture has changed in the last 25 years but everyone always represented as a certain change but actually it's been kind of going on for a very very long time discussions about media for instance were already kind of happening in the 60s 70s so what became clear is that the digital a media would question everything that was physical every substantial thing was going to become more virtual and therefore architecture really had to define in the world or define a new position and what I felt was important then is that since everybody would be convened eventually kind of related relate to individual media and and we all know this composition that architecture could be one device of one medium that could define collectivity and could accommodate the still important desire to be together in in that way maybe we can talk about the projects we'll just go on with these pictures here and that may be to hold on on this image it's hard maybe it's good to good to to point out here of course the pencil is here in its second version but with part of a very much larger plan an urban plan on a very important site in in Rotterdam and one of the only sites that were still possible in that time - in the city center to build on with the project by OMA of the architectural museum the current needles architecture Institute the boy bands from Bennigan's and of course the Museum Park three projects actually four if I'm correct a first project for the kunst are from 87 to 88 a competition project for the architecture museum eighty then the second project for the Kunsan in 92 in the museum Park 89 94 so within a short period of time oh I'm a developed four projects for this side yeah you want to explain no okay no no no yes it's true and what I also memorized yesterday is that yes it was the beginning of vague and integer and therefore the beginning of the market economy the beginning of the state shifting many more and more tasks to the private sector but it was just the last moment that the state could be such things or the city could decide things and in Virtanen there was a vet harder linguist who had two portfolios for finance in culture and that was a very important combination who could simply decide who would be doing kind of things in the city so he asked me first to do the console then we became responsible and that is the kind of public secret the architecture museum was initially planned here where now we have to collect will have to collects about of the moments we proposed to kind of shifted here and we did the competition then and that competition made the first project we had done here here look a bit ridiculous so in order to do a good that's a good counterpart for the architecture Institute we redid the console and then we lost the competition for the architecture Institute and so then the console stood on its own a lot of federal dramatic events what is interesting I thought is that if you look towards the first project for the pin style and the second one there's a kind of threat going true the Box stays runaway the box the square is still the square but there is an inversion also from a very clear and simple plan to something much more complex maybe we can talk about and also maybe you can explain to them why this shift happened in a way the shift happened I think the architecture and this history really shows it it's a kind of incredible combination of a particular ambition but then all the completely random events or accidents that happened on the way and kind of how you negotiate all those accidents to result so what happened is that can basically the constant are the city appointed the director for the console this never swim from camera and he basically hated this project and he said you know I cannot work here it's I need black box and what you've done is terrible and so therefore we we actually had no choice except to start again and when we started again of course it enables us to to be more interesting and that then convert and you see it here this site was located here but the work you know - there was a pedestrian X is kind of running through it now please go - back to the other pedestrian access running through it and a vote so the site was divided in four parts before we did anything and we always had a difficulty to go from here to there how please stay on that side okay so we always had the difficulty to go from here to there and then and maybe now you can kind of shift a few studs so then we thought for the first time that yeah okay so but then we decided that we could overcome this component whereby if this was the ramp by making the entry kind of ramp itself that allowed you to go underneath and to go over and this is one of these kind of rare moments and architecture when you really have the feeling to have invented something which actually is really where I think that car may be in any architectural life there can be maybe three or four wheel in branches not more and and and of course this invention then became the ambition to make a building that would represent the kind of continuous loop or a spiral and that would make the issue of what floor you were on kind of irrelevant and so simply through this device this intersection we could kind of move and move and keep moving and Emily just kind of spoke about how versatile the building was how it left them to do whatever they needed to do in any of the spaces I think it is really that key moment that triggered those flexibility you talk about inventions and I'm when we looked into all the projects that you did in the 1980s I think it's a very important period of these kinds of inventions where I was wondering if the idea of the fragments of architecture instead of the whole is not an important issue that we can treat also in relation to the console where you think of layers you think of promenade you think of an entrance door etc can you is that a guiding principle or was it a guiding principle for the Consol the idea of the fragment I said the two things I think the inventions were really stimulated by political activity and I would say that kind of one of the purposes of the current moment where innovation is such an important concept and such an important metric I would say that the market economy itself kind of simply by putting a commercial pressure on everything is is extremely negative or favorable for real inventions so that maybe we can do that later it was the time of fragmentation you know that was there that there were a number of philosophers who seem to emphasize the fragment over the hall that was the beginning of post-modernism people didn't no longer believe in a kind of large coherent story but were more interested in episodes and kind of separate events but I always had taken mixed feelings about that and so yes I was really alerted to the importance of a fragment but I always wanted to maintain a kind of overall hole so I think that even this building the hole is defined by their current circulation but it is true that the circulation leads you to a series of seemingly unconnected events which i think is one of the very very big differences with later projects because I think in the quinces novel is quite nice and what is also a very interesting in projects of that same period the one of the netherlands architecture Institute maybe that we can show is that trying to go back is that they're both in plan and in section there is an important work on the layering the idea that there is a kind of complexity in the section of the neurons architecture Institute I think is very interesting whether this section is related to a quite complex plan with the triangle and the circle in it and at the same time there's also something very easy very well not easy very involved ik very simple which is the very regular plan of the construction so I was wondering if in the console this principle of different elements the structural element dissection and the plan are coming back to two things basically in the beginning of the 20th century they invented the free plan free plan was kind of the structure of a building was no longer supported on walls but on columns and that allowed you to make the wall kind of much freer object which could take on any shape and which could be they call that a free plan in the second part of the 20th century it seemed possible to look at a free section or to liberate a section and I think that that is what to consolidate a floor didn't no longer have to be a kind of horizontal plane but actually it could basically take any shape it could become a curve a hill ramp and and in a way I can related more to landscape so I think that that became then driving kind of idea but behind many of the subsequent buildings you know a free dissection and and due to think about the section as a separate issue but I also would like to say is and which i think is very important for this structure I said this is European manifesto but it is manifesto by somebody who very aggressively embraced globalization because I myself was educated in Indonesia England America I did this with the Japanese architects we had an Indonesian Italian as a second second person in the office we worked with the Sri engineer and so I think that all those impulses were very important you see for instance in the materialization Japanese influence but particularly their idea that each of the three zones of the console would have its own autonomous structure for instance for those of you would be sensible for this we have in the main hall downstairs five columns so it's a kind of a symmetrical column grid all those were definitely inspired by a kind of collaboration with other cultures I think we're touching upon something that I really think is crucial for the consult and even if I talk about to consult with friends they say that you could reduce the project of the consult to its structure and to its structural logic would that be could we say that the essence of the project is the idea that you have a very irregular structure in a regular plan whether of course in the universe architecture Institute it was inverse and that it had an important impact on the composition basically I think that the architecture is in essence a collaborative effort whatever people think and in the mid-eighties became friends with Sasebo moment engineer from Sri Lanka and basically that he enabled or maybe I should say I enabled him to think about architecture and he enabled us to think about structure so that relationship became a kind of very important driver of a number of the kind of project and this is for instance kind of the kinds of one one where we had fear in their choices kind of supporting the books and where it became very interesting to simply you know where we simply as you know this each we and doctors have to be the same always no it isn't so then you can vary and then you can introduce a kind of totally different rhythm that more could relate to jazz than to any anything political overtime oh I see that we have five more minutes so this is very very frustrating because I think it would be nice to talk for two days about this project okay we can do that so we I'll skip some questions and I still have two more which I would like to ask in the way that the projects were represented in that time and I think it's very nice also if we look to the model or if you look to some of the collages that I saw in the archives about the concern there is this kind of lack of sophistication in the representation it's quite brutal it's quite rough it's quite unfinished and I think it was meant to be that way and I was wondering if it was meant to be that way because it was a kind of aesthetic that you very much believed into at that time or if it was also a way to start a dialogue with the client or with other persons in the team to work on the project well I think this is really a very important issue and this is totally out of context but in the banal I organize in 2014 I said that our values had changed kind of aggressively and from the French Revolution eaglet a fraternity Liberty we are now addicted to comfort security and sustainability and I particularly our addiction or commitment to comfort I consider first of all also an expression of the market economy but also extremely negative for you know any sense of challenge innocence of any sense of adventure and any willingness to take any risks this is obviously building the text risk and it's obviously a building that challenges and obviously a building that is not dedicated to comfort in the first place and in that sense I think that the that we now kind of forced almost to produce renderings I think that your enemies can really most repulsive architectural tools because they show kind of situation how it will what it will look like and I think that this completely counterproductive to thinking to intellectual kind of pursuits to show how things work maybe just to continue about that when we were in the archives of OMA I discovered this project CASL Palestra that you did in 86 in Milan where there's a series of collages with even actually the articles in which you cut all the little persons that were in your collages showing a representation or a scenario or snapshots of a life that could be possible in Gaza Palestine in this pavilion and at the same time we discovered also other collages which were collages of the NIE of the passive Villa and of the quince tile where you saw that there's a kind of thickness given to the facades with different materials that were cut out and put on and so I was wondering how the role of the facades was an important one in developing the console we have four different facades there are layers they have different materiality was materiality important at that time of course it was and and basically I came I was studied in LAN at the AAA from 68 to 72 the biggest influence was maybe Charles Jencks critically the world the book under was modern architecture he became a friend and he was completely relentless and almost daily confronting me with my inability to to do facades and and it really became a problem our friendship survived but he gave me an enormous inferiority complex and and so I think that you know all of my facades are born in inferiority complex and with the basic understanding that I don't can't do a facade so it's a kind of desperate struggle to find alternative materials alternative ways alternative sensations this kind of important moment in my thinking about facades kind of different relationships between a mechanical and the material between transparency and opacity and between stability and instability refinement and brutality brutal it's written down here I have two more questions I start with one if I can I'll keep the brutality for the last one I go back to my other question something that you mentioned in the interview that my colleagues had with you here two years ago I found very inspiring it's about also the context of that time in which it was a very difficult political content value changing political context and economical context but it was also very challenging architectural compact context why because at that time architects still had different positions and they explicitly wrote about their positions or expressed their positions to their buildings so we were in a context where there were different architectural ideologies in which you as Rem Koolhaas Oh Emma needed to find the place is Dickenson one such an example of finding a place in Rotterdam in the Netherlands at that time with these ideologies yeah of course it is was a kind of quite a crowded field and basically I think I take an advantage and disadvantage at the same time because I was completely not educated but completely part of an anglo-saxon discussion of architecture that was completely different from what was here basically here people were talking about men silicate that was a word you would never hear in America and in America kind of formal issues were convening much more crucial and the relationship between philosophy and architecture at the time was also very crucial so when I came here I had a kind of sophistication but no credibility because the anything I was interested could not be described in the dirty language and and so in that sense it was very became very important for me to have one single intervention in Dutch culture so that it would intersect at least with the Consol who is located in a historical between brackets side because I don't know if you can speak about history in Rotterdam if we look into the context after the Second World War but a context next to Bauman's which was a kind of vacancy in which you decided to make this building in close relationship to the surroundings I think that what Adam actually was very influential and and simply by being here it became very influential because supposedly the suhasi have been destroyed it was clearly we constructed but you could also see that there were already different waves in different mentalities reconstructing so actually it was the total chaos of kind of fragments of old buildings with fragments of modernist kind of entities basically fragments of postmodern architecture so I think out of you know maybe out of modesty I always felt it was very important to to be contextual but perhaps not in the traditional sense of the world where contextual means to be similar I was kind of fascinated for instance with the West a dyke with a park and that you know all those contrasts and relationships became very crucial in defining what we did come to my last question I have to stop okay last question last question we are in a building which we celebrate today 25 years and still it feels like this is a building which is very accurate towards our present context which is even not searching for a relationship with its context but it has a kind of timelessness and I was I was wondering in preparation of this this day today how it how come so I had a lot of ideas about it I had thought I thought it was related to the fragment to the structure etc but then I listened to what you said two years ago and you had three words and I'm going to repeat them that I found really and very inspiring you you told me that or my colleagues that architecture or your architecture was brutal boring and blatant and so I kind of thought about it so brutalist without any attempt to disguise unpleasantness boring is not into non interesting and blatant is a lack of subtlety so you're not wanting to please you do not want to be or seem interesting and you do not believe in subtlety would that be the key of the consult unfortunately not because I think that architecture whether we want to or not is not only the buildings but is also the language we use rounded and so therefore there is always an amazing kind of rhetorical apparatus which is necessary to partly reinforce but partly also to contradict the things so yes in public I'm for brutality but of course I work enormously on kind of assignment on public attention to be interesting but in private I try to find intellectual concepts that don't demand to to be admired but that at least create an interest and blatant [Music] blatant oh it's harder and harder to be blatant thank you thank you Adam we continue this this talk with three presentations presentations of the students I'm very much interested to see although there is not a specific connection with the console if these ideas of brutality pleasantness boringness blatantly will become possible or visible in the projects of the students which are a new generation of designers architects and form heifers that we will see now so I have to invite them I have to invite the TV Delft students to the floor [Applause] he's just getting our model so now everyone at first we would like to thank the current store for inviting us today because we think it's a great opportunity to show our project we working on you have talked a lot about the history of this building and history of architecture but for now we want to go into the future and our project is called Rotterdam 2040 but before let's introduce yourself a little we are David and I'm David as well third tier architecture student at tu Delft and following my minor at moment houses the future my name is David Ferran and I'm studying at industrial design engineering faculty of David Elves and I'm in the same minor called house of the future yes so this minor actually challenges us to imagine and shape future in which we then will try to design and build yeah so let's get in our scenario so designing the house of the future starts with designing the future and I want to get you all into our project and imagine a car-free city where corporations rule the empty streets so how will the future city look like we say it's a build out of three layers there will be living twice as many people as today streets will be car free and corporations will rule the empty streets and I hear you thinking what are corporations we already heard the marketing community today coming by we think they have a major role in our future yes so we actually took three examples to symbolize this trend and let's get into one for example humor it we find it's really interesting that Juba doesn't really have anything they don't have any cars or taxi drivers these digital platforms that allows people in the city to serve for others people in the city to bring them from A to B well actually with these companies providing this many and getting more and more into yeah well providing more and more we believe that they will eventually go into the housing market we try to make harsh statements for our scenario so in the end that gives us bound arees for our design but we will believe they go in the housing market and from rental houses and house that you can buy in the past you also get subscription-based housing and this trends in the city will live to extreme hyperdensity and this hyper density if we take a look at the next picture you want to show you yes its material world by Peter Mansell he photographs people in front of the house with all their products and as you see they have a real big amount of material products in the house which probably if you take a look at the washing machine they don't even use that often so we believe that this hyper tendency will lead to sharing that we're gonna need to be sharing in City which is pretty hard to facilitate yeah so we will start sharing and they've already talked you about digital platforms providing services and in a city we will try to enhance it by forming physical platforms where we can start sharing stuff and to build physical platforms in a city where twice as many people live as today we need space because otherwise we can't build and where are we gonna find this space we just said we're gonna find it in a street technological development shows us cars being autonomously driven and as David said sharing becomes a necessity in future city if we start sharing the car and the car becomes autonomous the whole human transport system will be much more efficient and we said it will be so efficient it could be on the ground or maybe in the air leaving the streets empty and you can see it in the picture on the right maybe it's hard to see but the green space is the space that comes free when cars will leave the streets and we talked we took Rotterdam for a reason because we saw a picture today of rather than being completely ruined after World War 2 this is a city where we have designed it's quite a young city and we designed it as a whole around the infrastructure of a car leaving us with wide suite and so there will be a lot of space available for us as an architect to design in yeah let's go to another phase which is the fun part for an architect I guess and that where you can start visualizing and designing towards the future so we're still in quite early phase of the product actually we've been in three weeks and we just finished our scenario and the next two months will be all about realizing these buildings and visualizing them but one interesting thing is as you see for sure the infrastructure network its network so as we've said before sharing a washing machine can be yeah how do you imagine it you can't bring it to your neighbor that easily so we want to actually try to implement this in this network where we build buildings that provide this shared living and physical platforms for all the existing digital platforms yeah this is an image that shows what we think could happen we we don't want to to make everything in the open space we have a great open street which is maybe 50 to 40 meters wide if we just place building right in between then all the streets because I'm really narrow so we say let's lift the whole thing up using the free program and then the open space is still the place for everyone and talking about the place for everyone we thought that would be an interesting connection to make to the console where we are today because the console is a place for everyone and this a platform where people can criticize or talk about society and show what's good and what's bad and we thought how can a museum in the future like this still be the platform for everyone we see it a bit like this a museum a place where everyone can speak about society creates feedback about society and big corporations they are really interested in what's going on in society because they can use this feedback and develop it into new services that are then direct provided again to the society so we thought it would be an interesting thing today to talk with mr. COAS but how can you design for the future and how can you what what are the things you take in consideration when you want to design a semi public space in such a future up to the fact that he is designing the new Museum in New York in my future so that's basically [Applause] we have a we have a small change of plans we will have the three presentations first and then have a discussion with everybody that I think it's much more stimulating that way so I invite now the group of Dave and Hoeven [Applause] hello everyone my name is ava and on behalf of our entire graduations to decode the aesthetics of sustainability I will present to you our master plan which we are working on currently first loosen and I would like to think dealth as well for the presentation because I think we have a very similar topic so I think it will be very interesting for a discussion as well this is loosen it is located in the centre of Stockholm just between the Old Town and the southern islands this loosen is a boat lock and has been changing and undergoing change as a result of every new condition in time it started as a boat lock then it became the complex city called sluicin ananda meaning susan misery because it was too crowded and chaotic and then continued to be a new condition of a road structure dug by garbage as the first modernist structure and then currently building foster partners master plan also integrating current tribes types of transport and also creating more space for leisure as you can see as an effect however all of these plans they reacts to the conditions of the time and we would like to propose a plan that reacts to conditions of the future according to a collection of sources cars will be less and less important in Stockholm in the future this is necessary to reach climate goals but it also can be seen as part of a larger trend we imagine three types of transport in Stockholm we imagine pedestrians and bicyclists remaining and of course the boats we imagine buses and metros however to be discontinued because smart vehicles can drive us to any location that we would like meaning no more bus stops no more parking spaces because these things will be they'll be driving around the clock and we imagine a fast type of transport in between city cities such as a Hyperloop so this is what happens when smart traffic comes into play and normal roads come becomes denser the roads can become smaller and with this increasing population in Stockholm and the decreasing of the roads structure the public space will become more and more important so this is what happens if you take all of the infrastructure out of solution and you see this enormously generous space appearing and this is what we would like to work with so we actually imagine that in this new future in this new condition the only reason to go to a transport hub is not actually to transfer because there will only be these types of transport and we would only need to transfer maybe from a Hyperloop to a car but then again mostly we would go to these transfer hubs for leisure to relax to meet each other to play sports and especially in this dense population we imagine this to be the future for solution so this is the boat lock then we have the Hyperloop the important pedestrian connection and combined together you can still see that this Park Place is still an important place for connections so we made in one design which is just one proposal and on the road to our master plan the boat lock this is a superstructure that connects to two places there's a Hyperloop with next to it Hyperloop station and also a place to rise from to both levels and here a structure to support the smart car sharing system that can be accessed by all pedestrians and then this pedestrian structure which is actually a very large Lance landscape that is to be dominated by leisure so this would be the landscape combining two parts of the city where you can play sport where you can watch theater and from it you can connect so this smart car system or take the Hyperloop but mostly it would be a place to go and spend some time look a bit like this and we tried to take this complexity from all of these types of transport and take it into this make it into this new proposal and we would like to talk with you about how do you see the new spaces that arise all transport spaces how can we use them and how can we take these new these all parts of the city and give them a new life [Applause] thank you last presentation coning Akademi hello everyone my name is David Leyva I'm a fourth year student of the Illumina coding Academy and I will present to you my case study about Museum Park and I call it Museum playing Museum square in English I started this project in Copenhagen I was there on a field trip with my class and we search for a positive outdoor space because we used the book a pattern language from Christopher Alexander and we use this pattern 106 a positive outer space and we looked what positive outdoor spaces are like so back to Rotterdam we got the museum square the museum park I mean I started with this idea of how the the park would look like if the buildings were beyond a square and I will explain to you what a positive outer space is it means that when the surrounding buildings make together a new space in between them so as you can see here the Bauman's the console the main tesota museum the depot and NIE all collected together will form a square and this is what it would look like in a plan but to get to a real plan I started with different forms I mean well I'll show you the current situation first I'm sorry this is how the buildings are located right now but there's coming a new building it's the addition of the depot of bones from burning by MV R DV it's a reflecting bow and it will be placed in the park next to a head boy much from Bernina I started doing figure crown studies with all the buildings that are in the park so I make little models of it and I looked what a positive outer space could be with all these buildings but then still I would have the current situation because I can just pick up these buildings with my models but I would still have a limited space and that's the park itself so I need to place it in the context and do the duty put these models again in a place and see where they would work the best as a square and within this process I found out that the east side of the park is the best side to place these buildings so here again is the current situation and what I did is I moved the buildings to this places but then I would still need to add the depot and I thought the des Beaux is quite quite an interesting building it reflects the surroundings and it could reflect the auto museum museu so I thought it should be in the middle of the square but then this would happen and it would break up the positive outer space there would be no such big square so I decided let's pick up this Depot and turn it around and put it back in the ground so it would open up the space and it would still feel like a big square from then on I started looking at the infrastructure surrounding the park and then I made a design that's based on this structure I added an extra opening in the boy Muslim bogna so instead of this square between the building itself you could go through the building because otherwise the building would separate the square from the park and in my idea they should be separated but they there should still be a connection and it is going through the boy Muslim bearing the music and this is what it would look like with huge Depot inside if it would be in the way it is planned now it would look like this and it wouldn't feel like a square so I did this I picked it up turn it around and put it back in the ground and as you can see it now feels more as a public and open space here again you can see the difference so what if we turn around this Depot and put it in the ground it would be mostly away and only the tip of it will come out of the ground and it would look like this in a section and you see that the Depot is no longer bigger than the other buildings surrounding it in fact it's lower and put in the ground and as you can see in this picture - you see there's a huge square surrounding all the surrounded by all the existing museu and this is what the boy mouse would look like if you could go through it and then at last and you can see how it would feel like a square for the four people who were looking very closely and my renderings I put a guy in it Wally if you want to see my renderings again or see more of it I'm Dave for leyva you can search my web site and check the renderings thank you for listening [Applause] okay thank you well thank you very much Dave Eva David and David and of course all the students I think that are also present who worked on on these projects I think it's it must be very challenging for you now to have had this presentation and have comments for us it's quite difficult of course to react but we'll do our very best as a kind of general remark before we go to each and one of the projects what I think is interesting in the room you can like disagree or agree with me is that they all of them are future oriented but not exactly in the same ways some are looking very much to a very near future and a very specific location other ones are looking more into into the larger future but they all deal with the idea of publicness I think that's an important issue that we can treat what would be the new publicness in 2014-2015 and is it really related because that's the second thing I saw in all of the projects to the ground-floor to what we do with the public space inside on the ground floor of our buildings I think to the first example but also the outside space in between buildings what is the role that we give to this ground floor can it be a space for a kind of new collectivity is it related and that's as a third point that I have is it then related to the idea of leisure on a museum Park the proposal of Swiss one but also to sharing and if it's related to sharing what do we share exactly I would like to discuss maybe a different aspect I'm really completely surprised by the incredible optimism they emanate optimism about the nature of mankind optimism about the stability of politics optimism about the homogeneity of expectations optimism in other words I would like to first hear from the different parties where they go through optimism and and and and of course any demonstration of optimism is extremely inspiring and and welcome but in certain cases I'm I think it's important particularly to if you look at the future and if you believe that architecture needs to have some credibility that it has a degree of robustness vis a vie non realities or plausible realities so what I would like to ask you know are all these European Cup opposition's and what kind of Europe are they predicting are they are they able to are they an extension of the conversation of Cambodia or are they post a Buddha or in other words what is their relationship with politics I maybe that is kind of really the the beginning we start with David and David in order which you you basically can predict and I assume that there is a degree of irony in it but if if there isn't I would like you to say so because then we understand each other better but do you even believe that Google uber and the other will exist in 25 years yeah to start with that we took those three companies we took those three companies as a symbol in our scenario because we try to relate it to what people known by today of course it could be other companies rising up in the future but for us in our minor we try to come up with a scenario that creates a context for us to design and if we would take all developments political as well and social into our projects maybe it will be a bit too much for us to go into everything but for the politics side I think there is something interesting going on because you could question yourself if corporations are this powerful in the future what is the role of politics against them and what is happening with that political politics have disappeared and corporations govern okay yes there's a corporation's will rule the empty streets it's you know I got a little adrenaline kind of thing when I saw that but then I was kind of very surprised by what what the corporation's then apparently tolerate because I was surprised by how sympathetic and cute kind of some of your housing was and I was wondering whether you had looked far enough back into history for instance to see that the Netherlands had a kind of visionary constant who actually did kind of proliferating kind of architecture project over the entire of the Netherlands which almost like two drops of water kind of seemed similar to your kind of thing so I think that you know it was an exciting combination of social dystopia with the language resurrection of the language of the 60s which was absolutely opposite so are you aware of that or is that a game or the joke or the the the strength fever project or not yes I think we are aware of that basically constant and Google yeah what can I say I think what we try to do is take this corporate world with our project for now into the extreme and people having all these projects in their houses making project actually one of the biggest challenges in the environment people talk about transport and food production but just the products houses full of toasters that kind of things we've thought that was interesting and in the next two months we'll be designing a building that maybe facilitates this shared economy or that we don't need that many projects that everybody having their own but we can share and for sure it's maybe a utopian idea but that's what we might try to achieve in this manner I don't think it's maybe unit open idea and I think in any case it's very important that you kind of study utopias or make utopian projections but I think what you need to do kind of maybe first or maybe not too late is to also criticize or or test your own hypotheses to destruction because a hypothesis which is kind of simply developing and which hasn't had kind of rigor applied to it or skepticism applied to it is a bit superficial maybe and in my own case I've always not so much criticized try to criticize furniture but looked president I was in kind of school which in a way was very similar in terms of its production kind of looking at the future making futuristic thing even kind of 40 years ago was the color prediction the traffic would disappear that little capsules could would go through the air all of that you know a super sympathetic super nice super cool I really wanted to believe in it but I also left any kind of world where the Berlin wall still existed so I went to study the Berlin wall because that for me was also architecture and most not saying that you need to constantly be involved but it would be impressive if you could actually show or argue why what you are proposing now is fundamentally live different form for instance Ultra Graham from constant and from other country utopias where is it different because sharing of course sharing is the big kind of idea of also of the 20th century the first sharing is kind of in constructivist to Russia Soviet housing where you can share the kitchen the kind of wash room the laundry the kids the husband's the wives everything and and and so that is it kind of actually a more vertical already a more kind of radical statement over there and then there is the kind of sharing of the kind of sixties which is again is a kind of radical statement so where is your idea vertical or where is the difference yeah that's my I think that lies because you get a subscription of space in our scenario so we have always owned something in the history we always owned a building we owned the material our houses build off we owe the car at the car is becoming a state of power for us it's part of our identity and we think in the future because the subscription-based society which is rising right now maybe no swap swap feet where you have the right to get from A to B will enter also the housing market there was this project in the Dutch Design Week done by MMP RDV where we have a smart material that can form in everything you want we during our brainstorm sessions sometimes think of we owning only the space to do what you want with the material so you will get a subscription for maybe 30 40 cubic meters in our platform to do with such kind of material what you want and if you're working for Google you get it in Rotterdam but if you need work in Berlin you will just take the Hyperloop underground and we'll be in Berlin using the same amount of space I'm wondering if the what you were searching for is related to ownership because the references that you mentioned constant new Babylon Friedman Levine speciale the continuous monument but also your own Exodus project I think our projects of a certain scale which is a different scale than the ones that I saw on the models and our projects with which are not proclaiming ownership by individuals I think they are therefore the collective as the Russian worker clubs were there in the 1920s and 30s and I'm wondering if politics are gone and we are post politics and we have corporates or corporations who are dealing with individuals if individuals still exist as citizens or if they become clients and so if they need to buy before they can share and so if the idea of ownership becomes an important element in your project yeah we we actually stated in our scenario that that that the corporations will will be at the biggest party in providing and and probably being posed they were having a higher haier haier agreed and then the the current political system actually ask you something about your school so what is the kind of relationship with your teacher are they encouraging you or are they or are they challenging you or are they discouraging you judging us to try to make this hard statement so in the end we can in two months come up with a with a new way of housing or a building that that facilitates and works in that future we eliminate standing yeah yeah yeah this was our actually we the first four weeks were doing workshops and trying to come up with different scenarios and now we are three weeks in making our own scenario which we are going to design because I'm very much interested in the idea of how you will blend the blue little things in your model these are the individual it's a preliminary idea of the project yeah I was thinking of a project that we are doing in the office Luxembourg where only 8% of the the grounds in Luxembourg is still public property the rest is completely privatized so public ground does not exist anymore in Luxembourg and I'm wondering if we are projecting ourselves in a scenario where corporations take over if this idea of who owns the ground and who will be living in these and working and sharing in your project will not also be an important element to put into discussion who owns the the ground I know that in the visionary projects REM talked about of the 1960's the there was no ownership of the ground so I think it could be also interesting to see how how that develops in your you can react if you want to yeah that's that's a tough question as you can see but the the corporations are getting such a prominent role into our daily lives that they will just claim the space that comes free from the car as first we saw industrial places in the north of Amsterdam for example being left because the industrial companies are going to other places and there we saw immediately a creative industry going into it and we use this this example throughout our project and we thought if new space comes free in a hyper dense City where people can build who would be the most powerful group of people that can take that space and that's where we thought the corporation's come in because the corporation's are also the the the the rule in our scenario why we all want to be in the city they have this prominent place so everyone wants to be with them so they will have the space so that everyone can be with them one more question because I'm constantly kind of surprised how resilient the profession of architecture is in the sense of being able to address since five thousand years the most incredible transformations changes can reversals and and kind of progressions it was interesting to that this is a project by an architecture student and a industrial designer because I can really imagine that in the civil design will be a lot more prominent with the new technologies with no kind of gadget that we thinks turning into gadgets cars gonna become also extensions so what what is your collaboration say and is it a real collaboration and and you know or should you become more dialectical and more enemies I have a feeling have a feeling that actually it you would benefit from a situation where you're not operating as a kind of single entity but where for instance you would imagine what kind of structure can maintain his convey walls and and you should kind of perhaps really technically tell us what the way we will how you can do it and and what kind of pleasures it will provide yeah one of the big differences between us I think he is an architect and I'm an industrial designer I think not not yet but we hope we will be and yeah Architects think of context and they design big things only once we we are on another skill we design much things of a something small which is produced a million times and we think more of the user interface and you would think more of the context that could be by separating or by turning the two sides in in a more articulate I think you would be able to illustrate a lot even about the kind of ownership situation or the corporation situation I think yeah because it's different in a Tesla actually has a lot to say about industrial design and and and it's important and its impact on Commerce sustainability blah blah blah okay okay then I invite Eva to the floor do you want to bring other persons with you and the mic roof the microphones are gone yeah okay I thought it was quite intriguing the project where you go from misery over road structures to leisure I kind of put that in in perspectives thinking about the aesthetics of sustainability I was intrigued by the idea what you actually do with the infrastructure and how you kind of really define it as leisure and use it as leisure or you do something else with it you continue to create a hub but is it still a hub only for transportation or because it does it become also a hub for program that was another kind of interesting thing that I had and my question my first question as an introduction would be about scale if we work on the area that you showed us is do you need to work on the city level of the city do you need to work on the level of the infrastructure that you left out I thought it was a very interesting image where you left out the infrastructure and you showed us the possibilities and the generosity that was still available or should you even go further into detail and work on another scale how did you tackle this problem I think during our design process we tried a lot of these scenarios we we showed you one and this is actually what we struggled with the most and I think the main question of our of our design right now is is how do you take on this complex situation of all of these different layers of transport and we just took one type of transport as a starting point but it could just as well be any possible future and the past has showed us that they change drastically but these transport hubs they are never designed for the future they are always reacting so perhaps also a question maybe to again is like should these transport hubs then be made to be adaptable I have a question first because there were two countries that were mentioned other than Holland Stockholm Sweden and Denmark is there a kind of shift in interest to Scandinavia or are we tweeting Scandinavia as a as a new what why why Stockholm very clear sustainability goals and we are working of course with this subject of sustainability that actually by definition is meant to be positive and Sock'em has these very clear goals and especially also on infrastructure they really want to get rid of the cars in their centre that you know I don't want to beat a dead horse but that's where I think that I'm a little bit disappointed that there is kind of not more critical sense toward Holland Holland apparently is one of the worst countries in in terms of sustainability its record is appalling it's the worst in Europe it's has now declared kind of fantastic aims but it's only kind of starting those aims in the next kind of want of governing so I think if there's any urgent issue to address that thing is this this particular country why why did you go for such a kind of plausible environment and and not address kind of really acute problem on your doorstep I think perhaps because because Stockholm was already I had in this we seemed that it would be a plausible situation for Stockholm yeah and if we imagine this future in in the Netherlands it becomes difficult to more difficult to understand and accept yeah but that I think in a certain way I'm a really critical of that escape clause because if somebody becomes difficult to imagine in the Netherlands and and to accept the Netherlands I think that shows that they can really cute and and blade blade yeah blatant kind of reason to do it and I have a feeling it would be much more kind of vertical and and eye-opening to see a kind of strong statement here then then there because so so that's one thing then I don't have to be mean but I saw that there is an enormous increase in cycling in Sweden and apparently in your current project I saw a lot of public spaces so open-air swimming pools and open-air theaters is it effects of global warming in 25 years that you count on to make love to make all of those possible because in Sweden the climate is horrendous and actually will forbid any cycling kind of half of the year any and it's really a trivial comment but I also find it really to innocent kind of we need to illustrate the kind of situation with a condition that we know it doesn't exist there well the goal of our studio will be to design a sustainable building so I think the reason to choose Stockholm is that we have a kind of context where people are willing to go for this sustainability so this master plan we're developing for a building in the end and the importance is the the public space we were wondering developing this massive plan this week and of course these we are thinking more about programs as well like public's place places where people can go to so it has to be more than only in a public outdoor area how many months you still have before finishing before visit because this is a graduation project you just started and you're finishing in June April okay okay so you still have a lot of time to so we can't be very critical that's what I'm just testing now because I'm although I was intrigued by the image that you show the potential of what is there when leaving out the infrastructure I must say that when you saw the final image I had the impression that everything had the same scale the infrastructure had the same scale as the leisure activities etcetera etcetera so there was a kind of randomness of of these things and I'm had the impression that you're too nice in a way in order to tackle the question I don't think for regret my students when they are graduating they have a radical proposal and they the jury can hated or can love it and most probably they do both but the student is taking a very clear position that he defends until the end and I'm not seeking it and not finding it yet in what you showed so I'm wondering if you would not benefit from the idea of looking into projects in history or looking into the question of what is exactly sustainability and what can it be in the future in order to nourish your thinking about the project how big is your team we're 11 people yeah so I think it's big enough to first of all to maybe split up and to do different scenarios in the team I think that you would gain enormous li if you could develop an internal mechanism where the is undone by yourselves kind of rather than kind of people from the outside thinking you cannot do this you cannot do that it's more interesting if you generate the the critical kind of mood and and and really interesting if you extrapolate it a number of things and came to different conclusions that in the end you can decide to integrate or not but I would expect of a larger team to develop a more dialectical relationship inside a team and more rigor in society team rigor is you can be ambiguous kind of term I don't mean that it has to be totally respectable or something but I would like to see simply more interaction in a team and more pressure generated by the team on the team I think it's very interesting because you could actually do it is also related to the themes that you are addressing there is the idea of aesthetics what is it exactly exactly the aesthetics of sustainability what is the aesthetics for you is it related to form to materiality to a kind of image that you have inspired by nostalgia of a kind of thing and what is sustainability for you and what is infrastructure so you could really work on these three elements all right yes I think we we did some research actually on the topic what what does sustainability look like and I think one of the conclusions was that it does not have a face sustainability is a philosophy it's not and you can generate through these kind of team set you that you know are sustainable you can make a sustainable image but there's always has to be this thing in between that the person who makes it in the person who looks at it knows but I want to come back to the issue Scandinavia can we use the let's say the diversity in inside the office to also generate different insight because each of in many cases many people have very contradictory experiences in themselves different educational systems and we try to benefit from those differences I think that Scandinavia is a kind of region of the world notoriously resistant to benefiting from differences and and I think that there is Dutch student body at this point is sufficiently diverse to also kind of feel those kind of pressures or at least influences from diversity I would expect I think I'll definitely do this do we maybe have another question we would like to ask about a project we were just wondering what do you like in public space well I give you a very honest answer I think that most of the current sorry for something really may be old-fashioned too dogmatic most of the current design public spaces I think are horrendous and I think they are these guys operations of creating order and wanting to avoid accidents or adventure or unpredictability so they are kind of fields of predictability that are a soft way of policing the population but of course that is the design part but there are always amazing can public possibilities in in in cities that are you know either designed in earlier generations or improvised uses or neglected areas where public life kind of finds a plausible way to exist public space is preferable over the designs no I think we have to be and and that's why of insist so much on criticality we have to be more critical you know because the typical client and the typical city and typical want no mischief and I think mischief is very important and I think if if a profession let's it lends itself for the elimination of mischief somehow through design I think it's a little bit sad and in way you know I don't want to kind of boss but this building is a kind of building that allows mischief way of thinking is somebody of the room wanting to ask a question related to this particular project or we continue and we have questions afterwards I'm looking I'm looking nobody is daring oh yeah but you have to come up huh I wonder why you decided to add leisure in the whole design well actually we were thinking what why why would you go to sluicin if not for transports because it is this big transport hub and we imagine that in a future where everything is super efficient and everybody is served in all of their conveniences then the only reason actually to still go outside is to to visit each other to meet each other to relax to to be outside to be out of the comfort zone so we imagine that this would be the place for that activity how would you fill in this space I don't know how how I would fill it up but I think that at a transport hub you already meet so many people that you don't necessarily have to make new things at that place for people to meet because they already meet there but it's what I think but then then there's the meeting of strangers in the meeting of people that you know and those are different in that way there's transfer like transfer from one traffic to another type of traffic and which you meet a lot of strangers but they start meeting so we yeah I think it would be great to shift to you and then then have general discussions so Dave thank you as an introduction before further discussion with him I must say I was very scared in the beginning we were project and when I discovered it also last night because of the way how you initially try to position space for the depot a building which has raised a lot of discussion inside and outside the Netherlands and Rotterdam and then all of a sudden you do this trick and when in the trick I see an image of Olafur Eliasson who is laying down in a grass field this kind of mirrors and I'm wondering if Pater ablaze also has not been inspired by this idea of the reflection of the the ceiling of them the air and the clouds as a way of dealing with nature so I thought that was a kind of very nice gesture of dealing with the enormousness of the depot within a space that you would like to keep as a void the park with which it's bit its design as it as it was and then a second thing that I but I have not really got route through my elaboration of my mind is that there is this kind of mind craft aesthetics in what you showed us in images which I kind of it triggered me as a kind of new form of representing architecture away from the rhythm and the renderings also away from the collages and the drawings but in maybe it's a new and challenging way because you're not an architect may come from the Willem de Kooning Academy and so I thought it was kind of me it's in sorry it's intriguing for me that the idea of representing a project could also be a way of conceiving the project and it was something that might be possible in what you're doing that were might well English word mind experiment which which is simply saying I'm going this is not realistic but I'm going to experiment anyway and you did that and that was a very admirable and kind of refreshing but I have a number of questions about it but maybe before I would like to know what education are you're actually following because the Academy has a can wide range which section of it are you following I studied spatial design yes special and so we sort of question what spatial design what's raised could be but at this moment I'm doing a minor at the table Delft and I'm thinking of doing a master's there too so so so it's maybe not as disconnected from architecture as it seemed too bad I mean we are obviously longing for a way out for an escape but you know I I don't know whether it adds something that I think it what you showed is a great solution for the collection building but at the same time I was a bit disappointed by the outcome of your thought experiment because there were many configurations where you could really see an interesting tension between things or where the proximity can really create an interesting shock or where the absence seemed to be an interesting question but then in the end it all came together in the kind of most reactionary composition of kind of public experience that I've seen in the Netherlands since 1938 39 in other words you know I don't know whether you're aware of this convert the Dutch had schools before World War two were the modernist and were the Conservatives and the Conservatives were called the office Hall and your project was an excellent example of the artist Hall as actually and two of the buildings and that is why it is a kind of interesting situation because the Bauman's and I would say the architecture Institute or perfect representations of that aesthetic or that mentality and the white villas and consoler would say are a different aesthetic so it's okay to recompose and very exciting but it seemed that in the end you came down on the side of conservatism and so I really wanted to ask you why why that is which is kind of steel pond in the center even there there was also a pattern I don't know which number it was but it was something about things being in the middle of a square and I thought that would be an interesting point or a thing of how the Depot could look like because if it if it would be in the center yeah it would it would be more of an art piece what did you leave it like that it was it was perfect so as it was gonna vary affinity Duncan yeah instead of only storing the art that it's that is in the Depot Depot itself becomes an art piece itself because it is so that you literally you can really show that and and I think you your presentation was actually plausible also because it was a different medium so I agree with the unique my only question is why did you then end up with this cozy perfect thing with the thing in the middle and you completely ignored the rest of the part that that seemed to be condemned to become a kind of residue without any kind of further meaning with some abstract triangles in it I think there's just one single question answer and that is that I liked it that way yeah okay but my one single answer that you liked it is not enough because that is the that is why I think education needs to be in itself and really critical and of course you have to you know interrogate yourself you know what your motives are and you have to actually have to have motives and I really thought that's why the beginning was so strong and you need to have a kind of stronger motivation or explanation for for an end and and of course the beginning is very strong because it it refuses a conclusion and so maybe and that and now you have a kind of conclusion but maybe you should think of something different than a conclusion today I finished this project one half year ago before the decision was made if the depo would actually be built okay and this could be seen as a critical political statement okay that did and did you did you try to make it public did you try to make it public did you did you try to make it to play a role in in the discussion no it's a pity because I think it was actually can really strong strong kind of opposition what is interval it's interesting in your project is that you take the massiveness of the whole Depot you don't think that it should be elsewhere or you keep it also in the museum park so you respect actually the starting point of the project you respect actually the project in itself you just find another location and another way of dealing yeah another condition and that's why I think I'm quite agreeing with the idea that the analysis was quite interesting of where you could put it and how there is a constellation of fragments within a field and if you should leave the even covered fields or if you should make kind of tension within it so I'm quite agreeing with REM that if it is just in in the middle not touching anything and just being very nicely put there it is trying to be a kind of good architecture whether maybe we need some more bad architecture especially on that location maybe I'm not as I'm just too nice to do something brutal like that I think yeah yeah well are we here at the kind of interesting moment somebody who is declaring themselves too much interest in Scandinavia where are we heading [Laughter] explosion of niceness okay okay so maybe maybe we comment down there in that there is a microphone that can travel all the way upwards you only have to stand up and ask a question yeah this your chance of defending niceness or I see somebody raising a hand in the back or was it just a gesture with a hand yes well I think it's interesting to see what you did with the collection building you know there have been fierce discussions about it and I would like to ask you how you perceive the the use of the space as the museum park or you call the museum plane but well let's let's assume we keep the buildings like they are how would you respond on the on the programming of the museum Park what would be your idea when the collection building is where it's going to be in a few years I then think it's too intruding because it's you saw in the rendering I made how big the depot would be if you compare it to the other Museum and I think in the design proposal it says that it should be subtle but in my opinion it's not really so I do think it should be there in a different way and maybe yet because you're right it's for story it's for stalls on top of each other that's how high it's gonna be but once it's there how do you think we're gonna use the museum bark as a space should we add more buildings should we do what's gonna be the big gesture here I'm not sure if adding more buildings would make the park better because it's still a park maybe if maybe we can add more space but not where we see them so we can put it in the ground or do something with the big garage that's there and that fluid or something but yeah I don't know actually maybe it's good to remind you that actually the initial plan of the city was to have the console at the point where now the that building will emerge and so it depends on even yeah and then so then we shifted here and then it was supposed to be on Don on that place and so in in that sense I think the position itself is not nullifying the kind of the overall composition I think maybe you can stand up and it's always nice to know who you are and where if you're studying or no I Frank I'm teaching at the T window fan and I work as an architect here in Rotterdam and I was really curious you first I think it was a br ingles projects in Copenhagen that you've shown as a positive space and then now we are now here in the Consol what I really appreciate about this building is in a way it's an experience instead of just being an object and for me the new project of MVR TV is really being an object yeah I don't really know how it's gonna be from an experience from the inside out and you like this project from be arc angles which to me also has a little bit to do with movement that you go through this Park and you constantly experience actually you had the object by wandering through with the same with this building going through it or they are passing it by and now you reuse the shape of the pavilion for MVR if you push it into the ground in a way you do create an object on the floor which does something with movement did you do something with that just besides being the fact that it is like a hill did you approach it from that way or was it just a mirroring I thought of it and that it could be sort of a playing object too because when I wasn't coping and there were in a playground tiny yeah actually the design I made there were tiny balls in the ground you could play on and I thought it could be something like that but I need a much bigger skill but with the comments of today if you would now be a little less nice and you would rethink what the round object on the square does as part of maybe movement and if you reflect maybe on the project from VR jingles or on the console where we are today would you do with different which you maybe keep NPR TVs building to be provocative but the way as it is but therefore then do something different with the square itself it could be a fountain too it's shouldn't necessarily be this depo but it was my subject so I decided to use it as the depo it is nice as the potentially but but I think you should go back and we should have a kind of more general situation [Applause] I have yesterday we we hadn't lecture here which was explaining in detail that your generation doesn't read but only looks and that therefore there is a kind of major shift going on away from information and from literacy with words to literacy with images I would say that the last project was kind of really about literacy with images but I want to basically test you to see whether this is true because I feel that there is an absence of historical reference as if historical references have become unimportant and I also feel that there is absence of general information and knowledge about even recent history which is actually handicapping you kind of rather than working for you so you already have deeply disappointed me by the your ignorance about the Maastricht Treaty now I want to ask you who has ever heard of Delft the skull okay so that's that's slightly better yeah yeah yeah do you have similar questions or things things you want to test is a new Babylon okay okay that's also pretty good so how did you I want to have a kind of maybe we have a discussion about whether you actually wheat or not or whether kind of all your other information is coming through internet through websites through your telephone is that actually true or not and maybe convened them testimonies would be appreciated because I don't know what your experience with your students is that way and where we should seemingly accept this theory or not we have the same problem and I'm teaching in France and birders is enormous weight of the history of the Ecole des buuza waiting on my students so I kind of oblige them to to read and we discuss texts within the studio but it's very difficult for them to go so far as to have a discussion on the text and what I also put that's also a question that I would like to ask you what I applied them to do is to look into make an atlas of historical references but to redraw the references because I have the impression that we are that the generations of students that are now with us and have this idea of copy paste and Twitter and what is the other thing snapchat and you kind of rapidly send information and then it disappears again that's what I was told and so the idea of slowly redrawing a plan or a section and trying to understand by redrawing it what you can do with it for your project seems for me and quite interesting an interesting approach it's like writing a text or rather taking notes while you were reading a text but the reason I'm christening it is that I am not convinced first of all that it's true and I have a kind of fear that basically because of this theory you are kind of put away and an almost separated by the acceptance of this theory Sepp separated from an entire body of knowledge simply because you are assumed not to be interested in it but maybe it's not true somebody wants to react all the way on the top I thank you I'm a student at tu Delft and we're not really required to have a I think it's not all too rigorous sometimes the lessons on history and theory you really have to delve in yourself and in my own environment I've seen actually more and more reading groups bug popping up so people do have a really deep yearning for context knowledge of history and yeah I think you shouldn't be too worried because we have also an incredible ability to organize are you saying that in your generation or in your environment you see deep yearning for the things that you're supposed to be beyond no I mean just to make sense of our environment reading is still very important and I think but even here if you could come here because then we Africa hi I didn't understand what you said in the beginning about Delft whether you're on your own in terms of learning history because that is what it seemed and that there was at the same time still strongly yearning for books blah blah blah I think the the education is very packed and theory and history have a very specific role it and they don't really sort of are interwoven in every facet of the courses so it's separate yeah but did you suggest that there was a kind of even kind of and we the interesting books is reactivated or getting bigger is because that seemed to also statement yeah definitely I think also self-publishing as seeing a rise and I think if you go beyond the fact that we might not read I think that this is speculation then you can see there's actually right now an incredible possibility space for the written word and image culture to intertwine in all kinds of different ways so I think it's a it's a it's a blatant statement to say that we don't read so so there's more person kinda maybe maybe come forward so that becomes a bit more active but I also felt yesterday that this kind of separation and and particularly this description of your generation is highly unfair and in a certain way also dangerous because it wishes you typecast you in a way which I think it's not not productive you know or not even encouraging you to do anything here I'm a student to you I don't open it's my first year in masters what I wanted to say about education I happen to have a double degree I started off with journalism just like you that because I couldn't get into architecture school so my journey in architecture started about 11 years ago and the the matter that was most concerning in Romania because I come from a previously communist country was that in order to support ourselves through architecture school we really had to kind of kind of burden our entire family for it because the tuition school the tuition fees were not low and also being able to study full-time was something that needed commitment for um for us so one of the things that kind of triggered me into understanding - huh - to what extent can we actually afford to go into reading to dive deeper into those those books was to what extent can we can can we enable a mutual communication from the industry with with us as students to be able to become practitioners or to start learning and also gaining money while being in school and that was a very concerning problem for me so then somewhere in my second year of school I had tuberculosis which is a really bad disease and it's eradicated in the world but it happens in Romania especially when you study two universities in the same time and to shorten my story it's it challenged me a lot to to go to go beyond and I I started a communication company for architects and I realized that we were only promoting ourselves within the industry so the only information was circulating inside our own industry so we didn't necessarily get information from outside there wasn't enough communication with with other like economists that would explain what the context is so when you are giving us books in architecture it's actually very annoying because the information is not circulating enough we should be reading other other things like and now I'm reading Piketty with with capital so I'm reading a lot of other things in economy because I need to understand the bigger picture and we're only reading our own our own lectures I'm of course I've read I've read your books and I'm sorry my hand is a little bit shaking I'm excited about it but this moment because I've actually because because I've I've traveled to Venice just to see your Biennale which is not cheap for someone that's coming from Eastern Europe and my parents are not as much of course so investing into education is a matter of discussion more than more than do we read you know that's that's my piece of thought thank you for listening I think I think that the market and the let's our current dependence on marketers we've been relying theme with the entire situation and I know exactly what you feed she felt because I had to I went to an extremely expensive school and had to kind of earn my own money and etc and it is of course very difficult to understand that only 30 or 40 years ago you could study in Delft for nine years and that you had a kind of fixed income every every year and I come now in a much richer kind of situation we cannot afford that anymore and and of course that may be actually as you say explain why people don't read because they don't have the time or the opportunity to read so that is why also these explanations about visual generation may hide actually all kinds of economic distress or inequalities they do contribute because the fact that we can throw away information through an entire network of I don't know I have 2500 people in my network they can all see the live presentation of this master class and they wouldn't have been able to do that without without this media so I I think there needs to be a connection between between them but also a selection of what are our sources of information because we're really talking about reading more but we're not teaching people what to read and how to think and I've learned about that when I went to think creative leadership school I took a mentorship there to understand how I can take the education of Architects to another level and they weren't even questioning about that they weren't seeing that creative minds have a different wiring of the brain and we should be feeding different kind of information and we should be enhancing our our our multiple connections in the in the brain because yeah there are some teachers here is that is that correct because I am connealy surprised that we have a kind of now a student body and I raised the issue in the second in the Stockholm case a student body which is actually very diverse but that we are still kind of thinking about architecture is a completely white and and completely Scandinavian that that's why I'm kind of so sensitive to that reference kind of world and and and we have so many now coming in our country in our student bodies totally different experiences that can really could could contribute to introduce pressure also and to introduce critical kind of perspectives that we cannot generate we don't generate on ourselves so is there any teacher in the room that can clarify or talk about that yeah yeah I'm harm is called course director of spatial design Willem de Kooning Academy our first agenda point it's very urgent right now is to diversify our student like identity especially abroad but also in the south of Rotterdam there are many talents many hidden talents we want to really really stimulate to access our white male community like me this kind of boring guys 50 year old education and architecture we want to refresh this drastically in the future that's that's that's actually a very and on the other hand mr. Hirata our nice prime minister who had this first debate yesterday unfortunately the reduction of contact hours from let's say twenty four hours a week two or three years ago is drastically now coming up to about twelve a week so we have like sometimes like five minutes maximum often three minutes to get to the points to that it get to the core point which is quite alarming situation and art education the Delft area anti over is more a bit more you know master but that is the situation we're in and we do our very best to do everything we have because we all love our jobs and we all of our students to survive thanks [Applause] but this is exactly why I'm insisting on the energy that is embodied in the student body and and also the richness of experience if you have already kind of spent I don't know how many years in Romania you are yourself are an expert in something you know an expert in surviving in that kind of economic climate but also an expert in what communism actually maybe didn't offer but might still have to offer and anyway in an experience of different political systems and therefore a different kind of awareness than we have and particularly in the kind of situation where the state is becoming more more negligent and more mechanical I think you have to generate a lot of the insight yourself so you have you do a plea for criticism because I was wondering today that we are in this building you develop the different context where you were brutal and boring and blatant it to go very fast and we saw today a lot of optimism happiness niceness etc whether I'm not sure that the situation is leading us to I'm very questioning the very idea of the optimism in this generation today I'm wondering if it is something that we can't understand anymore because I'm also part of the older generation unfortunately already or if if there is also a critical stance in your optimism that we haven't found yet because we are post political post historical we are dealing with a scattered Europe and even a scattered world so I think it is our our duty in a way to continue to be critical but maybe the tools have changed I don't know that's a question I very urgent last questions yes yes I wanted to say that I have the feeling like I'm not supposed to be here because I was actually on excursion and I'm from the Arctic and media hates the Royal Academy of Arts my name is George Parker and I have the feeling that they do use kind of miss a connection to the self in the sense of what your design identity is and if you connect for example history to your design identity it gets more interesting also to read more because in our case we have design analysis and we have to analyze this building for example but besides that we also have to think about who we want to be and how that can contribute and that's also in in context with we have lectures about architecture and architecture which is not set oh this building is built in this period and this is what it means but it starts with happening in the moment in history and as a reaction on that we talk about buildings that were built in a period so I think that's a change in education in systems in schools and what I would suggest is to collaborate more because we I learned a lot today already about more technical and more insights but I won't see the feeling aspect but more the diving deep into the context and what it means to you and what you can get out of it or what it meant in that certain time a period that I don't know what quite but I want to go because a few bits yeah but I think that there is an important role for all the students present present today the OS a issue I was there was a journal exists since the nine beginning of the 1980s I'm only part of this story ten years it was founded by the students in Delft it was not a project of the professors it was not a project of the institution it was a project of self-education by the students because they thought at that time that their education was not was lacking and was not interesting enough and so they they they they went for a collaboration first within the University and then went and joven in order to get nourished in a way because they thought that it was not happening and Netherlands at that time so it was a kind of project of auto education self education and I think that there lies a very interesting challenge for you I'm a promise I'm a student at TU delft and a co-founder of an architecture office there and to me it seems also what you've been discussing the architect seems to lose maybe the connection to the past a bit because the profession seems to shift Howard's a future a strategic position so it's like two of the three projects we saw today they were actually not reacting they were predicting they were taking place in the future a future that we don't even know it if it happens that way but to do so I think since the world the globalized world is changing at this rapid speed looking at the last past five years might be considered to be more important for us to predict the next 30 years than to look back a hundred years because the shift of change is drastically increasing and that's why to build it to predict the future and to develop the strategies of the future it's more interesting potentially to look at the recent past rather than the fast past that is further away I totally disagree because basically looking at the recent past is kind of something that you don't have to look at you experience it and it's part of your DNA and and everyone does it and I I think that exactly if you stay within that myopic situation you can become a victim of profound misunderstandings one of the profound misunderstandings is that everything change very rapidly I cannot say enough how slowly change is even in this digital era I was kind of an unbelievable kind of 30 years ago kind of for the first time trying to think about what the relationship between the digital world and the physical world was and and still we having accepted the same discussion it hasn't changed at all the kind of domination of the digital that was kind of predicted is didn't actually happen the kind of plausibility of the material world which was announced the 30 years ago didn't happen so I think that you actually really need every moment I can real awareness of what happened 25 years ago 50 years ago hundred years ago and if possible even longer because that is the only way in which you can kind of have any precision in terms of estimating what is going on now no applause please but is this a very very urgent last question yes okay one last one and then we have two to stop the person in the back hi my name is Raisa I'm from tu Delft and I think it's a little bit different I'm Urbanus I'm from urbanism and I think because from what I heard until now is from architects and architecture so I think it's a good maybe I can good give a small remarks about from the point of view of urbanism I think in terms of thinking about literature and reading and I think it's more interesting is about understanding the thought of the people because right now I'm doing my thesis and I'm talking about new town development of new town but then the way I try to make it this just to mix it up with the idea of urban vitality with which are talked about for example by young Gil there's a research recently that in 2014 I think most of urbanism students free for young girls really a lot but then there's a critical thinking about but why they refer young girls a lot so in that sense there's a really interesting book about it called everyday urbanism by Margaret Crawford where he actually criticized young girls and place makings and all this mainstream understanding of public spaces a lot because there's a narrative of loss there's they're only talking about this feel-good urbanism so in that sense understanding this conversation about public space and and in relation to what actually happened what is the politic of public space is interesting so it's I think I will not say that this understanding of reading a lot is is gone right now in the students especially in urbanism because we try to understand that really from the thought and even all this public space activists are against like obj because in the in the trendiest he actually I have this book of city of tomorrow that really want to make cities from scratch but then if I try to understand the point of view from his point of view then it makes sense because at that time the condition of the city is really bad that's why he wanted to make it from scratch so just by understanding this fast conversation by myself is already helping me a lot so I think yeah that's just a remark for me from urbanism point of view Thanks thank you thank you for the remark which i think is kind of making a resume I don't know how the images of yeah recapitulation of what we what we experienced I thought it was very challenging I thought it was a very strange to set up when you first contacted me but I think it was really nice having both the conversation on the history of the building and the historical moment in which this project was conceived and then having a very challenging discussion with actually all of you on the situations that you are living today as architectural students what I remember maybe is idea of slowness an idea of criticality and an idea of awareness of the moment that we are all living and in which you as young architects to be are being challenged every day I would like to thank David and David and Ava and Dave for their contributions the whole room for challenging us within the debate and the Consol for having us and of course REM for being here today thank you [Applause]

Channel: Kunsthal Rotterdam

Views: 40,842

Rating: 4.9041915 out of 5

Keywords: Rem Koolhaas, architect, masterclass, Kunsthal Rotterdam

Id: CvJBqgGvq9c

Length: 136min 15sec (8175 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 14 2017