Neri & Hu

all right it's fantastic to to see the auditorium full tonight welcome everyone it's really a great pleasure to welcome Linda nari and Rosanna who this evening to share with us the extent of their architectural practice Mary Ann who design and research office so as a start I would like to focus on this notion of extent in thinking about their practice here in the US and certainly here at the school we have embraced the notion of architecture as an expanded practice today but for us all too often and expect an expanded practice means writing teaching building small installations drawing maybe if we're lucky sometime when we were very very old building a building for Mary Ann who on the other hand an expanded practice has meant single-handedly transforming the architectural landscape of one of the most thrilling cities today Shanghai I first met Linden and Rosanna when they reached out to my partner Dan wood and I to come speak at the Shanghai Design Festival last year an event they have orchestrated now for the city for a number of years following Marian whose commitment to design across scales disciplines and practices every year the festival brings together a group of architects and designers from around the world to come together to share their work but more importantly to share ideas about the future of architecture cities and the environment through the lens of design and so through a few days of whirlwind one develops a fascination for Shanghai and the scene that Marion who have created an audience of hundreds of thousands listening in either physically or virtually through their extensive media channels but also a kind of contagious infatuation with the world that Lyndon and Rosanna have created as and around their practice first there is their beautiful and inspiring office that is also a kind of school for the next generation talent who are cutting their teeth at the firm before leading some of the most interesting emerging practices in the city and beyond second there is the design Republic a store and mind blowing multi-level showroom displaying some of the most interesting contemporary design pieces and furniture from around the world but also including their own think soho meets radical midtown intensified by their instant flair and finally there is their exquisite body of work around the city which acts as a register building after building of their thinking about the place of architecture in the chinese city today the possible stories it can tell about their pasts and possible futures the events it can stage and relationships it can create as well as the contributions it can make in creating a sense of place at once intimately of that place but also clearly in conversation with the global dialogue taking place around the role of architecture and design today in the world nari and whose work is not heavy it is purposefully and successfully addressing the largest possible audiences but what makes it so unique today is that it is doing so not through singular spectacular gestures or one-liners sound bites around reductive notions of authenticity rather it is communicating through sustained architectural attention and a practice built around care towards history materiality construction space experience and also fun and pleasure it is in this sense that their practice and work is still so interestingly connected to the learning of a Michael Graves now transposed to an astounding context of contemporary China with all the youth energy creativity and optimism that one feels as a new rising middle class is accessing with the speed of light culture design and architecture across all this modalities and scales I don't know many architects or architectural practices that can that that have this privileged and a unique position of not only about embodying a moment at a certain place but actually act shaping that moment through their own body extensive body of work as well as through their generous enabling of others to rise and in the process to create together a new space for architectural discourse for research and for varied design practices that are transforming how we understand architectures potential for impact today here and elsewhere please join me in welcoming Rosana who and in Denari we are delighted to be here in New York extremely excited to be Colombia Thank You Amal for the kind introduction a lot of pressure from that I am Linda nari and this is my partner Rosanna who we are a firm as a mile set base in Shanghai with a small satellite office in London the place we come from sets the stage for many of our actual architectural and design exploration we want to share that condition with you tonight as we bring forth a few issue that started out as problems that we had to confront from small projects when we started our practice then they became obsessions that kept coming back again and again surfacing and resurfacing sometimes consciously other times utterly unintentional you may find the following slides an oversimplification of the China condition today that we are in but for expediency and clarity we shall focus on these examination tonight so we're going to talk about confronting rural urban issues the rapid development and demolition of the city that we practice confronting rural issues and the disappearing villages that is happening at an unprecedented rate dealing with opposing forces of construction and destruction so you might be building certain things within the context of a neighborhood yet at the same time when your building is built the context that you were basing it on is now gone inheriting the remnants of China's industrial heritage an opportunity to reutilize artifacts of access through adaptive reuse so if you look at urban issues the rapid development these are images by not of Conder about 10 years ago and a film by Tonka called 24 City interesting points because between 2000 2010 the urban land expanded by 83% and the urban population grew by 45% I love these photographed it's quite beautifully because you actually see a different types of urban leisure by 2020 60% of China's population will be living in urban areas and this is approximately 800 million people plus and minus 60% of about 1.3 billion people here you actually see in these images that with urbanization changing the landscape of cities and altering the texture of daily life giving rise to new notions of urban leisure when we talk about rural issues I was talking about the disappearing cultural village culture you see very quickly that the China's vernacular villages that were formed based on confusion family ideals were clan based settlements created clusters of homes giving rise to traditional villages and yet these numbers are outstanding within 10 years it dropped from 3.7 million to 2.8 million an average of three hundred three hundred villages loss per day and a lot of them are not due to demolition Letham are the fact that they just became ghost towns empty because people want to go to the city to make more money you see government catalog of 9007 examples of intangible cultural heritage roughly 80% are rural only 40% of rural migrants are willing to return to their forms only 3% among those born after 1990 it's interesting because in this image each empty chair representing an absent family member who has left the village to pursue opportunities in urban center in fact our own driver is a case point in this he was a farmer and he left and he became a driver because he made more money driving for us adaptive reuse dealing with excess we were fortunate enough to be in this condition to be to have this opportunity many of our projects fall under the category of adaptive reuse and deal with local history and heritage in much of our work there is the recurrent theme of juxtaposes juxtaposing old and new reinterpretation of local topologies and a desire to celebrate and elevate the ordinary and a mundane and yet these conditions one out of six families in China have been evicted and relocated since early 1990s in fact our office we were literally evicted about a month ago so for those of you that are familiar with our block box were no longer in that block box were in a construction site so for for people in our office they're complaining because they're literally we had no choice we were given a month and we had to leave so this to us is is an everyday situation it's a real condition condition this is the context in which our practice intentionally situates ourselves as a practice we are constantly trying to insert meaning into our work by drawing from these contexts both geographical and historical for that we often find ourselves looking at the past in other words working with the notion of nostalgia so this brings us to the theme that we want to send her this talk around today it's nostalgia and more specifically reflective nostalgia nostalgia is a learned formation of a Greek compound consisting of nostos meaning homecoming and it's a Homeric word with algos meaning pain or ache coin around the end of the 17th century as a medical term nostalgia was thought to be a disease commonly afflicting soldiers and sailors who forced to leave their homelands began to manifest symptoms such as fainting high fever and even death all later attributed to actual physical illnesses it was only towards the first half of the 19th century that nostalgia began to attain its current modern meaning both in literary and everyday usage now commonly understood as a sentimentality for the past it should be noted that the object of longing is transferred from the concreteness of place to the invariably abstract notion of time time being irreversible the past being forever past nostalgia can only be defined as the presence of an absence practicing in China at this critical moment we find ourselves caught between what Kenneth Frampton calls the optimization of advanced technology and the ever-present tendency to regress into nostalgic historicism nostalgia can be a problematic notion for some it tends to be taken dismissively but we feel strongly that there is a potential to be constructive with the nostalgia rather than merely reductive image on the left is Michael Wolf's photography that captures the alarming trend of urbanization producing anonymous cities and the destruction of local culture image on the right is of a typical Shanghai Hong Kong alleyway remnants of Shanghai Seoul city fabric where we believe life happens and history is made these are the sites full of potential for newer more engaging architecture design working in such a city such a stage how do we confront this past this quote-unquote history what must also we look towards the future and bring the city to its future thus the union between the past and the future exists in the very idea of the city that have flows through in the same way that memory flows through the life of a person and always in order to be realized this idea must not only shape but be shaped by reality the shaping is a permanent aspect of a city's unique artifacts monuments and the idea we have of it here Aldo Rossi in the architecture of the city offers as a hint where he articulates this memory as a flow and the past and future of the city as a flow as well but are we being too naive is this overly nostalgic longing for something that must go away holding on to a romantic notion of the past that may have never existed professors Falana Boehm in her book the future of the past defines two branches of thinking thinking about nostalgia the first one is restorative the second one reflective restorative nostalgia is more literal and direct by comparison it attempts a trance historical reconstruction of the lost home and does not think itself as nostalgia rather as truth and tradition so there is a right and wrong there is an actual home to get you a history that we must recreate under this notion of nostalgia the other one is reflective nostalgia it thrives on the longing itself and delays a homecoming so it's it's about the process of going home but it's okay if you never reach home wistfully ironically desperately reflective nostalgia does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones it loves details not symbols to the left the image is a vignette from design republic furniture showroom showing chairs displayed behind glass panels juxtaposed with a louis borzoi installation of caged personal artifacts presenta was talking about civet Lenna boy am i in one of the article Rena philia she said ruins make us think of the past that could have been and the future that never took place tantalizing us with the utopian dreams of escaping the irreversibility of time at the same time the fascination for ruins is not merely intellectual but also sensual ruins give us a shock of vanishing materiality in our projects that deal with historic sites and existing buildings to the left is a old English police station that we turn into a design centre there is a gallery a one-bedroom hotel of retail furniture retail store we have been known and in many ways criticized that we celebrate a ruin there is certainly the power of the visceral experience of a decaying surface whose history is written into every crack and crevice but that alone puts it in danger of mere sentimental manipulation or even less critically a matter of style so if you see our play on old and new that's that's important for us but it is not so much style that we're dealing here the key for us is actually in the relationship between old and new not simply to put relics on a pedestal for worship when we choose to keep a section of crumbling wall for example we often frame and encase it behind glass in an archival fashion or juxtapose it directly against a section smooth whitewall this is a way to distance oneself from the actual material reality of the wall instead of focusing on the thing itself the intention is to highlight our desire or longing for it and what it represents perhaps this is a little extreme Rosanna walked in in this space I remember this was a plaster wall and keeping the lath partly because we ran out of budget during construction and the government was not pleased with it because that was part of the deal they will pay for the exterior if we play pay for the interior and we practically didn't do much with the interior so we use this reasoning that perhaps through it you'll have a better understanding of history this relationship old and new the framing of how things come together is constant in the things we do and when we started our practice we were given many interior projects because unlike what a mall said we had architecture actually we were getting old and we didn't have buildings so we were actually quite worried because we were given many of these kinds of projects and but we thought that this was a place for us a platform to Prak practice are our sort of passion for architecture so we have left many of these crumbling walls and oftentimes tell our clients you can afford this and now in its fifth year it's so successful that they decided to renovate this and actually I'm really fearful of our own success projects like the water house where you just deal with notion of an aging building that the government do not deem as historical but to us it's still important and now I'll talk a little bit about this project later as one of the few projects who are going to show for a museum project that we recently won in Kuala Lumpur we were given a shell of an existing building this building was the former office of the British engineering department that was in charge of the master planning of the Millea straits this was before when Singapore and Malaysia was one and what we did was we did this insertion within and our program so that the public experiences along the perimeter which also serves as the main connector for the museum when you are in this space you experience both the old and the new so it's not just a visual thing but it's an experiential process that you see so we're just showing you some of our recent projects this is a glam up rendering of Bow Street a competition we had one a few years back in London we were not allowed to touch this building and they said the only way you could do it is to do an insertion in the inside but you have to use brick and it's in Mayfair so how do you deal with these kinds of relationship so here's our insertion we're in this is rather dark I'm so sorry because we actually this was a last minute WeChat if you know WeChat this was sent to us so the resolution is extremely low so my apologies I know especially to Columbia students you know this is not acceptable I know but you can understand this idea of all the new so it's just the idea and you know you should tell teachers this way this is just an idea this mitigating for us it's not just about the composition but an experience of constantly juxtapositioning old and new so it becomes a spatial experience in itself here on the left is an image of the camper China headquarter and it's capturing a framed opening into a double-height atrium where shoes are hung and displayed reminiscence of the glimpses one could get in an old alleyway house shown on the right side the robbery Vanderhorst image on the right in our practice we often examine vernacular typology such as the hutong and the lien ohm that have persisted for centuries and generations our research and investigations into these typologies have been fertile means of critically understanding how to tie our projects into a broader historical context and lineage the hutong courtyard house originated in the northern regions of China for example reveals the inseparable relationship between humans and nature the integration of public and private space as well as the familial hierarchy which shapes every aspect of Chinese living and the lean own alleyway row houses that first appeared in Shanghai in the night in the 1850s still very much alive today is a fascination case study for the blurry boundaries of domesticity and notions of home as well as communal living conditions investigated by the permeate permeability and overlapping spaces and many of our projects actually showcase those conditions so this is the camper that in the interior of the camper headquarter and this is pretty much using the idea of the lino house but putting in a house within a house so you can see the cross-section kind of exhibited in the in this red paint and behind which is the showroom for camper and in other parts of the same display you see kind of sort of a recreated spatial quality of these hi nan tong can they're kind of they're called Kensing they're like the the light wells in between the known Tong houses and then speak about like different typology that we have utilized as design concepts this one is a office for a for a creative agency called flamingos in Shanghai and we kind of used these attic spaces as the point of departure for creating this this creative agencies headquarter office and so you from the attics that you actually come you can see their co-working space down below and this is Waterhouse again and Linden is going to talk a lot more about it later but it also shows that shows kind of glimpses of the way that you can gaze out into different people's apartments and different people's alleyway homes and this image on the left is a chapel facade recently completed by our office in Suzhou using a mix of modern and traditional materials as an interpretation of the black and white architecture of China's gell-mann region showing on the right in a painting by by when Jung recently we have launched investigations and research regarding not only for vernacular topologies but also vernacular construction materials and methods similarly as with the approach to typology the idea is not to transplant an outdated modality directly onto our own projects rather to interpret them anew both traditional architecture as well as modern rural architecture is being constructed with extreme humble materials brick concrete plaster there isn't a strong lineage of precise woodworking or carpentry as there is in Japanese building tradition for example so the construction is extremely rough but there is certainly a different kind of beauty and simplicity within this roughness that we want to embrace the whitewash wall is not pristine as you would see in the Mediterranean but in the wet climate of jung-soo it takes on a soft green and grays like the brushstrokes of the Chinese ink painting the brush paintings of all who was quite well known within Chinese within Chinese arches is representative of a new kind of sublime something of the modern era said against but based on the tradition of the mountain and water the chantry ink brush that has defined chinese fine arts for centuries the notion of the sublime may be best defined by the word jing gia which literally means jing means kind of space and environment and gia means boundary so the formulation of the new kind of sublime in our opinion defined by the two words jing jia Inspira is this mystical realm this kind of wow effect that transplants the person who is viewing a a fine work of art and to kind of bring them into this state of sublime in several recently completed projects we have employed recycled materials as cladding material collected from demolition sites across China and reassembled in various bond patterns the brick walls adding a texture reading and over time their patina continues to build the building begins to emerge as if it have been there for many generations one could say that the collection and repositioning of old bricks is not merely an act of being sustainable it also carries the idea of conserving time through curating the marks of history tectonic Lee on a building's facade this is another project that we will show in more detail later and this is the pseudo Chapel but it's showing here kind of the use of old bricks and the different fonts and the ways of laying bricks some are traditional and some are totally new kind of you know created by our own design and to juxtapose juxtaposed those things together it kind of creates a different kind of visual sensation this is a sawasdee flagship store also kind of creating this new kind of sublime by usage of the repeated bronze kind of creating this this lantern it's kind of like a symbol of a lantern that is inside an existing building that was given to us for the siwash sawasdee flagship store in Seoul Korea and in the Meridian jinjo this is a new construction where we did the building and the interior and this is just to showcase kind of the usage of these bronze pillars to evoke a sense of nature as if you're walking in the forest and again in the same project upstairs on the second floor in the Chinese restaurant it's also kind of using a different kind of material to create a different sense of sublime and also evoking a sense of nature with the bamboo tied with ropes and then having the kind of they're like sack like shaped lights that hang on the bamboos and this is zhengzhou office that we had done recently it's just a rendering it's almost like a 2/3 block long kind of plot and it's creating this massive urban building but also kind of putting a forest inside the building a wild forest and so we're going to show about six projects in more detail and this is the first one this lit house in Shanghai so we we name this rethinking this lit house and embed it in the title of the project is our attempt to set the project within its historical and typological context as we mentioned before the laying house which were once the dominant fabric that mayor Bing high the intoxicating place that it was in the 1930s 20s and 30s are now slowly being demolished taken over by high-density developments all over the city and had just done research about exactly how many of these alleyways were demolished over the past ten years and data shows that right now only about 1/3 is left just over the last 10 years one third of what it was there before is left in the city of Shanghai so you can see this condition that is being you know slowly being removed from us from our urban fabric and Aryan who was commissioned to reconstruct a dilapidated Lange house left with almost nothing except this glorious shell in the historic and artistic change the font area in Shanghai and that's the entry to the Chen's living area and the mission was to transform it into three separate apartment units you can see the site map we are pretty close to the wampa River and it's in the old French Concession area and so the red dot is where the house is our strategy was to rethink the typology of the Lange house keeping the split-level formation you can see in sort of that cartoon drawing on the right this is a typical laying house and adding spacial interest through new insertions and skylights to accentuate the architectural integrity of such a typology contemporize it for today's lifestyle historically the shank the link houses are separated with two distinct spaces with a smaller one in the back and a bigger kind of room in the front and most of these back rooms have a split-level so that's why you new you see this kind of a it's like a mezzanine level in the back so these link houses were often occupied by single families during the turn of the century they have changed over the course of the city's economic history they are now typically occupied by three or more families sharing the public staircase and land so that the neighbors live on different levels or rooms have a chance to interact as they move in and out of their personal units so this is the do plan of of our project and as you can see the plan is really very simple but you can see how a very simple kind of footprint is basically demarcated by the front and the back rooms this is a third floor to keep the spirit of this typology of life a new continuous metal stair was inserted to replace the old decaying wooden stair that was not to code so that's what you see in red it also serves to act both as a vertical connection to the three levels and at the same time to lock kind of these two parts the frontal room and the back room to be in tact in its configuration and one of the first things that we decided to do I think for functional reasons as well as kind of a symbol of a new way of looking at this typology is that we put we place all the toilets insert two in to be inserted onto the right next to the staircase to allow this unexpected juxtaposition of function you can see that the bathrooms conceivably the most intimate spaces of each apartment are inserted next to the most public stairway separated only with the sandblasted glass divider and these are just the different floors and different views above the stairway a clerestory skylight was added to bring light to the darkest space and also to the frontal view the mezzanine which is the back area and the staircase space itself the blurring of both the private and the public acts as the central concept that binds the split-level together and at the same time brings life to the middle and the darkest portion of the lain house and this is a view of the route ah so architectural II the decorative elements added over the last sixty years were stripped off and the large openings were created on the frontal section to improve like qualities to the public spaces of each apartment it is as if we have sliced off sixty years of time and now forces the building to embrace its community without a mask without a facade literally urbanistic Lee it is reshaping the lino typology with the transparency and modernity that also fulfills the vitality of contemporary life in this house at the same time when your neighbor gaze into your everyday life you have the city open to your private viewing as well the notion of nostalgia here in line with its reflective a subverts the idea that nostalgia could only look backwards it could only look towards the past we believe that know that too long for what is past you also have the capacity to create something new so to respect history and to live alongside history does not necessarily mean a search and Disneyfication or a recreation of history but we could offer other critical methodologies within design this is the back alley the Sukkot chapel which is the second project we're gonna show was a project that a developer had approached us and suit so for those of you do not know the city is about an hour train ride from Shanghai and in this particular village that they had inherited to the left the developer and in China they often call it a chapel but it's really not for religious meeting place it's me mostly for weddings but the chapel is a feature building within the larger village zone so when a developer comes and approached us with the idea of having a place of worship or a place of retreat they call it a chapel just to make it urban istic ly more interesting and I thought architect obviously we took advantage of that as such it occupies a very important part on the site that left side is by Jung ho Chang you know for those from China probably know him as dong jung-ho but to the right and then Calvin Chou Macau the New York practice did the hotel component which is the middle part sorry so this is the middle part we were asked to do this village and the smaller house is here and obviously when we were given the opportunity to do the chapel we spent most of that time doing this project in here the nostalgic notion of assembling was very important to us because if you notice in China the idea of assembling beyond a certain amount or a size you need permission in fact when we have events in China if it's more than a hundred people you need permission from the government if you know WeChat which is the watch up of China you can't go beyond a certain amount number without certain permission from the government and so the idea of the nostalgic idea of assembling was important to us when we were given this commission and as rosanna was talking we were in our research starts to involve this whole notion of vernacular topologies but also vernacular construction materials and methods and the whitewash wall which is to the left here is not pristine as you would see in most Western condition but in this particular part of the region it takes on this rather one called moldy look but this small D look can also be romantically seen as brushed oak of a Chinese ink painting and the approach to typology the idea is not to transplant an outdated modality directly into our projects rather to interrupt them anew both traditional architecture as well as modern rural architectures being constructed with extremely humble materials in this particular case we use recycled bricks and I want to show you this Lantern that we had created on top this was a model that it seen some of the elevations I realized we're running out of time we have for other projects so I'm gonna do this rather quickly this meandering path its architectural language is derived from similar elements from found elsewhere in the projects such as the undulating brick walls and floating white volumes but they are here taken to another level of articulation the brick walls begin to break down to an even more refined scale where different heights of walls interweave with each other to create a cure graph landscape journey leading into the building itself the white volume also receive a special treatment here it is composed of two layers the inner layer is a simple box punctuated on all sides with scattered windows while the outer layer is a folded and perforated metal skin a veil perhaps which alternatively hides and reveals in the daytime the white box emerges emerges shimmery shimmering lee gently in the sunlight very subtle exposing its content in the night the white box emerges shimmer in the night it becomes the jus alight beacon in the project its various window emitting a soft glow in all the direction so you see these different types of condition the meandering path that leads you ultimately to the beacon that we were talking about and this was a sectional portion of the main space we were also this is not just a connection to the rooftop but at the same time we were requested to create a space that can that do not force people to be in this assembly if they're not comfortable and this was part of the regulation so we took advantage of what is considered a fire regulated space and made it something special so you can't see that space as you walked through going up to the rooftop inside the building visitors continue on their guided journey through the pre-function area and then into the main chapel space which feature a light-filled 12 meter high space there is a seamless integration with the surrounding nature as a picture windows frame various man-made and natural landscape a mezzanine level hovers overhead docume date extra guests and includes a catwalk encircling the space allowing 360 degrees of viewing angles the mezzanine is integrated into a wood louvered cage element which wraps around the whole upper part of the room a grid of glowing ball of light and delicate bronze detail gives a touch of opulence to the otherwise quietly monastic spaces custom wood furniture and crafted wood details complement the simple material palette of great brick terrazzo and concrete so we'll show you some images and then we have this film which will give you a better understanding of the space as the practice we also made a conscious effort to film all our project because it's important not just to have beautiful drawings it's easy to have beautiful pictures but it was imperative for us for those people that can't really experience our spaces that we start documenting them so that even from a distance you can experience I know it's not perfect but it's a means to at least get closer to the building that we've designed [Music] first thing because this space I had given a tour to a bunch of kids that were 10 years and younger and when they came they were really intimidated by that big central space because they never really had a space of congregating since they were growing up they were going up and down that side steps and they would look down into this big space and eventually it took about 30 minutes before they start entering that main space and so conceivably what was required I think had a reason we didn't really understand the logic then but then we understand that the idea of this assembling people were not used to it [Music] we are running kind of late what we're going to do is to introduce the next two projects just by playing the film so we'll go through the images really quickly and then just play the film and I will talk a little bit about it so this one is a project that we did in Beijing we don't do a lot of projects in Beijing by the way for Lyndon has his reasons I have major problems but anyway so this is the city of 26 million inhabitants with seven million vehicles being trapped in a car in Beijing c'not aureus traffic is a compulsory experience in the capital city so everyone knows what it's like to be stuck in traffic and this is this project is in a former missile Factory right in the heart of Beijing it's right behind temple of Earth everyone knows where a temple of heaven is but there's actually a temple of Earth which is directly on the other axis of Beijing so the client came to us wanting to build this autom old photo mobile service center but it's not just any garage he wants to have a design gallery he wants to have the best coffee a small cafe offering the best coffee his office and an event space where he hosts fashion shows and art exhibitions so it was a really really interesting client who had this incredible vision about how a simple garage can also house interesting cultural spaces and so what we did was kind of insert this garage into an old missile space but also adding some warmth and domesticity into a space that would be just simply industrial the next project we call it the vertical Lane house it's waterhouse I'm gonna read you a quote by Calvino arriving at each new city the traveler finds again a pass of his that he did not know he had the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possessed lies in wait for you in foreign on possess places it's interesting to see that oftentimes it's the foreigner that appreciate your city and they find things in your city that you often neglect when we were given this commission the client came to us a Singapore developer and a Chinese government official they gave me a call and said it's in it's on the bun so this was my natural idea of the bun you know I thought well of the 33 building maybe I get to do one of them well I was wrong it was south of bun and it was this dilapidated decrepit little area and I said to myself what am I gonna do you know it's not that interesting so we thought maybe we want to design a building more for a traveler than a tourist and so we want to start celebrating people brushing their teeth for instance washing their hair you know in Paris this is considered if you eat on the street I just came from Milan and when you eat on the street it's considered romantic in Shanghai it's called unhygenic I just don't understand that kind of logic so we start talking about all these and and the client quite understandably just look at me and go are you mad I want Mayfair London so what do you do when they want Mayfair London and and all you want to do is this whole voyeuristic sectional quality in an architectural spaces that architectural school teaches you so this is what I want to do and yet you're forced to deal with the commercial realities that don't really care or developers that don't care about the history of the essence of Shanghai and so this was the building that was given to us and he says I want this all torn down it's not listed don't worry about it and I'm like well it's gonna be very expensive if you keep this it'll be half the price so obviously I lied and he agreed through that whole process but you know sometimes you have to do that architecture school do not teach you how to do that so so these were some of the drawings that we did some of them are very different it was interesting because here in this project we start dealing with old and new public and private the essence of what it is to be a traveler in Shanghai and so you see the floor plan we did this Corten steel the bar on the South bun and then we created the idea of like the old and the new and you can kind of see the greatest thing was when my mother came to this place she starts she couldn't stop laughing and she goes linton is this project done there's only two things either your client is really stupid or you're super smart and that's all Chinese parents they are the next question did they pay the fee I said they did fully and so she says well then you're a genius so we were this was one project when we were this was in many ways our first architectural project and the idea of actually keeping this structure and only making reprogramming three different buildings and the only new things were the the walkways and you can kind of see the reinforced structural columns this is the cheapest room because you look down into the reception that is a bedroom and in many ways this hotel is a reflection of the city the lane houses when you actually see there's that blurring of the public and the private so that's the next room neighbor that's literally you share a balcony and that happens in there every day so I managed to convince them that you know by doing this you maximize the room but if you do stay in this hotel be warned because if you are in one of your restroom you will be seen by another person and that is the China or that is the Shanghai condition I argue so even in the restaurant area you actually look up and then you will be able to see rooms and people could look down into the restaurants and this again was the client had a problem with this but then I said you don't really have to buy artwork anymore the people that come and stay in your hotel they pay to stay and they are the artwork and that worked so the idea of this blurring of the courtyard and the street having the restaurant and you see up into the rooms that's the skylight that looks up into them these were the existing stairway this was a Japanese warehouse owned by a Japanese factory maker and they apparently had a lot of illegal things in this warehouse so they had winding stairs that leads to nowhere or leads to into different rooms when the cops came and so we actually suggested to keep all these not just as remnants but at the same time as a way to understand sort of the viability of that urban urban condition that was this is the room that you see that's not a mirror right away so if you have children or if you want to take your parents over that's the best perfect condition to bond and yet at the same time don't hear them and you can look down into the restaurant down below so I just want to show you quickly here's the film of this particular project to give you the scale understanding so even though our theme here I mean where we're centering the talk around the word nostalgia and reflective nostalgia specifically but of course this you know points to a lot of issues regarding preservation and in China today there are a lot of different voices and different factions about and viewpoints about how to preserve something and of course this is you know a a point of contention among a lot of architects and urban planners as well but I think this project for us one of the most kind of rewarding moment was when we were given one of the most important architecture awards in Asia called the far eastern China award and it was actually given to us against the advice of their CEO because he said it's such a because he's the one who is putting out the money for this award and he's this is a tiny project he was looking for big theater big museum but the people who the judges who actually give gave us the award said that this project single-handedly called the city to look at buildings like this in a different way that you know not only the ones that are sanctioned by the government as worthy of preserving could actually be preserved in a way that creates something new that repurpose these dilapidated old warehouses into something else that could also be useful so that was I think a moment that really made us realize because our the owners wanted to demolish this and I think it was quite instinctive that we wanted to keep it as a way of marking a part of the urban memory that would have been gone I think so yeah so for us it was it was quite meaningful here remember when the Shanghai Tourism Board used this as an ad initially they had problems with this building but three years after its opening they used this as an international ad to talk about the responsibility that they are part of the reconstruction of Shanghai City which is kind of ironic you're jumping to them um I think maybe we'll just show like one one image this is the new Shanghai Theatre and this is located in the French Concession the reason why I wanted to show this image is because you want to see this is again a sort of a reconstruction of a project that already has a existing building but we actually did not bring it back to how it was this is the original building because there were different versions this was done in I think 1900 and then this is done in 2007 so this is the building this is how the building look like when we inherited the building so obviously we really didn't know what we could keep and so we wanted to bring back kind of that original understate at Grace but we couldn't bring that back exactly the way it was so we did make a new building and this is the new building we will go straight to the film so more than anything I think this is an urban urban strategy because at this point of where you see this right now you we actually gave a very big portion of the interior to the public so the sidewalk is enlarged by virtue of this area and what it does is because as a neighbor it's a it's a community theater so we felt that we wanted to allow the community to embrace the active theater through an architecture means so they could actually come and look at how the architecture is playing with the light and the air the ring and kind of that architectural theatrical moments can be felt by everyone who comes who comes to pass by the building as well as kind of a way for you to engage in the pre theater before you are to go into the play before you are going to see the real act there's this kind of idea of foreplay to to see the building kind of act for you first the theatres of architecture is played before your eyes before you actually go into the theater the black box theater inside and these are the kind of the bronze curtains like a curtain call on on a stage but we use these idea of this undulating curtain to make that the first ring of walls first band of walls so there are these zones the actual zone of the pre theater stage and then the other zone of the it's part of the it's part of the building but it's given to the public and then there's the public zone of the sidewalk the last project we're going to show you is young so it's about three hours away from Shanghai situated in the close proximity to young so scenic slender Westlake the site given to us was a designer 20 room boutique hotel it was a challenging one because he was dotted with small lakes and yet those lakes were really not that pristine by the time we got there because it was abandoned that the client thought that was important to maintain many of these scenic or once scenic places in rural China but the problem was we had to keep some of this we have to keep a lot of the existing structure the foundation needs to be kept interestingly enough the building we could change but it was a mandate that the footprint stayed I'm going to talk about this I'm gonna skip this a little bit because of time but so what we did was we start to look into the traditional courtyard spaces in the region and by looking into traditional yong-jo houses you can kind of see that there's this tiled roof with wooden structure yet we didn't really understand how we can tie the or all these different desperate buildings together so we thought of creating this grid in which the courtyard here gives hierarchy to the spaces it frames view to the sky and earth in it capsulate landscape into architecture and creates an overlap between interior exterior so you see the existing structure with all this different building we create this grid that becomes the wall and alig alleyway grid network that creates the connecting factor so our strategy here to unify these scattered elements was to overlay a grid of walls and paths onto the site to tie the entire projects together resulting in multiple courtyard enclosures the inspiration for the design actually originates with a courtyard house typology of vernacular youngsil Chinese architecture so this is a master plan and you see all the different programs and which is one oh this is the aerial view of the site so we've also in recent most of our project you can kind of see we have employed recycled brick as a cladding material in young so we collected from demolition sites around the regions and reassembled in various bond patterns and brick the brick walls and a textual reading and over time this patina continues to build and this is some of the walls the blurring of both the architecture and the landscape and these recycled brick that sits as part of that network that connects all the rooms there's this outdoor auditorium as she journey along the walls here guests can also extend through opening above to gain privileged vantage point to the lake at the same time across the grated landscape and beyond to the surrounding Lakes and hotel guests traverse the site using the wall pathway to discover their rooms once within there is a clear separation between the buildings and the walls a layering of privacy and a sliver of landscape for guests to enjoy other courtyards are unoccupied pockets of LA's garden to offer relief from the sense of enclosure constructed entirely of reclaimed brick as I had said a while ago the gridded walls narrow interior passageway forces a long perspective what light plays off the various brick patterns enticing guests to venture even deeper into the project so I do have a film here this is the reception area in some of the rooms beyond this is the interior of the reception these are courtyard outside of the specific rooms kind of see how the wall becomes the enclosure at the same time it acts as that public space as a corridor there were three exterior building that was not part of the grid they were all new and they were all the public spaces they are all the public spaces the past three years we've made a conscious effort to do projects outside in the city it's actually very easy for us given the fact that we've had many experience in the city of Shanghai to do a lot of the glamorous project but we've made a concerted effort to take on smaller projects projects that sometimes even need our help for programming we sometimes connect them for financing just to get villages that are literally dying not so much out of demolition but programmatically or having people leave towns because they are going to major cities and we argue that especially in China a lot of villages many of the culture are embedded within the village and if the village die one one would argue that culture dies with it the client had an amazing vision he had taken ten villages that had beautiful landscaping or at least abandoned landscape and he had hired many different architects in fact we were third in line behind so Fujimoto and Kengo kuma but for some strange reason this got built faster because it was closer to the city and theirs were a little further out but his intention was to make sure to bring livelihood back to all these villages that have people leaving their trade to go to cities and doing things that they're not good at that's a fact that was not supposed to be a joke [Laughter] so we like as a practice we like this quote by Antoine de saint-exupéry we do not aspire to be eternal beings we only hope that things do not lose its meaning it's easy to be overwhelmed by the growth of China's economy all you hear are the high-rise towers building and non-stop development but to us that in many ways can also be quite dangerous so Rosanna and I made this conscious effort to try to do things that have a purpose and meaning in in this city we live in this is a longer version video sorry about that so if you guys are hungry this is the last one don't worry thank you thank you thank you for that really impressive body of work that I use your practice is 13 years old and I think when we were talking earlier you mentioned that you the first building was the first ground-up building was five years in so it's projects that have all been done I guess within the last seven years seven years well I wanted to in responding just kind of first bring up maybe two sort of very interesting kind of contradictions that I think sort of drive your practice I mean I think there's many contradictions I think that the humor and with which you prevent presents actually very serious kind of work is is one but the you know I think that it's it's you know here in cities like New York or London where you also have an office the majority of kind of architectural activity of professionals involves work in existing buildings like you do and on the other hand as you pointed out in these kind of very impressive statistics in China you know the majority of architectural production is new construction less so I guess in Shanghai but so you're working in a place where many things are kind of tabula rasa and yet you've found a way to kind of you know sort of with with such a degree of sensitivity towards existing buildings existing kind of urban situations traditional kind of building types and I think that for me of course seems like one thing that really sort of drives you the second thing is that which Dean Andrea is kind of alluded to in the introduction which you you didn't talk much about is sort of that the first five years before this and and the degree to which your your trajectory has been from kind of commercial and retail work and in fact product design and the design Republic was sort of the first thing your brand which is based on let's say a lot of a lot of kind of commercial things right and it reminded me of we talked about before john paulson who started also doing like very small retail projects and and eventually moved into the kind of projects that he's more well known for and a kind of story that you know supposedly the when he was commissioned to do the the Trappist monastery in the in the czech republic that the monks the monks came to him because they liked the calvin klein stores mmm he designed right so this kind of sort of weird this is kind of weird contradiction between the kind of Monday and mundane and banal and everyday and the kind of sublime which is a term that that you used and so I think what I'm the projects which we didn't show which are also really impressive I think is a way that you take you know very ephemeral type retail orders may be superficial and kind of imbue a certain depth into it which is I think something that you you do with all the projects really um so the kind of Third Point or sort of impression I guess is back to this topic that you set up the the reflective nostalgia in the presence of preservation or ruins or decay in all the kind of projects in the term the yeah you use reflective nostalgia which I guess in contrast to the kind of restorative nostalgia and I think it's interesting especially here because there's I think with in the historic preservation program which is you know led by Jorge Otero Pyro's you know is talked a lot about the site idea of preservation is a kind of experimental or creative practice rather than a kind of sentimental practice which I think very much you know embodies what you do and I what is kind of exciting about it for me is like at first I thought it was something that was always about a kind of this sort of diagrammatic clarity between old and new right that there's kind of like a white piece that's embedded in a kind of brick piece or vice versa in the camper story but actually you seem to have many the repertoire is kind of much larger than that right I think there's like out of the six main projects you should the sudra Chapel is one where there is the only one where there's no existing building or anything I think that's the most kind of like tabula rasa but one could also read like this almost a sort of podium or vases existing ruined base which of course it's not it's it's new but the kind of cube reads like the sort of new half and kind of old half but I think it becomes almost more sophisticated because in for instance in the split house there is sort of no old a new part it's actually a kind of active removal of the mossad so through subtraction you produce the absence of facade and the kind of image of sort of modernity or newness for what is a kind of very old type and so I think I could kind of go on but it seems to be like there's many ways in which you deal with it and I'm I'm kind of curious you know whether it's like I mean you described it as kind of your interest for the water house in kind of like marking an urban memory so that there's kind of a almost like a kind of political attitude like in in resistance or the kind of erasers of the 20th century in China ratios of history but I also see it very much as like I kind of maybe architectural critique to write knowing that you know you also worked both with Michael Graves where they're you know practice that also dealt with kind of history and you know how to let's say confront history in the wake of modernism how do we in view kind of meaning or um you know but back into architecture and I think that there was even a quote from that you had in the presentation from Svetlana bomb about that this reflective nostalgia is about details and not symbols and and I think one could say like that perhaps past practices or practices in the 70s and 80s dealt with it with history very much about symbols and language and signification but I think it's clear to me that your your project is very much about the kind of details and I can I can also say having like seeing some of these projects that it's the your control of kind of details down to the you know door handles and meetings of different materials and glass and this kind of thing is quite also quite astounding in a context you know where we let's at least say the kind of the outside impression is that things happen fast and quick and in a way that's um you know very difficult difficult to come to control so I guess I'm kind of the question that I'm eventually getting to hear they're very good maybe I should skip the question oh yeah I mean I think the question is like how do you deal like okay you're given a project in Pudong where everything is new it's tabula rasa how do you deal you know how does your practice as it as it kind of grows you know how do you are you well you can keep working on existing buildings do you insist that you have to operate on existing buildings or do you have a set of technique it's interesting you should bring poutama because we just lost a competition for the shanghai modern museum which reads which we should have won and i can say this but we made a tactical mistake we call it the future ruins and we thought we were being cheeky and we were being brilliant and I think the district mayor just goes future woman you mean you're projecting what's going to happen in a hundred years our argument was in two hundred years when Shanghai is bombed this museum will stay you know the future ruin will be what it is the new Acropolis of Asia and he didn't take that very kindly so Jean Nouvel won because he just created a black new thing so yeah it is yeah so I think it's it's interesting that you asked about food on because immediately I thought of the project that we had just lost and and indeed we used history as well in a brand-new project right but we thought I mean in a sense we we see history as this concept not not so much the linear history of time that it's really in the past but if you see history and past and present and future as conceptual then you can actually intermix them and then if you sit kind of the past as in the future but that's actually how we came up with this strategy for the museum and like Lyndon said we thought it was brilliant but it got shut down because they didn't want to build anything that had anything to do with the past you know the city wanted to move forward but indeed we we used kind of similar ways of thinking yeah I think the term future ruin and I think also your description of the kind of opposing or kind of simultaneous forces of like construction and deconstruction it's sort of a beautiful image for for contemporary China but also your like your own work in a way and I'm also reminded of like the I think future ruin maybe from Robert Robert Smithson monuments of mistake yeah so like a moment in the u.s. also when there was this kind of you know he was looking at these landscapes that were getting there was just this kind of overproduction sort of suburban sprawl outside New York City that he he was um he was kind of looking at and I guess searching for maybe also this kind of balance between kind of old and new but I guess it seems to me like actually the pseudo museum is successful in that context like really there's no building but you found a way to kind of take this operation that you've maybe learned from elsewhere but I guess then another question is like how do you how do you make the kind of value judgments about like I was wondering about that that kind of really awkward facade on the on the theater from 2007 right and then you decided to remove you know how do you like the question I think brings up like who's you know whose narrative or what kind of history are you trying to promote or which elements do you how do you decide these kind of elements all the elements and new elements I think we started working on those concepts starting with water house and in fact you know now looking at what we have done over the past 13 14 years it looks like we had intentionally worked with old buildings but in fact it I think it started with water house these projects actually came to us and we just took them in a way that we understood how to and I think given the context that we're in definitely like you said you know it was a reaction I think against all the demolition that we see and for those of you who have not lived in a place like Shanghai you really don't know what it's like you know you you can you remember that you bought something in this market two weeks ago and you go back and get more because you like it and you realize wow the entire block is gone like you can't even find where it is because the shop not just the shop of the entire block is like gone and so imagine entire generations of memories being obliterated and you know how do you how do you pass those things down to your children your grandchildren so I think you know living in that kind of condition we realized that this is one way of kind of counter what we saw that was happening around us and so it started with water house and I think we learned also different ways of strategy as we go along so with water house I remember one of the things that we had to do internally during our design meetings was to kind of designed the rules for ourselves right which ones like why we asked the same question why do we want to demolish this and not that why do we want to keep this and not that and what are the rules so designing the building was almost like designing the rules of what to keep what not to keep and when you keep it what color to painted do you expose it do you hide it so one of the things that I think was very clear but we didn't we were not explicit in our talk about water house was all the other structural reinforcements were in this black painted black metal and we left them the way it is kind of like seeing band-aids and stitches you know and explode and expose them and there were a lot of other things with windows with details and doors and it was designing yeah it was it was like designing a set of rules and then our team just kind of played along those rules yeah I think that that rigor is like really present and in the kind of projects and I really it's one of like I think definitely like sort of like dialectic and and kind of collage and contradiction rather than sort of blurring and it it's so clear in each of the projects you know that those those kind of relationships and I'm kind of productive contrast that you kind of produce and it's interesting like I think the the the campers start with you didn't show in so much detail it's almost it's almost kind of reversed right there's sort of an old part on the outside which is white and then the new part is a kind of reconstructed type which is brick or wood and kind of inserted on the inside actually which i think is it's it's yeah I mean you didn't use kind of that many diagrams actually for the project and in communicating the kind of work but yeah it has a it's it's hard I guess to kind of when you're when you're operating on these sort of buildings like I mean Arthur what is the process actually for you like when you when you come to it and how do you how do you how do you make these determinations we do have diagrams but you know it's so hard because as you said when there's a lot of additive and reduction and all these rules a lot of them are three-dimensional so you can't really see it in plan it's a combination of plan and section and elevation and that's the reason why we often film our work for you to have that understanding holistically and and have a better understanding I remember David RJ who loves diagram I call it mr. diagram he came to our office and he's always saying I get it I get your diagram you know it was always I Clint and I get so frustrated looking at your new projects from afar because I cannot really understand your diagram from the floorplan intersection but after visiting it I get it you know you need to be in this space to understand what you guys are trying to do I don't know if that was a compliment and I don't know if that's a success but I think in many ways it is hard to to create this diagram when you're dealing with all these different modes of operations yeah but it is also a contradiction I think at the same time that we work always I would say in the beginning we want clarity and diagram and we're very disciplined particularly Lindon you know training the team to understand the diagram but we break away from the diagram later on I think for layering for richness or complexity for all those other things that we want in the experience so there yeah it's it's not so because we also don't want to produce a one-liner I mean if you make a diagram and you build the diagram and you experience a diagram then you know it's often just one way it's easier architectural II but we face this struggle in interior projects actually even even harder and oftentimes we have to in fact we have a whole lecture on interior arity and this deals with this notion of a lack of a diagram but we didn't have time tonight so that's a whole different lecture but that would take four hours so before we get into that maybe we should take questions either on hi thank you for your talk I'm from the Philippines where I kind of struggle with like people don't really value the old and are tend to look to the west for like everything how do you deal with educating the people around you about like the value of keeping what's already been around for like hundreds of years lotin you know I was born in the Philippines you know now actually very difficult we were naive when we went to China 14 years ago extremely naive we thought just the two of us we can change the landscape of the architecture of China and we were Crusaders speaking saying you know we don't need Putin you know all those high gleaming tower and it was not until two years in the thing and we didn't have architectural project that we start worrying are we really serious about you know our Crusades and the things but in terms of trying to educate the value it is hard and it was a challenge for us but I think we were maybe young and kind of naive so what we did was instead of talking about it we just made our project we just made our project an example of the things we believe in yeah but it's not just the Philippines definitely China you know I think as a culture maybe also because of recent history definitely you know the Cultural Revolution had a lot to do with it looking at the future looking at the West looking at everything that tries that that helps them to achieve modernization as fast as they can is definitely better than looking at the past but there there is a growing kind of sentiment about treasuring the past and history and there is a smaller group of kind of intellectuals who are advocating this so I would say definitely don't give up and you know continue but but I think being resilient is also another thing early on in order to in in many ways we were selfish we wanted our buildings approved so we were we got really close to the Planning Department and in the process got to know a lot of district mayor and to please them we created this what amar called the festival of design and we asked sponsors to pay for this big event and as the government to be involved now that takes a lot of work because one would argue you know it's easier if you just do your own projects and not do all these different other activities it takes a toll on us but we realize it helped the city as a whole the festival of design brought in different you know from architects interior designers product designers and come and speak and when developers comes and listen to all these different new ideas they start thinking maybe our city actually has certain parts of our cities are actually quite strong and we should not just demolish them and build new things and so these extra activities are important and I think both Roseanne and I it was important for us to not just nurture a bunch of younger generation architects in Shanghai today but also among our colleagues to understand I mean especially in product design we went to Milan for thirteen years ago and we have this big China tag with a camera and I said the most stupid thing to have China and a camera they'll just say don't come to my booth because you're gonna copy me and that drives me mad I got really upset I'm like you copy the Ming Dynasty you know that table is coming from the Ming Dynasty and I get really contentious like what's what's your problem and you get really personal so I thought you know the best way and and that's sort of the start of design Republic again we have no business in this whole furniture retail business we we shouldn't even be part of it right so we created this design Republic because the idea was to bring the best of what what the world can offer you know bring the brand like Vitra and our techno into China and hopefully younger generations would come and be able to sit on them and actually experience them rather than look at the magazine and go oh I can do this too right so so we did this and I remember our first three months there was no state sale in our store absolutely no because we didn't know how does I mean we didn't you know our store was rather huge about this size and we had 12 pieces John Parsons said jima all my favorite architects right lining up and people would come and they want to buy and I'm like now I actually don't want to sell because I love these pieces but that's just not the way it works but you realize of our Alto own 25 percent of our tech right the architecture collaborative which was part of Walter Gropius started design research and just when we thought we were being creative actually there are many precedents that we can look at if you look at lever ins and all these beautiful buildings if you look at those hardware's you think to yourself oh how did he manage to do all those the he owned the hardware store you know that so lever ins at the end bought the hardware store a splint the architect to this day there's a lighting brand called a splint he created them just to be able to control the process so I guess what I'm trying to say is try try to be involved with as many things as you can while you can thank you for those methylating lectures and I come from Shanghai I live with my grandparents in my childhood in lilo so I really appreciate your projects that I can feel nostalgia from a projects I loved atmosphere created by the materials in space but the question I want to ask is relatively protocol is about the relationship between the proud private and public space as we know the people England owned really enjoying the close relationship but sometimes when us when SEO projects was so large area glasses I know the glass is great it makes up space transparent more than and clean but for me I still maybe feel uncomfortable and with so large glass I don't like be monitored by others when I use in the restroom so how do you think about it relationship between their province and public space thank you there's a really great invention called curtain and so that's what will happen practically speaking what actually what what was interesting was what Rosanna did not tell you was that client was from Hong Kong and he had a very simple mandate when he came to me he said I'm gonna come to Shanghai I bought this dilapidated Lane house and I have two very good friends and I come to Shanghai once a month and I want to find myself when someone tells you that you don't ask them whether they have kids or where they're happily married I don't ask that kind of question I said okay we'll do it for you but in fact we designed something that the most public as Rosanna said which is the stairway with the most private we did have a curtain but he came in and he's like I don't want those curtain I want me and my friends to find ourselves to this process so that was not intentional even though sort of that voyeuristic nature in in in all of us you know you don't need to pretend I know you don't like it but I'm sure you also like Louise Bourgeois like to be able to see you know the parents room and all that but the key is we gave clients choices I mean it was his choice just yeah and I made a choice to not talk about that story because I don't really like that story so it depends on who is presenting the project if Linda pretends a project he starts with a story yeah I think the Kurt the curtain gives you you know the the choice but for us I think that project as well there is an architectural intention and a urbanistic intention in terms of how we were trying to push the envelope of technology you know we wanted to see like you know where this typology could end up if we were to do it this way again thank you so much for that lecture you guys touched upon it about designing a set of rules when deciding what to preserve and what not preserve I respond zooming into details I was wondering if you guys can give some insight about how do you guys actually decide what to keep and know and what not to keep like is it something very instinctual or is there like a very rigorous process behind what you decide what to keep or what not to keep I think it's synonymous to what to design and how to design it so for example if you were to design a brand new building you still have a whole set of questions that you need to answer while you're designing and the fact that we have to answer the questions of what to demolish and what to keep is because we're dealing with some existing conditions and I would say with each given project the the questions are the the decisions are different and the rules are different so designing those rules I think it's kind of the beginning of the process sometimes they are they need to be very rigorous sometimes they can be very whimsical they could be very you know kind of of the moment and emotional just like when you're designing a brand-new building you know you need to fulfill programs you need to fulfill functions and some of those things come with very logical ways of thinking and then there are other moments where it's really just so you know that the that the moment of the signature that you know you are the designer you are drawing the facades and you want a window here you want a window there you're making a composition sometimes not every little answer not every little design decision has a very kind of you know disciplined way of or you don't arrive at every answer from a very rigorous set of rules I was just curious about your building process like the actual process of construction when you're working in the villages we spoke about how you're intentionally working more in the villages as a way to preserve culture and I was wondering if how that goes into you know like how closely you work with the bricklayers or the craftspeople if you can speak about that process thank you we actually for young so we made a conscious effort we had a forum in which the client has a group of us to go to young so for a week and we had bricklayers and and they also have different ways of doing laying bricks and it was conscious effort on our end not to use imported stones for instance because no matter what or how expensive or how beautiful the stone is they were bastardize it because they don't know it's not that they're not good at it they're just not you they don't know how you know especially in the village they don't know how to make them they don't have that experience so we made a conscious effort to use all local materials in that particular area but there is that process in which we were in for instance the furniture they were all made around that area and you can kind of see it's not your typical Niren who furniture very fine if you look closely and if you know your furniture it's actually a little bit on the rougher side and and they were not really village bumpkins that were doing them but they had they were not as sophisticated but we made a conscious effort to design around that oh I like Columbia a lot of questions a mom I know you've nurtured a good environment here hynerian so happy to see you guys in the US in person everyone I have been following for years oh yeah actually matcha hi thank you so much for that opportunity okay so I have two questions one in short are you ever gonna open an office in the US I know you guys open a branch in London I've been dying for you guys to come to you the US and yeah okay so the second question sorry sorry a second question I know research is so huge for your firm and it's like embedded it in the you know your name and and it's always from like the way how you guys present your work and even how you lecturing about it um but I'm very curious in how you guess balance the the the practicality of you know running a firm but still be able to devote and to research and I also know you guys are teaching and I'm kind of curious about your view on you know like how you guys see if damia plays out and like you know like the passion between teaching and yeah but I'm gonna answer maybe there's three questions there but [Music] we open London not because I wanted to or we want it to in fact we actually did not want to open an office in London but we won that competition that that blurry WeChat photo and after winning that competition we want to other competitions in London and so as much as we want to close it because we couldn't really sometimes it's very hard to control that office because we have a bunch of prima donnas there and they're all very good don't get me wrong and I love them but but it's not so much that but it's it's just it was not a conscious choice if we had the choice we probably would want to just work locally but there was just so many different requests in fact we have about 13 projects in Europe right now and a lot of that apologies are really interesting Chapel in Stockholm for instance Learning Centre in Porto so projects like this we can't really turn down because they're interesting but how do you control and manage that process we've been thinking about New York we have a project in Miami we have a project in Brazil we have two potential projects in New York so we've been really thinking about and we have about close to 20 alumni that are in New York right now but I think it's gonna be hard because I think Rosanna and I are very controlling and a lot of the things we do you probably can tell in our project so we have to formulate a way maybe design a strategy again susana said the rules is in order to make it work when you talk about research today during the podcast they asked that same question and actually research came to us in a clear way when we started working with a European brands when we started we didn't really have architectural project or for that matter interior project so we started with product design teacups chairs and we started working with Italian brands and this was sort of our lineage at Michael Graves that whole interdisciplinary aspect and what really helped us was seeing the Italians having all these research both materiality and how things are made and you realize I was in Milan just three days ago and I was asking this question what happened to all the Italian designers product designers and the brands basically said the 50s and the 60s we didn't really have the opportunity to go out to the world so what we did was we found within our neighborhood the best Italian designers so you have such as you have appeal Castiglioni you have Gio Ponti you I mean you can go on much is stretchy you know all these product designers now we have this opportunity to go out to the world and select from a pool of designers with our research and their set skills our product inevitably becomes better that's their argument and it's through that process we realize that it's amazing how an idea can be pushed true or challenged through many of those foundational research that they have for many years you know a lighting brand like our t-midi or floss you can't just I mean you can go to Brooklyn for instance and make those lights and they are beautiful don't get me wrong there's a whole Brooklyn movement but once it comes to the technology behind it it's kind of primitive right so it's beautiful but it's somewhat primitive what the Italian does is through research they've covered all those aspects that is important to creating a beautiful product academia I think Rosanna can answer well I think I want to address two of those many questions well the first one allow us to plug in a little advertising here we would we won't be in the near future opening an office here in New York but we would love to have you come to Shanghai oh and we're always looking for the printers and we know this place has a lot of talented designers so we definitely invite you to send send us your CV your folio and Shanghai is a very exciting place to live and to learn and to work so I think you you won't regret it if you move to Shanghai and we don't work weekends but I have to say definitely I think for a lot of the designers who work with us they are surprised how I mean we don't yeah we don't kill ourselves and have all-nighters every day once in a while only in terms of balance I would say we probably we're definitely not balanced we don't strike a balance in our life in our in our work in the different aspects of a work I think you know very much our life is lopsided we our son is here he can attest that to you that I don't think he's you know our family isn't very balanced but what is important is that I think we explore every one of our passion with the best of our ability and we really want to strike excellence and everything we do and I think in practicing architecture I just don't feel like you can practice architecture in a vacuum nor can you practice architecture with being myopic because we have to deal with the context that we're in we have to deal with time history the future and we also need to I think practice architecture with intelligence and dialogue and that's where I think the teaching comes in you know I think some of the best architects are the best teachers and vice versa you can only be a good teacher if you have you know good experience and practicing so this is something that we truly believe and so from very early on we take a conscious effort and put aside some time and even though earlier on it was closer to home it was in Shanghai it was Hong Kong and now we've kind of you know brought in ourselves give ourselves more travelling time to to teach in the US but I think this is really important yes if we can't do it we usually don't commit so we're teaching at Yale for instance this semester and we were only really required to go there three times but there is surprised that we're only gonna miss two weeks so when we do things and we make a commitment we did I mean we decide we're gonna make teaching a priority before that we couldn't so for four five years we just said sorry but we can't do this I mean it's easy to just show up during the presentation mid review and final review but that doesn't help the student but doesn't help us either should we take one final question I have a few final questions hold on okay [Music] so again thank you for the awesome lecture so my final question would be for your Chapel project I think it's a brilliant idea that you created this veil it gives it such a mystic feeling to it that you don't give it a complete exposure to an exterior environment that you have different looks in daytime and nighttime I think it's really an idea and then the interior space is awesome as well but just a question that since it's you know more of a box compared to the traditional Chapel so the do local people relate it to a chapel when they see it I see it do they think it like you know Museum or like a library or do they recognize it as a chapel from the outside so how do you handle that thank you type of logical question interesting I think you're you're asking about the shape right that the shape does not look like the shape or how people you know when you imagine a chapel you would never believe yeah as a symbol as a symbol or anything else especially how you guys mentioned that in China usually people would use a for like weddings so you know when they are deprived of the religious part of it how do they recognize it actually I would encourage you to come and visit the place and and and judge for yourself whether it's actually a chapel or not the developer wanted to call it a place of congregation but over the course of six months during the opening he slowly changed that name because he realized the sectional quality and the procession going in in many ways from a floorplan point of view is very similar to a sequence of of a chapel and the way you come in underneath the mezzanine and look up and have this heightened feel so it might not take on the shape of a traditional chapel but I think it does quiet you down yeah a place of maybe not so much a chapel by the place of a sense of tranquility a sanctuary yeah I think the word that we used more than Chapel was was that we wanted this to be a sanctuary and and it was quite intentional that it did not take on the symbol or the shape of a traditional Chapel given a few things number one I think you know that that kind of tradition isn't embedded in Chinese culture then the more you know if we were to make a shape of a chapel the more it would become kind of meaningless and empty it would just become a symbol and I think for us the notion of spirituality is is really important in in the kind of the abstract way that it is about your own relationship with God it's not about any kind of you know doctrine or quote religious rules right so we really wanted to take that seriously and kind of use architecture and space and create that spirituality as opposed to from the lineage of you know kind of church architecture or both in plan and an elevation and in form okay thank you very much thank you [Applause] and I have to say these are really the best questions that we've we've had

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Id: RBlOHFM-ShI

Length: 117min 21sec (7041 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 16 2018