SO-IL

welcome everyone like it drinks in the auditorium nice have a seat welcome it's really really a fantastic pleasure to welcome Jing Lu and Florian edinburg this evening to present the work of their practice so ill I think it's fair to say that Searle is one of the most original voices emerging amongst the new generation of architects there are many characteristics that set their work and approach apart from others but one interesting and important way to enter this specificity and to understand and to understand it is I believe to take a moment to reflect on who they are and how and where they practice first is the fact that so ill doesn't easily fit in any predefined category they don't exactly belong to a generation since they are actually younger than the generation they have come to be associated with at the same time they seem already older than that generation if one is to look at the extensive work the practice has already produced and especially the caliber of architectural competitions they have been invited to take to partake in nationally and internationally often competing against leading architects from around the world most recently OMA REM koolhaas and sana as well as Annabel cell door for the new museum expansion competition here in New York second there's the sense that soil doesn't easily fit in a place the partners call themselves Brooklyn architects rather than New York architects the practice was founded in the u.s. even if it is in their own words quote unamerican as if choosing to start a firm here almost as if they chose to start a firm here almost by accident they speak of registering our contemporary and global condition not as something to be analyzed from a certain outside but rather as a very personal experience of three partners whose backgrounds native languages and architectural formations could not be more different they speak of searching for universal language at the intersection of or beyond those differences but designed for ambiguity and an infinitude of meanings and Lisa destabilization at times very literal destabilization such as with their groundbreaking pull-downs project winner of the 2010 young architect program competition at MoMA their work is intensely experiencial present and material while also being immensely reflective ethereal porous and with a lightness that renders it if not absent then almost boundless in many ways so il's practice and work holds things together contradictions hesitations temporary and permanent solid and air the seemingly simple and the infinitely complex the atmospheric and dreamy and the intently precise and concrete the formal and informal form and performance more importantly even so that brings together ideas and buildings in the kind of choreography at once logical and intuitive while also always being in search of beauty as an intrinsic fundamental and indispensable ingredient of architecture much of the sense of perfectly imperfect equilibrium that soils work and bodies so well has been captured and rendered tangible in the practices recent book and order edge aura with it as with their work we are moved from small to large moments and experiences textures and effects frame details and streams of consciousness in it it is not only the fragments of materiality transparency reflectivity solidity or ET reality that are surprising and compelling but also the words and stories which seem to perfectly echo the sense of soils constructed parallel universe one in which we are invited to enter and encouraged to engage Florian Edinburgh and Jingu co-founded soil in 2008 florian holds of master of science and architecture from Delft University of Technology and Jing studied in China Japan the you okay and the US before can concluding with the Masters of architecture from the Tulane School of Architecture in New Orleans since the firm's inception Elias pappagiorgio has been a key member of the team and was a and was made third partner in 2013 and native of Athens he holds a diploma of Architecture from I Soto University in Greece and the Masters of Architecture from Harvard GSD were actually really thrilled to have two of the soil partners as part of the school with Elias currently teaching at in the in the Corps one first semester program of the M mark and Jing teaching leading Studios advance studio since 2009 their most notable projects to date include the manatee femme Museum of Art at the University of California in Davis Kuki gallery and sale Korea the Logan offices Paul dance at MoMA ps1 blueprint at the storefront for art and architecture and breathe many living a housing prototype which responds to the challenges of future urban living the practice has been recognized with numerous awards to numerous to say here today but for both architecture and design and they include an AIA San Francisco merit award the PA award the architecture league emergent emerging voices award and the MoMA ps1 young architect program award amongst others the firm his work is included in the permanent collections of institutions such as MoMA the Art Institute of Chicago and the Carnegie Museum of Art please join me in welcoming Jing and Florian [Applause] thank you thank you mom I realized that Mao and us we have known each other for more than a decade and that's probably the reason why her introduction was one of the most accurate and precise and somehow the the an introduction really touches on a lot of the sentiment and the frameworks that we've been working in before I start to talk about anything a little bit of a marketing campaign the book is available on the on sale in the corridor and also on Amazon and it just came out a few months ago but we have a little bit of logistic distribution problem so I think get it before you cannot anymore so the book is a combination of our work in the last eight years that we had our office and it took us two years to write every single words that's included in this book indeed SML mentioned that we're three very different people including many others that working in our office lilius is from athens florian from holland amsterdam near Amsterdam and I'm from Nanjing China once I forget which movie I heard it in but one of the quote in that I heard that to resonate very well with our working style in office is that you know the highest level of intelligence is able to hold 2 contradictory and extremely different ideas in the same place so this is how we work we argue all the time and we contradictory and contradict each other all the time and that's why this book took many many years to conceive and it would be really nice if you can be part of this journey as well I was I put a lot of another earth okay I just came back from actually I'm curious because I know that we had an open house today here and how many people are doing high school and the camp for open bombed sorry under glass under grads Oh whew okay no I was just in London and on Friday judging in the RIBA medal for this part two so postgraduate and certain master degree and projects from all over the world and I saw 300 something portfolios in a very short period of time and I realized that although I've been teaching at the school and you know your generation for for a while that the sentiment of the generation that that's sitting here has shifted so much all around the world and it's really there is this of course the pervasive posthuman contemplation that's I think that's going on at this moment and also this either it's a dystopian or completely kind of a craft oriented approach or holding on to some kind of humanities that if it still exists today so I kind of reflected a little bit about based on my Friday's experience on this lectures theme which is consists of two parts I'm going to talk about the living parts and florins going to talk about the matter parts since the beginning this is actually a movie Tarkovsky's movie that we used as the prompt of our first columbia studio ten years ago which was exactly to contemplate what it would be in opposed to human society or world where our environment and gets vaster and vaster but our existence as human beings gets smaller and smaller and on my way back from London I also watched this movie I don't know many of you probably have watched it I think the movie laid around her when I went to school was a very much the movie to watch back then and I think now it's coming full circles and as we're thinking about contemplating about the technologies the implication on our society and how we're all getting faster and racing to a faster faster speed of connecting everything that we can consume and things are getting more and more in material the fact is that one that overlaps on the idiosyncrasy of the physical environment in the world they take on edges orders changes and also they become a canary vulnerable at the moment and when we zoom into this strange moments of the materials coming together in these small scales they can be sometimes ridiculous in a humorous way but also in this incredibly tragic way so the inner book we contemplate on how do we then establish a new kind of order that maybe it's different a departure from the modernist way of understanding the order maybe things are a little bit more elastic and taking risk and and instability as a new form of joy and aesthetics new aesthetics and also making some kind of edge that's more permeable and maybe it's an edge or they're lying on the outside of form that you cannot draw with a single stroke or it's a aura of a person or a being that's in the city that emanates some kind of universal feelings so those are the things that we constantly talk about in the studios and it all goes back to often the type or the discussion of how do we want to live as human beings as long as we're still here I have been personally quite interested in because I'm coming from a post communist China so the physical environment often is that I remember growing up is still quite collective and quite planned and regulated I became quite interested in the story of living how it developed in the last century all around the world and I came upon this book which I'm quite surprised that not many people know about it but it's by Manu Sina Fay Pierce who was now people lot of people call them material feminists at that moment they were called Marxist feminist and she came she wrote this book called cooperative housekeeping which was pretty much the first kind of group of people that contemplated in industrial cities how the technology and the new density in the cities is able to provide a new kind of way of living and in a masterplan sense that you know collective house worker can be taken outside of the realm of the pop domestic space and and the topologies of collective kitchen and the daycare started to come into play as something of a new kind of urban topologies so the kitchen becomes also a shared the socialites space from then and the daycare as I mentioned and at some point as we reflect the back that why did that not happen and why did the kitchen becomes and all this new technology becomes something that we all have in our private space is a Secours moment in history I think the American culture and the communist and socialist culture diverged is where the consumerism has the driving force of our economics economical life became the driver after the recession in the 30s and the fast forward to how that created very intensely individualistic and also siloed you know private lives are depicted in later movies like the playtime of Jack Tootie and to today the field of deaths becoming shallower and shallower with the newer versions of technologies where intensely reflected and mirrored back down to ourself so how can we not that you know I'm proposing that we go back to the socialist and communist you know narrative before the divergent but it's really interesting to reflect on that hundred years of history of living and and the shoe that lens look at some of the places that we working and this is the North Omaha it's one of the sites that were working currently at this moment on the collective artist loft project it was a very vibrant predominantly black neighborhood in the 1960s it was so highly regarded as the jazz center that there was a saying that if you didn't play north of Omaha you cannot be considered a jazz musician and through a series of the investments political and environmental issues today is one of the poorest neighborhood in America and so the project that we're working on is to try to use housing as a type as a kind of urban type to regenerate the economical and cultural life in in the city which we would talk up I don't think we're going to talk about it today but just to give you a context and this is another site that we're working in today which is Leon in Mexico in the last 20 years in the in the kind of effort of home ownership and also urban development there is this very fast Lee made you know cookie cutter house that's made basically blanketing the outskirt to the periphery of the urban centers as you can see they're building a really more kind of product oriented away there's no socials not much a social space not so much infrastructure that's putting place often it's lacking transportation availabilities as well so the city realized that rather than this kind of relentless occupation of for the peripheral space it's better to environmentally and also community socially it's better to Radin safai the city core so we're working with the city to consider more mid-rise housing topologies that is based on coal living and and collective living which I would talk about a little bit later and this is one of the earliest project that is in Athens Greece we didn't realize this project based because of the financial crisis in 2008 and aftermath of that but it's also one of those urban dilapidated urban core that's seeking a new model of regeneration to suit a typology it's a housing which I would talk a little bit about so this is the neighborhood in Athens and so there are a lot of empty lots that's just by virtual left empty because of the lack of maintenance and developments and a new in interesting new residents and they're all left empty and you can see a lot of conditions that's half have taken over by nature and half kind of architectural repose and instead of so rather than instead of the building just as infill passive infill topologies we took that the same building massing and it turned it to the sideways and he used it more as almost a barcode to connect the empty lots throughout the entire neighborhood so we call it the party wall as the typology so the buildings are super skinny they are so skinny that you can almost not call it a building but they just occupy half of sometimes even less than half of the building the site width and by squeezing the interior space as much as possible and releasing the exterior space as much as possible we were able to use it as more of an urban operation to make this very dense blocks that's deteriorating and dilapidated into something active again so this was the hope of the urban operation in the end that there would be this barcode of multiple colors and different lives that injects and kind of cuts new energies into the city so it's more of a typological studies rather than building studies for this project and we continued it's similar this was 2007 I think it was the project's it's the one of the first competition we entered thanks to Ilyas here that we were able to understand the specific conditions in the neighborhood and then we took the same in our and participated in the competitions of I think it's called a micro housing that Mayor Bloomberg the last a Bloomberg last mayor of New York had put out which is to also in a way densified D the already quite dense New York City blocks but there are a lot of built or not underused FA are left in some of this tower in the park modernist housing blocks so we used again an architecture as an urban strategy to re-establish that straight edge so we pushed the building onto the edge of the block whereas all the other buildings artists Tower in the park topologies that's pushed into the center of the lot and try to find a way to make this unit again as small as possible within the code Building Code the regulations so in the end I think the building the lot it was 230 square feet the site yeah well I think the whole whole whole unit yeah the whole unit it was it like 225 or something square foot and so it's really their most essential things that's related to living that's cooped in here for all the personal and the most private functions after living and then similarly rather than kind of overloading the corridors which is the common space in the middle and doing this double-loaded a corridor that only gets light from one side and inevitably you get light of the Norse for the half of the building we made it into a double corridor in single unit building so you would have the living space right in the middle but the common common circulation are both in the front and the back so actually maximizing the common space and minimizing the private space this was the unit plan quite a simple and again at the top and the bottom the front in the back that they all become this common space that the private life is pushed out to establish this more communal and socialize the space and because of the this squishin after the middle the building becomes almost translucent when you are looking from the building next door that you can almost see you through the building that's that was our hope and make an Eric one I think Eric see her in the back and I think we had a very different approach and I'm very glad that you you were the one doing it so this is Leon projects that has started with a very dynamic discussion with the city stakeholders the banks the loan providers in the city and talking mostly about how what should we do with the city that we have as a physical space and also how do we how can we change the people's a mentality of that we all have to own something on the land that actually doesn't have any social infrastructures but somehow that land belongs to you which is an idea that has already been planted so deeply in people's mind and the change that preference to something that's the opposite you know like you don't maybe the land is more shared and it's common and the corridor is more common but somehow the quality of life and it's a different way of understanding life and how can we shift the value proposition for for the people who are who we're trying to move back to the city core and so coming out of that workshop with the similar typology is that we have been always advocating also took a different kind of turn in this one similarly rather than the double loaded the corridors we used a single loaded corridor building but also changed it I mean twisted in an eight shape mobius shape building form so that the corridor the common corridor is both outside and the inside in the building in different locations and the one that goes to inside that also linked together abundance of shared space inside of the building and instead of a very regular facade we tried to devise a very simple but repeated facade type all type that is using this scallop to create a being financially married to facade type in the building that also gives different width of openings that connected the inside and outside the building is sixty two units for 1.2 million dollars construction cost so it's a super low cost building but I think the the aim here was not so much in architecture as an object but I'm really as it using architecture as an agency to change a certain way of connecting with each other and with the city itself so that's going to be started that by the end of this year right and this was so we try we keep trying with a new kind of way of talking about the living and I feel that in the last two or three years so we finally got some gotten some more attractions I mean attractions with our desires and aims and this was one of the other successful stories as well and they think that's really because the common kind of discussion has already has started to change in how we live in the cities all around the world already and this is one of the bring venting Paris is a new competition that will was launched by the current mayor in Paris that kind of encourages interdisciplinary collaborations between different experts also city officials and sociologists and basically and also like users program users shoot together and developers together come up with propositions for some of the most problematic public sites in Paris the current edition is looking at underground sites in Paris and how can we come up with innovative idea to occupy them and our sites our edition was along the river sighing and the sites that we participated in was this corridor from the bus tease that kind of hitting into the river and it created this site that in a way could be very you know heightened moment of there's two important axis but looking very closely to it there's this incredible difficult to trespass elevation change with the highway and the water being low and the streets the city streets being high so it's actually a very very disconnected relationship between the canal and the river at edge the natural instinct would be to make something big and become this heightened a moment at the crossing of this to connect to access but counter-intuitively we decided to instead of blocking and creating something very while at that moment to create something super low and make the building mass and on this side of the axis so this is a very low rise co-working space that we put on our site and that the aim of that volume is not so much about an architectural statement but it's really to activate that edge and populated and the housing part this very small housing part is the economical vehicle to make that happen and that the idea is that this place would it be changed over time into different phases we first activated the streets with this co-working and also quite a public rooftop here and then over time won this edge and maybe later okay I wanted to show this this picture over time when this edge become activated and urbanistic alee it it's transformed in the neighborhood and in the people's mind and maybe the highway can be it can also play an active role in promoting the highway to be transformed from vehicle vehicular space to a public space thanks to the autonomous vehicles that's going to happen very soon that we can get the city back this piece of land because we're only going to lease it for 15 years and then we can give it back to the land to the city and therefore the people and we conceived what this place can be so using architecture as more of a way of thinking the transformation of the city rather than Oh object that setting the stone so I'm just going to show you a little bit of the housing part which is also a cold living space which shares kitchen in on one floor between many units and so it's intended at that it's for people who are maybe a little bit younger and they would be the primary activator of this part of the city and I will end with the contemplation on the living with this to project that take on slightly different skills but somehow very similar so these are actually models of two different project one is a project that we collaborated with many living in thinking about a future many future way of living inside our city that maybe is post object post architecture and in you know defining a different way of connecting with each other and with our environment and this is a costume that we designed for Chicago biennial that just took place last month for a group of musicians and they would be there were four or three wind instruments musicians and one vocalist that would aware this is specifically designed a costume and the prompt it was a little bit that you know our environment is becoming much more related to our body scale as the field of depths is getting shallower and shallower and our environment is becoming more and more predictable with pollution sea water rice and sometimes we can go to very far in the middle of nowhere so this costume becomes almost kind of a personal architecture that the musicians can take them and it becomes a filter of the environment and the self so the two things that almost similar [Music] made it similar effect one lives in the middle of the city and provides the living area for three people and in the middle of the day it can be quite opaque and at night it becomes completely revealing and transparent the envelope is such that it filters the pollution in the cities and cleans the air by the filter food filtration and the inside there are three bedrooms that are just barely separated from each other visually sometimes with an elastic bungee net so you can see from one space to the other in this very translucent and dream dreamlike State and similarly the musicians would play in Chicago they played the music that we commissioned a composer to specifically make the music for this it's quite a sombre music and they played this music in the conservatory in Chicago in one of the most economical lead in stable areas but in this very lush green house environment and they slowly walk sometimes bump into each other and the piece are designed based on the movement of the instruments so the clothes also becomes the extension of what we do by that I'm going to hand in and I'm gonna hand it to Mike - Florian and who is going to talk about some more concrete things yeah and maybe Ilyas also wants to do a presentation in the end we can do that and maybe so where Jenks poked about living and how do we live and what do we share I'm gonna show three projects that have to do with how do we make things focusing on matter and also on labor and maybe you know the projects were the protocol mile already mentioned so I'll show the cooked chip project a project in Hong Kong that nobody knows about and and the Museum in Davis but I think it's important to look at it through the lens of how it is made or how do we make things and and and what is involved who produces our spaces gookju the gallery in seoul is a contemporary art space in a historic environment it's just the ubiquitous white cube it's a cube a white box that could be anywhere in the world that needed to be nestled and it's very beautiful historic setting not not necessarily beautiful but one of the few historic settings left in in Seoul and near the palace where the Emperor was and this was basically the the housing of the workers in the work in the palace they were in the surroundings and the number of these beautiful ionic homes around it and so we took the white cube as a given that we felt that this cube was too harsh and too disconnected if you want from from where it needed to be so when we went to present this scheme to our client who is a very busy businesswoman we decided to wrap it in a stocking that we had lying in the office to in way in a way softened this edge and in a way maybe create a sort of a permanent fog if you want around this sort of harsh box we push that all the functional things like entry mechanical and and stairs and this created this is a very undefined form here you see it's complex the palaces here these are the historic worker housing the home oak homes and here in the middle is the third building we also fixed it one and two and so we had no idea what it was this mesh but then we came across the disarmer which is basically a way in which you can create very beautiful double curved services that are also very strong it's the maximum size that is that is made it's on the scale of the body so this is only a very small scale and we decided to see can we explore this something that creates sort of this double curvature yet is strong for the scale of the building and so we started to experiment first in the office with different scales this on the left is the largest scale you can buy these are laser-cut in the office and we started to understand also how does this geometry actually works why is it elastic why does it take on these double curvatures because it's actually all made out of stiff rings it's just pure a metal thread and we found that there's one direction in which it falls stiff and in the other that it becomes pliable and we started to map sort of the building and at the same time once we had to find the ring the size that we wanted to use we started to work with an engineer because we knew that this thing also needed to perform and hold an exterior and so once we figured out the strength in one ring we started to see how does that work actually on the full sort of wrapper of this building and these different beautiful Maps started to occur at some point with the entire building actually figured out in the computer every single ring was modeled and we knew where the forces would run through the through the mesh and then we said are we gonna translate this into Korean and and have somebody make it or shall we make it ourselves and we decided to make it ourselves together with Mike Ron from front and so what we did is we went to we went to alibaba.com yeah and very quickly we got a lot of people that were interested in this one area in China umping County and we were bombarded with specifically one email and Skype a name called ring and she kept on skyping with us for a while and after a while she sent us this is that looks very promising that looks very interesting so we decided to travel first to Beijing and drive for six hours and meet this person who only for us existed in the digital realm and met her in in reality and I don't know how many of your friends have met online but the first of the physical meeting is always quite quite exciting and so we came in on ping and on ping is actually for us it was really incredibly fascinating to be there because it's a it's a it's a conglomeration of factories basically in a in sort of a grid setting mostly dirt roads there's no civic infrastructure there's no schools there's no universities there's no City Hall there's no museum there's nothing Civic it's just factories it's just people making things and we felt this is really the heart of sort of made in China there was absolutely no civic life the only place where we could stay was the brothel and we stayed there for a couple of weeks but first we met the brother of ring who was by himself sitting in the courtyard to the size of this stage and what was he doing he was welding our mesh together one ring at a time at that moment we had promised are busy client and created we would deliver this mesh and we were fully on the hook and here Jing explains that the the Rings the the skin consists of half a million rings sometimes there's a confusion in counting I think it's China ten thousand and a hundred thousand say this guy is clear be wondering how many it really are and Mike here mike says whatever gonna do that's ring by the way so ring ring says you know what everybody in this town can weld why don't we come up with a way in which we can all participate and so we actually sit together and we work there for a while and come up with a method where multiple people can work you know concurrently at at this mission we all ended up working with 60 people and making 14 of these swaths large stretches we used a local car wash as sort of a place to to clean and degrease here we do a check every single weld needed to be inspected the local school yard was a place for a mock-up and a test and after we got approval we were able to ship them and we actually worked with the gallery itself to ship the goods there was nobody in between sort of as a trading company because they move things in crates around the world so they brought the the mesh to our crude concrete structure they're sitting in its historic context and we worked with the ship and sail maker to hang this sort of custom dress if you want around around that crude geometry to sort of soften its edge this is a particularly an image I like where you see some of this old traditional craft meeting this new say I don't know if it's digital craft but it's certainly something that is derived through computation but I think these two together and how they sort of resonate with one another I think it's interesting we were able to make it seamless so the 14 swathes were actually welded together in the same technique so there's a continuous surface basically throughout the through the building and the building itself never actually reads as an object much more as sort of this thing that you can walk around but never fully actually grasp there's places where you can get in between up to the roof as sort of this thick poche places where you as you enter the building go through this threshold and you see a little bit context there and here the relation between old and new so that's one way of making things and now and maybe Jing you have to correct me if I say things completely wrong it's very interesting we're all presenting each other's project so we have no in some way we don't necessarily know what we know so this project is a very Jing that's been working one we work on everything together yeah and Hong Kong what is happening in Hong Kong everybody maybe knows West Kowloon they're building a very big cultural center with a lot of Commerce a lot of different just a new urban core probably people know about what's happening West Kowloon so the people in old sort of Kowloon and they got very nervous that there is a lot of development going on here where this used to be sort of the the main entry into Hong Kong and here we were asked by a large collector who also is very much involved in the development of the city to help on a lot that they were developing sorry here which is one of the largest sort of mixed-use developments and so people probably know Hong Kong is incredibly dense and there is a multitude of programs layered on top of one another and most of these developments they happen completely around malls and what-have-you and so we were asked while this building was already actually under construction designed by kpf this is the waterfront to take two floors of this project on top of the podium under the residential and to turn that into a place in which they could show an emerging art collection and also house travelling shows and so in some way I would say this is one of the most complicated contexts to work in it's also very interesting to think of your neighbors as things that are below and above you not just sort of left and right of you but this was we sort of took the took the the challenge and I think what we decided to do is find an approach that in some way takes a distance of course from from this very dense and commercial environment at the same time plays a little bit with this idea of the displayed is showing and in some way you could say the the the the the is it lavish a culture of Kong and the envelope was incredibly tight as it works every square inch counts for real estate in Hong Kong but what we try to do because this was one of the components of the project that didn't have to be commercially rented out we started to push this facade and make it a stick in a way as possible as sort of create a buffer between this context and and the art itself there is a part of a public plaza also it's two parts of the museum maybe it's easier to show here with sort of a view corridor and plaza and landscape they were also designing and so we decided to use glass not in its ability to be transparent but actually in its ability to sort of filter out to diffuse and to reflect and to refract and so we proposed to make a skin of glass tubes that are about a metre and a half in diameter and nine meters at all and in this way there will be sort of the soft boundary between the very you know dense urban commercial setting and this space for art and for contemplation and reflection and well you look at it straight it is transparent and it creates sort of this yeah boundary between the the inside and the outside and then there's areas gallery spaces where also you look back into the into the onto the harbor how do you make 9 meters tall glass here we again did not go to alibaba.com we actually went to cross a creek ursa as a company in Spain that for a hundred fifty years have been bending glass they were one of the first to do traditional shop windows in in Europe and it became clear that this is something that needs so much sort of expert knowledge that there's only very few people that can do this there was a company in China that tried is it Northstar glass and yeah and then click ursa because of its 150-year of experience was able to take this challenge and this is the first sort of showing of the their ability for the pitch to get this job to be able to make this 9 meter tall piece of glass that's Jing there um we need a mock-up we worked with really a few of the most advanced people in the glass industry including James o Callaghan who did a lot of work with Apple um and through that we also ended up working with Seeley as an installer who works on all the Apple glass and so well if we compare now the little courtyard where the brother of ring was welding his rings together to this glass facility where now the what is it 420 pieces of glass are being fabricated and just think about labor automation tools of production these two sheets they first get bent into this curve they need to be laminated there's an inter layer in between so it's double layered glass the the two radii they need to fit exactly into one another it's all especially developed tools specifically for this project large suction citizen suction cranes basically that handle everything automated they this is where they get cleaned before they get the lamination goes goes in which is the second layer they can sort of melted together with laser precision here you see the two coming together and then they get placed in a special grate again inspected by ting and then shipped shipped to Hong Kong so they're currently there busy hanging these and you should imagine this is on the waterfront on the seventh floor of this commercial podium there's a tornado you know winds so an incredibly complex process of installation that is currently going on and here you see it under construction and should be finished the end of this year so I will end with this project and somebody maybe could speculate what can we do with these two different approaches if we try to make something here some of the same intelligence and again I think we only want to talk about sort of the the way in which this materialized these ideas became matter so to say this is a competition at UC Davis University of California Davis Manavi shrim Museum and it was a design-build competition and this is something that maybe as young architects used to start thinking about it means that we were a subcontractor to the contractor and the money for this project came partially from a donor and partially from the UC system and since they could not rin run the risk of this project going over budget it was capped there was a maximum budget 25 million dollars all in including and it meant that what he presented there you know we as architects are very good at wowing but in this case we had to Wow but at the same time we had to also guarantee that we could pay for it and as an architect you cannot take the risk you cannot take a twenty five million dollar risk and so you have to partner with somebody who's willing and able to take that risk which is a builder and so we partnered with a builder called whiting Turner they open they operate nationally in this country and we also partnered with a firm out of San Francisco what's a national firm bowling chewinsky Jackson as the architect of record they have a lot of experience also with Apple they did all the Apple stores before Norman Foster took over and so we were at this team that had to enter this competition what was also interesting is that the competition there was an interview process and then there was there were there was a competition but it was a quite long competition where there's quite some exchange and where they because what was what would win would be built basically the I won't speak too much about the the ideas behind the the scheme but what we wanted to do is work with sort of the the essence of this site and of this landscape not in a poetic and romantic way UC Davis is the the AG school the agricultural school within the UC system it's a very empowered student body the kind of people remember the pepper spray incident where that happened at UC Davis and in some way was where sort of acute the Occupy movement sort of started and so it's very opinionated and very strong a student body who believed because they focus on say bioengineering they focus on working with with our world and the ability to actually tinker with our world they have a very strong sense of agency and so this spirit of being in control or if these being able to sort of shape your own destiny was something that we in in some way gathered from the land and wanted to bring into the into the into the we didn't want to create a very imposing building we didn't want to create a very didactic building but we wanted to create something very open something that the students could embrace and could create sort of their own narratives in and at the same time the climate the environment which is obviously something that we should all be concerned about but is also specifically for this student body that works so much with the land how can you make the environment also sort of a visceral experience in the in the building so we had sort of this idea of the productive ground and then an additional layer that that would sort of highlight the the idea of the of the environment but we started to do because also well there's a lot of things to go into it and now they start to explain the whole project in any case the the program was much smaller than the site the site was 70,000 square foot the building was only 35,000 square foot yet they needed a sort of a gesture they wanted to have some sort of presence it's at the edge of campus and it was how do you seduce a student population it normally doesn't go to a museum how do you seduce them to come and enjoy and sort of experience art for many for the first time I saw this idea of openness we translated in this idea of a very open structure a structure that just creates so the specificities specific spatial qualities but not necessarily given by program so this sort of tapestry a variety of spaces light dark open closed big and small that could take on any program any art that still needs to be produced also for an audience that maybe doesn't exist yet and then the program itself sort of found its way in this organization and just basically based on the qualities of the spaces we we we ended up with the lobby sort of in the center very transparent open and connecting sort of back to the to the land an area of art production and education towards the front the offices in operation here and outside courtyard and then the gallery spaces over there and the second layer this later that that creates this experience of the landscape versus grant canopy the canopy that covers the entirety of the site and creates spaces both inside and outside so during the competition when we won we actually proposed to cover the entire site with the same single perforated mesh this was because we had to guarantee the budget our builder didn't want to take any risk so he said we'll just give you 40 bucks a square foot for this single sheet of perforation which would create a very even and very continuous shadow underneath and we were interested in making actually the shadow and the light really part of the experience itself and so we started to - most of the annoyance of our boss the Builder tried to see if we could change basically and start working with that that sort of flat perforated sheet and and turn it into something else here you see a shadow of a tree which has different sharpness sort of a sharp edge and a more blurry edge and we tried to see can we create something similar with the material infill so the idea of layering started to evolve and also this idea that you could in some way through orientation and and spacing play sort of with the shadows and and the sharpness of the shade that we settled on this idea of a triangular beam that basically spans the entirety of the primary structure so it's both structural and it is the perforation and it creates of this this layering where the light basically bounces through these different layers of the of the mesh and makes it much lighter it makes it much stronger sort of present underneath and then from the top because this building is also visible from all around it's very smooth and it sort of emphasizes this layer that covers the entirety of the of the site and what we done did is we in order to create this variety played with these three parameters spacing orientation and openness and as the Sun sort of moves over it you can imagine how this creates a sort of a different effect in order to stick to the budget we guaranteed with our builder how much we would maximum be spending on this and we created the parametric model that allowed us to really finally sort of calibrate this spacing the orientation and the openness while at the same time knowing exactly how much material we used how many connections we had and so forth and so ultimately this gave this sort of map of that of that infill with areas for instance used for art display more dense and areas say that we're sitting over over mechanical part of the building for instance where you never could get really underneath could be more generously spaced and that was a way to actually through information really also control the budget and so while the steel was being installed we went back and worked again with Micra from front who also we work with on the mesh to start fabricating these beams first we have to determine the spacing that became also very important because this is where the joints of the of these different stretches of the the info come together 932 unique connections throughout the entire canopy and we went back to the motherland and started to produce them oh well the word they were actually machine fabricated but some of the components needed to be hand attached and so 932 unique sections of beam packed shipped and installed one by one and what was interesting is that there was so much skepticism within the the Builder that they had allowed for I think four months or something to install these beams and within two weeks the entire canopy was installed and only one of the 932 ones needed to be adjusted and so in some way I think for us it was real a real lesson if you want to if you want to in a sort of an environment in which it's harder and harder to to actually control the execution if you want to have some sort of say in it it's really important also control the information and the ability to to make things so the lines of production if you will um here you see the building it opened exactly I think a year ago November last year was the opening and in its relation to the to the landscape beyond the agricultural landscape here the campus over here and so that the canopy sort of dips down to the towards the the main access on campus as you enter the campus this is the main road in and this is where the pedestrian sort of come from it sort of reaches out to you it's very low it's a it's nine and a half feet there and so as you cross the street it reaches out but then you come under this canopy and it raises up to 32 feet and here you see suddenly all these decisions that you make in the computer being very legible and very present and really as you sort of enter this threshold of the canopy suddenly you immerse yourself in this very dense sort of play of light and shadow and something that's constantly changing right over time the Sun is incredibly present in Northern California and so this really animates and actually create sort of a completely different experience every time and the hue the hue are there the courtyard looking back through the lobby to the to the entry and here the galleries not organized in a very strict sequence with much more the ability for the student to choose its own path to create its own story and always with moments opening up to the exterior so that in some way you know sort of where you are in in the world that's it thank you [Applause] [Music] I'm gonna do questions you get me one more chair this one are you joining come on joint you think I think you should join so thank you for really inspiring lecture and I wanted in particular I you know I couldn't I couldn't have thought of or you know hope for a better lecture for open house and it the kind of work and the presentation really answered some of the questions that were coming up earlier when we had the conversation with the prospective students about you know what are the challenges for architecture today or you know what do architects do and you know when they come out of here and you know and it's it's so interesting to see you know to see the kind of processes that you know you've kind of designed and engage with and the ways in which today we are you know really kind of both kind of constantly zooming out and zooming in collaborating and mixing you know the highest you know scripting and and and the kind of parametric design with with craft and you were saying you know it's a sort of sense of immaterial and highly material at the same time that most sort of kind of sophisticated that skin is you know made in China and and and exposing all of that sort of process is so kind of interesting and I also think it's it's really you know to think about practice and design and collaboration and a network of knowledge I was thinking about a practice such as front with which you know micro and with whom you're you've collaborated and how you know they've defined also a kind of motive of practice you know there are sort of facade experts let's say but have brought that knowledge to completely different level now and they're architects and they're thinking about really you know making and understanding how something that is sourced or made in China is going to be you know different and if they're you know working in Spain and so it's just such an expanded sort of context and and you have to and and at times it's like Google you know like googling Alibaba you know and and and so the creativity extends to so many different levels you're saying googling is a creative act it can be if you know what how to search you know and and I think to kind of learn how to search and because this came up earlier today is like to learn how to you know what is the question that you ask the search engine is more important than knowing the answer right so that really I think came through in the talk and I thought that was quite quite interesting so thank you how did you or why did you decide to split it along that kind of living and matter I was in general it could be a gender well no because you said you reversed it yeah that gets you out of the gender thing well I think let's see as Jing said we we have very different ways sometimes of talking about certain things there there are sometimes you know these lectures of two people where everybody says one sentence and you know we do also Jing and I we saw each other for today for the first time in what three weeks or something so we haven't really fully a time to coordinate but actually I will also say that this lecture we had a lecture before which is actually called order edge Ora and in some way takes us through these three realms that the book takes through but then recently we've been talking a little bit you know if you if these are the ways in which you can organize matter because basically we talk about you know where do you put something and where do you put nothing and you can put it in its organization and then how do you sit she situated the organization then what sort of presence does it create that's the idea of that book but we started to think a little bit to what end right to what end and I think Jing was then pushed sort of this lecture into trying to figure out you know what are the you know how are we living today and what are the what a sort of the values set that we're actually trying to you know put at work with this act of designing whether is something and whether it's nothing and so we've been thinking a lot about indeed the way in which say our economic and material and environmental conditions affect you know how we organize stuff and I think these two areas so you know sharing and and living and go living and like how do we socially relate and its idea of labor in a certain way so not necessary that making but also the you know the ability to make and how do you make in different places and what does it actually mean who are the people that are making it so maybe a little bit more of a social angle so to say I think maybe Jing can say something about the two but I mean that's that's how we started to transform a little bit the the conversation also because I think we got a little bit worried that architecture can end up only being a sort of a luxury like we don't want it to be a luxury project as you know Jing is a communist alias here essentially yeah an ileus is born it is not a birthplace of democracy and so you know sometimes we wonder you know what do we do here or how can we be ourselves within a certain reality yeah I also think about you know we started office in our office in 2008 it was a very unset and then the more we grow our practice the more were confronted with the you know what actually happened after 2008 you know in Omaha for example in made in china' City you know like in the factories that's producing these things and so I mean as you know politics getting more and more erratic and you know technology becoming more and more unsettling for a lot of people politically but also culturally and we had the intuition that it's important to go back to the fundamental questions of you know just live and matter you know if we're talking about the meaning of living you know how do we interact with each other what is that fundamental relationship sure we can all have if we move outside of the city we can all have big part of land and you know by kitchen you know I can't kitchen like it that's not even the question at this moment so how do we want to live together as human beings is one of the fundamental questions as I think in time like this it's really important to go back to and also this kind of raised establishing a meaning with matters you know stuff we we can produce a lot of stuff as you can see anything in this day's we don't even need people to produce very sophisticated things anymore but at the end of the day you know that things have meaning you know and how the way very establish that relationship by the story of who's making it what's the tradition how did the technology evolved from the craft to the digital crafts and sooo that narrative maybe we can regain this connection with the things we touch with the things we decided to put here so they're not just this you know bought sold transaction or anything's no I mean I think that really comes through in the work and I was thinking about you know your first well it probably wasn't the first but the ps1 MoMA project is so you know there's so much continuity in terms of setting the stage right so you're using architecture as a kind of creating a series of situations of social interactions of and and and this is the sense of engagement with the structure and and kind of participation in a way continues throughout the work and and I think with the subsequent project that you should today there's always this architecture is kind of mobilizing a set of relationships and collaborations and a network of people and you know especially for the gallery it's you know the sense that the entire town you know becomes part of that you know the kind of making of that and of that project and so that's a kind of expanded story of the of the project in itself so I think that you know that's quite quite clear in terms of architectures agency to kind of mobilize and and it's also interesting I think you know we have been I guess it's a Alejandro's era polo that declared that you know the envelope was the last space of of architectural kind of intervention in terms of but I think he defined it at almost as almost this sort of okay this is the kind of beauty stuff that you add on top right like everything else is done and the architect comes and you know does the there's a kind of face of it all or the brand of it all but I think your your wreath ich Ihnen that and and kind of in terms of all of the making that that goes in it it and bringing back that kind of social dimension which i think is is really quite interesting so as it as it disappears and it gets blurred it actually is getting thicker in terms of not only the effects but the stories that are around it's making yeah and in some way we also wanted to create it as a space of in-between so that it's not just public and private but there's sort of this space that nobody owns if you want yeah and so I was thinking so arias came in a little bit later but you were part of the kind of practice you know very early on and I know you you've been really working and the competition Paris and and this kind of sense of the of the boundary and places like Athens is also really interesting right the kind of balcony and the thickened sort of negotiation between inside and outside which comes through actually in a way in the early projects of housing right you were already playing with this kind of inside and outside even though it wasn't so immaterial there was already quite present as an idea and I was thinking about Athens and that negotiation and is that yeah yeah I think I don't know if people know the sort of prevalent typology nothing's the known because of the climate that everyone has sort of an external space their own space Marconi and I think there what is interesting is that the sort of typology was generated through almost like development and process of sort of legal kind of framework sort of individual development of units and so and although I think that that the exterior space appears to sort of create a relationship with the city I think often is not utilized they're like actually very narrow it's a section of the streets that's also kind of like awkward so at the end these spaces are there but they're not sort of used as they were supposed to and I think some of the of the projects now with the sort of thickened in a way and try to sort of rethink that kind of in-between space between the interior and the exterior more directly even in the project in Athens were sort of flipping of the of the typology of order of the prevailing way of building on a lot where that balcony becomes facade the circulation but also sort of opens to that collective courtyard in in the Parisian in the in the Paris project there is a little bit different it's not necessarily a Balkan order very small balconies but there I think the the sickening also relates a little bit with with this with the city and even with a sort of history of the city I think what is interesting in the project is the speaking also about the the layering and the narratives is an effort to try to kind of like bridge or connect many different histories but also futures of the city so on the one hand the the project sort of ties into their historical AHS manian city and at the same time with what Jean was saying we sort of flexible proposal kind of like foresees maybe or way it sort of like changes that will come to the city and sort of trying again to connect the two it's interesting I I was thinking also in the lecture but what you spoken what you speak about I mean obviously there's a lot of rethinking around the question of typology and materiality and experience but we don't talk anymore about the diagram so much and and yet I think it's you know you still know some traces we see traces of kind of diagrammatic thinking even though it's not necessarily programmatic I mean even though it is experiential or it is but it's still the field the field yeah yeah and I was you know I because it's true we are in this moment where it's you know that composition has disappeared and yet and yet I think it's still there somehow and I wanted to see you know how it evolved for you in your work or I think it's fair to say that in our case still the diagram is a tool at least in design to to design basically not indeed necessarily programmatic if we start to think about maybe a generation before us that used program you know and the juxtaposition as programs maybe to create maybe newness I think we don't and maybe this is the digital has in some way eradicated maybe function right because now everything can happen anywhere and anyway everybody is on their phone so it really doesn't matter what the function of the room is anymore because the activity is actually taking place elsewhere and so there the the we do very much believe though that you need to find a way to generate variety difference different types of experiences so is there a sort of systematic way or maybe even a diagrammatic way to create variety so to say and and various experiences so I think it's fair know to say that for us when we we designed very much still through the diagram not necessarily through say vignette or through scenery or through in that sense yeah that's interesting so they're kind of the diagram but the diagram has moods but no but you're not sequencing kind of it's not a kind of phenomenological like narrative well I think some I think many times we store we start like a designer I think of a really strong diagram and then there's a phase where we're trying really hard to erase the maybe the last question before I open it up is you know one of our kind of core semesters here is the housing and I do see that there's a kind of renewed interest generationally in the question of housing and and social housing in particular with with some success I mean everybody thought it was dead and and yet today you know I think between you know Tatiana Baba in Mexico or Michael Madsen in Los Angeles or you know you you you guys are working on housing Hillary is working on housing with her practice moss and it you know it's it's like it's kind of like housing was dead and housing is back and you know these notions of sameness and difference and field and you know all these questions are coming together along with this sort of social dimension is that is that fair to say that it's some because I remember a few years ago you said you know this is where we want to take the practice and and so are you finding that this is happening or is it just kind of a few moments that are not adding up or could it add up we might all have different responses to this question but I I think the one thing for me that is what is happening and I think we're we enjoy in some way being part of is if there is some sort of transition happening or some sort of new form is emerging and if we can participate in that conversation I think the idea of micro mm-hmm and probably you have had larger conversations around that topic already here but I think it's one where we should also be very much thinking about you know what does that and I think is what Jing was trying to talk about in the beginning of the of the project say the micro units we did here the ones that an architect's ended up constructing was a very controversial conversation right it's like how much square foot can we squeeze out of somebody's you know living space in order for it to be you know still markedly you know part of a marketable proposition I think we're what we're realizing is that this is in some way I think there is a need for higher densities there is a need for less people right or more people that's in this area but how do you establish them within these very small units new type of relation or shared Commons so to say but III think it's fair to say that they think this transformation is taking place it's not necessarily driven by our architects it's may be driven by you know developers and and and and tech companies like we live or what have you anything we should also be careful that we don't get to you you know I think we need to be very conscious of what sort of role we play within that and what sort of ways we have to also push back a little bit what's that that make sense but at least design is brought yes you know I you know moving beyond the notion that housing is just a number of units yeah to achieve that you you can actually contribute Design Thinking to living again I think it's a we did deliberately not try to do it in the u.s. initially I mean so we went to Mexico and we went to France where there is very strong tradition exact oh yeah kind of social housing so I think that's another conversation to have I also think that we are particularly quite concerned was not concerned but I think we need to align collectively as a society to discuss this idea of the you know assistant right like the Intel AI Google assistants you know Siri they're all coming home and it becomes smart-home and so the home is packaged into this new wave of hyper product right so de to us and I feel like if we don't I mean we talked about housing as an urban thing and as a social topic as well so if we don't talk about it as a society enough you know as a foundation to just bring up that the frequency of the discussion how do we want to live we're going to be kind of you know too late in that discussion you know that the package will be done and you know hand it to us before we can even contemplate and talk about what that space is before you know it gets pushed on us yeah the house is just something that gathers your information continuously younger generation students feel the same way maybe we should ask them we should open it up yeah one question that's particularly interesting to me is that you bring a certain intensity to your focus on crafts in each of your projects if you come to a point where you don't have a solution you continue to solve for a solution that works to complete your design so my question starts at the beginning how do you begin in nurture your design process through the entire project to come to a solution that meets both your initial and final goals I think an earlier version of this lecture was called to be determined and it basically and you already spoke a little bit about the sort of embrace of processes as part of the project itself and that's why we'd like to show also these transformations in a way if you want from you know an initial impulse and then the effects of collaboration and new insight that then ultimately creates sort of an outcome so I think as a we don't know where we are going basically right so in the beginning we have a certain idea or maybe a certain intuition and then we just go down the path and and the path itself also determines the ultimate form I do think we have some sense and maybe that's based on experience or you know actually sometimes I explain is very simple there's only you know if you're a cook and you're cooking there's so many different ingredients but it's an architect there's very few ingredients to pick from right it's like steel concrete glass wood but there's not it's not like this wide array of things and so very quickly you can already say okay this is going to the metal realm or to the concrete realm or to the glass or to a combination of these or wood you know but I think it's not it's not you know Enoch it's there is I think our strength actually lies more in taking something that is quite straightforward element and and and just working with that single material so it's not so much very sophisticated materials or complex things it's really just I think I think we have some sort of general material understanding and since we are really interested in this process of translation from an idea into the making I think yeah we spend a lot of time also just you know exploring how to make things so it's a little bit of experience and intuition I think by now as well yeah and followed to that how do you interact with your contractors in such a way that it seems to me that you're reclaiming a lot of the construction process which is something we talked a lot about an architecture yeah can you speak more to your relationship with the contractor in production of your structures I think it's important to be super respectful to most contractors love what they do which is maybe different from what people think or at least they you know they have a knowledge you know in a material that you don't have and so I think first being respectful and understanding what their knowledge is and having and using an impact just but also showing that you know you know stuff that you're not just somebody who sits and has no control um I think the idea of being able to control the information so where we spoke about with with Davis really at that moment the contractor didn't know what we were doing anymore but and we just had to prove through the tools that we were in control but I bet I think the way we are set up I think both contractors and architects are set up in some sort of adversary' in relationship it's also how that how contracts are written so I think you have a certain awareness of that but I think very early on starting to work together is important but recently we also have started to build like our own mock-ups for instance and really you know actually get our hands a little more dirty to just show people how you know we would like certain things to be done so I think yeah you just need to go a little bit beyond drawing and beyond the computer yeah I think over there yeah thank you your projects I was really impressed by the ambiguity of inside and outside and the thickness of in-between spaces and the discussion of territory in those crochet spaces projects especially the Korea Museum and I find it really interesting that the facade or the edges often used as a breakthrough point in your design and other material additive berries inside and my question would be a white did you put near emphasize on the edge or the envelope what does the envelope mean to you yes you answer the first edge question so the answer the first edge questions now I think I think in a way and indeed I think we spoke a lot about also organization and how we're interested in sort of organizing different relationships into the space but the edge in a way is ultimately what defines the relationship of of the space we are creating right the architects of space with the exterior with the city with the landscape with the context with with history so I think that in that sense I think this this idea of also depth relates and with the third chapter with this aura and it's how these kind of objects are perceived and I think we are interested in creating not all organizations but also let's say objects or forms or or spaces not allow for this kind of openness allow for to be interpreted to be read to be experienced in in multiple different ways I think maybe relates back with is a conversation with a diagram it's where I think also the diagram starts becoming more ambiguous and less of a sort of one-liner first of all I just want to say that your work is amazing and my question is as a really young firm do you have any advice on people that might be looking to open up their own firm in the near future after grad school I would never go to grad school [Laughter] event we had an event with the artist Ai Weiwei a month ago and I think that conversation was about an hour an hour and fifteen minutes and he literally spend the first half hour going why are you in school like like I was in school for six weeks and I was done thank you for I think let's see we all have different stories for me it was very good to work somewhere else and really learn and I worked in a practice where there was an emphasis on making things and that's where I learned how to make things yeah so I would work somewhere first I think it's I think there there are people that start straight out of school and it's it's the first maybe well this is something actually we can maybe talk about a little bit in a broader context about sort of young and promising and then what happens next because I think in the beginning when people come out of school there's an incredible skill set that you have you're sort of the most advanced to the same because you're really you know in the moment so to say you understand what is trending if you want and so and you're quite agile and you're able to produce very quickly things that maybe you know resonate with our time but they're all you know in oh they're mediated right it's it's imagery it's digital but it is not a physical thing and so you can maybe be promising very quickly or sort of stand out you know within that field in the beginning but the challenge is not so much the production of of say that those those projects that maybe resonate with our with our contemporary time but the ability then to you know to transform those things I mean we are we're interested in making physical space we believe architecture as a physical activity and it is something you know it's it's a tactile something that you need to experience so how to translate those images those ideas is something that's very hard to learn by yourself and so maybe you can say well I really know what's going on and I'm you know and you can be sort of visually you could produce really interesting things and maybe you stand out but and that the the challenge I think what we also see happening with you know you can say the same of our contemporaries or maybe a generation that you know say be in between us and and you guys that they they're very strong but then the next step the follow through that's something you can't really learn by yourself so that's where I think just working somewhere and seeing how somebody else has dealt with it and does it is it's very useful I mean I think we all worked in different places and and it it helps thank you to go back to the first like response to the first question about not knowing where you're going is that the sort of thinking you take when you start your practice I guess like all all of these projects like little insights into a larger goal or is just act of like trying different things because we see like a vast array of work type of work in the way I'm working so just wondering if you could speak to that like what sort of the sequence of projects mean for you guys like in the long run well I think first of all not knowing where you go you're going can be super productive as well I mean we started the on that basis you know our Frank is Lauren said our first lecture title was to be determined and you know the idea was that we had no idea where the architecture was going and when we started in 2008 you know I think one third of architects lost jobs and the most office folded and you know when we were in your kind of age then we were thinking what do i do as a generation there was no there's no way forward there was no one telling us you know this is the issue that we have to tackle and this is a problem that we have to solve so we just turned that as a productive question in itself so in a way that I will say that it's you know the project it can be a way to guide you through this project from one place to the other and just by doing things I think it was very productive to us the first project we did and with ps1 we had only $70,000 budget which is super small for something that needs to stand for entire summer so and we had this very ambitious go-to something elastic which can only be made by hand so we basically did it ourselves and I think that gave us the confidence to do Kucha which you know at that same moment we said well we build something like that so we could just work with something you know that's never been thought before so one thing led to the other in a way so and but we always had this idea that not knowing what's gonna happen and not knowing what's the question we need to solve can also be productive just by doing it and I think maybe we all in some way grew up in very different contexts than where we are now and we moved quite a bit around the world and often we sit you know we find ourselves in situations where we have no idea of what to do like from from very early on and I think the you will be surprised how creative you become yourself if you don't know what to do you know I mean like human beings are super inventive and so I don't think you have to be afraid to go to the place where you have absolutely no idea what to do I think you'll be surprised how inventive are now creative you actually are and what are the things that you come up that can come up with so rather than trying to develop something that you're always certain about like what if you go always do a place where you have no idea what to do then you know you'll see suddenly some new ideas emerging rather than sort of repeating things that you know already seem to give you the confidence that they you know what they are so I think especially at you know at your age you should go to the things that make you the least comfortable where you have absolutely no way to figure out what to do because you'll see that suddenly new ways starting to emerge this is turning to more like a yeah actually the reason we teach is to learn things from you guys know we are constantly wondering also you know what what's the new set of problems we need to solve right and so and I mean being being with the the in the school I would say you learn from each other you learn from a teacher but we also learn from you and discussing and searching for things together so if you're taking my studio next semester doing that you only have to buy the book first hi my name is Thaddeus J hall president intrigued when you're talking about how the housing project cigars are doing is beyond Mexico and from the way describe it it seemed that it was as much an ideological and political sure of game that you're playing and not just a political one and as soon enough you insisting that we should have more conversations about housing my mind just went to you sure not just the places where there have been strong architectural traditions of living in social housing but places like Singapore Japan and certain parts of Russia where new types of housing basically invented and to do that architects work with a whole host of other experts sociologists anthropologists psychoanalysts so my question to you is in your mind in this day and age who are the experts so who is your dream team you'd like to see sit on the same table and talk about this well it's the Mexico project we talked with actually the users right so because the biggest question there is to how to reverse the thinking of the topologies of housing that you're supposed to get when you don't have so much I mean the people who live in this housing they buy them but they their income needs to be under a certain level to be able to qualify for that you know the long basically it's a form of a social housing so when you don't have so much I mean they they have no disposable income to be you know to speak of to decide where you live is a huge decision in your life and then you know there is a narrative for the last 20 years of that kind of housing and you should have a house that's on the ground have a backyard in the front yard that you can add to it and into reverse that thinking is the biggest key of question in in this project so we actively just you know it had workshops with the city together we're hosted workshop talk to his people made many many models to just interact with people to kind of tell them that may show them that there could be another value in the different kind of typological way of thinking and in the Paris project and I think the developer was very important instrumental in also talking with the city about the financial models that we were the only least half of the site and get back to the city so that you know the the site is given back in into the common economical life in in the city so in every situation is slightly different I would say the key person we have to convince but I mean that's why I went back to 140 years ago when housing was a very important discussion in the society it was not only architects working on it it was people who you know designed the parks the people who were working with you know feminist issues and health issues everyone was talking about it so in a way that if we were going to make a housing and a living and at the center of our discussion as the kind of core of our discussion so that there is a common understanding of where we want to be we have to talk with all walks of life in all kinds of typological projects and I think that's what we're trying to do also in different parts of the cities economical realities is different in different parts of the cities different parts of the world but I think indeed just to doing them and talking about them and involving as many people as possible around this discussion is what we're trying to do maybe one last question hi there thank you for a wonderful talk I noticed that the majority of your projects or are completed in white or they're predominantly white I was curious you view white as sort of a neutral non statement or if it's more of an active element that you purposely engage each time or or sort of what the role of of that element is in all these various projects I don't think at the exterior so white right most of our buildings except that the translucent Erwin's we we like green also yeah we like we have done pink buildings I think colors nobody long conversation but no first of all I think color is very difficult but also color is often applied so coerced and paint or something and it becomes like a graphic thing but so it doesn't have sort of a real meaning in itself apart from being a signifier or like giving something but it's often paint right if if yeah in some way it sounds may be like a cliche to talk about honest honest materials but you know and white paint is also white paint meaning the structure in California was painted white but at the moment you start painting in another color right it becomes suddenly the whole it opens up a whole larger conversation which is one where I don't think we necessarily have enough vocabulary yet to sort of speak to but I will admit that I spent eight years working for mrs. white Sanna and the white question also there came up many times but in some way I think the ability to reduce certain pieces of say information or things that you actually experience allow to highlight others right so at the moment that you start to use color in a certain way it starts to really diminish certain other reading since there are other experiences so I think at this moment mostly we are trying to yeah develop more spatial and tactile experiences that are not necessarily over over I sort of overwhelmed by my color I think color can be very very strong so yeah but the white is also I mean it works towards that kind of ethereal material slight abstraction I think that the you know it works towards that for me more than the kind of more than the kind of honesty it's it's more a kind of I think because many at least the projects we saw today had indeed to do these qualities because they were not always about light and Sandow and and translucency and then you know white or gray is kind of like more neutral in order to kind of elevate and amplify these kind of qualities but we have made a pink building and the green installation but I also think it's maybe so terrain to prefer ready to explore meaning I think it's I'll take it as a challenge yeah all right well thank you it was wonderful you

Channel: Columbia GSAPP

Views: 5,571

Rating: 4.8620691 out of 5

Keywords: SO-IL, Jing Liu, Florian Idenburg, Architecture, Design, New York, Columbia University, Columbia GSAPP, GSAPP

Id: E43uTVjfdtI

Length: 111min 17sec (6677 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 15 2017