Steven Holl: Air Light and Green Space: A Post Covid Architecture

shall we begin yes please start good evening everyone i bring warm greetings from the council of architecture and today we are honored to have stephen hall with us it's a it's a landmark event for us and i'm sure the fraternity will be enriched by his thoughts by his presentation and the discussion that he's having with and i want to formally thank steven for accepting our invite and taking time out and being with us and warm greetings from india indian architectural fatality and the council of architecture a brief introduction of the council steven uh council architecture is a special authority constituted under the architects act 1972 by the parliament of india and council is empowered to regulate architectural education as well as architectural profession and we are now uh reaching out to our fatality through this platform cos social where we have a vertical which we call dialogues and we have cochranes and we have reached to our audience in a large way through these platforms in these difficult times wherein we are all locked up in our houses and we can't go out and a positive approach from all of us to reach out to our fraternity to enrich their knowledge to enrich their thoughts as well with people like you and thank you once again for accepting our invite and i'm sure uh the coa social platform goes to another level by your presence today and we're looking forward for a intense uh discussion with the server uh over to you to carry forward thank you steven once again for being with us thank you thank you thank you stephen thank you mr habib khan and the council for the support for this series uh welcome everyone we are honored to have today as very special guest with us today architect stephen hall thank you stephen for joining us today stephen hall is one of the few internationally respected architects who has inspired many of us with his ideas on ecology and the concept driven design through his extensive writings his paintings the famous 5x7 watercolors which we hope to see today some of them an extensive study of models that that are at some time going to find the place in the archive and we hope we can visit the archives sometime later and the manifestation of his projects as an experiential built reality we are glad to have participants for stephen's talk surprisingly from across southeast asia sri lanka bangladesh south africa india and greetings to all this is the tenth talk of the series and before we begin i would like to place on record our special thanks to professor kenneth frampton and jose o'brien for the introductions and their profound insights before this program our thanks to professor bibi doshi too for the support he has given us through this time the theme of steven's talk today is most appropriate in the present context air light and green space host kovid the integration of air light and green space has consistently motivated stephen hall's work during a period of global pandemic the need to carefully consider these aspects of the built environment is greater than ever before this lecture by stephen focuses on past projects by stephen hall architects that hold potential lessons for a post covered architecture such as the embrace of green space landscape maximizing fresh air and natural light the facilitation of open circulation with social spaces and ecological integration and innovation as for architect stephen hall himself he of course needs no introduction but i nonetheless will do the formalities he was born in 1947 in bremerton washington graduated from the university of washington to pursue architecture studies in rome in the 70s and in 76 joined the architectural association in london and established stephen hall architects in new york city a long time ago one of the most innovative and influential architects of our contemporary times with projects across the world from new york and washington dc to china from bogota and texas to japan stephen is recognized for his ability to blend space and light the ecological integration of landscapes a deep understanding of energy cycles with a great contextual sensitivity and to utilize these unique qualities of each project to create a concept driven design we're happy that stephen hall could join us today please join us in welcoming our special guest architect stephen hall and i'd like to place on record is enormous support to the restoration of the iam ahmedabad campus and the dormitories designed by louis khan in collaboration with professor doshi so please join us again in welcoming our special guest architect stephen hall stephen thank you thank you um i have i have first a slide um thanks to doshi who took me on amazing tours of omanabad and i also visited the chandigarh sites during the march 2015 when i was last in india and i must say i was very inspired by the architecture and i'm really happy that we're getting the attention we need to these great monuments that everyone can enjoy in the future my talk is really about five points embracing green landscape space maximizing fresh air and natural light open circulation and social space outside simulcast distance seating and ecological integration i call it postcovid but in in a certain sense it's what i've been working on my whole life i've always felt the the importance of air light and green space in fact my ecological first effort this lecture by the way has been given how many times like 10 times and i keep changing it for each venue so i made it special for india today i have some the indian project but i began on this kind of lecture effort to anchor ecological meaning in architecture back in 2001 20 years ago with a series of lectures on pro-kyoto that was when our president uh at that time rejected the pre-op the the the kyoto protocol so i went on the war path and gave my and formed my lectures around these ecological imperatives but the beginning of that lecture also has a theoretical anchor and that is thinking about architecture and new architecture colin row made a table many years ago where he put down classic architecture in one column and modern architecture in another column i added my own column called the 21st century so for colin rowe classic was absolute and modern was relative and i say the 21st century it's interactive for colin row classic was fixed modern was stable 21st century is dynamic classic is physical metaphysical modern is physical real 21st century is virtual real classic is space and time modernist space time 21st century is space-time information i won't read all of these but you can get the point that we're in a time we have to think differently and creatively about the future so embracing green natural landscape i want to start in more detail on this first project i'm going to show several projects in this this talk but this one i want to show in more detail because it just opened it's fresh on a campus and it's a campus that was built uh over a long period of time in america it's the franklin and marshall college in lancaster pennsylvania and they had an old brick building they wanted to double the size of the arts building and i had a very good client and when we did the interview i i thought about benjamin franklin that famous moment when he was flying his kite in the rain at night and there was lightning and he just was discovering how electricity works the other the other character is marshall who was a was a lawyer so i said this building should be about the light and the heavy and then a little then they hired us even from this sketch that was a long interview process and then i had another a further elaboration which is much more intelligent and that is that these gigantic trees some of them are four feet in diameter and they're the oldest thing on the campus that those trees would have an impact on the shape of this building i had to double the size of a building that was on that side already but we didn't remove any trees and we allowed this building to actually take the concave and convex shapes of the trees around it so these are kind of my little watercolor sketches that the the the people in charge approved of in fact the president when he saw that sketch about the trees he said brilliant let's build it so it was a great client and there you can see the drawing studio woodworking studio design studio and painting studio an auditorium with for cinema they teach cinema there this is the school of art and then other other parts of this the college will use these buildings and there's a common space in the center that everybody shares it's built kind of like a box kite on a concrete base and then the trusses up above are very lightweight and open and the roof was done by local labor the the amish a very you know kind of interesting a group of people like the quakers live nearby in pennsylvania it's amish country they still drive uh horse and buggies and dress in black they don't believe in using electricity but anyway they came to put the roof in so all the whole roof was done by local amish contractors and there you see building quickly going up like a like a like a frame like a box kite and there it's finished that's just toronto ground concrete there's glass between the two concrete base pieces because there's a park in the distance so there was a buchanan park that opens on on one side to the to the arts quad and the other side to buchanan park and there you see the exposed structure and the exposed wood by the amish builders and there you see the feeling of the trees changing the geometry of this building and that's a water retention pond that it's a lower end of campus so i worked with the campus of physical planning department and i said instead of dumping this water into the storm sewer of lancaster let's retain it and use it as a green recycling situation so this this water then becomes a reflecting pond for the for the project in 2007 the opening of the nelson atkins museum was a long process of a competition um there you see the original 1933 building i went to the to the we were competing against todd wando christian poultz and partner there were like six architects competing and i went to see the collection which has a very amazing um asian collection and this dates from the 11th century and i thought about the the merging of landscape and architecture as the central theme so the idea instead of building on the back of the building or on the side of the building that the building this new series of lenses merges with the landscape and creates sculpture gardens so you see the the big block in the middle 1933 building we didn't touch it except for at the base of the columns on on the north side and the building is then merging with the landscape it's only in two levels the service level below and the gallery level above and the lenses that bring the light down and a lot of a great collection of naguchi so one of the ideas was to integrate the landscape outside with the gucci piece on the inside there you see the final of of one of the naguchi sculptures and it's a great place for social gatherings um this is before kovid but you can imagine social distancing working fairly well in the great space like this outside there you see the old original 1933 building and our new entrance pavilion the lens number one everything is connected below ground but then we you know one of the reasons we won the competition all the other competitors built obediently up on the north side of the building and we said you shouldn't do that you should go into the landscape similar approach was taken when we entered the competition for the kennedy center that was uh in 2012 there were five architects dildor scafiddio cobb freed richard meyer you know adding on a building that was done by edward earl stone and opened in 1972 and we said you shouldn't add directly onto the side of the building you should in fact make a landscape a new public space with this this is a very important project maybe my most difficult one that i've ever done in my life you see the jefferson memorial you can see it from here and the lincoln memorial you can see it from here and it's the end of the mall and this is a living memorial for jfk you know kennedy meant a lot to me in my life i remember the day he was inaugurated and who could forget the day that he was assassinated the very important president and uh it was a very important project and we made most of this uh the the program was for rehearsal space that the stage uh had to be the same size as the stage in the opera house very large so and then dance rehearsal studios a lot of pragmatics that had to be accommodated but then we accommodated them below and then we we puncture the the the landscape with three pavilions an entrance pavilion glissando pavilion and a river pavilion so you can see here the the the whole uh landscape then becomes a kind of monument to kennedy 35 ginkgo trees um for his presidency and the ginkgo tree is a very famous because in the month of november the golden yellow leaves uh form and they drop almost on the day on the 20 in washington dc because of the climate almost on the 22nd of november the day he was assassinated you know mysterious trees they're the ancient the most one of the most ancient trees i wish i had a photograph i should have had that in this slide now you can see here how how the the program is accommodated below grade and these these these different pavilions come up there's the river pavilion now you can see the river in the distance the potomac there you see the lincoln memorial and you can see here on the right the the the glissando pavilion has a big wall for simulcast projection i'm going to talk about that a little bit later there's my daughter walking around one of the reflecting pools at the opening which was a year two years ago two years ago boy this coveted thing has caused us all to forget the whole year you know in a way two years ago there we this was an event that happened before kovit but there's really a lot of events that have happened after covert there you have you know a performance the doors of the river pavilion open and everyone socially distanced or with their families in the landscape and that was fall 2020 and you know this this has been constantly active during this whole terrible covet period because it has great outdoor space great green space great light and air and even in winter there was snowboarding down the slope of the landscape so it's been a very active place and there was the kennedy awards june 6th just a week ago and because of covet they couldn't have them in the big opera house they had the performances were outside so it was terrific people called me up sent me emails stephen is that your project on television i said yep i'm very proud of that maximize fresh air and natural light so this is a project i will hope someday we'll go forward it was a competition we won for the for the city museum north wing expansion we were against uh you know zaha hadid alma paykov freed and uh i had a simple idea really i said let's just take the geometry of the site boundary and extrude extrude it into three levels of volume that's the shape so they had a funny shape what you the site that you could build on had a funny shape and then let's subtract for light and air so i'm subtracting maybe a third of the whole volume so so the new addition was a kind of subtractive architecture and and the idea really comes from what i believe is the most amazing architecture in india and that is the stepwells the stepwells are a brilliant subtractive architecture and you can see the original building on the right and i did get a chance to visit a couple of stepwells when i was there but one one thing i want to do sometime in my life is to visit and document or at least see i know there's a lot of ongoing documentation now because i think some of these stepwells are some of the most amazing subtractive architecture on the planet and there was also big ecological aspect matthias schuler and and we we proposed underwater photovoltaic cells in this pool that connects the existing building and the new building and that matthias did all the calculations for those that would have been in 2014 if we would have been able to go forward that would have been one of the first applications of underwater photovoltaics one of the things about putting them under water is they they are cooled and they're kept free of dust and that makes them much more efficient and then you can see all these energy ideas that's all matthias schuler from transsolar there you see a section of the new building and the existing building this would be a place for education for school children education and art i think is incredibly important today you know we have new new universities being built and i was with i was in one and i forget the name of it and giving a talk with with doshi when i was in india and they didn't have any art programs i think this is really you know humanity is about art and science not just science so that's why i feel this is a very important project art education enormously important it's the spiritual side of humanity here you can see the photovoltaic pool and the trees that we propose the existing trees to save and the lobby the this is all about subtraction and bringing light into the space and light into the gallery space and then right at the top on the roof there was a big monsoon collection pool that would be a perfect place for outdoor opening events this is a project in bogota colombia also a project that we want to build we've been working on this project for 11 years now all the working drawings are finished i gave this lecture in bogota to try to convince them to go forward it's a political problem at the chancellor level at the university but but it's ready to go so and it's a perfect example of light and air and green space the whole building is based on a concept of inside out in bogota because of the high elevation it never gets to be more than 70 degrees you know it's a it's a kind of constant beautiful climate you really don't need air conditioning or heating so that was a perfect example of fresh air everywhere and inside out and upside down and that was the con that was the concept so that was that led us to a lot of study models which i still love today where you you work about the idea of of a kind of planar inversion where there's an inside and there's an outside and they reverse each other and there you can see the classrooms the the the conference rooms they are all accessed on outdoor corridors with with windows that open and that big garden that's the heart and center a quadrangle a campus quadrangle that's the center of this project and also that it has gray water recycling pv cells that provide all the electricity natural ventilation to every part of the building and that outside i'm going to talk about that in my last section here about outdoor projection so from that large open logia you which is the main entrance you see also the cafe which is suspended above in the distance and both of these embrace that central quadrangle a project that i'm very proud of maybe this is my first project of any consequence it's the void space hinge space housing in fukuoka and uh i'm i'm proud to say today it was almost awarded the 25-year award from the aia as a great building but the the pyramid at the louvre got it instead but i got right up to the end because everybody loves it it's still working very well and the whole idea was that all the access to these apartments was outside everything had fresh air water gardens divide them so it's the void space that defines the the project there you can just see every one of these 30 apartments is different and i won't go into the detail but you can see the water gardens that divide them and all there there you can see like a chinese block they fit together some of them are duplex some of them are integrated across the hall and they're all accessed by outside corridors you see one of the corridors with fresh air and light on the right-hand side and this is under construction it's the institute for advanced studies in princeton this is next door to where albert einstein did his last work uh for the last eight years of his life he worked here at the ias and you remember i always remember einstein for for his brilliant science but don't forget he played the violin so the idea of art and science together so this is this is a really artistic commons building that david rubinstein is giving uh and it was a competition against oma and todd williams and billy tsen a number of different architects and our our simple concept was that it should stand for the intertwining of nature science mathematics humanities and the arts the intertwining of all these aspects so so even though you would think they're dedicated to science they really like this idea that the building would would be a kind of weave you see there's four water gardens so and you can walk what i call the scholars path from east to west the parking is on the east so you can walk into the main campus building through this building and and and therefore also the the notion of light it has a series of curved roofs that bring in natural light in diff different ways and one of the things i noticed i said to the director i said all your buildings all your recent buildings the modern ones they all have flat roofs dead flat the library is a kind of completely flat roof and i said i want to bring light in i want these roofs to have and then he he said oh thought bubbles he called them thought bubbles there you can see how the the intertwining of these water gardens there's a place in the building where you're walking through and you can see both the water garden on each side that was from the competition and there's the finished plans large conference room 2 000 square feet cafe lounge medium-sized conference rooms their program was uh you know quite elaborate and extensive it's not a big building but most of it is on one on the one level and uh and there there's the cafe uh from the bar looking out to the water garden on the east by the way it's the entrance is called einstein drive so when you're entering in the future there's the the full building with the with the company the original building that's einstein's office actually in the in the foreground but when you're entering now this campus you'll see this the the commons building open circulation and social space this is a visual arts building at the university of iowa which we completed in 2016 and it was it was all the different layers of art and it was a large building and and the site was very deep 300 feet on a side and i struggled with this because when we first started they had a much more generous site and it was easier to make you know green landscape and light and air to all the areas and slowly slowly they shrunk the site giving me only a footprint 300 feet on a side and it had to be several levels to get the 140 000 square feet of program in it so i started with this diagram basically another subtractive project i'm just thinking about it in the context of the the india project but it's basically a subtractive project where i cut this this square and i call it multiple centers of light and there's another drawing that's missing but there's there's a laminar shift that occurs you can see that that it isn't a straight cut that the whole building has a kind of laminar shift those two principles together are what form the architecture there you can see all the different studios you know painting studio graphics studio woodworking studio print making studio and you can see here that these cuts also have terraces because there's a laminar shift in the floor plates that allow these cuts to be very animated and you can walk through the building one end to the other and that's actually how you enter the campus this university of iowa campus 30 000 students quite a large campus and the dormitory site is on on the uphill side and you can walk down this slope and go out the other door so you can pass by the exhibitions of the art department so in a way it's also bringing art to the forefront as you move through the the movement on the campus there you see one of those uh multiple centers of light and how they become social condensers because there's a place of terraces of letting the light and air in but also a place to stop uh that's not a classroom and to be on your computer or to just take a moment off and and then those pause places so there's seven of those and you can see that this building in the foreground is a building that we we realized in 2007 and i struggled really hard about doing this new building because i thought at first it should be core 10 like our original building anyway i went through something like 30 designs do we have that little bit that little video we don't have that in this anyway in another lecture you will see i show how hard it is to have an idea that drives the design i had 30 different schemes to get to this design but that's not the point of this lecture this is a maggie's cancer care center we opened that in london actually it was opened on my birthday december 9th 2017. we opened this on my 70th birthday in london and it's about making architecture something that has a healing dimension to it and you know charles janks bless his soul initiated those maggie centers there's something on like 11 of them now they're around the world by you know relatively famous architects but the point is that architecture has a healing property and that's a social dimension you know you go here it's a place of gathering for people that have terminal cancer and they they have a tea party they have books of the library they have meetings they have counselors the mason the ban the idea of the building which is on a 5x7 is a inner layer that's like a comforting bamboo natural bamboo a structural layer that's like a hand a concrete and then an outer layer which is a music a musical analogy this is next to saint bart's cathedral one of the oldest in the center of london in fact it goes back so many years that it precedes musical notation and they did a thing the monks did a thing called nooms musical notation of nooms so i took that as a kind of let's say point of departure to bring light and color and i i made the outer outer curtain wall into a a kind of staff and then we did small drawings of color that would be inserted in the new kind of stained glass called ocalox it's the material that we developed with the okalux company so this this kind of complication could be you know furthered in in a different way and it was an experiment and it worked really really well you can see there the bamboo interior you arrive at a garden at the top the staff of steel of arab did the engineering was very difficult this this curved staff but there you see the inside where the colored okalux nume notations glow from outside light glowing on the inside and there's the natural bamboo and at night it reverses itself during the day you really can't see the color from the outside it's very it's very neutral building this is a by the way this is a deeply historic section of london that's a that's a a a 1715 building on the left of you know there was many uh effort to block our project because of this but i made the case that the coins of this building there was an another building here that was a brick box and from 1960 and we removed it and i made the case that the coins at the edges of this building hadn't been seen in 50 years and they would be revealed when we turned the corner with our curves around the maggies anyway after something like 60 presentations we got approval to build it and you can see here that glows like a beacon at night you know on a rainy november night this thing is kind of glowing and the colors are glowing it's very inviting there's doors on either side it's a very inviting social space this is a library we realized in 2019 you can see a lot of developer condominium towers in the background there's more in the works i wanted this building to be a public statement it's a public community library so we made it vertical instead of horizontal and when we made it vertical we we saved the gardens for for the public and we gave a view to manhattan to all the users in the building you can see here also the kind of central idea of the problem of a library today and that is the digital versus the book you know some some of my students making libraries they they they're so excited to say we have a bookless library i mean okay i mean i don't think the book will ever die and i think this whole digital versus the book silliness has kind of played itself out but anyway this drawing was from 2010 11 years ago at the height i was i've been teaching at columbia for many years and uh at the height and we actually gave a library problem or another studio did and anyway i wanted to balance this question so there are books when you're looking here at your entrance there's books on the face and then there's computer desks behind it so they're working on their computers on these different levels but they're looking at books and we kept the the ground free you know the building could have been done as a one-story building but it would have covered the whole site so then you wouldn't have this reading garden and that's a state parks building that that forms the edge of that garden on the north and the cuts in the building that's a structural facade so the cuts echo the movement on on the west side that movement going up and looking to the to manhattan and on the east side they tell you about the three parts of the program the children's library the teens library and the adults library which have to be acoustically separated and that's so when you're looking at the building you're looking at a concrete structure that's just got aluminum stain on it there's no curtain wall and there are no columns in the building so the building has you know it's about the tectonics of architecture as well and there you see that main view perpendicular to that stair to manhattan and the notion of the books in a large meeting room below and here's the children's library also you can see the empire state building on the right there in the distance even the children get to have this spectacular view and they can learn about you can see the united nations building from here and you can see louis khan's franklin delano roosevelt memorial from here and that's just natural plywood on the on the ceilings it's acoustically perforated to deaden the sound that children can be very loud and screamy i have a five-year-old and a one-year-old so i know that and acoustics is very important and at night you have a kind of glow and there you see the relation of the condo towers in the back and by the way there was a developer who proposed to give the library for free three floors in the bottom of one of these condo skyscrapers and a congressman by the name of jimmy van branner said no we want a public building that has an expression as architecture so here's a case where a congressman not an architect has the foresight to understand that developers cannot drive our world today which is happening i mean you look at hudson yards what a terrible project developers are driving our world we can't allow that to happen and here's the congressman that said no our community library should have a presence as a public building not the bottom floors of one of these condo towers and so i'm very grateful to jimmy van brenner for his you know love of architecture and understanding to get this project realized this is a school of art in houston it was part of a competition glass house school of art it opened in 2018 this was a competition against a number of architects and then they boiled it down to three and gave them each a certain amount of money to develop it i think it was snojeta i was against and morphosis and the charge to all of them was that the building on the right the one that says seven gardens was a parking lot for an existing church and you had to remove those cars and put them in a seven-story parking garage before you can build on that parking lot and there was another building here in the foreground which i'm sorry we should have had that was called the glass house school but it was only 40 000 square feet so i took a big chance i told them i am i believe you should look into the distant future or what you want to do here you should take the chance and double the size of your school make it instead of forty thousand eighty thousand by the way education was the first mission of your art museum i know it's very big now i think it's second to the museum of modern art and they're very full of themselves in terms of you know collecting art and paying a lot of money for it they they did they just bought an anish kapoor and installed it in front but anyway um you i said you wouldn't build a seven-story parking garage then because you could put the parking all underneath and connected by tunnels to the new building anyway we won so so that meant that we would have a whole campus here you see the museum on the right you see the glaselle on the left and the extension of the sculpture garden almost doubling its size and so this was built first because we had to get the layer of parking underneath so they could there you see the church in the distance so they could free up that site and and and here it's it's all made out of precast concrete and there are structural elements that hold the floors up it's a simple l um with it with a a wonderful open forum in the middle of it and these are sculpture studios painting studios classrooms and there's that forum that open forum that forms a space of un unpredictable use we've had weddings there already there's a rap artist that does his rap music on those steps i should have had a piece of that in this lecture but i mean that's another lecture and there's the straight structure you know that's all the natural concrete that's holding up the floors and each one has an operable window you see that square that means every studio has operable windows and i had to fight to the death for those operable windows they in houston they say oh we all use air conditioning here we don't need windows i said look this is an art school those art students may not be using air conditioning in the fall and the spring they need fresh air it's a psychological thing they need to be able to open a window anyway it was a long battle but i won and now everybody's very happy because at covid time everybody wants to open the windows on both sides of the building and let the air blow through the building and i think i really think that's a basic principle of architecture and it should be supported no matter what and it shouldn't be forgotten there's the whole master plan so we offered them instead of just a pavilion you know that the the kinder building an entire master plan that that um the unifies this is a in the on the right hand side there is the only mise van der rohe building uh a museum the only mesandro museum in america of course he did the great one in berlin but this one is curved because of the street so our building curves in response to his and this is the kinder building that just opened um six months ago and the idea of this building was to bring that texas light in like i thought of the clouds that seem so high in texas because the sky seems so big and i imagine them pushing down on the on the roof of the building forming a luminous canopy that the light would sneak in around the curves of those clouds pushing down and then because we've done over 10 museums i understand that the circulation inside of a museum is primary primary aspect you should not have any dead-end spaces you know the people who've done the museum of modern art don't understand this because it's not very good circulation this building has no dead-end spaces and and you can see the red line here how you can move and how you can close a gallery for installation and and not interrupt the possibility of visiting the building because you can you have another way of moving around it and every bill every area has natural light and you can see this sort of gardens the seven gardens that punctuate the building giving it a kind of a break and there's a complicated section and and the tunnels that connect the parking and connect the glass school that are very beautiful sculptural elements then they were being cut they had become art installations and this is an installation by olafur eliason and there's the main central space that they had a gigantic calder mobile um which they never told me about but luckily it it works here very very well and and the natural light is is working great and this sort of luminous canopy of the spaces and you can tell the person has a mask so you can tell this is covered time when they open the building and that's that luminous canopy bringing the natural light and all the walls are orthogonal in deference to the art so the let's say the the geometry and and the interest is in the sky and at the street level we saved all those great live oaks so endemous so systemic to houston and this is a sculpture gallery at street level to entice you to come into the building and the entire building is is enclosed in what i call a cold jacket that was a competition idea that this sunlight in houston is is enormous and i could open the the tops of these tubes 30 inches in diameter i could open the tops and open the bottoms and when the sunlight hits the wall by the chimney effect it will reduce the solar gain by 90 percent but also it would be a a glowing thing at night and bringing light into the second floor during the day so it's all about light and air these tubes are all about light and air and luckily there was a company in china that could make them and you know they they really have a magical appearance at night and they change with the different days the sunlight and the different day but i'm very happy to always feel that this is doing something special in houston and that is reducing the solar gain by ninety percent and that building becomes a kind of glowing beacon at night um and there you see the mies van der rohe building on the right outside simulcast distance seating in auditorium i think the the pandemic we didn't see it coming but we had already proposed an outside simulcast on our building in the kennedy center this allows also that people can see the opera going on instead of paying 250 dollars a seat they see it for free so i'm very proud of that i think that is a very democratic offering to the public i mean the people who can pay 250 dollars a seat inside that's fine they'll see the you know the full thing in in the flesh but at the same moment a simulcast not a recording but a simulcast the public can come for free and see the opera or whatever it is that's going to go on there and i think i think jfk would be very proud of that that democratic offering and we do a similar thing now at the bogota doctorate building in that great logia on the outside we propose a simulcast and we open up the seating and make it less dense ecological integration that's something i've been doing with all my projects over the years whether it's the first in the linked hybrid in in in in beijing um which we opened in 2019 it's a piece of a city it has residents it has shops it has wretched education has offices has cinema there's a chunk of the city that allows allows you to live and work and recreate in one place and it's the largest geothermal installation in china at the time 660 geothermal wells 100 meters deep nothing like that had ever been tried all recycled water in the ponds and i'm happy to say this thing is functioning perfectly so it's heating and cooling 740 apartments there you see the gray water treatment um which it was quite easy to do i mean it's a okay it's a plumbing to to integrate all the gray water in a big project like this but once you make this decision the client called modern green did the the treatment was basically an ultraviolet zapping system and there's no smell this water is absolutely amazing i thought you know there might be a problem i've never done a gray water treatment at this scale but it works perfectly you know water is a is a is a kind of limited resource on our planet all the water that was on the earth that was ever on the earth is still here and that's all we have so we have to think about water in the future as a kind of precious commodity so i'm very proud of this grey water pond pools that they can skate they can ice skate on in the winter time and they do and it's a public space so the ducks love it the children love it we have lily pads and lotus blossoms growing there's the cinematek that we that we proposed the bridges have programs in them that's that's for another lecture this is a project i designed in 2006 an ecological dense pack on the edge of the gnc and the housing collapse of 2008 killed the project but just a month ago it came alive again that's a funny thing about being an architect now that i've been practicing for 40 years more sometimes a project that you did 10 years ago suddenly comes back alive it's it's as you know it says and this is happening right now in about four different sites one in helsinki i'm not going to show you and then this one in turkey and this site is near mellitos there's the aegean sea and melatos is the oldest gritted city in western history it's an amazing place nothing's left of it of course um i went to ditima there's a lot of ruins there but there's not much left at the militars and but the idea of the grid the idea of a dense pack that became my my my way of how can i preserve the landscape do a maximum ecological project and get this many houses on it so it was the idea of dense pack maximized natural landscape and zero ecological footprint there you see this 2006 that's when that sketch came and these are the different types there are three different types of housing and then we work with matthias schuler the great the one that did the beijing linked hybrid and he had many ways to get a net zero with using the sea water desalination closed loop technical water and we developed every house the work all the working drawings of the project are finished every every house has natural ventilation natural shading and this all had to be done this was in 2006 throughout the day to understand to reduce the sun and the glare and we used all local materials so we want to have local labor and we use local stone and then a a kind of ash concrete and local uh craftsman-built wood sunscreens and then in 2010 there was a terrible earthquake in haiti and i thought to do a pro bono project to to house these people um that were displaced i mean million people were displaced in the 2010 earthquake and i thought to use the principle of this dense pack and actually i i actually had the foresight to understand that and this this is what happened i was just looking at it in the main towns like port-au-prince they couldn't rebuild on the sites because of the political manipulations and eminent domain and all this the only time you the only thing you could do is build on a new site so i said let's make a site on the sea and they would have views like that project in their book they would have views and there would be south facing and i would do the first one stephen hall architects and then my friend tom main would do another dense pack david adjay would do another dense pack i got them to agree and at that point i didn't have architect d architect e or architect f yet but the you get the principle the principle is to to dense pack to get net zero and all those principles could be could be you know re reformed and then we had solar thermal desalination matthias schuler was heading up that part of it all the electricity was provided by the photovoltaics on the roof an integrated system and we had solar cooking and we had grey water treatment and compost toilets so we but we we didn't have the political will so i once we finished it we made a pamphlet we tried but i think the politics is always the issue anyway we were maximizing the local labor with the windows and doors the structure was in recycled concrete the skin would be painted colors and interiors by the inhabitants so they would be in a way they would be given in the individuation by the inhabitants i don't know if you've seen photographs of haiti but bright colors are common on the houses and i'm sorry we don't have that image in that did we we didn't put it in here and i missed that one image but it's anyway that's the that's the that's the talk for today and i'm it's 11 o'clock that was a perfect one hour so i'm open for uh questions [Music] thank you stephen for that fascinating presentation and thank you for the message to young architects here in india and southeast asia to almost rediscover a new ecological balance you know i think that's the underlying statement of the talk so if we may begin i'll there are about five questions i'll keep them short i had them a little longer but i've shortened them landscape seems to be taking on a completely new role in all these projects in the manner in which we inhabit them and and at one point you even mentioned that the kennedy center was all locked the buildings were locked and yet it was a very lively living space you know because of the landscape and being the largest roof you know that's right and that that redefinition of the landscape the outside simulcast and so how would you really if you were to elaborate this idea of speaking to young architects on what is the new potential of the void not of the built form we mean so right absolutely very good question very good question and i i was educated as a landscape architect i worked for lawrence halperin one of the great landscape architects on the west coast when i graduated from the university of washington in 1971 i i went to san francisco i tried to work for mltw i couldn't go to they weren't hiring but i did get hired at lawrence halperin and i worked as a landscape architect and you know to me and and also my teacher was the great richard hague in the university of washington that taught us landscape as as a kind of first principle to understand the site he said whatever you're you're going to do a project go to the place and be the site wow so that that's that's that was i mean that's pretty easy to remember be the site you know and and so landscape to me is the way you i mean when you're thinking about a project you think about the voids first so i always i've always done that and uh and i think now when i you know when i make this lecture light air and green space it's sort of it gets obvious that how important this will be and it should be in the future rightly so absolutely the second question that i would have and you may answer parts of it or you may even leave out some part of it and this provoking a question here there is this underlying theme that you had of the ground as a datum so under the ground in the ground on the ground and over the ground so if we see the franklin marshall it really hovers and floats right the the horizontal skyscraper also floats right and when you see the neoclassical building i think at nelson atkins right or below ground and so there is a there is a conscious engagement with the datum of the ground you know right and which is not only experiential but also ecological you know the the two seem combined could you could you kind of and i know it's linked to a child i'd read somewhere it's linked to a childhood memory you know and if you could right reveal that memory to us and how childhood plays out as you know this amazing right when i was when i was about seven years old my brother who's a year younger than me and i would play in the backyard and we used to play what we call property we were making roads and little buildings but as we grew a little bit older and had some tools we built uh clubhouses and uh we had a two-story clubhouse and then we had a a a clubhouse in the tree and then at another time and at the same time actually the the the one existed on the ground and then it was one above the ground and then we dug a big hole and we put logs over it and an old carpet and put dirt on top so we had under the ground in the ground on the ground and over the ground and it's really funny because i'm really on i did i remembered it many years later when i was teaching first year at columbia and i said i made it i made a lecture i said there's only four types of architecture there's under the ground there's in the ground there's on the ground and there's over the ground and i gave that lecture with a little diagram and i began to remember that that's how i started as a seven-year-old so maybe i was destined to be an architect about the earth about the relationships of the earth and uh but yeah it's uh it's a principle that that i think also i must say and i love lebbius woods he was my friend until his death in 2012. but he was about anti-gravity so i just put him in over the ground fabulous coming to the special idea you know the projects at uh bogota marshall franklin there seems to be a notion now underlying that it's about air light ventilation and circulation which again appear ecologically they are of course ecological but they they seem to unite a kind of community gathering you know the spaces or circulation spaces these large volumes in in the franklin center these huge doors you know that really just open out and if there are disparate functions they seem to unite so how do you how do you see that this freedom of the pavilion if one could call it you know in the three pavilions at the kennedy center there's a new kind of freedom that is being explored through the fragment you know they're all fragments and yet they have a certain freedom how would you qualify that in terms of uh the expression well i think both in the in the in the case of the the the kennedy center the landscape the the the the ground and and what's happening below the ground and what's happening above the ground the ground plane the ground the landscape is also a social gathering space it's a primary aspect of solving the nature of the problem of adding you know when you got the program for a project like that there were a lot of you know rehearsal rooms that had to be exactly this size i'm sorry i didn't show a plan a proper plan in the talk but it's like it was a very let's say like a grocery list you know you have to have a stage that's 50 feet by 100 i mean so by by by introducing the concept of the landscape as primary and then under the ground and then these pavilions that come above that bring the light and air but also orientation one isn't let's say hamstrung by those sizes of the program pieces they don't then form whatever is the architecture which i think but most people you know they get a program and then it kills the the chance to do architecture you know lukan i i remember once statement he said the program is just so many bananas it's what you bring as an architect to the project that counts and that's the spiritual aspect and and and and you know dimensions that count so uh i'm i'm i feel that the idea that drives a design in the way that that landscape in one case is working or light coming down from above is working in another one that's very important amazing thank you if one could since you brought in lukan if one could look at the hunter's point library because it it kind of very gently looks over the fdr memorial you know by lucas it connects to manhattan it connects to you know and so while it situates itself and i think uh the fact that new york if i'm if i'm right and if i'm wrong please correct me uh new york really had a program to invite celebrated architects to create these kind of institutions it was a ten year program or something of that kind uh in which the hunter's point library was one of the programs you know on the queens and somehow it felt that that set of condominiums really needed a soul was that a thought that this library sitting pristinely on that landscape not occupying the landscape going vertical to resonate with the spirit of new york and also tectonic at one time that is just a structural form and the openings kind of reveal the sections you know the team the adult and the the sections and the openings also reveal the kind of movement and so it's very as frampton would call it a very tectonic form where there's a relationship of structure light and function and yet becomes a kind of a soul and a holding point to all these otherwise conventional conveniences was that a thought process or how did it really you know i i when i when i first got the assignment to do this project uh i drew a triangle and i'm sorry we have to remember to put that in the lecture there's a triangle uh of the city that connects the fdr memorial yeah and the un building by oscar niemeyer and lacobusier and this site it's almost a perfect triangle absolutely across the water across the water and i thought wow what an incredible sight because when you're in the library you can see lukan at the fdr memorial which is a fantastic project and you see the big in the the secretariat you see the u.n building which amazing history of new york architecture culture you know the story of there's a film about le corbusier and oscar niemeyer you know i knew oscar neymar because i had a brazilian wife once anyway i knew i met him three or four times and he gave me drawings that he'd done but you know that that scheme is really oscar niemeyer's scheme and there's a film by peter rosen that shows the truth that the role that oscar niemeyer played with lacobuzzier in realizing the united nations and it's a it's a touching thing because neymar was so young he he backed he backed off fighting uh whatever you know and but the building is very important in in the urban frame it's i believe it's as important as the empire state building or the chrysler building because it stands for something you know the belief in the united nations that to me is the most important thinking that we need to come back to today that we are all global citizens that the earth is one ecological system that we have to be you know someone says are you an american architect so i said no i'm a global citizen you know i'm not they say oh you seem like you're you're a european educated american i said i don't consider myself i consider myself a global citizen and i think we all are and that's why actually i'm so honored to be able to speak to india because it's the second largest population on the planet i mean i've been working in china with real ecological success i have to say they've been very receptive the projects you know realizing there are you know they're examples of what can do you can do for the future in an optimistic way it's amazing you know we have the technology you know we can do really interesting things in the future but we need the will the political will and i found it on several sites in several instances in china and i'd love to have the chance to do something in india i'd love to build that museum but you know the the thing is we're all global citizens now you know i did a project in beer ritz and i learned something because in beer it's a museum of the surf in the ocean and then we're going to have exhibits to talk about the ocean and the health and the mayor there you know who chose our project he said you know the fisherman and the surfers know that the ocean is in danger today we need to bring that knowledge to the public so i started to work there wasn't going to be just surfing exhibits in this there were going to be ecological exhibits and i started to work on the exhibits and i realized for the first time that every ocean on this planet is connected to every other ocean the water is moving and it takes almost a thousand years from one side of the planet to the other that that's this these sub currents and these laminar flows these complicated and if you look at these ocean movement of water that's the biggest example that the earth is a global organism and the humanity is part of it and that's how we have to change post covent means we've got to change we can't just go back to normal back to every day it's a wake up call for us you know and we should come to the future with the optimism that we are an organism and and we can build that way anyway wonderful since you brought in this notion of india being one of the epicenters now because of the population and the size um i'd like to stretch the imagination a little and overlap it with your early phase we were we were kind of we've been observing your trajectories from the 80s to now and i think you had also made a statement that in your earlier days you were a rationalist a very strong rationalist and that's the time we were also into morphology and typology in ahmedabad except and there was this whole notion of and then this whole experiential idea that that began to emerge in your projects was there a transformative move movement was it gradual how did you negotiate these two dialects this how did you negotiate well my personal story was i was trying to find an american equivalent of of the rationalists the italian rationalists that i could that i could find american typologies and morphologies and use that as a kind of building block but i was feeling that's very limited thinking and at that time there was a conference in banff that i was invited to and we were invited to ride a train from vancouver to banff which is a transcontinental canadian railway and on that overnight train trip there's a thing called the spiral tunnel where the train goes in on one side of this and it has to go in a spiral to get out to the elevation on the other side anyway i was seated next to a philosopher who was a specialist in merlot ponte who i've never heard of in 1984. and all night long we were talking about merlot ponte and what how these these principles of phenomenology could apply to architecture and i was thinking wow that's so much more open in terms you know open in terms of thinking than where i was so i often say that in 1984 i went through a transformation in that spiral tunnel when i came in on the east side it was a trying to be a italian rationalist but when i came out the other side it was much more opened up but that doesn't that doesn't mean that the principles of learning about typology are wrong that's you know learning about typology in the history i think it's fundamental to any art architectural education but i think especially in the future we need to be more open in terms of what what we might think that we can do absolutely if we if i can because you brought up this in the just two more questions you brought up this issue of the digital and the real book one is one is ephemeral one is virtual and the other is really embodied we experience it uh a common question which is generally said is that i mean i think your rubinstein and even the bogota projects are not built but the images look more real than real you know if one could call we're all suffering let's say there's no way out yes that's what's going to happen but we have to remember that's not the way to to begin a project you know nowadays in developer world you know these architects that are kind of obedient they'll whip up a very realistic image of some kind of building that has no idea about the section or the plan or the meaning of the building so in a way it's a that's a danger but i i just want to say it's there's you know the digital is a superpowering thing it can be a great benefit to architects you know i think that's it's a tool we it's transformed our field there's no doubt however the beginning of a project to have a soul and spirit has to start with the mind and the hand and one of the things i would say you know you once you have an idea that drives a design it can have a kind of spirit and one of the things that the the human brain can do that the computer cannot you know the way a computer works is it cannot access deep memory simultaneous to the processes that it's going through on the boards we have enormous power to do computational uh things and and and organizations you know kind of amazing okay and that's gonna go on with ai i mean we're doing a project working with ai uh with these people at icarbonx but the but the principle of creativity happens when you can access deep memory instantly and that's what the mind can do that computer will never be able to do so you know i mean that's the i think that's that's why the creative analog beginning is so important and we'll all use the tools there's no denying it you know i remember i mean you know when when the when the fax machine first came i was running my office on a fax machine because we were doing a project in japan and you could fax the stuff in at six o'clock at night and they would get it in the morning and i realized that the best if you were going in the future to be an architect if you wanted to have two offices you should put them on the opposite sides of the earth because you're 12 hours difference that means you can do you can do six months work in three months because the two teams can work on cycles and that was my principle why i started an office in beijing i mean i had to because the project was under construction but i said aha perfect 12 hour difference i don't need another office i have the basic and that's a principle about the digital power that we're using today to to be creative with it so i'm not against any of the tools but i'm totally convinced that the analog beginning is necessary brilliant and if one takes it from there i think there's a question from japan could stephen hall uh reveal to us his some parts of his design process you know the the idea the watercolor sketch the the iterative process with real models beside the digital the full size mock that happens could you could you just describe why is these are all tactile dimensions you know i mean the the the full-size mock-up is necessary to understand the materiality the reflectivity the the the coming together of different materials the the the glossiness the the the sort of the quality of the the supplier every building that we build we do a full-size mock-up fragment on the ground very important that's never going to go away i mean renzo piano does that it's that's important you know and and therefore when i do models sometimes i like to build the model the study model in the kind of materiality that that that we might be exploring but right now of course we have a gigantic 3d printer and that prints out models you know overnight so i use that too i mean i use that and then when we come towards a solution i might ask for a larger model in different materials but to me that's the joy of architecture i mean i don't get any joy out of digital rendering at all not at all in fact because there's a kind of company in china called ding dong they do our digital renderings overnight why would i you know get a joy in that i mean it's something you just nowadays you have to do it but it's not the the end-all and it's deceiving so we have to be careful the idea needs to have a heart and a spirit and the materiality the end materiality of a project has a tectonic a tectonic reality and that that's important amazing stephen there's a large number of young architects today watching the show and we know that some of your most seminal projects have come through competitions yeah even chiasma and i think chiasma was a turning point in life and were the glazelle and they've come through competitions and where most often you've had the courage to even redefine the program you know it's not listening to the competition as is given and those those are the ones we won by the way absolutely disobedience is important for an architect brilliant so how do you see how do you see listen i got to show you something yeah i was just making a list of all the competitions that we've done okay and we're we're just on our way to the 100 160th architectural competition wow congratulations but listen to this you know beckett beckett samuel beckett said that failure is a principle that an artist has to absorb and realize it's a principle failure you know fail fail again fail better you know i can't i can't you know quote him but 160 competitions and we won less than five you know in in the average you know i mean let's see there's a there's a number here at the bottom 34 wins okay in 160 competitions so look at all the failure there's a heck of a lot more failure than there is win and you got to be able to pick yourself up dust yourself off and try it again enjoy it now i actually enjoy competitions why because it's a place of experiment i don't try to win and that's that's probably why we've won some of them you know we we try to do the best possible solution you know and not necessarily be obedient to whatever they're asking for absolutely so i think that's that's that's that's an exciting thing about uh being a young architect today because you don't need a big office to do a competition you can do it with two people and then you know you can farm out the rendering and you can look just like kpf or anybody else because they're all using you know ding dong in china to do the rendering so have the idea that's the that's the key so suddenly the it levels the playing field in a way you know you know we're we're we're in a competition we're just entering a competition right now against two firms that have 300 people we're we're 33 people okay in two places and i never want to be bigger than that i limit the size but nobody's going to know that we're only 33 people because the renderings are going to look just like that 300 percent office so you know you could say that this moment that we're living in is a potential for young architects in a certain way and i think also i think that this this moment is open architecture can come from anywhere it doesn't have to be from architecture per se it can be inspired by music by by painting by sculpture that has a lot of potential and i also believe that people young people that are in school they want something that's that re reflects an optimism about the future that's why the the the first project i showed at the at the franklin and marshall campus they don't have any modern buildings on that campus you know the last building they had built before mine was a dormitory by robert a m stern with neoclassical columns and you know total postmodern building which nobody really cared for but you know it's all right but when we we we did this building they're they're big the students get very excited because this is a building that's optimistic about the future and i think that's the that's the message i think it's a positive one so pete stephen the last two questions before we close wait a minute wait a minute you already had your last two questions no okay the last these are the little oven one more question okay one more question and then you close uh i request you after the question close with your memories of visiting india so the last question because we talked of competitions and i've heard you speak about the fact that the unbuilt idea to you is as much architecture as the built you know and i've had a long conversation for over about 10 15 years with lebes on this was a strong believer that the idea and the expression of the idea even as a drawing is architecture but i remember that when it moved towards the light pavilion and the project of slice porosity which really facilitated that it could be built it finished after uh lebas's death but what do you have to say about this idea and the experienced reality where does where does it stand well levies and i agreed about that point in fact there's a there's a michael blackwood film about me and levi is having a conversation i think it's in 2012. i believe it's the year that he died in fact anyway it's an hour-long film that you can find on youtube um but we agree about the the idea as as central than driving the design and and having you know a way of anchoring meaning in architecture and i also agree with levies that the building doesn't have to be built i think that raymond abraham was also a proponent of that that in the architecture world of culture like you know like even in the world of music you can have a great piece of music and it's already great and maybe it can never be played in fact i built a house in korea based on a piece of music by isfan unholt that had never been played because it required 200 participant orchestra it could never be orchestrated so we built his score as a house with 55 skylights and his widow saw it on online and she said she sent me this letter she said you know i was shocked that my my husband's piece from 1965 inspired a work of architecture and it's built it's a piece that was never played in his lifetime so that's the power of an idea that that that's what i think is important and i i don't know i i think that that that that with that in mind by the way these competitions or whatever it is you do as a young architect you can never be discouraged because you're being creative and you have a you have a creative a model a creative object you know i'm here in my archive there's 3 000 square feet of models you see can you i don't know if i can turn this over there if you can see so this is you know maybe three quarters of those models are of unbuilt projects that were never built but they're they're there you know they're they're like unplayed musical scores and it's fine and i think the joy of architecture comes out of the creativity fabulous stephen so anyway and sort of i would have say this about india i still want to build that museum in mumbai so if someone knows anybody in any possible governmental position i'm you know ready to work we have the drawings we have the models neem is the director she you know would love to see it realized why can't we find why can't we break the political blockage and and do it it's a place of education you know for young people you know i mean i and then i will definitely be on a you know get back to mumbai which i and and do some more traveling there's a lot of cities that i want to see and i would love to see the stepwells that remain and and and i think those are worth fighting for they're amazing subtractive architecture anyway thank you thank you thank you stephen uh very grateful for this and let's be in touch and thank you very much thank you bye bye hour and a half

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Length: 89min 18sec (5358 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 17 2021