Welcome everyone. I'm Lindsay Wickstrom, a professor here at Columbia GSAP. It's a great pleasure to conclude the spring lecture series with a lecture by Dorte Mandrip. Dorte is a proclaimed humanist, someone who works towards the establishment of a more humane, just, compassionate and democratic society. Her humanism is a philosophical stance that is made legible in her architecture and her process of making architecture, anticipating the consequences of human action on the planet. She graduated from Denmark's R-House School of Architecture in 1991, worked and learned from Henning Larson briefly before founding her office in 1999. Since then, the collaborations and work that we'll see tonight have expanded and diversified in typology, site and team. But throughout this time, Dorte has remained steadfast in her search for the non-monumental, the counter-narrative, and the crafting of complex experiences. We're lucky to have witnessed her story in a recently released documentary called Another Kind of Knowledge. If you haven't watched it yet, I highly recommend it. In it, she shares her passion for drawing out the embedded intelligence of building materials, describing this process as the richest source of idea generation. In her work, it shows she is able to find an array of possibility in form and material stories from Danish thatched roofs and reparative Ukrainian limestone to Swedish mass timber and Navy seaplane parachutes. Experimentation and research have propelled the work to unique and surprising places, linking architecture to the fragility of deep geological time, interconnected with human stories, heritage, tradition, and culture. Rendering context through making and materiality has guided the practice to where it is today. Dorte has designed many types of buildings, from co-housing to museums to research centers and schools. She brings a particularly concentrated and playful spirit to placemaking, attentively imagining new forms and motion, play, and spontaneity in these spaces. Her exceptional awareness that good everyday architecture has the potential to transform lives for the better is especially potent in the way she makes spaces for children and young people. Dorte has cultivated a practice that relies on the gathering together of many voices. She emphasizes the importance of building a team with many experts and interests and remains very transparent about the way that her office functions. This point of view has enabled the practice to slowly grow to where it is today at around 86 people with more than 48 projects under her belt over the last 23 years, where she is now the title of creative director. Her sensibility for scale, site, and cultivated appreciation for difference have earned her in her office five UNESCO World Heritage Site projects to date and numerous environmental leadership awards. Among her many distinguished contributions she has most recently been elected to the architecture section of Akademi der Kunst, joining architects Peter Zuntor, Shigaruban, and Ann Lakaton to name only a few. Dorte's work challenges the profession to be more radical in our empathy towards each other and our surroundings. Her work asks us to spend more time listening and making to approach our contemporary condition with new levels of openness and curiosity. So please join me in welcoming Dorte Mandrop. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for inviting me here today. It's wonderful to be in New York and it's just as cold as in Scandinavia for the moment, so I feel at home. Can you hear me or should I check this up or it's okay? And thank you so much for the introduction, very nice. We like to talk about what we call irreplaceable places and it doesn't mean that it has to be unique places but it has to do with the thought of thinking of a place as something that could be irreplaceable or has a potential to be irreplaceable and that architecture in a way can underline that potential. So when we talk about irreplaceable places it's not always UNESCO sites or landscapes. It can be anywhere but it's much more about trying to create the irreplaceable or the place you could say. We are now 85 people in the office. We work very much in teams and we do believe that architecture should create an emotional and sensory impact but thinking of trying to solve some of the challenges that we think that architects should be a part of like trying to look into sustainability in a serious way not just as an add-on. We are also employing quite a lot of experts and very technical, technically advanced people in the office so we do believe that sustainability is something that we need to gain competence in and it doesn't really help to have the good intentions if we don't have the knowledge and the expertise within the office so that's what we constantly trying to gain. So today I will invite you to visit four actually very irreplaceable places. Three of them are UNESCO sites and one is a historic site in Berlin which has a great cultural importance. When you talk about the irreplaceable places in the UNESCO heritage term it's not only because of their beauty of course but it's also because they are important to the global ecosystems all of them in different ways and one of the places we'll go to is Iraq in Greenland in Arctic Greenland which is placed in the buffer zone between the UNESCO protected ice fjord and the ice fjord park and the town of Ilulisset. The other the next site is a peninsula rocket peninsula in Norway on the north Atlantic coast. This is also 300 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle but it's very different because you have the Gulf Stream running along the Norwegian coast which makes the climate much warmer and not at all like in there in Greenland and there's the Wadden Sea which is also a UNESCO protected site going all the way from Denmark through Germany to to Netherlands and the UNESCO site is of course mainly the beach area and our museum or visitor center is placed outside that zone and the last one is Anhaldabanhof the site of Anhaldabanhof in Berlin which has great historic importance. So if we start in the Arctic in Ilulisset as I said 300 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle on the west coast of Greenland close to the Disco Bay and Greenland is the largest island I think in the world. It's as large as Europe if you don't regard Russia as part of Europe and 80 percent of this is covered by the northern ice cap. So there's 56,000 people living in Greenland which is not more than a small provincial town in Denmark or anywhere else in the world and these they're scattered all over Greenland on the coast on the east coast and on the west coast. So these 56,000 inhabitants they probably don't have much impact on environmental challenges but it's one of the places Ilulisset is one of the places in the world where you actually see a very visually present climate change. The ice fjord is 25 miles long and is protected by UNESCO because of the unique phenomenon created by the rigid bottom in the ice fjord close to the to the Disco Bay. That actually makes the ice berks that are carved from the glacier stop and then you the whole ice fjord is kind of packed and then they will they will carve again and the ice berks will sail out into the Disco Bay. So the ice fjord center is a part of a competition that is hosted by the the Greenlandic government together with a Danish foundation the Realdania which is a philanthropic foundation that is helping cities and cultural heritage and in a way actually putting quite a lot of money into doing different projects around Denmark mainly but also here in Greenland. The glacier that is that you can see here in here this is actually the northern ice cap the edge of the northern ice cap. This is a picture in the summertime actually and the glacier here is one of the most productive glaciers in the world. So it's always been carving ice berks and and producing ice you could say but what happens here is that in the last last 20 years the glacier edge has been moving backwards to this to this edge here and it's very very visible that the ice cap is melting. So apart from this being an enormously beautiful place this is also a place where world leaders would go to where their own eyes see that climate change is actually happening. So even though the climate is truly very very extreme here and it's very cold in the winter time there's snow most of the year actually there's only a winter of June, July, August maybe without snow otherwise you have you have snow and you have wind and you have extreme temperatures but on the other hand this place has also been a place where the where the waters are extremely fertile because of the glacier because of the the melting of the glacier that actually brings minerals and other things into the water and then there's a lot of fish and the whole food chain is very rich here so people have been here since ancient times actually you can hardly believe how you survive in this climate without a heater but they but they did and since the 17th century the the Scandinavians has been here to hunt whales and and and other fish. So this is the Greenland's second largest town 5000 inhabitants and there's almost as many dogs 4500 dogs because this is the the means of transportation in the in the winter time along snow mobiles there's actually not a lot of road in Greenland because it doesn't really make sense and the main occupation here is is fishing and hunting and of course tourism is a really really important income as well. So the first time we came here, Raldénia and the and the Greenland government had a two-faced competition, international competition and the first time we came here it was a little bit disappointing because I thought that the site was close to was actually over viewing the ice fjord but since that was in the UNESCO heritage area that was not possible. So coming to the site you couldn't see the ice fjord unless you actually went to the to the very edge of the site and then you could actually see the ice fjord and this is a summertime picture and what you see here is constantly changing because it's actually icebergs that are packed and sometimes the waters are open sometimes they look like this. So part of the the scheme to us was to create a building where you actually had a possibility to move through the building and to and this is actually a picture from from this summer and you can move through the building by cantilevering the building over the edge of the of the site we got the possibility of getting the view past this big rock here and actually getting the view of the ice fjord as you move slowly move through the building and also revealing the dramatic ice fjord for the visitors that are not paying but actually moving across the roof and then out into the into into the wilderness. So in the Arctic there's basically no locally sourced building materials there's no forest obviously there's no temper there's no steel there's no concrete so there's no production of building materials of any sort. So another part of the scheme was to create a building that could be pre produced in Denmark and shipped in in the smallest amounts of containers to the site and as you could see this is a this is a picture from February also the waters are freezing so you can't bring material unless you do it in the in the open window of the summertime which is very short. So part of part of the scheme is very much about how to make a sustainable building on this site and to do it with the with the use of the least material and the most sustainable material of course also but also to create a building where you don't need a lot of big machines because there's no big machines in this area there's no the cranes are not all that large in a in a town of 5000 people you need to work with what you have here otherwise you need to ship everything which is not a great idea not very sustainable so so so being able to prepare this very thoroughly to make sure that we could we could ship everything in a in these containers and make sure that we don't we're not missing anything because otherwise you had to wait for nine months to get the next shipment up here so we prepared and we spent quite a lot of time doing every detail drawing over and over again you could say in test to make sure that when we actually produced this and shipped it we could also make sure that the building could be closed within the summer period of the two three months before the snow came so the the building workers could work on the interior for the rest of the year so so there was a longer time plan for this for the preparing and for the for the detailed drawings than in in other projects so another thing that is extremely important here is that you understand how snow is moving around with the wind the wind is is very strong here and it's not since the snow is of course falling the there's not it's not that there's an enormous amount of snow but the snow is moving around with the wind so one of the big mistakes done in the 60s and 70s in Nuuk the main city of of Greenland is for Danish architects to build to create shelter from the wind because that meant that a lot of the buildings were actually almost covered in snow in the winter time you could hardly get into the entrances and having a large build up of snow is of course very technically very bad for a building so so creating a building that was placed in the wind so we had the the least snow build up of course there's still a little bit with this boomerang shape we could we could actually manage not only to have a little bit of snow build up here and a little bit of snow build up here so so in that sense the boomerang was working really well and we tried it in a in a wind tunnel using a potato flower to see how it it reacted it's very lucky because most of the wind is coming from this direction it's and it's quite stable so with the building cantilevering of course to to be able to see the ice field but also lifted up on the ground mainly because we didn't want to we didn't want to blast more than necessary because the the the the fauna around here is extremely fragile and it takes a long time for it to come back if you are destroying it with the blasting or with with machinery so lifting up the building but that also meant that we could get the meltwater from the snow in the summer in the summertime away in a natural way into the lake down here so every time we design buildings I I think it's a motive that we we repeat is not just to repeat a certain motive but trying to create a public collective space or in a way giving back to the context a collective place that is not privatized and it's not in a way part of the building you don't have to pay to get up there and it's it's it's there for for everybody so creating the roof as part of the path of the UNESCO heritage site which is also used very much by the local community we could in a way give back this entrance to the UNESCO Heritage Park the possibility of of of walking up there and viewing for the first time the ice fjord and then moving on into nature so there's a there's a kind of gateway between civilization and and the wilderness here so another important I think emotional thing about the building is that the Greenlandic bedrock is the oldest bedrock in the world and this is where the Danish Greenlandic geologist discovered that the earth was much much older than we thought by investigating into this bedrock and in a way you could say with this billion of years time span on this on the site we in a way wanted to to pay homage to that by creating the building as a something that had a temporary character almost like an animal that is going back or a dead animal skeleton and and this fragility of the of the of the wood and the timber we think is is is very suitable of course is not supposed to disappear within a few years but but the expression of the building is is is much more fragile than this enormously old ground so in Greenland there's no real building culture that we could refer to since the the indigenous people of Greenland are nomadic and usually would move from from a summer hunting place to a winter living space we in a way and the everything you see in Greenland is is actually Scandinavian building tradition it's a woodhouse wood and timber constructions that is shipped from Norway and from from Denmark and I think the Greenlandic kind of culture there's they're painted very in very bright colors which is is quite beautiful in this vast nature but by not having a building culture to refer to in a way we decided to work much more abstract with the with the building expression as part of the part of the landscape or it's more about the tools about the kayaks or about the the lightweight constructions that you have in this area the kayak the tent and as you see here the the the ground is very this is a summer summer picture and of course it's just right after the building site is closed and the building is is opened but the in a way the the whole construction the colors and the and the and the the cladding and the and the colors of the surroundings are in a way emerging so by shaping this boomerang also we're creating a more intimate space on the interior of the building and on the exterior you have this kind of thrusting building which is reflected in in the pond or the small lake in front but but creating this gateway between the town and the park inviting people up to to walk on the roof and it's very very much in use actually i'm proud to say that people get married on on this roof and and so it's in a way to be quite touching that the the local community has really taking the building into into the daily life you could say so when you move up to the roof you see the ice fjord for the first time actually and as you could see this is a winter picture it's really much in use you can the the the snow is quite revealing lots of people on on skis and and walking and actually even i think there's i saw some bikes this summer also biking across it so so you you can start your hike from the roof and i'm moving directly on to the to the rocks and when you enter into the building part of the building is actually an open construction and the idea is that you can find shelter from the wind in the summertime and for the cold in the wintertime but that you have this possibility of finding shelter from both the eastern and the western wind so half of the building is covered is covered space so when you move into the building you enter into this quite closed rock which is almost like a cave you could say and and this is where you usually you will you will take off your shoes because you you have quite heavy shoes when you walk out in the snow also in the summertime you would have hiking boots on and so so you take off your shoes and your and your winter clothes here and then you move into the to the building to the this is the cafe area and the reception everything is kind of designed so one person can service the building also in the wintertime where there's not a lot of tourists and in the summertime it can expand and you can have more people working here so the exhibition is about the importance of ice and Greenlandic culture and it's it's kind of an overlap of very advanced technical means like the VR film here and and old-fashioned books and actually the books are very very popular I guess they're almost exotic now and and then there's a cinema inside one of the rocks that we we placed on the on the surface so they're kind of in very enclosed places and very open spaces here and here you see moving through the building you slowly get a view of the of the ice field in the center there's a the centerpiece here is actually an ice core and I think it's the first time an ice core has been exhibited usually there will be at universities of in Copenhagen there's a there's a big storage of ice cores this is where you can actually read things going on in the globe you you can see the industrial revolution and other big events happening around the globe in these ice cores it's quite quite exciting actually and here's the small pieces here of course representing different eras and the exhibition architect who we've been working with several times has worked with these glass cast of ice blocks from the from the ice field and using them as exhibition mantras and here the view of the of the beautiful area as you can see it's really in the winter time it's it's extremely frozen this area and in a way we wanted this building to also create shelter almost like a a beacon when you when you come from a walk and there's actually people also tourists coming here during the winter time so so having this shelter in this vast area also having it have in this in the winter time as a almost like a light tower or a horizontal light tower you could say what you see here is of course the snowmobiles coming back to the to the town and and in a way again being I think when you're in the Arctic it's it's the only place I've discovered where you really feel that if you walk in the wrong direction you might be dead and and it's I mean coming from Denmark which is everything is cultivated and and nothing is dangerous this is it's both very exciting but also very scary so in a way looking at this building as as the as the shelter in the in this enormous nature and of course the winter is it's dark the 30th of November you the sun goes down and you won't see it again until January but then there are other amazing phenomena that is worthwhile seeing so more and more tourists are here and the the building is actually open and this is not photoshopped this is how it is and of course it's much more amazing being there because this moves constantly constantly on the sky and changing all the time it's actually amazing but the sun comes back on the 12th of January 12 o'clock and then the the local community actually meets and also did before the building they were meeting here to celebrate the rise of the sun that actually rises for 40 minutes and then it goes down again but then of course in the summertime it never goes down which is absolutely magic and then so sitting on the roof or being on the roof to to celebrate this and the the building is kind of becoming part of this celebration which we're very proud of and this is what you see when you you take a hike into the area moving over this isn't this is actually from February yes so another active place a building that we still haven't executed executed it's a wrong word isn't it anyway we haven't built it yet but we under it's under it's on the drawing board we're doing the starting up with the detailing it's Andoja in in Norway on the Norwegian west coast also the Arctic but with a much warmer climate the reason this was also an international competition that we won and it's a this is a picture of the of this of the ocean bottom the sea bottom here and what you see here is the the small islands Andoja and Lofoten further down south and the reason why there is a lot of whales to be seen here is because of this ocean bottom because the big tooth whales need a lot of depth because they need amongst other other things they need to feed on big octopuses that are living in the bottom of of these valleys you could almost call them and you have almost all kinds of whales coming by here because they follow the the bottom of the sea to to actually navigate and the males are traveling from the the the north of the Arctic sea all the way to the Caribbean to mate and then they go back again and the most amazing thing is that they navigate along these edges of the of the valleys but also it's a cultural thing so they kind of learn from each other how to to to actually travel that long way so so Andoja is a is a place where a larger amount of scientists but also tourists come to take a boat because very close to the coast you can actually see the whales during their migration they're killer whales and sperm whales and all kinds of other whales here so the idea here is to build a whale visitor center for not for whales but a visitor center that is that is telling the story about the whales culturally and of course also from the natural science part and amongst other things this small island had a military base that was closed up and they are also in desperate need of employment here so part of this idea is also to create tourism or to enhance and underline the tourism in the area so the the building is initiated by a by a local group of biologists and local entrepreneurs you could say and then they they actually got the state to finance most of this building so this is the the the building site here and as you can see it's really quite small and the program was 6 000 square meters so almost covering the whole area and it was an area where also the local population would use for walks and and fishing and so forth so the program said that the edge of the of the island should be accessible for the public but otherwise there was no kind of limits to what we could do so the idea was in a way to create to look at the when you look at the the the crust of the earth and the ocean bottom there they are of course connected they're all part of the same surface so the idea was to underline that or to by by looking at the site as in a way as an earth crust that you could cut you could incise into you could cut into and by doing that you could create the building underneath the the crust of the earth and by doing that we could also create a new public landscape or plaza where you could view the ocean you can't actually see where else from here but at least you could you could look at the ocean from here and you went by rising up this hill you get a much better view and then working with the surface of the island in a way so it created the floor of the of the building and by doing that we don't have a base of the building everything is in a way following the topography of the of the surface so you only see the shell and not a big base and you get a very close relationship to the to the water on the outside here and by working with a curved glass we also get a quite robust construction because the wind is quite harsh here also and and the curvature of the glass is helping us with the with the wind pressure and also creating in a way a surreal view of the of the exterior the interior exhibition is is a mixture of art pieces of of very sort of haptic objects in one on one hand and then of course also working with a different advanced media inside the exhibition here so being this close to the ocean and the very harsh saline atmosphere we need to use concrete as part of the building actually we don't like to use concrete very much anymore because it's so unsustainable but we are working on minimizing the amount of concrete here and then we use the natural stone from the area to as a cladding of the of the building and of course making the roof publicly accessible we we are in a way giving backland that was taken to build the building and hopefully it will be kind of an important place for the local community. Now now we're moving down south to Denmark and this is in Riebe Denmark which is kind of on the edge you could say it's a very rural area and it's along the the the Wadden Sea and this the Wadden Sea is actually starting a little further north and goes all the way down to to Netherlands as I explained before and we've been lucky enough to create a trilogy you could say almost of Wadden Sea centers we are creating a seal center in in Laos in in Netherlands on the on the on the Dutch coast and we're creating a trilateral conference center for the Wadden Sea collaboration in in Germany in a in an on top of an old bunker from a submarine harbor from Second World War but I'll tell you tell you about that another time this is Riebe Denmark and the the Wadden Sea looks a little boring here it's just an open surface but the reason why the Wadden Sea is UNESCO protected is because all the migrating birds that are that are coming from the tundra in the north and from from Canada going migrating all the way to Africa are coming past this place because it's so fertile there's so much food here and so it has really a global importance in the ecosystem so birds and seals and different other animals are dependent on this place and the reason why it is so fertile is because of the the the tide and the very very shallow sea bottom so so you will have land for many kilometers when the tide is low and it becomes water when the tide is high and making the sea bottom when it's dry full of food you could say for these birds and this is darling magic it's called or we call it dark sun and it's it's the formation in the sky that these birds make when they when there's a predator close by and they will in a way try to confuse the predator by making these when they fly very close by each other so this is a phenomenon a lot of tourists are coming to see and it's in the spring and the fall mainly where the migrating birds are here and so there was a small center here that was focused on the migrating birds and they wanted to extend the center and they got this foundation that are which also financed the the ischelor center to finance a competition and that we were lucky to win so so there's something else about this area is that it's old viking area when they were not raping and fighting and going to UK they would actually have farms so they could also be quite peaceful times and this is an old it's not an old bike it's a reconstruction of a viking longhouse so where you use the such roof and rammed earth construction and of course the the timber as part of the construction and so this is the the reeds used for the for the roofs and it's actually grown quite close by and it's it's of quite high quality you can also buy reeds around Europe but this is first of all it's high quality secondly if you want it to be sustainable it has to be harvested quite close by so so you could say this is the existing center that we needed to extend and the extension was three times as big as the existing part but still we had to integrate the existing buildings into the new center which is quite difficult this is a building from the 90s it doesn't really relate to the area not to the building heritage you could say in the area or to in a way to the way you would make a farmhouse it looks like a farmhouse but it doesn't really relate very much to how the existing farmhouses look like with the very wrong proportions and and so forth on the on the other hand by reusing the existing buildings as much as possible we could also make it as sustainable as possible by not tearing down and and and so forth so the idea this is the existing buildings the idea was to integrate the existing buildings into the new buildings in a way in a embracing way you could almost say with the with the new buildings on the outside of the existing buildings but but then we had to have the entrance actually in the gable here because we're using of toilets and kitchen and and part of the old building without having to change very much in a way we were forced to to make the entrance into this part of the building and then there's a new education building here the new exhibitions integrated into the old exhibitions and a new boat house down here so as the vikings did we we wanted to try to to use the the the nearby harvested reeds as much as possible and we we really wanted to experiment with the reeds as a cladding not only on the on the roof but also on the facades and and on the overhang so we studied some of the dutch buildings that actually had thatched material on the on the facade but nobody had done the overhang before so so we we worked with this in a way almost like a surface or a volume of clay and and worked with these cards into the building both to to make the wind which is very strong here because it's absolutely horizontal to to make shelter from the wind and make the wind actually come over the house to create shelter in the in the center of the courtyards but also to work with the entrance and to to to enhance that quite strange placement of the of the entrance so it became natural so the the material and the and the site in a way the colors and the materiality of the of the area in a way patternates together you could say that so the building is in a way growing up from the the very horizontal surface the the reeds works very really well in this very saline climate because it's impregnated by the salt it's also helping the reeds to to be fire-proof so we use also salt as a fire protection and if if this was actually placed in a forest it wouldn't work as well because then the the the reeds will deteriorate much much quicker so lots of wind and lots of salt in the air then is really good for the for the cladding here so so in a way inserting these diagonal cards to underline the entrance awkwardly placed in the end of the building and and work with these diagonal lines all together to to make this grow from the landscape instead of being in contrast to the landscape and yeah and then of course also working very much with the connection between exterior and exterior a lot of exhibition buildings are these kind of closed boxes where you create your own atmosphere inside as but we really wanted this to be connected to the exterior so we worked with different connections and different ways of looking at the sky or looking at the in-framed part of the of the landscape here the existing building which was as you you probably could remember white and with the white wash done with a with a red tile roof we we were cladding in Rupina which is a european sort of central european quite sustainable timber or wood because it's extremely oily and it actually works like teak but you could actually harvest it in in poland and other places so this these trees are quite small and very skinny so and they also are moving a lot so you can only work with them in quite small pieces otherwise they will bend and and so forth but this is the cladding is non-treated and you can you can you can actually work with this without treating it at all okay it goes gray after some years so the interior is abstract and we try to in a way move back so the exhibition becomes more important than the materiality of the of the building here and this is the the last part of the exhibition it's called the departure and it's a it's an art piece which is a digital art piece trying to tell the story about the departing birds so berlin germany which is the only kind of city site for this lecture the anhala bannhof i don't know how much i mean now we're quite far away from europe but anhala bannhof was has a for europeans and especially for germans really heavy layers of emotion in the beginning anhala bannhof was the largest train station in europe and this is where people were coming from mainly from the south and arriving in berlin and a lot of liberals a lot of scientists a lot of artists coming to berlin during the weimar republic which was kind of it was kind of a center for for art and science in the in the 20s so they came through anhala bannhof it was later during after hitler took power it was also a backdrop for a lot of his propaganda receiving receiving people here at anhala bannhof and also very tragically this is where a lot of the transportation to camps went from so in a way it's it has both been good memories and certainly very very tragic memories around anhala bannhof then when the war when the wall came into berlin anhala bannhof lost its importance totally it was bombed during the war but then there was still ruins left and there were also trains coming and going from anhala bannhof until the the war which meant that the tracks were going into east berlin and in that sense coming from west it it was kind of meaningless and it was blasted in the 60s so not not during the war it was bombed during the war but but the remains were actually blasted during the 60s and and one of the things that's yeah one of the things is that there's only one fragment left of the anhala bannhof on the site which was actually saved by some a local architect that insisted that there had to be remains some something that could bear witness in a way to to all the tragic and stuff that had happened anhala bannhof so there's a small fragment left and there's an organization a foundation that private organization that is raising money to build a museum for exile here because the the meaning of being an exile has not really been explored in exhibitions it's mainly the the the holocaust that has been focused on but the meaning of being an exile and all the people that went into exile from anhala bannhof in 33 or very fast had to go into to exile so this museum which is also an international competition is about exile and with a focus on exile after 33 and so i'm going to to play a short video now which is one of the videos that will be in the exhibition it's it's a witness that are still survived that went into exile around 33 so this home will no longer exist and that's true you can't go back you can't go back because you changed yourself and because the home has changed homelessness homelessness the feeling of swimming in a empty room nowhere to belong and it means with the loss of identity that you no longer know who you are actually where you are actually a condition that you suffer for a lifetime yes that you have your own feelings even if they come afterwards not to a country but to a person that you don't have your feelings because you say yes but you say somehow unconsciously you say a homeless person has no right to feel something no right to have your own feelings those are found fictional feelings the real feelings you only had a home only there you could feel something that is a a terrible condition for a young person that you mistrust yourself and that you no longer have the feeling that you can be yourself it runs to the end so going into exile in in a way means floating in in the air without identity and without language without culture in a way leaving everything behind but also moving into absolute uncertainty so i mean you often think of exiled people as survivors and not as victims but but to but to to be forced into exile is a certain state of mind you could say that actually never actually changes and in a way is can be very very tragic so when you could say that when you look at this when you look at the site and you have this this is only part of the form of entrance protocol that you have left so the the extension or the enormous extent of the of the former building is no longer there and in a way you could say that the scale of what was there is actually not present but still the the the the fragment has in a way been bearing witness to so much and and it's so in a way what we wanted to do this is when you go through the fragment you only see a sports field and a new kind of public building down here but this this whole area was one big train station but so what we wanted to do was to in a way pay respect to that small fragment but not to to rebuild or not to build close to this to this building some of the other contestants were working with the with the with the scale of the former building and actually working with the fragment as part of the new building and we wanted to also represent the span of time you could say of this that has emerged since everything happened around Anhala Banhof and then the new building here so so creating in a way a plaza of of remembrance between the existing fragment and the new building was important to us since you cannot in a way you can't repair you can't rebuild history so so mainly the the new building is a backdrop to the to the fragment to to underline the the fragment and to make a new abstraction behind it so the the idea is that you have the the former entrance building here this is the what's left the small portico and so what we did was to work with the geometry so the backdrop itself were placed exactly where the entrance stairs to the to the tracks which were on the first floor of the building so so in a way entering into the building and moving up into the into the tracks has been part of the movement that we also wanted to recreate so so moving upwards without knowing where you what was going to happen in the future you can you can you can imagine how that would have been here so the the former monumental staircase here is where the entrance of the new building starts then the site there's an u-ban subway here and the site is actually smaller than the former train station was and you have as you can see a lot of foundations underneath the building here that might be still present we actually don't know yet but but by creating this this empty space you you also make a kind of space of reflection between you can enter also through the portico but you can enter along the the building here and then we created a plaza which is slightly curved so you move upwards and a little bit uncertain on your feet into the into the building and as you can as you can see maybe you can see it slightly here the the whole plaza moves from here and upwards to the first to the to the stairs to the exhibition here so the the large vault of the of the portico but also of the existing or the former train station we in a way interpret here in a building that that is not representing the former building but in a way representing the old buildings of transit you could say the the the train station the bus station the any any kind of place of transit so making this really really large span and making a building that has no kind of rest in this open large space so as you see here you have them the building moving upwards and by doing that we you can actually create a movement where you don't see the horizon until you you get up here and you can move up to the exhibitions here and then there's there's actually a space down here which is not part of the museum but is is part of the football field here and also part of the exhibition that tells about uh Anhala Panof and so in a way making this choreography inside the building where you moving upwards and you you have no possibility of understanding what will meet you and having these interlocking quite sort of intricate spaces so when you move around you have a feeling of being interfered you could say and so the facade is in many ways referring of course to the former building but in a in a new modern way with an open a filter between the interior and the exterior in brick and then you have the the very large span inside here moving on this soft softly curved floor so in a way exhibitions about exile has never been more relevant you could say there's there's never been more people on the move around the world of course Ukraine is one of them but Syria and and and and so many other people that are forced into exile so in a way you could say that you you could hope that this exhibition in this building will help to create an understanding of what it actually means to be forced into exile by from whatever reason thank you very much thank you so much darta um there's an incredible four projects i think i wasn't sure what you would share with us this evening so it was amazing to see them i think that there's such richness in the way that you see the site i think that was evident in the way that you told the stories and kind of unfolded all of the views of a place and perspectives that are existing in a place going way back in time and then also reaching into the future you spoke a lot about um accessing old knowledge and traditional knowledge and bringing that into a contemporary space and one one kind of touching moment i think when you're really finding a lot of formal opportunities with the material stories that are present or not present in the case of Greenland i was curious to hear a little bit more about your process for unfolding or learning about those kinds of constraints i noticed also that a lot of the projects had photography and images that felt like things were very tangible and real and the materiality was very present you could tell that had weight already in the in the presentation whether it was built or unbuilt and i was kind of curious to know how do you design the process for considering these architectural options or experiences and honing in on really the right story when it comes to these kind of physical constraints of a project well i think we have a quite slow process and i think this is why competitions isn't it is never a good commercial thing to do because we spend quite a lot of time in a way to try to excavate a site to to find something that we could use to bring the project on you could say so so we would usually collect a lot of information we will also try to work with experts with the lulissette we work with the mini-grossing the geologist with the whale we work with a biologist that was specialized in migrating whales and in a way you know you try to find knowledge around a project in a program that that can in a way give more depth to the to the to the building to the form to the materiality i think i find it really really difficult just to create shape kind of out of nothing because there's no you know you need to create a frame that can in a way direct you so i but we spend a lot of time on collecting and a lot of the information we we get from a site or history or whatever is maybe not useful so it's kind of yeah it's not a it's not an effective way of working i would say but then of course there's a lot of intuitive choices to be made but then what we would do would also try to create you know a challenge that we need to to solve and then we we would test the different concepts up against these set of challenges you could say so it's kind of a slow moving inwards from lots of information to to concepts and i we try i try very much also with the sort of younger architects in the office to to prevent that there is a there's kind of a certain shape or form or object created before we know what we really will find is important so so we usually we say don't fall in love until you know you know who you're going to marry or you know so it's a it's it's kind of a yeah it's kind of a time consuming process and it seems like you've spent a great deal of time navigating how to arrive at those particular projects throughout your practice and working with clients who are interested in that process i think instead of effective maybe efficient is the word that we don't like yeah i think this idea of working with young people too is really inspiring and interesting especially when it when you're engaging both the past and the future you're reaching back and also trying to anticipate what the future is kind of bringing or hosting those kind of questions of the next 20 50 100 years you know especially in the case of exile in the last kind of slide that you shared you know is there a kind of is there a moment where you felt really surprised by the outcome through this kind of consensus building on the team where the possibly new knowledge that's arising or coming out of certain contemporary events is driving a project in a certain direction that you might not have anticipated um well i think uh with the eluniset project i think what we expected was um or we feared you could say is that you know you have a you have a you have a foundation from denmark in a way paying a lot of money to build a building in green and what we um yeah our worst fear was that the building would not be part of the local community or they so i think um we tried a lot to um also to discuss this with the with the client you know that we need to to we need to have this roof and you know because that was the first part of you know cutting budget would be would you know maybe we don't need that roof because it's not you know it's not a necessity um and so we've been we were fighting a lot to keep this roof and and and i am actually surprised that um it is so much part of daily life and from the first day people just you know when i was there and last time i was there in october um you know people come you know from work and they would go for a walk and they just immediately just went up on the roof as part of the which was a natural part of their walk and that was i didn't anticipate that i didn't expect it to be so so naturally kind of um embraced by the local community so i i hoped for it but i didn't think it would happen maybe so yeah yeah yeah um i'll i might ask one more question but i would also invite any questions from the audience um i think we have a mic going around so please raise your hand and interrupt me um i could probably stay up here for a while i uh i'm curious you know um to hear a little bit of what you think about sustainability i think in the beginning you mentioned a sentence about it not being a kind of add-on and it is to me similar to the argument of the public roof we're trying to describe these intangible values that have time and people and qualities that are difficult to measure and difficult to draw and i also was thinking is this why you present a lot of photography is it feels the most tangible how do you find this kind of um this kind of ephemerality being projected or i don't want um or shared or taught in in these kinds of this difficult time the moment i i guess i mean to me um um i think sustainability i mean the climate challenge or um is so urgent now so in a way it should be shaping architecture much more than it is actually shaping architecture because sustainability is it's in a way um i mean the materials you can't use i think um which is not sort of morally morally sustainable i mean there's there's things you i don't think you can do anymore even though it's aesthetically pleasing um or a wonderful material you know there's i think there's so many things um that you have to take very very seriously now so there are um there's just things you can't do anymore and um no matter how much i would love to build an in situ concrete building somewhere it's just not possible and i think that kind of um understanding um is is far too slow in a way there's a there's a there's a will around globally that we should be sustainable but i mean it's just not uh it's not far enough it's really um it has to move so much faster and there's just things we can't do anymore um and you know but i'm in that sense i'm really worried um i think that like you say times are very worrying for the moment and um climate change is one of them there's also kind of a good political instability in a way uh emerging that i think is a very uh worrying yeah and you also teach do you does this conversation come up often with students yeah well i teach in uh in switzerland and um in mendricio and um it seems like concrete is the only material that they know um and uh and i think there's there's a i understand that in a way in scandinavia uh because since the oil crisis there's um there's been kind of um um quite uh hard work to kind of bring energy consumption down uh in the in the use of buildings but i think the the the imprint of co2 when you actually built hasn't been very uh important uh but it is now and i think when you go to switzerland it's actually um it's it's it's actually hasn't arrived yet right so i'm trying you're going are there any questions from folks i'm sure it would be yeah great well i have a dumb question that we have discussed before no questions are dumb before the lecture starts um is the modern sea visitor center the group of modern sea visitor center it's all consists of three or there is a structural base underneath uh yes i'm uh because of fire risks uh you need to have um an underroof which is a a a a roof that will not protect the reach from fire but um ensure that you don't don't get oxygen in right because the the when reeds are are burning it's mainly because there possibility of having oxygen otherwise it's actually much less fire dangerous than you should think so there's a there's a roof underneath to protect the building from fire but in in a traditional construction of reeds you wouldn't have you would only have a a wood construction an open wood construction um allowing air uh in underneath which also keeps the reeds healthy um but you need an underroof especially for public building otherwise it's too risky is that another a good answer or an answer that's a great question but but i can with the modern sea center there was the existing buildings was um actually made of steel frames so the the outer cladding was just a cladding there was no it wasn't a it wasn't a construction actually the tiles they were just a cladding so so the steel frames we continued also to be able to use the existing frames as they were and but then the rest is is kind of a lightweight timber construction based on that building and this kind of question have you had this question before are other folks trying to you to build off of this demonstration project of thinking about new types of fat troops and contemporary buildings well there's i mean the the thatchers in Denmark which is only like about 40 people they were really happy with this building because and they were they were so great they they worked very sort of they they really wanted to help us with the experiment and they in the end the the company that won the bid had to take all the other thatchers in because otherwise you know it's quite a big building as so after this there has been kind of a small rise in thatching modern buildings because usually it was you know it's very sort of traditional old fashioned not part of an abstract way of thinking yeah was that beautiful yeah yeah i think i think it's interesting i mean it makes me think about places that might consider that kind of system that might not have that tradition i mean i think someone you know interrupt me if you have a question i'm just gonna keep going so one one question based on the straw roof is what about a place that has less tradition or less construction knowledge or there's a kind of need to build up a new history or build up a new identity of architecture how do the and we kind of live in this global world where materials are moving all across the planet and knowledge is moving all across the planet and we as people are also kind of from many places and how do you think of this kind of translation of practices like that in bringing them into other types of climates is there a kind of ethical or right and wrong like climatic performance i don't think there's a right and wrong but i think there's you need to be extremely thorough to understand your your building techniques and your materials i you know i guess what is absolutely crazy is bringing you know modernism into the desert you know with glass and steel buildings and and cooling them down you know it's in a way there's a there's a kind of common sense i think in using building techniques that has to relate somehow climatically and so no right and wrong but i think there's there's a thorough investigation into materials and and of course the thatching i mean using reeds is really there's a lot of knowledge in this i mean you can't cut the reeds for example because the capillary effect will actually suck water into the reeds if you do the different things that you need to be very certain of which doesn't have to do necessarily with tradition or but it has to do with knowledge i think yeah you know wisdom um questions oh great Eric please um thank you doctor for this amazing lecture um so much of your work has to do with a kind of immersive quality within the landscape and in the representation also kind of really emphasizes that and i remember your Cornell students also they somehow you know were inspired by that too but what about the conversion i mean there's so much technical knowledge that goes into your work so many detours and if inefficiencies we've heard about arguments probably they were never going to hear about you know sitting down with a building inspector and convincing that the that's roof will work or the client at the roof will work um and but in the presentation of your work we see the kind of the finished project or or very elegant simple diagrams that are probably i mean i'm not sure if these are the ones you used to convince people um can you give us a little hint uh some glimpse of the back of house like what happens at door to mandra that you know you didn't show us today some aspect of like the struggle because otherwise it just looks like perfect tennis yeah it's uh it's uh yeah we lose a lot of competitions and we also um we also lost a lot of projects that you know that we won and then you know so i think there's um um i think that's probably the worst about being an architect is everything all all the all the good ideas that you can't convince anybody on on doing um but i i i i know actually um i think it's a lot of struggle i think we uh we spend a lot of time struggling and and um and the success rate of you know just going there to get stuff i mean where stuff is actually realized is not that high you know i mean it takes it takes a lot of failures we have you know we have this uh we have this shelf in the office uh with all the the failed projects that you know they're up for sale like you can get them for 10 percent or 20 percent no i i i there's a enormous amount of projects that are not uh hasn't been realized and and um my question is like you specifically about these projects like the moment you know what did you show the clients at the beginning oh how do you okay how do you get that you know how do you get yeah um being very stubborn i guess yeah um no i i think that the uh i mean you need a good client uh to um you need a client where you have uh i guess chemistry i think with these two foundations or with these two buildings that we actually did for this foundation uh raltenia or with those as you know they are very active uh investors uh very active um you know during the competitions being part of competitions actually being a client uh and and there's another foundation in in danmark that we that has other ideals i guess that we we can never win a competition with them i mean there's also it also has to do with them with common goals i guess and um so i think you in the end i think you know choosing the right client if if that was possible to to choose your clients but at least you can choose who you don't want to work with so you don't spend so much energy um that is wasted anyway so in in the end the client is all i think it's everything yeah yeah i've i've had really bad clients too so so and you can i mean you could never you can never realize anything with a really bad client thank you for the lecture um and it was really interesting to see the very first project where he talked about a very um challenging condition of bringing all these materials to a site that doesn't have things available then you ended with a project that sort of showed the ruins of an existing stoic uh structure so i'm curious if there has been sort of a shift in how you practice especially in the context of sustainability you're always giving back the land that you've sort of built on um and you have these very complex assemblies of buildings but do you ever think about in the design process how these things might eventually get deconstructed because i feel like in the practice we really think in the sense of constructing and we try to think about the negation of the building's carbon footprint or what not while it lives but we're starting to see a lot of these buildings sort of reach the end of their lifetime so when you design these new projects how do you approach that concept of sort of inevitability in the built world yeah the the idea of buildings being built to be deconstructed again is is a kind of fairly new thought i think sort of in general and we haven't we haven't been working very much on that i mean but we work very much with the flexibility of a building being um flexible enough to be used for different things in the future you know there's this kind of idea that you know the old factory buildings that you see getting transformed and reused again and again is because they have a really really simple construction a large spans lots of ceiling height and you know making these kind of general spaces that you could you could use for almost anything i mean and enough daylight and so forth so i think there's a i think there's a i think we are much more preoccupied with flexibility sort of future use flexibility and how not to create spaces that are too defined or programmed or built for a specific purpose but has the possibility to to be transformed into something else but i i do agree that the the building for disassembly is is also a knowledge that is interesting i think and it's an interesting thought but i think it's much more important to me to build sustainably i mean to actually transform if you can you know what's there and to to build in a way so you have a flexible building that can be used for many things in the future and of course to use sustainable materials and and and and energies consumption and and so forth but and it's not just to make it you know more sustainable than yesterday i think we have to be as radical as possible now because it's just it's just really really urgent great question other questions thank you for your lecture it was amazing my question is about your kind of engagement with the topography and the ground plane and like the ground surface and you showed the project in greenland where it's elevated at points but then the project in Norway where it's actually directly engaging with it and i was kind of struck by the images in the greenland project of like the before and after of the site with before it was super like rich in in plant life and afterward i mean it will come back but there was definitely like a lot of dirt and debris and i'm just curious because i know that obviously there are a lot of issues that happen when the architect passes things off to the contracting team and the builders but i'm just curious like what what how you reconcile like your design with the actual construction and the impact of it on the ground and then yeah any any thoughts about that because i feel like that's something i think about a lot is like this this issue that construction by its very nature kind of tears things up so just curious to any more yeah it's um yeah we i guess you know using as as little machinery as as possible blasting as little as possible i mean all all of these considerations was really part of the planning of the building site and and it is true that when you see the first pictures right after the the building site was kind of you know closed down and the building was open looks really you know like an explosion has been there almost but it's also because the the time of the year i mean when you go to greenland in the summertime you have this it's called arctic cotton you know you have these white cotton fields almost all over and you know so there's the changing of the year also and hopefully you know next year you'll have a much greener site but but but it is kind of devastating just to because you know it takes so much longer in the arctic than anywhere else yeah yeah you yeah thank you are there any other final questions that's a great question i mean i think that we're ready to um say good night but i wanted to just thank you so much for sharing your practice with us and for sharing the evening so thank you dorthy thank you and good luck with your final


Welcome to this talk on funk whale and the importance of decentralized podcasting. It's just something that I'm doing as it's just a little outreach thing. So who am I? My name is Kieran Ainsworth. I am a member of the Funk Whale Association who are the officers of the Funk Whale platform. We have been developing it for a few years now. I joined Funk Whale a couple of years ago as primarily a documentation writer. So I installed Funk Whale after looking for some self-hosting tools and I approached the project and said your documentation isn't particularly great. Would you mind if I helped rewrite it? And from there on I've kind of got more and more involved in different bits of the project. So I've been doing a lot of work with front-end development, documentation, community management and my role on the sort of board is that I'm a member of the steering committee, which means that I am responsible for helping with development of roadmaps and sort of research and development into different features that we might want to add at some other time. So what is Funk Whale? First and foremost, as you can see there, very nice little sort of interface design. Funk Whale is essentially a music and audio platform to put it very, very basically. But more specifically it is a free and open source project. It's a self-hosted server software with a front-end web application for playing music and the thing that kind of sets it apart is that it is federated. So it's built on the same software as other federated applications such as Mastodon, Plarama, PixelFed, PeerTube, Real2Bits and all the others. We all use the same software to interact with one another something called the ActivityPod Protocol and basically it just allows us to be a bit more interactive with other Funk Whale servers and also other software in the Fediverse. And when Funk Whale started up, it was primarily focused around music. The name comes from the fact that the original developer of the software Agat Berlio wanted a free self-hosted version of Groove Shark, something that she could put music into and then create playlists and radios from. So that's kind of where the pedigree came from. We come from that music background. But nowadays we're focused on many things. Music collections are still part of it but we also have audio publication tooling and content sharing as part of our sort of genetic makeup. So a little while ago we were looking at our roadmap. So around about September, October 2019 we started to look seriously at where did we want to take the project. At the time we had just moved away from having Agat as essentially the benevolent dictator for life and we're looking at moving towards a more democratic system of governance where we would ask the users to provide us with insights and sort of guidance on what they would like to see in the platform. And when we started approaching them with options, one of the things we found was that podcasting was a very, very widely requested feature which was something I don't necessarily think we were expecting but it was definitely something that people were very interested in. At the time, the Fediverse in general lacked a proper sort of platform for things like podcasting. We had music, we had, so I'm just going to adjust my volume, somebody's saying it's a little bit low. We had music, we had video, we had things like microblogging and we had image sharing but we didn't have podcasting. So that was something that people seemed to be quite interested in. So when people came to us and sort of suggested that, that fitted in quite nicely with another thing that we were looking to do in general which was content publication. So we sort of looked at it as an opportunity to develop an entire new structure, not just around podcasts but also around music publication. So that we were moving away from just hosting your CD collection and maybe some bits and pieces that you had done yourself to actually publishing the content and putting it through to the Fediverse directly. So that was kind of the background as to why we got into podcasting in general. And very quickly we saw that there were going to be a lot of challenges with this particular bit of work. The biggest one really was we as a collective didn't really know all that much around podcasting. None of us were podcasters. We listened to podcasts sometimes but not very often. I myself only listened to a few. So we very quickly realized that we were going to need to approach people who did this sort of thing all the time. We were going to need to ask people who knew about this stuff, had sort of experience working with lots of different bits and pieces in the current climate in order to build something that fit with their expectations and also addressed some of their frustrations, anything that frustrated them. The other problem was, as I mentioned before, we are a music publication platform or we were a music hosting platform. So this podcasting and publication stuff was not in our DNA. It required quite a lot of architecting on the back end to really get something that would work for publication. We needed to kind of rethink a lot of things because we had been making assumptions about audio in general based on music collections, which of course is a very different thing to podcasting. The other thing we didn't really know or understand was what should it look like from beginning to end for a podcaster to publish something. We kind of understood it for musicians. It was a bit simpler. You know, you'd have albums and you would have tracks that go in those albums, but we didn't really know all that much about podcasting. So in order to get that information, we decided to form a podcasting task force, as it were. And this task force basically consisted of members of the Funkwell Association and a group of people from the podcasting subreddits, from the Fediverse, people who made podcasts all the time. And we basically brought them all into a chat room and we said, okay, so if we're going to design this, what do we absolutely need to do? What do we need to hit? What do you want to see? And what would kind of encourage you to come over to using our software to publish your podcasts, if that's something you would like to do? And it was something, the other thing we needed to work out was, you know, we didn't really have an insight as people who didn't publish into what the competition was doing. So I say the competition, what other people who made this stuff were doing. So we very much needed to get that information from a firsthand experience and sort of pull that in to make sure that we were doing it correctly. And what we found was basically podcasts are hard. They're quite complex things where especially the, particularly the complexity exists on the back end. It exists within the software, but the user should be really getting a very simple front end to do things with. So we found that basically, whereas with music, Funkoil really didn't handle a lot of the more complex stuff like tagging. We let music brains handle that. If we were going to be publishing, we needed to start actually taking on board that complexity and sort of facilitating it in our publication layer. And podcasts of course offered a slightly different way of doing things because there was less metadata to be included. And it was less sort of cataloged than something like music. The other thing that was very, very strongly put forward by the people who we talked to was that there exist in the podcasting world standards. We have certain ways of doing things and that has to be retained no matter which tool we use. So for example, we need to use RSS. We absolutely have to include an RSS feed. Images need to be correctly sized. The RSS feed must be consumable by tools such as iTunes and Apple podcasts, which means we have to include certain fields that only exist for iTunes and Apple podcasts. The other thing we kind of came to realize was that people were going to be using us as a podcast publication tool, but we also needed to act as the podcatcher. Because our sort of current makeup at the time was to be a music hosting tool, but also an application which played music. We needed to give that same experience for podcasts. It needed to be that people could publish content, but also take the content they already liked and put it into Funkwell. And then the last sort of big thing that came from this was the sudden realization that if you're going to have two or more servers talking to each other a lot more, you're going to need to really strengthen the moderation tools that you have in place. Especially when we're talking about user-generated content, the scope for abuse on that is quite significant. So we needed to give users tools to be able to report things. We needed to give people tools to be able to block certain stuff. We needed to give administrators the ability to use things like enable lists so that they could prevent federation with certain other platforms. And we needed to give them the ability to ban users, take down channels, that sort of thing. So this was a whole lot of architectural design for podcasts, which was really the podcast that drove us to it. And what we came out with was basically a hybrid of a traditional podcast overview and a Fediverse channel. So in our world, we have podcasting channels and music channels. And from what you can see in that screenshot, it gives some basic information.  We can split things up into series, which was a big request that people had was the ability to create different series within the same channel. We have the ability to subscribe, which I'll go on to in a second. And obviously if you're the channel owner, upload new content to make sure everything is working as expected. The important bit here that we have is the information about what's in that channel. So in this channel, this is mine, ignore it, it's terrible. But there's one episode and it's been listened to 13 times. And this was important information that we sort of worked out was needed in order for people to get a grip on like how are people interacting with my content. But taking that on board, we went ahead with the subscription capabilities. And as you can see in the screenshot, we have kind of three options in every case. The first is if you already have a Funkwell account, you can subscribe using your Funkwell account to that channel. And it will be one of those things that appears in your feed when a new episode is uploaded, you'll get notified that there's a new episode in the front end. The other thing you can do is subscribe via RSS. So going back to what we were saying earlier, we put a lot of effort into making sure that our RSS feed was compatible as much as possible and that anybody could go onto a sort of an open Funkwell channel and subscribe without having to sign up to Funkwell. Because one of the things we very quickly realized was we don't want people to feel like they have to sign up. We want people to be able to enjoy the content no matter what. And that really should be up to them where they listen to us, whether they listen to us on Funkwell or some other podcatcher. And the last one is subscription via the Fediverse. So that enables users to follow a channel in much the same way that they would follow a mastered on account or a plaramo account or something similar. So we're trying to hit all sort of boxes there of how you can keep up with somebody's content. The other thing that I've been doing some work on recently is more front end stuff. But it's just making sure that we sort of point people towards adding new content where possible either by themselves, creating new channels or subscribing to things via RSS or via the Fediverse. So really pushing people towards that more sort of creation element. We want people to create. So that's with the basics in place. This was the development work we did over the past sort of year or so. It's been a wild ride. There's been a lot of content that's gone in. A lot of changes made. There's still some changes to come. The most current release doesn't have some of the newer tools that are around podcasting such as dedicated podcast searching and sort of wider accessibility of subscription tools. But we're not finished. There are still things, there are still items on the roadmap that we would like to complete and still items that are not currently on the roadmap which may need to be added in future to really help us to get involved with podcasting more. Because what we found is this is a market that we very much have enjoyed working in. And it's one that actually has proven quite popular with people. People see Funkwell as a podcasting platform now. Even if it was originally supposed to be music, this is how it's kind of evolved. So what do we have to kind of consider next to take Funkwell to the next sort of level of being a proper sort of alternative to what's currently out there? The first thing that strikes me as necessary is Funkwell currently allows you to import RSS feeds from external podcasts. It currently allows you to follow podcasts on the Fediverse, on Funkwell, and it currently allows you to publish your own. But what we don't have at the moment is any way of finding external podcasts. You still have to leave Funkwell to go and find the RSS feed that you're looking for. You still have to go and see where things are. Go and find them on something like iTunes or Feed or Spotify and grab the RSS feed and bring it back to Funkwell. Which of course from a user experience point of view is not great. It's basically meaning that Funkwell is not yet the one-stop-shop podcast that we might want it to be. So one of the things that I would quite like to see come in in future is podcast discovery for an external sore front. I have built myself a kind of proof of concept of how we might do this using the iTunes API. But there are different things out there such as feed and others that we might want to consider looking at. The other thing is an improved sort of publication workflow. At the moment the publication workflow it works. Things go in. You get a podcast out of it. It generates an RSS feed for you. But we have had people raise issues with it specifically around how do I edit metadata during that upload process. The problem I think is because of the way we designed the front end it was more in line with how we'd worked with music previously. Which is to say upload many files which have been previously tagged and just kind of let them be. Whereas of course if you're doing an upload of podcasts you want to basically upload an episode. Title it, tag it, put some artwork with it, give it a license, do all of that stuff and then move on to the next one. Or if you know you're going to be uploading multiple episodes of a series you might want to have a tool say that you can put them all in a series and say number them automatically. At the moment we don't have that. If you upload multiple things a pencil icon appears next to each one and you can click through them and edit them all but it's not very obvious how you do that. So that's been raised as something that needs to be addressed and we've had some designs submitted for how we might go about doing that which looks to be a lot better. The other one is something I'm going to come on to in the second part of this and that is the introduction of links to donation services. At the moment hosting your podcast on Funkwale is great but it's the same as hosting it anywhere else. What we want to be pushing people towards or encouraging is this idea of supporting people who create and the best way to do that in our eyes is to promote the idea of donation services and promote the idea of helping to support the podcast that you like. We don't want to be a payment handler obviously but we do want to help make it a lot more visible when there is a service that you can actually put money towards. And the last one it's been on the road map since channels were introduced it's very very complex. As somebody who does not work on the back end I don't really have the technological knowledge to go into it but there is this idea of channel claiming where if somebody uploads some music to a channel and it's not their music the person whose music it is should be able to claim that channel and take control of it. As you can imagine that's a very very complex thing to do particularly over federation because you have all of the different implications of the wider fediverse to take into account there. So it's our biggest boon it's also our biggest challenge day-to-day is working with that federation. But that moves onto my next point which is all about sort of decentralized podcasting. This may seem like a strange concept to people who do podcasting because podcasts are decentralized by design really. I didn't know a lot about podcasts going into this as I say it was a very much a learning experience but the more reading I did into podcasts as part of the research that we did for this the more fascinated I became by how they work and how they're set up and the thing that struck me was podcasts have this they occupy this unique space of being very very disruptive low tech you know certainly audio podcasts video podcasts as well sort of disruptive low tech standards compliant ways of communicating a lot of information. So podcasts can be hosted anywhere as long as they generate a valid feed anybody can capture them into a podcatcher and play the files linked using a relevant piece of software. That means that the the potential listener base is enormous much more so than you know anything based on you know a single platform a centralized platform and this was one of the reasons that when we were designing the podcast publications tools we were so emphatic about being a part of that existing infrastructure making sure that we didn't try to sort of lock people into our way of thinking but instead follow what podcasting was already doing because it already seemed pretty great we had you know things like rss feeds we had sort of good encodings being used like mp3 which could be so widely used it's it's kind of ubiquitous at this point and that's kind of a really important part of it and the reason that this came to my attention was during some of the conversations we were having with podcasters and specifically when we were looking at funkwell as a podcatcher so something that consumes rss feeds and plates them back um somebody had said something about a specific podcast i think it was called the the last podcast on the left and they said basically it's a shame i won't be able to play this through funkwell because they are going spotify exclusive and so they're not producing an rss feed anymore and this worries me slightly um it's a concerning kind of trend away from what podcasts stand for from from from my understanding of what podcasts stand for um because when you go exclusive to something like spotify you have the introduction of drm and sort of um you're sort of creating a walled garden around content and certainly for content that used to be free and and open so you know it used to follow the same rules as everything else for it to suddenly go into a platform specific um publication is a big break and there are a couple of reasons for this but the primary one is let's say that with podcasting the only limitation for a user is that they have a machine that has software that is capable of of listening to that podcast it's capable of reading the feed and playing back the the audio that's your limitation if you put it onto uh something like spotify you actually divide this into four four different experiences the first two are users who live in a country that have access to spotify um and those people will have two experiences one they will either listen to an ad supported um uh version of the show and the second one is that they pay for a um a subscription to the actual um the actual podcast uh sorry to the actual um um uh platform then you have people who go into other or live in other countries um which don't have spotify served up to them and those people have more experiences one is that they have to pay for a vpn and uh basically access spotify externally using the ads and then again access externally using a subscription and then there's that lost fifth one which is they don't have the money for any of this so they can't listen so we fractured the user base by centralizing the um uh by centralizing the content into a certain place and the problem with something like spotify is at that point when you've done that and you've taken that sort of um you've taken that decentralized nature away what you have left is not a podcast it's essentially corporate radio and like i say for something that started off as a podcast there's something that started off freely available having it move in that way is somewhat concerning but at the same time we have to look at why does that happen and generally the answer is podcasting is expensive um everything that takes up people's time is expensive and podcasting from the little i have done of it is very expensive you've got to take the time to script and record and edit and work with you know all about audio and video you've got to find a place to publish it you've got to do all of the um you know promotion around it and if you are looking to make money off of it you have to search around for uh you know sponsorships and and ad deals and things like that so when a company like spotify comes along and says we'll take all of that complexity off of your hands we'll give you a good portion of money um to pay your staff and to to make you make sure you can make a living it's very very tempting um and you can kind of understand why it happens and one of the things that we kind of found was that um the free software community in general is not always the best equipped to deal with that kind of thing we don't um we can't make a counter offer to that um our weapon here and what we can do about this is as i've said before kind of try as much as possible to make it easy for people to make the decision to continue listening outside of those platforms make it easy for them to continue to support their um their favorite podcast directly um which means lowering the sort of barrier to entry for um payments lowering the barrier of entry for sharing for supporting for for getting things out there um but it's an inherently sort of difficult thing to to come up against and something that you know we haven't found the answer for yet um it's something we've done discussions about um how we how we might help podcasters support themselves how we might help people support podcasters uh and musicians as well as this stretches to all areas um but the answer is is is a difficult one it's not one that sort of um you know comes very easily um now i've purposefully sort of left this i think i've got it exactly half an hour that's good i purposefully didn't want this to go on for too long um it's it that's kind of the journey that we've had um the first thing is podcasting is fun uh from a sort of user perspective podcasts are wonderful to listen to um having a good place to put podcasts is great for um you know people who make them from a software perspective uh they're a bit of a nightmare especially when they aren't what your um software was originally sort of um set up to do there's a lot of work goes into it it's um i think it's underestimated in general um but you know it's worth putting the effort in to to get something like that um free software worlds the open source software worlds um we we still face some significant challenges um with assisting people with things like anything to do anything to do with finances is something where we struggle and um it's because we don't have that monolithic approach it's because we don't have that um central financing um so it tends to be that you know we need to focus more on improving uh the experience of working within a sort of direct donation world and a direct sort of um way of of working um and yeah this this this whole sort of trend of existing podcasts being picked up by um companies and you know things that used to be so free and easily accessible becoming walled off inside i only know of Spotify doing it but i can imagine the same thing happening with apple music and deezer and a lot of others um is kind of a concerning move which is diluting what was really quite a fantastic sort of idea and it's a shame that it happens to some of the ones that people find you know people connect with the most strongly i think um two of the most popular podcasts that have been picked up are things like um uh joe rogan and the last podcast on left which is it's a shame um because high profile things being taken over has meaning and um you know it will normalize it in in my eyes at least but with the use of free free software tools with the use of you know these open standards real podcasting will never go away it will always you know bubble up underneath we will always see people continue to you know to put things out so yeah it's it's not all hopeless this wasn't what that talk was about it was merely just about this is something i think is very important and something that you know as a project we're really striving to support um so i think that takes me to quite nicely 35 minutes which is exactly what i was aiming for if anybody has any questions um i think that the um i think that the uh i think that the number has been put into the chat it's plus four nine five three six one uh eight nine zero two eight six eight zero zero one uh and if you're using event phone it's just eight zero zero one um i'll just have a look and see if anyone asks any questions in here uh so look yeah how do i find how can i find a funquel instance for a podcast i'm planning that suits me my needs and my content the best um yeah so the link there is is a good idea the uh get started guide um we actually have a um a sort of a pod picker we call it um which is uh just something that sort of takes you through the summary of different pods um which is what we have we referred to servers um people can write a summary of what sort of content they want from there um the two biggest servers um are open.audio and um i think Tanuki tunes which is my server is quite sort of uh big and open um there are lots of servers out there so you know if you find one the way you think it would fit in here then great um you know usually just find one that has open registrations and sign up or if you're feeling brave um install it for yourself it's it's a fairly easy install there are some hosts that will host it for you um they're listed on the funkwell.audio website so if you just wanted somebody to set it up for you so that you could host a podcast um then yes you could sort of uh put it in there uh do you know the podcast index.org projects uh i don't personally uh i will look it up after this that looks interesting uh if there's a solution that is to be found that could work for podcasters could it also be applicable to indie musicians or all the two fields uh way too different in order to accommodate both uh i'll just finish this one i think i've got a uh telephone person coming in so uh if there's but i mean yes and no i if we're talking about supporting um financially then yes in theory we already have some of those i mean there are already donation platforms which kind of work for a multitude of things um so really i think we should be you trying to to sort of lean into things like liberapay kofi maybe patreon um rather than sort of trying to solve that problem within the publication software because those features already exist and because that's already quite uh well established um having better interoperability between those tools um is probably the best way forward you know you just want to take the complexity away from the person listening it'd be nice if they had something like for example you're listening to a song you really like it so maybe you preload a certain amount of you know credits to your account every time you sort of play a song you really like you can throw some credits that way i don't know the complexity of the actual implementation is beyond me a little bit as i say i'm just a front end guy but um i don't think there's that big a difference between them uh from from that sort of perspective um yeah uh the servers were so open.audio is the main sort of flagship server and my server is called tanookietunes.com i'll put that link in um but there are lots of there are lots of servers as i say if you go to the actual funkwell.audio website they're there um so why should i as a podcaster decide against a centralized platform with lots of users for a decentralized one with only a few users how can we dramatically increase the visibility of my project now my product on funkwell um it's a good question i mean the the thing is with a centralized platform um is you may be on a platform with a lot of users but that doesn't mean that you're actually going to be seen by a lot of users um there is a lot of stuff on Spotify which never gets played um that that's just the the fact of it there are there are so many there's so much content on there that you are just you know you're just a grain of sand um obviously if you've got a sort of an established fan base and you've got a lot of people already listening to you then that doesn't affect you but in that case it also wouldn't affect you if you were decentralized those same people would still be listening and in fact you would be able to reach more people um podcasts uh kind of allow for word of mouth in a way that something centralized doesn't it can be passed around a lot more uh sort of virally um as for you know funkwell i mean funkwell's greatest strength is the fediverse um with this uh so the fact that the audio can be shared between people's servers and sort of streamed directly from server to server the fact that it can be followed on a multitude of different uh platforms is where the visibility would come from it's that sort of viral sharing but the fact that it also works outside of funkwell it also works uh just using a traditional sort of podcatcher also plays into its favor and that's where Spotify kind of falls apart um yes but if i have a lot of users but um you do kind of cut off an entire core audience which is the concern um yeah it's it's not there's no simple answer to this it's kind of the way it goes but um i feel like um the point made earlier in the chat which was that if you centralize it and you lock it behind a wall garden it's no longer really a podcast it kind that kind of stands it's not a podcast technically anymore it's something different and that's not necessarily a bad thing but it is true it's no longer what it was originally supposed to be um so you know it is best i think to try and make use of uh you know tools that fit into the existing podcast infrastructure okay that looks like all of the questions i don't think anybody's calling in which is fine so with that being the case if there's no more questions um thank you very much for listening to me ramble about um podcasts for 40 minutes um obviously if you'd like to check the project out it's just that funkwell.audio um but also go out and support your favorite podcasters whatever platform they're on um you know god knows they'd appreciate it especially in these times uh thank you very much um i think that's where i'm going to call it quits i think we have a phone call okay someone on the phone uh yeah hello hi hello oh wait i might be excusing for that one uh i just want whether you're familiar with the website called for godify.com you brought up earlier that there's like tons of audio that has never been heard of and that's basically site so it's like a song or a piece of material Spotify that has never been heard of before hmm what was the name of the site again sorry uh for godify.com oh no i've not heard of that that's quite interesting so is it it just plays stuff that doesn't get played much on Spotify yeah just click click on the button it literally shows you like a random song or a random piece of audio that has been like distributed on Spotify but never heard of before i even heard some tracks from 2009 i'm not sure that's great i really like i really like that idea yeah i that that is a genuine concern i when i was um i used to use google plus a lot because i'm that kind of person and i was part of um sort of publishing musicians uh club and i had people on there who published on Spotify and they never got listened to you know it does take quite a lot for you to to actually get picked up by Spotify's algorithms and to be sort of prioritized so i it's not the best solution for podcasts there's i think there's a reason that only already popular podcasts are getting picked up for Spotify circulation but you know that that sort of project sounds really interesting because it'd be fascinating to see what gets forgotten down the sort of cracks of the seat so to speak yeah it's also very interesting to play the game of the art for instance though i think that's one of the main reasons why i'm making music myself thanks to all nine personally so that's why i'm yeah yeah it is it is anyways thanks a lot i'm not i'm not affiliated with the side of the site i found it very relevant and decided to share that thanks yeah no thank you very much that's really interesting take your own thank you bye okay i thought we don't have any more calls going once going twice okay okay a lot more cards okay thank you again for for coming to to watch and i hope you have a great rest of your conference it looks like it's going to be a lot of fun