Okay. Well, thank you very much for coming here today. We have a really interesting program. And I just want to say on behalf of Columbia and our dean, Amala Andros, who unfortunately got stuck in travel and the snow and will not be here today. But I want to welcome you to the symposium, to Columbia University, and to the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation here. So we certainly had a little disruption yesterday. We had a flurry of emails and travel plans with people flying in and training in from all over the place. We did lose two speakers, unfortunately, and a dean. But I think we will, we still have a lot of people who made it. So thank you very much for those who did struggle through their travel plans to get here. I very much appreciate it. When I was speaking to Amala about the idea of this conference, this issue about disruption for me is everywhere. You can sort of see the word in times and popping up all over the place. And, you know, it's interesting for me, and it's a backdrop of 50 years of relative peace in the world, amazing eradication of poverty. It seems like we're sort of in some form of unstable place. I mean, politics and, you know, politics is not necessarily the root cause, but possibly an indicator of what's going on between the U.S. election, Brexit, and other elements. I mean, climate change is a significant underlying factor as well, in my view. Such amazing social and ecological forces are sort of ripping apart, you know, various systems that we just expect from snow in the Alps to beaches in far Rockaway. And economic frictions also seem to be there. I mean, in terms of wage stagnation, income inequality, 99%, there's something there. I don't know what it is. Is it in the water that we're all drinking? Or is it a precious resource that seems to be fleeting away? Is it something we can't see? But I guess my question is what role does technology have to play? I'm an engineer by training. Up here at Columbia, I oversee the technology sequence for the architectural program. And I just think that there is something there. Are we on edge already? Or is technology forcing this? Are technology solutions solving problems that have unintended consequences that are backlashing to us right now? Thinking about that 60 years of air conditioning and cooling that everybody had, and all of a sudden we have cities in places that we might not have had them before and climate change is forcing a lot of difficulties in those places. You know, with respect to some of these technology forces, Moore's Law sort of continues at pace. Computing power provides amazing operational capacity, although not even significant when compared to what's going on in all your heads right now in terms of the ability to compute. But AI does poke its head all around us, gleefully at times and chess matches, or on your dashboard or your car pointing you in the right direction. Personal connectivity is this thing, and in terms of big data all around us, it's the way that we are sort of enmeshing ourselves in big data, that we know geo-positioning, we know where we are, everybody knows where we are. I can track my son where he is right now. I can also track the reputation of who in this room wasn't very nice to the Uber driver last night. And that combination of positioning and reputation is an amazing sort of piece of technology that seems to be affecting all of our daily lives. And then finally sharing, the concept of sharing economy, only recent really between the last five and ten years, but starting to take over transportation networks, housing and lodging, workplace. These are real changes. And I think from my perspective, there's just an unease about it. There's an unpredictability. There's an excitement for sure, but there's an unpredictability. My own take on is what might be most disruptive today about technology is that we're shifting some of our value perceptions. If yesterday's yardstick was some form of resource, some form of thing that we measured, a good old fashioned pound of steel, or gallon of gas or barrel of oil, or kilowatt hour, somehow it seems to me that our value is moving to something more human, more qualitative. Happiness, wellness, productivity, quality. Things that we all strive for, qualitative, but yet are becoming quantitative. We can actually measure these things via a lot of the technologies around us. So we're shifting away from saying, how much oil or barrels of oil does this building or environment necessarily need? Maybe it needs more to be more productive. That shift to me is happening right now. I can see it in my industry by the way that I perceive things, but I think it's also underlying a lot of these technology pieces that we're thinking about. So to architecture, our staid profession of architecture, architecture doesn't change much, does it? Or does it? Does it bow to the next shiny gadget? You might. There are so many distinct and overlapping trends right now in technology and architecture, it's sort of hard to focus. But I think right now we represent some form of golden age of real change, particularly in the way of the relationship between architecture and technology. Fabrication tech, energy, computational tools, virtual collaborations, the list goes on. For today's discussion, we chose just to focus on really three of those topics to sort of get our viewpoint from a series of speakers. The first is computation. This idea really of tools really being representational. GSAP and its history is launching some of the world's first paperless studios, but they were representational. What do computational studios mean? What do computational tools mean? That shift has happened literally in the last 20 years. On to assembly, the route to manufacture how we get our products to our clients, to our cities has changed. Fabrication, obviously in terms of the ability to fabricate, in terms of computers and scripting and other types of things obviously, but also how we fundamentally put together buildings is starting to change. And finally integration. I think this convergence of elements forces us to realize that we are converging, not necessarily specializing. We're converging with all kinds of skill sets to solve problems, to use these technologies to see those overlaps more clearly than the sort of routes of siloed, specialized people would have us do. So those are the three areas. The speakers will introduce those topics. The moderators will introduce those topics, and hopefully the speakers will give you some insight into their work specific to those. But today is also not just about talking about technology. It's deeper than that. We want to address the question of how does this work with our students? How do we make sense of it to train and educate and inspire the next generation of architects going to this school, your schools around the world? How fast, how quickly can we get these tools into their hands? Can we get these ideas into their hands? What should we be teaching? And how do our studios, our classes, our curricula adapt to this? Ma and I have been talking about this since I started at Columbia, and I think it's a very important topic, and I'm really looking forward to your thoughts on this today. So on to our speakers, again, while some short intros, some panel and discussion follow-up for each of the speaker panels. We'll have a pedagogy section at the end of the day with some presentations, and then finally a round table. I hope you all came here to contribute, to discuss. It's a really exciting day for me. This is a topic I'm very passionate about, and I'm just really looking forward to sitting back and listening. So I welcome your ideas, so let's get started. Thank you. Good morning. We're going to do integration first, but in a way it's chicken and egg situation, which one should go first? Integration or computation or assembly? The idea of integration is not necessarily new. We've been working in an integrated fashion for decades now between architects and engineers, but today we are, however, looking anew at how integrated and optimized approaches are disrupting the design process. Whether that is through any reverent attitude towards disciplinary boundaries, whether it's a questioning of what is the right agency as an architect or designer or engineer, what is our right role, or through the embrace of contingency, adaptability, or flux in the process or data set. Our three speakers will expand on how their integrated approaches push the boundaries of scale and discipline from the scale of a single building in the city to the scale of an urban building type to the city and its invisible microbiological perspective. And so in this expanding order of scale, I want to welcome our speakers. Benjamin Gill-Martin is an architect and partner at Delis Caffidio Renfro. He'll be speaking about design assist, which is an alternative approach to the design and delivery of unconventional structures, and he'll be taking us through a few of his firm's projects, in particular the Culture Shed as a case study. Forrest Megers is an engineer and architect, assistant professor at Princeton University, jointly appointed by the School of Architecture and the Enleger Center for Energy and Environment, somehow splitting his time in between. He's going to be arguing for the value of design intuition, balancing that alongside the rules and limits of engineering. Ingebor Rucker of 3D Experience City, unfortunately got stuck in the snow, so she sadly cannot make it, but we are lucky to have Kevin Slavin. I think he's here, who is an assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab, who will be speaking about a very new field called urban metagenomics, which seeks to understand what cities are, not by looking at their built infrastructure, but by looking at their microbiome and trying to understand how we are different. So with that, we welcome you all, and we'll start with Benjamin. So thanks all for coming out early in the morning. I'm Ben Gilmartin of Dillard's Cafeteria on Renfrow, as Mimi mentioned. It's great to be here today. So I want to talk this morning, as Mimi mentioned, about a very narrow topic, design assist, or DA. I would say coming from practice, which is largely where I'm at day to day, I hope it's something that will offer a bracket to this conversation, to the other end of the spectrum in terms of scale, and also in terms of engagement with the academic space. So DA is a method of collaboration between the architect and the fabricator early during the design process to develop unconventional or non-standard design ideas. At DSR, we view this as a kind of research and development for invention within architecture, and the tools used to communicate obviously are digital and parametric largely. The reason for doing it is that at DSR, with each project, we try to create a kind of additional problem for ourselves beyond the brief. So the problem, you know, the basics of the program and the building systems and all that, we add something to that that's sort of a para problem that we try to expand our practice with each job through. So anyway, that's the kind of basic definition of design assist. I gave you kind of my definition. This is the kind of boring part, but traditional approach to doing jobs has a bright line between design bid and build and the designer's purview is largely on the left-hand side bid negotiations where we overlap and constructions where the contractor has control. In the design assist method, we're blurring the boundaries, we're bringing on the contractor early and we're overlapping our partnership to develop new ideas. So reflecting on the themes of disruption, integration from the practice perspective at DSR or forays into the design assist approach began as a sort of rogue activity to bring broad specialization from fabricators expertise during the design process to give viability to experimental ideas early on and now this approach has become fairly standard part of our early design, development of experimental ideas and I think many others as well in practice. I'm going to do a really quick tour, almost like a tasting menu through several projects that many you probably will be familiar with, but I'll do it from the perspective of the design assist aspect of the project and then that arc will sort of go from the kind of early stages in which we did it as a kind of informal approach to giving viability to our ideas to a kind of very formalized part of the process. So I believe you're probably all familiar with Alice Tully Hall. At Lincoln Center I would say that the brief was fairly obvious for the renovation of the interior of the concert hall or a performance space, but the client came to us with a sort of ineffable part to the brief where they said the space lacks intimacy. What do we do about that? And our response was to propose what we call the blush which is a sort of glowing walls of the interior that warm up the space during performance as a kind of added architectural effect and kind of tie the audience and performers together to kind of dissolve the space and the stage from the auditorium. To do that we started in our own shop doing experiments with laminating wood veneer to a resin core and figuring out how we could shape it and form it. We very quickly brought on partner collaborators so Threeform and Fetzer mill workers out of Salt Lake City. We did a lot of mock-ups and tests. We developed a proof-of-concept mock-up and eventually the owner came on board for that idea as part of the project. During that process we developed progressively a very detailed Katia model. It was parametric, kind of pre-build of the interior space of the hall with all its panels but also all the coordinating systems around it that allowed them to be tightly tailored to the interior space of the hall. And the kind of yellow areas you see are the glowing wall panels integrated seamlessly with what's conventional wood panels around it. Again this is a super fast journey through this project but the Katia model became a tool into the construction process and it basically was the instrument of coordination for prefabrication of the wall assemblies in the shop, the drive fitting of them, and then the bringing in installation to them relatively seamlessly in an existing interior space in the field. And you know it but the sort of special effect of the space that forms a kind of pre-performance or intermission moment that kind of makes the space heat up basically gives the music and a kind of added warmth and dimension. Very different project. The Museum of Image and Sound in Rio de Janeiro. We were looking at doing something there basically that was a continuous surface made of site cast concrete. And basically the collaboration was around how do you form it with these kind of inverted continuous surfaces. How do you fabricate this in this location. So basically that's the site where the Red Plus is on Copacabana Beach in Rio. You may be familiar with this idea but the kind of democratic space of Roberto Berlimarck's promenade became the kind of genesis of the project turning the public way up the building in a continuous surface that connected the public space of the street to public space at the top with access to the museum at all levels all the way up and free available views of the ocean and the city. That was the concept design image of the building full of a variety of different kinds of music graphic spaces that were presenting different aspects of the culture of Rio de Janeiro. The rhino model basically for the superstructure again a highly detailed pre-build and a kind of extended collaboration with Perry who's the international form work contractor to develop how do we pour these surfaces to create connections between the wall and floor all the way up the building with bevels and facets that are continuing from the floor to the wall to the ceiling. It was a kind of a very long and collaborative process to model with them all of the form work of it and all the ties and basically they eventually modeled the form work around the concrete structure and so you see our model at the top their model at the bottom left and the actual installation of the work going on on the right. Steel forms that were specially shaped special consolidating concrete and there you see the concrete going up for the building and as it is today still in progress on Rio speed but you could see the kind of really beautiful sort of details as the surfaces turn up and over with all the different facets and angles of the geometry. A third project just opened in August here at Columbia University up at the medical school it's actually called the Vagelos Education Building now but we used to call it CUMC and really the story of this was the integration basically the big idea was the cascade which I'll show in a second but the integration of a series of different trades together basically the superstructure the envelope and glass the GFRC elements that make up the expression of the cascade so again this is our location up at the medical school at 171st Street in Haven Avenue with the medical campus such as it is there the initial concept sketches and diagrams again a continuous vertical campus of public common spaces that track all the way up and down the building providing a kind of home away from home for the students in their kind of 24-7 life in the building the kind of initial competition or concept design visualizations of the building over time the development of the Rhino model with a huge amount of detail the superstructure as it's being built by Siami as the CM the kind of integrated BIM models of the building with the Rhino model of all of the GFRC elements at the end there on the right the kind of design assist collaboration again with the GFRC contractors and again this is the practitioner's perspective five minutes left okay I'll go quickly I have a lot more than five minutes of presentation left integration of GFRC glass concrete the final building the brode, the big ID, the veil can I have more time since somebody okay thank you I'll try to be faster you're probably familiar with the brode as well again the veil and the vault the vault is the space of Eli Brode's art storage for his entire contemporary collection the veil is the sort of enclosure around it self structuring and daylight from all sides and that's really the experiment of the project or the problem of the problem really trying to find moments where the daylight from the ceiling at the top finds its way down the walls all indirect daylight and a synthesis of ceiling to wall and again also not just ceiling to wall but also turning the corner seamlessly highly developed Katia model that basically covers all of the structural systems all the different panel types here you see a steel grillage that's overlaid with a series of precast GFRC elements that make the cells the molds that come from the model the cells on site before they're installed prefabricated steel frame elements the design assist in this case was CELA out of Germany prefabricated elements on site installation and the final job and basically you see the kind of fairly seamless visual connection between daylight at the ceiling and daylight at the walls coming into the space and the continuity around the corners for daylight and light to come in from all sides okay so the main story today from that trajectory of collaborations with contractors throughout the design stages leading into the construction stages and realization is the shed so the problem with the shed is a 250,000 or 200,000 square foot start up for experimental art performance events exhibitions at Hudson Yards the problem for the shed is the shed is a kinetic building that proposes responding to its need to be self sustaining by expanding and contracting its footprint in fact it can expand and contract its entire mass so the shed is located at Hudson Yards here on the west side kind of linked to the high line at 30th street and as I mentioned that basically it's a fixed building of 100 to 150,000 square feet on three large gallery floors and an event space at the top and the outer exoskeletal frame which is the shed which can roll out onto a public space and capture that public space to double the volume of the building using sort of an industrial port crane technology adapted to be the kind of building structure so I'll do part of this video in the interest of time I won't show it all but again the historic high line or the rally yards at the west side becoming the high line Hudson Yards being decked over currently for 16,000 square feet of new development the shed effectively again these kind of three large column three gallery floors with an event space at the top and lobbies down below and the exoskeleton of the shed a steel structure fully prefabricated with all the systems integrated into it that can roll out and capture the space of the public plaza out there to double the volume or the brown floor footprint of the building so it's a building that has fully served from below but it also has the capability for loading to come into the building from the plaza level has very robust rigging structure at the top that allows basically delivery to all levels and operability of all of the glass surfaces inside to allow access and kind of adaptable enclosure so it's possible to stage three different kinds of events at three different scales from a small medium large to extra large it can be converted to a large exhibition floor or art can be fully blacked out to make spaces for cinema presentation film or rigged for performances like dance experimental theater and the whole building can be taken over for advanced fashion if that still exists by the time the building opens and sort of lastly the shed can actually form a kind of proscenium space for staging outdoor events and concerts I'll leave it at that for now so that's what it looks like or it will look like at the end of 2018 again it can be a kind of vast hall space for events and performances it can be blacked out to be a cinema space it welcomes creative industries again its sustainability model is financial as well as environmental and so that it brings in revenue generating programs galas but also supports performance in the arts in almost every way conceivable and as I mentioned live music or concerts the upper gallery floors can support art they can also support black box theater productions Revit models derigar for all these kind of buildings fully integrating and drawing the building three dimensionally but a Katia model that's highly detailed almost a complete pre-build of the shed structure for that component that integrates building systems with the steel frame so this is just a quick spin around the Katia model showing the kind of lines of geometric intention the full sort of integrated exterior turned on kind of all the rigging steel frame above inside the ETFE enclosure of the building the large bogies or wheels that the thing rolls out on the kind of component elements so these kind of ladders that are made of pieces of the shed that come into the site in large as large elements and are kind of lifted to assemble the whole thing so there's the kind of fully loaded Katia model when we this had the most formalized design assist approach where late in the design development stages we went to three international contractors they tried to do a proof of concept to mock up we ended up picking Chimaly and Chimaly Technologies in Italy who does very large steel fabrications and could do all aspects of the shed structure there was an extensive process with them to figure out how to break this down into components they call it work in their shop as they're actually making the elements dry fitting at the Chimaly factory in Italy so you see the total frame assembled with our little scalar person there at the same time the subcontract integration of the ETFE with the steel frame and the kind of drive mechanisms that push the shed out and pull it back at the top the wheels and tracks down below which are quite substantial in scale and are now on site and then the superstructure of the fixed building which is completed and the elements of the shed being erected right now as we speak on site that will roll out for the first time in April May of this year so that's my slightly more than 15 minutes I'd say that's a trajectory through DSR's experience and integrated disruptive converging multidisciplinary collaborative development in the design of external problems ones that we create for ourselves on projects working with contractors to design assist, thank you very much Great, well I'm super excited to go to the shed and what I want to do and it's great that I'm following Ben because I want to talk a little bit more about the left hand side of his initial plot a little bit more as an academic how some of the ideas that we build in our institutions might propagate forward into some of the construction and design elements things that aren't necessarily ready to be built in large in the infrastructural projects but rather experimentally explored in sort of the context of research and so what I'm going to start with though it goes back to where Craig started which is the idea of value and what value integration sort of means for me as I work through different aspects of the architectural discipline so from a motivational standpoint I work in the center for energy and environment and we often use that in many architectural narratives of performance there's the blue marble and why we need to save the planet and the environmental movement of the 70s there's the black marble or the earth at night and our clear view of the fact that we do have an influence as humans, the Anthropocene is a thing now and just yesterday there was an article in the New York Times that I threw in here, not only can you see the wall of China from space but you can now also see this giant crack in the Antarctic ice shelf which will break off a piece, I don't know if anybody remembers Larson B fell off and there were these pictures of Rhode Island it was the size of Rhode Island so now we're going to break off a piece the size of New Jersey, isn't that exciting being from Princeton so you can see this from space so the real question now that I present all of this motivation and everybody's feeling like we should do something about the environment is that are you really scared of Antarctica and when you see the planet do you really feel like you're going to go out and save the planet yourself because often times even in my day to day work on the environment explicitly in architecture there are many complex moments that we've just witnessed that take place that don't necessarily anchor themselves in the environment per se and the larger population is always going to be more focused on this the reality of value is one that's more day to day local and experiential and so I think what I want to start by doing is going through the ways in which sort of energy and the environment play out in our built environment and these great tools this took a year to design this power bill by the company Opower they studied every aspect of how somebody reads it in order to make them recognize how much they're paying for their energy which unfortunately is still a very small number for most people relative to the yearly amount so when I put in new technology in buildings like a thermostat or energy recovery ventilator not only are architects not necessarily responsible these days for designing the guts of that but nobody really knows what's going on inside the nest either it's a bunch of machine learning and so understanding really where we can get some awareness not just about photovoltaics as a based on thing but what is their role really in the value proposition of the architecture where are we rolling away from technology as the narrative toward sustainability as the narrative and how functional are things when we build them as we move toward things that are zero so the zero water zero energy living building is an extremely marvel of technology and I think it's really cool but there are still challenges in how we create that narrative for the technology that supports achieving this and whether or not really cutting down the energy bills is enough and how do we think about design and the role of the architect in that system because there are many other moments that aren't necessarily energy and economy there's a whole social and ecological component and many people will call this greenwashing but I would argue there's incredible value in teaching people about agriculture in an urban context even though Stephen Dovner of Freakonomics may be able to prove that it costs $500 per tomato to grow a tomato on your balcony in New York unfortunately so I'm going to go on business selling those but I don't think anybody's going to buy them so with that sort of quick overview of my conceptualization of this problem my question then is how do we really integrate different values in architecture what are the core values propagate from achieving our projects but unfortunately and I'm going to hit you with a tough question now what should have implicit in other value models so there is architecture involved in this this is an architectural reality it's something that's built and unfortunately this building and this building have the exact same cooling system and heating system inside them and I think architecture made a great leap and its movement into modernism and me building the Seagram building here was a turning point where a lot of things changed and one of the things that changed at that moment were the systems that were inside the building but those have not changed much since then and one of the things I'm interested in is how since this time period one of my favorite parts about this building is the exposure of the structure which is not really structure that's why I like this picture because these I-beams are I-beams because they're the structure but they aren't supporting anything to sort of make the technical apparent in the building but the guts of this building and this building are completely the same although the architectural value of them and how we all feel about them is completely different so I think there's an opportunity here to start to rethink the design potential of everything in the building and to the previous projects I think that's an example of where we are exposing a lot of amazing different components of different technical systems that then become an apparent part of the design and so what I'm going to do today is more bend my will bend the will of this presentation toward my expertise in mechanical systems and talk a little bit how in two projects we've worked toward integration on a spatial context and then integration in a thermal context so to do that though first we have to think about how this all started a little bit right? Carrier invented air conditioning just a little over 100 years ago we've only had cool buildings for that long and it only took 50 years from the invention really for it to propagate into rooms everywhere and now over 90% of buildings have air conditioning of some kind also ASHRAE started in 1922 after AIA had been around for over 200 years and since then is now larger than AIA and we were able to then build these sort of international style or modernist buildings that have this common trait of being able to be cooled right? because if they weren't able to be cooled they would be really hot because they have a lot of glass and when the sun hits the glass it would make the building very very hot so really the guts of the buildings really enabled a lot of this you know formal success which at the time was a success there wasn't an energy crisis but today we do need to start rethinking that we are taking a major leading role in implementing new design strategies but still in the guts of the building not much has changed right? so SOM built the lever house and they worked on this here building as well and they have similar air conditioning air based central systems and I think we can move beyond that now and in fact the funny thing is it isn't that we need to develop a lot of new science in order to understand this problem or we need to invent new technology it was the mere fact that the technology was so successful in the 1950s that it has propagated so well because it has a lot of inertia in the 1950s and 60s at Princeton there were these researchers that studied all different ways to make people feel comfortable in buildings but this was before large central air conditioning was available and then this kind of got pushed aside and so just on Monday at Princeton we had Ed Aarons giving a talk all about the technology of the human body which is something we've largely forgotten about in architecture that people have heat transfer mechanisms inside you that do all kinds of crazy things to manage your thermal comfort and just adjusting the air temperature which is the only thing we really do in a building there's only one thermostat somewhere in this room that's measuring the air temperature and that's determining how this building how our space right now is controlled and there are many different aspects to what tells your body whether you're hot or cold and you've been around for a long time and what I'm proposing is we take that and fold it into the early design phases and think about how thermal energy plays a role in the evolution of our design thinking at that sort of conceptual and schematic design phase because right now as architects we used to we used to be the main propagator promulgator of all the systems in the building all these famous structures and mechanical systems were designed by architects the complexity has risen to a level where consultancy is needed this is the moment where my argument for intuition really is the strongest what I believe is that there's no way an architect is going to be trained in finite element analysis here electrical circuit analysis and solar simulation or the complex programming that goes on in airports to do all the planning for the circulation and so what you need to have is an intuition that enables your design process to engage at the earliest phase and so the design assist is really that thing it's that thing that's pushing the architect toward sort of an understanding of how the decisions they make unfold in that technical web of expertise that is needed to support the evolution of the contemporary complexity of buildings that are being realized so what I will take you through now are two different projects that I'm working on in my group which is so cleverly named the chaos lab because I have a lot of chaos in my life being jointly appointed between architecture and engineering and because I apply for a lot of department of energy grants that require acronyms for everything so to go back to these buildings to start the first project one of the things that is implicit in the guts of the heating and cooling systems of these buildings is stripes so these stripes at night the look of this building you could not have the stripes because you needed the plenum space to move the air around in the building and so in fact actually the mechanical system does come out and bear its ugly head at night when you look at this and this is repeated across many buildings when you look at them and so what we were doing in a project in Singapore then was thinking about what that space here that creates those thick stripes means in terms of efficient use of space and the integration of systems right because when we redesigned all these systems for moving energy thermal energy around the building and made them complicit with the structure and with the architectural design we were able to build the same vertical floor to ceiling height of each of these spaces so three floors and the same height as two floors for this building that we were working in so this was sort of what we called like we would sit in this room and be like I wish I could put my PhD students up there because I need some extra space there's just so much sitting above the dropped ceiling so you can see the original ceiling that's in place over here and so the structure takes up the first part and then the mechanical ducting and electrical takes up the next part so what we did was then design a slab that incorporated radiant heating and cooling in this case it was in Singapore so this was a radiant cooling design project and then we integrated all the ducting into the voided section of the slab so that we took air directly through the facade so that we didn't have to push air a really long ways through really big ducts instead we took it directly from the facade and distributed it throughout the space using a displacement ventilation and so this enabled us to make the same thickness slab as we would have for a voided slab you know and then enabled then also the miniaturization of the ducts and the distribution of the thermal energy all into one system so the next part was to prove to someone you could actually build something like this and that's where the proof you know then we needed our design assist because we didn't have one we were a bunch of researchers trying to convince the structural engineer to build our thing so what happened was we were given the floor of a building we were convinced our neighbor at the research campus in Singapore this is a high school United World College in Singapore and we convinced them to let us build this section of the building out in this 342 concept as we called it right three floors in the space of two but in this case which you should probably suspect from an architectural perspective that the objective in the 342 isn't necessarily going to be always making more floors what's actually better is to build higher floor heights because that's actually more pleasurable to be in so in this case that's actually the end result and it's actually much more pleasing space than just a spatially optimized cramped space so as a part of this we integrated this is sort of one of the ventilation units and then we had the floor system here and because the structural engineer deployed a post tensioned floor through the rest of the structure we had to set a simulated version of our system in a kind of raised floor on top of the slab and as part of the research which in this part this is the moment where then thinking about new technologies and how they can play a role in the development of the concept this is a desiccant dehumidification system and this is the first one of its size where we're using it directly in the facade to dehumidify the air which in Singapore if you've never been there it is always humid all the time and being a building systems researcher is not the best because you're generally in places that don't have cooling systems because you're trying to test them so yeah we sit around and sweat a lot and if we can dry the air you're much more comfortable because the temperature is usually around 80-85 degrees so it's not really warm it's just about always 90% humidity and so we are developing now in Princeton a new liquid desiccant system that has evolved out of this project right so there's opportunities for research to be instigated within sort of architectural integration projects right and so both sides of the building had this facade right that integrates the ventilation system in the top and then delivers air through a little service channel down into the floors below through very small ducts and both sides of the building had this right because in Singapore it's one degree north latitude so you can't just do passive solar shading on one side of the other so this is kind of what quote-unquote a good solar design looks like in the tropics around the equator and then here's the space right so our space in the building had about 20% higher ceilings than the rest of the building and then we used a high temperature chill beam system that convex air down through natural convection so the cold air falls down on the people at a very low speed and so that provides all the base load cooling and then all the dehumidification is provided over these desiccant systems right so we've separated the demand for cooling from the demand for fresh air right because typically in big buildings we have huge ducts that just supply all the cooling via air and the amount of air being moved is 4 to 10 times more than the people actually need for breathing and so separating these two systems and integrating them spatially actually allowed us to fit more in and to deliver better comfort with better efficiency so again this is the I can't really see the intakes in this but the the overall result then in a research side was we ended up publishing a paper then in the CTBUH so the Council for Tall Buildings has a journal where we showed that you would do this at the larger scale there is a lot of then compounding benefits because you can reduce the amount of extra wall space right that's containing all of those plenums you can increase the floor space decrease overall material obviously and the structural material required to support that and then you have less installation space as well so you can use more space for people and in the end finally the types of systems you're deploying provide a higher level of comfort because they transfer heat to people more effectively and finally sort of the last little instigation was we showed this to the Singapore government and they were not necessarily happy that we wanted to make their buildings shorter but we were trying to explain to them that they could fit more in the space of their buildings the way that they're being designed so again in the broader scale right when some of these ideas have more than just energy efficiency built into them then there becomes an opportunity to push a paradigm shift through a different avenue right and the real estate and the space avenue is much more convincing and a broader scale to people that have those other kinds of values more around development of real estate potentially that avenue can provide a much stronger argument but then there's a question philosophically about whether how hard do you push in that domain and so right now obviously people in Singapore are getting excited about this idea these are some of the projects of the team that's there currently now are pushing designing this for larger multi-story buildings and then there's even a we even have a fancy rendering now so the academia my engineering colleagues somehow managed to convince someone to do a nice conceptual drawing of what a tower that would be designed with this type of system could potentially look like and again the newer version one so with the desiccant system I'm designing and what's fun for me as a technology designers solar panels get really really hot they get to be like 160 degrees and so what desiccants need in order to get rid of the moisture they've sucked out of the air is heat and so if I put a bunch of solar panels here I can use the excess heat on them in order to get rid of all that extra moisture so with that we're going to move more away from that sort of transition into a little bit more of the thermal aspects we'll go into a more experimental project that I'll run through quickly in terms of and many of you have probably seen before this is something I did when I first arrived at Princeton and it relates to sort of my interest in thermodynamics and this concept of exergy and where temperature can be deployed more effectively and it relates again back to this idea of the human body having more nuanced relationship with its thermal surroundings the air and particularly evaporation and radiation as means that we can use and the one in this project that we used was radiation right and this is the idea if you ever stand by a campfire on the side that's all radiation right the convection the air is only warm above the fire so everything you feel from the side is radiation and all the surfaces around you are doing that all the time as well so heat lamps make radiation and if I design a surface I can also reflect radiation right and so what we were thinking was how can we toy with this idea of reflection and radiation so we built this little prototype out of mylar but found that you know just a random stringing of tubes doesn't reflect a lot of the surface area of the tube so we decided we needed to be more strategic so this is sort of a parabolic form and we went through some modeling to figure out how maybe we could make a structure that reflects that which involved looking sort of at reflection models very simple geometric models and so this is where sort of the formal geometry has started to be influenced by a radiant heat transfer model which is kind of a fun connection right between the thermal and the formal and then finally we used again our friends the old days we're studying at Princeton and used the sun path like they had this thing called the thermoheliudon which they simulated buildings with which simulated the sun path so we built our structure to be the sun path on the summer solstice so on the summer solstice this space is completely shaded and what it does is it takes a specific form which we cut out of a styrofoam and it cools down some tubes that are in the middle of each of these pieces of styrofoam right and we strategically make that cooling using evaporation right so we just have a fan and a bunch of water dribbling through a cooling tower the same things that you have on the top of the buildings here and we run that evaporatively cooled water into the pipes that are at the focal point of the cones that get created in this geometry right and so if you have a cone right and I put a pipe in the middle of it all the rays that come into the cone will bounce and hit the pipe in the center right and so the interesting part is then the whole computational form that we came up with right which this whole process of taking the geometry that we derived and moving into robot code is thanks to Ryan Johns and Axel Killian who I work with at Princeton and Ryan here and we created then this large structure with all these pipes that then modifies the temperature that's surrounding you and we reflected that onto the the central portion of this pavilion and what it achieved is if I make the temperature in this built in this room if I take all the walls around you and the ceiling and if I change that temperature by say I make it 5 degrees cooler you will all feel about 2.5 to 3 degrees cooler your thermal comfort is half radiation and so by bouncing the cool pipe geometry in that image I can make the only thing that's actually cold is the pipe in the middle the little blue dot and all the rest is just reflection and so I can make a surface area look cold in a pavilion while only having a teeny tiny set of pipes so 6 times less the surface area of the interior of the dome is the area that's actually cold and you experience that interaction with the whole space and so standing in there you experience a temperature that's 5 to 10 degrees cooler in an operative temperature sense because I've shifted the surface area temperature around you and we made images of this of the interior space to kind of demonstrate how the mean radiant temperature was lower and I'm just going to jump through this really fast we can talk about this more later because I really think it's important to understand that half of your thermal comfort is from that radiation right only one half comes from the air temperature which all buildings are controlled for and what we're promoting in my group is that we should be thinking about ways to measure this so we've developed new sensors we've developed new models for how the building should react to thermal comfort in terms of the radiant temperatures in space and then we have a new lab where we're deploying radiant heating systems in the floor so we can measure that we can put in those systems here you can see one section that's heated and keeping my group nice and warm and also keeps my child labor very warm that's important you always have to have your children cleaning up your lab for you and this project here is a collaboration or the architecture was done by the living David Benjamin so we've been collaborating on this in terms of what are the research opportunities from the very very beginning of the project right the whole concept was that this space would be a building that we use constantly for experimentation and research and so we're really excited that it's pretty much nearing completion and to end we're going to be now promoting a whole new arm of research now that we have this building in the context of extracting heat from the local and regional buildings so doing the same thing we did with that dome but more at the scale of the campus and pushing heat from other places more strategically into the buildings that are locally around us so with that thanks to my group for all their effort on these projects and I look forward to our discussion about how we can bridge all the way from the experimental up to the realization it was amazing let's see what happens there's like three different coffees up here in various states of decay alright is that show up that's awesome there we go okay so I'm going to talk about what you thought I was going to talk about urban metagenomics and just to check because usually the answer is zero does anyone familiar with the phrase metagenomics the word okay so it's usually zero okay so I'm going to talk about the application of the thing that you don't know to urban systems I work at the media lab I've actually I was thinking about it I've actually the first time I came here to speak was in 2005 and that was to talk about urban play and the very earliest games that use GPS and so on and so forth and then in 2010 I was talking about low latency trade infrastructure and basically I sort of do what I want which is all with the caveat that my father who was an architect prohibited me from becoming an architect and so I tried to do everything that is almost architecture so that is currently urban metagenomics so let me start the oh that's a shame the video isn't playing oh well it's just not this is it's just such a shame though okay this is this is a piece by called Seeds of Change and it's by an artist named Maria Teresa Alves this was executed in Bristol and I just wanted to talk about this because it's a very good introduction to some of the ideas that I wanted to talk about today so what you see here is what Maria Teresa Alves calls a ballast garden and it's a ballast garden that she constructed in Bristol and it's based on the idea that there is a considerable amount of flora if not fauna wherever you go that actually migrated to wherever it is through ballast that when ships during the periods of exploration and colonization would go across the ocean they would often be going empty going from one side to the other and so what they would do is they would just fill up their the keel with ballast with just stones just the biggest stones they could find from wherever they happened to be with no thought or attention to the idea that there might be still on the stones mostly seeds and that when they got to wherever they were going they dumped those stones that what they were actually doing were bringing all the things that they were never thinking about and never intended to bring to wherever they were going so in this case Maria Teresa Alves actually researched the specific seeds that were brought over during the English period of colonization and that's what yielded the Marigold Rukus Ativa in Africa all of these only arrived in England by accident basically in the bottom of these ships that these were sort of the quiet migrants that were underneath everything else that they thought they were bringing and raising these sort of interesting questions about who exactly colonized who and making clear this larger point that no captain was ever aware of just how much of their cargo was alive and I I bring this up I use this to sort of introduce the idea because what was true about these kind of not totally thinking it through type captains is also true of every one of us we also are completely unaware of how much of our own cargo is alive this is becoming increasingly popular idea or an idea with increasing popular awareness the idea of the gut biome somewhere around two kilos inside you that just aren't you from any genetic perspective right that you are possibly a majority of your genetic material is the stuff that lives inside you and more and more what we learn is that a lot of what your day to day experience of the world is and over a lifetime and so on and so forth has something to do with genetics and it has something to do with free will if you believe in that kind of thing but it also has to do with the sort of invisible cargo that each one of us is carrying we know now that the gut biome is at least partially responsible if not primarily responsible for things like obesity disease and even fundamental human behavior there are specific bacteria within your gut that can really be closely correlated if not demonstrated as causative for things like schizophrenia, OCD, depression even the likelihood that you will crash your car or have unprotected sex so the idea that who you are basically this assembly of all these other things is sort of what leads people who research the gut biome in particular to refer to this as the kind of second brain by the way that's also where most of the serotonin in your body is produced right so when you take something like an SSRI that's affecting your brain it's kind of a bullshit premise in fact what is actually where that's most of being produced is down here in dialogue with all of these things that we barely understand and I think about this idea of the second brain as we at MIT and everywhere else talk about this so-called smart city because you know what if cities like people are already smart in ways that we don't really perceive yet what if the really smart city is smart the way like your gut is smart and that's sort of what I've been working on and it requires this sort of like weird shift in scale about what I think a city is right so you know you can think about it as the scale of the one which is that this woman here and then the 500 to 1,000 maybe up to 10,000 different species that are in her gut to a literally unquantifiable number out around her and then even more than that really and this is all this was recently published I forget who published this and that's shameful but anyway this is the newly revised a tree of life so this is basically a map of all the different life forms on earth and the thing to recognize is like not only are we like way way way down there on the right but like everything that's even visible to us is like most of the life on earth is completely invisible to the human eye and turns out to be important and this is we are becoming increasingly aware of what all this is not because we have better microscopes not because they have greater representation politically but rather because of the unexpected bounty of cheap genomics everybody talks about the dropping the really like quickly dropping costs of genetic sequencing as how awesome it is that you can send your spit to Google and they'll send you back how you're going to die or whatever it is that people think they're going to get but the bounty of that really is not about sequencing humans it's about sequencing all the other stuff on earth right all kingdoms of life and their DNA collected from the environment that's metagenomics and I'll come back to that in a moment and what we learn is that all these kingdoms of life and their DNA many of them are in direct dialogue with us in ways that mostly are what keep us alive every one in a billion is pathogenic and slate wiper but the rest of them are awesome and necessary and have been very poorly understood we're just at the very beginning of starting to understand so we learn that the gut biome is basically in exchange with three sources in the world which is your mother when you're born it's what you eat and then it's what you touch and breathe and what you touch and breathe is extremely relevant if you are thinking about the unique density and diversity of these biological super organisms called cities because basically what you touch and breathe is within the built environment and so we build all these things or you guys build all these things I don't but you guys build all these things without this awareness of this kind of live freight that produces it is affected by it I just learned not so long ago that like 90 something percent of all the drywalls sold in the United States is coated with antibiotics did you guys know that this is a terrible terrible idea right I mean it's great at lowering the incidence of the flu but it's also it's like it's doing to our buildings what we've all done to ourselves which is why we all have food allergies and autoimmune disorders and so right it's also killing everything that we actually need at a microbiological level so we build all these things sort of unaware of their live freight optimizing for stability which is madness and I got interested in this and I was specifically inspired by the work of some designers in London this is actually old work this is probably ten years old they did something what they called immaterials and so what they were doing was using a light and time exposure photography to show the actual kind of the material quality of radio frequencies basically right so that's an RFID that's the physical field around an RFID and then they did the same thing at an urban scale to do this is they built this so that they could walk around and get time delay exposures so that's Wi-Fi through Oslo and to get a sense of that and these are good friends of mine I've worked with them for many years and my point to them is that these invisible radio waves that they are visualizing which is beautiful work but they're really nothing compared to the invisible living kingdom which we're here long before we got here and will be thriving long after we're gone and the very first thing that I'm aware of there's probably other things but the very first thing I'm aware of anybody who actually set out to get a sense of what that invisible kingdom was like is from maybe five years ago or so something like that not so long ago maybe five years ago it was getting the microbiome of the subway in Hong Kong which was a very very preliminary idea the subway is a great place to find out what's happening with the microbiome because it's where humans just get crammed in as if in an intestine and exchange all this stuff and get shit out wherever they're going and leaving all this stuff behind and what they discovered is that actually subway stations have different microbiological signatures so all this is possible as I was saying because you don't get this by building sensors for every single life form on earth you do this by gathering the DNA of whatever it is that's left behind and sequencing it and that's what leads you to this new field called metagenomics so metagenomics says if you look some of your DNA I can figure out a whole bunch of stuff about you sort of because I have a model of human DNA the humans have been sequenced and I just compare you against the model that we have for humans but if I gave you like a bowl of soup and said well what's in there you would need to know you need to compare all the DNA that you find in there against all the DNA of all life on earth and I don't have time to get into details it's super super fascinating and the way this is done computationally is some of the most sophisticated computation that I'm aware of of any field outside of like astrophysics or maybe weather it's really it's basically it'll take about a week on clusters at wild Cornell and it is analogous to picking up like a bunch of garbage that has been shredded and cross cut and taking a look and trying to figure out like what it once read because there's DNA that you get as I'll show you anyway it doesn't matter there's four different labs that are working on metagenomics in the city which is to say what is the actual life of the city the actual life like not the humans not the pets or the trees or whatever but like the actual life the majority of life so there's four different labs that are working on it and I will do these as quickly as I can so Chris Mason's labs here at wild Cornell have the unenviable job of actually swabbing every single subway station in New York City which they did it takes years it takes hundreds of people and millions of dollars but you can do it and they did it and they found that indeed subway stations have unique signatures it's for them to present this work but it's things like that the subway stations that were flooded by Sandy have from a microbiological perspective they are essentially marine environments still years later super fucked up stuff there's a whole story about kimchi I'll tell you another day anyway this is the alum lab at MIT a different part of MIT where I am they have the same idea but they said instead of swabbing all the subways it's like the only thing worse than this is this which is sewer robots that basically go in and sample the shit mash down there and bring it back and they are sampling what's going on underground this is primarily useful for epidemiology where you can see like certain viruses as they sweep through Boston again this is for them to present but anyway that's another model right so you can swab the subways to the sewer and then there's Jessica Green at the University of Oregon who had the really brilliant idea of just once a week just pulling the filters in the HVAC systems which essentially act as a fishing net for everything that is microbiological and has built an extraordinary practice around beginning to understand the built environment room by room how do bacteria move from room to room what they do there it involves all kinds of lab situations that you don't want to think too much about and a whole bunch of outcomes that I can't get into anyway and then there's my lab which is mutants across the board so yeah they're just everybody is somewhere in between and that's the whole idea of the media lab is that everybody is somewhere in between what they're supposed to be and our method is exploring the genetic material that we are sequencing to figure out what's happening in the cities it's a long story how we got there but we ended up using a bee trash so basically bees are increasingly being kept in urban environments in part because they do much better in urban environments than they do in pesticide land and bees will only go about a mile and a half to two miles from the hive and they have been optimized over millions of years to collect and contact with they come back to the hive and they dump it and so we gather everything that they dump this was the very first one that we did in Brooklyn and Queens these are using bees as citizen scientists this is Dvorah Najjar an engineer who is no longer an engineer but here she's basically a beekeeper or bee cleaner or something and we gather up the material that the bees bring us and after a while we realize this is extremely inefficient and it's contaminated by all the other crap that's there so we built metagenomic hives so these are bee hives that have a sterile tray at the bottom that basically acts to collect their garbage it's like an old 4x5 camera you slide that out it seals itself we send that to the lab and we sequence it so we built this Miguel Perez is the student at the media lab who designed this and it's the idea of using the bees to collect all the genetic material for us to contain it in such a way that it remains sterile and then bring that out and that that then gives us a portrait of or a landscape or whatever it is of what is happening within a mile and a half to two miles of that particular hive in the city so we started doing that in Brooklyn and then we've expanded out to do it in other cities so Sydney, Melbourne, Venice and Tokyo there's interesting reasons why you can't do it in some other places anyway so this was in New York and this anyway you can see what these are so this was recently displayed in part of the Venice architecture Biennale so these are the bees collecting material for us and we do this my interest I don't have a scientist, I just work with scientists I'm interested in this because of culture I'm interested in actually figuring out how to lift the awareness of this capability and this possibility and this vision of the world up into culture and we do this because science is culture we do this because what we're trying to do is lift that idea here's the bees at work they're not that happy in Venice for because there's not really that much for them to do there and so we can we can start to make some hypotheses about what we're learning courtesy of Elizabeth Hinoff who's my colleague at Wild Cornell Computational Biomedicine and so very, very quickly the thing that we learned when we did this in Brooklyn very first attempt was that indeed using bee debris is a scientifically valid way to determine what's happening around us the bee debris is the right way to do that you can't use the pollen it's the honey all kinds of reasons doesn't matter we took that into Sydney and Melbourne got these results these are only sort of like whatever top 20 and what we discovered from doing it in Sydney and Melbourne is that indeed cities have different microbial profiles that's a real thing we've then since confirmed that several times so this is kind of an important idea actually just to stop here for a second that when you think about the population differences of different cities we always think about that in terms of humans and that's just a terrible representation of what the population of different cities is and if you've ever wondered why you almost always get sick when you switch continents this is basically why right is that basically there's a mismatch between what's here and what's here and the reason that you get better over time is because those things start to find their level we did it in Venice and found we found mostly a particular fungus that is associated with rotting wood big surprise Venice so that was sort of one of the first real proofs that the hive biome actually does provide insights about the built environment that what we get from the bees can tell us something about the cities then we did it in 20 different hives in Tokyo in really neighborhood by neighborhood and that was the first time that we could really conclude that neighborhoods are indeed biologically distinct that the Upper West Side is microbiologically distinct from the Lower East Side is microbiologically distinct from Bushwick is microbiologically distinct from Lagos and we sort of don't know we like nobody really really knows exactly what that means but it definitely means something that's why people are like lousy drivers or they vote a certain way or they're just more irritable or happy or whatever is definitely in the mix but it's very I think even if we knew 10 times what we knew it would be very hard to come to it but we're at the very very beginning of a long arc in knowledge so the next steps are getting more and better data from hives and eventually to discover how we interact with cities same way as their guts but also for me the important thing is not just to gather data but also to build the imagination of this I think what's important is it's not just the scientific pursuit to actually quantify all this but also to insert this into what we think of when we think of cities we're imagining something that's real to understand that like us and like the ships that carry us here cities have cargo that might secretly be the captain okay thanks good I love you for three really fascinating and very very different presentations so maybe we're just going to go with this theme of gut that Kevin started I am struck by how in many ways the three of you didn't necessarily start with a specific problem to solve Kevin's case is the most extreme but Ben and I talked about this in terms of the culture shed that you know that wasn't a brief given to you it wasn't the brief to necessarily shorten all the towers of Singapore but you're all working with a kind of gut of gut question of how do we make living in cities more healthy or more sustainable or more culturally active more viable and so this is a kind of very important in terms of how you start not from the problem but from your gut and so I thought perhaps it'd be interesting for us to discuss how this kind of back and forth happens for you individually throughout your work the kind of balance of the gut of maybe there's something in bee poop maybe not right and the kind of back and forth realization of whether you're moving forward or sideways in your work my first thermal project was heat recovery from wastewater so we do have this tie somehow but I think in the fundamental nature of what lies beneath any project is not necessarily a brief or a motivation it's a question and so I think that's sort of the heart of I think we should accept that more in our community of design that we're answering questions not necessarily just delivering things and the question of value sort of speaks to that whether we're just delivering the value that people expect of us or whether answering questions that are useful and important for us and I think there's a mix of that going on and I think you need both but I would argue that what we were presenting maybe that's a common thread and to address sort of the question why we want to know these things and I'm not going to let Kevin near my cup it's help just kidding actually I'm sure it's too sterile probably I think we should make out probably I'm diabetic though so that's probably because of all these clean buildings I lived in in Switzerland when I lived there I guess I would say from the opposite end of the spectrum where I think that my colleagues probably it's their job to come up with ideas that solve problems that haven't really been formulated yet or to formulate problems that then you want to go out and solve it's not totally conventional to do that in the architectural practice and I think that the kind of narrow narrowly defined day-to-day approach that we're given as you mentioned is it's a challenge in its own right I think to solve those problems but I think that finding another problem that's kind of on top of that problem that's the thing that you add to it that maybe is totally unnecessary to the basic problem is definitely what motivates us that there's kind of an extra or meta or super experiment that we're trying to find that just it always relates to the architectural work but it doesn't have to be there it's the thing that sort of keeps us motivated and so I think that is a kind of research in its own right within practice the pursuit of knowledge that is sort of reaching out for something that a problem that doesn't have to be there but it's a problem we create so I don't know if that sort of ties a little bit back in but that's as academic as we're able to get I mean I think I think for me it it may just be as essential as you know through my architect father's prohibition of just being super interested in everything that architects are interested in but not being able to touch the building right so like what would you do as an architect if you were interested in everything you were interested in but you couldn't make a building and that's basically what I've been doing in many different guises over my career I mean like you know we did the very all the stuff that is now Pokemon Go is the stuff that we were working on 13 years ago really thinking about like how do ambient informatics change how you move through the city things like four square where it's been out from my studio but that was really the same question that I'm asking now with biology which is basically like what is it that builds our experience of the built environment that isn't the built part of the environment and I you know I like you know I don't know what the next version of that will be but I think that's the that's the thing that I'm tugging on I guess do you think there will be a practical application that influences how architecture responds in terms of curating the biological cultures that we're exposing ourselves to? Yeah I feel certain I haven't published this and I don't talk about it a lot but it's like when we did the hives in Brooklyn we found the flu before the CDC found the flu and the general idea that there's only like an agency probably for another like five months that there's like the idea that there's like a government agency is like the single source of knowledge around the movement of pathogens through cities is insane given all the things that we have but like taking it away from pathogens it's just like I think like Jessica Green's work in particular at the University of Oregon she's done I don't want to misrepresent it and I'm oversimplifying her work so don't take this verbatim but basically she's been studying how to build a hospital if you don't build it to be sterile if you build it to be like probiotic instead of antibiotic and that broadly speaking you're healthier in a hospital under most circumstances at this point she can now prove this in a room that just has the window open then in a room that has a million chemicals to try to kill everything that can be killed leaving alive only the things that can't be killed like C. difficile it's an obviously bad mode that we have pursued basically since the technologies of sterility have allowed us to do that but it's definitely not our future and I think that the same way that like 20, 30 years ago you couldn't have imagined that like an IT person would be integral to the conception of a building and you'd be crazy to build a building without someone on the team who really really understands everything from cell signal attenuation to ethernet cabling I know that like 20 years from now a biologist will be on the team to really understand like what you actually want to get into the room what you actually want to remove from the room because by then maybe we'll even know what some of that is I mean that's the same problem with the that goes hand in hand to the evolution of the clean building with the sick building right and the amount of airflow that you push in the building and colleagues of mine at Berkeley show that the standard model for hospitals is also the cliche that the solution to pollution is dilution so in a hospital you push as much air through the space as possible right because you want to push out all the bad stuff supposedly and we had this problem in the 80s when we first learned to seal buildings and condition them that we didn't put enough air in and so all that stuff that is in there that it tends to build up a little bit in ways you don't want it to but now right we're in this moment where you're pushing all this air and what actually happens in the epidemiology studies they're doing is when you push air really quickly around in a space actually when I cough my cough goes to everybody in this whole room lucky for you and because I have four daughters they're very young and very sick all the time so sorry for whoever goes home with the cold but that's because we designed the sort of the air flows around the idea that cleaner diluted is cleaner and I think there's much more strategic ways to understand not only how things move in an airflow sense right but also like what's in those air flows it's fascinating to we talked about this how you know we will eventually you know our consultant team will balloon even further beyond the engineers and the technical experts to biologists and so the first step of designing a project will not only be to get a survey but to also have somebody swab the site and to think about the health of buildings encompassing all that which I think you know is also tied to Forest and Ben's presentations where integration and innovation is not necessarily about creating more and more complex systems your thing is extremely complex but is about kind of creating something that is much broader at the social, cultural, public space level of the city or density of Singapore I was blown away when I saw that well the three you know you not only have a very catchy title to your lab but extremely catchy title to that project three for two is amazing when you think about the demands of housing and that Singapore and places like New York have so much footprint and in that footprint we have to address constant population growth and demographic shifts so this notion of kind of looking at something extremely small or in your case invisible impacting something much broader I think is really an amazing kind of thread between your presentations I think in your case like I never really thought about it just the idea of like really studying the human physiologically as the foundation of the infrastructure of architecture is I just that was news to me The bulk of the work is from the 1920s actually in labs at Harvard and it's really hard because the guy's name was Gaglu and then he changed his name to Gaglu and he did all these great studies with people in spaces this is before Fanger some of you may be familiar with this guy named Fanger from Deadmark that sort of defined the thermal comfort regime for ASHRAE and institutions that tell us how much to heat in cool buildings but yeah there's a lot of information sort of that you can bring forward in a broader context about physiology because like the resolution not just a bacteria but a people is available now I think within the space of design you can know something about how many people are well you can know if there's people in a room sometimes but there are certainly better sensors than the ones that you have to do jumping jacks for to make the lights turn on but in that domain yeah I mean maybe it's a little 10 years but I do think that our work always lives within the idea that there's an ecology that's social human, urban and cultural and so I think there is a desire to conceive of the projects that way less that they produce an image or a spectacle or things like that and more that they're performative in an urban cultural way that's really about people and what people do and how they do it together and a lot of the invention is or the experiments are focused at techniques for expanding architecture's ability to engage the urban context I also say that there's an awareness like in the shed even though it's maybe excessive in scale relative to the need of an adaptive institution or building that's able to respond to the fact that it lives within a cultural environment that has many other competing institutions and it's adaptive responses to be able to expand and contract based on the needs that it's hosting or sponsoring relative to other institutions at any given moment in time so it's something that kind of walks back and forth between being a metaphor not so literal as what you're talking about, bacteria in the urban environment but I do think there's ways in which we imagine that being a literal condition of the work that we do that the human network or the human ecology is very much part of what motivates our work from a bigger perspective I mean well I just have a question maybe a question sort of from the context of Kevin at the Media Lab and me having this strange joint appointment to Ben being out in practice and sort of my argument or my question and conundrum right in my role educating architects and engineers is really that relationship and I always claim it's not a dichotomy but like what is the role of all this expertise in consultancy you could be a biological consultant right now for a firm if they wanted to do an urban planning project probably right and I could be some sort of thermal consultant for crazy reflected radiant things or something right but because it's not really ready maybe for an argument for a realizable project but in the future is there a capacity in the discipline in the practicing discipline for more for more consultancy right right now you kind of have these silos you have a structural consultant you have your MEP consultant you have your IT consultant there's just a few things that happen and I wonder whether if you have a feeling of whether it's getting bigger and there's capacity for that domain to get bigger that keeps the architect engaged I want to put a filter on this because I think that there is always of course when I hear someone like Kevin speak I think damn it why didn't we talk to the biologist when we were working on the waterfront but Craig is kind of wagging his head because you know there is such a thing as inflation of all this and so I would like to talk about how integration can or cannot make things more streamlined not that I think the efficiency is the ultimate test of values but it would be interesting to discuss when and how does integration kind of move things along in a quicker way and when does it get completely over bloated so that you just are you know because you have everybody in the room you just can't move you can't you can't move fast enough I mean I would say because there's a little maybe it's even the last 10 years or so invoke somewhat in architecture schools to talk about interdisciplinarity transdisciplinarity crossing lines and things like that and certainly DSR is a place that's put itself forth as being interdisciplinary for a long time kind of building many distinct kinds of projects within different disciplinary areas and creating collaborations around them but I think the reality of being an architect is it's always interdisciplinary and the architect is always a kind of generalist who always is waiting in you know more than our expertise should allow and so there's a way in which you're always building teams of expertise around a specific problem that you initiate or is initiated and you're taking it on and you are kind of the integrator I don't know if that's answering your question so I think every project that we take on it's typical to have a certain team of consultants that you would go to but often we have a whole bunch of other consultants that are bringing in that extra problem that we want to bring into the project so I guess that there's a little bit of attention between training as an architect to be a generalist with enough knowledge of all these different disciplinary expertise but somebody has to be an expert in those things too because everybody can't be a generalist and so I think the kind of role the architect is to formulate the problem and to bring together people who have the knowledge base to solve it or to advance it maybe that's so obvious it doesn't bear saying but I think that we are integrators always by our training yeah I mean that's the argument I think that's the argument I'm trying to make and I completely agree and I think the difficult thing in the pedagogy right now is how to develop the right communication so that when you're in the room with all these people that you still maintain you can be a lead right you can be a generalist but as an architect you're the design driver and I mean anybody that's been in a meeting with a a big project you need to have that person there otherwise that's when you get stuck so I think the thing is it's great that we're in this conversation because now you can go forward and have a little bit of information about what Kevin's doing and that doesn't necessarily mean that you need to integrate it into your project but if you end up in a conversation with the biologist about how to close off the building you know that so actually I have one more thought because I think Mimi sort of set it up but we've also been on the other end of this project where clients have kind of taken on the idea that it's great to have all of the expertise in the room together all of the time and we find that's actually deeply counterproductive that you have to formulate what the problem is you're trying to solve and progressively bring on the people that you need to collaborate with and then broaden the circle as you go otherwise you get crushed by the weight of too much expertise that's too horizontal without enough focus and so there's new models of practice called like integrated project delivery that everybody thinks is great where the contractor and all of the subconsultants and all of the subcontractors and everybody are all together from the beginning to the end and it may be a useful model for solving really directly straightforward and conventional problems but I think it tends to kill creativity and innovation because you don't have the right smaller group of people to formulate the problem that's innovative that you're trying to solve I think the question actually in a way speaks to Craig's original introduction which is that there is this general sense that the world around us that we have to build in and for and do whatever it is that we do for there's this sense that that is way, way, way more complex now and of course it's not it's always like the world has always been exactly as complex as it is that actually what technology has done is just revealed that complexity and that's sort of what we asked it to do it's the reason that we built a computer but the problem with that is that it has revealed an infinite level of complexity because it's what we live in and then I think that the architects or any designer or basically any designer's role is what it has always been which is to figure out what constraints to apply it's just that it's a much wider palette that the constraints have to be applied to but I think that the fundamental ethos is one of awareness of what those systems are so that those constraints can be applied in a meaningful way the architect has the ability to have the awareness of alternate paradigms you don't have to listen to the engineering experts you can bring forth sort of information from other realms people or thermal engines not just buildings I mean I think a good analog for what we would hope for in initiating a problem is like you have this very expansive view of the reading that this kind of genetic interpretation of the city produces but you a couple beekeepers, a couple of students some designers, some people with expertise a half dozen people can initiate a project that has a giant scope to it and if the project has merit it can broaden and broaden to become a much bigger project over time okay I'm going to end it with the very open-ended impetus of greater awareness I'm sorry we talked through the coffee break but I just would welcome questions from the audience to the panelists during coffee break so we can move on thank you thanks everyone we're going to take 10 minutes and then we'll go to the next panel grab coffee no no