Welcome everyone. I like it. Drinks in the auditorium. Nice. Have a seat. Welcome. It's really, really a fantastic pleasure to welcome Jing Liu and Florian Ittenberg this evening to present the work of their practice So Il. I think it's fair to say that So Il is one of the most original voices emerging amongst the new generation of architects. There are many characteristics that set their work and approach apart from others, but one interesting and important way to enter this specificity and to understand it is, I believe, to take a moment to reflect on who they are and how and where they practice. First is the fact that So Il doesn't easily fit in any predefined category. They don't exactly belong to a generation since they are actually younger than the generation they have come to be associated with. At the same time, they seem already older than that generation. If one is to look at the extensive work the practice has already produced and especially the caliber of architectural competitions that they have been invited to partake in nationally and internationally, often competing against leading architects from around the world. Most recently, OMA, Ram Kulhas and Sana, as well as Annabel Seldor for the New Museum expansion competition here in New York. Second, there's the sense that So Il doesn't easily fit in a place. The partners call themselves Brooklyn Architects rather than New York Architects. The practice was founded in the U.S., even if it is in their own words, quote, un-American, as if choosing to start a firm here almost as if they chose to start a firm here almost by accident. They speak of registering our contemporary and global condition not as something to be analyzed from a certain outside but rather as a very personal experience of three partners whose backgrounds native languages and architectural formations could not be more different. They speak of searching for universal language at the intersection of or beyond those differences but design for ambiguity and an infinitude of meanings and destabilizations at times very literal destabilizations such as with their groundbreaking pole dance project, Winner of the 2010 Young Architect Program Competition at MoMA. Their work is intensely experiential, present and material while also being immensely reflective, ethereal, porous and with a likeness that renders it, if not absent, then almost boundless. In many ways, So Il's practice and work holds things together. Contradictions, hesitations, temporary and permanent, solid in the air, the seemingly simple and the infinitely complex, the atmospheric and dreamy and the intently precise and concrete, the formal and the informal form and performance. More importantly even, So Il brings together ideas and buildings in a kind of choreography at once logical and intuitive while also always being in search of beauty as an intrinsic, fundamental and indispensable ingredient of architecture. Much of the sense of perfectly imperfect equilibrium that So Il's work embodies so well has been captured and rendered tangible in the practice's recent book, Order Edge Aura. With it, as with their work, we are moved from small to large moments and experiences, textures and effects, framed details and streams of consciousness. In it, it is not only the fragments of materiality, transparency, reflectivity, solidity or ethereality that are surprising and compelling, but also the words and stories which seem to perfectly echo the sense of So Il's constructed parallel universe, one in which we are invited to enter and encouraged to engage. Florian Iddenburg and Jing Liu co-founded So Il in 2008. Florian holds a master of science and architecture from Delft University of Technology and Jing studied in China, Japan, the UK and the US before concluding with a master's of architecture from the Tulane School of Architecture in New Orleans. Since the firm's inception, Elias Papajorju has been a key member of the team and was made third partner in 2013. A native of Athens, he holds a diploma of architecture from Aisoto University in Greece and a master's of architecture from Harvard GSD. We're actually really thrilled to have two of the So Il partners as part of the school, with Elias currently teaching it in the in the core one first semester program of the M. Mark and Jing teaching leading studios, advanced studios since 2009. Their most notable projects to date include the Manetti Shem Museum of Art at the University of California in Davis, Cookie Gallery in Seoul, Korea, the Logan offices, pole dance at MoMA PS1, blueprint at the storefront for art and architecture and breathe. Many living a housing prototype which responds to the challenges of future urban living. The practice has been recognized with numerous awards to numerous to say here today, but for both architecture and design and they include an AIS and Francisco Merritt Award, the PA Award, the architecture League Emerging Voices Award and the MoMA PS1 Young Architect Program Award amongst others. The firm's work is included in the permanent collections of institutions such as MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Carnegie Museum of Art. Please join me in welcoming Jing and Florian of So Il. Thank you Amal. I realized Amal and us, we have known each other for more than a decade and that's probably the reason why her introduction was one of the most accurate and precise and somehow the introduction really touches on a lot of the sentiment and the frameworks that we've been working in. Before I start to talk about anything, a little bit of a marketing campaign, the book is available on sale in the corridor and also on Amazon and it just came out a few months ago but we have a little bit of a logistic distribution problem so I think get it before you cannot anymore. So the book is a combination of our work in the last eight years that we had our office and it took us two years to write every single word that's included in this book. Indeed as Amal mentioned that we're three very different people including many others that working in our office. Ilias is from Athens, Florian from Holland, Amsterdam, near Amsterdam and I'm from Nanjing, China. Once I forget which movie I heard it in but one of the quotes that I heard that resonate very well with our working style in the office is that the highest level of intelligence is able to hold two contradictory and extremely different ideas in the same place. So this is how we work. We argue all the time and we contradict each other all the time and that's why this book took many years to conceive. It would be really nice if you can be part of this journey as well. I put a lot of another... I just came back from actually I'm curious because I know that we had an open house today here and how many people are still in high school and came for open... sorry, undergrad. I was just in London on Friday judging the REBA medal for this part two so postgraduate master degree projects from all over the world and I saw 300 something portfolios in a very short period of time and I realized that although I've been teaching at the school and your generation for a while that the sentiment of the generation that's sitting here has shifted so much all around the world and it's really... there is this of course the pervasive post-human contemplation that's I think that's going on at this moment and also either it's a dystopian or completely kind of a craft-oriented approach that holding on to some kind of humanities that if it still exists today. So I kind of reflected a little bit both based on my Friday's experience on this lecture's theme which is to consist of two parts. I'm going to talk about the living parts and Florence is going to talk about the matter parts. Since the beginning this is actually a movie, Tarkovsky's movie that we used as the prompt of our first Columbia studio ten years ago which was exactly to contemplate what it would be in the post-human society or world where our environment gets faster and faster but our existence as human beings gets smaller and smaller and on my way back from London I also watched this movie. I don't know many of you probably have watched it. I think the movie Blade Runner when I went to school was very much the movie to watch back then and I think now it's coming full circles. And as we're thinking about contemplating about the technology of the implication on our society and how we're all getting faster and racing to a faster and faster speed of connecting everything that we can consume and things are getting more and more immaterial. The fact is that one that overlaps on the idiosyncrasy of the physical environment and the world they take on edges, orders, changes and also they become very vulnerable at moments. And when we zoom into this strange moments of the materials coming together in this small scales they can be sometimes ridiculous in a humorous way but also in this incredibly tragic way. So in a book we contemplate on how do we then establish a new kind of order that maybe is different departure from the modernist way of understanding the order. Maybe things are a little bit more elastic and taking risk and instability as a new form of joy and aesthetics, new aesthetics and also making some kind of edge that's more permeable and maybe it's an edge where they're lying on the outside of a form that you cannot draw with a single stroke or it's an aura of a person or a being that's in the city that emanates some kind of universal feelings. So those are the things that we constantly talk about in the studios and it all goes back to often the type or the discussion of how do we want to live as human beings as long as we're still here. I have been personally quite interested in, because I'm from post-communist China, the physical environment often is, I remember growing up still quite collective and quite planned and regulated. I became quite interested in the story of living, how it developed in the last century all around the world and I came upon this book which I'm quite surprised that not many people know about but it's by Medusina Faye Pierce who was now, a lot of people call them material feminists, at that moment they were called Marxist feminists and she wrote this book called Co-operative Housekeeping which was pretty much the first kind of group of people that contemplated in the industrial cities how the technology and the new density in the cities is able to provide a new kind of way of living and in a master plan sense that collective housework can be taken outside of the realm of the domestic space and the typologies of collective kitchen and the daycare started to come into play as something of a new kind of urban typologies so the kitchen becomes also a shared socialized space from then and the daycare as I mentioned and at some point as we reflect back that why did that not happen and why did the kitchen becomes and all this new technology becomes something that we all have in our private space is a curious moment in history I think the American culture and the communist and socialist culture diverged is where the consumerism as the driving force of our economics economical life became the driver after the recession in the 30s and the fast forward to how that created very intensely individualistic and also siloed you know private lives are depicted in later movies like the playtime of Jack the T and to today the field of deaths becoming shallower and shallower with the newer versions of technologies were intensely reflected and mirrored back onto our self so how can we not that you know I'm proposing that we go back to the socialist and the communist you know narrative before the diversion but it's really interesting to reflect on that hundred years of history of living and and the suit that lends to look at some of the places that we're working and this is the North Omaha it's one of the sites that we're working currently at this moment on the collective artist loft project it was a very vibrant predominantly black neighborhood in the 1960s it was so highly regarded as the jazz center that there was saying that if you didn't play in North Omaha you cannot be considered jazz musician and through a series of the investments political and environmental issues today it's one of the poorest neighborhood in America and so the project that we're working on is to try to use housing as a type as a kind of urban type to regenerate the economical and cultural life in in the city which we would talk up I don't think we're gonna talk about it today but just to give you a context and this is another site that we're working in today which is Leon in Mexico in the last 20 years in the in the kind of effort of home ownership and also urban development there's this very fast lean made you know cookie cutter house that's made basically blanketing the outskirt to the periphery of the urban centers as you can see they're building a really more kind of product oriented away there's no social not much social space not so much infrastructure that's put in place often it's lacking transportation availabilities as well so the city realized that that rather than this kind of the relentless occupation of the peripheral space it's better to environmentally and also community socially it's better to redensify the city core so we're working with the city to consider more mid-rise housing typologies that is based on co-living and collective living which I will talk about a little bit later and this is one of the earliest project that is in Athens grace we didn't realize this project based because of the financial crisis in 2008 and it after math of that but it's also one of those urban dilapidated urban core that's seeking a new model of regeneration through to the typology of the housing which I will talk a little bit about so this is the neighborhood in Athens and so there are a lot of empty lots that's just by virtual left empty because of the lack of maintenance and developments and new interest in new residents and they're all left empty and you can see a lot of conditions that's half have taken over by nature and half kind of architecture rebels and instead of so rather than instead of the building just as the infill passive infill typologies we took the same building massing and it turned it to the sideways and they used it more as almost a barcode to connect the empty lots throughout to the entire neighborhood so we called it the party wall as a typology so the buildings are super skinny they are so skinny that you can almost not call it a building but they just occupy half of sometimes even less than half of the building the side to width and by squeezing the interior space as much as possible and releasing the exterior space as much as possible we were able to use it as more of an urban operation to make this very dense blocks that's deteriorating and dilapidated into something active again so this was the hope of the urban operation in the end that there would be the spark code of multiple colors and different lives that injects and kind of cuts new energies into the city so it's more of a typological studies rather than building studies for this project and we continue that similar this was 2007 I think it was the project it's one of the first competition we entered thanks to Ilias here that we were able to understand the specific conditions in the neighborhood and then we took the similar idea and participated in the competitions of I think it's called a micro housing that Mayor Bloomberg the last Mayor of New York put out which is to also in a way densify the already quite dense New York city blocks but there are a lot of built or not underused FAR left in some of this tower in the park modernist housing blocks so we used again an architecture as an urban strategy to re-establish that street edge so we pushed the building onto the edge of the block whereas all the other buildings are this tower in the park typologies that's pushed into the center of the lot and try to find a way to make this unit again as small as possible within the code building code the regulations so in the end I think the building the lot it was 230 square feet the site now I think the whole unit yeah the whole unit was like 225 or something square foot and so it's really the most essential things that's related to living that's grouped in here for all the personal and the most private functions of the living and then similarly rather than kind of overloading the corridors which is the common space in the middle and doing this double loaded corridor that only gets light from one side and inevitably you get light of the Norse for the half of the building we made it into a double corridor and single unit to building so you would have the living space right in the middle but the common circulation are both in the front and the back so actually maximizing the common space and minimizing the private space this was the unit plan quite simple and again the top and the bottom the front and the back that they all become this common space that the private life is pushed out to establish this more communal and socialize the space and because of the this squishing of the middle the building becomes almost translucent when you are looking from the building next door that you can almost see through the building that's that was our hope and mimic an Eric one I think Eric is here in the back and I think we had a very different approach but I'm very glad that you you were the one doing it so this is Leon projects that started with a very dynamic discussion with the city stakeholders the banks the long providers in the city and talking mostly about how what should we do with the city that we have as a physical space and also how do we how can we change the people's mentality of that we all have to own something on the land that actually doesn't have any social infrastructures but somehow that land belongs to you which is an idea that has already been planted so deeply in people's mind and the change that preference to something that's the opposite you know like you don't maybe land is more shared and it's common and the corridor is more common but somehow the quality of life and it's a different way of understanding life and how can we shift the value proposition for for the people who are who we're trying to move back to the city core and so coming out of that workshop for the similar typologies that we have been always advocating also took a different kind of turn in this one similarly rather than the double loaded the corridors we use the single loaded corridor building but also changed it I mean twisted in an eight shape maybe it's shape building form so that the corridor the common corridors both outside and the inside in the building in different locations and when it goes to inside it also linked together abundance of shared space inside of the building and instead of a very regular facade we tried to devise a very simple but repeated facade type type that is using this scallop to create a infinitely varied facade type in the building that also gives a different width of openings that connected the inside and outside the building is 62 units for 1.2 million dollars construction cost so it's a super low cost building but I think the the aim here was not so much in architecture as an object but I'm really as using architecture as agency to change a certain way of connecting with each other and with the city itself so that's going to be started at by the end of this year right and this was so we try we keep trying with a new kind of way of talking about the living and I feel that in the last two three years we finally got some gotten some more attractions I mean attractions with our desires and aims and this was one of the other successful stories as well and I think that's really because the common kind of discussion has already has started to change in how we live in the cities all around the world already and this is one of the bringing venting Paris is a new competition that was launched by the current mayor in Paris that kind of encourages interdisciplinary collaborations between different experts also city officials and sociologists and basically and also like users program users shoot together and developers together come up with a proposition for some of the most problematic public sites in Paris the current addition is looking at underground sites in Paris and how can we come up with innovative idea to occupy them and our sites our addition was along the river sign and the sites that we participated in was this corridor from the Bastille that kind of hitting into the river and created this site that in a way could be very you know heightened moment of this two important access but looking very closely to it there's this incredible the difficult to trespass elevation change with the highway and the water being low and the streets the city streets being high so it's actually a very very disconnected relationship between the canal and the river at this edge the natural instinct would be to make something big and become this heightened moment at the crossing of this to connect to access but counterintuitively we decided to instead of blocking and creating something very wow at that moment to create something super low and make the building mass on the site of the access so this is a very low-rise co-working space that we put on our site and that the aim of that volume is not so much about an architectural statement but it's really to activate to that edge and populated and the housing part this very small housing part is the economical vehicle to make that happen and that the idea is that this place would be changed over time through different phases we first activated the streets with this co-working and also quite public rooftop here and then over time when this edge maybe oh it's later okay I wanted to show this this picture over time when this edge become activated and urbanistically it it's transformed in the neighborhood and in the people's mind and maybe the highway can be it can also play active role in promoting the highway to be transformed from a vehicle vehicular space to a public space thanks to the autonomous vehicles that's going to happen very soon that we can get the city back this piece of land because we're only going to lease it for 15 years and then we can give it back to the land to the city and therefore the people and reconceive what this place can be so using architecture as more of way of thinking the transformation of the city rather than object that is setting the stone so I'm just going to show you a little bit of the housing part which is also a co-living space which shares kitchen in on the one floor between many units and so it's intended that it's for people who are maybe a little bit younger and they will be the primary activator of this part of the city and I will end with the contemplation on the living with this two projects that take on slightly different scales but somehow very similar so these are actually models of two different projects one is a project that we collaborated with many living in thinking about a future many future way of living inside our city that maybe is post object post architecture and in a you know defining a different way of connecting with each other and with our environment and this is a costume that we designed for Chicago biennial that just took place last month for a group of musicians and they would be there were four or three wind instruments musicians and the one vocalist that would wear this specifically designed a costume and the prompt was a little bit that you know our environment is becoming much more related to our body scale as the field of depth is getting shallower and shallower and our environment is becoming more and more predictable with pollution sea water rise and sometimes we can go to very far in the middle of nowhere so this costume becomes almost kind of a personal architecture that the musicians can take them and it becomes a filter of the environment and the self so the two things that did almost similar made a similar effect one lives in the middle of the city and provides a living area for three people and in the middle of the day it can be quite opaque and at night it becomes a completely revealing and transparent the envelope is such that it filters the pollution in the cities and cleans the air by the filter but filtration and the inside there are three bedrooms that are just barely separated from each other visually sometimes with an elastic bungee net so you can see from one space to the other in this very translucent and dream-like state and similarly the musicians would play in Chicago they played the music that we commissioned composer to specifically make the music for this it's quite a somber music and then they played this music in the conservatory in Chicago in one of the most economically unstable areas but in this very lush greenhouse environment and then they slowly walk sometimes bump into each other and the piece are designed based on the movement of the instruments so the clothes also becomes the extension of what we do by that I'm going to hand and I'm going to hand it to the mic to Florian and who's going to talk about some more concrete things yeah and maybe Ilya also wants to do a presentation in the end we can do that and maybe so where Jin spoke about living and how do we live and what do we share I'm going to show three projects that have to do with how do we make things focusing on matter and also on labor and maybe you know the projects where the project Amal already mentioned so I'll show the Kukche project a project in Hong Kong that nobody knows about and the museum in Davis but I think it's important to look at it through the lens of how it is made or how do we make things and what is involved who produces our spaces Kukche the gallery in Seoul is a contemporary arts space in a historic environment it's just the ubiquitous white cube it's a cube a white box that could be anywhere in the world that needed to be nestled in this very beautiful historic setting not not necessarily beautiful but one of the few historic settings left in Seoul near the palace where the emperor was and this was basically the housing of the workers in the that work in the palace they were in the surroundings and there's a number of these beautiful Hanok homes around it and so we took the white cube as a given but we felt that this cube was too harsh and too disconnected if you want from from where it needed to be so when we went to present this scheme to our client who is a very busy businesswoman we decided to wrap it in the stocking that we had lying in the office to in way in a way soften this edge and in a way maybe create a sort of a permanent fog if you want around this sort of harsh box we pushed out all the functional things like entry mechanical and stairs and this created this sort of very undefined form here you see its context the palace is here these are the historic worker housing the Hanok homes in here in the middle is the third building we also fixed it one and two and so we had no idea what it was this mesh but then we came across this armor which is basically a way in which you can create very beautiful double curved services that are also very strong it's the maximum size that is that is made is on the scale of the body so this is only a very small scale and we decided to see can we explore this something that creates sort of this double curvature yet is strong for the scale of the building and so we started to experiment first in the office with different scales this on the left is the largest scale you can buy these are laser cut in the office and we started to understand also how does this geometry actually works why is it elastic why does it take on these double curvatures because it's actually all made out of stiff rings it's just pure metal thread and we found that there's one direction in which it falls stiff and in the other that it becomes pliable and we started to map sort of the building and at the same time once we had to find sort of the ring the size of we wanted to use we started to work with an engineer because we knew that this thing also needed to perform and hold an exterior and so once we figured out the strength in one ring we started to see how does it work actually on the full sort of wrapper of this building and these different beautiful maps started to occur and at some point with the entire building actually figured out in the computer every single ring was modeled and we knew where the forces would run through the through the mesh and then we said are we going to translate this into Korean and have somebody make it or should we make it ourselves and we decided to make it ourselves together with Mike Ra from Front and so what we did is we went to we went to Alibaba.com yeah and very quickly we got a lot of people that were interested in this one area in China Anping County and we were bombarded with specifically one email and a Skype name called ring and she kept on Skyping with us for a while and after a while she sent us this and said that looks very promising that looks very interesting so we decided to travel first to Beijing and drive for six hours and meet this person who only for us existed in the digital realm and matter in in reality and I don't know how many of your friends have met online but the first of the physical meeting is always quite quite exciting and so we came in Anping and Anping is actually for us it was really incredibly fascinating to be there because it's a it's a it's a conglomeration of factories basically in a in sort of a grid setting mostly dirt roads there's no civic infrastructure there's no schools there's no universities there's no city hall there's no museum there's nothing civic it's just factories it's just people making things and we felt this is really the heart of sort of made in China there was absolutely no civic life the only place where we could stay was the brothel and we stayed there for a couple of weeks but first we met the brother of ring who was by himself sitting in the courtyard to the size of this stage and what was he doing he was welding our mesh together one ring at a time at that moment we had promised our busy client in Korea that we would deliver this mesh and we were fully on the hook and here Jing explains that the rings the skin consists of half a million rings sometimes there's a confusion in counting I think in China 10,000 and 100,000 so this guy is clearly wondering how many it really are and Mike here Mike says whatever we're going to do that's ring by the way so ring ring says you know what everybody in this town can weld why don't we come up with a way in which we can all participate and so we actually sit together and we worked there for a while and come up with a method where multiple people can work you know concurrently at at this mission we all ended up working with 60 people making 14 of these swaths large stretches we use the local carwash as sort of a place to clean and degrease here we do a check every single weld needed to be inspected the local schoolyard was a place for a mock-up and a test and after we got approval we were able to ship them and we actually worked with the gallery itself to ship the goods there was nobody in between sort of as a trading company because they move things in crates around the world so they brought the mesh to our crude concrete structure they're sitting in its historic context and we worked with the ship and sale maker to hang this this sort of custom dress if you want around around that crude geometry to sort of soften its edge this is particularly an image I like where you see sort of this old traditional craft meeting this new say I don't know if it's digital craft but it's certainly something that is derived through computation but I think these two together and how they sort of resonate with one another I think is interesting we were able to make it seamless so the 14 swaths were actually welded together in the same technique so there's a continuous surface basically throughout the through the building and the building itself never actually reads as an object much more as sort of this thing that you can walk around but never fully actually grasp there's places where you can get in between up to the roof as sort of this thickened pochet places where you as you enter the building go through this threshold and you see a little bit the context there and here the relation between old and new so that's one way of making things and now and maybe Jing you have to correct me if I say things completely wrong it's very interesting we're all presenting each other's project so we have no in some way we don't necessarily know what we know so this project is a project Jing has been working on one we're working everything together Hong Kong what is happening in Hong Kong everybody maybe knows West Kowloon they're building a very big cultural center with a lot of commerce a lot of different just a new urban core probably people know about what's happening West Kowloon so the people in old sort of Kowloon they got very nervous that there is a lot of development going on here where this used to be sort of the the main entry into Hong Kong and here we were asked by a large collector who also is very much involved in the development of the city to help on a lot that they were developing up sorry here which is one of the largest sort of mixed use developments and so people probably know Hong Kong is incredibly dense and there is a multitude of programs layered on top of one another and most of these developments they happen completely around malls and what have you and so we were asked while this building was already actually under construction designed by KPF this is the waterfront to take two floors of this project on top of the podium under the residential and to turn that into a place in which they could show an emerging art collection and also house traveling shows and so in some way I would say this is one of the most complicated contexts to work in it's also very interesting to think of your neighbors as things that are below and above you not just sort of left and right of you but this was we sort of took the challenge and I think what we decided to do is find an approach that in some way takes a distance of course from this very dense and commercial environment at the same time plays a little bit with this idea of the display the showing and in some way you could say the is it lavish culture of Hong Kong the envelope was incredibly tight as it works every square inch counts for real estate in Hong Kong but what we tried to do because this was one of the components of the project that didn't have to be commercially rented out we started to push this facade and make it a stick in a way as possible as sort of create a buffer between this context and the art itself there is a part of a public Plaza also it's two parts of the museum maybe it's easier to show here with sort of a view corridor and Plaza and landscape that we're also designing and so we decided to use glass not in its ability to be transparent but actually in its ability to sort of filter out to to diffuse and to reflect and to refract and so we proposed to make a skin of glass tubes that are about a meter and a half in diameter and nine meters tall and in this way there would be sort of the soft boundary between the very you know dense urban commercial setting and this space for art and for contemplation and reflection and while you look at it straight it is transparent and it creates sort of this yeah boundary between the the inside and the outside and then there's areas gallery spaces where also you can look back into the into the onto the harbor how do you make nine meters tall glass here we again did not go to Alibaba.com we actually went to Cricursa Cricursa is a company in Spain that for a hundred fifty years have been bending glass they were one of the first to do traditional shop windows in in Europe and it became clear that this is something that needs so much sort of expert knowledge that there's only very few people that can do this there was a company in China that tried is it North Star glass and yeah and then Cricursa because of its hundred fifty year of experience was able to take this challenge and this is the first sort of showing of the their ability for the pitch to get this job to be able to make this nine meter tall piece of glass that's Jing there we did a mock-up we worked with really a few of the most advanced people in the glass industry including James O'Callaghan who did a lot of work with Apple and through that we also ended up working with Ceeley as an installer who works on all the Apple glass and so one if we compare now the little courtyard where the brother of ring was welding his rings together to this glass facility where now the what is it 420 pieces of glass are being fabricated and just think about labor automation tools of production these two sheets they first get bent into this curve they need to be laminated there's an interlayer in between so it's double layered glass the two radii need to fit exactly into one another it's all the specially developed tools specifically for this project large suction so this electro suction cranes basically that handle everything automated they this is where they get cleaned before they get the lamination goes goes in which is the second layer to get sort of melted together with laser precision here you see the two coming together and then they get placed in this special crate again inspected by Ching and then shipped shipped to Hong Kong so they're currently they're busy hanging these and you should imagine this is on the waterfront on the seventh floor of this commercial podium there's tornado you know winds so incredibly complex process of installation that is currently going on and here you see it under construction and should be finished the end of this year so I'll end with this project in some way maybe could speculate what can we do with these two different approaches if we try to make something here some of the same intelligence and I again I think we only want to talk about sort of the the way in which this materialized these ideas became matter so to say this is a competition at UC Davis University of California Davis the money shrimp museum and it was a design-built competition and this is something that maybe as young architects used to start thinking about it means that we were a subcontractor to the contractor the money for this project came partially from a donor and partially from the UC system and since they could not run the risk of this project going over budget it was capped there was a maximum budget 25 million dollars all in including your fee and it meant that what you presented there you know we as architects are very good at wowing but in this case we had to wow but at the same time we had to also guarantee that we could pay for it and as an architect you cannot take the risk you cannot take a 25 million dollar risk and so you have to partner with somebody who's willing and able to take that risk which is a builder and so we partnered with a builder called Whiting Turner they open they operate nationally in this country and we also partnered with a firm out of San Francisco what's a national firm Bowling Chawinsky Jackson as the architect of record they have a lot of experience also with Apple they did all the Apple stores before Norman Foster took over and so we were at this team that had to enter this competition what was also interesting is that the competition there was an interview process and then there was there was a competition but it was a quite long competition where there was quite some exchange and where they because what would win would be built basically. I won't speak too much about the ideas behind the scheme but what we wanted to do is work with sort of the essence of this site and of this landscape not in a poetic and romantic way UC Davis is the ag school the agricultural school within the UC system it's a very empowered student body that I don't know if people remember the pepper spray incident but that happened at UC Davis and in some way was where sort of occupying movement sort of started and so it's a very opinionated and very strong student body who believe because they focus on say bioengineering they focus on working with our world and the ability to actually tinker with our world they have a very strong sense of agency and so the spirit of being in control or at least being able to sort of shape your own destiny was something that we in some way gathered from the land and wanted to bring into the building so we didn't want to create a very imposing building we didn't want to create a very didactic building but we wanted to create something very open something that students could embrace and could create sort of their own narratives in and at the same time the the climate the environment which is obviously something that we should all be concerned about but is also specifically for this student body that works so much with the land how can you make the environment also sort of a visual experience in the in the building so we had sort of this idea of the productive ground and then an additional layer that would sort of highlight the the the idea of the of the environment what we started to do because also well there's a lot of things that go into it and I start to explain the whole project in any case the program was much smaller than the site the site was 70,000 square foot the building was only 35,000 square foot yet they needed a sort of a gesture they wanted to have some sort of presence it's at the edge of campus and it was how do you seduce a student population that normally doesn't go to a museum how do you seduce them to come and enjoy and sort of experience art for many for the first time and so this idea of openness we translated in this idea of a very open structure a structure that just creates sort of specific specific spatial qualities but not necessarily given by program so there's sort of tapestry a variety of spaces light dark open closed big and small that could take on any program any art that still needs to be produced also for an audience that maybe doesn't exist yet and then the program itself sort of found its way in this organization just basically based on the qualities of the spaces we we ended up with the lobby sort of in the center very transparent open and connecting sort of back to the land an area of art production and education towards the front the offices and operation here and outside courtyard and then the gallery spaces over there and the second layer this layer that creates this experience of the landscape was this grand canopy the canopy that covers the entirety of the site and creates spaces both inside and outside so during the competition when we won we actually proposed to cover the entire site with the same single perforated mesh this was because we had to guarantee the budget our builder didn't want to take any risk so he said we'll just give you 40 bucks a square foot for the single sheet of perforation which would create a very even and very continuous shadow underneath and we were interested in making actually the shadow and the light really part of the experience itself and so we started to to most of the annoyance of our boss the builder tried to see if we could change basically and start working with that sort of flat perforated sheet and turn it into something else here you see a shadow of a tree which has different sharpness sort of a sharp edge and a more blurry edge and we tried to see can we create something similar with a material infill so the idea of layering started to evolve and also this idea that you could in some way through orientation and spacing play sort of with the shadows and the sharpness of the shade that we settled on this idea of a triangular beam that basically spans the entirety of the primary structure so it is both structural and it is the perforation and it creates sort of this layering where the light basically bounces through these different layers of the mesh and makes it much lighter it makes it much stronger sort of presence underneath and then from the top because this building is also visible from all around it's very smooth and it sort of emphasizes this layer that covers the entirety of the site and what we then did is we in order to create this variety played with these three parameters spacing orientation and openness and as the sun sort of moves over it you can imagine how this creates a sort of a different effect in order to stick to the budget we guaranteed with our builder how much we would maximum be spending on this and we created a parametric model that allowed us to really finely calibrate this spacing the orientation and the openness while at the same time knowing exactly how much material we used how many connections we had and so forth and so ultimately this gave this sort of map of that infill with areas for instance used for art display more dense and areas say that we're sitting over mechanical part of the building for instance where you never could get really underneath could be more generously spaced and that was a way to actually through information really also control the budget so while the steel was being installed we went back and worked again with Mike Ra from Front who also we work with on the mesh to start fabricating these beams first we had to determine the spacing that became also very important because this is where the joints of these different stretches of the info come together 932 unique connections throughout the entire canopy and we went back to the motherland and start to produce them all they were actually machine fabricated but some of the components needed to be hand attached so 932 unique sections of beam packed, shipped and installed one by one and what was interesting is that there was so much skepticism within the builder that they had allowed for I think four months or something to install these beams and within two weeks the entire canopy was installed and only one of the 932 ones needed to be adjusted and so in some way I think for us it was a real lesson if you want to in a sort of an environment in which it's harder and harder to actually control the execution if you want to have some sort of say in it it's really important that you also control the information and the ability to make things so the lines of production if you will here you see the building it opened exactly I think a year ago November last year was the opening landscape beyond the agricultural landscape here the campus over here and so the canopy sort of dips down towards the main axis on campus as you enter the campus this is the main road in and this is where the pedestrians sort of come from it sort of reaches out to you it's very low it's nine and a half feet there and so as you cross the street it reaches out but then you come under this canopy it raises up to 32 feet and here you see suddenly all these decisions that you make in the computer being very legible and very present and really as you sort of enter this threshold of the canopy suddenly you immerse yourself in this very dense sort of play of light and shadow and something that is constantly changing right over time the sun is incredibly present in northern California and so this really animates and actually creates sort of a completely different experience every time that you are there the courtyard looking back through the lobby to the entry and here the galleries not organized in a very strict sequence with much more the ability for the student to choose its own path to create its own story and always with moments opening up to the exterior so that in some way you know sort of where you are in the world that's it, thank you Are you joining? I think you should join So thank you for really inspiring lecture in particular I couldn't have thought of or hoped for a better lecture for open house the kind of work and the presentation really answered some of the questions that were coming up earlier when we had the conversation with the prospective students about what are the challenges for architecture today or what do architects do when they come out of here and it's so interesting to see the kind of processes that you've kind of designed and engaged with and the ways in which today we are really kind of both constantly zooming out and zooming in collaborating and mixing the highest scripting and the kind of parametric design with craft and you were saying it's a sort of sense of immaterial and highly material at the same time the most sophisticated skin is made in China and exposing all of that process is so kind of interesting and I also think it's really to think about practice and design and collaboration and network of knowledge I was thinking about a practice such as Front with which Mike Ra and with whom you've collaborated and how they've defined also a kind of motive of practice they are sort of facade experts let's say but have brought that knowledge to a completely different level now and they're architects and they're thinking about really making and understanding how something that is sourced or made in China is going to be different than if they're working in Spain so it's just such an expanded sort of context and at times it's like Google like Googling Alibaba so the creativity extends to so many different levels you're saying Googling is a creative act it can be if you know how to search and I think to learn how to search what is the question that you ask the search engine is more important than knowing the answer that really I think came through in the talk and I thought that was quite interesting how did you or why did you decide to split it along the kind of living and matter it could be a gender you reversed it so that gets you out of the gender thing well I think let's see as Jing said we have very different ways sometimes of talking about certain things there are sometimes these lectures of two people where everybody says one sentence and they complete one another also Jing and I we saw each other today for the first time in what three weeks or something so we hadn't really fully time to coordinate but actually I will also say that this lecture we had a lecture before which is actually called Order Edge Aura and in some way takes us through these three realms that the book takes us through but then recently we've been talking a little bit if these are the ways in which you can organize matter about where do you put something and where do you put nothing and you can put it in its organization and then how do you situate the organization and what sort of presence does it create that's the idea of that book but we started to think a little bit to what end and I think Jing was then pushed this lecture into trying to figure out how are we living today and what are the values actually trying to put at work with this act of deciding where there is something and where there is nothing and so we've been thinking a lot about indeed the way in which say our economic and material and environmental conditions affect how we organize stuff and I think these two areas so sharing and living and co-living and how do we socially relate and this idea of labor in a certain way so making but also the ability to make and how do you make in different places and what does it actually mean who are the people that are making it so maybe a little bit more of a social angle so to say I think maybe Jing can say something about it too but I mean that's how we started to transform a little bit the conversation also because I think we got a little bit worried that architecture can end up only being sort of a luxury, like we don't want it to be a luxury project as you know Jing is a communist, Elias you're a socialist. Yeah and Elias is born at the birthplace of democracy and so you know sometimes we wonder you know what do we do here or how can we be ourselves within a certain reality. I also think that you know we started the office in our office in 2008 and it was a very unsettling time and then the more we grow our practice the more we're confronted with the what actually happened after 2008 you know in Omaha for example in Made in China city you know like in the factories that's producing these things and so I mean as you know politics getting more and more erratic and you know technology becoming more and more unsettling for a lot of people politically but also culturally we had the intuition that it's important to go back to the fundamental questions of you know just live and matter you know if we're talking about the meaning of living you know how do we interact with each other what is that fundamental relationship. Sure we can all have if we move outside of city we can all have big pot of land and you know by kitchen you know IKEA kitchen like that's not even the question at this moment so how do we want to live together as human beings is one of the fundamental questions that I think in time like this it's really important to go back to and also this kind of establishing a meaning with this matters you know stuff we can produce a lot of stuff as you can see anything in these days we don't even need people to produce very sophisticated things anymore but at the end of the day you know things have meaning and how do we reestablish that relationship by the story of who's making it what's the tradition how did the technology evolve from the craft to the digital craft and through that narrative maybe we can regain this connection with the things we touch with the things we decided to put here so they're not just this you know bought sold transactionery things. No I mean I think that really comes through in the work and I was thinking about you know your first well it probably wasn't the first but the PS1 project is so you know there's so much continuity in terms of setting the stage right so you're using architecture as a kind of creating a series of situations of social interactions of and this sense of engagement with the structure and kind of participation in a way continues throughout the work and I think with this subsequent project that you showed today there's always this architecture is kind of mobilizing a set of relationships and collaborations and the network of people and you know especially for the gallery it's you know the sense that the entire town you know becomes part of that you know the kind of making of that project and so it's an expanded story of the project in itself so I think that you know that's quite clear in terms of architecture's agency to kind of mobilize and it's also interesting I think you know we have been I guess it's Alejandro Zerapolo that declared that you know the envelope was the last space of architectural intervention in terms of but I think he defined it as almost the sort of okay this is the kind of beauty stuff that you add on top right like everything else is done and the architect comes and you know does the kind of face of it all or the brand of it all but I think you're rethickening that and in terms of all of the making that goes in it and bringing back the kind of social dimension which I think is is really quite interesting so as it disappears and it gets blurred it actually is getting thicker in terms of not only the effects but the stories that are around its making. Yeah and in some way we also wanted to create it as a space of in between so that it's not just public and private but there's sort of this space that nobody owns if you want. Yeah. And so I was thinking so Elias came in a little bit later but you were part of the kind of practice you know very early on and I know you've been really working in the competition Paris and this kind of sense of the boundary and places like Athens is also really interesting right the kind of balcony and the thickened sort of negotiation between inside and outside which comes through actually in a way in the early projects of housing right you were already playing with this kind of inside and outside even though it wasn't so immaterial it was already quite present as an idea and I was thinking about Athens and that negotiation and do is that Yeah, I think I don't know if people know the sort of prevalent typology in Athens the well-known Polkatechia where as also because of the climate everyone has sort of an external space their own space of balcony I think there what is interesting is that sort of typology was generated through almost like sort of a development process sort of legal kind of framework sort of individual development of units and so and although I think that that exterior space appears to sort of create a relationship with the city I think often is not utilized they're like actually very narrow with a section of the streets that are also kind of like awkward so at the end these spaces are there but they're not sort of used as they were supposed to and I think some of the projects now with the sort of thickened in a way edge try to sort of rethink that kind of in between space between the interior and the exterior directly even in the project in Athens with the sort of flipping of the typology or the prevailing way of building on the lot where that balcony becomes facade the circulation but also sort of opens to that collective courtyard in the Parisian in the Paris project there is a little bit different there's not necessarily a balcony or a very small kind of balconies but there I think the sickening also relates a little bit with the city and even with the sort of history of the city I think what is interesting in the project is speaking also about the layering and the narratives is an effort to try to kind of like bridge or connect many different histories but also futures of the city so on the one hand the project ties into the historical Osmanian city and at the same time what Jing was saying was sort of flexible proposal kind of like foresees maybe or ways sort of like changes that will come to the city and sort of trying again to connect the two it's interesting I was thinking also in the lecture about what you spoke and what you didn't speak about obviously there's a lot of rethinking around the question of typology and materiality and experience but we don't talk anymore about the diagram so much and yet I think it's you know you still we see some traces of kind of diagrammatic thinking even though it's not necessarily programmatic I mean even though it is experiential or it is but it's still the field because it's true we are in this moment where it's you know that composition is disappeared and yet I think it's still there somehow and I wanted to see how it evolved for you in your work I think it's fair to say that in our case still the diagram is a tool at least in design to design basically not indeed necessarily programmatic if we start to think about maybe a generation before us that used program you know in the juxtaposition as programs maybe to create maybe newness I think we don't and maybe this is the digital has in some way eradicated maybe function because now everything can happen anywhere and anyway everybody is on their phone so it really doesn't matter what the function of a room is anymore because the activity is actually taking place elsewhere and so there we do very much believe though that you need to find a way to generate variety, difference, different types of experiences so is there a sort of systematic way or maybe even a diagrammatic way to create varieties and various experiences so I think it's fair to say that for us when we we design very much still through a diagram not necessarily through say vignette or through scenery or through mood in that sense that's interesting so the kind of the diagram has moods but you're not sequencing it's not a kind of phenomenological narrative it's not prescriptive well I think many times we start like a desire I think of a really strong diagram and then there's a phase where we're trying really hard to erase beyond it maybe the last question before I open it up is one of our kind of core semesters here is the housing and I do see that there's a kind of renewed interest generationally in the question of housing and social housing in particular with some success I mean everybody thought it was dead and yet today I think between Tatiana Bilbao in Mexico or Michael Moss in Los Angeles or you guys are working on housing Hillary's working on housing with her practice Moss and it's kind of like housing was dead and housing is back and these notions of sameness and difference and feel then all these questions are coming together along with the sort of social dimension is that fair to say that it's something because I remember a few years ago you said you know this is where we want to take the practice and so are you finding that this is happening or is it just a kind of few moments that are not adding up or could it add up? We might all have different response to this question but I think the one thing for me that is what is happening and I think where we enjoy in some way being part of is if there is some sort of transition happening or some sort of new form is emerging and if we can participate in that conversation. I think the idea of micro and probably have had larger conversations around that topic already here but I think it's one where we should also be very much thinking about you know what does and I think that's what Jing was trying to talk about in the beginning of the project. Say the micro units we did here the ones that an architects ended up constructing was a very controversial conversation. It's like how much square foot can we squeeze out of somebody's living space in order for it to be still part of a marketable proposition. I think what we are realizing is that this is in some way I think there is a need for higher densities there is a need for less people or more people in less area but how do you establish them within these very small units new type of shared commons so to say. But I think it's fair to say that I think this transformation is taking place it's not necessarily driven by architects it's maybe driven by developers and tech companies like we live or what have you and I think we should also be careful that we don't get too conscious of what role we play within that and what ways we have to also push back a little bit. That makes sense. But at least design is brought into that. Moving beyond the notion that housing is just a number of units to achieve that you can actually contribute design thinking to living again. I think it's a we did deliberately not try to do it in the US initially so we went to Mexico and we went to France where there is very strong tradition still of kind of social housing so I think that's another conversation to have. I also think that we are particularly quite concerned with not concerned but I think we need to collectively as a society discuss the idea of the assistant AI, Google assistant, a series, they're all coming home and they're becoming smart home and so the home is packaged into this new wave of hyper product that's sold to us and I feel like if we don't I mean we talk about housing as an urban thing and as a social topic as well so if we don't talk about it as a society enough as a foundation to just bring up that the frequency of the discussion on how do we want to live, we're going to be kind of too late in that discussion. The package will be done and handed to us before we can even contemplate and talk about what the space is before it gets pushed on us. That's just something that gathers your information continuously. I don't know if the younger generation students feel the same way. We should ask them. We should open it up. Yeah. One question that's particularly interesting to me is that you bring a certain intensity to your focus on craft in each of your projects. If you come to a point where you don't have a solution, you continue to solve for a solution that works to complete your design. So my question starts at the beginning. How do you begin and nurture your design process through the entire project to come to a solution that meets both your initial and final goals? I think an earlier version of this lecture was called to be determined. You already spoke a little bit about the embrace of processes as part of the project itself. That's why we'd like to show also these transformations in a way if you want from an initial impulse and then the effects of collaboration and new insight that then ultimately creates an outcome. I think as a person we don't know where we are going basically. In the beginning we have a certain idea or maybe a certain intuition and then we just go down the path and the path itself also determines the ultimate form. I do think we have some sense and maybe that's based on experience or actually sometimes I explain it's very simple. If you're a cook and you're cooking, there's so many different ingredients but as an architect there's very few ingredients to pick from. It's like steel, concrete, glass, wood but it's not like this wide array of things. So very quickly you can already say this is going to the metal realm or to the concrete realm or to the glass or to a combination of these or wood. But I think it's not I think our strength actually lies more in taking something that's quite a straightforward element and working with that single material. So it's not so much very sophisticated materials or very complex things. I think we have some sort of general material understanding and since we are really interested in this process of translation from an idea into the making I think we spend a lot of time also just exploring how to make things. So it's a little bit of experience and intuition I think by now as well. I want to follow up to that. How do you interact with your contractors in such a way that it seems to me that you're reclaiming a lot of the construction process which is something we talk a lot about in architecture? Can you speak more to your relationship with the contractor in production of your structures? I think it's important to be super respectful to most contractors love what they do and maybe different from what people think. Or at least they have a knowledge in a material that you won't have. So I think first being respectful in understanding what their knowledge is and using that impact. But also showing that you know stuff that you're not just somebody who just sits and has no control. I think the idea of being able to control the information so where we spoke about with Davis really at that moment the contractor didn't know what we were doing anymore and we just had to prove through the tools that we were in control. But I think the way we are set up, I think both contractors and architects are set up in some sort of adversary relationship. It's also how contracts are written. So I think you have a certain awareness of that but I think very early on starting to work together is important. But recently we also have started to build like our own mock-ups for instance and really actually get our hands a little bit more dirty to just show people how we would like certain things to be done. So I think you just need to go a little bit beyond drawing and beyond the computer. I think over there. In your projects I was really impressed by the ambiguity of inside and outside and the thickness of in-between spaces and the discussion of territory in those crochet spaces in your projects, especially the Korean Museum. And I find it really interesting that the facade or the edge is often used as a breakthrough point in your design and all the material editing varies inside. And my question would be why did you put an emphasis on the edge or the envelope what does the envelope mean to you? You answered the first edge question. You answered the first edge question. We have a book outside. That explains very well. I think in a way and indeed I think we spoke a lot about also organization and how we're interested in organizing different relationships into the space. But the edge in a way is ultimately what defines the relationship of the space we are creating, the architectural space with the exterior, with the city, with the landscape, with the context, with history. So I think in that sense I think this idea of also depth relates and with the third chapter with this aura is how these kind of objects are perceived. And I think we are interested in creating not only organizations but also let's say objects or forms or spaces that allow for this kind of openness, allow for to be interpreted, to be read, to be experienced in multiple different ways. I think maybe it relates back to this conversation with the diagram. It's where I think also the diagram starts becoming more ambiguous and less of the sort of one liner. First of all I just want to say that your work is amazing. And my question is, as a really young firm do you have any advice on people that might be looking to open up their own firm in the near future after grad school? I would never go to grad school. We had an event with the artist Ai Weiwei a month ago and I think the conversation was about an hour, an hour and 15 minutes and he literally spent the first half hour going, why are you in school? I was in school for six weeks and I was done. Thank you for continuing. I think, let's see, we all have different stories. For me it was very good to work somewhere else to learn and I worked in a practice where there was an emphasis on making things and that's where I learned how to make things. Yeah, so I would work somewhere first. I think there are people that start straight out of school and it's the first, maybe, well this is something actually we can maybe talk about in a broader context about sort of young and promising and then what happens next. Because I think in the beginning when people come out of school there's an incredible skill set that you have. You're sort of the most advanced to the same because you're really in the moment so to say. You understand what is trending if you want. And you're quite agile and you're able to produce very quickly things that maybe resonate with our time. But they're all mediated. It's imagery, it's digital but it is not a physical thing. You can maybe be promising very quickly or sort of stand out within that field in the beginning but the challenge is not so much the production of say those projects that maybe resonate with our contemporary time. But the ability then to transform those things we're interested in making physical space. We believe architecture is a physical activity and it is something it's a tactile, it's something that you need to experience. So how to translate those images, those ideas is something that's very hard to learn by yourself. And so maybe you can say well I really know what's going on and you can be sort of visually you can produce really interesting things and maybe you stand out. But then the challenge I think what we also see happening with you know you can say the same of our contemporaries or maybe a generation that you know say in between us and you guys I think they're very strong but then the next step the follow through that's something you can't really learn by yourself. So that's where I think just working somewhere and seeing how somebody else has dealt with it and does it is very useful. I mean I think we all worked in different places and it helps. Thank you. To go back to the first like response to the first question about not knowing where you're going that the sort of thinking you take when you start your practice I guess like all of these projects like little insights into a larger goal or is just the act of like trying different things. Because we see like a vast array of work type of work in the way I'm working. So I was just wondering if you could speak to that like what sort of the sequence of projects mean for you guys like in the long run. Well I think first of all not knowing where you're going can be super productive as well. I mean we started on that basis. Like as Florian said our first lecture title was to be determined. The idea was that we had no idea where the architecture was going and when we started in 2008 I think one-third of architects lost jobs and most of the office folded. And when we were in your kind of age then we were thinking what do we do as a generation. There was no way forward there was no one telling us this is the issue that we have to tackle and this is the problem that we have to solve. So we just turned that as a productive question in itself. So in a way that I would say that it's project can be a way to guide you through this project from one place to the other. Just by doing things I think it was very productive to us. The first project we did was PS1 we had only $70,000 budget which is super small for something that needs to stand for entire summer. So and we had this very ambitious goal to make something elastic which can only be made by hand. So we basically did it ourselves and I think that gave us the confidence to do Kutche which you know at that same moment we said well we build something like that so we could just work with people and do something you know that's never been thought before. So one thing led to the other in a way but we always had this idea that not knowing what's going to happen and not knowing what's the question we need to solve is very productive just by doing it. And I think maybe we all in some way grew up in very different contexts than where we are now and we moved quite a bit around the world and often we find ourselves in situations where we have no idea of what to do like from very early on and I think you will be surprised how creative you become yourself if you don't know what to do. Human beings are super inventive and so I don't think you have to be afraid to go to a place where you have absolutely no idea what to do. I think you'll be surprised how inventive and how creative you actually are and what are the things that you can come up with. So rather than trying to develop something that you're always certain about like what if you go always to a place where you have no idea what to do then you'll see suddenly some new ideas emerging rather than repeating things that already seem to give you the confidence that you know what they are. So I think especially at your age you should go to the things that make you the least comfortable where you have absolutely no way to figure out what to do because you'll see that suddenly new ways start to emerge. This is turning to more like a self-help session. Actually the reason we teach is to learn things from you guys. We are constantly busy. Also you know what's the new set of problems we need to solve. Being in the school I would say you learn from each other you learn from your teacher but we also learn from you and discussing and searching for things together. So if you're taking my studio next semester we're going to be doing that. You only have to buy the book first. My name is Thaddeus. I was pretty intrigued when you were talking about the housing projects you're doing in Lyon, Mexico and from the way you describe it it seemed that it was as much an ideological and political game that you're playing and not just a political one. As to the note of you insisting that we should have more conversations about housing my mind just went to not just places where there have been strong architectural traditions of living in social housing but places like Singapore, Japan and certain parts of Russia where new types of housing basically invented and to do that architects worked with a whole host of other experts, sociologists, anthropologists, psychoanalysts. So my question to you is in your mind in this day and age who are the experts? Who's your dream team you'd like to see sit on the same table and talk about this? Well with the Mexico project we talked with actually the users the biggest question there is how to reverse the thinking of the typologies of housing that you're supposed to get when you don't have so much I mean the people who live in this housing they buy them but their income needs to be under a certain level to be able to qualify for that you know the loan. Basically it's a form of social housing. So when you don't have so much they have no disposable income to speak of to decide where you live is a huge decision in your life and you know there is a narrative for the last 20 years of that kind of housing and you should have a house that's on the ground have a backyard and a front yard that you can add onto it and to reverse that thinking is the biggest key of question in this project so we actively just you know we had workshops with the city together we hosted workshops talked with people made many many models to just interact with people to kind of tell them I mean show them that there could be another value in the different kind of typological way of thinking and in the Paris project I think the developer was a very important instrumental in also talking with the city about the financial models that we would only lease half of the site and get back to the city so that you know the site is given back into the economical life in the city. So in every situation is slightly different. I will say the key person we have to convince but I mean that's why I went back to 140 years ago when housing was a very important discussion in the society because it was not only architects working on it it was people who designed parks and people who were working with feminist issues and health issues everyone was talking about it so in a way that if we were going to make a housing and a living at the center of a discussion as the core of our discussion so that there is a common understanding of where we want to be. We have to talk with all walks of life in all kinds of typological projects and I think that's what we're trying to do also in different parts of the city's economical realities is different in different parts of the city's different parts of the world but I think indeed just through doing them and talking about them and involving as many people as possible around this discussion is what we're trying to do. Maybe one last question. Hi there. Thank you for a wonderful talk. I noticed that the majority of your projects are completed in white or they're predominantly white. I was curious if you view white as sort of a neutral nonstatement or if it's more of an active element that you purposely engage each time or sort of what the role of that element is in all of these various projects. Should I say something? I don't think that the exterior is a white, right? Most of our buildings except that the translucent ones. We like green also. We have some pink buildings. I think colors. We can have a long conversation about it. First of all I think color is very difficult. But also color is often applied so color is then paint or something and it becomes a graphic thing so it doesn't have a real meaning in itself apart from being a signifier or giving something. But it's often paint. If in some way it sounds maybe like a cliche to talk about honest materials but white paint is also white paint meaning the structure in California was painted white. But at the moment you start painting it another color it becomes a whole, it opens up a whole larger conversation which is one where I don't think we necessarily have enough vocabulary yet to sort of speak to. But I will admit that I spent eight years working for Mrs. White, Sana. And the White question also there came up many times. But in some way I think the ability to reduce certain pieces of information or things that you actually experience allow to highlight others. So at the moment that you start to use color in a certain way it starts to really diminish certain other readings and other experiences. So I think at this moment mostly we are trying to develop more spatial and tactile experiences that are necessarily overwhelmed by color. I think color can be very very strong. But the White is also it works towards the kind of ethereal immaterial slight abstraction I think that it works towards that. For me more than the kind of more than the kind of honesty it's more kind of the ethereality of it. I think because many at least of the projects we saw today had indeed to do these qualities because there are a lot of qualities about light and sandal and translucency. And then gray is kind of like more neutrally in order to kind of elevate and amplify these kind of qualities. But we have made a pink building. But I also think it's maybe still terrain that we further need to explore. Meaning I think I will take it as a challenge. Alright, well thank you. It was wonderful. Thank you so much.