Hi, everybody. Thank you for being here. Yeah, it's 3 PM on Friday, so we really appreciate the fact that you're here today. My name is Miguel. This is Daniel. We are the co-founders at Chainloop. Chainloop is an open source project that allows you to collect, secure, and distribute server supply chain metadata. But before that, we used to work at Binami and VMware where we did a lot of CI CD automation. And some of that automation is what's behind today, for example, the Binami container images or Helm charts that you might be using today. But today, we are here to talk about something else. Today, we're going to be talking about what does it mean, trustworthy software build materials, why you should care about it now. Then we're going to be looking at different solutions that can help us to reach that goal. Then we're going to have a demo and finally some closing thoughts about what could come next. So we're going to start with this traditional CI CD pipeline all the way from source code to production, so you might be building a Go binary at build time, then your packaging in a container image, and then pushing it to an OCR registry, and finally deploying it to a Kubernetes cluster. But the interesting bit and the reason we put this diagram here is because eventually, and this might have happened to you already, you will get all their stakeholders in your organization that they will have a saying on how you are releasing software. So for example, you might have a security team asking for a mechanism to manage vulnerabilities, or you might have a compliance team that want to double check, or they want to make sure that some open source licenses for some third parties don't go through. And of course, you might have an SRAD or a platform team that wants to make sure that the system is healthy, so on and so forth. And this gets more complex, that the Pickert organization is, and we're going to see that later. But in our experience, many of these use cases starts with source supply chain metadata. And by source supply chain metadata, we mean any piece of information, any context that you can get about what you're building, and how you're doing it. So this can go from CVS scans, VEX files, some legal security architecture reviews, QA tests, and of course, software building materials. So software building materials is a canonical example. And for those who hasn't heard of it, it's just a standardized machine readable list of packages, licenses, and so on. So you might have been asked, and this again, might sound very familiar to start taking care of adding, generating those work below materials on some parts of your pipeline, or running some CVS scans and creating some control gates. For example, you might have chosen to use SIF to generate a Cyclone DX S-Bomb when you're building the binary. And then you might be taking a S-Bomb and sending it to an artifact registry and publishing it to an OSIO registry, or you might be sending it to dependency track to WAG, so on and so forth. And this is a good starting point. This is a good starting point, but today, what we want to be talking about is we want to be challenging is this vision on this line. This line that we call S-Bomb trust or below material trust, all the way from the generation to the distribution or analysis. And we know that S-Bomb trust is a very overloaded term. So that's why the easiest way, at least for me, to come up with what we're looking for is just to ask questions. So these are the kinds of questions I will ask about my S-Bomb material gathering, generation, and distribution. So for example, can I uniquely identify the S-Bomb material that I'm looking for? If I know I'm looking for a specific S-Bomb, can I find it? Can I, is it gonna be available when I need it? If I need it for some auditing purposes for some analysis, is it gonna be there or was just recycled by some archival processing GitHub? Can I trust that the content hasn't been tampered? If I'm generating at a build time, can I trust that when I use it all the other end, it hasn't changed? And can I answer an equation of how it was built by whom? And the last two things, they look like very simple things, but actually they're very hard to do. Is the S-Bomb complete or consistent with the rest of pieces of evidence that we're creating? And of course, it doesn't even exist. And the answer to these questions might be no, some of them, it's in our case, but now the second question will be about why should I care? I have my pipeline here, I have my checkbox as I got my bonus, I'm doing S-Bombs, this is great, but why should I care about all this additional complexity? And the answer is, well, I have two answers. The real answer and the answer that you might, your company might care about, but in general, supply chain start attacks are on the rise and this is causing some regulations to pop up starting with the US, but the Cyber Resilient Act in Europe coming next. So this might prevent you from selling software in the future if you don't start taking this seriously. So from that point of view, so bear with me, I know that this is overly dramatic, but a silver bill of material that you can trust is useless and in fact, it should be considered dangerous because you're making, or you will be making critical decisions out of it. So when it's silver bill of material start uniquely identifiable, enforceable, complete and available, I'm gonna explain what are those properties next. So we came up with this diagram, and this diagram is just a set of properties that your system, a system that goes from the end to end from the generation of the S-bomb or the way to the distribution should have. So things like making sure that you can enforce the collection of the silver bill of material, making sure that you can sign it and you can verify its integrity, making sure that it's immutable, it cannot be overriding, things like that. And we're gonna be going through each one of those and we're gonna be looking at solutions for those properties. And the first one is gonna be provenance and verification. And for provenance and verification, basically knowing how S-bomb has been generated and making sure it hasn't been tampered with, for us it's easier to start thinking about S-bombs from the lens of yet another artifact in your silver supply chain. It's just another element that you're producing and you need to make sure if you're working on the security posture of your company, making sure that you can elevate the security posture of that metadata as well to the highest security posture that you can offer because they can get compromised too. And the good news are that actually there is a framework that describes different levels of assurance, different attack vectors, which is the salsa framework. And this can be applied here too. And there are two concepts that to me are very important which is applied here, which are integrity and provenance. So how can we achieve that? How can we achieve integrity and provenance? And the underlying component of all of it is what they call software attestation. And an attestation is just yet another JSON file that contains arbitrary information about your software, what you're building. So for example, if you're building a container image, you might store how you build it or what's inside of it, what build system configuration you had. And that will give you the provenance information, but then the second part, the second component of an attestation, it is authenticated, which means that it is signed and which means that you can then verify integrity out of it. So as you can imagine, there should be a way that we could take our sort of building materials and somehow wrap it in a attestation and enable integrity and provenance verification with it. And we have tools out there. We have the Intoto framework, which is this attestation framework. We have six store, you can use six store, you can use any other provider. We have witness and also there is this effort called Spomit that is actually trying to solve the how you're building, how you're creating S-bombs that you can trust. So with that, we could say that we can cover more or less the provenance verification. So we have wrapped S-bombs at this point. But now the next question is where do we store it and how do we store it? So we can also meet the uniqueness and integrity part of it. And for that, you could say you can store it in a database, you can send it by email or things like that, but there is a much older concept, the content that is for storage that at the end of the day is just a place where you retrieve data by the digest of their content. And not by its name, not by any of the metadata, but just by their content. And that simple change enables integrity and immutability out of the box. And the good news for that is there is a content that is for storage solution that we use every day, which is an OCI registry. So we can use OCI to store S-bombs, and that will give us the unique and identifiable properties of it. So we go back to our pipeline, we could technically take another station, wrap the S-bombs in it, and then store that sign at the station in an OCI registry. So we will get S-bombs that you can trust in identity, integrity, and origin. So that's pretty good. But now you might be thinking, this is hard to scale. And because what I show, this one pipeline, and usually the responsibility is delegated to the development team. So how do you scale this for organization without having the problem of having all the metadata scattered across silos because they may be choosing different artifact registries, or it may be inconsistent because it may be using different tools, instead of using SIFT, it may be using something else, or different formats. And of course, you cannot, it's hard to enforce the generation without metadata. So let's say that you could disable 3B at some point, and that release will go through. So how can you enforce that? And that's one problem, but the second problem is if you remember this picture of different stakeholders asking for information, it gets much worse than that. In a bigger organization, you might end up having the security team starting to ask you about integrity with Salsa we mentioned before, or they might be asking about ways of sharing S-MOMS. You might be in the process of doing SOC2, which is a lot of fun. You might need to figure out how to retrieve pieces of evidence for that. And of course, the platform team might be asking for SLOs and more advanced things. So you can tell this gets quite complex, and it's very hard to scale. And that's the reason we build Chainloop. Chainloop, as I mentioned, is a mechanism to collect metadata, like silverware materials, and then security, wrapping into the stations, and send it to different locations. It can be OCR, registry, dependency drag, work, and so on and so forth. But the important part of Chainloop is that we make sure that we define the separation of concerns between developers and security and other stakeholders in your organization. So the people on the right can decide what metadata they want to receive, they can decide where to put it, and they can decide what to do with it. While developers will just need to provide the metadata to stay compliant with those requirements. So I'll do more on that. This is an example of how you could, with Chainloop, enforce the fact that you want to make sure that a RAM, RAMs in GitHub, and it's sending a second on the X JSON format. Once you do that, that requirement will get propagated to developers, and they will need to provide it, and that will get verified before sending it. So that will give us the enforcement part, and the second part is when we talk about availability, and it's the fact that Chainloop can give you, we call it federated content-adressable storage, but it takes content-adressable concept and move it one step further across different backends. So you can have advanced routing and replication requirements, so you might need to have some specific piece of metadata for two years in Azure Blob Storage because of some compliance reasons, you could do it with Chainloop, for example. So if you put together this diagram, you will see that we have the same open-source components which are awesomely six-door in total salsa, so on and so forth, but we extend Chainloop extends on the enforcement side of things, and also on the distribution part with the federated storage. So next, Daniel's gonna do a demo. Hi, everyone. Okay. Can you hear me? Perfect. So now the tough parts. Let's talk about our use case first. We are part of the organization, building and delivering software. We have many teams, many different microservices. We use different tools, but in that very specific scenario, we use GitHub on developer side, on SecOps compliance side, we use dependency track for CV scanning and open-source license compliance. We use Guac and we have also Azure Blob Storage, compliance storage across organization and one OCA registry. What do we want to do? We want to start collecting all artifacts built by developers together with software bill of materials. We want to store it in the trusted way. We want to wrap it in total attestation. We want to push it to Azure Blob Storage in OCA registry and we also want to send it to all these different DevSecOps tools that we have, like dependency track or Guac and others. So we'll use Chainloop. We'll deploy Chainloop on the right side and we'll have an API, the contract, defined between SecOps and developers. We'll ask them to run all these different workflows in GitHub and start providing binaries, the jar files, together with Asbone files. So as I said, let's take a look at the right side. We will use Chainloop open source project. Chainloop has a few components, the console plane, the API service. We have CLI as well and the CLI can be used on the operator side or on the CI side, the developer side. So in my terminal, I have Chainloop CLI, the latest version installed. It's actually live. So we'll show you, I have a few cast backends already connected. I have AWS S3, Azure Blob. I have our inline storage OCR registry. Let's take a look at the integrations that we have connected. As I said, we have few instances of dependency track, Guac, we have also Slack. You can add more, or you can build your own integrations as well. And the last thing, Miguel was already showing it, we have a workflow created on the Chainloop side and we have a contract connected. This is a declarative version contract, so you can keep adding or removing things here and they're going to be propagated to all organizations and developer teams. So let's jump to other sites. We are on developer side. Now we have to start sending artifacts and S bombs. So if you use GitHub, you can use our reusable workflow. As you can see here, you need just two files or two changes, one in dot chainloop.yaml file and specify where can I find those metadata or artifacts? And below, you have just a job to use that reusable workflow. And you need the token. We call it Chainloop robot account token to be able to push metadata and artifacts to Chainloop. Of course, you don't have to use GitHub. You also can use, as I said, Chainloop CLI. So we have, we call it attestation guided process and we follow some principles from Git. So you can initialize attestation. You can add different artifacts and metadata. You can push things to Chainloop. We recently also added support for remote state. It means that you can actually run all these different commands in different jobs and state is kept on the Chainloop service. So now let me go to developer. So I have that project. This is the Java demo spring pet clinic project. I already showed you that we added that change the file to specify where you can find my binary. By the way, you can take a look at GitHub. It's one of our projects in Chainloop.dev. And now what's going to happen, a new job is created. It's called Chainloop attestation. And as part of this attestation, yeah, great job. You have met all compliance and security requirements. You can see that all the metadata has been recorded. Everything what security and compliance team ask you for, the artifact, S-bomb and different other environment variables, Git commit hash, et cetera, et cetera. You can add more. If you click that Chainloop trust report, you can actually go to the Chainloop report where you can find all this information I talked about, the contract, the in total statement with all information like Miguel made the last commit here. You have all information about our GitHub repository, artifacts and some other identifiers from Chainloop. So that was the developer side. If we get back to SecOps, now I would like to show you that magically Chainloop, through integration, puts all these different metadata, artifacts to other systems and other services. So you can see here the Penesit track. I have my demo spring pet clinic. Developers, they don't even have to know about these services. They don't have to have credentials to the Penesit track or Azure Blob storage.  So I can just show you that it's real. I can search for the most important library in Java world, log4j. Or you can see here, the different metadata automatically pushed to our Azure Blob storage. I can also take a look at our CLI. So I can list all workflows for the very specific, workflow runs for this specific workflow. I can also retrieve attestations. So you can automate things on your site. This attestation is verified with the public key I have on my computer here. I can get more user friendly outputs where you can see that everything has been verified. The same output you have seen in GitHub. Now, I want to show you one more thing. Because Chainloop is the open source metadata vault for software supply chain. So as you can see here, we are storing information about spring, pet cleaning, jar file. And we are creating some kind of graph in our federated storage. We have information about S-bombs. But at the same time, our security team, our legal team, our compliance team, they can start producing different metadata with regards to the very specific jar file as well. So, I have already pushed some metadata like VEX files to Chainloop. And I will try to download them. So what are we going to do? I'm going to first check the digest of the jar file I have here. And now with the digest, I want to query Chainloop. So I will ask Chainloop, tell me everything would you know about that very specific version of the spring pet clinic. Now you will get, you know, machine readable list of different attestations produced by different teams, parties, automations. And you can do cool things about that. So as I can see here, for instance, the one attestation created by security team, it's called VEX registry. So we are storing all VEX files related to different artifacts. And this is the attestation actually created by the GitHub, by the development team. And more security attestations. I can download metadata. And I don't have to have credentials to S3 Azure Blob Storage. Let's see how the network works. So I just downloaded Sbom for the jar file. But I also can read more about one of the VEX attestations. And I can see that there are two artifacts there, open VEX and also artifact. And I can even try to download that VEX file and then use it when the CV scanning with 3D for instance. This way I can remove false positives or other CVs that are already reviewed by our security team. So if you want to get one thing about this talk, it's about, we believe that metadata compliance and security, the bar is gonna be, it's been raised as we speak. And sort of build a material trust or metadata in general trust is the next challenge. And the reason we believe it's important is because it's the foundation for the rest of the use cases that we have been talking about. We have been talking about control gates. For example, you can use a discovery endpoint to find information you might be using. You may want to start sharing Sbom not by email but actually through another mechanism. So for that we believe that trust, metadata trust, for build a material trust is gonna be a requirement for the future. But the good news is that we have a, the future is bright with open source. We have very healthy set of tools right now that we can put together. And of course you can use Chainloop and you can find it in that repository. So thank you very much for your time. You have any question, thank you. Hi, thank you for your talk. Discover, I'm discovering Chainloop thanks to your talk. I have a question, did I understand this correctly? With Chainloop, I can actually have my VEX updated over time, does that mean that, yeah. Yes, I mean Chainloop can be a way for you to share VEX files but it's you to create those VEX files and then push them to Chainloop. So this demo is just showing you a way to collect and then discover VEX files. Okay, thank you. So it will not allow me to update with the latest build their ability disclosure. I will do, I need to do that. You have to do it on your own and then you have to push it to Chainloop. Yes. Okay, thank you, but Chainloop seems great. Hi, thanks for the talk and one quick question. Are you performing on Chainloop side any validations? If, for example, the S-bombs that are pushed by S-bombs, the artifacts are real artifacts. Do we do some kind of validations there? We do some validation in the client. So when the operator defines that it needs some S-bombs, it will say the format of the S-bombs. I mean to start with meaning Cyclone DX or SPDX and that means that when the developer provides that S-bombs will make sure that it's Cyclone DX 1.5 and things like that. What's coming though is actually making sure that you can add policies to that. So the operator can decide basically run a regular policy against the content of the S-bombs to make sure that it was generated by the version of SIFT that you really care about that you want to make sure that it has all the dependencies. So that's coming. So long story short, we have validations in the client. Right now they're more basic, they're basic, but now you're gonna be able to customize it with custom validations as well before they get pushed. Thanks. Go ahead. Yeah, there's one more thing. Today integrations are asynchronous, right? But what we are thinking about in the future, at the moment that you are sending, for instance, Cyclone DX S-bombs to Chainloop will do synchronous call through integration to some, I don't know, service to validate that S-bombs or to scan for CVs. And if something is wrong, you will be able to immediately report back to developers and break the PR just to ask for some changes.


My name is Andreas Hake and I'm the Dean here at G-SAP. I want to say basically how grateful we are to everyone here that it's participating in this session. The first one that we started last week actually was looking at something very specific. What is the status that we can, what is the work that images and projections are doing for architecture, for planning, for preservation, for the disciplines of the built environment? We are producing renderings, we're producing master plans, we're producing images that look kind of futuristic or alternative or recompositions of what exist but still we're often not interrogating what is the work they do, how they operate, how they associate with other things. And the discussion that we have last week actually was helping us to understand what is the way that we mobilize the jet to come. Today's session is addressing a question that is equally important and unavoidable for us. And we're affirming what it could be, basically what does it mean to operate from an ecological paradigm? And that's something that of course is not an accident, it's the fundamental question that our disciplines are looking at and they're part of unavoidable because it's the time that we're living also but also because the idea of how things connect with each other and how realities produce in the participation of many different actors that are forging alliances, being part of disputes, confronting each other but also finding ways to produce something collectively. It's a fundamental question of the time we're living and definitely a notion that our disciplines cannot avoid. So in a way I think that these affirmation sessions are accumulative, we're accumulating questions that relate to each other and we're building a way to address them together from different inputs, different trajectories, different traditions and sensitivities being collaborating on this. I think it's very important also to say that there's ways in which practice, architectural practice in this case is reacting to these questions and that it's already registering a body of experimentation that we can look at collectively and evaluate and I'm very happy that we have today Mireya Lutaraga, one of the founders of TAG with Alex Muñoz and also Juminori Nusaku and Mio Sunayama that have also been asked Mireya teaching at GESAP and I think your practices are incredibly relevant in this discussion and actually it's quite relevant to see also how you're engaging with cities like Barcelona and Tokyo that are the paradigms of maybe thinking of the connection of architecture and entities that operate at the larger scale and you're reviewing what those traditions are in basically facing issues like climate crisis and unavoidably their ecological dimension how to address them, two ecologies as Albena Yaneva would say. I think it's also very relevant that we have Albena Yaneva and Jorge Otero Pailos here as part of this conversation. Albena it's been crucial in connecting architecture and understanding how many of the challenges that architecture planning preservation and all the disciplines that are dealing with the built environment are how the challenges that they're facing are very much questions that have been also addressed in the tradition of the SDS and what is the way that the SDS has not only been influential in architecture but also what have been the contribution of architect designers and neighboring I would say and friends disciplines in contributing to the SDS and Jorge Otero of course it's also in the middle or kind of central to this discussion his work on basically how climate also it's challenging the notions of history and preservation and what is the way that experimentation that was one of the and laboratory station that was one of the origins of the SDS conditions also are part of this discussion is the fundamental I would say voice in this discussion Jorge that will in your presence here also put the faculty of this is also incredibly important to understand how to be part of these conversations I want to say also that affirmation is the very loaded term that we wanted to embrace and I will say more about this probably but for us it's crucial to say that whatever approach to critical reconstruction of the reality were part of also contains forms of affirmation where basically seeing what is the collapse and cracking of many systems that brought us to crisis like the climate crisis that we're facing now but by doing that many things are growing in the cracks there's many other forms to to understand how we operate collectively that are becoming very important relevant and what we're doing here is also affirmation what these practices are what these notions are what these ways to think collectively to act collectively depend on and are consistent and I think this is very relevant in a way we have the responsibility also to claim in what is that that we're doing and how different is from other forms of practice and other forms of knowledge but of course it's the conversation in the making it's not something that is fixed the notion of affirmation not necessarily needs to be about consolidating the knowledge that can be fixed but rather to find ways to experiment collectively and having a notion of togetherness that that allows for these conversations to happen in connection with the reality or as the reality or as reality being reality and the last thing is that I want to say that two more things that are a little bit more what we're doing here we are we have adjusted the part-genre and conversation with many others the format and in collaboration with everyone here it will be a little faster so you'll see a little bit more of a push for the speed but that's basically to make sure that we have time for everyone to intervene and the second thing is what this room is this room is feels very isolated but I think that the notion of what the conversation is now needs to be something different it's not really just about isolating people in a room and having a conversation that would benefit from this isolation but rather thinking how we reconstruct the medium in which we operate as one that is interrogating itself so as part of that like the idea that we are part of a larger let's say community of people and not people but human and not non-humans and that the role of a place like this ab is not that much to isolate and gain a privileged position to discuss but rather to contribute to render that whole ecosystem more critically and mobilize it or contribute to its mobilization as an interrogating community and a community that can experiment alternative versions of itself it's what probably we can do with this and that's why this room is expanded into a network of cohort the planetary cohort of people from all around the world most more or less that is participating I want to say hi to everyone that is contributing to this conversation in the distance and with that I want to pass it to Bartjan to open this second affirmation series or session Hello everyone welcome I'm sorry about the rain it seems to be that so far every affirmation it drains but welcome to our second affirmation which we provocatively call material ecology my name is Bartjan Pullman director of exhibitions and public programs here at GSAP and I also wanted to welcome back all of you who joined us last week I don't think we were lying when we said this project sort of aims to be planetary we had people tune in live remotely from no less than 55 countries across all continents and despite the different times and I also want to mention something else which Andreas really touched upon is that affirmations aspires to radically question not only prevalent ideas about the built environment but also existing format and it is for that reason that all of us are sitting here on the stage the presenters, the respondents, and myself but as moderator and channeling the questions from the planetary cohort this is a long way to say that this is not a lecture or two lectures followed by a panel affirmations really wants to be a planetary conversation so the presentations will be brief 25 minutes each we'll start with Humminori and Mio then we'll go to Mireia and then we'll have a response first by Albena Yaneva and then Jorge Oteropilos before we open it up to you the audience here as well as the planetary cohort then we will end around 8.15, 8.20 New York time I'm incredibly excited to welcome back Humminori, Mio, and Mireia to the school and to have Albena and Jorge join us to surface with the initial response to their work and to somehow grasp this work, to grasp what this work at least in our opinion is about I want to start with an observation that the architect Uriel Vogue made this summer in response to Humminori and Mio's work and that sort of struck with me ever since and this observation was as to how the notion of details in their work and I'm talking of course about architectural details, how details operate as ecological contracts but details as ecological contracts and perhaps indeed we can situate both the work of Humminori and Mio precisely within such an interface an interface which certainly operates across many different scales and in which details renegotiate, question, realign, resist and there I say affirm the ecologies and ecosystems that these architectures are part of and something else I also want to mention is that as a lot of you know already is that we asked the speakers to share a reading in advance which we then distribute to the planetary cohort and it's worth noting that Mirai in particular but also to a certain extent Humminori and Mio submitted a text that might well be described as a manifesto now and we can certainly critically interrogate the genre of the manifesto and particularly it's lineage as a product of modernity and it's claims to authority but nevertheless it also speaks to the urgency of their work in the face of the many planetary crisis and urgencies that affirmations want to address and specifically the very need to act so these texts are for I want to propose are not so much manifestos as affirmations touching on you know what emerges from the cracks that Andres mentioned earlier so as I said we'll begin tonight's conversation with Humminori and Mio of Humminori Nusaku Architects and Studio M&M based in Tokyo Humminori is currently teaching at the Tokyo Metropolitan University and established this architectural firm in 2010 and he received a doctorate in engineering in 2012 from the Tokyo Institute of Technology where he subsequently taught and his works were exhibited at the Japanese Pavilion in the 15th Venice Architectural by annual and many other places Mio Tsunayama began her study of architecture at the Tokyo University of Science and completed it at the EPFL in Lausanne where she was also a visiting professor this past year and she started her own practice studio M&M in 2012 Mio also teaches at Tokyo University of Science as well as several private universities in 2010 and Humminori and Mio's talk will be followed by Mireya Luzaraga of TACC which is an architecture and design studio based in Barcelona founded by Mireya and Alexander Muno their projects investigate how architecture can catalyze the development of more democratic lives through the incorporation of feminist thought, ecology and politics into spatial practice their work has received widespread recognition belongs to the permanent collection of the frock and has been activated in numerous exhibitions, triannuals and biannuals across the planet and is widely public and Mireya is the professor at IAC LaSalle and the Dean's Visiting Assistant Professor here at Columbia GSTEP after their presentations we will first have a question and a response from Albania Yenefa and Jorge Teopailos Albania is a professor of architectural theory and director of the Manchester Architecture Research Group at Manchester Urban Institute she holds a PhD from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Amine in Paris and has been a visiting professor at Princeton School of Architecture Parsons, the new schools and Polytechnico di Turino the author of Teven, right, Teven Monographs Albania's research is intrinsically transdisciplinary and crosses the boundaries of science studies cognitive anthropology, architectural theory and political philosophy Jorge Teopailos is a professor and the director of Historic Preservation Historic Preservation Program here at Columbia GSTEP as well as an architect, artist and theorist specializing in experimental forms of preservation he studied architecture at Cornell University and earned a doctorate in architecture at MIT and is the founder and editor of the journal Future Interior and I also want to take this as a moment to plug the pitch colloquium which is organizing and which will happen this coming Friday just across the street at the Italian Academy on Amsterdam Avenue and I briefly want to thank also Erisa Nakamura and Shannon Worley who are helping us with facilitating the audience questions tonight and to Clarissa Figuarito who is manning the affirmation station in the back and is correcting the question from our planetary cohort so with that I think we're ready to start but not before saying let's get ready for an evening in which we may or may not discuss ecological and romantic crossovers mongrels, ecological thinking, the notion of weak autonomy Zoom humans, cohabitation domes, love aviaries multi-sighted mentalities, post anthropocentric architecture expired cities, recollage and simply beautiful Thank you Hi, I'm Mio Tuneyama I'm Humi Nori Thank you for this great opportunity to extend our thoughts and work with great colleagues Today we present about urban fang architecture in a complex mesh Building a made of networks of various materials from raw materials to disposal Human skills and the knowledge are important actors as well as the work of microorganisms in the soil This network forms a mesh with buildings as temporary nodes We view the architecture as a complex mesh Just like a mushroom with its head above the ground has a spread network of mycelium, its main body However, industrialization black box the network of materials Architect can open up the black boxes break down the barriers of institutions and conventions Unlabel the grid of forced alignment and thereby reconnect the network into ecology of multiple species This creates habitat of multiple species where human and non-human entangle In the center of Tokyo where significant capital investment are made new goods and services, secure infrastructure and clean space are consistently maintained Conversely, the urban part very fairly is home to a dense population living in such houses and small apartment The deteriorating economic situation and the aging population have left this area looking worn and decaying It's as the salt brand new cities and expired cities coexist Due to energy and food shortage the war in Ukraine rapidly rising commodity prices and the economic strain caused by the COVID-19 pandemic more and more capital is being concentrated in certain areas of the world while other are being neglected In expired cities there is insufficient economic capacity to keep building and infrastructure updated yet life persist In expired cities life continues without replacement of infrastructure and services Their waste is converted into resources and used to make small updates The process of recycling being from unoccupied buildings, old shop front or neglected garden or our architecture uploaded begin with resourcefulness We aim to create livable spaces using once considered waste, decaying vacant houses solar energy and soil microorganisms It is like how fungi grows on expired food and nutrients Holes in the house is our home on the office and original forest solid steel structure was 30 years old when we bought it We moved in after making holes in each floor and dismantled interior and we are making it wisely The house is located in Nishioi where it only takes 5 minutes to the center by train but not has been redeveloped due to the complex topography on the edge of a plateau In Kansan and the local trains that lost the area generate loud noises The area is mainly residential but since it's on small factory used to be settled with now tend to be reconstructed into housing without lack of green space Therefore Nishioi is cheapest land in Shinagawa world in Tokyo So first we moved and we demolished windows so we live in there like for one year and after having windows we appreciated a lot so the way we renovated we really feel in our bodies what changes throughout the work in this building The holes made in each floor brings the light from the top and also bring up the heated air also like connecting kind of views throughout the walls and we moved in in this situation all the cable are hanging on also like rock holes to prevent the fire for the steel structure was exposed and there was no insulation on the wall also the floor we didn't have on the ground floor so we started to renovate this like coating the rock with like the cheapest painting finding DIY shop and also we insulated the walls and the floors to make it more comfortable for us and we also kind of felt the coldness through this bay window so we insulated with polycarbonate materials and also like using the energy around us kind of deconstruct our kitchen cooking on the stove cooking on the rooftop with solar cooking and finding the materials throughout the waste in the city this one is kind of using second hand materials after demolishing this exhibition one to one model of 8K TUC into our office so like our office is very woody we didn't expect and also meanwhile we got to kind of know the power of the soil and the soil environment is very important for the for the earth so we wanted to try to kind of have a soil in our garden so we started to break down the concrete in our small parking lot one by kind of build like every day to our 3 months and we also brought this it's very loud so we brought this trash that concrete debris to the disposal site which makes us like to kind of understand how much we produce the construction waste and we tried to regenerate the soil having the humus and the bamboo without any chemical materials and this soil was covered 30 years which was kind of microorganism inside was very dead and we planted and also like brought some earthworms and we started to bring back our food waste every day and afterwards like after 2 months like all the weeds came and started the mycelium started to grow and a year after it became like full of weeds and all the season changes a lot and we somehow like impressed a lot by the power of the soil and also like if we have a soil in our garden we started to have also cycle of the food so tomato grows from the compost and also we started to have a kind of rooftop garden and drying food on the rooftop and expanding this idea is like having pretty small surface of the soil had produced a lot of things also like bring the heat down because of the evaporation so if we make a small street which doesn't have a lot of traffic we can create the soil our next vision is having the soil a convincing name word you have so throughout this experience we started to understand that the materiality which goes back to soil is very important so now we are using more unpatrolled based materials also biodegradable materials like wood fiber or cotton so now like the interior it's covered with full of biodegradable materials if you can see the difference between the before and now and now we have also kind of child security for the holes because also with cotton material accumulation of the small project to form this architecture there is no completion in this house the holes are physical devices for better quality of space and life but at the same time it is a metaphor of punching the holes to the current housing industry whose premise of telling a brand new completed houses also quickly by time our innovation is still going on we take consistent resources such as people, energy and ways so we can find around us into the time so the phenomena of top-down enforcement of policies and institutions to address environmental issues is referred to as political ecology urban-wide ecology adopts pre-collage approach making the best use of available resources it is a practice rooted in our living spaces rather than in widerness or orientalism urban-wide ecology focuses on the disconnected parts rather than the transcendent hole like deep ecology it acknowledges that depth is found in localized elements rather than in frameworks that encompass the entire planet we will approach architecture through a series of small-scale realizations through the practice at holes in the house we learn the importance of the soil environment soil is the basis of life however it has been regarded as a new sense to architecture we began to seek architecture that coexist with soil traditional living environments consisted of houses with independent foundations and dry stone masonry retaining walls allowing rainwater to percolate into the soil and coexist with the sub-soil environment today however most urban spaces are covered with concrete and asphalt and rainwater is drained into communal ditches microorganisms are acidified and the soil is an unhealthy state for example when looking at the foundation of wooden houses the stone foundation was replaced by concrete continuous pudding by a solid slab foundation with improved moisture proofing and earthquake resistance carbonized pine piles are placed under the stone foundation to prevent subsistence in healthy soil that is permeable to fresh air and water, mycelia entangles the porous surface of the piles and mycelia binds the soil to piles in Akeno raised floor house we adopted an independent foundation so as not to disturb the mycelium and water veins in the soil Akeno raised floor house is located in Yamanashi site so instead of concrete foundation we propose an independent foundation made of recyclable steel plates the steel plates foundation opens up the ground surface allowing air and water to penetrate into the soil a high floor will keep the foundation dry even if there is a damage it can be inspected immediately we use wheat straw for the wall insulation material it's biodegradable materials about 20 people with an instructor did straw piling and mud wall painting so this is the living and dining room on the left is a wall of straw and earth a pellet stove has been installed the shoji screens are traditional Japanese architecture elements also biodegradable materials made of wood and paper we use these shoji screens instead of chemical fabric pattern so this is the detailed section the wooden structure is placed on the independent foundation the roof drops down to the south to maximize the sun energy the insulation is made of organic materials such as straw and wood fiber so next we show a small project in Tokyo called piles and pointed roof the idea was to allow the story and the building to exist in a high density urban environment first return all the ground on the side to the soil a trench is dug where rain falls from the roof and bamboo is then placed in the ground by pressing dried leaves branches bamboo charcoal and stones in the trenches rainwater can easily permeate into the ground the base the timbers are supported by 8 steel piles they have screw at the end which can be reversed to allow them to pull out during demolition in the future this prevents the piles from remaining in the soil which has become a problem in recent years in Tokyo of high density of cities small soil surface accumulation can play a major role in improving urban soils next project is house on classical element it is an off-grid house that uses traditional Japanese construction methods requires less energy the conventional wooden construction method is based on traditional carpentry technique but has been modified by modern technology to be more resistant to earthquake and fires and to enable mass production conventional construction method use small section materials machine dried timbers and metal joints they do not last long and rebuild after one generation on the other hand traditional construction methods have large section of members and allow for moving without metal joints and braces if air drying wood and bracing material are used it can last for more than 100 years since the traditional construction method does not use metal hardware the upper and lower wooden beams are joined together in this way independent foundation can reduce the amount of concrete used by 50% compared to a typical concrete slab the foundation is shaped to reduce amount of concrete in contact with the soil recent highly insulated and airtight houses use many chemical products such as vinyl and plastic which do not absorb moisture this house is constructed with cedar wood, cellulose fiber made from recycled paper and other materials that absorb moisture it can breathe the cedar rust balls and plaster are used for the walls no glue is used the walls absorb moisture when it is humid and release moisture when it is dry this is a breathing wall in a normal energy efficient house energy consumption during operation can be reduced but a lot of CO2 is used during production and disposal therefore we can reduce energy consumption during production and disposal while realizing energy saving and during operation so this is a picture the carpenter the clients held the celebration when the structure was completed so this detail the collection drawing shows integration of foundation that considers microorganisms in the soil and water veins a roof for the sun's energy, wood production process and traditional construction methods in this way architecture is created while considering the various actors in the ecosystem a lot of Mireya well thank you Bart and Andres for the invitation thank you also for the dedication and efforts that you are putting on this new format and we are very honored to be here surrounded by everybody so what we will do tonight is to in a very short presentation to go through some of the key aspects that we have been working in the office for the last years through the super quick explanation of some other projects that we have been developing in the office this was a little bit like the first that I wanted to show with some other works that we first project that I would like to show is ARCA in ARCA we wanted to investigate new models of production of green spaces within the city of Barcelona cities usually choose the plant species that live with us in the cities based on mainly ornamental and functional criteria causing like that an homogenization of the urban landscape together with the fragility of the ecosystems that live with us in the cities our proposal was to build this portable garden that would develop a more complex vision of the possibilities of incorporating nature in the contemporary city beyond aesthetic criteria so together with some biologists, experts in landscape and botanicals we did this careful selection of plant species and we explored like that in this garden the incorporation of edible species in order to open discussions on food sovereignty in the urban context or species that are capable of absorbing 10 times more CO2 than usual or even species that are capable of gathering a larger number of pollinating agents so as if it was a procession and it was a movie but it's not working but it was fun so I could move both mechanically or through human means which was more fun exploring the capacity for collective gathering around the artifact so the installation, this typology of garden could travel through the cities of Barcelona for example to places where there is a lack of green areas or places where there is a higher concentration of pollutants even to be turned as a classroom for the knowledge of botanical species and interspecies botanical knowledge in the schools of the city centre so as you can see our projects often this speculative nature so thinking with the material and political possibilities of the present we try to envision alternative scenarios for the future. This other project which we called the garden for romantic crossovers we started from the analysis of different uses that usually occur in the public space in Madrid and in this case often related to natural spaces for example the cruising which is the practice of having sex relationships among strangers in public spaces usually related to nature and that they are considered outside the norm and that goes into question the most common definitions of common nature the Matadero Madrid Cultural Centre and there we can see the Scalabox is located in the heart of an urban heat island due to the lack of shadow and the lack of green spaces so it suffers more of the warm temperatures so the proposal and then there you see the model there is to implement architectural solutions based on nature in order to mitigate the effects of the heat island effect and at the same time rethink the role of the public space from a queer point of view so what we built in Matadero was this prototype of what we could bring to this space in order to mitigate the effects of the climate change so this garden for romantic crossovers would link humans vegetation and technology in an infrastructural garden of post-natural coexistence a set of technologies imported from the agricultural industry generate this optimum environment conditions for this hanging gardens that makes a Prodisiac and aromatic species that will simulate the relationship between humans and other species so you see there UV bulbs, thermal bulbs, irrigation systems shadowing textiles are some of the elements that take part in this lightweight structure and public furniture device the next project is Solstice with Solstice we wanted to explore from which conceptual frameworks usually we start formalizing architectural and put them into crisis through the adoption of other materials and aesthetic criteria so if we agree that the planet is a material production the result of human actions and the proliferation of concepts such as Anthropocene are a clear example of that we also agree that this debates modern binomies like nature and culture and human non-human and woman and men are also like so in this sense we tried to started to develop this project from the assembly of the multiplicity of materials that would come from very different origins so you see here from like flowers and stones and branches picked up from the site where we build the pavilion to plastics and cardboard and other typologies of material that we also even garbage that we picked around the area and like that we build this dome that was supported by this wooden structure this golden dome that inside there was this foam ceiling and from the interior and exterior you could see this 16 capitals and this curtain made of nylon threads in order to prevent the wind from getting inside then this is in transit shelter for migrant species the figure of the climate refugee which we are starting to get used to listening to this political figure is this person is forced to migrate from their region of origins due to change on the local habitats caused by climate change we are getting more and more used to this concept but humans are not the only ones that are climate migrants so in this project we wanted to show how the optimal conditions for other species are also affected by the sudden changes in weather conditions due to climate change so in this drawing you can see all these species that now are located from the north of Africa and the south of Spain that potentially will become local species in Barcelona so within the framework of an exhibition where different urban models for the future of Barcelona were discussed our project paid attention of those silent victims of our industrial development so what we did was to inside this room we artificially reproduced the future conditions as experts are saying that Barcelona in 2075 will have in terms of temperature humidity etc and then we included this shelter that hosted those plant species that we predict that will be local at that time so again this proposal arises from considering cities as basis for interspecies coexistence and therefore taking ecopolitics and environmental ethics as central elements for the construction of our contemporary democracies finally we also collaborated with a composer to develop specific music based on non-human comfort requirements so that the visitor's experience was totally immersive I don't know if the audio is going to work so because we very often import technologies that they usually use in these green houses in the Netherlands we learned that they also put music to their plants so to make them like grow, they stress them a little bit so to grow faster because they feel comfortable with the this, for this was that they make them feel better not to grow faster next project that I wanted to show is a dome de cohabitación dome for a cohabitation so this was at the first biennial of feminist art and architecture in the, for the frag center in Orleans it's the third collection of architecture after MoMA and Tompidou and we were asked to take all the artists take over this abandoned industrial space that was supposed to be the next headquarters of this frag museum so this was our ground zero but our ground zero is never a tabula rasa so there was a multiplicity of agents that already were established there as the soil, there was rain inside, there were insects, animals, microorganisms and a lot of vegetation there so we consider that as a starting point of the project all these previous members that took over this site should be taken into consideration whenever intervening the place the move is not working also okay so what we did was this mobile infrastructure that was floating above the ground intensifying those relationships that had already spontaneously began to occur among this space and stimulated and making, growing this ecosystem so again this whole set of growing lights and thermal lights and fans and irrigation systems typical of the most sophisticated greenhouses we intended to explore the imaginary of a society based on cooperation instead of competition and on symbiosis instead of extractivism this is a cat shelter Rome has this very special and adorable thing which is the figure of the catara so we were called to work in Rome and we learned that from the times of the Roman Empire cats have been protected by law in Rome they are the, because their benefits as first controllers and the mutual benefits with humans this law apparently has overcome this modern obsession with sterilizing public spaces so they are still protected and they are the only ones allowed into the monuments and into the ruins and so on but the cats are helped by ordinary but organized citizens who feed them and look after them which are the cataras so if a colony of cats is detected in any place of the city like meaning two cats the city and the municipality is forced to preserve their habitat not move them from there and still feed them of course always with the help of these cataras so what we did was to detect like the most common colonies of cats in the city center of Rome so and we choose the Ignatio Salone near Ostia station colony of cats and we brought this cat shelter there so this project again in the public space speculated on the creation of a non-astrobocentric architecture so neither the materials nor the form nor the space were designed for human use and again the project this is our neighbor Alfredo that was testing the prototype and telling us which worked and which not while we were building it pointed out the emergency of thinking about public space not only prioritizing human needs but also taking into account their species the species that inhabit with us in the cities and reinforcing all kinds of mutualistic relationships so you see how we selected for and textures and colors and change based on the perspective on the vision of the cats pink mountains the recent history of Spain has this very special relationship with the Argentinian parrot it was in the eighties and seventies and even nineties it became very popular as a pet in Spain and it was in every Spanish home but as you can guess the Argentinian parrot is not coming from Argentina we imported thousands of these parrots in Spain and then we abandoned them and then nowadays these green parrots have become a plaque in many cities of Spain and there is a quite a controversy on top of that so there are of course ethical conflicts and then discrepancies between animal rights defenders and ecologists and biologists but while that municipalities have been covering out the extermination of these populations that are considered as invasive so what we consider very curious is to analyze the causes of this supposed invasion and the reasons for the extermination because far from being that these species is like affecting the local ecosystems is purely because it's noisy and the nests are heavy and so on so we wanted to in this pavilion that we built in the city of Barcelona we wanted to bring to the discussion these questions also to the cultural arena so in these like terraces of the center of Santa Monica in Las Ramblas which Las Ramblas is a very touristic space in the city of Barcelona where more than 15 species of birds including green parrots nests we wanted to we were asked to build this climate shelter for the summer because of the temperatures are so hard so we wanted to project this climate shelter where coexistence with birds including the Argentina parrot of course would be one of the most characteristic elements so we built this covering material with thousands of pink painted small branches and that were waiting for the birds to pick them up and build their own nests the bird houses were only served as like a visual claim while our dream was to start seeing the emergence of these dozens of queerness through the city and helping the birds having some material to pick up and build their nests this is an image from Las Ramblas of this pavilion that we recently finished and in the interior we also wanted to work with this we built this tropical garden that also helped soften the temperatures and this perimetral bench in order to rest and just to finish and very quickly I wanted to explain two very recent projects with a radically different program but we also try to have like this kind of similar approaches so we called the domesticities in the new global climate regime first project that we wanted to show very briefly it's the day after house we're not going to show all aspects of the project but we just wanted to show with this slide what our work methodology was to develop the project what we did was to analyse every single space of the house and every program of the prototypical middle class home in the western cultures and from kitchen spaces the bathroom the terraces ways of heating and cooling the corridors in order to understand also the political reasons that had led to this particular configuration of houses that almost all of us live in New York and live in the same house so we're not going to go through all of these studies that we did in order to do the house but we will rescue just one of them that is the habit of organising the house into rooms and sleeping separately so following Sylvia Federici's and her feminist analysis of the birth of capitalism we learned that gradually rooms began to become smaller and specialised in a space exclusively for sleeping so what Sylvia Federici proposes is that the incipient capitalism increasingly needed stronger and more differentiated subjectivities so sleeping collectively didn't work for that and that would better adapt to the multiple also possibilities that the market offered, that the industrial market offered, so separate heatings and so on which also was reflected on the programmatic organisations of the domestic spaces so if we look at this 16th century engraving from Giovanni Stradano we see a very different way of inhabiting the rooms that is totally different from now so we see how in the same room people are working but also sleeping but also cooking and living as a community, work, play and sleep together in these pieces of furniture that we call Alcobano so our project had the intention of one of the intentions was not depending in any way of fossil fuels studied another way of configuring the space so while you see on the left the regular home that had a distribution through corridors and bedrooms that everybody lives here the project opted for an organisation through nested spaces as you see on the right and now you see here that retained the heat in the central park where there was the only bedroom in the house so the red you see is the bedroom orange is what we call the winter house and blue is the summer house first thing that we did was to take out the windows, we love taking out the windows so that is nice so the advantages of sleeping together are countless, they have energy saving reasons and also strengthening emotional ties so what we propose in this project and the client accepted is that to build just one single communal bedroom regardless of the number of inhabitants of the house I explain you this because we are absolutely convinced that more than the use of sustainable materials or the incorporation of sophisticated technologies a political approach to architecture is the only way to embrace truly ecological thinking these are some images of the rest of the house, this is the summer bedroom house without the windows you see and the exterior we see the communal bedroom and the kitchen and then you see the kitchen and the exterior pattern and then just finally I'll show you very briefly the 10K house this last project is very linked to the previous one and what we did is to try to include the economic factor into the ecological issues also not to link ecology to affordability so what we wanted to see in this project is to what extent we could work by reducing the budget to the most and also dismantle the models and aesthetics supposedly associated with homes of lowering economic value so to do so the first thing we did and I'm not going to go through it was to analyze the different materials of the previous house that you saw and to subject them to an analysis by three parameters from the economy the incorporated carbon, the economy and the aesthetic relevance and out of that we built this 10K manifesto that I was playing super briefly 10K is according to the budget that we have, the total budget that we have had to renovate the house so the point of the statement is to work with thermal gradients in order not to depend on fossil fuels to heat or cool the house so as in the previous house we were trying to use our body temperatures and also like the different materials and the configuration of the spaces in order to save energy and next thing was to elevate the build elements of the house allowing like that the free passages so that we didn't have to do holes and hire other experts and reducing times and costs next one is the reduction of the material pallets to the maximum so basically we just like used one or two materials so like that cost energy efficiency and structural performance could be kept as balanced as possible. Another one was the elimination of new coatings saving both in the purchase of new materials, execution in times and also in carbon footprint and another one was the hedonistic and playful vision of the bathroom and kitchen that we moved them to the best spaces of the house next to the facades next one was the self-construction so this renovation exclusively made through dry assembly work like an IKEA furniture was proposed and also that allowed the incorporation of non-experts building the house that was us and the client basically that built the complete thing without having knowledge on other kinds of works and labors something that we just last slide to conclude was working with natural ship will as a thermal installation for the bedroom so there's this transhumance ship of the penis that are moving and their work is very good for the ecosystems but their wool is not suitable for the fashion industry so their wool is discarded but there's some cooperatives in Catalonia that are recovering this wool in order to use it as insulation but that is usually you don't see them it but we fell in love with the material and we used it and just to conclude I wanted to show a quote by Paul Preciado that who reading Derrida alerts us to the delusion behind apparently sacred concepts such as nature and gives us clues on how to act to dismantle it so the quote is the success of the performative does not depend on a transcendent power of language but on the simple repetition of a social ritual that legitimized by power hides its simplicity thank you that was really very interesting and very rich and there's indeed a lot of overlaps that we have spotted I'll start with the overlaps perhaps so I think that both the work of TAC and Urban Wild Ecology invite us to entirely abandon the concept of nature I think it was mentioned this maybe twice tonight in the soil example so we don't even think about nature which is out there which is passive and we can control and master as architects, as knowledgeable kind of individuals as subjects but there was an invitation I think from the two practices to designers to think of other ways of crafting the co-habitation of humans and many other species and we have seen such a rich range of species tonight I have made a quick list we have seen green parrots and cats birds, the Murtir birds, fungus, soil and insects that live in the soil we have seen sheep and lots of different plants and I can continue the list so your design in a way I think it's an interesting common feature in the two practices that you defy all sorts of anthropocentric kind of design and you try to rethink the kind of the Oikos that's another term that was mentioned many times in different forms, house, dwelling dome, shelter and the different forms of dwelling and sharing a space together so you try to rethink dwelling and Oikos by inviting all those species to join and most importantly not just to join but by giving them voice by acknowledging their needs and we have seen very careful consideration of the music and how birds react to music of the impact of climate change on some of those species so this awareness and care was there in the design and this is amazing to see how those voices, voices of species that we often do not hear and we do not acknowledge in design have been taken very seriously in the designs that you propose. I think it's also very interesting to see that we are perhaps on the side of talk talking about animal friendly which is friendly architecture because they were more than animals and then soil friendly type of architecture but it's actually much more than this kind of friendly type of design that you are doing because you are trying to bring some symmetry between humans and those species and you try to craft a different kind of way different systems or different architectures of cohabitation with humans which I think was quite interesting to see and with all this richness in all these projects I think your work in a way demonstrates to what extent designers and we as architects are in a very unique position to do things from within not just to rethink and reimagine but to actually craft this cohabitation of humans and other species to craft these ecologies very carefully and to craft them from within and this is perhaps the kind of affirmation tonight that instead of critically kind of addressing climate change, biodiversity and we can continue the list or instead of addressing it in a discursive way or in a militant way going against what we can do as designers is to work from within is to craft new solutions, new resourceful solutions from within so in a way the statement that all these interesting projects make together is that architectural design can become a powerful instrument for reimagining cohabitation, for rethinking this symmetry and for crafting new solutions and new ways of cohabitation also for rethinking the cosmopolitan law that we can also go into a kind of more ambitious direction so my question is then if this awareness is there, if the climatic awareness is there and the biodiversity awareness is there in practice how is this changing the entire kind of ecosystem of practice, the techniques you use, the materials you pick the dynamics of practice, the ecology, the internal ecology of your practice as practitioners because if we think of materials and Jorge is the expert here but if 30 years ago it was possible just to pick a material from the shelf wood or glass or just sand and use it in architectural construction now this is not possible any longer because every material we can point to nearly every material is an object of contestation, it's controversial, there's another kind of number of concerns that this material opens, so take asbestos or take wood and then you find a whole controversy there so it's just not possible to take one of those stable technical material resources and use it in our practice, we also have to rethink the materials, the techniques and the way we design so maybe you can tell us a little bit more about this reflexivity how biodiversity and climate change is also kind of making you rethink the techniques and the materials that you use in your work I can argue Thank you very much, I find it very interesting the way I think it's true this idea of how each material is subjected to controversy so we very carefully have to pick up materials, the techniques and everything that we have in our hands to do architecture it's true that when picking up materials and techniques and assembling methods we often even include more things to these controversies more than the traditional technological or scientific criteria to choose a material that we of course also use mainly for instance in our domestic spaces like the embedded carbon which built it, where does it come from how much time is it going to take to recover it so all these aspects that we are often used to listen and that maybe when embracing our domestic spaces how beautiful it is how it performs in terms of insulation or how it performs structurally how easy it is to clean it many of these things like the wool was not very useful for being seen but we found it very important we also believe that as many others that materials have other things that cross them political issues that go through them and many other things for instance the color we were talking about the other day we were talking to you and me about we use certain materials or certain techniques or sometimes in the more speculative projects that are just there for a person that is going to visit a certain biennale for one or two, 15 minutes or when projects were in public space we often choose materials or when we were talking about solstice we were working with materials and techniques that usually the modern movements has bands or has considered as minor works or considered as not serious architecture and so on, we also embrace these political agencies that material have in order to re-signify them and use them as in trans-feminist or queer thinking to use these materials or techniques that were in some period minorized or assigned to oppressed minorities in order to turn them around so the complete parameters that we embrace when choosing the materials and techniques are countless and also like specific for each project it is very difficult to judge the material, what is good and what is bad and the first we show the insulation of the floor, we use like a polystyrene board which we were consulted by like ecological architect, we should use it because it's high quality and also we have we learned like you have to prevent the humidity with plastic seat and it's of course reduce the energy, like for heating energy and also air conditioning energy but also like making this have a lot of energy and uses a lot of energy, also like it doesn't also goes back to the soil so it creates a lot of trashes so afterwards we started to use biodegradable materials and we learned also from the traditional carpenter that we shouldn't like pack the wooden structure with plastic seat because it's kind of prevents the breath of the wood which also makes the wood last longer so we have to kind of balance like what we have chosen but since we have kind of recognition of the soil environment we somehow tend to use the biodegradable materials because we know that it goes back to our garden so this is kind of our tendency now, like how we choose the materials and also of course it can be wrong because like a new information and new technology, new knowledge is very faster comes but architect has to be up with this, you know, new and we shouldn't like stick in one so that's why and we always refer to Cradle to Cradle, the book written by McDonnell and the Brown guard they said there are two cycles, one is biosphere cycles, another one is technosphere how to say it's artificial cycles so they said we don't we must not mix each other because if we mix biosphere and technosphere it pollutes each other we have to avoid this but if we use artificial materials this is how to say it's if we use artificial materials and also we at the same time we have to create the recycle systems, this is also a big issue it's this recycle system we cannot design so that's why we focus on the natural cycles basically just building on the conversation what a wonderful set of presentations I really admire what you're trying to do so I wanted to ask you a quick question to maybe get you to talk to one another about your relationship to the ground in your architecture both of you made some very specific claims about how your architecture relates to the ground but also the architecture itself showed different relationships to the ground very careful ways of both revealing the ground or lifting up the architecture from the ground or I think in both cases you're both lifting up the architecture from the ground at some point you're leaving the architecture above the ground and sometimes you're picking up the ground and literally putting it into taking it with you in the architecture and encapsulating it in the architecture and so I wanted to ask you a little bit about your thinking about in this contemporary moment how your architecture's relationship to the ground really enacts a kind of larger philosophy of what ground means for you I think you're both correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that both of you don't think of the ground as mere support for the architecture to stand on what's else going on but there's something very different going on in both of your projects in terms of the ground we see the ground like kind of hidden half of the nature do you know the book about hidden half of the nature there is a book about working of micro organism in the body and on the ground in the same way and kind of supporting our lives so the ground we don't see what's happening so we don't really think but all the working of micro organisms and the water is generated oxygen our food so we have to treat like also like our well not polluted not heating up but also like ground equally important that's why we try to do it and it's not we can't see so if we don't reveal in our architecture we can't show so this is somehow also what lifting up is like speaking out what ground needed and the other one is like we as a human we need some distance from the soil in my opinion because I think when we didn't have a window in our house of course cold air and hot air coming up but also the mosquito coming up and this we suffered a lot of specially him I don't know like mosquito goes to pick him up not me so we were like covering all our bed only our bed in the net like you did not the net but you so somehow like we want to coexist if they are in outside it's okay we can accept and we just spray ourselves to prevent from the insect but not probably inside we can't coexist so this is also like somehow behavior that to coexist we need some shelter to protect us yeah like I admire very much your approach to to this no like to find in Tokyo this these pieces of land and it's true that yeah we don't have like many examples on how working with the ground especially in this hour we had to lift the ground what we really wanted to do is that because this there's this like street from the San Antonio that it has like 60 centimeters concrete street because of the was this garden this market that was like on works and then they had to put it there so they have this we wanted to get into the ground but it wasn't possible because it's like so high so yeah we feel it's very important to come to the ground and that was also why when they asked us to intervene on the frack on this abandoned space that was like totally took over by the by ground and by and and we saw that the just the space nearby was already starting to get renovated so first thing that they do is to totally sterilize and isolate like as we learn in modern movement like to isolate everything from the exterior we said okay this is not like they want us to bring a feminist approach to this this is what we are exactly not going to do like to to like like prevent the rain for coming in and and kill the the connection of the ground and the exterior also and that is something that is a little bit also all of these like obsession of modern movement or from of isolating the human spaces from the exterior and it's like only also leading us to unhealth and and to depend on fossil fuels no that is why also we took away the the windows in our in our house no and and how we're also they think the cockroaches coming in but like yeah we think no and looking to examples of previous like we also very much looking to the history of recent architecture no like the house of Alex in Alice and the north of Spain is was a it is very common everywhere no but like it has and on the ground floor the cows and then the living room is on top but the the floor is portal so that the heat of the cows is coming to to your to your home so there is this mutualistic relationship that how the cow can heat your your space and you don't need external fossil fuel based heating and you are establishing also interspecies relationships that were there always can I ask you a follow-up question so it seems that you know on the one hand soil and ground has a kind of connotation of place and the thing that doesn't move in a kind of material ecology right it's the it's the kind of it's the Archimedean leverage point you know everything else moves but the ground stays but it seems that you both have different attitudes towards towards that sense that it may be in your work me oh your well you're both letting the ground stay and the architecture kind of circulate around it but you're taking the ground with you you're the ground is part of the mobility of the material ecology so but both of you I think are it seems to me looking at ground as a material as a kind of composite materials as as not something other than architecture but but and so it leads me to my follow-up question about the nature of temporality in your work because it seems that both of you have a kind of commitment to ephemerality you you you mentioned this in your M&M practice the expired city it's already let's say done and but we're not necessarily here it seems again if I've misunderstood you please correct me that you're you're not trying to regenerate that city there's something because that's a stable city it's a kind of reference point you're you're working in Tokyo you're working in Barcelona these are big cities and your work is it would it be right to say that it is committed to a kind of ephemerality of of of letting itself be taken away after a while of of not being permanent you know is that or are you yeah I think it's kind of the architecture is one state of the network of the materials so like one state but it also goes back to the soil and it becomes a waste or recycling so there is like idea of architecture as a material bank so if we understand the architecture or like building as a material bank so building itself it's like bank of the materials it's of course it's understanding of ephemerality because then also like if we use the wood as a structure it's go back to the soil and it's one day it goes like a decompose and it goes to the like production site so it creates the cycle so like wood is also one state of the substance so I think if we understand like the circularity of the biological sphere like architecture we can understand it's a very FMMO yeah like I think it's something that is like very contemporary like nowadays like no many people are embracing these kind of approaches and that yeah of course like if you like if we speak in terms of like also commissions like many of them have even like a temporary like they are already ephemerality but we try to give it like more also ephemerality like for instance if we build with these branches that we expect that the birds are taking them away or sometimes we will with natural flowers that the bees are interacting with them or even like when we build the houses no we we are doing this starting point waiting for some other things to come so that we are there just like us in this period of time we don't want things to stay the same as they are but we want the rest of the agents that are there to like keep on like working with these issues no where these things that we left but yeah I think this question of exploration and the sort of temporal dimension is crucial in fact something that came up in the cohort of well Cordell Connards was just to mention basically asking that the sort of hybrid in between that many of your works address if that could be extended to the sort of temporal dimension so there's no the notion of new and expired that binary doesn't hold anymore and somehow how collapses maybe this is a good moment to open it up to the audience seeing if there are any questions from the in-house audience Hi well thank you so much for amazing presentations and for your work it's a big fan of all your practices so I have a question about scale because you all operate from small practices with like traditionally what we could consider small projects but you have kind of the commitment I understand to operate at a planetary scale like the kind of networks that you engage are of planetary kind of dimension and they don't have like the traditional idea of the client as a kind of singular thing that kind of is contained in a smaller scale and I want to understand how do you understand kind of the bridge between those two the small kind of manifestation of your projects and the bigger scale of the impact or the bigger scale of the networks and entanglement in which they participate do you understand your projects as manifesto to take Bart John's proposition like kind of as a representation of our new ethos that you expect others to join you in do you understand them as prototypes that could trigger new regulations new policies how do you understand the relationship between kind of the the small intervention and the big entanglements that you want to engage yeah like I think we like we can not like the break the like the two different kinds of works that we do like I think when whenever we work for cultural institutions or for the analysis the analysis or even in the public space and we yeah try to in a way like in this like a short period of time that these people are going to go through the the works that we are doing to try to open up discussions like to turn them into spaces of reflection to bring things that maybe have not been brought to the discussion in terms of like of architectural issues or other political issues always like in political issues that that surround us in terms of contemporary thinking, ecology, feminism and so on so that is where we want to operate and activate all these networks of agents when we do these kind of works and like that try to imagine like possible futures of how to embrace these kind of situations and then when we I think when we work on housing we we yes have done the effort to like in and I haven't gone very deep into the houses but like in many aspects we were more yet trying to build this kind of manifesto of some specific actions that we collectively can do in terms of housing and of dwelling and really proposing that not just by the in this like very technological understanding of ecology of limited to what the regulations of the official certificates dictate we must act but from many other aspects like from the way that we live in architecture in general not just in our houses we could also try to like activate some other things no so I would say yeah like it's more like yeah we try to work like in these two different scales of activation in the more speculative approaches and in a more like kind of manifesto present ways of trying to yeah so I think a selection of material define the size of the building for example we cannot build high rise building with store blocks for example so I think the material is very related to the coexistence of other species so if we consider about the other species living we have to change the materials and then we change the size of the building according to the material I think yeah okay so then maybe a question we're already running late but maybe just to get the question from from the planetary cohort in as well we received many excellent questions just like last weekend when one notion that several people brought up which I think in particular these is important which is the sort of relationship between ecological thinking and indigenous knowledge and this is also tying us in a little bit to last week's conversation with DJ Deimos Futurism that also addressed this and Lex work of course as well so basically Yvonne Mapeau is asking in what way does this ancestral indigenous knowledge inform your ecological perspective and our architectural practice which is something I wanted to put to the table here is there an importance for yes in what way does indigenous knowledge ancestral knowledge inform your practice and particularly in relation to ecological thinking because I'm re-facing her question here because that's something that came up last week that before the imposition of colonial capitalism there were indigenous cultures that have managed to survive for thousands of years without creating ecological damage so she brings that at the starting point and is curious if your practice in any ways is informed by such knowledge and how do you think about it? Yeah like I think like without being romantic about the past and we of course like know that from a certain period of time we have relate on fossil fuel energies all the climatization of our houses regardless of the orientation or of like stopping the ventilations and so on so you know like the house the day after house that I showed it was like it is a very typical block of dwellings in Madrid that like it operates by doing like a double symmetry you know so yeah like one house has the living room to the north and one to the south regardless of the conditions and the insulation there is no insulation no like because we rely everything on gas no so and so for us it's very useful to come to examples of the past like of how there are passive methods active methods not relying on fossil fuels and of heating and pooling our houses or yeah to like because before houses were not sterilized no and you were also showing how the ground like there was no concrete on the ground before and that was much more healthy and also and for us it's important to and also and of course not not saying like yeah romanticizing the past but to also review all these examples not the one that I said about the about the cows and the and the living rooms no and and and the moments where and our houses were porous and the air could breathe or could pass by no and and there were not this like geopolitical and economical interests no so the client of the day after house where we where we took away the heating there is no heating no cooling he was complaining a lot but then when the the Ukraine war came and then the politicians in Spain were starting to say you have to turn down the the heating then he was happy because he he was the only one that he didn't need heating in order to be comfortable in there in his house no and other place that we haven't showed that we also live similar to you we also like have working with no heating we have the summer bedroom and the winter bedroom and we move from one to another one and also learning a lot from vernacular examples yeah I think it's once we I got to know like a power of the mycelium I really fascinated and I made a bench of out of mycelium so it's like a composed by but the chip and the hemp and mycelium into a vine the structure and after we exhibited this like my part nine of MMM she stored in her house in this bench in London and the mouse mice came to eat so yeah I think a new kind of it's biodegradable material but we got to know that it's very interesting for mice so but I think a traditional knowledge has all this experience right and this for example straw veil has to be a straw veil it's quite a new material but has to be covered with mud it's also like preventing the insect to live inside also would how to assemble it's like stronger is about the tradition which we kind of piled up for more than two thousand years and this is like really valuable kind of knowledge comparing new materials which we need to kind of examine it all the affection using this in real so of course it's very important and interesting to invent new materials but I think it's very hard to compete to the traditional knowledge which is kind of accumulated for two thousand years more than two thousand years I think we're out of time is there is there another audience question there well in the or maybe we can combine two yeah okay so I'll just ask and then yeah past the microphone when you speak of indigenous or traditional knowledge there's still this sense of distance from this body of knowledge in the sense that we do live in a context where most people don't actually bear or operate with such knowledge and I'm curious in that there it's implied that there is this process of I don't want to say evangelizing or convincing but let's say you know bringing people into this so my question to both well to all of you is maybe starting with Miu and Puminori how was the process of convincing your neighbors to adopt this soil alley and similarly for for Miria if you were to revisit these these provocations particularly in the pavilions how it's how do you think the next reception would be when not within a Biennale with when not within such a context you want to we have too many microphones so we run around hello to add that as well society of undoing isn't there's a nice interesting thought in this process maybe to kind of add to the last question there's the sense of undoing kind of this human hierarchies in both of the work in a sense it's interesting because I when we were reading these kind of papers we were kind of viewing as yes you're undoing the human part of the society but it's weird to do it as a human in that isn't there still kind of that center of an Anthropocene in both of these projects still I think when looking at that I don't want to view it as more of a critique rather a position of kind of progression that both of these projects are still considering more animals in different type species that I'm wondering to develop a new model society what decides the metrics that influence a multi-species justice of place building what is your sort of progressive mentality when you're looking at these projects what is you know the thing you're learning out of each time you make these interventions I didn't understand your question so please make it easier I guess I guess the point I had to run down was how do you measure this kind of how do you measure your multi-species justice how do you sort of view every like progression in each of your work what is considered to be sort of building towards justice towards a marriage between plants and people so you mean like how to how to measure when we design or how to decide when we design like the balance between human and the multi-species what are the sort of steps in between right the different skills to get to this sort of multi-inter species or trans species justice like to get to this relationship the sort of skills that are needed for that and the transition to get to those relationships right is that how understand it how do we measure like the success or no how do we measure the he's my student he's our student he was our student I told me so how do we measure the success or not success of the of the of our interventions I think it's very difficult because I we are human camps here the species voices so we have to always think searching this very scientific way for example we always learn from my go organisms activity activity through the scientific the information for example the dojo the dojo the knowledge of people like scientists you're getting knowledge from professionals of course like a gardener knows more and of course not also like a scientist knows more but I think of course I don't Of course, I don't know him, but personally, we don't design for microorganisms. We know that if they work, we are comfortable and they can live, yeah. And through this, you know, I think the other way of kind of designing for animals and multispecies is, I don't know, it's more, it's, yeah, since we don't know how they feel, it's very difficult, but we can kind of be objective, like observing their comportment of kind of how they come, or the hardness you design, if never came, it doesn't work. So we can also like experimentally develop our knowledge as an architect too, but yeah. Yeah, sometimes it's like, sometimes it's, times are so small that sometimes even you cannot like test if it works or not, like, or how much interaction with the other species did you have or not. Usually it does, so I can say, for instance, that the cat shelter, like the rams were useless, they never used them, these kind of things we can test, but like I think the goal is also to try to incorporate to the discussion of ecology these other issues. So, and that is also a success, no? The fact that the municipality of Barcelona has taken into consideration to include species that are edible, not just species that leaves are not going to fall in the winter or they don't have to sweep it or they are, people cannot be allergic, no? Which are the criteria where they are choosing the plants, so also like we measure not just on how the other species behave because the other species, I think that is successful for all of them because we are including them on the conversation. We are not, like, destroying their ecosystems. It is also like to try to open these discussions on the citizenship arena. I think now we're really out of time. We should conclude here, but we can have these conversations through the next series of information, the next iterations, I should say. Yeah, and we can talk to you later. We'll continue the conversation. Because you're here. Yes, we'll do that here. I just want to say to everyone in two weeks we'll have our next information with Christopher Hawthorne and Vicky Bean who will be joining us here with Adam Lubinsky and Waping Wu. So that's it for now, and I hope to see you next time. Thank you.