 Good evening. Good evening, everyone. I should say for Barkley and Cruz, bonsoir et buenas tardes. I'm not in Marlendros. I often wish I was, but this is as close as I'm going to get. And I'm sorry to arrive late. She had a last-minute emergency and really regretted that she couldn't be here this evening, both to introduce Sandra and Jean-Pierre to you all, but also to catch up on their work and to hear what they're doing, although they're here in this country at the moment teaching, unfortunately, at another university which has an inconvenient commute. They are going to discover, as I just did, that the, although Lima and New York appear to be very different, it's not true. They're two cities with absolutely no reliable public transportation, which is why I'm breathless coming in. So welcome to the world of infrastructure. It's one of the many things that you're thinking about. I knew at Barkley and Cruz before, you're always supposed to introduce this though. You're the only person in the world, but I knew of them already before I began a long period of research on the history of Latin American modern architecture and inevitably also engaging with the very lively scene in many places including Lima. I knew of them because of my own French connection, and they are a fascinating architectural practice because they have a, it is a transatlantic practice, and we're so used to transatlantic practices along the axis of North America, Europe, that a practice that moves between the Atlantic coast of Europe and the Pacific coast of Latin America is a fascinating one and also one that moves between the world of what we might call a declining technological utopia that is France and a world that requires a much different response to not only climate, but obviously issues of poverty, public infrastructure, and I think that we're going to all get a great number of lessons tonight of what I've been myself learning over the last decade of visiting Latin America, but also visiting their work, that there is a great deal to be learned by people who are involved in dealing with means that are sometimes more austere than the luxurious worlds of the North, but also that are at the forefront of a recognition of global changes, in particular climate change. I have managed to get in my crib notes the brief of their studio that they're doing at the Unnamed University called Yale up North called Learning from Pura, Building Resilience in Error of Climate Change, and they are, you're going to see, dealing with the coast in Peru in a very, very direct way. I'm sure you'll be introduced to the first project of theirs that I saw in reality, which is The Place of Memory, which is built into the very geology of Peru, but into a fragile geology at the same time as it embraces the very complex issues of how a society comes to terms with a long period of trauma. So it, of course, is a place that deals with the need to repair and to recover from the two decades of the silver path and the nearly daily terrorism in Peruvian life. It's not unique to Peru, a very common situation. There are projects like this in Mexico, and in particular in Santiago de Chile. But a fascinating project, I think, might be a bit of the springing off point for the studio because the site that they build into is one that appears as though it might fall into the sea at any given moment. Let me give a little bit of background on Sandra Barclay and Jean-Pierre Cruz. They are Peruvian-born and Peruvian-educated, but they both migrated during the very period when Peru was so deeply troubled to Paris. Continuing education there, but also teaching there. And in the case of Jean-Pierre, I believe, working for Siriani, for Enrique Siriani or Henri Siriani. Siriani is a very interesting figure because at the moment when France was beginning to dabble with the rise of post-modernism, Siriani took a position against that. And Siriani took a very strong position held by others in France that modernity was an incomplete project to riff on Habermas, which was a big motif still of that period. So this is the realm that they worked in first in France. They have built a number of very significant projects in France, and they continue a bi-continental practice, but their prime locus of operation now is Lima. I think there's something you're going to discover in the work, although I don't know the full panorama that they're going to present to us tonight, or the basics are up here actually. All the prizes are very recently, the Crown Hall of America's Prize and a Sandra named Woman of the Year by the Architects Journal. But I think also to note some ways in which their work, both in listening tonight, but I think also in looking at their website and looking at the publications relates to the work that you're doing in various studios. For one, they have been deeply involved in thinking about museological space. So if there are students here from the CCCP program, in a building I saw before, I knew them, which is their incredible renovation in the 90s, one of the great unsung works of French-classic post-war modernism. And this is the museum that now bears the name of Antoine Malraux, the Malraux Museum in Le Havre, which they renovated in the late 90s. I think it opened around 1999. An absolutely exquisite renovation of a major building that both shows off their own talent for thinking about how to intervene in an intelligent way to make another building sing. But more recently, the opening just a handful of years ago, I think finally in 2015 of the Place of Remembrance, which is a museum, but also a place to remember. When Amal phoned me and said, could you please come and introduce them, I said Ken should introduce them because Ken was on the jury, I think that selected your project, which you're going to show it, yes? Which you will show tonight. But involvement with other museums that are nearing completion, the Paracas Museum in the southern Peruvian Desert. It's the project that was cited in the Architectural Record, Architect of the Year Award. And there has been a huge flurry of activity, private houses of incredible subtlety, but also intervention in the public realm and very frequently museums. I should say also that they think very cogently about how one exhibits architecture. They have been involved with the Venice Biennale both on display, but in two years ago curating the Peruvian Pavilion there. So I could go on and on. The list of awards is enormous. We're not the first to recognize them, and I'm sure we're not the last, but we're absolutely delighted that you are here. I'm going to listen very attentively and join you and moderate the discussion afterwards, if you like. So please, I don't know how you're going to present this, but join me in welcoming Sandra Barclay and Jean-Pierre Cruz. We are very pleased to be here. Thank you, Amal, for the invitation. And of course, Barry, for your words and for hosting us. And also Laila for the tour she made us in the campus. Yeah, one of the few certainties we have about architecture is that in order to understand it, we should see the reality of architecture. We have to be there. Of course, architecture is about multi-sensorial and embodied experience. So there's always a problem about doing a lecture about our projects showing only pictures. So we are trying to show you some site work, pictures, drawings, and little films in order to try to make you understand the meaning and the intentions behind the projects. We are showing you seven projects all located in Peru. Because we consider our work as an ongoing research in which each project informs the next one in terms of strategies, hypotheses, building processes, and results. And in every project we do, our first effort is to ask, to find the good questions that will guide our decisions and not pretending to find answers, but with the aim to make a thing about the means we have at our disposal and the meaning and the sense the buildings should convey. Our long stay in Europe as a young architect and a patient's search through drawing gave us the insight on how to create a personal visual culture understanding what we consider important in architecture. It gave us, too, the needed distance to understand what could define architecture in our country. A constant and resolute work is, of course, part of this research. In each project we go from sketches to the model, then to precise drawing, and then into reality, and then back into sketches, models, and drawings. It's a circular dynamic between mind, hand, and matter. Our Peruvian culture comes with a wonderful past. We are interested in studying this fantastic legacy from the design strategies set in place to construct the landscape, not simply seeing them as archaeological remains. We are increasingly asking ourselves if nature, territory, landscape, architecture, and matter can still be seen as interdependent and with the same value. We consider if it's still possible to create an alternate approach to architecture, abandoning the modernist rigid separation of architecture, urban planning, design, and landscape architecture that make them a distinct and often polarized profession. We admire the ancient Peruvians for their knowledge to use what is available in order to give sensitive response to solve human needs, creating a wonderful landscape and understanding of the territory within its own logics in order to build infrastructure and architecture. That's not quite the same thing happening today, as you can see. In countries like ours, with almost no industry and an insipid economy, we have to imagine which are the resources or materials with which we can build. In conditions of permanent crisis and instability, we choose to work with what is available, as often people do in our country. But working with what is available does not condemn us necessarily to scarcity of means. For us it's mainly a matter of turning the gaze to the possibilities our society, our climate, and our landscape give us. To these conditions, including the mid-climate and the pre-industrial craftsmanship that we have, we have some of these wonderful ingredients to work with. That is culture, territory, climate, place, program, and technology. And the strategy allows us to carefully measure these ingredients to interact with the essential elements of architecture. So space, light, matter, and time. So let's take a look to our territory now. Peru is located in the heart of the tropics, quite at the same latitude, at the sandy and coconut beach trees, trees beach of South Asia or Brazil, for example. But huge differences start when we put color to this image. With color we realize that the Peruvian coast, harbors, the coldest tropical seawater, temperatures at such close latitude to the equator. The cold current coming up from the Antarctic and hitting the Andes range creates a unique climate and landscape. In order to fully understand this, a section is more appropriate than a map. The German scientist Alexander von Humboldt was the first European to realize that the section is key to understand the central Andes region. So we like to redraw this section, including the sea current named after him. So we start with an horizontal line that represents the ocean west to the left. Then comes an extremely steep topography with a 10,000-meter gradient in distance of only 200 kilometers. These geographical circumstances generate a unique landscape and a unique climate. A mild temperature between 15 degrees and 28 Celsius and no precipitation at all happens when a seawater convection and air-thermic inversion combine to create an almost permanent cloud over the desert strip where Lima, our city, is located. And it's around here. So the projects we are showing you are all in this edge between this huge underwater depression and the Andes. This makes our tropics very different from the usual image we have of this latitude. So we have at the same time an extremely arid desert and yet a very humid one. Our coast is a misty desert with no shadows and no contrasts because of the lack of sunshine more or less like eight months in a year. So it's hard to imagine that this could be Lima as a tropical city. We have no rain, no cold days, no hot days, no strong winds, and we can say we live in a place with an absence of climate. We have earthquake, but not climate. And we realize that only when we went to Europe to stay for more than 16 years and when we arrived to Europe we realized that in Lima, for example, there are no TV weather forecasts. It's always the same. And that's a huge thing, you know? So it's in the age of the Bay of Lima in that square that we had the opportunity to build the first project we're going to show you. That is the place of remembrance. The Commission for Truth and Reconciliation in charge of taking to public account the facts and responsibilities occurred during 20 years of political violence that cost more than 70,000 debt had the aspiration to build a place for reconciliation of Peruvian people. A national architectural competition was launched for the creation of a cultural center that would articulate the efforts to show to the future generations the memory of those years of intolerance in order to prevent repeating the horrors of the past. And as Barry said, Ken Frampton was part of the jury with Rafael Moneo and Francesco Alco. So the site for the place of remembrance was a residual area left by the destruction of one of these successions of cliff and ravines that characterized the Bay of Lima when a roadway to the beaches was created in the 70s. We decided to embed the building with the same logic. Architecture will be related to memory not only by its content or programmatic context but by revealing the memory of Lima's landscape. The building becomes then an artificial cliff that belongs to the territorial logic of Lima's Bay. In the same way, territory is more easily understood by a section. From now on we'll try to explain our projects almost only by the section. I think the section is... We think the section is more important than the plans because the section conveys not only space but also emotions. The plan is about organization more than emotions. So if we draw a cut-off longitudinal section of the cliffs, we locate a compact building near the natural cliff in order to economize both on the number of foundation piles and their depth. In this way, the territorial logic meets the economic logic. We had very few money to do it. It's the only museum of memory that was in Latin America that was built despite the government, not by the government but despite the government with money from the German government, the Swedish government and the European Union. The Peruvian government didn't want this building at the beginning at least. So this simple strategy opened possibilities for responding also to environmental needs. Opened the building to the cliff, allowed to control natural light and closing it to the northwest at the left, prevent us from the sunlight of the setting sun and the noise of the coastal highway. An operator in an inner space creates a natural ventilation limiting the use of air conditioning to the auditorium alone. And the site had still a strong handicap and that was that there was no connection between this site and the city. Only a narrow passage could be done to link it to the main urban avenue with public transportation. So we decided to transform this major problem into a design opportunity. We could introduce time in the way we approached the building. The visitor must take time to distance himself from the city to leave daily preoccupations behind and to get ready for seeing an exhibit which is not easy to appreciate. The visitor is then literally submerged in this gap created between the cliff and the building. The act of descending into this crevice turns gravity into a very explicit force. At the bottom of this newly created ravine, there is a marked physical consciousness, a kind of intensified presence. And we are not more in a urban setting nor in a natural landscape. We are in a place where we are giving ourselves the time for reflection. And time passes faster and faster these days as do the evolution of technology. On the opposite, we think that space endures and captures time. Everything we see here, is in the order of the permanent. We don't have layers. This is almost the finished building. And because space is defined by structure and not by technology, this is the permanent side of the building. Once structure defines what is permanent, it allows us also to configure not only the interior space as you see here, but also the transition space between interior and exterior, which has the responsibility of capturing light and bringing it to the interior spaces. The notion of time is present also when we walk through the building. The research center and the different exhibition spaces are accessible through a series of ramps, which, of course, is a magnificent device that we architects have in order to slow down our urban frenzy time and can climb smoothly dissociating the path of the eye from the path of the body. And this is one of the wonderful legacies of the modern movement that we like so much. And this is not a side work image. It's actually the finished building before the collection came in. So only the railings and the vertical white columns were in the order of the temporary because they contain the technology, very low technology, but sufficient to have this building built. And the building process is very important for us because in our country the design process does not finish with construction plans. And that was one of the huge learnings that we had coming back from France to Peru and seeing that you can still modify plans while building. And being aware that the quality of public construction in Peru is not good at all. The project strengths must not lay in the finishings nor in a well-executed building. I was here to figure out that a long time before us, but for Peru it's very appropriate. The choice of pouring reinforced concrete manually allowed us to reproduce the matter found in the cliffs, alluvial strata, merging with its mass and hue, making use of artisanal formwork assembled by hand using old wooden planks producing determination that absorbed the true imperfections. So we consider the traces of those imperfections as part of the memory of the construction. The plans that are meant to set a future action lost their supremacy as the building itself started to draw a map that describes its construction process. The irregular walls, the cobblestone pavement and the traces of hand crafting are the evidence of human labor and become the maps of human intervention. At left, we can see the footprints of the watchdog you just saw in the previous slide that we insisted to keep them in the stamped cement floor of the ramps. At right, the workers put their hands in the entry to the public plaza as the trace of the hands who literally built this place. So let's see now how the building becomes alive and it's nowadays. We find similar landscape conditions and this cove located some 120 kilometers south from Lima is a place where we designed and built six beach houses in four consecutive years. It was an incredible design laboratory in which we learned from one house to another to relate to this landscape. In this mile coast, architecture loses one of its major reasons for existence, to provide shelter. Without the need for shelter, only the creation of intimacy is left to architecture. Intimacy allows to live in this vast and absolute territory. Ancient Peruvians understood this very well. The platforms and the enclosures are still valid strategies nowadays. By using them, we abandon the common strategy of doing a pretty object isolated in the landscape. We could focus on bringing the landscape logics into architecture, creating meaningful microcosmos in each house. So we draw a slope of the cove, then an emerging platform in order to define a new horizontal ground for life. After that, we define an enclosure that ensures domesticity and intimacy, providing shade to the platform and framing the ocean view. Finally, a pool brings the ocean to the platform and serves as a natural railing. Underneath, we excavate the platform to create the rooms for intimacy, the bedrooms protected from the setting sun by the pool. From the ocean, the houses define platforms as extruded volumes from the cliff and from the desert, they seem to be excavated on the sand. As we approach to the enclosure, finally we discovered a threshold between two exteriors, which take us into a larger exterior space pointing to the ocean. As the pools are a mandatory feature in a holiday house, we propose them as ludic spaces where we can relate with our neighbors. Underneath, they act as a protection for the bedrooms. Culture and technology can work together. Local craft conditions give us clues about forgotten or undervalued materials. The buildings industry is one of the main culprits of this forgetfulness and the obsolescence of certain materials through its most fearful instrument, the construction regulations. Under a bench and a woman's straw mat, roofs are enough to live here. To adapt industrial materials like glass to a surface which has been modeled by hand, the most simple gesture becomes the most appropriate, like this cut in concrete for fitting a sliding window in a non-soul vertical wall. So this is another site where we were asked to design a bigger house in a larger site, but with using the same, more or less the same strategies. This is located 50 kilometers north from Lima. So the strategy of the platform and plinth was also used at this time with a single roof providing shade to the social area and the rest of the intimate spaces were located, as usual, underneath the platforms. There are surfaces being used as garden or terraces. In this case, we used local stone and this reddish puzzalonic cement. To build it. The enclosure fades away and you find your way into the house by turning around containing walls. Transparency is only suggested. The spaces are revealed as we go through the site. We discover each time new places in this site. The Paracas Desert, some 200 miles south from Lima, is one of the most arid deserts in the world. People lived here 2,000 years ago and were the predecessors of the ones who traces the famous Nazca Lines. The Paracas Archaeological Site Museum was destroyed by a strong earthquake in 2007 and the European Union financed its reconstruction and launched a competition the following year. For us, it was not only about an archaeological museum but also an attempt to introduce landscape logics into architecture. We had, at the same time, a meagre budget and a sublime landscape with ochre and reddish stones. Seen from the archaeological burial site, the museum is perceived as a layer built over thousands of geographic and cultural layers. It modifies landscape and, at the same time, depends on it, as would a rock or a trace in the desert. Again, it's not about providing shelter. It's about providing the correct contained space for living. The first element we defined was, as usual, an enclosure for downscaling the vastness of the desert landscape. A horizontal roof is conceived as a fifth facade as an element that can protect us from the sun and the strong winds of this region. Finally, a series of low-tech environmental devices find their place beneath the roof and help defining the exhibition spaces. Also help us control natural light and ventilation. The original museum was built in 1964 by German archaeology Frederick Engel. We decided to keep its memory by building in the exact same location, respecting the overall volume and geometry in order to avoid archaeological surveys that were mandatory if we built elsewhere in the site. As we couldn't reuse the stones, and the original quarry was inside the protected area and, therefore, impossible to obtain new stones, we decided to use the same pozzolanic ceramic technique for finishing the pre-Columbian bases, rescaled to the size of the building. We used the same pozzolanic red cement of the beach houses, but this time it was polished as if it was a huge ancient base. A porch announces the entrance to the enclosure, acting as a threshold between the vastness of the desert and the open-air inner circulation. The different programs are related among them by an exterior circulation. The main volume contains the archaeological exhibition, where the thin volume has the workshops, services, and space for community. The low-tech environmental devices show up in this circulation, and one of them constitutes the entrance to the museographic spaces. These low-tech environmental devices help us control natural light and ventilation and define the exhibition spaces. They organize the museographical sequence in a continuous and fluid space. When the environmental devices reach the southern façade, they become windows framing the burial site. So now let's go to a new urban setting for the next project. Yeah, we are back to Lima, where we were asked this time to design a commercial, high-end apartment building in a nice residential area. In order to have an idea, this is the place of remembrance, and this is the site of the building not far away. So again, the section can explain the project. First, we draw the contained urban space that defines a public garden. We unfold this garden vertically to provide an intermediate space between the apartments and the urban space. This vertical garden is organized like a joint ownership common to all the dwellers, which ensures its permanence. The vertical garden is curved to embrace the public garden, creating a subtle tension between the two. So now we are going to explain in plan, because the apartment circulation was very important for us. It's shown in red, because it could allow to change the configuration of the apartments without altering the exterior. We can have, for example, two, three-bedroom apartments or different configurations, two and four, or four and two, depending on the need of the dwellers. And the exterior always remain the same, not showing the difference in the configuration. So the east facade, the one who contains all the bedrooms, protects the bedrooms from rising sun and from the views of the building from which it's taken this photo, while the living rooms open to the north and south facades, which are almost equivalent in an intertropical latitude. So this is opening to the south and protecting us from the east. Back again to the coastal desert, this time in the south of Peru, at the gate of the Atacama Desert. An architectural competition was organized to build the Mokewa region government headquarters in the city of the same name. In the minds of the local Mokewa inhabitants, there are already certain elements which have a singular and defined shape and are landmark places in the city and in the landscape. The region headquarters is located in a new cultural and commercial neighborhood between the city and its river. The main square, a well-defined quadrangular void, and the city hall, a plain rectangular prisma, are two important landmarks made with local sandstone of the same color of the mountains. There are also landscape landmarks as this one, like a Cerro Baúl mountain. Cerro Baúl is visible from the city, gives us a unique identity to this region, as it was once cohabitated by the two biggest empires which preceded the Incas. It is even the main feature in the coat of arms of the region. The building is located in a topography between the city and the mountains. We create again a plinth that contain, this time, services and archives to generate a new high ground. We again propose a compact structure to create public square in continuity with an atrium. This atrium frames views to the city and to the landscape. On top, different buildings are separated by narrow courtyards, allowing cross ventilation and direct control of sunlight. Five buildings covered a roofed atrium, which acts as the prolongation of the public space of the plaza. In this section, we see only three of them. The buildings, which have a north and south glazed facade, are illuminated through courtyards, orientated and protected by the rising and setting sun by a circular blind perimeter. So in a similar way from the place of remembrance, we propose a compact volume creating a public space that wasn't asked in the competition. Both the buildings and the courtyards are connected by a big central outdoor covered space. There's a conference encloses a rational orthogonal structure which allows us to be more efficient in the evacuation distance and therefore in the vertical course. This overall efficiency did not only pay for the plaza itself, but allowed to include seismic insulators that enable the building to be considered a shelter for the community, as it will stand without damage in case of a major earthquake. To get into the building, you have to cross an exterior public atrium that merge into an exterior controlled atrium. Once you cross the atrium, you arrive to the central void, which is a covered outdoor space. The lateral courtyards are directly linked to this central space, framing the entry, the city and the landscape. All the offices are lighted from these courtyards. The exterior instead protect them from high solar radiation and heat. We used cement precast panel as permanent shattering for pouring concrete beams and bearing walls. The local cement plant was asked to produce two colors, but again imperfection in the mixing process produced a large variety of tones, which was a gift for us as the facade has now a very similar variety of the local stone. This video will show you how the building lives. This is the last project that is located in Pura. So we are now four degrees south from the equator in a booming city, where you can see the campus of the University of Pura, which is this one. The local university needed more space for welcoming a new student population coming from low income rural milieu thanks to government scholarship. They decided to increase their capacity by building a new facility of generic classrooms and faculty offices. Their aspiration was to take this opportunity to improve teaching infrastructure and gave us the opportunity to go beyond a standard response to Disney. And when the university was founded 50 years ago, it looked like the top image. And, you know, in the north of Peru, there's the Nino phenomenon when we are in a very arid desert and every 12 years comes tropical rains for about six months. And it came in 1973 and the provost following the advice of some professors decided that the first thing to do after they completed the first building was not to continue building another buildings but to plant trees, these carob trees that grow only during a Nino phenomenon and then stay alive for 12 years searching for the watershed that is 30 meters deep. So this vision took the university to look like this today and of course was an inspiration for us. Our first question was about how should be a place of learning here in this tropical dry forest in the middle of the desert. So reading Louis Kahn was of course a good hint if we wanted to go back to the roots of the question. He said schools began with a man under a tree who did not know he was a teacher sharing his realization with a few others who did not know they were students so that was very inspiring for us and the tropical dry forest helped us translate this very easily into architecture. So again the section and we start drawing the soft hills of the tropical dry forest and the trees, carob trees and we started the project by extending the shade of the forest at the place of the building. So a single horizontal line is created to define a shaded space capable of creating good conditions for learning. Then the program grows as in La Tourette from the rooftop down to the ground and the result is a series of buildings which are less important than the spaces in between them and the natural dry forest can continue underneath the building at least their shade and the spaces in between are the places for informal learning. The creation of these non-hierarchical places for students to study, eat, connect and discuss together outside classrooms contributed to creating a sense of community blurring the social and economic boundaries between the newly arrived students and the urban students that were already there. These thoughts brought us to abandon the traditional type of educational building shifting from the typical academic building into a learning landscape and by doing that we were not only introducing the landscape of the dry forest into the building at least the logics but we were also creating a kind of new urban space within the forest and as in a forest where the single tree is not more important than the whole five different building types formed 11 independent structures disposed within a 70 by 70 meters square volume, 9 meters high. The square shape is ideally in the forest where there is no predominant orientation so what we did is to align the building with the sand path. At the ground level this apparently compact volume is in fact extremely permeable and shaded invited students to cross it connecting roads and people. In the second level a clear square circulation has a strong visual connection with the ground level. So these sites are very different between the volume of their orientation the south and north facades protected by vertical louvers that are very efficient to protect both facades in the vertical sun of the equator this is the north one and a system of prefab concrete panels protect the faculty office from the setting sun this is the west side and the building at the east side the building that hosts the ramps and services constitute the main side of the square where the entrances from the campus pedestrian pathway are located. So the entrance building is in fact a threshold where we pass from the strong layer of the equator to the shaded exterior spaces of the learning landscape and this is not only a threshold it also connects the ground floor to the second floor and the lattice shuttering adapt our eyes to the shaded exteriors while we go up through the ramps or just enter the building an inside that is still an exterior space the open air circulation are shaded the narrow gaps that every individual building is leaving between them help the light come in and favors natural ventilations and the shaded and ventilated in between spaces provide places for casual meeting and informal learning among students there are places which are more as a circulation but other places which people can gather rest as the worker there or chat in between classes and these spaces become more important as we get into the complex until we arrive to this one that is the core of the building where the intermediate spaces are crossed by a stretch of the tropical dry forest and now we are going to again see a day pass Cusco that we are going to show you because it's a new adventure we are going into it was an opportunity to explore how to work with mountains always defining a platform and also working with architecture that can allows rain to come also working with local materials as this redstone trying to figure out how can we still work with ambiguity spaces in this climate blurring the limits between interior and exterior spaces working with sunlight from vertical sunlight that's it, thank you for those of you who don't know me at the beginning I started talking and didn't introduce myself I'm Barry Bergdahl, I'm a professor in the art history department curator at MOMA I just want to ask you one question and invite you to just add a little bit of a postscript because I was so intrigued by the studio description of the studio at Yale which takes off from the next to the last project from the university that you've just designed essentially maybe not the entire university but a kind of mini university campus in an internally turning village and your studio is called a learning from Pura so learning from this place and learning from the task to design an entire university campus is always fascinating because in a certain sense it takes you to the urban level as well as to the landscape so I'd like to hear a bit about and you define this as a climate change situation and although there really is no climate I'm completely fascinated by next time I'm in a hotel in Peru I'm going to enjoy the lack of weather reporting and living between countries like France where if it snows a little bit there's a nonstop television coverage and this country where every snowstorm gets to be a headline news in the New York Times for three days running but despite the fact that there is no weather Peru is a place as you know that's very much affected by changes in the climate and you opened with the sort of topographical section of Alexander von Humboldt of the Andes very fascinating because I was waiting to say to you but all of your projects are almost on the shelf at the edge of the ocean you haven't been pushed up into that section up until now but you also told us that the Humboldt current which is essentially a major weather controller in the Pacific is changing just as the Gulf Stream is changing in the Atlantic and as you draw those beautiful sections in which the bathymetry of the Pacific is in fact to be understood as not just simply something under the placid ocean but as something deeply related to what happens on the land and in the section that continues into the mountains I wonder if you could just tell us something about what you're reflecting on the larger geological climatic changes that are coming and that are already visible and how one responds to that so you're now entering your second decade back in Peru you returned once peace was established and began with a project that tried to deal with the memory and the reconciliation from that traumatic past but you now realize that your work is sitting at the edge of the ongoing dramatic changes that we're facing in climate and if you could tell us something about the Yale studio and tell us about how reflecting on climate change is affecting your thinking about place in architecture making mainly the consequence of climate change in Peru is melting glaciers that provides water to this coastal desert so it's a desert with water availability even if not so much and now we have the problem of melting glaciers so we will have more water for 20 years and then no water at all so they are already doing tunnels bringing the water at least in Lima bringing the water from the Amazonian basin to the Pacific desert but our studio was not very interesting in this consequence of climate change but in the resilience that have been forged over the millennia in the north of Peru because of the Lino phenomenon so we have this cradle of of agriculture that was in the coast of northern Peru that developed a certain resilience to this phenomenon that occurs every 15 or 12 years and what is happening is that we are in a laboratory where there is a desertification process ongoing and at the same time huge and very strong climate events so that's what will be happening in a lot of countries that are mostly of them that are mismanaged now climate change is not affecting as much the rich countries as the poor countries so what fascinated us while doing this university facility in Pura was that all that is the houses and the dwellings of the people in the not in Pura city but in the countryside is made of very lightweight materials with reeds and carob trees and mud so they are coping with this climate change not by trying to build very expensive houses that will stand to a flood but allowing the flood to come in they lose their houses but they can rebuild very easily afterwards so that's a very different conception about permanence and disasters they are used to losing their house not like a disaster but like a cyclical phenomenon and these techniques are being lost because of the government policies that are trying to build houses in a very different way, in a traditional way that is not that has proven in the last 10 years to be very contraproductive so we are trying to make a place of research in order to promote these local building techniques that are disappearing and what I was we were saying in the podcast before coming here we think that education or academia at least in our countries must not be only intellectual problem or theoretical investigation or research but it has to improve reality so what we are doing now at Yale is that we are thinking about different ways of building in this context that we will present to the purist mayor and we hope that these centers that are research centers will also be a refuge during a linear phenomenon for 6 months they will be invested by people and then when the flood goes out they can rebuild their homes without losing any resource so it's an adventure we don't know the results we are doing that because we don't know the answer it's fascinating as a historian to hear you talk about this because it reminds me of the whole history of interest in Peru and self-help housing and participatory housing of the most famous of which of course is Previ in Lima but not the only one which has some parallels in a certain way with that where one thinks about an accountant as an actor not simply as an occupant but as a kind of actor in the future of the building Previ was an excellent experiment of how to change the view of the role of social housing not provided only by the government but also involving people in their construction and in Pura in our building we didn't have to deal with this flooding situation because in the site we were in the upper part of the university campus so it's really like a new for us also it's a new approach that we master explore we don't know really the answers but we are looking for projects that can manage these flooding problems so as more not only as buildings but as constructors I'm just going to ask one more question as a follow up to that and then open it up to the people here to ask you other questions but since you're teaching this in New Haven Connecticut presumably it's not simply a closed circuit of learning from the residents learning from the topography learning from the climate and also realizing that the climate as inherited will not be the climate in 50 years or maybe even not next year but besides you learning from Pura and then Pura learning from Pura as a kind of process of reinvesting resilience into maybe government decisions that are not so resilient how do you take this out of Peru what can non-coastal Peruvians learn from Pura I think it's more that what we can learn from we can learn from a fresh eye from a different reality for a different perspective and I think what happens normally is that rich countries go and learn from two countries and then go back to the rich countries and learn from what they have learned and we want to do it the other way a little bit that rich countries can really not only learn but to give something to the other reality it's more a give and take then take it back to the rich countries there are a lot of other topics I'd love to push you on in relationship to this wonderful body of work and you chose only the thank you for the self-restraint the most recent Peruvian work and not the French work so I realize there's a lot that's edited out but by sounds there were waves which were more or less natural in the case of rich houses but when you showed schools there were always you know the sounds of people passing is just casual or have you ever thought about relationship or sound to the other architectural means I think it's more the photograph vision he likes to work with time and light so he wants to show always like a day in the building and in the sound is very important because as I said at the beginning architecture is not only about sight we are so used to only use one sense that is sight that we forgot that when we are in architecture we have all the other senses rumors, sounds noises temperature textures and those are very important and that's why we like to show these videos because they are showing a little bit closer to the sense of what we experience and even though it's very difficult and that was one of our main concerns when the graph stones invited us to the last Venice Biennale to show this building because we were convinced that if we showed a model or a photograph or plans we would not be able to transmit this feeling of space temperature, light and movement so we decided to put what is not in the building but was used to build it that was the form works of the lattice panels and to show a video that was much longer than the one we showed showing a whole day in one hour so we tried to bring the purest light, the northern Peruvian light to Venice projected in a Venetian wall while filtering Venetian light through the form work of the lattice work so it was a kind of experiment on how to show a building without any models, plans or images and also working with what was available in the site they gave us that was natural light because for the first time they opened the windows in the Alcenale and it was really wonderful but it's true that the sound helped us to have the atmosphere to be more near this feeling of atmosphere It occurs to me one of the really beautiful things in the place of memory and I love the fact that you showed us the site before and almost anybody who's an architect in the room had to think how in the world can you possibly, it's not even a site, it's a kind of non-site but that you created the capacity to experience that section and to move through that landscape where in fact in Lima there are very few places that are intermediary between being up on the plateau which has an Esplanade especially in that section and Esplanade along it you can look out kind of like the equivalent of maybe Santa Monica in Los Angeles or Malibu and then you have this highway and beach there but you don't occupy so it's not only that your building itself is derived from this very rich reflection on section but the occupiable kind of landscape section of that hill which also has an auditory element of hearing the ocean coming up through and feeling the winds coming up through that cut which otherwise doesn't really exist as part of the coastal experience at Lima those to give you all time for more questions Are there any other questions out in the audience? Thank you for your presentation and for the work, it's really quite beautiful you can speak about the differing scales and differing contexts in which the buildings have been produced and how you've navigated those where it seems like you have a very close relationship with the craft of the building and then in the multifamily project or the municipal project or even the university where things get much larger whether there's a difference in the process in terms of the realization of the building and how you feel or whether you feel there has been a shift relative to the intimacy with the materiality or what the translations have been in some of the larger projects I think we feel we do always the same project at the same time there are different conditions for this project but what we are focusing regardless of the scale of the building is this creation of intimacy or belonging or trying to capture exterior space in an interior quality space I don't know how to explain it in intelligent words in English but we are trying to create exterior spaces that are interior that have these qualities of interiorness which includes intimacy etc. From a design standpoint I think that's very clear across the projects my curiosity is more whether in some of the larger projects whether the realization is the way that you describe it with such intimacy in terms of the embrace of imperfection etc. and the closeness with the crafts people is that the same regardless of the scale or complexity of the project? In our first project in Peru when we were working still in France we had this first opportunity to design a house and we knew we couldn't be present in the site in the construction process so we decided to first of all try to keep the essential part of the architectural decisions work with the space with really less details little details not that complexity in the details because it wasn't it was the time where we communicated by faxes and really it wasn't possible to be in the site I think that that logic of keep simple and not too much complexity in the details and let the structure define the space stay with us in the other project so even working with large scale projects we tried to keep like that and in the process in the build process we tried to talk to the people that are building to try to communicate that because the try to work with them in searching quality not as perfection but as trying to do the best they can and I think that quality the builders they have a really good culture in building so normally they are willing to do that it's interesting to say that architects are not responsible of the site works so we are not we have no responsibility and no power in the site works during the construction so that's a big disadvantage but also it's kind of an advantage because as we don't have power we can go wherever we want and talk not to the bosses but talk to the people to the workers and the workers are still you know the craftsmanship in Peru is still is disappearing but is still concerned about about doing well which doesn't exist for example in France anymore so you can change things in the process also so we are just convincing them that it would be better going without the bosses knowing and talking to people and telling them to do that or to take care of some things and that was for example a big learning in the place of remembrance commission to officially commission to oversee the construction from the architectural point of view but we didn't have any power so and the builder was we were in a very complicated time when it was an election time and if the daughter of Fujimori was elected the building was not built at all and the other candidate we didn't know if he was going to be it's opening to this building so there was only one contractor who presented to the tender and the contractor never built a building it was his first building and it was a contractor sewage urban sewage so it was very interesting to tell the workers that this was a very important building for the country for themselves for every Peruvian so we started a dynamic that they were telling for example don't tell to my boss but I will do it or I will try to do it better don't worry and these kind of things are still existing in every at every scale of buildings at every moment so we like very much to continue to the design process during the building process which is impossible here in Europe it's impossible in Japan so that's I think that we are going to lose at some stage but we have to explore while it is possible so we're exploring that way maybe we have time for one more question thank you for the lecture I was just curious if you've been asked to do a project in the context of more density because there's a strong engagement with your project with landscape but maybe the notion what is the notion of landscape is more like an urban landscape and how would your strategy change or would it still be about this generation of intimacy and the projects I think it's the same strategy we can see the city as a landscape also and there are considerations that are not only the order of landscape but other considerations environmental considerations etcetera but in Lima that is sprawl city suburb city with no strong relationships to historical buildings at least we've never been confronted to build a historical building I think you have quite freedom of acting in the city and we have also a big advantage I think that is that for our most important legacy comes from the pre-Columbian remains very far away we don't understand them anymore only as objects or as design strategies but we don't know the users so we have this as a heritage for us for architecture and then we didn't really have big names in modern architecture we didn't have Barragan or Clorindo Testa or I don't know Villanueva so we are we don't have to kill our fathers so we are kind of really free to do architecture as in other terms not confronting to the weight of history and in our urban projects we are always trying to convince the client but because they are almost private clients to offer something to the city to make some generosity maybe a little public space on the ground level or maybe taking out the walls between the site and the street or like trying to build a better also a better city it's little by little it's very dramatic in the place of memory because you didn't you didn't so much insist upon it but it was clear in all of those views the first encounter with the building and the roof is a public plaza and an auditorium and a kind of open-ended proposition of what you might do there in a place that didn't exist before as well as being a connector through the section as we discussed so I think that project is already a monument to one thing around the concept of memory and reconciliation to give a place to a city which has in fact very few public places I think it's time to thank you and hope you'll come back again in a few years with another rich portfolio of this and some of us will probably make the pilgrimage either north or south to find out what the ongoing lessons of pure are but thank you very much