 I'm always worried about being one of the last speakers. Thank you for staying awake. Architecture is not a painting. It's not a sculpture, and it's not a book. Architecture is a complex mix of ideas, materials, history, meaning, mud, bricks, light, shadow, people, use, scale, and enclosure. There is no other way to experience architecture, but of itself. In music, the written score only hints at the reality of the actual beauty and impact of sound. And so, too, in architecture, drawings, models, films, presentations are only representation of aspects of the real thing. The conscious enclosure of space is the power and all-encompassing character of architecture. I will begin, I presume it's this guy, is it? I'll begin with two images. The first is an aerial view of where we are here in the mansion house, sandwiched between two great spaces of Dublin, St. Stephen's Green and Merriam Square. And the second image, the brick, cliff-like wall, encloses the Georgian streets of this place. It's this city we call home. Each project, done by collective architects, engineers, clients, is an invention. Each new building is an experiment. We live in a time when each of us need to seek solutions that have a minimal and responsible impact on the delicate environment in which it is placed. In Greta Turnberg's book, and I called, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, which is a collection of her speeches on climate rallies across Europe, to audiences at the UN and the World Economic Forum, her last words are, and I quote, I hope my microphone is on. I hope you could all hear me. This 16-year-old voice does need to be listened to. We, as practicing professionals, need to develop creative responses to the challenges of making architecture in sustainable, inventive ways. Imagination is a creative force. We need to grow creativity. Like anything that grows, seeds need to be sown, not seeds of doubt, but seeds of possibility. We need to consciously develop strategies of design, which respond directly to the dilemmas of contemporary and future architecture and architecture which values the care and responsible use of resources. This afternoon, I'll present in very quick format four projects that describe our thinking, discussing with you ways of seeing, ways of observing, to describe a process that, for us, feeds invention, nourishes creativity. They will be projects in Milan, in Lima, Peru, here in Dublin, and the Venice Biennale. And I am conscious that there is another curator of the Venice Biennale sharing the table with me. It's not often you get two in the same room. It's like birds watching. I'll begin with this drawing. In 2002, we were invited to participate in a competition for Biconi University in the city of Milan. This was a project between 45,000 and 65,000 square meters, and it required 1,000 offices, five conference rooms, and Aula Mania for 1,000 people on a site which was roughly 180 meters by 80 meters in the city of Milan. And this drawing is really important because this is the kind of DNA of the project. As architects, if you like, each project is a conglomerate. This is the need for the clients they already had, planning permission. It wasn't saying enough. They went for an international competition. And this drawing really describes the aspiration and the core idea of this project. On the upper part of the drawing are the small pieces, which are the offices. And we made, in our minds, a matrix of these 1,000 offices, hoisting them up into the sky and allowing courtyards of light to come to the lower ground. And the sketches, the question, the datum or no datum is really saying, in the competition, they wanted all of the conference rooms and halls to be underground. And we felt that it's not a good thing for people to spend long hours of the day not getting daylight. So what we're doing is corrupting the ground and bringing light, bringing these rooms to reach up to the sky, but also opening out the office buildings held above to bring daylight down in through the section. So this drawing on the top drawing is the plan drawing. There's two roads, streets in Milan. One was Via L'Ablini, which was very busy, and the second one was Via Runtken, and it was quieter. So what we did was we said, we won't put the main entrance of the building on the busy side. We'll come down the side street. And on the lower image, this is, if you like, a kind of architectural search, to find what happens when we corrupt the ground, what happens when we carve and bring light down from ground level down to the lower levels. And this is a study model for us, if you'd like to tame the 1,000 offices, and to how do you make a new world where groups of people spend their days? And what we've done here is to place the Aula Mania on the junction between the two streets in the city, and every 20 meters we have this double 3.6-meter-wide structure that allows huge beams to be placed on them. So you can see the courtyards of light between these beams of offices. And this was from the competition. You see these, essentially, offices can be single corridor or double corridor. And one of the most important things for us, and it's something that we really do value, there's a huge pressure when you're making office accommodation that you make the widest possible floor plates, you seal it, and that means that you have a huge dependency on energy. What we're really saying here is that for the 1,000 professors and administrators, everybody would have a window. Everybody would have the human power to open a window if you wanted to have a relationship to the city of Milan or to be part of the courtyard. And this is a long section through the building where you're seeing that each professor, the blue on this drawing here, these are the glazing patterns, which allowed each professor and administrator to have both clear glass, to have an opening window, and to have white glass. So the issue of privacy and protection was something that we felt keenly about. And we worked with Perma Steliza, the window manufacturers, to develop a technique of hanging the glass, to form a type of glass shingles. And the glass then, depending on where you were in the building, the higher you were up, the more protection from the sun you needed through the glass. And as you moved down the courtyards, the more transparent it became. And the outside of the building, the image on the right hand side is really the outer crust. That's the enclosure of the building itself. So this image, you're in one of the courtyards. You're looking up at these glass shingles. So professors and administrators are part of the organization of the city. And in the big room, the Aula Mania for 1,000 people, 400 people on the upper part, 600 people on the lower part on the stage, we also wanted to bring natural light. That light is energy. It's also pleasure. It brings the passing of the day to your mind. And this is really an important space for us. This cantilever of the Aula Mania is 22 meters in terms of structure. The people are standing five meters down below ground. So the interesting architectural moment for us in this project is that the city of Milan, which is on level zero on this one here, is both part of and framed by the university. And by placing an architecture on the cusp between these two scenarios, it meant that the University of Baconi is connecting to the city of Milan. And it also means that the citizens of Milan have, if you like, a view through a lantern into the space below and the ongoing, if you like, work of the university. What is important for us is this is clear glass on the left-hand side and the issues of materials. One of the things that we're researching now is that glass is really a modification of sand. And as we go through the issues of resources, I think what is true of all of society now is that we're becoming aware of what we choose and where the sources are from. I mean, there are islands in Indonesia which are being stolen by sand pirates because sand is becoming a very, very important commodity and is used in the making of glass. The other issue in terms of light as a resource, an architectural resource, that in the lower levels, we've used this beautiful stone Bianca Laza. And Bianca Laza has this characteristic of being able to reflect the light in a beautiful way. Moving across the globe, this is a project we entered a competition for a new university, Utec, in Lima, in Peru. Slightly mad thing to do when you live in Dublin to do a competition on the other side of the globe. But architects, as architects, we're all very attracted to the kind of challenge and unique story that each project has. So on the top image, this is the city of Lima. It has about between 10 and 12 million people. It's one of the desert cities of the earth. It is right beside the Pacific. It has these fantastic cliffs which are about 40 meters high and it has the valleys in from the Pacific. And also, of course, we're in Peru, this wonderful country with the Inca cities in Machu Picchu. And on the lower part of the screen, this is another, if you like sharing with you, the kind of DNA, the struggles that architects that we have to try and find something that holds this new world, a new story for our project. So this drawing with the blue and the brown is really trying to describe the Pacific and the 40 meter cliffs. This is the valley, about 360 meters of surface in this valley. It is very busy city. The traffic is absolutely chaotic in Lima and this 360 meter and very busy roadway was one part of the site and at the other side of the site was this beautiful part of Lima, a place called Boranco, which is a residential area, very elegant part of this amazing city. And the brief for the new university, Utec, was it's engineering university. It needed very big laboratories, medium-sized laboratories, small laboratories, smaller teaching rooms, library. So the way we interpreted that was to say we'll put the bigger ones down below like a Russian doll, we'll put the big ones down below like boxes, we'll put the next ones up above. And the roof scape that was left over with the reduced scale of the projects above meant that we could make intimate outdoor spaces, bit like the Inca terraces in Machu Picchu. And that meant then that on the right-hand side, sorry on the left-hand side to the main road that we could make a shoulder. We had this, if you like, metaphor that we would make a new cliff to the city. And when we were researching this, one of the things that we came across is a fantastic book by a woman called Andrea Wolff and it's called The Invention of Nature, sorry, The Invention of Nature, The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, a lost hero of science. And she describes him as a friend of Goethe, a friend of Thomas Jefferson and an influence on Darwin. And the reason why we have this up here on the screen for you this afternoon is that because Lima is only 12 degrees down from the equator, it should be absolutely roasting. But because of the von Humboldt current, which comes up from Antarctica, it's kept at a certain kind of temperature and it's normally in the 20s. It has nine millimeters of rain per year, but it has this incredibly benign climate. It has some fog every now and again, which is really an unusual kind of thing. But what's amazing about this drawing, which we discovered then by researching von Humboldt, was that it's called Naturga Melda, which is, this is a drawing done about the same time as the Act of Union was being implemented here around the early 1800s, 1802, that kind of time. So he goes to South America. He makes this first sketch for Naturga Melda. It's an untranslatable German term that can mean a painting in nature, but which implies a sense of unity and wholeness. And it was, as Humboldt explained later, a microcosm on one page. Now the reason I'm showing it to you this afternoon is that unlike the scientists who had previously classified the natural world into a tight taxonomic units along strict hierarchies filled with endless tables and categories, von Humboldt now produced a drawing where complex scientific information was depicted simply. No one before Humboldt had presented such data visually. This drawing showed for the first time that nature was a global force with corresponding climate zone across continents. And his radically new ideas still shape our understanding of ecosystems today. And for us, it developed, if you like, a stand which was really to describe architecture as the physics of culture. And when we were presenting this, David Chipperville held Venice Biennale under the heading of Common Ground. And we had just won this competition for the university in Lima. And when we were presenting this project on the public forum, we also used these two images. And they were roughly about probably about the same scale as you're seeing here this afternoon. And when the workmen were putting these images up in Venice, they asked, why are you putting up two images of the same thing? And what's really interesting about it is that on the left-hand side is Machu Picchu, which is the 15th century wonderful Inca city in the high Andes. And on the right-hand side is Schkelig-Michel, the between the sixth and the 12th century monastery out in the Atlantic. And the reason for showing that we chose these two images, one was the fact that between the 15th century and across the globe, that the sense of the intimate that both in the monastery and in the Inca city, you have the intimate space of the gardens and you have the vastness of the ocean, the Atlantic Ocean and the Andes. And for us doing Utec, we were doing big structure for the bigger spaces of the university, but we were also making intimate spaces for education. And this is a model of the project, showing the tough exterior to the motorway and the cascading intimate gardens, the roofs of the laboratories below. And this building, the other thing on the right-hand side, you see the building in context, the busy roadway, you see the sloping, if you like, skirt at the building to protecting it from the motorway itself. And then on the upper part, because the sun 12 degrees down from the equator is very hot, that we have this kind of peeked cap. So on the far image, you see this kind of continuous peek cap which protects the students from the very hot sun when it does shine. In terms of the sections then, every 20 meters we have this structure and because the site is like a boomerang in curves, you've got this sense of a medieval city because the structure is not in a linear way but curves like on a boomerang, which means that you have intrigue. And we've mixed landscapes so the students, when they're moving on these outdoor staircases, they're looking into the laboratories. And one of the things that's really very important, as architects, when we found out that the temperature is always in the 20 degrees, it never gets below that or really above it, we asked why then is it necessary to make internal rooms? So what we did was we analyzed the brief to find the rooms that had to be kept indoor and everything else that could possibly be outdoor, including circulation was all outside. So this is us responding to, if you like, climate and culture. So here's the section, we see the big section down below here with the parking down below. The other thing is that it's seismic. So we had to use these huge seismic isolators. So those red guys between the parking and the main building, I hope I never experienced it, but I mean it's a seismic rift along the coast of Peru. But essentially we've carved an internal space in which the campus, a vertical campus. Just here in this room over on my left hand side is a model of a project for the ESB headquarters. And this is really responding to our own city. We're in a Georgian context. We're really reinstating, if you like, the street line. And in terms of the image on the higher level, we're really also responding to light. So that light changes, obviously the near you are to the sky is a different one when you are carved. And we describe this as passive sustainability through a building form. What we did, we read the, if you like, the Georgian history. We reinstated the city street. We made a new street, a new pedestrian route that carved through the block. We have numerous entrances. We have, if you like, interweaved landscape into this project. And we've based the 15 meter grid on the 7.5, which was the normal Georgian one. We also interwoven landscape, both for the pleasure of the passerby in the street, but also for people themselves who would be working in the building. We carved then into courtyards. We have reception halls, which enjoy the landscape. And we make that public route from James Street to Fitzwilliam Street. One of the most important things is really to say that the deeper the floor plates, the more reliant you are on backup. So we wanted to make something that was, if you like, window-openable. So there is this potential within the building that the floor plate is narrow. You get good light, and that you have command of natural ventilation if you so wish within this project. Also that you get, not only you get cross ventilation, but also you can modify where you work. And the building is designed for passive shading. So that's east at the top of the image as the sun moves through. Also in terms of flexibility of occupation, by having a number of entrances from the street, by having major cores, you can divide the organization in terms of long value with a move from single occupancy to multiple tendency over time. And then in terms of travel, that you will have access for bikes and for cars within, obviously within the building, so that this makes not only, what's really important is that the ESB have been in that place in Dublin since 1927. And one of the important things is that the choice that they remained to, they could have moved out of the city center, let's say, but they chose to remain in the city center, which is in terms of public transport and enriching city life. So the final kind of piece of describing the ESB project is that the choice of materials, the durable materials in terms of construction, that we're really dealing with craftsmanship, we're making a pleasurable experience for people as they pass by, and that it would be a pleasure for the citizen. The final piece of my presentation this afternoon is really to say that in 2017, Shelley McNamara and I were invited to become curators of the 2018 Venice Biennale. And it was a wonderful honor for us, but also for Irish architecture. It was a huge, meaningful undertaking. And our manifesto, which is really about generosity of spirit, was really that architecture's ability to provide free and additional gifts to those who use it and to address the unspoken wishes of strangers. We are convinced, having been involved in that, that architecture is essentially a form of optimism. And we chose free space because we wanted to focus on space as opposed to architecture as object and translating it into the various languages of the world. In terms of the location, the 300 meters of building in the Arsanale and the collection of buildings in the Jardini on the right-hand side. I'll just very quickly just go through. These are French company. We chose about 100 architects from around the world to have samples of things that are benefit society. Lakaton Vassal in blue here. This is the extra space that these architects have found within the brief to work with as the least amount of services within their building. This is Michael Moulson in the USA. What's interesting in terms of sustainability is that the lower part of this housing, it's 102 units for people on skid roads, this housing for people who are on the margins of society, but he's kept the existing buildings on the lower level, made a community space between the new accommodation and where these people live. And in terms of global warming, this is Marina Tabasim from Bangladesh, bringing, if you like, a mud floor from the villages of one of the biggest countries that will be affected by rising sea levels. And this other project by Bjarke Ingels, which is really, I suppose, what we're asking for as architects and interdependence of engineers and clients, that this is Manhattan's response to the global impact of storms, that as they prepare for other storms on lower Manhattan, this is a 10-mile necklace of services that are on normal times, are parks, but on the times when they need to protect the city, they are infrastructure. So it's really to say that infrastructure has a social capacity. Opened a few days ago, this is Close Encounters with Remarkable Buildings. It's part of the Biennale that's now being brought back to Ireland. It's on show in Carlo, just opened two days ago. And I'm just trying to see in terms of, there's a few minutes of a video. Will I show it or will I stop? Show it, okay. I'll just go on to this one here. This is really to describe, as you say, what we really feel is that architecture is an essential form of optimism. We chose to use the natural conditions of these buildings in Venice. Coming in here is actually our Tishock, who visited the exhibition, which is on for six months. This is about the history of the building, and we emphasized that 300-meter-long space, bringing in natural light, removing the partitions so that the beautiful life in that particular part of the world really was exposed. And when Toshiba Mori spoke about another exhibition that consisted of 10 detailed sections of major architectural works by Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, and Paul Rudolph, she said, a quote from her, there are silent exchanges with deceased architects, yet the conversations and speculations that are embodied in their work remain alive. And when we chose in what's on now in Carlo, the 16 architects, we invited 16 Irish architects to look at existing buildings done by others and to find in them aspects that influence their work and to make them into three-dimensional exhibits so that this would be a communication, if you like, for the general public. And there's a quotation I'd like to put out this afternoon, and it's a quote from John Lennon. And going back to Greta Thornburg's, the kind of worry of that generation, John Lennon, who unfortunately had a very short life, and I quote from him, a dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality. And I think what's wonderful about John Lennon, and I think what for us was really important when we developed the manifesto for the Biennale. One of the aspects of it, we described the earth as client. And that has been, if you like, a very interesting collection of words, because in fact, the earth is our client. And all the schools of architecture in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland are currently taking on the earth as client as a theme for students to research. And for us, what's really important is that the younger generation, as they learn to build both those architects, as engineers or whatever, that really the earth is our client. And that we need to really be optimistic, to be real. We need to look, this is interesting, this is from Indonesia, an economist working with an architect developing a screening. These last few images, this is from Greenland, where the architects is building on a glacier and we positioned it right beside Marina Tabasim. So this is really the juxtaposition of two worlds, both being affected by global warming. This is just in terms of the image, the beauty of Venice, the world, how things change, how buildings can be used and sustained over time. And the last few images, this is the beautiful first building there by, it's the library of the Biennale. This is now on exhibition in Carlo, that's the project in New York. And one of the things that was fantastic when we were, I feel like, preparing the buildings was discovering things that had been lost. These were shutters and a beautiful window by Carla Scarpa that had been for 20 years hidden behind a plasterboard. And that when you're a detective and when you knock on walls and discover that sometimes the reuse of a building, the sustainable issue of a building is to find beauties that might have been forgotten. The next few images, this is in the wonderful work of Lacaton Vassal. And next image will be a beautiful, generous, this is by Peter Zumtor and gave his whole collection from Braegans of his wonderful projects. This is the collection of 16 Irish architects interpreting existing buildings on your behalf. It's lovely watching the child touching the, this is a wonderful project in Buffalo in New York. Michael Moulton's terrific interpretation of housing for disadvantage but making a piece of architecture. The history of architectural drawings which really informs this complex discipline. And as we move out of the space, you realize that free space was really beginning of a manifesto that architecture is, as John Lennon says, you know, if you have a dream, you dream alone, but when you dream, you dream together is reality. Thank you.