 Welcome, everyone. It's a great pleasure to host Nina and Florian this evening to present the work of their practice by her Bishop Burger architects. I'm particularly excited to hear them speak this evening since they represent beyond the exquisite quality of their growing body of work, a very unique and inspiring form of constructing practice, to quote Juan Herrera's title for the incredible series that he has led here at the school over the past few years. Moreover, Nina and Florian are no stranger to this place. Nina graduated from the MRC program in 2000 and Florian from the AAD in 2001. And so this represents a kind of return, and I'm delighted to follow with them their trajectory this evening. After meeting at Columbia G. Saab, I know they'll tell the story, so I won't tell it. Nina and Florian moved to London, I'm telling it a little bit, to work for Arup and Richard Horton respectively. And in 2005, they founded Fire Bishop Burger Architects, capturing the formal and digital experiments for which the school was known at the time and combining those with a keen interest in structure, fabrication, and a strong commitment to building. Nina and Florian cut their teeth on art exhibitions and storage facilities, as well as on private commissions that ranged from residential homes to high-end offices. To those, they added their own residential developments in a spirit of creative entrepreneurship. We hope they learn, in some part, due to their time spent here at the school. But beyond the type, program, and scale of the projects they engaged, it is the approach they developed throughout which is enticing, as they have assembled different attitudes to create one that is very much unique and their own. At once infatuated with formal expression, but also with an obsession with construction and detailing, as well as an embrace of structural opportunities to produce such expression, simultaneously geeking out on parametric design and fabrication while also bringing great likeness and a sense of humor to their work. At once traditional in their respect of the gallery as white cube and ready to subvert such art spaces. The work surprises in its ability to bridge discipline and craft with formal freedom, playfulness, and a drop of irony. Our special note are their projects, Knopen Halle, Bellen Halle, and Litzer Halle, which belong to a series of former factory buildings converted into art exhibition spaces where textile notions have been translated into built form as if to, quote, redress these buildings as they have said, but also to influence the atmosphere and experience of the interior spaces they contain. Inside a multitude of materials, details, and varied settings shape movement and light to transform the gallery space and its experience. This approach can also be seen in their residential projects where density, privacy, and intimacy have played central roles in their exploration of how we live today. They recently completed Courtyard House, which was featured in the 2018 December issue of Wallpaper Magazine, demonstrate beautifully such approach to form and structure to create a special sense of place. Their lectures this evening, I am told is conceived as a reflection on their experience at Columbia and the realities of the practice of architecture which they encounter after they left. Please join me in welcoming Nina and Florian this evening. Thank you, Amal, for that kind introduction. It's very exciting to be standing here on the other side of this room after having spent so many lectures sitting here and listening to other people. We've entitled this lecture CU in 20 because this is where, here, that we met 20 years ago. We both arrived at Columbia, having learned to draw by hand with a mainline and to ink our drawings in our previous schools. Although we had worked with computers before, the reality at Columbia was completely different. We were using animation software from the movie industry and design programs from the car industry. And rather than to learn to draw architectural drawings, we were visualizing data, developing patterns and playing around to explore the potential of these new tools and toys. I added the slide this afternoon, photographed out of an old abstract. This is essentially an app before apps that I programmed for Nokia phone in a pre-smart phone era, the class I had taken here. Except for a housing studio, it was not uncommon that there were no plans, sections and certainly no elevation drawings at final reviews. We were not necessarily learning to build buildings, but rather to explore ideas. In this project in Honey Rashid Studio, we used motion capture of a gymnast to manipulate and create a virtual space. The studio's projects were exhibited at the 2000 Venice Biennale, making us take the first steps to building these ideas. This structure was produced without a CNC machine but was rather cut using templates from our drawings. Columbia opened up our view of what architecture could be. We experimented with new tools, we borrowed methods and strategies from other fields and took inspiration from everywhere. The outcome was open. Sometimes we felt things were slightly superficial, but at least they looked really cool. Consequently or paradoxically, whichever way you wanted to look at it, we left Columbia with a strong desire to build. We continued to embrace new technologies as they became available and try to use them in aid of our architecture. Tonight, we would like to show you our work in this context, the process of taking ideas and how to build them. So this is the title of our first section. While leaving Columbia, we were faced with the reality of commissions and while you have great sites and great ideas, and when you're here at Columbia, we were commissioned to reconfigure the attic of this typical single-family home. The people who lived there wanted to have a place to escape from the reality of their everyday and their three kids and leave Zurich for a different sort of atmosphere. Just previous to this commission, we had been asked to design a fountain in the Swiss Alps and we had designed this rather sort of sculpted fountain and had real difficulty trying to get this built. We didn't know how to build this type of design at the time and only sort of with a stone mace and chiseling away, we have been able to get it constructed and so had to resort to sort of building a boring Swiss box. When we got to this commission, we certainly didn't want to build boring Swiss boxes. There are plenty of architects in Switzerland doing that. We wanted to look at the things that we had learned at Columbia and fold the dormer windows out of the roof landscape. This was our site, the space under the roof and we decided to really sculpt the space inside of it. We made computer models and attaching points, lines and surfaces. We really created a sculptured surface. We split it up into sections, used our favorite tool, the unfold button and made paper models to testing the virtual space in a physical space and went through various iterations of this. This was sort of the closest we got to a floor plan in this project and it was more to sort of indicate that there were other spaces in here, sort of the sauna, sort of a bathroom, here's some storage in the attic still and over here in the sort of a library that doubled up as a guest space, offices and sort of a lounge area. But you couldn't use this to construct. And what we also found that we had the problem is that we had created a model that really was only consisting out of a surface. So you can't build sort of something that has no thickness. And so we actually had to have a script written by a student to actually give our model a certain thickness. And he then sort of had sort of the blue lines being the ones he had and he had to calculate the thickness for the red lines or vice versa, I'm not quite sure anymore. And it also then defined the mitered edge between the different planes so that as you constructed it you actually would then be creating the angles of the geometry that we had designed. And here you can sort of see on the left all the different pieces that had to be produced. This data was sent to the carpenters and then on the CNC mill all the pieces were produced. They were assembled in the garden here for the dormer windows and hoisted up onto the building. Inside these are sort of old digital pictures so bear with us that they're a bit fuzzy. We had staircase carpenters cut all the, take all the pieces and put them sort of start assembling them. They were the most familiar with complex geometries. And so you used to see the roughness of trying to assemble this type of design. What we also had the problem here is that we were actually quite naive. This was the beginning of our practice and we had not allowed for any tolerances. We had this perfect geometric cloud space in our computer. The reality was that the attic space was nowhere near as perfect. And so as you were starting to build on one side and build on the other side, all of a sudden they sort of the pieces would meet here in places like this and they didn't necessarily owes meet up. And so there was a lot of fixing different corners on site of improvising. But soon we managed to actually create the cloud space that we wanted. Had spent a lot of money and time and effort to polish up all the holes and all the joints and then to paint the space. This is sort of the final outcome. We definitely gave the clients what they asked for. A space that was completely different than their home. A place that they could escape the everyday from and sort of forget that they had three children below that were making noise and being impossible. And these are the dormer windows that we finally built. It took us a year and a half to get planning permission but we managed to push it through. And these are not the renderings. The second commission that sort of goes in this line came shortly afterwards. It was a gallery space that friends of ours had rented but it didn't have any walls so you sort of think why would you rent a gallery space without any walls? Well they came to us and said they also wanted a triangulated space like that we had just built in the attic. And first we pressed slightly reluctant to build two buildings that sort of were designs that quite the same but when they told us they basically had no time and no budget we realized that this was gonna be a completely different project. We were gonna have to design away everything that was expensive and we took the challenge happily and designed them their triangulated object in their gallery space. We also learned from our mistakes in the first project so instead of just having a wire frame model this time we went for the parametric design and this allowed us really to put all the information that we needed for construction straight in the model. We could define the thickness of the slabs, we could design away the corners, all the things that we needed to do. But again, we unfolded our model and built lots of physical models. We find it really important that you can actually see the space and not just in a virtual aspect. What we also did is we sort of took the most expensive portions of the other design and put them away. We didn't want any mitred corners so we just left these open. It also allowed us the CNC cutting of these pieces to be a lot more simple and we designed these steel angles that you sort of see here that we're gonna define the angles that were sort of between the different elements. We sort of had these designed by an engineer and sent them straight out of our drawings to the manufacturer. These are all the different pieces that had to be cut and then they were delivered on site. As were the angles. And then how do you actually communicate to anybody how to assemble this piece? This is actually the drawing that we handed in for planning permission which just showed sort of a projection of the model from the top. But this was not really gonna give the people any idea of how to build this. And so what we delivered were not construction drawings but a construction model with the numbers of all the different panels on them and also the number of all the angles and where they went. This was then used on site to assemble the project within three days. And here it is, the gallery space that although it has lots of angled walls was quite interesting. The artists were also asked to engage with the space and see what they could do with it. And it was a very successful gallery that had a lot of great shows. Here you can sort of see the angles on the outside. And finally, the last exhibit that was there was by an artist called Christian Jankowski, a German artist. And he wanted to turn the project into a tableau vivant. So he asked us to design clothes for the workers in the gallery to blend into the architecture. And so not being really fashion designers, we did our best. And we delivered these paper models to a fashion producer in Berlin. And these four costumes were then produced, turning actually this whole gallery space into an artwork and is now stored somewhere. And if you have a lot of money and wanna buy a new artwork, it's for sale. So just sort of go back on this. We had sort of come sort of designing something having not the slightest clue how to build it. And then we had sort of experimented, put all our effort into this project. We sort of came in second place in the competition at this time where we're really happy to have the money from that to sort of put into research or trying to figure out how to build a triangulated surface. And then finally ended up here optimizing this, reducing the cost and make it actually feasible to construct. So I'm gonna move on to Florian who's gonna present the next project. Well, with triangulation out of the way, let's build with the liquid. Nina did this, those two objects for a class here at Columbia on material investigation. My contribution is that I prevented her from throwing it away when we moved from New York to London later, from London to Zurich. It's still sitting in our office in the entrance reminding us that concrete is a liquid in its first form and you can give it any shape. And that is the basic premise that we used on multiple projects that we did. To give you a bit of sort of spatial context, this is the lake of Zurich. At the upper end of the lake you see the city of Zurich. And remarked with factory and area that Nina's father had purchased. He's an art dealer, an art collector. And he wanted to house his collections in his operations in one place. And he acquired this old factory area that you see in an aerial view. And when we were moving to Zurich in 2005 he was in need of an architect and in a leap of faith sort of gave us our first commission. This drawing shows the area more or less in the state that it is in today. The blue building being the first commission that we got. It looked like this. We had for legal reasons, we had to keep the existing structure at least the main steel frame because we would have only been able to rebuild this much smaller since the area was overused. So we had to work with the basic volume that was there and the basic structure. So we went here. The brief was for an exhibition space. He wanted four spaces of equal size, a central axis to walk through. And that was about it, that was the brief. He was also very worried that you would take it, somebody would take a truck and run it through the wall and steal the art. So he needed something that was very solid from the outside. Since he liked exposed concrete we saw the chance and convinced him to do big prefab panels to make it safe enough essentially. Now, there we were basically with a huge box, 50 meters long, not that many openings, entrances or windows. And we were both excited and a bit scared of how to treat this. And we resorted of an idea of classic architecture parlante, if you like. We wanted to show that we were actually wrapping, padding, protecting a content that was very valuable and very delicate. We had certain analogies, we wanted to make this hard material soft and we went for petrified bubble wrap as a programmatic title for what we were trying to achieve. We started in a very, very old fashioned way by drawing a line and rotating it to get the basic shape. You see sort of several attempts here and then we created a diagonal grid to make this into a continuous pattern. The first test was then also a rotational object not on the computer, but really done by a joiner, by a carpenter to create the first positives. Then the negatives were cast, again positives, and so it was multiplied. And on the right-hand side, you see the test we did in one-to-one in concrete that we then eventually signed off to produce. We had to figure out how big the panels could be and there's sort of four by four meter panels. And we really tried to make sure that you have this continuous wrap. And that meant, for example, that the joints between the panels couldn't run straight through the bumps and cut them in two. So we had this mandering joint where the panels would meet. What was even more difficult was to work with the corners. We figured that we couldn't just stop the pattern and start again or do a mitered corner, for example. We needed to run this pattern around the corner, sort of around a rounded corner, which was technically quite difficult to produce because you had these bumps sticking out in all directions. And what you see on the right-hand side are rubber molds that were put into the formwork. And we had in the end to really lift the cast piece up and physically pry them off the cast concrete. You see here, that's the first mock-up of the corner in the factory, Nina, in discussion. We were quite happy with the result and went on to produce this. This shows here the assembly. This is one of the straight four-by-four-meter panels, 420 bumps on it. You had to sort of lift it in vertically and then slide it over horizontally because of the mandering joints very delicately and they all fit together. And this is the final result, the idea of creating the softness with this hard material. This shows you sort of the long main elevation, which is actually north-facing. This is early morning sun. That was also a reason why we really worked with that shape to create that softness because we didn't have so much direct sunlight creating shadow on the main elevation. This is the sort of short end and the back showing you the continuity of that wrap. This is photographed up the corner and with a diagonal grid, it obviously gives you quite sort of nice perspectives. And at night, we have this trip of light running right in front of the building which transforms it in something else than all together because the light only catches the front ring of each bump and sort of over the height of the building, the building sort of fades into the night. On the inside, we had this continuous big room. A shed roof that was sort of spanning, two sheds spanning the length of the building gave quite soft light and we wanted to maintain part of that quality because it was actually very well suited for art exhibition, but we had to sort of subdivide it into those four rooms. We made sure that those rooms would not touch the ceiling or the roof structure, kept our distance, painted it gray and made sort of the roof space bright white where the light's collecting and you have a very soft atmosphere light condition in the exhibition rooms. People go and touch this building. We quite like that because that's not what you typically, well as architects maybe, but normal people don't touch concrete buildings per se and the more daring ones like our daughter sort of start climbing up on it. It also gives way to all sorts of associations. We had the local gardener bring his kids on the weekend to show them the Lego building. People are reminded of wine racks and we found this on the internet where somebody sort of took the tentacles and added them to the building. A few years later the next building was up for redevelopment. You see it here in blue. It's been later dubbed the Papadelle Halle, you'll see why. This is the existing building before we started working on it. It's bigger than the first one. It again was supposed to house four rooms. You see sort of a floor plan here equally sized again, but with the added second floor that was to house some storage spaces for smaller object which is the top right floor plan that you see. What we essentially built was a house and a house. The steel structure we had to, again we had to keep still holding up the roof, but the lower walls of the new rooms would actually carry the seating, the intermediate floor for the upper rooms. We brought in some daylight into the lower room at the end of the rooms and then there was the wish of the client to have a colonnade. This building is facing the internal courtyard and he had this idea of extending the exhibition out into the space, putting sculptures, the fountains, trees, and have that dialogue between inside and outside. Now his notion of a colonnade was probably quite classic in a way. You have this balance between the solidity of the outside and the transparency of the transition. But we were sure that we wouldn't want to build a Greek temple in the outskirts of Zurich. So we had to come up with a contemporary notion of a colonnade. We tried lots of things and then ended up with putting actually a cloth ribbons across the entirety of the building and then have the wind blow in and sort of slightly opening it up. We tried to build a physical model. We destroyed this very shortly afterwards because we were worried that it would put off the client. Let's put it that way. I'm showing those photographs anyway because the right hand side gives you this idea of the view from the inside out and that filter, the colonnade as a filter between the inside and the outside. Well, we called it Pappadelle because we have these bands that were twisting and the way they sort of developed, they reminded us of noodles coming out of a pasta machine. This time again, we had a basic curve. With an oppenhalle, with the bumps, we started with a curve, rotated it. This time we had a basic curve and went with a parametric model where we first subdivided that line, put handles on it, then rectangular sections. In the next step, we tapered it from top to bottom and then you see the section remains perfect rectangles where it meets the slope of the roof but it then becomes lens-shaped towards the bottom. And then we started rotating it the way we intended it so that it would open up in one direction. Then the solid object and with this, we went also always interacted with the structural engineers and with the concrete company to optimize it in terms of the structural optimization and fabrication. And what we sort of mentioned earlier, what we did is we printed 3D models of it to really check the shape and how it worked on an actual physical object. One-to-one is a really great scale. They're eight meters tall and the objects are five tons heavy. They're quite solid objects in the end and to manufacture them, we needed a proper machine. This is the formwork, it's on rails. You have two halves that can slide apart and together. So you slide them apart, what you see here is that you have the reinforcement put in. You would then later sort of push it together. Here somebody's sort of still working on the reinforcement then it would slide together. You would fill in the concrete from the top, have it set for a day and then lift out the cast element. You would already hang it in two loops on a crane and then open up the formwork again and slowly take out the cast element out of the factory. You still see the loops on this one here. It has just basically left the fabrication area and we had 26 of them so they were starting to pile up before we actually took them to site. Now what you see here is that you don't only have to account for the load case in its final state where it sits but also during fabrication and transport and installation. They were sort of resting on these red structures then being pulled up, finally put in a vertical position rotated and then set in front of the building. Now this is something quite interesting because we did first sort of rendered images of this and always had this notion that it looked like a succession of these elements sort of opening up towards you. We had the idea that this was only really in the two-dimensional representation and of course I'm only showing you a photograph here but I invited to sir it really sort of works that way even though we of course have 26 identical pieces here. This is the solidity from the other side so we also achieved that because the other one is the main approach. This is basically the view that the neighbors have that you have from the outside. It's been dubbed the armadillo from here as quite hermetic and closed off. While our kids would say it's very Instagrammable the objects are really quite nice when you sort of walk through. This is the actual space of the colonnade if you sort of walk through it and this sort of if you think back at the crappy model we did is really delivering on this idea of having that filter between inside and outside. It's now being filled with art and you have that sort of connection of the art exhibition on the inside. We're not quite as far on the outside. We have still sort of trade trade people working there and not that many art pieces outside. The rooms on the ground floor at the short length is 12 meters which is quite a distance to spend with a flat ceiling. We use concrete in a different way here quite efficiently and cast these arrays of hollow plastic bubbles, balls that are a bit bigger than a soccer ball into that slab to save weight while maintaining the full structural sort of integrity of that slab. And this is the corridor upstairs which pierces through the entirety of the building with storage spaces left and right. And in the end we just put a window because it really goes from one end to another and the perspective you have the end would be looking at other neighbor's trees. This is the third project. They're direct neighbors, they're all interconnected but they were built sort of one after another. Our client was not the one from a master plan. He really and frustrated us in the beginning with that but we sort of then settled on organic growth. We thought it's a bit like a city. We tried sometimes in a speculative way to put in connections that we could sort of take up on later but we really had to sort of work from commission to commission. This is the building and initially the plan was to make this a windowless storage space adjacent to the exhibition spaces that we had and he then changed his mind and made this maybe the most public area of building of the whole area which is the gallery offices and gallery exhibition spaces. On the right hand side, these are the offices. Sort of single cellular offices because it's quite a discreet business. People need sort of their own individual offices. They're basically grouped around the perimeter. Then some additional rooms in the back and the white spot is a central atrium that goes through the both floors of those offices to bring some light in through the roof into the internal office spaces. On the left hand side, the full height of the building is an exhibition space and we sort of turn it around. We sometimes call it the Yang Yang building because we have this sort of box in the middle and the exhibition space runs around it. The central box is the only entirely artificially lit room that we have to exhibit art. It can be part of the exhibition and you open the big doors and you just sort of wander through but it's also possible to close it off and have it as a separate space, for example, for a client to show some individual paintings that you bring up specifically. This gives you sort of a very basic model, shows you the two floors on the right hand side for the offices and the full height exhibition spaces on the left hand side. Now this was the initial idea that we had already started designing this external windowless box for the storage. The idea was to, we had this notion of redressing those existing structures and with the Noppenhalle and the Papadella Halle had sort of found different type of sort of wrappings or textile analogies and we had thought of weaving this sort of bronze metal sheets around that volume. Now we had to come up with something else and we needed actually quite a few windows. In the meantime we had also started work on a different project that we're sort of not showing here today with a metal facade and had actually thought it was a good idea to do these buildings that were grouped together always in the same material so we wanted to switch it to concrete. In a way we turned the weave around. We went from sort of this vertical to horizontal waves and stacked them on top of each other creating the screen that was then to set in front of the actual perimeter of the building. And here it is. It's a filter again, a bit like the Papadella. The colonnade is a filter to control direct light, sunlight and to give a bit of privacy to these offices, especially on the ground floor. Now the object, the singular wave is not as complex in a way as the Papadella were but in this case we had actually an array of different pieces that would sort of create the screen together. And you see here how many different pieces there were. The green ones show you sort of a basic straight wave. Since it was an existing building we couldn't optimize it in any way so the diagonal had a slightly different wavelength so it was a different piece, different cast. We had these two different corners and we had the end pieces that you see in red because we did these loops in the end to make this really an autonomous object that was sort of looped in the end. Now this shows you sort of the anatomy of one of those waves. With the Papadella we had to use stainless steel reinforcement because they were so slender, so thin that we couldn't do it any other way which is quite an expensive thing to do. In this case we needed to avoid this. So we kept a 10 inch, 25 centimeter height always in the center of that curve but to make it sort of look more elegant the amplitude of the front and back contour actually sort of goes and I'm trying to show you this here. Basically here you start with a D that is flat at the bottom and is rounded at the top. Here in the intermediate section it's basically this, the perfect lens and then up here you have an inverted D which is flat on the top and then rounded on the bottom. And this way sort of this section sort of changes over the course of that wave giving you a more dynamic shape while maintaining the thickness of that element to do a reinforcement that can be a standard steel. Again we did a one to one mockup. We really wanted to test that shape in the sense that we wanted to understand the human scale of it, whether you were sitting down, whether you were standing, how you would relate to it. Then we're switching to the production. That dinosaur skeleton is the reinforcement cage for one of those waves that were pre-produced and then put into the formwork. This shows you the formwork. Now we had these, the elements that you saw that colorful drawing just previously. The ones where you could cast many of them we made out of steel. So you could do many casts out of one formwork but we also had corner pieces that we only needed two or three times and we made wooden formworks for them. And needed really a coating that made sure that the surfaces of the steel would look alike and it took some attempts with the coatings of those wooden formworks to achieve that but it would have been insane to make them all out of steel. Now they're piling up. We did a test assembly and it's good to show you sort of the foundation because we didn't just want to put this on a straight linear foundation. We wanted that screen to be really abstract and only just touch the ground. So we did these half eggs. They're sort of sticking, just sticking out of the gravel and that's basically where the screen is sort of touching the ground. Then we went on to assembly on site and that is the finished result of this wave screen. The factory originally was between two villages out sort of in the fields and is now being completely surrounded by residential areas of Zürich suburbia and we wanted to show that we were different when we're not a residential project. So this sort of slightly enigmatic or alien appearance was very much intended and we hopefully were friendly aliens but we wanted to make that very clear by the expression of our architecture. Looks cool in the snow and in the rain. This is at night when sort of the light is on the inside and this is a quick view of the exhibition space on the inside and what was important to us is that that wave screen was also present on the inside. We really wanted a threshold between inside and outside to be the wave screen and not so much the glass facade. So we made sure that you always sort of would have that notion of the screen and the reference of that screen also in the inside spaces. We're walking around that box quickly. You see it's sort of on the right hand side here and here sort of hung sort of full of art and that wave screen always present. Over on the other side in the offices that's the central atrium that atrium is being used very informally to put up art. It's changing from time to time. These are Mike Bitlos not Warhol Briller boxes that were stacking up here. And upstairs you have a library area and again you see sort of the waves, the perimeter of the building defined by that screen. The notion of the privacy screen was sort of made a mockery of by our kids that sort of started to climbing up and started living in it. And that's it over to you. So now we're going to switch materials. Previously we looked at these buildings here which all have these liquid concrete sort of analogies. We had already started working on this area here which was to house the collections. The collections have design, furniture, glass, ceramics and a lot of folk art. So there's a different scale, different type of objects and we were asked to design an exhibition space for those storage areas. And as we'd already looked at sort of metal facades there we decided we needed a textile analogy here as well in the metal idea. This was the existing building and the steel frame that we had to maintain. The brief was to have two exhibition space above each other. So we created a very intimate space at the top sort of a floating box and a more public sort of semi private space down here. Sort of semi private because you're going down but only semi because you have these big glazed windows allowing the light to come in. And you can sort of see here we sort of propped the structure away from the elevation and took it back into the building sort of allowing for this visual connection into the building here. Just briefly here, this was the service core that connected the two stories of storage to three stories of exhibition space and three stories being the entrance, the lower floor and the upper floor and they were all on different levels so we actually had to connect all those over there. This is sort of going back to the site condition. We had originally designed here the Knopp and Halle expecting people to come down the road and come inside here. When we had to design the Wellen Halle all of a sudden the situation changed. People were coming in here they were going into the Knopp and Halle over here or over into the Pappardelle Halle and we didn't really essentially know how people were going to be entering this building. Were they going to be coming from this side or were they going to be coming from this side? And so we created a symmetrical building. One that you could come in on either side it didn't matter, you could walk through it you could walk by it look into the glazed edges and here we sort of propped the building up because we had to maintain the steel frame for coat. This is the exhibition space that we created below. You can clearly see sort of the glazed sort of area here where you can view into the space and it was a big open space sort of multi-use flexible. We weren't allowed to put any walls in there he wants to be able to be independent of those in any exhibition space. Here the spiral staircases that sort of take you up and down. We worked quite hard to make sure that this was a perfect spiral even though there was a landing here in between. And this you sort of see sort of a snapshot one evening when we walk by they had already put some furniture here and you can sort of see just how transparent that walk along the edge of the building is. What we're not going to be talking about tonight in much detail is our details and how much effort and time we spend in making sure what we build is perfectly and beautifully detailed. These are just some two pictures sort of give you a little bit of indication of this of the work that we did on the staircase and the railing and also here as it meets the concrete slab. This is the upper exhibition space which is much more introverted. It's a private space. It's also a different scale because we wanted to offer the opportunity to show design furniture in a much more intimate environment. And we worked also very hard to design away all the disturbing factors of exhibition spaces. Often if you go into a gallery you'll see where the spot tracks are. You'll see where the ventilation comes in. You see sort of the fire extinguisher all these things that you actually don't want to see if you're actually primarily there to see what's being exhibited. And so here underneath where the trusses have been we actually put the lighting off of the space but also these are the tracks for the spots and the other slot is where actually the fresh air comes into the building. We also wanted a good lighting condition so we created these skylights between the two trusses to get a sort of a diffused beautiful natural light into the space. And here just give you a sense of a bit of scale. This is sort of a temporary installation of some of the folk art that's in the collection put on these funny rolling tracks to sort of see what's in the collection. What could you use? How could you use it for an exhibit? And then we get to the hairy building. We decided we wanted to make a hairy building. Sort of a carpet surface, something that was sort of textile and deliver it this sketch which was basically a statement of intent. This is an inverted version. We don't know which one we sort of liked better but it was an image that we showed to the client and he liked it so much that he carried around it in his wallet for quite a long time. He doesn't have any pictures of his family but he did have a picture of the building which we were quite pleased in. And then we had to figure out how do you build a hairy building? What is a hairy building? What is it constructed out of? So here we go, attempt number one. We thought, okay, hairs. We went to a brush company. Toothbrushes are still made in China nowadays but street cleaning equipment is still produced in Switzerland. We looked at what type of products they have there. This is made with a natural fiber which of course we wouldn't be able to use on the exterior of our building so we sort of combined these two ideas and created our first mock-up of what sort of a hairy texture or sort of a carpet could be for this building. We then experimented with sort of densities and grid whether we cut all the bristles in the front or whether we let them be all different lengths. We hung them outside for a couple of months to see if we're gonna have spider nests or dirt in there and also to sort of see what this was going to look like. And although it was a really great object up close and you sort of had this glittery, strange, spiky but soft texture, when you sort of went from a distance and looked at this project, you have realized there was just basically a black surface or it looked like a balding one. And to sort of have a lot of steel and a very expensive sort of in terms of its material we decided to abandon this and continue to our attempt number two. So as we were gonna maybe be exhibiting furniture we went to Sofa Springs, industrial material. We called up the company and said if we would like to buy 30 kilometers of stainless steel springs and they sort of paused and they said, how big is your sofa? We then continued to try to explain that we were actually trying to build a building with them and we made some renderings just to see what this could be. We experimented here, this is actually a physical model with a corrugated sheet in terms of how do you attach this? We looked at sort of hanging them vertically but then they made so much noise with any wind that we must really drive everybody completely crazy. And so then we decided we had to create a new system. And so we designed these diagonal, super custom made supports to hold an industrial product. We sort of took here the model, we cut a line through the diagonal. These are the dots that we were cutting through and then these were these design of these custom made supports. Here some of them were manufactured. The idea was that you could sort of push it in, clip down and they would be held in place. And again we built a mock-up which looked very promising when we had it outside of our office. We brought it to site, we hosted it up on the building. The lighting condition was such that we immediately abandoned this attempt. So we were attempt number three. By this time we were quite far along in the construction and everybody was like, what's the outside of the building gonna be? What's how are we gonna build this? And everybody was getting nervous. We have our own construction managers in the office and they were really getting on our case. And so we had to sort of look what we had around. And we had these drawings from our previous attempt. So here you see the springs and we sort of looked at them and said actually there's something else in this two-dimensional representation. We could produce something out of this idea, these undulating fingers. So here the fingers of my son that are coming up and we were gonna decide how to interlock them. So this is the first model that we made in the office out of paper to try to sort of represent this idea. We looked for other inspirations of what this could be and this is more of a schindle sort of analogy from a butterfly wing and tried these cardboard models out what the sort of schindle effect would be and what the interlocking one would be. And we definitely decided we liked the interlocking one better and how do you build these? So the idea was sort of to create these spines with the fingers coming on either side so that you could actually slot them into each other. So here we're slotting into each other and we wanted to sort of have a random effect. So in cardboard you could sort of pull them into any position that you want. In stainless steel this is a completely different condition. You were gonna have to bend them into the angles that you want. So we defined all the different angles and then we had to actually script a grasshopper or a program to make sure that we don't have any collisions when we slot them into each other. This is sort of the first rendering that we did where we sort of showed what this would look like and we didn't really like it because there was sort of this repetitiveness. You could sort of see repetitive patterns appear in it and so we decided we desperately needed to get rid of this. So we needed different strips with different angles on them. And what we actually managed to do is to create two different ones. So number A and number C are the two ones that we designed and then we put them upside down so we actually had four different strips to be able to use. Here you sort of, at the bottom, shows you the different angles that we sort of bent the metal to. And then we created an assembly system. If we were just given these to the contractors they would have assembled in any way they wanted to. So we had to create our own randomness. Here you see A, C, B, D, A, B, C and we mocked it up to make sure that we got that randomness and that a non-repetitive nature of this carpet that we were trying to produce and we're quite happy. So we went to manufacturing. We were cutting these out of a stainless steel sheet and we wanted to use, have a little waste in the steel as possible. We couldn't just cut sort of the lines around back and forth because of course then there would be no tolerance. We'd learned about tolerances by this time to slot the pieces into each other. So we actually had more time on the laser but less waste and here they're being cut in the manufacturers and this was a special tool that was put into this compression thing. So this is the top bit, the bottom, the compress and each one of these here has a different angle so that when you put the steel in you end up with these different angled pieces. And this is the finished sort of effect that we achieved and the finished building and we really I think achieved sort of this carpet, this hairy look that we had wanted. It looks different in different lighting conditions where the suns are shining or it's diffused light. Sometimes it even glitters. Just briefly, we also created some custom pieces here where we cut out part of the fingers so that you could actually use, have a window behind it and you could see through the screen. And you can just briefly see it in here. And I think we left, we lived up to the promise. Our statement of intent and the project that we delivered I think they match up and I think we're all really happy with the result. The hairy building was then nicknamed the glittery building due to the sequenced dress of my daughter matching quite perfectly with the background. So just quickly, the last project we're gonna go back to timber. We recently completed a project, a residential project. This was a new build so it offered us different possibilities than the conversions that we have just shown you. And the project was located here in sort of the suburban situation but they actually had a very large plot of land. And so they were very exposed to all the neighbors who could basically look onto their property and see where they were. And so what we decided is to create a courtyard situation allowing them to have some outside space that is really only theirs and wrap the building around this courtyard in which we planted also a tree. We hope that the tree really grows and becomes one with the building in time. The building sort of has this undulating roof sort of to match the landscape, the mountains that you see in the background and also to turn its back to its neighbors so that sort of can't see what's happening at the front of the building except for where you sort of go right through the building into the courtyard and into the entrance situation. Here's the front of the building. The courtyard sort of opens up. It's not completely enclosed with the sort of and you also see the large windows which are open to the view of the mountains and the lake in the distance. And as you sort of enter the courtyard you really see that we've created a room that can be lived in. It's an additional room to the building. This is similar to another project we just built previously which was a development which we unfortunately won't have time to show tonight. But the idea of that you can create outdoor spaces that are rooms that are just as valuable as the interior spaces that you're designing. And even in different seasons you are sort of orientating yourself constantly around this courtyard. So here just quickly to show you the floor plans. So we sort of had this idea of extending the project into the landscape, sort of creating paths that you're moving through. So you're coming down from the streets, the carport, you move along this building into the courtyard inside here. This is sort of a guest apartment that they wanted. And then you move into the building here. You have the coat room, the staircase in the corner, kitchen, dining room, and living space. And you can also go in the other direction. This is an exterior dining room that's sort of semi-covered. And then on the top we wrap the bedrooms around the buildings really creating the space that encloses this courtyard. And it was important to us as you moved to the building that you were continually seeing the courtyard, that you were sort of orienting yourself in the building. And so the corridor actually runs on the inside perimeter. We created windows here that are sort of a little bit like train carriages that you can actually see through from your bedroom out into the courtyard even though you're actually an interior wall here. And on the top floor there's a private office space. So this is just to give you a little bit an impression of the interior. We worked a lot with surfaces, with textures, with colors, working with the details that we had so painstakingly designed in all our more commercial projects, bring them into a residential context, played with surfaces. And we also managed to choose the furniture for this living and dining area and go all the way into interior design. So it's quite nice to see sort of the transparency of the building because it's only like one room width. The living space is double-heated. And if we sort of make it look back to the process, this is quite complex geometry. We had tried to design this with Revit through Revit right back out the window. You cannot design this type of geometry in Revit. It's just not gonna happen. And not only that, but you also have to have some sort of communication tool between yourself, the engineers and the contractors. And although we had made a 3D model, the contractors asked the engineers to deliver them this framing model so that they could actually take it to site because we're gonna prefabricate the building. So we took, we had the panels delivered and they were assembled. And just like in the project right to the beginning, we had numbered pieces of wood that had to be assembled according to the 3D model that they had provided. Here you sort of can see that we had decided we wanted it's a sort of expressive zigzagged roof structure. And here this is our concept model for that, trying to sort of see how that would work. It also had not only sort of the bend, sort of the beautiful aesthetic of it, but also had a practicality aspect of it. The fact that we had this undulating roof, we wanted to triangulate the structure so that it would give us flat surfaces that we were gonna be cladding and putting insulation on. And here again for the contractors, as the roof structure, and this time also the cladding. And here this is a few pictures of the interior where you can continually see that. Okay, let's wrap this up quickly. I hope you got a sense that we tremendously enjoy the way we're working. Curiosity is important to us, the excitement in the work. But we don't think it's narcissistic or self-centered, but it's actually sort of what fuels the process. It's how we get other people aboard as architecture is always a team effort and it affects many people. That starts with the clients and with our own team. And then we take the engineers, experts along, and we challenge them and ourselves to create new path and a different thinking. We try not to make architecture a pure problem-solving process. We're working intuitively, sometimes non-linear, jumping around, things occur, misunderstandings can actually bear potential. The idea for one project pops up in another. And I think here at Columbia, you all know this kind of process. It's playful, it's fun at times, it can also be nerve-wracking when no solution seems to occur. With the way we work, we aim to create architecture that people can relate to. Spaces you enjoy to use to spend time in that fit around you and enhance your life. Buildings that create or augment our environment that inspire and communicate. We have learned to take ourselves and the way we work more seriously over time. We found that in the building industry among craftsmen, entrepreneurs, people with cool machines, or great knowledge and old techniques, you find plenty of partners in crime. You find people who love a challenge, who know things we don't, we're happy to fill you in and bring you up to date. People who like crazy ideas and love turning them into reality. Those are our friends, our partners and teammates. In the end, architecture is a very public affair. It is out in the open, built to last. Part of our environment, our culture, our future. It is a lot of responsibility, but we have found that with our approach, the serious play, things can actually work out. It's obvious to us that our time at Columbia is an important influence on what we're doing today. And we are convinced that you, the students of today, you're way ahead in a completely different place, probably with you thinking your ideas, your priorities. On the other hand, we firmly believe that architecture is a field where you don't become obsolete over time, where experience has a value, where you can grow with age. In this sense, we're looking forward to competing with you and see you in 20. Thank you. Well, thank you both. It was really wonderful to see the work, but also to hear you speak about it. Obviously, it's as unique a practice as practice can get. I mean, it's like an architect's dream. Here's a playground of buildings that you are sort of approaching and experimenting with. No master plan, no, I mean, there's a kind of real, you mentioned kind of organic growth and no windows, except for the house that's like heaven, and the kind of real sense that you can start with the most creative kind of idea or analogy, a material exploration, and then kind of build your way from there. And so, I mean, you mentioned at the end a little bit the team and at the beginning of the presentation, the kind of translation or where drawing stopped and construction started. And I was curious as the process and the buildings got more complex, how much of that process have you redefined or in terms of the boundary between drawing and building and that feedback loop, as well as the relationship, maybe to speak a little bit more with the engineers, the builders, is that a team that's a kind of single team or do you move from one project to the next? Or I imagine that the kind of experimental nature of the practice has also yielded quite an experimental approach. I mean, like you said, like Revit's not gonna work, so what are the tools that you've developed kind of over time in terms of the work process? Yeah, well, with regards to the team, our own team is quite sort of the people that we employ have very different backgrounds. There's more specialization going on over time. In the beginning, we had that notion of everybody could be doing everything in the practice and we see that people have sort of individual strength and the individual backgrounds and we're trying to get everybody to closely communicate. Now, we have our own construction management in our office is small, we have 14 people and we have three, part of that are three construction managers. They're completely different sort of, they have a different mentality to architects. So you have some culture conflicts in there that you have right in your practice and that most of the time that's a good thing. But it also then extends out with the sort of engineers we're working as specialists. You assemble your team of people that you like to work with that don't necessarily always have to be the same people but you need a certain mindset and you learn and that's the same for manufacturers, the concrete companies, for example. Some we've used once, some we have used repeatedly because you need that spirit of people that really want to come along. And that sort of falls into place at some point when you know what to look for and I think it just sort of happens over time. We spend a lot of time talking to the people. Certainly have certain engineers that we continually use but that doesn't stop us if we have a project and we sort of see well actually this would be suited for an external advice, we'll go find it. And also when we're sort of tendering projects, in the end you have to sort of see even if you have a preferred contractor which you've had great experience in building something with, if they don't deliver on the price you're gonna have to go with somebody else and you're gonna have to build up a new sort of experience and rapport with a different contractor and try to come up with a solution. But the construction management team has been really crucial for us because we can control what's happening on site a lot stricter and we can also figure out very early on what costs, what? Where can we save money? What is the most expensive part of the building? And a lot of these projects look incredibly expensive but a lot of the expenses were designed out. So yes, I mean obviously if you're gonna put a corrugated sheet on one of these exhibition spaces it's gonna be cheaper but it's not cheaper if you're gonna put a stone cladding on it. And even the single family home we had somebody come and sort of say oh well you must have had so and so many million for this project. We said actually no, we spent half and they were stunned because they said well I just saw this house and there was no built-in furniture there were half the materials and it was complete standard box for the same price. We are trying to design well so that you can actually design more for the same price. So I mean just, you still produce a complete set of drawings or is there kind of... If we can, if the drawings are useful we produce drawings. But you can, right that's what I mean. So you also have given yourself this ability to sort of work more in a more hands-on way or? Well what's really interesting I think is that many things are produced from art drawings. So it's not that intermediate step. It's not withdrawing this then the carpenter takes it he draws it again, he sends it back, we check it. But we are actually doing these models the sending them back and forth and that is an extreme sort of step in efficiency that helps a lot. So how long have you been working on the compound? I think we started 14 and a half. 14 and a half years ago. I can always sort of tell it because I know how old my daughter was when we started. We've been working the whole period of time. We're still now, there's large concrete prefabricated building that we built that we didn't show tonight. We have one storage we showed the metal facade in the last slides that's under construction now. We're adding another floor to another building and we're gonna be building a bridge to connect the two. At which point I think the main area of the campus is gonna be complete. There is sort of, we have a design and we have what we've had about four designs for an extra special museum for the folk art right next door on a plot that belongs to my father as well. But we're not really sure if that's gonna ever gonna be realized. So in this time, obviously software has changed, technology's changed I'm wondering how do you see immediate and future changes in the way you're approaching not only the design process but the building process and then beyond. I mean it does feel like we're on a cusp again but it's not so clear necessarily. I mean. Well there's obviously a threat that we're sort of repeating things and making them sort of efficient in a very sort of one dimensional way. That's the danger enough of that sort of rabbit type architecture and it's worth sense. On the other hand we have really amazing tools and we have that ever closer connection to manufacturing. We're probably also in a very privileged situation with Switzerland having really good traditional craftsmanship but also people in that those traits that are really interested in new methods and new production techniques the carpenters with their CNC milling machines and so on. I think there's a great opportunity there to bringing the ideas, the design and the execution closer together. I also, we see as every new tool as an added tool. There's nothing that replaces a different technique. I mean we still do hand sketches and hand drawings sometimes of certain elements and every, we still build physical models as much as and cut them with a knife as much as we 3D print them. So every advancement technology is a bonus. So I'm excited you're teaching a summer workshop this summer and wanted to hear a little bit both about that but also about pedagogy and how we can push these kinds of explorations again in schools. It's been very interesting for me. I mean just a lot of the material research right now is being done more in the kind of private sector or by kind of large firms developing their own or the way you work but it's not so common anymore in schools and I'm just kind of wondering about your thoughts about that. Well the premise of the summer course was really that it ties in with our office of that you look out and see what technology or industry or research is being done and use that as inspiration to come up with the design and it's a really designed tool to help you come up with new ideas. And so what we're actually doing is we've gone to material researchers at the ETH which sort of showed us a product made out of fly ash, a garbage material that's going to normally go into landfills as sort of the end of production. And so they're trying to give that a new life sort of recycle the material or upcycle the material into a building product to produce a foam that can be up to 90% aerated and potentially be some of our new building insulation materials but maybe even some structural elements. Material scientists, they basically design pieces of material that are this size. So we said if you're gonna want to use this for architecture you're gonna have to up the scale. At the same time, we wanted to sort of sort of looked at the transitional geometry course that Trevor was teaching here and said, you know, you're doing really great stuff but it's all this size and things change when you increase the size. So we needed to have a design studio where we sort of use this technology to say what happens when you make a big? What is the potential of it? How does that create space? And so that was the premise of doing this. So we're actually gonna take four digital manufacturing technologies. We're gonna 3D print the foam. We're going to cast the foam into sort of exoskeletons on the traditional 3D printers that you also have here in the shop. We are going to use a large scale 3D printer. We're talking about 150, 180 by 120. So most probably the largest 3D printer sort of out there and gonna either create sort of the form work directly with that or to make positives that we can then vacuum press molds around. And the fourth technique that we're gonna use is sort of milled foldable form work out of a CNC cutter to see how you could potentially fold form work, make it flat, you can ship it easily to places on a different technique. And we also said we wanted to create an architectural space with these casts. So rather than producing just sort of columns or objects that you can sort of walk around, we said that they actually need to bridge a space between a floor and a wall so that you can walk underneath it, you walk around it. You can assemble a whole series like the way we did the Pappardelle and create a new architectural space. So it's sort of exciting because it's taking research and architectural design practice and sort of combining them and taking it to the students and sort of saying these are techniques that can inspire you. They can sort of make you think about what architectural space can be, how you can manufacture it to try out new tools, new software, new technologies. And that's sort of really what interests us in terms of sort of bringing that to architectural education. But I want to make one brief remark on sort of architecture education. And we had a really nice day here today and I think lots of things are moving in a really good direction at Columbia with sort of lots of models lying around and all sorts of techniques being used and so on. But I think the one essential thing, and maybe that's more in Switzerland, but I have the feeling that it's a global problem, is that architecture is becoming more and more self-referential. Everybody's looking at everybody else and so on. And I think the only place where you can really sort of, where you can learn this and experience this is at a university, that you really sort of go into other fields, get your inspiration from where it doesn't matter but just don't sort of circle around your own profession all the time. And that's something that you can't fix afterwards. I mean, this is something that really the university has to deliver and I think that's something Columbia's probably traditionally doing really well and is doing well now, but it's such an important part of education. So I'm curious, so yeah, the work is Instagrammable. There's a kind of, right? I mean, in general, I mean, I think that's what's interesting about, there's a lot of reasons why the work is really fascinating but is also such a sense of focus where it's kind of exploration outside of the images that are circulating, let's say, which is really great. I wanna make sure there's enough time for questions. Not at present, although we have our first commission. In Germany, I'm not gonna be. That doesn't count. It does! From Switzerland to Germany, that doesn't count. It does count. They speak a different language there, you know? They detail as well. We've just been commissioned to do a factory, an extension to a factory there. And actually, manufacturers are some of the facades that the glittery, hairy building was produced by them and then they asked us, can't you extend our building and design something that we can manufacture and put onto the sort of, as a phase for our new building? But we're waiting for those commissions. So if you have any friends here in the US which need some practicing architects, let us know. You're welcome to redo this auditorium, by the way. Any time. At what point, at what stage in your practice and why did you decide to internalize construction management to your practice and how did it sort of affect the way that you think of fabricating things? We started trying to do our own construction management, but we were the construction managers. So I think already sort of in the second project we were trying to do this, but as much as we're generalists, we can't do everything. And we learned that the hard way. If there's a great engineer, use the great engineer. If there's a great lighting designer, use the great lighting designer. Don't try to do everything by yourself. However, we had then hired an external construction management team to come and help us on a project. And when the project was completed and we were about to approach them about the next project, they said, don't you want your own construction management team and how about I come work for you? Which was great because it meant that they really enjoyed what we were doing, but they also saw that the process would be so much easier if we were on one team. It has helped to reassure clients in a way because we have our own people, they know how we operate. And if we come up with something that is not conventional, we are much quicker in assigning sort of a realistic timeframe or budget to it with our own team. And that has helped us with clients, for example. And we could deliver on things like that, for example, with that residential building that we just showed. And we were being quite realistic from early on, even though we didn't exactly know whether the journey was supposed to go. Thank you for the presentation. And thank you especially for starting with your own education. I think being back at the scene of the crime at Columbia is fantastic. And I'm curious about perhaps the influence of your education in a remark you made at the beginning, which is that there are plenty of clean boxes in the world and plenty of people who want to make them in Switzerland in particular, but globally as well. And why is that not you? Why does that not appeal to you? And what appeals to you instead in terms of maybe some of the things that were going on here at Columbia 20 years ago in terms of pattern, in terms of surface, in terms of deep surface and those types of geometries or methods. So why do people like that box and why is it not for you? I spent my whole childhood in galleries and exhibition spaces and they all looked the same. And the idea of this white gallery box, I've just seen too many of them. And in the end, these paintings or this artwork often ends up in somebody's home and somebody's office. And it's not the white box anymore anyway. So why don't we show the artwork in different spaces? And we could give a whole lecture about how what we think exhibition spaces should or could be that they're basically the ones we designed are all extensions of my father's living room. They were more living rooms that he could then play with. And we're finally got to the point where he's starting to put actually more stuff into all the spaces. And we hope that he will open it to the public in the near future. But sort of having grown up in Switzerland and you sort of see this good quality, repetitive white box, it definitely wasn't something I wanted to make. I mean, my greatest inspiration is maybe Erosarinen. Not only because of the TWA building, which is just so beautiful, but if you go and look at his work, there's so many different things that he's explored and not necessarily would you recognize that certain buildings belong to the same architect. And that's sort of the route that I wanted to go here. I wanted to be able to do those explorations that we had done here in studios and take them out. And once we explored with soap bubbles and try to figure out what type of architecture soap bubbles would produce, the next time I was in Greg's studio and we were looking at algae and moss and lichen. And those are the type of buildings I wanted to build that were inspired by those things. I did a studio here with Homer Fahadi and it was called Migrant Sites and we were to improve an area of London at the time by taking something quintessentially in New York and transplanting it to London. Maybe it's also that notion of being the foreigner and being the odd one out to increase the awareness of things, of the way you perceive things, perception. I don't know, in a world of blobs, I would probably start building boxes. But going to Zurich, I had this clear intention or we had the clear intention of not becoming a typical Zurich office. So it might also be a bit of a childish subversiveness, but I think it also has its purpose. Okay, I thought I was gonna do your response, but Amal stood up and came in. Oh, really? No, it's okay. I'm so sorry. I'm on automatic pilot now, it's the end of the semester. It's totally fine, it's totally fine. So, but I need to say something, right? At least it's been looking at your work more in depth. Laila, can you tell me? No, it's, Okay. I just wanted to say that looking at your work also with a little bit of time before hearing you, I really love that your profile starts with this idea, this word joy, the idea of giving joy to people, your architecture giving joy, being an experience of joy. And so I read that and I was immediately very taken by that. And then as I started looking at your work, which is incredibly, there's a lot of testing, there's a lot of intelligence, there's a lot of curiosity. But it's also really funny. There is something that has a lot of humor in it. Maybe also the fact that your work, especially all the work that you have done in the factory, is as a weird sense of scale, things are either a little too small or too big or too, or too shiny or too rigid or too many, you know, dot, dot, dot. And you feel it when you look at the project from the outside, you feel it when you were showing the images from the inside, you know, where suddenly those things are a little too big or a little too small. There's, I found, even before hearing you, a lot of humor in your work. And it was very exciting because it's something that's actually very rare in architecture. So on one end I wanted to just bounce it back off to you and ask you how much are you aware of it? How much do you forcefully pursue it? How much are you willing to continue to take on this road that is kind of like a very exciting road in this world? Well, I have two comments to that. My first internship was with Etere Sotsas' office in Milan. And Joanna Gravunder, who works now out of San Francisco, was sort of showing me around and making me do things. And she said, look, Nina, in the end, you design architecture with either is really, really late at night, or it's really cool. And I sort of took that on with us. And, you know, sometimes I say to the younger architects in her office, this is a profession which doesn't pay that well. If you don't have fun when you're doing this here, don't do it, go do something else that pays better. And I think maybe that reflects in our architecture. If we're not enjoying ourselves all day, there's places where we can earn more money and borrow ourselves just as much. So maybe that's where the fun comes from. Absolutely, and it's very perceivable, you know, also listening to you. And then, you know, as a segue to that, I also was curious of, obviously the work you've done at the factory all started from this constrain of the box, right? You're given a box. And then, in a way that pushed you very much also to think about a skin. So there is the box, and then there is this texture around it. There is a thickness, there is even a space, but there is a little bit this tension between the simplicity of the box and the complexity of this world that is around the box. And then, of course, you show the house, and I've seen also a little bit some of the other work. And I'm curious of how much in the rest of the work you are also looking at making that complexity thicker or deeper or, you know, more spatial. I think that's why we tried to show the last project is because it was a new build and it allowed something completely different. Sometimes we're slightly nervous that we sort of get stamped by the office who can produce really beautiful skins. And it wasn't by choice. It was due to the fact that those were the commissions we had where we were given a building to renovate. But we'd really like to take that complexity into the form-making, into the spaces. And I think some of that we tried to show in the courtyard house of how, not only in the form, but in the movement. It's a lot about movement through space, about creating sort of orientations, sort of self-reflecting, being playful in the geometries. And I hope that we're gonna get many more projects that we can build in that way. Great, well, thank you so much. It was really inspiring, so thanks so much. Thank you so much.