 All right. Grab a book, grab a seat. Welcome, everyone, to the Spring Open House special evening lecture. It's a great pleasure to have with us this evening Eric Bungi and Mimi Wong to present the work of their practice and architects through the lens of their most recent publication in their words, an anti-monograph, entitled Almost Building. Like the work that it presents, Almost Building is an absolutely beautiful, elegant, and rich visual manifesto for what a thoughtful and sophisticated architectural practice looks like today. Moving across scale from folded paper models to bamboo structures and from tectonic building envelopes to playful urban fields, as well as across program and typology, from pavilion to library, housing, cultural center, pier, tower, the diversity, pleasure, and precision that transpires from the book's pages, whether photographs or drawings exudes not of an idealist approach to the work of the architect, but rather a poetics that results from the discipline of practice. The daily discipline of sustaining obsessive and consistent attention to discover every opportunity for design and carve every possible space for architecture. In many ways, what is at once surprising, but also self-evident for those of us who have followed the evolution of Mimi and Eric's prolific partnership, is that spanning the diversity of their work is an undeniable and sustained consistency of approach. This consistency is rendered clearest through the book's drawings. Architecture for an architect is first and foremost made up of lines. The drawn lines, whose careful modulation and width, thickness, orientation, spacing, materiality, and scale can transform to become built surfaces and volumes, at times opaque and at others transparent, at times filtering and at others reflecting in a delicate yet purposeful articulation and redefinition of given relationships, whether between inside and outside, between various programs, or between old and new. Lines are what become boundaries in architecture, of course, but for an architect, they can also form what they have termed armatures, a sense that one can design and build just enough architecture to enable a scaffolding for architecture and life to flourish together and complete one another. As if registering with realism and humility, the uncertainty of the times we live in as architects, but also as citizens of the world, almost building presents us with the work that is anything but uncertain. Rather, the book and the practice inspire us to consider a way forward for architects and for architecture in the pursuit of meaningful work through the careful and systematic reinvention of the discipline and the everyday together. In our time of distracted minds and seemingly collective attention deficit disorder, this level of attention is not only admirable, it is almost radical and has already resulted in an architect seemingly discreet, yet confident, beautiful, and uniquely precise body of work whose impact continues to grow element after element, almost building after almost building. And with every project, there is a commitment to contributing beyond itself to the context, cultural, social, and environmental that it serves and shapes. This impact that is at once felt within the field, but more importantly, maybe even beyond, has of course been the recognition of, you know, too many awards to list tonight. Just anecdotally, I have counted 25 in the last three years. But tonight, we're mostly here delighted to have both Mimi and Eric, cherished long time GSAP faculty members who have inspired already so many students here at the school speak about their own work. Please join me in welcoming and architect Mimi Wong and Eric Bungade. Thank you, Mal, for the insightful and generous introduction as always. Thank you so much for our staff being here. Really happy to see former students, future students, and of course our dear colleagues. Really happy that you're here. For us, this room is kind of multi-layered with many memories of conversations. And this is what we love about being here at GSAP is this incredible optimistic conversation that we continue to have. Thank you, Mal, for the honor of sharing our work with the people, the colleagues, and students that galvanize us every day. Buildings and almost buildings is about questions that we've been asking for a long time. It just took us a while to put it down on paper. Questions about the objective aspects of architecture and its subjective experience. After we finished Canopy at MoMA PS1, we'd come and hang out like flies on the wall, anonymous spectators of the activity around us. Canopy was conceived as a framework for microclimates and social exchanges, but without hard boundaries or overt functions. We thought of it and our other early installations as almost buildings. Buildings that invite transformation and interpretation by others. By the users and the mis-users, whom we began to call the inebriated who tried to climb it like a jungle gym or the ones who decided to decorate it with toilet paper or the ones who sent us this unsolicited photo, the users and mis-users, as we began to call them, who had appropriated the installation as their own. At the end of the summer, we sold the bamboo to the artist Matthew Barney, who used it as scaffolding in his upcoming movie. At the time, we were just trying to recoup the massive debt of building Canopy, but in hindsight, we love the fact that it transformed from one kind of armature to another. So is architecture necessarily complete? Or is it a state of indeterminacy that incites us to engage with it? Whereas we made our early installations as building-like as possible, we are now trying to embody the attributes of the almost building in our more permanent work. Could they remain incomplete and embrace ambiguity in positive ways? At what point is architecture complete? It's a question that's been evolving alongside philosophical and scientific discourses, of course, for a long time, and maybe one they couldn't have been asked about 100 years ago. But we ask it through three frameworks, armatures, boundaries, and zones. So at its most reduced, architectures often represented as an armature from Loge's 18th century depiction of the primitive hut, which probably competes with cave and nest as the origin of architecture. 250 years later, of course, the Corbusier's Domino, X-ray of constructive potential of architecture. We see these as almost buildings, in the most basic sense, a sort of midway point between something else and the building. So in fact, the fact that it's missing something, that these are missing something is super exciting to us. Because for us, there are armatures that are capable of endless reformulation. But we're interested in both the social aspects as well as the formal aspects of the armature, how the armature could be awaiting its own enactment of its potential, but also how it might delay its form in uncertain, potentially informal, or open-ended form. So two years ago, we had the opportunity to enter a competition as a finalist with James Corner Field Operations for Detroit River Yards. And it made us think about how in the 1960s, the armature was kind of promoted to megastructure, allowing architects from, you know, Archesoom to Super Studio and the Metabolists and so on, an easy expansion from building to city. But we're more interested in the armature at a sort of finite scale of buildings where field and surfaces meet, at least usually, because I think in this case we kind of overdid it. This is a 2,000 foot-long armature, we somehow thought was a good idea. But we explained to the jury that it could be built over time. It would never really be complete. They might have missed this nuance, I think. But so for us, open porch, as we call it, was an armature that could help further the city of Detroit's ambition to reclaim empty space and turn it into a public realm. So we imagined it as a kind of a threshold or a catalyst that could introduce intensity in a city that was lacking density. So after searching for a lot of formal variation in the armature, we kind of concluded that we didn't need to differentiate either its form or its use, because this would happen sort of automatically as people would appropriate the length of this armature. And we quite like the tension between this diversity and the kind of tension that it might have with a sort of legible, finite form. So as a framework made of glulam timber and steel, it basically distributes infrastructure, whether it's electricity or shading or rain cover, armatures for plants, places to hang, play equipment, and so on. And also gathers together a few of small buildings underneath it. So given the progress of the city's ongoing transformation of almost a renaissance of Detroit, we felt that a simple armature could be completed over time and it appears intimate in some places and this in others. In other words, the work perpetually in progress. So after losing that competition a year later, we had an opportunity to build a real armature. This is a project that starts construction of the fall. It's the Jones Beach Energy and Nature Center, a long single story building that will act as a sort of armature for exhibitions and education about a very interesting correlation between nature and energy. So the exhibitions will highlight both positive and negative connections between these two fields. It's in a very beautiful place, the legacy of Robert Moses. In the 1920s, this barrier island on the Atlantic, just an hour drive away, was created by a lot of dredging and landfill, if you will. And it's a beautiful sight with the exception of this parking, which you see. In two weeks, we're gonna start demolishing two thirds of it and turning that rubble into dunes, pathways, and also to help us elevate this building above the flood plain. This is one of the better legacies of Robert Moses. I think less controversial. He left us with a lot of, I guess, really good public space on the beaches. Just due west of this is our side. It's kind of very different from that legacy. It's a very natural place. If you go there, you can see a lot of migrating birds, dune grasses, it's a really beautiful kind of pristine place. So we're replacing it with a one-story building that's 320 feet long, elevated above the flood plain. And our goals here are to create an immersion with nature, which is why we're removing all that concrete. But a lot of constraints we had to build just north of the Seahaw line, that dashed line you see, that's the coastal erosional hazard area line. We also reused all the piles from an existing SOM 1960s bathhouse that were demolishing, so dilapidated and extending. And then, of course, we wanted to create a great viewing sort of deck to the beach. The projects organized around a series of volumes that contain all the services and mechanical and produce a kind of very continuous gallery that will then tell the story of energy, nature, and those interesting correlations. Inside this building, which is framed in timber, you will learn about smart grids, renewable energy, the ecosystem, but also what are the connections between those fields. The building itself will be a teaching instrument. It'll be a net zero building with 300 solar panels. It's partly funded by New York State Parks and the governor's office, as well as the local energy provider. So along its length, this armature that surrounds the building will become a kind of place for teaching, for outdoor uses. In fact, we have no idea what it's gonna be used for, which is the whole point, but we're providing amenities for that to happen, a shaded area, electricity, and basic connection to the environment. We've thought of it as a chalet for all, kind of like a large Hampton's house, but for the general public, basically. And as we've been exploring a range of possibilities for the armature, oscillating between its disappearance and its clear expression, we've been asking similar questions at the boundaries of our work. Can the boundary be complete and incomplete in different places, or in different times, or in different ways? Full confession, we like making holes, cutting them out of buildings, creating erasures. They range from the shallow to the deep to confound the relationship between the buildings, or to confound the limits between buildings and their contexts. It's also an act of sneakily transferring privately owned space to the public, or bringing that public domain and the macro scale of the city into our work. So for us, the almost building is variably connected to the environment. We see these limits not as a single thickness, but as multiple layers in depth, which brings into question, where does the building begin or end? So we had an opportunity to make a few holes in this project. Before Carban Mini approached us to transform this 22,000 square foot warehouse and green point into a design center, we asked the question, will there be any cars? And we're so relieved to find out there are no cars. It's just a design center. But at that time, they had not yet settled on this name, ADO, which stands for Amalgamated Drawing Office. That's the office that produced the first mini. And it's interesting to see how their changes in names kind of reflected their changing agenda as they produce this new institution. So at one point they call it grassroots box, and the idea was to engage all the local design and fabrication community. Then they call it free space, a name that we proposed as a sort of idea about continuous urban interior. And then finally they settled on ADO. So it's in green point. You can go there. There's a restaurant, a design center. You can actually work for free. It's like a free office, free wifi. There's a little design shop. But there's also an accelerator that's producing ideas about improving urban life. But for us, we were thinking about the conversations we were gonna have for this building, a very opaque building, 24,000 square feet. And we kind of gravitated towards ambiguous transformations rather than legible ones. So we made many new openings. And we used the salvage graffiti covered bricks to patch them up again. And we were very excited about this. We called it reconstituted graffiti. And then the graffiti artists came back and they tagged it. And so at first we were upset, but then we realized if we really believe in appropriation we should be excited. And so actually we were kind of amused by this. There's multiple layers. But this ethos of kind of patching and remixing the context, remixing aspects of the 12 foot wide garage doors throughout Greenpoint. And just letting it be messy, not patching electrical lines that we put into the slab. Things like that really inspired us to create a kind of destabilizing place that is really multi-layered and just quite rough. But the largest hole we made was this, what we call the cut, where we removed basically a triangular section of the building and rebuilt it back in the same brick. Kind of thinking that maybe somebody might think it had always been here. It's probably unlikely. But this idea of the remix, I'll extend it to the programmatic goals that our client had, which was to say that these functions, the restaurant on your left, and then this sort of free space, this river of space in the middle, that's kind of an exhibition space, a lot of the time, as well as a workspace, would just flow from one to the other. Basically a nightmare when approaching that department of buildings because they don't understand anything that is not in a box. But one of the nicest descriptions we heard from somebody, I forget who it is now, was that it's kind of like a museum without galleries, said that pompous maybe, but we like this idea that it kind of has all the armatures of the museum. We were interested in confounding the physical boundaries as well as the cultural, social, starting with that cut on the exterior and then extending it as a deep construct through the space. So this living drawing is trying to show how that free space in the middle is constantly reconfigured, going from event space to free co-working space. People don't work for free, they're working in the- No, they work, they don't have to pay. Free co-working space. To hosting a rotating exhibitions from the design community. And so we are cutting through the walls that we need to separate use that allows us to bleed those programs from each other into that free space. And hovering over that free space is a very large skylight that we call a periscope, which brings a much larger context of the city into the space. In this case, it reflects Midtown Manhattan. And downtown Brooklyn, not downtown Brooklyn, Williamsburg into one plane. It's for us a way of remixing the context, creating this new surreal context and bringing it into space. And so as the contents of the space below is changing through the rotating exhibitions, so does the light and the color of the light and how that eliminates the space. We really imagined the project as an armature, an open invitation to engage with it. And so we proposed in the last bay that they didn't need all this space, just rip the roof off, to allow for things like this to happen. This is an installation by Assemble Collective from London who proposed a new kind of factory making the tiles in the workshop further into the space, and then cladding this structure or this installation by United Visual Artists, which was fantastic because it really reframed how we interpreted the space ourselves. And so it's interesting to think about how our urban, how our city zoning often produces silos of use. It made sense in the early 1900s, particularly for manufacturing districts like this one, because of environmental concerns. But now as the waterfront neighborhoods are opening up to new modes of production, we're interested in making these work cultures visible and participatory. Further down the East River, we are renovating these two industrial warehouses as part of a campus for the garment industry. There are many pressures on our waterfronts. We need more public space. We also need more housing and we need to increase density for housing. The two buildings that we're doing are these two buildings here. But we also need to keep manufacturing space in the city and to support the working class, largely immigrant class that actually make things. And so this picture is from the turn of the century when Brooklyn was the fourth largest manufacturing center in the country and the Brooklyn Army, sorry, the Bush Terminal was this revolutionary and first of its kind intermodal shipping warehousing and manufacturing complex and the largest one in the States. The two buildings that we're doing that we're renovating are there and here in this plan. So you can see in this site plan the way in which the shipping, the delivery of goods from ships and then transported to rails worked. They literally passed right through the buildings on these rails. But with the advent of air freight, the ships and the railways were abandoned and the peer buildings slowly disappeared in such a way that the old storehouses, these two that we're doing, all of a sudden now front the river, whereas they didn't before. This is an opportunity for us to reconnect in new ways to the river. It's part of a larger mayoral initiative called Made in New York that is about keeping manufacturing, keeping things made in New York and providing first spaces for the garment industry who typically work in extremely insulated environments to open up their environments in different ways. So it's interesting to look at the original buildings because they were essentially a building of doors, not windows, doors that allowed the goods to come in and out straight from the exterior facade through these pulleys and gangways. And so we are cutting into the buildings. From then to now, the multiple transformation of the building is really present at the locus of the facade. There are layers of transformation at one point these cuts were introduced, the concrete spangels were introduced, and so this is the existing condition that we're working with. We are cutting, opening up the building and connecting or replacing the rails that used to bring the goods from the water to the street with this interior street that now connects the city side, which is this view to the water side on the other side. And in this way, we are acknowledging that there are multiple histories. There are overlapping histories, not just one history. And we are adding to these histories, adding layers to the intervention, sorry, adding layers of intervention in a way that the old or rather the new doesn't stand apart from the old, but remixes it in unfamiliar ways. But what thickness does a boundary become a zone? And if we progressively erase this zone, at what point does the building read as incomplete? This question, of course, is relative and it will depend on your culture and the climate in which you live. But within this framework, we're really interested in some historical examples, including Le Corbusier's Villa-Biseau from 1928, the second scheme, the built one, in which each floor plate is ringed by a perimeter of exterior spaces. These are all stacked and they're residual. But what if they would be more like Louis Kahn's fascination with castles, that in this case, come long uncastle, which a series of geometrically described voids would be considered exterior. So if we move from the perimeter to the center of a building along the way, let's say from a veranda to light well to the courtyard, one can consider this a kind of spectrum of voids that could also be considered in section if we survey from the elevated ground plane of the modernist building to a loggia to a covered roof. In either case, we're really interested in the ambiguous possibilities in between. And the capacity for these sort of incomplete voids to inform the building's spatial structure, which we think of as a neutral term that it sidesteps issues of type. So in Auburn, in Auburn, New York, we've recently finished a project that again had a name change. It's now the New York State Equal Rights Heritage Center. But it started with really humble goals. The RFP asked us to design a visitor center. We probably wouldn't have gotten the project had it been announced like this. Everyone would have been after this. But it's in a really interesting site in the Finger Lakes District of Upstate New York, a city whose moniker is history's hometown. That was at the crossroads of progressive ideas in the 19th and early 20th century. And this is the home of Harriet Tubman. She spent the last 50 years of her life. And for those of you who don't know, she's a national hero who is the operator of the Underground Railroad. And directly adjacent to our site, another very important figure in the struggle for equal rights is William Seward, who is the governor of New York and Secretary of State Abraham Lincoln. And his house, which is this red dot, is directly adjacent to our site. It's now a museum. And so we've been working, in a sense, in sort of two historical contexts. The one is the built historical context, so which is really at the hinge point, if you will, right between the historical part of the town and the downtown. And the other one is the social context, the progressive historical context. And what was fascinating to us was that our client and the people in the town had a very conservative attitude about the first, the built one, and a very progressive attitude about the social context. So that was quite a challenge to marry the two. And so the social context of the project is really an exhibition that celebrates the struggle for equal rights, mainly focusing on abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, and LGBTQ rights. And it's an initiative that comes from our governor and is really kind of a portal, if you will, to visit all the sites throughout New York State that are connected to these issues. So as a one-story building in this site, it was quite challenging to think about how to build in a next to buildings that are comparatively taller, but yet our project is bigger in footprint than them. So we looked at ways to kind of articulate the form and we kind of understood that many of the houses in the region are really comprised of volumes or elements and in a way this is how we articulated to the city how we would build this community, building within that context of houses. So the project is comprised of four volumes that hinge together and open up views to the context and that are constructed around two cores, allowing for a visit that is kind of in the figure eight. This organization really places you as a visitor, always on the perimeter looking out to the context and so we wanted that connection to be very kind of direct and very immediate. Now the project happened super quickly, 19 months from concept design to ribbon cutting and we also were kind of overseeing the site design, the exhibition design, we became part of the curatorial team because there was no curator and so actually it forced us to think very comprehensively or cohesively across these different disciplines. How can a small building like this really kind of live up to its sort of large social and exhibition goals? So our first instinct was to think of the context as content, so the building kind of engages the existing context through very large openings and of course through these what we call cuts again, borrowing from our own ADO, views that structure very direct connections to, to the environment. So this is just a screenshot that then very few months later became a reality where the Seward House Museum in this case really kind of enters into the building through this kind of very incomplete zone. We also wanted the project to be very monolithic and elemental in this construction kind of a viewing device. So we used reinforced concrete for the interior finish as well. It actually ended up being faster, we had less issues to deal with, less beams and so on, but we also wanted it to be very kind of primitive. So it's a brick cloud building with concrete, trouts of floor and glulam timber beams and structural wood decking. So very simple materials. Now the exhibition sequence is really figure eight and I'll take it very quickly through the different elements that we co-designed with MTWTF. Now the funny thing is the first one has been immediately appropriated by the town who have written on the chalk, the idea was to give them a map in chalkboard so they can always update it in a low tech way. So from the foyer you're already kind of introduced to the exterior and then you make a choice. You can turn left, see one of our Finger Lake loungers is based on the bathymetry of the Finger Lakes. You can sit there, look at this video content that shows you dynamic maps explaining the connection between the region and equal rights. Or sit at the, you can sit at the sound booth where you hear recorded speeches, excerpts from them, but spoken in contemporary voices so you understand that the struggle for equal rights continues today. Or you can look at these fantastic posters that kind of celebrate through color-coded fabric which conceals the acoustic and absorptive material behind all of the kind of characters that are part of the story. Or you can sit at the social justice table where you see a rotating video of legislative milestones or continue to look outside. So this hinging of interior and exterior space into penetration of volume and solid is something that we're quite interested in that kind of destabilizes your perception of a very small building in this way. So it's interesting that as we, this is the date of the opening, as the controversy surrounding the loss of their municipal parking lot started to fade, people in Auburn have started to warm up to the building. In fact, now it's kind of their living room, their social space. And all these crazy things happened, but this was the opening and I would say the kind of the best moment for us was Pauline Copes-Johnson, who's the great-grandniece of Harriet Tubman is there, next to our Lieutenant Governor, Kathy Hoshel, cutting the ribbon. I asked her, Miss Copes-Johnson, how do you like the project? How do you like the building? And she said, better than I expected. And so I didn't see that coming, but it really uplifted us. And I think, I don't know what to expect, but during these frankly dark times as a country, we've found some consolation in these projects that have a social agenda. So we explored the idea of the incomplete zone in plan and section, in response to climate and culture in the next two project. One we got the other. Villa-Villa is part of a project that I way way curated. There are many GSAP faculty involved. We were all stuck in the same holiday in eating bok choy for four days, designing 10,000 square foot villas. Ordis is in Inner Mongolia. The government was trying to develop this area as a new energy sector for the country. Two intuitions shaped our response. The first is the extreme desert climate. It is extremely cold in the winter and extremely hot in the summer and it makes outdoor living kind of unfeasible. The second is maybe because we were living in a 3,000 square foot apartment in the East Village. Who needs 10,000 square feet? So we thought we would wrap an inner house that is smaller with an outer house where the inner house is the house that you actually need and it is fully conditioned, heated, cooled, has better materials, et cetera. The outer house is much more rough. It's not really heated or cooled. It's passively heated and cooled and has only top light. And so it's an idea of structuring the organization and morphology of the project around a thermal logic to reduce the energy that you consume and spend. Which we tried to encapsulate in this thermal model where you can see the blue is the extreme cold, the green is somewhere in between and the warm spots are the inner house. In terms of the floor plan levels, we tried to create three radically different floor plans that basically are all spanning from the perimeter to the same four columns. The ground floor each spoke opens to the exterior. The second floor is living in a donut in the round and the fourth floor, the four bedrooms, have different orientations. It's an idea that living expands and contracts. It contracts in the extreme climate and it expands into the outer house during the better months. We never built it, but it's almost built in our minds which explains the aesthetic of these images, this kind of abandoned construction site. The project was actually canceled. The client fell out of favor with the government and exiled himself to London, but we were still thinking about this idea of a building within a building. And so we tried it again for a library in Shanghai this time at a million square feet, which is big. And we didn't know how to deal with that scale at first. Our intuition was how do we make it feel intimate? How do we create intimate spaces for reflection and study, but also balancing the institutional scale at the same time? The site in Shanghai is right next to Century Park, which is basically their central park. It's a well-loved park. And so our intuition was to shove it in the corners so that we could open and maximize the open space and create a very immersive park environment outside of the building, but also from within the building. We took cues from China's oldest library, the Tanyagu, where the reading room is very connected to the outdoor environment and the books are above to protect it from rot and mildew, et cetera. And so we took that pairing, call it a sandwich of floors, and basically multiplied it, kind of like the binary code of the project, multiplied it vertically through the project. So each floor plate is a different figure in plan. And as they are stacked, the in-between space creates this very nebulous space in between and allows us to interconnect these different datums, that for us, because there's pairs of floors, would maybe make the building feel a little bit smaller. And so you can see in these plans how the different configuration of the floor, basically the superimposition of that creates that multiple height void at the perimeter and creates this vertically continuous library. In the middle are the cores. That's the fast route through the library. Along the edges are slower routes that basically hopscotch between open floor and open floor. And you can see it on this section where that slow route takes you around the cylinder in between the library and these captured garden environments that are in the thickened facade. This is one of them. Connecting the ground floor to the open, I mean the ground floor to the third bypassing the second, which is one of the densely packed floors, which is where all the books are. And so it goes until you reach the top, which is the most quiet space for study. We were really fascinated that not only was paper introduced in China, but also the printing block and those were terracotta. And so the terracotta creates a screen. That's what you look through. The unfinished side, the warm side, faces the interior of the library. And the glazed side, which is iridescent, faces the exterior. We thought we won, but then we found out that we didn't actually win anything. We won the ideas competition, but not the actual competition to build. And so we didn't really win anything. So we built a model, which is what we do when we lose competitions. We build the model of the project and they live with us in the office as constant reminders to try it again. Almost a project. It's almost. So if the incomplete is about the physical limits of the buildings of our work, ambiguity is about the questioning, the singularity of the experience of the projects. If you've been to the Storm King Art Center, you might have seen this piece by Allison Schatz called Mirror of Fence, or you might have missed it because it tends to appear and disappear. In form is a doppelganger of a picket fence, but this fence rather than divide space dissolves into a landscape of light and weather and seasons. We are obsessed with similar ideas. How can we register the impermanent context of our work? How can we fold the perception of a building into its surrounding, collapsing far and near objects with field? We're of course drawing from a much longer discourse about ambiguity from Emsen to Venturi to Colin Rowe. Our focus has partly been to convey the material and temporal ambiguity, to remix context and to destabilize perception. So the almost building is intentionally vulnerable to contrasting and conflicting interpretation and resists a stable identity. If you visit Chicago as a tourist, you might have visited this place. It's Navy Pier. It's the second most popular tourist destination in the state of Illinois. But if you live there as a Chicago and you definitely have never, you never go here unless you have visitors from out of town because it is a tourist trap. The American Waterfront has gone through two phases of redevelopment since the 80s. The first turned the waterfront into these carnivalesque marketplaces, which is the pier that we inherited. It was actually one of Burnham's five piers, only one of them was built. And this is the existing pier that we started to work with that had been so clogged with so many different kinds of structures, banners, commercialism, capitalism, that you couldn't actually see the city and you couldn't actually see the lake. And so really the main part of our work was to erase and to declutter and to reconnect the structures and the experience of the pier back to the lake. So all of the structures that we did from the small to the large, in some way reframe, reengage and reflect the city and the lake. Starting with the lake pavilion, which started with this potentially done simple idea of can we take a slice of the lake and float it above the pier. The lake freezes in the winter so it becomes just a solid sheet of glass. And in the winter the sky is extremely gray. And then it becomes this Caribbean blue in the summer. So the lake pavilions are constantly changing as you visit the pier throughout the seasons. You could think of it as one volume that's hewn where the void is carved out. Or you could think of it as two kiosks that is covered by a reflective surface that is actually polished aluminum that reflects the lake from one side and the activity of the pier on the other and recombines it in this way that is always different no matter where you are, or no matter the time and day. It's very, very popular with the flies because the reflection of the light and the illumination from the kiosks attract them. So in the summer it's completely covered with spiders who feast on the flies. But I guess if we are really opening our structures to appropriation that includes spiders and spider poop is now on our list of things to watch out for. To mark the beginning of the pier and to re-stitch it back into the city is what we call the information tower. If you stand in a certain position and squint your eyes you might think that it's a skyscraper that leapt across the highway onto the pier but it's actually only 45 feet tall. It's intentionally playing with the proportion and the scale of the skyscraper and borrowing it. And it borrows a concept about borrowing which is shake in Japanese which means to borrow a distant scenery and incorporate it into the garden and it's really very much a part of Japanese and Chinese garden design. So the info tower reflects depending on your vantage point the brick pier buildings or the sky or the fireworks that are shot off during the summer. It appears and disappears and it registers the moon cycle. So when there's a new moon the lights inside are more dim and when it's the full moon the lights inside brighten. Not gonna do that. A project on the boards. So even if we perceive formal or temporal ambiguity in a sort of very visceral intuitive way it's culturally inflected to some level and this becomes more the case when we're confronted with a hybrid. So is the Ponte Vecchio a bridge? Is it a building? Is it a fragment of a city? It started as a bridge but evolved really to this sort of typologically ambiguous condition, it's both and street and building. We love thinking about this question. If something occupies a gradient between something and something else it's in this case it's almost something else. So it's very confusing but we love this idea and to paraphrase Roslyn Kraus our position about architecture is to think about a spectrum between building and almost building and to find these places in between which is what we think about as the almost building. We are fascinated with this indeterminacy and the variety of interpretations that emerge from this condition. Maybe the most simple form of typological ambiguity is building a sign. So this is a project for the DOT. It's very much a part of our infrastructure our city's infrastructure. On this side is the maintenance facility for all of DOT's vehicles and on this side is one of the five asphalt plants that supply asphalt to the city. We obviously played with signage with road signage in particular. So if you are a truck driver coming to refuel here you will know unambiguously which direction you need to travel that way. Or this building actually houses electrical transformers. The squiggle in the elevation is the electrical diagram for stepping up power from low voltage to high voltage. So the building simply does what it advertises. So when we were invited to design an art installation in Taiwan we told the client that we're not artists and we asked them can we produce something useful? So they said sure, what do you want to do? And so we said well have a place for people to gather and okay so we designed this pavilion for the local people, the Amis as a kind of a performance space. It's in a very beautiful part of eastern Taiwan called Hualien and the context was a kind of a new park that was celebrating the Taiwanese government's low carbon footprint. So we thought that was worth celebrating. And we wanted to create a pavilion that had multiple sides, a kind of polycentric pavilion that reflected the fact that there are many different tribes of the local indigenous Amis people there who all told their stories in different ways. So we created 11 ban shells as it were with curved green bamboo, technique we had developed in our canopy that Mimi showed you many years before. And a circular stage where we thought with this void in the middle and a ring and no hierarchy, all kinds of things might happen. We built this with the local Amis people and it was great to see them just take the bamboo from the car to the site and build this very quickly. So these ban shells produce this kind of strange condition where it really is a choice on the part of the performer or the director as to how this is configured. And it was exciting to see how ultimately performer and audience really would occupy the same space, maybe not a perfect seat, but a choice in terms of how this would unfold. And at a slightly larger scale, the largest structure that we did on the Chicago Navy pier is this wave wall which is somewhere between a stair and a landscape. We were responding to a very functional aspect of the brief which was please connect the two dock levels. So we proposed this wall that inflects out to become an overlook over the lake and inflects in to become a stair. And the seeming continuity of the form is actually made up of lots of pieces and the louvers themselves are actually cassettes that were prefabricated in a shop and are brought to site and hung onto the armature. Our contractor was very grumpy when he was building this. He called it the Swiss watch of stairs which we thought was a compliment. And so this, the typological ambiguity that we're playing with stair, landscape, stage, et cetera is about providing these spaces that can be for use for spectators, for audiences and it's constantly changing. It's a social gathering space of the pier that reconnects the space of the pier back to the lake and to the city. In the last two projects, we're asking what happens when the almost building is considered at the scale of the city. Soria Imata's linear city from 1882 proposed to blur the distinction between industry, agriculture and daily life. It was meant to be no more than 500 meters wide. That's about two long city blocks and it would have extended for however long humanity required. Linear city influenced the Soviet discernmentist and the Japanese metabolism movement and we are in turn inspired by their typologically ambiguous combination of streets and buildings. But these mega building as infrastructure projects delineate a very legible strip that sets them apart from their context leaving the existing ground plane of the city or country untouched. We are interested for this exhibition, Manhattanisms. We were interested in engaging a more ambiguously broad territory. Storefront for Art and Architecture asked 40 architects, many GESAP faculty, to speculate on new urban forms of Manhattan that might arise from our current sharing economy. So key party extrapolates on this culture of sharing where life has been dispersed and atomized across the block but we're also projecting its corollary, a retreat from all the sharing into small private spaces. So we're imagining that the city blocks could be dispersed overlapping, sorry, we imagine that the city blocks could be cut up and dispersed where you live between the larger shared public buildings and the mini towers that provide an escape from civic life. Our logic was that if we can take advantage of the efficiencies of sharing maybe we can expand the public realm of the ground plane. It's a utopian or dystopian depending on how you feel about sharing. Hypothetical Manhattan has a field-like armature of amenities. So in 2012 we had an opportunity to contribute to the evolution of housing types or at least discourse in the city. As Mimi mentioned we used to live in a very small apartment so we had to first overcome our own initial concerns about designing very small units but we did realize that it's a conversation that needs to be had and a necessary step to increase density and at least begin to address equity and affordability. So Carmel Place was the first prize in this competition held by the Bloomberg administrations at the time called Adapt NYC and it's located in Kipps Bay on 27th Street and 1st Avenue, it's still there last time we checked. And it emerges from a long lineage of histories and stories and discussions about housing in York City. At the turn of the 20th century Jacob Rees, the photographer, exposed the urban plight of the plight of the urban poor which galvanized a lot of legislation improving living conditions, light and air, et cetera were introduced. Since then the average unit size in the country has steadily increased from 1940 at about 1,000 square feet till 2007 at about 2,500 square feet. It keeps on ebbing and flowing but it's also ebbing and flowing in the wrong direction at some level because it's going against the grain of our household size. We no longer say families, we should say households and these households are very diverse. In fact, 82% of them in New York City are not comprised of nuclear families but our housing stock is really based on the idea of a family. The percent of single persons living nationwide, alone nationwide is very, very high and this is old data, this is from five years ago so it may be more. It's of course an international issue as well and probably we'll see this more and more in countries like the Brick countries. So at what level is the idea of a unit, at what level does it adapt to social change but also to the way we live and work? So the competition was held in 2012 and it was based on body research by CHPC. We won it in 2013, maybe partly on the basis of this image which they probably thought was real, it was just a rendering of our approach and three years later it stands there built. The project is basically comprised of 55 rental apartments, 40% of which are affordable as they call it, designated to different levels of income and 60% of them which are our market rate. There are standard apartments in every sense in terms of the lease and so on but given the small size of the units, we try to really expand on the public space and I think that since we actually won a competition, our developers, partners had to really maintain this ratio so it's actually quite generous for a building of this type. The ground floor for instance, the lobby, we oversized it so that it's like an outdoor street, hypothetically a Thanksgiving dinner with all 100 residents could happen and so on so we tried to disperse the public space where we could. These units are all single, are studios but even though it's one type of unit, there's kind of a large variety partly due to the site and actually this large variety created a spectrum of different possibilities for residents which was kind of interesting at least to the real estate people but it was interesting in terms of the diversity of people who could live there. We built it as a series of 65 modules, steel-framed modules that are welded together all sitting on top of a base which we built in situ so we had two sites, it was kind of confusing which site are we going to today? So the factory which was in the Brooklyn Navy Yard no longer exists where we built these modules over a period of a few months and then the real site as it were where these modules were then shipped across the Manhattan Bridge with police escort and stacked in a period of three and a half weeks which makes everybody really excited especially if you're a developer but it really took a year and a half this whole process but it was exciting to see that moment and then to enter these apartments for the first time in place after having seen them many iterations in the factory. We introduced some very basic ideas, very tall ceilings, huge sliding doors at windows or sliding terrace doors that create like a feeling of a terrace, lots of storage, it's kind of the basics but it really made it feel spacious so much so that New York Times reporter who spent a night there, in the end decided it was really spacious and had all her friends over she could have cooked but she actually ordered Chinese takeout but this is to demonstrate that you could live in this apartment. So the project is kind of diminutive next to its neighbors but it I guess it has a large voice in the conversation about zoning and lifestyle and affordability in fact the zoning for quality and affordability was enacted a bit after that and we had to testify or speak to the to the authorities about many, many things but it's interesting to think about how it's now part of a larger set of infrastructural ideas and that influenced our approach to the design. So we design it as four, what we call micro towers which is a sneaky way to hide mechanical equipment and elevator mechanical rooms and things like that into a single form that in a way like you Ferris could just be basically adapted to varying zoning constraints. We also modulated the color of the bricks to suture it together within this kind of modulated context but also to give it a different experience kind of a subtle experience as you walk around the building with many sort of different perceptions. We're interested in celebrating basically this very thin dimension. So can we think of units beyond the four walls of dispersed home? Can we think of building as a microcosm of the city skyline? Can we think of housing as infrastructure? And where does one building begin and another one end? Are there intermediate conditions? So in our living room, our dining room, there's seven peas have invaded an Italian at garden. This is the whimsical work of our friend and artist Nina Casciadurian as part of her series called Seed Assignment. She makes these on-flight with things at hand in this case the In-flight Magazine and the contents of her dinner. But it's become our daily inspiration because in our search for thinking about architecture that simultaneously occupies different realms. It's also a metaphor for practice, not just ours, but I think all of ours in a sense. Practice is the airplane cabin, our intellectual workspace, the space full of constraints but mostly possibilities. So in our book, first events, copies of which I think we're, I'm not sure if there any left but you can order if you like. We put forward an architecture that embraces the impermanence of things and their perceptions. While the notion of the incomplete really asks questions about the physical or shall we say the objective limits of architecture. Ideas about ambiguity for us. I invite questions about the perceived or shall we say subjective aspects. So for us, the almost building is an active resistance, an active resistance to closure and a constant reminder to remain open-ended. Thanks very much. Well, thank you for this kind of inspiring lecture. I think it's really, first of all, I know that the book is fresh off the press and I know that you've been kind of working on it for some time and since, today we've been talking about putting things together and assembling a kind of position through the making of portfolios, et cetera. I wanted to kind of expand a little bit on the making of the book and how it sort of reflected back on your practice as a way to read the work. It was very interesting for me when I saw it. Obviously this is intentional, but this kind of line that cuts through from the drawings to the projects and the way you've chosen to kind of redraw some of the work with this kind of striation, these lines, suddenly I started to see that across all of the projects as a kind of thread in terms of this armature, this sense of, from the bamboo kind of the lines and the kind of grain of the bamboo to even what was interesting for me in the library is that while Ordos is a sort of diagram of a stack, let's say the library creates gaps between the kind of solid and the void and creates this kind of striation in section that then you overlay with the striation of the diagonals of the facade and there's this kind of layering that happens or the kind of vertical striation of Carmel and the kind of zigzag of the super graphic DOT little structures. And I had never read that clarity through the work, that kind of layering, only in fragments I think. And that was kind of very interesting for me when I saw the book. And then that kind of gets layered then with, I mean, of course it does, physically it does what it's supposed to do, which is kind of infrastructural sense of architecture, but also the sort of blurring of inside and outside, this kind of ambiguity. But then you layer the materiality, this kind of, whether it's bamboo, mirror, reflection, like that artwork that you've shown. Anyway, I thought it was very interesting that through the drawings is kind of a rereading, through the ways in which you've chosen to redraw the projects, there is now a very kind of new clarity as to the work itself or at least some of the, of course every project is different, but there is a sort of refraction or reflection that happens. And I wanted to maybe hear you talk about, only because of course, I know that, hear you talk about that process and why it was important to redraw and if you've discovered through it a way to reread your own work moving forward. For us, redrawing was one way to enter into the book because as you know, we had been talking about it forever. And every time we tried to sit down and write it, we would just bang our heads against the wall, tear our hair out. And so we started to just redraw rather than trying to write. And part of the redrawing was for us to discover for ourselves what the formal or material kind of similarities were. We always knew that we had a consistent approach, but the outcome was always different. And often people would react to the work like, well, you know, you do the curvilinear thing for your installations and then you get all rectilinear on your buildings and we're like, that's not what it's about at all. And so the redrawing was a way to kind of like find those spaces of continuity. And then through the redrawing, we started to think about the different modes of representation and the way in which, you know, as architects, we have to have different voices in terms of the imagery, the drawings, the whatever, right? Like all these different graphic voices, right? The voices that are on paper. And so then we started to play with that. So actually, we're interested in drawing and less so in images. And I think the instrumentality of the drawing was interesting to us. That's technical capabilities, but also how it could represent experience. So the drawings show basically come from our working drawings, actually. And they've been with us for a long time. I think they kind of emerged and just certain pieces emerged in a certain way. But as Mimi was going to say, the book is very heterogeneous because we have many voices. And so the drawings are all together and then you have the collages and really tells the story in a sort of polyphonic way. Not about a project, but the larger the project that we feel that we're in the trenches working with the whole time. It's also interesting. I think that the, I mean, it was evident in the way that you kind of showed the work, but another way to kind of, this rereading happens where it seems that you're, I wanted to ask about the role of precedent in your work as well. I know that you certainly kind of use it quite a bit in studio and the way that you teach, but there's kind of always a set of references and how that comes into play. In fact, it's still at the diagram level, but there's something more that's starting to appear as well. Well, like in 2008, we introduced the idea of the proto building in our studios, which is kind of a proto almost building. It's the same idea really, just this idea that rather than thinking about history through precedents that are fixed, we can kind of mine these conditions and reappropriate them in a light way. And so we asked our students to combine elements, make hybrids and think of systemic ways to then assemble them together. And we still teach this way. We still think this way in the office and so we're ravenous when it comes to history, but also we'd like to try not to feel the burden of it. And that's, yeah. It's history of architecture and history of building types, et cetera, et cetera, because we know that we're not reinventing the wheel. There is a long discourse of whatever, certain strategies, certain architectural languages. We're also interested in the history of the sites that we work with because we are trying to land our projects in some way that acknowledges that we're working within a complex layers of history, a complex kind of set of influences and we're trying to add to that in some way. And so the way that we sometimes work with architectural precedents in the office is that we may be looking at an element or the way in which those elements combine or a system or a material decision, et cetera, et cetera. There's different scales and different things that we pull from the precedents and basically we're trying not to do that. But I'm trying to do something different. But it's interesting to me because it seems, I mean, I could expand this notion of precedent from the kind of historical notion to the precedent as found object or found building because you're kind of approaching these, kind of found buildings in the kind of the same way of these layers and this kind of cutting and adding. And but I also have found just again in the lecture tonight that somehow even in your work on adaptive reuse, this negotiation between precedent or old and your intervention has now become, or maybe just for one project, for the Heritage Centre, it almost also feels as though this was a kind of found building on which you kind of acted. I mean, there was something very interesting in terms of that lineage of the project. So I'm also wondering whether this kind of almost building is starting to become generative in terms of new projects as well, this sort of sense that it was already there. That's right. I mean, now designing, or more ground up buildings, they're buildings. So actually the book is called Buildings Anomalous Building that allows us to collect a few buildings in there that are, but this sense of adaptive reuse I think it's a pletitude to say that every site you're adaptively reusing. But I think we're always trying to balance the reverence with some sort of respect for some aspect of the building. But maybe not tell our clients about the reverence. I mean, although the EDC was interested in hiring us for the Bush Terminal because they liked our approach to ADO, which was kind of remixing. And it's tough to do in every project, but we're trying to find this place to open things up and not make them so limited or conclusive. It's also been interesting to look at the trajectory of the practice. I mean, of course you've done competitions around the world, et cetera, but you're really quite a local, I could have New York practice. And it's something that we've noticed here. I mean, through lectures, there is maybe a generational sense or the sense that practices today that are striving are actually against all sense quite embedded within the city that they work with. Do you find that to be true? Or, I mean? I would say that, while I wouldn't sneeze at building the library in Shanghai. No, I think that would be nothing to sneeze. No. But I have to say that the opening that we attended for the Equal Rights Heritage Center was the most moving opening that we have ever been to because when you build a project for a small town like that, it really, really matters. And all these people showed up, it felt like the whole town showed up and they're so excited, you know? And they're really, really using it and it's become this kind of magnet for the community. So, whereas, you know, the Hong Kong, the tower that we built in Hong Kong is a very different relationship to the place and to the people. And, you know, that was also a very exciting project, but you don't feel it as viscerally as you do when you work in an environment that is closer to home. So, I know that you're quite busy right now. What's on the books that you haven't shown tonight? The kiosk that I flipped through. That looks really good, actually. Partly because we're not sure whether there's gonna be four or one. We're just designed as four. The second project we showed, the Jones Beach Energy Nature Center, that's in CDs. Yeah, it's beautiful. That starts construction later this year. The Bush Terminal starts construction also later this year. We have a new building in Chinatown, a house upstate. You know, we're working in Buffalo and grain elevators. We're interviewing with them, but none of them are formed yet. And the park, the Gansford Peninsula. Oh, yeah, we won that. Just west of the Whitney with James Corner. Another. Yeah. So there's a lot of work in the office. It takes a while for it to percolate to the point where we can see it and understand it and within the framework that we are working in. And that's a process I think all of you probably experienced as well. And what about the relationship? I mean, you've been teaching for ever, yes. So how do you find whether, I mean, has that kind of feedback loop between, I mean, that we all, it's essential. It's not just the teaching and then being with the students who are just so amazing and imaginative, but also with our colleagues. This conversation is fundamental to all of us, I think, in terms of practice. I mean, this divide doesn't really exist in that conversation. It exists in a sense that me and Aaron are in the office for certain part of the week, but otherwise, for us, it's instrumental to thinking about practice. Actually, the drawing project kind of emerged from our teaching because at one point, I felt like an imposter because I was coming here and talking about representation and really pushing the active drawing and resisting the renderings and creating imagery out of drawing, but we weren't doing it in the office. And so we brought it into the office as well as certain aspects of our research that we do for teaching. We've brought it back into the office and then, of course, vice versa. What we know as practitioners, et cetera, we try to bring in appropriate ways into teaching. What sort of environmental consultation goes into planning like the Long Island in terms of the mirrors and the lights? I always think I even get afraid for birds, so. Oh, that's an interesting question. It's a very topical issue. We're using bird safe glass. There's a lot of migrating birds. We're using the deep overhangs to shade the glass. It's not foolproof, but we need to bring light into the building, but it's definitely a concern. For this reason, we're not including a wind turbine as one of the energy exhibits. There's a lot of controversy about those, but there will be offshore wind turbines that the state is building. They will be interpreted through other material on the site. So yes, I mean, cats kill a lot more birds than glass, but still, it's an issue. It's not a glass tower, should we say. But definitely, all the mirrored stuff, actually we break it down. It's not a big risk. It's not like the shard. It's about surface area, and we do very small slender towers. But actually part of the refraction of the one that I flipped through is to confuse the birds. If you give them a huge surface, that really acts as a mirror, and they don't know what the limits. So I'm not saying that's the only reason, but part of the faceting is about not creating a huge surface area for the sun to reflect and produce glare, but also for the birds. But one thing we agree upon as partners is to studiously avoid questions about partnership. We duke it out until only the best idea survives, which is about editing, and trying to cut out the excess ideas, trying to cut out the fat, the extraneous things, right? The duking out is a process of constant editing and challenging ourselves, but you might turn around and ask the people who are sitting behind you who are staff and they can give you a more unbiased answer. But it really is about kind of cutting out the extraneous, whether it's extraneous concepts or extraneous architectural moves or material decision and trying to do more with less. So that is- It's not always quite clear what that is at the moment at the time, but it's very inefficient. Yeah, very. The napkin sketch was a better strategy for architectural practice. More lucrative. It's been a long day. Thanks everyone for joining, and I hope to see many of you soon again. Okay, thanks. Thanks, thank you. Thank you.