 Let's go directly to the second panel, from fascination to construction. After decades of fascination by technology, its ubiquity has become a global instrument of progress, but also a tool of oppression and segregation. Medellin practices try to develop certain sensitivities to expand the concept of technology beyond the airway construction system, exploring its cultural and social implications, to understand and to re-describe complex social and cultural contexts. We have again three practices invited to this panel. Amund will be first. From 2010, Sonia Neigel and Jan Ciesen have been working in Berlin under the name of Amund in cooperation with Björn Mantensen. Their material and architectural culture is intimately connected with the construction understood as an statement. In their work, small commissions are used as a laboratory of construction inventions, and because many of them are interventions in existing architectures, their engagement with reducing, reusing and recycling buildings is part of the ideology of the office. O plus H architects are Maki Onishi and Yuki Hyakuda, and they are established in Tokyo in 2008. Materiality and construction are in the base of their work. Simplicity and a kind of do-it-yourself and materialism builds a precise example of how to work with the immediate resources in a very inventive way. Palace, Benjamin Reynolds and Valle Medina established Palace in Basel in 2012. Their web page is organized in cycles, botanics, materials and displays as a collection of windows that shows how they speculate and react to different states of culture, space and economy. The moderator of this panel will be Lori Hockinson. Lori Hockinson is professor of architecture at Columbia G-Shap, and is also a partner of Smith Miller and Hockinson Architects, an office with a long trajectory as a laboratory of speculation and making, and an office also for investigation and practice, negotiating traditional craft with bandwidth construction techniques. So let me invite Amund, the stage. Hello, everybody. Thanks a lot for inviting us to Columbia. I'm very happy that we are around here in this conference. So... And I want to... Also, I'm Sonja. I also want to say hello. And it's really amazing to see how somehow it's perhaps a generation that forms a... They have some common ground. And I'm recognizing that the dealing with problems is perhaps something which everybody of us is dealing with a lot. And this is very interesting to me. So we are two-thirds of the office, Amund, Sonja, me and Björn. Amund is actually the acronym of our names. So it's Architects, Martensson and Nagel Tyson. And so we founded by kind of random... The office was founded almost randomly. And I will give you a short introduction about our history. So this is the Academy of Arts where we studied architecture. I studied industrial design before at the Design Academy and at the Academy in Brücken in Germany. And then at the Academy, Sonja and me, we met. And there it was also... Like Mareike did say, it was very... In the design studios, it was very focused on the conceptual way and of bold designs and how to focus on a very bold and architecture. And there, I did an internship at the office of B&K+, which is the first office of Arno Brandlhuber in Cologne. Björn Martensson was a partner there at that time. And that's where we met. And we both finished our studies with a diploma in 2002 and 2003. And at that time, it was already a little crisis in Germany. So many of our colleagues went to Spain and to countries where it went well at that time. So we stayed in Germany and we mainly did exhibition designs in the first years. So this was our first project. It's a very small exhibition. We did for an design competition where office products had to be presented. So we made an abstract office context with a vacuum-molded tabletop where we presented the new designs. So it looked like this. We had all these red tables with this vacuum-molded surface where we presented the new developed products for this design competition. Then we did an exhibition on some urban planning and some architecture in the city of Mannheim. They had this 400 years anniversary that they were celebrating and we were asked to do an exhibition in a museum there. And then we also did some fair stands. This is, for example, for a solar module producer. And we did this fair stand where we did hang the solar modules from the ceiling. And on the reflecting floor, you could see the mirrored image of this hanging city. And you could walk about these roofs of this solar module covered roof. So during these first years, we hardly could get any architectural permission. But we were still all the time very enthusiastic about architecture. And we're very interested. And so we are some small studies we could go on with architectural or dealing with architectural themes and topics, which we are kind of interested in. It was more like a hobby in these time days. And a few years ago, our passion for observation found for architecture without architects and also for anonymous architecture led us to a special phenomenon, which we have documented ever since. And this card shows a little bit the periphery of Stuttgart. It's very fragmented. A lot of settlements going on. It's very dense, the whole region. And the initial ignition was a bizarre building, which we found in this region. It was an elevated gas station and residential building, a mixed-use building. And it was planned like this. It was not rebuilt somehow. This was the original planning from our architect. And we discovered this building in the urban periphery around Stuttgart, which is characterized by many medium-sized companies. These buildings are special to us because they come to existence through a special law regulation. And these are kind of mixture buildings. And they are especially, you can especially find these buildings in industrial areas. And the possibility in these areas is that the rigid separation of function is softened up by the legislator. And the people who are living there, or the entrepreneurs, they are interpreting this situation in different, very kind of interesting and funny ways. So this was kind of the study we did by our own. And it's why are we interested in these buildings, in these mixed buildings? It's kind of a symbiosis. And on the one hand, they are kind of unconventional to us because there's some, very often there's no architect integrated in this design process. And so they have also a high degree of individual solutions. And on the other hand, these buildings also overcome the functional separation of modernity and creates a center of life that integrates work and home at the same place. And the inhabitants of these areas, they are a little bit unnoticed and they make kind of experiments with possible forms of buildings that, and also with life and also models of working somehow. And that's what we are interested in. And in this early study, there's also, you can see kind of an obsession or passion for kind of a field research for observations of the built environment. And also for the examination of the context, why can these forms or designs or buildings occur? Probably there are some role models for us, like Rudovsky's architecture without architects. And also the investigations of Alison and Peter Smith and Venturi Scott Brown and also the photographs of Bernd and Hillar Becher, which are encouraging us to encourage us to kind of follow our passion. And because at the beginning when we did that, a lot of other architects we asked, we showed them our photos and we were kind of proud and somehow fascinated about that and they could not really understand what we are doing. And so, but we keep on doing that. And a photograph of these things. And because they also find some, for us we can find some solution in these photographs and these strange, kind of strange buildings. So this is one of them. The fascination is, there's a really wide range of things that we are fascinated with. So it's like everyday buildings, but also like this, very traditional buildings that have a strange shape, which is a result of circumstances, streets, neighbors. So we collect this and the buildings of the in between cities, these half industrial, half living buildings, that's a bigger body of photographs, which we are, which we collected and we could form a group of. So in 2009, we did our first joint project, Björn, Sonja and me, which is the Just K house. It's a low energy or passive house for a family with four kids. And we had lots of constraints and requirements for this building. It was a very small site with 365 square meters and it was a house for a family of five and now six. So it had to be a more tower like building. And for there are all these constraints and requirements. There are some buildings like the Black Maria, which is quite important building for us. It's one of the first film studios for the Edison Film Company from 1890s. And it was a building to develop films. And at that time, the film material was not very light sensitive. So they had to invent this film studio where, which you could rotate and open the roof. So you could expose the film material to the maximum of light. And so this kind of buildings, we are, or this kind of ideas we try to incorporate in the design of the Just K house. Here you see the development in models. We work quite a lot with models, but also with Rhino and with 3D, which you never show because it's not sexy. Another requirement was the local building regulations. So we had to build a pitched roof in the area. Usually you don't build pitched roofs during architecture school or you are, it starts now, but in our studies, it was not that popular. And we got kind of fascinated by the diversity of pitched roofs there were. And so these are some targets and solutions we found for this house, the elevated ground floor, which is the main living space. And then the bedrooms and the individual rooms under this huge roof space. And the interior is all done in a prefabricated massive wood panels, which we investigated a lot at that time. How to work with this system. Another aspect was that we are very inspired by artists, which work with minimum spaces like Al Wexler from New York. And I happened to work with him in 99 when I was studying here in New York. And some of the ideas we incorporated in also the Just K house, how to build minimum space for five to six people and still generating a feeling of generosity in this building. Or then there are these salutes of the of epsilon. It's an artist he already died from Israel. And he created this very intimate salute just around the daily functions of the inhabitants that are imagined inhabitants. So I will focus a little bit more on technical aspect of this project of the Just K house. We had a very limited budget. So we decided to cover the roof in a very cheap roofing material is a roofing membrane, which is usually used for industrial or for warehouses. And it was a very technical and simple solution how to seal the horizontal seams. But there was no solution for the edges. And another inspiration is like the Belgium fashion designer Matam Agella. And in the 80s, he deconstructed fashion or garments. And he took them apart and we stitched them again, putting the seam to the outside so that the production process of fashion and of of furniture and not of clothes became visible. So on the right side, you see the corner detail as it was proposed by the by the company. And on the left side, you see the detail how we finally did it and to accentuate the corners of this building and to give it also more distinct appearance. So as I mentioned, we dealt deal a lot with the found found crude architecture of everyday's life. And we like these unpretentious charm of these buildings. And also, it's not always about beauty beauty in these buildings, but they're rich in a kind of stimulating inspirations and unusual design tricks. And it testifies somehow a relaxed approach to handle materials or finding solutions. And through these daily observations, we we find interesting solutions and strategies of which we can learn. And we photograph these buildings and try to understand the circumstances and the strategies we found it could be the use of material or also detailed solutions. We want to kind of enlarge our repertoire to find solution to our design problems. For example, this illustrated by project we did some years ago. And and our client he bought a quite quite ordinary house and he wanted to we had to extend that. And we wanted to do it in a simple way. And there's some kind of our findings, how they build and how they extend and how they deal materials they already have like like this house in Bill Gottwiesen. And they there we are kind of somehow attracted by the this radical predict pragmatism. And also the kind of it also shows somehow a kind of how anonymous buildings are grown somehow. And and with these things, they are creating very often very own specific character, which we are interested in. And also, for example, these ruins in in we've we'd found in our holiday in Greece, which also remind a little bit on the work of the artist, so live it. And this also could be an inspiration for our design solutions. And actually, we are interested in quite a lot of wide range of building activities. And so the this is the existing building, which client bought it's quite a not really very, very simple structure. And nevertheless, we think that also these kind of very simple buildings are have the potential to to to develop a lot of qualities. And so in this much in this project, it was a lot about sustainability and resilience. And also, we wanted to, and we wanted to make a kind of a concept out of repairing things instead of building or rebuilding things. And so we wherever it was possible, we tried to apply this method of of repairing to our project. Also, we and we also wanted to overcome the separation of the old and the new. We just want to go on building as we as we saw it a lot in old medieval towns, for example. And so this was the extension for the family to extend the 70 square meters building to for a family and the use of the needs to a family of five now, and and also bring some very light and modern life or in this building. So for us, architecture has a lot to do with also interventions or and many of these interventions are somehow already done in the past 100 and maybe also thousands of years that architecture exists. And for us, it's very quite important to know these strategies and to and to how to deal with them. So I always saw that time is over. So I quickly flip through the final project, which is the Freed Pavilion. It's a cafe pavilion on a cemetery in the city of Durand. And they had the requirement was that it public summit. It's a public cemetery. The requirement was that there's a cafe pavilion for morning feasts, but as well as regular visitors. So we had the idea to combine this archaic shapes with with a kind of modern pavilion like ideal. And it's this square ground floor, 12 by 12 meter roughly roughly. And it's organized by four by three volumes and the bathrooms and the kitchen. And you have three guest rooms. So you could use these guest rooms individually for smaller groups or join two of the guest rooms for bigger groups. And in section, it shows the diversity of these three spaces. So you have a vaulted space, a tentroof spaces and a pitch roof space. And all these spaces open up to the surrounding cemetery and park and creating a distinct facade towards the surrounding cemetery. At daytime, it has this reflective glaze. And at nighttime, it changes and the pavilion becomes transparent. And so Amund is, as I said before, collaboration of Bjorn Martensson, Sonja Nagel and me, we are actually two independent offices working together for projects, but also with other offices. So this is part of Bjorn Martensson's office, a small working space for his models and the computer opening to the adjacent garden. That's an archive and archive space in our studio, which is also in a regular townhouse in the city of Stuttgart. Well, that's a friend of us visiting us, a friend from Paris visiting us in our office. So thank you. O plus H. My name is Makio Nishi. I'm Yuki Hyakuda. Thank you very much for inviting us to this symposium. We started our office in 2008 right after we finished master course. We're actually classmates in Kyoto University. And Yuki decided to go to Toyo Ito's office for five years. And I stayed in Tokyo University as a doctor course student. And also I was teaching in YGSA Yokohama National University where Kazuyo Sejima and Rie Nishizawa are also teaching. And we in 2011 in Japan, we had a big earthquake in Tohoku area earthquake and tsunami. And that was a big thing for us when we start started architecture. This is our office. Let us introduce our office. Our office is in Nihonbashi area, Tokyo. And our last office was actually in the on the fifth floor in a building. But we decided to move here after 2011 earthquake, because we found it is very interesting to talk local people and think architecture together. So we moved our office on the ground floor and totally open to the town like this. It's almost like a vegetable shop. We has actually it was a garage so we don't have any glass glasses. So totally open to to the town. So sometimes many children suddenly come to our office to see our models. And we use rows as a room to make big mock-ups like this. So in 20th century people tend to think that it is important to look for a common rule that can be shared by as many as people as possible. In our current time, small individualities like ripples enabling us to respect the things that one can one can and cannot do. While overlapping of diversity values, we can also cherish what we share. One of the beginnings that led us to respect individualities and diversity is a project called Good Job Center Kashiba. It is a place where people with disabilities create new jobs in society. It is the message from the client when we were asked to design Good Job Center Kashiba. Sorry my English is bad but I would like to read this concept. Acknowledge the differences, cherish the differences. To distinguish the differences between each person, cherish these differences and aim to create an environment where good distinction can grow. It is necessary to properly understand the characteristics of human in order to create a comfortable living environment based on such understanding. Art illustrates the differences between each person profoundly, allowing these differences to stand out and transform into visible materiality as individuality. People who gather here with or without disability can coexist with one another as their true self. To create an environment where everyone can be deep in their own potential and can make the most of their abilities. This was the message from the client but we found it is very important thing that we should think when we think architecture. Actually this is original atelier. Some members are working together at the big table and the other members have their own table to be alone like this. Actually he is staffs who support people with disabilities but he is also an artist and he is doing his own paintings here. Behind this wall there is a storage and a person who really don't want to talk anybody. There is a space for him to work alone. After seeing original atelier we make a first concept. We want to do something like a forest. There are some con closed space and bright open space. Each people can choose a comfortable space for themselves. This is a model. Wall is very unique. I think this wall system, the style wall pattern creates walls and gaps at the same time. In this system connection and separation is equal. Within one space people can choose to be alone or be with one another. This is main interior image. This is narrow and space and back is very bright and big spaces. This is big, bright spaces. We can see the very nice corner through the space. This is the completion photo. You can see many walls and stairs and windows and roofs are gathered together in one space and various activities are happening in one place at the same time. People feel that they have their own spaces and also they are together. You can see a big table for the meeting. On the second floor there is a place for parking. This is a craft space. This is office space. Many people are doing different things but they are together. This is a cafe. Under the table there is a small store. It is open to the town. It became a school route for elementary school students. This is a small shop. We like this photo a lot because this is an office space and this is resting space. A space where resting and working happen together. Gathering of activities gently. It is a place to work but sometimes some artists come here to do some installation like this. This was art and music installation by art university at Good Job Center. This is from outside at night time. Second project is a new cultural center in Taga town. We thought about landscape from landscape to architecture. This is a surrounding area. In this project we try to think about landscape and architecture, how to relate each other, create a new landscape in harmony with environment using wood that has been cut out from mountain behind. You can see beautiful mountain here and material comes from here to this building. This town is located near Kyoto. It takes two hours from Kyoto by train and bus. In this town, 8,000 people live here. Over 85% is a forest. Even though there is a lot of forest, trees are left unused because of limited demand. Wood industry is not popular in this town. Through this project, we have to encourage the lumber industry. This is how to deliver from the forest. It took more than two years to prepare all of the wood for project. We have constraints about timber production. We have to consider the construction method and there is a limit to the length of wood because of the transportation problem. We cannot use laminated timber because there is no plan in the neighborhood. Maximum size of timber is limited. Clam length is maximum 6 meters and beams maximum 4 meters. We propose a structure sign. This is typical order of the timber structure. This is a very simple idea. We create a long beam by connecting with steel plate. This span is maximum span 10.8 meters. By making primary and secondary beams the same size, we create a large and thin plate. Sorry. We can create space in which thin roof plates are floating like this. This is space. This span is over 10 meters. We have another problem about fire proofing and fire compartment. Sorry. A and B is a typical way of solving this problem. A is wrapping everything with fire proof materials but we cannot see the timber. So I had this option and B is installed fire compartment wall. We refer to traditional houses in nearby area and we choose option C. This is a drawing of traditional merchant house in nearby area. Colored part is warehouse, fire proofed by clay. This is outside and this is inside the house. Fire proofed warehouse surrounded around the main houses to protect them from external fire. They also divide the main houses into several parts to prevent the spread of fire. It is like photo of traditional merchant house. Actually, this is monkey's grand-grandfather's house. Inside this is a photo. This is a plan. Total floor is 2,600 square meters. Hole needs compartment by law. The other part, we installed fire proof portions like this and divided several parts. So the other parts can be in exposed timber frame. This is a concept to how to make the space. Let me shortcut. Okay. This is a compression photo. Right side is space for kids. This is a cultural center. If people use the rooms, people have to pay small money. But common area is free. We want to make many places in the common area, benches, in our like space and victim for kids. This is the main entrance hall. We can see the sky through the gap of roof. We can see the rice fields through the kids' area. This is a space for library corner. This table is very large and low for kids. Kids gather this space and study. They can study. I like this photo. Several roof plates overlap together. I think through this project, technology and wisdom can transform local constraint to attractive regional characteristics. Also, we made a lot of free papers and delivered them to all the houses in the town in order for people to know about the process of making architecture like this. We made 10 free papers during planning and construction period and delivered it all over the town. That's why we do that because when I was a child, we thought public buildings are not loved by people. We would like to change the situation. We would like to share the process of making architecture with local people and celebrate the architecture together. We are preparing opening ceremony with local people together. This is opening ceremony. We had a big party. She is a lady in local area. She researched local cooking and did a party. Many children helped us to help that party. This is a very small town. Many elderly people are living in this town. Many, many elderly people came to the ceremony. At last, we would like to show you some of our projects because this talk is about technology. We would like to use technology to make uniqueness of the architecture. This is our first project we designed. This is an animal-like roof in the forest. That is what we're talking about and technology is a still plate. One still plate cannot stand by itself but support each other. It will be the strong structure. Next is imagine the floating cave with clay technique. This is that is a folly in the park. Next is animal-like bell hut in temple. And technique is 3D carving wood. This is a one to five scale mockup. And this funny creature has two legs like this. So if hung the big bell, wait, heavy bell, he rotates. But this is still a lot, and this is carving a dream. Technique is still a lot and acrylic like this. Joint part is very interesting like this. And this is our latest project we have in Bangladesh. We are trying to make a factory for 600 people to work for making bags. And we are trying to talk with people in Bangladesh and we are trying to think technology and diversity and individuality through this project. Thank you very much. As Juan mentioned, my name is Ben Reynolds and... I'm Vaya Medina, thank you for the invitation. Yeah, it's clearly a pleasure, as many people have said already, to be here and to also listen to the way in which other offices are negotiating contemporary questions that we hope also in our kind of brief talk about what we do, we can let you know how we tackle them and how we, in fact, use the project as a means to comprehend this context. So we wanna talk about the way in which context shapes our practice and the role of the project as a strategy to comprehend. And here we're referring to the context in a broad sense, I should pick this up. One that we're all exposed to and one that is in fact hard to articulate for us. And more precisely, and perhaps this relates also to the panel that we've been assigned to, one that's becoming increasingly too complex even for human comprehension. So, okay. In our practice, the question of comprehension entails firstly acknowledging a kind of surrender to the context, the kind of laying down of the arms of knowledge. This begins somewhat of a chaotic act of shrugging off convention and our own pretense. So with every project, there's a kind of fatalistic act of the beginning moment of the project. So in the past, we've talked about this context as being somewhat of a, could be described as a noir context, something that we can sense dramatic things are happening, fed by massive shifts, I'm sure we are all aware of, but exactly what they are and how they shape the context, it's very difficult to claim. So in order to talk about our projects is to talk about long sequences of work and varying outputs and materials that are basically reasoning processes in order to comprehend. So in fact, we wrote a book not so long ago and we'll refer to it a little later, but it was inspired by this figure of Hugh St. Victor, the great mystical writer of the 12th century, you can see here on the left, a Parisian theologian who produced a document called the Mystic Arc, which is a non-existent document. It's only known by the whispers and the gossip of those who attended his lectures, but effectively it was a wall painting. So something at the architectural scale that contained at the time of the 12th century all the knowledge of the world. Things like the Zodiac sign, the Mapamundi, the Zodiac cycles, as I said, and the entire cosmos. For him, the arc, and I quote, was to rid himself of confusion, which is the mother of all ignorance. So again, this kind of brings us to the topic of technology in that every project begins as a kind of comprehension spurt, a jolt, which provides this initial vector of investigation. And we begin by looking at this multitude of ways in which a subject can be addressed. The key for us is this massive survey, much like the work of Hugh St. Victor. For example, we were commissioned by a private librarian in eastern Switzerland to work with a collection of 13,000 books. And obviously there's the physical side of a library and it's arrangement, which is something we took into account. But also we also had the kind of ability to see with new eyes this entire collection in a very detailed way. And from that, we actually decided to find what could be called the kind of center of information of this place if we were to pass the information through a software that could read locations of where the books were written and locations that were mentioned, effectively you could produce the center of the library, which we found to be approximately 480 kilometers off the coast of Greenland. The poem, a poem could then be written by the titles of the content of this library. And this poem, as you see sort of in this film that we made at the bottom of this image here, is essentially these places that the software thought were real, but in fact were not. So we passed this database through an information extraction pipeline, which actually has already built inside of it geography, names of places, names of rivers, names of mountains. And these were all places, in fact, that the algorithm thought were real, but it were indeed not. Yeah, so following from this large act that we call like a extraction act, we find that often the moment in which one can establish anything, within complexity, within multitude, reveals that actually nothing is established. So, but only a series of claims in motion could be considered as something that is always moving and that actually informs the present. In order to form a sense with the ideas that we often work with, we find simply clues that we unearth from motifs that often are contradicting, often come from very ancient times. For example, in ancient Egypt, the heart used to be, yeah, the belief was that was the originator of thought. We still say that we memorize something by heart. Not only did we discover that the mind is in fact the seat of intelligence, now the mind can fluidly print the images in association to what it has experienced in the past. For example, on the left-hand side, yeah, the brain can actually be exposed to footage and then on the right-hand side, we can see how, oops, our memory can be reconstructing such a sequence only from the images that has been storage, biologically. Or for instance, when in the past we tried to make sense of the sky, of course, the differentiations in different levels of the atmosphere were simply meant to be a perfect division between strata are almost like levels of powers. Nowadays we know and we can have a different understanding where we can perceive and we can compute at an atomized level, things like turbulence and laminar conditions and actually the differentiating planes between them are simply different pressures and different mathematical understandings of it. Indeed, the seas were thought to be made not simply of water of the river, but of the material found directly under the heaven. Crystalline, congealed, especially combined to resist the flame of the sun, moon and stars. It was an elusive kind of material. Now the seas are tiny pulses of wave energies, rolling and spreading data that are at the same time simultaneously re-routing thousands of millions of vessels. So what we're effectively doing here is kind of comparing a knowledge at a particular moment in time that has been undermined and somehow critiqued by what we could call the contemporary condition. And it's also true with nature. You know, nature, as told by the Hudson River School, not so far from here about 200 years ago, was considered immense, untamed and something to be settled. Now our salads are actually, I guess, nascent beasts in the way that here cardiac tissue has been injected into a spinach leaf and is pulsating like a heart could. Obviously in language, in a primitive sense, can be traced to an understanding of how nature signals itself. We always thought those signals, to be honest, on the right, you see very clearly, a yellow band for all clearly identifies its toxicity by its color. But those signs also can be dishonest. On the left, this fiddler crab possesses a weak claw, despite its size, that still intimidates smaller species. Now, what is the future of language if words can be assigned, quote unquote, a poeticness? This is a project by Kyoto University wherein a machine can read an image and assign, in its library, words which it thinks it's kind of poetic. Things like singing free heaven and so on and create poems out of just looking at something. What does that actually mean for language? And, you know, surely the poem of the future tries to avoid poeticness in general. And again, if we keep comparing, in deciphering the body, East Asians understood it as a series of meridians. The body was not considered as something biological but made of pathways along which energy flows. Now, among other things, the body is a space that can be read at a cellular level, whereby abnormalities are recognized after matching samples against massive amounts of collected patterns. The line actually between a fake smile and a real smile has been for a long time, excuse me, a subject of study. In some cases, we simply were like a fear green, to tell our predators that we are harmless, that we are one of them. But now my smile is like my wallet, actually. And even the tall and dark amalgam that we call the city was for the ancient Chinese, a cosmic diagram, an image that actually meant to balance man, state, nature, heaven. It was designed to distribute she, the divine breath. Now there's a reality of the city, as we know, is that of certain harboring of the known, the threat and the potentials. So in all of these previous examples, it seems that the perception of reality changes always over time. What is considered a truth is made way for a heresy, which becomes truth and so it continues. The idea that there is nothing established, but only claims, emotion, means that there is an eternal crisis of definition. Already in the mid-60s, back minister Fula produces this document. It says knowledge had doubled every century up until the 18th century. By the end of the World War II, information was doubling every 25 years. Now, information is doubling every 30 months. The moment when every project becomes a sensor, we can say, and also it's also sending information out, we will lead to the doubling of information every 12 hours. So our practice has been for a while operating under this quest of amassing information to create this sense and this intelligible ideas. Projects respond to a context that is becoming increasingly beyond the reach of our human comprehension, where information is at the vignettes of information itself. So what we do is very much architectural in nature, but this process often leads to exploration in different mediums and working with unique and independent collaborators. And our practice goes through, of course, an endless consolidation process since we produce buildings, but we teach and we produce books. For example, in the context of this particular project, yeah, the idea of an intense reconfiguration of what it meant to build in a context foreign as China, it is a project in itself. So out of this complexity that we tried to cater through this presentation, we discover that there are two archetypes within our practice that are key to understand the way we articulate thinking. The two figures are the fear of the conjurer and the fear of the seer. So on the wall of our studio in Basel is a gift given by a friend of ours, which is a reproduction of the painting, card shops by Caravaggio from 1594. And this friend cut out two details and framed them. They're two faces, one of an unworldly boy and the other is the card shop himself. He said, or this friend of ours said that it was a reminder of that we forever slip between a state of unknowing and being able to author a manipulation over reality. Incidentally, this friend of ours is a marathon runner and he said it's running for him is the only moment where he can become kind of characterless. So this became quite important in the beginning of our office to understand the problem of dealing with information, that it could be possible to be both someone in awe of complexity, i.e. the state of unknowing and someone that could manipulate it, i.e. the conjurer as Bay mentioned, which kind of reminds us of this also particular interesting, I would almost call it kind of performance that Frank Lloyd Wright did during the construction of the Johnson Wax building where he was ordered by the Wisconsin Industrial Commission to prove whether his slender columns could withstand 12 tons. So what Wright did was he said, okay, I will take up your challenge, but also I will invite the press. And so one afternoon in 1946, he invited Mr. Johnson and the press and after piling the column with sand for hours, it fell at 60 tons, which was five times the expectation. So here, somehow Frank Lloyd Wright as the conjurer where technical prowess meets the manipulator of truth. The second archetype, which is quite relevant for the studio, is the seer. The figure of the seer can really be traced back to Greek mythology, and it was known for being able to see things that are hidden from others. The seer doesn't operate by foreseeing the future, but instead operates by divination, out of being able to comprehend reality. It makes something appear out of nowhere and operated by sacrificing information. Seeking knowledge of the future, we signed a pact very early on as could be considered like a funding document for the studio that it reads, I climb high mountains to prepare my writing, which means in a way that is a reminiscence for us of maintaining a certain sense of euphoria in able to enable a constant evolvement. Under constant recording as well, we constitute each of our individual annotations sheets or diaries. This large tabulae of horizontal partitions is in principle algorithmic because of the vast information that and variables that it can contain, but also of the type of operation that can perform. You could, for example, quickly construct an intersection between a thought annotated at 6 a.m. in a solitary room in New York City with a joke from 2005 annotated at 3 p.m. This is part of the method to organize what appears to be disjointed, random facets of existence. So this figure of the conjurer and the seer pays a role in our projects, but as well in our teaching. We're currently leading two pedagogical experiments. One is taking place in Vienna, which where we direct a design studio for his third department. It's quite special about it, is that it runs with a philosopher Vera Wielmann and a visionary and entrepreneur operating under the pseudonym, like a fake name, Don Gross. In parallel in London, we run a studio at the Royal College of Arts, currently entitled Chronocopia. The studio runs as a pseudo-corporation and is entitled High Holdings, where we encourage each of the individual participants to respond and be responsible for a certain domain of knowledge for them to evolve thinking. In both contexts, actually, we operate under certain freedoms and also certain contractual operations, for example, what we call the free sheets, which entitles each one of the students to actually produce thinking under restrictions. So the free sheet is actually a contractual limitation. Same with our own project, these two figures come together. For example, in the making of the monograph Paris Hermitage, the building came about or originated from a performance and here the architect can be seen carving a space and stepping away from the computer to engage with a sense of materiality. It documents the building Paris Hermitage, which is constituted by quartz articulations and where citizens go there to restore their sense of work or rest, wakefulness from what we claim to be a current contemporary condition of pulverisation. It was published in late 2017 and was co-edited by New York publisher, Nicholas Weltyke. Yeah, and as a sum up, also the architectural response and the building was formed from masking 100 plants of educational spaces across history. Maybe just to finish, a second example of how a project for us is really a strategy of comprehension was an exhibition we produced for a gallery in Vienna in the form of sculptures and video works that became the seeds of a larger publication currently in the making. The first move was to create a site-specific work, which is this fragment of a ceiling of a building called the Melgrube, which is a building that used to store on one of the main plasters in Vienna the flower from all over Europe. It was a public building. The work is made of 300 kilograms of flower and composed from just reading a text about the building since no images or drawings of it exist. In the same exhibition, we explored the possibility of how to contain an atmosphere in an image. This idea comes from the notion that everything between us and an object is mediated by a thick layer of air which distorts an image, i.e. that everything is mediated by a state of turbulence. And this became the beginning of a project that puts the ideal geometry of an architectural rendering in question. And in doing so, can you measure this turbulence? This is a capture of the movement of pixels across many frames looking at the previous video. And so in order to inject an image, sorry, an atmosphere inside of an image which we're currently working on, we build a device in the gallery, which is called a scintillator, which is a handmade telescope and a source of heat, which is the candle you see on the left, which needs a precise alignment according to the focal length of the mirror. And in between that setup, we are placing 35-millimeter slides of some renderings of forthcoming projects. And out of this setup, which is, I guess, hot off the press we're currently working on, is a way in which you can document the recording of atmosphere or, let's say, a kind of layer of reality on top of something as precise as an architectural image. And so to close, the project has become an excuse to comprehend context of increasingly massive amounts of information. And the role of this conjurer, or these two characters, the conjurer and the seer, is to adopt not just a method, but a character that produces a range of outputs. Typically, this only creates more questions, but above all, it produces a sense. And the origin of the word sense is direction. So thank you very much for your time. It's such a pleasure to see the work of you all and this kind of wild grouping of technology. But also that it's fantastic to have a window into the way that you think about your work and the way you produce your work, right? So this is opportunity. And when we have this kind of grouping together, you start to think about the relationships. So your practices are so thoughtful. And I also enjoy, which I think others do too, seeing studios in which you're working. So you kind of help us understand the context, like kind of the local context and also the context of your thinking. So I just wanted to say a couple things before we open it up to questions to the audience. One was that given this topic of technology, which is of course, you know, and the ubiquity of it and the context is that we could maybe all agree or not, I would say we might all agree that technology is not neutral, that it's not a neutral thing. And that was a question I wanted to ask you about, but maybe we'll open it up here too. And that material, because you all are working with this, also I would say material, materiality, whether it's the material, information material, whether it's a particular material, or whether it's this kind of context of materiality in a given place, like, so if we could also agree that material is not neutral, and that I was thinking that one of the things, or some of the things that your all work is dealing with also is context, whether it's the context of thinking of knowledge or information in this very broad context, or the context of the forest and the wood in which you're working in a very precise way with that material only, or the context with which you guys are working where you began to assemble those photographs and thinking about how this kind of local architecture and how you're putting those two things together and exposing a kind of seam often, the seam, it's this materiality of the seam, and maybe the seam is also something that you're all working with. So I just wanted to say those few things, but I also, to think about a context for speaking about the work here, and I wanna open it up because I know we're seriously over a schedule, and you guys have all been sitting for a long time before eating, so if there are questions. You're all positioned as representatives of technology as architects, and how you respond to the capacity of, I guess, technology and knowledge to both clarify thought and clarify intent, and also obfuscate that and confuse that by the burden and kind of overwhelming nature of data and knowledge at the moment. How does your practices operate between that spectrum of overabundance of knowledge and technology and data, and clarification of it? Give a quite short thought to that. Well, at least I could say that for us, the technology is not an end on itself, so we really like to work with these tools in order to be able to articulate rather complicated scenarios. And I would say it's also like a gate to see more things rather than the opposite. I would maybe answer it. Yeah, thank you. In our case, technology is always quite hands-on, used in a very direct relation to the project, so if we have, you always, for us, it's a challenge to also challenge the technology in a certain way to go beyond the standard. Usually, there's always a standard which is applied in building construction, and how do you challenge this the way technology is used, and you can see this in all the three projects in sometimes details like the coroner details, but also in the use of material, and also the misuse of material sometimes. Please, please, please, please. And I think there are obviously several aspects of technology. The one is that you can use it for, perhaps, have more possibilities in the building process, which is quite interesting. For example, the prefabricated wooden constructions, you have also kind of more freedom than in other systems, perhaps, and this is also not easy to handle that because then you have to find other reasons why you're doing something in a certain way, and the other thing is that for the sustainable buildings, in Germany, at least, we have a lot of technology to build in the buildings, and we are now trying to reduce all these technology. It's not really important to the building as in design aspects, because you mostly don't see these things, but you have to handle it, and it rises up the costs enormously, which is really kind of bad, and you always have to kind of repair these things, and after a few years, you are recognizing that doesn't really work properly, and things like that, and so now we try to make some building, for example, where we kind of handle it in a completely different way, and try to really reduce it and make low technology buildings, so. Like no ventilation, no heating system, or just a very simple heating system with... Things like that. So there's no hydraulic system anymore, so just how basic can you go using as least as much technology as possible? Because after 10 years or 15 years of monitoring all these systems, it became a little bit obvious that it doesn't work like the kind of numbers are, it's just a kind of a calculation, but it doesn't match with the reality. Andreas, did you? Yeah, well, thank you that the talks were really amazing, and they open many questions. One of them, and I'd like to ask specifically to Amon, because you had this reference to a number of books that have been very important. Rudovsky, of course, Architecture Without Architects, or the Beher's work at large, or Made in Tokyo, in which basically the relationship of practices with technology was very different in the way it was perceived through those studies. The first, also, Beher was very much about the technology in which designers, engineers, or developers were very much hands-on in the development of components, systems, whereas, for instance, Made in Tokyo is much more opportunistic, it's technology that was developed by others and was mobilized through a series of, from a position in which basically designers were not that much developing those components, and Rudovsky was talking of something different, like, my question is basically, what is the way you think, as practitioners, you have the possibility of relate to industry, or to the processes by which components, systems, are developed, not only, let's say, applied? Well, these references, or these books are, maybe they were also a little bit misleading because they are more references or models for our aim of observation. So, I can understand that, technology-wise, it's a totally different path, so. But, we still, like, Rudovsky, he's focusing on this simple construction, like the, let's call it more, authorless architecture, not architecture, without architect, but it's, in Germany, we are really, it's a very advanced building market, so technology is something which is massively sold, and so, we try to reduce it more, it's our aim and our project is to reduce this enormous technology amount, so, because the experience is that you don't build you don't make better architecture by incorporating more and more technology, so, it's just in some very specific corners and construction elements we use advanced technology, like the prefabrication or the misuse of material, but, like, all these heating systems and all this technology is not something that we are very interested in. It's interesting as well, following from this notion of the building systems, the idea that technology is there, we can use it, we can apply it, but for us, at least, as a thought, the idea of almost challenging, the idea of this comfortability, as you were mentioning before, that maybe you're thinking nowadays of consuming a space that has no heating, maybe, or no ventilation system, that for me is very interesting to see, yeah, to somehow find these sort of seams where the idea of comfortability or the idea of the convention can be, maybe, challenged or reconfigured. I might also just add, if I can. Sure, please. Yeah, I think it's interesting also teaching, which, I guess, by teaching, you kind of come into contact with a kind of emerging generation who have no pretense about what the point of using technology is. It's not really even a question. It's somehow something natural. And it's interesting also to look at the way in which architecture's relationship to technology, not just in how a building comes about, but also the forms which have kind of generated with respect to, say, certain kinds of software. And I guess for us this, what we kind of term a sort of naturalizing process with respect to technology, obviously these things are somehow polar opposites, nature and technology, but nevertheless, deciding when and how to use something and almost respective of understanding what architecture does with technology, that if we could make decisions based on what is the most effective way we can use technology at one point, or how can a certain output using technology be relevant for the certain thing that you need to achieve? I guess it sounds kind of abstract, but somehow, given the fact that technology is such a given, then I think everything's in question as well. I was thinking that also, I mean, in all of your work, so the question of the dialectic or this kind of opposition all comes up in your work, but also constraints in which, whether it's this, you said a comprehension spur where you're kind of trying to gather all this information as a way to spur ideas, but the free sheets that you used in the studio or the constraint of just using the one material or just this question of how do I resolve a connection? And not even talking about the rules, all these rules that came up last with David's discussion about sustainability or the kind of constraints, the governmental constraints that you're referring to in sustainability. So, I mean, so this topic here of technology, which seems, we kind of think we know it, but actually I think what you guys are exposing, I think to me or to us is this other side of it that when you say it's more natural or not the ubiquity of it, but a kind of given that you're undermining in another way. So anyway, thank you and thank you guys.