 We decided to open the other architects tonight, collaboration with the CCA and Giovanna Morenzi, the creator of the particular. I think it's a very self-serving exhibition because most of us would die and to go to Montreal to see it, and didn't make it, so we just decided to bring it here. One of the things that is very special about the exhibition is that Giovanna decided not to cut anyone or anything but rather to find a way to edit and compress so that everything will compress as it is at all. And I think just that is an incredible exercise to learn to engage with. I also think that it's such a fantastic first collaboration. I mean, we are a school that sort of prides itself in always pushing the boundaries of the discipline, of practice, of trying to find new words of practice and do that with new forms of knowledge. And to look at that legacy sort of all there in one room is really kind of both interesting and important. And so I hope one of the things we can reflect on today in the conversation is this question of legacy. There is now a kind of thickened body of work, of practices, of history, of all that kind of research and to be able to reflect on the successes, the failures, what have you introduced, what are the artifacts, what are the mediums, et cetera. The other question I think that emerges in really interesting ways is the question of the engagement of the real in the city and what does that mean? It's really interesting to see how we always talk about how can schools, how can practices engage more deeply with the real and hear about the examples and again, successes and failures. So how can we think about this notion of engaging the real again today in relation to that body of work? The question of expanded practice and how these architects are trying to find, to open new territories for architecture, for intervention, for ways of thinking and what an expanded practice can mean today in light of that show. And the question of research, I think the title of today's talk is the Conversation of Search and Research. And we are a research university and yet I can assure you that most of what we do doesn't often constitute research according to scholarly measurements. And yet we are constantly searching and researching. And so to question that term, is it really the accurate term? And then Giovanna proposes search in a way that it's much more akin to creative practice. There's a kind of collage, intuitive way of moving through research that is quite different from quality or scientific practice. And to get it really as a kind of creative practice. And then maybe the last point is one of the interesting aspect from Giuseppe's perspective, and I see David's smiling at the audience. David is here. David is the Assistant Director of Urban Design. David said, when you look at this body of work, the disciplines kind of undo themselves. The urban designers, architects, planners, I had this thought that the other architects, the planner, a lot of these methods are shared. And I think we kind of come together at the beginning around these questions of search and research and then sort of separate. So to think about this level, this question of expertise and boundaries and how they manifest themselves or not in this kind of work. And then the last question would be to think about the future of that kind of work. You know, are we at a moment of reflection where there's a kind of attraction or expansion or how is it different to think about what's happening today? So to kind of help us think through some of these questions and more, Giovanna Borasi will be joining you in the conversation. She's, of course, the chief curator at the CCA and created the exhibition, The Other Architect, Kedavari Borasi, who will be playing a few of you in the window, Professor of Professional Practice in Architecture and Barter College. Her research practice revolves around new media and organization. Kedavari, very, very honored to have been here today. He's the Dean of the School of Architecture at the Hoover Union and the principal Boston-based architecture from NADO, where design is driven by the search for new forms of knowledge in the performance buildings. Matthew Buckingham, neighbor, that we don't see enough, is the chair of the Visual Arts Program in the School of Visual Art. Longyear, utilizing photography, film, video, audio, writing, and drawing as we're impression of the role of the social memory base of contemporary life. Last but not least, the designer of the exhibition, the architect, who designed both the large room, expanded version, and then adapted for our intimate space here, Michael Merdick, principal and co-founder of the Hilary Sample of the New York-based building, Los. Their practice is characterized by a major approach to research and independent exploration of materials and methods. So this will be quite formal. We'll ask everyone to step up, give us a short presentation and then we'll have a conversation, hopefully, with the audience over here as well. Joanna, would you like to start? Unless you guys prefer, I think, everything ready. This is who I've been here. I'm Samale for starting in a kind of real way, this collaboration with the great manager, I'm Samale, CCA and NUGIA, working together and I'm very happy that this is being the first real sign of this. And as you say, it was just the first one. And for us, it's very important because obviously for us, it's a very different change of public. We tend to imagine that at the CCA we have a public and we speak, obviously, it's maybe the same but it's also a general public and it's here, I'm sure it's more focused and taking more, so we're very happy to be able to work with them on this too. So I hope that, well, you will see the show, so I want to speak too much about the exhibition, but I hope I will continue in this life with the idea of today's research and research. So I'm going to start with these two images that are coming from our website and this is the current splash page and it's kind of irony in this image and the context that is over-imposed is a field of intellectual research and then you see the scene of the student capital and I'm excited about this, under this inflatable building and in fact, the quote that is that your intellectual research comes actually from documents in your capital city price and this is part of this research on inflatable buildings and you will see some of this in the exhibition but the idea that somehow the research that started with this group that the three prize put together with the engineer in the sixties asked it actually from the British government to really carry thorough research on inflatable building and pneumatic building and so on started really also with a simple gathering like pre-internet idea of like gathering other examples other like what is the status of this inflatable building and they go from photos of the military structure to more kind of big, large, mundane things so this I will say and so this is the other image page we have in our website that this is a real search and this is one of the things that we have worked on in the last years is this idea that can actually search our institution in its entirety and so you don't search anymore only in the collection you search in everything that is kind of the system environment so in whatever you type there you will find a book, a lecture the person has given if something has appeared in the exhibition or participated in family programs, everything and so on so the idea of the search is not anymore just searching in the collection but it's searching in this kind of living institutional type that is being started so these two images from here are kind of like the evidence is two attitudes that are not to be very different somehow this search is even if we're not used so obviously Google system is linked to a database so somehow whatever you will search here someone has actually organized it in a certain way and so whatever you will find is always because as I said it was named in that way or was organized by someone so somehow it's like searching in a kind of structure that is defined by someone and what I find refreshing of this is that in reality this other way of researching is actually more interesting to me because that's this spontaneity or intuition of constructing a kind of intellectual connection or other connection like this are also and this database can not provide to us so I think the work I'm trying to do as CCA and I think it's also in the exhibition it's really about using this kind of double system and then it's going in kind of organizing information and also deconstructing organizing information to create another source or another and like the construction around these things. CCA in the way we kind of define the institution in this moment as a research museum so everything is actually very driven from research and that's what the challenge we have in when we collect and we collect our files or anything for the collection and also in this new perspective where everything that we do is becoming researchable so also every lecture we do become part of the archive and so we all become very conscious in what we do because this will also impact as a smaller research that will be done using our collection in the next year. So the main discussion we have now is like what is important to keep now that it's relevant for let's say all this audience that will want to come to our research system in the next years. So one of the main interests for me in doing this exhibition was also about showing these different research methods and how these people came about to produce content. Using a very different approach, very different attitude and somehow coming back to your point a model of this interest, like all these groups that have a very specific interest and I mean a city or can be other, what is the vocation, how are you and then had a kind of focus research that is in, somehow I understand if I'm an architect or an academic so I will do research in a certain way that you actually have a kind of, besides school, in what you are looking for before you create the tools and the way you will have to find, you're finding the research to arrive at that kind of result and so I think the selection we have done in the city is about a very negative way of using different tools using different, all kind of, you know, a past or can be a way of understanding how the city is, maybe it's a TV series that you'll have to make people participating in a project, maybe it is you know, it's a tour with his family to visit all the comments here in North America to understand different idea of social connection and so on so it's also, for me, wants to be also refreshing ideas about also not only the idea that architecture expands the field but also using all kind of possible tools to arrive to a completely different result so I think that is about all of these things and there are many more things to say the presence here, the politicians everything is always very inspiring all the very many projects that are some of those that have been falling over the years to see them across the group here so we were all asked to present or potentially talk about a study from our projects I guess to talk about this question of the other architect and so I think that while going through some of the descriptions of the exhibition and the kind of documents of course the world keeps appearing again and again and you know so the work is beyond building beyond building something that I feel like is the kind of unopening of a lot of the projects that are presented here but also some of the descriptions that I saw on the website and some of the things I read so I am going to come back to what's on the screen but just for the kind of our discussion today the term actually I want to add to it and perhaps it's already there I don't know maybe you can tell me how architect unbuilds and I like this kind of notion of unbuilds as the sort of idea of unbuilding not just as demolishing although I think if you look up on the Google search or even the dictionary definition unbuilding is always this usually associated with demolishing but it's also associated with dismantling taking things apart unbuilding really is kind of a productive strategy unbuilding to really reconstruct unbuild to reconstruct something else so this is the idea I kind of want to put forward as a notion of what can that mean I think the other architects are always defining and redefining architecture through a lot of the different parts that are already part of this exhibit and I'm going to add kind of unbuilding as another that needs to be redefined I don't necessarily know that actually you know what that means but I think that also it connects to this idea that Amal already mentioned in her introduction is this engagement with the real so this sort of I think the idea of unbuilding also connects to that and so I'll come back to this project in a minute but building is something we can do a lot about it also an advocacy group that I founded with Amal Wilson called Who Builds Your Architecture and this was already made an appearance in the show and I think there's also a video of my collaborators Amal Wilson and Jordan Carver discussing our work with Who Builds Your Architecture so hopefully people here will have a chance to see that so I'm not going to talk about that but what I wanted to talk about was a project that has been kind of on the back burner for me and has sort of started again this summer and the project is called Drawn to Redraw and it's in collaboration also with me who did Dixit who's another organ tech supporting Amal in New York so the two events you saw these are actually very long 20-foot coins and therefore you see their compressed versions here not so clear but I think as I go through it and there are just a few slides it hopefully will become apparent so Drawn to Redraw is an existing work of architecture making apparent histories otherwise hidden, obfuscated or ignored by extending the adjusting by extending and adjusting the formal and spatial logic of the project at hand the resulting drawings played with the design of the original radically alternate course the first project, if you haven't already guessed is the 9-Eleven Memorial so the top things that are cutting off are the top two square pools of the 9-Eleven Memorial that are based on the footprints of the World Trade Center that came down the Twin Towers in that memorial the names of the dead from 9-Eleven attacks the memorials at Ground Zero in a closed loop this is the week of the light we should perhaps be thinking about all of this again the memorial is redrawn in this project the memorial is redrawn and expanded to include names of Afghan, American and Iraqi casualties both civilian and military on the 2003 US invasion of Iraq the names are assembled placing the perimeter of the memorial and extending underneath them so this whole spiral of names is imagined as a continuation of the existing memorial going underneath the first tower, tower one the first spiral the American names line the floor while those Iraqi casualties are on the ceiling as of the day destroying a few months back the American names being yellow you can see it this year the American military in yellow reach five levels down and Iraqi names in sign extend down to 14 levels in the second tower the American names under the fruiting of the second spiral are similar as to tower one this is the one here but in this case the American names are limited to the American military personnel killed in Afghanistan war and the anonymous names of the Afghan dead lying the ceiling of the second spiral because the names of the Afghan casualties are even less clearly known than the Iraqi civilians the individual names are entirely replaced by the anonymity of numbers so this second spiral all the blue what you see is actually the numbers spelled down in Arabic from one duty for discounting the dead and it's kind of an infinite loop where the names can always be added we can talk later about Arabic why not Pashto, Dari, etc but right now you're in Arabic so this year you can see the American names from the ground the Iraqis on the ceiling and then there's just a little from at six I have all the paragraphs while the site has been under construction and one thing I kept going back due to this little sign that has been there for a long time I think it's still there go ahead and check maybe in about six months or so but here you see this error as well as the financial center pointing up at 9-11 Memorial pointing down and if you walk around the site you'll see lots of confusion about all sorts of things people were visiting the 9-11 Memorial and here the left arrow is actually for the rest and 9-11 Memorial is for the east but of course the 9-11 so there's all sorts of confusion and I have lots of recordings and so on that kind of play like just speaking of the second project in the series is around Hall of Nations which is a structure designed by Raj Shrivall in private method which is progress which means progress grounds in New Delhi and this project began also with the news and the petition that was circulated as these projects are going to be demolished soon hopefully not but they are actually right now the government has alluded to redevelopment plan and they're going to be replaced with a world-class convention center these iconic projects developed as I mentioned design by Raj Shrivall they were completed in 1972 for Asia-72 International Trade Fair the project was selected from an architectural competition this is a more recent photograph these iconic structures are built with concrete space frame there are square plans that are different sizes, modules that were initially designed that would be expanded and added to us as needed the structures are also well known for the hand-cored cast of site concrete space frame steel members at that time too expensive for the government even steel joints when are possible so building a kind of a space frame and hand-cored concrete is quite a feat so this space frame allows the clear span of almost 80 meters height varies from 3 meters to 30 meters designed as a whole for display of various objects such as books, tractors bulldozers, aircrafts, trains there really isn't a record of war with the exhibitions that were displayed in these halls where the scale of it is incredible and I think that it's you know, right now they are really underused and not just lying empty and you will see the last time I heard the redevelopment plan is going ahead they are scheduled to be demolished but I continue the project again with drawing and redrawing of this structure I don't know where it's going you'll see where it leads one of the things I'm really interested in is actually making physical models and taking the sort of casting idea the idea that have you then to build a new kind of forms of small models that are repeating the sort of idea of casting in concrete and then kind of making them again so I just have I'm not sure if it really connects to some of the things you're talking about but I wanted to use this as a case study of a project that's very much in progress in spirit of the exhibition that just shows also documents, sketches, letters, diagrams that are associated with all different projects but I do hope we can also discuss unbuilding as a more general term but also as an active one an active one that redefines works of architecture and I want to add my thanks to Amal and everyone Gisa it's very nice to be visiting from just a few steps away I thought for the question of research in visual art while it's been quite present if it's always been examined in the most rigorous or interesting ways and pairing it with search and research this kind of relay I think is one way to start a more invested examination of what is entailed in so called artistic research and I'll just start with I thought it to you and selected what I want to present in terms of methodology primarily and I decided I would quickly show you flip through an artist book that I made a few years ago when I was invited to do a project at the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa I am from Iowa and the Des Moines Art Center was growing up for me this was the art museum it was the only one I really knew until later when I made it to Chicago in Minneapolis but still within the Midwest circuit and it's an interesting situation there which I didn't realize of course as a child and going back as an adult and then being invited to do a survey exhibition there a lot of things became very clear to me working inside the institution it's architecturally interesting it's a three part museum of almost equal proportions between the original Sarin building for 1948 I am pay edition from the 60s and then Richard Meyer edition from the 80s I think I had the dating and as I began utilizing my own experience with the institution and the museum several questions that I do try to work with in most of my work about the status of art came to mind especially the institutional role of caretaking and how if we maybe could all agree on the kind of provisional definition of our very basic premise that art could be anything that we designate and use as such and of course art institutions have a certain gravity in that in that dynamic and I at the same time when this invitation came I was also teaching for a time in Sweden in the city of Malmö making regular visits there over a quite long period working with the same group of small small group of students and one day when I was wandering around the city I came across a copy of a sculpture that I recognized from the Domboye Arts Club I hadn't seen it there and you see it here this is the cover of the artist book that I made you can sort of see it in the background with a lot of angle it's a sculpture by Carl Millis called Pegasus and Man we're looking up the rump of the the horse the flying horse Pegasus there in the outdoor cafe area in a photograph from the early 1980s again doing research at the museum and I often work with directly with language recorded language in my work but I started thinking about deliberately working outside of language and the proposition of triggering language with this publication so marginalizing the written word literally in the book and thinking about how to approach the museum from inside from inside the archive to try to tease out some of the struggles and commitments of let's say defining art on a practical level and also this question of taking care so let me just begin moving through the book quickly here's an illustration of the sculpture that is used by the Des Moines Arts Center library as a book plate opposite one of the early homes of the Des Moines Arts Center which was founded in 1916 already in the end paper of the book that I produced I was interested in this question of flight obviously this fantasy of flight in the myth of Pegasus of course man or Belarophon is falling he's about to fall get to that a little bit later but then also the way into the original fairly provisional white scrappy looking art museum this ascension of this wooden staircase in what looks like a side alley perhaps improbable horse I'll get to that in a few minutes but when I came across this phrase I immediately decided that would be a good framework for talking about this set of conditions Pegasus of course ends up in the stars in the movement as the configuration of the constellation of Pegasus so I began there and now I'm just going to move through and stop every now and then with a few words playing off of a kind of terribly subjective free association of what I found in the Des Moines Arts Center requesting everything that I that could be found that had a connection with the sculpture by Carlos the model and one elevation of the serenade in the 1948 Serenade building in which different Carlos sculpture they were friends at Cranbrook Carlos had been spent from Sweden some years before the sculpture in the workshop at Cranbrook in its before its cast and cast and then sent a portrait on a company of some of the publicity around the sculpture and now spent in the newspaper along with the funding and the source of funding and the gift after the opening of the new building dispute among the board of directors around the acquisition of works led to the resignation of the first director in the new space he was only there a few months here were inside the new building looking at the empty pool where the Carlos would go dispute in the newspaper and then the arrival of the sculpture by this time in the chronology what started to interest me was the way that it became kind of a sign of the museum and even of the idea of art and modern art of a certain type in Iowa and then in Time Magazine in 1949 there was a brief review of the sculpture after it was installed of course this is where the reviewer labeled it an improbable course events and exhibitions one of which is the dilettante exhibition exhibition of work by Des Moines a quote of colored artists in this exhibition that says was held in the corridors and then connected to a description or an announcement of that exhibition in the Des Moines one of the African American newspapers then published in Des Moines I am a bystander a new director who I discovered had had in Sweden fascist paintings of which there are still a few traces in Stockholm particularly this sculpture which is actually used by the Nazis as a meeting point in the city of Stockholm where it was at the time that I was working on this project back to Iowa the pedagogical dimension of the museum and then I was quite happy to see the folks in their waiting pool because this was a snapshot of someone anonymously donated to the museum and taking a dip and also had a similar arrangement of figures at the Metropolitan Museum in the interior reflecting pool which features prominently in the mixed up files of Mrs. Bailey Frank Weiler and the children take a bath in that reflective pool cleaning the pool around the time the second life was in discussion this idea of flight and then also another carmelous sculpture or fountain with a figure on an arch which is remarkably similar to Sarin's son's St. Louis arch or ephemera concerning sculpture and then the discovery of copies of this sculpture in other parts of the world and then dispute over how many exist and a controversy about putting under underwear on a figure and then actually this telephone that was kind of one of the things that made me want to work on this project I'll just read it it's difficult to read anyway while you were out to Jessica from Linda King's Secretariat regarding Anne Richardson of Carlson Company Incorporated Minneapolis specifically coming to DeWine Arch Center to see the Pegasus sculpture would like to be met by someone who is very knowledgeable about this piece will not come here tomorrow if no one to meet her needs to make a plane reservation call her back soon just this notion of someone without explaining why needing to make flight to see a sculpture and then and then most recently the question of the sculpture's physicality and preservation the sculpture went through a series of x-rays it was determined it was nearly about to collapse and it corroded inside several year project was undertaken to rescue it and so on and back to DeWine Arch Center and then at the end this sort of captionless project acknowledges the sources of of all the images and lets them co-exist here at the back of the board and early sketch of the museum I'll save the rest of my thoughts and comments for the panelists question thank you very much the construction was not prevalent we set our eyes on what we could call a search for jobs in the form of research through the agency of building the fundamental divorce between the construction industry by way of a separation of the means and methods one could also call in a way projects of representation to be located in a kind of moment of research or a focal point of means and methods for the MOMA project for instance our task was to speak to the institution of art and in that sense the installation of full scale of applications for the fabrication that show grinding one of us to speak to the construction industry about plumb what is true what is right on the one hand but also in some way inflect on a history of art if you like the painting through the construction of perspective and a flash of the canvas that ensues somewhat later and so this project in part escapes the building industry to invent a new means and methods of stitching a joint by way of laser cutting something quite standard right now but in the 90s was a different way at that moment to look into computational abilities and in this case what if you like is composed of many customized pieces is calibrated around the flatness of perception and the possibility of overcoming the tolerances that would normally normally be associated with this now what I like about a discussion about means and methods is also the way which are focused on materiality as the basis for both research and action implicates acts of drawing in this project once we understand the structural manabilitity of corrugation on one axis in distinction with its structural rigidity on the other vertical we also begin to see that a skin surface contains space within it but we also understand through this drawing that drawing and architecture is not merely illustrative it's not pictorial it's always already an act of construction and so here research is located at the intersection of the construction of perception on the one hand and the construction literally of building in looking at the illusions and the electronics that we set up I have this dichotomy of figuration on the left and configuration on the right where in the left marks of construction are smoothed over whereas on the right the configurative practice if you like acknowledges the unit of construction as the seed as the foundation of any act of construction in this riff on the certainty of University of Virginia what we did effectively was to study the water line effectively expanding and contracting the three eighths dimension dimension to expand it kind of expandable a variable bond and then allow the logic of brick it's quarreling to produce a ruled surface that gives it the ample depth to give it structural and lateral stability and so in this narrative the the agency of structure is expanded by the possibility of light and air conditioning of course the next this research which for my generation was quite important not maybe for yours was that we had to learn how to draw all over again because we didn't know how to script and we realized that all that we had done by hand was almost in vain and ridiculous and so retooling ourselves enabled us to also think differently as we began to think not nearly visually but through code most of you have already skipped over that point the separation of course between the construction industry and ourselves was discovered here in a job that had a budget of 250,000 dollars this hookah den of which came in at 200,000 dollars leaving us 50,000 dollars for the rest of the 6,000 square feet of project and innocent that we were we had no idea why would this cost 200,000 dollars and of course like you will today we essentially took the project apart figured out a way to build it by taking the coin sticking it on the ceiling suspending plumbobs and realizing that we've built it in less than 30 days for 30,000 dollars with a profit etc. you know the story so effectively getting around effectively thinking of the construction industry as a central part of the research is a riddle that gets much more interesting when we get to the large scale particularly when you're dealing with systems of mechanical engineering and suspended floors and building industry algorithms that are so overwhelming and essentially killing architecture so now there is another aspect of anyone's research which has to do with the obsessions that we operate with and somehow as you look at the history of architecture you come to appreciate the the kind of inversions of perception when you look at the suspension of Caesar structure though not in fact but obviously in concrete the way that structure similarly is suspended but also programmable in the hands of Khan the way in which suspension is optimized by figures like Gaudi rotated to make the arch and how that has become computationally so much more effective with the tools that we have today and then looking at some of the great works of history this is the flat arch of a square yard in case you don't recognize it compressed because the dome is actually not allowed to go higher the church is literally on top of it so what's happening in this image which looks quite benign in fact is that the keystone that we have in the center of the office is constantly getting displaced until it comes to the ground for the project of the compressive capillary wanted to see what would happen if we inverted the project and needed to also invert the keystone as a way of suspending the structure here with high density foam and a great amount of weight for this installation that again like some of the other installations is composed with a series of systemic arts and yet stretched over a site-specific scenario as you enter the exhibit space at the BSA in Boston and effectively becomes a structure that appears of course to be light and in suspension of a compressive structure and potentially something that could be stood on as it supports here and the center piece that we like is evacuated in view of in view of a reward the projects of course and these are not linear so you can think that these obsessions may kind of bounce around through time but in the Inman building in Georgia Tech we were given a high base structure and in large part the potential of the project really had to do with how you ruin the space inside it was already a great building but we realized that this would be an infrastructural project that is that there are certain wiring that would give flexibility to the ground but if you think of the roof and the gantry frames as the foundation that in turn that could become the element of suspension and through an extension of the logic of the the skeleton of the space could become the mechanism by which the project is unleashed similarly at the Melbourne University through under very different circumstances through a studio space that was never afforded by that school the idea of tilting up what we know as flat studio spaces into a vertical section the transformation of the invited studios the guest studios into this suspended obelisk that is an extension of the roof of that building the tectonics of that now bringing the material explorations back to the obsession of suspension and includes a covered ceiling spanning about 22 meters composed of LVL LVL construction system lateral embrace with triangulated coffers that bring in southern light indirect light in the Melbourne and then through massive timber begins to thin out into veneers as it is suspended effectively a wood construction that locks into place very much like the the catenary the suspended catenary that I just showed in that project the logic of the construction industry worked in our favor a novation project that very much supported our efforts prefabricated the entire project and delivered it in 18 months versus 24 months these maybe are less important in this context but in fact quite important as an aspect of research that delivers on this tectonic transformation that starts heavy above a massive relationship to the light and then then it comes down to the veneer another form of coffered ceiling for the seminar space below with these thin baffles the Toronto project currently under construction is not so much related to that but is related to this idea of double dipping or projects that draw in the logic of illumination spanning and the hydrology of the building the entire building comes down to this one moment the studio space at the very top of the building that effectively produces the studio space that is hovering over the city I won't go too deeply into that video but effectively the promise of this space with this structural logic much like the first and fourth bridge where two cantilevers kind of kiss each other at the centre and enable them not only not to have columns in the middle but no drain into the centre so all of the the water on the roof is going to the sides like with everything in the world it is not affordable it is not buildable and it's something that is about to be rejected when we suggested that we build it inside of our studio and so the logic of these fabrications take on a bigger application as we do it around in our wood shop demonstrating that the ruled surface is effectively a series of straight lines and that not only can you put chipboard in there but the radiant environmental system as part of it and then all of this enables the drainage system to come down and irrigate the landscape and finally just to go back to our research on materials and maybe where we stand today if we have invested in 20 years of identifying the logic of the construction in the industry on the one hand and material logic that aggregate and break down in accordance with the industrial standards of 4x8 sheets, bricks and so forth we were finally confronted with the project that is liquid and that is concrete where it's either the formwork in pre-construction that gives it its expression or a post doctoring of that work that impacts the way that it looks at Paul Rudolf in a simple house that is a donut a courtyard that is on the side of a hill essentially this project is about establishing the most advantageous relationships to the views to the sites and containing a private space in between and two wings of which interlock at these two corners and typologically make a donut that is continuous producing a monumental archway as a landscape feature that goes in through the building now the other side but a front wall on the upper right-hand side that is the main entry of the building with this massive concrete beam effectively that cantilevers out over the entry the reason I'm showing you this actually goes back to two monalities of research that we were interested in and how to formulate ideas about concrete knowing fully well a history of very interesting construction and formwork that even lives on until today the first one has to do with one's computational abilities to produce optimal formwork that can represent in the classical sense that you produce from the smoothness of concrete from its liquid state into a form of rustication to manifest the depth and the weight of that concrete that's philosophically one modality of research completely different than this other one smoothness of the interior gives way to cast elements of aggregate and that aggregate becomes the constitution of that concrete wall and as it escapes the building and goes into the landscape effectively changes the constitution of that aggregate to become the very stone walls of the property lines in France these two projects coming together in one building I ended with these three images innocently some 30-40 years ago I discovered on my in the Rome program why Roman streets look like the way they do I didn't understand why they were arched until I realized that somebody has to build this and the reach of their arm is really an index of its construction system and to think that for over 2,000 years even what we're doing today as we tag is effectively the same at least conceptually but something is happening right now in the context of the nanoscale of we say research and materiality and the reconstitution or the eradication of the structural unit and the construction through 3D printing where all of a sudden the denominations that we conceive of buildings in terms of different building performance elements and the kind of construction lines that we assume come in building blocks maybe eradicated if we can come around to address these issues then everything I've presented to you so far will become well, thank you let's say since 2000s as we witnessed a kind of double history over theory and technology over design models of working and thinking sort of reinforced themselves I would say nowadays kind of different point where both maybe as technology is in doubt technology as a progressive project I think is in crisis at some level it's all show so keep that in mind this is a technology without parametric or coding or science of the scientific project and architecture which displace the idea of design history is not just to show two projects that we do in the office one is these reproductions we worked on fake reproductions in a way of other people's designs so this is supposedly a scented candle designed by Adolf Loos and then we will write a story about the kind of history of it which some of which is is true in some of it isn't and sort of playing with disciplinary history so Loos and Rothman are always a kind of split in the field for you gotta choose and we sort of collapse into some other space and the other one I'll just show some software effect on the rear back and using other people's computers so let's say software stuff so we also work at the same time and think relatively early on with projects in coding and using video game physics engines through processing to sort of make so we would watch something briefly against from the background to sort of playing with games or just throwing games into bin and producing form with that kind of almost childish kind of act kind of almost really dumb using very sophisticated technology to be very dumb so this should sort of show a kind of maybe just show those two projects because the website and as a kind of way to think about this problem where we're at are we in the midst of it still or are we at a moment where let's say this kind of machine anatomy where both the strange partnership between technology and history which is maybe not explicit and maybe not even intentional has reinforced each other and we're both I think are enough to know about being rethought Response, not a direct response to everybody's even though all of your work in practice is obviously quite different but the fact that search goes through drawing and all of your kind of practices whether it's visualization of making the invisible visited memorial for the book et cetera I think the notion of this kind of your beautiful book is a kind of drawing of free association of collaging all these moments together and Giovanna a curator is also drawing these connections between pieces and parts and texts and stories and kind of visual documentation and obviously in your practice especially the line becomes a full very literally and you talked about this kind of drawing as a kind of form of research connecting very literally to kind of construction and I think your visualizations are obviously a kind of form of search and research so the drawing cuts across and and in various forms also this kind of engagement with the real whether it's the material realities of building and construction the politics of memory and actual life and death and your kind of everything is research or your daily notes this is a beautiful story someone is going to take the plane so this is a very clear sense of reality and the last is following on this notion of free association that Matthew has it's free association in general there's a kind of fictional quality to the searches and researches that that maybe kind of going back to my initial question in a research university we claim to do research and yet it fails to to kind of meet the criteria of actual evidence and scientific research and etc. and yet it produces its own realities and so maybe to sort of connect a little bit the exhibition to your engines of this kind of research as fiction, as creative practice, as a free association that opens up sort of new possibilities rather than kind of very and the way you created you said I'm an architect before being an historian and so the way you did the research for the show would be very different from a historian's perspective on the archive so research is kind of fiction just to start the conversation because I think that word is very problematic let's say I wish we could leave with a different word maybe because of its history or because of its actual meanings and other practices of disciplines well I think also the there are a few elements, one of the things that for me was important also in the research of the show but really thinking also whether it was research is also where it's done according to what it is and I think the world obsession that modern use is actually fundamental you think like what is also the motive and the engine of sort of research but sometimes I also think it's really where it is done and I understand being in the search universities you are in the university so somehow the fact that many of the cases we present were actually created another entity and kind of maybe that was a way of liberating some of the space to say well then you can do different research because you create a kind of different space at the same time so that's also sometimes I wonder if the search has to be academic because it's done in the academia and before it's looked into that eyes or it would be done in a different place or then be seen differently. So I think the issue of value for me only carries the research but how actually where is done is quite important and this well in the idea of obsession that I found really as an art that connects to I think he's also an academic researcher that continues I think it's fundamental to qualify this more research or a search somehow that this kind of engine that continues to improve for that in many different formats maybe I can just introduce something rather conventional into the conversation because I I've moved Cooper very recently but the environment from which I came at least as an interpreter in those MIT where contrary to all of the ambiguities about what we're doing right now they had a very, very clear idea of what they were talking about and that is what the designer in the context of the School of Architecture the historians have had an incredibly clear set of criteria around which research is done with primary sources, secondary sources, archival research and an even institution in the way that you get tenure, the structure on which you write articles, books and so forth is very well learned on the other sides of the aisle the sciences, the School of Engineering also have a very clear sense of what they're doing because no matter where you are but let's say in civil or structural notions about metrics optimization and iteration of certain experiments become the benchmarks of evaluation in that context it happens to be not books but peer-reviewed scientific journals that become the basis for advancement and so forth but in all of these years I was there they couldn't get it right with the designers which not only describes how either they didn't get tenure but nobody knew how to develop the language around which cultural speculation happens which also is more on the lines of what I think you were trying to say between history technology and those things which have to do with scientific situations that architects do which are constructions part reality, part fiction but I don't think that in a way we have come to terms with what constitutes research in any with the kind of codification of some of these I wonder what you do here or in other institutions well I think this exhibition would demonstrate that probably we shouldn't and in this an age where kind of design thinking and this kind of speculative pre-association kind of creative thinking is becoming sort of appropriated by other disciplines in the field I think it's actually a moment to revert a little bit to kind of turn on tables about and suggest that this kind of speculative sometimes projective is actually something that you know it's I think the exhibition demonstrate that it's in front of the rich to situate oneself kind of outside let's say that's different because it's discursive so it produces debates it produces questions in a world where proof there's no proof in the not a single proof the question is what constitutes disciplinarity revert back to the classical foundation of certain forms of representation I think I'm seeing questions sorry it's a good question in the sense that we are at a point where humanities for example are not being supported the kind of research on what are working on brands and stuff especially with the context of academia because it doesn't have these metrics of what is it going to be but I mean how do you do it or that you sort of have to in any kind of humanities or social arts you know you are asked to define what you're going to produce at the end I think within the university that's something that really happens from the top of it your work is supported for the research you will do not necessarily what you are going to use at the end or what is the kind of and I think that that is and especially in architecture because I think this exhibit shows I think in many different ways the kind of range of even small interventions potentially can have a large impact as a kind of a cultural question or a cultural practice so I think that I mean at least in our research in academia I think people are you know trying to settle what about you know what are we talking about in arts and sciences so certainly in this university there has to be a lot of talk about what does it mean to do humanities or humanities the metrics that you know are used for engineering or science there is a different method that we use to do that I mean research seems to be downed up to some degree and not a very progressive object in the field so for me I do think that we're at a moment at least I feel it so it's not really arbitrary where let's say people the younger people put it in generational terms which I don't know why you do that but like then um the kids today I think that they don't believe that let's say technology has made things better or that like the event in a way that let's say that we have witnessed sustainability even if you think technology in a very broad sense the parametrics the computational models sustainability social media whatever it hasn't produced a utopian project it's produced a kind of dystopian and that's why models are lots of analysis that's why you see kids today like they'll take robots and they'll make piles of crap or something out of it you're using the most advanced technologies to produce things that just look like junkies or they're misusing history to the same anyway to the same ends to produce some sort of ad hoc you know thing that might not make any sense and there is a kind of there is at this moment a rethinking going on implicit in the field through like what kind of models are now viable I think all the realities all the stuff coexist and it just all keeps going but I think the most interesting models that are going on people that we're looking at there's a real rejection of technology like I have never seen views and part of the stuff is just personal and I go the way I was going to go forward like this kind of goodness in this first hand is you know the rise of painting again it's crazy to me you see more people bringing paintings back into studio to show it as a kind of compositional thing it could be a problem that we're going to form the other way as well like this rejection of technology could be too great so are you seeing painting coming back in the visual arts I think there's that perception although I think like the death of cinema it's been with us since the beginning but I think the reason that we ask those questions is because of our changing relationship but I think this question of knowledge that doesn't have clear metrics is a very interesting one in terms of asking ourselves what we're doing that's why I began with a sort of reminder that as you all did as well in your fields about artists being people who do always do research but in different ways as opposed to research as an aesthetic that's used where research is a subject in an artistic practice I'm probably guilty of both that back and forth is interesting to me I think also just coming back to the title of the panel today that reminder that research is a secondary search of some kind and even how I think that is is quite interesting to me about that we're looking for something and it's actually the action that is privileged and that's how I feel about the mix of what we can do as architects whether other architects are not they are the mix I think that is a very interesting question and I think it's also a problem of labels with institutional critique having had several iterations of formations that we associate with those moments and then there's always a problem of something sounded dated but I think something that's less considered is how institutions appear differently than they did at those other moments so it's it's not just a matter of going back to an older practice in terms but figuring out because I'm not sure what else there is other than institutional critique in navigating life at all levels so it's much more about figuring out how institutions have or haven't changed and how they appear to have changed and what those relationships are and I think that's also how I read even at our level in the classroom a lot of social and political questions that are influencing how we speak to each other in the classroom it's hard to speak about the other today only because not only is it a historical category but it's resonance at weight because of the hegemony of certain cultural consensus against which I've read in the context now after 30, 40 years where ideas of difference have been already absorbed and commodified and become part of everyday practice despite the radical conservatism of the world in which we live it means that the you know maybe the role of the image is not the same as it was 80 years ago the role of the building in the context of another fabric is no longer the same so it cannot operate in the same way I also added I thought it was really just to sort of link those two positive comments together I think it's really interesting about institutions there's one thing for me as you're saying that is that since one thing that's shifted is that everyone has become an institution we are all institutions individual as much and it's like we all have our social media accounts and whatever it is everyone has become an institution so even located in that institution our institutional fatigue has become a very fraught enterprise it's a very slippery one but I think at the same time it is and maybe this also is the weird about the dissolving from the other side in the context in the same time it's still there and we still do it so there's that one side where it's all very slippery and then at the same time every day we have architecture making decisions and we are making God a judgment so we are changing this and that and so it still exists despite everything but the limits to which you make those decisions don't need to be framed for the our God's judgment that there are other ways in which we are my sense in fact do you think I would just go across as a branding model man basically maybe I don't have enough distance for myself so you have to actually place this need within this conversation better but I mean I find ourselves deeply, profoundly influenced by institutions at least two of them one of them is the academy which in many cases has fundamental conservative things I'm speaking about for instance today now after a year I can speak more constantly about this so to say how to build research speculation and exploration where the school has such profound traditions that at one moment were highly experimental and speculative is it a question about what constitutes value and relevance in this moment of time in the media that we operate and against pressing questions that through which you can have a conversation with the world but I would see that in a symmetrical fashion to the practice that we do outside of the academy and admittedly I don't see that far a gap between what I do in school and what I do in the world is separating the world but I I cannot imagine a world in which I'm not totally invested in the institutions of the construction industry in the loopholes of patronage and the processes of building consensus when a client group has 50 heads excuse me I don't mean to trivialize this discussion but actually there are mechanisms that issues the institutional fatigue and the revolution of certain working models that occur without which in these discussions for you it goes back to the engagement with the real I mean the radical is to engage to conditions they rely not just on that as the real and this is not I mean it's productive about the other world that you're still this is palpable possibility to engage in a certain kind of warfare shall we engage with the exhibition thank you everyone