 I'm Felicity Scott, and it's my pleasure to welcome everybody here to the fourth Detlef Mountains lecture on the histories of modernity, an annual event hosted in memory of Detlef's life and his scholarly work, and which celebrates his avowed commitment to coupling academic rigor with an ethics of innovation or transformation, so with the belief that the architectural history is something that can change. So while evidence throughout the longer trajectory of his work, Detlef's historical project of seeking a type of open-endedness or an openness to the future is distinct from something like codifying cultural codes or norms, and the sense of urgency which attended much of his research was very clearly articulated in the introduction to his 2011 collection of essays, Modernity Unbound. His writings in the context of his introduction, within the ever unfolding context of modernity, he recalled and I'm quoting him, I came to focus on things that had been misunderstood or overlooked in the historical record and could therefore serve as mediators for new thought and design. The writing of architectural history can close down the past or open it up anew. It can bind historical experience into yet another ism or it can unlock the life of modernity that resides even in the modernisms we already have. So Detlef's major monograph on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, simply titled Mies, appeared posthumously in 2013 and it stands as a remarkable testament to how architectural historians might critically revisit the discipline's relation to modernity, even sometimes taking a canonical figure like Mies as an entry point, and it was on the occasion of the Mies book that we launched this series seeking to identify younger scholars whose research similarly seeks such critical openings, such enlivenings, and such a productive unsettling of the project of writing architectural history. So tonight, very delighted to be able to welcome and to introduce Ayala Levine to present the fourth lecture in this series. Ayala is currently assistant professor of architectural history within the Art History Department at Northwestern University, where her teaching and research focus on the history of architecture and urbanism in post-colonial, early post-independence sub-Saharan African states, and it's work that complicates in important and rigorous ways the field's extant narratives of modernity and of modernization, a point to which I'll come back when I finish. So prior to arriving at Northwestern, she was a fellow at the Princeton Mellon Initiative in architecture and urbanism and the humanities, an opportunity that she used to turn her already remarkable dissertation written here at Columbia into a book manuscript and the working title, I hope I have this right, Ayala, is exporting Zionism, question mark, Israeli architectural development aid in post-colonial Africa, 1958 to 1973. And in the intervening years between being here at Columbia and Princeton, she was part of a European Research Council project entitled Apartheid, the Global Itinerary at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, for which, among other things, she developed some really groundbreaking work on Julian Beynart, which was published in Architecture Beyond Europe under the title, and I quote here, basic design and the semiotics of citizenship, Julian Beynart's educational experiments and research on wall decoration in early 1960s Nigeria and South Africa. I cite this one because I've quoted it recently in my own work. It's a fantastic piece of research. Also appearing in that same journal is a punctual and I think quite seminal reflection on complicating global histories titled Beyond Global versus Local, tipping the scales of architectural historiography. It's a text also that I've assigned in a series of classes and I think is really exemplary of Ayala's talent in drawing out complex issues with a type of economy and clarity that is rare and extremely productive and very welcome. She has a series of other publications to her credit, which I won't go through, but these are ones I wanted to flag in this context. So Ayala has been invited to give this year's mountains lecture, not only on account of her outstanding and original scholarly research, but for the critical, methodological approach that she brings to bear on writing histories of architecture and urbanism, as we shall see tonight, I imagine. Ayala's research remains in a strong and knowing dialogue with extant histories of architecture's role in the violence of the European colonial enterprise and its aftermath in conferring modern identities to new nation states. But both in her reading of African-Israeli technical cooperation in sub-Saharan Africa and in a new project focused on North American claims to global expertise, again, in the context largely of Africa, she articulates complex, nuanced and multifaceted accounts of transnational exchange and of development that expand beyond east-west and north-south axes, opening up a variegated field of objects, of actors, of sites, of institutions and forms of knowledge that have informed and which continue to inform processes of modernization in the so-called global south. So that's an account then of her rigorous scholarship and her fine-grained research, but also, as I mentioned, her commitment to forging new and more inclusive frameworks for thinking about architecture and modernity, those in which other voices and other knowledge has come to visibility that we've invited her to be this year's mountains lecture. So finally, I want to thank my fellow committee members, Keller Easterling, Barry Bergdahl, Edward Dimenberg, and especially our sponsors of the Mertens family, at least Jaffe and Jeffrey Brown, who are here in the audience and Keller, and of course, Dean Andreas and the events team here at GSAP for continuing to ensure that this series remains an important event in the GSAP calendar and more generally, I think, as an annual lecture that celebrates innovative scholarship in architectural history. So please join me in welcoming Ayala to the podium. Hi. Thank you. I would like to start off by saying thank you, Felicity, for this generous introduction and how pleased and honored I am to come back here to GSAP, where most of my scholarship that I owe so much to has been foundational for my intellectual formation. And I'm also very honored to give this talk as part of the Deadlift Martin's lecture. In a way, I'm referring back to Lucia Ali's first inaugural lecture here four years ago, where she discussed and analyzed the UNESCO building FASAD as a device of global governance. So I continue this project in a sense of discussing the post-war global, globality of the corporate FASAD with this, by introducing actors that are peripheral to the hegemonic center, peripheral to the discourse people who have not produced theory and whose archives are really hard to excavate. And with a specific interest in climate and ornament, the relationship between the two. So I'll begin now. In the double spread of the opening pages of U.S.-based Hungarian emigre brothers, Victor and Aladar Olgé, 1957, solo control and shading devices, we find the juxtaposition of two FASADs, both situated in Rio. On the left, a mid-century modernist curtain wall, punctuated with vertical fins, and on the right, a Baroque building. Next to the images, an epigraph by Marcel Brauer reads, the sun-controlled device has to be on the outside of the building, an element of the FASAD, an element of architecture. And because this device is so important a part of our open architecture, it may develop into a choristica form as the Doric column. In this brief statement, Brauer displays the sun-shading device from the techno-scientific environmental discourse to recast it anew as a cultural achievement, compared no less to the epitome of classical architecture, the Doric column. Was Brauer and the Olgé's after him constituting the sun-shading device as a new order, a sort of post-war reprise similar to Le Corbusier's return to order in the wake of World War I? The Olgé's superimposition of Blondel's human profile on the facade of the Ministry of Health and Education in Rio, famous for its bristleet, further confirms this assertion. Through this recasting, the sun-shading device was now an architectural element equivalent to the classical order, and its cultural significance far exceeding its technical application. At stake in this new order was a universalism based on geographical specificity. For Brauer, this was not only the concern of southern countries with hot climate, where the sun-shading device had originally developed, as is evident by its own application of sun-shading devices in this campus architecture in Minnesota, St. John's University, and here in New York campus, NYU campus in the Bronx. Rather, it was a reaffirmation of the internationalism of modern architecture, at a time when it was challenged, contested by the geopolitical reorganization of a new world order, following the demise of the French and British colonial powers and the rise of new independent nations in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. As Blondel's profile suggests, the question of the sun-shading device is intimately linked to the concept of the human, or man's relationship with the environment, and the forms of post-war or post-colonial subjectivity it entailed. Taking my cue from Brauer and the Olgays, but not submitting to their vision of classical humanism, I would like to broaden the discussion to other forms of subjectivity the post-war discourse on architecture and its role in post-colonial social and economic development has instigated. By focusing on the Billion's scheme as a site where these relations were negotiated, this analysis bridges two seemingly disparate concerns in the history of modern architecture, climate and ornament, or biopolitics and aesthetic representation. In my talk today, I would like to address these issues by examining a project for original university in Nigeria, carried out by a team of Israeli architects starting in the early 60s, with consultation of landscape architects of the University of Wisconsin. In this story, the Israeli and American teams represent two distinct, although for the most part complementary, cultures of expertise. I examine how these cultures of expertise were brought to bear on the recent legacy of colonial rule, specifically its construct of tropicality and the troubled relationship between man and environment it was predicated upon. So here I'm referring to tropicality as in tropical architecture in British colonial discourse, rather than tropicality in Latin America, which was a self-affirmative rejection of or contestation of modern architecture coming from the south. Concept in 1960, in anticipation of Nigeria's independence, Nigeria became independent in October 60, and as part of original competition over the allocation of higher education in the country, Ife University was the Western Nigerian government's ground piece of independence. So this was the situation in Federal Nigeria in 1960, it was comprised of three regions, each with an independent, with an autonomous government. And Ife is located over here, close to Ibadan. So a Federal Committee, British-led Federal Committee decided to establish two regional universities, one in North Nigeria, one in East Nigeria, but not in the West, saying that because there is a Federal University in Ibadan and a new one is going to be established in Lagos, the Western Nigeria government does not need to establish a new regional university, but the Western government decided to move on their own and publish a white paper that refuted this commission's advice. So it initiated, it was initiated against the recommendation of a British-led committee, it was to present a post-colonial alternative to the neighboring University College Ibadan. So at the time, the University College Ibadan was the crown piece, the epitome of modernity in Nigeria. It was celebrated as the most modernist building complex in West Africa, perhaps, even. The problem that the university administration presented to the Israeli team, headed by Baez graduate Ari Sheron, was how to design a university, sorry, I will come back to this, how to design a university that would be both modern and decisively post-colonial. So University College Ibadan, if that was the image of modernity, how to be modern but not look like that? What would be that image of modernity that would be post-colonial? This problem was articulated specifically in relation to climate and university curriculum reform following the American Land Grant University model. Unlike University College Ibadan, which was established in 1948 by British colonial administration, following the Oxbridge model at the outskirts of a great metropolitan area, I remind you that Ibadan was bigger, larger than Lagos at the time, the University of Ife, much like the other two regional universities that were established immediately with independence, so in the democratic and rural settings of the American Land Grant University, with its emphasis on applied research in agriculture and technical fields, a better fitting model to cater for the immediate development needs of the region. The site chosen for the campus location next to the town of Ife was deemed appropriate and this is the town of Ife and it grew as a traditional town from the palace at the center radiantly and trickly. This is the university campus and here are the vast farmland that was given by the local chief. The site chosen for the campus location was deemed appropriate to fulfill this goal precisely for its semi-rural character and the vast agricultural land, Ife's uni, the local Yoruba King, made available for this purpose. So the land allocated here was 3,000 acres compared to the 500 acres in Ibadan. British colonial architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, who were responsible for the design of the University of Ibadan, envisioned the university as the epitome of the tropical architectural approach, which they had developed during their tenure as colonial officers in West Africa in the 40s and 50s. This body of knowledge derived from the colonial medical discourse on tropical disease and hygiene, as it pertained primarily to help colonial administration and soldiers to survive in what they perceived as hostile environments, hence the wall becomes a filtering device compared to the ventilation helmet on the right. By the time Shalona arrived in Nigeria in 1960, the discourse on tropical architecture was so prevalent that even the vice chancellor of the future university expected him to address it as a problem. So here on the right we see Vice Chancellor Adyose, who had been the first African professor at the University College of Ibadan before becoming the VC for Ife, and he also acted in Ibadan as the head of its Department of Preventive and Social Medicine. So in a sense he was educated in Glasgow, in a sense he carries on the British perception of the environment, but at the same time he wishes to revise it to adapt it to the conditions of independent Nigeria. The challenge the VC presented to Sheryl was double, how to be modern and respond to the climate, but in a completely new form that would rival the architectural image of the University College of Ibadan. So the stakes were not formal alone. The challenge was how to render men environment relationship in the tropical climate as productive, that is conductive to agricultural production. In other words, the conception of the environment not is something that men needs protecting from, but can be beneficial for his existence. Given his experience working under architect Hannes Meyer, who was famous for including climatic conditions in his multiple calculations, as well as adapting modern architecture to conditions in Israel, Sheryl was no stranger to climatic considerations. However, in Israel these concerns were not consolidated discursively into a body of knowledge comparable to the British tropical architecture approach. Nonetheless, Sheryl was quick to adapt to this discourse, as you can see from his posture. Climate, not a problem. In part in Israel, a privileged position as a macroclimatic pilot country where experimentation had already been taking place for some decades. Unlike British colonial expertise, it was implied that Jewish settlers had first-hand experience with climate and did not assume a temporal geographic distance as in the colonial metropole and its African and Asian laboratories, quote unquote. And the knowledge power access it entailed. So I would like to just briefly look at this gesture. What we have here is a performance, first of all, of the informality of the Israeli architects compared to the more composed Nigerian professor who was educated under British rule. So the Israeli performs his own informality as an architect and also his approach to the climate. He exposes himself to the elements. He is almost reckless in it. For example, Malaria was not an issue for him at all when he talked to the professors in EFE because in Israel he was taking the role of a pioneer in establishing the kibbutz and exposure to Malaria was kind of an initiation process into becoming a good Zionist. Between 1961 and 1962, Sharon arrived at the solution of the inverted pyramid whose climatic benefits he explained in a series of sketches. These sketches contrasted between a self-protecting building and applied solar-shade devices. In this second statement, I argue, Sharon presented a damning critique of the tropical architecture approach, using modernist architecture logic to reject the application of external devices to the building's surface. In other words, he rendered the shady devices additive as ornaments since they were not integral to the building's structure or contributed to its spatial flexibility. This devout adherence to modernist principles can be traced to Sharon's studies at the Barhouse, of course. However, as the title of Sharon's monograph kibbutz plus Barhouse suggests, Sharon attributed his experience at the kibbutz, a Zionist collective agricultural settlement which he had helped found prior to his studies at the Barhouse, actually the kibbutz paid for his studies at the Barhouse, a comparable formative experience. For this reason, rather than looking at his professional decisions in abstract or technical terms or just as part of general international trends, I propose to read them as symptoms of Sharon's embodied cosmopolitanism. A term I borrowed from Bruce Robbins, whose faculty here at Columbia, to emphasize that Sharon's cosmopolitan position as a foreign architect in Algeria is very much embedded in his experience in settler colonialism and nation building in Palestine, where the relationship between the new Jew, the Zionist take on the European human, and the national territory were highly politicized. Sharon's contestation of the exclusivity of Fry and Drew's climate control architectural solution demonstrates how the techno-scientific notion of climate was intricately linked to issues of race, eugenics, nationality, and sovereignty. The arrival of different architectural solutions to the same empirical parameters discloses how the translation of studies of climate into architectural form is ideologically charged, specifically regarding the desired relationship between man and environment, and in this case, the Nigerian students and their campus. If architecture was the solution to the problem of climate, what needs to be interrogated in this analysis is how in each of the solutions given to it, climate was constructed as a problem in the first place. In order to fully understand the implications of Sharon's critique, we need to confront two colonial structures of thought, the British imperial one and the Zionist settler colonial one. For Fry and Drew, the tropics presented a violent attack on the census, with which they explained colonial subjects' lethargy and backwardness. Their architecture, even when applied to the colonizing subjects, emphasized physical and psychological separation from the tropical environment. Lying at the heart of this separation was the deep-seated fear of racial degeneration of the colonizer. Acclimatizing too well, becoming native, quote-unquote, would not only lead to moral and physical degeneration, but would also defeat the very idea of racial superiority that justified colonization in the first place. So what we have here are images from Fry and Drew's 1956 book. So that's the height of decolonization in West Africa and British West Africa. And what is interesting is that while they're referring to the post-colonial Nigerian subject, they have an issue, the issue of acclimatization remains as a problem. But the Nigerian subject does not need to acclimatize. So this is an inherently colonial problem, the problem of the colonizer rather than of the colonized or the decolonizing subject. And it is not by chance, I think, that these two images that are very problematic in this sense were removed from their subsequent publications following the independence of those countries. So they had a problem applying or translating their studies, their methodologies, into the post-colonial situation. The fear of racial degeneration also haunted Zionism. Albeit with the influence of the German Volkisch movement, it took on a specific nationalist territorial dimension. The Zionist discourse was affected by race-science discourse and accepted its proposition that the Jews are the generating race. However, Zionist thinkers shifted the emphasis from biological essentialism, the idea that the Jews were inherently the generate, to environmental causes such as the living conditions in the Eastern European Tettle, the Jewish town, or the modern alienating city in which most Western European Jews lived. Influenced by the popular movements of Lebanon's reform, life reform, and corporal culture, body culture, as well as social Darwinism and neo-Lamerchism, Zionist thinkers saw to reverse the effects of degeneration by national regeneration in the homeland. As I own. The healing of the Jewish body could only occur through its relocation to the native land and a transformation through the working of this land into a productive nation. The same logic was extended metaphorically to the land of Palestine, which in a typical Orientalist view, was perceived as dead land, infertile and unproductive. Thus, this discourse displaced the Jews degeneration and projected it onto the Arab inhabitants of the land and they're supposedly degenerate agriculture. In this formulation, only by reconnecting the Jews, the Jewish people to their land will the two be regenerated and cured. So it is not by chance, I argue, that the same architects and the same vision of natural abundance, the land of milk and honey, was engineered in scientific institutions, campuses, national parks, and kibbutzim. And these architects, Yalom Lipa and Dantor, were actually invited. Yalom Lipa was invited by Sharon to consult on the landscaping of the Efe University campus. Lipa visited the site, but didn't end up working on the project. Central to this bodily turn in modern Jewish history is Max Nordow, a Zionist physician and a journalist who coined the term muscular Judaism to denote the rebirth of the new Jew in his native land. In architectural history, however, Nordow is known for his monumental work, Degeneration, a critique of fantasy culture. Like Nordow, who extended this discourse to material culture, Adolf Los applied this discourse, the discourse of the generation to architecture, as it's well known. In his famous essay, Ornament and Crime, he argued that ornamentation, like the tattoos of criminals and primitives, is a symptom of unproductive societies. While Los's decentralized and dematerialized plain white wall was especially appealing to Viennese Jews who were among his favorite clients, in Palestine, the plain white wall served to reimagine the Jew as a new viral body that's no longer needed to hide or camouflage itself. In this Zionist narrative of men and environment mutual rejuvenation, architecture served as a mediator for the sensual connectivity with the territory rather than as a protective shelter in its traditional sense, extending the sensory organs and limbs of the new muscular Jew. So the idea was that in Europe, the Jew cannot expose himself in his Jewishness. And this exposure was not only mental, but was physical as well. The expression of his Jewishness was something that was disclosed via bodily performance, degeneration. In Palestine, the Jew can rejuvenate his body and architecture played a mediating role in that, not by sheltering, protecting from their environment, but mediating this connectivity. Embodying the fantasy of national physical rejuvenation, the white wall was the matter through which Zionism could constitute itself in the flesh. Productivity was also a primary concern for the University of Wisconsin team of landscape architects who divorced it completely from the haunting threat of degeneration. The team arrived in Nigeria in 1966 to consult on the design of the University of Ife Campus as part of a university-building assistant program the U.S. Agency for International Development launched five years earlier. Following the establishment of agricultural universities in India in 1951, this was the largest American assistant program in Africa to date. This assistance involved pairing a major American land grant university with Nigeria's new found regional universities, Kansas State University partnered with Ahmed O'Bello University in the North, Michigan State University with the University of Nigeria at Nassuka in the East, and the University of Wisconsin with the University of Ife in the West. Through this access to large tracts of land otherwise locked in traditional land tenure, American experts could introduce and experiment with the modernization of agriculture in the region in parallel with what came to be known as the Green Revolution concurrently waged in Asia. In contrast to the tropical architecture approach that sought to neutralize or to filter the effects of climate, the Wisconsin team sought to incorporate the tropical climate into their design calculations. While the team used Fry and Drew's seminal books on tropical architecture, the studies of Victor and Aladar Ogye who address energy resources as a global rather than a colonial concern helped them to shift the discourse away from viewing the tropics as a hazard that needs protecting from. So as you can see here, the arrows in Fry and Drew are unidirectional while in the Algiers, they're pointing to two directions and they're much more dynamic in the sense. The Algiers articulated climate, the Algiers and the Wisconsin team after that are after them articulated climate into an array of resources such as sand radiation and soil including the bodies of the students themselves who took part in the cycle of energy production and loss. And here we have the abstraction of the universal, quote unquote universal, corporatement in the Algiers into a more abstract figure that could include the African body in the Wisconsin team's report. The Wisconsin team rationalized climate to make it calculable and manageable so that production can be maximized through what they perceived as a proper integration of, I quote, human needs and resource goals. This shift corresponded with a more general tendency in the post-war era to supplant racial or climatic determinism with theories such as human capital which postulated that human resources once invested to become human capital determined development more than natural resources. This theory assumed that while natural resources are limited, there is no limit to economic growth via skill acquisition and university education. In the third world, as the Chicago School of Economist Theodore Schultz explained, founding universities and setting up programs for knowledge transfer required healthy surroundings to succeed. So it's not enough to have education. In those places, you need to have an environment that would be conductive to that education. In addition to creating a healthy environment, a more pressing concern was the rebranding of the countryside. Since under colonial rule education, upward mobility and access to the rewards of modernity were associated strictly with the city, the Israeli and American teams faced the double challenge of attracting faculty from the nearby urban centers of Lagos and Ibadan to the semi-rural siting of the campus and to compel students to return to their family farms following graduation. At stake was the creation of alternative imaginaries of the countryside so that the status of the farmer and rural living conditions would be elevated to present a desirable alternative to the city. As Sherwood Berg, the American agricultural economist and educator explained who also worked in Asia as advisor, we modified the technology to fit the prevailing attitudes. We modified the local socioeconomic setting to make room for the technology. In other words, in order to introduce American farming technologies, there were at least two fundamental issues that needed to be addressed. First, land tenure reform to which the university ground served as a demonstration field. And second, the recreation of the countryside anew. So it could offer an attractive alternative to the city. So in a sense, if the city was the measure of modernity, the countryside had to be more modern than the city. The regional university campus served as the ideal setting for this education of desire by demonstrating modern rural living. Just as the university farm served for demonstration for nearby farmers, so did the residential quarters of the university faculty and staff scattered in the last vegetation between the agriculture faculty and the university farm demonstrated high-quality living standards in the rural area. The problem of image, the University of Ife was facing, did not only regard the status of farming as a profession and the betterment of living standards in the rural environment, but also the association of social mobility, cultural capital and urbanities strictly with the city. Alongside the high standard of living, the Israeli planners envisioned the university as a cultural center that would boost Ife's importance as the cradle of Yoruba culture. Yoruba is the major ethnic group in this area. So the Israelis imbibed the abstract human capital with national purposefulness, cultural and racial pride. The importance given to culture and agriculture as two equal components in the production of national subjects is reflected in the early plans for the campus, which are based on a divide between the academic core and the faculty of agriculture. So this is the academic core that you saw in one of the first images, and this is the faculty of agriculture. And over here are the farms and the scattered around here are the faculty housing. Since the American Land Grant University offered no rational plans for the marriage of culture and education with agriculture, they grew historically rather than planned this way, Sharon resorted to Kibbutz planning, which she was well familiar with as a planner of the Kibbutz healthy movement. The two separate but complementing entities, the academic core and the faculty of agriculture constituted the nuclear of the campus from its early inception. So before there was a plan, there were two cores, the cultural administrative core and the agriculture faculty. And their composition became the plans organizing principle. The Kibbutz offered a particularly fitting model for this coupling as its social core is often comprised of public buildings, such as libraries, museums, or auditoria. And as such presented a unique example of bringing the cultural institutions of the city to their rural environment. In an essay Sharon published in 1940 in public buildings, he expresses misgivings that architecture in Palestine is still too European and that public buildings in the rural settlements were still too urban. I am certainly concluded that when our roots will deepen in the country, the climate will be a determinant factor in the building's planning and would determine its Israeli unique character. For Sharon, therefore, climate was the conduit through which modern architecture can be made formally and materially at home. The most important site of this acclimatization was the building's skin. In Nigeria, Sharon emphasized the volume of the building's envelope as the site where locality can be embodied without dressing for the weather, a term colonial British architect Edward Lachance used to describe his architectural approach for New Delhi. With his inverted pyramid, these are the humanities. So this is the first faculty ensemble that was built and determined the entire character of this core. With his inverted pyramid, Sharon challenged the necessity of various sun shading devices that fire and drew used and that became under the guise of climate control their prominent decorative feature. The ambiguity of this element which is added to the building's skin as a prosthetic device was already criticized in Brazil in the early 50s by the Swiss architect and educator Max Biel, whose critique implied that the sun shading's the additive application exposed in practicality of the modernist glass curtain wall. To avoid the sun shading's screens additive and therefore excessive effect, fire and drew incorporated them into the building's mass. Resulting in a continuously recessed interior space with movable, what they called partitions of air. Following their observation that in vernacular architecture in British colonial Bangalows, all activity was displaced to the semi-outdoors of the veranda, the roofed open portico, fire and drew solution was to incorporate the veranda into the building's mass. Put in other words, they brought the outside in while creating a system of protecting screens that gnawed off the space of the building's interior. So in effect, what happened was that fire and drew created those liminal spaces that were unusable as filtering devices that just took off the spatial fluidity of the space of the building's mass. For Sharon, the opening of the fully extended balcony at Ife here at the north end facade continued his and others experiments in Israel. So Sharon created this kind of evolution of the facade in Tel Aviv architecture. Interestingly, from the eclectic orientalism that refers to the Arab vernacular through the modernist experiments, the introduction of the Israeli version of the Bristle, the Trissol and coming back to this thickening of the skin of the building that refers back with this tower to the vernacular orientalist version. So in Nigeria, he provided a more elegant or in his words, organic solution as the balcony of the reverse pyramid is neither an applied sunshade in device nor a structural secondary outer space. Interpreted in his narrative as a metaphorical thickening of the wall, it was as if the shaded volumetric openings were carved out of the staggered cantilevered stories. To enhance the volumetric presence of the building, the walls and the cantilevers were distinguished by a traumatic play of color. The walls and columns were painted dark gray and the cantilevers that are exposed to the sun were painted white. So it's kind of taking a very modernist trick and applies it in a very different context. This carousel, they materializes the darkened areas and creates the illusion that the cantilevers float one on top of the other. Yet this illusion is interfered by the bulky stairs, cylinders that cut through the cantilevers horizontal lines. Painted too in dark gray, the tower stressed that the darkened areas are in fact the mass that constitutes the very flesh of the building. Even if the elongated facades are faced with wide spans of glass louvers. When shaded, the transparent glass becomes part of the dark mass in continuity with the body of the towers. The reverse pyramid, therefore, contrasted with the Ibadan campus design logic of the recess gnode of cubic volume. As Friedrich's drawings show, interior partitions were difficult to incorporate without blocking ventilation. In order to maximize airflow, Sharon's inverted pyramid does away with most of the partitions to maximize the correspondence between the buildings used in interior space and its volume. The cantilevered balconies function not only as access galleries to the classrooms, but also as shaded spaces to extend classroom activities outdoors. So these are very generous spaces. The recommendation of the Wisconsin team to site the buildings on a rise, raise them above the ground and using a double roof, further shape the evolution of the campus course inverted pyramid typology. So here we have the faculty of education and we can see in this drawing how the humanity's logic is now raised from the ground and doubled here with this double roof. So we have the same logic just extended and sophisticated. The design for the faculty of education extended the inverted pyramid structure with two significant revisions. First, by adding a raised roof, it allowed for vertical evaporation of warm air. And second, by elevating the building from the ground by massive concrete trusses, it allowed for a breeze to sweep the open ground floor, acting as an extension of outer space and serving as a cool shaded area. In addition, planters and resting areas continue this outdoor atmosphere even on the second floors. The Wisconsin report emphasized the roof as the single most important component of a building for thermal insulation in the tropical climate and recommended a double roof for ventilation and a wide overhang for rain protection and reduction of glare. The faculties of administration, law and social sciences designed as one ensemble follow the suggestions with, follows those suggestions with raised umbrella roofs whose parameters far exceeded those of the buildings. Acting as overhang that provided shade to the north and south facades and allowed warm air to evaporate. With trusses extending diagonally from the roofs to the ground, the building silhouette created the illusion of inverted pyramids, which connected them visually with the humanities and education buildings. And here we see better the connection to the education building. Expanding on the vocabulary of the latter, the buildings were raised above the ground, creating a shaded courtyard with planters and seating areas at ground level, as well as a raised internal mall designed as a hanging garden. Following the Wisconsin team's report, but completely re-envisioning the type of climate responsive building most suited to the tropics, this building's design took the veranda inside, outside ambiguity and transformed it into a courtyard logic of hanging gardens and cool shaded resting area. With the shaded ground level and the hanging gardens of the upper floors, the raised courtyard created dynamic inside, outside relations, whose effects far exceeded its strictly climatic functions. These relationships were further reinforced by the bridges that cut through the administration, law and social sciences buildings, or the ramp leading to the central library, as in my opening image. While Fry and Drew's tropical architecture treated students as passive containers of energy that needed to be conserved, the University of EFASC dynamic design increased not only ventilation and evaporation, but also the vitality and freedom of movement of students who inhabited the space. To the Wisconsin team's conception of the human as an active agent, simultaneously affecting and affected by tropical environment, Sharon's team added the design and strategy of national revival based on biological regeneration. I would like to conclude this talk by turning back to the question of the ornament at the thickening of the building surface as a site where locality can be inscribed. For Sharon, the challenge was how to imbue the campus buildings with local identity without resorting to applied ornamentation, or fake synthesis of the arts, which usually means modern buildings and technology with art as applied ornament in terms of sculptures or murals. In other words, instead of dressing the modernist buildings up in your Yoruba garb, at stake was to render the modernist building skin itself Yoruba. In order to do a whole specifically designed to facilitate Yoruba theater production, the cutouts, groove texturing of the walls and the amorphic murals that have nothing to do with murals in the area create a plastic festive space, a sort of Louis Kahn's modern monumentality rendered free form. Rather than exhibit its structural lightness, as one historian suggested, the cut, in my opinion, the cutouts are self-referential, a reminder of the materiality and plasticity of the wall, which was further accentuated by the groovings. So it's really hard to see, but here are some groovings on this wall. And Sharon juxtaposed these groovings to this Yoruba figurine, dating from the 14th century in his Kibbutz and Bauz book. So at first it was very suspicious of this juxtaposition. I thought it was just, it became fashionable in the 70s to refer to local art as inspiration. So I thought it was after the fact. But in the archives, I found out that Sharon referred to this as an architectural inspiration already in 1960 when he visited the Museum of Ife, that was established by Cornelius forbinius. Cornelius forbinius is that how, well, a German ethnologist and anthropologist who kind of discovered Yoruba art. By the 60s, textured grooving became prevalent among architects as a form of repressed ornament, literally pressed onto the building's surface. While Sharon drew from contemporary practices in Europe and the US, such as the UNESCO building that I mentioned earlier, he juxtaposed the textured surface of the Ododuo Hall with an image of a Yoruba-famed bronze sculpture dating back to the 14th century, suggesting this was the specific reference for the building's corrugated grooving. In one of his early reports, Sharon had noted these sculptures were of special architectural interest alongside the Yoruba king's palace. Significantly, Sharon single out this sculptural tradition and specifically refer to its architectural rather than artistic value. What architectural lessons could the Yoruba group's sculpture offer to the modernist Sharon? Compared with the abstracted African sculptures and masks known in the West through their modernist appropriation, these Yoruba sculptures were distinctly naturalistic. Unlike Picasso's rendering of African masks and tattoos as markers and vehicles of abstraction, these sculptures' grooving accentuated the three-dimensional naturalism. So here we have a practice of Los Antagones, Van de Velle, and his use of grooving as a low relief as well, as a structural ornament. Similar to mural inscriptions in Yoruba-Sharine architecture, the grooving is reserved for the face or torso of Yoruba royalty and signifies their spiritual attributes. And here in a fascinating photo that I have no idea who took and what was the context, we have the Yoruba king situating himself among those figurines and there's as a lineage with no chronology. So they all kind of coexist at the same temporal dimension. Reminiscent of the practice of sacrification and tattoo, these bodily inscriptions thicken the skin in low relief and direct attention to its double function as a boundary and expression. But literary theorists An Cheng identifies the skin's complicated relation to essence versus surface. As a vibrant and sensorial interface, the skin is the site where the spiritual is localized, pinned down to the individual in place by the performance of inscription and the traces it leaves. In this African-Israeli encounter, the skin is neither entirely bare nor a form of inauthentic dressing, but instead where the biological and the cultural intertwine and reach their highest synthesis. Using this Yoruba tradition to complicate Western metaphysics, privileging of depth over surface or the hidden over the visible, which is also the logic of the generation, right? It's the moral, it's the moral degeneration that is expressed as symptoms on the body surface. Sharon liberates cultural and environmental inscriptions from their modernist taboo. Perceiving them following design is thinking as mutually constitutive and as the only condition contrary to losses thinking for a productive society. There are a few lessons to be learned from this rather convoluted story that took us from Ife in Nigeria to Israel, through Dessau and Vienna with a detour to Madison, Wisconsin and Sao Paolo. First, that the history of modern architecture, if it wishes to be truly global, can no longer afford to overlook the complex itineraries, multiple actors and unexpected encounters that have thoroughly shaped architectural production in the last century. Second, that in order for us to recognize these various novel sites of architectural production, we need to move beyond the conventional archives and architectural publications and compliment them even if this means by confrontation with competing epistemologies such as the scarring practice or contested derivatives such as design is many environment relations. Only through such reading, readings are analysis of architecture critically engaged with and shed important light on economic or technical scientific discourses such as development or the environment. Thank you. For two seats here, so I imagine I'm supposed to take the other one but not in the interest of actually offering a formal response but I am going to sit here and help shepherd questions but I just wanted to begin by thanking you for what to my mind was Lissa convoluted story that an incredibly precise and certainly complicated topography of these different agents, these different discourses and these different ways in which bodies and climates and ornament or cultural trappings begin to come together and in sort of initially illegible way. So I mean I think this is a quite remarkable piece of work and I wanted to, I will ask the first question but that's probably all, I was very struck on you opened with a sort of a side to the archival difficulty the difficulty in accessing archives and somewhat reductively my first thought was that that was a reference to the difficulty of obtaining documents in the Nigerian context and as you talk unfolded into all these different contexts it struck me that that was not necessarily what you're referring to and certainly the careful navigation of sharon and the context of labor Zionism and that sort of early period also comes with its own archival complexities and troubles and so I was just I guess wanting to see if I can get you to just unpack a little bit what the archival difficulties are. I mean I understand they're difficult, the documents are missing, the whole history of Nigerian archives is a complicated one but am I right that it's, the remark was actually pointing to something more diffuse than that. Yeah in a sense it's an architectural archive outside of architecture, that's a question where to locate those clues in regards for example the reimagining of the countryside it is not something that any of the architects have ever stated or sharon's relationship to the climate it was something that they had to dig out from his own recollections of his kibbutz life he mentioned how they were singing and dancing to fight malaria or there is a quote where he talks about butterflies and birds as something that could intrude into the building there's no problem with that because it was a displacement of the mosquito whose bites can be dangerous for because of malaria so the displacement of the mosquito into cheerful butterflies and birds so it is really reading between the lines reading the architect how he operated how his embodied experience as pioneer came to bear on his reading of architecture so for me this is a side note the fact that he first established a kibbutz and worked as a beehive person there and a builder and then went to the Bauhaus completely reshapes the thinking of what he studied at the Bauhaus and how he related to Hannes Meyer and this part of the story is always neglected it's always the European educated architect arrived to Palestine and the Nigerian archive is even more difficult to unpack besides the lack of documents it demanded a lot of scrutiny via newspapers for example what Nigerian agricultural faculty explained as a contemporary problem so this goes back to the reimagining of the countryside and reading through the text that the university educators the various vice chancellors wrote as part of their academic work many of them were agricultural experts and in inauguration days for the university for some buildings so there is a lot of reading and digging and sifting through a material that just usually does not it's not contained within the architectural history perspective I think one of the most remarkable things about about that type of expansion is the way in which you bought those lessons back with incredibly precise ways to the technologies of the balcony of the details of the section and I think this is a type of register that's often lost in expanded histories and so the way that we returned with incredible precision to the comparison of the Ibadan and if they balconies I think was a really important gesture in that regard but other questions this one up here Oh, thanks for a lovely presentation One of the major figures behind the discussion about existence minimum in Germany was Alexander Klein and as you know Alexander Klein left to fled Germany for Palestine in 1934 did Sharon have any contact with Klein and could you maybe did he ever have a take a position on the existence minimum question? I'm not sure I'm not a I don't consider myself a Sharon expert per se so I wouldn't know about that specifically but Alexander Klein is an interesting figure because he was interested in climate and also participated in one of those tropical architecture imperial conferences the one that was in Mexico City in 1937 I think but having read through his text it didn't pretend to climate at all so I didn't include it in my research so he's one of those neglected and interesting figures in the architectural history Israeli architecture history that were involved in this imperial international discourse and existence minimum is very interesting in relation to housing also in the post-colonial period the question of basic needs, basic human needs and the rights of housing but this is not something that I worked on. Thank you for the talk. My question relates a little bit to Felicity's last comment as you sort of complicate the archive and then come back to the sections and to the formal analysis which I agree it's fascinating but the problem I was having looking at it as after you've gone through this very evocative argument of climate as a construct a problem that needs to be constructed in order to retrofit it in a way I found myself not really believing any of those sketches like so I'd like you to tell us a little bit about why should we believe those sketches if you do when and why were they produced does the air really work that way through the building or are they just looking to they just wanna build an inverted pyramid because it looks really very modernist. Well the question does it really work probably depends on the season that you come there when I was there it worked but I'm also I'm better in the hot climate I wouldn't know there is a guy in Israel whose climate that's really his research only his research and he invented a kind of machine that can check climate control devices in a building whether they work or not and I urged him to go to Nigeria and test it there but that's not the approach that I will that's simply not what I do yes there are air conditions air conditioners in those buildings but I specifically for the closed offices but the classrooms are pretty well ventilated some glass louvers were painted black in order to be able I think to project slides that's a problem that you have also at universities in India so it is also about the technology of the auditoria or the classroom that demands a different it's like it's one it's either you have a breeze or you have the good conditions for the for projection it's like either or so the question of does it work is less a concern for me I don't think that the university ecology but then it works better Mary and then Chris first thank you so much Ayala and it is wonderful to see the formal analysis and how that's evolved I had a variation on Maria's question but I have two questions actually the first easy one maybe is I'm a little nervous about sort of Brice Oley is colonial and this form is post-colonial how do you explain Brazil I also think in general there's a lot more continuity between colonial and post-colonial architecture although this project may defy that continuity the second question really is how do we know it's not just brutalist fashionable cantilever this is basically a variation on Maria's as opposed to determined per se or primarily even by climate there's so many cantilevers in this period inverted sections and how do you relate it to like that word brutalism that floats all over the globe about this time well I'll start with the second question I guess climate was a problem that needed to be addressed and the inverted pyramids in this tiny little sketch that I found contains within it the entire story this goes back to the question of the archive Sharon didn't theorize this and he definitely didn't theorize this as a post-colonial reaction it was something that I kind of extracted out of that tiny little drawing which is really a critique of tropical architecture as not modernist enough that's his critique in relation to brutalism yes of course those forms are fashionable it's fun to produce this kind of sculptural monumental works that they didn't build at the time in Israel one of the architects involved Harold Rubin came from South Africa where they also produced brutalist campuses and very much influenced by Latin American architecture, Brazilian architecture the reference now to your first question I do not present the Bristle as colonial Le Corbusier first tweaked this idea for Paris and Barcelona and so it was not necessarily a post-colonial project and it is just a conception of the tropics specifically for the British as I said at the beginning of the talk not the Brazilian architects the conception of the tropics as a specific environmental sociological condition that doesn't allow a productiveness that inhibits the tropical people from developing or entering into world history as a new subject that was what was at the heart of their discourse and their Bristle as and their sun shading devices are not the same as the ones practiced in Brazil at the time as an affirmation and celebration of sculptural form so there's our much more restrained sun shading devices and now what I like about the Max Bill critic is that it's usually it's usually as regarded as a almost racist critic of Latin American architecture they are not modern enough they are abusing modernist principles and they are incapable of using modernist principles in a calculated sense, rationally but when you refers to the Bristle A this is not a modernist device that they miscalculate or misrepresent when you refers to the Bristle A he's really criticizing the curtain wall so it's a critic of the north rather than a critic of the south Is it also not the case that, I mean your point was not that Sharon's balconies were post-colonial but that the way in which they marked their difference from the Frey and Druze was the distinction that was being made so it's not that either in some sort of essential form the first was colonial, the second was post-colonial but under the mandate of taking the environment into account that this was his formal rhetorical trope to mark that shift so I don't think she was saying this is post-colonial she's saying this is a claim to the post-colonial articulated yet through the distinction of the balcony and in a sense the balcony is the Israeli colonial project which I skipped here this is where the horizontal, the bend window the ribbon window is acclimatized into the Israeli into Palestine and becomes a kind of secondary outer space instead of the ribbon window that doesn't work in that climate so it's a colonial Jewish project so there's nothing easy about those distinctions but I'm interested in how Sharon reacts to the British legacy there a very vibrant living legacy because British architects continue to work and Fran Drew also built on this campus as well as James Kubit I had something else to say does he ever refer, you're very convincing that he's trying to do something different Ayala I'm just curious and it doesn't challenge your argument at all does he ever refer to this as a post-colonial identity? No, not at all and he hardly ever uses it he doesn't use the term those terms at all not colonial, post-colonial That would surprise me if he did Chris Hi Ayala, such a wonderful talk and so rich and I wrote a lot of stuff down and I have to keep taking my glasses off to read them but the thing I wanted to try to tease out because there's so many moving parts to the story and you have to pin things down to work out the relationships historically, temporally, spatially one of the things that obviously you're very aware of is the continuity of the concept of tropicalism way back into the 18th, 19th century going into colonialism through the bungalow and through these other tempered structures in which they developed an idea called medical topography in which what you've isolated as components to this moving machine are things such as the body and the individual, the tempered envelope and structure of a building but there's a third category that seems to fall off when medical science starts to become more linked to bacteriology instead of miasma theory which is the landscape, the immediate surroundings the immediate topography of land so that what happens is that climate starts to become this essentialist nebulous term that isn't quite fixed hasn't have a specific fixity to an immediate surroundings it's sort of like it's more pliable to questions of nation because it can be more of a general question instead of a topographic specific question and so what I'm wondering is what were the triggers and questions of immediate landscape to this wider new narrative of the nation that when we talk about colonialism in the 19th century immediate surroundings, immediate regions have regional climates, have specific topographic climates which allow you to start to talk of representation and architecture by reaction to an immediate surrounding now the question is openable because the immediate surrounding has dissolved has dissolved, has somehow been solved through modern medicine which I think is a false expansion I think there is still questions of the immediate surrounding going on so I'm wondering what were in your archive finding those questions and the other thing that intrigued me was the role of, you introduce the role of the Israeli Jew into this subject which suddenly opens up a sort of dialectical question of the stand of Fry and Drew which is a very innovative thing but I'm still not clear how you've created this figure which you said displaces another in Palestine this figure of the new, to quote you, the new Jew in I guess the old Palestine how has that figure set up when they have to have interlocutor relationships to African universities and African professors what are they positioning themselves as a modern figure? It wasn't still not clear to me how they distinguish themselves nationally, politically and modern as a trope in regards to outreach so those are the two questions I'm asking Thank you, well the first one is very easy to answer for me from my perspective actually the climate reemerges in the American discourse or the post-war discourse the one that replaces the colonial one reemerges as microclimate so in order to become scientifically workable and manageable Fry and Drew's big band of the tropics becomes really outdated a fiction that is not usable for anything and even for Fry and Drew the 1956 book is architecture in the humid zone and then in 1964 it becomes it's expended to architecture in the humid and dry zones so the dry zone become part of the tropical so tropical architecture under the British discourse by the 50s in a dialectic that is this very characteristic of knowledge production becomes institutionalized exactly when it's no longer bears holds no water so this is the critical moment where really the tropics mean nothing at all compared to other studies now the second question relates to the entire the entire dissertation, the entire book project which is the very complex negotiation of Israelis and how they position themselves in Africa and through such stories I want to show how the Israelis try to blacken themselves rather than whiten themselves in the story you have a sensibility that belongs to the Jews anxieties of the generation in Europe rather than the body that is reinvented in Palestine via this encounter with a postcolonial subject in Nigeria those anxieties, those they are mirrored through the postcolonial subject to reflect back to the Jew I could go on and on about this but my main point was that the Israelis try to position themselves as you could say better whites or non-imposing whites or mediating figures people who have already translated once European architecture into a developing country and now are able to translate it once more they are proficient in translating architecture not only to climates but also to state conditions that are very precarious to working in emergency conditions working on the ground with the people promoting the egalitarian labor and also applying architecture in also other fields of development in non-conventional, non-textbook ways to the context that they encounter so yeah, these are many moving components to this story but that's basically the essence of what I'm saying I think just to end that behind that was my one question because I don't know enough about this that I think you're describing the Ashkenazi Jew the narrative of the Ashkenazi and so the Mizrahi or Sufadi were not part of that essential... Actually in the French colonies they had a big role to play because they spoke French so but I didn't work on the French colonies and all of the architects that I looked at they were Ashkenazi Jews so you're certainly right, correct? Hi, that was a fantastic talk, Kyle it's really a pleasure to learn, continue to learn from you and so this is a question quite different from some of these I guess back to the archive in a sense and to the very, very end of your talk where you put development and environment together do you from reading newspapers and the things that you were doing is there a way, and I also realize this is outside the scope formally of what you've been working on what can you say if anything about the role of the oil companies in Nigeria, either the American Shell or BP in this anything but post-colonial moment in which really what we're talking about is transition into, as you said, development and I'm asking that because I'm just curious about the program of the university which is very striking, it does follow broadly the land grant model where you have professional schools of very particular types the agricultural school that you described and the education, the school of education and I would read those as belonging to the biopolitical project of producing subjects for a nation, yes, but also for an economic and social transformation and so those young kids there in the image behind you are, in a sense, those figures and so there anything but archetypal, stereotypical et cetera in this sense, they're very, very specific so it's the specificity, that's what I'm asking so on the one hand it's fascinating the problems of building a university in the kind of rural area in inland away from the cities attracting elite academics out there and so on it seems to be mirrored in some of the demands of the oil companies being made of the now self-educating population in African countries at this time particularly in the West where there was a lot of oil so I'm wondering if you see, if these forces ever meet I guess there's not the kind of technical education here that might support at some entry level engineers and so on into that industry are there, is there something like that in other universities in this building program and if so does that somehow articulate with this particular form of quote unquote development? Well I have an easy way to get around this question which of course complicates the story very much so because oil replaces agriculture and oil replaces development you can say in Nigeria so these years are the years that you still don't have the oil boom so and the oil is in the eastern part of the country not the western side but the western side is the dominant one with the federal government situated in it so I haven't seen in my records any reference to oil in the education reforms here and in my story oil is what kills the story that I want to tell here the story of development as it was imagined but I know Daniel Barber is going to include the VP headquarters in his book but Barber talks about those buildings in the traditional sense of okay you have European administrators working in these environments and therefore they need to have a climate that allows them to work basically to be the corporate universal men of the oil gaze rather than the Nigerian subjects I cannot answer this but maybe I will be able to answer it in my next project when I will work on Abuja Abuja's planning which as many of you may know was many architects were involved but McHarg the ecologist was central to it so how oil and ecology intersect I wouldn't know it's mainly oil money rather than oil as a resource you know one thought I don't know if this is useful but you know there's this thesis which actually comes out of the scholarship on Nigeria Michael Watts for example of the oil curse oil as you said the boom you know corruption whatever you're getting and all this goes down the drain and it seems to me your project could in principle complicate that project like if you tell that story not from the coast but from that's what I meant the refineries and so on you know and all the money therefore concentrate but if you tell that story from another geography and from within you know this other this rather more in sense utopian on the one hand and obviously neocolonial in another project of building basically of nation building through the production of certain kinds of a kind of citizenry through education I wonder if it complicates the oil curse narrative a little bit that's why I was asked yeah I think it's a great point and it's like oil in the countryside also how oil reshaped the country in a productive rather than substituting mode that could be another angle I got past the mic thank you Ayala that was so beautiful and I was actually thinking of how useful this story is against the ones that we're more familiar with with the Dodoma and Abuja and the planning of those capitals as being symbolic in terms of their inscription on the landscape and here we're releasing that and the level of the building and not as projecting a sort of outwardly legible semiotics but in terms of organizing a whole series of techno scientific discourses as well as discourses on resources and one of the things that I thought was most beautiful about this reading was this dialectic that you set up between degeneracy and rejuvenation in a way that it seemed like it was if I'm understanding correctly that it was this sort of architect's frame of having to oscillate between those two things that then interspersed the resource as something which would get you out of that bind in a way and so maybe just to connect back to your question Reinhold the way in which you've read the resources figured through this campus both as climate which isn't actually challenging if you have the right tools to resolve it but also the human capital that you mentioned as a kind of hedge against the vagaries of agriculture and maybe even eventually oil which is controlled by these big multinational BPs and BP headquarters designed by Fry and Drew so there might be a way that the theorization of the resource which I know you've already done helps to open up those ways in which these different transnational rhetorics get interspersed in different spaces if that makes sense. Yeah, the way I think of it is if the human is also a resource then there is a dialectic between different actors different resources so you have the human you have land or climate and you have oil so this can really triangulate very nicely. I will have to, I will definitely think about it later on. Also oil is an important component in the story because many of the American companies that worked in Africa they actually had much more projects in the Middle East at the time because of oil. So in a sense somebody first needs to write about their work in the Middle East for me to be able to write about their work in Africa but I have a tendency to bypass this kind of problems. So I will definitely, this is definitely a component that needs to play in, yeah. What's great, just links, it's not a question actually but I suppose Polynesia is there also? I suppose Polynesia is there as well in your story of the year Los and the tattoo and the way the grooved statue arrives it seems to me it almost requires you to not just the Vandervilder and so on but to work through that whole narrative because I think what's permanently rich in your argument is that you swim upstream always almost in every gesture going the opposite direction than the conventional discourse and I think the biggest upstream move is and the most directly anti-colonial move because I just don't think the narrative is in the colonial post-colonial register at all but in the kind of psychosexual fantasies which are with Los where the figure of the other, the tattooed face of the Polynesian head is neither behind nor in front like it's not the past and it's not the future and it's somehow much more gripping and in Los's argument as you know it's labour he's basically argues it through from labour so it seems to me you could successfully deepen a little bit that dimension of your argument which I found was so compelling so that we could finally then read these white bands for what they are as you yourself pointed out within a more or less generic modern discourse in other words what is it that distinguishes those white bands from the criminality of the dark bands in the face of the dark flesh so a kind of black on black scarring or inking versus the white on white floating beyond the black and I thought in the analysis of the balconies that I was so precise what you were saying about how the blackness between the white bands nevertheless including the glass reads as mass and therefore you then said something like so therefore they kind of carved in so then we are carving like the groove and inking in black so I think there's a really strong argument that you're making about black in that sense so when you say the blackening of the Israeli kind of consultant it seems to me that all of these things could be stitched up slightly more I'm asking for more vulgarity I by the way love the lack of vulgarity in all of the answers to the questions you were the most minimal answer you can give is about four or five twist back was a four I'm just inviting one more loop back and maybe pick up Lowe's along the way and then a completely irrelevant thing how does my for whatever reason was quite obsessed with insects so I just kept thinking about the malaria and the insects and this beautiful thing you said about the butterflies and the bees and so on and there is some sense in which insect life is a protagonist I don't know I just get that feeling one seems so light and relevant but I think the blackness is the more serious point but you know that when my list is like 10 things that one needs to pay attention to I think sex is number one which makes sense but insects are number three housing shelter shelter comes like number seven or eight you know I have a feeling like the genuinely post-colonial discourse might be an intensely insect focused discourse. Thank you so much for the talk. Just a small remark that when I looked at your Shrine architecture or practices then I found it fascinating that they paint them first white as a substrate for inscription so I wanted the blackness to be an important part of architecture identity and so on but it was the whitest dressing to become the basis for a second inscription that complicates the entire story so the black body as reference is not a reference at all in a sense and I need to read more on African epistemology in order to understand that better and I haven't found the right resources. The black body as constructed in other words instead of the black body is in the past and in the other and is what has been transcended the construction, the daily construction of blackness as this is what I found so direct in your analysis of the balconies. Yeah and the Israelis admire blackness because it is a marker of the natural relationship organic relationship to the environment and I cite like there is a poem about that I cite in my work which describes the African doll or the African body of the woman who works in the field as one that shines under the sun that never gets old so there is an Israeli projection of desires of acclimatization that lock the Africans in their blackness, fetishize the blackness. Yeah just can't resist right because so then the use of the white as a substrate is too good too and you have to because the black is constructed as such the equivalence of the black lines to the white Josephine Baker et cetera this in the low sense right. I think it's very it's it's it looks so strong in your argument that I kind of feel like a little bit of steroids in that part of it. The next mark along. I actually want to get to I don't know if you know this essay that relates to the question of African epistemology which is Robert Thompson wrote a essay called you or about art criticism that refers specifically to the scarification and it relates totally to the projection that you just talked to the Israeli projection about that because what he says is that the scarification on the sculpture is like the scarification of running a line in the earth and running a line on the body which brings forth the aesthetic quality. In other words cultivation is not an anti-natural it is the way to bring nature out to bring the nature out in the sculpture in the human body in the cultivation. And so the way that would play in the Israeli epistemology of cultivating the land and that form of organization and the way that would then happen in this kind of development and the way to go back this sort of relates marks questions but also brings back Mary's question about brutalism like how do you now get from the scarification of the concrete that was happening at that time into a whole nother kind of deep is it a deep organism or is it a deep cultivation of raw material like what's at stake in that brutalness and that might get to, Mark was your term not brutal but vulgar, it might get somewhere between the brutal and the vulgar and the bodily for sure and the state of the body and someone like those. Well for me the interesting challenge that I am still not willing to take is to reflect via the story on brutalism in the North, brutalism elsewhere and ask the same questions. It's not like there is a proper brutalism and here is what those crazy Israelis are doing in Africa or derivative Israelis doing in Africa but it is asking you questions about brutalism in the North. But thank you about the, I will ask you for the reference. Any last questions? Well let's thank Ayala again for her talk and thank you, thank you.