 Doctor, engineer, architect, Pavla Malkova, who joins us today from Prague and who is on the faculty of architecture at the Czech Technical University. She is one of the most prominent architects in the Czech Republic and has done a tremendous amount of work in historically charged places, bringing new design and new thinking to those places to reactivate them and give them new relevance in contemporary society. She also received a Fulbright Fellowship here at Columbia University to come here to Columbia University and we had the pleasure of having her amongst us for some time. And so we are in a sense welcoming her back virtually. She also has a thriving practice as a theorist and as a writer, as an artist, and obviously as a teacher. She's written many books, among them experiencing architecture in 2013, the humanistic role of architecture in 2016. A very interesting and exciting book about architecture of reciprocity, which was just published this year. And also this year, a book that brings together the work that she and her office did at the Memorial for Jan Palach in Sistati. This is a really interesting project which I hope she will show us today. With Miroslav Shekan, she is a partner in the studio MCA Atelier. And in 2012, she founded the Office for Public Space at the Institute for Planning and Development of the City of Prague, which she headed up until 2017. So she has both, she is a polymath. She has a career that spans both professional practice, theoretical writing, aesthetic experimentation, and government work. She has been recognized with a number of international and national prizes such as the architect Grand Prix in 2012. The first prize in the East Centric Architects Award competition in 2013 and she's been nominated for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture, the Mies van der Rohe Award in 2013 and 2020. So it is a great pleasure to welcome you to the historic preservation program lecture series. Pablo, thank you very much for being with us and please take it away. Thank you very much for the introduction. Hi everyone. Thank you all very much for being here and taking time. And thank you for the opportunity to give a lecture here at Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, a school to which I have close personal relationship. And I'm very sorry that due to the pandemic I can't do it in person as originally planned but only online. So I'll try to share my presentation. Yes, so here we are. So the next topic I would like to introduce to you today follows the experimental preservation platform, which was founded on GSAPP and this led by Jorge Autor Pilos. And when I spent a semester here a few years ago as part of a scientific Fulbright scholarship I carefully studied its activities. The approach which is based on openness, willingness to seek and evaluate as well as the complexity of thinking. I consider extremely important today, not only in architecture. Therefore I would like to introduce you to one of the methods of fulfilling the goals of experimental monument care, which is the involvement of monuments in contemporary life. I'm calling this method communicative monument, and I will show it both on a general theoretical level and on practical examples of the realization of the Prague architectural studio MCA atelier, which will lead together with my colleague architect Mirek Sikan. Presence as a creative component of memory. The foundation for the protection of monuments lies in the retention of their cultural value. Primarily, in the retention of their physical essence, which is the barrel of culture meaning and its intellectual content. Yet it and of itself this retention never suffices equally. It is necessary to connect the monument fully to present day life and actively develop its culture meaning further as an edit value for today. Before we turn to the methods of how it could be well helpful to ask why. Why, in fact, is it necessary to protect, revive and develop monuments. The monument is memory. The physical substance of the monument is the barrel of mind based memory. Memory forms an inseparable part of the continuity of life for an individual or for society. The conjoined lines between past, present and future. If you view the world as a whole, linked by contexts between individual cases and not as a mere heap of sections built together, but without any connections to one another. Whether in space or time, then the key to its comprehension lies in these coherences, these relations and memory is a type of relation. It is seeking a connection in time and it's adjoining space. Memory is irreplaceable. The greater part of society today doesn't and doesn't not wish to look into the future, particularly for the long term. That is the future that is part of the trajectory of humanities of lifespan, whether viewed as a poly-linear or a cyclical. And it seems shortening our view into the future seems likewise to shorten our view into the past or vice versa. Indeed, almost an inability to see or truncation conscious or unconscious at both ends. Not seeking, not seeing in the mind is transferred into not reflecting in our actions, where we lack responsibility towards the future. If the protection, revitalizing and development of monuments aids in our becoming aware of this trajectory between the past, the present and the future, as much as our roles in each stage. Then it is at the very least one of the reasons why to examine it. Perhaps we could even say all the more important in the present moment, full of short-sightedness, fragmentation, egocentrism, superficiality. If the present is part of this trajectory between past and future, then its task is not only to convey the past into the future, in which case it would de facto become merely a crossing of this crack of emptiness. But also to create a permanent trajectory itself. This means that we cannot merely shift memory passively, but must continually form its active part. On the level of human existence, of course, it happens even automatically, even by means of our existence itself, which cannot avoid leaving traces whether good or ill. In this lecture, though, we are discussing the level of cultural memory, which requires active and conscious participation. What then does it mean to be an active part of cultural memory rather than its passive transmitter? And what are the possibilities for such activity in the area of architecture monuments, whether institutionally protected or others, that bear valuable memory? Active and holistic heritage protection. The final purpose of an architecture monument is not merely its existence in and of itself, but equally how its value acts on an individual or society, how it will influence life in a city and the people within it. This influencing contains two essential levels, one, the contents of what the appearance and functioning of the environment in which it or they happen to be. Such a consumption of the monument requires a no less complex understanding of how to protect it. It could be characterized on one hand by an active approach, and on another by a holistic one, which sees the goal of monument protection not only in the retention of the matter, as the most basic level, but also in its revitalizing its connection to current affairs, developing and heightening its quality and supplementing it with contemporary layers as an inseparable necessity in the sense of the continual being of the monument. Monument protection, in other words, is viewed as active creation. Transmitting information about the past to the present. One of the possible ways of implementing an approach, both holistic and active, emerges from the actual meaning of a monument that means the transmission of information about the past to the present and the future. If we speak about the protection of architectonic and artistic monuments, then this information will primarily bear a historic and cultural character. The active conception of protection means to find this information, identify its birth, protect it, evaluate, revive, develop, elevate it, and find a method of how to communicate it on individual or social levels. As such, we could therefore speak of a communicative monument, and precisely the method through which we make the monument a communicative monument is what I hope to address. An approach that matches the holistic and active conceptions of heritage protection, for example, in the response to the ideas from experimental preservation, particularly in understanding the protection of the monument as a creative act, not merely the retention of a cultural layer inserted by the past in creating yet a third layer of today. As such, the complexity of monument of heritage protection is increased by a fairly significant dimension. The communicative monument. Protecting the monument is not enough, we need to bring it to speech. How do we make a monument speak? How do we interpret the intellectual contents saved within the monument? How do we make it part of a conversation with the present? As such, we now arrive at the qualities of communication in general. Basic goals are similar whether we consider communication between people or communication between people and their physical environment. Yet since in the context of a physical environment, it is harder for us to imagine the speech. Let us first examine it as if simply looking at communication on the interpersonal plane. And by posing the most elementary questions, what is the importance of mutual communication for people? What tools does a human speech employ? What are its specific qualities? Communication is a type of relationship, the factor of form of touch. This is the initiation of a relationship between person and person, person and society, person and living environment. It is no accident that in certain languages, for instance Czech, a derivative of the Latin's communicatio is used both for a roadway and for a connection. A means of understanding what creates sociability of individuality or individualities, a form of copying. Interpersonal speech is conveyed through the body, gesture, voice, written word, visuality and so on. It is explicit or abstract, comprehensible or incomprehensible, open or hidden, fruitful or mendacious, quiet or loud, dominant or submissive, opulent or economical, full or empty, deep or superficial. And similar meaningful ramifications and qualities could be found in the language of the architecture and thus the language of monuments. Only their implements differ. The language of architecture. A form of language, just as in person to person communication, forms the method that a monument or architecture in general relates to the individual, the society, the environment. The basic functionality of language is understanding. Hence it is necessary for the language of architecture's speech to develop out of the language that we as people first encounter and perceive. The language of architecture's speech, the language of its perception by human subjects and the creation of architecture itself are all one and the same. Communication could be inserted into the forms of architecture itself, or attached as an extra explicatory layer, text, image, another object or many further ways. The basic communication of architecture transpires in the utilitarian plan, organizing our movement or stasis within space. Go this way, sit down here, stop, grab here with your hands, look over here, walk on through, turn aside, turn away, lean against this, put your hand down, take a seat, enter, bend down, descend, go another way, cross this path through, turn around, stand still, jump over, reach out, open, lie down, rise up, lift, slide, look, keep your eyes on this, turn your eyes away, look up, cast your gaze downward. And then, in turn, there exist further layers of architecture's speech that we could call an enriching, where architecture can address our senses, our souls, our minds, deepening our perceptions, feeling, experiencing, comprehending of space itself and the environment itself and ourselves within them. Architecture can speak on the conceptual or the non-conceptual levels, though, of course, one can never chart out a precise boundary between the two realms, and often they overlap. In the conceptual level, it represents the reality which can be grasped empirically, and rationally, and transformed into a conceptual language. In extra-conceptual, there is no representation, but instead the creation of an immersive space, grasping at our senses and perceived through feelings. The language of both could be explicit or implicit, narrative or abstract, even though the explicit and the narrative usually correspond more to the conceptual level, and the implicit and abstract to that of the extra-conceptual. An explicit and narrative language works within literal meaning. We understand it on the level of habits and social conventions as much as in the case of a language spoken, written or signed, which is merely the agreement of the assignment of a certain concept to a certain thing. A window appears like a window, a door, a door, a table, a table. An implicit and abstract language speaks in turn perhaps through associations, metaphors, symbols or conversely, even the elementary language of the structure of space or material. Even though the language of architecture is predominantly grasped through the visual, we should never forget that it could act through other senses, hearing, smell, touch and kinesthetics. How to awaken speech in a monument. Here as well, we may draw upon human language for our ad to ask, how do we bring a person to speech? How to awaken speech in a person who is silent because the words are forgotten? The contents hidden deep in the psyche, the voice is long unused. The body is infirm, society has cast aside. How to raise up from the depths of a person or a building the lost, the rust-eaten words? How to manifest the images of the past? How to bind the severed threads of scattered memories into coherence? And the answer to show interest, to help, to ask, to understand, to find the right themes, to offer words, to forge a link with present life. In the case of a built monument, this implies finding the original language, protecting it and renewing it, reading the communication of its message, all the layers and contexts, finding the relationship of the message to the present, understanding the role of the monument in the tale of the past and finding for it a role in the tale of the present. Creating the contents of a dialogue with the present, giving a shape to the language of its dialogue, inserting it into present life. Every monument is different. It is as much of an individual as any person, and every story is itself different, every dialogue different. And yet, as much as any person, it forms part of a sociability in which the language of understanding lies within the very essence of its existence. Making monuments speak as part of their active and holistic protection as a means for their connection to the life of the present and the generation of new cultural layers is not a universal method. It is more of a creative approach where general principles and tools can be brought to bear upon concrete situations. And the best way of formulating it is through investigation of concrete instances. The unique realizations of MCA Atelier display the various possible forms of its approach, as we have ourselves together with Miroslav Sikhan applied it in our work. The first of them is Jan Palach Memorial in Přetati. The house where Jan Palach was born is not an institutionally protected monument. The physical matter bears little historical or artistic value. And since the time when the Palach family occupied the structure, it was subject to wide ranging changes in its exterior appearance and interior layout. Yet without question, its intellectual message is a strong monument, if not one necessarily protected. The house, respectively the place, is the material trace of the framework of a narrative, where the end and the further beginning is Jan's demonstrative self-immolation in protest at the political and social situation in Czechoslovakia after the Warsaw Pact military occupation in August 1968. The goal of these extreme sacrifices was to awaken civic society from its passivity to undertake active resistance to the lack of freedom for the nation and its citizens. Over time, the future of Jan Palach became for the Czech and Slovak people a timeless symbol of the struggle for freedom and ethical values. As such, the goal behind the revitalization was strengthening the role of the place as a recollection of Palach's death and its significance for history as well as the present. As for infection, the typology chosen was that of the memorial. In other words, the architectonic category where the chief mission is in fact communication. Jan's communicability came to form part of the works where it being. The basis of the meaningful communication didn't require much searching here. The legacy was Palach's death itself. The question then arose, what are the various layers of this communication? What are its contexts? What is the meaning? Its meaning for the present and what meaning belongs to the universal timeless level? And finally, through what language created out of the original and the new should transmit all the layers and contexts of its communicated message? Even before the transformation into a memorial, the house spoke on its own, the ordinary language of reformer home using the language of the quotation backdrops of everyday life. Considering the condition of the house, repeatedly rebuilt and now decrepit, there were few words left over. The meaningful sense of the new language of the memorial is transmitting to its visitors the message of Palach's sacrifice. Here the importance lay in the engagement of the people affected similarly in the goal of the memorial not only to inform the visitors, but to address their engagement, engagement through perceiving, experiencing, feeling, understanding, comprehending. With the central axis, we chose the layer of communication that points to the family background and the personal everyday level of Jan's life, thus equally the layer that indicates the widest meaning of Palach's death and its importance for today. The new form of the memorial is where two characters of language intersect, informative language acting on the rational level and the language of senses, feelings, emotions, spirits. The first character is presented by the information and objects displayed in the historical exhibition in the new museum pavilion, speaking via historic texts, exhibition items, historic photographs, film clips and so on. The second speaks through the new aesthetic architectonic form of the memorial, metaphors, symbols, associations, yet equally archetypal or subconscious impressions. The new language has linked up with the original one in dialogue and in harmony. The language of the memorial symbolizes the situation in which a sharp edge intervened international life and the challenge it provoked. It stimulates us to listen to the challenges of today and our personal reactions to them. Visitors passes through the symbols thus inserted into the architectonic and artistic layer, 14 symbols, 14 halts, like the stations of the cross. The sharp edge of evil sliced into the house from outside, attacking home, family, the inner life. We entered the house through inside the edge and become part of the fracture situation. From the petaforcourt, we entered the main space of the house, emptied by the strike of the edge of evil. The blinded windows lie at the boundary between the individual stance and response of society. The sharp edge of evil was blocked by the strength of the home and the life sacrifice, the table that kept the edge of evil at bay forms and homage to the family and to the mother. The blinded windows are the interface between a personal stance and the approach of the wider society. The cracks provide a Judas window for surveillance from the outside, yet simultaneously the hope of sunlight entering within. A fragment of staircase leads upwards to Jan's now vanished room. The room for reflection in the back of the main space is the place for the artistic response to the challenge by contemporary authors. The door to the house Jan had left last is now and forever only a door for departure. Into the heart of this space of reflection, we entered through a corridor where the ceiling is covered by the Czechoslovak flag at the same position as the body of Jan Palach, which was covered by it, the sudarium of the body. The garden center is a point of intersection, binding the situation of the memorial into a single unit of space and meaning. In the garden's corner, it appears another new house might be standing, but instead it is a limited section of the surrounding space inside, present in our current era, we observe the past. The once enclosed courtyard now opens freely into the space of the town, a meaningful gesture of the presence. The monument has become a public space. Through the architecture and the site to speak fully, it was necessary to stand on the side of the listener. In this case, both the society and the individual facing this difficult and discomfiting message to extract it from the depths of a gradual forgetting to find for it words strong enough to match its own strength. The second one from three I would like to show you is the house in Hornysvietla. The house in Hornysvietla is a part of an institutionally protected landscape area where the subject of protection is predominantly the house position in the character of the wider whole. The earliest cells are baroque, the wood and stone core is of 18th century vintage, the brick edition dates from the first part of the 12th century and small editions from the same era later part. All layers are the traces of stories starting with the building's purpose in each given era and ending with the fates of its inhabitants. The aim of the last restoration was to save the house more precisely to lengthen its lifespan through reinforcing its sustainability into the future. Through the revitalization of its structural and technical condition and no less through the creation of a new role for the house in human lives. A building intended as a residence is in terms of the meaning and the language of its communication, a different type of structure than for example public building or the highly specific form of monument. What in short is the intellectual message of a building intended as a residence, what can it communicate to the same extent it communicates with its inhabitants as well as the other people in its vicinity in the village the landscape. For the inhabitants the house is a life partner. It is a being that follows them through the life of day to day utility as much as any spiritual of emotional experiences. The touches are physical, through gaze or thought, and each touch is a form of relationship, hence no less of language. The original language speaks of layers of time, of contiguity with the surrounding landscape of the ever present force of nature, and the new language draws upon this, developing it into multi-voiced polyphony. Words are given through materiality in the form of the tactility of individual materials, the way that the house interacts with the natural surroundings, through light, shade, human touch, traces of time slayers, dialogues of old and new structures. We perceive the embrace of the rounded wooden handles in our hands. A bad foot reads the curseness of the pebbles in the concrete surface, the joints of the three worn floorboards, and the transition to the smooth surfaces of the new wood floors, the back leaned against the exposed stone wall. Ascending the stars stirs, we experience a view through verticality, the meadow, the forest, the sky. Opening the house doors toward the village we experience wonder when, behind the ordinary facet of the old house, there suddenly resounds a dialogue of old and new, as much as the sudden link to the open landscape through the all-glass doors at the other end. The house gained its speech when we liberated it. When we relieved it of the burden of its enclosing structural layer of the most recent period from the blinding surfaces of paint and the suffocating deposits of objects. We opened its body towards the free flowing landscape, connecting spaces to free up their conversations, uncovering the pores in the beams, floorboards, stones, allowing them to breathe, letting in the warmth of the sun, color of the landscape, and as well new life. And the last one we would like to show is the bastion of the crucifixions, which is a protected heritage site, a trace of Prague's historic fortifications with great significance in the structuring of the urban organism, informing the character of the site in providing authenticity of detail. The goal of revitalization here was, for one, to open up the public a long, inaccessible part of the urban center and transform it into a public space, and for another, to preserve valuable historic remnants and conjoint them into culture and life. The intellectual message of the site is the representation of historic moments in Prague's history and donations, the international political situation of medieval Europe, yet equally the urban expansion of Prague under Emperor Charles IV representing the culture ideals of this age. The preserved original language, a field of fragments, remnants of words and sentences, yet within each one, a concentration of strength, of meanings, of secrets. The original language is grounded primarily in associations, spatial and meaningful associations or the natural qualities of the materials and the surroundings. It seeks out the lost context and creates new ones. It anchors the site in a network of original paths in the symbolic connection of visible urban landmarks and its structure of meanings and culture. The spaces of the supplementary structures are incented against time's curse into the accretions of the earth, like archaeology against time. The below ground atrium is a sunken negative of the tower we know to have stood in the area, but whose precise location is unknown. The rusty steel of the outer objects of the parterre recalls the rusting relics of wartime objects strewn across the battlefields of past ages. The black carpet on the ceiling is a kind of man-made moss below the ground in the spirit of defensive architecture, where the heart is on the surface and the soft inside. The gratings of the main room evoke restraint, the dignity of a stone cave, while the curves seeping out of the rare below ground spaces are the curves of old walls, rust orange, purple, nice green moss. The space makes present the boundary between below and above, between light and dark, earth and emptiness. The site comes to speak through its accessibility to human presence. After decades of isolation, it has begun, once more, to relate its long and short tales about how it was touched by the nation's most vital historic moments. The essential skeleton of setting and meanings has risen to the surface. The revitalized materials are flourishing with constructions and colors. The new additions create associations with the history and the spatial context of the site. Speech creates a relationship. Wherever there is language, there is conversation. Wherever there is conversation, there emerges a relationship. And in an active relationship, meaning is formed. In the present conversation of a monument with individuals and society, there emerges a new active cultural layer of the present time, connected to the layers of the past, incurring the monument as a living component of the trajectory between the past and the future. And hearing there lies the sense of bringing a monument to speak as part of its protection. Thank you for your attention. Thank you. Pablo, that was terrific. Thank you so much. I am going to do the clapping for everyone else because Zoom does not allow us for the kind of active relationship that is usually allowed for in a regular in-face, face-to-face conversation. We are going to try to bring the audience to speech at one point. So those of us that are online, you're more than welcome to please turn on your cameras. And I have to now find where you are because I've lost my Zoom, unfortunately, right, at the wrong moment. Pablo, are you still there? Can you hear me? I'm still here. I hear you. Hang on because I see what happened. Okay, sorry. I lost the screen for a second. So just a little housekeeping. So those of you that are in the audience, I'd like to open it up for questions. I'm going to ask a few questions first just to get the conversation started. We have about half an hour for Q&A. And then I'm going to call on people in the audience to have their questions or comments. I'm going to ask you to please raise your hand using the screen. So if you hover your mouse over your own image, there should be a way for you to raise your hand. If you click down where it says participants and you find your name, you should be able to raise your hand. It says more and then you should be able to raise your hand. And perhaps, Meredith, you can give instructions on how to do that for those that don't know how to use the raise hand function on Zoom. So please do that. And then I will call on anyone who has some questions. You can also write those questions in the chat. And if you do that, then I can also scroll through them and bring those call on you to read them or bring them to the attention of Pavla. Back to your talk. Thanks again for a magnificent presentation. It's first of all very impressive to see the level of work and the breadth of work that you have done with historic sites and your commitment to an active and creative relationship to these heritage sites. I think I'm very impressed by your development through your practice of a theoretical framework for both explaining what you're doing, but also giving us clues about how to do it. And how to create meaning to bring the meaning of the place forward, but to be an active participant as a designer in that conversation. And I think you really foregrounded this notion of that creative act being central to the act of preservation. And so I wanted to talk a little bit more about that because I think for many preservationists. The idea of creativity is one that is considered to be something that should not show right that the that the preservationist work should be invisible. It should not be, should not be visually expressible and that the whole point of preservation is to, in a sense, keep that keep that the present from showing in the in the in the monument. And you took a very active stance against that in your talk. And you made the claim, which I thought I wanted you to expand upon that to do that to not recognize our relationship in the present to the monument is in a sense to do a disservice to preservation. You said preservation is not merely a crossing it's not merely just taking something and moving it on from the past to the present, but it is to take an active part in shaping and reshaping cultural memory in an active part in influencing contemporary life. And so that places a lot of pressure on you as a designer and a preservationist to take a stance, you, you have to take a position vis-à-vis contemporary life, which can many in many ways be political. I mean you, you, you, because life is political. And so I, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about that, because when you are talking about the kinds of lessons that kind of speech that you're bringing into a monument these are national monuments many of them these are national shrines. They're speaking to a public that is trying that that is going to approach these as politicized monuments know they have a role to play in contemporary politics. I, but I sense in your work that you're trying to also move beyond politics to some extent to try to reach a kind of emotion that is that transcends politics. It's an emotion of, for example, the big wedge that you drive into the Jan Palachom is one about this sense of, of, of something from the outside coming, you called it evil even you use the word evil to describe that wedge that you, you know how do you stop something evil in the world. And you talked about the family as, as the kind of place where that stops and you wanted to give that representation. So I just wanted to have you talk a little bit more about that, you know, the, the, the kind of opposition that you seem to be placing between the kind of political sphere the public sphere and the private sphere of, of the family or of, of, even in the individual that there that there's a private sphere and your monuments, your creative work in your monuments seem to try to make room for that private sphere within the public, that the individuals not lost entirely in the public realm, when they enter the public realm they're not subsumed by the public realm but I wanted to hear more about that. From you. In terms of your, you know, your thoughts on that I mean that your thoughts on the relationship between the individual and the public. Do you see politics being only in the public sphere, or is the individual that you are that your monuments speak to I think they're speaking to but I'm not sure you tell me is is that is the individual also political are these two kind of politics that you're, your monuments are trying to negotiate between, or do you always feel that you're addressing just the individual or just the public kind of as an abstraction. Okay. It's not true that this this speech with just we as an architect with war dealing with monuments. And when we are active. It really could be manipulative. We could manipulate it but I think, if we are talking about our role as, as, as we could make the monument bring to speech it. So, on one side, we have to interpret it something which we have to find in this monument. Yeah, we. I think our task is to first to listen very carefully to try to understand what this monument to content the ideal content of this monument. I really wanted to say, it's, we are indifferent in this situation. Yeah, we only have to translate as best way, we are able to do it. And the, the second part of it. It could be dialogue from the past and present and future and I think that we have to be through unity and if we are through it's, it is not manipulative. We could say now we are in some situation present and we want to make a dialogue between past and our task is to find really clear language of the past and and make it visible on the on the monument. And if you ask about the role between individual and society in politics, I think that this example of young palace memorial it's a good example because it was a young reaction to politics and society situation. And what we wanted was to show people all the visitors who come to the memorial to be able to feel to understand that there is their own task that is challenge. Many times it was challenge for him. He had this challenge. He wanted to do something as a person he wasn't able to be part of some politic movements and so on so he had the only chance to react individually. And I think that what we wanted to say through this monument was that not only in this very hard period of our history but also today there are many many, maybe small, but many other types of evil. So there are many small challenges around us and each of us caught and is able to react to them if we are listening them. Yes, so I think it's possible through the individual act in some historical point to generate it and show that it has validity, general validity. So it has validity also for our present maybe in more abstract level and also in future and what we wanted was not only to show real dates and information about this history situation, but more to show the general level in it, which is valid for our presence and for all individuals we are dealing with the situations. So one of the things I really enjoyed about your talk also was your description, your very careful description of communication as a relationship and that it is not only a logo centric but in fact that in other words it's not dependent on simply words or speech or text, but that the body also is involved in communication. And that the kind of work that you do as an architect dealing with historic sites dealing with a very abstract art which is architecture in a sense create these bodily relationships in a carefully orchestrated way to establish an interaction between the visitor's body and the heritage that they are inhabiting in a very particular illustration that will create a kind of dialogue. But in a way what I really took away was this notion that the heritage is also gesturing through your work to the visitor trying to engage the visitor in different aspects to look to sit to pause to move right to be in a space in a particular way. And I want to ask you a little bit about this orchestration do you and your working method do you work with a large group of people like you sit down with a community and you ask them to tell you about the kinds of relationships or values that they understand to be present or underrepresented at the site or do you work with historians to try to understand that do you work alone do you work you know how do you engage other people in the act of redesigning these these sites, you know, do or do you or do you most you know you get the brief and then you work alone in the studio and then do the work. I think there is a different in different sites, you know, tell us a little bit about that process. I think that both approaches are present in our work. It depends. Sometimes what we are because we are not working specially on historic preservation we are also working on many other types of public buildings and, and other and also public spaces very often. We are working, for example, on public spaces, which is often revitalization of public spaces where people still are living. So, our communication I think it's not about to ask them how do you imagine this how do you want it's to to will look like but we at the beginning. Let's ask questions like how do you feel here. What do you want to do here in the future. Are you afraid of something here so we, we asked for us to imagine about acting in the space, not about visibility of space or architecture or design form of it. Because this, this awareness of what we want people could do that in future revitalization. It is our, our starting point. And after it, we only start to form forms of architectural design. So, and the other approach is maybe when we are in a little bit more artistic level as for example this memory of and power. I think in this situations, it could help so much this participation white participation people I think in this situation is more through us and artists through your feelings through your very, very inside feelings and inside imagination because in this situation you are more than an public creator of public space. And maybe what is interesting I think you asked also about language. And I think in this communication with people it is very important for me personally and it's a long, long years. The topic of my research and my thinking and my, my writing these books and text is that I think that if we want to find language as an architects to put in architecture for architecture to speak with people itself. So first I think we have to understand language, which people understand environment around them to understand really language of their feelings the language of the picture of surrounding environment. And in this picture of this feeling the picture of this of this perceiving the environment so I think this is maybe a kind of participation with people and doing it through this concrete project I think as an architect, you have to do it your whole life to try to understand the way to language how people understand surrounding environment so architecture so monument and so on so if you, if you understand a little bit this kind of language I think then as for example in this memory of and you could work with it abstractly, you could translate this this forms of language into the speech of some abstract art architecture and so on so then for example when we use this abstract language as in the memory and then it is about immersive art so I could show it on the on the example in art you could have representative art when the artistic object represents something it's and this representation is outside you outside and when you want to do what we are doing for example in this memory is to make something immersive so this communication is not outside you but is becoming through your perceiving so you don't see some representation some representations in this objects and architecture, but you have to create these communications through your perceiving like immersive like immersive art like immersive objects so this is the way we are trying to work. I think it's very powerful you know when we talk about feelings and emotions right. We often talk about in order to understand your feelings, you know, putting words to feelings right so when you're trying to deal with difficult feelings in psychology. Psychologists will talk about putting words to feeling and I somehow think of your work as putting spaces to feelings. I'm trying to express a feeling spatially so that that process helps to clarify it and helps to kind of reify it and be able to deal with it in a particular way because you're you're dealing with very charged feelings, I mean, young Bach burnt himself to death in order to protest the Soviet invasion. So putting putting spaces to feelings so that other people can kind of understand that seems to be a really interesting way of kind of dealing with the psychology of a place that kind of emotional charge of a place. And of course, these are not reductive in the sense that you know there are multiple feelings or you know multiple emotions that can be in the space. So you're not, you're not trying to kind of control it, but you're trying to clarify it and give it some sort of sharpness so that it's easier. But I also feel that there's a real generosity in your spaces because you, you welcome the kind of the visitors on experiences. It's you're not, in a sense, trying to be dogmatic or restrictive in the sense of what can be experienced in a particular space that you're trying to also welcome people's own memories and experiences at the space as a way of understanding the place which is to me really at the core of this idea of of bringing the monument into a relevance today and giving it a future, giving it a new relevance because it's it's a relevance in the people that come to the to the monument and the and the experiences they take away so I find that really powerful we have a question from Shui Yin who's raised her hand so she you want to turn on your camera and ask your question and others please, you know, do the same. Thank you very much for your project. And I think the idea of speech is really fascinating to me. And I'm wondering, like, what exactly is this a set of ideas like the speech. Here is it kind of like the like a rent in like political speech, and then it's kind of like creation of the communication by speech related to action, and then action can open up faculty's potentiality and creation. But at the same time action can also mean like startling unexpectedness. So I'm just wondering, like, how could we guarantee such acts action has like good result or in other sense like do you think speech is the only communicative way or like for example how do you think of like the power of silence or some other, some other ways. I mean the silence is kind of the opposite to speech, but then like it's the speech, the only necessary way to create this kind of action towards like a better society. I think when we are talking, you ask about the relationship between communication and action. So, in old Greek, they ever said that communication have to be before the action, which is something I believe in very strongly. I think that if you want to act to be aware of your doing, it's one thing you have to think about it before. And if you want to act as a part to know you have agreement with the society with people as an architect. If I am doing something, I am doing it always for other people, not for me itself. So for me, this communication is necessary to know that I have agreement with these people that I know what to do. So for me, action, it's better if action is after communication. So this relationship and silence, I think silence is a break between communication. So it's also one part of language, you are right. Yeah, this question of action is a very interesting, very interesting one. So I wanted to ask you about memory a little bit because a lot of what your work has to do with memory. And you're talking about a kind, you know, you're dealing with sites that have a very important history. And so, and they and that history is interpreted at the side textually I imagine. But I wanted to ask you a little bit about about memory. How do you, how do you think of memory? Are you, do you think of these sites as places of memory? In the sense of like Pierre Nora's notion of places of memory, or do you think of these, in other words, collective memories that get played out in these in these places? Or do you think of these as places that are more for an individual memory? Do you see this as places to build memories or to to evoke memories? I'm thinking of the National Park Service in America, for example, right? The National Park Service has a mission to make memories. It's that's where you take your children when they're young to learn about the relationship to the environment, the relationship to American history. It is educational, but it's also a kind of product placement. You know, you have a wonderful experience together as a family and then as part of that experience is the national story. So I'm wondering that relationship, you know, is it, is this a, do you see these as places to build memories, to create memories that are imbricating personal memory into a national narrative? Or are these places where the national and the individual can be kept apart? Okay, sorry, it's a very complex question, Jorge, for a few last minutes. No, no, I think because for me as an architect, the architectural environment is very important as a part of some existential question to me. For me, it's very important to be aware how it's important for people to be able to identify with their surrounding environment to be aware of their role in it. Which I think could help them to understand their life itself. And this way, I also, I'm also thinking about memory in monuments, I think, because this memory has as many levels, yeah, it could be, it could be think about it as information. This monument could be some educative object, which could in physical essence, bring you some information about history, like book, like any other object, which is better of this memory as information. For me, it's also important this role of memory as a part, which could help people better identify with the architecture, this object, this place, this town, this, that home. So I think this, yeah, so for me, memory is a part of the character of this environment, which could help to feel it, to understand it, and so on. As a language, or as a language. Anyone else in the audience, I want to make sure to, if there are any comments or questions that anybody would like to ask. Don't be shy. Okay. Pavla, it's, it's such a pleasure to see your amazing, amazing work. It's such an honor to be able to have you virtually here with us in our, in a public lecture program. Thank you for sharing your ideas, sharing your theories, sharing your practice, and your original approach to, to the preservation of heritage. It's an inspiration to all of us and in a real lesson so thank you so much. Thanks. Thank you very much for invitation, everybody for taking time and be here, and also for interesting discussion. Thank you and bye.