 So thank you very much. We are continuing with the fourth panel. The fourth panel is titled, From Material, Culture to Design. Designing to build is one of the essence of architectural practice and, for many offices, one of their obsessions. To build today opens new windows to the understanding of the construction systems, the use of the materials and the fabrication of the components and instruments of a critical practice as a theoretical, political ingredient of the present. We have three practices for this panel. Thomas Chapman founded Local Student Johannesburg in 2011. His work explores a kind of local condition through the recuperation of the industrial legacy of the recent history of South Africa. Moreno Ramos and Eloisa Castellano come from Mindelo, Cape Bird. They work quite close to the processes of construction, building the boundaries between design and fabrication, always looking for a very sensitive relation with the people. And James Sen is the founder and principal of People's Architecture, Architecture Office, based in Beijing, China, PAO. It's the first big corporation in Asia that means work for the sustainable, useful for the community, and socially responsible guidelines. And they work with contemporary industrial resources from prefab to recycled construction systems. It's a very active, experimental way that has taken them to Venice Biennale or London Design Museum. The panel will be modulated by Eddie Bunghe, who teaches here at GESAP, principal of N Architects, together with Mimi Hoang, also faculty of GESAN, and of his focus on the experimentation through construction with the architectural culture and its pedagogy. After this panel, we'll have a coffee break before going to the last part of the evening. So thank you for your resistance. We have some more offices to show you. I think local studio is first. Welcome. Thank you. I come from Johannesburg, South Africa. I established my practice local studio there in 2012. When I started, we were two laptops in a living room doing self-build projects. And we've grown over the years to a team of 13 professionals, some five years later. Sorry, I'm only five years old. This is our own office building in Brixton, Johannesburg, which we developed and worked from today. We offer architecture and urban design services and do a wide range of projects. Our building is a bit of a 3D business card for us in that it's a mixed-juice building. There's retail on the ground floor offices, our office in the middle and apartments on top. It acts as a catalyst in a complex area. And interestingly, we've actually picked up a few clients who started off as patrons in the coffee shop downstairs. I can't claim that I'm in a position where I can pick and choose work, but one of the only constants in our work is that we try to emphasize the importance of public space and try to impact the public realm in all of our projects. This might seem obvious to this audience, but it is pretty unusual for those who know my city. I was invited to talk about practice within the sub-theme of material culture because I believe that as a firm, we're known to be experimental and innovative with materials. I think this conference is insightful and I thank Prof Ferreros for the invitation, but the truth is I actually stress a lot more about cash flow than I do about materials. But I think the two are somewhat interlinked. Today, the majority of my work is conducted in Johannesburg, a city established 111 years ago due to the discovery of immense gold deposits beginning where the centre of our downtown is today. The mines and in turn the construction of our city relied heavily on cheap migrant labour, a trend that has sadly continued to this day due to an entrenched system of social engineering through spatial division known as apartheid. Although apartheid was officially abolished in 1994, its legacy lives on, not least in the way we plan our spaces and construct our buildings. 23 years after democracy, we have a situation where, despite publicly opposing one another, the largely unchanged capitalist private market and the so-called revolutionary government contribute in their different ways to an industry that is dreadfully slow-moving, cripplingly aspirational and continuously obsessed with the creation of devices of separation. Jonah Arrow, who actually lectured here at Columbia last month, once said that the largest prefabricated construction module that makes sense in South Africa is the brick. And I was thinking of calling my presentation beyond the brick in reference to my perhaps controversial view that the dominance of masonry construction in our country can be attributed at worst or at least associated with some of the problematic aspects of our industry and how I've grown my practice by purposefully not building in brick. The project that enabled me to launch a practice is the Outreach Foundation Community Center. This is a multi-purpose center built for an NGO in what is one of the toughest parts of downtown Johannesburg called Hillbrow. When we met the client that had secured about $200,000 through a national lottery grant and had appointed another architect to design a small brick building to sit alongside an unfinished community hall. We were invited to pitch an alternative design and propose a translucent box floating above the odd unfinished building rather than beside it, creating more space for dance, more natural light, and views of surrounding buildings. I most certainly bluffed when I said that they could get this building for the price of the old one and desperately went about trying to find a ready-made steel structure in the former's weekly that we could use. As a practitioner, I've always been interested in working smart rather than hard, trying to find quick-fix solutions to problems, avoiding working from first principles. In my search for a ready-made shed, I encountered a host of suppliers selling something like prefab construction, cold rod sections preassembled as wall and roof panels. I believe that the light steel frame industry in South Africa boomed and faded within two years of this project. But for a moment in time, we were able to build a building twice the size of the brick one for the same price and in a third of the time. It took four months to build. The building is now four years old and is heavily used and not looking too bad for its age. This project birthed a volley of social infrastructure projects built for clients wanting more and better spaces than what their budgets would allow and who were willing to deviate from our norms of construction that came to define the work of Marfa's. I mentioned aspiration earlier. This is the construction site of the largest gated community in South Africa known as Waterfall City. There are no waterfalls here. Just brick walls dividing McMansions from a no man's land of highways and power lines linking back to the Johannesburg City Center 20 kilometers away. It seems that the richer the richer have got, the heavier, uglier and further apart from each other, they build their houses. And now this is not a problem in and of itself but the brick bungalow has become the gold standard for housing in South Africa. Into the South African government and their reconstruction and development program called RDP launched in 1994 with the RDP House, a $1,000 mini-MAC mansion. And the government built just under three million of them for South Africans on the housing list. Even with the price tag, the government has not been able to provide even a tenth of the housing in the locations they're required due to this inefficient typology. The problem lies in that there's constantly a reference to the assumed aspiration of citizens. The people need proper brick houses with four walls and a roof which is an unattainable dream created by both the government and the private sector. About three years ago, we began working on adaptive reuse schemes in downtown where developers have brought large former office buildings for very low prices with the intention of converting them into affordable rental housing. Developers will often pick up these buildings for nothing and try to maximize efficiency. The affordability level of the housing market in South Africa is weighted at 70% with a household income of under $350 a month, forcing developers to build schemes that are accessible to this market. Projects like this mostly involve the creation of internal partitions to define apartments within deep floor plates which previously were open plan offices and industrial spaces. Now the cheapest way to do this would be with cement stock brick walls and this is far more to do with a low cost of labor. Migrant workers are paid less than $10 a day than the cost of brick. Fortunately, the structural systems of most of these buildings cannot support heavy interior walling, forcing the introduction of innovative lightweight walling systems and an upskilling of workers in much friendlier working conditions. This project called Bramford Tain Gate involved the creation of 400 affordable housing units in the Burntouch-Shallivan office tower built for the French oil company Total in 1976. The interior walls are rendered polystyrene and the most interesting part of the intervention was actually the adjustment of the dark glass sunshades which you'll see on the left which actually obstructed the view of the city when you were standing up and we turned these into balconies by cutting the steel frames and moving them up a meter. The glass was found to be brittle and we couldn't afford to replace it to the same spec so we opted instead for white corrugated iron which makes the change of use evident on the skyline. Amazingly, the 30 story building has some of the best views in all directions in Joberg and was built without balconies. We also converted the massive banking halls on the ground floor into communal spaces for tenants, something that makes the building very popular place to live today while being a massive departure from the traditional brick bungalow. The last theme I wanna talk about is separation. The South African government has tried as hard as our corrupt president will allow to introduce large scale public infrastructure projects that try to undo apartheid planning at the city scale. There are several bridges in planning and implementation stage intended to create pedestrian connectivity between areas purposefully separated by highway infrastructure. The most high profile of these is a new link between Alexander Township and Santon called The Great Walk. Alex is a very dense and poor black area of a million people and Santon, the richest square mile in Africa and our Wall Street. There's generally very little material innovation in these projects, meaning that despite looking very heavy and imposing, they'll take five years to build and therefore be plagued with cost overruns and labor issues to the extent that by the time they're complete, the surrounding community have a very negative impression of them. This is actually the temporary footbridge built over the highway, which created access while The Great Walk was being completed. This one was built in four weeks. We were given the opportunity to work on one of these projects, a pedestrian bridge at this location between two areas previously separated by apartheid. The level crossing had seen a lot of children knocked over so there was an immediate practical need apart from the symbolic act. Needless to say, the initial concept prepared by the engineers looked a lot more like a wannabe Kalatrava. We were able to wrestle design control from the engineers and propose the lightweight steel bridge, which we built off-site in two months and erected in 24 hours. With savings in the construction costs, we were able to build a community park on the western abutment, which is the pro of the two communities. We purposely painted the bridge red as a reference to the efficiency of temporary scaffold bridges. And as a reminder that the ability to connect trumps the iconic object which symbolizes connection. I will end with a statement about practice. I believe that we've been somewhat successful as we've been doing these first five years precisely because I'm not a perfectionist. Our material language was birthed out of a need to produce quickly and efficiently and has now developed a life of its own which speaks about lightness, temporality and with that a symbol of a new formal future for a city held back by its heavy apartheid modernist past. I would call local studio a quasi-commercial practice in that we're not the enemy of developers but use our insight to find other ways of making their projects profitable than the methods that seem obvious to them. Our moderator Eric actually said we've got 10 minutes and not 15 so I'm actually done. Thank you very much. Ramos Castellano will be next. Welcome. Hello to everybody. We need a small short video for introduce yourself in covered. Mindelo is a city in a small island that is San Vicente that is in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean 300 kilometers far from Senegal. And this is the second house that we build by ourselves for an American client and we made the project, we made the building construction and it takes us about three years, one year for the project and two years for the building construction. This was a picture of the site where we worked for two years there. Meanwhile, Iloiza was working in the studio, was carrying the employees, the worker in the site and this takes us two years to build it so in that time I had time to make paintings and using the material construction. This is the lime party for example because it was tiring to stay always concentrated in architecture and they have a totally different logic in covered. So it takes time to understand everything and for go out to the island we need some other activity and this was the activity that I developed all the time in the building construction. Then this is the house. The house was very introspective because the client want to be not in the middle of the social dimension but in the middle of his dimension so he want to enjoy the nature and ingest the place. The house is bio-climatic, is passive at level of climatization and we try to use more material that we find in the site but not the wood. The wood come from other place in Africa but we will return in this question of the material later in other project. The wood is remain all the time raw because it was easier to let the material interact with the place instead of treating him and every time every two years give manutenation. So when we let the material like they are we do that because we think about trees. Trees don't need manutenation so we use wood like it is. This is another project. This is our fifth project realized in Cape Verde. This is in a small fisherman village called San Pedro and we built this eco-hotel named Aquila's Eco-Hotel and this is an interesting story because we do the project and we were also the clients. We were partners in this hotel. So many people they think that that was a crazy thing to do because it's a very small village fisherman village and people say you are crazy to do this in this place because no tourist will come there. But we were sure about this and we go ahead with our proposal and we finished the project and well it's in the middle of the village and because we wanted to put people coming from outside enjoying the real life of Cape Verde. I know that many of you maybe you don't know Cape Verde because it's a very small country ten tiny islands but as Moreno said previously we have this very peculiar logic so well we built this here in San Pedro in the fisherman village and as you see is a concrete structure with the rooms we made the rooms as containers the dimension of well you see Aquila's is here this photo was taken from the sea the ocean is in the middle of the village and I said that we used the initial idea was to use containers but then we changed our minds and we decided to use certified wood and we built the rooms as well well the shape are containers and the dimensions and I will go ahead with the photos this is another view from the hotel is in the very middle of the village as I was saying before because we will people to enjoy the real life this is during the construction you can see the materials I was talking concrete structure with those containers let's say built as panels panels assembled and we made all the panels in Mindelo and then they carried to San Pedro and to assemble all the work as you can see here and in this photo the idea that this is implicit here is that the flexibility that we want in our architecture because life as life and architecture change and also tourism change so we made the project like this because tomorrow if the conditions change we can change also we can transform into apartments or whatever this is a photo showing the local boats that people use to go fishing and basically we take the same kind of way of building let's say like this with these boats and we used the construction report let's say that this idea of the boats construction in woods with the courts inside for the movement of the woods that one is another view of the hotel facing the square and the school here we have the rooms very simple and natural we want our architecture to be natural for people because architecture without people is nothing so we try to give most that simplicity is a very difficult thing to reach and we try to create to our architecture simple but not how to say banal well and the rooms are simple because we want to encourage people to discover the place not to stay with the internet all the time with their smartphones or laptops so we don't have internet we don't have television it was decisions and choices we made in conscience let's say because in some ways it's also a way to encourage people to discover themselves and do reflection and well enjoy a place because when you go visiting a foreign country it's important that maybe you interact with people and know the environment and well this is another view from Dakile's Ecotel as you can see life there has a very is a very slow no rush and people well it's a very poor village people don't have maybe water in their house and they have to carry water but there's a lot of happiness there because you can see children playing and well we try to use materials also this kind of warm materials to welcome people that will stay in Akiles and from the inside of the hotel enjoy the village this is another project that we are making in the island that is in front of San Vicente one hour by boat this is a agricultural island and like you see in the picture we have all terraces here in the persistent nearest terrains so the client of this project are German and they have a travel agency for trekking tourism so for them it was interesting to keep the place like it is and for us it was possible to work with them because they don't want to destroy the place so for them is to keep the place for Ernie Mone for us is to keep the place for let people live like they are used to live and our purpose was to spread their money in the village nearest of this place and then in this way people can accept their project as well and the tourist that comes there they can feel the happiness that we spread in the people giving them work for about two years now the first phase of the project was the master plan and then after we have done the master plan they start to build the terraces and now one years ago we started to make the architectural project so we made a hotel of 14 rooms with a restaurant and a reception and 10 villas each villa is different and each villa has a different view this is how they made the terraces they take the stones from the valley that is down this plot let me say this big plot and they carry it one by one like they make pyramids without machines without instruments and making these terraces where they can really put agriculture and then cultivate so we try to make a circle in the project the project is made for the people that comes to visit that place and then they can eat what they cultivate there and then they can start to see how it works how the people there lives with architecture, with this strict relation with the place and then this image shows how this architecture are in the other part of the island and how we start to think our project we want to transmit the same feeling that the people that lives there as when they lives in their homes so we want, this was very important for us and this is something that is a statement for us we want to, the tourists don't change the place but the tourists change it by the place so this was a statement our architecture in a way they are very political but in a very simple way we want to show what we understand and what we think that is fair and then we try to put them people in a very simple way, living in it these are the technical issues that we had and this is a tent where I lived for about 15 days in different zone of the project for fill the site for understand how the climate works there where the winds come which is the direction when it changes from the day to the night and for example sleeping there I can experience eagles that make nest in the mountain nearest and then I can understand that at night the tourists can have that feeling and then the architecture comes very natural it's a consequence of the process of filling the place ok this project is also an eco-hotel that we made in Mindelo in San Vicente for a French client this guy is a trekking guide and he comes from the mountains in France and well when he came into our studio he has an idea he wants to build the hotel but we kind of built the construct the program with him and in this photo you can see here is the hotel we try to as we do in every project to reach the integration in the urban context can I say something? we try to dance together with the other buildings yes we have danced everywhere music I was talking about this integration in the urban context and using the same logic as you can see of the built environment we use the same logic we put our architecture there as a mark but integrated this is too well too maybe I will show you this picture another time this green house existed there's an ancient house, colonial house and this was the trekking office of this guy and he has this piece of land, this plot behind and is there where we built the hotel well we can see here the ancient house we made a few changes there not really much, a bathroom and the terrace here we have the blocks, the rooms the touch from the behind for the circulation of people and also the circulation of air because we wanted this kind of... we wanted this cross ventilation in every project that we do and here this is technical drawings this is the bar it's above Pilates to permit this... the dissentrance the fluid of this dissentrance to permit the visitor to enter and to discover the surprise behind that was the blocks of the rooms here you can see these oil barrels and this gate made by these oil barrels because we want to always trying to reuse and recycle found materials in order to do this sustainability so in this project we recycled water and we put solar panels and in this photo you can see a room with these verandas and we also designed all the furniture beds and lamps and everything this is made by recycled dudes here you can see in this detail this was the remains of metallic profile that we cut to do the handle of the doors while this is the lamp that we draw this is a photo of the construction and this is an overall view of the bridge the rooms to the ancient house this is another project we show in the next time it's a museum that is made by the camps of dead barrels so it's a ventilate facade that permits the insulation of the building and there is a small artisanal museum inside I think I finished the time thank you very much for having me here I'm very happy to be a part of this group so I'm James representing People's Architecture Office we are three partners there's me with He Zhe and Zhang Feng the both of them are Chinese they're from China I'm Chinese technically but I'm originally from the US and born in Los Angeles and have been in China for about 10 years so my background I have undergraduate education in product design and then worked for a few years as a furniture designer and then went on to study architecture later on we do a wide range of scales and program in terms of projects but we try to always ensure that we're engaging with social issues in our projects and part of our engagement with social themes is our interest in informality being based in Beijing we find a lot of inspiration from the sort of creative ways that people live there I guess and we started off with really no work and no money and had to come up with things to do so we did this we tried to engage with this kind of informality in our own way but this is also a reaction to the high cost of housing there is no private ownership of land in China also we are playing around with materials this is polypropylene plastic that you can score and fold and we designed this space where you could have a temporary bathroom, kitchen and bedroom we continue this exploration of material in lots of different ways we tend to go to ready-made things sort of found objects in a sense and again adopting this kind of bricolage way of approaching design so this material we thought was very interesting these reflective photography panels that are both very flexible but also structural so these structures are self-supporting there's nothing else in there and we literally pack these up, bring it onto site and deploy them so this allows us this kind of modularity, collapsibility these are manufactured in factories has allowed us to do this in many locations and again looking at the way that the city has developed and grown in ways that are unexpected we've always found these HVAC tubes on the outside interesting in that it shows you where there was a program where it wasn't meant to be originally so say in the basement you have these ventilation tubes that lead you to the exterior and so again we used that, we adapted that to do quite a few things so this is signage, this spells out in Chinese Baidase which is the name of this historic area in Beijing and so this is a kind of a visitor's center to bring people to this area and to introduce them to this neighborhood so the tubes they're not just the signage but they're also public furniture and they're also periscopes that you can look into and then what you see is well there's one here that allows you to see into the interiors on the second floor where they have workshops going on and then other ones over here and over here where you can see views to important landmarks historic landmarks in the area that a lot of visitors may not be familiar with the public furniture and the periscopes so this kind of interaction with people is something that's central to our work and these canopies are also interesting along those lines these are collapsible sort of expandable canopies that take over areas along the street at night when the cops are not working and they have restaurants that basically like triple quadruple their space but these are some of the most active areas in the city and so we were invited to do a kind of an intervention in the UK actually this is Preston and so what we did is we took those canopies and altered them and put wheels on them so they were interested in connecting two areas in Preston and so we thought we would design these large sort of architectural scale objects that you can, the public can cycle from one place to another and then where you stop you can expand them out and they have all kinds of public programs and again this because of this approach this has allowed us to bring this to many different cities so this has been in, now it's been in more cities than this but Luven and Hong Kong also Shenzhen and I think this also brings about an idea that we like which is prototyping and testing out ideas each time we do this we make it better because there's a lot of problems with this project it's very difficult, it's scary at times because it's quite large and something that's moving, cycled by people who've never done this before it's a risky thing but it is a way for us to sort of develop a product that we see also as architecture that is also having a strong engagement with the city on city scale the next project is the courtyard house plug-in and I think this brings together a lot of the ideas I've shown you before this project is based in an area right in the center of Beijing this is called Dashalar and this is Tiananmen Square this is the Forbidden City and also you can sort of see in the fabric that this is now not so common in Beijing anymore and this is these historic Hutong neighborhoods that Beijing is really well known for and this is the largest remaining part of that texture so in Dashalar you have really poor conditions there it's really a slum-like environment, there's no sewage buildings are hundreds of years old and also a lot of properties have become vacant because of these conditions most of the population is elderly and so we proposed to the city a way of retrofitting, reusing these spaces without removing people or tearing anything down and the idea was to build a house within a house so without changing anything of the original building we build a new building inside of that so you can see some before and after images there's a lot of informality going on here and our way of doing this is with a prefabricated panel that we developed on our own in fact it's a kind of structural insulated panel these are some images from the factory so these panels allow you to bring these in, they're very light you can carry them with actually a couple of people and you can move them through these small alleyways and we have this what you call a camlock that's integrated into these panels so this allows you to build a house in just a few hours it's extremely inexpensive but very high quality because it is manufactured in a factory and this is just me and my partner building this house this is actually our first one that's the name we're looking at we can also mold in wiring I should explain that this is all molded, it's injected polyurethane so that allows us to integrate all kinds of things but the exterior and interior finishes it's all in the final panel so when it's finished it's pretty much ready for you to occupy so that lady that you saw that was kind of peeking over really curious about what the hell we were doing actually was really skeptical about what we were doing ended up going in there and realizing wow it's really warm in the winter and there are no heaters on and she ended up being our first local to ask for one of these I should also mention that this started off as a government pilot so in fact it was a government project which is significant for us because in many ways we're criticizing the ways that the government has been approaching urban renewal but to have this lady ask us to do this is really important because it means that this is affordable for them this is it would cost about 30 times the amount of money to have a new house in this location this whole thing cost her unit cost about $2,000 and we've done also other properties these are the ones that are vacant that are owned by the government we've turned them into sort of Airbnb type of spaces and we continue doing this for other homeowners and in addition to that we've also moved our office to this location to bring us closer to our work these are some kind of like Lamborghini doors that open up but it allows us to use this courtyard space more efficiently this is an interior of our office we also design furniture, all these things are designed by us and here you can see kind of the relationship with the new and the old this is called Plug-in Houses our first project that is independent of the original structure so this is Miss Fan and she just kind of came up to our office we're almost like a shop front, people come up and say hey can you do a new bathroom for me or a new kitchen for me and we say sure so this project was interesting also in that its form is not dictated by planning guidelines or policy because there's none it's not exactly legal to do this so what we had to do was negotiate amongst the people around us so this neighbor said don't block my light this neighbor said don't block my view and this neighbor said don't block my air and so that's what the final result is and people will say well this doesn't really fit with the environment there's all this contrast but then I answer well this is not original none of that is original and these really reflect the building techniques of a certain period and these are built out of necessity people challenging the system and we see ourselves as doing the same thing so the lady, Miss Fan, she actually grew up in this neighborhood and eventually left with her family as they were able to afford an apartment in a high rise outside of the city but since then she's now married and is pregnant and that's when she came to us to ask if we could do this and so she could move back to this area she was attracted to the community there the social network that she's still connected to but also it's much closer to her work she's able to shave off three hours from her no I'm sorry four hours from her commute the interior is done in a way where we really try to expand the space given the small size this is about 30 square meters for the house this house cost about $2,500 U.S. dollars and also took just a couple days to put together we have these clear story windows to bring light further into the space and we also integrated a composting toilet so she has her own bathroom the final project I'll show is I think a project that even more so ties together all of these ideas this is called the People's Station it's our most recent project we just finished this probably a couple months ago so this is a cultural center and it takes this same plug-in panel that we've been developing this prefab system except it's a much larger scale and you can see the steel structure allows us to adjust the shape of the building we can add space we can take away space and that kind of flexibility I think is quite important in the context of China where there's a lot of insecurity with the situation but we also integrated a lot of our vehicles so we updated our tricycle house and that tricycle house is also attached to the building but also is something that you can cycle away we also attached our People's Canopy and so the ground floor of this building is all opened up to the public this is situated on the border of the historic area and the central business district so it's really meant to be like an entryway into this historic area so it was important that we designed a space that was engaging to the public and so this is the People's Canopy that's being cycled away and these are the tricycle houses that have Many People's Canopy in the back and also we have our first retro-spective exhibition as the inaugural event this is showing seven years of our work you can see a small section of our plug-in panels our courthouse plug-in here and a lot of our other installation type projects in full scale and as well as some of the interior we have we have these big clear-story spaces to bring light inside and I think that concludes my talk Okay, well thank you all for this set of very interesting conversations I was thinking about all the words that we've heard today and those that we haven't a little bit I think unifies a lot of the topics today is no work, no money no time, especially in the last one and there are other words that we hear less client we've heard this word in a couple of the presentations but one can also think of the kind of space to create the agency of the practice is the more predominant topic so maybe this panel is not so much about materials and building as it is about agency of the architect through that logic so I would like to kind of summarize some of the things that I think you guys share and some things that you don't in three categories one actors, who you are the second one culture and context and the third one can say is the practice itself so first of all you all come from obviously very different backgrounds but in fact some of you are practicing in countries other than your own whether you are American Chinese or Italian working in and of course you have a multicultural practice as well you all say, well two of your offices in your website say we are young and I think you're probably all young but it's something that is part of a mission statement all of you are humanists at heart and I think you all talk about people whether it's the users or the mis-users or the empowerment of labor through handicraft or the emphasis on public space and the activation of public space now in terms of the cultural context I look this up in Wikipedia the GDP per capita of Kverde is about $4,000 a year in Beijing it's $15,000 and in Johannesburg it's $19,000 so we have actually a disparate set of GDPs per capita but this doesn't really describe the cultural context you're working within because you're working in a massive city and you're working in a very tiny island and you're working in a relatively large city so we have three very different cultural contexts in that sense in terms of the culture of construction I think speed, labor, skill has come up quite a bit and I think another thing in terms of the cultural context are the social divides that are maybe quite different in each of your cases on the one hand we have the kind of divide of Kverde being on its own divided from everything else pretty much it's kind of an island to which most materials arrived in barrels and so on so there's a kind of culture of scarcity to the apartheid state which still in some ways has an enormous legacy to the divide between the Hutongs and the New Beijing so one could say that you're all trying to somehow bridge some of these massive divides in terms of practice some things that I noticed that you share or don't share because it's a very heterogeneous group at some level is the kind of interest in the well blurring the boundaries as Juan put it quite clearly between how it's a drawing and building quite quite simply the insertion of the architect within this kind of space of construction maybe an interest in the informal one could say or the art form even and then I would say the active interventions that all three practices seem to partake in as a way to create constructive practice maybe one more thing that you share as practitioners is an intimate an incredible intimacy in terms of your relationship to your users I mean you know the names of not just your clients but the neighbors you speak a lot about the sleeping in the site Moreno you talked about how you camp in the site and you get to know the workers you work with them you're actually building the projects and then I know Tom you guys have a community relations person on your team and it's very very important how you engage with that context so I guess three topics that I think govern maybe are a discussion it could structure this way one is we can think about culture and context second one think about performance of materials and design built but in a sense not so much technical in terms of theatricality sometimes of this performance and then finally let's end up talking more specifically about practice so I guess my first question is maybe starting with you James can you be specific about a challenge that your office has faced that you think produced in a sense the constraints of the project in a very kind of innovative way where invention arrives from these challenges A challenge? Just name me you know I think working in China is very challenging I think previously a law office mentioned it is possible to very easily have a well functioning practice in terms of getting work and producing but to have work that embodies certain ideals that you have I think is extremely difficult such as our project in the Hutong we wanted to be critical we wanted to ensure that we have a critical practice and we started off being idealists but you still need to have a space to be active we never show any renderings of anything on our website we try to only show built projects and when you do that when you give yourself that kind of constraint you're building very very small things but we wanted to ensure we had that active engagement this sort of physical material engagement and also to be able to try things out and test things out so a lot of those projects could not be done it would be impossible to preconceive them And in a way one could say they would be impossible without the enormous constraints that you face because you'd be building villas for someone else Yeah exactly I think architects have just for whatever reason we've become fairly alienated from a lot of the work that we understood the profession to be I do have a strong interest in finding a way to have greater social agency that's part of this B Corp certification I think also from other people here architects are becoming more entrepreneurial and that is something that we're looking into also interested in different ways of scaling and thinking back to my product design background products are smaller but they have immense scale and they can also have immense impact I think one of the things that characterizes your different approaches is in fact this multi-disciplinary background you have a product background you're also an artist and again I mentioned community relations I'm not sure if you have the same kind of heterogeneity in the office but certainly the approach has to do with this in terms of cultural context one thing that keeps on coming up is speed so you guys build really quickly I don't know how long things go really slowly in Cape Verde so maybe this is a little different but I know in Johannesburg you mentioned that speed is absolutely critical issue but as a skilled labor yeah I mean I think we've maybe developed a bit of an edge because we've shown that it can be done quickly I think we've got a real departure I mean if you look at the Zeitgeist even young firms in Johannesburg now it's still very much obsession with permanence, with making monuments with this kind of which I think of it as a modernist idea and with us we're not as concerned about the building's lasting forever interestingly it's a very immediate need and we think they've got a role as soon as we can get them up they've got a role to play for a fixed amount of time and then it's not to say that they're temporary but do not burden in the same way so once we set ourselves those constraints or lack of constraints I think we kind of then come upon some really interesting solutions and that's why we're obsessed with things like scaffold and finding ways to apply that sort of idea which is something that kind of unites the work of all three I would say but the empowerment of labor seems to come up in all of your discussions for Moreno and Eloise I think the idea of engaging as many people as possible spreading the wealth I mean I love how you put it Moreno is like we took the client's budget and we tried to spread it on the site amongst the community and I've read interviews where you've talked a lot about how you try to use as much handicraft as possible so can you speak a little bit about this cultural context of labor the lack of skill but also the empowerment of labor and the training of labor through your projects well as you Eric said life in Cape Verde is very slow but sometimes it could be stressful for us architects because we have schedules and the work to do but all these things in a certain way lead us to to have this relationship with materials and with culture and with the workers too because you have sometimes you have to to understand them and you have to to go and maybe if they don't understand what you are saying you have to draw you have to maybe make a mock up or try to build or made a prototype or this kind of approach so the walls in this last project you showed you've described them in another conversation we had as being similar to those of Frank Lloyd Ryan to Taliesin so this is not an indigenous practice it's taking it to the typical stone wall but then transforming it by creating form work and pouring concrete is that correct? yes because in a way we want to be contemporary so we are not making typical houses but we want to just transmit the same feeling the same form of work with different we are in a different time so what we are trying to show is the same feeling but in a different way that brings me to a general question I don't know who wants to take it but you all have a varying level of sentimentality or unsentimentality about history and about materials I would say maybe Tom and James probably less sentimental maybe the way you talk about materials purely in terms of speed and budget you guys you talked about this factory maybe the way you talked about the Hutong context well it's just one other layer of history so you are all working within these stratified historical context what is your position relative to the contemporary? I'll take that I mentioned ties into what I was saying just now I think that we start off being pragmatic and I think that's the and then it ends up actually representing a new direction or a new future so and now it's become a bit of a it's just something we actually we struggle to do to build in media that doesn't really contrast from its surroundings we've become known for that contrast I would say it's not that we're sentimental but we actually definitely try to emphasize I don't know those of you who know Janisberg but it was built at a time the majority of the city was built at a time where max gold production which is the mid-seventies so you've got we actually had Skidmore Owens and Merrill build a tower you know for New York and it's got this grayness and this heaviness and I think that building the first building I showed was the first piece of social infrastructure to be built since the it's pretty much that time in the mid-1970s so we couldn't afford to build like they built because we're in an economy with a negative growth rate so you can't possibly try to mimic what's there or even borrow from what's there because it just costs too much and in fact I think all of you work in a way with both local and imported traditions or materials whether the wood comes from Norway you know Africa or but then you know very local construction techniques and I think in James's case working within a city that has a vast manufacturing potential especially when you have a product design kind of background working with that the possibilities seem endless to me that you can build a house for $2,000 you could probably build a toilet for $2,000 in New York on union labor a lot of it's made in China yeah exactly so I mean this question in a sense of regionalism if you will we're in a kind of almost post regionalism kind of era perhaps you're unsentimental about where things come from you want to empower workers so you're working within very opportunistically one could say inserting yourself as architects within production cycles but also within sites do you think this is something your generation shares is there something new in the air in this kind of empowerment between architect and labor? I think to be contemporaries to understand these forces and actually I don't think we have any choice everything around you is mass produced except for buildings and so that is why we have this interest in understanding manufacturing's role in architecture I think our loss of agency has to do with that that we're not familiar with a lot of these technologies and there's a barrier for us to engage with this and so we want to explore that I agree very much about materials I think our interests our main interest I would say is cultural but in order to get to the cultural we think the way to do that is to be ultra-pragmatic and I think that kind of exaggerated animatism is what you see in this sort of urban informality so no one's spoken about materials in reverential terms there's no sense of kind of the iconic you know the precious any kind of meaning is what in our works we use material like words so when we make a building we want to make a phrase and each material transmits a new word or a sensation we use wood when we want to transmit nature we use stone when we want to transmit nature we use uncrafted material when we want to transmit human labor so material are just a tool for transmit sensation and the end of this sensation is harmony that we want to transmit we want people inside our place feeling good I wonder if this is where the panel has different approaches in a sense what I'm hearing from your colleagues is more a sense of expediency but maybe they're not telling the truth maybe that there's something behind this white beautiful crystalline contrasting you know like house that immediately pops up like a mushroom in the hutong or the red bridge in Johannesburg I mean you speak in terms that kind of divest the kind of emotional aspect of these materials but are you lying well material doesn't come with associations without the people that give them the associations so I mean in fact I don't think there is any contradiction it's just an issue with history so in the hutongs yes these buildings they have absorbed a very traumatic and tumultuous history that's why there could be value in that but only if there are people there to learn from it and understand it if there are no people there then our attitude it's useless so we are also really interested in flexible systems and flexible designs that allow people to engage with our design in meaningful ways and therefore the opportunity for history to be absorbed into certain materials whether or not they're newer or older and you said something interesting I think that we are experiencing a change of paradigm paradigm change and now this generation I think that they are changing the mentality and the approach and this reflects in architecture and in everything as life in an interview I read with you, Luisa you mentioned that sometimes you or maybe you mentioned this the other day that even just to choose one screw on your island is an incredible challenge because there are no materials there's nothing I think a scarcity of material an incredible scarcity of material and as we talked two days ago sometimes you have to do this research on our market before starting to build that's interesting so you said Luisa you have to check the market see what's available before whereas we just design something and of course that's to start to design our furniture too I would like to say that we are essential not like Mies van der Rohe we are essential because it's the only way to be so we are forced to be essential so the scarcity has produced a mode of practice yes it's not fashion but it's a state of living it's a kind of survival let's end with just a couple of questions about practice I have a question for you Tom you're 7 years no 5 years into your practice you guys are 5 years into your practice 7 14 so you're old maybe that's why you don't say we are young practice is from 2007 with Ramos Castellano 10 years now so a question to each of you what is different about practice now than you ever imagined when you were a student I was never a good student I think throughout university I doubted whether I would be able to do architecture and with that I think throughout my studies tried to just find some sort of satisfaction making things or running little hustles but what's different you know the way you built the outreach project you basically told them you can build it for a budget it was a complete gamble did you ever imagine that you'd be inserting yourself into that kind of space of risk yeah I think I'm a risk sort of prime person I don't mind risk what about you James clearly from product design to architecture to now building $2,000 homes in Hutongs I think one difference in terms of mindset is that we can actually affect policy that designers can engage in that way I think I went through school thinking there are certain parameters we just have to accept and we didn't even do this intentionally you would have government officials coming to us and say we have these problems we don't know how to deal with there's enough social pressure that makes this a moment of crisis and they need creative minds come up with so none of you are waiting for the phone to ring oh no I'm definitely waiting for the phone to ring but while I'm waiting I'm making things what's different when you trained did you imagine you'd be sleeping on your sides all the time I wonder about that there is something that is interesting about architecture that nobody can say you how to do that so nobody can say do you can be an architect you can do like an architect there are different kind of architect so you're telling everybody here that whatever you're learning in school is not going to be like this basically and the point is have no expectation and be open always and try to adapt well that will take some questions from the crowd there's one right here I believe in the middle is there time one question I was really surprised when we first started that the panel on material and construction was going to be the first one that was about culture and justice and especially with starting off with apartheid I mean it woke me up because I was falling asleep so but then by the time you got to the end and the whole story of architecture as making an ethnic domain whether you're resisting it as in the first one or preserving it as in the second one using the empowerment of labor as a strategy I thought you know this makes sense because if you think about the the grand challenges of the 21st century it's all about material resources and cultural differences and how we're going to somehow live on a planet with an expanding population and disappearing resources so you're exactly at the epicenter of the grand challenges of the 21st century and so you've been claiming to be young but I want you I want to ask you to pretend to be older and what you would aspire in your approach to contribute to these grand challenges as you look into the future that'll be the next constructing practice panel in the next year when they get older but it's a great comment maybe not so much a question but I thank you all for coming and we'll think about your question for a long time