 Welcome everyone to the second, third lecture of the semester. It's really a great pleasure to have Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efren García Grinda this evening with us. They are partners of Amit Thero Nueve. This is the last time I say it in Spanish. The partnership started in 1997 as Thero Nueve, an open structure located in Madrid designed to bridge professional practice research and teaching inside an architectural frame and in 2003 they changed the name to become Amit Thero Nueve. As the name of their practice suggests Amit Thero Nueve or in between Thero 9 has developed a unique and exciting body of work dedicated to an architectural practice set between scholarship and building and between building and design research something we certainly value here at the school. The practice is committed to reinventing nature beyond the false dichotomy that opposes what is natural to what is conceived as artificial and instead seeks to construct another nature, a polluted altered nature that is at once nature and fantasy, architecture and environment. Their work moves beyond any distinction between high culture and pop for Amit Thero Nueve everything or maybe nothing is pop whereby fixed meanings are now replaced by a network of links and of multiple origins and in which meanings and symbols, drawings, objects are entirely recast. To define those intermediary spaces Amit Thero Nueve has coined the term third spaces. Third spaces are like gardens, they are understood to construct new relationships between nature, technology and history. There are spaces defined as mediating between different materials of different origins. There are also buildings that are now understood as an assembly of complex ecologies that act as a linking mechanism between living beings, social groups and technological objects. Third spaces can also be understood as cities which are no longer mayor stages for activities but an integral part of our scope of action as architects and designers in which urban form moves away from the classic idea of the complete or ideal city to one which engages with essential urban phenomena and which conflict is imagined to be able to be designed. Third spaces can also be thought of as public spaces transformed from voids to become a real context for social interaction and where the active involvement with social exchange becomes the main purpose of a project for new architecture of the city. In this moment where we are caught in sort of politics of identity and boundary and definition, I think it's so inspiring to look at this way of thinking, of blurring and of redesigning as really part of the kind of agency of the architects and I'm really excited to have them to share with us their exquisite drawings and buildings and representations and it's not clear what is what and the two sort of converge to inspire new ways of thinking and of engaging with the world. Their work is part of the permanent collection of the Pombitou Centre in Paris has been exhibited in multiple Biennales, Venice, Chagra amongst other. They are currently teaching at Princeton. They've lectured and taught in many schools across Europe, Asia and also the US and their projects and writings of the last 15 years were published in 2014 in a monograph called Third Natures and more interestingly and recently they were published in Alcroquis together with Moss and kind of absolutely beautiful and very inspiring issue of their work. So please join me tonight in welcoming Christina Diath Moreno and the friend Gathia Grinda. Thank you very much for an amazing introduction. Thank you very much for inviting us. Thank you very much for being here. All of you coming here today, having in mind that some of you have a submission in two days. That's a lot. We really appreciate it. And for us it's a pleasure to be here, it's always a pleasure. It's not the first time and we love the place, we love the house and we are now trying to connect this guy to show our slides. Yes, he's here. So let me start with the beginning, that is the name of the lecture. That is Alternative Notions of Beauty. And it's going to be a lecture partially about time, also about notions of beauty, our own understanding and how time is compressed in architecture and how things happen in parallel to connect back our discipline with other subjects, individuals and other species. We will talk about all of this. But also the lecture will be about the design as a form of knowledge, how we understand it. We are obsessed, we are two obsessed guys in fact. So we are obsessed with both the consciousness and the connection with the world around of every practical, formal and technological design decision when we are working as an alternative to the banality that has dominated the discourse and practice of architecture like you know the world around. And today we are going to talk about birds, people, cosmologies and gardens, about discoveries, engineering, structural behavior and also about hedonism, vision, establishment, natures, natures again. And of course about the space in between or surrounded by or connected with things. So this is strange, sorry, this is strange, can you hear me properly? This is strange relationship with time that Christina was referring about. It always started when researching a term that we were using at that time in certain articles. We found this guy that is on the screen, really old one. That in a letter of a fellow humanist, Plimio Tomacello in 1541, described the series of Renaissance gardens he had the opportunity to visit to experience, I would say, around the Garda Lake in the north Italy at that time. And he wrote this statement, right? So for the gardens, for the Renaissance gardens, that he found a new maturity was not quite known at that time, that he needed to somehow invent a new term for that thing that he was experiencing, you know, that early, which was like this word, third natures. But let's start talking about why, you know, we decided, not very much into contemporary world at that time, why we decided to take such an archaism and to convert it into one of the main words in our practice. This is going to be a very personal lecture maybe, but we are talking about time in relationship with projects, so how long and short period projects can live together and have an influence among them. I think that all of you have experienced or will experience this. In 2004, we won a competition for this institution, Libre del Señanza, the translation could be free institution for education, that, well, we won in that moment and it was finished after more than 10 years. It was finished in 2014, 2015. And due to a confidential contract that we have with the client, we couldn't even show what we were doing. But at the same time, we were teaching in different universities and institutions, we were doing other competitions and we were publishing our ideas that were in parallel with this guy. And as I said, all our projects try to refer deeply to the world around and are composed not just by a single self-standing object or building, but they understood as a complex set, we understand them, as a complex set of connections with many other entities and things, without discriminating them in relation with the historical moment, if they are existing or they existed in the past, but in a sort of incremental non-nostalgic time. Nostalgic is the key word. And having this in mind, today we are, and this is the final part of the introduction, today we are going to talk about one project, this guy. And we are going to explain how it is understood for us as a small cosmology and how it has been linked and fed by encounters with texts, thoughts and buildings in a time frame of 12 years, more or less. We will be visiting the building, we will be entering in and out. But just briefly, because maybe this is very Spanish and you don't know the local, well, you don't know about the Institution de la enseñanza, very short I will introduce it. It was set up in 1876 as a constantly evolving experimental laboratory for new teaching methods, led by a group of university professors, among them in the middle is Giner de los Rios, who were previously sanctioned by and suspended from the university for pleading for academic freedom, academic freedom. That's an amazing scene from now. And all of them were convinced of the necessity of the deep reform of the society through the education of children, so starting from the beginning. They created not only the institution itself, but also fostered the most important cultural and scientific centres of the country in which people like Federico García Lorca, Salvador Dalí, Juan Ramon Jiménez, Luis Buñuel, Antonio Machado and several Spanish Nobel prizes were involved, as well as the so-called generation of 98 that was educated in the garden and the pavilions of the former institution. And finally, maybe the most important and brilliant generation of Spanish culture since the 16th century and almost the last one before the Spanish Civil War. The historical place was taken by the dictator troops during the Civil War in the year 1939. And this is a key point because from that moment until almost the last part of the 20th century it was gone. They burned the library and the archive and also they totally destroyed the garden, sorry. So after that the headquarters were donated to a religious institution and most of the people involved in the descendants were forced to go into exile. Well, it's a short, super short introduction, but it's for you to know what kind of institution we are going to talk about. Only after resuming democracy, the disciples and the descendants recovered the site. Then this, well, you can see this is the original location here. Where is it? Up there. In the original location, that is very close to the south-north axis of the city, that is La Castellana. Then just to finish this short intro about the institution, the working material was very difficult for us because there's no information, no files, there's no, it's only the memory of a common identity, a culture, or a common feeling of unthinking. So how to deal with this and how to translate it into architecture and how to do it without a nostalgic approach, that was the most important question. But let us start by saying that the notion of space is closer. Okay, thank you. That the somehow renewed notion of space is a crucial thing or aspect for us in the world that we were developing that time and we are still developing. Space for us could be defined as a complex interwoven network of interrelationsity among many different agents. A complex place where an immense amount of interactions between different agents are overlapped. For us it's a gigantic library of links and immense register of interrelations between different agents. By saying these we mean that we are used to think about space as emptiness and how to deal with the creation of the objectivation of this emptiness. And we are very much into considering instead the space of interaction as the notion of space that interests us. So I would say that instead of having a pure passive concept of reception which is meant to be in this emptiness, something that you're receiving through your senses, space is presented then in our view as a space of intermigration where you are at the same time experiencing and creating it, obviously. You are being part of a situation in the permanent construction as a changing set of interrelations with other biotic and nonbiotic entities. You can see in the images. The interesting thing for us is that through the work of this institution that Cristina was referring to and its founder, Hiner Delorrios, we somehow realized that instead of being related with the physical traces context, this word that is constantly used in architectural discipline could be more related with a group of people, simply. With a group of people that is having a common identity and is having a common culture with its material culture, with its symbology, with its aesthetic expressions as well. So that architect could be referring to that expanded notion of context instead of being referring to the physical traces that we can find in the cities, which is the usual notion of context. And that suddenly blasted in our mind because architecture has had, as a discipline, very serious problems dealing with ourselves humans and how to integrate ourselves in the discipline. How are we considering us subjects as part of the process of designing a building? So you have only to think about the names that we are giving to ourselves in relation with the architectural practice, starting from the ones borrowed from philosophy and from sociology, people, labor force, audience, citizens, public, multitude, and so on. But also the ones that are like from within the discipline, such as user or client, such a generic characterization of the subjects that are involved in the creation and the definition of space, it wasn't enough for us, basically. Well, simultaneously, as the lecture is going to be touching projects maybe well known or not well known but published at the same time, simultaneously to the development of the project, we were testing in the office other projects dealing with these questions for ourselves as an intellectual ground zero to face similar topics. In this one, we were trying to relate a specific intentional community with architectural decisions and the experiment was placed in Salt Lake City. We explored if a big public space could be an activator of an intentional community as a counter city like Salvation Mountain or Drug City, Biosphere 2 or Slav City. And this public space is an enclave containing a series of micro buildings dedicated to all kind of gathering and public activities consorted a long time with a simple technique of inflation. It is a set of excessive and carnal forms generated inflating large silicon membranes whose shape is defined by limiting their movements in lines and points on their surface. But more than explaining the project, what is important for us is that we are extremely interested in the contemporary and alternative forms of life or lifestyles as one of the most intense and genuine products of our culture. We truly believe that they constitute at the same time a record and a critique of the society and are real attempts to build an alternative to the codes, customs and dominant material worlds. Based on an affiliation and affection, they are in fact mini societies proposed in direct confrontation with the mainstream society while cultivating these senses many times through alternative aesthetics that represents a symbolic way of expression and negotiation of identity. Through projects like this one and our work in the academia, mainly at the architectural associations during the last decade, during the last 10 years, we have been speculating about how to translate into formal material and organizational decisions the behaviors, the material worlds and the symbolic expressions of those micro communities without resulting in a direct or straightforward linguistic appropriation. As in this case where we took the opportunity of participating in the Greek Pavilion for the Venice Biennale as an invitation, we developed a project called Aegean Paradise through thought as an alternative model to the mass tourism in the Mediterranean coast. It's a vast and light-silk surface that shelters an ocean of perfect weather underneath that is simultaneously infinite and the idea is to propose a big communal house that shelters an augmented landscape confined between veils, threads and core tines where privacy is achieved by distance and proportions. The few constructions within it are repeated systematically generating an infinite and abstract field. This weird paradise is thought for the other part of the life, the counter-routine, temporary compensation to the everyday grey reality and we explore in this project the possibility of dealing with the holidays, this suspension of the time when simply certain ideals impossible to get on our everyday reality, grey reality and routine are temporarily actualized and are made possible. The invention of alternative lifestyles is a key understanding for us, can be considered then as a conscious and political act discussing the dominant and hegemonic culture through everyday practices, reinventing alternative forms of being in the world that also permits us to review the idea of certain environments as in this image from a project for the canals of Bruge in Belgium. So coming back to the project that we'll be dealing with during the whole lecture, we had a very interesting problem there. So how to connote, how to make illusions in architecture without directly appropriating linguistic tropes from the group? How to design an architecture that can maintain relationship with things outside itself, outside the discipline without falling into the free fall of assemblage of languages? How to recall these links without falling into the simplistic, almost populistic identification to the identity of a community? Because these people were like pretty special to them in that moment in space, they were called the secular monks, right? And how to do it as Cristina was saying without a nostalgia recall in this case because we were dealing with something that was totally historic, belonging to the history of a particular city. And surprisingly, we found a possible answer in General de la Rios himself and his understanding of the landscape. There was a completely modern and almost a proto-ecological one. We were lacking to that respect that considered the landscape a cultural construct, meaning that landscape and culture have a reciprocal and beyondivocal influence. This approach was a mixture between a geographical understanding following the 19th century's theories that started with Alexander von Humboldt about geography, a pure experiential one, mainly approached through excursions and walked throughout the landscape nearby the landscape of the city that he described literally as the gaze, as the sight of movement throughout the landscape as a sensible reception of it through social wandering and scientific understanding. He was obsessed with this thing, which is the rock beauty of the Castilian landscape that through his eyes, maybe you can consider it poorly, there's nothing green on nature during most of the time, along the year. Through his eyes was mainly poor lands, yes, but golden lands of barren nature and intense beauty. It was somehow projecting a new way of looking at those landscapes. But also more interestingly for us, for Hiner Dororius himself that I contact with things, but more specifically to those landscapes, was one of the most important pedagogical tools to really educate children, and as a moral kind of, also tool that could be at the end, you know, really producing a completely renewal of the country. But also, we are fortunate because somehow we found that there was a physical translation of this idea of landscape within the headquarters of the foundation, the house that he was inhabiting and where he was teaching those disciples. Because they were thinking that in the gardens themselves where proper education could be taking place. So we decided as a fantastical thing, the direct contact with things as a reproduction, as a small scale reproduction, as nothing was happening outside the city. So, suddenly we decided to invert somehow to put an upside down, you know, the targets of the project in the face of the competition. So we decided somehow that instead of being focused on the building, so in a totally Swiss adult theme, we decided to be putting our efforts on the garden itself. Instead of the building, the construction of the garden will be the conceptual material center of the project. And the building is just what it gives shape to it, stepping back and becoming just the background for it. So we selected different... Is this moving? No. Yeah. We selected different densities, for the different vegetable species to foster what the ecologist called an arched distribution of the resources, you know, the water, the nutrients within the soil, and so on. Everything is meant here to produce wildness, or if you want, the naturalness of the wild. Based on the competition for those resources. So instead of formally designing a garden, what we did basically was putting everything in there, the resources for the vegetable species to grow, and we foster competition among them to produce and artificially produce a somehow ecosystem based in, you know, the species selected in those who Gennard de los Rios was encountering through his social wanderings. Sorry. So somehow it is a fragmented, or a fragment, sorry, of an artificially constructed ecology wild, because it seems barely maintained. If you go there, you can have the opportunity to go there. You will see that there is not certainly a formal logic to it. And it's not easy to understand how it is generated, but you see, you know, how these different species are competing one another. As the Castilian plateau for Gennard, it's not green. It's stepped for a few weeks, but purple, coral, and silver, as you see in the image, when we were like somehow distributing the species in this geometric grid that is not any more visible, right? And somehow it's containing those species, and it's recalling those landscapes that Gennard de los Rios was somehow approaching as the main pedagogical tool for his disciples. The sequence of a wild naked garden of sprouts during the winter is slowly flowering the spring and reaching a frugal, excessive, compacted unsaturated material mass of greenery in the summer recalls the vegetable demographies of the and dynamics of Gennard de los Rios landscapes. It seems clear now, maybe more for you, why somehow we were so interested in this notion of of third natures and also why we were introducing the understanding of other species in this set of interrelations that we were like calling third natures. So all the other species, from the people now to the other species and a big jump to the past, so in 2002, we started testing in different situations the role of environments and certain nature that could facilitate a direct and horizontal relationship among different species. This project is the magic mountain and ecosystem mass for AIMS thermal power station in Iowa where we propose to transform the existing building into a piece of landscape. We did a film for the Venice Biennale in that moment. This is the short film, he's working and the project was just a membrane of roses and a background of honey that was meant to attract the most important butterfly and bird species in the northern United States in the paths of these species, transforming the building into a mountain where a variety of animals could live and attracted by the water tanks, of course, and by the insects and the whole ecosystem. We used in that moment, we understood that genetic material developed by the researcher born in AIMS who grew many species after the climate of Iowa was the main tool for the designing of this project. And in this other one we also explored this notion of architecture understood as a natural monument artificially generated and converted into a living system in the what the name of the project is the National Museum of Energy that is kind of difficult to get because the difficulty of creating this museum with the absence of an actual collection they don't have a real collection a collection of energy that's not easy to get the dismantling of the existing buildings the existing power plant that are two huge buildings empty and rough and also the lack of clarity of the topic what is the museum of energy. So our decision was to base the decisions, the design decisions the geometry the organization, the spatial organization the materials based them on the management of energy and also the introduction of a complete ecosystem as part of the mechanisms to maximize deficiency. So the air is like very like a normal way of using the air but it's pretty treated in the existing underground galleries and in the old power station using the thermal inertia of the ground and then is introducing the beginner space of the extension that becomes a vast vertical atrium with large indoor inverted domes that serve as big chimneys like it's a very normal way of doing this kind of manipulations the inner space is a big room in between a climatic lobby and a new typology of greenhouse is a complete ecosystem with natural species from the carbon phosphorus period and as I said also participates actively in the treatment of the indoor climate and the energy control. So then we're coming back to this notion that Bon Fario introduced in 1541 that was like repeated many times in some decades afterwards by many many humanist most of the of the big writers Shakespeare and Cervantes were using this word sometimes so you can imagine the impact of that thing into other thinkers so but he was using it as a counterpoint of third nature the one that is existing by itself and you know the classical definition of nature and second nature which from Titero was like used to be referring to artificial modifications of nature such as a with practical reasons such as agriculture but the new Renaissance gardens that was a reality that was appearing in that moment specifically not only had for Bon Fario a new and unexpected material condition that were like obviously something in between man made and having natural species but also and more importantly they were culturally produced and received remember that the references to classical culture and mythology were crucial in those gardens but more importantly for us contesting the material, geometrical and functional understanding in that moment of architecture as a necessary counterpart to discuss its own the implication of architecture remember that in gardens materials are alive and ever changing you cannot control them totally geometry has to be happening in a different way rather than in architecture so you cannot fixated it and they are not necessarily determining the nature and the use of the space and they are having a totally different purpose which is somehow a neodonist approach to space so these various things were like fundamental for us to understand that liberating architecture from a narrow minded understanding of this relationship with human actions and activities is also a key point for us and could be leading for an architecture which is based on those notions of introducing another different species but also not having a close bionevical relationship with function and activities most of our projects rely on really strong spatial organization that are very resilient that are really powerful and the relationship with activities are quite open and it's something that happened as well in the King of the Loreal Foundation this openness and range of possibilities relations among spaces and activities is somehow achieved by those strong clear spatial configurations that in most of our beloved examples or beloved buildings are experiments on typologies there are clashes between different moments and truly a typological inventions that appear in moments of crisis and uncertainty in cultural terms then coming back to in the case of the institution the spatial configuration is based on the recreation of the historical headquarters configuration following as well the regulations that forced us to follow the existing machine to respect the rights of the surrounding buildings so the proposal is a series of pavilions classrooms and elevated pieces like this is the McPherson pavilion and is defined as it was defined by as surrounded by a belt of greenery pursuing the ideal of the institution of approaching to the closest possible to outdoor life and therefore a series of pieces to be perceived as independent pavilions but in fact connected on their back forming a super long and narrow building fold and wrap around the garden itself and all of them with angle and inclined sides so they are perceived smaller than they are therefore the institution is based on the construction of rooms around the garden internally the rooms the geometry the different sizes and the groupings permit different configurations of the space and each room it has no prevalent direction and their relationship with the ever changing garden and corridors is based on the different layers the numerous layers surrounding them are important to the lattice in a way that they are perceived as an extension of the garden seen from the interior the lattice tends to disappear a friend will explain a bit more about this while from the exterior becomes an opaque lattice it's a kind of background for the garden the system of rooms is surrounded by a thick specialized dividing wall the black part there are staircases elevators and artillery spaces that are wider or narrower and they can expand and contrast the public corridor so it's like having bigger and smaller spaces for informal meeting spaces before the classroom and after the classroom a similar notion related with the spatial organization was explored also in the auditorium situated just underneath the central void at the end of the garden, below the ground level you will see a picture at the end of the lecture and reproduces the set of rooms that you have seen before inverting the way they are related so the gradation between the interior and exterior of the classroom and the garden is translated with identical shape and dimensions in a set of interconnected spaces but changing completely the materiality so that the different rooms look to the main stage through these large the clope and eyes these rooms can be open or closed these eyes can be open or closed to expand the auditorium and the shape of the frames of these stravismic openings that look one another also act as bearing wings maybe they are working as beams that hold the metal columns of the upper classrooms that appear in the garden so exploring the consequences of using exactly the same spatial arrangement that is on top but inverting the organization playing with the way the rooms are interconnected but after the competition so we won the competition we started work with the client in a very long process developing several projects at the same time, not that time we were absolutely frustrated by the lack of working tools that some of the perceptual exploration we were trying to carry on were incapable somehow to allow us to study those perceptual experiments we wanted to make in the building itself so we began researching and surprisingly again we were again very lucky we found common ground with some scientific and analytical representation on systems that were used to study the landscape in the work of several authors that were very much very influential I would say in the work of Hiner Delorrios and his approach to the landscape particularly we were interested in a very important name for geography which is Horace Benedict Sorcerre that was trying to map the geography and the geological structures of the Alps so he was the one that basically invented the Alpinism so this kind of willingness of climbing to the summits to discover the geography the geography these impressive environments that were the Alps in a series of expeditions here that he was undertaking around 1776 Sorcerre realized that a circular panorama could help to accurately and scientifically record not only the experience of climbing to the summit and the view he was experiencing and around I completely knew for that time humans were not used to climbing mountains there were no practical reasons for doing so only the discovery of the geography he was like thinking that was not capable only to describe the experience but also to describe the geological formations and the structure of the Alps themselves and he suggested and he with one friend of his that was an Alpinism Alpinist as well published in 1790 this detailed description of the geological strata and the positioning of the peaks that were unknown at that time so most of the records of the Alps were like partial because there was not a possibility of recording the complete structure and positioning of the peaks at that time he was describing it through this anamorphic view that was containing not only the experience but only the scientific record and for the first time the geological structure of the mountain range but this cartography and representation of mountain ranges arrived thanks to new tools of techniques that also won big influence on the thinking of Iner de la Rios the landscape painter and the geographer Frans Schroeder was developing a marvellous technique a machine that was capable to translate the movement of the eye while you were looking at the landscape and translated it directly in a drawing he just took a telescope he attached to it a pencil he made a 30 cm diameter paper and magically literally the movement of the eye was drawn in a paper being capable to record these scenarios of mountains around himself literally almost magically translating the movement of the eye into drawings but also there was a scientific and geographical understanding of those drawings that were capable through very simple operations being translated afterwards into the you know operations, the plans, the maps with very simple means literally connecting points one another by doing different autographs in different points of the mountain range so we were fascinating by this discovery you know of how representation could be not only a tool to present again things to understand things but also somehow in the world Alexander van Humboldt they were reclaiming its own reality as possible things I think Humboldt introduced this wonderful for us a comparations bringing different things into the drawing not necessarily being linked in time and space and start to relate one another to discover the interrelationships that happened within mountain range the climate the natural species to start founding a new proto-science that was ecology the system or the study of the interrelationship between different events within nature basically the discovery was happening within the drawings where empirical data brought into the space of the paper and start constructing interrelationships again the discoveries were not previous to the drawing themselves and the act of making those graphs but they were happening within them so that he started to create this strange world microcosms in themselves that were reclaiming their own right of being somehow considered entities real entities in themselves and we suddenly we realized their architecture could be approached in a similar way it's not the same but in a similar way through this expanded notion of context forming of microcosms of expanded connections somehow critically discussing also the autonomy of the object of the architectural object form and languages in architectural design constructing buildings as definition of a small network of links with many other things through affinities and affections so somehow this was the recall of our small discovering while looking at those representations we realized that architecture could be a repository of conscious connections with many other identities that would become the record of an understanding of the world around so now a fast visit to another of our projects that is still under evolution and in this coming project we were also exploring typological inventions based on clear spatial organizations serving space for interaction it is placed in the Herte Valley and is thought to be the place for the celebration of the Sherry Blossom the project what we proposed was an assertive building that uses the size and the scale to establish a point of reference at the scale of the whole valley and in this project we inverted what we were proposing in Giner de los Rios instead of having a garden that is the center of the space we enclosed the space completely isolating it from the landscape and selecting carefully the connections with it the aim was to intensify the perception of the landscape by constructing a tiny completely interiorized optic dome where the space can be really choreographed like in a cathedral but at the same time the interior space is defined by big holes connected with the exterior in selective ways like entrances and light, radiations connections, views and we proposed a building that was working with the presence position, volume and material like a church for pilgrims a chapel that floats in the landscape and the entire building is the final destination of this pilgrimage so there are three different ways of entering in the building, three different ramps that are connecting with the interior an annular foyer and everything is leading finally to this central space that is the end of the pilgrimage this is the concrete ring under construction and underneath rooms the ramp is consciously something that is totally out of scale is a space in itself this is the foyer in the ground floor those are the underneath rooms the concrete ring is surrounded by a non-structural lower part a steel non-structural lower part and an upper metallic shell like a structure that is somehow functioning as a dome as Cristina explained the process of interiorizing the space was followed by the introduction of this big openings that connect the interior of the building and the interior of the building there are two different points on the landscape distorting as well it's the mechanical behavior of the dome as you can imagine whenever you are opening holes in a shell like structure you have a problem so we simply bent the surface towards the interior to both modulate the light re-stabilizing the structural behavior of the dome and transforming the desolation of the surface with these very simple steps so the interior is simply defined by this desolation it's a big room and the stood as a three-dimensional structure of very simple, really simple interwoven steel plates that ensure a similar behavior of that of a dome as you see they are like a very simple construction technique based on two mill steel plates connected with rods that all together joined by simple means are ensuring the structural integrity of the dome and it's replicated all these things towards the inside with this mosaic of rhomboid figures that also serve in such a big space and such a volume of space to fine tune the acoustics of the place as well as you see in these images on the upper steel structure and the construction this was stopped in that moment they were trying to again to finish it and will be very soonish putting our hands on it hopefully less than 20 years this is going to be the next step so we also firmly believe that there is a certain specificity related with architecture and its materiality and its equilibrium that can be explored playfully in this case what a dome an infrared dome could be can a masson re-structure be literally inverted in its mechanical behavior so this project developed for the School of Architecture in Paris the pavilion is a we propose an infrared building that floats a small dome that could be kept in a box and that can be inflated in accordance with public events externally is a large golden dome and internally is a white space that protects the event so the building floats and is anchored to the wall of the courtyard of the school it was finally constructed for an exhibition finally it was constructed for an exhibition in Tokyo in the Museum of Modern Art at the scale of one to five and we develop the dome following the behavior of masson re-structures this is a model following the theories of Robert Hook to show the problems of Saint Peter's dome but in this case the dome is shaped playing with physical behavior in the digital realm to simulate the process of inflation and therefore the actual shape of the piece digitally reproducing the physical behavior by Antonio Gaudi and also the so-called soft concrete by the Spanish architect Miguel Fissac so somehow the dome is a real inverted catenary that we developed through a series of iterations and the position of the binding points on the seams gave shape to the membrane to finally have an infrared pavilion that uses pieces of rococo furniture as counterweights and is meant to be a shelter for events and a machine for the festive transformations of the school Coming back to Ginerre the structure in there is conceived based on the relationship with the cladding and the lattice but also in relation to how we perceive the structures and understand their performance their behavior so basically there are like very thin steel columns so there are like plates of 2 centimeters every 180 meters something like 4 feet or a bit more that allow us to get rid of any beams on the floor slabs and allow us also to play with the perception of how this structure works whenever you're there nothing seems to be a structure because the plates are so thin that you instantly associate them with the cladding as the sub structure of the cladding so literally and it's not the first time that somebody asks where is the structure of this plate of this thing the runes seem to be held by the thickness contained within the space between the glass and the lattice that we will be seeing literally playing with this notion of lightness the lattice itself as a filter between the glass on the garden as a light this was also the result of perceptual experiments partially based on the work by the guy who produced at the end of the 19th century this amazing draw was that you can have a look to them would be fantastic but there is Santiago Ramonica Hall that was the father of the modern neurobiology and he received the Nobel Prize and he was very attached intellectually and also personally to the institution was one of those who were like fostering afterwards the main scientific institutions of the country even though most of the physiological principles of stereoscopic vision were pretty well known at the mid 19th century Ramonica Hall started a research based on physiology on a certain thing which is very important in our perception of space which is the chasm this part of the brain on the bottom of the brain where our visual fibers crisscrossed and nobody knew how and why he was embarked in discovering how this crisscrossing of the nerves was like related with the perception of depth sorry so maybe you have played with that thing of having a thing in front of yourself closing your left eye and looking with your right eye and the other way around to make things move and disappear because we are having two different similar images being perceived with the same eye so if we do so funny thing is that if we are focusing our eyes on certain things that are like out of this area where we are perceiving really very well as a single image things the rest of the visual landscape is doubled and we tend to perceive it blurred this is the basic perception not of volume but of depth that is pretty interesting and comes with our Ramanika Hall kind of findings so we somehow try to make something similar with the lattice basically because of the size of the rooms because of the distance you are perceiving the lattice because of the intensity of the light that is focused obviously in the outdoor space in the greenery of the garden whenever you see the lattice magically tends to disappear in fact you don't perceive it it's something similar to a light rain that you perceive through the space that you see in it but in a kind of strange blurry way and we tried because there were like partially classrooms and partially spaces for study we tried to reproduce this sense of concentration that our rainy day gives you whenever you are in the interior looking at it so that's the more or less the effect from the outside it's impossible to be photographed literally so it's only related with the perception of both eyes being converging into the garden and having out of you the scope of focal images the lattice itself the cladding is then at the same time a garden facade a lattice interior to the classrooms composed out of three layers of really thin steel bars to be producing this effect attached by brackets among them whose density is fits according to the science portion in order to block direct radiation and producing the modulation of views right so it's very simple has no frames to be having this effect very well done so it's not you're not perceiving the frames really thin 70 centimeters bit more than two feet so that you know the and the layers and the steel bars are one another to produce rigidity you see that and in the corners they are bent towards the interior to produce this clean without any frame the effect obviously of the of the lattice is inverted whenever you have light in the interior so you're capable to see through even though you know during the light the daylight seems to be impenetrable seems to be a solid mass acting as a background for the garden and reflecting the green and the and the coral colors of the garden so almost finishing on the last project that was done in parallel to Giner de los Rios the notion of vision and the as a friend was spreading was also the main strategy for this project that is the archaeological visitor center in Clunia in the middle of nowhere in Burgos that is the entrance of an archaeological site and we played with the possibility of literally give shape to things through our eyes and also maintaining an intense relationship with the surrounding landscape as you can see in this image and the building is thick horizontal slab elevated from the ground to cover a set of parallel rooms and this horizontal landscape that is that permits also a panoramic view of the interior as well as the surroundings and the empty of enlarged access would you mind to construct the projection of the view to the landscape crosses the rooms from side to side as a visual cone by means of another transverse reinforced concrete bolt that serves as the support for the shield shell beams in fact structurally this is a necessary and becomes an outdoor space also oriented towards the settlement origin of the city on top is an extension of the surrounding landscape and is defined by a set of bolted reinforced concrete shell beams with different widths that go down to the height of the windows and the doors is more or less like this and the bolts are also punctuated by skylights that intersect in parallel to the flat sides of the cells in order to introduce light in this otherwise very extensive and dark otherwise dark space and it's almost imperceptible in here you can see the existing building that is nothing to do with us that is the existing our proposal is by reducing the height to the minimum dimension it becomes an abstract line on the hillside of the city but also this idea of giving shape to the space based on the size of movement and the perceptual experiments comes again with the I'm sorry because I think that is pretty important that's working so what we did basically is basing the entire thing on what we were like mentioning before that is the site on vision so there was the only existing thing of the original garden that was like still remaining in there was a nest path like that was crossing the garden so we took this idea and started to give shape literally to the volumes and you know as you see here instead of projecting our eyes or thinking about our eyes as screens that receive information we started to understand the eyes as something that could be giving shape you know almost carving a space while we were walking so the big diagonals pointing the space where created one perceptively the garden and we started literally as the small thing shows to give shape to the building based on the positioning of the perceiver in every single point throughout the years path like of the garden so basically we were capable to instead of being focused on the building itself in a frontal way so the typical way you encounter in buildings every time you were looking at it it tends to be a void in the instead of a building so the building is never perceived either frontally and it's not the main focus of the perception every time you try to look at it it appears to you as fragmented volumes and as a void just to finish and it's very difficult to take pictures of this space so it's much better to go if you come to Madrid let us know but we are going to enter through this narrow corridor to discover the starting S shape of the interior garden and then the small different pavilions all the classrooms in the garden and how the diagonals are open at the end and how the geometry is totally fragmented nowadays it's not even possible to see this because the garden is really having and it has taken over the whole space so you can't even see the building only in the rear part on top of the auditorium where you can find the way of entering from through this huge staircase and discovering also these inclined surfaces that are not only open to the sky that also make the garden perceptually larger and it's like they are also like reflecting the color of the sky, the vegetation and the soil without even details so extending perceptively the experience and somehow they are like drawing backwards reducing the presence of the building and from outside the building is never perceived you never see the building it's like almost impossible there's no place where you can see a building so the perception is always lateral and physiologically what is really present all the time is the garden from the interior and the exterior and the most important thing maybe to finish and to have a kind of conclusion the building is never the main object as we were explaining it's not the protagonist, it's not to be perceived it's just to be perceived whenever you try to look at it it tends to disappear especially in spring and summer time it refuses to be seen and perceived as a whole and is our reign or your reign reconstruct the building while you are working inside and now coming back to the time and to conclude and close we will close the lecture today so by saying that by spending time with the descriptions of the world around these marvellous charts and drawings that we love despite you know the long time that we were produced we understood that our obsessions with multi-layered reading of architecture and with the project of architecture and the students a form of knowledge something that allows you to enter in contact with the world and to discover we're in fact an attempt to define small scale alternative worlds through construct or in other words constructing cosmographies that self-contained microcosms that could reflect a particular understanding of the world around and could establish effective relations with objects, subjects and natures but embody them either physically or virtually and in doing so and this is the main work that we were doing these materialized microcosms could provide a small scale alternative to the social and spatial conventional orders and in the same time that gardens in the same way that the gardens and the pavilions and the buildings of the Institutions Libra and Sinyanthas this foundation the origin of this project were doing during 60 years until the arrival of the civil war in Spain proposing in other words alternative notions of beauty based on a direct and deep appreciation and understanding of the world around and this series of links that every single space an individual is having reconstructing and reenacting them and the bonds with all of them in architecture throughout every single decision. Thank you Thank you very much for this wonderful lecture it was actually a pleasure to listen to you it's really an honor to be tonight giving the response for many reasons only because I'm a deep admirer but also I have to understand that the production that Amithedo has done Amithedo has done in the last since the beginning has influenced the contemporary production of architecture in Spain in the last 15 years you guys define a new ways of understanding things that clearly had an impact on how not only we look at things nowadays but definitely how we communicate architecture and we represent and build architecture itself so I would like to start opening a conversation that maybe can open to the public later actually I'm going to quote one of the sentences that you have claimed tonight about the idea of a space and you said literally space is a place of intermination but it's permanently in reconfiguration and it's an idea that it's quite clear reading your articles the ones that you have published not only in the last croquis but actually even in the first ones in the first croquis that it was published in 2004 right it's this idea that architecture has to go beyond the physical traces so you're clearly blurring the subject kind of embracing this philosophy of the object oriented anthology basically and trying to apply that into architecture so understanding the complexity of the whole going beyond what we see and embracing what it's not there and it was not a long time ago that I did an interview for the magazine Quadrants to Yoshie Sugamoto and in that case about public space and suddenly Sugamoto defined the public space as something that it was not there comparing actually Japanese public space with Spanish public space of course and he was defining the Japanese public space as something that just emerges with when people actually occupy the space specifically just in certain types of festivities like when the Sherry Blossom right so it's this idea of the space that it's not only ephemeral but it cannot be even touch and it depends definitely on who actually does it so this idea of a space that it's changing temporally and it's temporal changing applied to the public definitely it oblige us to define how we actually design public space and how we understand the public realm so my question would be how to apply that into our practices how to apply that philosophy into how the discipline is being operated but not only that into for instance how the city is regulated how architecture is regulated how we engage that idea of being physical into into our practices Big question I would say it's something that we discovered throughout this project I mean today we we tried to explain everything throughout one single project because it was the main thing that we were doing in somehow behind the curtains it was not possible to be expressed and told and it was permeating throughout different projects that's the first thing but something that we discovered throughout this project is that we needed to invest a lot of time on understanding realities around us so it's something so we were facing a very a problem of many that you will find the students whenever you will be entering into the practice is how to deal with the situation that you don't know so that's the first thing that you know whenever we are like project in public space, whenever we are talking about it, whenever we are like dealing with certain circumstances related with our work so you don't know enough you don't know enough so it's and the paralysis comes of this this situation in where you cannot understand things around so I would say that one of the things the first thing that we practically were trying to set up in within this project but with several projects as Cristina was explaining that were like set up by ourselves for ourselves to understand how to deal with these problems methodologically was methodologies basically so ways of getting in contact with this world or this world around understanding how for example a social group could be a context was surprising to us for the ones that don't know don't know this place which is a fundamental in the recent history of Spain and the definition of the national character you know people that were studying in that place or the somehow the schools that were created following the things were easily somehow detectable so you could tell the people that were educated in that way even the way they were behaving the way they were talking approaching reality was clear so how to deal with that how to deal with a group of people how to deal with a common identity how to respond to that how can we work with that so basically with our students we were trying in many cases to deal with this basically understanding public space which is one of the most difficult things to be dealing with because it's dealing with specific groups of people but it's also having a side to it so in the tradition of democratic spaces in both Europe and in the US public spaces need to be generic, open, abstract and refer to everyone or anyone in the society so there is an inherent difficulty of dealing with these subjects in architecture so basically we just were students to deeply study customs, behaviors symbolic way of bringing affections into physical things for social groups and self cultures we asked the students to understand architecture as simply a combination of the physical definition of the space and the interactions being happening within it and we simply try to record it it's a small attempt I think basically first of all by having the interest on that and secondly to develop methodologies related with that it's really interesting how you end up answering my question because definitely actually it was in the first 2004 corgis when you claim that it was 5 years 5 years after opening your office or it was like 6 years something like that so suddenly you were claiming that one of your main goals were to really find the game and actually after that you published an article about how to really find the discipline so from the beginning of your practice you have embedded a goal of experimentation and you address that in many ways the fact that you're always taking risks in materiality for instance most of the materials that you use it's really difficult to control their life time you build with flowers for instance or with earth it's kind of this type of material that you accept from the beginning that it's sensible to change through time in a radical manner so there's also an acceptance of the failure because of that experimentation from the beginning maybe it's not failure maybe it's the idea of permanent temporality because also you're always talking about change even convincing us that your building is not there is invisible so how to build things that are there and not there at the same time that change through time they are so open that you cannot control as your garden well in fact we were trying to explain that I think it's not only that we love gardens and ascapes is that we find that they're like really challenging for architects in the sense that whenever you need to face them so your tools as an architect are like not anymore there so you don't know how to deal with them so we can force nature or landscapes or gardens or these species to follow us to follow our desires but actually they're not they totally resist to a conventional architect or practice so that's why both metaphorically but also in a very straightforward way the notion of third natures was so important for us because it was like really reconsider what architecture in general terms could be nowadays I think for others which is not obviously transmittable to others because it is a personal take on third ancients and our methodologies also are aimed to be somehow related with our own necessarily for others but I think that idea is for us still quite important I mean something challenging the use of notions of architecture something that we have repeated and we still repeat this the first day in our courses so when we first met together one of the things that we were like really commenting is that we really like architecture but we dislike it as well so it was a conflict in this appreciation of constructed environments because they were not really fine-tuned with contemporary practices with contemporary worlds with contemporary somehow takes on certain things things that were happening around us socially and culturally and the architect was like anchored some worlds but even the most historical days coming back 20 years ago because our first article in it was in Quadens Manuel Gauss the second one the second one was about that was about timing architecture in that moment maybe like of course if you don't know him for sure you know him but of course Cedric Price was the one really putting this thing on the table and saying architecture I am what the hell I mean architecture can die architecture needs is dirty you don't have to have architecture forever in that moment in that article we were already dealing with that fact that there is not that important the materiality or it's not that important that it's going to be forever that's 20 years ago about them I love there's also I mean before opening to the public I'm gonna question that is more a gossipy thing than anything quite curious because there's also this obsession from you guys to refer your work to references that they're always older than 20th century so you're always referring to works of the 15th, 16th, 17th and most of them it's not always most of the time and most of them are always related with actually it's not architectural history they're basically a collection of cases of scientific discoveries that at a certain moment change the perception so you actually go to history but not to most of the time, well not to history but other science is it a conscious decision are you aware of that yes so so why well the why is quite simple we said at the very beginning of our talk that basically we are not discriminating a long time you know, first of all you have a better perspective of other findings whenever you have a certain time in front of yourself and I think the preoccupations the way of approaching things that discoveries you know something fascinating for us was to discover them I mean throughout this very simple thing which is looking at how depth is perceived in humans and to discover that there was someone with a microscope and with an ink and a pen I mean really discovering that simply it's like we can have many advanced tools but at the same time the problems and the discoveries are quite similar the situations are completely different and they are like enlightening the contemporary conditioning ways that we are like fascinated by so it's not that we are nostalgic that maybe we are, you know, a bit no, I didn't mention a certain no, no, no, I'm mentioning it so it's not but I think that I mean those findings are still relevant in marvelous ways you know, you look at these sources always and the of the autograph hey guys, a piece of paper a telescope and a pencil so you draw with your eyes I mean, you see the things and they look old, they look nostalgic maybe, they look at you like belonging to a different time and they say, come on what a discovery I would like to be the one that is capable to draw with his eyes I mean like, yes, I want you know, and then, you know things are like mind-blowing, small discoveries related with their walls and the fact that, I mean, it's not amazing that Bon Humboldt discovered the beginnings of the ecology by drawings, by taking mountains from here and drawing them together in relationship with a sub parameter it's not a fascinating that he was capable to describe things that we are still amazed by but it's simple with drawings that he was not even doing by himself the drawings there are like and also because there is a fundamental thing as well in that obsession there is of course having good friends of any epoch everywhere but also because I think there are like a a certain obsession on transmission on languages and also by understanding the mechanisms also within the architectural realm through which this transmission is happening you can literally discriminate and being conscious of what you are dealing with you know, in terms of material and the last thing I would like to mention because I'm talking too much that we don't look at them as references at all so there are like really discoveries for us for us it's a fascinating thing to be rediscovering these walls and this finding that we still think that they're absolutely relevant maybe it's time to open to the public if there's any question or commentary okay I see that your drawings are the bonds between the institutional creativity and the professional world so do you have a specific kind of like clients you deal with or how do you approach the clients to make these come to realization we are having a specific clients yeah and we also as we explain we set up a for ourselves certain projects that there are opportunities for us to discover certain things it's not that we somehow reproduce the overall set of circumstances that deals with the actual real everyday on the street project but we are like really investing a lot of time on the office partially and because of our work in the academia that's the reason why we we didn't construct that much and we are setting up these problems for ourselves as well I don't know I mean the drawings are still an amazing tool for us I mean we most of the things that you saw are part of maybe of four year five years kind of work in the sense that most of the ones that were producing that moment but we were like trying many many other things most of the most of the drawings that we produce for this building have never been reproduced they're really important for us we are waiting for a really special occasion because they were like certain findings in the representational tools in here because as we were explaining there were certain moments in where we couldn't literally draw so for example there was not a machine that was capable to simulate the entire set of rods that we put in there just to refer to something we couldn't test properly throughout the tools that were on the market you know the visibility and the effects that we wanted to recreate so we we couldn't as well test what was the actual size of the sensation the feeling of the size of the garden itself so in fact when the client when we finally constructed the thing and they asked us literally but did you know that this was like this did you test that? and we said but we needed to invent new ways of representing things it's true that this happened and also maybe we are a bit mad or crazy but we still believe we end up talking about Humboldt in every lecture but we still believe in the fact that if we are able to invent our way of looking around and doing that drawings we can discover things as he did we are crazy I mean there's kind of maybe not market outside for us no clients asking us for that if you find someone you are going to be very lucky but we still believe in that as a tool of knowledge and you have to I mean you are super young and you have to try and you have many possibilities with the new softwares and all the possible ways of addressing a question not only our hands so but it's not going to be for you to be super rich anyway maybe yes definitely it would accept this idea of the unexpected as a part of the design process or to embrace it to a point that it has to be it seems the only way let's embrace it there's another question hi thank you so much for the lecture I kind of am really impressed by how somehow your process is very empirical just like your references it's very scientific almost very steadfast but always the result is unpredictable and wild and I'm kind of getting suspicious about how unpredictable your results are because you said you're creating environments almost creating worlds with your projects like you're opening these small openings for the plants to grow it's almost like a God complex of controlling every little thing but making it look even random in the end I'm kind of curious if that's how you see the expression of your ideas your creativity your stamp as an architect in the project and another part of the question is has there even been a project where you actually failed in accomplishing what you wanted or what you planned or creating the environment that you wanted to create all of them hopefully in the sense that you know being the architect and the account of failures in a way so I can we could have made a different talking about the failures of this place the literature that's a good one and are as fascinating as the possible success you know yeah we are having so our brain as most of the humans are divided in two parts in our case one is specialized on the unpredictable and the other part is obsessed with the control so you know as the visual images are produced in bouncing between both hemispheres of our brain the projects are like produced bouncing between these two realms like crazily essentially as a garden right the garden as you said you established certain rules in order to allow or otherwise that battle between species wouldn't have place without you setting specific species therefore there is a control for that to happen one of the marvelous things of working with others you know obviously this is not our thing you know it's something that is being shared with many others through the work as well through the opinions and many things about the garden well we invested most of the most of the money we had for the garden in creating a soil the soil the nutrients of the soil so we did something was our client was looking at us only Teresa Aguilera the person who was collaborating with us the Atlanski Park it from Barcelona was convincing the client we couldn't but she was able to convince the client that we spent most of the time on creating one and a half meters thick soil that was like having all the marvelous nutrients you could have and was porous and perfect to allow this craziness to happen so the work was like mainly you know really producing this soil condition for this and the irrigation system for this thing so we you know blasting maybe a last question we have to maybe yeah okay those two no no we're gonna do two we close one thing I last time too from your lecture was when you said the two of you kind of came together for your mutual admiration and hate for architecture and I was just wondering if you could do anything like because of the way that you learn architecture and are fascinated by it in academia but then you go and practice and it's totally different or is it something else or we were describing that we are two working together and how we made the decision of is that your question I mean the first thing is that we are totally different and when we first met and we started to do I mean we started with just was impossible and we have a lot of character I mean we are spanning with like the blood is like crazy so it was very difficult so we started to establish rules to work together so that was the starting point I remember the first months were like battles so you need to have a system of rules and to agree no but I think in our case it was a discovery because the difficulty of working together was also discovering that we needed to simulate in our small environment things that were happening afterwards with clients, with realities, with people using the buildings and so on so suddenly we said oh this difficulty is not that bad let's try to set up a method or a way of dealing with the situation of needing to work together so in fact I don't think I will be could have been able to do what we did together and I think none of us could have been doing that in the sense that it could be completely different things for sure and I think that negotiation that was happening at the very beginning among ourselves is a way of in a laboratory reproducing situations and circumstances you will be facing being an architect I think that is a fascinating thing of being or having many subjects within the work not only ourselves, people in the office collaborating with others and so on is the best way of reproducing a world within a world and a world of different surgeries within the office where those are like constantly not asking but stimulating opinions about what we are working because I think as many subjectives you have within the process the richer the thing is something similar to the creation of these links we were talking today about Thank you so much for the lecture I was really fascinated by the title of the lecture which was alternative notions of beauty but I'm just wondering what does beauty then mean for you in your work and what is that kind of alternative notion does it mean that you're thinking about beauty not in terms of like an aesthetic or a quantity or or it's interesting and the difficult to answer and I would like to refer to in the sense that there are certain ideals that are capturing historical times and capturing a particular way of looking at the world understanding it, appreciating it and dealing with its transformation and if you ask me for a definition of beauty which is... you know, reversing the question I would say there is something under construction, something that we do think that us, in the sense of a big us, in the sense of of different communities that are sharing a common identity is recreating and re-enacting that thing to be constructed that is beauty and I'm not a philosopher at all I'm not someone into aesthetics as a philosophical problem but I think in everyday basis what we found fascinating when we found this problem of a particular group of people that were even dressing differently I'm correct but acting differently having a different appreciation of the world wanting to educate their children in a very specific way you know, all those things that were involved in this institution, we realized that was like a fantastic thing to also be dealing with in architecture so we do believe that in architecture languages are always under construction somehow that need to be referred to our social constructs necessarily that need to be need to deal with the way we construct collective subjectivities necessarily so second thing that we were discussing we first met is that we dislike architecture because many times were like either the reflection or the translation into architectural languages of an epoch of a single way of understanding an epoch or the subjectivity of the architect and it was for us frustrating so we want to where please don't take my reference or Taha in a bad way but we totally disagree with that totally disagree with architecture as a ground for the architect's subjectivity you know, a projection totally way to understand language is something that is in permanent definition and it therefore depends on us so thank you very much Christina and Efret for such a good lecture and for everyone to join have join us here thank you