 Hello, everyone. My name is Caroline Gomez. I am the director here at Cooper Hewitt-Masoni-Pissan Museum, and I am super pleased to welcome each and every one of you tonight. We actually filled out so quickly that the education team jettled to come up with this new arrangement in this gallery as well as in the lecture room, so we are all lucky to be here this evening. I am delighted to welcome David Ajay back to Cooper Hewitt. As all of you, I hope, know, David is the curator of our exhibition, David Ajay-Fillett, now on view in the Marta Gallery. So far, in this exhibition series, we have invited 12 prominent artist, designers, thinkers to mine and interpret our collection of over 210,000 design objects. And if you haven't heard already, fashion designer and national designer award winner Tom Brown will curate our next fillette exhibition, which opens on March 40th. What I love about the series is how guest curators hone in and bring light to some truly spectacular works in the collection, including so many works that have often never been on view. Such was the case with David. When David first came to Cooper Hewitt, he met with dozens of curators here, starting with our prints and drawings curator, who showed him some very gorgeous architectural prints. And David said, no, thank you. And he moved on until he finally met with our curator of textiles. And when he learned the collection of textiles, which boasts 28,000 pieces dating from the Hanuk Dynasty to a 3D printed textile made just a few months ago, when he learned that it contained over 140 examples of western and central African textiles, that was it. An architect who spent 11 years traveling through Africa, David visited more than 50 cities to study and document the constant astonishing variety of design practices. This is the first time these 14 textile David shows from our collection have been exhibited, installed in the gallery on a beautiful armature of David's designs of the room. So, if you haven't yet seen the extraordinary installation, don't walk run because it closes in just 10 days. David is widely celebrated for his fluid integration of African design traditions into the language of contemporary architecture. Founder and principal architect of Ajay Atsofiets, David's growing portfolio of some 50 village projects on four continents will soon include, of course, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. In fact, it was just announced three days ago that the museum will open on September 24th and that President Obama will be hiding the ribbon. In what I expect will be the first of many awards for this project, Wallpaper Magazine and the Museum's 2016 Best Cultural Draw Award. And the accolades keep coming. It was recently revealed that Ajay Atsofiets is on the short list to design the Obama Presidential Library, an enormous and well-deserved honor. And of course, we are thrilled here in New York that David will be bringing new life to the Studio Museum in 2019. This afternoon, David paid a surprise visit to our high school design prep class and took part in the students' critique of their design projects. A huge thank you to David for that participation. I spoke to one of the kids and he said, it was just awesome. It was just awesome. And one last special shout out to Noel. Noel and David collaborated on a study. That's our elevator in the bathroom. I have to add that all of us Cooper Hewittians here today are a little bit exhausted because we are installing the next installment of the design triennial, which opens in eight days. So that's why we're hearing that. There are people working on the third floor and I look forward to seeing you all on the show. But anyway, a little reason for the noise behind me. Back to Noel. Thanks to the generosity of Noel, a portion of the sales of these beautiful textiles that David designed that referenced specific works from the Cooper Hewitt Collection. They benefit our textile acquisition fund, which is quite wonderful. You too can acquire David's Cairo design for Noel exclusively from the shop of Cooper Hewitt. I can't help but make that call out. For our program tonight, David will be in conversation with Susan Brown, our Associate Curator of Textiles, who partnered with David from the very start on the making of this beautiful exhibition. So please join me in a warm welcome for David and Susan. Thank you. It's nice to see this long gallery of people. And thank you to David for allowing me to play in your archives. Susan and I are going to talk about textiles actually because I don't want to question you. I'm going to just take you through a series of scales of my design practice. I'm hoping that maybe the methodology, which is always looking for a way to find the figure, find the pattern, maybe, which is a kind of recurring strategy in all the works through different scales. And I thought I'd just go through about five projects very quickly, which start from the chair that I did in Noel. And Noel are my collaborators, who I've been collaborating with for the last three years, both on furniture and now on textiles. So I'm thankful to them for allowing me to play in their R&D and experiments and incredible teams that make things happen. Noel asked me to design a chair for the studio range that was part of the, the studio is something they do I think every 10 years. And it's a kind of moment where they kind of make a large investment in a piece of furniture, which hopefully if it does well, you know, we'll be part of their stable. And they had asked me to do a chair. I'm not a chair designer. And I was re-traumatized by that ask. And in fact, they probably asked me, I kind of ignored, I think for a year, because I just didn't know what to do. And so I think Andrew and Ben came over to my studio and started more or less trying to, you know, show me that actually designing furniture was not too different from what I was doing with buildings. But I became very fascinated with when I finally locked into it, the idea of making a chair, which was going to somehow be about the expression of the body in a way for me, the evolution of the chair, you know, from a timber-thrown-like throne, sort of symbolic relationship through to, you know, the classical period. And it's kind of upholstering more sort of democratizing role to the 20th century, where you have new material technology, making cantilevers and expressing new materials, was really fascinating as a kind of trajectory. And I wanted to see if at the beginning of the century one could make a chair that would explore some techniques which are old but also new, and could actually maybe start to kind of create a piece of furniture which would follow the fitter of the body, very specifically. So that, in the beginning, was very much this idea of a silhouette, the body is of kind of, in decline, was very much drawing that was making everywhere. And this idea of trying to make a prop that didn't make sense was interesting, it's funny to say that it was designed to sort of make a cantilever and then to prop something against it. Lots of studies later and essentially, in the beginning, the body of the chair was an exploration of first pattern making and really being frustrated by not having any kind of rigor to that pattern making, finally started to kind of work with the engineers in Noel's incredible technical team to map the forces of the body in that form, in the form of the chair. And in that mapping of the forces of the body, this pattern started to emerge. And what you, so what started to happen was that finally a way of kind of making a matrix out of that, that posture started to become the meaning of the pattern. So the pattern which a lot of people think is maybe just drawn by me as a kind of figure really became something that came out of a way of making, of modeling, and of describing the body in that decline position of thick and thin profiles. So the beginning, you know, there were patterns that were being sort of explored, these things. And each one of them really didn't, you know, satisfy a kind of end game and felt that they could go on and on and on. We made so many studies on models. And in the end, the form which becomes these V shapes and these verticals that thin out and fade to thin sort of edges and thick faces to kind of support the body in metal and in plastics, plastic really becoming much more sort of metal becoming thicker. But always this idea of expressing the thickness of the material became the kind of guiding nature of the furniture and became and sort of emerged the motif. There were some moments of kind of very simple all, you know, additions. Some of these lines were not joined and I would join them. So in a way there's a kind of authoring that kind of goes into the very technical form. And then in the end, you know, these forms of tested piece of furniture went through extraordinary tests. Incredible safety standards. I read that the chairs, you know, architects like to draw furniture whereas they have no idea what we're doing. Furniture is this incredible discipline which has to do so much that has to endure so much to be able to kind of be a product out there. I wanted the back to be flexible, but in being flexible it also had to have to endure all these incredible stress tests. So this chair in the end rocks and has kind of rock or rocking motions with the plastic one and then the metal one is rigid. And you know, I call it sort of skin and skeleton. And one is a plastic chair which is mostly indoor and then the metal chair is an outdoor piece of furniture. They're made of special plastic and then sort of cast aluminium. And in the end this is the pattern. And this is sort of the three drawings of the form and it's really a more or less in fact expression of that force or the forces of audio in that position. And then the plastic one when this idea of a hybrid laminating piece of material with the same pattern, the same pattern, acting as structure not as decoration, creates this thin sort of hybrid membrane. And then the collection and it's different finishes. And you can imagine how it became. But in looking at it the cast option became an option where I became very interested in the idea of making a chair that could oxalize and have patina and record and register whether or the body or be pristine as well. So we explored finishes which allowed us to kind of make a copper finish or perhaps a bronze brown finish. So almost as the chair was being finished I became also very interested in shell structures and how taking the simple form and then bending it or twisting it could actually kind of create compositions which could almost be like archetype forms, geometries. And this was something I've been working on for a long time. This idea of a form which is almost like a building but really was scale-less. And it was this idea of taking a sheet, cutting an arc and then folding it inwards would create an incredibly strong three-dimensional arch. And then finding a very simple clipping mechanism to bring them together to create a structure. And then to really this distortion that is created as a kind of property of the two natures of the material. So this is the sand cast. This is a bronze version. There's now many versions. And it's basically sand cast with these formers. And then struck. There are four equal pieces. And the distortion of the curve which creates the strength, the extra rigidity and strength is then polished so that the inside of the table, basically the coffee table becomes this kind of optical, so reflecting member and then the exterior, you know, that's much better. Sorry. The launcher became really an inspiration in trying to see if we could make something that was more, really took inspiration from the chair, the skeleton and skin chair, the V and the sort of faceting forms that were coming from it. And to see if we could then make a form which was more sculptural and less furniture-like. So in a way it kind of sort of obviously well got a large object and it shaved it and cut it to create a series of contours, a series of diamonds of faceting that would create the lounge chair series. So again a lot of studies were made. You can see the chair where the sort of geometries were coming from. And then from that geometry, three-dimensional tests were made and then the first prototypes were made and then this chair was just launched. And it made a series of sort of parts that went with it, sort of a sort of a rest or a stool which then forms and then eventually you also made a side table that goes with it. So it became this kind of triptych that could be so, that is in the secrets, but it's that kind of composition and the idea is that it becomes a kind of composition in a space. So it's a piece of furniture. It's incredibly comfortable. This rotates, it spins, but it has this very sculptural quality. So it's sort of working almost against the idea of a kind of traditional piece of furniture. It's more of an object, but it actually performs very much like a piece of furniture that is economically tested against, you know, criteria and has this kind of ability which you don't think it would have because it works with counterbalance so that the whole thing just spins around and around in space. So that's sort of small scale objects and that's really been the last five years, I guess, four or five years of working at that scale. But just going backwards before that, a project that I completed in Guangzhou for a biennial there in 2013 was also incredibly important. This is in Guangzhou in South Korea and the biennial is an extraordinary thing where the city actually commissions every two years a curator who curates architects to make structures that have kept permanently the city. So the city's a continual iteration of design ideas which are adding to the public life of the city. It's a fascinating program. It's not the idea of the pavilion as a kind of temporary property. The pavilion as a kind of an opportunity to always continually question the city. I collaborated with Thai last year, dear friend of mine, and it was heard with that director that year and our thoughts, we went back to Guangzhou which is actually an incredible city that stood for democracy against a lot of sort of dictatorial regime and the way it was part of a liberation front and has an incredible literacy culture in the small community and, you know, when we visited, we shocked how books were very much part of the fabric of society. Books are exchanged. People go in cafes and leave their books on tables for other people to use. Newspapers are folded really nicely on their front benches. There's this kind of extraordinary relationship to literature which we found really powerful. We were asked to find a site and I became really fascinated by these historical reconstructions of sort of viewing pavilions which were perched on sort of very undesigned industrial perches which were basically the access ways for getting down to the water. The waterway basically has an extraordinary tidal relationship when it's full tide. It can come right up to that point and then in the summer it drains right down to all those people. So it's very, very, very extreme. And so the city really kind of full masks itself around the time. I became very interested in these reconstructions and asked if I could get the budget for one of these things that were being built sort of along the city and that would be my convenient for the community. But I wanted to learn from this and this and to make a new thing and also to then turn it into an open space for exchange. So we got given a really nice piece of work front of the junction of the street and I wanted to place this poly stair system here. And then I kind of drew this idea of taking the budget of the concrete works and turning that into a basin which would be able to flood. So that whole base would be able to be submerged and then create an upper structure which would be a sort of shade that would create the upper addition which would be about timber and the assembly of timber into a geometry that would create a form that looked to paint but actually was very porous. So this idea of a kind of duality of this submerged and sort of upper level object became very fascinating. And then how they could stay as a slill as possible, you know, to kind of make it truly a balcony, to bring it onto a landing, to make it to an epic theater, to sort of grab a ride, became a good strategy. And then this is the kind of form where it sort of becomes, this is the moment when you come in and have a culture that's there here and you have a culture that's sort of everywhere here. Bookshelves, bookshelves are allowed throughout the entire structure. There are sort of slots everywhere and this place is a kind of wifi zone. So we gave it to the library, the local library and they basically reticed like the 200 books to begin with which were stopped in the structure and it's incredible how it's just kickstarted, events, music, happenings, poetry, readings. It became a kind of spot in the community for exchanging. So here is that sort of cast library at the base of that upper level. And sort of learning from those traditional structures that we have here. Kind of laminating and creating a cross-fold of regular pieces of tango, so not curving anything, everything is straight, but using the articulation of it and the sort of positive, negative nature of the geometry to then create these folds. So this is where we are. That's the structure here. It's housing. Actually, because this is the kind of moment where there wasn't, there hadn't been much of a mystery to the library up to the streets. And you know, this is the Korean bridge which I really love. Safety rails and people that fall in the river, they don't have to do it. You can go down to the water and you have no rails. It's rocks. It's astonishing. And then the structure. So the structure is just staying reasserted to kind of allow us to preserve and consider. Because one of those convenience which they wanted to take away, like actually this is what they kept. So you have these two moments. The former one was amazing too. You get that Korean comic just to help us with this. And engineers who created that kind of design as well. So really, the standard piece of that structure was to be a podium. But I'm sure it's not. There's a big public project to be stopped. Energy is more of a forward path to that, which is to create a model of a person that needs to be consistent with just the question. Sorry. You mean really nice. You should shout. It became a model. It was really a question to look at really a housing scheme that was for getting homeless people off waiting lists. Homeless and people on waiting lists to come off the waiting list to look at the housing scheme that would create access up the ladder for people in the lowest run of that income strata. But also, it has made possible an incredible gift by an incredible patron who bought a really beautiful site in Harlem. And so that allowed cities tax dollars, which are there for building housing. But you can't buy property in Manhattan because it's so valuable. So most low income housing is really difficult to build because of the land prices, not so much the architecture to build. So the gift made it possible to make this project happen. It became a kind of model last year to look at maybe how the government can incentivize and kind of intervene in creating these models. And it's creating an incredible way. This is Harlem at its beginning. I love this image because Harlem is really a farm. And it's hardly that this is Harlem looking up to the north. It was a series of incredible handlets and farms. And it was the high point of the city. And so it had incredible produce, but also incredible flowers growing up here. This is Harlem now. And this is the sort of urban conditions that exist around the city. This is the structure that was built, which was a carpark with gothic details. Drew Gellison kept his car here. It was part of the Harlem Amazons, extraordinary place with extraordinary architecture in the ways of descending down hills, turning around mountains. Kind of the birthplace of, you know, some of what I describe as a kind of afro-modernity, afro-futurism, the beginning of an explosion of the African American community's contributions to culture and these great intellectuals that really have kind of helped us define civil rights, human rights, et cetera. And also the place where, in the way the architecture of that area, and parts of New York as well, have kind of embedded in them this, for me, this agricultural and flower, an ornamental nature into the architecture has become something that's kind of endearing to many communities. And so it became very interesting to me to sort of think about how to make a building, which obviously solved a lot of urban issues. It was really, for me, an urban system. It would bring different age groups. It would bring child care. It would bring art. It would bring food-eating health issues. It would bring community facilities together. But also it would also try to speak to this incredible history. And I just became very, in the research, very fascinated by something which happens all over New York, but also happens very much in Sugar Hill Harlem, is this culture of roses. And one sort of, I sort of discovered that these incredible sort of places where the planting happens and the cultivation of roses happened, that became just really gripped. And also became very gripped about the way in which roses are in public culture, you know, with the Franklin's kind of amazing song about, you know, a rose growing out of concrete. All this kind of, all this cliche, but kind of ruse issues, which I thought, could we look at how we could work and understand a kind of, a new kind of ornament that maybe also spoke to something that was kind of very much a kind of psychic. We found the heart of roses and basically started playing with it as a kind of series of perspectives. And these are just, this is actually the sort of panel that we set up as the system for building. But essentially it's a series of scales of roses that disappear in and out and create a sort of gradated pattern. And then we just test those in that pattern in different ways. But we did it by making a vector form, which is really a series of stratifications of sort of our form, which basically goes against the concrete and indents it in different ways. And as you look at it in different lights or shade, you get the pattern and it appears and disappears. So it became a kind of way of making ornament, which was not in the sort of 19th and early 20th century, but that kind of carving the form and letting shadow light sort of reveal it, but the way in which you extract from the facade and how light and shadow appear or disappear after the product. And this became very fascinating to me as a kind of way of maybe speaking to the history of being able to also create a new way of making the skin, the mainstream skin of the building. The form of the building is, it sounds like I remember the teens. The form of the building really was about creating a pyramid block that would allow us to make 125 units, the highest density we could make on that side. And I became really fascinated with doing 251, obviously acknowledging that. We became very fascinated with this idea. What was that? Creating a sort of a building that would allow us to kind of corner slide and set back, but we've not changed its geometry. We would just simply create the same module of sort of one, two, three, four bedroom units in here, up above, but also create a kind of rotation in the form that starts to speak about geometry and looking back to the city of the upper level, but creating a setback on the screen plane. And that basically would sit on a very transparent base. And that base would be really the program of the support that you need for community, dense community housing. You know, I really don't believe that community housing can be built without the infrastructure that can support it being part of the activation of the ground. So sectionally, you see the form of the building really, this is the housing here. And then the shift is really the same form just rotated and shifted over, kind of like it's 10 feet over, to allow us to create the same relationships. And then this is a crash. This is a museum. And then you have offices storage. Plans, it just, you know, creates this kind of bar on the 155th where you have on the base a courtyard glass classrooms. The crash really has the best views over the park and the neighborhood because of the slope. It creates this extraordinary kind of ground play with indoor courtyards. And then you enter at the very end of the first door into that suite of rooms. The residents go through a compressed corridor deep into the hardwood building to go up the elevators to their apartments. And then you go through this door to the museum, which you enter here with the elevator and then that shop. And then you look down the shaft, which reveals the museum to you as you go in it. And also this shaft, which we have at the entrance, which shows you the content of the museum. I actually find, so the people stop showing up and say, they don't want to do that. You come down, the museum is really a kind of long chamber with a series of sub chambers behind it and there's a commercial space on the front and offices and education spaces and studio spaces behind it with services. The apartments above the crash level are compressed around. This corridor actually expands and contracts. There is also just a great perspective. And then the different apartment types that are arranged, so either three bedroom or studios or two bedroom, and each one kind of playing with the serration of design, which is something I learned from the sort of visits around this street, to kind of create a system which would obviously break the sort of design playing, but also create a relationship to the room, which is these rooms. And then you're doing this as the time as you go up, you come to a sort of staff office level and then you come to the side of that and it goes up and you have this kind of movement towards these spaces. And this is really looking at where the elevations were. And these are the panels that are repeated and the variations which have been created. So this is looking at 100 and then, this is the same thing as that. 100 is even, sorry. And then this is the bottom of the head. This is looking at 100. And then this is the side of the building. And traditionally, this would be just a blank, so straightforward and efficient building. And we sort of pushed to create this figure that would become the profile of the building and then incorporated it as much as we could even though this was really a privilege for me. And it isn't really about the way in which the architecture oriented itself, that talks about it in a figure, a partner. But that's the project that you can see through the relationship to the city. So it's a very prominent, it's a very high point that when you're coming into the city, you really see it very prominent. So this was the inspiration behind the Surabic facades, which I became very passionate about, this sort of thought-jump system that is stepping system, which happens just in very select moments, which I think is kind of amazing. And to kind of make a memetic typological relationship where it goes, I always find very interesting that sometimes you directly borrow something that is not literal, but is about the kind of way in which the portion of the form system works. So the building almost looks like a stacked series of slices, sitting on a kind of glass, a glass plate, and then obviously in the evening when this glows, this is going to get this kind of reverse of what you think the gravity of this thing is should be doing to this moment. And then sort of in the light, the pattern reveals itself, or sometimes it disappears. And the process is just getting planted. We push the building back to the United States, and the reason for that is to be able to allow the urban farms to then come to that plaza. So there's a kind of food education that's building, to which we're kind of talking about food health and the produce that is part of this area, will be part of that. So it's not a problem. And then the crush spaces and spaces. And the way in which the children's spaces, these are children's privileged view. Because the slopes, they elevate, and then see the view that adults can't view it. It's a very important thing to do in the garden. So you don't have to just go over the children. And we went to Italy to look at what you might know. It was an incredible work. So we learned about the crushes, about supervision, and learning to learn to make the spaces that these bathrooms, these windows, so you can learn about the children that they have in these bathrooms, and the kitchen, the courtyard that you go in and out of, and this flood of light that people protect over the place. And then the museum was a space where that corridor, that slot that was showing you on the plan, basically lights the education space for the children, and then leaves into the museum space. So it's really like a light chimney. It just descends like deep into the plan and allows this inhabited streets inside the basement where children can kind of break out and read and learn. And it works on the museum. The museum is even in a performative space, a large space for program, gallery, and traditional gallery spaces. And then that's the entrance that you come in, and you sort of have your current gallery, where it's the studio museum collection, which has been attached to the foundation. Then the residence corridor, this is the sort of long shot that they're sitting there, and they just sort of line them all up, and that's these apartments, which have timber floors, and some buildings, and some people have done what they wanted to do, but I haven't had quite a lot of pictures of people's incredible habitations in these apartments. Sort of the different windows in the main room, which they create, the solid and how it plays with the mind, and how this is going to be revealed, and it actually becomes even more strong after the rain. It sort of, it almost costs the people a surprise about how vibrant the path is, and then sometimes you'll go and people say, I didn't see what happened, and it's like a sunny day. And that sort of modernity is very interesting to me, in the way in which the material doesn't have a kind of singular sort of opaque quality, but it's quite diffuse and dissolves, and almost dust-like, which control times some people, some people don't like it, of course, but I really enjoy it. And my community that I work with here really enjoy it, which was actually about a lively equation. The color of the building was chosen by the community. I actually gave them a palette from red to beige to gray to black, and this was the color they all chose. So it's really funny, a lot of people think that I chose it as a building, but actually the community chose it. Great. Okay. That was it. Thank you. Thank you for Okay. Susan and I collaborated on, well, Susan actually showed me her collection. I had no idea about it, and it was completely blown away. Yeah, so about two years ago, David and I went to our storage facility and looked at all 140 African pieces in the collection, and one marathon day, and it was really fun, David, to look at the collection with you, because you have an amazing eye for quality. Do you have any training in textiles, or is it just from exposure, or any experiences? Yeah, no, I think that textiles for me are very, very much, I came to them very emotionally. I don't have any formal training in textiles. I'm not a textile designer. Right now. Right. But I think that I was sort of, I mentioned earlier that I was, you know, as a young boy, I was born in Colton, was born in Asalaam, in Tanzania, but my parents came in, and for a very early age, my, you know, my mom and my self-extended family looked after me. I know children are always going to wrap them in textiles. Textiles are kind of part of a sort of everyday life. And at first it seems like nothing, but I actually noticed that I was born from day one, and my mother still stays still wearing some traditional cloth all the time, which is very obsessed with the vibe of the light, or the light print, and the meaning of the print. So I've always had this incredible relationship to pattern and texture, and that's because of her. And, you know, I have a son now, and his mother now also has times not in print, and I'm sort of looking at that whole cycle happening again, and I'm sort of wondering about this. But I sort of became fascinated that somehow these patterns kind of, they have this kind of extraordinary quality, which can have an ability, for me, especially in Africa, to have this narrative, most of the cloths have a kind of narrative behind them, that they have this incredible abstraction that's able to kind of literally bring people together through the material, and that became very fascinating. Yeah, so in the exhibition all of the textiles are displayed very quickly, but in life they're all intended to be worn as garments, and so I wonder what you think the pieces gain and lose by being separated from the body in that way? Yeah, I think you actually use a lot, you know, not seeing how they fold and how they work with the body, but I think that what I was very much interested in doing with the show was to talk about the way in which the abstraction that you see in this work, like the sort of mathematics and geometry that you factorize in the kind of power, is an incredible system. And in a way, so this idea of kind of trying to talk about it, not just this kind of intuitive process, but this incredible system that we use and the type of making is, it's a kind of incredible level of intelligence for me. Instead of needed to be made, put in that plane, which kind of forces you to engage it, not just as a kind of, as a clock, for example. I didn't want me to think of it just as fashion, but I wanted you to think of it as systems and organizing principles. So you've been invited by several museums at this point to kind of reinterpret their African collections, and I wonder if it was different working with a design museum as opposed to an ethnographic or anthropological collection? Yeah, I mean I think that the use here of working in a design museum is that, I mean with the graphic design that's in Berlin or in Chicago, etc. One was always trying to move away from the work being framed as ethnographic work, and that's always been problematic for me because I don't look at African artifacts as a kind of ethnic thing. I think of it as a kind of living contemporary art form that has this very powerful ability to use abstraction and very unique ways. So I always go to those collections and try to move them out of that sort of way of thinking to think of them as very contemporary and very relevant to the state. So it was very nice to have some good view where that wasn't the issue. So that was a very easy conversation with the teams and to understand the power of the geometry of these objects, of these textiles, beyond the just, you know, use as traditional pieces of work, but as ways of looking at form in modern thinking. So that kind of leads into my next question, which was in your book, African Metropolitan Architecture, you talk about the multivalent consciousness of the African, which has a kind of ethnic identity as a sort of deep history, which is then overlaid with colonial history and the contemporary condition. And I'm wondering if textiles like the ones in the show reside very deeply in that history there, or do they kind of bubble up through all the layers? No, I think that the textiles are loaded with some of that memory in a way. They weave those issues, and I think if you look at the way textiles are made on the continent, a lot of them have the narratives going directly into them. So you are looking at kind of living in power, which is trying to express its time. They are about not just making order, but also about expressions of the techniques and the technologies and the kind of abstractions of the time. And I find that really, really hustling. Yeah, when I was writing about the objects for the exhibition, one thing that I struggled with was the word tradition, because some of these textile types have been around for three or four hundred years or more. They have this long and deep history, but traditions change, and they adapt if they're still a living idea. So I wonder how you address these deep histories without suggesting that there's that. Well, I think that it's, for me, an understanding of the fundamental nature of what it is we're looking at. And, you know, I love looking at history, but I'm very keen not to talk about memetic with history, but I'm very keen to rehearse through history. So I can sometimes kind of go very close to a pattern, but then I'll want to kind of move it into a language which makes sense in my kind of thinking at my time. So I can learn lessons, but yeah, I'm more interested in the way in which that lesson is there for the time that I make. So a number of your buildings have a mediator that operates between the environment and the internal volume. And oftentimes those mediators are carriers of pattern. And so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the release of pattern in terms of light and how those mediators modulate light and how it relates to the pattern systems that you're using. Yeah, I mean, I sort of have a kind of cosmology of how architecture is to do with the relationship to the sun. And more so the relationship to the equator is kind of what my obsession is. So the equator and how it fades. So in a way, the closer you get to the equator, the more I decouple and make two pieces of skin. And the further away you go, you know, it becomes singular and sometimes interwoven. So in a way, like for instance, which is held in New York, it's kind of one system. But, you know, but in Washington, where it's so weirdly tropical, it becomes, you know, Washington can get extremely hard and extremely cold. It's kind of weird, hybrid climate. It kind of allowed, you know, the way for me to make a kind of tropical architecture where it has this skin that's a double skin. And the double skin, at that moment, you know, I think in architecture can either just be technocratic, just simply holds on to what we're about to do with the kind of almost very kind of analog way of understanding the diffraction or reflection of the sun, which I think is a very analog way of trying to kind of block the sun. But for me, there's a kind of huge tradition deeply embedded in our mental psyche from just being in forests and being in trees with the notion of the diffusion of light is much more complicated and mediated through shadow and pattern. So I became very fascinated that this secondary system had to kind of operate more than just a kind of device, a technical device, but had to be a kind of carrier of messages about the human conditions or the geographic condition, the intensity of light and the way it works. So, you know, in a way, as you get closer to that equator, the skin becomes more double and maybe more dense and woven. And as you come in, it becomes more paint with apertures to kind of erupt. And it's zenith rather than in its, you know, I kind of have this tendency to kind of perforate the zenith just to do with the kind of angles of light. So if you look at the trajectory of the work, it's really kind of operating between those two things and not just there's a kind of system. So in one of your interviews, you said that textiles can help you to resolve complex agendas in architecture. What did you mean by that? I think that in the 21st century, as we kind of try to evolve architecture, that, you know, much of the evolution is kind of about hybridity and colliding new conditions, new ways of reusing things, updating the way we use certain spaces. And in the hybridity, you know, you can either kind of make a stack of differences and just express it. That's one way of looking at it. But there's always so far that I think that that can work as a novelty before it becomes exhausting just as a kind of fatigue of just, you know, piling up things. And I started to think that, you know, that actually deep down, we also have the capacity to understand how to kind of make very complicated things have a kind of a new singularity, a new topology. And textiles for me have the kind of flexibility to create that ability to maybe bring a single system that creates an identity of a topology to be. So that'd be fascinating. All right. So as Caroline mentioned, in conjunction with the exhibition, we designed a collection of textiles for Noel, which were inspired by pieces in the museum's collection. This was your first time designing textiles? Yes. Yes. Dorothy over there made it happen from Noel. You know, I find it slightly almost a deceit to say I designed them because I basically worked with an incredible team who listened to my wins and allowed me to, you know, get their incredible skill to get by these people. Thanks. Designing specifically for the interior environment, which you have a different frame of mind or is the emotional experience of being in a place always forefront for you? Yeah. I mean, I try, I, I'm always trying not to have, even though the notion of interiority and exteriority is very important, and that distinction is very important. In a way, in my work, I'm always trying not to have that distinction. I'm more interested in scales of space. And literally outside is just another scale that happens to use the volume of the size of the frame. So, and I do that deliberately because in a way I'm trying to not, I'm trying to always find systems that kind of have a language right away through and don't sort of, you know, fabricate architecture into like the skin and then somebody else does the inside. I find that working, it can work in certain kind of worlds, but I don't, I think it's a, it's a very played out idea. And I'm always interested in an idea which tries to kind of make systems that kind of mobilize the way in which you sit right through to what you should do. So, I noticed in your color in that collection that you often have a kind of a cool and warm parent. And I wondered if you found a parallel between, you know, light and working with color. I was kind of similar. For me, they're actually the same. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I did, you know, it's very interesting. People use color as a kind of emotional register. That's fine. For me, color is just a spectral play. So, in a way, I'm trying to, when I use color, I'm trying to illustrate the light. So, it's not so much that I think blue is about I'm happy and red is about danger. I actually find that not interesting at all. That was from the team program. No, but it's kind of, it's pretty, it's pretty much how people, people think of color in that kind of emotional way. But for me, it's actually pretty interesting. So, for me, black is not negative. It's just the absorption of light. It's the, it's, and usually I will go to a darker color when I'm interested in a place which has too much luminosity and I want to kind of draw the light inwards. And, you know, I'll go to a brighter color when I want to kind of create a kind of presence, a kind of physicality. So, in a way, I'm always drawn with light and the color tones are just, just, just the illustrations. So, another interesting feature of the collection is that it was made in nine different mills using nine different techniques. Why is that important to you? It wasn't so much important to me, but what was kind of interesting was that as we kind of asked questions about what we wanted, as we asked questions about what we wanted it to be, we realized that certain mills just couldn't do what we were asking. So, Dorothy and the team were amazing. They had, you know, something about mills around the world. So, we were able to just find the light, whether it be instantly or in America, that just could help us develop that specific technique that we were searching for. You know, I asked crazy things. Like, we had an image, and I'd blur it. And I kind of then want to kind of restructure it and, you know, to be more like to have a kind of fabric nature or photographic nature or, you know, asking crazy questions. The textiles in the exhibition also include a very wide diversity of different materials and techniques that are local to different regions. Some of them are local, local, like the one called Romali. Others represent a different local region. I wonder if you could tell me about that. Thanks. And in a way, I was trying to show this attitude to a kind of, I mean, I like to work real outboard geometry, geographies. Yeah, school was kind of as much like, I mean, it's kind of physically and physically terrain and how that kind of manifests itself. So, in a way, I was just trying to talk about the way in which different materials are being merged into different geographies and have different abstractions. And in a way, to me, I'm also in a way talking about how my architecture is also trying to do it, trying to find a way to kind of make a sense of each geography and how that impacts things. Now, only one of the pieces in the collection has a very explicit reference to one of the Edykram symbols, which is, appropriately, the symbol for a well ventilated house. I wonder why you were working on this collection, which was, in a brief, was to do an inspired collection, but I wonder what you thought about cultural appropriation or why you were working on this. My, about cultural appropriation? Oh, who did you name on that? In terms of, well, there's a sort of issue around community health copyright. These types of tech sales are not a specific design, but they're a specific repertoire of motifs and techniques that, you know, it's not one design, but you know. You see it, and they fall, you know, it's a particular fall. Even though the colors might vary, specific motifs might vary. And so, now, there's some desired part of the Echampé, for instance, to be able to copyright that in some way. Yeah, on Echampé. Sounds smart to me. You must have given us some thought about it. We're working on it. I just didn't stop. No. That was great to get you to do this, of course. I think that, you know, there are some things that emanate from a certain kind of universal quality, of course. I think that the notion of collecting is a very troubling thing, because in a way, it's a kind of moment in the kind of global project. And so it has a kind of specific legacy. But it's also kind of created a kind of role in the kind of information and knowledge. So I think that there's a little bit in the way in which we can talk about, you know, how we can go, you know, be better than you can't touch it. So I can't say why Echampé is not right. Okay. I'm actually quite, you know, I just have this kind of conversation about, you know, the historical things, whether you should have said, whether if something is just historical, you should just leave it. I think that if something becomes something, a question should move it. Move it as a museum, if it's no longer a kind of public collective, or if something is no longer kind of about how we see it and all that, you know, it should change. It's tough. It's hard. I think the elderly mom should go back. She should go away from the British Museum. You know, she should go back to Greece and Britain should have a copy. Thank you for holding on to it for the two hundred years. That's great. She'll go back. Okay. I'm going to open it up to the audience now for questions. Please remember to wait for the microphone before you ask your question. Thank you. Hi, everyone. So I think we have a few minutes for questions. So if you have a question, please raise your hand and I will come to you with the mic. Any questions? All right. Be right there. How important is for you to embed a powerful and relevant narrative in the construction of your work? Sorry, I said it again. How important is it to embed a powerful and relevant narrative in the construction of your work? To embed a powerful narrative in the construction of your work? It's not so much about embedding it. It's about that is the way in which I creatively work. So I don't kind of take it and put it in. I kind of find it and use it as the expression. So for me, it's not about whether the narrative has a power or not, whether it has a relevance. So it can sometimes be something that you think is not very relevant, but actually maybe relevant in terms of its kind of ubiquity. And I was trying to just find a system that gives you the inspiration, not necessarily the power of the story. And do you think it's key to produce architecture? It's key to producing my kind of architecture. Yeah, my kind of architecture. I mean, I think everybody does architecture differently, but I find that in this time, in the 21st century, that the idea of being able to kind of understand a world that's become much more kind of universal, specificity and to create narratives is very interesting. And it's a very interesting part of architecture that's not going to explore. So I think that like all art forms, I think as a creative person I go towards a thing that hasn't been explored about what you think might be right. I'm not kind of interested in whether it's right or wrong. It's for historians. I'm just interested in it because it's something that needs to be looked into and it's really inspiring. Any further questions? So one of the things you said that made me think was the idea of presenting those textiles as living things as opposed to artifacts, as opposed to representations of traditions. And I wonder as an artist and designer working in a Western society that seems to have certain expectations in curating exhibitions that brings work from non-Western countries, but in most cases there is some sort of an expectation when you say an artist from let's say Cairo. So how do you negotiate actually to bring those objects and present them in a lively manner as opposed to artifacts, as opposed to replaced and sort of projected objects? I think that's the problem with the history of objects is that they also kind of have a history of curation. So we're also having to unpack that all the time. I think as a kind of independent person my job is to come in and disrupt, not to reinforce. And I don't come to disrupt just because that's what's kind of interesting, but because in a way I'm kind of interested in finding a way to see it afresh. I'm always interested in trying to look at something from the past that makes it better than to be in a different way. The way to do it is I have to dislodge it from what's kind of narrative to then re-look at the narrative again. So I think that designers are really good and I think the program here is hard about this idea of continually refreshing through a different lens things that have curated and cultural memory and continually questioning that cultural memory and checking it. But I agree with you. I have a lot of problems with things become static. I think it just dulls the kind of dissection of it. Thank you. So I think we have time for maybe one more question. Does anybody have another question? I know there's some folks in the back. I don't see any questions, so thank you very much.